Heathen Souls in Action Series
Winifred Hodge Rose
In a previous soul lore article, “The Shape of Being Human: The Hama Full-Soul”, I related a fascinating anecdote from Laxdaela Saga that I consider offers clues to a powerful method of protecting our health. Here I will relate this anecdote and follow with a discussion of how it can be used as a pattern for soul-working to promote safety and healing for our physical body or Lichama. For more in-depth information about the souls I discuss here, the Hama, Hugr, and Aldr, please refer to my relevant soul lore articles on this website.
Please note that in this article I focus on the Disir, our female ancestral spirits, as healing guides and protectors, as is their traditional role and is shown in this anecdote. Of course, other spirits can play this role for us as well: male ancestors (Alfar), Deities, animal or plant spirits, or other wights, but for simplicity of discussion I will stick with the traditional reference to the Disir.
The Hama Soul
Here is a very brief summary of my understanding of the Hama soul. This soul first joins a person during gestation in the womb. It is traditionally associated with the placenta, caul, and afterbirth, and with the hamingja or spirit of luck associated with these, which is born with us and accompanies us during our lifetime. It is Hama who shapes the infant in the womb, and fuses with the baby’s body to become the Lichama: the physical body or Lich which is shaped and vitalized by the Hama soul. Our living body is our Lichama, our Lich and Hama combined. From a modern perspective, I think one of the main linkages between Hama and our Lich is through our genome, which not only plays the major role in shaping our body and its functions, but is also connected to the portion of our orlog which comes to us through our genetic family history. The health of our physical body is dependent on the health of the Hama.
I believe that the Hama is formed of three parts, which were given to Ask and Embla by Lodurr, as told in verse 18 of the Voluspa (Poetic Edda). The first part is the La or Lo, which is the spiritual power of the blood that vitalizes the body, and is the ‘blood’ that is often thought to carry familial characteristics down the generations or bloodlines. The second part is the Laeti, which refers to a person’s ability to act, to behave, and to possess a voice and speech. This gift enables social interaction as well as physical activity. The third part is the Litr, the person’s unique physical appearance enhanced by the shining light of the living souls within. (Note that the Hama is not mentioned in the Voluspa, though it is frequently mentioned in Norse folklore. Associating the Hama with the La, Laeti and Litr of the Voluspa is my own interpretation, as I discuss in my full article about the Hama.)
The Tale of An the Black
As is told in Laxdaela Saga (ch. 48 & 49), a man called An the Black was sleeping with his comrades on the night before a deadly attack was planned. An was extremely restless during his sleep so his comrades woke him, whereupon he related his nightmare to them. A horrible old woman with a huge knife had dragged him to the edge of his bed, slit open his belly, pulled out his entrails, and stuffed brushwood into their place. She left, carrying a wooden trough with her.
An’s comrades thought this hilarious and nicknamed him An Brushwood-Belly, but it was An who had the last laugh. The following day most of his comrades were killed, and An himself was taken up for dead, having been disemboweled during the skirmish. During the wake for the dead the following night, An severely startled everyone by sitting up and announcing he felt much better! He said that he had actually been aware during most of the time since his injury, but had briefly gone into a swoon. During the swoon, the old woman had returned to him, emptied the brushwood from his belly, and returned his entrails to their proper place. An Brushwood-Belly went on to make a full and rapid recovery, an amazing outcome for such a dire injury.
Interpretation
It’s clear that the old woman, however cruel and horrible she seems, is one of An’s Disir and intends to protect him. She foresees his terrible injury and proactively removes the entrails of his Hama-soul, the soul that shapes and energizes our physical body and its functions. She keeps these entrails safe in her trough until the skirmish is over. Then, as An lies mortally wounded in a swoon, his unharmed spirit-entrails are returned to their place in his Hama. His Hama is now hale and whole, and has the power to heal his Lich through Hama’s function of shaping the living body, the Lichama.
