Angela Puca AP: If you’re interested in Heathenry, Heathenism and the Magic within these traditions stay tuned because you’re just about to find out.

Hello everyone I’m Angela and welcome to my Symposium. I’m a PhD and a University Lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of Magic, Paganism, Heathenry, Shamanism and all things esoteric.

Today I have a special guest here on the channel, it is Dr Jefferson Calico. Jefferson is a Religious Studies teacher who specializes in new religious movements and contemporary Paganism. His book “Being Viking” is an anthropological account of contemporary Heathenry in the US released by Equinox Publishing in 2018. So please help me in welcoming Jefferson on Angela’s Symposium. Hello Jefferson, how are you today?

Dr Jefferson Calico JC: Hi, I’m good. How are you doing?

AP: Thank you so much for being on my Symposium.

JC: Oh, this is amazing. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I love the Symposium and your YouTube channel are amazing. Smart and thoughtful and fun as well. So that’s perfect.

AP: Yeah, that is like my motto, ‘the academic fun.’ But yeah, I’m really happy to have you here to talk a bit about Heathenry and I know that you specialize on Heathenry in the US but you also have a broader knowledge on the subject matter. So my first question will be what is Heathenry and is it different from Heathenism? Can you please give us an overview of these traditions?

JC: Yeah, I tend to call it Heathenry. My book “Being Viking” has the term Heathenism on the title and so, I think part of that is just because we haven’t really decided yet what to call it in the scholarly field. So there’s a lot of terms that are used for it including Heathenry. Maybe Heathenism comes from the similarity to Paganism, so making it into an ‘ism’ or Buddhism. Heathenry is maybe more similar to Christianity, so just different ways of making it into that collective noun. But then practitioners use a whole different set of terms. Some of them will call themselves Heathens, that’s a very common sort of umbrella term for the movement or Norse Paganism, Norse Pagans, Ásatrú also Forn Sed, which means the old ways and then there are specialized terms like Vanatru, Rokkatru, and all these may have different connotations for the focus of the religious practice. But Heathenry in general it’s a type of contemporary Paganism that really takes its inspiration from those pre-Christian, Norse cultures and societies. So like cultures that would have societies that would have spoken Norse or Germanic languages, Anglo-Saxon, those sorts of language groups and the pre-Christian religions that they would have practised.

Yeah, so I guess when I think about Heathenry I think about an overview of what it might involve it’s really focused on gods and those divine beings. So you might call it theocentric or god-focused but the gods and goddesses play a very important role in heathen spirituality. It’s also very lore-based. So there’s a group of texts that we call the lore that were written in old Norse, things like the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, and Icelandic Sagas that form like a textual basis for the religion and those are a really important part of the lore. There’s also a strong reconstructionist aspect to Heathenry and which is about taking the past very seriously and having some sort of historical accuracy or very tied to what the what might be called the arch-Heathens what the arch-Heathens did in the past and tried to reconstruct that in some way. And then, I would say, that there’s also a very strong orientation towards nature and ancestral veneration. So those are sort of those big points I think for what makes Heathenry what it is.

Now we’re going to talk about Magic I think and so we might get into a little bit about Magic has an important role in Heathenry but it’s also a contested practice, as well, so that’ll be interesting to talk about.

AP: Yeah, definitely but before we go into that I also want to ask, are there differences between, for example, Ásatrú and Odinism and other forms of Heathenry?

JC: Yes, I think that the basis is this connection to the Norse past. There would be differences, I don’t know if you want to call it theological and some practical differences in practice. There’s definitely some differences in terms of how they view contemporary society and how they relate to contemporary society. So that’s an important difference but a lot of these things we talked about are very similar and so I think there’s a similarity between all the different shades. They’re all drawing on very similar sources, they are sharing a lot of the practices and rituals but then there’s this difference in orientation especially towards contemporary society, I think.

AP: And do you think that Heathenry is a form of Paganism or would you think that it is different from Paganism?

JC: So I think it’s a type of Paganism. At the same time, again, there are some different tributaries, what I call tributaries in my book, in “Being Viking” that influence the development of Heathenry or which make it different, in some ways, from what we might consider… you know, it’s hard to talk about what Paganism is since it’s so varied but that make Heathenry different than Wicca, for instance. And sometimes there is some tension and Heathens, at times, some Heathens have tried to distinguish themselves from quote-unquote “Pagans” even though they are in a sense Pagans.

AP: But most scholars would agree that it is a form of Paganism?

JC: Yeah, I think it’s definitely a form of Paganism. But it’s like boundary setting and trying to do boundary setting. So there is a critique of, I don’t know, Wiccan and Witchcraft within Heathenry. At the same time, there’s parts of Heathenry that are very much influenced by what I call that tributary of Wicca and Witchcraft. So in some heathen communities, there’s a tension with Paganism and an attempt to set some boundaries there between what Heathenry is and what Paganism or Witchcraft in Wicca particularly might be.

AP: Yeah, that makes sense.

JC: And that comes down to, you know, one of those things is Magic, okay.

AP: Yeah I was just about to enter the field of Magic. I know that there is a controversy all right.

JC: Sorry. Go ahead.

AP: What I know is that there is a controversy regarding Magic and Heathenry. Can you please tell us more about that?

