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 Introduction

Raven calls carrion cry

Gallows bent creakin,

Gentle clang o’ polished steel

Buzzard’s eye a’twinklin

-The Lay of the Outlaw Resurrected

There is a myth, which pervades all myth. Which rests at the core of all myth and
it is the heard of Indo-European culture, from India to Russia, Iceland to Italy, and
Britain to Iraq. The myth is simple; a man born of divine parentage, half human and
half god fights for his people, and wrests culture, divinity, life and joy from the lap of
the gods and brings it to those he loves, protecting them like a father, defending them
like a brother and often dying on their behalf. This myth at its core is about the Sun, it is
about divine hallucinogenic experience and it is about the internal battle every father,
son, husband and brother faces when he awakens to his masculine responsibilities. The
warrior of the myth is not a brigand, he is not a thief, a rapist, a liar or a cheat, although
at times he may do all of these things (and worse) to secure his victory in the story. He
is a moral creature in an immoral world, a creature of semi-divinity which has the
power to be totally immoral yet chooses to live under the rule of another or abide by the
laws of those who are his inferiors, those he chooses to call his family.

This is the myth of Fionn McCumhail, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, King Arthur of

Camelot, Beren son of Barahir, Indra, Odin, Zeus, Hercules, Romulus, Sigurd the
Volsung, Beowulf, Robin Hood, Roland, Jesus, Prometheus, Owain, Marko, Gareth,
Percival… the list is endless. One could say that this myth is Indo-European manhood
and from I t come all of our ideas of what it means to be a man, to be noble and to be
heroic.

In this book we will explore what these myths mean, we will explore what it
means for a man and a woman, what these role models are and how and why they
behave the way they do. We will uncover the secrets of the mythology of our past, and
rewrite the myth for the modern age, in our flesh and in our blood; what Tolkien did
with pen and tongue, we will do with iron and sweat.

However, the way it has been done in the past is the way it shall always be done,
and any differing of the method creates monsters. There is a pattern to the creation of

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the hero, he is not a brigand, a thug, a murderer, a rapist, and abuser, as we described
above. There is something altogether different about him. He pillages, he is violent, he
kills, he loves women and is loved by women, but he is something else entirely. The
creation of the hero often creates monsters as the myths often tell us, Mordred came
from the bowels of Arthur himself, but he is a demonic force of chaos that destroys the
Otherworldly kingdom of Camelot. Morrigu (The Morrigu or Morrigan is a tripartite
female deity of fatemagic and death, much like the three Norns or Furies in Norse or
Greek mythology) offers Cuchulain the gifts only the goddess can offer and when he
spurns her, she utterly destroys him and almost his entire country in the process. Sigurd
is tempted by power and it ultimately annihilates him, in the mirror of the story in
Turin Turambar the same happens over and over again. There is a taboo; an
untouchable chaotic force which rests at the centre of the heroic myth, and that is power.

Aragorn of the Dunedain is tempted by the same power, he temporarily lusts for
the One Ring, and yet refuses it, sending it to be destroyed, he knows its corruption and
its destruction should he choose to follow its speedy path to control and domination.
Yet ultimately through his refusal of ultimate power he ascends the throne of Gondor,
unites the kingdoms of men, defeats Sauron and has the victory over the Orcs (the
Anglo-Saxon word for demonic spirit, the antithesis to the noble elves/fae).
Contradictorily, even though Aragorn refused the power of the Ring he achieves
ultimate power through the ring of the crown of Gondor. There is a hinted route to
power, it is not violence, it is sacrifice.

This is the core myth at the centre of the Indo-European myth, the God who is
Lord of all should sacrifice himself for the good of the people and die and be reborn
anew. The myth is the tale of the Sun, he who rises to power each year to power and life
and then recedes into death, it is the tale of the Soma, the Emmanuel that dies and is
reborn when the storm god Indra/Thor/Perun battles the chthonic serpent and steals
the bread of life from the halls of heaven. Birth, life death, rebirth, these are the patterns
of the solar deity. The Indo-European myth is centered on these truths. That the
strongest among us should protect us and fight for us and die for us, that the nobility be
passed on, unspoken and unremembered, the time of valour without renown.

In the 21st century such ideas are laughed at. This is truly the era of the dimming
of the gods, the Kali Yuga comes to a sputtering end of the Iron Age snuffs out the last
remnants of any kind of nobility or sense of justice and heroism in the world. The only
way to abandon such concepts is to abandon the lies themselves. Abandon the 21st
century, abandon the myth of the endless advancement of capitalism, technology,
oppose the opposition to hierarchy and kingdom and beauty and truth, encourage

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elitism but be truly elite, truly heroic by looking ever upward and outward, not
backward and downward scorning what lies beneath you. Culture is a dead weight
which should be abandoned by the discerning and spiritual creature.

There is a war going on inside each and every one of us, it is a battle between the
higher self, the soul of the eternal one which has manifested as a human being in this
time, this life this body and the mundane fleshy creature which knows itself by a name
and hungers for sated pleasures, ignoble untamed, desiring and petty. The lower self is
oft described as the “ego”, the “I” that is bitter and twisted and malevolent and thinks
of nothing but itself, not for survival purposes which ore commendable but for low
desires mendacity. The higher self is oft described as the “soul”, the “I” that is
thoughtful and introspective, kind and gentle towards that which is weaker, thinking of
that which is all part of the same whole and how it can use its physical strength to
defend that which it loves. The core truth to the conception of power is that if you are
truly concerned only with power and seek to crush and oppress that which is beneath
you and weaker than you, you would rape and murder your own wife and children.
Why wouldn’t you? They’re weaker than you. Or would you stop someone who sought
to rape and murder you loved ones? Why? If they are weaker than you, why bother?
Shouldn’t you join with the other strong men who are entering your home and assist
them in harming those weaklings called women and children? No? Then you are
embodying the mentality of “soul” over “ego”.

The lower ego is the part of yourself that when faced with the beauty of a new
woman in your life, does not see a beautiful creature whom nature has gifted with good
physical form, a sweet voice and a kind disposition, but an opportunity to fuck. The
lower self wants to reduce everything to something it can feed upon or destroy, the
higher self seeks to elevate everything to an act of worship. The way you interact with
women is an ideal example, look to the heroes of old, the myths, see how deities behave
towards women and children; there are you examples, oft though they may be
contradictory and confusing.

This is the true warfare of the warrior, self-overcoming, self-destruction in the

fires of awareness of your own limitations and the shattering of those ideas of when we
stop, how we quit, when we give up and so on. The warrior who learns martial arts
ceases to concern himself with power or violence or the battle with an external force. He
suddenly sees that the opponent is actually himself, in every way that can be expressed.
The violent man opposite him represents his own fears and hatred, reflected back, he
faces his opponent not as an enemy but as a twin part of the same nature, an opposing
force presented to him by Wyrd to be destroyed as an act of self-overcoming. He does

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not seek the wanton destruction of his opponent as an animal does a rival lover, he
seeks first the destruction of his urges to survive, to needlessly and heedlessly continue
his existence for little more than “more minutes” upon the Earth. He chooses to survive
because he has a higher calling, to continue his battle with the self and all it
encompasses.

When you reach this stage in your training, as a human being, as person who
“works out” and as a martial artist, you abandon the act of War and begin studying the
art of War.

This is no longer about running, or jumping, or fighting, or surviving, or lifting

weights, it is about destroying the lower self and advancing to greater heights along
with the heroes of myth and legend.

That is the work which we begin with this book.

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 Chapter I – The School of Youth

Found m’self cruel gallows

Swayin breeze,

Gived up jeweled life

Softened pampered ease.

I have led an interesting life; my mythology has been adhering to a specific

pattern since the day I was born. That pattern came to fruition in my late teens, when I
met my teacher and Brother Tim. Everyone will have had this experience at some time
on their path through life. You meet a man or woman who is “further on” than you and
you feel you have found a companion and a master, as the saying goes, “when the
student is ready, the teacher will come”. My teacher taught through physical metaphor,
there was not a lesson I learnt or that we didn’t uncover together that was not shown
through physical experience of the world around me. This was no metaphysical
allegory of words and numbers and times and anecdotes, as even this book will
become, this was real life activity referring to spiritual and mental growth.

My teacher climbed an oak tree as if her were a monkey, limber spongy, fluid,
without difficulty, hopped into the air and scaled a huge hanging branch. He sat in the
tree and calmly told me, “The oak will only allow you to climb when you are ready.” I
fought and I struggled, screamed and thumped my chest, got psyched up and tried
over and over again, each time I failed. He would sit and laugh at me from the tree
watching me struggle, shouting now and then “stop trying”. This battle continued for
months until eventually I gave up, and for years I resented his mocking laughter, his
assertion that I wasn’t ready, that I stop and wait, get stronger and try again. But one
day, after he had died, I went to the tree, now his teaching had synthesized inside me
and I knew what he meant and I calmly hopped up, scaled the tree’s limb and sat where
he used to sit, laughing and crying as I accepted the task ahead of me.

The schooling of youth is a hard set of lessons and the task master is brutally
firm and unyielding. You are hungry for mastery, but the master is always older, he is
always wiser and he is always laughing at your feeble attempts to be as good as he is.

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 The greater and lesser battles of the internal self were laid out before me, not as
mental concepts but as physical realities.

 To conquer yourself, first you must master your darkest fears

 To conquer your external enemies, first you must master your physical
body
 To run with the alpha wolf, first you must be a pup and learn to fight
through playful and joyful experience.
 To lift heavy first you must learn to lift.
 To do 100 press ups, first you must learn to do 10

The lessons were all the same; time, patience, skill, concentration, patience and
more patience. Time is a weapon that the skillful use to best their opponents
before they’ve even landed a punch or lifted a bigger weight. If you are mentally,
spiritually and physically prepared to face your opponent he no longer has a
hold upon you, and the patience with which you trained manifests as the
extreme skill of the learned, not the hasty aggression of the weakling. As one of
the founders of this system remarked, the fool who continues in his folly will become
wise; true, and the fool who continues to lift heavy things and put them down
and practice the bare simplicities of the martial arts, will one day learn what it
means to be a warrior, if not in this life, then the next.

The way the adept learns is through acceptance of loss of grief and of
passing through successive layers of grieving until full detachment occurs. This
is most obvious and concurrent with the hallucinogenic or transcendental
experience, an experience that would have been required for the emerging
adolescent male in every historical culture, whereas female initiation is though
beginning of menstruation and childbirth. The girl reaches puberty and suffers
her first cramps, her first period and becomes a woman, the man has no such
experience, he has to be taken away from the group, into nature, by other men
and experience bloodletting by force of the knife. Women bleed so that they can
give birth and create life, men bleed so that they can kill in battle, to take life.
The archetypal initiation ritual is therefore a process of violence handed down
through the male line, father to son, brother to brother, which sets the boy up to
commit violence to protect his or his tribe’s interest. This process usually
involved a ritual death, a ritual burial of the boy and an emerging into light of
the adult male, thenceforth to be treated as an adult, killing of a specific animal
(wolf, tiger, bear, jackal etc), ingestion of a specific hallucinogenic plant or
mushroom, and meeting with death, or the devilish aspect of the tribe’s
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 pantheon, were all signs that the boy had been tested, marked (scarred or
tattooed by the elder or his father) and would be now allowed to select a mate
and fight (and train with) the other males.

None of these rituals occur in the life of the modern man, in the
developing world there are vestiges of their remnant still practiced by tribes
relatively emergent into the spiritual pollution of modernity, but these are
quickly dying out, in the almost impenetrable parts of the world, the jungles,
war-torn countries, wilderness (Siberia, Sahara, Mongolia, the Hindu Kush, and
the Himalayas spring to mind) these rites of passage still occur in the tribal
culture of the people. Where you’re still reliant on using an eagle to hunt for
you, or the threat of a wolf or a bear is still real and can’t be solved with
patrolmen with semi-automatic weapons, you need these rituals to initiate the
boy into manhood. In the West in particular, we do not.

This is especially interesting for those of us who identify as Indo-

European and who look to the Germanic/Norse/Anglo-Saxon/Vedic/Slavic
pantheon, that culture of heroic warrior conquerors who moved across most of
the European landmass, who scuppered the might of Rome, who turned back the
Saracens and the Turks, who invaded Russia and the Baltic states, who drove
out Pict and Celt and were stalled by only more of their own kind following in
successive waves of invasion into already populated lands, these people had an
intense and brutal initiation for their young males, and it survives into much of
their heroic literature and prose mythology. Wotan hanged himself on the world
tree, waiting for the runes to appear; he sacrificed part of his own body, taking
his place at the forefront of the Wild Hunt (as all of the psychopompic huntsman
gods do). There are strong elements of magic, the hinted presence of
hallucinogenic plants (especially the Vedic Soma, in the form of the Fly Agaric
mushroom), withcraft and wizardry; there is blood and the slaying of dragons
and giants, the eating of cooked hearts by huge fires and the ceremonial
bestowing of a weapon handed down through generations, often from Odin
himself. All of these point to a hearty tradition of initiating young men through
pain, suffering, bloodshed and ritual intoxication and the “death posture” to
experience the divine through death and destruction. One could only be called a
son of Odin, or Thor, or Heimdall, or Tyr once he had experienced the archetype
in reality. How could he do this but by having his eye blinded and being drunk
with the mead of wisdom? How could he invoke Thor in battle if he hadn’t tried
to eat his fill of boar, drown in lakes of ale or lay with a thousand maids? How

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 could he call upon Tyr for guidance if he hadn’t faced the wolf in the darkness
and bare handed held its jaws open whilst he strangled the life out of it? The
myth of the Ragnarok on one level (at least) is the myth of the male initiation, the
facing of your opposite and the destruction of both.

This is what Sigurd aims to do for the perpetual adolescent boy that is
called man by Westerners; learning through suffering, intimacy with tragedy and
a facing of death and pain, through a method of fitness and martial arts which
ends up becoming the self (or group) initiatory experience.

The Disciplines of Sigurd

For Sigurd to be successful in acting as an umbrella term for your physical

and martial experiences it needs to collate all of their forcefulness in one
direction. For Sigurd to act as the initiation your fathers didn’t give you, it needs
to find a way for you to see and to experience what was missing from your
interpretation of things you may have been doing for a very long time. In that
sense we hope that Sigurd becomes the key to your training which has up to now
been missing.

To put it bluntly then, those disciplines are based on evidence we believe

is exant in the mythological heritage of a great many cultures, by no means just
Indo-Europeans. All of the culture which expressed (and to this day express) a
keen interest in the manifestation of traditional warrior roles in the community
(for men and women) all shared a common idea of what that meant for those
who were chosen to engage in physical combat. Warriors were expected to be fit,
healthy and virile, they were expected to breed and be well bred (coming from a
line of warriors) and have an understanding of the myths and poetry of their
people. Obviously the priests and bards of the cultures were expected to be
fluent and expert in such things as recitation of myth and execution of ritual, but
all historical and mythological examples the warrior was understood to be at
least well versed, if not openly gifted, in the arts of the tongue as well as the
sword. The disciplines we personally explore in our own way are –

Martial Arts

The choice of the martial art itself doesn’t matter; it is the elevation of the
study of violence to the study of self-overcoming. MMA as the most modern
interpretation of the urge towards violence and self-defense is quite simply one
of the oldest sports on the planet. The Greeks were wrestling and boxing and

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 calling it pankration as early as 688BCE, and before then we have evidence of the
Babylonians and Sumerians wrestling as training for their combative forces.
Little else is of consequence if you can’t fight to protect what is yours, as the
barest exoteric interpretation of why you should fight. Little else is of consequence
if you have never faced your fears and felt a fist crunching into your cheek bones,
as the deepest esoteric interpretation of why you should experience death.

Above all else, make sure you’re practicing the martial arts. Karate, Kung-
Fu, European Sword, fencing, boxing, Krav Maga, Jujitsu, wrestling, do whatever
you want, but make sure your teacher knows what he (or she) is doing and there
is at least the inkling that what you’re doing is an expression of something bigger
and more important than just learning to batter drunken morons of the street.

Fitness

Having a sense of humour is important in this game called life, and to

paraphrase Crowley we like to describe Sigurd as having “the aim of religion with
the method of powerlifting” (Aleister Crowley described magic as the “aim of
religion with the method of science). Our goal is the ascension of that mountain,
the same mountain every soul is ascending through lives of struggle and
experience, but we use the most simplistic methods to take a step further up that
slope.

We will deal with the specific spheres within the discipline of fitness later
on in this book but for now let it suffice to say that this is the most important part
of Sigurd. Something as seemingly pointless as picking up a heavy object,
holding it and then putting it down again becomes the most important part of
your training. Do you understand? Two truths.

Yoga

A much more obvious spiritual and physical endeavor and one we eagerly
encourage everyone to explore. For those of you who have visions of middle
aged yuppie mothers attending evening classes and lightly stretching whilst
listening to panpipes, put those images out of your mind. Yoga was devised
alongside the Vedic tradition’s growth within the Indian subcontinent and is
intrinsically associated with reconnecting with the earth and the internal energies
of the subconscious and luminal states. Primarily, for our understanding, it was

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 also (and is still) used by the Indian Kshatriya caste to limber up and stretch
before and after bouts of combat or in battle itself. Yoga then is a method of
reconnection with the divide before or after you send someone or yourself, to
meet Yama.

Poetry

This may surprise some of you, but for the Fenians who we mirror, that
band of brothers who followed Finn McCool into battle, poetry was one of the
disciplines they were tested on before being allowed entry into the cult. The
Picts, Scots, and Irish were intimately aware that poetry was the mouthpiece of
the Gods, and to express yourself in mundane terms was not the path of the
warrior.

The warrior is, like Virgil’s muses, a man who saw the beauty of poetry of
a heroic death. A brigand could never understand why he should die for those
weaker than himself, a poet would. The man whose life is a story in verse will
express himself in divine terms, not those of the flesh.

Mythology

Alongside poetry stands an understanding of the myth of the culture the

warrior came from, without it he had no root from which to draw the sustenance
of his bravery or courage. Myths like that of the Volsungs, the Arthurian
tradition, or even the mythos of Tolkien serve to give the warrior an archetype, a
structure around which to formulate his own life. Without an understanding of
mythology and the myths of his people, the warrior is a floating buoy with no
anchor to hold him down, when the storms of tribulation and trial come he will
be battered and tossed by the waves until he is carried off wherever the currents
of the day desire. A truly grounded warrior, who knows what he is, where he
comes and where he is going is as immoveable as the mountains, because his
myth, like that of his forebears lives forever. This is as true for the Christian or
the Muslim as it is for the Saxon, Buddhist or the Slav.

Meditation and Magick

Magick as defined by Crowley is “the Science and Art of causing Change to

occur in conformity with Will” which fits perfectly with our perception of the path
of Sigurd as the overcoming of the self and the petty desires and the searching
and execution of the True Will. Meditation is a path of self-overcoming, the

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 execution of the will and the calming of the mind to a specific end. Magick and
meditation are essentially twin pillars of the same temple and should be explored
with equal attention.

There is nothing sparkly or effeminate about magic, it is a deadly art, a

form of manipulation and essentially violence against the status-quo. Magic and
wizardry as it would be understood by our ancestors was something horrifying
and dangerous, not to be dabbled with by the light of hand or with little
understanding of the consequence. Your understanding of magic and meditation
should be shaped by your own experiences; we can but point the way to the
door.

So how do all of these undertakings fit together as one unified whole?

That is something we shall explore in detail over the coming chapters, but the
key, the thunder clap and lightning bolt comes when all of the above disciplines
merge and become one expression of self; when poetry is working out and lifting
heavy rocks and putting them down is mythology. This is hard to explain, but is
truly an illuminating moment when perceived with an open heart and mind.

Our first step in the process of understanding where we are going is to

understand where we are from. The present is an easy illusion to ignore, simply
because it is the only truth, the only reality, just that the truth of your inherent
mortality is the only truth that matters, thus we can look to the past to manipulate
the future. This is really the only way any tribal people, still in touch with the
land in which it was spawned, makes progress in understanding and growth
within (symbiotically) the environment. To look to the past and the cult of
ancestors, with the mind firmly in the present and the eye of the future and the
responsibility toward descendants we are able to manifest a specific destiny. In
that way we are co-inheritors of the web of Wyrd and weavers of our own fate.

Our first port of call then, is in the world of myth.

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 Chapter II – The Warriors of Myth and Legend

Wolves hilltop braying

Eyes upon carcass

Chief casts weary glance

Slow drawn cutlass.

We appreciate that for some the application of myth and legend and
historical heroism onto why they lift and the application of their martial arts
could seem redundant. Times have changed they say, men and women don’t lift,
get strong or learn how to fight so they can be remembered, or perform feats of
extraordinary nobility to protect their community. Or do they?

What is the path of the real soldier but that of the noble warrior? A man
who puts himself in the line of fire, even if it is for money (which is what a huge
amount of ancient warriors did) is still risking his life for a cause potentially
different to his own, even if it is just for riches and a good fight. One of the hero
cults we’ll be looking at is the Varangian Guard who served the Byzantine
Emperor in the Dark Ages and it can only be said that they were fighting for
money and a chace at a good fight, hardly the most noble of causes, but they are
remembered as heroes and semi mythical legends. People like Charlemagne,
Vlad the Impaler, Robin Hood, William Wallace, whilst all remembered as
heroes and nobles by their people by their people, were essentially fighting to
secure or protect wealth, land and title.

Myths and legends are a deep reservoir of ancestral and archetypal

wisdom, if youre lifting and fighting you need to understand why people once
lifted and fought to get stronger and harder. Too much of modern fitness and
training is focused on just getting better at the thing we do, but for what purpose?
Why are you doing it?

If the answer to the question is, “to look hot for the beach then you’re
probably better off just doing hypertrophy exercises with machines, and you
certainly needn’t bother learning a martial art. If the answer to that question is,

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 “to be a better man/woman” then we’re on the right track, but that still doesn’t go
far enough. We want to take this to its logical conclusion, so the truest answer
anyone can give to the question of “why” we lift/fight is “because that’s what
we’ve always done”.

We are a separate class, we lifters and fighters, strength and martial ability
is not something that everyone seeks, and it is one of the sad fallacies of the
fitness and martial arts “scenes” that they seek to get everyone to understand the
virtues of getting stronger and learning how to fight, when clearly 90% of the
human race just don’t care.

Part of the beauty of a right understanding of these myths and legends

will be the realization that this is not for everyone. These men and women who
fought for their people, for a name, for nobility, and for fame and fortune were a
breed apart. Something special and separate, creatures of necessity and violence,
unlike the larger majority, the herd and the thralls.

A common theme running through the myths and legends of these people
then is an association with wolves and canine packs. The warriors of old must
have noticed everywhere they found themselves in Europe that the only
creatures like them were the wolves, jackals, dogs and bears who sought battle,
fought for little reason but the whim of the pack and were ferociously loyal,
seeking confirmation only from within the group. The warrior clans we shall be
looking at and the heroes who were their lynchpin each had some kind of deep
archetypal association with a wild and dangerous animal. If this doesn’t
immediately appeal to the lifter and the martial artist, then you’re training
wrong.

Einherjar

In Norse mythology the god Odin, in preparing for Ragnarok (the twilight
of the gods) and the annihilation of all creation, Chose to create a special place
where human warriors could assemble and train for the final battle. This place
was known as Valhalla or Walhalla which means “hall of the slain” wan was fit
only for those who died in battle with bravery and honour. The Einherjar were
the warriors who had been sent to Valhalla, collected by Valkyries and given
their fill of a nightly resurrected boar and a permanent source of mead, training
for the battle where their honour and nobility would be given the ultimate test.

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 The Einherjar are attested to throughout the various sagas of the Norse
peoples. And Odin is regularly mentioned in association with them, their
position being somehow resonant with his followers in the Wild Hunt. The
horned god who leads the slain warriors out once a year on a drunken night of
revelry and violence, a similar deity exists in almost all Indo European cultures.
The slain being selected by Odin’s daughters, and being describes as Odin’s
adopted sons, all points towards tradition of bravery in battle being intimately
associated with being the selected scion of the Allfather, the father of the slain.
When the Einherjar are not drinking mead and eating pork they put on their
war-gear and make sport of slaying each other and honing their battle skills.

On the day of the Ragnarok, Heimdall will blow his horn, Odin will
consult Mimir and ride out with the Einherjar to face Fenrir in the final conflict.
Of course, along with Odin and the other Aesir, the Einherjar put up a good
fight, each one dying once more in battle, finalizing their oath bound nobility
with the ultimate noble death.

In a historical sense the Einherjar have often been linked with the physical
Germanic tribes, who obviously sought to invoke the slain warriors by
pretending to be them when they went to war. It was known for warriors to
choose the darkest and gloomiest nights to make battle, all painted black,
wearing furs and the soot of their subterranean fires to blacken their weapons
and armour as if they were corpses come back to life.

The myth of the Einherjar provides us with a bold and striking link
between how the dead were believed to fight and live in paradise and how men
should behave in combat in the living world. The reverse loop of logic required
to understand this should be obvious. The warriors in battle behaved as if they
were Einherjar and then when they died they believed they became Einherjar. This
is hugely interesting as a launch pad for the Sigurd berserker, the man who seeks
to follow in those footsteps of the Odinic or Indraic warriors who came before
him, seeking ever higher heights of thunderous self-mastery. The Einherjar are
closely linked with another type of warrior which mirrors and complements their
own traits, that of the berserkers or ulfhednar. These men, much like the Einherjar
fought in a fanatic almost drunken trance and flew into battle in a blind rage, in
which it was believed that they shape-shifted into wolves or bears. It is worth
exploring the tradition of the berserker/ulfhednar and the Einherjar in full and
we highly recommend you do so.

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 For us then, as athletes, powerlifters, strongmen and those aligning
themselves with a tradition of spiritual and mental experimentalism personified
by Indra, the Einherjar embody what we are seeking to do. They were/are
soldiers first and foremost, but they were bombastic, huge personalities, chotic
and fearless. When linked with the womanizers, rowdy and bawdy, and in death
they become heroes, fit only for Valhalla, for only the halls of Odin can contain
them, they would burst from the mere fetters of Hel’s caverns!

The Fianna

Aside from the Einherjar the other hugely important warrior band we
have to consider is the Irish Fianna, or Fenians. In their mythical context the
Fenians were followers of the hero Fionn mac Cumhaill or Finn McCool as he
was known in the Scottish cycles. Once more the mythical band of heroes was
based on real bands of outlawed and homeless young men who wandered the
countryside doing what brigands do. Again the myths seem to have influenced
the men and the men influenced the myth.

The historical mystery of the Fenians surrounds young nobles who hadn’t
yet inherited their lands or titles and had to live during the winter in their
ancestral homes but during the summer had to hunt for food and sell the pelts of
the animals they had killed. There could be a lot of reasons for this, but primarily
it would appear to be so that the nobleman didn’t have to pay for his
descendants to hang around his home eating all his food.

In the mythical tradition the Fianna operate as a band of warriors in

service of the High King of Ireland, the majority fighting and showing loyalty to
Fionn McCumhaill whilst a rival sect with within the group serve another leader,
their rivalry serving as a function for the movement of the stories.

The main reason the Fianna serve as an excellent example for us is due to
their total use of the trident of mind, body and spirit. To prove yourself worthy
of serving in the Fianna you had to display a huge and heroic repertoire of
physical skills as well as mental and spiritual expertise in the culture of your
people. The Fenians had to –

 Be versed I n the twelve books of bardic poetry and know the myths of
his ancestors

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  Be buried in a large hole up to his waist and defend himself with a shield
and rod from the attacks of nine warriors striking him with spears. If he
was harmed in any way, he was not accepted.
 The main test involved the applicant braiding his hair and setting to run
through the woods whilst the other Finians chased him. If he was cought
and wounded or if he showed hear he was refused entry. If the braids
were unknotted or frayed from the frenzy of his escape he was refused,
and if during the run he landed on a stick and it cracked underfood he
was refused.
 He had to jump over a branch at chest height whilst running and duck
under one at knee height, without breaking stride on the run.
 Finally, he had to remove a thorn from his foot whilst sprinting and again
not break stride.

Clearly the mythical structure of these requirements has been passed down and
exaggerated over time but we can see a basic theme emerging. The Fianna had to show
eloquence and understanding of poetry (mind) and their mythological heritage (spirit)
and then show feats of almost impossible agility and speed (body). So we can see that,
at least in theory, the Fianna of history had to be schooled in the myths of the past to
ground them in the culture of their noble founders, their employers, their king and their
people, and then they had to be ready to fight and survive and best each other.

For the athlete and martial artist of Sigurd the Fianna example should be
obvious; read, think, learn and always advance in your martial and physical discipline.
Finally the war cry or motto of the Fianna –

“Pure hearts! Strong limbs! Actions matching words!”

What could epitomize the path of the warrior better?

Hashshashin

As our final exploration of warrior bands we will look at the legendary Assassins
or Hashshashin in original Arabic. The term was originally used by the Mutari Ismailis
in mockery of the Nizari Ismailis, not intended to have anything specifically to do with
their use of hashish (which is very probable), the term actually means “low born rabble”
or “landless peasants” and was meant as an insult.

The main personality in terms of the Hashshashin was their leader Hassan ibin
Sabbah, who by conquering various mountain fortresses began to coagulate a

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monogeny of Nizari Ismaili Muslims in the Persian and Syrian territories. Hassan is
credited with the creation of the order of the assassins (semi mythical/legendary as
with all these groups) just before the First Crusade. In looking for some lofty spiritual
reason for the creation of the order we find it far more likely that Hassan gathered
together other Ismailite devotees and followers into a loose band of warriors to gain
more temporal and worldly power for himself, solely for his own gain. Due to the chaos
created by the crusades Hassan found himself slap bang in the middle of the route for
the invading forces to pass through and inevitably ended up fighting his own enemies
(for more power) and the Christian armies “liberating” the Holy Land.

