I am also a Practitioner of Norse/Teutonic Shamanism
This is some of the things I have learned in my journey.
The Ordeal Path is probably the most frightening of all these Paths to the outsider looking in. It uses pain, fear, suffering, and discomfort for the purposes of achieving altered states, coming out of them, creating energy for magical work, cleansing, breaking down internal barriers, and offerings to the Spirits. From a distance, it looks horrifying, especially to people of our modern culture who see all pain as something uselessly awful to be avoided at all costs. People who inflict pain on themselves, or help someone else to create pain, are seen as sick and dangerous. But to our ancestors, it wasn't necessarily like that.
I remember being a child and seeing a film in my school about the history of Native American peoples, and it briefly mentioned the Lakota Sun Dance and included snapshots of a century-old illustration. It was dramatic and bloody, with braves hanging on hooks from the rafters of a tipi-like structure, their faces contorted with pain. I can still remember the squeals of disgust from the other kids around me. Not only could we not imagine something like that happening, we couldn't imagine anyone doing it and living. To us kids in that classroom, that kind of apparent damage might be fatal, and the idea of deliberate self-inflicted suffering was incomprehensible...yet many of those same children went to a church every Sunday where the main figure on the altar was a crucified, suffering man.
Yet we have our own such icons in the northern tradition, the most obvious being Odin who traveled as a beggar on the roads, learned seidhr painfully in skirts, tore out one of his own eyes and threw it in Mimir's well, and ended up hanging in agony on the World Tree for nine days. There is also his counterpart and blood brother Loki, who is repeatedly imprisoned, tortured, starved, has his mouth sewn shut, and is raped by a stallion, just to name a few of his adventures. Fenris is chained and stabbed, and Tyr has his arm bitten off for the safety of his tribe. Frey walks willingly to the fields every year to be ritually sacrificed for the fertility of Vanaheim. Iduna is imprisoned, turned into a nut, and rescued by flight. Both Angrboda and Gullveig (who may or may not be Freya) are burned three times over. Baldur is pierced with mistletoe, Loki's son Vali is turned into a ravenous wolf who then kills his brother, and there are many more tales like these. The Northern myths are full of bloody sacrifice, whichever way one turns.
Of course, just because a deity goes through a sacred mythic ordeal, willing or unwilling, does not mean that everyone who works with that deity ought to do the same. This Path is not for everyone, or even for most people, and that's as it should be. On the other hand, if an ordeal is necessary, there is greater power in linking that ordeal ritual to the paths blazed by the bloody footprints of a God in pain, if only by doing it in their honor. Linking it in this way draws divine power into it, gives it greater depth, and can take you much further than going there alone. Being suspended on hooks from a living tree has its own power, as does being cut, bound, beaten, and buried in the Earth for a time, or being bound with chains while one wrestles with one's inner wrath. However, when those rites are done in the name of Odin, or Frey, or Fenris, with attention paid to details that bring the experience closer, the rite becomes transpersonal - done not just for one's self but for the Cosmos as well. If it is done publicly, the people who choose to witness are blessed with further understanding as well.
I should disclaimer right now that the sort of applied pain and discomfort that best serves the purposes of the Ordeal Path is not that which is most injurious. In fact, serious injuries tend to put one into shock, which is not an altered state that is easily usable for magical purposes. Instead, the best sort of pain for the job is that which gives the body just enough sensation to set off the right brain chemistry, sustained over a period of time, but not enough to do any permanent damage. For purposes of this chapter, "non-injurious pain" is defined as something that does not leave any damage that can't be easily healed up over a period of days without professional medical help. A cutting or branding may leave a scar, a flogging may leave bruises and welts, a tattoo is clearly a deliberate mark, but none of these will impair the person's daily functioning in any way, provided that the work is done skillfully on the right areas of the body.
For a concentrated look on the spirituality and techniques of the Ordeal Path that is more than this small chapter can cover, we encourage folks to get a copy of Dark Moon Rising: Pagan BDSM and the Ordeal Path from Asphodel Press. This is the first major text about how this path is done deliberately in a pagan-religious context, and while it is not northern-tradition per se, there are a lot of useful spiritual techniques and thought-provoking ideas from its various authors that are worth reading for anyone going into this kind of work. It also goes into much greater detail about how to create ordeal rites for people.
When it comes to actually learning how to do the physical techniques of this path - whipping, cutting, tattooing, branding, piercing, hook suspension, etc. - there is no way to learn this properly from books. Please, please find people who are skilled in these techniques and properly apprentice to them. It dishonors the techniques and those who passed them on to us to hack through them sloppily; they should be done carefully and with the proper training, and with attention to detail and to sterile procedure. The latter, too, is very important. Believe me when I say that if our ancestors had been able to procure rubbing alcohol, Technicare, and sterile packaged implements, they would have used them. Getting an infection from a poorly sanitized ordeal rite is a bad omen and does no honor to Those whom we serve. Remember that this is the Path that is second only to the Path of Sacred Plants when it comes to the ability to kill the body or put someone in the hospital, and move with respect.
It should go without saying that a spirit-worker should never do an ordeal for a client if they aren't skilled in the techniques that the client requests, even if it sounds like what is needed. If it's that important, find someone else who can do it and send the client over, or team up with the person who can do it. For example, I am not a tattoo artist, but I've run rituals for people who wanted sacred tattoos, with me directing what was happening and the actual work being done by a Pagan tattoo artist who had the equipment and the skill.
