Bypassing the Ages to Find the Real Spirits

Since taking up traditional shamanism, I have had an internal conflict. It was trying to reconcile venerating and honoring Frigg, Woden, and Loki with a path that did not have them.

The Judeo point of view has infected reconstructing and/or remembering the old religions as people try to go backwards. There are people trying to build churches¹, and they have dogmas for you to follow. While leaving the church and stepping into heathenry and paganism, they are bringing that thinking with them. In short, they’re not leaving the church behind.

You cannot fit the world’s oldest raw spiritual path into a modern, sanitized, church-style marching order. You just can’t. They don’t go together.

And then there is the kith and kin misunderstanding. People gather their group to worship Odin. They prick their thumbs for blood. They swear a little blood pact and decide that they are a tribe, to the point that some ostracize their own family. There is a difference between building a cozy friend group online and actual deep-time blood lineage and ancestral ties. In Old Norse and the broader Germanic lore, the absolute bedrock of your existence was the ætt—the clan bloodline. It was not a social club. Your biological family stood above all. Chosen family was a luxury.

So how do we fix the conflict?

When Wodnas called to me, I asked him, “What do you want?” And he said to me, “To turn back time.”

I immediately was like, I ain’t no prophet. I’m a poet, a really bad singer, and a storyteller. And he’s like, “That’s what we need.”

Yeah okay, it was a bit more firm, defiant, and better articulated.

Odin wasn’t telling me to build a time machine, which is great because there’s no way I could’ve. I’ve realized that one thing he meant was for me to personally go back to when shamanism was the spiritual path no matter the spirits I encountered. It means I throw out the temples, the chains. It means going back to a time when we sat around the fire or hearth and the shaman was your entertainer.

Proto-sciences, the historical linguistics, and comparative mythology make some of this possible as weird as it sounds, but not in a reconstructionist sort of way. More as a guideline, while allowing the spirits to tell me who they are. There are clues, like the 5th-century gold bracteate Dr. Crawford talked about, where the runic text didn’t read as expected. Then there are the spirits.

Even with the guesswork, the proto-sciences strip away the politics and social clubbery. They take you back to the linguistic and cultural bedrock, which is exactly where the spirits actually come from and probably where they’re still hanging out.

I don’t need to reconstruct my religion, because shamanism is the religion. The spirits aren’t dead. They’re right here. I don’t need dogma. I go to them as they are.

In traditional shamanism, the dream is real. The spirits are real. Some are old. Some are gone because it was their time. The rest are there, and they are approachable. Fine then. I’m gonna get walking, shall I?

1. A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet. ↩︎