Our Hama-soul comes to the fore, comes into power, when we sleep and dream, as we do in the womb while our Hama is shaping our body, or when healing from a major illness, injury or surgery, and as An was doing both times that the old spirit-woman came. This state of sleeping, dreaming, or trance sidetracks our awareness-energy away from involvement with the everyday waking world and makes room for our Hama and our Disir or other spirit-healers to do their necessary work. We could say that An’s Dis is operating on the etheric level on An’s etheric body.
This tale looks very similar to accounts of shamanic and spiritual healings from many different cultures around the world. It shows the power of the spirit-body to heal the physical body, and I find that this similarity adds weight to its authenticity as a mode of healing. But I see an interesting difference in this account, too: in shamanic healings, the living shaman plays the main role, using spirits under his/her direction. In An’s account, it is the old spirit-woman, his Dis, who does it all: foreseeing his injury and proactively protecting his Hama before the physical injury even happens, and then returning his Hama’s organs so they can heal his physical body. This bears some similarity to a modern alternative form of healing called ‘cellular memory’, where the idea is to stimulate the spirit-energy of a sick or injured part of ourselves to ‘remember’ what it was like to be hale, and to follow that pattern.
Aldr and the Ordeal
I want to take this tale of An the Black and create from it a pattern for a method of spirit-healing. There’s one big gap or difference between the situation that An the Black endured, and any situation we might be in, where we want to use this healing method. That is: An had nothing to do, in any conscious or volitional sense, with his own healing in this tale, whereas we want to initiate a conscious and willing act of healing. There is a way to bridge this gap between his experience and ours, however, and this is by recognizing the role of orlog, of the ‘ordeal’, and of our Aldr soul.
Very briefly, our Aldr soul is another vitalizing life-soul as our Hama is. The word ‘Aldr’ comes from *al and ‘alan’, meaning ‘to nourish’: Aldr provides subtle energy to nourish our body and enhance our health, vigor, and span of life. The word also refers to our life-span and an age of time, and is the root of our word ‘old’: the state we achieve when our Aldr is able to nourish our Lichama through many years of life. Aldr is shaped and given to us by the Norns, as we see, for example, in Helgi Hundingsbane I, vs. 2, where the Norns ‘shaped the aldr of the aetheling’, (Poetic Edda), and in Gylfaginning of the Prose Edda, where it is said again that the Norns ‘shape men’s aldrs’ (Sturlason p. 18). In my longer article about the Aldr I explain my conclusion that Aldr is actually a life-soul, not simply ‘life’, as it is usually translated.
Aldr is the soul which governs our relationship with Time during our life in Midgard. It is linked with our orlog through the mechanism of timing: the timing of significant events in our lives, including time-dependent physical events such as puberty and menopause. Aldr shapes the characteristic events of our ‘body and life in time’ as Hama shapes the physical characteristics and abilities of our ‘body and life in space.’ I find this partnership or linkage between Hama and Aldr to be of crucial importance when looking at the timing and nature of health-impacting events (both positive and negative) over the course of our lifetime. Such events are not random; they are part of subtle patterns influenced by the Norns and our orlog, working through the energy and the triggers of timing that our Aldr feeds into our Lichama and its actions.
An the Black’s orlog brought him to a place and time where he suffered a terrible injury, an ‘or-deal’, an event dealt out to him by his orlog. His Dis was tuned into this flow of time and orlog, and responded in a frightening but life-saving way, so that An’s healing was the fulfilment, the completion, of his ordeal. It was this upcoming ordeal of battle and injury, this nexus of orlog and ordeal, that prompted An’s Dis to take action.
We can set up a deliberate challenge for ourselves, a psychospiritual ordeal, to similarly prompt our Dis or other healing spirit to take action if they foresee that it is necessary. This necessity might relate to an unforeseen event, that we don’t know about but which the spirit sees, as has been happening to us all with our current Covid-19 pandemic and its unknown degree of threat to each of us personally. Or it might be something known: a scheduled surgery or a debilitating treatment such as chemotherapy, for example. The necessity also could relate to a change of function such as menopause, aging of the brain, or muscle wasting. These are the kind of situations where we would benefit from relying on the Hama and on our other souls connecting through the Hama to our Lichama, our living body, to help us compensate for the change of physical function. In terms of these examples, this would mean promoting spiritual fertility in place of physical; a serene and detached spiritual state in place of our former level of intellectual ability; or inner strength in place of outer strength.
