by Sean Jobst
25 September 2020
Last Tuesday, I spent all afternoon hiking the trails in the nearby forests. These form part of the Talladega National Forest along the slopes of Mount Cheaha (2,413 ft / 735 metres), the tallest mountain in my state. Getting out on these trails remind me of how blessed I am to live at the southern foothills of Appalachia, for the alternative reality of life - what actually matters and will be truly sustained (not "sustainable") in the future - is within landscapes such as these and not some larger, "smart" cities the elites want to engineer as the new reality. Just as the events of 2020 have seen an acceleration of such schemes, we who have the insights to make and live our own parallel reality can and should accelerate our own efforts.
But such thoughts were not my main focus as I reflected on more primal matters of spirituality. For just as these forests - sacred and teeming with life - have withered all the storms (literal and metaphoric) over the centuries, so too will spiritual realities manifest no matter what goes on in the physical realm; the two are not always so easily separated however. Its also a reminder that travel restrictions being as they are in this "new normal" (upending my summer plans for the foreseeable future), the journey continues and often this journey need not take you physically far. There is wisdom and experience discernible all around and within you. So it was that I welcomed the coming of Autumn with these hikes....
The Autumn Equinox marks the year declining, a symbolic "death" as the days get shorter and the nights longer. Its midpoint between the longest day of the year - Summer Solstice - and the longest night of the year - Winter Solstice (towards the end of which I was born). Not surprising given how easily these changes are observable, the ancients placed great significance on these auspicious dates. For example, aligning various mounds and megaliths with these astronomical changes. From my own ethnic perspective, its my contention that we are not only descendants of Indo-Europeans but also the Neolithic peoples who built the great megaliths and left advanced, elaborate carvings and cave art. We are thus truly indigenous to our respective lands, so its only natural that landscapes would have such a powerful effect upon us.
"The vernal and autumnal equinoxes could have become early associated with man's quest for food in Ice Age Eurasia, where the migration of great animal herds and the appearance and disappearance of plant foods were vitally important to the advanced Homo sapiens groups who created Paleolithic iconography featuring bulls, stags, other animals, and plants in what appear to have been symbolic contexts." (Elizabeth Chesley Baity, et. al., "Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy So Far," Current Anthropology, Vol. 14, no. 4, 1973, p. 404)
Such natural and cosmic changes are also encoded within various Myths - a subject I took up in my series earlier this year: "Roots of Proto-Celtic/Germanic Mythos, folk faith in prehistoric Swabia?" Its also related to the findings by anthropologists and folklorists that fairy tales have prehistoric origins, not merely tales constructed by medieval societies. After a failed attempt to join an Asatru group in summer 2018, seeking the fellowship and support I knew was necessary as a new Pagan eager to practice but not fully knowing how (in some ways still holding on to too many fears and nervousness), and while rejecting out of hand the New Agesy inauthentic hodge-podge "Neo-Paganisms" divorced from the centrality of ancestors and landscapes, I was forced to look within to my own intuition, and find my own path. (No offense to adherents of either, for we must each find our own path). There were hard points on this journey but I quickly grew to find myself, for which I am grateful. Consistent study, Shadow Work, journaling, and meditation helped me in this process.
One of the crucial lessons I found was the importance of a living tradition that survived within folklore and folk-tales, even if Christianized these can be easily discernible down to their most authentic, primal symbolisms. The texts of latter-day Norse likewise has no meaning for me as one who is of Continental and not Scandinavian heritage - the long experiences of my ancient tribes that cannot be reduced to the experiences of another people crammed within a small time-period. Not only that but mine coming from regions - Flanders and Swabia - where Germanic and Celtic merged, in addition to a Spanish bloodline which is also largely Celtic; so I have to make some measure to recognize each. From a reconstructionist perspective, neither the Germanic or Celtic peoples "celebrated" the equinoxes and solstices, despite these modern neo-paganisms. But these were still crucial fixed points of the year to count the new and full moons around which the auspicious times were based - a perfect balance of lunar and solar as surely as the Autumn Equinox is this liminal time balancing light and darkness.
Forest hikes remind me of why I am on my spiritual path and that it was truly my ancestors and my primal self calling me. Getting out on these trails makes me even less able to understand why so many people confine their spiritual experience within the confines of some structure - and my ancient Germanic and Celtic ancestors recognized this, with the sacred groves and the forests being the places of the numinous. Seeing the majesty of Nature precludes an atheistic perspective for me, as I can feel and sense there is clearly a spiritual realm, with many mysteries that exist and aren't quantifiable. This is backed by recent scientific findings that confirm such things as multiverses and there being more than five senses.