JC: I think there’s different perspectives on Magic in Heathenry. So we’re probably going to talk about… there’s a part of Heathenry that has a strong magical orientation and really is quite involved in what we might call heathen Magic and interprets the heathen tradition in terms of, or sees a strong magical practice in the historical heathen tradition as well. So those two things are often interrelated. Like people who practice heathen Magic and see Heathenry as a magickal religion also interpret the lore and the old tradition, old ways in Magic, see Magic there as well. And so we’re going to talk about some of those. I’m sure we’re going to do that.

But then there are, on the other end there are people who would say that Heathenry is not magical, that there’s very little Magic and what Magic there might have been was seen as problematic even in the old days, in the old ways, that Magic was an illicit practice or a practice that was looked down upon in some ways, a marginalized practice. And so some people will still say that Heathenry just isn’t magical and that it’s really what, we might call, a devotional or votive religion, is strongly oriented towards venerating the deities, the gods, others. In my book I quote a practitioner who says, it’s not magickal so don’t Magic it. And so there is that sort of strong critique among some Heathens about it. And then there’s another, I think, another perspective on Magic, which would be from this reconstructionist perspective, which says, okay if we’re gonna do Magic, as contemporary Heathens, it needs to be accurately based on what we see happening in the past. So what kind of Magic do we actually see in the lore and what of that can we actually do, we actually know what they’re doing and can we reconstruct that.

So in this perspective, okay, you know there’s a scepticism towards Magic because but we ought to be cautious about Magic, we ought to tie it really closely to the lore and just do what we know that the arch-Heathens did in the past. So that’s that reconstructionist idea about Magic. So, for instance, in that perspective, they’re going to say you know everyone is like casting runes for divination but there’s not a lot of good data from the past on casting runes as a divinatory practice. So we shouldn’t do that or we should be very careful about doing that. Instead, we should do some of these practices that we see happening in the lore that we can reconstruct.

AP: That’s interesting because you see the same patterns with reconstructionists in Italy with the Roman and Greek traditions. So it’s interesting to see how certain patterns appear in different traditions and in different places.

JC: Right, yeah and I think the Heathens have struggled in that area because there’s really not a lot of data on that. So people have really tried to mine into the lore of several of them, and hopefully, we can talk about that, but certain sources like Egil’s Saga, that has some Magic in it and Eric the Red’s Saga in the Vinland, Icelandic sagas and some other sources for Magic that people have used in Heathenry to try to reconstruct some practices.

I think there’s also, I mentioned this in the book also, there’s a sense of, like, blue-collar Heathenry and that what Heathenry is about, it should be practical, you know, it should be about ethics and living your life and not really about sort of the magickal things. It should be really practical and hands-on and not about Magic. So there was, among some Heathens you hear sort of a class analysis of Magic like Magic comes from people who have read too many, who’ve been influenced by contemporary culture a little bit too much or who aren’t really practically oriented towards life, maybe they’ve read too many books or something.

AP: So this implies that Magic is not practical which is interesting because Magic usually is aimed at very practical results.

JC: Right, right.

AP: So maybe it’s just that they have a positivist outlook on reality where only tangible things can produce tangible results?

JC: Yeah, I mean this perspective would really see Heathenry in terms of its ethic, I think and its approach to life in that sense. Of like self-determination and hard work. I’m bouncing my table a little bit here too much. Self-determinate hard work, you know, perseverance and some of these ethical principles about how to make your way in a difficult world. And I agree Magic often has a role to play, has a role to play in that. And you see Magic practice by Heathens of all sort of backgrounds, it’s not necessarily coming from one sort of, it’s not like just college-educated Heathens or something like that that are practising Magic. You really see Magic pretty widespread, different forms of Magic and across the spectrum and heathery.

AP: For example, you mentioned the Nithing-pole the Nithstang or scorn-pole and its digital use. Can you tell us more about that, please?

JC: So that’s Nithing-pole or scorn-pole?

AP: So Nithing-pole, sorry for the mispronunciation.

JC: Or Nithstang, you said that. Nith means to like… Nith means to denounce or condemn or curse, to identify someone as a villain, to disparage them, to insult them. So I think it’s Jackson Crawford, who’s an Old Norse Scholar, who uses that term scorn-pole which is good. That idea of casting scorn on someone who’s done shameful things, I guess. Sometimes it’s called cursing but it’s not, it may be cursing but just this idea of, in a magical way, casting scorn on someone. And in the lore, so like in Egil’s Saga there’s a famous passage where Egil, who is the hero of that Saga, cuts and takes a piece of wood, piece of hazelwood and then he kills a horse, puts a horse head on it and then pronounces a curse or pronounces this scorn against his enemies and against the nature spirits, the Landvættir, in their area and he wants to cast them into confusion and disarray and then he cuts runes onto this scorn-pole or Nithing-pole and just and sets it up and leaves it there as a way to, as a magical way to prevent his enemies from succeeding, cast their family into disarray, disrupt their family line. So it’s like casting a spell against one’s enemies in some sense and cutting runes that express that. It’s also in an episode of “Vikings” the TV show and I think it’s season three, there is a Nithing pole that is is erected in one of them, one of the scenes in Vikings. So it’s got its role in popular culture as well.

AP: It’s entered popular culture as well. Yeah and I can imagine that, after Vikings, many people got interested in Heathenry.

JC: Oh boy, yeah. Yeah, there’s a whole controversy about that too, of course. You know I think Heathens love Vikings and also hate it in some ways too. But…

AP: Perhaps because it’s not as historically accurate.

JC: Exactly right, yeah.

AP: It’s yeah. I would expect that that would be the case.

