Celts and Germans

[Psychonaut]

Ehh, the key problem with that article is it doesn't take into account regional variances in Celtic religious worship, which was HUGE, consisting of many, many gods, most of whom we don't have any proof of to this day. The same case is true to a lesser degree with Germanics as well. Their similarity was closer, naturally, when they were closer to one another. But a far east Germanic and Celt-Iberian were not likely to have much in common in way of religious practices..

This is certainly true, to a point. While it is certainly possible (as the various Theodish groups have shown us) to recreate a very specific tribal religion just as it was a thousand years ago, how many of us are only descended from one particular tribe? Some people in extremely remote and isolated areas may be able to claim this, but the vast majority of Germanics, Celts and Celto-Germanics are mixtures of various tribes within their respective meta-ethnicity. That being the case, some of us find it more consistent with the Folkish perspective to find the common ground between these groups rather than to side with one alone.

[Jägerstaffel]

Certainly agree with you Psychonaut.
We have to accept that the majority of us Germanics aren't purebred Saxons, or Geats, or Angles, or Jutes, or Visigoths or whatever. Many of our original tribes don't even exist anymore.

Most of us are a mix of quite a few ethnically Germanic tribes - and this isn't something to be ashamed of when it comes to our folk beliefs. A Scot wouldn't be so out of place in Norway (take Edvard Grieg for instance) and a Frenchman wouldn't be so out of place in Germany, etc.

It just makes it harder for us to nail down as - this is how I must worship my gods as this is how my ancestors did; being that our ancestors are diverse but stem from a similar tradition.

[Baron Samedi]

I have always felt lesser when I have been told that I need to only conform to "one" side of my heritage.

I have a great deal of love and respect for the Continental/British Isles Celtic heritage in me, perhaps more than my Germanic heathen side. Always have. One of the deities that I find myself feeling the closest to happens to be Cernunnos, Lord of the Wilderness. His image burns into my psyche like a searing blade.... And I feel that his essence means WAY more than most people could ever imagine.

I think a dualistic heathen path is the right way to go, personally, and I would like to see a structured form of this codified.

And I also would like to help in this endeavor as well

[Lyfing]

I somehow happened across this writing today, and I thought of this thread. It seems to have been written by some Witch, but I think it has some interesting things in it..

Northern European Shamanism: A Preliminary Reconstruction

Copyright © 1989 Leigh Ann Hussey

Une traduction en français de cette page peut être trouvée ici. (It's got cool pictures, too!

Shamanism has come to be associated almost exclusively, in American popular thinking, with the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas. This not only inaccurately reflects the extent of shamanism's practice (it is found from Australia to the Arctic) but also, sadly, contributes to a neglect by those of European descent of the shamanic practices of their own ancestors.

One cause of this neglect has been the carefully fostered image of Europe as the wellspring of Western Civilization, by which tribal origins and traditional life are often glossed over. However, I was delighted to discover, when I examined ancient sources, that I did not need to borrow from other traditions; it is clear that tribal Europe had as strong a shamanic tradition as, for example, any of the American Indian tribes. It is fitting that other people, too, of European descent examine this European Shamanic tradition; it is a rightful part of our heritage so there need be no accusations of theft or exploitation, and its images and symbols ring more truly in our collective unconscious than those of other cultures.

This is a survey of a few shamanic elements that occur within Western shamanic traditions, obscured as they are by time and cultural discontinuity. I will be using material from many Northern European cultures, on the assumption that each one may have retained some element that the others have lost. The similarities between them all have convinced me that there actually was, once, a unified European system, and Hilda R. Ellis Davidson, in Myths and Symbols of Pagan Europe (1988), shows in depth how the Celts and the Germanic tribes were at one time, before the establishment of the Roman empire, one people. To hold parts together, I'll be using cross-cultural shamanic universals as outlined in Mircea Eliade's definitive work, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951).

http://www.elfhill.com/leighann/writings/eshamn.html

...

Shamanic Initiation

To start with, according to Eliade, shamanic initiates undergo a "death" experience, whether through ritual or through apparent physical death (as in coma or catatonic sleep). In an "apparent" death, a young woman among the Araucanians of Chile will collapse as if dead, and on recovery announce her vocation as a machi or shamaness. On the other hand, among California tribes such as the Pomo, initiates are symbolically "killed"; they undergo wounding by the initiating elder shamans and are laid out like corpses, buried under straw.

The fourth story in the Welsh cycle of the Mabinogi tells a vivid story of the death of Lleu Llaw Gyffes ("Fair-haired, Skilled-hand"). Lleu cannot be killed on foot or on horseback, indoors or out, on land or on water. Having emerged from a bath in a gazebo-like bath house (having a roof but no walls), with one foot on the back of a goat and the other on the edge of the bath, Lleu is struck with the only weapon that can kill him: a spear that has been forged for a year and a day "while folk are at prayers on Sunday" (the implication being that it is an evil spear -- but see below).

What makes Lleu's story not merely that of a strange way to die is what happens next: he does not die, but is transformed into an eagle and flies away. Lleu's uncle Gwydion, a powerful enchanter, searches for him and finds him in the branches of an oak tree, at the foot of which a black sow eats flesh that falls every time the eagle shakes himself.