As with all semi mythical outlaw/brigand heroes, Hassan selected a robust

mountain fortress for himself and his followers in northern Iran, the legendary Alamut
castle. From Alamut Hassan began to lay out the religious and spiritual indoctrination
of new warriors and created a hierarchical system of the passing of secret knowledge
from a grandmaster down through several layers of initiation in a classical lodge format
(much as the Free Masons do to this day). The famed assassins of legend were the
Fida’i, those men willing to sacrifice themselves to Hassan’s cause no matter what it
was; giving their lives in combat should their mission be compromised.

One of the most common and well known stories of how Hassan indoctrinated
his followers (as if Islamic Ismailite warriors need any more indoctrination or
encouragement than their own religion and the example of early Muslims) comes from
a period long after Hassan’s death so is probably made up. However, we can be almost
certain that most of the mythical content of any medieval legend is exaggerated or
inflated to some extent. The story goes that Hassan would have his followers
kidnapped and drugged with toxic doses of hashish and brought to the fortress of
Alamut, where they were shown ‘paradise’, presumably feasting, drinking, women, etc.
much as the Einherhjar would expect Valhalla to appear. When this ‘paradise’ was
taken away, Hassan was revealed as some kind of prophet or wizard who could give
them paradise once more should they follow his orders. Whilst this is all probably a lie
or an exaggeration at least it does fit quite neatly with the interpretation of Islamic
theology which the peasantry and semi illiterate warrior classes would have known at
the time and thus could have been manipulated to believe.

The assassins once they had been initiated were trained in Islamic theory and
doctrine and also in stealthy combat and (obviously) assassination. This gave them the
lofty position of being the Ismaili spiritual warriors, those men who believed they were
fighting a holy war or Jihad to defend the faith (an idea which would have been easy to
propagate as the Crusaders invaded through northern Syria). The assassins (the Fida’i)

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were young and generally healthy men who could use their strength and stamina to
commit the murders Hassan required, sending them to kill his political opponents and
enemies of Islam in the surrounding territories.

The historical accounts have the assassins roaming around the Syrian, Iranian
and Palestinian lands killing whoever they felt was in their way, even kings in some
cases, and even attempting the life of Saladin three times. They were eventually
annihilated by the invading Mongols when they tried to kill the Khan, Alamut being
sacked and the assassins losing their political and temporal power suddenly and
violently.

Much more interesting for our research are the legends and rumours about the
assassins, the idea that Hassan indoctrinated his followers by showing them a
beauteous garden of temptations and delight is in stark contrast to what the average
Muslim of the day would have expected from paradise. If anything the descriptions of
the paradise sound more like the expectations of the western minds who were invading
the area at the time. The deeply confused Catholicism of the day was probably
influenced by the ideas of the pagan communities if suffocated and it is highly likely
that the knights and soldiers of the crusading armies, and the Slavic and Baltic states
that border the edges of the Muslim world, believed paradise to be populated by
buxom maidens offering drugs and drink.

As we have mentioned this does sound an awful lot like the Valhalla with the
Scandinavians and Germans expected to await them should they die gloriously in
battle, just as the myths of the assassins say.

Regardless of its truth or untruth then, the notion that spiritually educated men
were willing to give their lives in service of a religious cause (pagan or monotheistic)
and receive entry into paradise like world where beautiful women gave them meat and
wine until their entry into “final battle” seems to be almost universal; even the
Christians have a vaguely similar idea.

What can we take from such stories then? What were these “heroes” of the
Islamic world doing? Outcasts, lowborn rabble, hash smokers, peasant outlaws,
murderers who lived in a mountain fastness, plotting against their enemies, slaying
them in secret, all for the service of a religious cause that allowed them entry into a
spiritual and fleshly elite. They were doing what all the heroic warrior bands do, serve,
learn, grow and train for mastery of themselves, each other and their enemies.

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 Just as the Einherjar, the Fianna and the Hashshashin all worshipped in their
own way, they also focused on a specific outcome to their spiritual and martial beliefs.
A yin-yang or order-chaos diametric begins to emerge when you study these concepts
for long enough. It is apparent with each of these examples that the warriors involved
became better warriors and better people (in terms of their culturally unique
understanding of what that means) as they became more wise with each element of
their study.

A soldier who kills for the sake of killing is just a murderer; a scholar who
studies the texts of his religion for the sake of being known as wise is just an old man
who knows a lot of words. But the warrior who has studied the arts of his faith, and the
religious man who has a martial ability with which he restrains himself and stands up
for his people, whoever they may be, that man becomes an Einherjar, a Fenian, a
Hashshashin, a holy warrior.

The same pattern of thought crosses over into every physical and spiritual
discipline. If you’re just a man who lifts heavy things and puts them down for no other
reason than to get big or strong to look tough in front of other people than you’re just a
moron. Getting strong had a purpose, it has a purpose, it has always had a purpose, it
was to make boys and weaklings into men, so that they could serve the community and
be better at being men. For women the same is true, if lifting is just a way to make other
women feel small or a way to make yourself feel tough and dangerous then it’s
irrelevant, its point has been missed. Lifting and strength training, wrestling, the
martial arts in totality are for making you a better human being, so you should embrace
all of their aspects in one discipline.

In reverse the theologians or scholars among you who seek to learn poems and
verses of scripture or historical myth and legend for the mere sake of knowing them,
but never actually experience the majesty and beauty of nature will never feel the truth
and know what it was those verses speak of.

It is like the armchair philosopher who writhes of the wild life and produces
books on survival or bushcraft but lives in the top floor city apartment with all the mod
cons: completely not authentic. An experience of nature, an experience of the divine, an
experience of martial strength and ability focused through the lens of a discipline like
powerlifting is the highest form of historical service to the gods and community. The
heroes of old were men and women who sought a name, to be remembered, usually for
the sake of their egoist concerns, but through their walking the path of heroism they
learn the maxim of kings of the ancient world, that the strong, the rulers, the nobility

22
are nothing without the everyday men, the peasants, the low classes. Truly there was no
class system in the ancient world, that only needed to emerge with wealth and
possession. Before this was the idea of a community and the nobility, those who had a
claim to rule through the strength of their hand and their descent from the gods and
those who made up the populace of the kingdom. There is no other division of labour
or way in which the world can be interpreted, there are kings and there are peasants,
it’s just a strange era in which we live where those who would have been kings are now
poor and the spiritual peasants are in a position of power and wealth.

However, fondly we remember;

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

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 Chapter III – Berserkers

Terror helm, daubed with awe

Hooded wanderer stumbles,

Hands black stained gore,

Lifted from gallows.

The Berserker in the path of Sigurd is the man who has accepted his death,
perhaps not imminent, but accepts his fate, that he will most likely die a violent and
painful death. For those of us in the 21st century, this fact is still rather bizarrely quite
true. Most of us will more than likely die in hospital as aged men of a degenerative
illness like cancer or heart disease, and those deaths will more than likely be difficult,
painful and emotionally exhausting. Those of us who don’t die in our beds will
probably die in an automobile accident, or of an accident in the home or at work and
that death will most likely involve being violently injured and bleeding to death or
having a massive heard or organ injury. We may not be hacked into meat by an enemy
on the battlefield, but the decision to face death whilst still alive is still something
intimately associated with what it means to be a man, and above all what it means to
someone who calls themselves warrior.

All warriors faced death as a reality; it was a concrete, immutable, unavoidable

law, the only certainty for the man of our ancestry. In the cold and violent landscape of
ancient forested Europe and Asia the idea that you could live until old age and be
anything other than king or wizard would have seemed ridiculous. A warrior could
expect to be hewn limb from limb and forgotten by everyone around him, never
remembered save by his immediate loved ones who would probably not mourn him
long due to the savagery of day to day life. Each man and woman in the community
would be subsumed into the collective whole as “ancestors” worshipped on specific
feast and memorial days.

The hero however was elevated to something altogether different and more
sublime; he faced death, accepted death, and died usually as a hero, marking his death
with the maxim, “better to burn bright and fast than to fade away slowly.” The following
examples we have given have therefore been chosen because of their classical adherence
to this development of the warrior ideal, some of them survive their ordeal, but whilst
facing their demons (dragon, giant, chthonic army, invading enemies, etc.) they are

24
utterly changed by the experience. This is the key, the ultimate truth of the heroic path,
“victory or death”, there is no other option, we either ascend the mountain and become
exactly what we were born to be, king, warrior, wizard or poet or we die in the process.
This is what each of these heroes represent and each of them has something to teach us
about what it means to serve a cause unswervingly, with crippling devotion, to the
point where it kills you and alters the lives of everyone around you. We have chosen
not to go into deep detail with the story of each character (apart from a short synopsis),
instead focusing on the specific deeds and characteristics of the hero which are useful
for Sigurd.

Marko the Serbian

We begin with one of my favourite knights, a historical character whose living

deeds were altered to fit the poetic needs of the Serbians, Bulgarian and Macedonian
bards who sang of him. Like many other princes, kings, and emperors, the physical life
of Krali Marko was used as a way of continuing and redrawing the lives of the older
gods and heroes in the new pantheon of Christian or Pagan knights who lived after the
fall of Rome and the creation of the new empires in the wider European subcontinent.
Marko therefore can be taken in with King Arthur, Charlemagne, Robin Hood, St.
George of Palestine and Vlad Dracul as a very real historical character but one whose
mythical deeds should be taken as a mirror of the spiritual needs of the people he
served.

Marko was the son of a Serbian king during the Turkish occupation of the Balkan
region in the late 1300’s and his living deeds weren’t hugely inspiring. Marko lived as a
vassal king under the Turks and ended up fighting beside them against the Wallachians
in the Ottoman invasion further north to punish Mircea I for invading Turkish occupied
lands in the south. Marko was killed along with other Balkan rulers and the Turks
ended up annexing their lands and ruling it as an occupied territory as opposed to
vassalage.

The poems and bardic tales of Marko on the hand, are hugely inspiring. Because
Marko allegedly spoke to his urges (in real life) for the Wallachians to win against the
Turks and for his own life to be lost during combat so that they might have the victory,
he became known among the Serbs and the wider Balkan region as something of a
Robin Hood character. The poems and legends speak of a mighty hero who even
though he fought sometimes for the Sultan he was always keen to assert the spiritual,
national and political independence of the Serbian kingdom and was secretly (open in
poems) often in opposition to Turkish power.

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 According to some traditions he was born to a vila, a Slavic mountain nymph or
fairy, which would make him (like King Arthur, Cuchulain, Finn etc.) half divine and
half human. This is a key element to a huge number of the heroic stories and one we
will explore later on. He was often described as being out of control in his youth and
went wherever he wanted, with whoever he wanted, drinking and brawling and testing
his strength. Marko wore a wolf skin cap which he wore low over his face, he had a
large thick black moustache (a classical Indo-European adornment for warriors) and
wore a large wolf skin pelt over his shoulders with a spear across his back and a huge
sabre at one side and an even bigger six flanged mace at the other. The regular pointers
are here, connection with wild animals (wolf skins), the untamed and unkempt
masculinity (large moustache), and huge strength required to fight (his massive
weapons) and of course Marko rode a supernatural horse which had ridiculous strength
and power, named Sarac.

Morally, Marko is shown to be a man who protects women and children and
those who cannot fend for themselves, again a classic archetypal activity for the hero.
He fights against Turkish despotism on many occasions and whilst not launching into
open rebellion is shown in many stories defending the Serbs against Turkish
oppression, much like William Wallace or Robin Hood were said to do against their
oppressors, he is a helper and a hero to the people, always sung are his wondrous deeds
of charity, companionship and fidelity toward those he calls brother or sister by blood
oath.

In Bulgaria and among the southern Slavic legends Marko takes on a lot more of
the mythical and legendary aspects of much older stories and becomes even more
fantastical in his abilities and activities. He is often described as being a giant (like Bran
in the Welsh myths) and is described as having assisted god in the creation of the earth!
This is again more association with Marko as the divine warrior, taking on a lot of the
characteristics of gods like Thor or Perun, an associate or brother of God/Allfather and
companion in the creative act. It is also said in many myths that as well as being
possibly mothered by a vila, he definitely suckled from one and by drinking the milk of
a fae nymph he became incredibly strong, being able to throw huge boulders and move
ridiculously large objects.

As with many of these heroes, Marko is said to have not actually died, but
merely retreated into a cavern or cave where he is waiting to emerge to fight for the
inhabitants of the Balkan region in the moment of their direst need. One interesting
myth from Macedonia has him drinking “eagle’s water” (an obvious allusion to the

26
Vedic Soma/Persian Haoma) and becoming immortal, awaiting his time to return
alongside the Prophet Elijah.

So, what can we glean from all these abstract and stirring myths of Marko the Serbian
prince? We crucially, Marko is of noble birth, he is mothered, suckled or raised by a vila
and is therefore half divine and half human (a common motif). He is comically strong to
the point of ridiculousness, and carries absurd weapons of enormous weight around on
the back of his supernatural horse. He is closely linked with the ideas of rebellion
against tyranny, a restoration of order, a protection of women and children and those
who can’t defend themselves and a loose allegorical affinity with being almost totally
divine and having something to do with the Soma mythology which was prevalent
among the Slavs.

Marko is the archetypal hero of the Indo-Europeans; he represents everything

they would have sought to cling to in their oppression from the south. I personally see
the depiction of Marko with his wolf pelts and huge moustache as being representative
of almost all the heroes we’re here delving into. He could be Slavic, Indian, Pakistani,
Russian, Germanic, Nordic, Irish, he shares all the of the same symbols as the major
heroes of all of the Indo-European pantheons and many of those shared by the Asian
and Semitic peoples as well.

Marko is full stop number one for us, simply because he represents the most
simplistic form of the hero; a masculine, comedic, strong outlaw, extremely violent,
semi-divine and houring blood brotherhoods and oaths whilst also displaying very real
and human levels of fear, anger, lust and hatred. Marko is out churl (the entry grade of
Sigurd) in perfect definition, a simplistic and primitive hero.

Turin the Black Sword of Nargothrond

Tolkien’s creation Turin Turamber of Dorlomin obviously shares a lot of

similarities with Sigurd the dragonslayer as the story of his family’s downfall and death
is so clearly a reimaging of the Volsung saga by the great poet and bard of Oxfordshire.
When dealing with a character like Turin, a modern creation in the eyes of most people,
we must remember that like Tolkien we believe myth to be a creation of archetypes and
latent forces which are beyond our understanding. I for one then, when reading the
Silmarillion and any of Tolkien’s other works which deal so explicitly with pre-existing
pantheons and myth cycles, take them to be a rightful retelling of thousand year old
legends from the mouth of a bard for whom I have nothing but the utmost respect and
admiration.

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 It is necessary for us to deal with each of the major themes in Turin’s life in
relative detail so we will do our best to summarise the lengthy lay as shortly as possible
without missing important points.

The story begins with Hurin father of Turin, fighting in a battle known as the
Nirnaeth Arnoediad, which ended with the dual forces of Elves and Men utterly
annihilated by Morgoth, after which Morwen (his mother) decided to send Turin to live
with the Elves in Doriath. When he was much older Turin received news that his
mother and sister were besieged and going the King, asked for mail, sword, and shield
and wearing the dragon helm of Dorlomin he went out to find them.

After an argument with an elf that ended in murder, Turin ran as an outlaw in
the woodlands to fight among the Gaurwaith, a band of wandering men who
slaughtered any who they came across, man, elf, and orc.

Beleg the elf hearing of the dire news spoke to the King and decided to looking
for Turin, whom each regarded as son and brother. Beleg, coming across the outlaws
camp whilst Turin was away, he was held captive by them and tortured for
information, which Turin finding upon his return, grieved with his adopted brother and
swore to only fight Morgoth and the orcs from then on.

Beleg and Turin argued about where best to find the vengeance against Moroth
and Turin would not accept Thingol’s pardon for the accidental murder he committed.
After parting ways, Beleg returned to the elf king and asked for weapons with which to
assist Turin in his battles, choosing the sword Anglachel, made from the iron of a
meteorite and superior to all other swords because it was made by Eol the dark elf
smith.

Beleg eventually found Turin and the outlaws in a dwarf’s hiding place and was
reunited with him, giving gifts of the dragon helm and lembas bread. In time Morgoth
and the orcs began to reach out and plunder and slaughter in the world of men and
elves once more and Turin and Beleg fought them in a horrible series of guerrilla
conflicts which earned them much renown among the people of the mountains.

Turin and Gwindor came eventually to the elvish stronghold of Nargothrond

and Turin continued his career of orc slaying, wearing a dwarf mask and dwarf armour
and carrying Anglachel reforged with the name Gurthang (meaning Iron Death), thus
he was named Black Sword the elves. After much talk of the curse of Hurin laid down
by Morgoth, Turin led the elves of Nargothrond in a great battle against the orc host
that sought to sack the hidden city. After a horrific battle where nearly all but Turin

28
were slain by the dragon Glaurung he fled back to Nargothrond to rescue Gwindor’s
elvish maiden. Finding the city almost in ruins and the elves being taken captive he
(with what is almost described as the famed battle fury of the hero) fell upon the orcs
and evil forces like a dread wind, casting all before him slaying hundreds. Eventually
he came to face Glaurung the dragon and was held in a serpentine hypnosis telling him
that his nigh forgotten mother and sister suffered due to his absence. Glaurung let Turin
go, long after the captive elves had been dragged away and sealed the fate of the
children of Hurin.

When finally Turin came to the house of his mother and her kinswoman he
found it desolate, being told long ago that Morwen and her daughter had fled the land
in grief searching for him. In a rage Turin slew many easterlings who lived in his
kinsman’s house and he himself fled into the wilderness, naming himself Wildman of
the Woods and slaying any orc he came across. Eventually he came among some more
outlawed men of Brethil, staying with them and coming to the house of Brandir where
he once more renamed himself Turambar, Master of Doom. In the time of his
wanderings Turin’s mother Morwen had (ironically) come to the refuge of the house of
Thingol in Doriath where once Turin had lived with Beleg, and hearing of the savage
end of Nargothrond she was much grieved. In vain hope Nienor, Morwen’s daughter
and Turin’s sister fled Doriath to look for her brother. Being set upon by orcs, she and
some elvish companions were attacked by Glaurung the dragon, returning once more to
seal the spiteful curse on Hurin, he wiped her memory, making her forge who she is
and where, and even though she is found once more by the elves she flees naked in the
dark, running wild and hopeless.

Eventually Nienor finds herself at the site of the ancient battle, and throws
herself on the mound of bodies where Turin is leading a party of orc hunters and finds
the maiden naked and terrified. He covers her up, not knowing it is his sister and
renames her Niniel. Back in the hallsof Brandir, Niniel is restored to health and falls in
love with Turin, whilst Brandir falls for her, none telling of his feelings. Finally Turin
and Niniel are wed, much to the discomfort of Brandir and the black sword once more
fought against the orcs in the woodlands.

Niniel became pregnant and in the same year Glaurung came out of his hiding
place in the ruin of Nargothrond and headed to Brethil both to plunder and ruin and
destroy Turin. The hero decided the only way to protect his adopted people was to face
Glaurung and even if he died to give them enough time to flee until the dragon left the
woodlands and returned to his hole.

29
 After much discussion Turin led a pair of men into the wilds to face the dragon,
but Niniel in her grief at the proposed loss of her husband/brother fled after him,
Brandir coming with her in secret. Turin found the dragon sleeping by a cliff side and
decided to creep up underneath him in a crevice and impaled him on Gurthang up to
the hilts. Glaurung shattered everything in his death throes and burnt a great area of
land to ruin as he thrashed about. Turin went down into the valley to find his sword
stuck in the dragon’s belly, withdrawing it burns his hand and upon seeing the last
twitching eye of his enemy was struck as if dead, lying as he did beside his sword and
the worm’s body.

Niniel hearing the commotion flees to Turin’s side, along with Brandir who by
this point has tried to steal her away (for her own safety) and Niniel, finds him as if
dead, binds his burnt hand and washes it with her tears. Glaurung waking with his last
breath tells Niniel of her true name, of her relationship with Turin and lifts his hypnosis
from them both. In her grief Niniel threw herself off a cliff to drown in the river below.

Turin awaking from his cursed sleep ran to his people and found Brandir telling
them of Niniel’s death, believing it to be malice that has driven him, slays the man who
loved his sister and his wife. Fleeing the site of the murder Turin came across Mablung
the elf who had been hunting Nienor, the daughter of Morwen all that time. And
recognizing Turin he told him everything of Nienor’s flight into the wilderness and her
coming to run naked in the dark. Turin now realizes everything that has befallen them
and links all of Glaurung’s malice and sees that Nienor was Niniel and all the foulness
of his rash hand. Turin running into the wilderness once more seeks his end on the
sword Gurthang and falls upon it up to the hilt, where it smashes into shards.

Mablung and the men of Brethil find Turin’s body and lay up a huge funeral
pyre, laying him and the broken sword in a great mound, writing upon the door stone
the names of Turin, the slayer of Glaurung and his sister Nienor Niniel.

Thus ends the tale of the children of Hurin.

Well, where do we start? The story of Turin is one of utter bleakness, at every
turn the hero is confounded and his heroism is often a tragic hand in his downfall and
all of those around him. As is often the case with Nordic and European myth the hero’s
power is marked by a dreadful curse which cannot be undone by the force of his hand.
In this sense Tolkien has taken some of the concepts of what is known as miasma in
Greek mythology, the idea that a black aura of death and judgment can follow

30
someone, and even a family until all are dead. This idea goes further than just that of a
curse, it is a black spirit which haunts the family, much as Glaurung haunts the
descendants of Hurin at the will of Morgoth, shaping everything they do, until all are in
untimely tombs.

Throughout the story the people who love Turin find themselves regretting the
association and feeling the intimate tragedy of his life, which is beyond his control but
he hastens through his arrogance and hunger for heroism and glory. This mirrors the
choice given every hero, but most explicitly to Sigurd (whom Turin echoes). Sigurd is
given the choice between a long life of mediocrity and to be forgotten when he is gone
or to have a short and violent life and be remembered forever. Sigurd (like Turin, albeit
perhaps unconsciously) chooses the short and tragic life but to be remembered by his
people. To be truly heroic this has to be meditated on, even by people who perhaps
won’t die in battle or win many riches by his own sword held hand. The point is to live
violently and passionately, seeking every experience at the behest of all others.

Exploring some of the major components of Turin’s path; his blood brotherhood
with Beleg, which he breaks through murder and which in some ways begins the long
slope towards his eventual end, which he meets also at the hand of the sword
Anglachel/Gurthang. This could be seen as a justice and punishment theme within the
story of Turin, as one of Glaurung’s constant assaults against Turin is that he is an ‘oath
breaker, enemy of friends and dishonest to foes’, which launches Turin into a rage. If
anything this can be seen in his constant betrayal of those around him who he has
sworn to love and protect. He abandons his blood bother who offers to take him back to
Doriath, he abandons his adoptive father the king, he abandons the outlaws, he slays
Beleg, he leaves the elvish maiden to die (not really his fault, but Gwindor blames him),
he kills Brethil who gave him a home and flees to his suicide upon his own sword. All
of these are ways in which he breaks oaths that have bound him to his fate, Master of
Doom, by doom mastered; the hero that through his glorious power and ability to mould
the fates of all around him finds himself slain by his own hand. We will see how many
of the other tragic heroes follow this pattern.

Next we have his being raised by elves. Many of the heroes of Indo-European
myth are orphaned in some way and raised by elves or fairies or the gods, and
eventually go on to protect or fight for their adopted household instead of their own
people. Turin’s being raised by elves however is always something of a bittersweet
process, he receives magical weapons, protection, learns from elves and makes friends
and kin of the elves, but he always follows his very human heart and much like those
before him is cursed by a very human fate.

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 Critically for our understanding of Turin’s heroic path are the times in which he
is an outlaw living in the woodlands, first with the Gaurwaith who behave
reprehensibly at times but do what is necessary to survive and secondly with the Men
of Brethil whom he eventually becomes a kinsman of. As we see in a lot of our heroic
myths, the hero is defined by his time as an outlaw, and Turin is no different. It is
during his time with the Gaurwaith that he decides to only fight against orcs and sets
the path in motion for his destruction of Glaurung and his eventual downfall. Of note
also are his having a reforged sword, first as Anglachel and then as Gurthang, whose
fate is tied to his own, and obviously his association with dragons whom he eventually
destroys.

In Turin we have the archetypal dragonslayer hero whose fate is tied to his
adoptive family, the women he loves and the men he betrays. In obvious ways Turin’s
life mirrors that of Sigurd, in whom Tolkien openly admitted the story was based. The
only glaring way in which Tolkien has altered the story is the savage way in which the
love triangle is resolved, with the Volsung saga ending with the realistic but deeply
depressing end of Gudrun by Atli by her hand and the plunging of the ring into the
river with her. Tolkien probably felt it had more of a Tristan and Isolde fell to Turin’s
tragedy if it was focused around everyone around him dying when he broke his oaths.

In the context of the warrior arts which we are exploring, the meaning of the
story should be obvious, blood oath, marital oath, oaths between enemies and oaths
between family members are kept at any cost or the full weight of the dark gods falls
upon the hero. In that way, we tread the true line between heaven and hell, for the hero
will be grim remembered, regardless of his actions, should he be known as a traitor.

Beowulf and Grendel

Beowulf is easily my favourite of the European heroes, surpassing even Sigurd in

his ability to capture my imagination, due to the distinctly noble character and behavior
of the heroes in their final battles and the way in which Beowulf conducts himself
during combat and eventually death. As an archetype Beowulf is completely whole and
entire, showing through each of his violent confrontations with his three opponents, the
greatest that the pagan Anglo-Saxons had to offer in terms of heroism, tenacity and a
gritty (if slightly nihilistic) outlook on life.

To begin then, the King of Denmark, Hrothgar, builds a great mead hall grander
than men of the era had ever heard of and sets his bodyguards to lie down to sleep in it
overnight. In the morning the room is found showered with blood and gore but no sign
of the thirty knights, Hrothgar follows a trail and finds the bloody footprints of the
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monster Grendel, a descendent of the outcast Cain. This first description of Grendel as
being descended from the original cursed outcast is interesting as I links him with the
hunter-gatherers, the Fomorians, the Vanir, and so on, the eternal primitive enemies of
the more civilized agriculturists.

Over the course of a set period of time Hrothgar calls various heroes and knights
to come and kill Grendel, all of whom are killed, leaving only a minstrel/bard to
survive and sing the song of a man eating ogre. This song is eventually sung in the
presence of a young warrior of the Geats called Beowulf, who has already proven his
prowess by facing and killing sea monsters in the open ocean (symbolism of the older
chthonic gods). Beowulf goes to Denmark with h is knights and after much discussion
with Hrothgar promises to rid him of Grendel.

Beowulf, having the strength of thirty men and knowing no mortal weapon can
slay the beast, lays aside his armour and says he will wrestle it with pure strength
alone. In the early hours of the morning Beowulf watches as Grendel enters, devours
one of his men and then proceeds toward another. The hero wakes to battle, grabs hold
of the hairy paw and refuses to let go, Grendel only escaping when he has ripped off his
own arm and fled screaming. In the morning Hrothgar declares Beowulf a hero and
holds a grand feast in his honour, but the monster Grendel has returned to its lair and
roused its mother, an even more hideous giantess (and some say cognate to
Gulveigr/Ginnungugap) who enters the hall at night, takes her son’s severed arm and
carries off one of the Kings friends.

Beowulf once more volunteers to hunt down the monster and avenge the king’s
friend, following the blood trail to the lair and finding the man’s head on a stick.
Beowulf leaps into the pool beside the shattered body of the king’s friend and swims
(whilst fighting many monsters) to the heart of the den. Coming suddenly into contact
with Grendel’s mother because of a strange current in the waters, he wrestles her, and
amid the ruins of all the knights she has killed over the years Beowulf finds a great and
gleaming sword and cuts her head from her shoulders.

With his men Beowulf returns to the land of the Geats and serves the kingdom
well, eventually becoming the king himself and ruling wisely for fifty years. Near his
death he hears of parts of the kingdom being ravaged by a mighty dragon (much like
Fafnir/Glaurung) which sits upon a mighty horde of gold which it has stolen from the
conquered. Beowulf sets out with eleven men (the perfect number of 12 warriors) and
challenges the dragon to fight, being wrapped in its coils and finding his sword useless
against its scales. Wiglaf (one of Beowulf’s retainers) leaps forward and distracts the

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dragon long enough for Beowulf to crawl under the worm and stab it in the soft
underbelly (Fafnir/Glaurung/Smaug). Although the beast is dead Beowulf is sorely
wounded and bids Wiglaf go into the cave and retrieve the treasure that he may see it
before he dies.

Beowulf looks upon the dragon hoard, recounts his great deeds in song once
more and after saying goodbye to each of his retainers takes his last breath. The men
push the dragon into the sea, and build a barrow in which to entomb Beowulf’s ashes
and some of the dragon hoard. Standing by the barrow they erect a stone and carve
upon it the deeds of their hero king-

“So lamented mourning the men of the Geats, Fond-loving vassals the fall of their lord,
said he was kindest of kings under heaven, gentlest of men, most winning of manner, friendliest
of folk-troop and fondest honour.”

