The Seidr witch project!

View from Masterhøj**

'I’m standing on top of Masterhøj, a burial mound of possibly 5000 years years, looking out over Roskilde fjord in Denmark on a beautiful day. The sky is blue with some fluffy white clouds being chased along, the grass is emerald green with bright yellow dandelions, and the fjord itself is a deep grey blue. It’s been a long journey that got me here, and I wonder what is going to happen next! I’ve come here to do a shamanic journey, more specifically to communicate with 2 dead witches who I know have been trying to get me to listen to them, but I just haven’t been ready up until now...

This is where I live (in Denmark, not the burial mound, lol). I moved here from the UK permanently in 2014, because (silly me) I fell in love with a Dane back in 2010, when I went on an experience week at Findhorn (it’s a spiritual ecocommunity in Scotland.) In my defense, they are very handsome the Danes, and I’m a bit of a sucker for a good looking man.

But I want to give you some background to this story. There are lots of things jumping into my head to tell you, but because this is a story telling you about the Seiðr side of things, I’m going to focus on that. I am not a person who has ever been interested in the Viking sagas, or hearing about Vikings. They seemed a bloodthirsty, violent lot to me, and I tend to get a bit faint at the sight (or thought) of blood. It also all seems to be about the men the Viking era, and I while I like men, I am really a woman's woman! But I came to find out that there is a whole other 'woman's side' to the old Norse that has been hidden from us.**

Anyway, when I arrived in Denmark, I had a hard first year. It’s really something to move to another country with an entirely different culture, as well as a entirely different language. But for me, it was so hard because my eldest son was living in the UK with his Dad, and I spent the first year heartbroken sitting around at various different springs in the town. (There are an inordinate amount of sacred springs in Roskilde, but that is a whole other blog.) In the second year, Britain in all it’s infinite wisdom (not), decided to leave the EU, and I was suddenly faced with the reality that I was living in a country with one of the hardest and toughest requirements for immigrants in the world.

One requirement was that I passed a danish language test, and it was TOUGH in capital letters. I had to use alot of energy doing the work, it didn’t come easy to me, no natural talent here for languages. I’ve tended to do things I’m good at in life, I could read by the age of four, I love learning and am an eternal student - so the academic side of the language course was fine - but language school totally exhausted me, not least because it felt fairly oppressive! The government had a program of 'assimilating' foreigners, you had to constantly show that you were taking on and being part of danish society. It was a shock for me as a British person, I hadn’t realised how much I had assumed that I had the right to be British and stay that way - but now I was being told that I had to ‘danify’ myself if I wanted to pass these tests. I constantly had to speak and write and read about danish issues, danish food, danish culture, and of course this was generally about how great it all was, no critical appraisal here, no talking about myself, my own life, my own culture. The other topic we got to talk and write about, was world politics, which had gone pretty right wing in several countries by this time. It was really unpleasant for me to have to constantly focus on problems and injustices, day after and day. I got ill and despondent. I didn’t have time or energy for my spiritual practices. Me and Thomas were stressed about what would happen with my residency, because I couldn’t fulfill the criteria I needed to get permanent residency in Denmark as a non EU resident. My husband would lie awake at night worrying about where would we go as a family if I couldn’t live here, he's a university researcher, and it's not easy to get permanent positions in this work. I focused on passing my language exams, which took me 2 and a half years, but the stress was always there, underneath everything.

I started to do some shamanic training in the summer holidays, in the second year of my course. I sooo needed a break from all this logical left brain stuff. I couldn’t get booked on courses local to me because they were full up, so I did an online course with Sandra Ingerman. I would go out and walk along the fjord and find places to sit or lie, put the headphones on and do a journey. It was perfect. I got to do exercise, be outside, listen to all the interesting stuff being taught and then do a journey. I spent the whole 2 months of the summer holidays doing this, and I felt life was coming back into my veins. 
Then I listened to some bonus interviews Sandra Ingerman had done, and one was with Imelda Almqvist, a Dutch woman living in the UK with her family. She was really interesting, an artist & shamanic practitioner, she talked about the work she had done running shamanic groups for kids. I thought that was so cool to be able to give kids these tools so early in life, what a difference that could make! Then I saw she was teaching an introductory course in Norse shamanism, or Seiðr in Sweden. Something in me just vibrated when I saw this. I checked it out, and it was only an hour away from where we lived. I had to do it. 
And so I did! For the stark contrast in how I felt before and after this intro course, it was a bit of a miracle! It was because in what they were teaching, in the ‘feeling’ of it, women had a place to be powerful, strong, AND psychic. I saw myself as I sat and listened to the words from Eirik’s saga, where there is a description of a seiðrkone’s giving of prophecy to a gathering of people at a farm house. Actually, it wasn’t so much of a ‘seeing myself’ but I knowing. I KNEW it. Something inside me KNEW it. The journeys we did were the same, when I went to meet the Norns, they already knew me. When I journeyed to Lyfjaberg, the mountain of healing, I WAS SEEN. There was no getting away from anything. It was laid out before me. This was who I was. 
Before I went to Sweden, I was an immigrant who had no hope of getting employment in Denmark (even though I was a qualified nurse, it wasn't recognised in Denmark, and that's even before considering that I would need to be FLUENT in Danish - this is not the same as 'getting by'!)

