The Ancient Fires
of Midgard
Andrea Haugen
The Ancient Fires of Midgard
The Ancient Fires of Midgard:
© Andrea Haugen
First printed in 2000, re-edited in 2008
Lyrics by Andrea Haugen, taken from the albums
“The Winds that sang of Midgard’s Fate”, “Volven” and
“Frigga’s Web”, published by Amazonian Music and
Edition Wolffackel, c/o Hanseatic Musikverlag GmbH
Drawings by Petter Jensen
Photos by Hanne Englund and N.A.P.
Nebelhexe fantasy art by Vebjřrn Strřmmen
Typography and layout by N.A.P.
CONTENTS:
Introduction
The Past is Alive
Understanding the Myths of the Germanic Pagans
The Nine Worlds
Northern Traditions and the Natural Lore
The Magic of Trees
The Arcane World of Plants
The Runes
What is Magic and How Does it Work?
Seidr – Northern Shamanism
Getting in Contact with the Animal Spirit
Wolf – The Call of the Wild
The Self
Natural Birth and the Beloved Pagan Child
Garments and Accessories for Magical Purposes
Sources and recommended Reading
Biography
For Alva – my lovely little elf…
INTRODUCTION
I have always felt different from the crowd. I thought much more about
life than others my age did. I had deep emotions, intense dreams, visions
and magical experiences, I felt very connected to animals, had a great
interest in ancient cultures, and I loved gloomy and gothic images. I was
intensely drawn to ‘creatures of the night’ like vampires and werewolves
(who really are merely symbols of our natural instincts), supernatural
tales etc.
Many things the ‘ordinary’ people did, made not much sense to me. I
reacted to the respectless way people treated nature and animals with,
the way they treated each other. I reacted to the kind of low behaviour
I often saw in the streets. I felt really out of place. As a child I was
very fond of the American Indians. They had pride, they knew how to
survive. When I saw these stupid wild west movies I was angry to see
how the American Natives were demonised... the cowboys’s low life
behaviour is a true representation of all I dislike...
I was always searching for something deeper, higher, more passionate –
perhaps a life in another world. I always believed that there were other
worlds, worlds parallel to our own world. I still wonder if beings from
these parallel worlds visit our world, yet most of us cannot see them.
Often when I walk, alone with the wind blowing around me, I wish that
time could stand still. I yearn to go “home”, a home that I don’t know
where to find.
I always wanted to feel truly alive, to try everything once, to dare, to
play with life… and I have at times put myself into negative situations…
simply to test if I was capable of getting myself out of them again…
which I always did. Life is a peculiar game…
In the early 90’s I moved to London, where I was a part of the gothicand
alternative music scenes. Here I met my first influences and
inspirations to explore the darker aspects of life. I travelled around
Britain, living short periods of time in places that seemed interesting.
Then I moved back to London, where I studied “the biological basis of
human behaviour”. Here I really learned how biologically close we are to
animals and how unaware people are of their natural instincts.
I realised how the patriarchal religions are responsible for much of the
unnatural behaviour we see in our society. The lack of respect for nature
and animals, suppression of the feminine forces, no tolerance to otherthinking
people and other religions. It’s all in their holy books.
The natural spiritualities on the other hand teach a balance between
forces, balance within, respect for nature and all other creatures… and
most of all self-respect. If one respects the self than one also respects
others.
I connected with different witch- and magical organisations (and the
early Neo-Folk music movement, whose occult outlook inspired me a
great deal…) and truly started to work with my inner self. With it I got
really interested in the myths and mysteries of my ancestors. I think it
is really important to know and understand our own culture and why
we practise our local customs. I wanted people to understand why we
celebrate Christmas and Easter, what our traditions originally were
about. This is why I wrote this book. I try to interpretate the spirituality
of northern Europe - the myths, folklore, superstitions, natural wisdom
and magical traditions. In my very own way.
But even though this book focuses on the myths and traditions of
northern Europe, many chapters discuss life’s mysteries, magical
practise, goddess worship and my thoughts on human nature in general.