JC: So yeah, So this is sort of an example of an interesting way of trying to reconstruct this magical practice. So we see it in the lore and then we saw, in Heathenry, there has been this ongoing issue in the culture of Heathenry on the issue of race. So they’re sometimes termed Völkisch, who see Heathenry, in America okay, who see Heathenry as a religion for Northern Europeans and then you have people who are universalist or inclusive, people are using the term inclusive now. You see Heathenry as something that anyone can practice who’s called to it. And so there’s been this ongoing controversy, really since the very beginning of Heathenry as a contemporary movement which started in the 70s, early 70s in the United States, an ongoing controversy there. And this, of course, has been fought online to a great extent and so we saw the universalist or inclusive Heathens raising digital Nithing-poles online, on their websites against racist Heathenry, racist forms of Heathenry. So scorning their enemies, in a sense, online and you can still find some of these online. They would sometimes they would put an image of that, that image of the pole and the horse’s head and then pronounce a curse or pronounce this sort of a ritual scorn, invoking the gods against their enemies or the racist Heathens in this sense. People who they thought were misusing Heathenry in that way and then post that online as a magical act. Again to send their enemies into disarray.

AP: Yeah, technology now is being used even for this kind of thing.

JC: So is that Magic?

AP: Is it Magic for them?

JC: Yeah, I think that they would definitely see it that way, you know, even though it’s digital or whatever. It’s not in the physical world in some sense.

AP: Would you not see that as Magic?

JC: Oh I definitely, yeah I think, that is a that’s Magic for sure.

AP: Yeah and what about goddess Magic? Since Heathenry is god-focused as you mentioned earlier. And it is a theocentric religion. So what about goddess or even god Magic?

JC: Right, so there is the central… I write a little bit about this in “Being Viking.” So I have a chapter in “Being Viking” on the gods. So there’s this centrally important place of the gods in Heathenry.

AP: The hard polytheism in a soft world.

JC: Oh yeah that’s the name of the chapter “Hard Polytheism in a Soft World,” right. So hard polytheism and you may have talked about this on your channel but hard polytheism is his idea that the gods are in some sense, I don’t want to say real beings, are hard polyth… hard poly the gods are…

AP: Ontologically existent.

JC: What?

AP: Ontologically existent, ontologically existent.

JC: Ontologically existent beings, yeah, with their own personalities, their own history, their own stories their own families, right. That’s hard polytheism, whereas we would talk about soft polytheism as more, in Heathenry, the gods are seen as more archetypal in a sense, perhaps. And not necessarily individual entities, existent entities in that sense, right. Right, so there’s a lot of Magic in Heathenry that involves invoking the gods and that’s really where goddess Magic is going. Where it’s taking the Goddesses as real beings and then as mighty beings, as beings with great power and then invoking them into various situations in real life. Calling on their might and in some way tying their power into physical situations or situations in someone’s life. And that would involve things like trance work and often trance is used differently and in maybe a few different ways in heathen practice. And goddess Magic is often used to establish a relationship with a particular goddess or a particular god, a particular being through trance work. Maybe doing things like path-working and using visualization and guided meditation, in that sense, to learn, to gain familiarity with a goddess, to learn what they’re like, what do they like and to learn to interact with them so that then when you do your ritual, your Magic ritual, then you’ve got more information, you have this established relationship so you can work with the goddess more closely if that makes sense. So that’s really how trance work, I think, is being used in goddess Magic and I will just if I can, real quickly, just reference a book.

AP: Yeah, definitely.

JC: So here’s a book by a practitioner. This is Alice Karlsdóttir’s book “Norse Goddess Magic.” So maybe I can just reference a few books by practitioners as we go. Your Patrons may be interested in some of those that work. So “Norse Goddess Magic” and that’s really how she’s using trance in her work too. And she works a lot with Seiðr, which we’re going to talk about, is a type of Magic that’s often tied close with Freyja, the goddess Freyja. And Alice Karlsdóttir, for instance, works a lot with Frigg. So Frigg is seen as… Frigg is the wife of Odin and she’s the Queen of the Gods. She’s very much involved in the home and so she’s often associated with, what some people, call women’s work or the type of work that would have been done in a domestic setting. And so she works a lot with Frigg and using trancework and journey-trance work to path-working. So she uses trancework to work on these correspondences, all the esoteric connections with Frigg. So, for instance, each of the gods in Heathenry has their symbol or their symbol of power, maybe. So Thor has Mjölnir as hammer and Odin has Gungnir, his spear and Frigg has a spindle for spinning thread and so that’s her symbol of power. And that is associated, again, with this sort of domestic work and then, so then doing Magic with Frigg may involve invoking her might into this type of work, or domestic situations, into family situations.

And so she gives some examples like as you’re spinning thread and working with the spindle you are invoking a magical intention right into that thread and then you’re going to use that thread, you can use that thread just as, maybe you put it on your wrist as a talisman of some sort, right, or use that thread then, on an altar and for a ritual or just as a way to invoke Frigg on your altar. You might use that then to do sewing, right. So you’re stitching that thread then into a garment or a piece of cloth and again then someone who would wear that piece, that garment that you sow then would have that protection or that blessing as Frigg as part of their life.

