Seidr, Magic, and Community: Reinventing Contested Northern Shamanic Practice This article has been submitted to Anthropology of Consciousness. I'm told it's accepted, but have not received word of when it will be published. If you wish to cite or quote from this article, please contact me at jenny.blain@freeuk.com. An earlier version of this article was given at the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness meeting, 24-28 March 1999, Berkeley, CA. Research on which this article is based was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. For ease of conversion between platforms, in 1999, this article was written with the letters ð (edh) and þ (thorn) replaced by dh and th respectively. That convention has been retained in this version of the paper. An exception is the word seiðr, which is transliterated seidr, a simpler convention gaining ground in Britain and the UK, in Heathen use. Abstract: In the Icelandic sagas, the term 'seidr' is used for magic, often negative, performed chiefly by women, sometimes by men, with male seid-workers referred to by the derogatory term 'ergi'. In today's North America and Europe, seidr is a growing practice within Heathen (Ásatrú or Northern European pagan) spirituality. This partly-experiential paper examines the construction of seidr, including trance-divination, journeying, and healing, from accounts in the old literature together with anthropological descriptions of shamanistic practice and insight from core shamanism. The paper interrogates accounts of seidr from practitioners who position themselves within competing discourses of 'magic', 'religion' and 'rationality', and in relation to communities of spirits, ghosts or wights, deities, as well as other Heathens and pagans, to define seidr as central to their formation of identity. Today's seidr is contested, gendered political practice, implicated in the shaping of new dimensions within Heathen spirituality. Keywords: seidr, neoshamanism, contested practice, cosmology of Northern Europe Introduction I have been engaged in producing a series of papers on seidr as present-day shamanistic practice within Earth Religions spirituality, its construction, and how the people who 'seid' constitute identity. This includes their relationship with meanings of the word, and the communities being constructed through seidr performance, in addition to how people do seidr today and its reconstitution from the old material of the Icelandic sagas and Eddas. In the saga of Eirík the Red, a seeress is invited to a Greenland farm which has fallen on hard times. In a elaborate ceremony, she foretells the end of the famine, and a good future for a young woman who has sung the song that enables her to ask questions of the 'powers' or spirits that give her information. She sits on a specially-prepared platform, and in trance communes with the spirits, then relays her information, while she is a spákona, a spae-woman, one who can speak the future, in this case she requires the assistance of the spirits and it is her work with them which is apparently termed 'seidr'. This account forms the starting point for the reconstitution of 'oracular seidr' today among Heathens, but it neither explains nor exemplifies the range of meanings of the word 'seidr', which varies in the present as much even as it's likely to have done in the past, from one group to another, one country to another, as it is drawn upon by people who seek to make their own connection to past and present. Sejd as neoshamanistic practice in Sweden has been described by Lindquist (1997). The practices I have observed and participated in, and that are described here, are from North America: Swedish sejd may be more reliant on core shamanism, but appears in Lindquist's account as an example of 'urban shaman' practice embedded in a cultural and cosmological setting. In North American seidr such embeddedness cannot use the specifics of place, climate, language and mythological knowledge that are available in Sweden, and North American rituals of oracular seidr are more elaborate and formalized, and possibly more research-dependent, than those Lindquist describes, in search of a similar 'embeddedness'. Tracing the past: seidr in mediæval literature In today's Heathenism, reconstitution of Northern European religion, there tends to be a distinction between magic and celebratory-religion. Quite a number of people do not engage in magical practices, but do talk to the goddesses and gods, or spirits of the land in a very matter-of-fact way without expecting direct communication, and engage in ritual without a deliberate change of consciousness other than that