Barbelith Underground > Temple > Invited possession/horsing and channeling/divine inspiration.

I just read your fabulous article about Horsing the Aesir, Vanir, and Rokkr. My experience seems to have a fair amount in common with yours. That is to be expected since I'm Hrafnar trained, but as the group I run, called the Vanic Conspiracy, has a somewhat different focus, and somewhat different experiences, I thought you might be interested in my input on the subject of the Vanir. This is, initially, just my own notes in response to your article. Your descriptions overall seem to be in a somewhat more formal context than we normally have set up - not that we're per se *informal*, but we don't designate attendants, for example.

Freya: "If she comes in her warrior aspect, she will be cooler and not do those behaviors, although she will still want the attractive attendants around."

I have also experienced that Her Seidhkona aspect is VERY blunt, usually pretty serious, and the thoughts that pass through the Horse's head may be vicious or frightening. I have felt Her actively prepared to rip out another Horse's heart through their ribcage as a potentially necessary last resort to banishing an unwelcome posessor.

It's not that She's bad, but She's totally unphased by the prospect of doing what is necessary, magically or physically, to solve a problem in front of Her. Usually Her viciously practical solutions prove unecessary simply because it is clear that She's NOT bluffing.

We have noticed a tendancy for the name "Mardoll" to signify Freya as Njordh's daughter, a younger, maiden path, or the aspect of Freya who has searched the seas for Od. It is this path that Njordh particularly dotes on, and gently guards.

Nerthus: "She is always veiled, because anyone besides a Vanir priest/ess who sees her face must be killed."

This has not been my experience, though I can see why it might make for a deeper trance, and I'm actually wondering to myself why it is that this ISN'T our experience, considering the reasons for it... Huh....

Anyway, Nerthus as the Vanic Conspiracy tends to encounter Her seems to be very much a Vanaheim Farm Wife - practical, and blunt, cheerful, mothering, capable of being primal, but tends to consider that private, and not terribly fond of clothing that gets in Her way, except veils that aid in the trance itself.

Njordh: I had no idea He so liked Rum, but that makes sense - it wouldn't be a good idea for me as the horse, since I also work in Umbanda with Ghede and other Lwa and Orixa.

We find He likes wines from all along the European coast, including Champagne and Port. He likes to give Freya pearls, I've noticed. I'm not His favorite horse, but I'll do in a pinch (it's kind of my job for all the Vanir, as far as I can tell). I haven't noticed Him caring about the gender of His horse more than He cares about the strength of His connection to the horse. Perhaps if we had more mediums with strong connections with Him, that could be weighed more objectively.

Freyr: "Frey will horse men or women, so long as the latter are masculine, willing to shapeshift to male astrally before he arrives, and willing to wear an enormous ritual phallus under their tunic. "

While I have definitely felt the shift into masulinity when I have tranced Freyr, and I am told it's quite obvious that I'm male at those times, and straight women and gay men both find themselves VERY attracted to me, I have never found a need to shift to masculine *before* His arrival, and He has never prompted me to wear a physical phallus for Him.

"He will never hit on anyone who isn't willing and enthusiastic; he has no wish to make people feel uncomfortable in that way."

That is my personal experience with Him, and yet I have seen Him overstep His bounds in this area with another horse. However, the subject of His attention seems to have a history of issues with Him, so I think there's more to it.

"Yes, [Freyr and Freya] do have a sexual relationship, although it is a ritual thing, done for fertility purposes to make the crops grow rather than his romantic relationship with Gerda or his share-the-wealth sexual attitude..."

Hrm, I've never looked at it quite that way... In my experience Freyr and Freya have a very deep love and intensely sexual connection with eachother, but I suppose it's true that the connection is not, per se, *romantic*. I wouldn't say it's *purely* ritual, however. To me they feel like non-romantic Soul Mates, and I have repeatedly experienced Freya's pain at the knowledge that Freyr will die at Ragnarok, and Od is unlikely to ever return. (Note for Barbelith: I have a LOT more to say on this particular subject.)