She talks about things like visualizing health. Say you’re knitting a baby blanket and you have a magical intention, you’re visualizing the health of this infant, invoking Frigg in this as you’re knitting the baby blanket and instilling in that blanket, again, with the might and the power, the protective might and the power of Frigg for the health of that infant and then giving that to the baby. So all kinds of ways that you might… she also mentions, you might prick your finger and let a few drops of your blood fall into what you’re working on and she talks about the fairy tale, “Sleeping Beauty” where, I think it was the mother, Sleeping Beauty’s mother had pricked her finger and let some blood fall into… that’s using the lore, that’s an example of using the lore. She would see those Germanic fairy tales as part of the lore, as part of giving us information about what happened in the pagan past and what that was like and then incorporating that into magical practice.

So that’s sort of the idea I think of god is Magic, in particular, surrounding Frigg especially. So Frigg has nine handmaidens as well and each has a domain of a specific aspect of life so healing and dreams and love and invoking those Goddesses in different ways and bringing their might into different aspects of life. So that would be, I don’t know, that’s goddess Magic I think and the way Heathens would practice that.

Identic Magic comes out of a different tributary more out of that volkisch tributary. And Odinic Magic is tied to Odin, of course, but really sees in the story of Odin. Odin is this being who’s always seeking to expand his knowledge, expand his wisdom, expand his understanding, to transcend his ego, to transcend itself, the limitations of himself and breakthrough to a greater consciousness. And so Odinic Magic is different, it’s tied to this idea of expanding consciousness, evolving into higher states of being and takes Odin, if Odin maybe… this is more like a soft polytheism, Odin may be a real being who experienced all these things but Odin is the one who hangs himself on Yggdrasill, on the world tree for nine nights and at the end of this ordeal he is able to proceed he breaks through and is able to perceive the runes and draws the runes out of this place of mystery and gains mastery over the runes and their mysteries and their Magic. And so that then becomes a model or an example for the Odinic magician who is seeking to expand his consciousness and into the mysteries of the cosmos. So that’s a little bit on Odinic Magic and its difference from say, Goddess Magic.

AP: Yeah, it’s actually very interesting so thanks for including that as well. But now we can move on to the runes then.

JC: Yeah, probably when people think about heathen Magic they probably think about the runes. I mean the runes are so central to the tradition. They’re distinctively, I guess, runes are distinctively Norse in some ways. So it was the writing system that were used in writing. It is the alphabet basically for Old Norse. Old Norse would have been written in, prior to the Latin alphabet coming in with, I guess, the Romans. I guess the Romans brought their Latin alphabet, right. So it’s an insertion in, I don’t know, an alphabet that was developed for the Futhark, so we call it the Futhark instead of the alphabet, the runic alphabet would be the Futhark just taken from the first six runes.

So runes are really tied to the Norse tradition and sometimes Heathens can be protective about the runes, again there’s an issue of boundary setting and so they see runes, oftentimes, Heathens may see runes as being misused by people outside the tradition. And again, that they need, you know, they’re not tied to the past in the way they should be. So they really emphasize that to really use the runes properly, you need to be really grounded in the lore, you need to be grounded in Norse culture and understanding the gods. So it’s tied to that religious culture and shouldn’t be used in a willy-nilly way. So there’s that critique of the way others are maybe using the runes in Paganism. But runes are then used in several different ways. They’re most clearly tied to divination and again we see this, there is some evidence in the lore, this is Tacitus. So Tacitus, in his “Germania,” talks about the German tribes cutting twigs and carving symbols on the twigs and then casting those in some way to prophesy the future, to tell the future, to answer questions. We’re not really sure exactly what they were doing, what were they carving on these twigs. You know, I don’t know, that’s not really clear but that definitely has become then a precedent for the idea of carving runic symbols on tiles that are then cast in various ways or chosen for divinatory purposes.

So you know there’s the… some people call it, an Odinic pull which you take one rune out of a so there’s often, okay, often the elder Futhark, there’s a there’s different runic alphabets, different Futharks. So there’s the Elder Futhark with 24 characters and that’s seen as the primal, most important, magical, of the Futharks would be the Elder Futhark. And so that’s often used for divination. That’s 24 characters, carve them on tiles and then use them for different divinatory practices.

One being, you pull one tile, you have a question about, you know, how’s my day gonna go? Or how should I be approaching this particular situation or problem in my life? So you pull one tile and then you need to be able to interpret that rune correctly. And again, then Heathens will use the rune poems. So there’s a couple of different rune poems that come from the Anglo-Saxon and the Old Norse traditions in which each of the runes is listed in this, has a stanza in the poem and then it’s described in certain ways with different associations or correspondences for each of those runes. So the runes aren’t seen just as an alphabet but in this sense, they are energies tied to different aspects of life, that have their own meanings and correspondences. So you would draw a rune you need to be knowledgeable about how to accurately interpret those runes according to the Norse tradition.

Or draw three runes, one that might be about the past, one that might be about your present situation, give insight into your present situation and one that would indicate future possibilities, future tendencies and so especially during Covid and quarantine there have been several Heathens who have really have gone online, on their Facebook pages or Instagram pages, Patreon pages to doing rune pulls every day. And so I’ve been trying to follow some of those but just as a way to help guide and minister to people, you know, during confusing times. So we’ve seen a lot more of this online doing these public divinatory readings. And then these magicians, runemasters who will pull runes and then interpret, interpret it in light of the contemporary situation and uncertainty that people have been feeling. So I think people have really benefited from that and taken solace in that practice.

AP: And what about Seið Magic then? I know that there are two variations; oracular Seiðr and epistemology and Völva stuff as much as healing Magic. Can you tell me more about that?