occasioned by the concentration involved. Others, however, use magical techniques which fall into three main categories: galdr or sung magic, runic magic, and seidr. Until quite recently, most people who did 'magic' tended to use runes either for divination or for spell-work by means of rune-charms (combining galdr and runic magic). The community is changing, though, and I am increasingly seeing people who are using consciousness-altering, ecstatic practices, including journeying for divination, for healing, for what a friend calls 'de-ghosting', or for gaining personal knowledge and self-development. Groups are arising, of people who help each other learn - or construct, invent or reinvent - the old shamanistic techniques of the North. A recent issue of the journal Idunna, produced by The Troth, an organization in North America, is devoted to seidr practice. What people know about seidr comes largely from the Icelandic Sagas and Eddas, where there are various accounts of magic-workers, at least some of whom appear to be using 'shamanistic' techniques: the Greenland spákona (spae-woman, prophetess) in the Saga of Eirík the Red being the most clearly-described example. People today are drawing on these accounts in constructing their practices, for instance those who practice Oracular Seidr use the account of this Greenland prophetess, and the possible formulae given in some of the Eddic poems (Vóluspá, Balder's dream, and the Lay of Hyndla, as Diana Paxson describes). The saga accounts were composed, the Eddic poems written down, post-Christianization, but it seems likely that the practices referred to had remained part of popular awareness, that is, the possibility of their occurrence was still part of the culture. Indeed, Jórmundur Ingi of the Ásatrúarfélagidh of Iceland maintains that some practices of Icelandic folk-magic represent a continuation of seid-magic into the present day. Traces appear in other areas of Northern Europe: for instance, in Scotland, the 'spaewife' remained part of the culture, although with little evidence that her practices involved ecstatic trance, and a number of practices related to divination or spae-working have persisted until the present-day, though stripped of spiritual/ecstatic content. However, it's unlikely that Heathen Northern European culture in 'viking' times (the periods described by the Kings' sagas and the sagas of the Icelanders) could be convincingly described as 'shamanic'. There quite possibly were shamanic communities here and there, but overall in the period for which we have any kind of after-the-fact record, no. These were times of political change, and there is the suggestion of suppression of seidr/shamanic activity, by rulers who were themselves heathen as well as those who were Christian. There were shamanistic things people did, magical practices that in the view of the later writers of 'historic' accounts were connected with Saami shamanism, ways of connecting with spirits and getting knowledge that used ecstatic trance, but most of this was on a private or semi-private basis, not centrally part of the culture by these times of the ninth and tenth centuries of the common era (Blain, 1998a). (If you go far enough back in Northern Europe you get to shamanic cultures, obviously, but present day heathenism is mostly based on what can be gleaned from the Norse and earlier Anglo-Saxon written material.) The sagas were written during a particular period of history, and tell of an earlier period. Anthropologist Kristen Hastrup says that the objective of the saga-writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was to tell Icelandic history in a particular way, though family stories (Hastrup, 1996). The sagas do not deal with 'community' or 'society' as such, rather with the relations and happenings of particular families. According to Borovsky (1999:7), 'the sagas can be read as documents that straddle the terrain between (oral) "history" and (written) "fiction" because they were intended to provide the medieval audience with a sense of their past that would resonate with the present.' The descriptions of seidworkers appear as part of this construction, and for the most part seidr is performed against the protagonists of the sagas. There could be reasons for this: some members of the Icelandic church had become versed in certain kinds of magic, including galdr and to some extent foretelling not associated with seidr. Various kinds of magic were proscribed by the laws in Jónsbók, after the (thirteenth century) annexation of Iceland to Norway, as punishable by death. These included: "...fordædhuskap ok spáfarar allar ok útiseta at vekja tróll upp ok