Ergi: The Way of the Third

            This particular chapter is going to cover what is probably the most controversial of issues in the entirety of northern-tradition shamanism. Many scholars, magicians, and spirit-workers have skirted the issue, or touched on it gingerly only to back off again. Discussing it angers both homophobic heterosexuals and assimilationist homosexuals, both modernized tribal peoples and researchers wary of projecting modern assumptions about sex and gender onto the ancients. However, like it or not, the constellation of power and taboo that the northern tradition calls ergi crops up again and again all over the world, including among fledgling modern spirit-workers.

            I've chosen to use the much-debated word - ergi or argr - even though its meaning is unclear, and it may have had many meanings over the centuries as being Third became less and less acceptable. (Some of them have been conjectured as "morally useless", "perverse", "cowardly", "effeminate", "receiving of anal penetration", and, tellingly, "a sorcerer".) That's not to say that it was ever completely acceptable; even in tribal societies where it is not seen as a terrible or shameful thing - and for that matter, even in places where it is or was seen as a sacred thing - it was never exactly the sort of condition that any parent wanted for their child. Even "sacred" can mean "taboo", which can mean "kept a respectful and/or fearful distance from", a condition that any spirit-worker will recognize. What it doesn't mean, and never will mean, is "normal".

            If you look at the research on shamanism worldwide - and especially that of the subarctic circumpolar shamanisms, from Siberia to the Inuit - you find, over and over, the disturbingly frequent presence of spirit-workers who transgressed gender roles and indulged in unusual sexual practices. In some cultures, just showing evidence of these behaviors was considered a sign that a child was bound to be a spirit-worker of some sort.

            This was remarked on particularly in Siberian shamanism, specifically among the Chukchi, Koryak, and Kamchadal, and across the Bering Strait with the Inuit. While Siberia may seem to be a long way in the minds of many people, from Scandinavia or even Finland, there are many things that the circumpolar subarctic shamanic traditions have in common, much more so than shamanic traditions from further south. That includes northern Europe, especially during Neolithic times. (I could also discuss gender-transgressive shamans scattered throughout many other cultures around the world, but for the sake of brevity I'll stick to northern Eurasia; anyone who wants to find the other material can do so without trouble.)

            Interviews with these "transformed shamans" report that the spirits informed the shamans in question that they were required to put on the clothing and take up the jobs of the opposite sex; in some cases, they lived their whole life in this way, including taking lovers appropriate to their role, and in some cases the male-to-female shamans would ritually mime childbirth. (Even here, however, the "special" role of these shamans as still not playing by the gender rules can be seen; a "shaman-wife" of this type did not have to observe the taboos of women, but could accompany their husband to battle, and rather than taking their husband's name, sometimes the husband took theirs instead.) Sometimes one also finds reports of male-to-female shamans who changed gender later in life, but remained husbands to their wives and fathers to their children, merely adopting female clothing and household jobs. Some merely donned women's clothing during ceremonies.

            Some claimed that they picked up the traditional skills of their new role as quickly as they did due to the spirits helping them with it constantly. In some cases, the transformed shaman had a spirit-husband or spirit-wife who had transformed them to be the "right" gender for that marriage as far as the spirit-spouse was concerned. Researchers tell of the troubles of being married to such a one, as the spirit-spouse was considered the "real" head of household, and the shaman's spouse had to obey the commands of the shaman's spirit-husband or be fatally punished.

            Interviews also repeatedly came across the fact that while these transformed shamans were not necessarily fully accepted or much liked by their tribesfolk, nobody gave them any trouble due to their perceived power. While tribesfolk differed on whether male or female shamans were stronger, they were united in believing that the transformed shamans - koekchuch, kavau, yirka-laul-vairgin - were the most powerful of all. In fact, the social respect allocated to them was used by researchers as an example of the power attributed to shamans in general; if an ordinary person of the tribe decided to change their gender, they might be shunned, but if a shaman did it, it was a sacred thing done by the spirits to give them extra power.

            It's also often observed that when it comes to tribal sex-roles and the tasks and taboos differentiated between them, there are really three gender roles - men, women, and shamans. Regardless of the shaman's gender presentation, they are permitted to do what is not permitted, because their position sets them apart, and because doing so gives them power - not just in public opinion, but in the web of maegen and hamingja. Male shamans could be around women in childbirth without harm to themselves; women shamans could touch sacred objects usually restricted from female contact.

            Many of the Siberian tribes had third gender shamans, to the dismay and bewilderment of the "civilized" scholars who wrote about them with words like "perversion" and "sexually inverted". Chukchi shamans spoke about the terrible transformation of a man into a "soft man", which all shamans dreaded to be told to do by the spirits. Still, some received the command anyway, and had to go along with it or be killed. (To this day this is the difficult choice of some people with gender dysphoria, and when they are also spirit-workers, refusal can also eventually be fatal.) Some men apparently preferred death to going through this transformation, and received it, although not all who began it went all the way through to the end. It started with a change of hairstyle to that of the opposite sex, and then progressed to a change of clothing. The final phase had them changing their job roles in the tribe, taking on the tasks of their new gender, and marrying partners appropriate to their new role. They would in turn acquire special spirits appropriate to that role, sometimes "spirit-spouses". There were also female-to-male equivalents of the "soft men", and scholars were further horrified by tales of how they used artificial phalli for sex with their female partners.

            Among the Saami, who in many places lived intertwined with the descendants of the Indo-European invaders and the invaded aboriginals, two of their many deities stand out. One is Juoksahkka, the "bow-woman", who unlike her two very feminine (and more popular) sisters and her mother, is a woman warrior-figure who carries the bow generally reserved for men. (The bow-woman figure is oddly echoed in other parts of the world, such as the Hopi woman-warrior kachina god Pohaha who carries both the male bow and the female rattle, and is the counterpart of a cross-dressing male-to-female kachina figure named He'e; and the Egyptian archer goddess Neith, whose rites supposedly made use of women wearing artificial phalli.) The other is Leabolmmai, the "alder-man" who brought game to hunters. The first element in his name, liejp, refers to both the red sap of the alder tree (a sacred substance that was used to paint symbols on shaman drums and protect people from danger from ritual objects) and to menstrual blood. The power of the menstrual-blood man takes on more significance when we remember that the alder, which made the best charcoal, was the tree of Loki the ergi shapeshifter among the Norse. Juoksahkka and Leabolmmai were said to be bitter enemies, as it was their job to choose the sex of the unborn child, and they often disagreed over what that ought to be.

            When it came to smaller wights, there were again cross-gender beings in the middle. The vuojnodime or "invisible ones" came in three categories: male (bassevarealmma), female (bassevareniejda), and double-sexed (gadniha). Similarly, the three sacred animals - reindeer, bird and fish - were seen as masculine, feminine, and third-gendered respectively, any male or female members of those species notwithstanding. The assumption of "fish" as third gendered echoes the Norse hermaphroditic serpent Jormundgand, and the line in the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem about the Big Snake's rune Ior - "Serpent is a fish, although it feeds on land."

            Other parts of ancient Eurasia had traditions of third-gender spirit-people. Herodotus and Hippocrates both discuss the "enarees", or male-to-female transsexual shamans among the ancient Scythians, who "mutilated" their genitalia and took on female roles. They were said to be the most powerful shamans of their people. Ovid actually claimed that some Scythian priestesses knew how to extract "female poison" distilled from the urine of a mare in heat, with which to dose men in order to feminize them. The average person might throw this off as silliness, if they didn't know that pregnant mare's urine is the main source of Premarin, the most widely used estrogen drug today. They also ate a lot of licorice root - so popular among them that the Greeks to whom they exported it referred to it as "the Scythian root" - which is also an anti-androgen.