JC: Okay, some of it can mean to speak, to sing, it is often just translated as Magic. So it is often used as an umbrella term for Magic. Some interpreted it as cognate to an older Old Norse word to seethe, so like summoning and interpreted to seethe, like summoning up ecstatic energy within oneself. It may be related and some, I don’t know, too related to kundalini energy or something you know Prana or something that you bring up. And some people just see it as related to the word to sit, so like to sit in, like a seance, maybe, to sit and commune with the spirits. So Seiðr is often connected to the spirits and communicating with spirits. It has often been seen as Seiðr that involves transport and particularly journey. So it’s often been interpreted as a shamanic, Norse Shamanism a shamanic practice in terms of like trance and soul journeying, soul journey. But it’s also associated with things like changing the weather or healing or shape-shifting even, so all kinds of things that that Seiðr is associated within the lore, especially.

So, in my own research and in “Being Vikings” I talk particularly about two types of Seiðr both of which are really associated with women in the tradition. So often there are men who are Magic workers. Men do a lot of divinatory practice and some men do this sort of shamanic-journeying, trancework as well. But it has been more oriented towards women. Women have been the ones who have really been involved in reconstructing these practices in a lot of ways. So a couple of varieties of how are people using this type of Magic in the contemporary world. I don’t think I’ve got her book here… well I don’t have her book on my shelf but one of the most important… anyway I’m sorry about that… one of the most important people who have been involved in reconstructing the practice Seiðr is Diana Paxson and she’s got a number of books out. She’s got a book on runes, for instance, and she’s got several books on the practice of, she’s got a whole website on, Seiðr and her reconstructive practice of Seiðr, her kindred out in California is called Hrafnar which is like raven, Raven Kindred, Raven Kindred California -Harafnar.

So her practice is actually sometimes called the Harafnar Method just because of how important she was and her kindred was in developing this method. And so she started really seeing this as a shamanistic practice and so developed different ways of going into trance and in Heathenry that’s… I mean they used frame drum, for instance, which isn’t necessarily a heathen practice but they saw that as part of this, a practice that could be brought in and used to go into trance and singing and singing and Galdring which we haven’t talked about but Galdring is another runic practice involved, sort of, chanting or intoning the names of the runes, in particular, that’s what it’s developed into in contemporary Heathenry.

And so different methods of going into trance and then journeying into the, I don’t know, Norse Underworld in some sense. This is one way that so in their practice they will journey along the trunk or the spine of Yggdrasill around the world tree. So if you visualize the world tree and now in its vertical plane, you have Midgard or the material world in the middle and then as you journey down the world tree you go into the places where its roots are and you could call it the underworld but it’s maybe the other-world, something like that, and so you journey. This is the pathworking or the shamanic journey down the tree to the roots of Yggdrasill where there are places to go there. There are places like the well, there are these wells along the roots of Yggdrasill, the Well of Wyrd where the Norns gather.

So the Norns are- the three Norns sort of like the Fates, I guess, the three sisters who weave the destiny of humans, weave history. And so they gather there around the Well of Wyrd or often they would journey through the gates into Helheim which is more like the place of the dead, in a sense. So the underworld, the place of the dead and because that’s where Odin and others have journeyed because that is where these powerful Seeresses, these Völvas and Seiðkonas are there in their mounds in the underworld, in Helheim. And so you would go there and commune with them, right, speak to them, draw them out of their sleep in the mounds and commune with them. And so this process, that’s the shamanic aspect of it and then Diana Paxson went on to talk about this in terms of Oracular Seiðr and so she really didn’t see it as looking. So oracular has to do with looking and seeing things and sort of moving away from shamanic practice in a sense but going into a trance state so that you can see into whatever, into the Wyrd that Heathens would call it Magic.

AP: Is Seiðr Magic the Magic that is practised in Heathenry? I mean is Seiðr Magic the term that is used in Heathenry to refer to magic or is it a specific form of Magic?

JC: Yeah I mean I think that it has become specific. And I think it’s specific in terms of the shamanic journeying, trancework that’s going on. So they’re using trance differently they’re using trance to journey into the other world, ask questions, to inquire of the spirits and then to gain that information for people and bring it back into a physical world to help people in their lives.

AP: So Seiðr is the shamanistic form of Magic in Heathenry?

JC: Well yeah, I think it’s become a little bit more than that. I think that Diana Paxson is trying to say that, Wyrd’s oracular, you know, so it’s about asking questions. And then the seeress, now the seeress is a medium in a sense who receives the question and then hears or sees from, in the other world to the gods and then relays information. And all that I’m trying to tie to epistemology so this sense that we are just very limited in our perception of what’s going on in the world. But the seeress is one who, one quote in the in my book, this is chapter eight in the book, talking about Magic, one quote says that the Seiðman or the Seiðkona is just one who operates with all the doors and windows open. Whereas most of us are our doors and windows are closed. We just can’t perceive the information that’s around us the Seiðkona or the Seiðman has all the doors and windows open, is using trancework to broaden their sort of their sensory capability to take in information from other places, other beings and then help us to see that and relate that to us in ways that can help our lives.

So the other form of Seiðr is healing Magic. So other people are using trancework and soul journeying in more of a healing capacity rather than like an information capacity. So in oracular Seiðr I have a question that I’m trying to find an answer to it and the seeress peers into the other world or journeys into another world to help me answer my question. In the healing form, this has been developed by Kari Tauring she’s in Minneapolis and she’s developed a whole system that she calls Völva Stav. And it involves going in so this draws on the ancient Norse tradition of the Völva that we see in Eric the Red’s Saga. So there’s a very famous, important section in Eric the Red’s Saga where this Völva comes to the small community and performs, you know, goes into trance and answers questions and helps the people in this community. Very important passage for Heathens especially for Seiðr workers and people who are magical practitioners, very important passage.