fremja heidhni," (Hastrup, 1990, p 391), that is "sorcery and spae-working (foretelling) and sitting out to wake up trolls and practising heathenism". In actuality, no-one was convicted until Iceland's small witch-craze in the seventeenth century, long after official religion had changed from Catholicism to Lutheranism (Hastrup, 1990). The proscription shows however that "By the act of sitting out, which was a metaphor for leaving the ordinary social space, it was possible to invoke supernatural beings" (Hastrup, 1990, p. 391), and that the invocation of these beings, by the time of writing, was regarded suspiciously. Whether it was regarded with equal suspicion in the tenth century is not clear. Some early accounts (of for instance the activities of Queen Gunnhildr, a noted seidworker and political figure) suggest that seid-magic was more acceptable, more part of the community, whereas in later ones seidr is negatively construed and Gunnhildr has become the archetypal sorceress, 'the prototype of evil and revenging women in the old Norse corpus' (Jochens, Old Norse Images of Women, p. 180). However we are told that Gunnhild's husband, Eiríkr bloodaxe and his father Haraldr Fairhair, 'hated seidr' and put to death Eirík's half-brother together with eighty seidworkers: indication both that seidr was performed, and that it was not favoured by some of the power-seekers of the time. Exactly what was meant by seidr, in these accounts, is unclear, and it is possible that the meaning changed over time. However there is indication that spirits were invoked for their assistance, that the person might call the spirits to her or himself, or journey elsewhere to receive their aid or seek knowledge (possibly in changed form, as one who was hamramr, shapestrong, though some commentators say that shapeshifting did not form part of seidr practice). Snorri Sturluson in Ynglingasaga describes the magical practices engaged in by Ódhinn, who - could transform his shape: his body would lie as if dead, or asleep; but then he would be in shape of a fish, or worm, or bird, or beast ... Sometimes even he called the dead out of the earth, or set himself beside the burial-mounds; whence he was called the ghost-sovereign, and lord of the mounds... Odin understood also the art in which the greatest power is lodged, and which he himself practiced; namely, what is called magic [seidr]. By means of this he could know beforehand the predestined fate of men, or their not yet completed lot; and also bring on the death, ill-luck, or bad health of people, and take the strength or wit from one person and give it to another. But after such witchcraft followed such weakness and anxiety [ergi], that it was not thought respectable for men to practice it; and therefore the priestesses were brought up in this art... .
(Trans. Samuel Laing, London, 1844) And indeed, in the old literature, seidr appears primarily as women's magic: taught first to the Æsir by Freyja, according to Ynglingasaga. In the Eddic poems, we are introduced to the vólva, or prophetess who speaks the great poem Vóluspá (the speaking of the seeress), and to Heidhr (who may be Freyja herself, or may be another name for the vólva who is speaking). Freyja in the poem Lokasenna is described as 'fordædha', a word for a (usually evil) magic working-woman. In the sagas, in addition to Thorbjórg the seeress of Eiríkr the Red's saga, there are numerous women who are described as seidkonur (seidwomen), or as illusion-workers or shape-shifters. These include two seeresses from Kormak's saga, Katla from Eyrbyggja saga, the 'Finnish' seidworker from Vatnsdala saga, Oddbjórg of Víga-Glúms saga, Kjannok of Heidharvíga saga, Heimlaug of Gull-Thóris saga, and seeresses, vólvur, named Heidhr who appear in Landmanabók and Hrolfs saga Kraka, Örvar-Odds saga, and many others. (Indeed it seems that by the end of the saga-writing period, that name 'Heidhr' had become synonymous with 'seidworker'.) Some of these sagas deal with the everyday lives of Icelanders, and while they were composed some two centuries after the episodes they purport to record, people are portrayed in them as engaging in activities of a fairly usual kind, so that the concept of the seidwoman or vólva seems one that was generally acknowledged. Jenny Jochens says that Tapping ancient custom embodied in oral tradition and reinforced by persistent social practice, these narratives... give credence to a historic reality of prophetesses among pagan Germanic-Nordic tribes. Equally important, the literary proliferation of the sibyls in the thirteenth century suggests that they were part of the contemporary perception of pagan times.