Working in the same way as before, we can take several major points from
Beowulf’s story. Beowulf is a young hero who has by a certain implied youthfulness
already defeated several sea monsters, showing superior strength, fighting ability and
strange amphibiousness. This could be said to represent the Anglo Saxon concern with
the land which they had conquered from the previous inhabitants. Wherever the
patrilineal Germans/Scandinavians went they invariably removed a more matrilineal
(or at least matriarchy minded) people, whom they would have demonized. From their
point of view of the strong and mighty heroism of the solar warriors who worshipped
the male gods of the skies and mountains a people who worshipped a woman who
lived in caves and rivers would have been abominable. This is best seen in the parody
of the Beowulf story in the movie “13th Warrior” when the Norse warriors find a
carving left behind by the Grendel folk, a small totem looking like the Venus of
Willendorf. The male warriors are repulsed by the object and spit on it or move away
muttering oaths, the very idea of a matriarchal cult focused on chthonic rituals of
cannibalism would have been abhorrent to them.

Beowulf, seeking fame and fortune, goes to Denmark to seek his name by killing
Grendel, and once more displays his prowess against the old gods/giants. He more
displays ridiculous feats of strength by first wrestling Grendel, then ripping his arm off,
both of which are implied to be utterly impossible for normal men. Interesting also that
Beowulf’s main contest with the giant monster is focused on a wrestling match, a
contest of each hero/demon’s physical prowess and strength, not use of weapons.

When Grendel’s mother emerges and takes her turn to terrorize the knights, she
is described as even more gigantic and horrific to look upon. This is a clear reference to

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the giantess of the old pantheon, and bears a striking resemblance to the giantess of the
Baldur myth. When none of the Aesir can move the dead solar god’s funeral barge they
call upon the old giantess to move it (the implication is that only night and darkness can
move the dying sun) and as she emerges her very presence is an affront to Thor who
seeks to destroy her. She is described as being huge and terrible, hairy and riding a
giant wolf. The theme of an old giantess being the mother of the ancient titanic gods is a
prevalent one among the Norse and Germanic myths. When Beowulf faces and beheads
this creature he is finishing what Thor couldn’t (or wasn’t allowed to). In many ways
this then parallels the Sigurd myth in that Sigurd is said to be able to kill the dragon
and the serpent, both of which the gods themselves were not. It would appear the
Anglo Saxon bards who sung of Beowulf were attempting to say “if Sigurd killed the
serpent, then Beowulf killed the giantess”.

In Beowulf’s final battle, he directly mirrors Sigurd’s conquest, except he lives as

a just noble king for long years before finally facing his dragon in combat. This dragon
is unlike Fafnir or Glaurung int hat the hero is not easily able to overcome it and is
almost bested but for the interference of a noble retainer Wiglaf. In this way the
Beowulf myth parodies but alters the fundamental story of blood brotherhood in the
Volsung saga. Blood brothers in the Sigurd story often betray each other, or move
against each other, and a similar fate appears to be in store for Beowulf when his men
flee the sight of the dragon’s wrath. In that moment of fear and doubt Wiglaf leaps
forward, chastises the other men for breaking their oaths and then proceeds to throw
himself into the contest. Through this act Beowulf is able to deal the killing blow, once
more to the beast’s underbelly as with all the other European dragons. Cunning in
combat and loyalty between brothers once more have the victory, whereas in the
Volsung saga their opposites are the downfall of everyone involved.

The Beowulf story then has a lot to teach us about bravery, loyalty, and the way
in which men seek their end. In a beautiful and almost Buddhist detachment from the
riches which they sought, when Beowulf dies his men place a large amount of the
golden horde (the very thing which they would have once fought and died for) on the
funeral pyre and burn/bury it with their king. The abandonment of the sought after
riches in favour of the memory of a beloved brother goes a long way in telling us what
the thrust of a modern heroism should look like.

As a role model and archetype Beowulf embodies that spirit of Valour which
seeks to stand up against objects of opposition no matter how big or strong they are, to
secure a name and a kingdom. Characters like Beowulf, Sigurd, Ragnar, and other
Scandinavian heroes all focus their power through being better at removing and

35
fighting obstacles in their path than their fellows. Primarily the focus seems to be on
fear and the overcoming of fear. The object that holds back everyone else in these stories
is the fear of the opponent, be it dragon, giant, the sea or a rival lord, but the hero rises
up and without fear overcomes the enemy. It is in fact the fearlessness that allows him
to obtain the victory.

King Arthur and the Holy Grail

Putting aside the enormous symbolism of the Holy Grail being implicated as the
sacred Soma, being a cup, ring, stone fallen from heaven, womb of a woman, filled with
blood or a draft of wine or mead which causes rejuvenation of the drinker and the land
in which he lives, we will focus instead on the myth of Arthur himself, his rise to power
and his hunt for the grail and point out symbolic links where appropriate.

Much like Aragorn and Sigurd, Arthur’s story begins with a wandering wizard
of divine birth, a Gandalf or and Odin. Interestingly it could be said that all of our
journeys begin with a meeting with such a character, but that is something we will
explore in detail later with the Barrow Lord. Merlin, the archetypal mortal/divine
wizard of myth said to be the son of a virtuous maiden who was carried nocturnally on
a Wild Hunt/Witches Sabbath to a demonic mountain where she was bred with a cruel
old fae spirit, which led to the birth of the magi. His mother, being an honourable
woman of noble birth, baptized her child as soon as he was born, causing him to stand,
speak his name, thank his mother for the precaution against his native father and
proceed to speak as one already wise in the ways of the world. Merlin found his calling
as an older man, with the highly symbolic tale of his discover of the red and white
(Soma) dragons under the castle of Vortigern. His predictions came true and Vortigern
was ousted by the young king Uther Pendragon, who became King of the Britains.
Merlin counseled Uther throughout his reign and mainly as a magician and shrewd
inventor helped his charge to rule the entirety of the country.

The most famous of the accounts of the contrived birth of Arthur relate that
Uther fell in love with the wife of a petty King Gorlois, the maiden Igraine. Uther was
disguised by Merlin as Gorlois, who had been killed outside the castle walls, who snuck
into Igraine’s chambers and according various legends either seduced her or raped her,
depending on the perspective of the author and the depth of his Christian virtue. The
product of this seduction (not excluding Uther eventually marrying Igraine and being
step-father to the three daughters whose father he colluded to murder) was Arthur. The
boy was taken my Merlin as ransom for his involvement in the seduction of Igraine and
given to a wise if slightly bumbling knight, Sir Ector, who raised him as his own son

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and regarded Merlin as something of a wandering ascetic, someone to be respected but
avoided.

In some legends the sword in the stone already existed, in others, the Archbishop
of Canterbury petitioned Merlin to find the rightful King of Britain and Merlin retorted
that a just and noble King would appear, whereupon the Archbishop emerged from the
cathedral one day to see a sword thrust hilt deep into an anvil, with an inscription
stating “he who pulls the sword shall be king”. This legend cannot be a culturally
unique invention of the time, for such a sword symbol exists in the Volsung Saga, being
the sword which Odin thrusts into the tree in the hall of the Volsungs, which Sigmund
then removes. A wizard putting a magic sword into a tree/anvil that only the rightful
king/hero can remove.

Obviously, Arthur removes the sword as a young man, and with the help of his
confidants and those present begins to carve out a kingdom, at which point Merlin
reappears to take up a similar position as that he had with Uther, counselor and
resident wizard. Again the similarity wit Odin helping Sigmund and then helping
Sigurd are profound.

Arthur selected a body of elite knights (not the common twelve as is usually
quoted) but a very large number, sometimes up to 130 depending on the material.
When these knights all sat around their circular table, making them all equal their
swords were placed before them to declare their honour and desire to be held as a
brother in the fraternity, creating an iron circle, or iron shield of swords. Thus the
symbol goes that the knights were not a force of brigands or mercenaries but an elite
selection of warriors oath bound to protect the kingdom and serve it. One of the striking
concepts of Arthur’s Camelot was that the oath was sworn to his wife, the lady
Guinevere, and not to Arthur, thereby staking their honor on the feminine right, a
remnant of the matrilineal heritage of the indigenous Britons.
another famous portion of Arthur’s myth relates that when he lost or broke the
magical sword from the stone he was told by Merlin to go to a magical lake where a
woman, the Nymph Du Lac would offer him another magical weapon, the infamous
Excalibur, an item which held effectively made the wielder immortal and indestructible.
Arthur’s fate would be knit to this sword and much in the same way as the smiths of
the early Bronze Age he would feel it important to return the mystical weapon to the
earth when he was done with it. Again this parallels the observation in the Volsung
Saga that the horde of gold was effectively ‘stolen’ by the gods, and the ring of Andvari,
the cause of all the trouble and strife was removed from the rivers and eventually
returned to the rivers when Gudrun threw herself off the cliff. Magical gifts from the

37
gods are given for a time to mortals, they fashion their kingdom from them or through
them and then when they crumble the gift is returned to the earth. Neolithic and Bronze
Age communities were known to have taken swords and broken them before putting
them in tomb of the dead loved one or buried large hordes of precious metals and
valuable goods for no apparent reason. The truth appears to be in this concept, that
what is taken must eventually be returned, and even though carve out a perfect form
for ourselves, a myth and legend, it must eventually return to the earth and decay.

Arthur continued his reign in benevolence and honesty, a paragon of divine

kingship, a mythical sun king of the old order. But eventually he too met his downfall.
His chosen faithful right hand man Lancelot was selected to escort or rescue Guinevere
(again depending on the tale) and during their time alone they fell in love, and upon
returning to Camelot would steal away together to rough it in the woods outside the
castle walls. On many occasions Guinevere is described as becoming bitter and twisted
because her marriage vows are distorted through their adultery and as Lancelot is sent
on various dangerous errands by her, he becomes more virtuous (due to his guilt) whist
she becomes more licentious and vicious (due to her guilt). Guinevere’s bitterness
eventually causes the death of another of Lancelot’s loves, the lady Elaine, who was
evicted to a convent when Guinevere stopped them being together. Her one victory was
to give birth to the knight Galahad whom she predicted would be the bearer of the Grail
and the healer of the land.

The Grail Quest and the reasons behind its sudden stealing away of all the great
souls of Camelot has its root in the concept of the ring and the Soma; a divine gift, a
divine healing potion, a divine draft of mead, hidden away at the end of a quest which
only the most virtuous and manly of knights can achieve. The Soma and the Grail share
in common that their being hidden away and their being discovered heal or blot the
landscape and the lives of everyone in the kingdom. When the Soma is withheld the
rains do not come and the sun I darkened, much as the fire from heaven brings
inspiration and wisdom to mankind, so the Grail being brought to Camelot will forgive
Arthur’s past sins, Lancelot and Guinevere’s infidelity and the general temper of
somber moodiness which has gripped the people. At the same time as the Grail Quest
beginning and the knights each leaving in search of the prize, Lancelot is banished from
the kingdom and Mordred, either Arthur’s illegitimate incestuous son or nephew,
decides to rebel against the King, taking some of his closest confidants with him and
assisting the enemies of the realm; winter is represented as a civil war.

It is Galahad, as virgin, and son of the deceased Elaine and virtuous Lancelot that
heals the wound of Camelot and receives the Grail’s bounteous victory.

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However, before that can occur Arthur is mortally wounded in battle (the recipient of
the holy relic/magic weapon must die before it can be given to the people, the King
must die before he can be reborn). Alongside Sir Bedevere he oversees the sword
Excalibur being cast into the lake, where the fairy queen receives it again and drags it
back down to the Underworld. Arthur himself is then carried to the water’s edge and he
is pulled into a boat with the Fay Queens, where he is taken wounded to the Isle of
Avalon, healed and awaits his countrymen’s calls for the return of the King; a theme
clearly exploited by Tolkien. Before the final battle Arthur allegedly forgave Guinevere
her infidelity, thus healing the broken bond between them, and as she retreats into a
nunnery her poisonous sinful vagina can no longer commit subsequent crimes (these
were Christian times) and the land can be healed by the Grail’s discovery. In some
legends Lancelot too retreated to the scene of the final battle (against the command of
his banishment) and fought alongside the knights and his King one last time before
witnessing Arthur fall. He then went to the nunnery and found Guinevere dead, where
he carried her back to the site of Arthur’s immortal rest and laid her at the feet of her
King, to rest forever in the peace of forgiveness. Much of these themes seem to be
softened retellings of the brutal love triangle which existed between Sigurd, Gudrun,
and Brynhildr, the betrayal Brynhildr, the betrayal of Mark by Tristram and Iseuld,
perhaps the enduring theme of all of these heroic myths is that broken oaths ruin
everyone, even shattering kingdoms as their poison leeches outwards.

Food for thought and a wound that only the Grail/Soma/Ring can heal.

It is worth exploring this in your own meditations, that the treasures which you
prize, the kingdom you have built, the magical weapons you have secured from the
Otherworld, the lovers you have rescued or stolen, the families you have raised and the
castles you have built will one day very soon be dust and ashes. Everything dies, and not
slowly, but violently fast, that which was once a muscular and glistening temple to the
human potential will one day be a heap of rotting much or ash and a collection of
drying bones which will look almost identical to those of the cretins you walked beside
in life.

What matters then? Does anything matter? We return to the same questions over
and over again.

“Cattle die,

Kinsmen die

You yourself die;

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 I know one thing

Which never dies:

The fate of the honoured dead.”

-Havamal 77

Sigurd the Volsung

Sigurd; our namesake, our totem, our hero, the man-god that will survive
Ragnarok and arise from the ashes, the dragonslayer, the one who treads the serpent,
the true King of Kings, not some weakened slovenly peasant, a man of noble blood
riding the thunder cloud and striking his foes with a sword that has seen violenge all
the days of its life.

Sigurd and the story of the Volsungs is by far my favourite of the Scandinavian
and European myth cycles, it contains the coldest and hardest experiences of the Norse
view of life, of betrayal and oath and love and forgiveness. It is a tale of woe, of
brutality and savagery but it is also one of hope and heroism and rebirth from the ashes
as each time the major protagonist is slain his descendant is handed the reins of power
(if symbolically) and awaits his time in the sun. The Volsung saga then speaks to us
most deeply on the level of human characters, it tells us that even men descended from
Odin, wielding magical swords and gifted with enormous powers of strength and
prowess, still call upon their very human gifts of fearlessness and indomitable will to
secure their victory and their thrones.

In this short description of the major events in Sigurds’ life I am working from
the Volsung saga as understood to be “orthodox”, not including any of the variations
brought in by the German Nibelungenlied or their modernizations via Wagner. Whilst I
do appreciate the influence of these stories on the understanding of who Sigurd was
and his relationship to the wider Germanic/Scandinavian culture, I believe the
Icelandic Volsung saga to be a truer version uncorrupted by potential Christian
poisoning. In that sense I recommend the reader look to Tolkien’s translation of the
poems, in his recently published work Sigurd and Gudrun.

Sigurd is the second son of Sigmund, son of Volsung, who with his other son
Sinfjolti fought so valiantly as a werefolf outlaw in themes we shall explore later in the
chapter on ordeals. Sigmund carved out a huge empire for himself and his sons with the
magical sword Gram (comparable to Excalibur as we have said) which Odin had thrust
into a tree in the centre of the Volsung hall which only Sigmund could remove. In his

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final battle to secure the largest portion of his lands Sigmund faced a cloaked Odin in
combat and had the sword Gram shattered in his arms (the gift which Odin gave is
violently taken away by the same hand). Sigmund in his death song passed the shards
of Gram to his unborn son Sigurd via his second wife Hiordis.

In the accounts of his youth Sigurd is raised as one of accepted noble birth ut
essentially in a form of captivity, and is eventually sent to live with Regin the smith.
Regin taunts Sigurd in a series of strange conversations which lead to him obtaining the
magical horse Grani, which is descended from the immortal Sleipnir, Odin’s horse
(compare this to the magical horse Marko). In further arguments/discussions Sigurd
learns the legend of Fafnir the dragon and the accursed golden ring of Andvari and the
hoard which the dragon guards, not knowing that Regin is related to Fafnir and seeks
the hoard himself. Sigurd agrees to secure the hoard in statement of his bravery and
heroism and has Regin regforge the sword Gram for him, which cuts straight through
the anvil upon which is was cast (again compare to the forging of Anduril from the
shards of Narsil by the elven smiths for Aragorn the returning king). We see the
symbolism once more of something which was broken or lost being returned to the
blood descendant of the man who once wielded it, and therefore awakening power
latent in his heritage; a powerful symbol.

Sigurd goes to the dragon Fafnir’s hiding place and hides in a ditch by which the
beast crawls from his lair to drink water, and by the guidance of Odin manages to
skewer the dragon from beneath with Gram (see comparisons with Glaurung, Smaug,
and Beowulf’s final foe). The sacred heart which falls from Fafnir’s body is a
blessed/accursed object, and at Odin’s command once more Sigurd bathes in the trench
of Fafnir’s blood which makes him invulnerable, except for a portion of his back where
a leaf was stuck. It is interesting to note that the underbelly of the dragon was his weak
spot, and after bathing in the blood Sigurd’s immortality is weakened only in a spot on
his back. Regin appears and tells Sigurd to cook the heart for him which he will eat later,
and in a classical mirror of the bestowing of wisdom to the Irish wizard Fionn, Sigurd
accidently burns his thumb on some of the dragon’s heart blood and sucks it,
immediately acquiring some its power and hearing the birds talking in the trees. The
birds tell Sigurd that Regin plans to kill him and eat the dragon’s heart for himself,
which will make him enormously powerful. Sigurd springs on Regin and slays him,
before eathing the heart and attaining all the powers he would later be famed for.

There are several themes here we must explore. Sifurd as hero who wields the
reforged lightning bolt handed him by Odin in the form of the sword Gram has become
something of a Thor or Indra character. In his hunt for the gold he seeks the hidden

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wealth of summer which has been stolen by the dragon winter, much as Marduk fights
Tiamat, Thor fights Jormungand and Indra faces the cosmic dragon that guards the
Soma. Again, Sigurd defeats the dragon, and bathes in its blood and eats the heard
which must be cooked first, all of which are classic Soma symbols par excellence. Indra
rides on the thunder cloud (magical horse/eagle) to the dragon’s lair and rescues/slays
the Soma which is the dragon and also its heart, which he then presses/bathes in and
eats which confers immortality and limitless strength upon him, Sigurd here appears to
be a personification in flesh of Thor and Indra and Odin, all of their major mead/Soma
hunts being merged into one. It is also worth noting that the common theme is here
once more that Soma/dragon’s blood bestows prophecy and invulnerability, which are
common associations of it in Siberian, Asian, and Northern European literature.

Now the complicated parts begin. Sigurd travelling on Grani spotted a high
tower glittering in the distance and came to find Brynhildr ensorcelled in a tower of
shields and swords surrounded by a ring of fire. Only Sigurd with his certainty of
survival due to Fafnir’s blood overcomes the ring of fire and lands inside the tower of
swords, where he wakes Brynhildr and the two fall in love. Brynhildr says that she
cannot leave with Sigurd and become his wife until he has carved out a kingdom for
himself as she will marry no other than a legendary king. Sigurd lays her back down on
the bed and rides out to find his throne. Once more the fate of the land and the fate of
the hero rests in the lap and womb of a maiden/queen who will offer her hand only
when certain parameters are met (Guinevere and Arwen come to mind).

Sigurd eventually comes to the court of Gjuki where he meets the brothers
Gunnar, Hogni, and Guttorm and their sister Gudrun. Gudrun is immediately
infatuated with the hero and pines for his love, unaware that he is concerned only with
eventually securing Brynhildr. Gudrun’s mother Grimhild gives Sigurd poisoned ale of
forgetfulness and makes him fall in love with Gudrun, the two are married and he
becomes blood brothers with Gunnar and Hogni. Riding one day with Gunnar, Sigurd
sees the flaming tower once more and is oddly reminded of something and the two ride
to the fortress where Gunnar declares that he wants to marry the maiden within.
Unable to cross the ring of fire and swords Gunnar asks Sigurd to go in his place and
when Brynhildr is awoken she feels there is some reason she should not marry the
disguised Sigurd but yields anyway. When they return to the court of Gjuki Sigurd
hides his crime from Brynhildr and pretends nothing has happened. Over some
presumed years the couples go on with their lives, Sigurd confused as to why he feels
something for Brynhildr and she clearly confused as to why she pines even when

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Gunnar is clearly a mighty hero for rescuing her. Already Sigurd has broken his oath to
Brynhildr and the blood oath between he and Gunnar begins to sour.

One day Gudrun and Brynhildr are bathing in a river and begin arguing about
which of their husbands is the better man, Brynhildr stating without doubt that it is
Gunnar for his securing of her hand by leaping the ring of flames. Gudrun in an idiotic
rage tells Brynhildr everything and the forgetfulness falls from her, as she remembers
Sigurd and reveals the true state of the betrayal which has been wrought.

Brynhildr now falls into a Valkyrie’s hatred and begins to plot the downfall of all
around her, she loathes Gunnar and mocks him daily, refusing to lay with him and
laughing at him when he tries to persuade her to his virtues. Gunnar and Hogni plot
Sigurd’s murder and convince/entrance their brother Guttorm to do the deed. Sigurd is
stabbed in his bed through the only weak point on his back and wakes to slay the
youngest brother. Brynhildr bursts in, beside herself with grief and rage and mocks
Sigurd in his death throes, even though he declares his love for her and his guiltlessness
at the betrayal. Brynhildr (depending on the myth source) either kills herself on Gram,
which breaks beneath her or dies of a broken heart, asking that Gunnar and Hogi build
a great funeral pyre for her and her love, which they do.

Sigurd and Brynhildr are laid on the pyre together, with the shards of Gram and
the body of Guttorm, and all are taken whole to Valhalla where the Einherjar are said to
drum their feet and hands on the tables (thunder) in anticipation of the arrival of the
Dragonslayer. In some myths (and particularly Tolkien’s translation) Sigurd is said to
be the one hero who survives Ragnarok and kills the serpent who slayed Thor in the
last day, and emerging from the fires becomes the new god of the new aeon.

Sigurd here seems to be something of a kind of reborn Thor, for if Thor dies
fighting the serpent and Sigurd avenges the death, he becomes a kind of adopted son of
the thunder god, and along with all the other symbols associated with his heroism,
Sigurd becomes the warrior god of the new survivors of the spiritual death of the Norse
which the Volva predicted.

For us as warriors and brethren of Thor and the Aesir, who have survived the
spiritual Ragnarok of the last one thousand years of Christianity, and it’s poisonous
oppression of pain, hatred and death (Fenrir, Jormungand and Hel), we emerge as the
new sons of Sigurd, the one who has slain the dragon. Sigurd becomes a herald and a
god of the new dawn, like the Ubermensch of Nietzsche’s emergent New Man, Sigurd
has his symbol as the lightning bolt and calls for all men and women to honour the
gods, defeat the dragon, bathe in its blood and ascend as immortals.
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Aragorn the Returning King

As out final exploration of the male heroes of myth and legend which add
weight to our premise, we will look at Aragorn, Strider, King Elessar of Tolkien’s hugely
well-known Lord of the Rings trilogy. LOTR is heralded as being the second most read
book in the western world after the Bible, which holds it aloft as a rival alongside the
monotheism of the past. Tolkien aimed to give his people (the English) their mythology
back, as he said the myths of the Scandinavians, Russians, Germans, Irish and so on had
all survived but due to the destruction of English culture after the Norman invasion, a
lot of what it meant to be English was forever repressed and regarded as backward or
clumsy. This racism still exists to this day with people using a West Country (Wiltshire,
Somerset, Devonshire, Cornwall) accent when making out that someone is stupid and
putting on a posh (received pronunciation) accent when insinuating that someone is
clever. This comes from the root idea that the peasantry would have been Anglo-Saxon
and the nobility would have been Norman/French, so they had to keep themselves
separate, therefore a racial hatred of anything vaguely indigenous to England and
Britain was contrived. The nobility instinctively despise the peasants of the West
Country, Wales, Scotland, the “north” and the isles of Britain, with Ireland fairing worst
of all and its inhabitants being regarded as barely human by the aloof inhabitants of
manors and bearers of royal titles up and down the land.

What Tolkien aimed to do then, as an Oxford professor of English and Anglo-

Saxon was wrest back some of this nobility which he instinctively saw in the English
people. The inhabitants of the Shire are without doubt the inhabitants of the shire
counties (Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Hampshire, Somersetshire, Devonshire etc.) made
short and squat by their small opinions and small world view, whereas the inhabitants
of Rohan are most certainly the noble Anglo-Saxons who still ride the horse and live in
mead halls and Iron Age hill forts. The people of Arnor then, coming from the far north
of that land are certainly (without putting too much allegory into the text, a function
Tolkien himself despised) the ancient peoples of Britain, the Picts and
Scythian/Egyptian refugees who found home in Scotland and the isles between
Norway and the British Isles. We’re not here to do a lengthy expose on the similarities
between Tolkien’s work and British history, suffice to say he desired for the cosmology
and world view of the major characters and races in Middle Earth to reflect or at least
complement those he felt the Anglo-Saxon and English would have shared.

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 Aragorn II son of Arathorn was a descendent of the line of the kings of Numenor
and a Dunedain prince, blessed with the long life given to him through the
intermarriage with Elvish bloodlines. Aragorn as a rightful heir of Isildur, the last true
King of Gondor has the right and claim to unite the decrepit kingdoms of Rohan,
Gondor, and Arnor and renew their lordship of Middle Earth by defeating their
common foe in Mordor. Much like Sigurd and King Arthur (as has been noted by
hundreds of different authors) Aragorn has to unite a broken kingdom, reclaim a
throne, defeat an enemy to claim a maiden and reforge a broken sword. All of these
elements are key to Tolkien’s understanding of heroism, that something broken being
reforged would unite disparate tribes and the right kingship of one who has the right to
the royal throne would heal the land, an idea closely associated with the ancient
European idea of the King being descended from the gods/elves.

At a young age Aragorn was fostered in the house of Rivendell by the Elvish lord
Elrond, his heritage hidden from him and his nobility kept secret until he was an older
man. Whilst in Rivendell he fell in love with the maiden Arwen whose fate eventually
became knit with that of the One Ring of Sauron, causing him, like King Arthur to have
a vested emotional interest in securing her survival and safety because it was part of the
safety of his own kingdom. When Aragorn eventually learned of his ancestry and his
birthright he took the mantle of Lord of the Dunedain and went out into the wilds of
Middle Earth to fight orcs under the name Strider and protect the Shire from
encroaching bandits and raiders from the wildlands.

At this point in his life, the all too familiar events of the Lord of the Rings takes
place, which surely everyone reading this book will know. In short, Aragorn joins up
with Frodo and the other hobbits, assisting them through many perils to Rivendell
where the fellowship is formed which will carry the dread accursed ring to Mordo to be
destroyed. Aragorn leads the party through Moria where Gandalf falls into the abyss
with the Balrog and continues to lead them right up to Boromir’s death and the splitting
of the fellowship at the hands of the Uruk-Hai. When Frodo and Sam continue the ring
quest alone Aragorn takes Gimli the dwarf and Legolas the elf on a journey to try and
rouse allies against Mordor across Middle Earth. On their mission to free the other
hobbits Aragorn and his companions get caught up in the awakening of Rohan and
help defend Helps Deep from the Uruks. Continuing on with the resurrected Gandalf
they quest finally to Minas Tirith where Aragorn accepts his birth right of the reforged
sword Narsil and faces his demons in the tombs of the accursed army, leading them at
the turning point of the Battle of Pellenor Fields to victory. As Frodo advances the ring
towards its goal in Mount Doom, Aragorn leads the collective armies of Rohan, Arnor

45
and Gondor against Mordor in on last heroic stand. The men of Middle Earth are
hugely outnumbered but at the moment of certain failure Tolkien pulls off what he
called the eucatastrophe, a sudden turning point from death and failure to life and
victory. Gollum falls with the ring into Mount Doom and the power of Sauron is
broken, Aragorn succeeds in his quest, secures the throne of the unified kingdom of
Middle Earth and weds the lady Arwen. An all-round perfect victory.

Like the sun kings of old, Aragon’s reclaiming the throne secures the health and
prosperity of the entire area and a new era of cooperation dawns between elves,
dwarves and men, one that even the kings of the Elves in the Third Age could not claim.
The end of Lord of the Rings did not herald the end of Aragon’s life as a soldier, and in
his rule of the Reunited Kingdom he led many military campaigns against the
Easterlings and Haradrim, reclaiming territory lost during the dark days of Sauron’s
presence. Tolkien was not shy about stating which of the historical kings Aragorn
somewhat mirrored, and pointed to Arthur and Sigurd as mythical influences but
Charlemagne as the main historical inspiration. Charlemagne (whether you like him or
not) as King of the Franks, claimed descent through his mother from the Albigensian
line, the old Grail kings of the proto-French, and his unification of the Holy Roman
Empire was seen as a recasting of the Eastern and Western empires of Rome and
Byzantium. It is well known that Charlemagne also had to secure the hand of an elven
maiden and had a few sore experiences with magical serpent rings, as can be seen in his
apocryphal myth cycles associated with his band of knight retainers and a strange
bishop/wizard standing in for Odin. Charlemagne, the hammer of the pagans, takes on
many of the spiritual and heroic facets of the older heroes, whom he would have sought
to destroy. It would appear heroism is in the blood, and the ancestrally pagan Franks
couldn’t help but spread the story of the hero Emperor who reunites the kingdom, wins
the maiden, wins the throne and crown and rules in benevolence with a band of
knightly champions.