After all I am inspired by the mysteries of life... and particularly the
lunar side of life in general... Please keep this in mind. Even though I
know a lot about the old Germanic traditions I am not a representative
for the Germanic religion. I consider myself to be more of an ‘universal’
pagan or witch. I am a seeker, an artist who has experienced many
strange things in her life. And what I want most of all with my music, art
and writings is that people free their minds and think for themselves.
More and more people become free thinking individuals and show
respect for the earth, for animals and search for life’s mysteries. And I
really hope this is a true step in the right direction and not just a fashion.
Life as a journey, with new possibilities and also many obstacles... there
are always new beginnings in life...
I hope this book will inspire you. To really understand the Pagan way of
thinking you have to look inside yourself. Let your inner voice be your
guide.
THE PAST IS ALIVE
The word “Pagan” originates from the Latin word “Paganus”, which
means “villager”. The word “Heathen” has a similar meaning, referring to
the people from “the heath” (“Heide” in German, “hede” in Norwegian).
Like their environment, these people were uncultivated and free.
They lived by the principles of nature and as a part of nature. Their
polytheistic faith had a deep spiritual connection with the environment
of their native land.
Sadly, many people that hear the words Pagan or Heathen today tend
to imagine terrible savages from a dark period a time long ago, before
civilisation. They imagine barbarians that celebrated dark macabre
rituals, where the Pagans offered up human sacrifices to evil Pagan
Gods, a time of horror and fear. People also imagine humans of low
intelligence and no emotions. When we imagine a caveman, we see a
picture of a man dragging a woman by the hair. We learned that the
Vikings were brutal men that plundered monasteries. We learned that
witches were evil women in service of the devil, casting wicked spells on
God-fearing people.
These images and ideas are communicated through books, movies and,
in the old days, these stereotypes were even taught in schools. Yet what
most people know of the Pagan way of life is the direct descendant of
the stories spread by the early Christians, meant to demonise those that
stuck with the old ways and old Gods when Christ came knocking on
the door of Europe.
Much has been written about the Viking raids, for example. While the
Vikings are condemned as plunderers who attacked the monasteries
along the coasts of France and Britain, people don’t seem to wonder how
the monks and clergymen came to hold such treasures. A lot of these
worldly goods were, in fact, stolen from the peasants in order to “save
their immortal souls”. Salvation was indeed expensive.
And how did the Vikings know about the rich pickings to be found in
the monasteries in the first place? Their keen knowledge of where to
plunder suggests that the Vikings had already made contact with men of
the Church and knew of their Roman Catholic greed. Torgrim Titlestad
suggests in his book Kampen om Nordvegen that the Vikings did not
attack the monasteries out of greed, but because they felt threatened by
Christian Europe. The attacks could also have been an act of revenge.
Little has been written of the Church’s cruelty in christianising the
people. Many Pagans were forced to convert to the new faith. Statues
of the Pagan deities were respectlessly destroyed. In fact, the Church
destroyed many ancient cultures all over the world. I get really angry
when I read about ancient cultures that were blooming for thousands of
years and of the amazing things they discovered about life’s mysteries.
Then suddenly the missionaries came and burned all that ancient
knowledge, leaving a once proud and wise people with basically nothing
else than a Bible.
After centuries of being dominated by Christian morality, society is still
very much influenced by their dogma. Even if people do not consider
themselves Christian, they are very unaware of how the patriarchal
religions have destroyed their ability to think naturally.
Christianity has taught us duality, the narrow idea of good and evil and
the struggle between the two. Cutting off one half of a whole creates
severe disharmony. Because of this view that things are either good or
evil, never in-between, people can no longer think in a balanced way.
They cannot understand diversity; they have to fall from one extreme
into the other and cannot see an issue from different angles.
