We earnestly forbid any sort of heathenism. Heathenism it is when someone venerates an image of the devil, that is when someone worships heathen gods and the sun or moon, fire or water, springs or stones or any kind of tree, or loves witchcraft, or commits harmful acts in any fashion, either in a sacrifice or in divination, or takes any part in such impropriety . . .
Laws of Cnut (translated by Bill Griffiths)
Having outlined the fundamental beliefs and practices of the pagan era, it is now necessary to explore the survival of these traditions after the arrival of Christianity. Far from being completely obliterated, they gradually went underground in the new era. The lore and legends of the pagan myths were transformed into folk and fairy tales, and integrated into everyday life (as in the names for days of the week), surviving in oral form amongst the populace right to the present day. And they sur-vived in literal ways as well, some of the old gods still being worshipped and the old ways still being practiced throughout the centuries. It is amongst the witches and occultists of the Christian era that we are able to discern traces of the pagan legacy.
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UNDER THE CHRISTIAN AXE
The conversion of the Germanic peoples was neither easy nor peace-ful. The turning point—at least as far as the continental tribes were concerned—occurred in the year 772 BCE when the Frankish emperor Charlemagne ordered the wholesale massacre of some 30,000 Saxons who refused to convert. The victory of the new faith over the old was made even more emphatic when the Irminsul, the sacred pole of the pagan Saxons (the symbolic equivalent of the Scandinavian world tree Yggdrasill), was cut down at Charlemagne’s command. As the archae-ologist Marija Gimbutas has said, this act of desecration would have had the same impact as the demolishing of St. Peter’s would have for Catholics.
The conversion of the Germanic tribes was achieved by trying to explain the gospel in terms that the pagans could understand. This is made clear in an Old Saxon manuscript dating from around 830 CE.
This text, known as the Heliand (Savior), was the first translation of the gospel for the Saxon world. The figure of Jesus is portrayed with many of the features of the god Odin. He is a magician, a master of the runes, and the chieftain of a band of twelve warriors (counterparts of the twelve disciples). Instead of the two ravens named Huginn and Muninn (see plate 3) that perch on the shoulders of Odin (represent-ing thought and memory) the new savior has the dove, represent(represent-ing the Holy Spirit, in their place.1
Once conversion had been successfully achieved, this temporary synthesis of the old pagan god and Jesus faded away. During the long era in which Christianity was dominant, Odin’s previous pre-eminence in the pagan pantheon made him a prime target for the Church’s pro-paganda. He became transformed into the devil of Christian belief.
Sorcery in some form or another continued to be practiced surrepti-tiously throughout the Christian era, usually in the form of ritual magic or witchcraft, and Odin, as the master magician of the pagan tradition, was sometimes implicated in such practices. Usually, but not always, ritual magic was performed by men and witchcraft by women.
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BROOMSTICKS AND FLYING OINTMENTS
Amongst the European witches of the Christian era (see plate 5) the most popular means of entering altered states of consciousness was to mix a host of psychoactive plants together to make a hallucinogenic paste known as flying ointment. Henbane and belladonna were key ingredients in these ointments. These pastes when smeared on the body of the witch caused her to experience wild hallucinations and a narcotic trance.
The anthropologist and neo-shaman Michael Hamer has pointed out that the psychoactive effects of the ointment would have been intensified if the ointment were introduced through the sensitive vagi-nal membranes by means of an anointed staff or broomstick. Not only does this help to explain how the ointment worked on a chemical level but also explains the frequent sexual fantasies of the sabbats ritual gatherings of witches and demons. Another common experience of the witches, at least according to their accounts before their inquisitors, was that when they had sexual intercourse with the devil his penis was pain-fully cold. This peculiar fact, incidentally, was one that Sigmund Freud, much to his annoyance, could never decode. However, it may refer to the insertion of the broom accompanied by rapid changes in body tem-perature caused by the initial effects of the drugs.
