landscape, meaning, paganisms and ancestors Jenny Blain

My focus paganisms and ‘reconstructionist’ spiritualities and identities landscape, contestation, sacred sites shamanic practice and seidr ancestors and relationships with these – the past in the imagination of the present – Heathenry and seidr – doing lowland Scottish family history

tradition authenticity re-enchantment as concepts used and elaborated by practitioners topophilia heterotopic spaces ‘new-indigenous’ relationships with landscape

Topophilia as component of personal/group identity and ‘belongingness’ narratives, stories of place, engagement with spiritual meaning, ‘feelings’ about place

knowledge of landscape different knowledges seeing with ‘other’ eyes heterotopic changing

Seidr emerging as one of three ‘ritual forms’ in Heathenry (so-called oracular seidr) but not only oracular links with ‘shamanic’ practice Blain and Wallis in Brill Handbook of Contemporary Paganism (2009) Blain in Pathways in Modern Magical Practice (forthcoming) Archaeology e.g. as described by Price (2001) different types of seid-practice today - Blain (2002) Lindquist (1997). The ‘definitive’ work on pre-Christian seidr - Strömbäck (1935) (in Swedish) Dubois (1999) has discussed links between seidr and practices of nearby ‘shamanic’ cultures, notably Sámi shamanism Tolley’s two-volume work (2009) has made many descriptions of seidr accessible to English speakers

Seidr as ‘reconstructionist’ spirituality and practice Did the seeress look like this? (Image from Price, 2001)

In working seidr, you are entering a different landscape, a dreamscape, almost a fairly- tale – who you meet there cannot be known in advance not everything is as it may seem so, follow the rules be careful be polite give what is asked. Different ‘feel’ of practice within different landscapes - fitting practice to place, engagement with place, landscape as culturing