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A contact episode with Loki

  
  

Page: 12(3)45

 
 
Sekhmet
17:02 / 20.04.05
Shapechanger, sexchanger, androgynous magician-god, underworld traveler, father of change.

The gods never would have gotten anything done without Loki. And what does he get in return? Scorn and abuse. Is it any wonder the poor fellow has a temper and a bit of a vengeful streak?

Mordant, you might be interested in this book - it's basically a retelling of the Eddas from Loki's point of view. Just goes to show there's two sides to every story.

Written In Venom
 
 
mixmage
17:21 / 20.04.05
grant: This exchange of insults is known as flyting and there are quite strict rules about the veracity of claims made:

1) All said must be true to the best of the Þyle's knowledge.
2) No vulgarities or other profane words should be used.
3) The boaster's skills should be acknowledged.
4) The Þyle should be detailed in why they think it is an idle boast, perhaps even offering an example like that done in Beowulf.
5) The Þyle should continue the flyting only so long as they are not satisfied that the boaster is not being totally honest.

[rules found here]

... in other words, when Loki and Odin accuse each other of living as women, you can be sure that these insults are based in truth... and, as I mentioned waaay back "The gender-switching Loki is the pushiest git I have met yet, but ze looks absolutely Divine, Dahlink!... full of hirself."

Gypsy: There are several explanations offered for "the eight-legged steed" depending on your sources. In addition to the "coffin + 4 pallbearers" model, there's also the "plank of wood on sawhorses" where the trancemedium would lie during oracular divination. My own leanings are [naturally] biased toward the "eight legs = eight digits" model of HandRunes.

Could Loki "birthing" these beings be a poetic kenning for developing the original Chaos Magick techniques?
 
 
mixmage
21:37 / 20.04.05
Almost forgot... if you're an eight-legged steed, then travelling Yggdrasil is as easy as planting a foot in each world, then sticking your head in the ninth.
 
 
mixmage
21:41 / 20.04.05
perhaps I should also have remembered that "Ygg's Steed" is another way of saying Yggdrasil - The tree that connects the nine worlds of Norse legend.
 
 
Papess
22:07 / 20.04.05
...he's got a love who's willing to sit there beside him and catch the stuff in her bowl. If he can inspire that kind of devotion, he can't be all bad, can he? - Grant

Maybe Sigyn is just pathetic. I mean, would anyone think highly of a woman who waits patiently for her murderous and leacherous husband who is in prison? Oh, how romantically, utterly pathetic.
 
 
charrellz
23:47 / 20.04.05
Then again, didn't norse women wait around while their husbands raped, murdered and pillaged? Different strokes for different folks.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
12:30 / 21.04.05
The pre-ritual shopping expedition: Put myself in brain-off-the-hook mode and went to look for messages. Wanted an altar cloth but didn't want to spend a shedload of money. My ramblings finally took me to a party supply shop where in I found red paper napkins. Then the supermarket: bought beer and brandy and tuna steaks for ritual offerings.

All the while this was going on, I found my mind filling with images. I saw a woman, me and yet not me, dressed in scarlet, a natty trouser suit of some lustrous fabric. She was barefoot. She walked into a building and traced the rune Hagalaz in the air, then left. I got that this was actually some kind of blessing. Next image: the same building which is now on fire.

Must've blessed it pretty hard.

There was more of this kind of thing. Also, I found my perception of other people altered: people seemed to shine, I could see all their weariness and confusion but also their brilliance and potential, represented as an outline of fire. I kept wanting to touch it.

I was really ill yesterday, as in, I could hardly move. Today I'm a bit fitty but not too bad.
 
 
benj
14:50 / 21.04.05
(Off-topic, maybe, but I have to say I'm loving this thread... the Temple forum is always a place of learning)

Despite little more magick than book-learning and a few sigils, I've long considered Loki a kind of patron God; that Promethean/Trickster aspect of his - "Yes, I'm going to fuck your shit up, but it's the shit that needs fucking up, just you wait and see."