A Mode of Practice
The tale of An Brushwood-Belly can point us in a promising direction for enhancing the health and safety of our body parts. The very first thing to keep in mind here is that this approach fully depends on one of our Disir or other kind of spirit-being who is focused on our well-being! So the first step in applying this approach is to work on our relationship with one or more protective spirit-beings: Disir, Alfar, Deities, or others. These beings will have the necessary ability of foresight, to identify what parts, systems, or functions of our body will need protection and what action needs to be taken to do so. Focused dreams, meditation, spaeworking, rune-working, automatic writing, trance-working, and the like can facilitate the necessary communication between us and the spirit-being. Offerings are also advisable!
As communication is gradually established, the next step is a rather tricky one for many of us: we need to realize that our Dis or other spirit or Deity is actually running this show. I don’t at all mean that there is any spirit-possession involved, or giving over control of our self to a spirit. But if we are full of the idea that we are totally running the show, and hold a lot of preconceptions about what is involved, then it’s easy to miss the subtle signals and knowledge that the spirit is trying to communicate. Unless it is a spirit like An’s Dis who walks up and rips out a body part, of course! Not all of them are this direct in their actions.
This description seems amusing, but it’s a signal that these communications and operations may be scary and unpleasant, and again, if we try to hold onto total control we could end up rejecting an unpleasant but necessary healing experience. We might also have our own idea of what needs to be done, and hold onto it so firmly that we’re blind to something completely different that the spirit knows is coming and is trying to communicate to us. Like a respiratory pandemic, for example, creeping up on us when we think we want to focus on some relatively minor, unrelated health problem.
What I’m talking about is balancing between our ego-control and the spirit’s guidance: entering into a state of mutual trust, cooperation, and respectful open-mindedness, while also maintaining clear judgment. Inviting one’s Fulltrui / Fulltrua, one’s most trusted Deity, to be present to oversee and empower these activities is a wise move to promote this state of trust and cooperation.
Enter the Hugr
In my experience there is a state of mind very helpful for success in this and many other kinds of spirit-work, esoteric work, and magic: a state of powerful balance, of skillful tension, between rationality and intuition, between strength of true will and temporary surrender of ego, between open-hearted trust and clear-minded critical thinking. I have a name for this state of mind: Anglo-Saxon Hygesceaft (HEE-yeh-shiaft) or Old Saxon Hugiskeft (WHO-gie-skeft). These words literally mean ‘Hugi-ship’, in the same sense as ‘apprenticeship’ means ‘the state of being an apprentice,’ or ‘friendship’ means ‘the state of being friends with another person.’ Hugiskeft is the ‘state of being in our Hugr’, placing our awareness fully within our Hugr-soul and allowing this soul-mind to direct our thoughts and actions. A lot of our everyday awareness does reside with our Hugr soul in any case, but the dynamic tension and balance between opposing impulses, as I described above, is often not a conscious part of that.
The Hugr soul is intimately connected with the characteristic abilities associated with both the intellect and the heart. It can analyze, judge, strategize, be courageous, bold and forward-thinking. It can love, be tender and insightful, be open to friendship and willing to trust. It is intimately involved with our intentions, desires and longings, which are the underlying motivators of our thoughts and actions. Hugr also has access to knowledge hidden from our conscious mind: Hugr truly ‘knows things’ and serves as our wise inner rede-giver as we evaluate, make decisions and take action in any kind of situation. All of these powers of the Hugr can be accessed especially well from within our Hugiskeft, and can be directed toward protecting our own health and wholeness, among many other aims.