            There has been a good deal of research done on the Norse seidhworker as ergi, as sexually and/or gender-deviant, most notably by Brit Solli, Ing-Marie Back Danielson, Jenny Jochens, and Neil Price. Referring to someone by one of the many colorful insults that indicated a less-than-completely-manly nature was grounds for death in medieval Scandinavian society, and this discomfort rubbed off onto the reputation of sorcerers and seidhworkers. According to the Gods and wights that I work with, it wasn't always this way; in the centuries and millennia before the medieval era, such folk had a social situation more similar to that of many other circumpolar tribes. While it wasn't exactly what a parent would necessarily choose for their child (given all possible choices), and while it did set them apart from the people (although that was the way of things for a spirit-worker anyhow), it was not a shameful offense. Instead, it connoted greater shamanic power. One wonders if an echo of that "too-powerful" nature was part of what fueled the fear and hatred of the average Viking, causing them to react in a manner so extreme that accusations of ergi were legally akin to attempted murder. One might also wonder if it continues to fuel it today.

            For all that medieval Norse/Germanic society seemed to have been extremely sexist - at least by the Christian era when most of the lore was written - archaeologists keep turning up pre-medieval graves with cross-gender clothing and artifacts. Seven male skeletons with female clothing and jewelry have turned up in pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon burials in England, another in Holland, and more in Scandinavia. Similarly, female skeletons have turned up buried with weapons. One cremated couple were buried in connecting graves; the female skeleton had woodworking tools and the male one had female jewelry. Probably the most interesting cross-gender burial is that of what seems to be the grave of a gender-crossing Saami noaide in an area where Norse and Saami people lived intermixed together. The Saami skeleton is biologically male, but is dressed in Norse female clothing and jewelry and is buried with a woman's needle case.

            The medieval Norse accusation-insult that a man "acted like a woman every ninth night" shows its magical roots by the sacred number nine. It may be that "shapeshifting" into a woman's form every ninth night was a way of gaining magical power, as a sort of temporary ergi. For those who feel called to ergi but are not ready to leap in all the way, this might be a way to start slowly, doing it in a magical context. Every ninth day and night, try to live as fully as you can in another sex, including shapeshifting your hame in that way. Dedicate that time to devotional, ritual, or magical work, and see what happens. Changing sex, especially temporarily, can be a powerful kind of altered state all its own, with an intense shift in perspective.

            Then we have the infamous claim in lore that some priests of Frey behaved like women and wore "the tinkle of unmanly bells" on their skirts. (The wearing of bells is something that many feminine-male ergi spirit-workers in this tradition have found themselves compelled to do, even if they have never actually heard of this claim.) There are also picture-stones in Gotland that show figures wearing the trailing skirts of women, and prominent beards as well; whether these are cross-dressing men or women with false beards is unknown, but either way we are looking at gender-crossing behavior that deviates from the conventions of depicting ordinary men and women. Some scholars have pointed out that you can't have set examples of "normal" gender activity unless you have examples of what isn't "normal", and that making that latter the province only of holy or supernaturally-ridden people with a mandate from the Powers to defy those laws is a way of keeping "normalcy" in place, without entirely banning the "wrong example" entirely.

            Another interesting example is the line in Hyndlujod, where Hyndla comments on the ancestry of the volvas, the vitkis, and the "seidberendr" folk. The second half of this third term - berendr - is tantalizingly unclear; technically it means "carrier", but in practice it seemed to be an obscenity used to refer to female animals, and then to female genitalia themselves (as in the modern term pussy for vulva). In modern Icelandic, a related obscenity is berandi, meaning ass or buttocks. That would mean that this word could be considered to connote "seid-carrier cunt" or "seid-carrier ass", and while we may recoil at this term, one should remember that what seems rude in one culture is ordinary dinner-conversation in another. Certainly it makes sense if this third category refers to third-gendered spirit-workers, being as the first two refer to female and male ones respectively.

            The ancestor of the seidberendr, Svarthofdi - Blackhead - reminds us of the fact that there seem to be more cross-gender entities among the "dark" gods, including Loki, his child Jormundgand, and possibly his extremely assertive warrior-wife Angrboda. (His daughter Hela, while she is all female, is conversely half-alive and half-dead.) As one would expect, there are greater percentages of ergi spirit-workers among those chosen by those dark Gods, especially Hela who seems (anecdotally, in this modern era) to be very fond of human servants who are between male and female. It fits well with the tradition to have a spiritual ancestor who was associated with darkness and the Underworld.

            This also coincides with the research of the Russian scholar Troshchanski on Siberian shamans, who found that the "black" shamans (not evil per se, just those who worked with underworld rather than upperworld spirits) had significantly more gender-crossing behavior. Among the Yakut (who at the time of his interviewing had more "black" shamans than white ones, and assured him that they were just as useful, if more fearsome), most male "black" shamans wore women's clothes as daily dress, dressed their hair in female hairstyles, and had two iron circles sewn on the chest of his ceremonial apron, symbolizing breasts. As someone who would, if these categories were applied to my tradition, be a "black" shaman, and having seen the high concentration of transsexuality, intersexuality, and other gender-crossing drives among Rokkr spirit-workers, this all falls into place rather ominously. It's not just a "back then" thing. It's a "happening now" thing.

            Some people reading this will make an immediate negative connection between "dark" underworld deities and their "perverted" human servants, and find it creepily appropriate in another, less positive way. To this I can only speak from my own personal conviction, which has in turn been strongly affected by the priorities of my patron deities. I can only say that from the point of view of a northern-tradition ergi underworld shaman, change is a Good Thing. Rigidity of viewpoint needs to be shaken up, lest it become a false prison. Unquestioned anything is bad, and questioning in a spirit of openness can be a holy act. When we call Loki Breaker-Of-Worlds, we mean it as a compliment. Sometimes worlds grow old and stale and need to be broken open, and that includes people's internal worlds. Sometimes defenses grow so rigid that they inhibit all but the most squeezed and crippled growth, and they need to be torn down. Sometimes what was a survival necessity in past times becomes a social liability, and needs to go. If that weren't what the Gods wanted of us, at least periodically, then They wouldn't have made us this way. To be argr is to be a catalyst. To be an argr spirit-worker is to be a catalyst with all the power of the Gods and wights behind you.

            One of the things that struck me when I was reading about seidhr - and especially on the issue of seidhr as being historically considered to be "evil magic" because it could be used to alter men's minds and thoughts - was the term "turn the world upside down". This might be a reference to an earthquake (which would be pretty serious magic) or to changing someone's perceptions so drastically via this mind-altering magic that their world might as well be turned upside down. The phrase struck me so strongly because that's exactly what third gender people do. By our very nature, we turn the world upside down. We are living, walking catalysts, and this is the first mystery of our existence. We turn everything that people think they know about gender - that supposedly safe ground beneath their feet - upside down. We change worlds.

            Of course, it's not just Rokkr gods who are picking up ergi people. Frey and Freya have always attracted effeminate gay men and some transgendered people, especially those that are involved with explorations of sacred sexuality and sex work, and there seems to have been a spate of argr servants of Odin being chosen recently. Many of these are along the female-to-male spectrum, although a few are going in the other direction. They range from women warriors who are fairly "masculine" in their aggression and lack of "frithfulness" (recalling his servants the bloodthirsty Valkyries), to female-to-male transsexuals who have become fully male except for "natural" factory-equipped genitals, echoing the Old Man's most argr heiti, Jalkr (Gelding or Eunuch).

            Of all the "bright" and "upper-worldly" Aesir gods, Odin is paradoxically the "darkest", as any survey of the rest of his heiti will show. He is a god of the Dead in his own right as leader of the Einherjar, a god of war and frenzied berserker states, a god of sorcery who cohabits with ravens and wolves, a dead man hanged on the Tree. He is also just as ergi in his own way as his blood-brother Loki, if less obvious about it. He has also managed to overshadow the ergi archetype with the King archetype in most people's eyes, and so avoid being outcast, and thus he is a God of both those in power and those cast out at the fringes, the ruling class and the homeless wanderer. He is a deity of extreme opposites, and so it is not unusual that he takes both uber-manly warriors and argr spirit-workers.

