Category Archives: History/Deep History

“If it is a Full Moon, you will want to bring the Goddess energy into the Circle….it produces an altered state of consciousness…There are…several ways of accomplishing this.

“One way is for [a] dance to be undertaken with “calls”. Now calls for the most part, are vowels only….”calls” are all vowels strung together in certain ways. They also need to be trilled or vibrated when vocalised, it is the vibrations in the ether that makes them work. 

” ‘I-A-O’, is one such call for the Goddess. The sounds have to be made ‘long’. ‘I-I-I-Ay-Ay-Ay-O-O-O-O’, that sort of sound needs to be trilled.  Another one is ‘O-A-U-E-I’….

“[The] silver web vibrates to thought in a lesser degree, and to sounds in a greater. The vibrating of the web on particular parts, produces certain results. So trilling out sounds that are associated with the Goddess or the feminine energies, will vibrate on that part of the web where that particular energy resides.”

– – – Rhiannon Ryall, Celtic Lore and Druidic Ritual, p10-11

This was a regular part of O’Sensei’s warm-up routine…

…and remembering that the Mongolians who swept down through Korea into Japan, and settled there as the Yayoi – which is what the aDNA tells us – were the South Eastern end of the Bronze Age world system, and that the maritime routes of the Nordic Bronze Age – with the early Insular Celtic and whatever other languages, pidgins and Creoles they were speaking – were the North Western end of the Bronze Age world system…

…and later, where the warrior-fraternities gathered individually for well-fashioned metal, and age-old worship, in the Val di Camonica, Freya’s name – which is spelled PUEIA at Bedolina by a Celtic or Etruscan scribe whose mother-tongue rolled their ‘R’s vigorously, and who knew that the Northern tribes pronounced their ‘P’s as ‘pf’ – … 

…is spelled PRIAUIUI with a little help from Nature, on Rock 1,  Pioggia della Croce in Berzo-Demo

…thus using additional vowels, but also using only the sacred, original three vowels – the vowels of Shiva -…

And on other rocks in the Val di Camonica we find just such sequences of five vowels, including precisely the sequence that O’Sensei would have recognised as the Amatsu Sugaso sequence that he normally used in public (just one time, at his sacred home in Iwama, Saito Sensei records him using the even more sacred Amatsu Futonorito sequence (AIEOU))…

Understanding the magical, or alchemic thinking that was the way our ancestors thought is hugely important to interpreting archaeology: and even more so now that archaic DNA is providing ever more clarity and detail as we look at the most recent millennia of European prehistory. 

To one who practises the ancient Japanese nature worship that has been robustly – and institutionally – preserved to the present day, it is obvious that a stele at the entrance to a barrow is a go-shintai: the physical container for the soul of the spirit/divinity that in this case is the recently passed-over ancestor who has, through ritual and ceremony, been enabled and empowered to become a strong protective divinity for the tribe. 1)  This last explains all the various places that barrows are seen to have been erected. And that a stele is a go-shintai of someone hopefully protective, explains all the various places we find stele, and all the various things that have happened to them in the way of re-use, and what looks to us like ab-use.

The secretly preserved ways of East Anglian craft and magic 2), with their unusual emphasis on bones, in the part of England most purely Angle, and least apparently Celtic, give us an insight into the way that we see human remains were treated – and utilized – in the European megaliths. And make very clear that cremation and urn-burial are a super-protective way to stop unwanted use and manipulation of the ancestor’s bones – the urn itself can be magically empowered (in fact, any fabricated or found object as a matter of course would be magically empowered) and the simple selection of bones, let alone the mingling with the bones of a favorite horse, would make it very hard for anyone to find a specific bone, which is always what East Anglian magic requires, animal or human. The exception, of course, is the skull, which for that reason plays such a huge part in Celtic magic, and has, too, a significant rôle in Norse legend.

And the West Country and Welsh crafts and magic 3) are very clearly cognate with the imagery on the comparatively recent SW Iberian stelae (Tartessian/Cunetai) masterfully catalogued and analysed  4) by Richard J. Harrison (of Bell Beaker fame). 5)  And a familiarity with the magical way of thinking brings additional insight: shields are so prevalent, more so even than human figures, because the purpose of the stelae is to be protective.  The most depicted objects (weaponry and a cauldron) are identical to the drawing in a recent book by a West Country wise woman… 6) She explains each object as symbolizing one of ‘the four Islands of the Tuatha de Danaan’. These ‘original Celtic Magical Weapons are as follows: Island of Finias: Fire, South, SPEAR / Island of Falias: Earth, North, SHIELD / Island of Murias: Water, West, CAULDRON / Island of Gorias: Air, East, SWORD’. 7)

And the other most common object is a mirror: obviously used for scrying, just as Íth Son of Breogan first saw Ireland from the top of an Iberian tower, on a cold Winter’s day, before setting out with the Sons of Míl: ‘Íth mac Bregoin atchonnaire hÉrinn ar tús, fescor gaimrid, a mulluch Túir Bregoin…‘ 8)

1) This is the enterprise, too, of the largely contemporaneous – and much re-used – Pyramid Texts in ancient Egypt. 

