Wyrd and weirder

 

Read the Eddas (literally the “great-grandmothers”) and the Icelandic sagas with care, and you will find not only Viking battle stories, but some profound insights into the human condition and the interconnectedness of things.

The key word here is Wyrd, from which “weird” derives. Wyrd is often translated as “fate” or “destiny” but it is related to weohrtan, which means “to become”. Wyrd is best understood as a web of connection, joining everything that happens in this world to movements in other worlds. 

Events that may appear to be separate in time or space are connected by threads that are fine, supple and strong. Any movement in any part of the web may be felt anywhere else. Omens point to patterns, they are not just about something that is going to happen in the future. If you know the ways of Wyrd, you use them to read the patterns of connection. If you are a master of these things, you may be able to pull on the threads to change the patterns.

Wyrd is beyond the gods. The web precedes gods and men and lives after them. We call it a pattern, but like the Tao, as it plays through the Book of Changes, it is in constant motion. A lively guide to these matters is Brian Bates’ “documentary novel” The Way of Wyrd, where an Anglo-Saxon sorcerer instructs that “Wyrd itself is constant change, yet because it is created at every moment it is unchanging, like the still center of a whirlpool. All we can see are the ripples dancing on top of the water.” [1] Yet by studying the ripples you can detect what is moving at the bottom of the water, or far away across its expanse. 

Because we are part of Wyrd, we can never see the whole. So we look for ways to see enough to help us navigate. Carving and casting runes is a way. So are dreams, and those special moments when you awaken to the workings of the deeper pattern. “Man is touched by wyrd when he becomes involved in matters whose nature and origins extend beyond existence on earth,” Germanic scholar Paul Bauschatz explains. “There are times…when apparently ordinary activities acquire special significance, and it seems likely that at these times daily life is touched and colored with elements beyond our limited perceptions.” [2] There is room to re-weave the threads of Wyrd. 

Jenny Blain, who has participated in the revival of ancient Norse seiðr, or shamanic rituals, observes that “this concept of Wyrd is one that is being developed within the community. Though often translated as 'fate' and sometimes equated to 'karma', it has a more dynamic sense. People are active agents in the creation of their own personal wyrd, or ørlög. Their deeds and vows, strands of ørlög, become part of the fabric of Wyrd.” Those who work the seiðr  rituals feel they are “'reading' Wyrd, seeing along the threads of the fabric to possible outcomes. Others within the community consider that seiðr in the past involved active interception of the fabric, 'tugging' at the threads,"[3] 

In English, the word “weird” derives from Wyrd. It declined from common usage in England until Shakespeare revived it, with a sinister twist, with the Weird Sisters in Macbeth. It retained some of its original meaning a little longer in Scotland, where if you called someone “weirdless” you were saying that he was unlucky. 

In more recent times, to call something “weird” is to say that it is strange, uncanny, hard to explain and maybe spooky. A “weirdo” is someone who is very strange. Yet thanks to a campaign that started in Austin, Texas, “weird” has been making a comeback. Austin is the first North American city to sprout a poster campaign to keep the city weird. Keep Austin Weird. Other cities followed suit.

One of my favorite books on Northern European traditions is The Well of Remembrance by Ralph Metzner, who embarked on a quest to reclaim the mythic wisdom of his ancestors from the Nazi curse. He was drawn to Odin, not as a war god but as the poet-shaman wandering between the worlds, facilitating direct and personal revelation. In the course of his quest, he writes, “Often I felt as though I was seized, or inspired. I would think of Odin and get insights or answers to my questions, including questions about the meanings of certain myths. Or I would suddenly find pertinent myths that I had not known before. Strange though it may sound, I would have to say that much of what I am relating in this book has been directly given to me by Odin.” [4]    

I have had similar experiences since Tolkien told me in a dream, many years ago, “You must study Scandinavian mythology.” I was at first reluctant to follow that advice, partly because of the long shadow of the Nazi attempt to hijack the gods and symbols of the North.  As I began to walk this ancestral path (I have Scandinavian blood on both sides of my family) in my reading and travel and in my dreams, I was rewarded by special moments of encounter and discovery that left me in no doubt that forces beyond the veil of the world were in play. During a trip to Europe, I had a personal vision of Yggdrasil, the World Tree, from which I wrote a poem.

Since then I have had spontaneous encounters, usually in the fertile space between sleep and awake, with Odin and Freiyja, with Idunn and Loki, and with a powerful völva, or seeress, of the old ways.

The ancestors are calling, calling. And they can use the worldwide web as well as the web of the worlds. It is amusing to note that “wired” is an anagram for “weird”. A woman named Kim shared the following story. “Sprit likes the wires. The Web, in particular. The deities who work fate, don’t they spin and snip threads? My Mom's picture popped up on a dating app my ex-husband is on. He sent a screen shot. I'd just asked my Mom that morning for a sign that she was there. He had been on that app over a year, and he showed me how faces appeared as you scrolled through and how you could indicate interest or not. My Mom was never on a dating site, and certainly wouldn't be suitable to his selected age range. I think that via the Web, we can have communication with the Other Side.”