(Jochens, 1996: 116) But while the accounts may give 'credence to a historic reality of prophetesses,' they also portray seidwomen as 'fordædha', doers of evil deeds, seidmen as 'ergi', 'argr' or 'ragr', a disputed word that has been translated as cowardly, unmanly, sometimes said to imply homosexuality, and one of the few words for which provision was made in Icelandic law, that its saying without cause would be cause for outlawry. The present: Experiencing I am attempting to investigate seidr and its meaning for those reconstituting it through engaging with practices in a number of different ways. Thus, I am becoming aware of an increasing variety of ways in which seidr practice is gaining relevance in the present day, within the rather loosely-woven community of those who are aware of it, in parts of North America and Europe. I'm therefore interacting with seidr techniques through personal journeying, facilitation of others' connections with spirits through journeying, and oracular seidr performed for within small local community; also I've had some involvement in use of seidr techniques in healing and counseling work. The word 'seidr' is used in the community both for personal communication with wights, goddesses or gods, spirits, in ways that are broadly speaking 'shamanistic', and increasingly for community-based practices which may possibly be construed as 'shamanic'. The definitions I'm using of 'shamanistic' and 'shamanic' are similar to the usage of Heinze (1991), and are based on ongoing discussions with a colleague. These concepts will be addressed later in this paper. In describing practice in the present day, I will recount my own first exposure to oracular seidr, at a festival, Trothmoot, held at the Gaia retreat centre near Kansas City. I had been reading about seidr, on the Internet, and corresponding with people about it via email, witnessing, some time previously, major disagreements on an email list ensuing from descriptions of seidr as 'shamanism', reading accounts by heathens of these contested terms. Oracular seidr was, I thought, something I should see, and probably learn about, as an academic trying to study identity in earth-religions and grasp how people constructed the realities that they worked within. I knew the story of the seeress Thorbjórg. I knew the basics of how the seidr séance was constructed, following Hrafnar's deductions from the literature. Two friends were interested in pursuing this further, incorporating a more shamanistic practice into the small 'kindred' we had developed previously, and I had asked for, and received, training materials from a friend. I read up on neo-shamanic journeying, dipped briefly into some of the anthropological literature on shamanism, and was ready to face the unknown. I had participated in, and led, neo-pagan guided meditations, worked with altered consciousness within circle rituals, and could, to some extent, visualize the 'journey'. I was eager to see the session, and report back, but did not envision myself as a seidworker. It was late at night, after the other events of the day, and the room was dim, candlelit, still warm from the exceeding heat of Kansas at midsummer. My brain switched into 'taking notes' mode as people were seated, and the seidworkers began the preliminaries, chanting a rune-row, invoking deities, singing the journey song, drumming and singing the songs that called their power animals. In the near-darkness, Diana narrated the journey down beneath the roots of the world tree, to the gates of Hela's realm, and Winifred sat in the high seat, her face veiled, and in trance went through the gates. I had been working hard, visualizing the journey and taking mental notes. What I did not expect was the very strong pull, experienced both as a yearning and as a direct physical tug at my midriff, to follow her. I remembered the instructions, and concentrated on visualizing the gates before me, closed. Diana had said that the seeress would remain connected to us, by a silver cord. I felt the cord, an umbilicus between myself and Winifred, felt its tension. Questioners stepped forward, and I listened while feeling that attachment, that pull. Some asked of jobs, some of attachments, of health, of future meetings, of relatives. One asked of a severe health problem and the need to face her mortality, and I listened in the half-world of trance, before the gates, profoundly moved. When Winifred left the high seat, I felt my body doing work, drawing her back, lending my own strength. With a second seeress in the chair, I was more able to distance myself. Now there was no call to enter the gates, though I knew that later, at another time, there would be. The seeress was tiring, and still there were more questions. Diana, taking the high seat, called to me to stand behind her and 'shadow' her, giving protection and physical stability, should she sway in the seat. After the session, I walked to my tent, up the steep rocky path to the campsite. though we had been 'talked back' from the gates, up to the World Tree and back through a tunnel of trees to the everyday reality of sitting in our circle of chairs