Sometimes I am annoyed when I see movies, in particular Fantasy
films. These films often feature mythological beings, magic and mystery,
yet are always based on the Christian concept of the battle of good
against evil. There is always the good guy and the bad guy. The bad guy
always seeks to totally destroy the world. This concept is immensely
immature, not to mention extremely unrealistic. Nothing is entirely
good or entirely bad. Life is not that simple. The Pagans would never
have thought in that manner. Total destruction could never happen in
the Pagan world, as the Pagan understands that life is a cycle. Thus, after
every ending comes a new beginning. Death is a part of life, and this
process is necessary for the world to continue. Old life has to make way
for new life. The way western society feels about death is very different.
Death is considered morbid, a taboo subject.
Many people in our society would scream in fear or disgust at the sight
of a human skull or human bones. Why? They have a skull under their
own skin. They have bones; they have blood flowing through their veins,
yet if they see blood or a skull in a private household, their reaction is
hysterical. They don’t want to be reminded of their own coming death,
and a memento mori like a skull does just that. Individuals who are
fascinated by the macabre and gloomy image of death, who don’t fear
the darker side of life and who, for example, find black clothing and socalled
gothic make-up attractive, are often judged by the ignorant crowd
to be abnormal, if not outright evil. It might be a common assumption
that such individuals don’t want to live, but the truth is quite the
opposite. In seeking to know the mysteries of death, the individual also
seeks to understand the mysteries of life – in order to live it to the fullest.
Fear of the supernatural and death is also often displayed in many
superficial films. A typical example of this is an individual ‘messing
around’ with Tarot cards. Of course, the card symbolising death appears
in his or her reading and the individual is in a state of shock from
getting the death card, which gloomily predicts that the individual will
suffer a premature death in the very near future. The creators of such
movies and TV shows appear to have no idea that the death card in a
Tarot reading merely represents the ending of the present situation and
the beginning of a new phase in the individual’s life. Thus, it usually is a
positive card.
The Pagans believed death to be a passing over into another form of
life. To the Northern people, the other side was a place where feasts
and sexual pleasures could be freely celebrated. Loved ones were also
reunited. In many Pagan cultures, the underworld, the world of the
dead, was also a place of wisdom often consulted by the mortals. The
Christians called this consultation necromancy, and demonised the
practice.
In Pagan societies, men and women who reached old age were shown
a lot of respect for their wisdom and experience. The elders often knew
when their time had come to depart from this world and prepared
themselves for their passing over. They were thus respected until the end
of their earthly life. The Northern people had a saying: “By your death
you will be remembered”.
In modern society, a disturbingly high number of the elderly are placed
in old people’s homes where they are being looked after by people not
related to them. Here they await death, a death that doesn’t come easy
– for a natural departure is often prevented. They are driven back and
forth from hospital, put on life-support machines to keep bodies that
collapsed long ago alive. Having more or less died already, they often
lie there lonely and forgotten. This is inhumane. By understanding the
Pagans’ acknowledgement of death, I think this attitude could easily be
changed and the elderly may once again be allowed to die with their
dignity intact.
Still, I think the patriarchal religions have caused the most damage
by destroying the natural relationship between men and women. This
they did by demonising and suppressing the feminine aspects and, in
particular, natural sexual behaviour.
In ancient Pagan societies, the feminine was truly recognised. For
example, the first civilisations worshipped a Goddess as their highest
deity, the Great Mother – Mother Earth. The nurturing giver and taker
of life, the great womb we all come from and to which we will all return.
The oldest statues representing the Goddess that have been found were
around 35,000 years old.
People held fertility-rites in honour of the Great Mother. The union of
man and woman and the creation of life was celebrated as something
sacred. The moment of giving birth was considered very powerful, and
the woman was then at one with the Mother Goddess. Our own mother
is our own very first love, naturally, she is the first person that means
everything to us. She is the person we are first bound to, she is the one
that imprints us during this crucial first phase of life. In short, she is the
one that shapes us the most.
There is a rich variety of myths around the world that tell us that life
came to be through a female animal, a she-beast that nurtured a God
or a human being. The ancient woman established the first bonds
between animals and humans by breast-feeding the young animal. Not
surprisingly, she was believed to have a close soul-kinship with the
wild beasts. As we will see later, Northern mythology shows us that
the feminine is the key to hidden wisdom. Every culture had its wise
women, witches, seers, herbalists, healers and priestesses. And, as we can
see within the patriarchal powers, these women’s natural jobs were taken
over by men who, more often than not, didn’t really understand the arts
they were adopting.
