Winifred Hodge Rose
Background reading:
Ferah Bind-rune: Primary runes are Kenaz as the fire, plus three tree-runes: Birch, Oak, and Ash; the latter two from the Anglo-Frisian Futhork.
Exploring your Ferah Soul
Now it’s time to delve into the mysteries of the first soul on our list, the Ferah. I suggest you review the first sections of the assigned reading, Born of Trees and Thunder: The Ferah Soul, to refresh your memory in preparation for these exercises. Take your time reading this material, and let the ideas begin to settle into your awareness. You are getting to know a seemingly unfamiliar being now, a great being within which your conscious self, mind, body, and life-force are imbedded, as they are with all our souls.
Join your Ferah in its Habitat
Each of our souls has its own characteristics and, I might say, its own ‘habitat’ where it feels at home, where it is in its strength and competence. Joining that soul in its ‘habitat’, as well as you can, really facilitates communication between you. Ferah is powerful in Nature, in the flows of life and being that encompass Nature. It is strong in trees and animals, in mountains and forests, in lightning and thunder, in Fire and Earth, and in the life-energy that flows through all of us on this Mother Earth and links us together as the Feorh-cynn, the Kindred of Ferah. Ferah is very strong in humans, too. The ancient Saxons called human beings ‘firibarn’: children of Ferah, and referred to ‘the folk’ as ‘firihi’. Ferah life-force flows through us all.
Spending as much time as you can outside in natural surroundings and natural habitat, and especially spending time in the presence of trees and mountains, will stimulate and open your awareness of your Ferah, and promote communication between you.
When you can’t be outside, but want to connect with Ferah, meditate and focus your awareness on natural scenes and powers, and the life-force itself that flows through all living beings. A Ferah-and-Thor meditation or communion is a great thing to do during a thunderstorm, too, even if you (sensibly) don’t go outside for it!
Exercise 3-1: Ancient Roots
In the first pages of “Born of Trees and Thunder,” I show how the word “Ferah” and its siblings and forebears go all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language, a time before any of the European languages had branched off on their own. Ferah is truly ancient, as words go! Then, on top of that, the word is directly linked to the PIE Thunder God, Perkwunos or Perkwunas, and to powerful, ancient Earth-Deities.
Questions:
(a) Does this great age for the name, and the being, of one of your souls mean something to you? Does it deepen your sense of connection with your oldest roots: ancestors, nature, evolution, ancient Deities? Is this something that is important to you, or not so much? Explore this meaning, if it is meaningful to you.
(b) What do you think about the idea of humans being shaped from trees? What is your interpretation of this, and what does it mean to you?
Exercise 3-2: Ancient Deities
Thor Thunder-God (ancient Perkwunos), his mother Fjörgyn Earth-Goddess, and Frigg’s father Fjörgynn, are all related to our Ferah soul through the congruence of all their names and functions. Nothing more is known of Fjörgynn than his name and relation to Frigg, but this name gives us some pretty obvious clues. He’s likely to be the brother of Fjörgyn, and likely to have been her husband, too, at some point lost in time. They must be an ancient, powerful pair of Earth Deities, or an Earth and Sky-Powers deity-pair.
As you work with your Ferah soul, tune in to all these Deities through focused awareness, using any technique you choose. Get a sense of how the power or energy emanating from these Deities is similar to the energy of your Ferah soul.
When I do this I get a sense of ‘flavor’: they all have a similar ‘energy-flavor’, though the flavor I taste from the Deities is stronger than that from my own Ferah. There are also some subtle differences in their energy-flavors, which I like to explore and try to understand more clearly.
Question: Do you sense connections, in some way, between your Ferah and these Deities? Do you sense the presence of elemental Fire and Earth here? Explore these connections and their implications for the nature, power, and potential of your Ferah soul.
Exercise 3-3: Your Ferah-Habitat
Using what you’ve learned from the assigned reading, and the previous exercises, begin to explore, through meditation and through real-world experiences as much as you can, what your own Ferah’s preferred soul-habitat is like. It’s likely to be some kind of natural setting, but it could also be some kind of temple or other sacred place, and of course, it could be a combination of the two. Let your mind wander through landscapes of the imagination, while holding to your awareness of your Ferah soul. Allow your Ferah to guide you to the place it considers ‘home’, and explore this place using all the powers of your imagination. As you continue with the next reading and exercises focused on Ferah, you may refine your understanding of its habitat.