around the high seat, I could sense that I was climbing in another reality, still walking back from Hela's gates, and used the sensation of physically climbing to help my return from the light trance of the audience-participants. I first sat in the high seat a few months later, and my friends sang for me to go through the gates. A raven sat on the gatepost, with one white feathered streak on the side on its head. On the next journey we experimented with questioning, and I found that I could wait, in darkness, for a question and, with some difficulty (due to my wish to analyze rather than speak the vision) relay what then came to me. However I remained conscious of the audience, wondering about their level of comfort, their level of trance, attempting to facilitate their experience, except when I sang the runes or sat in the high seat. The almost formulaic ritual was a performance, which led to its own state of altered consciousness, different from that of the solitary or facilitated journey. I would go through the gates, wait to be sung onto a path, and see first many people, then a tree, and by the tree I could find answers, though they came slowly when people asked, and speaking, requiring to withdraw sufficiently from the deep trance state to be able to articulate with physical tongue, throat and lips, was hard, and has since become still more hard. Then came a journey that was different from the start. As I did the narration to the gates, it seemed increasingly that this was for the others, I was facilitating their journey, but though I felt myself moving into a light trance I did not see the gates. Sitting on the high seat with the veil over my head, I was in a mound, at once seeing the one who dwelled there and being myself the dweller in the mound, one buried there long before. As people asked questions, answers came from within the mound, from the glitter of flecks of gemstones in the soil, from images projected onto walls of stone or earth, from patterns formed by stacked stones before me. At times my awareness seemed to incorporate a large hall of feasting people, who yet formed part of the mound - howe, barrow or cairn, I did not inquire at this time. When Thorgerd, a craftswoman, asked of her work, I heard the ringing of hammer on anvil, and saw the dwarf-smith who laughed when I passed on the question to him. My friend had asked this question before, which was why he laughed. In the mythology, dwarves crafted the finest objects, and forged precious metals. Two days later, sitting at my computer, the images returned to me and the poem was born. Around me earth
above me roots, turf
darkness encircles
and the scent of moist soil,
mould
with a freshness of new life
as seeds stir in soil
waiting rebirth
a fresh spring, a new year
Here is silence. And here I could wait, between questions, without overly tiring, recovering strength from the setting, within the cosmology and indeed physical landscape with which I was most familiar. The present in the past: Seidr as contested practice These examples give some sense of the performance of seidr. That word 'performance' of course is itself contested within the community of those who engage in shamanistic practice in the west, 'urban shamans' (e.g. an essay of Jonathan Horwitz, available via Internet), and I should explain my use. For me it holds another meaning, resulting from early training as a dancer, where 'performance' far from holding its popular meaning of 'put on, a show, a facade' rather means a total involvement with the material, a more focused appreciation of what one is doing. The performance engages the performer, absorbs her, demands fullest attention, to be successful in involving its audience. This meaning resonates with attempts to connect experience with 'what is done', perception with action, and hence performance with event, within a cultural interpretative frame, as persuasive act with creates conditions for change in both audience and performer (to use the definition of Csordas; 1997). I focus in this paper, however, on other contestations, and here I will return to the weaving of meaning, the movement between past and present, text and reconstruction. It seems from the old material that not everyone supported the practice of seidr, and even people who made use of the services of seeresses or seers might turn against them, as in Kormák's saga. Furthermore, there are no references (that I have found) to seidr used for healing, only that the strength of one person could be given to another; which can hint at a range of meanings. Some people within today's heathen community have concluded that 'seidr' was synonymous with 'evil magic'. Others consider that seidr is too involved with changes in consciousness, too associated with the 'new age', for a religion of (assumed) Viking warriors. Seidr is therefore contested in today's practice, as in the sagas. An ongoing debate exists over the word 'ergi', used to refer to male seidworkers on various occasions in the sagas, and in the Eddic poem Lokasenna. Some heathens shun seidr because they fear a link with homosexuality. Others, like French seidworker Yves