For myself, life is gearing up to get serious about magick and there's a static buzz in the background to it that sounds like him..

Mordant: "I want to be the engineer again."

It occured to me that the etymology of 'engineer' has to do with 'ingenuity' - and here's a bloke who wagered his head, and when he lost, avoided paying by pointing out that his neck wasn't part of the deal.
 
 
benj
15:07 / 21.04.05
...and my original post was to wonder why Loki didn't have a day of the week named after him, like Tyr has Tuesday etc etc.

Then i remembered that Saturday is named for 'Surt', a fire giant; so why should a fire giant be elevated to the same level as the major Gods of the pantheon?

And looking up his name in a book of mythology, I find Surt "would set the cosmos alight at Ragnarok" and was identified with Loki...
 
 
Papess
16:08 / 21.04.05
I thought Saturday refered to Saturn?
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
16:18 / 21.04.05
It refers to Santa.
 
 
Papess
16:25 / 21.04.05
Saint?
 
 
heimdallr
19:49 / 21.04.05
Odinn is also a Godform not to be trusted, look through the saga's etc, Shapechanger, sexchanger, androgynous magician-god, underworld traveler, father of change, these are all attributes of Odinn. " sides of the same coin perhaps??
 
 
Papess
20:59 / 21.04.05
I was once told by a very high magician/witch/lama that Norse gods held a very low form of magic.

Please don't hurt me!
 
 
Olulabelle
01:01 / 22.04.05
Crikey. That was some spectacularly all-knowing guru.

I suppose we better all turn to 'high' magick then and get on with practicing ornate rituals in fancy frocks!
 
 
Sekhmet
05:31 / 22.04.05
Glad to hear you're feeling all right, Mordant! That fiery aura thing sounds familiar somehow...

Hagalaz. Destruction before rebuilding... Seems to be a theme here.

(By coincidence, I'm embroiled in an extended study of the runes, devoting one week to meditating on each, and Hagalaz happens to be the one I'm on currently... )

... sides of the same coin perhaps??

More than perhaps. Loki is Odin's partner in crime and traveling companion at the very least, and possibly also his blood-brother (or, according to some, his actual brother). Certainly they seem to be brothers in spirit; both magicians, both tricksters, both quick of wit. Yet one is the king of the gods, the other their scapegoat. One wonders why.

I've run across the theory in several places that in fact Loki generally acts in the best interest of the gods and often at Odin's behest, even when he's at his worst. He's the fall guy for the things Odin can't do because of his position; Loki the one who takes risks and breaks rules when the big man can't. My favorite permutation of this theory involves the death of Baldr. Perhaps it happened that Odin, in his wisdom, and having spoken to the Seeress and acquired knowledge of Ragnarok, sought a way to preserve the gods' favorite son through the coming destruction. Only Hel's realm would be untouched in that time, and only in Hel could Baldr's spirit remain perfectly preserved. It was unlikely that everyone would see it that way, though, and since Odin could of course not do the deed himself, he required Loki's secret service. Loki engineered the entire affair, disguising himself as an old witch-woman and as a giantess (there goes the sex-change meme again) in order to acquire the proper weapon and to prevent Baldr's premature return from Hel. He guides Hod's hand as he throws the mistletoe dart, but note that Loki does not himself throw it, and so is not technically the murderer. Thus Baldr stays in Hel, and as the Seeress foresaw, he will return after Ragnarok when the worlds begin anew. On an archetypal level, this makes Baldr a sun god of resurrection, but what does it make Loki? (What all this might imply about the nature of the message that Odin whispered into the dead Baldr's ear before his body was burned makes for interesting speculation as well.)

(*hurts Strix, but in a good way*)

I wonder what ze meant by "low", exactly. The Norse path seems to get that attitude a lot from outsiders. Ignorance? Stigma from association with less-savory types like the Nazis? Is it just too "earthy" for some people? Is there a problem with some facets of magic being practical rather than superlatively esoteric? In order for magic to be "high" do you have to be in a marble-tiled room wearing elaborate robes and chanting in Enochian, or is it possible to perform powerful magic by passing a horn of mead over a bonfire?