I propose here a specific method of enhancing the dynamic tension between relevant counterbalancing characteristics and qualities of the Hugr soul, as a way to enter our Hugiskeft and to raise Hugr-power. I note in particular the Hugr-capabilities of trust versus judgment, logic versus intuition, true will or deep desire of the soul versus everyday ego-motivations. I view this as mirroring the primal tension between Fire and Ice, where Ginnungagap, the place of magical potential from which all arises, forms as a strand of creative tension spun between the spindles of the two primal polarities. The space between the polarities is where everything happens, within Ginnungagap and within ourselves.
Though there are other ways to enter our Hugiskeft, I like this particular approach because it effectively swells and empowers our Hugr in a controlled and constructive way. Hugr is powerfully linked with both our emotions and our thoughts. Threatening or very emotional situations can cause Hugr to ‘explode’ like the ‘wind of the troll-wife’ (as Hugr is called in the Edda, p. 154; section 69), with unintended and unfortunate results. This is not what we want when pursuing a healing path! We need power that is focused and directed, rather than being reactive and hysterical, which is a natural but unhelpful reaction to injury or other serious threat to our health and life.
As I have discussed in previous articles about the Hugr soul, I think that ancestral spirits such as the Disir and Alfar are actually the Hugr souls of departed humans. They are already fully in their Hugiskeft: this is their natural state-of-being after death and separation from most of our other souls. Mature and powerful ancestral spirits like the Disir and Alfar have full access to Hugr-abilities that we may access only sporadically during our Midgard life, such as the ability to foresee future events, to interpret the deep motivations of living humans (as well as of spirits), the ability to discern something of what is occurring in other Worlds, and other magical abilities that can be directed toward spiritual healing.
By entering fully into our Hugiskeft, using the methodology I describe below, we attune our awareness and own Hugr-soul with the ancestral Hugr-spirit. We thus begin to speak in the same language, to operate on the same wavelength. This is the point when communication and power or energy is most easily transferred between us and the Hugr-spirits. This sets up favorable conditions for healing and other energy-working and magical endeavors, including some forms of spaeworking, which can help us with spirit-communication and insight.
An the Black, as far as I understand from his tale, did not access and use his Hugr to facilitate his healing. The Hugr involvement in his healing came from his Dis, the Hugr-spirit of one of his ancestresses. He did not participate actively or consciously in his healing, whereas my purpose here is to suggest a method where we do intentionally participate. Hugr is intimately involved with our intentionality, our thought processes, and the emotions that underlie them. It is also the link between us and the Hugr-spirits of our ancestors. Thus, Hugr is an essential player in esoteric and healing work such as I outline here.
The Lybesn
In the tale of An Brushwood-Belly, I want to note that An’s Dis did not leave his Hama-body empty when she took away his Hama-entrails before the fight. Instead, she filled his empty belly with brushwood. Looking at this from the perspective of magical healing, I think that the brushwood functioned as a kind of amulet or charged token (tacn), something that in Anglo-Saxon would be called a lybesn, lybsn or lybsin (‘Lueb-sn or Leeb-sn’). Lybb refers to charms, amulets, drugs, medicines and poisons. Lybcraeft involves the creation of lybesn in the form of knots, amulets, charms, as well as herbal potions and medicines. Runes and galdors can also serve very well in this healing approach.
I think that a Lybesn plays an important role in this form of healing, whether the Lybesn is physical or metaphysical. It is a token or marker of the interaction between you and your Dis or other guide. When you pursue this protecting and healing work with your Dis, watch carefully for such a token, or for instructions for making or finding one, either through your altered state of consciousness, or in the serendipitous appearance of some material object, rune, or song that seems to be related to the work you are doing.
There is a rune known to be of use to healers and that I recommend here, in addition to any others you might choose to use. Uruz the Aurochs, the mody wight defending its territory, represents our immune system fighting off all invaders from its territory, our Lich. Yet, as we see with Covid-19 and with organ transplants, an immune overreaction can be as dangerous as an underreaction. The balancing of opposites that I offer as a method for building Hugr-power applies also to invoking the Ur rune: we want to mobilize the Mod-filled wight’s power without allowing it to run amok and destroy its own territory in the process.
