Summoning Spirits outside of the usual means

[Lion]

I would be really interested in your system. Is it a form of Chaos magic?

 

[nunaphael]

So, I might be wrong, but in the Western traditions, the main place to find methods of conjuring spirits is in the Abrahamic tradition. As in to say, conjuring angels and demons utilizing the names of the Abrahamic God.

Frankly, I'm not sure why this is. The god i read about in these Grimiores comes off as very different than the one I'd hear about in church. As in to say, if you were raised in the church, you would've been taught that God doesn't permit interaction between humans and spirits. Then you find a catalog of spirits you could summon. Provided you're utilizing his name to do so. Whether or not this god promotes this practice, he is involved.

This seems like something a god like Odin or Hecate would do. As in to say, a god who holds domain over magic, spells, and spirits, having an assortment of beings the average magician can call upon to aid in both the most mundane, and arcane, of concerns, providing a manual on the conjuration of these beings, and instructions on etiquette and offerings. I mean, I'd be happy to conjure elves for healing and protection, or dwarves for knowledge and wealth.

So, does the practice of spirit summoning exist in other traditions? Perhaps in a less dramatic way than that of the Goetia?

I work exclusively with "spirits", although, I don't call them that. I call them by their names, I ask them to introduce themselves and we have conversations and I talk to them like I'm talking to you right now. I don't think it's really useful to label them apart from their given names. I don't call you "human", or "entity", I'd probably just shorten your name to "lumineth" or once I got to know you better I might call you "lumi".

I practice the nordic tradition called seidr magic as well as galdr magic. We don't use circles, incense, astrology, magic squares, or any of that stuff. We use a staff, a hood, special songs called vardlokkur, which we use to induce the trance state as well as set our intentions for the ritual, and occasionally (if I want to do a really long or deep journey) a brew called poetic mead that is lightly psychedelic and helps to maintain the trance more easily.

The most important elements are the staff and the vardlokkur. That's really all you technically "need" to do seidr rituals. The staff is used to ground and anchor you, it will become your axis mundi while you are traveling, so you hold onto it tight and grip it fast while you journey, it is your lifeline so to speak. The vardlokkur are special songs which you will learn from the spirits themselves as you journey. They teach you poems or songs that you chant or sing, which will allow you to go straight into a trance and call upon them. Think of these songs as like phone numbers that you keep in an address book which you use to "call" the spirits you wish to work with.

Unlike other shamanic traditions, we don't use drums, we pound the staff rhythmically into the ground to produce a pulsing beat which entrains the brain and puts it into a theta state. About 7hz I believe. I forget the specific technicality, but I'm sure you heard of the idea yourself before. The lucid and trance states usually occur in the theta range, so that is why shamanic drumming is very effective and used all over the world for shamanic practice. We achieve basically the same thing with the rhythmic stamping of the staff on the ground.

Another way to use the staff is to spin the staff in a rhythm as if you were spinning and weaving wool into thread using a distaff and a drop spindel. But among reconstructionists this is actually a bit controversial as far as I am aware, because it is actually quite hard to maintain your focus in a trance journey while you are spinning and weaving. The spinning and weaving is a bit distracting, but I suppose if you had to do it every day for your entire life, that might make it easier to use in trance journeying, but I am a bit skeptic of this personally. I stick with the generally accepted method, which is to just tap your staff on the ground and hum or chant or sing your vardloka and focus on your intention and just go into the trance.

A "vardloka" (literally "ward-lock") is a short poem, typically three lines, with the timing being two beats on the first two lines, and three beats on the last line. The first consonant of each "beat" is alliterated with the following beat, and it changes each line. For example:

Wither, rune-warder,
Shall we sail?
Bearing such baleful brews?

A tricky day traveling
Riding through rain
Helping the hopeless at home.

(I know it's awful, I just made it up off the top of my head to demonstrate the technique, and no I did not use AI, that's why it's so bad lol)

Ordinarily though, you don't come up with these on your own. Or rather, you practice coming up with them on your own as a hobby, you study poetry and you study meter and song and verse and fill your mind with the raw materials that the spirits need to assemble the song themselves out of your memories, you see? You learn a bunch of stuff so they can pick the ideas out of your head for you and go "these ones" and the spirits instruct you themselves.

That's basically how we do everything, it's not really "me" doing it. The idea is to become a "hollow bone", you want to empty yourself, your own desires, your own goals and agendas, and the only thread of yourself that you hold onto is that singular intention you picked at the start of the ritual. Like "I am journeying to find a companion who can help me to cure my friend's disease" or something like that. Apart from that, your staff anchors you and you go into the trance and hopefully you find a spirit that trusts you enough to work with you.

Trust is how this form of magic operates. You don't think in terms of "good" or "evil" - you think in terms of "did you do what you said you were going to do?" All that matters is reciprocity. Are you someone who keeps your word? Are you dependable? Or are you weak and are you a traitor? Do you make excuses when you screw up? Then the spirits won't want much to do with you, and it will take a lot more work to earn their trust. Or you might be able to convince the ones that are quite innocent and somewhat naive. But you will never convince the more powerful spirits that are ancient beyond comprehension and have vast amounts of wisdom, for example the Aesir or the Vanir gods, or even very ancient landvaettir, or jotuns and thurses.

To that extent, we don't really use any form of protection, so no circles or banishments. We don't do that really because it's somewhat disrespectful if you think about it. No spirit can ever take control over you unless you consciously or unconsciously allow it to do so, this is called the "law of sovreignity" so you have literally no reason to be paranoid about spirit possession. It can only happen if you, or some unconscious part of you, wants it to happen. So that's the real question you have to ask yourself, do you trust every part of yourself? Not just your conscious mind, but do you trust your shadow as well?

Anyway, sorry to ramble. I actually came to this forum looking for more discussion about nordic spirituality and magical traditions but so far it's been pretty low key. Most people are into your bog standard qabalah, tarot cards, astrology, stuff like Agrippa, Mathers, Eliphas Levi, Waite, Crowley, Gardner, basically neoplatonism and heremetic philosophy that goes back to the greco-roman hellenistic period reinvented for the 20th century. A few more "advanced" students go beyond this and they start studying the primary texts, medieval grimoires like the Oberon or Grimiore Vellum and so forth. But even those grimoires teach concepts that are still basically just the same thing Mathers and Crowley were doing, but in a more rustic and "old fashioned" way that wasn't quite as syncretic and the techniques are slightly different. But the underlying philosophy is the same - there is a "monad" or some singularity that everything stems from, some monotheistic entity that is the "source" and there is this top-down heirarchy where everything is an emanation of "the one". That philosophy is called "neoplatonism" and it was first founded by Plato, and then expounded upon by Plotinus and later Iamblichus, and it became the basis for all western esoteric magical traditions for over a thousand years now. It also became the basis of monotheism in general and for Christanity, which took over and almost abolished all other world views.

 

[Lion]

Thanks for sharing this. So much there to think about. How do you actually see/contact the spirits? when you are in a trance state do you do anything else to see/contact them? how do you know that tthey are there? also in the reciprocity you describe what is it you exchange with them?

 

[Keldan]

I practice the nordic tradition called seidr magic as well as galdr magic.

This is actually pretty similar to how I work with my spirits. They each have their own names and their type of being, and that’s how I address them as who they are.

I do work with a few very ancient skógarvættir, as well as some thurses and sjávargvættir. I wouldn’t really say that I practice any Norse tradition, which is why I’ve mentioned on the forum that I practice Norse folk magick. That description feels much closer to what I actually do.