Northern Tradition for the Solitary Practitioner: A Book of Prayer, Devotional Practice, and the Nine Worlds of Spirit

By Galina Krasskova and Raven Kaldera

An essential guide to expand your spiritual practices for followers of Norse Paganism, Heathenry, Asatru, and other Northern Traditions.

Northern Tradition for the Solitary Practitioner is a groundbreaking look at devotional work in religions from Theodism to Asatru to Norse Paganism, all of which comprise the umbrella of the Northern Tradition. Although interest in devotional and experiential work within these traditions has been growing rapidly in the past few years, this is the first book to show the diverse scope of such practices as a living, modern-day religion.

It features an in-depth exploration of altar work, prayer, prayer beads, ritual work, sacred images, and lore, and a thorough examination of common cosmology that forms the foundation of belief for Northern Tradition communities and related Heathen practices.

Northern Tradition for the Solitary Practitioner is not denomination-specific: rather, it seeks to provide an entry into interior practice for anyone involved in a branch of this broad family of traditions of the ancient Norse, Germanic, and Saxon peoples, using material suitable for the solitary, independent practitioner. Those outside of the Northern Tradition who wish to deepen their own devotional practice will find this book helpful in their own work, as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 21, 2008
• ISBN: 9781601639547

Galina Krasskova

Galina Krasskova is a Heathen priest and Northern Tradition shaman with a master’s degree in religious studies from New York University. The author of many books, including Runes: Theory and Practice, and coauthor with Raven Kaldera of Northern Tradition for the Solitary Practitioner, she is a columnist for Witches and Pagans magazine. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Book preview

Introduction: Solitary Spirit

My fingers are cold, almost too cold to move by now, as I chip at the flint with my little oval of wrought iron. Tinder nestles between my knees, kept off the wet snow by a few dry twigs snapped from pine branches. In even older times, this might have been done with a fire bow such as the Nauðiz-rune, or a fire-twirl in half a mullein stick such as the Cweorth-rune. I’m grateful to have flint and steel. Steel would mean a tribe with a blacksmith; flint would indicate the means to chip stone out of earth. I have matches, of course, and a lighter, but that’s not the point of this. The point is that I make sacred fire in the old way, or at least in what is an old way for me. It’s a way of honoring those who came before me, who hunted, herded, planted, harvested, birthed, sang, and died. Who passed down to me that gift of my flesh with their survival. Who first heard the call of the Old Gods, and passed down what they could of the knowledge to call and to hear Them.

Sparks fall onto the charcloth, a square of linen burnt black for tinder. Cloth means a loom, means thread painfully extracted from flax with scutch and hackle, or the raising of sheep and the spinning on a soapstone spindle. Under the charcloth is birch bark, from the tree of the All-Mother, rich with oils that relieve pains. Under that is flammable fungus, and dried leaves. The right leaves, from the right tree. One learns to scrutinize one’s environment desperately if one wishes to survive in places like the North of the world. The white snow is blue-violet in the almost-dark, and the moon peers from behind the tall evergreens. Warmth is leaching out of me like water out of a cracked bucket. Every breath I take into my lungs aches.

The charcloth catches, and I blow on it carefully, trying not to feel frantic. This is the fourth time I’ve gotten to this step. Breath, ond, the gift of Odin the All-Father. Grow, flame, with my breath. Finally, the tinder catches and flares, enough to light my beeswax candle stub, which I place in my lantern. The rule of making fire in cold places is that you immediately make more than one source of it. Dry leaves, dry pine twigs, then larger pieces of pine, a tree I associate with Jord, Earth-Mother, and with Ullr and Skadi, the Gods of the hunt. Then Frigga’s birch, then Thor’s sturdy oak logs. Oaks have rough bark and blow apart when struck by lightning, leaving the gift of a hundred splinters of sky-fire for the cold tribesfolk to pick up and take with them.

The fire burns merrily, finally. I could lie here all night and survive, if I had to, clad in the furs of animals who gave their life for me and whose totem-visages echo down through myth and artifact, or in warm wool spun on a soapstone spindle and woven on a weighted loom. I hail the fire Gods—Loki, Logi, Surt who lit the primal flame. Every act of my northern ancestors was bound up with many Gods and spirits, the beings who sustained them, and without whom they might not have survived. I warm my hands at the wisdom of those who came before. My tribe will never freeze.