The token or Lybesn is the place-holder, the promise, between you and your Dis, that what was taken from your Hama will be returned to you at the right time, to your great benefit. It’s interesting to note that brushwood was considered a valuable resource in medieval Iceland, and anyone cutting or using brushwood from another’s property was subject to a fine (Stapleton, p. 33). The brushwood stuffed into An’s belly wasn’t just a random placeholder, but an item of value: an IOU from the Dis to An Brushwood-Belly.
Though there was only a short period of time between when the Dis placed the brushwood in An’s belly, and when she removed it and replaced his original entrails, presumably An still needed to have bowel-function during that time. The brushwood-Lybesn temporarily provided the energy for that functionality. It provides a substitute for the sequestered Hama-body part. You could also try using the Lybesn to call your Dis and ask about how the process is going, though she may not answer you until she is ready to.
An Example of a Hama-Working
Here is an example of how to pursue this methodology. It is not meant to be rigid and inflexible, but rather to provide an outline that can stimulate you to pursue your healing aim in the best way for you.
Intention. If you are currently healthy, you decide you want to consult your Dis or other spirit or Deity to see whether there are any precautions that need to be taken now to protect your health in the future. If you are already experiencing a physical health ordeal or know you will be soon, you want to consult your spirit healer to engage in a joint effort of Hama protection under these conditions.
Preparation. You spend time in meditation, rune-casting, automatic writing, spaeworking, prayer, dreamwork, or other forms of altered consciousness to begin the process of contacting an appropriate Dis or other guardian spirit. Of course, if you already have such a relationship, then consult with them to form your plan. You also may choose to request a trusted Deity to be present to oversee and empower this endeavor. Offerings to all concerned are appropriate here.
Enter your Hugiskeft. Work with your Dis and Deity to develop your ability to recognize and enter into your Hugiskeft. (If this would be helpful for you, you can access my longer articles about the Hugr on this website, including especially those listed under the section “Soul lore study guides”.) Work within yourself on the dynamic tension of opposites relevant to this spirit-work: open-hearted trust versus clear-minded judgment; rational versus intuitive mind-states; setting aside ego-control and preconceptions while maintaining your will / desire directed toward your goal; courage and boldness versus cool-headed strategizing. Focus especially on dynamic tensions in areas you may find difficult or unfamiliar to you, where you are strong on one side of the balance and weak on the other (e.g. trust versus judgment, rationality versus intuition). You may also find there are other dynamic tensions you need to develop, specifically relating to you and your situation.
This sounds like a lot to do, and indeed it can be a lifelong process of development and refinement. As you begin this, though, just do the best you can to find such a state of dynamic balance, working with one pair of opposites at a time. One good way is to visualize or symbolize these opposites in some way: pairs of runes, colors, Deities or other entities, situations, styles of music, action figures, mythical worlds, works of art, natural phenomena. Develop a scene in your mind where you stand between a pair of these opposites and hold them in balance, being drawn equally powerfully toward each side, interacting with each one while not giving up the other one. Feel this in your body, as though you are standing between two powerful magnets, centering and grounding the magnetic forces while not being sucked over toward one side or the other.
Another method is juggling: real juggling if you have or want to develop the skill, or juggling in your imagination, using different colored or rune-marked balls or other objects to represent the counterbalancing forces of the Hugr. Attune yourself closely with these objects before you begin, then continue juggling until you have reached ‘The Zone’ of perfect rhythm and balanced forces.
Spend as much time as you can getting familiar with this state of balanced opposites and training yourself to enter it at will. Also try to apply this sense of balanced Hugr-qualities to situations in your everyday life, with the rede and assistance of your Hugr. There are many benefits to this approach of learning to recognize our Hugr and its powers, and to work actively with it, in all our life-activities.
As you complete this stage, you have contacted your healing spirit(s), begun learning to enter your Hugiskeft, and to gear up your Hugr’s power in a focused way.