The ordeal and "death" of the initiate is seen not only in Lleu's story, but also in the lore of Oðin, chief Scandinavian god. The Scandinavian World Tree is Yggdrasil, "Ygg's steed", so called because Ygg (another name for Oðin) "rode" it in quest for knowledge. Nine days and nights Oðin hung from the Tree, wounded with a spear (notice: again a spear), with neither food nor drink, until at last he looked down and saw the runes. The runes are at the same time alphabetical letters, whole words, charms, and constellations of concepts. They are simple in form but complex in meaning, and are used for divination and talismanic magic. "I took up the runes," Oðin says, "screaming, I took them; then I fell back."

The Otherworld Journey is another common feature of initiations, as well as of regular shamanic practise, since one of the shaman's functions is that of psychopomp, or leader of the souls to the land of the dead; to be able to lead souls there, one must know the way from one's own experience! A shapechange to a flying shape is often involved, since many cultures conceive of the Otherworld as being either far distant (most easily reached by flying) or somewhere Above (more on shapechanging later), and indeed Lleu does reach the Otherworld in the shape of an eagle. Oðin, too, seeks knowledge in an eagle's shape, as we'll see in a moment.

As Joan Halifax, in Shaman: the Wounded Healer (1982), says: "To the heavens, to the well at the end of the world, to the depths of the Underworld, to the bottoms of spirit-filled lakes and seas, around the earth, to the moon and sun, to distant stars and back again does the shaman-bird travel. All the cosmos is accessible when the art of transformation has been mastered."

The World Tree is a universal feature of the Otherworld, a tree whose branches hold all the worlds and which reaches from the underworld to the heavens (in the Siberian tribes, this is the cosmic tent-pole, and the cosmic smoke-hole at the top of it is the North Star). In some cultures the initiate journeys there in spirit because that is where the souls of the unborn are (often in the form of birds), and the initiate is going to undergo a new birth. The oak to which Lleu flies is demonstrably the idealized, adamantine World Tree of cross-cultural shamanism -- Gwydion says of that tree in one of the spells that lures Lleu down from it, "Rain cannot rot it, nor fire burn it," and it is in a remote place, which siting is a well-known motif to those acquainted with shamanic experience and lore.

The World Tree can be Lleu's oak, Oðin's ash (Yggdrasil), or the oak venerated by the druids (in Old Irish, the word for both "oak" and "door" is dair; in Old Welsh the words are dar and drws. Notice the similarity to the English word door -- the Indo-European linguistic root is the same for all:"deru". The concept of the World Oak as the gate to other worlds is as basic as language itself in Europe). In fact, there are eight Otherworlds (not including Midgard, which is this one) among Yggdrasil's branches, the abodes of gods, elves, giants, and demons. The levels of worlds on Yggdrasil are strongly remeniscent of the levels of Otherworlds in the Siberian worldview; and in both worldviews, the Otherworlds may be reached by climbing the World Tree.

Other sacred trees are shadows of the World Tree. The machi stands on a high, stepped pole when she beats her drum to seek vision. The pole of the Plains Sun Dance, to which dancers are tied (or sometimes hung) by skewers through their flesh, reminds one of the Tree of Oðin's hanging ordeal. This quote from Stuart Piggot's The Druids (1968), first written by Lucan in Julius Cæsar's time, could just as easily describe the poles of the Pacific Northwest as it does a sacred Druidic grove: "And there were many dark springs running there, and grim-faced figures of gods uncouthly hewn by the axe from the untrimmed tree-trunk, rotted to whiteness."

Another feature of the Otherworld is its aspect as realm of the dead. In Wales, this land is called Annwfn ("unplumbed"), and in both Wales and Ireland its entrance is often through a hole in a mound. Indeed, the tumuli and chambered tombs of prehistoric people were the abodes of the dead. When the people who built them passed from the land or were absorbed into the incoming cultures, the nature of these burial structures became obscured or expanded. Now the opening into a mound became the entrance to the land of all the dead; or real grave-goods became rumoured treasure in the realm of the Sidhe, the faeries. [see the accompanying excerpts from W. Y. Evans-Wents' Fairy Faith in the Celtic Countries]

Annwfn is not by any means a "hell", as Caitlin Matthews points out. The land to which Arawn, king of Annwfn, leads the dead is full of the pleasures the Celts loved best: feasting, hunting, and lovemaking. Arawn performs the shamanic function of leader of souls to the Otherworld, as do Oðin and the goddess Freyja, each of whom take half the warriors slain in battle to their respective halls. When the Romans encountered Lugus (the Gaulish Lleu), they saw him as Mercury, their own psychopomp figure.

...

The Cauldron as source of knowledge, like that of Gwion/Taliesin, appears in Scandinavian folklore as the three cauldrons of poetic mead (see below). And even before the Cauldron, there was the Pool of Knowledge. Wells, Springs, Baths There was a pool at the foot of Yggdrasil called Mimir's Well, and those who tasted of its waters gained all knowledge (this sounds like Ceridwen's Cauldron); Oðin gave up an eye for a taste of that water.

...

A crossroads is yet another example of magic-in-ambiguity, for it is neither one road nor another. It is a place where the dead may speak to an inquirer, and it is dangerous, for people standing in a crossroads when the Wild Hunt (see below) passes will be snatched up. Since one of the traditional duties of the shaman is to deal with spirits and the dead, it is significant that Lleu's death occurs in just such a liminal place -- "neither indoors nor out, neither on horse or afoot..."

Later,
-Lyfing