Kodratoff, maintain that the word does link seidr with so-called 'receptive' sexuality, whether of women or of some gay men, in the past, but that for various (as yet, unspecified) reasons this need not apply to male seidr practitioners today. Jordsvin, a gay male seidr worker, points out that in practical ability to 'do seidr', women and gay men seem more able to effect the change of consciousness required, but that heterosexual men can do this also: though they may have to work harder to achieve the same effect. One suggestion from several seidworkers is that seidr work requires a 'loss of ego', a setting aside boundaries of self and other and decentralizing of self. This is counter to hegemonic masculinity in North America and Europe today (Blain and Wallis, 2000). If 'real men' are expected to 'be in control', and seidr involves relinquishing this control, be it to spirits, deities, ghosts or ancestors, to do seidr is to become de-masculinized. Yet this in itself is capable of many meanings, and this ambiguity may be seen as a strength. Today the word 'ergi' takes on a new meaning in the light of debates about the need for men and women alike to understand the world rather than seek to dominate it, to listen to voices of others around them in an increasingly multivocal society, as we move into a new century and a new millennium. Another debate within the Heathen community relates to the relation of seidr to shamanism. On the one hand, proponents point to the seeress' ecstatic trance and quest for knowledge, as 'shamanism'. On the other, opponents, possibly fearing too close an association with the 'new age' or 'neoshamanism', emphasise differences between descriptions of seidr and records of 'shamanic' rituals. This debate seems to me to be misplaced. 'Shamanism' is a Western construction (Wallis, 1999), a generalisation and abstraction from what shamans do, as described by Western explorers, historians and anthropologists and linked by them to particular socio-economic 'types' of society. Seidr, as specific, culturally-based practice, is by definition not 'shamanism' of this nature. The picture we have of 'shamanism' is essentialised by removal of the historical and cultural contexts in which shamans practice (Flaherty, 1992) and linked both popularly, and by academics, to a 'past constructed as timeless, primordial, mythic' (Green, 1998). Magical/shamanistic practice in the past occurred within a changing socio-political context, of centralization of power, of resistance, of religious change linked with socio-economic survival (in Iceland) and dynastic power-broking (in Norway and elsewhere). It seems likely that the practices of seidr, and the meanings of the words related to them, changed over time and across the cultural geography of the North of Europe, with influences from, most obviously, Saami shamanism, which was itself neither stagnant nor static (Hultkrantz, 1992). Seidr was, and is today, gendered political practice (Blain 1999). Today's seidworkers are drawing on a rich resource, in the old literature and the folk-practices of the countries of the north, and drawing, too, on knowledge of shamanic practice elsewhere. Seidr is being constructed in many ways, in many places: emerging from study, emerging from folk-magic, from sagas, from folk-tales or fairy-tales, from history and from imagination, in ways that fit places and peoples, landscapes, wights or spirits and specific cultures of the communities and individuals concerned. Oracular seidr is only one construction, though perhaps the most ritualized and community oriented, and obviously based in saga description. Seidr can be used, as stated at the commencement of this article, for healing, 'de-ghosting', for what seidworker Bil Linzie terms 'whole-making', which includes all of those and more. The seidworkers I have interviewed involve themselves in a range of activities requiring altered states of consciousness. Thus, Bil Linzie works as a healer, or 'wholemaker': though a considerable portion of his work is with those who are dying, to enable their transition as 'whole' beings. He will meet ancestors, ghosts, bridge worlds of living and dead for those who seek his help. In different ways, Jordsvin uses techniques derived from oracular seidr to bridge between worlds, enabling spirits trapped in the 'wrong' world (and causing trouble for householders) to pass through him to their next 'home'. The ancestors who help him are not all heathen, and nor are the people whose houses he 'unhaunts': but his practices remain based in heathen cosmology of the nine worlds, the well and the tree. Winifred uses techniques of spae-working to counsel and guide: she becomes a link between deities and those who come to her for counsel; but she does not use the term 'seidr' for her divinatory and counseling practices. For Thorgerd, seid-journeying becomes a way to connect with Heidhr, who seems to be instructing her in herbalism by this means. She and others point out that the ability to bless is the other side of the ability to curse. Many of those who do seidr or spae-working state that their seidr has broadened their awareness