Identify the Healing Target. In your place of balanced power within your Hugiskeft, clear your mind and wait for some kind of signal from your Dis to indicate what body part, system, or function needs to be protected at this time. There are many ways this signal can occur: a visual image, a sensation such as coolness or warmth within your body part, a twitch or twinge, words or thoughts coming into your mind, a ‘gut feeling’. Give this plenty of relaxed, quiet time to settle into your consciousness and build your confidence that your own awareness, your Dis or other spirit, your Hama and Lichama are all on the same wavelength.
Having in mind the challenges we face with Covid-19, let us say for this example that your Dis identifies to you that your lungs must be protected from looming danger. For this particular healing methodology, this means that she must shelter or sequester your Hama’s lungs, and probably give you a Lybesn, material or metaphysical, as a place-holder. (I don’t want to get too specific here, because I know that the Disir and other spirit-beings have their own ways of doing things, and very often surprise us by doing the unexpected. Be prepared for surprises!)
I will tell you what this Hama-organ sequestration feels like to me, though it may be quite different for you. There is an empty space within us that mirrors the metaphysical and psychological meaning of the missing organ, though obviously our physical lungs will continue to function. Though in some ways it feels annoyingly like a missing tooth, that you’re always feeling to see if it’s back yet, in other ways it feels like a space of freedom opening up inside you. Everything in our body has symbolic meaning and metaphysical functionality, and when a Hama-body part is sequestered, that is where we feel it. It is an unsettled, incomplete feeling, which motivates us to explore and learn more about what is going on.
The Psychospiritual Ordeal. This time of sequestration is the time to understand how the missing Hama lungs (or whatever organ or part you are dealing with) affect you on all levels, and what role they have played in your life. What emotions were stored there? What habitual tensions? Does it have any association with past experiences: an illness, or the explosive joy of triumph, filling your lungs with a shout after a great achievement? The crushing feelings of sadness and grief as your lungs empty with sobbing? Filling with pride over the achievements of your loved ones? Have your lungs often collapsed in feelings of shame and lack of confidence, or inflated by being overbearing and bullying others? Training your lungs through regular aerobic exercise, quieting them through meditation, polluting them with smoke…on and on, you become more and more aware of what your lungs really do on all levels of your being, and all the various impacts you and your lungs have on each other. This can be emotionally and intellectually grueling, but cathartic: a psychospiritual ordeal.
Here is another example of this type of ordeal. Let’s say your immune system is the part that needs to be sequestered during an oncoming threat to its functions. Viruses can coopt our body processes such as our immune system and take them over for their own purposes, creating a dangerous situation for us. While your immune system is sheltered by your Dis, examine the meaning of your ‘defense system’ as a whole, its physical, mental, emotional interactions with your whole being. Are you overly defensive, or not defensive enough in setting and maintaining personal boundaries? Do you overreact or underreact to triggers? Do you have crossed wires, first letting people into your personal relationships, then cutting them down or letting them cut you down, creating a downward spiral in the relationship? Entering our Hugiskeft, balancing between trust versus judgment and other Hugr-powers to reach a clear space in the center where wisdom resides, helps us work our way through such ordeals and find our place of wholeness and healing.
The Physical Ordeal. As you go through this inner process, you may also end up going through physical illness, injury, surgery, debilitating therapy, or other physical impact as a continuation of your ordeal. If your physical condition is serious enough that it’s hard to think and pursue these psychospiritual exercises, or if your awareness is lowered through sedation, then lie back and allow your Dis and Deities to do the necessary work at this time, as An the Black did.
Here is where the Hugr’s natural desire for trusting love and friendship steps in. Connect with the spirits and Deities you trust the most, let down any defenses you might have against healing, e.g. feeling you don’t ‘deserve’ it, or being filled with anger, resentment, fear, or despair about your condition. These things seriously get in the way of healing; you can’t afford to hang onto them. Instead, tranquilly open your heart, and thus open the paths to your other souls and your spirit friends, so they can feed healing energy through your Hama and into your Lichama. Breathe, relax, enter into the ‘rest, digest, heal’ of your parasympathetic nervous system, instead of the ‘fight, flight, ordeal’ of your sympathetic nervous system. You are already undergoing an ordeal and there is no need to add any more stress by actively pursuing a psychospiritual ordeal during this phase of your healing.