I came back from that intro course with a clearer sense of myself than I had ever had in my life, and there was no doubt that I had a strong and clear connection to Nordic spirituality. What a shock that was! Other than moving to Denmark, there had never been a shadow of a whisper to suggest this to me before now. 
Well, there had been one thing, but I hadn’t taken it that seriously. In the first year of moving to DK, I wrote down a message from spirit. It said, ‘make your own runes, they will be your power.’ So I did, even though I didn't really believe it, but I've learnt to listen to things like this, because the outcomes are so interesting! And anyway, I like being creative, so I made a runeset, using stones from the beach, and from the many that I had collected from all around the world (I’m a bit of a magpie stone collector!). I tried to learn how to work with them, reading books and failed to connect. They just didn’t work for me. Later on that all changed, but that’s another story…. 
There were also several other things that had happened to me when I was in Sweden that shocked me out of my state of confusion about 'who I was.' One of these was meeting a Swedish witch who lived up in the North of Sweden in a forest region. She arrived in the middle of the day, and was coming to do some teaching for us, and I first saw her when we were having lunch. Now I read energies, it's not something I can fully switch off even when I'm not working, so I am always receiving impressions, and when this woman appeared in front of me, it was as if someone had suddenly and unexpectedly stuck a full length mirror in front of me! It was like I was looking at myself, not because of the physical appearance but because of the energy signature. That was a huge shock. Just bizarre. I've not experienced anything like that before or since. (And I suspect that spirit emphasized and amplified the effect somewhat because they were really trying to get the message home, this still wasn't enough, the next year they had to go to the lengths of sending a dead vølva home with me until I would fully wake up to the realization of being a bit of a witch myself!) But I thought she was SOOO cool, she was so magickal, a proper nature witch, and I was confronted with 'maybe this is what I am - REALLY?!!' Silly old Rachel, who everyone thought was weird when I was a kid (and I don't think anyone would have ever called me cool!!) For many years, I had seen myself as a spiritual 'wannabe', meaning I had a longing to be magical/do magical things, but I didn't really believe that I could. And now it seemed like that was because.... of ME. I had been getting in my own way!

So here I was with a new vision of myself. Everything had come full circle. I had a strong spirituality when I came to Denmark - I was already working as a channel and healer, but the focus of my work had been with Ascended Master Sarah, (daughter of the Magdalene and Yeshua!). One of the reasons I had gone on the intro course, was that I felt I needed to understand more about the (more ancient) culture of the old Norse. I have always had a love for going to sacred sites, stones circles, burial mounds and such, and I had come across a spirit guardian at a local gravhøj who was keeping people out as much as he could, I suspected he was an ancestral guardian and I wanted to feel that I had a better understanding of where ‘he was coming from’ before I tackled dealing with him! (as it turned out, I never had to do this, as it got resolved in another way). But I was strongly aware that in and around the sacred land that I was living on, there were many powerful ley lines, magical mystery places, holy sites, sacred groves, and so on. And so it turned out, I had done exactly the right thing by going on this intro course (which has now become a 2 year advanced course!) because the old Norse were also aware of these things. Everything started to come together. Although I still channeled Sarah’s teachings, she also came with me on my shamanic journeys as a helping spirit. I would go to the upperworld, and meet her by Chalice Hill in Glastonbury, and her and my other helping spirits would work together. In this guise, she appeared to me as a young and beautiful Nordic vølva witch, showing me forests and working with the powers of nature and plants and herbs. She also started teaching me how to work with earth energies, and she gave me a whole system for creating energy matrices attuned to her vibration of the violet flame that 'grew' in the earth to clear the land where you live! I was amazed!

But going back to the start of the story, I wonder when the witches started calling me? It was a gradual realization for me I think. I have a friend who lives along the fjord, and she asked me to look at the energies around her house, which I did. There were waves of energy coming from the landscape and rolling across the fields towards her house!! Along this side of the fjord, there used to be literally hundreds and hundreds of burial mounds, of which just a few handful are left. But I felt the pull of an ancestral link there too, a woman who had called her. There were some burial mounds literally across the field, and I thought the ‘ancestor’ might have her presence there, but no that wasn’t it. It kept nagging at me, this thought, so I went online and started researching the area. I don’t know what I expected to find, but find something I did. Just a stone throws away, there had been what looked very much like a seidrkone burial, at what was probably then the shoreline. Her bones were actually in the local museum, I found out later. I had to go and see her. I kept expecting to find out it was a mistake, I couldn’t really believe it was that easy. But no, no mistake, it was her, and also another burial was mentioned in the museum of another woman, a vølva (wand-bearer) local to the area. One of the women had been buried with a staff, the other with a spear by her side, and large boulders placed on top of her - all of which can be signs of seidrkone burials. I KNEW these two seidrkoner had work for me to do!

