Unpacking the Seidr quote
“Seidr [is] a sexual defined metaphor for the practice of sorcery itself…conceptualized as feminine in a society that equates the act of sexual penetration with masculinity and the function of receptivity with femininity. Because the shaman and the sorcerer are considered to be possessed and so penetrated by the spirits, their role is thought to be like that of a woman in a sexual encounter.”— M. Clunies Ross, Prolonged Echoes: Old Norse Myths in medieval Northern society vol 1 (1994)
This is a text post as well as a quote, because..well, I want to tag some folks at the end. But see, here’s the thing. Odin got taught seidr by the Lady Freyja, who gets stick for her supposed sexual appetites. She’s the one who gets mocked for sleeping with her brother, as well as the dwarves for Brisingamen.
But rather than being a passive receptacle, the Vanadis is quite the opposite. Her fury and her rage are enough to make Thor quake in her boots, and in case you forget, this is the Lady who gets first pick of the dead warriors. She’s the mistress of sorcery, desire, battle - the Lady who runs things her own way, and woe betide anyone who seeks to take what’s hers.
Because what we think of today as masculine and feminine, that pesky gender binary which we are steadily unlearning, wasn’t the same to the Old Norse. Freyja was a warrior, but she was feminine too, and women warriors were warriors first - part of the ranking system of Old Norse society. At the bottom was the slave, who lived and died, not by their own determination, but at another’s whim. Those who had power, determination and ability - these were the ones who got respect. And in their home, even the women who were not warriors exercised their power over the matters of their house, which is why women could divorce and own property of their own.
Remember, this is not our modern gender coding, but in fact something that comes out of social interaction and practicality. If your men were going to be away seasonally, of course you ran things. You made the decisions and you made sure there was food and drink enough, stores enough, to survive in winter and hard times.
That sense of responding to conditions is precisely why Freyja is so potent - she gets what she wants, and she doesn’t stay home, weeping. No, in fact, she weeps, but as she wanders looking for her lover.
She is a furious terrible figure who exerts her power through the ultimate ability to receive all wisdom and not be bound or held by anyone.
And she’s the one who takes Odin and teaches him how to be receptive, how to turn his fury and his inspiration into something that draws spirits to him, because here a secret - Odin is Self-possessed. Could he have hanged himself on the tree without Freyja teaching him the necessary receptivity?
Think about it - to the Old Norse, nothing was worse than powerlessness. Faced with a crippling injury, you did what you could - the handless manage flocks, the deaf are doughty fighters, the lame riders.
Now, imagine, for a second, the epitome of powerlessness, bound for nine nights, wounded - penetrated by his own spear. Sacrificed self to Self.
Who came to Odin then in those nine nights, but his very own self? Who doubled down upon him and filled him up? This great god become the very antithesis of the potent, and in doing so, came by the runes when his own Self filled him up - the spirits of the runic mysteries emerging from that great roaring of inspiration, that terrible frenzy.
Because that’s the secret. You have to let go and you have to do it by confronting the fact that you have no choice in the matter. The I that you think you are will eventually vanish - hell, it vanishes constantly, and then reconstitutes itself anew so quickly you believe there’s a continuity of identity when there really isn’t.
Once you recognize your ultimate negative capability, you realise just how empty the hand you’ve been using to grasp things all your life is. You stop trying to penetrate the world, and instead plunge into yourself.
And that’s why Odin’s hungry like the wolf. Because he’s frenzy incarnate - his godly frame thrums with the fury of the kosmos in all its infinite variety and shape. Imagine if everything you ever ate drove you to pursue yet more variety of flavour and quality, if you were capable of receiving more and more ad infinitum, and each morsel just made you want more.
It’s implied that Freyja is cock-hungry, sex hungry for itself rather than procreation - some even suggest that’s what ergi means - but consider her and Odin together for a second, both seidr-folk, and you’ll see the connexion.
The desire to be ‘penetrated’ - to be taken by and to take the kosmos into yourself, to find it in your own flesh, and to let your own flesh be it manifest. The infinite variety of shape and form is yours - you can change at whim, man, woman, bird, beast - the choice is endless.
Consider Loki, receiving the stallion and birthing the mount who can cover all the worlds. Consider hir as maid beneath the earth, or as bridesmaid to Thor as he quests for his hammer. Consider that hammer as laid in the lap of the bride to assure fertility, or Freyr’s rampant ithyphallic attributes.
Then wonder about the union of opposites so beloved of occult texts, or the hieros gamos. Then in the erotic component found in certain spirit interactions - marriages to lwa, or nuns engaged in mystical marriage to Christ - and you might begin to realise that the modern phenomenon folks call godspousery may in certain contexts and contexts may be symptomatic of a wider spiritual reality.
(Which is not to say every case of such things has any more levels to it than what the participants experience, merely that it may be a particular perceptual angle.)
This reality is one of reception and transmission, of obsession and possession by numinous powers - not necessarily particularly similar to naything we Westerners might see as possession, given our generalised monotheistic enculturation.
Here perhaps, enthusiasm is best applied:
enthusiasm (n.) c. 1600, from Middle French enthousiasme (16c.) and directly from Late Latin enthusiasmus, from Greek enthousiasmos “divine inspiration, enthusiasm (produced by certain kinds of music, etc.),” from enthousiazein “be inspired or possessed by a god, be rapt, be in ecstasy,” from entheos “divinely inspired, possessed by a god,” from en “in” (see en- (2)) + theos “god” (see theo-). Acquired a derogatory sense of “excessive religious emotion through the conceit of special revelation from God” (1650s) under the Puritans; generalized meaning “fervor, zeal” (the main modern sense) is first recorded 1716.
When we become enthused, we become filled up with experience, with affect. We eat, breath, sleep that thing. We will speak on its matters till the cows come home.
This capacity can be enhanced by certain techniques and experiences - we can develop an affinity for certain elemental (in the sense of the basic primordial building blocks of experience) constellations of affect and personality, somatic, psychological and psychosexual impressions and patterns.
In order to do this however, significant reconfiguration of self-hood has to occur, which changes our relationship with the world at large and others around us, often irrevocably and unrecognisably so,
Oftentimes, these take the forms of initiatory experiences - crises and experiences in which we are thrown out of habitual relations - which change our refferential index to allow us to become more receptive to the vast richness and variety of the kosmos and as a direct consequence of these new impressions and perceptions, enable us to deploy ourselves via ways of Being which seem strange to those who have not undergone the reconfigurations.
Such understandings allow us, through interactions with those powers and presences with which we co-habit the kosmos, to perform certain acts which seem to violate or manipulate ordinary perceptions and so-called reality itself.
So there we go - a bearded frothing madman’s unpacking of the above quote. Take it or leave it.