            So what does this have to do with modern shamanism in the northern tradition? Long ago, after years of living with my intersex condition, when I was first ordered to change my gender by the Goddess who owns me body and soul, I didn't connect it to the phenomenon of shamanism. That was largely because I was ignorant of the entire thing, and wasn't connecting much of anything. When I began to read up on shamanism, the transgender issue hit me like a shock wave. These things weren't separate, they were part and parcel of the same system. Still, I thought, it could just be me. I could be an anomaly.

            Then I met, for the first time, another spirit-worker who was also owned by Hela, and had gone through a death-and rebirth process....and had an intersex condition, and considered herself to be a third-gender being. Then I met a third one of Hela's bootscrapes, who was dealing with transgender issues. On top of that, I made the acquaintance of two spirit-workers dedicated to Odin, of which one was a female-to-male transsexual and one was a very gender-transgressive woman. (And yes, there have been more since; we keep cropping up.) It was when we began to exchange knowledge that it all came together: the taboo that we, needing a word to describe it, call ergi. Yes, there are a lot of different possible connotations for that term, some of them extremely unflattering (which we believe came from a later and much more homophobic and sexually conservative era), but the word still rings through us. This taboo needs a name, and this is as good as any.

            These words - ergi (n), argr (adj) - are Old Norse terms that we are using to refer to a specific constellation of shamanic-power behaviors, which include the following:

            1) Gender-transgressing behavior, from partial cross-dressing to full social gender change;

            2) Gender-transgressing sexual activities - for example, men receiving penetration, or women giving penetration or having nonpenetrative sex;

            3) Being public about these activities and accepting the social taboos (including being outcast or marginalized) that come with them. One can see this reflected in the shaman's position as not having to accept the taboos of either men or women in their culture, but having an entirely different set all to themselves.

            These three things seem to reoccur together in tribal cultures around the world, creating an international sprinkling of third-gender spirit-workers. It seems to be a taboo, or set of taboos that go together, and bring great power at the cost of being even further set apart from other people. (For more information on spirit-work taboos, see Wyrdwalkers: Techniques of Northern-Tradition Shamanism.)

            You'll notice that I'm not using the words "gay" or "lesbian" or "homosexual" or even "sexual preference". That's because the phenomenon of ergi is not centered around those things, although most people confuse them terribly. An individual can be argr and be interested in all sorts of people sexually - male, female, in between, all of the above. Being argr is not about who you want to be sexual with. It's about who and what you are when you're with them, and what you're doing with them, and if it turns social gender and sexual taboos on their heads.

            There's a lot of supposition and argument among intellectuals about the "true" meaning of ergi, but as usual none of them are actively researching it rather than vaguely theorizing. For many of us spirit-workers, it's not just a theory. We need a word for this thing that we are and do (for it's both something we are and something we do), and we see the echo of this same power/blessing/curse/wiring/energy/sacredness in those brief glimpses of the ones called ergi, and whether the researchers like it or not, that word is where our paths lead us.

            First, gender-transgressing behavior. When this moves from shameful pastime to hobby to identity to spiritual path, it ceases to become a private thing. For the spirit-worker with the ergi taboo, it isn't enough to be third-gendered internally. You have to be visibly different in that way as well, whether it's only that your ceremonial costume has strong elements of clothing that is socially acceptable only for a sex different from the one that you most appear, or that you must act in a way that is deliberately gender-inappropriate. Your gender transgressing has to be evident to everyone who comes to see you in your professional capacity, and you may never deny it when asked.

            For myself, when I lived as female I went through a phase of being very butch, especially when I stopped shaving off my chin hair and lived for a time as a bearded woman. Then when I started taking testosterone and shapeshifting my body, it quickly swung to the other side of the apparent-gender pendulum. I went from being a masculine-acting woman to being a somewhat effeminate man, without actually changing my behavior. (Funny about that). The wights for whom I work did not allow me to "complete" my gender change, insisting that my genitals stay a mixture of both. I am not allowed to be either wholly man nor wholly woman, but always somewhere in between. I also found that once I passed perfectly as male on the street, I was compelled to wear skirts (something I'd eschewed during my butch-female years) as part of my ceremonial costume, and sometimes my daily wear as well. It was as if I needed that reminder of femaleness to balance out my masculinity.

            There is no one right way to do the first part of the ergi taboo, except that it must be visible and apparent, at least whenever you are doing anything to do with shamanic stuff. No one who knows that you are a spirit-worker should have any doubt that you are also third-gendered in some way. Whether that moves into physically changing your body or not is your own decision, and you will have to make that depending on your own bodily comfort. Further advice on this matter is contained in the "Letter to Transgendered Spirit-Workers".

             Second, sex. Most of society today assumes that being transgendered is about sex, or sexual preference - that it's sort of "the far end of gay", as it were. Transgendered people, and especially transsexuals, will tell a different story; any given transperson may be attracted to men, women, and/or other transfolk, as I said above. Sex isn't part of gender identity, they will say, and I'll say it too, when I'm talking purely about transgender as a biological phenomenon. On the other hand, here I'm talking about the ergi taboo, which is a spiritual phenomenon, and as with all those sorts of thing it's never so simple and clear-cut. Sex is most certainly a part of this constellation of taboos, and it has to be sex that is gender-transgressive as well, whatever that means in the context of one's society and gender-role programming.

            For anyone living as male in this culture, that usually does include being penetrated, if only astrally. In our culture as in Migration-era Scandinavia, there is still a cultural superiority around being penetrated; it's seen as female - and therefore automatically passive and definitely lesser, something that takes away from the "superior", active manhood. That lack of being willing to be penetrated physically easily runs over into unwillingness to be penetrated emotionally, mentally...and spiritually. This is a problem when it comes to spirit-work, even if you're not being used as a horse. The qualities of openness, receptivity, and submission are important ones to master if you're going to go down this path, and being sexually penetrated - by another person, by a sacred object, by a deity - is a fairly sure-fire way to get there.

            We've also discovered that if you are wired for it - and if you are third-gender, it's highly likely that you are wired for it - anal penetration, done correctly and ritually, can be used as a sacred-sexuality tool for psychic Opening. This seems to work equally well regardless of what kind of body you have and what direction you're going in; as many female-to-male people have reported this as male-to female, perhaps because anal penetration is gender-nonspecific and could even be used as a way to stimulate litr and sexual energy for people who do not use their genitals due to dysphoria, or have had them entirely removed (as some ancient historic third-gender groups did), or had too much nerve damage due to surgery. (More information on this technique can be found in my book Dark Moon Rising, published through Asphodel Press.) I have no reason to doubt that our ancestors figured this out as well, and indeed all the historical fuss over anal penetration and its association with ergi and seidhr would seem to bear that out.

            On the other hand, if you're female-bodied and living in a female role, and penetration is what's for breakfast in your normal sex life, ordinary vaginal penetration is not going to do the trick when it comes to accessing the considerable power that is the ergi groove in the Universal web. This was brought home to me by a conversation with a woman who was working with argr energies as a method of mind-altering sex magic while still in a heterosexual relationship with her male partner. During these periods of ritual sex, she would refuse penetration, but would instead have him perform oral sex on her for long periods of time. For the two of them - and the culture in which they'd both been raised - one-way oral gratification was something women did to men, not vice versa; to switch roles in this way was to cast an aspersion on the man's manhood and to put the woman in the dominant (and therefore, according to the culture in which their libidos had been programmed, masculine) role. It was very clear to her that she'd hit that groove, because it worked, and it had that certain argr feeling.

            Other female-bodied people I've spoken with have gone further and accessed that taboo by creating a strap-on phallus and charging it ritually. The trick here is to be able to insert and embody one's astral penis into the artificial one (this technique, too, is described in Dark Moon Rising), and use it for masturbation or the penetration of others. If done right, this is a straight shot through to the ergi power, and it's something that most female-bodied folk who are naturally argr will be able to figure out quickly on their own. Some combine this with anal penetration, if it's seen as a "male" thing to them.