Aragorn is the archetypal medieval hero king, purely pagan but influenced by
Tolkien’s nominal Catholicism. As he aged, the near immortality of his parentage and
upbringing inevitable wore off, and like all hero kings he too succumbed to death. The
Christian myth fails, and the heathen truth reigns, all men die, even the kings who
united a broken kingdom. Tolkien even in his Christian influence allowing 99% of the
main characters in LOTR to survive a war which saw hundreds of thousands of other
die, capitulated to the heathen truth in the end. Of the original Fellowship of the Ring,
Boromir died in combat, Gandalf and Frodo went to the undying lands, Meriadoc and
Pippin were buried in Gondor either side of Aragorn, and upon hearing f their

46
companions death Gimli and Legolas board a grey ship and sail for the Elvish afterlife
as well. The kingdom reunited, the world saved from darkness, even the heroes of old
must yield and wander to the Halls of Mandos.

The tale of Aragorn unites all of the major themes of the hero which we have
been looking at, and brings them all to a perfect end. A band of brothers faces
insurmountable odds, companionship based on shared devotion to a cause unites them,
they almost fail, but then succeed and one by one old age and the grayness of loss
swallow them away. There is sadness and melancholia to Tolkien’s work, even more so
in the notes of the Silmarillion. Death stalks everyone, even the semi immortal heroes of
the story. Tolkien knew this to be truth, for he had sailed for foreign lands, leaving the
Shire behind with a band of brothers, heading for the trenches of Europe in World War
I. He would have felt the innocence of the Shirefolk flowing through his veins and he
too would have felt the bitter kiss of loss when his fellowship was broken and friends
died unknown and unnoticed in the horror of modern warfare. Tolkien knew that
heroes of myth are great and noble characters of huge deed which they inevitably
survive and see the end of, but in real life out noble heroes die just like the rest of us. In
many ways then the stories of Lord of the Rings could be seen as a way for Tolkien to
relive the horrors of war but allow his close companions to survive, grow old and die
beside each other as friends, a luxury his real life brothers did not have.

The bitter sweetness of the European myth.

The Unbroken Bond

From these examples we have explored, we have revealed a man who is

dualistic, and spiritually contradictory. The hero is often a scion of the culture of the era
in which he finds himself. If he is a pagan knight he is not just any knight but the Son of
Odin himself, half mortal and half divine. If he is a Christian knight he is the Christian
knight. The uniting factor being their unswerving loyalty to virtue, a moral code (often
given by the nation and time in which they live) a personal law and the people they
serve. On the other hand they are utterly unique, separate from the mundane order of
the day, fantastically strong, aggressive, able to drink more mead and eat more meat (or
the total opposite) than any of their comrades or enemies, they are virtuous yet ribald in
their licentiousness. Each is brought down by a love of women or a specific woman,
whether a strong warrior woman, a witch, a mother, a wife, each one is dethroned by a
woman, the archetypal lady of the world. And here is the humanity of the hero, his
essential tragedy, for each of these stories does contain a tragic end, one way or another.

47
For every hero must live and love with reckless abandon, eventually felled by death and
death alone.

Perhaps each hero could be said at some point in their myth to have thought
(and lived by) the maxim of “all men die, it is dying well that matters”. And there is what
we must take forward as men and women manifesting these myths in our own lives.
Are we not the same men that once walked this earth? We may feel like children playing
among the tombs and ruins of better men, but we are the same men. How we choose to
live and how we choose to die, these are the things that define us. We choose to not live
in a demoralizing or ignoble manner, we make blood oaths and bonds of brotherhood
and sisterhood in the same way it was ever done. And we have enough intelligence,
records and heroic poetry and myth to show us the way up the mountain, it is up to us
to walk it.

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 Chapter IV – Shieldmaidens

Noose chariot

Broken bone dagger,

Wolf beside me

Manicked cackle.

The warrior woman of history had to behave like a man, fight like a man, lift,
strike, wrestle and kill like a man if she wanted to survive and be the best she could be.
Women of our era on the other hand are told to love like infant princesses and regard
themselves as nothing more than an object and a womb to be wooed and impregnated
by a better male. All of this is as true now as it was in the 1930’s, the Victorian era, the
Georgian era and the many other eras before when women were but livestock to be
traded and thrown about with little concern for their autonomy.

This statement may come as a surprise to many readers, for you must obviously
think, surely he is going to give us examples of women in the Indo-European and wider
myth cycles who were regularly used and abused by the men of the mythology. Yes,
there were women who were nothing more than vehicles for the story of the major
heroes, but there were also real hard women and the women I see in my everyday life.
The statement may also come as a shock to women who believe that in our modern time
they have something akin to real freedom, something I also challenge. Freedom for a
woman in our eyes rests in her ability to be everything nature dictates she must be but
also being whatever she wants to be. Freedom for a woman of Sigurd then is the freedom
of the mother bear, or the alpha female wolf, or the female great white shark or the
female spider; it is the freedom to be a woman, but also a warrior.

The mother bear is a perfect example, she selects her mate, breeds with him, he is
huge, terrifying, she huddles away, has her babies and then lives and breathes to
protect and feed them, she hunts and teaches them the ways of the environment in
which they live, but oft if she comes across a male bear (sometimes even the father of
her cubs) he may try to kill her to eat her children. This is frighteningly close in my
view to how a hunter-gatherer woman must have felt in ancient times, and even how a
Viking woman in very recent times would have felt if living in a rugged and dangerous

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environment. If her husband was off at war, hunting or making a name for himself, she
could very likely be left home in the village or community on her won, raising her
children. What then? What if the men were bested in combat at the town gates? What if
brigands entered the village and began raping and burning? Was it the lot of a noble
woman to slit her children’s throats and then her own? Or was it to hide her children
and wait to be raped, hoping that the intruders left and they could live on in rapt fear of
a repetition of the intrusion? No. I don’t believe it was. I believe that like Eowyn in Lord
of the Rings, that women of old (especially in more warring and martial communities)
would have regarded it as their position to protect the children and themselves (their
wombs being a precious resource for the tribe) at any cost, and that a fate worse than
death was reserved for the gilded cage of the goodly wife. Women are humans, they are
humans who can produce life, they are feminine, motherly, kind and tender, but they
have muscle, they can fight, they can kill, so what kind of ignoramus would say it is not
their lot to be able and strong?

The shieldmaiden is the woman of Nordic and Germanic culture who had selected
this life for herself, she had chosen to be a soldier and often given up the life of a wife
and mother (although mythological and historical examples exist of women who were
both warriors and mothers). The shieldmaiden is the perfect term to describe the modern
woman who has taken upon herself the path of being fully aware of the roles of nature
dictates as mother and wife, but also taking the path of what she decides as withc,
goddess, Valkyrie, soldier, lifter, strongwoman, outlaw, and fighter.

The following examples are mythological and historical, they show women who
were mothers and wives forced into situations which require them to become warriors,
and they also show women who were warriors eventually falling in love and settling
down to a life they would have once abhorred. We also have mythical maidens who are
given roles as daughters of battle itself, harbingers of doom and gatherers of the fallen
dead. There is an intimate and seldom mentioned link between women and the
battlefield, one which the Scandinavians knew very well, and it is in their literature and
history that we see the clearest examples of women who fought and died with the same
reckless hunger for renown as their male counterparts.

Shieldmaidens

The shieldmaiden was a woman who, as we’ve sid, chose the life of the warrior
in the same way as her male comrades. The word shield-maiden implies that the girl
has chosen to marry the shield instead of the man. Another way of describing it is in

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George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, the wildling spearwife, she who has wed the
spear and taken the life of a warrior instead of that of a wife or maid. The shieldmaiden
was therefore presumably treated as a man, it would have been necessary for the unity
and cohesion of any warrior group that a maiden, however beautiful or desirable to the
males was out of bounds and “defeminized” before she was able to fight alongside
them.

One of the best examples we have historically of these kinds of women in the
Varangian Guard, and whilst there is no concrete evidence of how they lived or what
they did, their mere presence among such an elite shows the kinds of men and women
that populated the Varangian ranks.

The Varangian Guard were and elite body of warriors who served as the
bodyguard for the Byzantine Emperor between the 10th and 14th centuries, made up
mainly of Scandinavian, Germanic and Anglo Saxon warriors. The Emperor Basil II
formed the Varangians due to his wariness of the Byzantine forces, preferring to trust to
the loyalty of Scandinavian mercenary forces that had shown their mettle during
carious battles. In this way the Varangians are not too dissimilar to the Praetorian
Guard which the Roman emperors created from out of their most loyal subjects, the
body of warriors eventually becoming so entrenched as to challenge the authority of the
emperor himself.

The Varangians were so devoted a mercenary force because of the instinctive

oath bound format with which the Norse, Germanic and Anglo Saxon peoples
functioned. If they swore an oath (even based on monetary gain) to protect any man or
territory, they would sooner die than forsake that pledge. It was said that after the
defeat of the Anglo Saxon kingdom by the Normans that the Varangian Guard was
disproportionately made up of Englishmen searching for new lands and a living after
losing theirs to the invaders of 1066; regardless of their origins or the reason for their
allegiance, they stood by their oaths.

In their exploits (in the main between 900AD and 1200AD, before losing a little of
their Nordic homogeny) they were generally used as a marine or commando style strike
force, coming in at a pivotal moment and turning the tide one way or the other (i.e. if
they succeed, the army won – if they lost, it turned the tide against their force). Their
history reads like a butchers log book of slaughter and mayhem, serving the Byzantines
in various conflicts against Muslims in the south, Normans in the west and many other
enemies on different borders (sometimes actually allying with previous enemies to
defeat new ones). The Varangians were said to have fought well during the sack of

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Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, where the fighting was said to have been
“very violent”.

The Varangians were known to be fiercely and uncharacteristically loyal to the

native Byzantines, with carious chroniclers noting their berserker rage which gripped
them during battle, their lack of care for wounds or death and their uncommon and
fanatical devotion to the emperor or anyone they had sworn oath to. The Varangians
could be seen to be like the riders of Rohan, the Rohirrim in the Lord of the Rings,
specifically their sudden ability to sway the tide of battle and their reputation as fierce
horsemen. At Helm’s Deep they arrive at ecactly the right moment and rout the Uruk
Hai, then at the Siege of Minas Tirith (the white city, said by Tolkien to be comparative
to Constantinople, and Rohan cognate with Anglo Saxon England) they arrive during
the worst part of the fighting and chanting death ride in to alter the course of the
combat.

Why give such a clear historical overview of the Varangians in our context of the
shieldmaiden? Well, these Scandinavian and Germanic warriors clearly been shown to
be extremely violent and displaying all of the cultural attributes the Northmen were
famed for. So it is with great surprise that we read in 971 when Sviatoslav I of Kiev
attacked the Byzantines in Bulgaria the Rus were astonished to find armed female
warriors among the Varangian dead. This clearly shows that the Varangians had little
concern for the sex of the warrior, so long as he/she was devoted to the service of the
emperor, bound by oath and died for the cause were it necessary. For the woman of
Sigurd the Varangians should be a huge inspiration, firstly that the men (unlike many of
the era) were unconcerned with gender when it came to physical displays of honour or
martial ability, and secondly that the women found it their lot to serve alongside the
men without concern for the alleged weakness of their sex.

Among the shieldmaidens of myth it is worth briefly mentioning the legend of

Hervor in the myth cycle of the magical accursed sword Tyrfing. Hervor’s father
Angantyr lived his life as a warrior using the magical sword and eventually dying in a
duel with a rival. After his death Hervor was taken to live as a slave until eventually
growing up to fight under her male name Hjorvard, pillaging, sacking and living as a
man. When she learned of her father’s past she decided to take up where he had left off
and recover the magic sword Tyrfing.

Leading a male crew in a fleet of ships she came to a magical haunted island
filled with long barrows, and only she was brave enough to disembark and walk on the
ghostly shore. Challenging her father to emerge from a large barrow with a fire burning

52
above it he finally approached her and told her to abandon the folly of questing for a
cursed sword. It would appear that like the cursed gold of Andvari in the Volsung Saga
the sword would only bring death and destruction on the bearer and her clan.
Undisturbed from her quest Hervor persisted and claimed her inheritance and returned
to the ships to sail home, only to find that the noise and lights from the barrows had
scared all the men away and only she remained.

She came to the court of a noble king and committed many exploits, still living as
a man under the Hjorvard (whilst she must have been known to be a woman, the idea
living as a man must mean living as a warrior). After reaching the end of her service she
resumed her piratical activities and lived as a Viking raider, as many of the best
Scandinavian heroes did.

Eventually she settled down, gave up the sword, married a nobleman named
Hofund and became a queen in her own right. She had two sons, passed on the sword
to one of them, who then used it to slay his brother. He then had children of his own,
naming one of them Hervor after his mother and she too lived as a shieldmaiden and
was known as the commander of a fort of the Goths who was slain during the invasions
by the Huns.

It would appear that a lot of Hervor’s exploits, her temperament, her eventual
succumbing to love and settling down and her granddaughter’s continuance of the
tradition whilst brandishing Tyrfing, mirrors a lot of what Brynhildr and Gudrun are
credited with in the Volsung saga. Shieldmaidens, women who refuse to be bested by
men, fearless, as courageous if not more so than their male counterparts, undaunted by
curses or ghosts, noble in the face of Hun invaders, these are strong women.

It is worth briefly mentioning the historical example of Freydis, the half-sister of

Leif Erikson recorded in the Greenland saga. The continued excursions into Vinland led
many Viking communities to be formed along what would become the Canadian and
Nova Scotian shores. These communities would have been under constant threat of
attack from the Native Americans (which particular tribe, we do not know). Freydis,
when her village was attacked by the Natives, bared her breasts, grabbed her sword
and ran at the enemy, screaming and hollering, eventually scaring them off! This
example of a woman apparently not even for a moment considering the threat posed to
herself by the attackers but like her namesake running into the fray, is a brilliant one for
ye shieldmaidens.

Another historical albeit brief account given in the Saxo Grammaticus states that in
750AD three hundred shieldmaidens fought on the Danish side during the Battle of
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Bravalla. It also says in the chronicles of Ragnar Lodbrock that a shieldmaiden by the
name of Lagertha turned the tide of a significant battle by leading a flanking assault on
the enemy, saving her leader Ragnar. Such fleeting and seemingly everyday mentions
of women being involved in combat lend weight to the growing idea that women were
not only ready to fight if needs be, but a small number of them were consistently
preparing to fight as a profession and a chosen specialty. It was obviously regarded as
alien to their sex, but it was accepted as a role if they should choose it.

Some historians and scholars would have us believe that these stories of the
shieldmaidens come down to us as example of why we shouldn’t abandon the gender
roles and show that when women are warriors everyone dies, or that when women are
strong and powerful in character, their men become weakened and pathetic. If any of
this is true it is more glaringly offensive to the men than the women, are we expected to
believe that the presence of a woman who can fight or wrestle or lift heavy things is so
galling to men that they suddenly lose their testicles, abandon the warrior lifestyle or
can’t help but retreat into ignominiously suicidal behavior? I believe that stories handed
down to us are meant as what they are, accounts, remembrances, tales of woe and
sadness (as the Norse myths usually are) ad ones which show us how women should
behave as warriors, just as they show men how to behave as warriors. Just because
Sigurd chose Gudrun over Brynhildr because of a magic potion, which causes all kinds
of grief, doesn’t mean the myth is trying to tell us not to drink potions given us by our
moody female hosts. But we’re asked to believe that Brynhildr’s cruel demeanor at
being snubbed and offended by Gudrun and her subsequent venomous revenge is a
warning to women to never take up arms or step out of the kitchen!

As we move forward and uncover more of what it meant in ancient history and
mythological circles to be a shieldmaiden and a warrior woman we will see where the
myths and the legends cross over and begin to form a very real and definite pattern that
any self-respecting female martial artist, strongwoman, powerlifter or athlete can
embody through her actions, nobility, speech and execution of desires.

Brynhildr

Our first port of call is of course, the shieldmaiden par excellence, that inimical
and infamous warrior woman Brynhildr. As we have explored in the section on Sigurd
the Volsung, Brynhildr was imprisoned in a tower surrounded by walls of flame and
swords, pricked by a thorn given her by her Father/Lover Odin. The moment she
appears in the story she is revealed as a prize and a being of substance and weight, she
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is not to be messed with, she is as much of a character and a creature as Sigurd and
Sigmund, unlike any of the other women previously or latterly taking part in the tragic
events. Her discovery by Sigurd, the winning of her hand and the subsequent betrayal
stands in direct opposition to that of the hero. He awakens to his birth right, to wed a
princess and secure the kingdom of his ancestors and secures victory after victory. She
awakens to her birth right, to wed a King and become Queen in her own land, and is
betrayed over and over again, her honour is trampled. She is used as a pawn and her
abilities are regarded as second fiddle to those of the heroes. Her arguments with
Gudrun and the revealing of the betrayal by blood brothers to secure her hand for
Gunnar are shown as the root of her bitterness, that it is somehow wrong or aggressive
for a woman to presume to be regarded as the same as a man and not treated like a
piece of shit for wanting to be treated the same. Gudrun in the modern (and probably
ancient) interpretations of the myth comes across as bit of a bitch for boasting (a
warning against gossiping or bragging) and Brynhildr in her immediate plotting of
revenge comes across equally venomous.

The Christian poisoning of the story is evident in the more Germanic versions of
the myth which have survived and been convoluted and altered down the ages.
Brynhildr in the European versions comes across as hugely worse, arrogant, savage, in
the extreme and bent on her revenge as soon as she is wronged. The German version
differs as well in that Sigurd (as Siegfried) rapes Brynhildr to break her spirit and
prepares her for Gunnar, taking the valiant shieldmaiden and reducing her to a stony
ashen housewife for the other hero. It would appear that as the myth distanced itself
from its heathen origins, the character of Brynhildr became ever more problematic for
the monotheistic and deeply misogynistic Christians who retold it. Brynhildr quite
simply could not be shown in a positive light for resisting either Sigurd or Gunnar and
needed to be shown the ropes of being a good housefwife, even if it did mean battery
and sexual assault.

The Nordic myth however has these scenes evident solely as a heated argument
between Sigurd and Brynhildr, reminding us intensely of those heated arguments
between other broken hearted lovers, Romeo and Juliet, Tristram and Isolde, Heathcliff
and Cathy. When Sigurd reveals the truth of the betrayal Brynhildr is incensed and
promises vengeance, and being a shieldmaiden all know that it will not be deceptive or
based on trickery but blatant and out in the open. When finally the vengeance is had
and Sigurd is morally wounded she bursts in laughing and is cold and bitter to the end,
only softening when her love is dead and she can join him on the funeral pyre. Much
like Heathcliff plotting the downfall of all around him and securing the annihilation of

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all that Cathy loved, he only softens when Cathy is dead, ironically then becoming even
bitterer when he has succeeded in destroying her. Strangely then Sigurd and Gunnar’s
plotting and chicanery is more like how the Vikings would have expected a woman to
act, whilst Brynhildr’s open promises of retribution and securing and ending of the
blood feud between she and Sigurd reminds more of how a warrior would act.

It is strange also to note that Gudrun in all of these initial deceptions and plotting
remains like a dopey dove, caring only to secure Sigurd’s love, but when she is married
off to Attila and eventually secures her revenge she acts quite a lot like Brynhildr;
murdering her children, burning down a hall, assisting her brothers in assaulting her
husband’s capital and then killing him and herself. If anything, the Sigurd myth frowns
upon the whispery, gossipy nature of what would be regarded as witchcraft (the
potions of forgetfulness and the notion of feminine betrayal) and lauds the savagery of
open declaration of feelings and actions, no matter how violent. If Sifurd and been
open, if all had spoken their hearts, all would have been saved, but egos and fragile
sense of what could or could not be done according to social customs of the day
dictated that everything go awry. At the end of it all, when Brynhildr throws herself on
the pyre with Sigurd (or is placed beside him after hilling herself with his sword, in
some different versions) she secures their eternal love, now as when they were
originally together, and it is said as we have mentioned that they attain Valhalla
together, as lovers and as warriors.

In one of the Eddaic poems recounting Brynhildr’s ride to the afterlife (Helreid
Brynhildr) she is confronted by a giantess who tells her she is responsible for all the ills
that befell her during her life and she has lived ignobly. Brynhildr retorts – “Ever with
grief and all too long are men and women born in the world; but yet we shall live our lives
together, Sigurd and I. Sink down, Giantess!” Even in the plummet to her everlasting end
Brynhildr is the warrior, indignant, stubborn and beguilingly certain of herself. The
perfect woman.

Eowyn

Returning again to Tolkien’s world we find another perfect example of a

shieldmaiden, a spurned lover who becomes a warrior and finds her heroic saga
contrary to the machinations of the men around her. Eowyn is a maid of the House of
Eorl; the ruling noble family in the crumbling kingdom of Rohan, a country Tolkien
said he created to embody all of the great features of English culture. Rohan is rugged,
hilly and mountainous along its borders with huge open plains filled with horses
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bordering the large forests of Middle Earth. The people of Rohan are archetypal Saxons,
based on Tolkien’s semi fetishist imagining of the post Roman mixing of “Celtic”
culture with that of the Germanic/Nordic invaders from the mainland and from
Scandinavia via the Danes and Vikings. The House of Eorl reminds of the rugged
farmer folk of the North of England, the Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria for example.
They live in small walled homesteads with a central long hall in which the noble
families dwell and rule from, with houses of the community built up within the “town”
walls. It is these simple and hard towns which are the “iron age hill forts” which pop up
all over the maps of rural England, not the proto-castles which many of the heritage
sites would have you believe, but the remnants of the walled and ditch ramparted
communities of the Britons, Saxons, and Vikings.

Into the House of Eorl, Eowyn was born, the niece of the ruling king Theoden.
Her father was slain by orcs when she was young and her mother died from the grief of
loss, so she was taken into the house of her uncle and raised with her brother as one of
the children of the king. In the events of the Lord of the Rings when it becomes pivotal
that the capital Edoras and Rohan as a nation is awoken and mustered for war, Eowyn
is key in the reawakening of King Theoden from the poisoned slumber in which he has
been cast by Grima Wormtongue and the wizard Saruman. It is her ministrations and
care which have held the king in a vague in-between state and when he is torn from the
evil grasp it is her who nurses him back to full strength.

As the events of the War of the Ring unfold the shieldmaiden in Eowyn emerges
proper and she effectively demands to be allowed to fight alongside the rest of the
Fellowship. When the retreat to Helms Deep occurs Eowyn declares her love for
Aragorn in whom she sees all of the traits of the heroes of old, much as Brynhildr saw
them in Sigurd, in whom the two are closely paralleled. One of the most interesting
dualisms of Tolkien’s story is how he connects Catholic moralism and tradition with the
much older and poetic heroism of the Saxons or Vikings. Aragorn and Theoden
effectively tell Eowyn she can’t fight, that there is honour and renown to be had in
staying at Edoras as a maid or protecting the children and women when the orcs break
Helms Deep and come into the tunnels where they are hid. When Aragorn and Eowyn
argue in Edoras before the evacuation to the mountain fastness Eowyn is praised by the
future king for her bravery, but she scorns his kindness which appears to her as
mockery of her femininity, she wants to be seen as a warrior and nothing else. In one of
the most strikingly un-Catholic sentiments which Tolkien wrote into LOTR Eowyn says
that her greatest fear is, “To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all
chance of great deeds is gone beyond all recall or desire.”

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 After the events at Helms Deep when Eowyn did go to the tunnels and wait for
the men to finish fighting she resorted to classical shieldmaiden behavior, and like the
mythical Hervor, disguised herself as a man and rode with the Rohirrim to the Battle of
Pellennor Fields. Here she distinguished herself and fought bravely alongside the men,
eventually being felled beside King Theoden and standing alone against the Witch King
of Angmar. Of course as everyone knows the Witch King could not be slain by the hand
of man and openly boasted of this fact as he pranced around preparing to slay her, but
once more Eowyn revealed the strength of the shieldmaiden.

“But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Eowyn I am, Eomund’s daughter.
You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark
undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.”

Eowyn invokes the memory of her dead father, who stood against the orcs, she
declares that she is no man, almost scornfully, and unlike most of the men in the story
thus far erects herself fearlessly before the Witch King. Eowyn slays the Nazgul steed,
duels with the dark servant an even with shattered shield and broken arm finally deals
the killing thrust. After the victory at the Pelennor Fields Eowyn survived and
recovered in the same house as Faramir and the two fell in love. After seeing first hand
all of the violence and brutality of war and the loss of her adoptive father and near
death at the hands of the Nazgul she declares that she will give up the life of the
shieldmaiden and again like Hervor become a normal wife ruling the household of her
husband Faramir.

Tolkien later described Eowyn in character as a “stern Amazon woman” but was
eager to give her relatable feminine characteristics, rather than just making a harsh and
bitter warrior queen, perhaps how he may have viewed Brynhildr.

Eowyn stands as something of an enigma for us in this study; she is cold, harsh,
and cruel when it counts, she is a hardened feminist at first but then when faced with
the horrors of combat (and victory) and securing her valorous name, she gives it all up.
She appears as the classical Amazon or Valkyrie but again when faced with the love of
Aragorn she reveals her feminine side and becomes almost desperate and a little mad
with desire for the future King. Indeed Tolkien said he had originally planned for the
two to marry, or that Eowyn would die and Aragorn would mourn her deeply. It would
appear in Tolkien’s original plans and notes he was going to more closely parallel the
myth of Sigurd and Brynhildr and mingle some of the elements of Gudrun into the
character. It is undeniable that the love expressed between the hero and the
shieldmaiden is core to this story, if Aragorn didn’t have Eowyn he would have had no

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real contact with the human world, his companions being elves, dwarves, wizards and
hobbits. Eowyn provides Aragorn, as Brynhildr did Sigurd, a weakness, a troubling
element, something unexpected and exciting, exposing both of their more human
characteristics.

What can the shieldmaiden of the 21st century take from Eowyn? Hard, cold,
brutal, and brave when the hour called her name, but feminine, loving, and lustful whe
the man of her dreams appeared. Crucially she didn’t adjust her personality or her
goals for those around her. When she openly stated her desire to win a noble name in
battle in front of Aragorn he was quite scathing, telling her to remain at home and win a
name to which she gave her famous retort. But when the two of them shared the cup of
mead or wine in the aftermath of the Helm’s Deep combat (a sharing which was
symbolic of a proposal of love) she was soft and caring, gentle and open about her
feelings. Such a woman is rare in the LOTR, the other women in the story are either
vehicles for the plot or so lofty and alien (Arwen) as to be difficult to interpret. Eowyn
then: a human, a woman, a shieldmaiden.

Valkyries

Whilst the Valkyries are not strictly shieldmaidens, the historical and mythical
warrior women of Northern Europe oft modeled themselves or at least invoked the
myth and legend of the Valkyr. Brynhildr in most versions of the Volsung saga is
regarded as being a Valkyrie who has been made mortal and imprisoned by Odin. In
other versions she is or has the spirit of a Valkyrie but is mortal from the start.
Whatever the position of the writer, Brynhildr is intimately linked with the Valkyries,
so they deserve our attention.

Valkyrja in Old Norse means “chooser of the slain” and these women were those
spirits who rode with Odin or Freya to select the slain warriors who would dwell with
either of those gods in their specific halls, Valhalla and Folkvangr (Freya of course
declaring that “half the slain are mine”). The Valkyries then bear the Einherjar to
Valhalla where they serve them pork and mead (interesting that these warrior women
are reduced to serving girls when they have fulfilled their duty).

In the Voluspa the Valkyries are described by the Seeress as “Ladies of the War
Lord”, with many of them named as being deeply associated with facets of battle or
weapons themselves. Often though these women are immortal warriors who fight
alongside Odin or the Gods, they can marry mortal men and become mortal
themselves, becoming shieldmaidens, exactly how Brynhildr gives up her immortality
removed through the her love with Sigurd.
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 The Valkyries are described as fearsome women decked for battle, appearing
much like the fates or furies of Greek mythology, or the Morrigu of Irish culture,
women who choose the slain or select the fates of men, drenched in blood and gore,
with their armour and helms blazing with the hero light.

The Valkyries appear to be able to become mortal, live the life of a shieldmaiden
or wife of a great hero (always a great hero) and then when they die they become
Valkyries again, repeating the process, sometimes even incarnating as mortals again to
marry the son or grandson of the man they had been married to in the previous life. It
would appear there is a theme of shieldmaidens being Valkyries and Valkyries being
shieldmaidens, much as the Hindus or Vedic Indians believed someone could become
the living avatar of a god, in whom the spirit of the god dwells, but when he dies the
god once more becomes “god” again.

The Valkyries are described as being something of an honour guard for Odin,
following him around beside his ravens, the one selecting the slain to go to the halls and
the other feasting on the corpses of the dead. The association of beauty and light with
darkness and death is intimate, something the Norse seemed to enjoy. There are
mentions also in Anglo Saxon sources of Valkyrie like beings who ride near burial
mounds and screech, making sounds not too dissimilar to those of Lilith owl
demonesses and the Irish ban-sidhe (banshee). Again there is an association of often
cruel and cannibalistic female spirits and the battlefield or burial mound.

Freya is of course intimately associated with the Valkyrie, being dressed for
combat and a chooser of the slain herself, she is the ruler of the Valkyries alongside
Odin and takes half of the produce of the battlefield for her own discarnate halls. The
Valkyries are a constant and awful presence for the Norse and the European, their
purpose and their spirit being closely associated with that of the raven and the other
flying or floating witch women who choose from among the slaughtered remnants of
the battlefield what is worthy of retaining.