2) Secrets of East Anglian Magic, by Nigel Pennick

3) West Country Wicca: A Journal of the Old Religion, by Rhiannon Ryall;  Celtic Faery Shamanism, by Catrin James; 

4) Symbols and Warriors, Western Academic & Specialist Press 2004

5) The Beaker Folk,  Thames and Hudson, 1980

6) Celtic Lore and Druidic Ritual, by Rhiannon Ryall, p.138

7) ibid. pp.39-40

8) Lebor Gabála  Erenn, section 379

There are a handful of places in the British Isles where continuous tradition has been maintained since pagan times: Wessex, rural Wales, the Fen country, remoter parts of Ireland… 

The traditions of the Fen country, current in many parts of East Anglia, are unique for preserving elements of that Germanic culture of the Mother Goddess worshipping tribes mentioned by Tacitus in Germania: the Angles were one of these tribes, and in East Anglia there seems to be less culturally Celtic admixture than elsewhere in England, possibly because of Boadicea’s defeat at the hands of the Romans, and the subsequent slaughter of the tribe. 

In any case, when we hear that when receiving healing or blessings at a holy well, “the guardian spirit of the well is invoked, the water is drunk, and an offering, such as a coin or bent pin, left behind” 1) we can only think of all those two thousand year old watery depositions of coins and bent swords – and other pointy objects…

* *

And the “ga-ga-ga” formula of the Kragehul spear… well, of course, ‘ga‘ and ‘gae‘ are Old Irish for ‘spear’, and ‘dja‘ is Ancient Egyptian for their bronze-tipped spear… But more than this: Kragehul is on the sacred island of Funen, just off shore from where the Angles were, and very much part of that Mother Goddess worshipping area – and ‘ga!” finds an echo in the standard conclusion of the East Anglian charms reported by Nigel Pennick 2): “Ka!”  He reports: ‘With the final ‘Ka!‘ , we put full concentration into the meaning of the words, and the [specific action that is being performed].’ 3)

If we assume that this “Ka!” is pronounced with considerable aspiration, and that the Old Norse “g” also had a guttural, fricative quality, then this East Anglian “Ka!” was also used by Ben Jonson, in a masque he wrote for Queen Caroline and her ladies to pretend to be witches: the ‘Seventh Charm’ for instance: 

Black go in, and blacker come out:

At thy going down, we give thee a shout.

Hoo!

At thy rising again, thou shalt have two,

And if thou dost what we would have thee do,

Thou shalt have three, thou shalt have four,

Thou shalt have ten, thou shalt have a score

Hoo! Har! Har! Har!

As Ben Jonson wrote in his preface, the witches in the play have ‘their shouts and clamors, as also the voice har, har, har very peculiar with them’.

Ben Jonson, of course, was a member of Shakespeare and Burbage’s company, and they most definitely did have some inside information on the ways of witches…   

And, most interestingly, one more Yeneisian-Old English connection in the magical/sacred register: a South Kettish exclamation, ‘hu-ha‘, reported as meaning “My God!” 4)

This would mark “ga-ga-ga” as being hunter-gatherer magic, through the Pitted Ware Culture, thus, in Old Norse terms,  seidr rather than galdr, and more typically womens’ magic: though Frigga did teach seidr to O∂inn. So it makes perfect sense to find this charm on a spear!!! And perfect sense that this spear was used as a sacred offering…

And in view of the early runic tendency to write on an object magically the name of the object itself, or of the substance of that object – it may not be insignificant that in Old Irish the ‘spear’ itself is called a ‘gae‘!!!

1) Secrets of East Anglian Magic, by Nigel Pennick, p.212

2) ibid pp.121-2, 135, 141, 144, 175-8, 181, 185, 187, 214

3) ibid p.135

4) Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der Jenissej-Sprachen, by Heinrich Werner, vol.3, p.359

Now, the set of Aettir implied by the Kylver stone’s ‘Uthark’ version of the rune-row, have a profound emotional and spiritual flow:

Ūr – Starting out with an awareness of our deep, primal origins, 

*Thorn – through struggle with adversity, and working with what nature brings,

Ōs – we reach the divine,

Rad – and thus can embark on a ‘way’.