Heide: "Heid, when riding a human body, comes across as a little old witchy woman, the sort who lives in the gingerbread house out in the forest."

Pretty much. Rarely, and I suppose for a very specific reason, I have had Her come across as in Her 40s or so - early menopausal. I'm too young to be a preferred horse, but again, one of my jobs for the Vanir seems to be that if there is no other horse available, I am obliged to fill in.

"She prefers black and gold for her colors"

She also prefers a greyish-purple in my experience along with black, and I don't get so much of the gold, but when it's there, it's a darker, antiqued gold, rather than the bright shining gold Freya gets. (Note for Barbelith: I had a dream where Heide appeared as invisible, but draped in layers of gauzy cloth. The under layer was black, the middle layer was purple, and the top layer was pale grey. The overall effect averaged to the greyish-purple She seems to prefer, at least from me.)

Gullveig: I notice you've left Her out. Some percieve Her as an aspect of Freya. I treat Her sepparately (as instructed), but I percieve Her as Heide when She was younger, very powerful, and less in control of those powers.

In my experience Gullveig is quite wary of the Aesir in general, Odin specifically, and of Men in general who do not specifically belong to the Vanir. I've seen Her behave through a particular horse as though She has a rather severe case of Post Tramatic Stress Disorder from Her experiences being used as a weapon in the Aesir/Vanir war. Most of the reast of the time She seems to have an interest in the empowerment of female magic-workers - especially Seidhkonas. I have no idea how She responds to those of fluid gender who approach Her, or those who are biologically male but identify as female, but I have seen Her ride a particularly ergi, effeminite male horse without difficulty.

Hnoss and Gersemi: I haven't seen Gersemi horsed, but I have accidentally horsed Hnoss, and She seems to be about 7-8 years old or so. She expected to see Gersemi nearby, identifying the adolescent female who was near as looking very much like Her. She seemed to feel very nervous and afraid to be at this party without Her older sister to watch after Her.

I brought away from that unexpected experience the sense that Freya's Daughters wear white - one with Gold (Hnoss, I believe), and one with sparkling jewels (Gersemi, I believe). I don't think horsing them is ever likely to be a common thing, and if we ever deliberately invoke them, we will be sure to invoke Gersemi first.

--Ember--

Less searchable M0rd4nt

00:49 / 17.01.07

XK: I've run into internal gender baggage related magical issues on a few occassions and what I needed to work through them was making sense of the internal context, and how it had been informed/changed by external gender values.

I think this is one of the things that's really bound to come up in a person's magical career. Nobody is 100% 'masculine' or 'feminine' (however your particular culture defines those things) and sooner or later you're going to have to deal with that. Fairly or unfairly I suspect that the insistance on rigid gender roles in magic may have evolved and endured in part as a reaction against this, a way to shore up the masculine or feminine identity against the scratchy awareness that one is not all man or all woman.

packaging my role as passive is as useless as saying those with the internal port are passive to those with the external plug sexually everytime they interact. As someone with built in internal ports and retrofitted external plugs when need be, I find those definations to be worse than useless in creating productive dialogue around issues of consent and personal power.

I could not agree more.

Sed: Both predominant sexes can be penetrated in a number of ways, the act of assigning gender roles to the sensation is wrong, thou i would assume some people find it an easy description to provide a map of the experience, it basically seems to me that people are using a convenient method of describing the sensation of opening up and being filled, which is also charged by the use of sexual metaphor. The idea of sexually charged spirituality moves two usually taboo subjects when considered together and anchors them. Another way of expressing the intimacy of this kind of contact and the kind of receptivity required by the possessed...
[snip]
...perhaps its not the gender descriptors themselves that are of importance put the comparisons with a sexual interaction, i think the feeling of a loss of self and disassociation are large contributing factors to why the terminology may be employed, the masculine feminine labels are perhaps acting as a misused way to maintain a sense of male dominance within certain community's.