Ferah’s Sensory Awareness
We’ve talked about senses and sensations in Study Guide 1, and there’s a purpose to this. When looking at our holism of body and souls, our Ferah soul itself is the locus where our senses function. Ferah fills the body as an etheric substance, and both our physical senses, and the analog-sensorium of our imagination, flow through this Ferah-substance as well as flowing through our body and brain. Our experience of the world is, or should be, a full-body experience of all our senses, physical and metaphysical. And in this full-body experience, our Ferah soul is our foundational actor, sensor, and responder. Thus, we grow ever more attuned to the physical world and to the metaphysical worlds, and our Ferah grows in power, experience, confidence, and wisdom. This is how humans are designed to be, and it is very clearly how animals are, too, in their own distinctive ways. All of us together are the Feorh-cynn, the Kindred of the Ferah.
These days, we live too much of our lives in spaces that limit our sensory awareness and our mental and nervous-system faculties that process, interpret, and are stimulated by this sensory awareness. Our visual and auditory senses are over-stimulated by all the forms of media and communication we use, while our other senses are hardly used at all when we are in cyberspace and other forms of remote media like television and telephones.
Relying on cyberspace, people don’t learn the arts of reading body language, nor the subtle art of scent-signaling. Don’t learn the arts of conversation, either, nor critical thinking. Critical thinking as we think of it today is mostly applied to abstract matters, but the ability itself begins and is founded upon the ability and training of our physical senses to observe, identify, discern, discriminate, sort, test, evaluate, accept or reject, and respond to challenges posed by physical objects, persons, and experiences in the outside world. Becoming more detached from the demands of living in the physical world, our critical thinking abilities likewise become distorted through the loss of our physical-world foundations.
This situation was taken to extremes when we socially isolated during the Covid-19 pandemic, and people’s joy in getting together personally, face to face, when we were able to do so signals a resurgence of our need to use our full sensorium together: hugs, back-slaps, body language, smell, sharing tastes and glances, sweaty friends, grubby kids, loud chatter, the lot. This is how we’ve evolved, body and brain together: our senses are the interface linking physical world to body, body to brain, brain back to body, body back to physical world. All of these transactions occur by going through our Ferah.
Our senses are the key to experiential learning in the real, physical world. The senses of our imagination, our analog-senses, are key to experiential learning in the metaphysical worlds. As much as some of our physical senses are atrophying as we depend more and more on cyberspace, the problem is even worse in metaphysical space due to lack of training and practice for our own imaginative skills. Cyberspace is imaginative space, yet a lot of it does not heavily exercise our own imagination. Stuff is fed to us; we don’t do a lot of the cooking. This is in sharp contrast to reading or listening to fiction (without visuals), for example, where our own imaginations are challenged to come up with what the characters, landscapes, situations, surroundings look like, sound like, feel like, smell like, etc.
So, for many of us in modern life, parts of our sensorium are under-active, and other parts are over-active. Over-activity reaches its height when people are subjected to traumatic experiences, and suffer from PTSD as a result. Traumatic experiences and threats are imprinted into Ferah’s sensory-substance, destabilizing it and causing Ferah to throw out over-reactive signals when faced with everyday activities that normally would not be threatening. Soul-healing is a large topic of its own, that I won’t attempt here, where we are focused on learning the basics of who all our souls are. But soul-healing is something that I hope and pray other Heathens, trained and familiar with our Heathen souls and with other work ongoing in the Heathen community, will further develop and grow onward.
Our Ferah is responsible for detecting and evaluating all physical and metaphysical sensory cues in our environment, and for deciding on appropriate responses (which can include ignoring irrelevant stimuli). It does not do that in a state of abstraction, away from our conscious mind. Our conscious mind’s activities in this regard are part of Ferah’s process.
Ferah unites all our senses, our body, our brain, with the flows of energy and information that circulate around us in our environment at every moment, including the energies of Deities, spirits, and beings of other worlds. Ferah is our master of ceremonies here, our ring-leader in this great circus of physical-metaphysical sensory life! If we had to rely simply on our conscious mind, our intellectual thought-processes, to run this whole show of sensing, evaluating and reacting to the entire physical and metaphysical sensory worlds out there, we would collapse within minutes! Our conscious mind and conscious learning and decision processes can only do so much of this massive knowledge-integration. We need our Ferah, and we need it to be healthy, experienced, wise, powerful: we need to be Feraht Heathens.
Exercise 3-4: Nourishing Ferah
To do this work and stay healthy, Ferah needs to be properly nourished and cared for. Our physical bodies become weak and ill when poorly nourished and nurtured, and the same is true for our souls. For this exercise, enter into your Ferah-habitat and be still and receptive. Ask your Ferah to show you, cause you to richly sense and feel, what kind of nourishment and nurturing it needs to be at its healthy and powerful best. Record what you learn in your Daybook, and proceed with implementing what you’ve learned from your Ferah.