I wonder what ze thinks of some other forms of magic, like Voudoun, or anything ze doesn't practice hirself.
 
 
ghadis
06:34 / 22.04.05
I was once told by a very high magician/witch/lama that Norse gods held a very low form of magic.

They think they know it all doen't they. Snooty fuckers
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
06:40 / 22.04.05
I don't believe that lama's really a magician. He doesn't have a pointy hat.
 
 
ghadis
07:07 / 22.04.05
No pointy hat but have you noticed that in that picture he's pushing back the boundaries.
 
 
jeed
08:06 / 22.04.05
Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

Fear the lama

Fear him
 
 
Sekhmet
08:08 / 22.04.05
Witch Lama should be a new Temple servitor.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
09:17 / 22.04.05
I think the person who called the northern magic "low" sounds like a bit of an idiot. What does that mean, exactly? Is it based on many years of experience working within those mysteries? I'd be prepared to bet that it isn't...

I actually see a lot of broad parallels between the northern mysteries and the mysteries of Voudon. I sometimes even speculate that they are more or less the same process filtered through a different set of ancestral stories, and with a different cultural emphasis born of a colder climate.

I daresay that said "high magician" would probably look on something like Voudon in a similar light. Low magic for primitives. Which is just misinformed ignorance. Once you get beyond the surface of areas like Vodoun and Santeria, you discover a complexity and sophistication that makes ceremonial magic feel like children's hour. I think you only begin to really see and appreciate that after a few years of involvement though. I would speculate that the northern mysteries have the same kind of depth, potency and sophistication, but you have to live with them 24/7 to be able to fully grasp that.

What may look fairly "primitive" to an outside observer, such as a person passing a horn of mead over a bonfire, might not be. It depends what meaning is attributed to those actions and what they represent in a magical context. What does the fire mean? What does the horn mean? How was it made? What is inscribed on it? What does the mead represent? How was it brewed? What passes are made with it over the fire? What shapes are drawn in the air with it? What words and sounds are intoned? What is going on in the head of the person holding the horn? What is the purpose of the ritual?

A set of simple actions can contain worlds of meaning and significance that you just don't see as an uninvolved observer. You could look at a little old lady pouring some rum out in the street and whispering something under her breath, and not necessarily clock on that she's a Haitian Mambo doing really powerful magic. Similarly, a lot of hoodoo practice seems fairly mundane, but it gains its power and potency from the web of meaning that the actions and ingredients exist within.

Surely ceremonial magic is also open to that kind of reductionist critique? The wand, pentacle, cup and sword are supposed to have meaning and significance beyond their external form, aren't they? I think it's astoundingly short sighted for a ceremonial "high magician" to not understand how, say, drinking litres of blessed mead and throwing a hammer, can conceivably have the same kind of inner mysteries hidden within the external form as more austere, polite activities like perambulating around a circle in swishy robes with a bell intoning nasal vibrations.
 
 
mixmage
17:46 / 22.04.05
*hugs Gypsy Lantern*

Ahh... Sekhmet. Hope the runecourse is going well.

Mordant: I was actually looking for the alternate form of Hagalaz, when I stumbled across this and felt it relevant.

In addition to denoting Wryd/Urd, eldest of the Nornir [Fates] and keeper of the Past, Hagalaz is also associated with hail: notably, the ability of weather-witches to take out a whole settlement by destroying ripening crops. Just yesterday I learned that hailstones rising and falling within stormclouds, become charged and provide the potential difference that will discharge as lightning (ref)... just randomly heard it on the radio. Good synch, so I'm reporting.