And so Völva means staff carrying woman, something like that and so Kari’s practice involves going into trance using the staff so she’s tapping out a rhythm and maybe doing some footwork. So she is really engaged with dancing and singing and just sort of that folk tradition and using that in magical ways. So she’s singing and she’s tapping out a rhythm. She’s developed a whole guild of people she’s trained to do this kind of work because of the guild, she’s tapping out a rhythm and that’s then going into my altered state of consciousness and through that altered state of consciousness what she’s able to do is to see the threads, sorry, the threads that in Heathenry we would call Orlog. These threads of a person’s life of a person’s fate and these are threads that come out of the past. And so our lives in the present are woven of these threads that come out of the past of our family line of the circumstances that have affected our families in particular. So we’re tied to the past through these lines of Orlog. So in her trance state and she’s able to see these and these are tied to emotions, the emotions we experience.

So we experience emotions and memories and we don’t know why we’re experiencing them but they’re all tied to our Orlog, to the past, these past experiences. And so in trance then she’s able to see those threads and follow them back into the past, into past experiences, into past lives and into one’s ancestral line where there have been trauma. And as she follows that she can find that emotional trauma that’s still lodged in our Orlog from the past. And then resolve that in different ways or heal that past trauma, that past those knots and twists and the threads of Orlog. Heal that in various ways by chanting runes into that situation or even by taking it into the body of the Völva and doing an emotional process with that and healing past trauma in our lives. And then coming out of that and doing almost like counselling work, talk therapy and other magical practices ritual to help us heal from trauma in the past and heal our emotions so we can relate better to other people, in life and think better and work better. But it’s all about not, in her practice is all about using trancework as a healing practice.

AP: So now I have a few questions from my Patrons the first one is from Andrew. And Andrew asks, are European music groups like Wardruna and Heilung, who openly advocate inclusiveness, having any effect on the racial philosophy in the US Heathen scene.

JC: Those groups are increasingly popular in the United States you know they’ve toured in the United States at least Wardruna has for sure, I know. And so a lot of Heathens are talking about those and really enjoying that music. I am I’m not sure to the extent to which their politics has really gotten through, necessarily, in the American scene. I think people have really connected to those groups in terms of their music and the musical performances and definitely have incorporated that music in their spiritual lives and practice. I’m not sure the extent to which their political messages really got through though in terms of the American scene.

AP: And he also has another question, how are US events reacting to the Q-anon “Shaman’s” public performance at the invasion of Congress?

JC: Yeah, he made a big splash and some Heathens, of course, have been understandably horrified by that. Some, a lot have just have seen it as sort of a comic thing and have just sort of laughed him off in some ways. But I guess we see a variety of responses a lot of have just been like distancing themselves from him and just basically saying this guy is not a Heathen, he doesn’t represent Heathenry, he has nothing to do with Heathenry at all, the only thing he then about him is his tattoos. So he’s got several tattoos that are Heathen related on his chest and I even heard some people online were saying well those are just drawn with Magic Marker they’re just drawn with a Sharpie. Anyway, I don’t know but I mean, having those tattoos definitely says something about his relationship. I mean why would you have those tattoos you know unless you had picked them up from Heathenry in some way shape or form.

Other people have really focused on other aspects so his regalia if you want to call it that, is sort of a mishmash of symbols. So he had like face paint on, looking at my picture of him here, he had red white and blue face paint on so that’s like America or something and he was carrying an American flag but then he also had bison horns and so that was… A lot of Heathens just picked up on that and were like, look this guy is taking on the symbols of indigenous people and native people in the United States and misusing that and that’s really what we’ve got to push back against. Forget about the heathen stuff we really need to push back against the misuse and misappropriation of Indigenous American Native, North American Native symbols and yeah and other people have just you know have… So I think generally people are distancing themselves from him, not taking him seriously and really wanting to say this guy, you know when questions come up, people say this guy is just not a Heathen. Again, the issue with the tattoos, a lot of people have tattoos and I guess that remains a mystery for American Heathens, like why would… They are outraged in general that their symbols are being misused with that sort of white nationalist politics and the Q-anon issue. So in general there’s this outrage and push back against the misuse of heathen symbols in those settings.

AP: Yeah and I think that symbols are not copyrighted anyway so even if he were to identify as a Heathen, he’s not a representative of all Heathenry. So he’s just one person in every single, in every human category and in under any human-invented label there are people who, you know, commit crimes. It’s like, oh so there’s a white person or an Italian that commits crime does it make me, as an Italian, guilty? No, because society is made of groups and individuals and even if he were a Heathen, I don’t think that that Heathenry in general or the community, in general, should be responsible for it.

JC: Right. I mean Heathens definitely understand that but in the press that’s not widely understood so in the press there definitely was reporting that was again attributing those symbols to that, as if those symbols are always unnecessarily racist in their connotations and that’s really the struggle for Heathens in America, for sure. Where there is just a misunderstanding of the variety of Heathenry and the fact that the sort of the racist or white nationalist heathenry are a real minority. Often Heathens feel like all the press is sort of against them, you know, misunderstanding who they are and this guy just added, you know, fuel to that fire.