There do not seem to be any accounts of accidental self-poisoning by witches using these ointments, which is quite remarkable bearing in mind the great number of potentially toxic plant extracts contained in them.
This suggests that the preparation of the ointments must have been very exact, particularly as both henbane and belladonna can be lethal in too high a dose.2 What is clear from a number of accounts and reported cases is that the women who were using these drugs went into powerful trance states in which they (or at least their spirit bodies) flew to sabbats.*
*The persecution of the witches was largely directed against women and their traditional practices of healing and trance induction. This can be viewed per-haps as a continuation of the displacement and subordination of the female god-dess we have already seen in prehistoric times with the arrival in Europe of the
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There are a number of features that link the visionaries of Viking times with the later witches of Christian Europe. First, and most obvi-ously, those who practiced seidr were almost all women and most witches were also female. Second, both the seidr ceremony and the witches’ fly-ing to the sabbat (where she meets demons and participates in imaginary orgies) involve trance states. In both cases these trances often have a strong sexual element. Third, the staff of the Norse seeress has its counterpart in the broomstick of the witch. There is an interesting twelth-century mural of the Norse goddess Frigg in Schleswig cathedral in northern Germany.
She is shown astride a broomstick in the manner of a witch. Both the staff and the broomstick may have been used as phallic substitutes during magical practices. Finally, henbane was used by both seeresses and witches and its psychoactive properties induce trance states. It is hard to believe that all these parallels are simple coincidences.
Hallucinogenic drugs and sexual ecstasy were not the only means of entering trance states; other techniques were also used either separately or in conjunction with these. There are a number of features of ancient spells designed to bring about trance. One of these is repetition, as important to the seeress as repetitive drum beats are in bringing about shamanic trance. For it is equally important to the seeress to repeat the same words or the same or similar phrases over and over again. This is the power of suggestion at work or what we may call autohypnosis.
Many people today when they are “psyching themselves up” for some task will repeat their own private mantras. The text of any spell can be compared to the script of a play. However potent or profound the written words may be, it is up to the actress to bring them to life by the emotional power of her performance. Likewise, the seeress must make her spell reach a similar emotional pitch; she must enter into an altered state of consciousness to attempt to realize her, or her client’s, goal.
(contiuned from page 48) Indo-European peoples. The entire Judeo-Christian ideology extended the patriarchal dominance in religion, and the role of the feminine in spiritual doctrine has been largely suppressed in favor of the male Trinity of Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, the latter being the original and logical position of the feminine principle in most spiritual triads.
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We can also discern a possible survival of pagan meditation and úti-seta in the same period. In Dorset in the year 1566, during the course of the examination of a man named John Walsh, it came to light that he had learnt witchcraft from “iii kindes of Feries, white, greene, and black.” He was said to have spoken with them “upon hyls, where as there is great heapes of earth, as namely in Dorsetshire.” We may deduce that the “great heapes of earth” are the prehistoric barrows that still sur-vive in great numbers on the hills and heaths of this county. In other cases the local people shunned these places of power. Robert Kirk in his The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies wrote, “there be many Places called Fairie-hills, which the Mountain People think impious and dangerous to peel or discover, by taking Earth or Wood from them: superstitiously believing the Souls of their Predicessors to dwell there.” The folklore of France also reveals the close association in popular belief between menhirs, dolmens, and the witches’ sabbat, with monuments named the Sabbat Stone and the Witches’ Kitchen.3
THE GALDRABÓK AND THE WIZARDS OF ICELAND
As we have seen so far, vestiges of the old ways lived on in the secretive practices of the witches, practices dominated by women in most parts of Europe. But the survival of paganism in Iceland is quite different and it illustrates a further link with the pagan past. In Iceland the vic-tims of witch hunts were predominantly men and the evidence for their practices shows them to be clearly distinct from those of their female counterparts in the rest of Europe.