Kēn – Whereupon, accumulating glimpses of light and enlightenment,

Gyvu – we perceive that fullness is in the constant exchange of gifts, that the earth brings

Wen – which brings us to bliss

Haegl – so that as we perceive the multiplicity of interconnected adversities…

    The second Aett enumerates each of the virtues accessed by understanding the Web of Wyrd – mind-states from each of the cultures that came together on the sacred islands:

Nyd – …we become aware of a web of becoming… the flow of divine energy and of necessity…. a Silver Web…

Īs – we find we can become calm, cool, have hunter-gatherer mind, zen-mind…

*Jēr – and be at one with every moment, every phase of the changing seasons of the ever-flowing year…

Pēordh – we can see the play of serendipity in music… in gathering food… in finding each other…

Ēoh – and we know the profound properties of the Yew… wood that comes together with a blade and protects from a blade: an amulet, an axe-handle, a bow… The eternal unchanging. We carve it as a pothook, and we place it at the sacred, warming, nourishing heart of the house…

Eolhx– we know that the wisdom of the woodlands is our well-being and protection, embodied by the great White Stag…

Sigel – and we watch the sun, do magic with the myriad divisions of the solar year. We hold the sun in a piece of gold…

Tir – …and honor the divine warrior, who can think and act for the many, for the tribes: and all in the service and protection of… 

    The third Aett  honors the gods and great spirits – from each of the cultures who come together on the sacred island – who gather round and support the Mother Goddess: 

Beorc – the birch-tree, Frigga, Freya, the Great Mother, the opening of buds… purification, regeneration and fecundity…

*Ehwoz – the all-wise horse, marked by the Goddess, and our co-equal companion. As Tacitus said: ‘knowing the minds of the gods’…

Man – man as a team-member…as sexy beast…man as a force of creation…

Lagu – The lake and Lugh and the leek… guardians on the hilltops, travelers and guides, seekers of wisdom, and talking to the ancestors… at the well of life… trying to deepen ‘the eternal unchanging’…

Ing – The golden harvest as the fire of the sun transmuted… and caught in an ear of grain… We roll a wheel of fire down from the mountain top…

Daeg – time arrayed in the blessings of daylight: the blessings of life itself…

Ethel(Adali) – the strength of the farmhouse, where all are assembled…

Feorh – Vitality… the fir… and the Tree of Life…

    The second Aett enumerates each of the virtues accessed by understanding the Web of Wyrd – mind-states from each of the cultures that came together on the sacred islands:

Nyd– we become aware of a web of becoming… the flow of divine energy and of necessity….

Īs – we find we can become calm, cool, have hunter-gatherer mind…

*Jēr – and be at one with every moment of the changing seasons of the changing year…

Pēordh – we can see the play of serendipity in music… in gathering food… in a roll of a dice… in making love…

Eoh – and we know the profound properties of the Yew… wood that unites with a blade and protects from a blade: an amulet, an axe-handle, a bow… We carve it as a pothook, and we place it at the sacred, warming, nourishing heart of the house…

Eolhx – we know that wisdom is protection, embodied by the great horned elk…

Sigel – and we watch the sun, do magic with the myriad divisions of the solar year. We hold the sun in a piece of gold…

Tir – …and honor the divine warrior, who can think and act for the many, for the tribe: and all in the service of… 

The third Aett: honors the gods and spirits – from each of the cultures – who gather round and support:

Beorc – the Mother Goddess…the birch-tree… Freya, Frigga… purification, regeneration and fecundity… 

Now, the set of Aettir implied by the Kylver stone’s ‘Uthark’ version of the rune-row, have a profound emotional and spiritual flow:

Ūr – Starting out with an awareness of our deep, primal origins, 

*Thurs – through struggle with adversity

Ōs – we reach the divine,

Rad – and thus can embark on a ‘way’.

Kēn – Whereupon, accumulating glimpses of light and enlightenment,

Gyvu – we perceive that fullness is in the constant exchange of gifts,

Wen – which brings us to bliss

Haegl – so that as we perceive the multiplicity of interconnected adversities

      second Aett:

Nyd – we become aware of a web of becoming… the flow of divine energy and of necessity….

But now, what about the ubiquitous triplet of pine-needles?…

Not only is it present in the Elder Futhark – and the Uthark – as the *Algiz rune, pronounced ‘z’, originally… But it is has the value ‘s’ in many Camunic Valley inscriptions, and in Locrian. Some linquists reconstruct a Proto-Celtic word : *sappos: there is certainly the Latin for ‘fir’ or for ‘a variety of pine’: sappinus, and a Middle-Welsh word for ‘fir’ or ‘pine’, sybwydd. Linquists also reconstruct a Proto-Celtic word *su-wid, meaning ‘wise’. 1)

All of which suggests that in some of the Northern Italian scripts, too, individual signs had emblematic names… Just as in the rune-rows and in Ogham…

And which also suggests that learned folk responsible for some of the Camunic Valley rock carvings and inscriptions, and those who put together the Elder Futhark (and Uthark) were well aware of possibly many varieties of lenition and of circumstances where it was felt to be simply allophonic. 