Queen of the Black Coast

The Queen of the Black Coast is a short story by Robert E. Howard in his created
mythical/historical continent of Hyperborea, of which the most famous inhabitant (and
hero of this story) is Conan the Cimmerian. Conan, whilst living in Argos (Greece) is
hunted by local authorities, escapes and boards a trade ship bound for Kush. When the
ship reaches the pirate infested waters of Kush (Egypt) it is intercepted and annihilated
by the famous female pirate Belit (The Queen in the story’s title) and her crew haiing
from the kingdoms south of Darfur and Zembabwai (probably the Ivory Coast/Liberia,
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that kind of area). Instead of killing Conan, as he slaughters many of the harder
members of her crew as they attempt to bring him down, she sees the alpha wolf she
has long sought to be her consort. With little persuasion she encourages Conan to
become her lover, her champion and fellow captain of the ship and continue their
looting and pillaging of the Argosian, Shemite and Stygian shipping routes.

In time the legend of Belit the she-witch of the pirates is flavoured by the tales of
the iron handed man she calls lover and soon Conan and Belit become ever more
desperate to find that elusive ultimate treasure which all pirates seeks, allowing them to
retire in blissful expense.

Sailing up an accursed river the pirates travel inland to a great abandoned city,
where obviously a huge and terrible civilization once spread far and wide and is now in
ruins. Upon seeing the ruins Conan and Belit discuss their spiritual beliefs and whilst
Conan casts off anything save the most Odinic and simplistic understanding of fate and
desire, Belit utters her famous oath to love him even beyond death, which sounds like it
could have been uttered by Brynhildr to Sigurd.

“There is life beyond death I know, and I know this too, Conan of Cimmeria, my love is
stronger than any death! I have lain in your arms, panting with the violence of our love; you
have held and crushed and conquered me, drawing my soul to your lips with the fierceness of
your bruising kisses. My heart is welded to your heart, my soul is part of your soul! Were I still
in death and you fighting for life, I would come back from the abyss to aid you – aye, whether my
spirit floated with the purple sails on the crystal sea of paradise, or writhed in the molten flames
of hell! I am yours, and all the gods and all their eternities shall not sever us!”

In further parallel with the Nordic myths, Belit soon finds a cursed jeweled
necklace which she puts on and causes her to give clumsy orders, which allow the
demonic inhabitants of the crumbling city to strand the pirates in the jungle, where they
can be picked off. Conan succumbs to a poisonous flower and when he wakes finds the
ship in ruins and Belit murdered, hanged from the mast of her own ship. Once more the
beautiful poetry of Howard’s prose comes through as he describes the way in which
Conan deals with his dead love.

“The dead lay as they had fallen. But on the deck of the Tigress, on a pyre of broken
benches, spear-shafts and leopard skins, lay the Queen of the Black Coast in her last sleep,
wrapped in Conan’s scarlet cloak. Like a true queen she lay, with her plunder heaped high about
her; silks, cloth-of-gold, silver braid, casks of gems and golden coins, silver ingots, jeweled
daggers and teocallis of gold wedges.”

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 Conan finally waits for the demon murderer who attacks the ship in the night,
and true to her word, as Conan is about to be slain, Belit appears as a spectre in all her
funerary splendor and distracts the beast long enough for Conan to recover and slay
him.

With the final passage of the story Howard relates how Conan gives his Queen a
Vikingesque funeral pyre, sending her ship to flame in the reaches of the ocean.

“Again dawn tinged the ocean. A redder glow lit the river-mouth. Conan of Cimmeria
leaned on his great sword upon the white beach, watching the Tigress swinging out on her last
voyage. There was no light in his eyes that contemplated the glass swells. Out of the rolling blue
wastes all glory and wonder had gone. A fierce revulsion shook him as he gazed at the green
surges that deepened into purple hazes of mystery.

Belit had been of the sea; she had lent it splendor and allure. Without her it rolled a
barren, dreary, desolate waste from pole to pole. She belonged to the sea; to its everlasting
memory he returned her. He could do no more. For himself, its glittering blue splendor was more
repellent than the leafy fronds which rustled and whispered behind him of vast mysterious wilds
beyond them, and into which he must plunge.

No hand was at the steep of the Tigress, no oars drove her through the green water. But a
clean tanging wind bellied her silken sail, and as a wild swan cleaves the sky to her nest, she sped
seaward, flames mounting higher and higher from her deck to lick at the mast and envelop the
figure that lay lapped in scarlet on the shining pyre. So passed the Queen of the Black Coast, and
leaning on his red-stained sword, Conan stood silently until the red glow had faded far out into
the blue hazes and dawn splashed its rose and gold over the ocean.”

Howard gives his hero, Conan, who is similar to the Scandinavian heroes Sigurd,
Beowulf, etc. a shieldmaiden like Brynhildr and has her die in much the same way as
they do, facing a horrid ancient beast. He also gives her the Viking funeral pyre those
heroes have, with all of the plunder piled around her and his knightly cloak wrapped
over her dead body. In many ways the relationship of Belit and Conan is like that of
Beren and Luthien or Aragorn and Arwen, as Howard, like Tolkien, seeks to reconcile
the old myths with a “happy ending” (which is never present in the old stories). Even
though Belit dies a violent death and the ending is mournful there is not a violent
outburst or aggression between the lovers, on the contrary, one comes back from the
abyss to save the other. Belit then is the warrior princess who unlike her fellow mythical
or legendary sisters does not love and loathe her hero and end up destroying him.

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 In a strictly feminist sense as well Belit is the perfect role model for the
shieldmaiden of Sigurd. She does not meet Conan and become a gibbering maid, lusting
after him and giving him her ship and asking him to lead her, she demands his
allegiance and tempts him with her nudity, enticing him in until she eventually retains
all her power but has a consort and a King and a feared warrior at her side. The
relationship of Conan and Belit then is a little like what we can imagine the relationship
between Aragorn and Eowyn or Sigurd and Brynhildr might have been like. Two
mighty warriors fighting alongside each other, whose love and lust was like electricity
that caused them to best each other and allow themselves to be bested.

Such a relationship between a man and a woman is what all humans secretly (or
openly) seek, even when they sign up to the religious or cultural pattern of their day. A
paradigm such as that of Belit and Conan is what every Sigurd couple should be seeking
to manifest, a true love, based on mutual passion for the other’s success and the
constant raising of the other to a godlike pedestal.

Medb

Alongside the Valkyrie and the shieldmaiden of myth and legend, one other
goddess stands as a shining testament to the ancient understanding of the brutality and
cruelty of a female warrior. Medb, in Old Irish pronounced maev was Queen of
Connacht (one of the southern Irish providences) during the battles with Ulster, whose
forces were led by Cuchulain the Ulster warrior hero. Cuchulain deserves the attention
of any reading this book, and if you haven’t read the myth cycles surrounding his life
and exploits we strongly urge you do so.

Medb is an interesting character in that she occupies a “human” position in the

myths of Ulster but is clearly a mythical/religious character and not strictly to be
interpreted as a historical creation of the bards. In that sense we will be exploring the
similar character and goddess of Morrigu and Morgana under the same heading,
regardless of any personal feelings of whether they are cognate.

Medb in the chronicles of the various kings of Connacht and the Ulster cycles is
repeatedly handed around many of the main characters, married off to several kings
and is raped by another before other suitors seek revenge on her behalf. The the Cattle
Raid story Medb tries to bargain for the possession of a mythical bull to rival her richer
husband’s and when her offers of sexual favors and money are spurned by the owner
she decides to go to war to win the creature. Medb united several of the clans of Ireland
to go with her to war with Ulster including several exiled bands of Ulstermen led by a

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warrior named Fergus, who it is said betrayed his people because he enjoyed fucking
Medb so much, “preferring the buttocks of a woman over his own kind”.

When the raid into Ulster goes awry Medb sends several warriors one by one to
fight the hero Cuchulain at the fjord in the river, where he stalls the entire Irish army
single handed and ends up dying of his wounds when his hero light eventually
diminishes. Throughout the Cattle Raid Medb and Cuchulain have many encounters
where her sexual advances are spurned (because Cuchulain is betrothed to Emer) and
she continually sends animals and heroes to face him, all of which he defeats, much like
Hercules in the Greek myth cycles.

As with all Irish myths the hero dies, along with many of the major characters on
the “good” side, whilst “bad” guys live on and become good or morally less
reprehensible through seeking revenge for this or that offence. Eventually Medb and
her husband are at each other’s throats and Fergus is murdered, which Medb revenges
by plotting her own husband’s murder, whose slayer is then murdered himself by royal
retainers. Finally Medb was killed by a jealous son of a rival whom she had killed,
slinging a piece of cheese at her head as she bathed. As would be expected she was
buried in a cairn standing upright to permanently face her enemies in Ulster. As the
situation is complicated with the racial and social homogeny of the Irish nations Medb
is dually regarded as the villain one minute and the heroine the next, depending on the
perspective of the chronicler.

There is an idea that Medb (whose name is the same as the English Mead) means
“she who intoxicates” which explains her hold over men and the sexual weaponry
which she uses to advance her aims. As an exemplary manifestation of the goddess of
life and death and primarily the national goddess of Ireland Medb stands exalted in her
position of demanding equality with her kings, demanding sexual union with the
heroes of the stories and generally going around telling everyone what to do or killing
them.

This is where the Morrigan can come in as an interesting assize, for she shares a
lot of the mythical components of Medb’s character without sharing the historical or
legendary elements, being a goddess pure and simple.

Morag is a tripartite goddess comprising of three distinct goddesses who the

larger goddess is able to call upon or morph into depending on moods or circumstance.
Compared intimately with the Valkyries, she oft appears as a raven or crow and moves
over the battlefield selecting the dead. Like Medb she is a warrior first and foremost and

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a queen second, advancing her desires sexually and seductively and then securing what
she wishes through violence.

Etymologically Morrigan comes from the root word mor meaning terrifying or
terror as in mort i.e. death, and the English mare, the ending of nightmare. Rigan then
means ruler or king, as in rex or regent, the one who rules, so Morrigan means
“terrifying ruler” or “queen of terror”. Interestingly also then that Medb as queen of the
Connacht, the woman who uses terror and fear to advance her aims and makes her
claims through violence.

In the Ulster Cycle the Morrigan appears at Cuchulain’s side offering him love
and wealth should he worship her or make pact with her in some way, each of which
Cuchulain refuses and is assaulted or offended in various ways to stop him fighting to
his usual ability., Much is made of the links between Medb and Morrigan but no one
goes as far as to say they appear to be the same entity appearing as different forms,
when Medb sends a hero to face Cuchulain, Morrigan is there to offer him a way out,
when he refuses she trips him or bites him or distracts him and Medb’s hero gains the
upper hand, it is only because Cuchulain is so great that he overcomes these trials.

Throughout carious other pseudo-mythological cycles the Morrigan appears as a

battle goddess, ruling over combat and the victory of this or that hero or god, she is
combat and the victory of this or that hero or god, she is portrayed as deeply sexual,
charged and aggressive to the point of being masculine, a personification of the
tempestuous and changeable nature of Irish weather and climate. The Morrigan was
seen to appear, much as the Banshee previously mentioned in connection with the
Valkyrie wherever a hero was prophesied to die in the battle he was heading to. In that
sense, unlike the Norse or Germanic “choosers of the slain” who waited until the hero
or warrior was dead to inform him he had been chosen for Valhalla, the Morrigan
merely told the character he was going to die, without much promise of anything good
to come afterward.

Medb and the Morrigan are famously cruel and fickle goddesses and queens,
changing their mind when they are spurned and punishing their enemies ritualistically
and with extreme violence when they feel they have been wronged. They are also
intensely sexual creatures, and it would appear that they emerge in Irish mythology as
a function of the warrior women who may have south to invoke or call upon a
particular goddess in times of war. Irish culture was very different from a lot of what
was going on in the rest of Europe at the time and it cannot be quantified by the usual
simplicity of interpretation which can be applied to English or Northern European

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myth in general. The Morrigan and Medb are not simply War Goddesses, they are
something much deeper, and strangely eventually appear to be just women.

Amazons

No study into strong women would be complete without a look at the legendary
and semi-mythical Amazons. The majority of their mythology and the
historical/legendary mentions of their exploits and conquests are focused in the Greek
and Mediterranean cycles, so their positioning in terms of a historical people is difficult
to pinpoint. However, most scholars these days place them as either Scythian in origin
or perhaps actually Scythians. Either way the Scythian women were known to be strong
fighters and regularly rode out for war so the Amazons themselves could be an
invention of the Greeks who looked to the Scythian peoples and saw a race that
encouraged women to be involved in combat, and therefore reduced the men to a state
of serfdom.

The root of the word Amazon is ambiguous but there are various
understandings of the etymology which point to either “warriors” in Indo-Iranian or
“husbandless”, both of which are theories which carry some weight but are not
conclusive. The general idea that Amazon comes from a word meaning “single
breasted” is now proven to be incorrect, as Amazons are never depicted as single
breasted in Greek art or mentioned as having this self-mutilated wound in the myths,
which the Greeks would have loved to do to accuse the women of trying to become
men. The Classical Greeks however attested that this was the case because the Amazons
wanted to be able to throw their javelins or use their bows better without a big ol titty
getting in the way.

The legendary kingdom of the Amazons was allegedly in the south of what is
modern day Turkey and they were known by the Scythians in the nearby regions by a
name which meant “man killers”, pointing to either their murdering of men within
their own community or the killing of opponents in battle. Either way the Greeks and
Scythians appear to have viewed the Amazons with unrestrained hostility.

The generally accepted and widely known myths of the Amazons feature them
as single breasted warriors living in a militant matriarchy. We can safely assume any
historical truth behind these myths is basically a much watered down version. The
Amazons were said by the Greeks to not allow any men to live within their kingdom,
and all of the women trained for war and were prepared for combat, making them
appear as something like a feminist Spartan state. Baby boys were executed or raised as
slaves depending on different sources, and the Amazons allegedly bred with slaves or
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with neighboring tribes at certain times of the year. All of this sounds like it points to a
tradition in the area of women being in charge, or at least in a position of power within
the tribe and mating with men of their own accord or according to their decision and
not the men’s. this would have been viewed by the patriarchal Greeks as intensely in
opposition with their own culture and perhaps they portrayed the Amazons as self-
harming, war mongering man haters to protect their own interests inside their own
communities.

Whilst some of the sources claim the Amazons were loathed or feared because
they killed men or oppressed their men others have their name meaning simple “those
who fight like men” or behave like men, i.e. are matriarchal and continue warrior
traditions as women. Some sources have them as being responsible for the births of
specific races or kingdoms, with the Scythians and Sarmatians closely associated with
either being responsible for their creation or related to them by blood.

Crucially the Amazons appear to have had a culture of worship which revered
Ares and Artemis, one male god of aggression and warfare without restraint and the
other a well-known female warrior goddess, both of whom are purported to not be of
Greek origin but come from further north, in classical Scythia. The women danced in
honour of Artemis, brandishing their weapons and showing off their skills, which
sounds a lot like the “dances” or kata of the martial traditions of the Japanese and
Asians. So perhaps the Amazons weren’t dancing but were going through steps and
forms of movements to express their ability as warriors first and foremost.

Recently much evidence has been found in support of the Amazon roots in the
areas where there should be remnants of their kingdom. Between 20-25% of the burial
mounds and kurgians of the Scythians contain the remains of women dressed as male
warriors, or in the armour and brandishing the weapons of the male warriors, i.e.
making them the same culturally and symbolically as the men who they lived and died
beside. This makes them on a par with the idea of a shieldmaiden who fought and died
beside the Viking or Germanic male counterparts. The Amazons then could be a
mythical remnant of the Greek social view of the Scythian or nearby tribes’ relationship
with female warriors. The Greeks who from very early on regarded women as being fit
only for staying in the home and raising the children would have seen bands of
hundreds of Scythian warriors with up to 25% female contingent as being invariably
matriarchal and in contradiction with the Greek idea of made a “warrior”.

The amazons should be the greatest inspiration for the female martial artist or
strongwoman; they are proud, aggressive, dominant and fiercely protective of their way

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of life and their borders. Whether we take the myths about their conduct literally is
beside the point, they emerge in history violently and remain in the mind of weaker
men as a kind of looming spectre of what happens if women become independent.

Suffragettes and feminists throughout the 19th and 20th centuries have been called
Amazons as a slur against their sex, implying that if left to their own devices they will
somehow soon be cutting off male genitalia or killing infant males to secure their rule of
a new matriarchy. Perhaps that might be the case in some extreme examples, but in the
main the modern Amazon should look to the examples like the women of Asgarda in
the Ukraine who have formed a women only colony where they train in martial arts,
protect themselves violently against male involvement and say they are attempting to
create something for women, by women in an age and environment where large
numbers of women are bought and sold into sex trafficking as a mere commodity.
Regardless of the problems with some feminist doctrine in the sickly and morally
decaying west, we can but encourage women to continue to indulge in the opportunity
offered to their gender to be on equal terms with men, especially in terms of lifting,
fighting and fucking.

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 Chapter V – The Barrow Lord Draugadróttinn

Sun risen corpse

White black skull,

Dagger found home

Enemy’s throats

Any study of the spiritual and mythical life of the warrior would not be complete
without an understanding of ritual intoxication and divine poetry gifted through
imbibing of a sacred plant’s smoke or flesh. From the perspective of the hero we can
once again look to the historical and mythical support for the idea that he was only hero
once he had experienced a sacred initiation at the hands of an intoxicating substance
wielded by a semi-divine teacher.

Every culture across the earth makes use of some kind of intoxicating plant or
secretion of a plant or animal, it is a telling sign that the only sects which don’t are those
monotheistic dictatorship cults which require the subservient loyalty of the individual
to the religious elders. This is quite obvious in the context of the “religions” because
they need the communities to be loyal and unthinking, seeking their spiritual health in
men and their dictates, whereas the living faith of the gods exists in nature, in plants
and animals, which are unruly and beyond the scope of human control structures. It is
obvious when we see that the Catholic Inquisition, that maddened cult of death
worshipping psychotics, thought of all plants and healing herbs as witchcraft and all of
nature as the “devil’s church”.

The historical and ancient truth of the use of intoxicants for spiritual purposes is
beyond debate, it is a fact that our ancestors used hundreds of different plants for
psychoactive healing purposes and used a specific set of plants as teachers of wisdom
and the giving of divine favour. It is core to the very structure of the Soma function that
the intoxicant be a divine treasure effectively stolen by mankind, which gives him an
immediate and almost wicked understanding a “sneak peak” of the divine mind, hence
the ideas of Indra and Odin stealing the Soma or the Mead from the dwelling place of
the gods/giants.

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 This is central to our understanding of ritual and our understanding of the
ritualized function of any endeavour which mimics the spiritual path. Lifting weights,
like the hunting of a deer or the building of a house is a part of the human life, I t is a
part of the sacred story, the myth which upholds the world and keeps the forces of
chaos at bay. It is therefore incumbent upon the individual to perform a ritual before his
physical and spiritual endeavours, as one, not separate, for nothing is truly separate, all
is divine and unified.

This realization comes only from a divine ritual associated with intoxication, a
fulfillment of the path from man towards god, a realization which can only occur in
nature, inside the ritual space.

The Sacred Hanapiz

Cannabis, hemp, marijuana, weed, mother herb; no plant has a more polarized
and aggressive set of adherents on either side of the spectrum. Those who see cannabis
as a drug akin to cocaine, heroin, or various other chemical drugs regard it with disdain
and disgust, as a swallower of time and a waste of youth. Those who see it as a plant
teacher, a spiritual aid and a psychopompic guide of the nether worlds regard it with
feverish devotion; there is rarely a nonchalant attitude towards cannabis, love or hate,
regular smoker or devout abstinence.

We are not here to say whether you should or should not use cannabis to prepare
your mind ritually for the function of your spirituality, we are here merely to explain
and explore the historical and religious use of such a plant.

The word hemp comes from the Old English hænep which itself is derived from
the Proto-Germanic hanapiz which allegedly comes from the same root word from
which the Scythians derived cannabis. The early Scythian (evidence circa 2500BC) were
described by Herodotus as performing a ritual at the burial of a loved one by creating a
small pyramidal tent with leather sides which they erected over a small fire,
presumably embers or coals, which they then cast hemp flowers or buds onto. The
smoke then rose up from the coals and the family members and wizard would then take
it in turns to put their head into the tent and emerge intoxicated, whereupon they
would shout with joy and lay on the ground. This appears to have originated through
or evolved alongside a ritual in ancient Persia known as the booz rooz. Rooz means
“day” so assuming the same words were around at the same time, booz could indicate
the suffic “piz” or “bis” from cannabis, thus perhaps it could mean “cannabis day”. The
Persians would set a huge bonfire in the centre of a village or communal spot and throw

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cannabis plants onto the flames, allowing the thick smoke to waft over everyone
present, thus achieving the same result (if not more so) than the Scythian shamans.

The earliest evidence of the Vedic Indians using cannabis dates back to 1500BC;
and to this day the followers of Shiva and various Hindu sects throughout India and the
wider Indian subcontinent use cannabis ritualistically almost daily. We will explore the
Hindu use more later.

In Africa there are hemp smoking rituals among the tribal peoples from the
desert regions of the east to the more jungle choked regions of central Africa and the
western horn. Like the Native American peace pipe, certain tribes believe you cannot
make any sensible decision until you’ve smoked some hemp. The Taoist texts make use
of hemp as a sacred cure for several illnesses and the Chinese goddess Ma Gu is the
maid or aunt of longevity and health, with the symbol for cannabis being two plants
drying in a shed. Tarim mummies in north-western China were discovered buried with
sacks of cannabis next to their skulls, presumably the shamans wishing to continue their
vocation in the next life.

The Kaneh Bosm of the Bible teble texts has been claimed by many sources to be
cannabis, with the Exodus recipe given to Moses by god containing the unknown plant
which was used as anointing oil of the priests of the temple. A wandering people such
as the Hebrews would have undoubtedly come across the culture of cannabis in the
middle and near east and during their time in Egypt would have been well versed in
the various traditions of the Egyptian priesthood.

The Germanic tribes were also known to use hemp, with alleged Nordic
association of the plant with Freya and her feminine spirit residing within the flowers
which was passed onto the eater or smoker during ritual use.

One of the oldest names for cannabis used by the Assyrians, presumably where
the word came from was qunubu meaning “way to produce smoke” and they called the
Scythian shamans kapnobatai meaning “those who walk on the clouds/smoke”, again
probably associated with well-known Scythian ritual of the smoke tripod at burials.

Clearly the cannabis plant, as its ritual use spread with the cultures moving
across Asia and Europe, became a central part of the religious and shamanic beliefs of
the people living in the wilderness. An appreciation and experience of this plant in its
correct environment within the correct ritual space gleans the same instinctive and
earthy results.

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The Sacred Meduz

The other obvious intoxicant which is widely available to us today and is most
commonly associated with divine madness or intoxication in the mythical devotions of
the folk religions, is of course alcohol. Earliest evidence of traces of fermented beverages
dates as far back as 10,000BC, well before the recorded use of other intoxicants, at a time
when the first religiously motivated cave paintings were being made and the first of
what we could call temples was erected in what is now Turkey, the famous Gobekli
Tepe. There is evidence in China of the fermenting of rice, with honey and fruit up to
9000 years ago and in other parts of the world barley beer and grape wine were being
made. We can look to the Mesopotamian rooted cultures for visible and recorded
evidence of the medicinal use of alcohol by the Sumerians, Assyrians, Egyptians, and of
course Bible states that alcohol should be used as treatment for depression, and given to
those about to die to alleviate their pain.

The most famous and “heathen” of the alcoholic beverages and the one most
commonly associated with Germanic and European paganism is mead. But oddly
enough, even the slightest bit of research shows that wherever bees and honey are there
is mead, evidence for the brewing of honey mead exists all over the world, with the
oldest examples coming from the European homelands in the near east and around the
Caucasus as well as the Middle East. The Greek, Vedic and Beaker peoples of Europe
and Asia were also known to have brewed and drank mead in association with ritual
beliefs and as the populations moved away from areas where large amounts of grain or
berries could be produced to brew beer or wine, mead became the dominant intoxicant.
The Russian, Eastern European and Baltic regions populations used mead as a medicine
which had religious implications, leading to an understanding of it being a holy drink,
healing the body and also dulling the mind so pain was lessened or suffering
dampened. The people of Finland were known to use mead in association with festival
observances, in much the same way as the Hindus or Scythians used (and do use)
cannabis, and even how it is used today unwittingly by holidaying and celebrating
humans, to deaden inhibitions and awaken primal urges.
Mead is doubly important from our perspective because of its link with the Soma
function. The theory goes that as the Soma was “lost” or the true meaning or identity of
the substance used by the Vedic priests became blurred along with other substances the
priesthoods and cultures using Soma began to use other intoxicants in its place. If you
couldn’t find Soma proper then anything which caused a drunken or euphoric feeling
would do to stand in for the time being. It would appear that the Indo Europeans felt it

72
didn’t matter entirely what you ingested as long as it changed you and allowed a descent
or ascent to the divine or the chthonic.

There are also quite well thought out theories that the origin of mead is in the
Soma ritual itself, as the ancient peoples would store the Soma in pockets or skins of
honey (honey was a well-known preservative). When the Soma spores or debris were
left behind in the pockets of honey it began to cause fermentation and due to the
incredibly frugal nature of our ancestors they drank or ate the alcoholic paste and
became drunk, associating honey and drunkenness with Soma and divine intoxication.

In the mythology of the Nordic and Germanic tribes, alcohol took on a Soma
function in its association with Odin and the way in which he received his poetic ability
via the murder and theft of the mead of Kvasir.

The Aesir and the Vanir, the more anthropomorphic gods (Odin, Thor, Freya
etc.) and the giants (Loki, Fenrir, Jormungand etc.) after their long battle declared a
truce by spitting into a cauldron, as their spittle solidified they formed it into a man,
Kvasir. Being made of the spit of gods and giants he was wise beyond compare and able
to give knowledge to all mankind. When visiting a pair of malevolent dwarves (all
dwarves in Nordic myth seem a little malevolent) he was murdered and his blood
drained into three containers, they then mingled the blood with honey and distilled a
red mead. If anyone drank this mead they immediately became a poet and a bard
(anyone can see the Soma symbolism here, red blood in golden honey creating poetic
ambrosia).

The two dwarves invited the giant Gilling and his wife to come and visit them,
they took him out to sea and capsized their boat whence the giant drowned, the
dwarves returned home and broke the news to his wife. Asking if she could see the
place where he drowned one of the dwarves dropped a large rock on her head, killing
her. Suttungr the son of Gilling heard what had happened to his father and mother and
went to the dwarves and led them out to a small island which would flood when the
tide came in. they offered Suttungr the mead of Kvasir in blood payment for the
murder, which the giant accepted.

Whilst on one of his worldly wanderings Odin met nine farmers cutting hay and
offered to sharpen their scythes with his whetstone, which worked so well that when he
offered it to them, they fought to the death, slitting each other’s throats. The giant
Baugi, the brother of Suttungr spoke to Odin whilst he was staying with him, saying
that his business was unproductive since his men killed each other and Odin offered to
do their work in exchange for a drink of Kvasir’s mead. After Odin had done the work
73
during summer he went with Baugi to Suttungr’s home and asked for his payment,
which Suttungr obviously refused. Realising what Baugi would try and do Odin
suggested he drill into the Hnitbjorg Mountain, whereupon he slipped in and Baugi
tried to hit him on the head with the drill.

Then Odin, much like Indra in the Vedic myths, goes to Gunnlod and wins three
draughts of the mead, each one completely draining the container, the then transformed
into an eagle (the fire eagle of the Soma rescue) and flew away. When Suttungr
discovered what Odin had done, he too took the shape of an eagle and pursued him
(much like Indra and Vtra). As Odin approached Asgard the gods realized what he had
done and prepared vats for him to spit out the mead of poetry, some of it spilling back
and down into Midgard and the other worlds. This portion is known as the “poets
share” and is there for anyone to drink, but the gods and Odin reserve the chief share in
Asgard for the poets he gifts with divine oration, i.e. the shamans of the Odinic tribes.

This myth shares many of its major components with the most famous Soma
myths of the Vedic, Irish, Persian, and Greek pantheons. The blood of a giant is made
into a drink, that derink is then stolen and hidden by another giant or dragon, which
the hero then performs a task to rescue, he is tricked and then pursues the Soma on his
own, whereupon he is chased by the giant reborn or a descendant of the giant. A
portion of the Soma/mead is always given backward to the people of earth, which
allows man to think like the gods.

Throughout these myths and the historical and legendary use of the mead in the
different cultures of the world, we see the same recurring theme, that the brewing of
alcohol in any form, but particularly that of the honey mead is a gift from the gods,
something divine which must be protected or used with reverence. Much like the
cannabis then, or any intoxicant, there is a way to use alcohol. Getting stoned and drunk
needlessly, all the time, just to forget reality, this is not the way of the Kshatryia or the
Berserker, this is the way of the drunken brigand. Using cannabis in a reverent manner,
approaching it with caution and respect, drinking mead and ale with a feeling of
divinity and adoration of those who discovered it, stole it from the gods, and gave
mankind the Poetry of Prometheus, this is the way of the Ulfhednar.

As we approach a unique and personal interpretation of the way to drink and

smoke herb, we discover a correct way to approach all ritual, and therefore the correct
way to do everything in life which points to a more respectful and reverential manner,
allowing the true experience of the divine to emerge. It is the perfect contradiction that
this correct way to live is in fact a realization that there is no correct way to live. Just as

74
the athlete who has been lifting or running or fighting or wrestling for decades or more
realizes there is no correct way to keep fit, or exercise or which heavy things to lift for
what series of repetitions, it is simply the fact that you are lifting that matters, just as it is
the fact that you are truly living that really matters.