On the other hand, there are ordeals that can be done without learning physical-trauma skills. One example might be a fear/trust ordeal, where someone is blindfolded and led through a dangerous area by a guide, or just into parts unknown in order to do something unexpected. Another might be having other people embody and say aloud the things which you fear to hear, or which trigger you, in a space where you are honor-bound to stay and hear it and not lash out. Ordeals can also include simple endurance rather than pain - for example, climbing a mountain to do a rite, or standing vigil and praying for a long period of time, or trance dancing for hours. Many of techniques of the other Paths, if done well past the point of comfort, become part of the Ordeal Path as well.
The most important thing to remember with ordeal-work is that it is meant to take you beyond your ego, not simply fluff it up. While some ordeals can give you increased confidence in yourself and your power, if there wasn't a point somewhere in it that was completely humbling, you didn't do it right. Ideally, you should eventually get to the point where the part of you that is ego is irrelevant. That's one of the way that the Ordeal Path resembles the Ascetic Path (and indeed there are places where they combine). The Ascetic's Path works with small, gentle, inexorable steps, and its focus goes inward into stillness, while the Ordeal Path takes great painful ripping steps, and its focus goes outward into a scream...after which one passes out of one's collected muck and finds a place of stillness. In the end, the Wheel of these Eight Paths all lead to the central hub, that place that we may not be able to adequately describe in words, but we all know when we've been to it.
SIN EATER
A sin-eater is a traditional type of spiritual healer who uses a ritual to cleanse the dying of their sins. The sin-eater absorbs the sins of the people he or she serves and typically works for a fee. As the sins are usually consumed through food and drink, the sin-eater also gains a meal through the transaction. Sin-eaters are often outcasts, as the work may be considered unsavory and is usually thought to lead to an afterlife in hell due to carrying the unabsolved sins of others. The Roman Catholic Church regularly excommunicated sin-eaters when they were more common, not only because of the excessive sins they carried, but also because they infringed upon the territory of priests, who are supposed to administer Last Rites to the dying according to Church Doctrine.
The sin-eater saves the dying not only from hell, but also from wandering the earth as a ghost - thereby performing a service for the living as well. In some traditions, sin-eaters perform their work for the moribund, while in others, the ritual takes place at the funeral. The sin-eater is usually associated with the British Isles, but there are analogous customs in other cultures as well.
A sin-eater typically consumes bread as part of the ritual of taking on the dying person's sins. He or she may also eat salt or drink water or ale. Sometimes, special breads are baked for the purpose of the sin-eating ritual, perhaps featuring the initials or image of the deceased. The meal is sometimes passed over the dead or dying body or placed on its breast to symbolize its absorption of the person's sins. The sin-eater may also recite a special prayer.
Some cultures have customs that are similar to sin-eating and may have evolved from more traditional forms of the ritual. Instead of a designated, outcast sin-eater serving a village, for example,
the deceased's nearest relatives may perform the service, as was once traditional in Bavaria and the Balkan Peninsula. In the Netherlands and some parts of England, ritual baked goods were given to the attendants or pallbearers at a funeral. This latter tradition lived on for a time in New York. Today, the custom of the sin-eater has largely died out, though it is often referenced in popular culture.
The "Pennsylvania Dutch" Art of Pow Wow Medicine
When I was a child I had a growth that my Great Grandmother tried to remove for me using the methods of Pennsylvania Dutch pow wow medicine. She was a practitioner in a very small way, one of probably thousands of Pennsylvania Dutch men and women who used the techniques of pow wow to treat minor ailments of their friends and family. She was not one of the pow wow healers like the Early American "Mountain Mary" or--much closer to our time--"Aunt" Sophia Bailer, whose fame resounded throughout the whole of Pennsylvania Dutch country.
So how did her treatment of me work out? Unsuccessfully. She thought I had a wart, which is what she was treating me for. It turned out to be a vascular tumor, which was later removed by surgery.
This does not mean pow wow medicine is a joke, or should be dismissed as one. Often it was the only treatment poor people had access to--all the more because it was generally known that healers in the tradition were not supposed to accept money.
Sometimes, whether because of inherent magic or because of the placebo effect, there were outstanding cures. Which is about all that can be said about modern medicine, when you come to think of it.
Well, what IS pow wow medicine, anyway? Pow wow medicine is flashes of lightning in a dark forest. This is just a metaphor. What it means is that almost nothing you can say about it will not be contradicted by someone. I am trying here to follow the views and theories of two distinguished Pennsylvania Dutch scholars, anthropologist David W. Kriebel and folklorist Don Yoder. They spent years studying the subject, and know more than I do.
So, here goes.
Pow wow is a kind of folk medicine using spells, herbs, laying on of hands and the like, which is believed to have been brought to Pennsylvania around 1710 by immigrants from what is now Germany. It has nothing to do in its origins with American Indians--and not even in its name. To its original practitioners it was known as Brauche, which means "practice" as in professional practice, or "use" as in custom. Unless you speak German or have studied it, you will more or less have to take my word that "Brauche" could be taken for "pow wow"-- it IS pronounced something like "BROW-kheh". So, draw your own conclusions.
This does not mean that pow wow NEVER took on American Indian features. It may well have done things like adapt American herbs and borrow from American Indian rites. But in its origins it was purely European.
Is pow wow medicine good or evil? Yes!!! Which means, "It depends on who you ask." For some people it is indistinguishable from witchcraft, (or hex) and thus evil. For other people--including my late Great Grandmother and, I suspect, the majority of practitioners, pow wow is on the side of “Good” and provides an opportunity to do good. A few famous practitioners were reputed to try to play both sides.
I am a Diesel Mechanic by trade.
