Fare thi e'er well

Fare Thi E'er Well

---

The first day I met you, it was already cold
The snow crunching under my feet
I had never come across someone like you before
With so many needs

We bathed you and dressed you
We fed you and loved you
We took you for wheelchair races
And delighted in your laugh

But as time passed, you began to waste away
And I will never forget that day or the tears we shed
When your bones came clear through your skin
For we all knew full well what that meant

Your limbs began to seize up, breathing became hard
You could not walk or speak
But you could always smile and let us know
That you were not yet ready to go

Then one day, there came a man in black.
Officious and tall
You were to be moved from this place
He just had to do the paperwork - that's all.

As he sat and began to write, the wasting fell away
You regained your speech, could walk again
You could eat and you could play
But soon the paperwork was done, and it was time to go

And so you went with the man, walked out of the door
And got into the car that had not been there before
You gave a goodbye and he started to drive
I waved you off then went back inside

These times are sad, I was sorry to see you go
And you go with the love of many of us from 'the Hall'
Wherever you end up, I wish you well.
Rest in peace Rachel Bennett, fare thi'e'er well.

Regnitz

During my first month here in Germany, while I was looking for somewhere to live, I lived in a tent that was pitched on the banks of the Regnitz river.

It wasn't an ideal situation but it was much better than sleeping at the barracks with Josh and having to get up at 4am every morning. The army doesn't recognise unmarried couples and so I would have to leave for 5am and then spend 2-3 hours wandering around with nowhere to go until cafes opened. The campsite was a much better option.

Actually it was really quite nice.

The weather was good and I'd actually missed living outside.

Yes that's right, I'd actually missed living outside. There is so much about living outside that I love. I love waking up all snug in my sleeping bag, the air cool around my face and taking in a breath of really nice fresh air. I love the little green lights of fireflies settling on my tent at night just as I am going to sleep and I love sitting out(obviously covered in DEET) as darkness falls. Solid walls, while I wouldn't ever want to forgo them in winter shelter us from so much. Most of all a feeling of just being a part of it all.

Nothing compares to being in a tent during a really huge thunderstorm.

It exhilarates and yet calms all at the same time.

The only downside to living in a tent that I can think of is the lack of security and feeling of being exposed.

One night I woke to hear footsteps outside my tent. You learn to sleep light in a tent, especially during high season on a campsite because you just never know who is knocking about and torches make really good clubs. Quietly I reached for the torch, trying not to give away the fact that I was awake so as not to lose the advantage of surprise should anything untoward happen and that's when I saw it.

Unbelievably there was a girl stood in the middle of my tent. She was dressed in clothing from the 20s/30s and dripping wet. I didn't see her head. My tent is only a dome tent and she was too tall. One can only assume that her head was sticking out of the top if there at all!

At that point I did the only thing I could be bothered to do. I swore, turned over, did my best to ignore her and tried to go back to sleep despite the constant feeling of someone walking over my grave.

Eventually she went and I went back to sleep wondering if I could shift my pitch from the riverside to under the nice oak tree further inland.

Seidhr and Choices

In all the accounts, save one, all Seidrworkers are single and itinerant. They have no relationships except for the one Seidrkona that has a son.

Yngona Desmond's book 'Voluspa - Seidr as Wyrd Consciousness' agrees with this, further stating that Seidhworkers involved in relationships don't have the same amount of focus to take things as far.

A while back, before I met Josh, this idea of being alone, of living on the outskirts of the community and using my particular scary talents didn't bother me. It was something I strived for. I wanted to become adept and earn the title of Seidhrworker.

Now I've become aware of a choice that's been creeping up on me but has remained unnoticed for quite a while for one reason or another.

The choice between my love and an art.

To be honest, if it came down to it and perhaps this is a sign, I'd choose my relationship, my love.

I don't know what that would make me - I will always have this extra 'awareness' about the worlds, knowledge and experiences. I cannot change that anymore than I can the colour of my eyes or skin. I would use that as needs be for the benefit of my family and community. I just won't be on a dedicated path to learn about Seidr anymore. I know it would be kind of foolish to throw away the chance to learn more and take things further but I think it would be more foolish to throw away the kind of love that I have found with my lovely man.

This relationship and the love we have has its own mysteries, as does motherhood and even though this is often overlooked for its mundanity, I think I would be happy just stopping here( if I could). I'm not prepared to sacrifice this in order to take things further with Seidr.

