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Seidways Shaking, swaying and serpent mysteries Jan Fries Copyright © 1996 by J Fries and Mandrake of Oxford First edition All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form by any means electronic or mechanical, including xerography, photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any infor- mation storage system without permission in writing from the author. Published by Mandrake of Oxford PO Box 250 OXFORD OX1 1AP (UK) A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the US Library of Congress. ISBN 1 869928 36 9 Also by Jan Fries and published by Mandrake of Oxford Visual Magick - a manual of freestyle shamanism Helmnar - a manual of rune magick. Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire 2 Contents 1 The First Word from the Cauldron 5 2 The Serpent Stone ...11 3 The Sacred Disease 20 4 The Num and the Kia 44 5 Horses of the Zar 52 6 Kami of the Sacred Peaks 58 7 The Second Coming of Christ. 66 8 Seidr Under Midnight Skies 73 9 Spells of Suomi 97 10 Introduction to the Practice 119 11 Seething Practice 122 12 Rhythms and the Mind 137 13 Attention and Involvement 164 14 Feeding the Spirits 173 15 Dragon Lore 186 16 A Tangle of Serpents ....... 206 17 Gods and Giants 229 18 Visions of Taliesin 265 19 The Cauldron of Ceridwen 298 Selected Bibliography ......319 Discography 325 Index 327 3 1 The First Word from the Cauldron I have been told that introductions stand no chance of being read, no matter how valuable their information-content, unless they include a bit of excitement right in the first few lines. Well then, how would you like this? As far as magical books go (this depends on how far their readers take them) this one is almost about sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. Almost, but not quite. It is also about dragons, about cauldrons, and about the darker side of pagan religion and magick in ancient Europe. After writing Helrunar there was quite a lot of bizarre information left over, which just wouldn't fit into a handbook of rune-sorcery. This information stewed in the pot for a few years. Then it asked for a place on paper, and here we go. Some of this stuff is obscure, some is speculative. Very little of it pretends to be factual, unless the reader chooses to believe and make it so. I do not ask you to believe, instead, I would like to challenge you to do your own research, come to your own insights, and to construct your own working hypothesis as you go along. This goes for the theories, but even more so for the practises. If you choose to experiment with the techniques described in this volume, let me remind you that you, and you alone, are responsible for what happens. Some of the practises are definitely not suited for everyone, most require a degree 6 First Word from the Cauldron of magical experience, and all require good health of mind and body. If you are a beginner in trance magick, I would strongly suggest that you master a few basic skills before attempting any of the techniques in this volume - skills like visualization, self-hypnosis, astral projection and earthing energies. For these techniques you could consult my earlier books. More important yet is the ability to communicate with what might be called 'the deep mind', the 'holy guardian angel', the 'fylgia' etc., as these are the parts of the self which make the magick work. Well then... what was this about sex? This book is almost about sex, insofar as it deals with pulsation, with trances that excite and energise, that make the body shudder, sweat and glow. This is not the usual sort of sex, such as is commonly practised on Friday night so as not to interfere with the demands of the working week. What we deal with are phenomena like lust and living flesh. Think of what Austin Spare termed 'the new sexuality', a concept that is miles away from simple male- female role-playing. What Spare thought of was the sexual interaction of the T and the 'all-otherness', the lust of awareness in all of its forms, and the transcendence arising from going beyond. How about drugs then? Sorry, but this is not a book on what happens to people who get high on things cooked up in bathtubs and sold at street-corners. It is more concerned with things that people cook up in their own brains, with the hormones and neurotransmitters which the brain produces naturally. I wouldn't call such substances 'drugs', as all drugs are just crude attempts to approximate the effects of the mind's own elixirs. And rock 'n' roll? Can you sense the rhythm? There is a rhythm to trance work. There is a rhythm in ritual, and there is a lot of rhythm in the shaking and swaying trances. Rhythm can stabilize awareness. It can change awareness, and some rhythms can lead your mind on a journey to yourself. And it's a book of exploration. A good many of the trance practises on these pages have been used by cultures all over the globe, starting, I suspect, quite early in the Stone Ages. For a variety of reasons, these trances have fallen out of use in Europe and in the 'modern world', which means that hereabouts people have to re-discover methods Seidways 7 which seem new but are as ancient as they come. A lot of cultures practice these trances in our day and age, which supplied me with a wealth of useful data. Few magicians are aware of what treasures can be found in a good ethnological library; if they knew, they would feel rather silly about their own vows of secrecy. Most of the great magical secrets have been published time and time again in the unlikeliest of places, but it does take an inspired eye to recognize them. When the first European scholars studied the shamanic seances of Siberia, they were swift to call them a mixture of quack-doctoring and plain insanity. Given their cultural background, what other conclusion could they reach? Similar practices are well-documented from pagan Europe, sadly, they have been ignored for a long time. Ecstatic people have long been treated as if they were lunatics, and when the church came to power, it soon declared that the pagan ways go straight to Hell. The very sort of behaviour that many cultures seek in their healers and priests was attributed to the Devil, and rigorously punished. Yet people shake. A body in trance can easily begin to sway, especially if the mind is busy elsewhere, and shaking and trembling are not far from this phenomena. I found it happening when I was a child. I used to draw pictures. In the process, when pausing to consider the picture, I used to get extremely excited. This excitement expressed itself in trembling. Many a time the hand holding the pen started the quivering, and often enough, the rest of the body joined in. This led to a number of interesting and void-minded consciousness states, im- proved my ability to see and imagine, and scared my parents consider- ably. They suspected brain damage, and had me examined by several doctors, who could not find anything wrong. I soon got the impression (hat shaking was undesirable, and began to struggle against it. It wasn't easy, but for several years I managed to avoid it. Then came magick, excitement and madness, and soon enough the shaking returned. I felt very uneasy about it at first, but when I learned that there are cultures which actually invite it as a sign of spiritual grace (or total obsession), I felt compelled to allow it once more. For some years I assumed that the shaking is a side-effect of intense mental activity. Then I learned that 8 First Word from the Cauldron it can work both ways - that intense mental activity can be a side-effect of shaking, and that one can lead to the other naturally. This led to the next question: was this just a personal phenomenon or could it be learned by others? At first, only a few people dared to experiment - Julia, Astrid, Gavin, Ruth - whose support has done much to make this book possible. They tried, they experimented, and developed their own access to shaking trances and inspired rituals. They taught me about individual differences in shaking and swaying, and about the necessity to develop one's own working method. These experiences were the beginning of this book. From this point, things became easy. All of a sudden a great deal of useful information turned up, such as books, films, recordings, dreams, and better still, people who had experienced the shaking one way or another, without quite understanding what was happening to them. Some of my friends were kind enough to write of their experience, such as Gavin W. Semple, Shantidevi and Nema/Maggie of the Maat Network. I have included their accounts as they are lucid and informa- tion, and even more so as I believe in offering you several points of view. For the same reason a lot of quotations have been included. If you really wish to understand a phenomenon, the first step is to consider as many points of view as possible. Kenneth Grant offered some scintillating suggestions which helped a lot to fuse this book together and permitted me to quote from our correspondence, and Mogg and the Oxford Golden Dawn Occult Society gave me the chance to present the practise to a wider audience during the Thelemic symposiums of 1992 and 1993, when scores of people found that they could shake, trance, and enjoy it.