AP: Then I have another question from Mike, another one of my Patrons. I am interested to find out how these traditions are treated in the countries they are native to, like Iceland for instance or Sweden. For instance, I know that there is an Ásatrú Temple being built in Iceland. However, I wonder what the acceptance is like in the wider community? Are they seen as counter cultures in these countries as Paganism is often treated in the USA?

JC: I can. So European Heathenry isn’t my speciality but I can talk a little bit about that, especially maybe Iceland. But I would say that now at this point, so if you look at Heathenry, contemporary Heathenry really starts in Iceland. In the early 70s. And then early on in the 70s also there are groups that form in the United States but the first modern or contemporary heathen group is in Iceland. And it probably was seen as a curiosity in Iceland. For some time it was quite a minority religion and Christianity was the state religion in Iceland. But what we’ve actually seen in Iceland is a remarkable acceptance of Ásatrú probably because it’s just so tied, I mean Icelanders are very in touch with their past and even Christian Icelanders have come to terms with the importance of their pagan past and so there hasn’t been that… I don’t think in Iceland that same stigmatization of Paganism as there might be in the United States, for instance. Just because of that historical continuity with the Icelandic past and so I think that there has been some push-back from some Christian groups in Iceland but at this point, it is also one of the state religions, you know, in Iceland that receives state funding and I think is very well accepted even among the Christian population in Iceland. So that’s been, I think, that experience is probably different than in a lot of other places but it’s been very well received and has grown, it continues to grow, the presence of Ásatrú continues to grow in Iceland for sure. And there’s a lot of, I mean, there’s a lot of tolerance of that religion and even acceptance, you know. That’s probably different than in other places. In other places where the revival of Heathenry or Norse Paganism had been associated with the heavy metal tradition, death metal traditions and you know, church burnings. Some of the burnings to Slav churches and things like that. And so Heathenry got associated with far-right, the recurrence of Neonazism and tied into that …

AP: Why is that associated with heavy metal?

JC: Why is it associated with heavy metal? Viking metal, you know, I don’t think anyone would want to call it Viking metal but there was a whole… heavy metal that has Norse Viking themes, uses Norse mythology and its imagery even.

AP: Yeah, I was just trying to understand why metal would be associated with the far right.

JC: Why is it associated with the far right? Well, there was also a genre of heavy metal called white noise that was extremely tied to Neonazism and the resurgence of Neonazism in Europe for sure. There are strains of heavy metal that are have been, not just associated, but deeply ingrained in skinhead, what we call skinhead culture and skinhead groups. And Viking metal in some sense was also tied into that because they were utilizing Viking Norse imagery, Germanic imagery and mythology as part of those ideologies. And it was a scene, yeah, it’s a heavy metal scene.

AP: Yeah, I guess that kind of touched me personally because I am a metal singer.

C: Again yeah. We don’t want to misrepresent metal right?

AP: No, we don’t want to do that.

JC: Not all is that bad right. And there is metal, Amon Amarth, the group which uses a lot of Viking imagery, for instance, but it’s definitely, they’ve explicitly said you know we’re not racists we’re not Nazis and have really explicitly tried to distance themselves from that scene so there’s even metal that you might call Viking or Norse inspired metal that is very inclusive and not racist in any way shape or form.

AP: Yeah anyway.

JC: But throughout, even in American Heathenry, metal is the music. That’s what Heathens listen to and it’s only recently that sort of that we’d call it like the neo-folk like or Wardruna, that you mentioned and Heilung, so those groups that maybe I don’t know neo-folk or something like that have come along and become part of the sort of the heathen music scene but metal is the music and now some of the neofolk as well and everyone listens to the metal, yeah.

AP: They’d better do!

JC: I didn’t know you were a metal singer, that’s cool.

AP: Yeah, I am.

JC: So the book that talks a little bit about, let me just make sure this is the one and again I just don’t have this on my shelf at the moment but it’s definitely worth reading so it’s called “Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground.”

AP: Then we have one last question from…

JC: Okay great.

AP: Yeah, from Eric Torres, he asks, I’m interested to see if the Yggdrasill is still an important part for the Heathens and also what do they think about the Ragnarok? How do they perform their rituals and construct their altars? What are their morals and ethics that follow in this religion?

JC: Okay, that’s a big question. Yggdrasill, we’ve talked a little bit about Yggdrasill and its use in magical practice. Yggdrasill is a very important symbol. I mean it’s used symbolically. It’s a very important symbol in contemporary Heathenry in the United States. It’s a cosmological symbol and so I write a little bit about this also in “Being Viking” my book. It’s using the cosmology just in terms of so it structures the cosmos and the nine worlds of the Norse cosmology. And one of the important things about that imagery is that those worlds are not separate but they’re interconnected. They may be distinct but they’re interconnected and so there’s all this imagery in Norse mythology about moving along the tree there’s beings that go up and down the tree.

AP: And contemporary Heathens and still do that. Contemporary Heathens then still do that still use this…

JC: Still use that symbol?

AP: Yeah, I mean is it still used now?

JC: Absolutely.

AP: Or is it just in the lore, okay.

JC: I mean you wear it as a pendant. You see it everywhere on T-shirts, you know. On kindred banners the symbol of the world tree’s everywhere it’s a very important symbol. So it’s used in magical practice, you know, it’s used in just thinking about what the cosmos is in terms of travelling and moving through the nine worlds. Yeah, it’s a really important symbol.

AP: And how they perform their rituals and construct their altars. I think that we said a bit of that earlier.

