Man, I need to win the lottery. The heat is out. The plumbing is backed up. A socket is dead. Without these things fixed, when winter comes on the windows will shatter. I’m sure of it. I already have some shattered windows.

I woke up to a vision, and although I normally don’t share I will this time. I was looking at my backyard where my little vé stands. There were two cut young trees – not saplings – to make column posts. They were side by side near the tent’s door by where I have the fire. The posts were cleaned of their bark and red. I could see the cuts from where they had been worked on.

Atop the posts I watched as two energy spirits came and set themselves onto the pedestal, each taking one. I knew who they both were at first, but now I can only remember the one. The first, the unnamed one, sparkled with blue edges like a burning bright star. The second was a glowing yellow waning crescent moon shape, shining just as brightly but yellow. I knew that was a Salmon of Knowledge. He chose the column closest to my tent.

I heard a soft voice say, “They have come to make things wont.” But over that as I got to the “things wont” part of the statement, a stronger louder voice said, “to make things right.” It sounded like my spirit spouse. But he wouldn’t do that, would he?

I mean. Would he??

Pschaw!!

Looking at them, I sent a part of my being out. I felt it leave me – a sparkling bit of essence like them. It was shaped like an eye – like a Ra’s eye or other such symbol – and it went forth to the two spirits on the posts. Thus my will joined with theirs.

I know what he was doing, that male voice – he was putting in this own point of view; it was overwriting the message while at the same time making things clear possibly. Translating maybe. I’m not the brightest eyeball in the jar after all. When I woke and opened my eyes, the first thing I did was try to figure out who the 2nd was. I had known, but I no longer knew. I halfway hoped my spirit spouse would tell me, but he was quiet. I wondered if it was him, but I also didn’t want to assume.

So I decided instead to do some research. First, the term “wont”. It was pronounced as a blend of “want” and “won’t” – and boy was that a devil to tease apart. All of the things I found kept insisting on the term “to be lacking, starving, etc.” in a verb tense. I couldn’t get away from that, and it was really pissing me off. So I stressed looking for a noun usage of “wont’ in an Anglo-Saxon sense.

Not “want” as a verb, nor “won’t” as a refusal, but gewuna – a word that meant “custom, habit, established practice.” How do we use it today? We don’t – rather, you probably don’t. I still do. I say the phrase, “as is their wont,” to mean their habit, their practice, their way. It has taken me HOURS to realize this. Please pat my back.

So these spirits have come to my little grove to make things wont. I hereby propose we put this word back into use, please.

This was about establishment. I wasn’t told they were making a new wont. They were making things wont. This suggests habits and methods, possibly to do with learning the things they show me. Period. To the spirits, this might make many things right. For that something must align with how things are supposed to be or have been. This is actually my way – but I do have to say the other day when doing a rain ritual and my spirit spouse said I needed blood for the purification part, I stood my ground.

He was teasing me I know. I had no blood on hand and I was in the middle of a ritual. He also knows how I feel. Killing is just flat not my way. I am sorry, cosmos. Blood doesn’t purify. It dirties what you’re doing with the final thoughts and stress of that sacrifice. No matter how drunk you make them – so you put drunk energy into it instead? Blood is not the way. Not for me.

So to the Salmon of Knowledge. Way back when I was first being approached, picked up, mulled over, and chewed on by parasites and spirits an angry little guy in a yellow kilt with barely any pattern had come to me to see if I was “fit for the job.” His kilt I later learned was in an extinct pattern: a high bard himself. He looked at me. I, half awake in my bean bag bed, looked at him. He realized I was staring. He winked out of sight – gone.

The elders say not to stare at the spirits. He started it. Plus I was half awake.

I pursued him once to figure him out but then the drama got too large. The other day, though, I decided to try again. It was my first serious shamanic world-walk in a long time, but I managed despite having to put tendrils out like crazy for “fairy location”. I asked the spirit spouse, “Are you coming? You don’t have to.” I felt his warmth on my arms, so I began with the music and the dance.

I couldn’t fly but I knew I wore a cloak – I’m sorry, I don’t know how to use that thing!! – so I made a door. I could feel the energy as I used my body to focus on stepping through onto a beach. Handled business there – it was amazing! – and went on to find the little yellow kilted fairy dude. For that I had to start again.

I put apple flavored liquor on my lips and poured libation outside. I spent a lot of time warming up, raising my wyrd, and could not see much. … but after a while I was in a “I know it’s there” sort of way. After a while I realized I was on a yellow cobblestone road, but it hadn’t been walked in a long time and had grass growing tall in the cracks. Weeds. Whatever. And I knew there was a crescent moon in the sky… with the dark side to my left. I think that’s waxing? I kept going and called, “Little yellow fairy,” but he wouldn’t come.

He’s hiding, I said to no one in particular. I followed the fairy’s “scent” because suddenly I knew he was a fish in the water, and there I dove into a lake or something. And I said, “Are you a water spirit? I just want to know: are you a family sprite, a random dude, what? Just tell me so I know how to proceed here. What job were you talking about?”

I could see him approach as a white outline, sort of. A salmon. His lips were prominent in the vision, and that’s a good sign. But I thought to myself, maybe that was because I knew Loki had turned into a salmon once. The spirit spouse suddenly urged like an excited sportsman from my right, “Now get your hooks into him!”