Maybe its not my role to, maybe my role is to use my skills to build community(unlikely with my lack of diplomacy I know but I think I'm getting better and I want to) and raise Heathen children and maybe point any fledgling Seidus in the right direction?

There will always be the rituals and different magics, that's typical of a Heathen woman full stop. Women were always the ones that did this stuff in the past. I just won't be getting my Seidr on unless necessary. I won't be going out of my way to take that stuff further.

Luck

Given the crazy events that have transpired in my life since last year, I've been thinking a lot about luck recently. Both my personal luck and shared luck.

This year has quite possibly been the luckiest of my life.

I got a job I mostly enjoy in Korea, I've managed to get mostly out of debt and I met the love of my life.

In England, I was pretty much forced out of living there. My job prospects went to shit, I had no personal safety and I couldn't see much of a future for myself there. It was clear that my time to move on was overdue. I really wish I'd moved on when I'd first gotten the hint too...

When I finally accepted that I had to move, I walked into a job in Korea within days of starting to look - it was handed to me on a plate with rent free living thrown into the deal. So I came out here and within about a month I met one of the four other Heathens in Korea - my Josh. What are the chances?

7000miles from anything, in Pyeongtaek city I met the love of my life.

And you know what? Even then I knew it!

Now you're probably thinking 'yeah yeah you lucky cow' but you know what else I believe? I believe that I damn well earned that luck.

Oh yes....I think those three years I spent working with people with learning disability, getting chased round, assaulted, wiping bottoms and whatnot earned me luck because of how people began to see me and consequently my family then.

I don't know this for sure of course - UPG all the way.

I'm still not entirely sure how luck is earnt however I'm pretty sure that it's got a lot to do with how you reflect on your family and how you are with your family.

We prove ourselves in different ways.

Newbies, Christians and Heathenry

When I was a newbie to all this non-Christian lark - back in the early/mid-nineties, I used to search for any and every bit of 'proof' that Christianity was wrong and that I'd picked the right path.

I used to care what Christians thought of me and yet went around spelling the word Christian with an 'x' in a very childish attempt to show my disdain for them. Then again, at that point the word 'magic' had umpteen number of spellings and everyone's online name either included the name of a deity or the word 'Lady' or 'Lord'.

Over the years, I came to care less and less about what Christians thought of me and as the polytheistic mindset really sunk in - I was no longer threatened by the existence of the God of Abraham whereas previously I tried to find ways to prove that everyone was deluded and that he wasn't real. I developed a taste for Catholic art and at one point even considered getting a tattoo of the Virgin Mary of Guadalupe. I was a languages major and through my studies of Spanish and consequently Latin American culture, I grew to love the aesthetic. One Pagan housemate was shocked and disgusted. She hated my tacky plastic pictures of the Virgin Mary, she hated my Fatima pin that I used to wear on my punky jacket with the pink flames on and she definitely hated the Virgin of Guadalupe patch that I had stitched to my excessively baggy jeans for a while.

'Why the fuck do you wear/have that shit if you're a Heathen?'

'Because it's fucking cool and it's not like it means anything to me. I just like the way it looks'

She was rather new to it all and very anti-Christian and I think that is something that we all go through in the process of conversion.

People seem to think that conversion is just a matter of a ritual or just deciding but it's not. It takes years and years for that change to happen - especially if you were raised in a religious family.

My family aren't particularly. They'll show up at church for 'hatches, matches and dispatches' but other than that - they don't really see the point of churches. My father has quite a recent habit of changing his religion(one day he's announcing he's a spiritualist, the next a shaman and the next a traditional Christian!). My mother just thinks that it doesn't really matter what anyone is as long as they're good people although I would say my mother is a bit of a Pagan type but doesn't really know it yet. And my brother....well.....to say he's completely unreligious is a bit of an understatement. Gideon bible?? Smoked it.

Yet in spite of growing up in a family that thought it was funny that they buried the last pope in a dress with shoes that didn't quite match - it was still a bit of a process to get to where I am now because I read a fair chunk of the bible, I went to church for a while (less than a year - stuck to that one, didn't I?! LOL). And really, we underestimate all the Christian stuff that exists in our society and ideas regardless of your upbringing. For example - I opted out of the Religious Education course at school but they still made us do modules entitled 'Caring, a Christian perspective' and 'Marriage,a Christian perspective' and sent us to do community service activities for good measure.