Resolving the Ordeal. The empty space that appears when your Hama-lungs or other organs or functions are sequestered becomes filled with meaning as you pursue the full course of this healing method. As you begin your recovery, you can choose to re-shape that meaning-space in a way that you consider better and healthier, based on what you’re learning from your ordeals. The Lybesn you receive, if you receive one, should give you some clues as to how to go about this. Consulting with your Dis, Deities, or other spirit guide will give you more.
It’s wise to be patient during this phase, and not rush matters by asking your Dis to give you back your Hama-organ, even if this is an uncomfortable process. Ordeals are uncomfortable! The whole point of the process is to sequester your lungs (or whatever body-part or function), until it is safe to return them, and this is something that the Dis will know better than you do. The best time to return them will depend on both internal and external factors that affect you.
In serious situations, your physical body part may actually be removed or partially removed, or become less functional. In this case, the Hama-part corresponding to the physical part has to step in and carry all of that part’s metaphysical functions that you identified and worked on during your ordeal, including its energetic connections with your Lichama and Aldr. It’s very valuable to have your Dis sequester the Hama-body part while undergoing this kind of physical ordeal, so that the energetic shock resulting from injury, illness or surgery is buffered by your Dis and her trough where your organ or part is sheltered. When she returns your sheltered Hama-body part to you, its haleness and wholeness will help you to heal, to reduce the energetic scarring, and to compensate for the missing physical part and its many functions that you have learned about during your ordeal.
In Closing
I’ll close here with a quotation and a rune-blessing. The quotation invokes the brushwood-Lybesn of An Brushwood-Belly’s healing, and reflects the energetic friction raised by the dynamic tension of my Hugiskeft exercise.
“Wit is brushwood, judgement timber: the one gives the greatest flame, the other yields the durablest heat, and both meeting makes the best fire.” (Overbury)
The blessing-runes are the Yew (Eihwaz): supported by strong roots, keeper of the fire of life and a joy on the estate; and Need (Naudhiz): a constriction on the chest, which nevertheless becomes help and healing if heeded in time. Let us heed the true needs of ourselves and others during this time of pandemic, and help the constrictions of stress and illness turn toward right action and healing for all. Let us use the friction of the fire-drill and the power of our Hugr and Hama souls to light the needfire within us and rekindle the bright flame of life and health for ourselves and our world. Let us hold fast to the strong roots of trust and troth, the joy of our estate, that undergird us all.
Bookhoard
Hall, J.R. Clark, with supplement by Herbert D. Merritt. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 4th Edition. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Canada, 1960.
Jonsson, Finnur. De Gammle Eddadigte. G.E.C. Gads Forlag, Kobenhavn, Denmark, 1932.
Larrington, Carolyne, transl. The Poetic Edda, revised edition. Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2014.
Laxdaela Saga. Transl. Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson, Penguin Books, London, 1969.
Rimbault, Edward F., ed. The Miscellaneous Works of Thomas Overbury, Knight. John Russell Smith, London, 1856.
Rose, Winifred Hodge. “Aldr and Orlay: Weaving a World” in Idunna 85, Autumn 2010, and on HeathenSoulLore.net.
Ibid, “Hunting the Wild Hugr” in Idunna 117, Spring 2018, and on HeathenSoulLore.net.
Ibid, “The Shape of Being Human: The Hama Full-Soul” in Idunna 73, Fall 2010, and on HeathenSoulLore.net.
Ibid, “Who is Hugr?” in Idunna 118, Winter 2018, and on HeathenSoulLore.net.
Stapleton, Sarah. “Justice Done: Outlawry Crimes in Medieval Iceland.” (2015) Theses, Dissertations and Capstones Paper 967.
Sturlason, Snorri. Edda, transl. & ed. Anthony Faulkes. Everyman, Rutland, Vermont, 1987.
This article was first published in Idunna: A Journal of Northern Tradition, #122, Spring 2020. It was posted on this site in August 2020.