The end of the old Northern pagan tradition took place in the year 1000 when Iceland officially became a Christian country. It was the last of the Germanic countries to take up the new faith. Out of the 120 recorded witch trials only ten involved women and of the twenty-two witches who were burned to death only one was a woman.4 The first witch burning in Iceland took place in 1625. The man in question was executed when a page of runes was discovered in his house. By this
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time runes were widely associated with the workings of the devil.5 The discovery of magical manuscripts (known as grimoires) reveals that some traces of paganism persisted among the sorcerers of Iceland.
Grimoires are basically practical manuals for magicians or sorcerers. The word grimoire is derived from grammar so such manuscripts and books may be described as grammars of sorcery—containing the structures of the language of magic. The earliest such books derive from the Jewish tradition and are thus structured on the Hebrew language, particularly on its mystical expression, the Kabbalah. Typically a grimoire contains tables giving the symbolic connections between angels, demons, plan-ets, colors, numbers, and so on; these provide the theory behind the practice. The actual practices of ritual magic given in the grimoires include conjurations and evocations of both good and evil spirits, spells to locate treasure, to gain knowledge of the identity of a thief, to work love magic, and so on.
Many of the later grimoires of Christian Europe contain elements of folk belief preserved alongside material derived from the Kabbalah.
It is also often the case that these later grimoires are less systematically organized, having lost much of the structure of the earlier works. In Iceland, which has traditionally had a higher level of literacy than most other European countries, the links between folk magic and the magic of the learned members of society seem to have been stronger. Thus the Icelandic grimoire known as the Galdrabók (“magic book”) con-tains more material of pagan origin than perhaps any other work of this peculiar literary genre. That Iceland was the last country in the Germanic-speaking world to be converted to Christianity was also a major factor in the presence of pagan elements within its pages.
The Galdrabók, like most grimoires, is a compilation of spells, sigils, and conjurations drawn from a number of different sources. The con-tents of this particular magical book were put together between about 1550 and 1680. What is clear is that the book passed through the hands of four different people, each of whom wrote his own spells after those of his predecessor(s). There are forty-seven spells in all and the name of Odin appears in six of them, that of Thor in three.6 It would probably
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be wrong to think of references to Odin, Thor, and other pagan deities in the Christian period as evidence of the intact survival of the heathen faith. The pagan gods were never fully forgotten but banished to the fringes of society; they had become outlaws in their own culture.
Forms of rune magic appear to have survived also and played a role in the traditional form of Icelandic wrestling known as glima. In 1664 a Galdrabók was found in the possession of a student and its contents were subsequently described in detail by Bishop Brynjulfur Sveinsson.
Among the spells and magical sigils contained in the book were four signs to be used in wrestling.7 One of them was known as ginfaxi (see figure 5) [x-ref] and was hidden in the wrestler’s shoe.8
While glima wrestlers were still using sigils incorporating runes, it is unclear whether they were familiar with runes themselves. While Icelandic traditions of sorcery show that fragments of the old pagan faith persisted, the first historical traces of a neo-pagan revival are to be found
Figure 5. The ginfaxi sigil
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in Scandinavia. For although the use of runes died out in most of the Germanic world it never did entirely in Scandinavia. On the large island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, runes were still carved on gravestones as late as the sixteenth century, while in certain districts of Sweden the runic script survived among the people almost to the present day.9
We have seen a continuous thread of northern European paganism, extending from prehistory all the way into relatively recent times, and although some beliefs and practices have been forgotten and the survi-vors driven underground, Europeans have never completely forgotten the old gods or the old ways. We have seen clear continuities between the pagan female magic of seidr and the later practices of witchcraft.
Furthermore, the largely male rune magic of pagan times is echoed by the practices of later magicians who used grimoires and sigils. Iceland was an important repository of pagan lore and knowledge, a source that continues down to the present day (see plate 28). As Iceland had been the last “official” bastion of old Germanic paganism so it also became a herald of its official modern revival when, in May 1973, the Asatrúamenn, a neo-pagan movement founded by its chief priest Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson, was given government recognition as a reli-gious organization.10