            I'll now take a quick tangent, because the reader has no doubt noticed that I'm doing a lot of mentioning of social sexual taboos from different cultures. We don't live in the same culture as any of our ancestors, nor are we raised with their taboos, or those of early tribal (or in most cases, modern tribal) societies. We were likely also raised in a variety of different cultures with regard to what we were taught was sexually acceptable/unacceptable and masculine/feminine. Why does this variable social programming count? All I can say to that is: Because it does. It doesn't matter what messages you internalized around these things, it only matters that you violate them, because that releases huge amounts of archetypal power.

            In this way, the ergi taboo strongly echoes one of the pillars of Indian Tantra, where violating sexual taboos are encouraged as part of the power of sex magic. In early Tantra, vegetarian initiates were made to eat fish and meat as part of a "love-feast" before partaking of ritual sex; the breaking of the flesh-eating taboo not only symbolized the male and female energies, but also paved the way to breaking the sexual taboos (sex with someone not one's wife, not for procreation, and not in an "ordinary" position) that were to follow. Tantric yogis were not the only ones to realize that the breaking of sexual taboos created power, although they did not (as far as we know) go so far as to break sexual gender taboos, which is an even greater "offense" and thus a greater power source. That's the job of those of us who were born wired to do it.

            Doing it publicly - which can simply mean being known to do such things and not denying it when forthrightly asked - is a greater "offense" still, and thus multiplies the power. Far from making one "passive", it requires a huge amount of courage and endurance. Today, in the country and society in which I live, the numbers of transgendered people who are being violently murdered in the streets is rising to a frightening rate. To defend ourselves not from insult, but from violence and death, we who walk the ergi line need to band together and be proud, and watch each others' backs. We should go down neither to the blows of others, nor the blows of socially-induced self-hatred. As one such spirit-worker said to me, "I realized that this is a perfectly reasonable way for a shaman to be, as we have been this way all over the world for many thousands of years."

            That brings us to the third pillar of ergi - being the outsider, the outcast. The idea that social extremity brings shamanic power is well known in shamanic societies, and even non-shamanic societies. Part of what we do as spirit-workers is to see the larger picture, and where our tribe sits in that framework. In today's world, that means sorting through all the cultural pressures brought to bear on men, women, and those not wholly in either camp. You can't see that clearly unless you are outside of it, and stepping outside is not something done lightly...because you can't go back. You may see things that outrage you, or at least make you profoundly uncomfortable, and after that the shoes of "normal" will never fit again. It is a "higher" perspective - not in the sense of being more morally elevated, but in the sense of being someone perched in a high place, seeing farther, looking at the people walking down the narrow road and seeing only what is in front of them, and knowing what is coming before they do.

            As discussed in the very beginning of this book, and the third book in this series, it is the shaman's Wyrd to be both the outsider - an important position - and the servants of those very people who may fear and keep their distance from them. The ergi taboo seems to reinforce the former side of that equation, and it will take a lot of work and creativity on the part of the spirit-worker not to give up on the second part - because that way lies disaster, just as surely as refusing the call. It is our Wyrd to live both as the outcast and the spiritual center simultaneously, and it is our orlog to figure out how to do that in a modern society that no longer remembers this, by triggering older memories of who we are, or creating new ones. It's a challenge that has already killed many of us. We must not dishonor their memories by giving up...and besides, the Gods believe that we can do it, and they wouldn't have chosen us, each one of us, if they believed otherwise. Their trust is our Road, and we have to walk it.

            In Skirnirsmal, there is mention of an ergi-rune, which either causes one to become ergi, or validates the existing condition. Fairly sure that this was a bind rune of some sort, I went off to find out which runes were bound up in it, using my method of asking each of the rune spirits in turn, and drawing from my bag the right ones. I was amazed at how quickly they came forth and went together...but then again, I'm fairly argr myself, so I suppose it was to be expected - like coming to like. It is a bind-rune of Inguz, Mannaz, Nauthiz, and Ior, looking rather like an Inguz boundaried between two vertical lines, with another vertical line in the center.

            First, you draw a Mannaz - these things have a proper order, you know - which is the handfasted man and woman, the male/female pair that build all society, and the symbol for society itself. Then you draw the Inguz in over that, symbolizing sacrifice - the castration both physical (Ing-men were castrated before being killed, giving their fertility to the Gods) and social (becoming alien, different, never quite the same. Then two Nauthizes are drawn in, facing in different directions. The are the commitment, the wall that is put up, the fact that once ergi, you can never go back to being blindly, blissfully normal. Yes, they also acknowledge the hostility that you will get from your community, as you go about messing up their careful, safe, false categories. Finally, the Ior is drawn in the middle - the symbol of the Snake who has been our patron in many cultures - one thinks of Tiresias, Athena, Ariadne and Dionysos, Shiva, and of course the fluidly-gendered Jormundgand - and the rune of all liminal states. It is fitting that it is in the middle, and that it is drawn last, as we accept who and what we are, and what that all entails for our work and our existence.

            Can I cast it on other people? You bet I can. What will it do? Well, if there is anything in their brain-wiring that might be termed hidden gender issues, they'll come out in all their flaming glory and torment the person until they do something about it. Maybe someone close to them will come out with it, forcing them to deal with it there. If there isn't anything like that in their lives, the rune will look for some other comfortable social assumption they've based their mental existence on, and tear it down. It's a dangerous rune. It changes people...just like we do.

-Ari, seidhmadhr

            I should now stop and disclaimer that not all spirit-workers are argr, nor do they need to be. We all have our sets of taboos with which we gain power. This is simply one set that has attracted a lot of attention through the ages, and that is particularly socially difficult. However, it does predispose someone to be better than usual at certain sorts of spirit-work skills. In a very real sense, spirit-work is the only job for which being somewhere between male and female is actually an advantage. That's why there are so many of us doing it.

            There is a strong link between shapeshifting and ergi, and with good reason. Being born with hardwired neurological gender dysphoria has a dramatic effect on the astral body. Most primary transsexuals, when asked, will admit to having intense experiences of "phantom limb syndrome" from childhood, only for them it was a matter of having phantom genitalia that were not the ones that they were born with. This dissonance caused them a great deal of psychic pain, usually leading to a significant amount of dissociation from the body.

            When used to refer to a severed limb, the phenomenon of phantom limb syndrome is fairly well explained by science - the brain doesn't know that the limb isn't there any more, and the parts of the brain that would be receiving sensation from there are still giving off signals. On an astral level, it's been explained by energy-workers as the fact that the physical limb may be gone, but the astral one is still there. Some people with phantom limb syndrome have been able to continue the phenomenon indefinitely (instead of having it fade out over time) by moving their astral limb on a regular basis, so that the brain doesn't decide that the limb has finally withered or become paralyzed. It's a good example of a phenomenon that exists at the crossroads of the physical and the astral. Similarly, someone afflicted with gender dysphoria is both born with a brain that expects to be attached to a body of a different sex, and continually gives out distress signals about the situation...and an astral form that differs jarringly from the physical body that it is attached to.

            To grow up with such dissonance leads, as pointed out earlier, to mental dissociation from the physical body. Unlike dissociation due to abuse or trauma, in the case of gender dysphoria the individual is actually coping, on an energy level, with a serious difference between lich and hame, something which (especially as a child) they may have no idea how to articulate, much less work with. But when such an individual begins to experiment with separating their hame from their lich and moving it about, they'll discover that they are better at it than someone who has gone their entire life with seamless coordination between the two. "Which fish discuss water?" goes the Zen proverb, and the answer is: "The drowning ones." If the only way that you can survive mentally is to become more aware and more identified with (even if only on an unconscious level) your astral body than your physical one, that's a powerful training ground for being aware of what most people ignore.