And possibly they thought of the broader Germanic dialect continuum as merely deep dialects of North-west Indo-European/Pre-proto-celtic, and were inclined sometimes to write the etymological original: such as, up at Bedolina, accompanying a rock-engraving of a small unit of young men, on the edge of woodland, the word ‘PUEIA‘ (reading right-to-left), which some scholars have related to the Germanic goddess ‘Freya’, but which could also be a way of writing ‘fjör‘ or ‘feorh‘. And, indeed, a sign related to the putative Kylver stone version of *Fehu stands next to it:

And this learned way of thinking about writing sounds and their etymology is still current in the Celtic world, in Modern Irish orthography: first the actual sound is written, but  t h e n  the etymological letter: so that this PUEIA, if it means ‘Freya‘, or if it means ‘Fjörr‘, would as Modern Irish be written ‘fPUEIA‘, and the Germanic masculine singular case-ending where we usually see the *algiz-rune might be written ‘-azS‘.

1) The University of Wales’ English-ProtoCeltic wordlist…

To those of us who live in Northerly forests, it is immediately obvious that the sign the Kylver Stone apparently uses for *Fehu – transposed to the end of the rune-row we know as normal – is a sprig of fir needles – – – 

In summer and fall, fir trees drop these on the ground in front of us all the time. 

Now, in Old English *Fehu and ‘fir’ are near-homonyms 1),  and in Old Norse *Fehu and a poetic word for ‘the grand, sacred tree’ are near-homonyms 2),  and in    b o t h    languages there is a similar word meaning of ‘life-force,’ ‘vitality’…3)  which is so very natural for an Animist culture surrounded by evergreen forests.

Northern Eurasian shamanism tells us that the fir-tree is a protective presence – and in Old Norse, protective in particular of mothers… ‘Mothers’ Night’ (‘Modraniht‘) being a kenning for Yule… 4)

So the Kylver stone – which we believe was over an unknown burial – is letting us know that the ‘Feoh‘ (OE) rune has another sign and name and meaning: ‘Feorh‘ (OE) –  ‘fir-tree, life-force’ instead of ‘cattle, wealth’ – and that it comes at the  e n d  of the rune-row.

This is interesting because the earliest sizeable collections of Elder Futhark inscriptions are weapon-depositions in bogs in the approximate territory of the Angles – whose language became part of Old English, and who were one of the seven contiguous tribes that Tacitus tells us ‘share[d] a common worship of Nerthus, or Mother Earth’ and who ‘dwel[t] behind ramparts of rivers and woods’ 5).  And the modified set of Aettir implied by the Kylver stone’s re-ordering of the rune-row is distinctly matriarchal : the three Aettir are ruled by Ur, by the Norns, and by *Berkana…

*

The symmetries of the Elder Futhark and of the modified version, the ‘Uthark’, are such 6) that they neither can have arisen by chance… so a certain matriarchal spin to the ‘Uthark’, and a patriarchal spin to the Elder Futhark – for instance, in the Elder Futhark first and last runes are two of the only four Proto-IndoEuropean words in the row (!) – do suggest reasons for the two rows to have been created together, and with a hidden meaning…  All of which becomes less remarkable when we consider the internal characteristics of the various mystery religions which were prevalent within the Roman Empire at this time… particularly within military circles, where many Germans served as mercenaries.

*

So if *Fehu is really ‘Feorh‘, the ubiquitous fir-tree and the vitality it engenders, what of the other main tree in our Northerly forests?

Well, Anglo-Saxon Cen has an Old High German cognate, kien, which means both ‘resiny branch of pine, used as a torch’ and, quite simply, ‘pine-tree’.  And our pine-trees do have bundles of needles, which look like this:

…and on the ground they look like this:

…but what most often falls to the ground are a carpet of these:

far, far too ubiquitous for any kind of divination, but much more remarkable when they look like this (Cēn):

And the pine-trees also drop catkins which, on the ground, usually are bent in the middle, to look like this:

Very, very clearly this is the rune *Ken… Pine-tree and the light that it brings…

1) OE: feoh, fur–  

2) ON: fé (gen: fjár), fjörr

3) OE: feorh,  ON: fjör 

4) The Northern Shamanic Herbal, by Raven Kaldera p.98

5) Germania, chapter 40

6) Nightside of the Runes, by Thomas Karlsson

And this is what would explain the ubiquity of one-eyed gods in so many traditions: and many of them masters of disguise…

…the likelihood is that any piece of bark – or anything that nature presents to us – that we read as a face in profile will, on the reverse, have a differently located eye…

…or none at all!!!