These interplay of Natural, Cosmic, and Psychic (as in the psyche) forces confirms me within my Polytheism. This complexity cannot be reduced to one single monotheistic idea which in theory consolidates all power to one but in practice delegates those to lesser beings. All these forces manifesting the cycle of life, death, and rebirth solidifies me in the Animistic understanding that there is a consciousness within all things. At this time when wild fires are waging out on the West Coast, largely a natural reaction (coupled with some cases of arson) to decades of stifling "environmental" regulations divorced from such authentic natural practices as controlled burns to break down the decaying and create new life - making them more prone to wildfires spreading - I am blessed that our region has been spared such fires. As I hiked with every new sight, I was constantly reminded that all life is cyclical....
From the decaying trees nutrients seep into the soil; from the controlled burns and the natural fire (such as lightning striking the bark, recreated in the rubbing of sticks together for the fire which provides warmth and sustenance - Gebo Rune X) will be the ashes from which new life can arise. Amidst all this is also the various flowers which teem throughout these forests and I am reminded that biodiversity is truly a beautiful thing, just as in the diversity of cultures and peoples around the world living within their biospheres. I am reminded that in deeper regions of Appalachia further north, the folk medicine and folk lore of the hearty, resilient Scots-Irish people have been preserved - the old wisdom from the Highlands with some unique elements added to meet the challenges of a new landscape.
The landscape here in the Southeastern United States happens to be similar to the mountains, river valleys, and forests of my ancestral lands. This is something that we Americans of European descent who return to our ancestral, indigenous faiths (properly understood as the natural and balanced state of being) can resonate with. In my own case, I am finding that there is something within me that resonates with these forests; perhaps its because my great-great grandfather, Alois Schneider, worked for the forestry service around Schloss Baldern in the early 20th century. So there is something within my blood, perhaps my ancestral memories, that are switched on in the forests. This resonance is something primal that I wasn't aware of before this journey of the past few years but have since found solace. I am reminded that there were certain guardians of the forests within our history, and at times of crises like wartime our ancestors often found protection in the forests.
So often in these woods I have encountered deer - the primal animals of the forests whose "alertness" could be symbolized in our striving towards higher consciousness which expands to something larger while still being very primal, their expansive antlers much like the Algiz Rune which expands to the cosmos while being firmly grounded; wild turkeys, native to this continent and whose feather cloaks were worn by the indigenous Creek people of this region; hawks soaring high, much like they do within many European myths such as the one perched on top of the World Tree; and never-failing, the majestic ravens, nearly always in pairs of two much like those representing the "Thought" and "Memory" of Wotan, or the Irish Morrigan. Ravens have become quite prevalent in our foothills of southern Appalachia. On this calm beautiful day, I still experienced some moments of this wind or "Wode" energy. "O Wotan I hear you in the tranquil rustling of leaves, and in the wind of a full-blown storm"....
The forests are part of our immediate worldly realm, what continental Germans knew as the Mittilgart (equivalent to the more well-known Midgard of the Norse). It is the place where the various energies from different realms and realities come together, just as the individual is also part of Mittilgart - the world is within us as much as we are within the world. This is what is known in occult literature as the Law of Correspondence: "As Above, So Below. As Within, So Without." But this reality was so self-evident that the ancients did not need to name or even conceptualize it, simply encoding it within their traditions and balanced, animistic worldview.
"Of course, not everyone in central Europe was a farmer or shepherd at that time. Hunters and gatherers continued to survive in the vast forests. They did not see a contrast between nature and culture like the Neolithic farmers did; for them, the forest was neither strange nor dangerous, but an extension of 'home'. The idea of Midgard - a peaceful world, with a garden in the middle protected by the gods, surrounded by a perilous, external wild world (Utgard) - is based on this late Stone Age ideology." (Wolf-Dieter Storl. The Untold History of Healing: Plant Lore and Medicinal Magic from the Stone Age to Present. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2017, pp. 102-103)
Although not historically attested as a celebration day among the Celts, the name "Mabon" used by some Neopagans in relation to the Autumnal Equinox has some basis in Mythology. The figure of Mabon ap Modron, a hero-deity in both Welsh myths and Arthurian legends, could have derived from the Brittanic and Gaullish deity Maponos. He was "captured" three days after his birth and taken into the underworld. This could have agricultural and seasonal symbolism as with the Greek myth of Persephone (who also went into the underworld to which she returned in the winter months after harvest), but Mabon being a god personifying youth - much like the Germanic Balder, whom I earlier commemorated with a Blot in these same woods - could symbolize the constant cycle of birth, youth, old age, death, and rebirth. From a purely seasonal standpoint, Balder's "death" is an allegory for winter and his "rebirth" for summer. Much like Balder and Mabon, whose stories demonstrated the liminality between cosmic and chthonic, the forests are also conduits of these various energies.