Right... found the alternate form here



... although the article mentions some reasons for the alternate runeform, I'm pretty sure I first saw it in Leaves of Yggdrasil by Freya Aswynn - she offered it as a softer, less destructive version: a snowflake instead of an icebullet.
 
 
rising and revolving
18:15 / 22.04.05
Gypsy, I like your point. Certainly, I'd never be caught dead even *using* the phrase "low magic" let alone deriding it. I might, if the circumstances were right, differentiate between "results based" and "theurgic" if I was really looking to clarify a position. Yet as near as I can tell, results blend into theurgy and theurgy is meaningless without results, so that's a load of cobblers too.

Anyhow, I just think that this bit

Once you get beyond the surface of areas like Vodoun and Santeria, you discover a complexity and sophistication that makes ceremonial magic feel like children's hour.

is bollocks, for all the reasons you give in the rest of the post. Unless for some reason you're inclined to think there's something essentially limiting in the Hebrew mysteries, or other forms of ceremonial.
 
 
Papess
19:57 / 22.04.05
I think the person who called the northern magic "low" sounds like a bit of an idiot. What does that mean, exactly? Is it based on many years of experience working within those mysteries? I'd be prepared to bet that it isn't...

Actually, he is highly respected Rinpoche in Tibetan Buddhism. An enlightened, transcendant master (and I don't use that term lightly) who not only has experience far beyond yours Gypsy, or any else here for that matter, but can remember the lifetimes he was incarnated as a Viking and lived the life of an authentic Asatru.

"Idiot" is a not only incorrect, but entirely uncalled for and rude. I think the adulation you get here in the Temple, Gypsy, is going to your head.

To be fair, I misquoted Rinpoche. He actually said that the "Norse tradition is not transcendental" as a religion. Instead of that, I stated sort of an inversion of it. Mea culpa.

Olulabelle, your sarcasism is terribly petty and childish, first off. Secondly, I never said he practiced "high magick". As a matter of fact, Tibetan Buddhism, especially the Nyingma-pa school, is partially (a large part) based on shamanistic practices of the Bonpo which is similar to the Norse tradition as it's a theurgical as well. (You might want to note that, Gypsy.)
 
 
grant
20:02 / 22.04.05
(By coincidence, I'm embroiled in an extended study of the runes, devoting one week to meditating on each, and Hagalaz happens to be the one I'm on currently... )


Oddly, next week, I'll be switching from a tarot column to a rune column, translating magick into tabloid.

Feel free to bump up the different elements of the Barbelith Rune Index (see Temple wiki for links) as you go through 'em, too. Bound to be useful for this Loki stuff as well.

I've run across the theory in several places that in fact Loki generally acts in the best interest of the gods and often at Odin's behest, even when he's at his worst.

I was kind of wondering after a little think yesterday if Loki wasn't so much like Lucifer as like Satan -- in the old Hebrew sense, as being a kind of loyal opposition or tester.
 
 
Seth
20:06 / 22.04.05
"Idiot" is a not only incorrect, but entirely uncalled for and rude. I think the adulation you get here in the Temple, Gypsy, is going to your head.

Na, Gypsy's always been rude. Even before he got props.
 
 
Seth
20:07 / 22.04.05
RUDE BOI!
 
 
Papess
20:15 / 22.04.05
Whatever Seth. I suppose that makes it okay? No, it doesn't.
 
 
Olulabelle
20:19 / 22.04.05
Strix, I didn't mean to come across as that sarcastic, I just don't think I'm entirely convinced how someone can be all those things at once. And indeed if they are all those things at once how they could make such a sweepingly narrow-minded statement.

But sorry to have offended you, and Mordant, sorry if this is rotting your thread still further.

Back to Loki?
 
 
Sekhmet
22:37 / 22.04.05
To be fair, I misquoted Rinpoche. He actually said that the "Norse tradition is not transcendental" as a religion.

Depending on what he means by "transcendental", that could make a great deal more sense. The Buddhist concept of enlightenment as an attainment of transcendental emptiness seems to me to be something a bit foreign to the Nordic mindset.


(The Hagalaz thing is haunting me. We had a hailstrom which damaged our car a few weeks ago, and we are now getting an insurance settlement for it because the car is totaled, which means we get to take a vacation. It's like the sense of the rune in a nutshell...)
 
