landscape, meaning, paganisms and ancestors

Jenny Blainwww.sacredsites.org.uk

My focus

• paganisms and ‘reconstructionist’ spiritualities and identities

• landscape, contestation, sacred sites• shamanic practice and seidr• ancestors and relationships with these– the past in the imagination of the present– Heathenry and seidr– doing lowland Scottish family history

• tradition• authenticity• re-enchantment

as concepts used and elaborated by practitioners

• topophilia• heterotopic spaces• ‘new-indigenous’ relationships with landscape

Topophilia

• as component of personal/group identity and ‘belongingness’• narratives, stories of place, engagement with

spiritual meaning, ‘feelings’ about place

• knowledge of landscape• different knowledges• seeing with ‘other’ eyes• heterotopic• changing

Seidr

emerging as one of three ‘ritual forms’ in Heathenry(so-called oracular seidr)

but not only oracularlinks with ‘shamanic’ practice

Blain and Wallis in Brill Handbook of Contemporary Paganism (2009)

Blain in Pathways in Modern Magical Practice (forthcoming)Archaeology e.g. as described by Price (2001)different types of seid-practice today - Blain (2002) Lindquist (1997).

The ‘definitive’ work on pre-Christian seidr - Strömbäck (1935) (in Swedish)

Dubois (1999) has discussed links between seidr and practices of nearby ‘shamanic’ cultures, notably Sámi shamanism

Tolley’s two-volume work (2009) has made many descriptions of seidr accessible to English speakers

Seidr as ‘reconstructionist’ spirituality and practiceDid the seeress look like this?

(Image from Price, 2001)

In working seidr, you are entering a different landscape, a dreamscape, almost a fairly-tale –

who you meet there cannot be known in advancenot everything is as it may seemso, follow the rulesbe carefulbe politegive what is asked.

Different ‘feel’ of practice within different landscapes- fitting practice to place, engagement with place, landscape as culturing