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The religions that we refer to collectively as the Northern Tradition, based on ancient Norse, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon myths and beliefs, were first and foremost a product of their geography. It was the influence of place that shaped and molded them, and gave them their characteristic flavor. Snow, ice, blizzards, short growing seasons and bitter frost, forbidding mountains and trackless forest, icy, storm-ridden seas—these are background to the Northern Tradition in more ways than simply providing an aesthetic or a fairy-tale setting. They are the threads that run through everything—cold, bitter, bloody, desperate, harsh, and valiant. To fully understand the Northern Tradition, one must start here, with the weather and the land.

All pre-civilization peoples and cultures shared the same struggles—disease, famine, death in childbirth, accidents, animal attack, territorial wars, and so on. Everyone’s Ancestors sustained losses from their environment in some way, but in the Arctic and sub arctic circumpolar areas, the issue of survival was even direr. Finding enough food to eat, especially enough food to save through the longer winters on a shortened growing season, meant that famine was that much closer than it was in the more verdant southern areas. Predators were fiercer and more desperate during cold months. As Raven’s personal vignette about learning to make fire by hand in the snow implies, fire was necessary for life itself during one-third or more of the year. Exile from the tribe and hearth fire during that time could be a death sentence, so complex codes of hospitality and obligation arose to keep people from killing and exiling each other during the stifling, dangerous boredom of long winters. Life was harsher, so people were harsher. There is a strong thread of stoicism and fatalism that runs through the Northern myths, in which a code of honor is all that holds together the social order, although sometimes that code is consciously jettisoned in favor of personal survival. Rather than being excuses for bad behavior, these are moral tales that illustrate the struggle and difficulty that even the Gods have in deciding between compassion and harshness when life is on the line.

Even before the worship of the Gods, there was ancestral veneration. Today we find it difficult to imagine such reverence, even for beloved Ancestors whom we knew in life and still remember fondly. We don’t leave out food for them, though, nor generally consider them guardian spirits worthy of propitiating. Yet, for the folk of the ancient North, this was a given. Those who came before had given them life by surviving, and therefore were worthy of great honor. Similarly, the land itself was full of spirits who required honor and propitiation—the earth, the rivers, the lakes, the trees surrounding one’s home. If this was neglected, one might not survive. Even with all these careful preparations, one still might need to call in bigger allies—the Gods, or greater spirits who could aid humans when things got too difficult. In those days, weaving one’s religion into one’s life was more than just a nice idea; it was a matter of life and death. It was the way things were.

Today we live in a different world. Many people are drawn to the Northern Tradition for a variety of reasons. Perhaps it was the practices of their Ancestors. Perhaps the Gods of that cosmos are speaking to them, regardless of who their Ancestors were. Perhaps they are personally drawn to its values, or its myths, or its complexity. Whatever the reason, the numbers are growing, but not fast enough to guarantee that there will be anyone close by who shares your path. However, just because you don’t have a group to practice with doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be able to practice your religion. In fact, it may be the lone solitary who needs regular practice most of all.

In the older branches of Neo-Paganism, such as Wicca, most of the books on solitary practice focused partly on personal ritual, and partly on magic and spellwork. This is one path that we are not covering in this book—not because we don’t approve of it; both authors do magical workings as part of our spiritual activities—but because we want to stress that this is indeed a religion, and devotional work is a good place to start in any theistic faith. The foundation for a strong spirituality, after all, is one’s relationship with the Gods and Ancestors. So, instead, we begin with practices that are less flashy and mysterious but much more solid, such as prayer, meditation, and opening one’s soul to the Gods.

Six Ways of Being Northern Tradition

All the various traditions that fall under the contemporary Pagan and Reconstructionist umbrella demographic share the problem of not being taken seriously as a religion both by academics and the general (monotheistic or secular) public. Part of the problem lies in the fact that many centuries of propaganda have assured that the vast majority of people see polytheism as superstition, not the sort of faith that rational people would have—and certainly not one that’s valid or true. We feel strongly that what we practice is a religion, not merely a subculture. It would please us to have this fact taken seriously by the rest of the world. To this end, we encourage theological discussion, including ecumenical theological comparison, which is why we are (perhaps for the first time) applying an interfaith tool to the Northern Tradition. We do this in order to explore the ways in which different people personalize their experience of religion.

In Dale Cannon’s excellent book Six Ways of Being Religious, a framework is set out which maps six different paths that anyone in any given religion can follow. The author stresses that all of these paths are found in every religion to a certain extent, although each religion decides for itself which paths are more or less acceptable. Although there are no Northern Tradition or even Pagan examples—the author is a Christian minister with some Buddhist experience, and draws his examples from those faiths, with the occasional foray into Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism—it isn’t difficult to extrapolate the six paths into this tradition.