There is an ancient tradition throughout the world of shamans and wizards who
understood this, and in their teaching which is universal, but most perfectly displayed
(in my feelings) by the Aghori Sadhus of the Indian sub-castes, and understanding and
adoration for death, causes adoration and subsequently and understanding and
liberating enlightenment towards life. The twin faces of something as meaningless as how
you ear, or how you dress, when destroyed in the fires of contradiction, suddenly allow
the realization to occur. This is how death, of a loved one or on your own death bed
causes the deep respect and love for life, which can only come with a close encounter
with life, i.e. it’s ending.

Lord of the Pyre Kurgan

The Aghora tradition in India is a sub-sect of a form of Hinduism which seeks to

worship Shiva in his highest manifestation. The Shivaite follower will have often spent
time studying orthodox Hinduism, perhaps even once being a Brahmin, and therefore
knows the strictest doctrine in terms of ritual washing, prayer, sacrifice and the Vedic
scriptures. However, the Aghora Sadhu is wandering ascetic, has often abandoned the
doctrinal approach to the Vedas and now venerates all aspects of Shiva (the one) by
experiencing extremes that life has to offer. They are the famous dreadlocked naked low
caste Indians who live on the cremation ground, worshipping Shiva in his form as
Bhairava, the god of destruction and death and terror. They smoke cannabis daily and
with almost pathological devotion, they tend to the recently burned corpses, sometimes
even eating parts of them and famously using their skulls and bones to make
ornaments, cups and tools. They are viewed by the orthodox community as heretics, but
strangely are accepted as a necessary part of the plethora of sects which make up
Hinduism, because even the highest caste Brahmins accept that Shiva must have his
followers and they, like he, must live on the cremation ground, smeared in ashes, eating
the dead, befriending jackals and vultures and living outside the borders of the accepted
world. In this way, the Sadhus become a kind of semi-divine priesthood, much like the
oldest shamans displayed throughout cultures of the world, with all of the bizarre tea
teachings the wizard always has to offer.

The Aghora Sadhu uses alcohol, which is forbidden to the orthodox and he also
eats meat, animal and human. They are famed for their bizarre rituals, especially ones

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which seem in contradiction to their meaning, such as appreciating their two hands by
never using them again, or appreciating how good it is to lay down and sleep by
standing up for five years meditating. The seeming contradictions of their rites are
rooted in a similar tradition much further north in Tibet and Nepal with the Tantric
Buddhist sects and their shamanistic approach towards enlightenment. These men,
known as Siddhas in the myths, attained enlightenment by doing seemingly insane
things. There are tales of yogis demanding enlightenment from a wandering ascetic,
only to be told to farm the same piece of land for 50 years, whereupon they eventually
understand the teaching, or the tale of a tee total, highly orthodox Brahmin who had
abstained from sex, being told by an enlightened yogi to drink wine, eat meat, have sex
with hookers and then meditate on his experiences, which leads him also to
enlightenment. The stories all contain a remnant of the Soma function, with many of the
yogis finding their goal in the violent opposite of their perceived aim, and allegorical
(or truthful perhaps) realizing of the fire eagle chasing the fire eagle, or Odin sacrificing
himself to himself.

Leading on from there we can see a similarity in the god Shiva with the god
Odin, lord of the barrow, of magic, and divine intoxication and poetry. The followers of
Odin, like the Sadhus were known to smear themselves in ash, perform rituals at the
graves of their ancestors to prepare themselves for battle, and just as Shiva’s eye was
the greatest wisdom to look upon, through the third eye in the forehead, so Odin’s
single eye looked upon all his kin, the other one being given to Mimir for the wisdom in
the well. Perhaps we can see a remnant or a spiritual kinship in the idea of going to long
barrows, bathing in the smoke of the cannabis, just as the Scythians did at their own
burial rituals, washing in the smoke and the ash of the dead, sitting around their bodies
and their remnants, the friend of jackals, owls and foxes. It was known for example that
the European folk, in their own rites of burial or spiritual detachment would
cannibalize and use parts of the body for tools and decoration. There is evidence at the
barrows of Wiltshire in particular of both ritual sacrifice, cannibalism and the use of
bones for ritual purpose.

Bhairava, the manifestation of Shiva associated closely with violence, terror and
death is very similar to the aspect of Odin which could be said to be reserved for the
enemies of Aesir. Odin as a wandering ascetic, a wizard associated with evil crafts and
baleful magic, meditations which reveal the runes, of Soma rituals involving murder
and theft, the tramp who wears a wolf pelt and is prepared to betray or trick anyone to
further his own aims (and those of the Aesir).

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 Finally we must bring all of this back together and ask how any of this can relate
to a program of powerlifting or strongman or wrestling?

Once again we must look to the Hindus structure as being a perfect example. The
aforementioned examples of the Akhara wrestling schools which mix religious
devotions with martial arts, the two are thought of as one. The mingling of spiritual
asceticism and the seeking of enlightenment in the lifting of heavy objects, The worship
of gods of death and violence in association with an adoration of life and a desire to
have a fit and healthy body with which to pass on healthy genes to your descendents.
These are things that the Odinic warrior wizard, just as the Aghora Sadhu could
appreciate.

Yoga also, as the mainstay practice of fuddy duddy middle aged middle class
women across the lands, was originally an ascetic martial practice reserved for warriors
and monks about to go into battle or face the prospect of a violent death. Woden was a
warrior and a wizard, once more we say the same thing, the two go hand in hand. Twin
faces of the same expressive act.

We would be irresponsible to call upon our mythical past, to awaken the spirits
of the ancestors in a program of fitness and martial ability without accepting the
juxtaposition of the contradictory and violent spiritual discipline which goes alongside
it. The Aghora tradition holds that everything is sacred and to deny any part of creation
as intrinsically sacred is to deny part of Shiva. The same is true of Woden, as Allfather
he accepts that all things are permitted, all things are holy, the cannibalism, alcoholism,
use of cannabis and intoxicants are all commendable for the divine realization of the
wholeness of the cosmos. In light of such a realization, something as transient as
wrestling or lifting weights seems to appear pointless, but then we are reminded of the
beauty of such an understanding of the world as expressed by Robert E Howard in the
story the Queen of the Black Coast,

“I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too
deeply. I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or
Crom’s realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer’s
Valhalla. I now not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red
meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle
when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priest and
philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am
no less an illusion and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with fire, I love, I slay,
and am content.”

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 The smoke of cannabis in the lungs, hot from the naked coals. The tang of the
stout ale washing down the acrid taste of bloody meat on the tongue. The warmth of a
wet crease, cinnamon coated and honey dewed, the kiss of lips and the pain of lust. The
taste of iron under your tongue as you strain and heave, the bar greasy between your
sweating palms, the steel clanging as you haul and struggle against gravity itself. You
are wrestling with gravity, the object is being pulled back down to earth, but you, the
god lift it up and scream.

This is life. All is one.

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 Chapter VI – The Twin Pillars of the Cosmos

Helm ‘pon proud brow

Of mortal framed deathless,

Armour dark moonless night

Arm strong as forest.

In previous publications I have spoken of creation and destruction, the twin pillars of
evolution which uphold the vault of the cosmos, as absolutes, truths with little
interpretation. Creation is the act of sex which creates life, thus all (culturally lawful)
sexual desire must be pure and permissible. I also spoke of destruction, as that act of
violence which ends life, thus all aggression, hatred and violence is permissible. Of
course these are true, there is no moral code, there is no god measuring or judging us,
there is us and that is all. However, I have evolved from that opinion, the truth revealed
itself to me through ancient experiences.

Creation and destruction, sex and violence; these twin polarities, like hot and
cold, fire and ice, merge and blur in the centre and somewhere in their union a
lukewarm or paradise zone emerges. This is Midgard, Middle Earth, the realm created
from the juices of Muspelheim (fire) and Nifelheim (ice) which allows life to burst forth.
This is the earth on which we live. Balance therefore between the two is not achieved
through a wanton expression of both in equal measure, a compromise must be reached.
Genghis Khan was one of my examples in previous works; he notoriously raped
thousands of women, fathering hundreds of children who went on to spread his DNA
through an enormous descendent population in Asia. He also famously rampaged and
pillaged out from Mongolia and colonized an empire they never could have dreamed of
before his arrival. However, Genghis Khan had wives and children, he had blood
brothers and an army, he had a capital city, he had devotees, loved ones and those he
shared human experiences with. To apply my polarity of sex and violence to this man
appears easy, but if he was truly (as I believed) a man of rampant sexual desire and
rampant desire for violence, he would have raped his own children and murdered his
blood brothers, he was stronger than them, so why not? Because even in a man as
primitively archetypal as Genghis Khan there was balance and measure, a time for war
and a time for peace, a time for sex and a time for tenderness.

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 What occurred to me in my deeper meditations on the subject of the twin pillars
was that there are two personalities within every human, and these two personalities
need to be synthesized for the human to even begin the process of ascending his
mountain of disciplines. During my discussions with the founders of Sigurd we
jokingly named one part of the human, the orgre mind and the other the god mind. This
description eventually struck and oddly enough actually fits quited well with what
we’re trying to explain.

The ogre is the body, the basic urges, the thought processes that lead to actions of
the physical form, “I need a shit, I need to eat, my belly hurts, I need to stop walking now, I
need sex, I want to hurt that person” etc. the ogre is simplistic, he is the ego, he is the lower
mind in the cosmology of the Buddhist and the Hindu, he takes over when the physical
form needs protecting and simplistic requirements of the physical need to be taken care
of. He is not a negative entity, he is not something to be overcome, it is something to
synthesize and unify with the higher self. The point is to not let the ogre take over.

The god is the soul, the higher urge, the parts of the brain concerned with thought
and understanding, the higher human layers of the brain, it leads to the so called
spirituality. “I need to find the nutritionally superior food, I can overcome the pain in my belly,
I can walk further if I focus my senses, I love my wife, I see myself in my enemy” etc. the god is
the spirit and the soul in one unity, he is the higher mind in the Buddhist thought, the
Brahma, the Odin thought of the Allfather. He tends to exist in permanent conflict with
the ogre but it is in fact an illusion, just as the Tao or the yin-yang is an illusion, as is the
conflict between Odin and Fenris or Thor and Jormungand. The unity of opposites
creates new life, new beginning.

As one sphere is destroyed its destruction creates new life, from the Ragnarok
the ashes and hope of humanity emerge, a new dawn from out of the ruins. The same is
true of the psyche, when the ogre and the god come into conflict, a resolution is
uncovered, a truth which allows new growth. You determine which is more important,
the twin polarities are constantly battling, “should I lift one more rep”? at what point does
“one more rep” become damaging and dangerous and at what point is it part of the ogre
overcoming the caution of the god and vice versa the stupidity of the ogre?

Divine Forcefulness

One pillar of divinity is the destructive element, the force expressed by man as
single combat with his opponent, whether internal or external. The obvious expression

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of that pillar in strength training would be wrestling. The martial arts as a whole are
suitable as a functional way of exploring the trade of fighting and killing, but wrestling
is a perfect embodiment of what the strongman seeks from his opponent, not the raw
aggression or ferocity of anger but the timed and skillful meting out of planned
movements and applied strength.

From our perspective we can cite the tale of the god Thunor wrestling the
personification of old age, known as Elli. When he and his companions are engaged in a
series of tests of strength (ala Hercules), eating meat, drinking mead and then wrestling,
he loses against the old woman but his strength is regarded as incredible as he only falls
to one knee. The Norse and Scandinavians in general can (and do) cite a long tradition
of manliness associated with the ability to eat, drink, lift and wrestle better than their
peers (and enemies).

Wrestling goes hand in hand with feats of strength, and much of the mythical
strongman contests of the various legends of the tribes of Europe, Asia, and Africa focus
on the ability of the hero to lift an enormous object, drink or eat something immortal or
inedible and wrestle something absurd like a giant, or in Thor’s example, old age itself.
When you test yourself against the elements and become strong, having the appetite,
physique and demeanor of an angry bullock it makes sense that your inclination would
be toward wrestling your peers who also have such a physical presence. Unlike contests
of sheer violence, like boxing or Muay Thai, which rely on the striking of limb against
limb, wrestling is a contest of strength and skill, even when it includes striking (as in
Greek Pankration).

We can cite several traditional forms of folk wrestling which are of interest to us,
due to their format and the way they function. Turkish oil wrestling or yağh güreş is
related to the other forms of wrestling from the Caucasus region and shares a lot of
similarities with the equally aged Persian tradition. The wrestlers themselves are
known by the Persian title kibset which means literally “hero”. Turkish wrestling is of
interest to us because the original schools in the Ottoman Empire in which the students
learned the techniques and movements of the art were also spiritual centres. So, the
initiate learned not just how to wrestle (i.e. how to fight like a man) he also learned
Islamic law, the prism through which his culture interpreted manliness (i.e. how to
think like a man).

Another form worth looking at is that of Mongolian wrestling or Bökh. Genghis

Khan allegedly considered wrestling to be the best way to keep his men combat fit and
the institution of physical combat was regarded as one of the Three Manly Skills,

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including being able to ride a horse and fire a bow (sometimes merged together as
another sport). So once again the concept of manliness to the Mongolian was rooted in
his ability to ride, shoot, and wrestle, making him a composite and reliable citizen and
fighter. Outstanding wrestlers of high martial caliber were given higher offices in the
Khanates and local festivals in the provinces were encouraged to include a wrestling
component.

Of further import is the Iranian tradition known as varzeš-e bāstānī which means
ancient sport and is a composite mix of Islamic Sufism and older Persian cultural
elements. The wrestlers are expected to be spiritually upright and put their duties to the
faith first and then focus on strength afterwards. This is a perfect example of the Islamic
concept of the inner and outer jihad, calling on the warrior to battle his inner conflicts
first and defeat his ego before focusing on a military display of might. The original
Persian martial art was a way of training soldiers to be ready for battle and over the
slow transition to Islam absorbed many of the tenets of Sufi tradition, just as the pagan
Samurai eventually became nominally Buddhist.

In some schools of the varzeš-e bāstānī instead of reciting prayers to the prophet
and Islamic heroes they tell each other stories of the old Persian myth cycles and local
legends. Before wrestling the fighters will train with heavy weighted objects of metal
and wood and do rounds of bodyweight calisthenics.

This practice of mixing the spiritual tradition with the martial tradition is as old
as the idea of having a standing or well prepared army in itself. The wrestler couldn’t
just be some guy who went back to his farm afterwards, he had to feel that his training
was leading to something; he was a warrior of his people thus his spiritual and cultural
traditions emphasized and mirrored his physical strength. In the Indian tradition of
Akhara the monastic schools often teach martial arts and forms of wrestling to students
who regard themselves as being part of a spiritual discipline of which wrestling is an
important part. Living like monks/sadhus they engage in recitation of holy verses,
meditation, physical disciplines and wrestling on a regular basis.

These are just a few examples of cultures where wrestling and displays of
strength alongside a martial tradition are thought of as the exemplary ways by which a
man shows his true power. Men fighting men, of equal or superior strength show their
might by besting their peers, not by meaningless shows of brute force. This is of huge
import to the man or woman who is studying the inner discipline of mastering the self
internally and the world externally; a spiritual path which is also a physical contest,
Always against the inner demons and the members of the tribe.

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Monastic Discipline

Sigurd cannot become one more notch on the bedpost of the powerlifter or
strongman who seeks to intertwine elements he enjoys whilst continuing to lift or
wrestle as he already does. Just how a realization of the awareness of the self alters all
facets of the life of the average man, so a deepening awareness of why you lift or why
you wrestle should alter every facet of the life of the lifter or wrestler. The scholastic
and monastic system of teaching the disciplines of the martial arts is a key element
which is missing in most of the ways we research and rethink our training. There is a
sense of loftiness and importance to powerlifting events, it is a sport and one which has
a lot of rules, a lot of fragile egos with their life interest invested in it and so cannot be
altered without pain. We do not seek to alter the way people lift or the way people
compete, but perhaps re-invoking an element of play and aggressive masculine fun to
the proceedings would allow for a huge injection of life force and vril into it.

Wrestling and bare knuckle boxing could be the first step toward allowing
yourself the enjoyment of the less serious elements of the sport.

Thunor the Strongman

As a god of the archetypal strongman Thor stands as the unification of the twin
pillars of creation and destruction. He is the patron of peasants and lowborn men who
fight in the battles which sculpt the destinies of kings and chieftains. Without the
hammer and the might of the thunderbolt Asgard would fall, Odin and the other gods
know the power of the god of Thunder and they knew it from the moment he was born
and brought into their midst.

Thor had children by his wife Sif and the mistress giantess (odd considering his
hatred for giants), he procreated and was lustful for the beauty of his wife, swearing to
slay Loki for stealing her hair and only being held back by Odin. His wrath is well
known, his desire to slay giants and use his enormous hammer to smash creatures
much larger and more deadly than himself. He also was famed for his appetite for
mead and meat, both of which the strongman and powerlifter can admire.

Thor wrestles, is aggressive, fights with death and old age herself in the giant’s
halls, he carries around the magical hammer Mjolnir and wears the sacred beld
Megingarder which is said to double his already enormous strength –

“Strong is great Thor, no doubt when Megingarder, he braces tightly o’er his rock firm loins.”

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The strongman and powerlifter looks to these archetypes as signs and waymarks in the
heritage and memory of the ancestors, Thor is the god of peasants, he is the god of
violent retribution in the service of pro-creation, he holds back the forces of darkness
and death, he invokes the spirit of joy and eating and drinking, his mirthful laughter is
bane to the ears of the chaos gods, he lifts rocks, drinks mean, eats meat in copious
amounts, throws his hammer, wears his strongman belt and cheers the destruction of
his enemies. One personality stands exalted as the scion of the strong, Thor alone and
Thor above all. Being strong then, we look to Thor as patron and protector, friend and
brother of those who seek to be strong.

Divine Copulation

One of the most primitively celestial aspects of the warrior’s path is that of sex,
and the sexual union. Odin, like Shiva, carries a spear, a symbol of his phallic nature, he
is the god of mushrooms, intoxication, the mead of the pressed soma, the golden liquid
that pours forth initiation and wisdom. He is Lord of the Mound, just as Shiva is lord of
the cremation ground. Lords of death are always lords of life and the dualism of
creation and destruction, thus these homed gods, like Pan and Dionysus are at once
psychopomps and lords over dead hosts (the Wild Hunt, the Einherjar) but also rule
creation and sex. One of the titles of Odin is Allfather, the father of everything, his
scandalous and contradictory sex drive and fathering of most of the heroes and villains
of Norse saga lands him in all kinds of trouble. He is Lord of the Dead and also Lord of
All Life, just as Shiva is to the Aghora initiate.

For one studying Sigurd and our processes, sex is not an aspect of the ogre mind
to be frowned upon or shunned, we are after all not Christians. Like all of the aspects of
our ogre nature, selfishness, greed, hatred, etc. lust too must be synthesized, unified,
finding its true expression and worshipped for it to be elevated above mere act of
procreation.
Sex for the Indo European was (and is) intimately associated with the tripartite
nature of the goddess, the maiden, the mother and the hag. The Guineveres and
Brynhildrs, Eowyns, Medbs and Morganas, they are all layers of the same archetype.
Women in myth are strongly associated with the land. If the penis of God, the spittle of
Sleipnir is the Soma which erupts from the earth after the rains then the vulva of the
goddess is the erupting springs and lakes which drip noisily and with great vibration,
damp and smelly with life. At Glastonbury Tor there are twin springs at the foot of the
temple mount, red water filled with iron and white water filled with calcium; the red

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blood of the menstrual virgin earth and the white milk of the aroused mother goddess.
She is ever fertile, ever abundant, giving forth life in season according to the
rainfall/sperm that the Allfather pours from the skies.

Sex then, is a divine act of union between two opposing forces, the destructive
male spear which penetrates the virgin flesh and causes blood to flow from the womb,
simultaneously causing the milky fluid of the female arousal. The shared eruptions of
red and white devilishly mirroring the spittle on the soma rind which reminds so much
of the twin powers expressed in savage unity. Sex is a celebration of life, a constant
victory against the forces of darkness, chaos and death; that through the blood of the
virgin and the milk of the man, the heat generated, much like the vital internal heat of
the kundalini and the Indian scholars so hungered for, sweaty vibrant desire, causes
new life to emerge from the bowels of the woman. Sex is a divinity in itself, hot folds of
wet flesh, the stink of musk and sweat, the hidden contours of the womanly crease, the
creak of cleavage and the goose pimple of downy hair, all signs of the awoken goddess.
The male, his erect penis, so frighteningly similar to the Soma, bulging, thunderous,
triumphant, enraged and engorged with blood, Rudra is swollen and heaving with life,
Thor is electrified and gushed with lust for battle, the sudden eruption like the lightning
bolt, the cry of the man as he seeds the waiting earth. These are signs of Life!

The stag and the bull roar at the top of their lungs when the smell the females in
season, the wolf and the dog will howl and bark for hours when they can smell a bitch I
heat, and when the land is ready the sky breaks with a raging roar of thunder and sends
forth floods to drown in the earth in seed. The human of old would have seen all of this,
not as metaphor, not as symbol, but as reality, as above so below, at every layer of
existence.

It is therefore just as (if not more) important for you to embrace the creative and
sexual aspects of the cult of life. Martial arts are inherently seen as a destructive force, a
force of violence and chaos, of the sudden horror of physical assault on your person or
the people you love. But what we are doing is protecting and serving through violence,
we are not brigands who rape and steal, we are the noblemen who stand up against
such barbarism, taking what we want from our enemies but loving heartily and warmly
those whom we call mother, father, brother, sister, son and daughter. Martial arts is
therefore a creative act, just as lifting weights and sculpting the body for survival is a
creative act, self-overcoming and blurring of the heroic archetype with the personal
myth is a creative act. The wheel of the year and all its mysteries, of Spring, Summer,
Autumn, Winter, and Spring, of birth, life, death and rebirth, is the single most
important thing you can meditate upon and observe in your walk through life. The

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falling leaf, the shooting star, the baby that becomes a man, that becomes a father that
becomes a corpse, all merging into one, all becoming one story, the story that will never
end. The worship of the sexual act, that you get to be beautiful and young, and have
smooth skin touched by rough hands or be a rough bearded man and get to bury your
face in folds of cinnamon flesh that tastes of honey and spiced mead, you get to
experience these things, they are worth celebrating to the utmost. Be naked then, be
aroused, be bombastically and ceremonially careless in your celebrations, let your feasts
be enormous and your sexual appetite insatiable; there is time enough for mournful
dirge and sadden prayer. Leave that for the funeral pyre.

As a final though, meditate upon the contradiction previously expressed by

Conan the Cimmerian, that life is an illusion, and therefore we are also illusions, and
are therefore real in the eyes of the illusion. Therefore it is incumbent upon us to burn
with life, to drink and eat and make merry with each other’s bodies whilst we are here.

Everything else is meaningless, transient, a fleeting glimpse, a breath of smoke

on the wind, it has little to offer us but metaphysical balms on the cold winter nights,
but only rank whisky can warm your belly, only a well seared steak can fill your bowels
and only a sweaty cunt can soothe your loins when the going gets tough.

Remember how little you are, and how little you know, and what little you are,
of such inconsequence, remember that and accept that you are also God, you are also
pristine perfection embracing an experience it will never have again.

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 Chapter VII – The Ordeals of the Hero

Grave comes mist

Shadows and shades,

Hollow eyed toothless

Black iron blades.

Every hero is shaped by his time in the wilderness, his descent into the underworld, the
facing of his demons and his union with nature and the dead before his ascension to
something loftier and nobler. This tradition is not unique to Indo-European culture and
many hunter-gatherer societies to this day require men and especially
shamans/wizards/witch doctors to have been through some kind of horrific initiatory
experience. Perhaps this comes from the Neolithic times when our ancestors would
have felt intimately that anything that went remotely against nature in their eyes was
wrong and almost blasphemous (forgive the term). For example the dwarves and
smiths who work with metals in European mythology are often crippled or have been
broken in some way, giving back part of their youth or beauty or capability to nature
for the crime of creating weapons and rings and jewels from the raw flesh of the
goddess. It also reminds of the very idea to hunter-gatherer communities that the
plough, furrowing through the soil, forcibly impregnating the ground with seed and
then forcing plants to grow was regarded as rape of the fertility goddess and mother
earth herself. Something needed to be given back, a punishment or a bargain was
required. It would seem the hero, who was often a mass murderer when the chips were
down, would have been viewed in the same way.

Modern warfare has reduced heroism to a series of staged events; even

participating in the horror of war these days gives the deceased soldier the name hero.
To be murdered in the line of duty is heroism to the modern westerner, who expects
with our 21st century technology, no one but the enemy should really die. Warfare to
the Norse, German, Celt, and Gaul would have been horrendously bloody business,
veterans of warfare, and therefore heroes would have been viewed as superhuman. To
even survive one battle, to live through the horror of a mounted cavalry charge, to hew
enemies limb from limb and survive to not only tell the tale but to go looking for it
again and again and to win for your tribe victory, renown and riches would have made

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you a hero to your people but wouldn’t have you remembered. To the Indo-Europeans
who sought not victory or wealth but a name and to be remembered as a hero,
something altogether separate was needed. Heroism to the peoples of Europe required
feats of extraordinary divinity. To just be another warrior who pillaged and slaughtered
wasn’t enough, they wanted to be thought of as avatars of the gods themselves.

To be remembered as the avatar of a god, you first had to have given something
back to the gods, and that required the sacrifice of which we spoke. This was often a
time of testing and suffering, a sojourn in the mountains, a near death experience, a
period of darkness and solitude, the dark night of the soul of the more modern traditions,
the valley of the shadow of death for the Christians.

This is something relatively seldom spoken of by those seeking to be fitter,

harder, healthier or during study of the martial arts. Yet these initiations were key to the
ancient understanding of what it means to be a warrior and a hero. It is all well and
good learning to fight, learning to defend yourself, becoming hard and fast and skilled
in battle, it is another entirely to overcome your fears, become the chosen vessel of the
archetype of a god and live out your myth from chosen re-birth to death.

In the Sigurd Tradition we have selected a few core myths which allow us to
understand the way in which the original time of testing and initiation can be replicated
and re-experienced with relative accuracy to encourage that same facing of the primal
fears of the warrior.

Most of the myths or legends we have that remember a time in the wilderness for
the hero has him meeting or founding a band of outlaw brothers who are in the same
situation. During the sojourn in the forests and thicket the brothers blur the lines
between man and animal, often coming to be seen as werewolves or half wild. This is
most obvious in the tradition of the Norse Einherjar and their wolf skins worn during
battle, with their esoteric and secret rituals of initiation resulting in a semi-divine ability
for superior strength in battle. This time in the wilderness then takes of the same basic
process as that of the shaman or wizard who much temporarily die and be born again
and is then seen as being half in the fairy/elf realm and half in the human realm, his
abilities to communicate with the dead and the spirits coming from the fact that he has
one foot in each realm. The warrior equivalent then has one foot in the human realm
and one foot in the permanent warfare of the forest and the wilds; the werewolf
becoming the perfect archetype which he seeks to embody. (it is worth remembering
that the werewolf in Irish tradition, which is probably the most unadulterated myths of

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the pre-Germanic British islanders, is a protective creature, seen to serve the community
by protecting it from actual wolves.)

This is most clear in the tradition of the Fenian Band in the folk tale of Fionn
McCumhail of the Irish cycle. Finn and his men spend half the year in the service of the
King and come a certain time (probably the initial Wild Hunt in late October) they
would cross over into the fairy realm and spend the other half of the year living as wild
men. When we compare Finn with Gwynn of the Welsh/Arthurian tradition, and
remember that Gwynn is the god of the underworld we can see what is going on. The
mythical hero and protector of the people spends half his time in service of his people
and the other half in his “real” home, the underworld/land of the dead. The hero is
therefore half human and half dead; one foot in the world, one foot in Hel.

In our recreation of a similar program in the Sigurd Tradition we have to

approach a set of conditions which would encourage the fullest interpretation of the
initiatory experience of the hero.

Looking at three other examples (as well as Finn and the Fenians) we have Turin
and the Gaurwaith, Robin Hood and his Merry Men and King Alfred of historical
legend.

To begin with Turin, as previously discussed, after the savage crushing of the
elvish and human alliance by Morgoth and his demonic forces, the hero lives in the
wilderness and meets a band of outlaws called the Gaurwaith, which means Wolf-Men
in Sindarin. These outlaws live freely in the huge woodlands and lead raids against orcs
and similar to the Brotherhood Without Banners in Game of Thrones they run by their
own laws, killing whoever they come across or disagree with.

The other obvious example is Robin Loxley, in another version of the story the
nobleman Crusader returns to his home of England and finds that his country has
become rife with ignoble taxation laws and despotic kings and sheriffs. His initial
attempts to ignite revolt and lead the locals in a defense of the weak are met with
savage oppression. Robin then meets the band of wandering outlaws in the woods,
known as the Merry Men, clearly a tradition in English culture by the time of the
writing of the myths, presumably modeling themselves on an older outlaw process
such as that of Fionn and the Fenians. Robin then becomes known as the Hood, robbing
from the rich and giving to the poor. But crucially, it is only after his time in the
wilderness that Robin awakens to his true purpose, his True Will, and only then can he
begin walking the heroic path.

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 Another example, again from the legendary history of a very real historical
personage is of King Alfred’s time in the wilderness of Somerset. Alfred, as the son of
the deceased Saxon king of Wessex Aethelwulf, inherited all of his father’s domestic
problems and as he sought to lead the men of his kingdom, the Danes pushed their
advantage into western territories. The Danes pushed hard and chased the Saxon rebels
into the Somerset wastelands (which would have been a huge marshy bog) where they
hid for some time as a band of outlaws leading guerilla strikes against the conquerors.
Eventually Alfred and his men faced the Danes outside Chippenham in Wiltshire and
defeated them, forcing the Danish nobles to convert to Christianity. Once again, it was
only after his time in the wilderness that Alfred was able to become the hero.

