Nigel Pennick is well-known for his many books on the Northern Tradition, the runes, East Anglian Magic, geomancy and the Spiritual Arts and Crafts. He writes:

“When I was ten years of age, I suffered massive infection that left me deaf and struggling for my life. During this time I had a cosmic axis experience that in retrospect seemed to have gone on for three earthly days, but that is subjective and there is no way of knowing. I was present in both the upperworld and the underworld. I was elevated in an out-of-the body state to the right-hand corner of the room, where I saw myself lying in the bed. Then I was taken through the roof, which I saw from above before going to the upperworld inside a column whose walls were translucent and patterned like dark scales. In the upperworld I beheld the awesome light behind the light, a blinding whiteness beyond brilliance. Then I was cast down the column, back through my body and into the bones of the Earth where I experienced the presence of the human and animal dead, embedded in and part of the rocks, where, I, too, was buried in a kind of basalt sarcophagus, seemingly for thousands of years, before again I returned to my body and waking consciousness. A terrifying experience that I could not talk to anyone about for decades.”

Shamanism is a life-long process of expanding consciousness. Further illumination began for Nigel with a vivid epiphany at the Pantheon in Rome, a place that was designed to represent the Cosmos, a physical manifestation of primal potential, encapsulating all time and space. Some months later, he experienced shamanic death and dismemberment.

Lying in hospital following a sixteen-hour heart attack, he felt triangular glass shards tearing through his body. These grew and multiplied, cutting through his flesh, shredding it in all directions, blood flowing out in streams. He felt that he was dying and accepted it, aware that his physical nature was spreading out in all directions, dissipating like liquid splattering on the ground, becoming boundless. He describes this as a timeless moment, like being on the rim. During this he felt he was identified with the giant Ymir:

“…Ymir, the primal giant, is dismembered by the gods as the primal act in the formation of the world. The various parts of Ymir compose the basic structures of the world. Ymir’s bones become the rock, Ymir’s hair the plants growing upon the earth. Ymir’s blood becomes the sea – the ebb and flow of the tides recalls the ebb and flow of blood in the body, the old way of viewing the pulse. The sea’s tides are related to the waxing and waning of the Moon, paralleling the heart as the origin of the bodily blood-tides. The penetrated body bleeds, just as springs of water emerge from within the body of the Earth. The spiritual principle of “as above, so below” links the bodily blood to the tides, and also links the bodily breath to the winds. All is a symbolic way that humans can relate to the materials of the world, from which our bodies are formed, through the physical exchange that links our individual being in interbeing, in continuity, and in separation.”

Suddenly he was snapped back; the body rejoining like two powerful magnets slamming back together, or like the gravitational creation of the Cosmos itself (a potential existence that creates itself). He compares this to the massive, inexorable forces of Ice and Fire, which cannot be resisted:

“In the Northern Tradition coming-into-being story, the Primal Void - Ginnungagap - is a state of non-being that ‘contains’ all potential matter and possibilities, yet is nothingness. It is the potential of the division of unbeing, a state that all further being emanates from. Once initiated, a process of separation and accumulation proceeds, building up the two polarities of Is and Cen (ice and fire). These are the principles of static being and energetic change respectively.

Is (ice) is the immobile principle, a static form that is brought about through the örlog of ice’s formation. Thus water frozen in a bucket takes on the form of the internal volume of the bucket. This is the form that it must retain until conditions change, and the ice becomes flowing water once more. In transvolution, these frozen forms are the fixed patterns in life that have come into being, the ‘baggage’ that causes blockages in progress. The Ice Giants personify these blockages. They come into being in a certain particular form through the processes of örlog, then have a long-lasting effect upon continuance. They may bring a useful stability for certain purposes, but they are inordinately difficult to change. The forms of orlog, manifested as Is (the frozen form) unavoidably turn the course of events in a particular way. They may limit possibilities, forcing events in a direction that, in time, brings the individual’s destruction and dissolution, one’s ‘doom’. The individual is hemmed in by these giant forms and pushed forwards in a particular direction until the conditions can no longer sustain existence. Though static, they nevertheless interact with dynamic processes to produce a ‘catastrophe’.

When a friend came to visit, Nigel asked him to bring a copy of the Eddas. When he opened the book, there was Ymir…

Nigel felt that he had been recreated. Some time later, he was taken outside in a wheelchair to await transportation to Papworth Hospital, the first time he had been in the fresh air since his heart attack. Looking up he saw a birch and a pine tree and wept, because this was beorc and cen, new beginnings and knowledge through pain. He thought “It doesn’t matter what happens to me now,” and a line came to him from Beowulf: “Wyrd often spares a man who is not doomed, so long as his courage holds”:

“The symbolic separation of Ymir’s body to make the world gives us a sequence of forms that allows us to relate to the world, part to part. These are manifested in different ways in the thirteen types of the world that appear in the Old Norse spiritual text, Alvissmal, and the twenty-nine runes of the Old English Rune Poem. By isolating the perceptible parts of this interconnected continuum, we can gain insights and some understanding of them, and better relate our own part in this with the whole…The legend of Woden’s discovery of the runes tells how he hung himself upon a tree for nine days and nine nights without food and drink in a rite of destruction of the self. Perilous and painful ordeals, whether self-inflicted or as the result of outside agency, are life-threatening events from which the individual cannot avoid being forever altered. They undergo a permanent alteration in conscious awareness…Woden’s legendarium tells that he received from the eldritch the gift of knowledge of the runes. The story is quite clear that he did not devise the runes, they were revealed to him from the realm of Otherworldly existence, the eldritch wildwood. Like the tree-sprung Oghams, the runes are linked with natural things, appearing in the branches of trees, the veins of leaves and cracks in the earth. The runemaster is a liminal being who moves between the wildwood and the built environment, reconnecting civilization with the primal, pre-cultural world. The synthonal nature of the runes, where the open meanings of Nature are linked to the closed meanings of the alphabet, makes them a link between the intuitive and the rational or analytical. The runemaster thereby reinstates the eldritch wildwood in the realm of human preoccupations.

Nigel says that the shaman is literally ‘re-membered’ after his disintegration and that it is important he remembers the trauma. He is blessed, but must practice his art or suffer the consequences of rejecting it. Afterwards, Nigel dedicated his work to the Spiritual Arts and Crafts, the importance of which he realised so lucidly at the Pantheon. After his near death experience, he felt he was given a second chance in life so that he could fulfil this pledge, as he says: “life is short; you have to get on with it”. As part of this quest, he began working in stained glass, created a window of Sophia with a cosmic egg. She is the exemplar of wisdom and illumination, brought about by the shamanic initiation. The cosmic egg represents the primal potential.

Extract from The Shamanic Crisis in The Path of the Shaman © Anna Franklin, Lear Books, 2007 £12.95 ISBN 0-9547534-4-5