            In a very real sense, many shamanistic techniques are about using a state of mind which would be dangerous and damaging when induced unwillingly and unexpectedly into the inexperienced, and learning to control them and induce them carefully as tools, thus not suffering the ill effects. In this way, the mental and astral dissociation of the gender dysphoric becomes a useful tool for journeying, pathwalking, preparing to receive spirits, and of course shapeshifting.

            There is the ancient Germanic rhyme, "Call me Varg, and I'll be Arg," - call me a wolf, and I will be argr. As this rhyme suggests, being able to change species is closely akin to being able to change gender, to the point where if you do one, it's assumed that you can do the other. Changing your astral gender is an excellent intermediate step to changing your astral species - if you've got the kind of brain that can do it without a huge shock to your self-image. Ideally, the ergi shaman should be able to function while astrally male, female, or somewhere in between, regardless of where their physical form is at any given time.

            There's also that an actual physical sex-change is a form of shapeshifting - in fact, it's probably closer than almost anyone in this culture ever comes to going through that process embodied. It's especially shamanistic in the sense that it is done with mind-altering substances (hormones - and anyone who claims that they aren't mind-altering hasn't ever lived through changing them from one type to the other from week to week), pain ordeals (surgeries), and involves the death of the old identity and the rebirth of a new one. For someone who isn't a spirit-worker, going through this process is the closest that most people will come to something paralleling a shamanic death-and-rebirth process. For argr spirit-workers who are called to this change - and not all will be - it will almost certainly be a very literal part of that process.

            It's an act of magic to watch one's flesh shift from male to female or vice-versa. Spirit-workers who have taken this path have discovered, like I did, that astrally shapeshifting can speed the physical process along. Some claim that this shapeshifting, especially when it is fueled by the energy of gender-transgressive sex, can work small physical changes in that direction without the aid of hormones, by magically manipulating the body's own endocrinal substances. This would be a way of harnessing the Path of the Flesh for the purposes of shapeshifting, and it is a technique that needs more experimentation by willing volunteers.

            There's also a death and rebirth aspect, whether we like it or not, in the fact that we change our identities. Even for those who don't change their physical bodies or the letter on their driver's license, there will be a transition of sorts - at least, if you're a spirit-worker, a transition will be enforced by the Gods - from being a publicly gender-normative person to being a publicly non-gender-normative person, in whatever way you are required by Them to manifest that. This will lose you a lot of actual or potential friends and allies. It may lose you your entire blood family. It may lose you partners, jobs, housing, automatic respect, and community status. Since we have no social position for spirit-workers, it can leave you more or less an outsider.

            However, things are different now than they used to be in ancient times. First, there are exponentially more people around, period. Second, communication is such that we may connect with hundreds of people who live nowhere near us, unlike our ancestors who probably only met a few hundred people in their entire lives, if that. An argr member of a tribe might go their whole lives without meeting another such individual, or might at best only know one or two. If they lived in a large city, there might be half a dozen. Today, population and communication is such that I can personally connect with three or four hundred transgendered individuals, and see twenty of them regularly. (There is also the fact that the incidence of intersexuality and transgender is increasing with every generation, largely due to endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment, but that's another book's subject.) There are enough of us that we are now a tribe unto ourselves, should we choose to be one. The day that we named ourselves a tribe was a turning point in the world's Wyrd, and it reverberated through the tapestry. Several of the Gods heard it, and became interested, and got involved. There is no turning back now. We claimed every person who lives in whatever way between male and female as members of our tribe, even if they have no idea about it, and so it is.

            Like all tribes, we have honored ancestors. Most of us are sterile or do not bear children for other reasons, and many of us are cast out from our blood kin. Right now the murder rate of transgendered people is appallingly high, going from one to two a month just on this North American continent. It may also be rising, although some attribute the escalating rate to better reporting of deaths that are already occurring. Some members of the population want to wipe out our very existence, and they attempt it in the streets and in our homes with fatal beatings, shootings, and stabbings. There are also those ergi-folk who go mad from the strain of being constantly discriminated against, and take their own lives in the struggle. Some lived lives of secrecy, in and out of the military of centuries ago, with no one ever knowing that their bodies, under clothing and uniforms, were not what others expected. A few lived long and became elders, passing on their wisdom.

            These are all the honored ancestors of our tribe, some fallen in battle and others living to the end of their days. Regardless of whether you have a connection to your blood ancestry, if you belong to our tribe, you can rightfully call upon them for aid, and they will answer, and claim you. However, there is a price. The Dead of our tribe are angry. They are tired of seeing their children fall young and alone in the streets, and they say that this must stop. If you call upon them, you join in the obligation to protect your tribe, by whatever means you have.

            (For information on who the honored warrior-dead of our tribe might be, in order that you may call their names, I suggest checking the website at http://www.gender.org/remember/ and making a list. The holiday for the honored Dead of our tribe is November 20^th.)

Being Ergi
by Lydia Helasdottir

            Yes, you have to be in the middle, you can't be at one end of the gender continuum or the other, and you have to do things that are averse to societal norms. Sex is involved too, the taboo-breaking of sexual gender roles. There's a huge amount of power in breaking taboos anyway, but especially these. Ergi is something that you are, not something that you do. It's not an easy road at all. I was born with hugely excessive amounts of testosterone from my mom taking fertility drugs; testosterone poisoning from the womb onwards. I came in being genetically female, physically in-between, and mentally about 2/3 female, 1/3 male at all times, which is a kooky space to be in.

            There was taboo and power in that from the very beginning. From the age of about 12 on, my mom said, "You know, not everybody's like you." I think what she meant was that we had lived all over, and we had just moved to a small village in Holland where everyone had lived five generations in the same street, so they just didn't get us. But I took it on a much deeper level, because I was just realizing that not everybody did things that I did. Does that mean I'm abnormal? I had no idea, at the time.

            I struggled with it a lot. I didn't want to transition to male, because that isn't me. I'm both, and I want to be 50/50 in that third space, but I find that I can swing either way in terms of who I'm being, and what my energy system has got on any given day. We have this running joke, when I have to deal with corporate guys - that we all slapped our dicks on the table and mine was the biggest one of all, and I'm the only "woman" in the room. But it meant that I had to get used to being the outsider. I was the outsider for a number of reasons - not being from wherever we were living, having a weird sexual orientation, being masculine....the best thing that could happen to me at that point was that someone would mistake me for a boy, because then it would validate the fact that I was both. It gave a lot of access, strangely enough, to being ambiguous about who I was - which was good, because it let me out of the social role, and once I accepted that I was ambiguous about my gender identity, then I could also be ambiguous about all the other social expectations, like being a nice person and not drinking people's blood and stuff like that.

            And then I found that there's just simply a lot of power in it. I like that a lot; it's an exciting, life-affirming thing to me. It's powerful partly because it's just perverse to societal norms. If you consider that all fixed structures are potential power, when you knock down a tower, the energy released is huge, because of all the potential power that went into building it up comes exploding out. Societal structures hold a huge amount of power, and when you break that by being unusual, or having unusual proclivities - and particularly in doing it in a ritual or magical or spiritual context - you get a huge rush of power. Also, from being able to mingle male and female energy in me, and have all of the bits working on an energetic level at once, it gives not only a different power level, but also a different flavor that you cannot achieve otherwise. Baphomet has got both, and uses all of it, and all of it is functional. It's the power contained in the double wand of power, the dual phallus. All these things are only available to people who can do both, or at least have some kind of ability to get into the space where unusual sexuality is happening.

            And just to seduce otherwise really straight people, and for them to realize three-quarters of the way down the road all of a sudden that "Oh! But this is so abnormal!" but they still want to do it, It is natural for even a fully female-identified female to have a strong reaction to my maleness, but because I don't come in a form that they're used to having a physical attraction towards, they don't really realize it until it's too late. Then it's like Wile E. Coyote running off the edge of the canyon cliff, and then looks around, and only falls when he realizes that he's run off the cliff. And there's a lot of power in that, too. There's a fear moment in that about what will the neighbors think, and or if I do you, what am I? Am I queer now? If I was entirely female and a girl did it with me, that just makes her queer. But given that I'm a bit of both, what does that make her? What part of you am I attracted to, and what part did I have sex with?