It’s good to do this on a regular basis: check in with Ferah periodically to see whether its needs have changed, and whether your nurturing is being effective. As you proceed in doing this, you will become gradually more familiar with your Ferah, and be better able to understand its needs, its potentials, and how you can partner with it consciously instead of unwittingly getting in its way!
Ferah and Law
How do people come up with the idea of ‘law’ in the first place? What is the connection between what humans observe about the laws of nature, and the laws that humans come up with for ourselves? How much of human law is rooted in instinct (like perhaps the almost-universal laws against incest), and how much is invented by humans for various helpful or unhelpful purposes?
There are three large areas of Law, in its broadest meaning, that Ferah is connected with: (1) the laws, patterns and rhythms of the natural world; plus (2) human social laws; plus (3) laws / customs / traditions that govern relations between humans, Deities and spirits. And there are Ferah-words that relate to each of these three. The names of several kinds of trees, of natural phenomena, and the name of the life-force itself, all relate to Ferah. Then there is the word firihi meaning ‘the folk’ in Old Saxon. What is it that makes ‘the folk’ be a folk, an integrated group of people? It is their laws, customs, traditions, among other things like language, which indeed has its own language-laws itself. ‘Ferah-soul’ unites ‘firihi-folk.’ And finally, when a person is wise, pious, devout, strong in spiritual practice and spiritual connections, honoring the troth and commitments between themself and the Holy Ones, ancestors and other spiritual beings, that person is called feraht. Three words relating to Ferah, three domains of law. Law in its broad, life-supporting sense means creating and maintaining a structure of ethics, norms and behavior that supports our life as a healthy community of people, Nature, and the worlds of the spirit.
Exercise 3-5: The Path of Priesthood
If you are on a path of priesthood, either public / group or private / individual priesthood, or if you are a Heathen Law-Speaker, study the section on “Ferah, Law and Priesthood” in the assigned reading. Consider which, if any, of the points discussed there, and above, have relevance to your path, and record your thoughts in your Daybook.
Exercise 3-6: Ferah and Sacrifice
I talk about Ferah and sacrifice in the assigned reading, and give a description of what Ferah-sacrifice means to me. What about you? As you’re coming to know the nature of your Ferah soul, what are your thoughts about what sacrifice is, what the Ferah’s role in sacrifice is, or should be, and what all of this means to you as a practicing Heathen? If the subject of sacrifice is not very meaningful to you, or if your idea of sacrifice is not really relevant to the Ferah soul, then you can skip this exercise.
Exercise 3-7: Afterlife of Ferah
What are your thoughts, or what is your sense, about the afterlife of Ferah? This is a subject I am still exploring myself; I feel there is a lot more to learn about it. Obviously, we don’t and can’t have ‘objective’ knowledge about this, any more than we can have ‘objective’ knowledge about the existence and nature of our souls. ‘Subjective’ knowledge, on the other hand, is accessible to all of us: this arises from subjective experience, and subjective experience is what we’re pursuing here in our studies, along with whatever objective knowledge we can find. Modern Heathens are working toward modern understandings, both personal, and shared common understandings, about many aspects of our religion, and learning more about the afterlife, if any, of the souls is part of that great effort.
Exercise 3-8: Ferah during your Childhood
Read the section on “Development and Psychology of the Ferah” in the assigned reading. I see Ferah as being a very strong, up-front soul during the active years of our childhood. I had a great enlightenment experience when I realized this, realized that so many of my treasured childhood experiences and memories were rooted in Ferah and its interface with Nature. What I recognize now as my ‘Ferah-Habitat’ was, in my childhood, the treasure of my life, both inner life and outer life, though I could not have put all this into words.
Spend some time attuning with your Ferah in its habitat. Then, travel back in memory to your childhood, if this is a safe thing for you to do. If it is not, please ignore this exercise. But if it is safe for you, ask your Ferah to guide you toward memories where it played a big role, had a great influence in your experience of life.
There are several layers to the purpose of this exercise. One is to recognize your own Ferah and the role it plays in your life. Another is to enter into the joy that Ferah can bring: the simple joyfulness of being a child, filled with the bubbling energy of Life itself. I hope that you had such experiences as a child, and can find them again in this exercise. I also hope that if you have lost access to that simple joy in life, you decide now in partnership with your Ferah to rediscover this path of delight.