But no, I wasn’t going to do that. I touched lips to the salmon’s fish mouth, giving him the libation. I wove back and forth – Kiss! Kiss! Kiss! – sort of like how I’d done with my spirit spouse the day we traded wine. It was like I’d done it a million times. The moves were practiced and expert. Maybe my weaving with the salmon was inserting hooks after a fashion. When you do that, you’re weaving your wyrd together.

I woke up the next morning about 10:30, which is a good time, and lay there. I had been in the liminal space, a place with things in it. A wet cave I think. I had picked up three scrolls that were also like fruit roll ups – treats for the mind I suppose – and the fairy said to me in a tone you say to a young child, “Put those down, now” in that accent. So. “Put those doun nooo.”

He said something else as well, something about setting things up or something. “Give me a minute, you’re a music type nooouu, soooo…”

And his face changed at least twice At first he was the fairy that had shouted at me by my bedside. Then he was Mr. Scott from TOS – I guess he’s telling me he’s Scottish or being an engineer or something. I told the yellow fairy that if I don’t have a name I’m going to call him Feesh.

Then I began looking into the clues I had. There’s the trick behind personal visions which people don’t realize. I’m touched by spirits of various pantheons. This doesn’t mean I’m founding a new church or have some huge destiny. It may be something so simple as: the gods feel bad for me or my life is their special project for fun. These blog posts may be all you see of what happens.

So just enjoy the tale.

So now to look into the tree posts, another thing I can verify or not have verified and be moved into the realm of dream fantasy. Here goes a random search. Drum roll….

“In early Germanic / Old Norse practice wooden posts that marked out a sacred precinct (vé) or acted as cult pillars were indeed sometimes described as red or blood-smeared. Key attestations:

• Temple-posts (stǫng f. “post, pole”). Adam of Bremen (Gesta Hammaburgensis, IV.26) says the great temple at Gamla Uppsala had “posts of astonishing size, all adorned with gold and blood,” standing outside the hall after sacrifices. In several sagas cult-posts at a hof were reddened with the blood of a freshly slain animal.
• Reginnaglar “divine nails.” These iron or wooden “god-nails” were driven into the main pillars of a hof; they were consecrated by smearing (literally “reddening”) with blood at blót. The pillars themselves might therefore appear reddish.
• Hárstafr / Hǫrgr-posts. In descriptions of private homesteads the boundary of a vé could be staked out with upright poles; after a sacrifice they, too, were “hlautbönd svertaðir”—darkened / reddened with hlaut-blood. (cf. Hávamál 145; Þórarins þáttr Styrkmanns.)
• Irminsul parallels. Continental Saxon sources (Widukind, Vita S. Lebuini) speak of a mighty wooden or red-stained “pillar” representing the sacred axis; though not called vé-posts, the symbolism overlaps with world-pillar cult posts in Scandinavia.

So two freshly stripped, reddish posts set at a vé entrance would fit known Germanic patterns:

• They mark the liminal edge of a holy enclosure.
• They are “reddened” (either naturally—as cedar/redwood—or ritually by hlaut-blood or red ochre).
• They can serve as supports or as “gate-guard” poles onto which protective figures (spirits, carved heads, reginnaglar) are placed.”

Fuck.

I will not shed blood for this. It’s wrong. One thing I’ve always noticed as a student of history and archaeology is that things go good for a people until they begin sacrificing themselves to the cause. It takes out their tie to the earth when they do that. It puts tears into the mix. And from there things steadily go south.

But I don’t have to do blood. The older way is to use ochre.

──────────────────────── ARCHAEOLOGY & TEXT ────────────────────────

1. Neolithic & Bronze-Age burials
   • Scandinavia and North Germany: hundreds of chamber burials (e.g. Vedbæk, Denmark; Skateholm, Sweden) contain bodies dusted or painted with red ochre—often around the head, hands, and the post-holes that framed grave chambers.
   • Purpose recorded by archaeologists as “symbolic life-force / blood substitute”; the colour marks the threshold between worlds.
2. Iron-Age bog deposits
   • In peat-bog offerings (e.g. Illerup Ådal, Denmark; Thorsberg, Germany) many spears and shield-boards have traces of red ochre under later patination. These were dedicatory weapons planted upright in the marsh—ancestral to later vé-posts.
3. Hofstaðir (Mývatn, Iceland) sacrificial hall
   • Excavations (Lucas & McGovern, 2007) found red ochre staining on structural timbers and the great central post. No butchered animal bones lay near those stains, suggesting the colour itself— not blood—was the intended marker.
4. “Red posts” outside temples
   • Adam of Bremen (Gesta Hammaburgensis, IV.26) says the great temple at Gamla Uppsala had posts “totis columnis auro coronatis” (all columns adorned with gold) but also notes they were first daubed red with pigment before gilding. Several scholars (e.g. Price 2002) note ochre was the ordinary temple stain.
5. Reginnaglar—“divine nails”
   • Landnámabók (ch. 60): settlers uproot their high-seat pillars, cast them into the sea, and let them drift to the God-chosen shore; these pillars were first consecrated with “rautt leir” (red clay/ochre) and then had iron nails driven in. The ochre is specifically mentioned as part of the sanctification.
6. Eddic formula “rauð viðr” (“reddened wood”)
   • Hávamál 145; skaldic kennings for sacrificial posts use “rauðviðr” (red-wood) as a stock epithet. Saga prose explains the colour was achieved “með rauðaleir eða blóði” (with red-ochre or with blood). Ochre is listed first.

So do I continue to say “fuck fuck fuck” while walking through the house that those posts were actually verifiable… or what?

I’m walking away from this overwhelming shit for now.