 

References

 1. Brian Bates The Way of Wyrd: Tales of an Anglo-Saxon Sorcerer (London: Century, 1987) 75

2. Paul C. Bauschatz, The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 28

3.   3. Jenny Blain, Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic: Ecstasy and Neo-Shamanism in Northern European Paganism (London: Routledge, 2002), 15

      4. Ralph Metzner, The Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Myths of Northern Europe (Boston: Shambhala, 1994) 10

 

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing withSigns, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

How dreaming gets us through

In our current closed-down society, people who did not previously make much room in their lives for dreams are dreaming up a storm. Unused to sharing or working with dreams, they often shout out, “Why am I having this weird dream?” As a lifelong dreamer who devotes much of his time to teaching others how to dream, let me offer a few general observations: 

1.Dreams always tell us more than we already know. Don’t dismiss any dream, or tag it as “weird” or trivial, until you have recorded it and looked carefully at what is going on here.

2. "Weirdness" in dreams may be special effects your dream producers bring in to dramatize something you need to understand or act upon, such as the need for social distancing and self monitoring.

3Dreaming may be traveling; you make visits and you receive visitations. Your social life may be very restricted in ordinary life, but you can be as social as you like in your dreams. You can go to that farmer's market or that travel destination you've been missing. I dreamed I wass in Aruba the other night, lying back under a palupa on the white sand beach with the taste of sea salt and lime daiquiri on my lips. I did not feel downcast when I reurned to my body's housebound condition. I enjoyed the full after effects of a mini vacation and did not have to pay for a plane ticket or wait for bags.

4.You have intuitive radar that comes fully alive in dreams. You see things happening at a distance in time and space. You check out the possible future. You see unwanted events in the possible future you may be able to avoid if you clarify your dream information and take appropriate action. You see desirable future scenarios -your dream home, your dream partner, your dream job – that you may be able to manifest if you follow the road map your dream has given you.

5. In dreams, you can go to a night cinema where the feature films are made especially for you. You are not confined to sitting in the audience. You can step through the screen and become scriptwriter, director an star of your own life movies.

6. You can talk to the dead in your dreams. There is nothing “weird” or unnatural about contact with the deceased, especially in dreams. We meet them because they are still around, or because they come visiting, or because in our dream travels we go to places where they are alive. Sometimes they have guidance for us. Sometimes they need our help because they are stuck or confused, and may have been hurled into the afterlife without preparation or rituals of leave-taking. With so much death around us, this is a very good time to learn, with the deceased, that consciousness survives the death of the body and that life goes on in whatever world.

7. Dreaming, you have access to wiser sources than those available to the daily trivial mind: to the god/goddess you can talk to, to the ancestors, to a Greater Self. Your dreams are a voice of conscience and course correction, showing you how your current actions and attitudes appear to an objective, witness self. Dreams are a way for your true spiritual guides to get past the cynical, reductionist skeptic in your left brain and recall you to your bigger story.

8. Your dreams are a factory of images that can help you stay well or get well.  Your body believes in images. Find the right ones and you program the amazing pharmaceuticals factory inside you to pump out the right drugs, boosting your immune system.

9. You don't need to go to sleep in order to dream. Your most powerful dreaming may unfold in the twilight zone between sleep and awake. You may journey like the ancient shamans, hyper-awake. The scales may drop from your eyes so you see that the world around you is a forest of living symbols looking at you.

10.Active dreaming is a path of real magic. In my lexicon, true magic is what happens when we bring gifts from another world into this one. We do this when we remember our dreams and act to embody their energy and guidance in everyday life. And when we wake up to the fact that dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. Dreaming is about waking up to a deeper reality and deeper sources of meaning in our lives

To get good at dreaming, as with anything else, requires practice, practice, practice. Three things to do now:

* Keep a journal. Date each entry and give it a title. This is going to become the most important book on dreams you will ever read: your personal encyclopedia of symbols, our data log for “supernormal” phenomena like clairvoyance and precognition, a place where you dialog with your Self and your inner teachers, a workout for the writer and creator in you.

*Learn some of the core techniques of Active Dreaming, my original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. These include using the Nine Keys to Your Dreams explained in my book Conscious Dreaming, practicing the Dream Reentry technique, and learning to navigate by synchronicity, which is the dreamer’s way of operating 24/7/ You’ll find a short guide to my relevant books here. You may also want to check out my online video courses for The Shift Network

*Learn my Lightning Dreamwork technique, a fast, fun process by which we can share a dream or a personal story with a friend, give each other helpful feedback (without presuming to tell each other what our dreams or our lives mean) and help each other determine what action we should take to embody guidance and energy from the story.

Get to know your dreams better and you may find that if you still want to call them "weird" you will use the word in older sense. Though few of us remember its origin, weird is derived from Wyrd, which is a way of understanding how things in all the worlds are connected, and turn together. In the Scotland of my paternal ancestors, to be “weirdless” was to be unlucky or unfortunate in life. 

Photo: Under a palupa on Manchebo beach, Aruba, by RM