            I have functional female bits, although quite larger than normal by a long way. But my astral bits, my energy bits - I have both, and funnily enough I can actually be in a female space but use the male astral bits, the phallus, even though being female. Hela taught me that trick. She can have a phallus, but it's a female phallus, a very strange thing. And similarly, I can be in a male space and use my vaginal opening. One of my favorite weird twisted things has been to imagine that I was a boy imagining that I was a girl, because then the fantasy is fulfilled by the female bits. That I find a very healing experience to have. One could do it the other way around, too, if one has the boy-bits that one doesn't really like, that aren't sufficient to cover the whole spectrum. I've found that this is beyond even being a 50/50 mix; it's something that has become something else altogether.

            I was forced to learn to stay in my body, even with dysphoria. That staying in the body with a dislocated kneecap was a lesson in that as well. When it first happened, I said, "Oh, this is going to be OK, I'll just disassociate." Tink. Tink. Tink. It was like there was a bell jar around me; I couldn't get out of my body. But dissociating from gender dysphoria does have advantages; it teaches you that you don't need to stay gendered...or human. If you can have a phallus, you can have wings, or claws. But actually, for me it went, if I can have wings I can have a phallus. If I can have claws that really, functionally do something to someone, and make them feel it....then I can do it with a dick.

            The two poles of ergi sex magic seem to be about being stone, or getting buttfucked. Being stone forces you to use the astral bits rather than the physical ones - I'm stone with everyone except Joe. Relying on the astral bits rather than the physical ones, I find that really brilliant because you just don't get involved with all the usual boy meets girl (or girl meets girl or boy meets boy) and they have all the ordinary sexual decisions and roles that limit you. As soon as genitals get touched, it tends to get complicated. Anal sex opens you right up, if you're ergi and you're wired for that sort of thing. And everyone has an asshole, regardless of gender. It makes a channel that goes right up and out the top of your head, opening you up.

            There's a point that is like being a species that never had two genders; they just are, and when they come together with new ones, they just are. I got a lot of that from doing sexual but non-carnal energy exchanges with people that didn't even involve astral genitals, it involved hands and exchanging energy through the hands. Because it was just not focused on the genitals at all, it was relieved of the polarity that goes with bits, and it just became a very swirling kind of energy, like a yin-yang with a million fractal yin-yangs inside of it, and all these little polarities going on, but they were just little dynamos, not determining the nature of the interaction at all.

            I understood at a very young age what it was to be sexually penetrative, even though it wasn't done with a penetrative organ made of flesh. In a way, you're piercing someone with the experience of sex with you. The meat may be coming in one direction, but the actual energy penetration, and the strong experience, goes the other way. For me, it's like putting a plug in the socket. All the electricity comes out of the socket into the plug, end of story. You might stick the plug physically into the socket, but everything important goes in the other direction, out of the socket and into the plug and down the wire. So that was my concept of sexuality from the beginning.

The Tale of a Transsexual Norse Pagan Spirit-Worker
by Linda D.

            I have three patron Deities: Loki, Freya, and Lofn.

            Loki, God of Change, Humor, and Sex-Changing, is the one who is training me to do spirit work by putting me in situations where I have to figure out what to do, and gain the necessary skills to fix the problem. He started that with abducting my raccoon spirit-friend into another world, thus giving me the choice of learning to journey to get him back, or of using the now empty raccoon skull to make a stang for travelling to the nine worlds. Either choice is fine with him, as in both cases, I get skill in traveling to other worlds for future errands. He doesn't seem to believe in classrooms much. And as God of Change, having lots of choices is a good thing. As a hypnotherapist, creating change in people is what I do best, and so I think he's pretty happy with my day job. I seem to have an almost magical knack for helping people change.

            Freya, Goddess of Desire and Women's Magic (seidhr), has told me that she'll have work for me to do later. I am almost sure that she is waiting for me to have my sex change surgery and be anatomically female before setting me to work for her. In my mind, Freya is a goddess of desire, and I think of seidhr magic as seducing the world into doing what you want, rather than imposing your will with galdr magic. So while her brother Frey is about the having of abundance, she's more about the desire that motivates you to get it.

            My third is Lofn, Goddess of Forbidden Loves and Passions. The sum of her lore is about 3 lines in the Prose Edda, and so most Norse Pagans tend to ignore her. Arranged marriages aren't the norm anymore, so why would she be relevant? But if you think about it more carefully, aren't there forbidden loves today, of a different kind? Loves that are socially unacceptable? Passions that are called perversions? I should think the big battles raging right now for and against gay marriage should make it clear that there are still "forbidden loves" today. And what about bisexuals, who are treated as traitors by both straights and gays? And of course, there's all the BDSM relationships, kinks and fetishes. You can find them all in Lofn's realm in the Dreaming, in trance journeys, or during sleep. She's not just about forbidden relationships, you see. She's also about forbidden passions, such as crossdressing, and even simple fetishism for wearing panties, as well as the need to transition to the other sex. If it's a forbidden or socially unacceptable passion (in a given society), then it's part of Lofn's realm.

            Lofn helps me directly with my day job, and I've learned quite a bit about her from how she's interacted with my clients as a guide. Lofn's name literally means "permission". A lot of what I do is really about giving people permission to be themselves, and to encourage them to do what they want to do with their lives. Permission is also the central concept for hypnosis: without consent, nothing can be done. This is also true of therapy, as you cannot change someone who does not want to be changed. Another name for this concept is "acceptance", something that many transgendered people badly need to give themselves, as they are often wracked with guilt and shame about their irresistible need to manifest gender-transgression. I think all queers wrestle with that to some degree, and Lofn is the one most capable of helping with that.

            For devotions and magic, I consider the key to be her symbol, as well as her magical tool. I see it as an old-fashioned silver key with a golden glow, and I also have a old key like that among my magical tools. For statuary, what I found is a woman showing the way in through an archway or door. It's meant to hold a picture, and I got it at the Las Vegas airport (made for the Monte Carlo hotel). She has asked me to collect flower petals, and has explained they were to be put "on the path". I'm still not clear on what she meant, but I assume laying down flower petals would be good to consecrate a place to her influence, or call her to a place where her magic is needed.

            And where does all that leave me? Well, my main spiritual talents are for seership, and I was told by two other seers to get in touch with my ancestor spirits. I've since started talking to one who is responsible for managing the gifts of seership for my family line. However, the situation is complicated by the fact that this bloodline talent is exclusively reserved for women of my family... and I'm sort of in between. So I'm only getting part of the package, and she says I'll be getting more of it after my sex change surgery, which is about 2 months away for me now.

            You see, I transitioned to living full time as a woman 15 years ago when I was 21, took hormones briefly and stopped because I thought they were causing problems with my health (I just had an incompetent endocrinologist), and put the surgery plans on the back burner, having no money for it anyway. In my 20's I practiced ADF Druidism with a Norse focus in a grove that I had founded, until the group closed in 1999. During that time, I sought to learn mediumship and trance possession, to be able to learn directly from the gods what the scholarly sources omitted. But after the grove closed, I had about 6 years of getting the divine answering machine: "Please say your prayer at the sound of the beep, and place your offering into the designated slot". I'd occasionally get vague hints about what to do from Freya, and when I didn't carry them out because I didn't understand, she'd ignore me for 6 months to a year. After a while, I pretty much gave up on trying to talk to them, and focussed on my work with transgendered people, getting occasional hints from Lofn when she helped clients. And while I didn't get direct orders during those 6 years, I suddenly found myself interested in doing things, which seemed to be my ideas at the time. For instance, belly dancing lessons were my idea, but the exotic dance lessons I started two years ago weren't. How is me knowing exotic dance useful to the gods? Beats me. I'm also pretty sure learning to weave on a loom wasn't my idea, either.