What is happening here? What is each of these heroes (and hundreds of other
examples) learning whilst in the wilderness? The wilderness experience is the initiation
which the male warrior goes through, his ritual death, the loss of everything he holds
dear, the acceptance of his imminent death and his facing of his worst fears, then during
the overcoming of these obstacles he becomes hero. The hero then is a wild man, like
Finn, half human, half divine, and it would seem our historical legends accept that the
myths themselves and the process of the “rise of the underdog” archetype demand that
the hero spend this time in the darkness of his worst fears.

A successful program of fitness which seeks to develop this mind and its
adherents would require that the participant engage in what we will call the “Time of the
Hero with the Werewolves”.

As a foundation we take the idea that the Fenians led by Finn himself engaged in
a training program which required a total abandonment and separation from humanity,
in the aforementioned requirements for entry into the Fianna. As we explored earlier,
each of the major tests for the Fianna sought a totally mythical and heroic application of
their abilities. This wasn’t just a training session or a way of making the Fianna stronger
or faster, it was a method of severance from their previous life and an awakening to a
new phase of existence.

This initiatory tradition is mirrored in the requirements of all the warrior bands
and heroic figures we looked at. Each of them was asked at some point by their
mythical partners or native populace to show nobility and bravery with their strength
and marital ability, but also unswerving dedication to the popular cause and a poetic
and spiritual understanding of their native faith, whether it was towards the old gods
or the Christian/Islamic deity.

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 In Sigurd we seek to explore the nature of this paradigm, that through ordeals
and exercise which seemingly have no ‘point’ we can uncover deeper reservoirs of
mental and spiritual grit. The ordeals also serve as an initiatory tradition within our
own study.

Ordeals

The Hero with the Werewolves

It remains relatively difficult for the majority of people reading this book to
attain anything close to the required time in the wilderness for the true beauty of nature
and the panic of living in the wild to set in. however there is a way for the wilderness
experience to be engineered so it can encourage the most immediate knowledge of the
self. It can then be repeated in varying environments to add further layers to the
wisdom which can only come from being in the wild of your native land.

Each of the heroes of this book had their time in the wild woods or the deserts of
their homeland, spending time with their gods and casting off their previous concerns,
that is the fundamental thing we need to attain. A mere day or night in the woods gives
nothing but an understanding of fears or anxieties, the second or third night a test of
will, but a fourth or fifth night is when the veil breaks and the true “goal” of the ordeal
could be said to emerge.

For each of these ordeals a meditative example will be given, a theme and a ritual
focus around which the experience can sculpt itself and awaken the archetype buried in
the soul memory of the adept. For this period of time in the wilderness with the
werewolves the most obvious archetype we can use in conjunction with our mythology
is that of Sigmund and his son Sinfjolti. Sigmund is the hero who in the Volsung saga
draws Odin’s magical blade from the tree which stands in the Volsung halls. He is
betrayed by the warmongering husband of his twin sister Signy who attempts to steal
the sword. Signy pleads for her brother’s life and her husband chooses instead to tie
Sigmund and her nine other brothers to trees in the forest where each night a she-wolf
comes and devours them. When finally it is Sigmund’s turn to die he waits for the wolf
to be close enough and then bites off her tongue, before breaking loose and fleeing to a
cave. Signy then finds him in the cave and disguising herself has sex with him, the child
of their union being the hero Sinfjolti, who says he has the face of the legendary
Volsung himself.

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 Sinfjolti grew in the house of his mother’s husband and was in secret prepared
for the vengeance of the house of Volsung, eventually going to the cave where Sigmund
hid with the magical sword of Odin. Together, father and son (who were also uncle and
nephew) went into the wilderness and lived as wildmen. Some versions of the lay have
the heroes finding and killing a group of werewolf bandits who live in the woods and
whose skins they steal, turning them into werewolves. The version by Tolkien (in Sigurd
and Gudrun) has the following beautiful verse –

Thus son of Signy,

Came Sinfjolti

To vengeance bred

Of Volsung slain.

In the forest faring

Far in warfare

Long they labored

Long they waited.

Wide they wandered

Wolvish-coated

Men they murdered

Men they plundered.

Daylong slept they

In dark cavern,

After dreadful deeds

Of death of Gautland

Finally Sigmund and his son return to their vengeance and destroy the house of Signy’s
husband, burning it to the ground and killing all his men with the magical Odinic

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sword. As Signy stands by the flames she speaks once more of her guilt that her own
twin brother is the father of her son and then throws herself into the flames.

What this part of the Volsung saga has which is so powerful are these clear
references to the Berserker/Ulfhednar practices of donning wolf pelts to fight in battle.
Like Turin with the Gaurwaith, Sigmund and his son live in the wilderness together,
bred for vengeance, finding kinship in their hunger for revenge, faring far and wide and
laboring hard to seek their quarry. In their wanderings they wear the skins of wolves
and murder men, rob them and sleep in caves and barrows, plotting the day they have
their revenge and rescue their sister/mother.

Whilst it is not acutely declared that they live as werewolves or are able to
change their shape, the implication is there that the Scandinavian listeners and authors
of the lay would have known. These men were living as Berserkers, their wild blood
lust the only thing driving them and their desire for revenge their only hunger which
could be slaked in the blood of their enemies. Living in caverns wearing only the pelts
of the wolf and slaying and robbing all they came across, the two became like all the
classic outlaws, in fact they embodied that concept of the vargr, the outlaw who was
synchronous with the wolf himself.

In Old European culture the wolf was an outlaw, a creature that lived on the
outskirts of the woods, a constant harrying pest to human life, a danger on the road, a
fear in the night, an enemy of children, the aged, the sick and a voice in the darkness
that spoke of mystery and nocturnal secrets unseen by men. Only fire and civilization
could keep the wolf at bay, and like the darker spirits of the dead who sought to haunt
the living, the actual wolf came to take on a negative spirit, noble but cruel and
shadowy. That Odin and Loki were both intimately associated with the wolf and were
fathers and kinsman of wolves needs little explanation, these were furtive creatures that
struck fear and awe into those who saw them. The actual human outlaws, those men
who were cast out of community for murder or rape were seen to become wolves, how
else could they live alone in the woods without being killed? It was noted how they
formed into bands were only the strong survived and a cruel pack mentality emerged,
an outlaw band wearing scraps and rags and eating what they could, robbing and
murdering to survive, filthy and outcast, must have looked to the dwellers in the walled
towns and villages like wolves themselves. Those warriors who lived in the wilderness
for a time whilst preparing for battle, or hiding in the shadowed dark during initiations,
or entering caverns and burial mounds to share the spirit of the wolf, whilst hunting
and killing the outlaws they came across, they too would have been regarded as vagr,
outlaws, bandits, thieves, killers, a creature to be shunned for its violent nature.

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 Sigmund and his son became this creature, they personified the archetype in this
myth. Roving with nothing but the furs on their backs and the swords in their hands
(one of them given by the lord of the werewolf warriors himself, Woden) they straddle
the illusory border between wolf and soldier.

For our ordeal in terms of experiencing the transition from man to animal and
the express emotive factors of what that means, we need to do our best to shape-shift
within a set process and paradigm.

Leaving the human world with a blood brother or kinsman, taking with you only
the furs on your back (try to find animal fur, dog or wolf if possible) and the clothes you
need to survive, and a small satchel of only cooked or preserved meats which you can
eat on the move. For the next three days and nights, move around the wilderness
environment you have selected, preferably a woodland area, never stopping for more
than a couple of hours to rest or meditate or practice your martial arts. As you spend
this time In the woodlands, as each day and night passes, sleeping in the open, or in
makeshift shelters you can put together during the day and rest in during the night,
making fire as you can with what you have around you, try to ration what little meat
you have and concentrate on a steady degradation of the human idea and a continued
expression and shifting towards that of the wolf. Try to talk less and less, communicate
more with each other by symbol and signal, by hand gesture and procession of
movement of the body and form to get across what you mean and what you intend
through subconscious gesture.

The meaning of shape-shifting is to alter the external visage so that an internal

transformation takes place. When shape-shifting truly occurs it is not an act of actual
alteration of the external form and physical body it is the change of the mind which
causes the external body to shift and move differently. When the ordeal of existing in
the wilderness as an animal is approached with the question “am I supposed to think I
will actually turn into a wolf” then you are missing the point entirely. Descending into
the lower brain functions, becoming the ogre of humanity so that the upper echelons of
the human mind are able to unify spiritually with their source, this is the point.

The outlaw whilst he lives in the woods, or experiences what it means to be

outcast has everything stripped away, his personality, his attitudes, his previous goals
and aims, and he is reduced to the core centrality, the emotive and fiery fundamentals
around which his ego pivots. When you spend time in the wilderness and experience
the depravation of being reduced to the bare minimum foundations of “who you are”
you are able to effectively grow from that place and ascend your throne.

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 Sigmund whilst he is in exile, living in the caverns as a werewolf and haunting
the woods with only a sword and his brother/son/nephew experiences the stripping
away of everything he thought was important. All that remains is his goal to destroy his
enemies. Whilst Turin is with the Gaurwaith all he does is kill orcs and anyone who
crosses his path, robbing and murdering for naught but the pleasure of the kill (like a
mad wolf). Robin Hood found his true calling as a warrior for the people whilst hiding
in Sherwood forest, stripping away who he was until all that remained was his urge to
reclaim his titles, destroy the Sherriff and save the people from tyranny. Finally, King
Alfred found himself in the wilds, as many Anglo-Saxon rebel did during the later
invasions of the Normans, hiding in the swamps of Somerset, reduced to savagery to
survive, killing whoever they came across, until they emerge as outlaws and bandits to
reclaim their kingdom (successfully for Alfred, not so for his descendants).

When you leap forth into this initial time of testing in the wilderness,
experiencing the woods as a creature within them, as a feature of them instead of a
visitor or a wanderer merely passing through, you see your place in the entire picture.
Truly the time in the wilderness as a werewolf is an experience of the divine inside
yourself, a way of understanding who you are and what you are not. Invoking the
spirits of this type of ordeal, the initiations which require exhaustion and hardship only
adds to the ego/ogre stripping elements.

The Mountain of God

Mountains have always been the seats of the gods. We can point to the lofty
houses of the gods in Asgard, Olympus, the Garden of the Gods of the Sumerians high
atop Mount Hermon, the Vedic gods and the Himalayas, and of course Moses speaking
to YHWH atop Mount Sinai. The scripture of the Jewish people also speak of their god
commanding the “high places” to be taken down by the prophets and Kings of Judah
and Israel, indeed it would seem all of the Baal temples were atop mountains or raised
hills. Mountains are named after gods, they are the places where the gods descend and
speak to the mortals whose lives they interfere in. Crom is strong in his mountain.

Julius Evola wrote of the mystical and spiritual metaphor of the mountain climb,
of lofty abodes of the gods and the spiritual quest which is allegorized by the real
physical event of climbing up the steep side of a high place. The mountain has ever
been the symbol of the questing man, of his desire, to dwell with the gods, and each o
the obstacles which he faces, as he overcomes them show him how to overcome other
obstacles in his life.
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 The myth/story which we feel shows this best is that of HP Lovecraft’s “Other
Gods”, which we have included here in full –

Atop the tallest of earth’s peaks dwell the gods of earth, and suffer no man to tell that he
hath looked upon them. Lesser peaks they once inhabited; but ever the men from the plains would
scale the slopes of rock and snow, driving the gods to higher and higher mountains till now only
the last remains. When they left their older peaks they took with them all signs of themselves;
save once, it is said, when they left a carven image on the face of the mountain which they called
Ngranek.

But now they have betaken themselves to unknown Kadath in the cold waste where no
man treads, and are grown stern, having no higher peak whereto to flee at the coming of men.
They are grown stern, and where once they suffered men to displace them, they now forbid men
to come, or coming, to depart. It is well for men that they know not of Kadath in the cold waste,
else they would seek injudiciously to scale it.

Sometimes when earth’s gods are homesick they visit in the still night the peaks where
once they dwelt, and weep softly as they try to play in the olden way on remembered slopes. Men
have felt the tears of the gods on white-capped Thurai, tough they have thought it rain; and have
heard the sighs of the gods in the plaintive dawn-winds of Lerion. In cloud-ships the gods are
wont to travel, and wise cotters have legends that keep them from certain high peaks at night
when it is cloudy, for the gods are not lenient as of old.

In Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, once dwelt an old man avid to behold the gods
of earth; a man deeply learned in the seven cryptical books of Hsan, and familiar with the
Pnakotic Manuscripts of distant and frozen Lomar. His name was Barzai the Wise, and the
villagers tell of how he went up a mountain on the night of the strange eclipse.

Barzai knew so much of the gods that he could tell of their comings and goings, and
guessed so many of their secrets that he was deemed half a god himself. It was he who wisely
advised the burgesses of Ulthar when they passed their remarkable law against the slaying of
cats, and who first told the young priest Atal where it is that black cats go at midnight on St.
John’s Eve. Barzai was learned in the lore of earth’s gods, and had gained a desire to look upon
their faces. He believed that his great secret knowledge of gods could shield him from their wrath,
so resolved to go up to the summit of high and rock Hatheg-Kla on a night when he knew the
gods would be there.

Hatheg-Kla is far in the stony desert beyond Hatheg, for which it is named, and rises like
a rock statue in a silent temple. Around its peak the mists play always mournfully, for mists are
the memories f the gods, and the gods loved Hatheg-Kla when they dwelt upon it in the old days.
Often the gods of earth visit Hatheg-Kla in their ships of cloud, casting pale vapours over the

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slopes as they dance reminiscently on the summit under a clear moon. The villagers of Hatheg
say it is ill to climb Hatheg-Kla at any time, and deadly to climb it by night when pale vapours
hide the summit and the moon; but Barzai heeded them not when he came from neighbouring
Ulthar with the young priest Atal, who was his disciple. Atal was only the son of an innkeeper,
and was sometimes afraid; but Barzai’s father had been a landgrave who dwelt in an ancient
castle, so he had no common superstition in his blood and only laughed at the fearful cotters.

Barzai and Atal went out of Hatheg into the stony desert despite the prayers of peasants,
and talked of earth’s gods by their campfires at night. Many days they travelled, and from afar
saw lofty Hatheg-Kla with his aureole of mournful mist. On the thirteenth day they reached the
mountain’s lonely base, and Atal spoke of his fears. But Barzai was old and learned and had no
fears, so led the way boldly up the slope that no man had scaled since the time of Sansu, who is
written of with fright in the mouldy Pnakotic Manuscripts.

The way was rocky, and made perilous by chasms, cliffs and falling stones. Later it grew
cold and snowy; and Barzai and Atal often slipped and fell as they hewed and plodded upward
with staves and axes. Finally the air grew thin, and the sky changed colour, and the climbers
found it hard to breathe; but still they toiled up and up, marveling at the strangeness of the scene
and thrilling at the thought of what would happen on the summit when the moon was out and
the pale vapours spread around. For three days they climbed higher, higher, and higher toward
the roof of the world; then they camped to wait for the clouding of the moon.

For four nights no clouds came, and the moon shone down cold through the thing
mournful mists around the silent pinnacle. Then on the fifth night, which was the night of the
full moon, Barzai saw some dense clouds far to the north, and stayed up with Atal to watch them
draw near. Thick and majestic they sailed, slowly and deliberately onward; ranging themselves
round the peak high above the watchers, and hiding the moon and the summit from view. For a
long hour the watchers gazed, whilst the vapours swirled and the screen of clouds grew thicker
and more restless. Barzai was wise in the lore of earth’s gods. And listened hard for certain
sounds, but Atal felt the chill of the vapours and the awe of the night, and feared much. And
when Barzai began to climb higher and beckon eagerly, it was long before Atal would follow.

So thick were the vapours that the way was hard, and though Atal followed on at last, he
could scarce see the grey shape of Barzai on the dim slope above in the clouded moonlight. Barzai
forged very far ahead, and seemed despite his age to climb more easily than Atal; fearing not the
steepness that began to grow to freat for any save a strong and dauntless man, nor pausing at
wide black chasms that Atal scarce could leap. And so they went up wildly over rocks and gulfs,
slipping and stumbling, and sometimes awed at the vastness and horrible silence of bleak ice
pinnacles and mute granite steeps.

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 Very suddenly Barzai went out of Atal’s sight, scaling a hideous cliff that seemed to
bulge outward and block the path for any climber not inspired of earth’s gods. Atal was far
below, and planning what he should do when he reached the place, when curiously he noticed
that the light had grown strong, as if the cloudless peak and moonlit meeting-place of the gods
were very near. And as he scrabled on toward the bulging cliff and litten sky he felt fear more
shocking than any he had known before. Then through the high mists he heard the voice of
unseen Barzai shouting wildly in delight:

“I have heard the gods! I have heard earth’s gods singing in revelry on Hatheg-Kla! The
voices of earth’s gods are known to Barzai the Prophet! The mists are thin and the moon is
bright, and I shall see the gods dancing wildly on Hatheg-Kla that they loved in youth! The
wisdom of Barzai hath made him greater than earth’s gods, and against his will their spells and
barriers are as naught; Barzai will behold the gods, the proud gods, the secret gods, the gods of
earth who spurn the sight of men!”

Atal could not hear the voices Barzai heard, but he was now close to the bulging cliff and
scanning it for foot-holds. Then he heard Barzai’s voice grow shriller and louder:

“The mists are very thing, and the moon casts shadows on the slope; the voices of earth’s
gods are high and wild, and they fear the coming of Barzai the Wise, who is greater than
they…The moon’s flickers, as earth’s gods dance against it; I shall see the dancing forms of the
gods that leap and howl in the moonlight… The light is dimmer and the gods are afraid…”

Whilst Barzai was shouting these things Atal felt a spectral change in the air, as if the
laws of earth were bowing to greater laws; for though the way was steeper than ever, the upward
path was now grown fearsomely easy, and the bulging cliff proved scarce an obstacle when he
reached it and slid perilously up its convex face. The light of the moon had strangely failed, and
as Atal plunged upward though the mists he heard Barzai the Wise shrieking in the shadows:

“The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon
the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth’s gods… there is unknown
magic on Hatheg-Kla, for the screams of the frightened gods have turned to laughter, and the
slopes of ice shoot up endlessly into the black heavens whither I am plunging… Hei! Hei! At
last! In the dim light I behold the gods of earth!”

And now Atal, slipping dizzily up over inconceivable steeps, heard in the dark a
loathsome laughing, mixed with such a cry as no man else ever heard save in the Phelgethon of
unrelatable nightmares; a cry wherein reverberated the horror and anguish of a haunted lifetime
packed into one atrocious moment:

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 “The other gods! The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of
earth!... Look away! … Go back!... Do not see! … Do not see! … the vengeance of the infinite
abyss… that cursed, that damnable pit… Merciful gods of earth, I am falling into the sky!”

And as Atal shut his eyes and stopped his ears and tried to jump downward against the
frightful pull from unknown heights, there resounded on Hatheg-Kla that terrible peal of thunder
which awakened the good cotters of the plains and the honest burgesses of Hathg and Nir and
Ulthar, and caused them to behold through the clouds that strange eclipse of the moon that no
book ever predicted. And when the moon came out at last Atal was safe on the lower snows of the
mountain without sight of earth’s gods, or of the other gods.

Now it is told in the mouldy Pnakotic Manuscripts that Sansu found naught but
wordless ice and rock when he climbed Hatheg-Kla in the outho f the world. Yet when the men of
Ulthar and Nir and Hatheg crushed their fears and scaled that haunted steep by day in search of
Barzai the Wise, they found graven in the naked stone summit a curious and Cyclopean symbol
fifty cubits wide, as if the rock had been riven by some titanic chisel. And the symbol was like to
one that learned men have discerned in those frightful parts of the Pnakotic Manuscripts which
are too ancient to be read. This they found.

Barzai the Wise they never found, nor could the holy priest Atal ever be persuaded to
pray for his soul’s respose. Moreover, to this day the people of Ulthar and Nir and Hatheg fear
eclipses, and pray by night when pale vapours hide the mountain-top and the moon. And above
the mists on Hatheg-Kla earth’s gods sometimes dance reminiscently; for they know they are
safe, and love to come from unknown Kadath in ships of cloud and play in the olden way. As
they did when earth was new and men not given to the climbing of inaccessible places.

Barzil the Wise, the archetypal wizard hero, stumbled across by the rationalist
Lovecraft, as with most of his characters, semi mythical priest who will sacrifice
everything to attain his goal (something of a Faustian archetype). Atal goes up with
him, but his fears pull him back at the last minute. The unwritten part of the story is
that in all of Lovecraft’s work the gods of the earth are relatively benevolent whilst the
outer gods are beyond conceptions of right and wrong or life and death, much like the
difference between the gods of the mountains and older titans or giants/forces of chaos.
It is past these outer gods which the mountainous wanderer must stumble, and it is past
these outer gods which the companion or assistant can never attain. Barzai’s fear of the
outer gods is an expression of his human nature and Lovecraft’s innate fear of the
unknown and the outer dark. To face this fear is the highest example of human
ingenuity and creativity.

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 For this ordeal then, go to a high place, a mountain or hilltop, endure and
experience foul weather, danger of death or losing your way in the mist. All these are
fine metaphors for the spiritual path and the path of the man who exercises the muscles
of mind and body. Meditate at each moment of the ascent, how the view changes, how
your body feels, how you collect experiences and how you approach obstacles. When
you slip and fall, do you give up and go back down the mountain, or do you keep your
sights on the summit and keep climbing? These are all important questions. When you
eventually reach the top, looking back down the path which you took to the summit,
how do you view the obstacles? How do you view the things which seemed
insurmountable on the ascent but are now beneath you once you reach the place of rest?
This is how you will view your life when you die.

Bringing these experiences back into your day to day life you will see the awe
and the expression of awe manifesting in your thought processes, the way you interact
with those around you. The concerns of the everyday spiritual peasant will appear
transitory and fleeting. There is a way to climb a mountain and a way not to. Most
mountain climbers (who call it a hobby or a sport) do not experience climbing a
mountain, they climb it as a runner covers distance in a timed race, it is merely an
obstacle to be adapted and overcome for them, not a spiritual metaphor to be enjoyed
and overcome for the benefit for the individual (and mankind). When you climb the
mountain(s) then you should do so with the intent of experiencing something other than
yourself, or experiencing the other within yourself as a reality. Mountain climbing can
allow you to, like Barzai, meet with the gods themselves and be pulled aloft into the
immemorial depths of space or it can have you squawking and squealing back down
the slopes like an idiot as you remain exactly the same.

One of the mantras of the Sigurdian endeavour is the triple pillar process of the
warrior, Lift Mountains, Make Bastards, Break Skulls. Overcome enormous obstacles, brag
and boast in the spiritual sense as Braggi the god inspired the ancient Saxon and Norse
warriors to do in their Symbel feasts. If someone says you can’t climb that mountain, not
only do you climb it but you climb it in winter, barefoot, with your skin bared to the
wind, and you return, fully avowed of your right to brag!

The Forest of the Giant

As well as the concept of Sigmund and Sinfjolti spending time in the wilderness
as werewolves and then returning as heroes, there is also the concept of the hero who
shape shifts into a wolf for a set purpose or time, working evil for the sake of good.
Such an event occurs in the story of Beren and Luthien in the Silmarillion when they

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seek the door to Angbad and change into a werewolf or vampire bat and stalk
unheeded to the very slumbering place of Morgoth and steal the Silmaril from his
crown. However, throughout the story the wolves and beasts which Morgoth sends to
defeat Huan and Beren are described as being horrific creatures of evil, only for the hero
to metamorphose into one to complete his mission.

It is important for the hero, the athlete, the martial artist to have a sense of his
own moral code, of what he is or is not willing to do for the service of his cause and
what he is comfortable with in the attainment of his goal. Beren had spent the previous
years killing werewolves and fighting demonic creatures, only to then pretend to be one
to attain his goal. He was therefore a man comfortable in the skin of an enemy,
comfortable skulking in the dark like his foe so that he could have the victory.

For the third ordeal, go out into the wild woods with brothers and set up a camp
site or fire and taking it in turns or at a tie over a period of nights, retreat into the
darkness and be separate from the group. As you spend time away, wanting to be with
the fire, the light and the kin drinking and making merry without you, experience the
knowledge of being outcast. Move in the darkness, go away from the group for some
time, return when you haven’t heard human voices for a while, when the fire is burning
low or when your brothers have become drink addled, move amongst them silently, or
enter the camp and retreat again without being seen or heard.

This is the path by which the friend of the man becomes the friend of the wolf or
the friend of the world or the friend of the wolf god if not a physical wolf.

Return to camp and punch one of your companions in the back of the head,
without them hearing you. Toy with them, see what is acceptable and what is profane
in the eyes of those who call themselves brother or outlaw alongside you. Dropping a
rock on a sleeping kinsman forehead? Drawing blood with a knife when he has his back
turned? Leaping from a ;tree and wrestling until one of you passes out or submits?
Where are the boundaries of your group and your kin? Do you have boundaries
yourself? Can you steal fire or steal food from them without being seen or heard?

These are not only goals the wanderer should seek or outlaws but the hero, for
he is able by fighting with the iron steeds who call him brother to see how sharp his
own iron has become. Whom is served by not being tested? Do the wolves not
constantly check who is alpha? Do the male bears and stags not test each other with
savage violence each Spring and Autumn to see who has right to the female wombs in
their territories?

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 Thunor is the god of thunder, an eruption of strength and power, and an
ejaculatory force which needs sharpening and a hammer which needs constant blunting
on the anvil of tested strength. Thor could be said to be forever preparing for Ragnarok,
going out among the giants and the enemies of Asgard not to destroy them but to test
and hone his strengths for the last day and the battle against the serpent. Do the
Einherjar in Valhalla not fight day and night, sharpening their weapons and honing
their skills against one another, being hewn limb from limb and then being reborn anew
with pork and mead to fight another day? How do you prepare for expreme violence
but by being prepared for extreme violence?

The Four Elements

This is one of those ordeals which goes against everything I would recommend
as someone who trains four days a week in powerlifting and strongman. This ordeal is
exhausting, deprecating, insufferable and ruins you for days afterward, but then that is
the point. I would probably recommend it therefore during a de-loading or rest/test
period when you are able to give it 100% focus.

This ordeal was initially taught to me by my late friend and instructor Tim,
aforementioned in the opening chapters, this was one of the first ways in which he
properly tested how far my mental and spiritual endurance had come and put me
through my paces. Needless to say I failed. Miserably.

Before we look at the spiritual and metaphysical applications or elements of the

ordeal we will deal with what exactly you should do. This is the initiation par
excellence for the Churl, a way by which the athlete taking the first step on the path of
Sigurd can experience true hardship, true pain, and the misery associated with feeling
their body bested and the spiritual grit it requires to overcome external stimulus.

Excusing the anecdote, my experience of this ordeal was with Tim, in the later
part of Winter, a February morning in south west England, cold, wet, windy, that kind
of sideways rain which stings and aches the longer you stay out in it, coupled with a
harsh northerly bluster which cut to the bone and made the rain feel warm. Tim insisted
that we leave from his house in only our shorts, barefoot, topless and run to a woods
about 2 miles away; this he said, was the element of earth, to move around in our
environment as close to the elements as possible. At random intervals along the run he
would decide to take a detour through a bog, over a field, crawl through a gulley, drag
ourselves under barbed wire fences etc. all to get ourselves as close and intimate with
the sodden ground as was possible, covered in freezing earth.

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 When we arrived at our destination, he said we would now engage with the
element of water, and we jumped into the lake in the centre of the fields and paddled
around for a while in the pouring rain. When we emerged I was ready to go home, two
hours into a day which he promised was barely even begun. Next he pointed to one of
the huge oak trees which line the shore of the lake and said we had to climb one, which
we did with relative ease, but once we were up it was time to meditate on what we had
learned thus far. Earth and water, and now the element of air, freezing cold, in the
driving rain, the harsh north wind whistling through the trees, cutting me right to the
core of me, my body temperature plummeting.

We stayed like this for some time, Tim quietly assessing how we shivered, why
we shivered, what could be done to get us warm, what we could do to shelter out of the
wind and rain and how to use the tree to our advantage. Eventually he decided it was
time to get down and we ran back the long way to his home some 3-4 miles away, on
the way collecting soaking wet rotting wood which he said we would make a fire out of,
the final element.

The wood was sodden, black, stinking, it gave off a thick dense cloud of smoke
and vapour when we began to warm it by the fire in his garden until it eventually dried
enough to burn. The fire was cold, it was useless, it didn’t warm us, and with the real
warmth of 21st century life barely metres away it was unbearable to sit shuddering in
the dim winter twilight whilst the heating and lighting of a working class English semi-
detached hummed a few metres away.

We talked, we laughed, we shivered and we eventually began to warm up. The

fire cut to my core and its eternally distant promise of making us feel better made the
night seem all the more cold. I finally yielded and went home, Tim remained in the
garden, he waited until the rite was completely finished. Death was the end, spirit the
final element.

To understand this final ordeal, or this ordeal of Sigurd’s which is written in the
mythology of the sagas, we have to understand why it appears so clearly. The myths
and legends appear to each contain the elements of earth, air, fire and water in
abundance, and eventually too the hero dies or someone close to him does. The
elements are always the key, the Lady of the Lake, the dragon of flame, the giant in the
earth, the god coming down from the skies, the hero placed on the funeral pyre…these
elements are as much part of the story as the characters themselves, because this is the
passage or pathway of the hero from one point of initiation to the next.