of themselves and their relationship with past and present, with earth and ancestors and spirits and with the deities and wights of Heathenism. For at least some, it seems that seid-work becomes a way to move away from the hegemonic discourses of identity, gender and ethnicity within mainstream 'western' societies, and create identities that are more fluid, more able to deal with ambiguity and transitions. Seidr becomes a way to resist categorization, particularly of gender and sexuality. Yet as stated above, some within the heathen community have said that the term 'seidr' is commonly associated with evil magic, and that activities of journeying and divination are more properly termed spae. On the one hand, there are the arguments that seidr involved 'messing with people's minds', changing memories or personality characteristics, turning (or threatening to turn) 'the world upside down' (which potentially refers either to an earthquake or to a great distortion of perception of the one whose world is so affected). The curse that Gunnhildr laid on Egill Skalla-grímsson seems an example of negative seidr. Yet the accounts of negative seidr can be read as the attempts of people to defend, or to avenge. Again, blessing and cursing can be sides of the same coin. On the other hand, we have the stories of the Greenland seeress, and of Thurídhr sundafyllir, who gained her name by calling fish into the sound, by means of seidr, thereby providing prosperity for the people. Zoë Borovsky (1999) points out that both these instances of seidr relate to fertility, and she speculates that not only does the Greenland seeress foretell fertility and prosperity, but her use of seidr techniques, calling the spirits, actively accomplishes this fertility by bringing the components of innangardh and útangardh - approximately settlement and wildness, deities and giants, knowable and unknowable - back into balance. If so, this concern for a dynamic balance, for creating wholeness for individual within community, sites seidr securely as shamanistic practice, performed for the community, and going beyond telling the future to engaging with its construction. A present-day example of 'calling the fish' comes from the seidkona Raudhildr, who tells her story thus. On a fishing expedition, one person had caught no fish. She says: I touched his line and "sang along it" to the fish. I asked them to please give one more of their kind to this good man. I said he would make offering to the gods and wights of the sea for the prosperity of all their folk in return. I sang of the man's worthiness to receive such a gift. How a great fish giving himself to this man would bring honor to all parties. I sang of his power and his bravery as a warrior (the gent was a Vietnam Veteran). Lastly I thanked them for listening to my song. I took my hand off the line and a fish hit his line so hard I herd the line slap against the side of the boat. Two minute later he had the fish on the deck. I don't like the practice, but on the big trip boats, they will sometimes club the fish. But this one didn't need it. The gentleman knelt down and touched it, said "thank you" and the fish stopped moving. It was very powerful. No more than two minutes after that, the boat limited out and the lines were pulled out of the water and we headed home. Practitioners and others speak of the seidr worker as responsible to the community, where this community goes beyond that of humans alone. Often the seid-worker shares her or his life with spirits, ghosts, or other beings who have a stake in whatever is afoot, and a say, at times the final say, in what will be performed. Finally, there are differing views within the community as to the 'true form' of seidr practice, some following the rather elaborate formulation derived by Hrafnar, which includes a guided journey to the gates of Hela's realm, the underworld or world of the dead. Others point out that in the literature, there is no description of the seeress making this journey to seek spirits of ancestors: rather the spirits are called to her. (Hrafnar do not claim a monopoly of 'true' practice. They point out that they are reconstructing one form of seidr, in their own way.) My feelings are that no practices are 'correct', for we are striving to recreate something which 'works' within the present. The past is a guide; but making contact with spirits requires us to escape or evade centuries of Western 'rationalist' thinking. Journeying elsewhere to seek them has its practical side. Seidworkers may have 'rationalist doubts' about their practice, as members of the wider North American society, especially when they attempt to cast their practices in its discourses, even as anthropologists do (Blain, 1998b). Seidr as shamanistic, possibly shamanic practice is culturally based but results-oriented. The present: Seidr and the community There are at least five grades of attachment to seidr, that I can ascertain, within the Heathen community in North America and parts of Europe. First, there are those who will have nothing to do with it, distrusting it either as 'evil magic' or (for some men, especially within