Many of us are only a generation or two removed from the farming practiced by our recent ancestors, so harvest festivals and storing crops for winter may not appear relevant but such a view would be mistaken, as there are multiple layers of meaning to these seasonal turnings. This includes the interplay of darkness and light, lunar and solar. Celtic cosmology held that human beings were symbolically "created" from the Dark Soul, not of celestial deities but an underworld deity. It was only Christianity (and Abrahamism generally) that identified "darkness" and the underworld with something "evil". The ancients recognized that much "creation" - the manifesting of one's will and positive results - can come from the primal, chaotic energy of Darkness. The Darkness is generally a more settled and self-sustaining element within Nature than Light. Reflecting on the increasing Darkness marked by this season reminds me the Unconscious is the fixed, innate repository upon which our Conscious is built upon; a conduit connecting us to our Ancestors; and the link between different aspects of self.
"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious....Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." (Carl Jung, The Philosophical Tree, 1945; in Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 13: Alchemical Studies, Princeton University Press, 1967, Paragraph 335)
The liminal times associated with the seasons are also a mirroring of the changes within day and night. The spring festival of Ostara is associated with a Germanic goddess of the Dawn, the symbolic renewal of light and life within both daily and yearly cycles. Not too long after Ostara is a mysterious time auspicious in both Celtic and Germanic cultures - best known under the German name Walpurgisnacht - when the symbolic veils between worlds are "thinned". Not only does this conjure up images of the darkness present even at the height of spring (everything contains kernels of its opposite, the balance of Nature), but it could also reflect the pre-dawn hours of "Witching Hour" whose strange effects happen to be based in scientific and astronomical facts, i.e. cognitive functions changing based on the Earth's magnetic field and position from the Sun being at its most distant.
Within the historically-attested Celtic calendar year, the Autumnal Equinox is roughly between the festivals of Lughnasadh and Samhain, to borrow their Gaelic names although they would have been known under different names by other Celtic peoples. The god Lugh, known to the continental Celts as Lugus, had many qualities that convey this imagery of different realms - a lord of thresholds and pathways; traversing the dark times of the sky from sunset to sunrise; and the midpoint between the longest day of the year and the Equinox that begins the slow decline to Winter. Lugus has many shamanic qualities as a god of crafts, arts, and inspiration. His parallels with the Germanic Wotan includes such powers of inspiration, but also in Wotan's own ability to travel across different worldly realms - he is both associated with the Underworld, aspects related to death and rebirth, and the symbolic Wild Hunt that begins across the skies in this latter part of the year.
The etymology of Tuesday is derived from the Germanic god known to the continental Germans as Ziu (and as Tiw to the Anglo-Saxons and Týr to the Norse), so I honored him by wearing my Tiwaz Rune shirt, and broader spiritual aspects with my Helm of Awe and Triskele pendants. For me the Helm of Awe represents the nine worlds, with the eight points symbolizing different aspects of our self and psyche, with the ninth and center one representing our physical reality (Mittilgart) and how we work with those other worlds/aspects. I am reminded of this when I venture into these forests, with their various twists and turns, hidden treasures to be discovered, and as a meditative space. How does this symbolism relate to the Tiwaz Rune and the god Ziu in his various qualities?
I was also conscious to recognize the nature spirits as I do on these hikes; one way I do this is sprinkling some tobacco as this crop is commonly grown here in the Southeast. In honoring various land and nature spirits, tied to specific places, I've learned its best to use as an exchange with them (and its about a symbolic exchange) something that is native to their region. Not only with the Creek who were indigenous to this region, but also as I learned personally among the Lakota out on the Prairies, tobacco was used for ceremonial purposes; and I was honored with the gift of a prayer tie I have retained these last ten years since Pine Ridge.
Ziu is associated with order, justice, and balance - all principles that also manifest within Nature. What I witness in these forests is an internal law that all exist within it as part of balance; that even in its order there is chaos; and that everything is subject to cycles, as surely as life itself. Austrian occultist Guido von List associated September with "the weatherer" and "the generator of law", two qualities of Ziu. When the council (Thing) is held and justice decided, all the realms are further linked so that each may manifest this same cosmic or natural law: "Spirit and body, day and night, maintain their balance, gods and men deem that every sort of strife is put to rights and they come together for a common purpose; high-holy legal assemblies [things] are called, great popular assemblies are held, the fruits redden on the trees, the ears of corn become golden, the great general festival of the harvest draws near for gods and men alike." (Guido von List, The Religion of the Aryo-Germanic Folk: Esoteric and Exoteric, Runa-Raven Press, 2005, p. 17)
Not merely the social assemblies of tribes, the Thing "meeting, assembly" also carries ethereal meanings via its other meaning of "appointed time" whose etymology derives from the Proto-Indo-European *ten- "stretch, span, finite space", which also gave rise to Proto-Germanic *timo "time". I am reminded during this seasonal turning just how much celestial bodies were linked to reckoning time to the ancients. The Proto-Germanic *Tiwaz stems from a root referencing "heavenly radiance". Tiw in the Old English Rune Poem uses imagery of an ever-present star across the night skies. The Norse poem Hymiskviða names the "father" of Týr as the jotunn (giant) as Hymir, whose name is related to the Old Icelandic word huma "twilight, dusk". Its through these word-play that the allegories within Myths are most evident, and these convey deep truths about Cosmic and Natural forces. These forces are more clear to me on such reflective moments as forest hikes.