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 The four elements lay the pathway of every other passage by which the hero
makes his way through life. Extremity becomes his friend, hardship becomes a part of
the process by which he sees his life given meaning, it is the prism through which the
light of his soul is divided into separates, but unified again when he is whole, when he
sees nothing but the divided made singular, i.e. upon the moment of death.

Grading system

In Sigurd, because we are dealing not with fitness levels, or routines of arranged
progress or initiations into various grades or lodges of thought, but with outcomes of
understanding we can never truly gauge where each individual is on their own path of
initiation. Strangely enough t is highly likely that someone who has been drilling away
with the Sigurd process for decades could feasibly be overtaken in a matter of days by a
total newcomer who is simply more instinctively aware and prepared for the teaching.
This is something beyond anyone’s control and the man who hungers to call himself
Aethyl (expert) and maligns himself all of the Churl (beginner) aspects, will never
ascend, he will remain of low mind and forever see this as something hierarchical
(which it is) and never glean the true anarchistic overtones. Two truths, there are two
contrary viewpoints working in tandem, as one, the fire and the ice, creating a
temperate inner world where the gardens of perfection blossom.

As a way of understanding what we’re talking about here, I have been studying
philosophy, mysticism, magic and the occult for nearly ten years, I have read hundreds
of books on the subject, I have been doing martial arts for eight years, I have been
working out in this school and in traditional primitive movement for ten years and I
have been dealing with the process of initiating and schooling individuals on their true
worth for three years. I can safely say hand on heart, I am nowhere near saying
goodbye to my Churl nature. I now see the foothills of the mountain and I can spy the
hillocks of the Thane which I will pass through, but I do not believe I have achieved
Thane status. This is something intangible, unexplainable, only the enlightened man
will understand what we are talking about, this is a process of self-overcoming without
levels, it is a circle within a circle, the veils of the Suffi, the islands of the blessed, each
one closer to the source than the previous, but they are not destinations, they are
outcomes and shedding of thoughts.

Churl – Beginner in the Steppes

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 The Churl is the beginner, he who has set out on the path towards his goals. The
ascension of his spirit, the separation and therefore union of ego and soul, he is the man
who has locked his sights on the mountaintop and is preparing to move towards that
goal. He is naked, cold, scared of every shadow, mentally unstable, wholly sold on the
idea that he is and that he has some form of substance other than pure hallucination.

The Churl is all of us, coming from the Anglo-Saxon word meaning “peasant” or
“man of low birth”, it represented everyone who was not in the service of the King or of
noble birth, i.e. at the moment of our initiation, every one of us. No one can ever truly
say they have advanced beyond Churl status, we are forever bound to our fates, so only
the man who ascends past an understanding of his mortality and into the boundless
joys of his imminent death can say he has even glimpsed beyond the Churl. Churl is
petty concern, flexing in the mirror out of pure narcissism, leering at women for the
sake of the stirring of base lust, the common fantasy of something beyond your reach or
out of your reach because of an oath taken. Churl is the huffy disposition that moans or
mutters or whinges, it is the “I can’t be bothered” or “do I have to” mindset that plagues
the western man, forever beset by his teenage brain which has never grown up because
it wasn’t initiated through pain and suffering. It is the whining disrespectful peasant
mind that cannot comprehend anything lofty or useful beside itself, the selfishness that
speaks of “what can I gain” from anything laid before it.

Crucially though, the Churl was a member of the Anglo Saxon community, he
may have been a farmer or a servant, but he was part of something bigger and better
than himself. In the same way, the Churl may plague you, but you are part of
something bigger and better, you have begun the trudge up the mountain, and each
workout, each meditation, each discipline of your ogre is a step toward full ascension.
This is no place for self-pity and self-depreciation, it is the place for honour, the position
of greatest strength and limitless opportunity, because you have yet to make any real
gains, you have yet to develop an ego about your supposed position. All is left to play,
alas, most of us a Churl shall remain.

Thane – Adept of the Hills

The Thane, coming from the Anglo Saxon word thegn is the man in service to the
king, he is the fighting man who stands beside the king in combat and protects his
interests. Thus, in Sigurd, the Thane is the man who has taken some enormous step
towards the Allfather, he is someone who has had a sudden vision of his place in the
world, his position of power vs. his position of weakness and has undertaken or
ascended a particular point of no return. The Thane is the man who has overcome some

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intrinsic level of his Churl nature, subdued the ogre in some fashion, that it may be
synthesized. He is the siddha who has taken his hermitage on the mountain, the warrior
who has begun his training under a competent master, he now sees the peak and
understands what must be done to attain its lofty heights. He is not foolish, he has done
away with the desperate hope of a quick fix or an instant cure to his weakness, he
understands, as the powerlifter or strongman does, that to become truly strong he must
make sacrifices, he must experience pain and suffering and through those ordeals he
will become stronger.

The Thane therefore locates and analyses his weaknesses, he adjusts his routine
to compensate for them that he may experience them more and understand their root. If
someone close to the Thane dies he does not leave his understanding of death at “the
person I knew is dead”, he studies his thoughts, his actions and his reactions and he
explores the roots of his words, “he creature I knew has passed on”, “the electrical charge that
inhabited inanimate matter has ceased and merged with the greater electrical charge of the
earth”, etc.

In terms of lifting practice and the martial arts, the Thane is a man who does not
stand opposite the rock or log, the opponent or brother and say “there is the object/man I
must move” he analyses himself and proceeds to a place of inner calm and remembers “I
have no self, I am not here, there is no here to experience, there is only Allfather and his
manifestations”. From this point of view to his understanding of illusion, he begins to
shape for himself a glorious archetype from which he can be born. A selection is made;
an understanding and envelopment of the heroic deity or figure that he wishes to
emulate and merge with. There is no feeling of self anymore, time is an illusion to be
done away with, this life can become a living and breathing testament to the glory of
the gods or it can become a shallow hell in which all things noble are trampled upon.
The Thane has begun the process of choosing his path up the mountain.

Earl – Knight of the Mountain

The Earl is a stage perhaps a minority among the participants of Sigurd will ever
reach. If the Thane represents a lifetime’s work, then the Earl, coming from the
Germanic root Jarl represents several lifetimes. The nobleman warrior in the Vedic
system was a man who had wrestled and battled with himself through countless lives
to achieve the status of Kshatryia, he could now be counted among those worthy to
ascend to noble houses, riches, wealth, fame and glory and possibly even kingship. For
the Geramanic and Norse peoples, this represented a person who was a warrior born,

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into a family of warriors, trained as a warrior from birth and expected to behave as a
warrior in any and all situations.

The Earl in Sigurd represents an intimate understanding of the responsibility of

power, it is not someone who will needlessly and heedlessly act for his own benefit, for
his own selfishness, it is one whose nobility looks ceaselessly outwards and upwards,
never scathingly downwards and backwards. He does not lord it over his peers and
inferiors, he is noble. Perhaps you have noticed as we ascend through these grades I
have less and less to say on them, that is simple, because I have not reached even the
middlemost foothills of this discipline. I am not even in sight of the path that winds
through this mastery; this is the cavern in the side of the mountain which contains the
hermitage of the Siddha. He no longer cares for the mundane platitudes of men and
mortals, he looks upon them as stepping stones which he once had to navigate, or a
morass of filth which he once had to wade through to reach the mountain side. Perhaps
there is still something of the world in him, he hungers for glory and honour and
remembrance, but he understands that the truest test of valour lies in the noble death
and the service to a cause or a mission which has no reward. He is truly outlaw because
he is beyond conception of the law as something which moves him or applies to him.
The Earl of Sigurd is moving to the loftiest heights, he has taken the firm and
unyielding steps toward mastering his desires and his illusions, if not mastered then
controlled, he has a mastery of the disciplines he has selected for himself, whether
martial, physical or spiritual. He need not test himself or brutalise himself any longer,
he may begin the task of passing on what he knows to the next generation, lest the
truest sense of his domination of the world be lost with him or misinterpreted by those
who come after. Remembering always that the way can be written, is not the way.

Aethyl – Lord of the Skies

The final initiation the Sigurd adept is achieved only upon death. The Aethyl,
coming from the Anglo Saxon word meaning noble or of noble birth referred to the man
who had the right to claim the crowns should the current king die. These were the men
who had the blood and birth to call themselves cynnig of their people should the
opportunity arise. In Sigurd this refers to the king of the mountain himself, the
Allfather, the Sky Father. This is the man who like Caesar of the kings of Europe can say
he is descended from the gods. Just as Sigurd could say he was descended from
Volsung who was descended from Odin himself, so the Aethyl upon his death bed can
achieve ultimate victory of the soul over the flesh. This is the point where every

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moment in the life and lives before synthesies and the past 30, 40, 60 years of trial and
travail on the mountainside can be said to be complete, and the final veil is broken
through. Whatever lies beyond is the realm only the Aethyl can traverse, and he or she
has now become a god, and what memories or legends or myths he leaves behind
becomes the myths of a future people. What more could any of us truly ask for?

Training the Physical Form

In Sigurd as opposed to our previous publications, we have learned the lessons

of trying to be experts at something we are still learning. Powelifting, Strongman, these
disciplines already have a plethora of methods and practices which confuse and
submerge the budding adept in a smoggy morass of conflicting advice. We understand
one thing and one thing only: success and victory.

However, fitness is not a competition, if you get big doing CrossFit then good for
you, if you get lean and hard doing classic MMA training, or get huge doing
bodybuilding then keep doing what you’re doing, it doesn’t make you better than
anyone else, it just means you put effort into what you were doing. Te body craves to be
tested and put through its paces, it wants to be fit and strong and healthy, it loathes
being fat and useless and the organs seemingly rebel against you when you allow it to
be poisoned (what else is cancer but rebellious suicidal cell structures?)

In Sigurd there are no fixed routines, as you’ve seen from the grading system,
this is measured by your experience, not your results, so if you get huge but the process
was shitty and you learned nothing and you remain a spiritual ignoramus, then we
don’t really care. If however you do three workouts and during those workouts have an
experience of your mortality, your inherent inner strength and your association with the
gods then you’ve experienced Sigurd in action. Most people who push themselves to
their limits in terms of speed, endurance or strength will have at some point
experienced the self-overcoming required for true spiritual growth.

So, depending on your personality and your preferences it is down to you to

select a routine most closely associated with your body type and experience the world.
There’s no point getting massive in the gym if your concern is about moving naturally
in the wilderness, you need to do research, find out what is out there and experience
different methods until you find something you resonate with. The decision of how to
use your body to get fit should mirror the decision process used to express yourself
spiritually. None of us came to Odin’s gallows by accident, it was a purposeful

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experience of the divine which we felt resonated with us more intimately than the other
options given to us by parent or state. If anything else were true we’d all be Christians
or Atheists, because those are the options encouraged by parents and the state in the
West. If you came across any other spiritual path of your own accord it was through
reading, research, direct intimate experience and guidance by someone who was
already doing what you admired. The same is absolutely true of fitness. You need to find
your own path.

There are but two microcosmic disciplines within the macrocosmic discipline of
Sigurd, they are Wood/Stone and Steel, corresponding to a specific way of working out
which we personally appreciate and see value in.

As we stated at the beginning of this section, all we are concerned with is those
athletes and instructors who have had success at what they do, why would we look to
anyone else to give us advice or instruction? For that reason we have selected a
community or school of thought under which we personally have or do train and value
their input and their expertise. When it comes to something as dangerous and
potentially injurious as powerlifting and strongman, it makes sense to appeal to the
masters of the art to teach you what they know. Anything else would be immature and
arrogance.

When selecting your training programming or deciding where and when you
will train and with whom, make sure you include rest days (when you eat huge meats,
sleep a lot and get drunk) after every major intrusive session. The only time I train two
nights back to back is powerlifting into wrestling, which perfectly complement each
other in terms of targeted moves. It doesn’t matter if you’re sore going into a grappling
session, it certainly matters if you put a powerlifting squat session the night after you
did an eccentric max hold strongman session, because your leg muscles will still be
broken down and repairing and you risk injury. You need time to rest, eat lots, and
have a flagon of ale and a bowl of herb. But above all you need to find your own way,
some people can train certain core movements twice a week, with only a couple of rest
days, other people need to train hard at that one movement once a week and rest a lot
more, you need to find your niche.

As we go forward then, remember, this is not a training method, this is a way of

life. As you adapt your training to the way we work you should just see a spiritual
alteration and dimension begin to emerge in the way you interpret a successful workout
and a successful year of training.

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Discipline of Wood and Stone

The discipline of wood and stone is the way of athletically focusing on strength
and its component parts and giving them a visible and tangible outlet. The discipline of
steel focuses on alterations and permutations which are relatively invisible to the
layman when we can do 100 press ups it is no more interesting to watch than someone
doing 10, when we can scale a wall or leap over an obstacle it is relatively interesting
but the gymnastic component will always be relatively uninteresting, event to the
person doing the exercise. When we can lift 100kg on an Olympic bar, to the layman it
is hard to understand what that means until they themselves try to move it, and the
same is true on the march towards 200, 300, and 400 kg. the discipline of wood and
stone is different in that it looks impressive and it is hugely rewarding for the
practitioner to complete a workout and progress through very visible grades of strength
towards a tangible end result.

Everyone has seen the World’s Strongest Man contests and everyone has at some
point seen the insane feats of strength those men are capable of, the dragging of huge
vehicles, the lifting of huge stones, the throwing of enormous logs, the pressing, lifting,
and carrying of enormous pieces of debris and scrap. What this amounts to is the most
basic urge for the human male to be strong. It is bizarrely a very spiritual urge, for it
mirrors his desire to be the best he can. Contrary to the “ugg ugg” view the world would
like to perpetuate of strongmen, they are a very articulate and martially minded
community, as the training requires a semi militaristic outlook and is rooted in
traditions which go back (via concrete historical links) to ancient times.

The most obvious strongman contest involving wood and stone is the Highland
Games of Scotland and the similar contests used by the Welsh, Germanic, and Nordic
peoples, specifically those in Iceland and Norway, with their long collective tradition of
huge strongmen. The Scottish contest in particular requires displays of strength in
lifting, carrying, throwing, pressing, dragging, wrestling and tossing. We can see in
these contests the very origins of the masculine initiation rituals which probably took
place each year and were used as opportunities for the men of the tribe/clan to display
their strength in front of peers and maidens and gain the prestige and renown
associated with winning a competition and besting the other enormous talents on
display. The original WSM contest actually included a wrestling component (Kazmaier
comes to mind) and was thus focused much more clearly on the original requirements
of such competitive games, i.e. to test the warriors of the tribe against themselves, each
other and external opponents.

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 Whole cultures to this day focus a disproportionate amount of their sporting
endeavors on strength and the displays of huge power associated with it; Iceland, Iran,
Turkey, Croatia, Russia, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Scotland, Canada, Greece,
Wales, all come to mind and have fielded athletes throughout history who show huge
genetic and social conditioning towards favouring brute strength over other perhaps
more logical considerations.

When it comes to our own interpretation of the strongman workout it is heavily

influenced by our DIY aesthetic and the approach of out mythological heroes. None of
the men previously mentioned in the forerunning chapters were trained in elite schools
of their day, each of them learned their trade in the wilderness, or in outcast
knighthoods where they needed to learn fast and with focus on the basics, lest they
overcomplicate things and die! The Sigurd idea of the strongman workout then is quite
simple; in the woods, scrap yard, abandoned building, the wilderness, big lifts with low
reps.

What does that mean in real life then?

Some of our strongman workouts are carried out in an abandoned quarry, using
discarded rock trolleys and carts, boulders of varying sizes and logs collected for
carious sites over the years (wood quality and type will alter the weight). We also train
at a classic spit and sawdust “gym” in our hometown, just a warehouse filled with
powerlifting equipment, men who want to train with the right people in the right
atmosphere, just doing it.

The strongman workout is focused on lifts, holds, carries, and throws of as large
a weight as possible (at least once per workout) and repetitions of slightly lower weight
for low reps. One difference with strongman as opposed to powerlifting is the attention
toward experimentation and improvisation. When at the quarry we are surrounded by
ever larger boulders and ways of adding weights to lifts which we can now do 5+ reps,
so we are always adding and adjusting and altering work to allow for bigger and better
lifts. This is very important for your growth to give yourself a baseline of strength
which is then constantly tested. Also, because the items in a quarry or scrap yard or the
woods can never really be properly weighed you have to continue to test yourself to
remove the possibility of stagnation.

As with all programming though the importance is in building a pyramid, a

foundation of strength dug in correct form, correct applicaton and the regular building
of repetition of lower weights allowing you to lift bigger ones. Get out into the woods
or a gym with the right equipment and practice, see what you can lift, work out a
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program where you can experience your strengths, 5 and 10 rep maxes and then research
the work of other more experienced lifters and begin working on lifting the big stuff.

When it comes to who we look to for inspiration and who we recommend you as
a follower of lifestyle and spiritual practice of Sigurd look to for guidance, we can do no
better than the strongest men of our era. Training methods and systems change and as
the world’s strongest men get stronger, their training gets more intelligent and more
diverse. However, there is still a simple truth to the world of strongman which is
missing from a lot of other systems, uncomplicated, brute simplicity which encourages
men and women to lift something heavy, hold it, carry it, move it, or throw it, and put it
back down again.

Look to history and heritage, look to the Icelandic strongmen and the culture of
the “Husafell stones” and the stone lifting grading which determined what careers a
man was able to go into, dependant entirely on his innate or taught strength. Men have
always lifted heavy objects, so do your research, span the breadth and depth of our
heritage and look for the mysterious crossroads where strength sports and manliness
somehow bisected the world of the spirit. This is where Thor is waiting.

Discipline of Steel

Beside strongman, which is probably one of the oldest ways which men tested
their strength against their peers and displayed their suitability as a warrior, a mate and
an alpha, stands the discipline of powerlifting. The system of moving huge weight in a
simplistic format of three core moves encourages the best from an athlete. Heavy lifting
offers us the best results in terms of hormonal balance, growth, real strength and mental
and spiritual development. When you learn that you can progress step by step, kg by kg
and get bigger, stronger and harder, you learn that the same metaphor is true for
everything in life. Step by step, inch by inch, grueling experiences and savage self-
mastery, you learn to conquer your lower ogre and encourage the god within to emerge.

Powerlifting as a discipline requires three main movements around which all the
other movements focus, with a goal to assisting these in getting better –

 The deadlift
Weight on a bar, resting motionless on the floor, the lifter reaches down, in a
variance of stances and lifts the weight off the floor, then puts it back down
again.

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  The squat
Using either a squat rack or a group of spotters, the athlete rests a weighted bar
on the shoulders, squats down (crease of the hip past crease of the knee – ass to
the grass) and stands back up.
 The press
Depending on the athlete, either the bench press alone or the overhead press
included. With bench press, the athlete lies on a flat board raised off the ground,
and with the aid of a rack or spotters lifts a weighted bar off the chest, lowers it
down to the sternum and then presses it back up to start position. With the
overhead press the same occurs but whilst the athlete is standing and the bar is
lifted overhead.

Most of the people reading this book will obviously know what deadlifts, squats and
presses are, so why repeat them? Well, because people like to complicate things in our
era, something which is not only pointless, it is counterproductive. You don’t need to
do a hundred different exercises, you don’t need to experiment with a thousand
different ways of moving weight, you need three basic compound movements which use
almost every muscle in your upper and lower body. The deadlift and squat are almost
totally unique in the way that they (relatively safely) use every muscle in your body,
but fundamentally encourage true strength.

The deadlift is the most pure and simple metaphor for the lifter who sees a
martial spirituality in what he does. In the end we are just lifting heavy things off the
floor and putting them down again, but we see something deeper, and the deadlift
describes it perfectly. A seemingly insurmountable obstacle appears before you, the
long bar with what appears to be no too much physical material, the metal rings on the
end don’t look heavy (they’re not rocks or logs at least) but they are. As you approach
the bar as a novice lifter and inevitably put on too much weight (we’ve all done it) you
find that it is actually impossible to even move when you don’t have the strength. This
isn’t a case of willpower or mental conditioning (not until the later stages) it is simply a
case of you cannot lift that much. Suddenly, the premise of lifting a bar off the floor
becomes hugely important to you. You want to be able to move this weight, so you take
weight off the bar, you find a program which works and you begin to train yourself to
lift more and more weight. One day you can lift it and you experience euphoria which
has been compared to an orgasm but which quite frankly feels more like the experience
of physical domination or victory during combat. This is core to what it means to be a

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man, overcoming an obstacle which appears insurmountable, but with planning,
dedication and control is eventually mastered.

To this list we can add supplementary movements like the clean and press which
adds the explosion of the deadlift with the speed needed to move the weight from hip
to chest and above the head. There is also the bend over row and the pull from hip to
chest height, both of which assist in back strength and control, allowing the squat,
deadlift and bench press to increase.

We repeat again, strength has to be viewed like a pyramid, you lay the
foundations through correct movement, good form and posture and then you build
upon that foundation step by step with weight, always forsaking ego for good form. It
doesn’t matter if you can lift 200kg if you bend your lower back and one day blow out a
vertebra or your knees; it’s much more interesting to see someone loft 100kg properly
with perfect form.

If you work out at home or without equipment, workouts will be relatively hard
and the understanding of correct form and maintenance will be relatively difficult. You
will benefit from going to a gym which has somewhere you and a close friend can work
for some time without interruption, assessing the upper limits of your potential so that
you can lift at specific weights for a set period of time. It is therefore worth researching
good form, technique and practive for heavy weighted movements, enough material
exist on these subjects to read for a lifetime, but in the same vein as with the strongman
recommendations we would point to the work of the most well-known and successful
lifters, those men who share your body type and genetic gifts or curses (it would be of
course pointless for a short armed man good at bench press to research the deadlift
techniques of someone with long arms).

Fundamental to all of this is finding and forming a brethren or comrades in arms

who will push you, motivate you and point out your weaknesses. One of the oft
recommended but never openly required elements of powerlifting and strongman is the
presence of men who are bigger than you, better than you and lift more than you. You
need to be around the best at all times, or you will stagnate and think of yourself better
than you are. This is the discipline of iron sharpening iron, men of the sword and the
stone are best mastering their arts around men of the sword and the stone.

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The Wolf’s Cavern

How do we coagulate all we have written here? How do we bring all the actual
elements of what Sigurd is into a cohesive whole? Well, that is something we are still
working on. Essentially what we have done here is curate a series of myths and legends
for you out of the impossibly rich and diverse heritage of humanity’s time on this
planet. Our bias has been toward Northern European and Indo-European culture
because that is who we are personally, but the archetypal force resides in the
opportunity for this to be reinterpreted and regurgitated by anyone of any faith, tongue
or nation.

What is the focal point which we would call on all readers henceforth to take
from this? If I had to select one element of the Volsung Saga which speaks to us the
most about the heroic ideal, the outlaw hero and the man rising from the dark ashes to
ascend to greatness, it would be the story of Sigmund. Chosen by Odin to wield a
magical sword, betrayed, tortured, left tied to a tree and awaiting death alongside his
brothers…escaping, becoming an outlaw, a Fenrir he lives among the caverns and the
woods and even when he is accompanied by his son/brother/nephew he remains in
the guise of a wolf; he is intimately associated with the concept of the outlaw hero. He is
a murderer, an outcast, a thief and a fen dweller, he skulks and hides, even when he has
his sword returned to him, and he awaits his time to rise and slay his enemies. He is the
outlaw archetype par excellence.

Sigmund’s story transfers to that of Sigurd in that Sigurd never allows himself to
resort to these murderous ends, in his father’s story every element of the murderous
outlaw werewolf has been burned out allowing Sigurd to be the perfect hero. Sigmund
however gives us the perfect elements of where we stand now as human beings in a
dying world which has betrayed most of us spiritually and socially. We are spiritual
and social outlaws, murdered one by one in the dark by a she-wolf which rips out our
throats unseen, leaving us to die awfully slowly whilst slumped in front of the TV with
a McDonald’s burger in one hand and a Coke in the other. We have the sword which
was given us by Odin, resting in the bowels of our hearts, waiting to be unsheathed and
used to carve out our heroic path, we just have to take it.

Sigmund has his wolf’s lair, his time in the wilderness experiencing his ordeals,
so we need somewhere, each of us, as tribes to experience the same events unfolding in
a similar manner; reliving the myth as a fully functioning story which allows us to
bereborn in the same fires as Sigurd and Brynhildr.

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 You need somewhere you can train, not just a gym, not some weights in your
front room or your garden or garage, a place you can erect as a temple to the self and to
carving out a new future for yourself and your kin. This place is the cavern of
Sigmund’s hermitage, where he becomes a werewolf and learns the trade of murder
and theft and the life of an outlaw, even though he is the son of a king and the inheritor
of a weapon forged in the hands of Odin himself.

The Nordic concept of the symbel was of a solemn and sincere ritual focused on
binding the brothers together on a common goal. Often taken the night before a battle
or a huge ordeal was to take place either on the battlefield or against some heinous
creature of the abysses, the warriors would gather and declare their greatness and the
greatness of their kinsmen, and take oaths, renew blood brotherhoods and prepare
themselves for death. This was not a feast and alcohol was the only liquid drunk, it was
a night long toast to death and glory and the heroes who made up the band who were
about to take up arms for whatever reason. You need somewhere that the same rituals
can take place, where lifting weights, sculpting the self as a tripartite totality of mind
body and spirit can be elevated to the lofty heights it deserves. A Sigmund’s cavern for
ritual, drinking, sharing of oaths and the concept of divine time shared between
brethren.

First and foremost and, I believe, as the binding factor and fulcrum from which
Sigurd will explode outwards is this idea of the creation of outlawed spaces, abandoned
buildings, empty houses and long lost tunnels where men and women can slip away
from the clutches of society and become something they always were and something
they always have been.

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 Epilogue

Outlaw crooked tree hanged

Baying huntsman,

Riding roughshod, wild and free,

Re-forging the broken.

Someone somewhere is dying, but you’re not. You’re nuzzling the downy haired
mound of a slender handed female, you’re kissing the cinnamon coated honey dew lips
of her crease; you’re not dead, are you celebrating?

Someone somewhere is crippled and weeping, but you’re not. Your limbs are
firm and hard and ripe and ready for battle or the steady conquest of subtle victories
lying before you. Your arms are strong, you can carry your woman; you’re not dead, are
you celebrating?

Someone somewhere is childless, orphaned, homeless, hungry, but you’re not.

Your roof is sturdy, your kinsmen hard and rugged, your table full to feasting and
singing; your cup overflows, are you celebrating?

Celebration comes in many forms; to quietly and respectfully celebrate the life of
a brother or sister is to pour a drop of mead on the grave or the fire, some for the dearly
departed, the rest for your living body. To noisily and joyously celebrate a wedding, or
a birth, is to pour out in abundance, a thousand cups for the Fae folk, a thousand more
for the living and the dead! This is celebration, that twin polarity of honoured and
hallowed flesh, strung up on the gallows, hanging until the runes appeared, celebrating
all as it is, as one, all at once.

There is a sense of humour here, a realization that hagalaz, that rune of hail and
hardship comes also with a burst of laughter, the heavy rasping breath of the rune
bringing outbursts of hysterical joyous mirth.

“Ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

Odin is not without amusement when he leaves you clinging to your senses,
reeling from the loss of ego, embattled and alone, circling the abyss. This is all a game, it

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is all funny, it is just a momentary experience on an infinite burst of experience. Why
worry where the milk falls or what pattern it falls in once it has been spilled? Your fate
is written, the web of Wyrd is out of your control, but all is illusion so you have the
illusion of self-determination, which to you appears to be real, so it is. Truth within
truth within truth, all is a lie so all is permissible, and all is blasphemy. Perhaps this is
the truth of the Gnostic tradition and the monotheistic, to one everything is a punishment
from God and worthy of divine attention (“all have sinned in the eyes of God”) and to the
other everything is a gift from God and worthy of human enjoyment.

What of it? Both are true, because God does not exist, you do.

Your world is your creation, everything around you is shaped by your decisions,
your opinions, your belief system, it revolves around you, it is you, you are the
Universe and it depends upon you. The spine of Yggdrasil runs through your skull and
down through your spine into the earth, behind you is the past, before you is raw
potential, waiting to be manipulated and adapted according to your will. Nothing else
is true, and everything else is accepted as truth.

Have we been clear enough now what working out is for? That fitness and health
and martial ability are but by-products and side effects of the physical venture. The key to
the mystery of fitness and martial arts is to elevate it to a level impossible for the Churl
and the ogre to understand. The dross elements within yourself want this to be about
getting more pussy, being bigger than the other guys, stronger, faster, harder, tougher,
but the Aethyl and the god-man want this to be about worshipping the goddess, being
more like Odin, Thor, Heimdall, Tyr and Sigurd. Synthesizing these elements within
yourself, becomes the utmost task, the highest command from on high; it then becomes
awfully clear how such a confusing archetype as Odin is possible. A god who created
order from chaos, who somehow represents the loftiest and most primitive urge
towards heroism and structure is also a Lord of Death, psychopomp and King of the
Slain in Battle. A wizard, a hero, a warrior, a lover, King, trickster, shape shifter, GOD,
what gods are we, what gods do we worship?

We leave these questions open, as opposed to the strictures of interpretation

which marked our previous publications, we don’t have all the answers, we are on the
same path. You and I walk a route up the mountain which could end in a cliff face of
smooth as glass sheer marble, no hand holds, no stairs, no rope, no ladder. It may be up
to you to spot crevices and cracks we had not seen, so that the mountain path becomes
visible, and is slowly trodden down to provide a way for others to follow. But we
follow the way marks of those who came before us, and to paraphrase Carl Sagan in the

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wrong context, “we have waded but ankle deep, and the water seems inviting”… we ask you
now, to take the risk, to swim with us, and who cares if we drown.

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