some North American understandings of Northern religion practice) stating that 'seidr is for women or gay men' (Blain and Wallis, 2000). Second are those who neither practice nor seek out seidworkers for knowledge, but recognize it as forming ways of connecting to the deities and landwights of the North. Third, those who are 'clients' of seidworkers, attending seidr séances when the opportunity presents. It should however be noted that attendees may come also from other sections for the pagan or alternative religious communities, or even from outside these. Fourth are those who perform journeying within a northern cosmology, as a private activity for personal inspiration or knowledge, and use the term 'seidr' for this. This is what I have referred to as shamanistic, rather than shamanic practice. Fifth, those who facilitate and engage in seidr as community activity, whether practicing as healers, group-leaders, counselors or teachers, or taking part in community Oracular séances, as seers, seidr-guides, or assisting in other capacities (e.g. as warder or guardian or sacred space). My estimate is that people engaging at this level can now be counted in hundreds, in North America: the numbers are small, but growing. Schools of practice are starting to appear, not all within organized heathenism, and a number of known 'shamanic' workers explicitly relate their practices to seidr, and as seidr becomes increasingly known it forms a bridge between heathen and 'urban shaman' communities. Seidwork offers opportunity for shamanistic practice within a heathen cosmological framework. While its present-day reconstruction draws on techniques from elsewhere, including the copious literature, both academic and popular, on shamanism (notably Circumpolar and Indigenous American practices) seidr has its firm basis in the cosmology, mythology and imagery of Northern Europe: of the Well of Wyrd and the World Tree Yggdrasill; the Norns who spin lives for deities and people alike, the animals which come to the tree; the spirits of the land; all the beings and deities of the Nine Worlds. For those of us who grew up within cultures influenced by those of Northern Europe, who learned the names of deities as we named the days of the week, this is an accessible imagery, a familiar mythology, a potential home: grounded in a spirituality that avoids appropriation. And so for myself as a daughter of earth and of the grey northern skies: though hazards and dangers lie in the darkness of the long nights, I will seek the tree and the worlds that lie on its branches, and would drink from the well at its roots, source of wisdom for which Ódhinn gave his eye. References cited Blain, Jenny, 1998a. "Seidr and Seidworkers: Recovering shamanic practice in contemporary heathenism," The Pomegranate, 6, October 1998, 6-19. Blain, Jenny, 1998b. "Presenting constructions of identity and divinity: Ásatrú and Oracular Seidhr," In Doing Ethnographic Research: Fieldwork Settings, Scott Grills, ed. Pp.203-227. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Blain, Jenny, 1999. "Seidhr as Shamanistic Practice: Reconstituting a Tradition of Ambiguity," Shaman, 7(2), 99-121. Blain, Jenny and Robert J. Wallis, 2000. The "ergi" seidman: Contestations of gender, shamanism and sexuality in northern religion past and present, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 15,3: 395-411. Borovsky, Zoë, 1999. "Never in public: Women and performance in Old Norse Literature," Journal of American Folklore 112(443): 6-39. Csordas, Thomas J, 1997. "Imaginal performance and Memory in Ritual Healing," The Performance of Healing, Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman, eds. Pp. 91-114. New York: Routledge. Flaherty, Gloria, 1992. Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Greene, Shane, 1998. "The shaman's needle: development, shamanic agency, and intermedicality in Aguarina Lands, Peru." American Ethnologist 25(4): 634-658. Hastrup, Kirsten, 1990. "Iceland: Sorcerers and Paganism." Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries Ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hastrup, Kristen, 1996A. Passage to Anthropology. London: Routledge. Heinze, Ruth-Inge, 1991. Shamans of the Twentieth Century. New York: Irvington. Hultkrantz, Åke, 1992. "Aspects of Saami (Lapp) Shamanism." Northern Religions and Shamanism, ed. Mihály Hoppál and Juha Pentikäinen. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, and Helsinki:Finnish Literary Society. Jochens, Jenny, 1996. Old Norse Images of Women. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. Lindquist, Galina, 1997. Shamanic Performances on the Urban Scene: Neo-Shamanism in Contemporary Sweden. Stockholm: Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology. Sturluson, Snorri, trs. Samuel Laing, 1844. Heimskringla, or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway. London: Longmans. Wallis, Robert J, 1999. "Altered states, conflicting cultures: Shamans, neo-shamans and academics." Anthropology of Consciousness, 10(2), 41-49. Copyright ©1999 Jenny Blain, all rights reserved.
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