 
Papess
01:56 / 23.04.05
The Buddhist concept of enlightenment as an attainment of transcendental emptiness seems to me to be something a bit foreign to the Nordic mindset.

Precisely. Thank you Sekhmet for pointing that out and replying to my realization of my mistake. My mistake is not Rinpoche's. However, because of his many years of study and the fact that he is respected by both the Buddhist community and Magickal communities, (he is in his mid 70's, BTW), not to mention the ability to recall many, many lifetimes with uncanny detail, I tend to consider his opinion to be invaluable.

But that is what I was getting at - that one might only be able to do only so much with Norse gods given their very nature.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
09:40 / 25.04.05
Hang on a minute:

"Idiot" is a not only incorrect, but entirely uncalled for and rude. I think the adulation you get here in the Temple, Gypsy, is going to your head. He actually said that the "Norse tradition is not transcendental" as a religion.

But...that's not what you actually said, and therefore not what I was responding to.

You said:

I was once told by a very high magician/witch/lama that Norse gods held a very low form of magic.

Which - taken on its own merits, as it was presented within the thread - is an idiotic, misinformed statement. Whether your friend believes he was a Viking in a past life or not.

The statement:

"Norse tradition is not transcendental"

Has a pretty fucking different meaning from "holding a very low form of magic", and would have got a different response out of me. You can't just come into the thread and change the entire meaning of what you posted, and then have a go at me because I didn't get it. How was I supposed to know that you had actually misquoted this person and, in fact, what they actually said was something completely different.

I think I've made quite a solid, reasoned case above for why I think the statement about the northern trad being low magic is idiotic. If you disagree with any of that, please engage with me on the subject rather than just patronising me and calling me a naughty man.

You obviously have a lot of respect for the author of this statement. Maybe I would as well if I were to meet him, but at the moment he exists to me only through your representation of his words in text. All you conveyed about him was a misquoted statement that you then changed afterwards. I don't really give a shit how old he is, how respected he is by everyone you know, or how many past lives he can remember before breakfast. For all I know he could just be a dodgy old con man and you've been taken in by his patter. I can't possibly know anything about him. All I had of his gigantic unparalleled wisdom was the misquoted statement: "Norse gods held a very low form of magic". Which I happen to find hugely offensive, ignorant, stupid and deserving of reasoned criticism. My comments were not a personal attack on this man, as I don't know him, but a response to that statement, and more generally the problematic concept of a "high" and a "low" magic.

I think the statement "Norse tradition is not transcendental" is a bit odd in itself though, and there's probably a wider debate there that could be taken into a new thread. What does he mean by transcendental? It's a funny thing to say... Does he mean that the Tibetan Buddhist concept of transcendentalism does not appear in Northern European religious and shamanic practices? Well why would it? It's a very different form of spirituality developed by people in a very different climate with different concerns and methods of survival. Does that make it any worse or better? Is a value judgement being implicitly passed in that statement? Does he mean that my Northern European ancestors were somehow spiritually stunted compared to the Eastern traditions that involve "transcendentalism" - whatever that means?

Sounds like bullshit to me. Maybe there is some really brilliant thinking that has led to him to this conclusion, and if I sat down with the guy for five minutes he could explain it all properly and I would be convinced and walk away enriched. Maybe. At the moment, all I have to go on is the statement itself with no argument or reasoning behind it. Do you want me to just accept that blindly and without question because you tell me the man has vast experience far beyond mine or that of anyone else here? Well that's that then. Maybe we should just close this discussion forum once and for all and turn it into a platform for your friends infallible cryptic gems of wisdom?

The way I see it, the main problems here are:

1. A fuzzy understanding of what is actually meant by the term "transcendental" and the context in which your friend is using it.
2. A lack of solid historical information about what the practices and religiousity of ancient northern European peoples actually did or did not involve. Your friends "past life" memories notwithstanding.