Old German iconography showed Ziu holding the Sun in one hand and the Moon in the other hand, so as "Sky Father" he ensures a balance of the two. French philologist and mythologist Georges Dumézil identified Ziu with Sovereignty within the tripartite functions he applied to Indo-European mythologies. He saw Ziu as representing the "light" aspect of society - exoteric values such as justice and order for all the tribe - and Wotan as representing the "dark" aspect of society - the esoteric, mysterious, shadowy realms, and inspiration. The two deific power-forces are to be balanced so one may truly know themselves. The "dark" for me conveys imagery of the Unconscious and the Shadow which are essential for any growth. Such were my thoughts this Equinox, the mid-point between the two Solstices.
From a celestial view Ziu is also related to the North Star, the star that provided guidance in the skies just as the keen observer in the forests can find their way through natural signs. Also known as the Pole Star, this relates to the Axis Mundi, a symbolic tree or pole that was allegorical to the natural and cosmic order. It was the conduit of Earth and Sky energies, just as we also channel these energies through our bodies. This is the concentration of those energies into one sacred space, but also a constant striving to awaken consciousness. The wind is an ever-present force during Autumn, as the changing color of the leaves fall to the ground in a natural symphony that involves this invisible yet manifest force. Its no accident that the Saxons of northern Germany also called their sacred Irminsul "screamer", with all that imagery conveys on an energetic level.
Perhaps the most well-known story about Týr within the Eddas is his sacrificing his right, sword hand to the ravenous wolf Fenrir. I am generally selective about the Eddas, first because as Norse records they are not necessarily how my Continental tribes viewed Ziu, and second being collected by a monk it contains alot of Christianization. The wolf is not the negative creature it was within Abrahamic lore, but I do think the story is valid from a purely allegorical standpoint. He represents that wild, striving side of us that yearns for inner chaos within a stifling order. With Autumn ushering in the "chaotic" forces of Winter, its also a reminder that the "wolf" must be kept at bay to ensure a balance - not succumbing fully to these seasonal forces. Similarly, the werewolf legends - "were" being synonymous in old language with "man", hence "man wolf" representing some kind of shamanic transformation - could be medieval embellishments of stories about people who lived outside the margins of society in the forests, preserving alot of the old wisdom and folk medicine. I am reminded once again of what can be found about ourselves in such an environment - As Within, So Without.
I finished my hiking late afternoon with some moments of reflection at Mount Cheaha. Simply meaning "high place" to the Creek people, its easy for me to see how many poets, novelists and artists across the centuries derived inspiration from mountains; how many others found peace and solace, even good health at these high places. From an esoteric standpoint, they were taken as liminal places joining Earth and Sky. One can easily see how the ancients appreciated both mountains and forests with awe, for example in landscapes like the Swabian Jura that was simply life for my ancestors. In a world ever-descending into absurdities and contradictions, especially with the craziness that has defined this year, these places are the most real and authentic - reflecting back with what truly matters within our selves. Its a reminder of the most primal and the most transcendent - and I definitely wouldn't have it any other way as I forge ahead in yet another turning of life's cycles.
"It is possible that the ancients, who ignored mountain climbing or only knew some rudimentary techniques (and therefore knew the mountain as an inaccessible and inviolable entity), were consequently lead to experience it as a symbol and as a transcendent spirituality. Considering that today the mountain has been physically conquered and that there are few peaks that man has not yet reached, it is important to keep the conquest from being debased and from losing its higher meaning. Thus, it is necessary that the younger generation gradually come to appreciate action at the level of ritual and that they slowly succeed in finding again a transcendent reference point. It is through this reference point that the feats of audacity, risk, and conquest as well as the disciplines of the body, the senses, and the will that are practiced in the immovable, great, and symbolic mountain peaks, lead men to the realization that all in man is beyond himself." (Julius Evola, Meditations on the Peaks: Mountain Climbing as Metaphor for the Spiritual Quest, Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1998, pp. 22-23)