My first community service activity involved having to pull cancerous skin from a senile old lady's leg before covering it with cream.

Nice.

Anyway, back to the point. It takes years for you to change and part of making that change is being rabidly anti-Christian - guess it's the only way of dealing with the cognitive dissonance. But eventually the change comes when none of it matters anymore and you go into a church service and haven't got a clue what's going on, hungover and wishing the fucker that keeps ringing the bell would fuck off. You find yourself having to have Christian concepts explained to you and you might as well be having Hinduism explained because it's just that foreign to you. Bible stories end up being 'fucked up' but highly entertaining costume dramas and you figure you might as well take the local Christians that are offering freebies for everything you can get.

There is so much Christian baggage in modern Heathenry - not that it's not to be expected or anything. But I think give it a few years, let the first generation of children born to Heathen parents come through, let folks come to terms with the conversion process or even admit that there is a process to get over it.

It's only when Heathens stop giving a shit about how they're seen or about what they're doing and how it relates to every other bugger that we'll start to become credible.

Er...yeah...not really a point to any of that but nevermind.

It's my blog and I'll post if I want to :P

Warning

Once a lady walked the heath
The fallen dead to find
And as the mists curled round
She sang a lullaby

The dead, they heard
That beauteous song
And gathered all around
And as she sang
The dead came out
Entranced by the sound

The more she sang
The more the mist
It grew all around
The more she sang
The colder it got
Frost forming on the ground

The dead they liked her oh so much
Decided then and there
That they would steal her clean away
From this middle earth

Now the lady is with the dead
Singing her lullaby
Trapped deep in a mound
Forced to sing
That cursed lullaby.

Let this be a lesson for all you here
Be careful what you sing
For even a children's lullaby
Can be a harmful thing.

Cat Houghton, April 22nd 2008


This was something that sort of came to me this morning before class....maybe my subconscious telling me not to make anything I write too good? *snigger*

I even got a tune with it but luckily no reality/dead calling effects that I can ascertain as of yet.

P.S This is not my Vardlokur chant....

On Writing Vardlokur

This my fiends is going to be one of those dirty, UPG and woo-filled posts.

I'm leaving Korea in about three weeks and I'll be going back to Europe. A place where I can interact with the landvaettir and where they don't so much mind me doing crazy Seidhr type stuff. Being here in Korea has been so restrictive. The land spirits are just not used to immigration yet and aren't very accepting of other cultures and peoples. From the get-go, it became very apparent to me that practising any kind of Seidhr was a no-no. This isn't my turf, I am foreign and no matter how much I come to understand the lore of this place, what I might encounter and what I might do in order to placate the things I might encounter - that still doesn't mean that they would accept that placation.

The impending move back to Europe, to land and spirits that aren't completely alien to me must be having an effect and I'm being rather seriously nudged to take a slightly different path and to do a form of oracular Seidhr ritual.

Most people have only ever heard of the oracular Seidhr ritual in conjunction with the Hrafnar group and like the Hrafnar group, I'm looking at Eirik's Saga Rauda for my recon clues.

However I differ from Hrafnar on one rather key point. I don't believe that the Vardlokur are sung with the intention of singing the Seidkona or anyone else on a journey. I believe they are songs for enticing in the spirits. For pulling/enticing them in.

Why do I think this?

In the past I have come across songs which, when played alter reality, they facilitate that 'shift' between normalcy and that state in which the dead come through. Certain combinations of notes, certain 'feels' of music.

I know from personal experience that it is possible to 'pull' them in however I would much prefer that they come willingly.