Even today, in many tribal societies, we can see that women celebrate
many ceremonies. The night, the moon, magic, imagination,
understanding and the unknown are all associated with the feminine.
Aspects such as these were an integral part of the ancient people’s everyday
life, yet as we know in our western society, these aspects have very
little or no importance at all.
The patriarchal, monotheistic religions teach us that one male God has
created life. All by himself. No union of Mother Earth and Father Sky, no
female entity that gave birth. The God of Israel supposedly created man
in his image and thereafter he made woman out of Adam’s rib in order
to be his companion. In comparison, Northern mythology’s first man
and woman, Ask and Embla, were created equally from two trees, an ash
and an elm.
In the Bible we can read - considering that the Bible and all other
“books of truth” have been re-written, edited and deliberately misquoted
throughout the ages - that woman is “the source of all evil”, responsible
for the “fall of man” (Genesis 3). Here, the all too human (and all too
male!) authors of the Bible clearly admit how powerful and manipulative
they knew women to be. Eve is the original sinner; she tempted Adam
to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge, after the snake made the
idea slither into her mind. The snake has been a symbol of fertility
in ancient Mediterranean cultures, and so the fable of the apple may
symbolise that Eve initiated sexual intercourse. The snake was further a
symbol of female intuition, the third eye. This shows us that it is woman
who makes man aware of hidden knowledge. The natural and powerful
act of Eve enlightening Adam the Bible calls a “sin”. She stole Adam’s
“innocence” (unawareness). For this, God causes Eve and her daughters
for all time to suffer great sorrows; to be ruled by their husbands and to
give birth in pain.
Needless to say the authors of the holy books were very hostile towards
the opposite sex. Why exactly this extreme hostility to women came to
be in the first place, I don’t think we know for sure (...but they couldn’t
have had much luck with women I guess?). It might be interesting to
note that all the forbidden features in the garden Eden are in fact Pagan
sacred symbols: The snake, as mentioned above, the tree of life, which is
called Yggdrasil in the North, the fruit (the apple), and the image of the
nude man and woman. Reading Babylonian mythology, for example, we
can easily see how the Bible has been influenced by these myths.
If we look at the Hebrew myth of Lilith, the first wife of Adam, we can
see how the beautiful, sensual and independent woman was demonised.
Because Lilith refused to lie underneath Adam during intercourse
(this version doesn’t make any sense if we compare it to the biblical
story of Adam and Eve’s innocence), she was banned by Jehova for her
disobedience and became a seductive demon that indulges in sex for
purposes other than breeding. Lilith lures men to have sex with her and
afterwards drags them down to damnation. I again wonder if with the
image of Lilith the authors tried to show their contempt for Babylonian
women.
The suppression and demonisation of woman and her most natural
desires led to terrible frustration. If we look at the Middle Ages, where
women were seen as creatures of the devil by the Inquisition, we see the
cruelty that was practised against the focus of their fascination: Woman.
For it was she that reminded them of what they were under the cloth –
men with natural desires.
There have been women artists, philosophers and scientists in ancient
societies (e.g. Hypatia from Alexandria, AD 370-415). But, as the history
books have been underlain a male monopoly for hundreds of years, it
shouldn’t be surprising that all the great accomplishments of history
seem to have been by men. With the patriarchal tradition, women
were denied the right to express themselves and to show their potential
and their minds were deliberately kept empty. This shows us just how
anxious the male authorities were that women would outdo them if
given the chance.
There have been female artists through the centuries, and many of them
created magnificent art. But, as I read in a book called Old Mistresses by
Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, their talent was ignored and their
works were never exhibited, the reason for this being that it was believed
that a woman could only express her “indecent” and “hysteric” nature.
There have also been female musicians and writers who have suffered
the same prejudice. Female scientists had to be satisfied with getting
the chance of being their husbands’ assistants. If she herself had a great
idea or even a discovery, the...
arwenna