JC: Yeah well I talked with these of like thread magically, a Magic thread on an altar or something like that. So there’s two, really there’s still two main rituals, I think, that may be developing as Heathenry continues to grow and evolve. The two main rituals; one, which is the Blót which is a sacrificial type of ritual in which you invoke a god and offer some sort of a gift to the god. So this is an exchange of reciprocity one of the important phrases in Heathenry is a gift for a gift. So as the gods give gifts to us so we want to be in this relationship of reciprocity with the god so that’s the Blót, that’s this ritual of sacrifice or gift exchange with the Norse gods and that’s practised at every heathen gathering.

And then another ritual, that’s very important, is the Symbel which is sort of a community feast in which you pass a horn. Here’s a horn. So you pass a drinking horn around filled with mead and you would, in different rounds, in the first round maybe you would invoke the gods and then the second-round you might invoke your ancestors and so people would take the horn and speak these words into the horn, in a sense and charging this mead with their statements and then maybe a third-round might be to the living heathen community, you know. So like giving compliments and maybe making oaths about what things you’re going to do, activities or achievements you’re going to do in the future. So that you would pass the horn and make these invocations as a method of creating community and community bonding. So that’s the Symbel. So those are the two main rituals, I guess. Heathens have lots of rituals it’s very ritually driven, ritual is an important part of it but those are the two main rituals for sure.

AP: And what about the moral… Oh sorry, I interrupted you.

JC: Oh I’m just gonna talk about an altar. So altars again are a really important part of like material culture in Heathenry. So home altars are a standard part of that and altars would be set up for Blót rituals. So those altars would have images, so Heathens use a lot of images. So images of the deities, other symbolic, maybe a world tree on there or an Irminsul which is the Saxon image of the world tree. And other symbols that might be placed on that altar, things of personal significance. There also would be ancestral aspects so ancestral figures on an altar or a lot of times people use photographs of family members so that this is a really, the ancestral aspect is just really important in Heathenry and some people just have a shrine to their ancestors or an altar to their ancestors that would involve pictures and other images that would represent the ancestors of the deep past. And so and then sort of daily devotional or votive practices around those altars. So that would be something that you would do, prayer, meditation, burn some incense, light a candle. I mean that’s, Pagans do those sorts of things on their altars to the gods and their altars to the ancestors…

AP: What about the morals and ethics… sorry

JC: Altars are also seasonal. So for the festivals or the holidays in heathen life special altars would be set up or you might change what your altar looks like given the season. And again I think this is very standard and this is what Pagans do all the time but that altar would change through the ritual or agricultural season of the year.

AP: Yeah and the last part of the question was about the morals and ethics.

JC: So morals and ethics are very important in Heathenry. One of the early instances of ethics was a table sort of that was compiled by a heathen group and it became widely accepted across Heathenry called the Nine Noble Virtues. So these are hospitality and self-determination and independence and a lot of these virtues have to do with sort of the philosophy of life that you often see in Heathenry, of that rugged individual, tied to a strong community, that are trying to make their way in the world make their place in the world. In a world that, you know it’s a hard world that we live in it’s not a friendly place, it can be a struggle to survive and so a lot of the heathen ethic is rooted around that issue as an individual, my strength as an individual, my strength is tied to a strong community of people that might be called the Innangard, my community.

So this is a very community-oriented religion as well as emphasizing the strength of the individual. So a strong individual tied to a strong community bonded that way and then tied also to the ancestors who are part of that living community and ultimately then to the gods who they would see as kin not just sort of separate beings, in some way but these are part of the family, we’re part of, their family, these are our kin and so this is the community. I talked about this in “Being Viking” again in my chapter on the Symbel and how they use the Symbel, that ritual to enact or construct this understanding of the individual and these rings, concentric rings of community and so a lot of the ethic and morality is about how do we build strong individuals how do we become strong self-reliant individuals and how do we build strong, close-knit communities that can weather the struggles of life.

One other thing I want to say is in response to the question about Europe. Every European country at this point has, you know, in Northern Europe and I would say, every European country now has some sort of native faith movement. That is so in Germany, in England, and the Norse Countries all have groups, heathen groups that are part of contemporary society, not necessarily at odds with society you know but really part of the religious pluralism of those countries. And these are now well-established religions and religious groups throughout Europe. Not in tension with society but part of contemporary society.

AP: Yeah, perhaps in some cases they are still at odds with the dominant religious system in certain countries but yeah. It also seems to me as though there are more native groups… yeah… I would agree that there are native groups or groups across Europe, European countries that are trying to rediscover or recuperate, in a contemporary way, certain practices that they feel to be part of their heritage, of the cultural heritage of their countries although in certain countries they may be more counter-cultural.

JC: Yes.

AP: It depends on how strong the dominant religious system is.

JC: Yes, I totally agree with that, yes.

AP: Yes, thank you so much, Jefferson, for being here on the Symposium this was really fascinating and I’m pretty sure that my viewers loved it too. Don’t forget to let me know in the comments what you thought of what Jefferson said and leave your questions and you will find in the info box all the info regarding his book “Being Viking” and also his contact details.

So this is it for today’s video and if you liked it, as always SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel, activate the notification bell so that you will never miss and upload for me and as always, stay tuned for all the Academic Fun.

Bye for now.

JEFFERSON’S BOOK

‘Being Viking’ by Jefferson Calico

USA https://amzn.to/38fz2hT

UK https://amzn.to/3c5y5d2

Jefferson’s Contact Details

Jefferson.calico@ucumberlands.edu

First uploaded 8 Mar 2021