And I'm perfectly happy for people who find that there is an area of overlap between the way they experience sexual fantasy or activity and the way they experience spiritual activity, positive or negative, to use the language of one to describe the other. It can as you seem to suggest be a powerful and healthy act to bring spirituality and sexuality together, if not in practice then in the way one talks about these two areas. Not a problem. What I'm protesting is, to quote my own earlier post: the very rigid and absolutist way in which spirit-possession is gendered by some... [the insistance] that the same set of rules and responsibilities that one might reasonably apply to a sex act be transferred across wholesale to a situation where those rules don't really apply, creating unnecessary tension and friction when such artifical boundaries are inevitably transgressed. You are also insisting that instead of a few useful terms and concepts, a person engaging in possession must drag all their sexual and gender baggage over into what is possibly already a rather twitchy area.

Emberleo: Learning Posessory work often does (whether it should or not) open up the emotional can-of-worms that is personal issues with sexuality. Folks who have been abused in the past, or don't deal well with sexuality often find the "invasion" of posession to be traumatic all over again because it does push those buttons, even if it hadn't occurred to them ahead of time that it should.

I think that's because possession and other forms of intense spirit contact involve working with the permeability of one's personal boundaries. If those boundaries have been messed about with then related issues can certainly crop up during the course of the work. Sexual abuse will almost certainly create serious issues that the spirit-worker will have to deal with, but then so can other forms of abuse: emotional cruelty, physical assault, etc.

I reckon, though, that having to work within a model in which possessory work is treated as mapping closely or exactly onto penetrative sex is very likely to cause unnecessary grief and trouble for the n00b spirit-worker who has such abuse in hir past. Imagine saying to someone "to do this work you have to become completely powerless again, you have to be invaded again, and you're just going to have to deal with it." Nice.

I'd say this kind of thing does damage not only by suggesting that the experience of possession will likely resemble painful experiences from thier past, but also by potentially distracting from, undervaluing, or just completely ignoring other ways of experiencing the permeability of the body and the Self which are less immediately sexual and therefore perhaps more appropriate.

F'rexample, one of the main tricks I've used to get a handle on the whole thing is breathwork. Lots and lots of breathwork. Breathwork is fantastic for breaking down rigidity and allowing the Self to be experienced as fluid and permeable. It can be very emotionally challenging at times, but I'd venture to suggest that it's far less so than trying to achieve the same thing with a less subtle penetrative technique. I use a kind of bastardised Reichian technique for the most part, although that inevitably ties into sexuality as well and might not be the best or easiest place for a survivor to start. I also use perfumes, incenses and smoke to explore permeability. (This incidentally is one of the reasons for Loki's insistance on the horrible cigarettes I've complained about elsewhere, although I strongly recommend that people find something else to inhale. I prefer to break the things open and burn them over charcoal, but sometimes only a proper smoke will do.) Then there's the ritual ingestion of food or drink libations, which works in the sense of a shared meal but can also be used to break down Self/Other barriers--I often find I'm called upon to eat and drink things I wouldn't normally have and don't enjoy, like very strong bitter coffee. Then again you have things like piercing and bloodletting, which can also help to blur the boundaries.

But mostly it's all about the breath with me. I even noticed, at the times when I was seriously angsting about all this, that when I was resisting contact with a spirit my breathing would go wonky. I'd find that when Someone began to come through during my devotions I started to breath differently: more shallowly, using just the top of my chest, as if I was in a dusty or smoky environment or as if the air was too cold to breath comfortably. On a couple of occasions I actually began to have an asthma attack brought on by spirit-contact (and I never get instant stress induced attacks like that). Once I became aware that I was doing it, it was like a light went on in my head and I started breathworking like it was going out of fashion.

As well as disappearing useful techniques, then, there's also another issue here, that of disappearing a whole section of experience relating to spirit contact and spirit possession because it does not conform to the horse=lady=passive/spirit=tummysnake=active model, or in fact consciously draw on sexuality very much at all. I think this is unbalanced and unhealthy.