Summary of Ferah, with Further Meditations
Here is a short summary of the Ferah, and some guidelines for focusing or meditating on Ferah. These are ‘chunks’ of Ferah characteristics for you to consider and meditate on, one by one, in the process of becoming more familiar with this soul.
Ferah is life-force, sparked by lightning, grounded in trees and Earth, permeated by the vibrations of thunder. Our heartbeat and all the electrochemical and biomagnetic activities of our body reflect these powers.
Ferah is a subtle substance that fills our body. Our senses, sensations and feelings, and our instincts related to these things, are located in this substance as well as in our physical body and brain. Ferah, body and brain (and imagination) work together to pick up, process, interpret, and react to all our senses, sensations, feelings, and instincts related to these.
Ferah is a being with thoughts, understanding, emotions, wisdom. Our reactions to the things we sense around us are the work of Ferah, who guides us in this way as we navigate life in the physical and social worlds.
Ferah is not our only guiding soul, not the only soul who participates in our everyday life. Ferah’s guidance and participation relate especially to these things: our use of our senses and how we react to what we sense. Our perceptions of the laws, rhythms, and patterns of nature and natural life, including the life force that flows through us and all living beings. Our willingness to enter into relationships with our Deities, to follow a path of Heathen-style piety and devotion towards Deities and natural powers.
I suggest rereading the section “Development and Psychology of the Ferah” in the assigned reading, paying attention to the role of Ferah in childhood, and the distortions that Ferah can develop when it is mistreated or not well-nurtured. With its highly-developed environmental sensing functions, if Ferah is exposed to a damaging environment (especially during defenseless childhood), our Ferah, and we ourselves along with it, can develop excessive fears and phobias, become hyperalert and overreactive, and develop negative coping mechanisms to deal with these problems, such as slyness, cruelty, deceptiveness, withdrawal, neuroses, etc. These are important matters to meditate upon, to better understand ourselves and our life, but I realize that for some of us these issues may not feel safe to enter into more deeply. Use your own judgement about what is the wise course for you. Don’t meditate on matters in this paragraph if you feel it would be harmful for you.
If you do pursue meditation on the preceding paragraph, and find that you have significant damage to your Ferah, look through this summary and go back to the Ferah article, and pick out some of the strengths of Ferah that you can use as healing meditations. For example: Ferah’s connection with the life-force; with the invigorating and re-tuning vibrations of thunder; Ferah’s deep connection with the forces and rhythms of Nature and with our Deities, especially those of Earth and Sky powers.
Perhaps the most healing activity you can do with your Ferah is get to know it and value it. All of us feel healing and renewal of life, when someone else takes the trouble to know us deeply, cares about us, about our character, our life-history, our challenges, and offers love and support for our healing. You can do this yourself, with your conscious mind offering this blessing to your wounded Ferah. This is one way (among many) to understand Odin’s sacrifice of himself to himself, hanging upon the Tree. Ferah is connected with trees, with sacrifice, with Deities, with suffering (through its sensing abilities which can be overwhelmed by suffering). It is also connected with powerful life-force and with wisdom, both of them great supports for the healing process. By offering ‘your conscious self’ to ‘your Ferah self’ in service for healing, you recreate one kind of power that Odin the healer generates for us, hanging upon the Tree of Life.
As we grow throughout our lives, and especially as we strive to live good Heathen lives, our Ferah grows in power and wisdom. We become feraht, wise and powerful in the ways of our Ferah soul.
Focusing your Awareness on Ferah
You can use these summary paragraphs as meditation-seeds in your quest to get to know your Ferah. Choose one, focus your awareness on it for as long as is useful, and record what you’ve learned in your Daybook. Then choose another paragraph to do the same. When you have worked through all of them (or as many as you choose), then begin meditation to get a sense of how they all fit together into a living, complex being.
Once you have done all this, you should be in a good position to begin to actually recognize this soul in yourself, and feel some ability to interact with it, get to know it, and work more consciously with it. Be sure to continue recording your insights in your Daybook. I think you can see what I mean, about our souls being complex beings. It really is useful to have our Daybook to keep track of all we’re learning about them.
As you’re working on these exercises, meditating and writing, you may very well find your Ferah ‘writing notes to you’ as you work in your Daybook. By this I mean that you will have a sudden understanding, not something you laboriously figured out, but an “Aha!” moment about Ferah as you write. It is so great when that happens! Something inside you, some insight, just suddenly presents itself to your conscious mind, and the activity of writing often seems to stimulate such events. Your Ferah, or any of the other souls as you work on them, knows you’re focusing on it as you write, and seizes the opportunity to communicate directly with you.