            Many years went by, and then I had a penetrative sexual experience that blew my mind, and prompted me to start hormones again and to sign up for genital surgery. Then, suddenly, my patrons started talking to me again, and for the first time, asking me to do things! I was very excited, after so many years of silence. Were they waiting for me to resume my transitioning before guiding me to peers and teachers? Or did they decide to give me a push to get on with the next phase of my life? Either way, my transitioning and returning to active status as a spirit worker seem to be intimately connected with each other. In my 20's, I was trained for two years as the apprentice of the guardian of my city, who has since moved to another province. I wondered if I should take up the job again. The answer I got was basically: "We shouldn't have to tell you to do the right thing." In other words, it's my choice, but the job does need doing, and they'll approve of it if I do. Divination indicated I should wait till Beltane before officially taking on the job, and that there would be challenges in the meantime. At the very least, I'll need recovery time, and be out of commission for a while after my surgery in January.

            So what does it mean to me to be a third gender spirit worker? It means being a betweener, being and understanding both sides, but never completely. It means having experienced what it feels like to ride my brain on male hormones, and then on female hormones, and realizing I make more sense to myself on female hormones. It's understanding being obsessed with sex, and able to utterly ignore emotions to focus on a goal on the boy side. It's having too many emotions at once to be able to understand them, and knowing you're being completely irrational on the girl side, but that it will pass. It's understanding how two very different types of humans feel and think, while being both and neither. Perhaps that helps in understanding how non-humans think.

            Shamans are living bridges between the spirit world and human world. We who are between genders are living bridges between men and women. The only problem with this metaphor of being a bridge is... well, people walk all over you while trying to figure out what the other side is rambling about. On the upside, I'm very good at translating boyspeak into girlspeak, and vice versa, for helping couples understand each other. I'm also lucky in that I look very female, and that I live in a city where people usually don't care what you do or what you are.

            There is one more aspect that ties into my being third gender, which is being an agent of change. I've been given hints that the ancestress originally responsible for my family's talents was a Norn. There are many Norns of varying ranks and powers, drawn from all the races of the 9 worlds, ranging from the individual lesser Norn guiding a person's soul, all the way up to the big threesome at the Well of Wyrd. And I've come to believe there are two types of Norns, both of whom can see the threads, but who alter them in different ways: I call them Fates and Muses. Fates are the ones who actually decide what is for the greater good, and arrange the threads to make it happen. It's all done behind the scenes. I can see the threads, but I don't know that I can actually alter them. Muses, on the other hand, are the inspirers. They inspire people to act and think in certain ways, but this only works with the person's consent. Which doesn't mean it's necessarily informed consent.

            I have found there to be three kinds of Muses: Muses of Desire are those who motivate people to do things, through what they most want to have, do, or be. Muses of Virtue are those who inspire people to act honorably. Some of them do so by promoting the code of conduct of their faith (i.e. Mother Theresa, Gandhi), and others by urging people to follow their own inner wisdom and code of honor. Then there are Muses of Fear, who motivate people with what they fear most. If you haven't guessed it already, I consider myself a Muse of Desire.

On Being A Twenty-first Century Argr Man
by Jálkr

            Attaining some measure of understanding about my identity has been a convoluted journey, requiring sleuthing, research, personal introspection and just plain audacity. Any worthy explication of the process is consequently likewise. I don't think using terms of identification from an archaic culture is inappropriate, but I do think it is making a large leap, a justifiable one.

            The basics, to establish my credentials: I am a middle-aged female-to-male transsexual, of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian ancestry. I have borne multiple children. I am also newly arrived on the Heathen spiritual path, that of my forebears. I decided to embark upon it after careful reflection on my life's purpose. At this point I can only say my Fulltrui, Óðinn, is satisfied with my current understanding, but I am fully cognizant that there is no such thing as reaching a conclusion - with no further striving required - as long as I draw breath. Valföðr tries his votaries to the breaking point, that much I know for sure. Obtaining a sex change at 39 was no easy feat.

            I see Heathenry being grounded in pre-existing lore, but influenced by UPG - unverified personal gnosis. Without UPG, all we have is static soul-less artifact. Without pre-existing lore, UPG can take wild flights of fancy. Neither can function without the other.

            Neil Price's exhaustively researched The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron-Age Scandinavia has been my primary resource regarding historical reference to being ergi or argr. Of course, Price ties being ergi with performance of seið, and I am not a practitioner of seið (yet). What I am, though, is a being of socially stigmatized status whose sexual behavior would definitely be described by many as "deviant", and whose childbearing experiences have definitely affected both my sexuality and my perceptions of things both physical and spiritual.

            Socially, I have gone through all the necessary processes to be granted legal status as a man, but they are far from ironclad, and I think most people reading this have a fair idea of just how marginally transsexuals are regarded in contemporary society. My manhood is regarded as suspect, even moreso because I still use my remaining female anatomy, my genitals, as a source of sexual gratification for myself and my partners. I am the frequent and enthusiastic recipient of penetrative sex, not merely of "tab A and slot B" variety, but extremely queer and transcendent unions. Whatever shreds of normalcy I may have once managed to hide behind are really quite irrelevant these days. If anything they underscore just how deviant I have become, in the eyes of society. Just like the ergi of old, not a one can meet me or know of me and think that I am "just a regular kind of guy."

            I leave you with a personal journal entry from when I was first coming to knowledge:

            "Back in September I went down to Brown University during their week of Viking-related programming and heard Neil Price, from Uppsala University, discuss Viking Age archeology, cosmology and social structure. In particular, I wanted to find out from this amazing man about the concept of ergi as it related to gender and sexuality. I ended up buying Price's gigantic tome The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia and could spend hours in it, prowling around and learning. As an FtM (female-to-male) mother of northern ancestry, I find all this really fascinating and it speaks to me across the ages. I remarked to someone in e-mail today that I feel like a double agent, gender-wise. My physiology and history anchor me to my origins and I will not deny them. Nothing contemporary in the lexicon of identities works as far as encompassing all of it, but honestly, isn't everyone a mix of paradoxes? I'm just a little more weird than others. What a feeling it is, then, to read about these long-dead folk and recognize my spiritual kin."

Secret Selves
by Steph Russell

            For some of us it isn't obvious at first, not even to ourselves. Not because it's not there, not because it's not intensely present, not because the evidence wasn't always visible, but because of internal dishonesty. We lie to ourselves first and then by extension to others, sometimes not even realizing we're doing so. The edifice we construct bit by unintentional bit eventually looms so large in our inner landscape that it becomes constricting in ways that were unforeseen. We rein ourselves in to the point of constructing a virtual prison inside our own beings. Inner revolution is never easy, but coming to terms with my gender identity is admittedly one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. What hurts is that in many respects I blame myself, and rightly so. I can be angry at the world all I want, for all its oppressive density, but I chose to hide. It's difficult to admit. I wasn't always aware I was doing it; in fact the grand majority of the time I wasn't, but in those frightened moments of realization I ran scared from my own nature and stuffed it down into the black depths of my own abyss.

            Every time my truth manifested I went into denial so deep I lost track of myself, and instead lived a projection of other peoples' image of me. When I was finally forced to waking and became aware of what I was doing, that person I had made myself into died. I went through a pretty intense grieving process. I grieved for what was easier. I grieved because of the inevitable disappointments I shall wreak on others. I grieved for things I thought I should have been and the worth assigned to those things. I lost my sense of self entirely and went through a full-blown identity crisis, even as I saw myself more honestly and clearly than I ever have. I grieved for that lost sense of identity, even though it wasn't real…and at the same time, I grieved for what I've missed out on and what I will never be able to be.