One day when I was out on one of my walks, I was given some information. These women knew about me. Not just about me, but about our modern day time. They were aware of us. In some way, I still don’t fully understand, but I can feel, they are part of the landscape. In their lifetimes, they were aware of the future and ‘what would happen’. They had planned for it. And now, even though they were dead, something of them was still physically energetically present in the landscape and involved in what was going on. They knew about our current situation in the world, about the 'New Age' and the radical change we are going through in these times, and they wanted to help. They are helping. They are the Ancestors.

It was another huge shock to me, to realise this. But why wouldn’t they be able to see into the future, they were seeresses, this was something their society did as a matter of course, week in, week out?!! 
I knew they wanted to speak to me, but I was afraid. Speaking with dead witches was not really in my wish list, although I was willing, I put it off, waiting for a time where I felt more able to deal with it. I skirted around the issue, I got some more information about how to connect to them. Don’t do it from home, all the electricity in the house creates confused energies. Again this confirmed my feeling that somehow they are actually here in some physical but not physical way. Go to a power place.
That’s how I ended up at Mesterhøj, it’s up on a hill looking out over the fjord, and this spring, everywhere I have gone, family walks, going to a conference centre, out with a friend, I have been not thinking about Mesterhøj at all, only to suddenly find that I am standing looking at it, from yet another vantage point on the fjord. In the end I wrote it down on a piece of paper, ‘Mesterhøj’. In Rachel world, once something gets written down on a piece of paper, it gets done. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. I think it took me about 3 weeks, until another long standing series of coincidences drove me to realize that I just had TO DO IT.

And this is where our story started that I have been telling you about, with me standing on top of Mesterhøj. It was a pretty windy day yesterday. But there is a hollow in the ground at the top of the (covered in grass) burial mound. I put my blanket down, put my bag as a pillow, lay down, put my headphones on to listen to some of the ole shamanic drumming, and closed my eyes. Straight away I started thinking of a new project I have just started with a friend. We were guided to started a weekly podcast/ fb live talking about what energies are coming through, and then from this we started to get activations and light language that wants to be channeled, and now suddenly it’s turned into a whole thing neither of us really expected, but are totally inspired by. Standing down by my feet, looking down at me, were the 2 Norse women, and they said ‘yes, you’re both doing what witches have always done. You are tuning into the cosmos as it is in this moment, and bringing through what is there. Your bodies are the tuning forks that vibrate that sound out so everyone can hear.' They told me this and more, and then said they are here to support. They appeared to me as a body of light, I suppose, it’s hard to describe, because for me, it’s the same as when an actual person is present, except I can’t see a physical body... but their energy was beautiful, powerful and strong. It made me realize how I had still subconsciously been holding onto some old misconceptions about witches, which are well, generally being a bit rubbish and evil! They were anything but!

I have come to realize that there was no coincidence with me coming here to Denmark, I thought it was about falling in love, and of course it was. (but I suspect spirit/soul used this to get me here!!) I have a soul heritage in Scandanavia that is powerfully mine. I have work to do with the land, in co-creation with the land spirits and the seiðr women who are also part of the land. It hasn’t been easy. There has been sacrifice. There is incredible love and magic here for me. All very Nordic!! A Seiðr witches tale indeed!'

** I didn't take the pictures on the day - I could feel it 'wasn't the thing' to photograph that day, that that was a time to respect the ritual and the spirits that attended, so I went back  some weeks later and took some pics - I can go past it on the way home from picking Benji up from school, lucky me :-)  

*** this is also a whole other blog, but suffice it to say that scholars of the eddas, and Norse sagas, were until fairly recently men, and they were much more interested in Odin, Odin and a bit more Odin. (OK I'm exaggerating here to make a point, but the essence of it is true.) Also it is suspected that the 'women's mysteries' were not written down, and were more hidden. However through more recent female scholars and researchers such as Maria Kvilhaug, as well as our ability to gain direct experience through shamanic journeying, a new story is emerging of the female lore that is by right part the Nordic spirituality.
You can see more about my work here 
https://www.facebook.com/seidrwitch
https://www.rachelgoodwin.dk/seidr/
https://www.facebook.com/rachelgoodwinchannel