I said upthread that I sometimes speculate on possible broad parallels between the Northern tradition and things like Vodou or Santeria. These magico-religious traditions don't contain overt "transcendentalism" either, at least not in exactly the same way that Tibetan Buddhism does. So what? Does that somehow make them more base? Unworthy? Primitive? Unsophisticated? Childish? Dirty? What? I don't understand the point of the statement. It's like saying "The Norse tradition is not the tarot".

I actually think - based on my experience of them - that a form of "transcendentalism" does occur very strongly in Vodou and Santeria, and the process of communion with the divine in Vodou and similar religions leads to a transcendence every bit as beautiful and magnificent as that which you find in Buddhism, Tantra, etc... It's just different. It happens in a different way. You walk a different road to the same destination. You might not be able to see that at first glance. You might be distracted by the surface elements - the doll magic and potions, dancing and sacrifice - and not really grasp the heart of the mysteries without very heavy involvement in them yourself.

Based on that, I might speculate that the Northern mysteries could have conceivably contained a similar depth, complexity and "transcendentalism" that isn't really communicated through the scant archeological evidence and surviving texts that are all we have to base our understanding on. Since we don't actually know very much about these practices and this religion, it's all just speculative. Which I think makes blanket statements with implied value judgements, like that of your friend, seem a bit daft. At least when they appear quoted without any context.

But of course, he was a Viking in a past life, so I'd better just keep my trap shut and respect his superior wisdom.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
10:03 / 25.04.05
...bollocks. For all the reasons you give in the rest of the post. Unless for some reason you're inclined to think there's something essentially limiting in the Hebrew mysteries, or other forms of ceremonial.

I was being needlessly provocative there. Totally agree with you. Thanks for calling me on that.

To try and put it a bit less ineptly, I think there's sometimes a perception that ceremonial magic is really sophisticated because of its circles and godnames and enochian tables and all the mad complexity of the Golden Dawn system. And that other more animistic or shamanic traditions are simpler, unsophisticated, primitive, low, etc... Because they don't have any of that stuff, and do things with beer and dancing and drum patterns instead. I think it's a big error to make that assumption, because there's loads of stuff going on beneath the external forms of these things.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
11:17 / 25.04.05
But that is what I was getting at - that one might only be able to do only so much with Norse gods given their very nature.

I strongly disagree with you, or your friend, or whoever it is forwarding this opinion. You seem to be saying that Northern tradition practices do not lead to any form of "enlightenment" or "transcendence" and I find that statement - as presented - to be agonisingly ignorant. For a start, it's defining "transcendence" entirely in terms of Eastern spirituality and seems to be constructing a straw man argument around the lack of Eastern spiritual values and Eastern methods of attainment in Northern magico-religious tradition.

I'd speculate that walking the path of the Northern trads, building and maintaining really solid living relationships with the Aesir and Vanir, grasping the mysteries of the runes, and so on, probably brings with it a type of "transcendence" and kenning that is entirely equal to the spiritual path of Tibetan Buddhism, Tantra, Western ceremonial, Vodou, or whatever.

I think your friend is on shaky ground trying to argue that his form of enlightenment is somehow "better" or "more worthwhile" than that of another culture - if that is indeed what you are implying by bringing this up. I think that's a position that needs a bit of criticism, and I'm not going to treat it any differently from any other idea I find a bit suspect just because you assure me it's the very wise words of a very wise man.

If you disagree with me on this, then please forward your counter-argument, explaining your position in more detail. I'm really not convinced at the moment, but I'm not the fucking fountain of all knowledge! I'm only posting my own personal views and perspectives and I'm more than happy to have them challenged and picked apart if you think there's something I'm not seeing. Please. That's the purpose of this forum, and that's all I'm trying to do with your friend's quoted opinion. Perhaps we can have an interesting and mutually rewarding conversation about it? At the moment, your argument just seems to be: "Well my special magical friend said it! And he's far cleverer than you'll ever be! - So there!"... And there's not much I can really say to that.
 
  

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