As we mapped out the territory to be covered in this book, we realized that much of it would fall into one or another of Rev. Cannon’s paths. Some are beyond the scope of this book and thus aren’t going to get more than a brief mention here, but we will endeavor to give resources for further inquiry. Others are discussed in whole chapters here, some of them touched on for the first time. In Six Ways, one learns how these paths are done correctly—and done incorrectly. It’s as important to know the latter as it is the former, especially if you’re doing it all by yourself with no one else to compare it to except for a few authors who can’t possibly give you all the necessary information.

The first path is the Way of Sacred Rite. This is the path of finding religious meaning through ritual, and it is more usually done in a group than solitary. Still, solitary ritual may be better than none for the soul who responds strongly to this path. We cover this path from a personal perspective in Chapter 6.

The second path is the Way of Right Action. This is the path of acting in one’s own life, on both a personal and a global scale, in a way that reflects the values of one’s faith. This is reflected in everything from the daily decisions of one’s life—what to eat, where to work, who to marry, how to behave in difficult circumstances, how to make moral decisions—to the groups to which one renders aid and service, and how one does it. We explore the Way of Right Action in Chapter 8.

The third path is the Way of Devotion itself, the overriding paradigm of this book. This path specializes in cultivating a personal relationship with the Gods and vaettir (spirits), trusting in their care, basking in their energies, and committing to ongoing personal transformation and betterment through working with them. The ideal of this Way is to come to a balance between surrender and autonomy, paying attention both to the issues of the material world and the call of the Otherworldly. While this Way is alluded to in many parts of this book, it is discussed in most detail in Chapter 2.

At the moment, there is very little written about the practice of personal devotions in the Northern Tradition faiths, and thus few resources we can point to. Some periodicals and Websites have had small articles on devotional activities, but they are difficult to come by. However, when it comes to devotional activities for specific Northern Tradition deities, we are seeing an explosion of devotional books coming out that deal with them, and are expecting literally dozens more each year at this rate. People have found their voice when it comes to talking about the Gods they love. Some of these books are listed in the Bibliography at the back of this book.

The fourth path is the Way of Shamanic Mediation. This path entails achieving altered states of consciousness in order to become a mediator or channel for divine energies and wisdom, in order that the Gods might intervene more directly in the world. It is entered into in order to create resources to help individuals and communities when ordinary resources do not suffice. Methods may include spirit journeying, oracles, divination, or possession. In the Northern Tradition demographic, this takes the form of divinatory runework in all traditions, the practice of oracular and other forms of spae in Reconstructionist groups, and Northern Tradition shamanism in Reconstructionist-derived groups. While the Way of Shamanic Mediation is entirely beyond the scope of this book, resources are provided in the For Further Reading section if you are interested in learning more about such things.

The fifth path is the Way of Mystical Quest. This path works with meditative and ascetic practices in order to slow down, turn inward, and overcome the limitations of ordinary life in order to come into better awareness of the Divine. Unlike the Way of Shamanic Mediation, which requires that the practitioner have a direct goal in bringing change into this world, the Way of Mystic Quest is deeply personal, and the only goal is one’s own realization and contemplative experience. The Northern Tradition is still finding its feet with regard to religious mysticism, as there are few written records about such things. Furthermore, by definition, mysticism requires a certain amount of isolation from the busy, noisy everyday world in order to find that inner quiet, and such activities were unlikely to have been recorded. While advanced work on this path is beyond the scope of this book, the basic tools—prayer and meditation—are available to anyone, and discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, respectively.

The sixth path is the Way of Reasoned Inquiry. This path is well-loved and well-trodden by Reconstructionists because it involves the study of written scriptures (or whatever one’s religion considers authoritative written documents) and attempts to formulate insights through that systematic study. It is the Way of figuring out how things are supposed to be through uncovering what truths are possible to obtain. This path is about scholarship as a sacred act. It is probably the most respectable path in Reconstructionist traditions, and will be covered in depth in Chapter 9.

For the Gods or for Ourselves?

That’s the question that people come around to sooner or later. I lay out a cloth, a candle, a sheaf of grain, a stone pig, a horn of beer. I say a formal prayer, one that I’ve said before. I bow my head in reverence, and then I go outside and pour the grain and beer onto the earth. For whom am I doing this—the God to whom I am making the offering, or myself? Do the Gods need our attention? Are They any worse off without it? Is our benefit limited to any favors the Deity in question might grant? Why are we doing this, anyway?

These questions are deep and pointed, and deserve to be addressed. The answers are a matter of theological opinion, of which we can only give our own, but that’s better than no answer at all, and certainly better than tossing off