There is also this section from Eirikssagaraudr:

But on the morrow, in the latter part of the day, she was fitted out with the apparatus she needed to perform her spells. She asked too to procure her such women as knew the lore which was necessary for performing the spell, and bore the name Varblokur, Spirit-locks. But no such women were to be found, so there was a search made right through the house to find whether anyone was versed in these matters.'I am unversed in magic,' was Gudrid's reply, 'neither am I a prophetess, yet Halldis my foster-mother taught me in Iceland the lore which she called Varblokur.' 'Then you are wiser than I dared hope,' said Thorbjorg. 'But this is a kind of lore and proceeding I feel I cannot assist in,' said Gudrid, 'for I am a Christian woman.' 'Yet it might happen,' said Thorbjorg, 'that you could prove helpful to people in this affair, and still be no worse a woman than before. Still, I leave it to Thorkel to procure me the things I need here.'Thorkel now pressed Gudrid hard, till she said she would do as he wished. The women now formed a circle all round, while Thorbjorg took her seat up on the spell-platform. Gudrid recited the chant so beautifully and well that no one present could say he had ever heard the chant recited by a lovelier voice. The seeress thanked her for the chant, saying that she had attracted many spirits there who thought it lovely to lend ear to the chant-- spirits 'who before wished to hold aloof from us, and pay us no heed. And now many things stand revealed to me which earlier were hidden from me as from others.

As you can see for yourself in the above excerpt from Chapter 4 of the aforementioned saga - Thorbjorg categorically states that the chant had attracted many spirits.

Unfortunately we don't know exactly what Gudrid chanted/sung and so logically, the would be practitioner of oracular Seidhr is left with two choices.

a. Give up and forget the idea
b. Use the information that can be deduced as to the nature of the chant in order to write a new one that can be used.

From the above excerpt, we can easily surmise that the Vardlokur had several characteristics.

* It had a rhythm to it. All chants have a rhythm.
* For a chant to be a successful and memorable chant, it had to be quite short and have repetition. This can still be seen in most chants from folklore. Another possible aspect of such a chant could be 'counting' as can be seen in chants such as the 'Magpie chant' (one for sorrow, two for joy etc etc).

From these two facts we can possibly also surmise that the Vardlokur is something that is at once hypnotic and yet builds into something a little more ecstatic.

Another thing to take into account is that some children's chants have a tune to them. From personal experience I know that certain tones and rhythms have different effects and that some indeed attract the dead.

One interesting angle that I have considered in writing new Vardlokur comes from a couple of things that the Viking Answer Lady says in her essay 'Women and Magic in the Sagas:Seidhr and Spae' (http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/seidhr.shtml)

Where a Saami or Siberian shaman would rely upon the beat of a drum to achieve the ecstatic trance, the völva requires a special type of chant, the Varðlokur. No words have been preserved of this chant, but since the Varðlokur had been used by Guðríðr's foster-mother as a lullaby, it seems likely that the chant was repetitive and soothing in character.

and also her references to the law codes in Anglo-Saxon England that suggest that Spae-craft was not necessarily a dead art during and after the conversion period:

The spae-wife is not absent in Saxon England, either, for a Christian penitential states:
Si qua mulier divinationes vel incantationes diabolicas fecerit, I annum poeniteat, vel 3 XLmas, XL dies, juxta qualitem culpae poenitentis.
"If a woman makes prophecies and incantations by diabolic means, she is punished for one year, or 40 masses, 40 days, with the punishment being proportional to the guilt" (Crawford, 107).

Could it be possible that somewhere, floating around there is an early folk song/ballad/chant that holds remnants of an Anglo-Saxon variant of the Vardlokur? In the same way that some Heathen lore was preserved for the Christian audience by Grimm's fairy tales, could it be possible that there is knocking around out there, a really old folk song that in some way preserves parts of the Vardlokur or derived from it? Although I am unsure as to where the Viking Answer Lady comes up with the 'lullaby' link (I can only think it was something expressed in the untranslated text as opposed to the translation that she herself gives on the site), if it is the kind of song that could have been used as a lullaby, it may have been quite an innocuous chant of the kind that can still be spotted in English folk chants to this day.

Chants along the lines of

'Jenny Wren fell sick upon a merry time,
In came robin redbreast and fed her cakes and wine'

seem innocuous though they contain fragments of folk belief that, although not ancient, refer to a form of Pagan belief.

So I have been searching not only for possible chants/folk songs/ballads that could have been referencing enticing the dead (even in an abstract manner) but chants/folk songs or ballads that could possibly (either from their tunes or subject matter) be used in such a way. There is a power in tradition and it would be good to use it.

So far I have come up with nothing except a great liking for a folk song called 'Three Ravens' - but being an Odinic type, what do you expect ;)

I do have a form of chant/song that needs refining and that I think could do the job but I'll have to try it out properly when I get back to England so all is not lost if my dreams of finding something older don't come through ;)

The saga continues....