            When Hela took me the first time, She gave me a lot of instructions, but the big over-arching one was to integrate. She talked (far more than merely talking, but I don't know how to adequately describe Her communication in a succinct manner) about the various divided aspects of myself and I mulled it over, absorbing Her instruction/revelation. The last instruction was for me to "integrate my male and female sides", or something to that effect; it wasn't so simple as only words or one word for each part of the communication. She talked about how I had stifled myself in so many ways because of my refusal to accept all parts of me. She told me how much more whole and powerful and (words fail for this part, existent in the world?) I would be - more of myself, far more present and even real, if that makes sense.

            I heard Her and had to acknowledge that something was missing, that I had been hiding things from myself and everyone else. I acknowledged Her rightness, as there was no way for me not to, and agreed to work on things. I did, however, end up pulling from that what I wanted to and told myself later that She wanted me to integrate masculine and feminine traits in myself. That's just not adequate, but I didn't really want to face the depth of what I had been hiding. It took a serious smackdown and a removal of all of my coping mechanisms (read: escapist behaviors) to force me to action.
            Even though it has been years since Hela first made Herself clearly known to me, I feel like I am still at the beginning of all this. My transformation has been painful (and of great depth) thus far, and working through my gender issues has been a large part of that. I've had to come to terms with the fact that this has always been a part of me, re-examine my life and all its bits, re-live all the painful parts, go over the points where I went into denial over and over again. I'm very aware of the fact that I'm being re-made and that I'm an active part of the process.

            I've always been an outsider. Even in the depths of my denial, that part was obvious and I had embraced it. There was no other way for me to function. I moved around a lot as a child and had a terrible time trying to find a niche. I never identified with either girls or boys in any deep kind of way; girls didn't like me, and I didn't like their toys and games. Boys were sometimes more accepting on an individual level, but my strangeness went beyond mere gender issues. Most of my teachers didn't like me and found me odd, though there were exceptions. Any individual friends I had (and they were few) would quickly turn against me in a group situation. At the same time, even while being an outsider, other people were always terribly obvious to me. I could tell what they wanted, what they were up to, what their frustrations and motivations were. I could tell what bothered them and where all the lines of tension lay. It was easy to tell when differences between people were due to differences in perspective. Gender lines were easy to follow. This understanding has only deepened since starting this process.

            Most of the time I feel utterly alien - neither and both, all and none. My exact point on the continuum moves around quite a bit, but my default is squarely in third, or at least I think it is. I'm keenly aware I'm not done with this part of my transformation, perhaps not even over the hump, yet one of the main aspects of my being that separates me from the vast majority of other people also gives me vital insight into theirs. It's just kind of strange realizing that it has always been this way.

            Coming out from the transgender closet is doubly difficult when you are suddenly faced with the fact that you are Owned by a Deity. Any existing intimate relationships are put through a rigorous testing, and significant others quickly become alienated, as they sense they are no longer your primary focus and can feel like they are with a person they don't know. Power struggles emerge between them and Deity which leave you feeling like you are in the middle, with the blame squarely placed on your shoulders, simply for being what you are. You can hardly blame the other person, as it's very unlikely they had even considered this possibility and they certainly didn't sign up for it. You might try to desperately balance everything while fighting your way through it, trying to keep your entire world from crumbling beneath you, but crumble away it will. The question is if you can build a new foundation fast enough.

            A lot of my work at this point is very tied to my identity as ergi. The construction of my tools of power are tuned to this process of transition, so I am very aware of the fact that my being transgendered is an important part of my identity as a spirit-worker as well as a great source of personal might. A lot, though far from all, of the counseling work I have done as a spirit-worker is in relation to transgender issues, which I personally find ironic because I consider myself still only a neophyte in this realm. I can see the work piling up and fleshing out for the next year, and making use of my ergi nature is a big part of that.

            One of the things that seems to help me most with getting through this process thus far is physically expressing my astral reality in some ways. I was born “female” (a point with which my body argues) in meat-space, but when confronted with an aroused astral form during a lesson I quickly learned that I was not entirely female. That was a bit of a shock, finding myself sitting there with an astral erection, being taught men's mysteries by a shape-shifting God. Soon I was instructed to construct an artificial soft phallus for packing, made of organic materials so as to make it good for projecting into, and something miraculous happened. I quickly learned that if my astral phallus had a place to “sit,” I would experience markedly less dysphoria. I wouldn't get as frustrated as easily, and felt more myself, as it were. Soon I added men's underwear and sometimes men's pants. If I neglect to wear my phallus, things get worse again.

            Over time I noticed that my energy flows were being changed, as were my sexual needs and my experience of my body, and it all feels a bit closer to “right.” Having appropriate sexual outlets helps a lot, and while there is room for improvement for this in my life, I can really tell when I'm getting at least some of what I need. It makes a big, big difference. I'm still learning about what it is that I truly need, as are my partners. In my case, I happen to be a pansexually identified, fluidly third-gendered being, and as such I have a lot of needs. It's a tall task to get them all met, especially in meat-space, and I haven't been able to do it yet.

            I still don't feel fully “clicked into place.” I'm still in the middle of this thing, and n order to get back in, I've had to step completely out. Something that seems to help with this process is having an ongoing conversation with my body. I used to do this from time to time in the first person, but once the gender issues and shaman sickness started to manifest (along with a whole host of ugly internal and external struggles that often left me self-destructive) whatever productive dialogue I used to have ceased. I had to start treating my body as an entirely separate entity and giving zir credence as such.

            Initially I referred to ze as she, and that was fine, because ze wasn't really talking back yet. Ze was just giving me little abstract feelings here and there, but even those were helpful. Ze was genuinely afraid of me (and rightly so) because of my inclination toward self-harm, but having a body that is in rebellion against its inhabiting being is difficult and frustrating. I had to actively work at rearranging my thought processes on a cognitive level to help combat the instinctual desire to think about offing myself (like I said, all my old coping mechanisms were forcibly removed.) Once I had done a lot of work there (and frankly, I still have those thoughts from time to time; they're just less intense and far less frequent, thankfully) ze started talking back. First thing was that ze wanted to be acknowledged as not being entirely female zirself.

            Now, I am not to my knowledge medically intersexed in any way, but my body wanted that recognition all the same. Granting it to zir has helped us click together better and hopefully over time we will be even more unified. Acknowledgment of zir's needs as sometimes at odds with my wants and needs has proved rather useful, and the dialogue has helped us compromise where needed. I find that ze responds very well to understanding regardless of whether ze gets zir way as well. It might seem odd that causing a seemingly new schism (although it's not really a schism, just a method of Acknowledgment) in oneself is a way to greater integration, but it's proving useful.

            If you are just discovering gender issues in yourself, be prepared for a rough ride. My experience may or may not be typical, but in having extensive contact with others going through the same thing, there are certain similar characteristics of the process we all seem to have to deal with. There will be initially violent swings in self-perception. You may at times truly feel like you've made a mistake and that this isn't you. You will likely experience strong recoils whenever you hit upon some new and deep truth about yourself, especially if it results in some kind of extreme sexual satisfaction. Dysphoria can be devastating and can be triggered by various things - for me, the biggest trigger is an orgasm resulting from imagining myself in a sexual gender role that I can't actually achieve physically in meat-space. Realization that the actual organ isn't there can result in a morbid sense of futility. A sense of impotence and infertility can be devastating, even if you never thought it important previously, or even have any current desire to do anything active with said fertility.

            The best advice I was given going into this thing was to “get a good support system.” That can be easier said than done, but it's something well worth working at. Join communities and talk with other folks going through similar experiences. Don't cut yourself off from loved ones, despite the inherent danger in being open. Yes, you have to be careful, but this process cannot be stopped. You will either lose them or keep them, and that part is not in your control. Don't deprive yourself of potential support in favor of drawn-out tension and secrecy. If you are really destined to be an ergi spirit-worker, who you are will eventually be made entirely public anyway, and that will be part of your power. Learn to see it as power, even in the wondering eyes of others.

Raven Kaldera
cauldronfarm@hotmail.com

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