Seiðr (Say-Thur) - — an ecstatic Norse ritual technology used to perceive, influence, or reshape unseen forces affecting fate, mind, and circumstance.

At one point, I did have a YouTube channel.

It’s probably still there somewhere.

A few days a week, depending on the week, I’d get up, get ready, fire up the camera and do readings.

Tarot, oracles, runes, I used them all to one degree or another.

At the time, I had no idea how much of this territory overlapped with what the Norse would have recognized as seiðr or seiðr-adjacent practices (Pendulums, Drumming, Trance states, Spirit journeying, etc.)

Here’s where things get complicated.

Modern hard-line reconstructionists often present seiðr as something strictly feminine and entirely forbidden to men. And to be fair, the surviving Old Norse sources do often frame seiðr as feminine-coded while associating male practitioners with accusations of ergi or argr meaning unmanliness, deviance, social transgression.

But the deeper you dig into the material, the less clean and absolute that distinction actually becomes.

1. The Vitki.

The term vitki appears to refer broadly to a practitioner of esoteric or operative sacred knowledge.

Rune-work.

Galðr.

Healing.

Divination.

Protective workings.

Operative ritual.

Depending on the context, a vitki could be respected, feared, sought after or socially suspect all at once.

That’s important because the worlds of Galðr and Seiðr were not neatly sealed off from one another the way modern people sometimes pretend.

A man using runes for divination, chanting invocations, entering altered states of consciousness and attempting to influence outcomes is already operating in territory that overlaps heavily with ecstatic ritual practice whether modern hardliners are comfortable admitting that or not.

And yet we do not see universal executions or outlawry aimed at every male practitioner of esoteric arts.

Context, status, utility, and fear mattered.

2. The Berzerker

We love imagining Berserkers as the absolute peak of Norse masculinity.

Bearskins.

Violence.

Shock troops.

Human battering rams unleashed into battle to create pure chaos.

Fair enough.

Problem.

These men entered ecstatic altered states before or during combat.

Whether we interpret that through ritual psychology, spiritual identification, battle trance or something more esoteric, the overlap with ecstatic ritual practices becomes difficult to ignore.

No, the sources do not explicitly state “berserkers practiced seiðr.”

But they complicate the simplistic modern argument that altered states, ecstatic practice and ritual transformation were viewed as inherently unmanly in all circumstances.

3. The Ulfheðnar

These men were known as the Wolf Skins and like their counterpart, the Berzerker, they too entered into battle while the Berzerkers were causing four-alarm pandemonium and they took out specific targets. They were like the equivalent of Norse Assassins but in the broader context of military actions, the Berzerkers were the shock and awe and the Wolf Skins were the Spec Ops types.

Surely the Wolf Skins should fare better, right? They have tactics and strategy. Their kills are more precise. They have total control.

…except they don’t.

Nope, these men also go into trance states, surrendering their conscious to that of an animal spirit. The wolf in this case.

Whether interpreted spiritually, psychologically or ritually, these men pursued altered states tied to animal identification and ecstatic transformation.

Get their man cards as well. If the Berzerkers lose theirs over trance work, then the Wolves lose theirs because of possession. I don’t make the rules here.

4. Norse Society

If seiðr existed entirely outside acceptable male society, then an obvious question appears:

Who exactly were the völur practicing for?

Kings consulted them. Jarls consulted them. Communities consulted them. Farmers consulted them. War leaders consulted them.

Entire settlements relied on prophetic and ritual specialists to influence luck, weather, harvests, voyages and political outcomes.

Which means Norse society clearly depended upon these practices even while simultaneously maintaining tensions around who could openly perform them.

That contradiction matters because it reveals something modern absolutists often ignore: the surviving Norse sources do not present a centralized orthodoxy.

They present inconsistencies, exceptions, exemptions for the elite, selective enforcement and porous boundaries.

In The Golden Dawn Tradition, there’s an adage that reads “To know, to will, to dare and to be silent.”

The selective nature of the enforcement of the outlawry or even summary executions was divided by class. If you were a noble or someone feared and respected, no one was coming to chastise you about your use of Seiðr if you could kill the idiot who chose to utter the words “ergi” or “argr” at you. Most feared those very consequences.

The Vitki and actual practitioners then knew that they just didn’t talk about it.

There’s a story I heard years ago — one I have not yet been able to verify or relocate in the surviving sources — about a warrior who, drunk after battle, admitted to using seiðr to turn the tide of combat and was killed on the spot.

Until I can locate the source, this story should absolutely be treated cautiously and may well be a conflation of multiple saga traditions.

But even if the tale were authentic, it would not prove what modern hardliners think it proves.

If anything, it would illustrate the selective enforcement I just mentioned.

Because the implication of the story is not that no man ever practiced seiðr, what is implied is that admitting it publicly carried social risk under certain circumstances.

Those are two very different claims.

Out of all of the gods, this is where things get to be a little fun. Freyja is explicitly tied to seiðr. This is where simplistic arguments start falling apart completely.

Odin is explicitly described in the surviving Norse sources as practicing seiðr, despite its association with stigma toward male practitioners.

Odin is far from a minor figure or an outcast. He’s the chief god himself.

That does not erase the taboo. What it does is absolutely demonstrates the taboo was neither absolute nor simple.

The tradition itself preserves the contradiction.

Other gods exhibit magical or ecstatic traits that overlap with seiðr territory, but are not always named as such in surviving texts.

And honestly, Odin alone is enough to make simplistic claims about “real men never practiced seiðr” historically difficult to sustain because of the roles he embodies.

He is the supreme masculine archetype of the tradition explicitly practices a ritual form associated with ergi, which demonstrates that the taboo was neither absolute nor simple.

For the hard-liner, there’s the choice between two buttons. It’s either that and we ignore that he’s performed Seiðr or we dismiss him as an argr god and reject him entirely.

The problem with the hard-line stance is that it ignores many facts about Odin such as his insatiable knowledge for wisdom, the sacrifices he’s willing to make to get it and the fact that he transgressively rides edges because the taboos are hinderances to him and they do not serve him.

The next god on the list, you all knew this was coming: Loki.

Again, the point is not that Loki is explicitly called a seiðmaðr in the surviving texts. The point is that the mythology itself repeatedly blurs the very boundaries modern absolutists insist were rigid.

Loki engages in transformation, boundary crossing, shape-shifting, and magical acts, and while it’s never explicitly called Seiðr, there’s more overlap again with the intended goals of the practice itself.

The deeper you go into the surviving Norse material, the harder it becomes to sustain modern absolutist claims about seiðr with any real confidence.

What emerges instead is something far messier: ecstatic practice, ritual technology, selective stigma, elite exemption, overlapping magical systems, and social tensions that even the lore, itself never fully resolves.

Which honestly feels a lot more human than the sanitized certainty people keep trying to impose on it centuries later.

To close out with a bit of my own personal opinion. Times have changed and attitudes have changed along with them. We’re talking centuries, here. Some of those attitude changes have, to be fair, yielded awful results.

That being said, the primary reason that the Rev. Dr. Wulfgar here stands on truth under the watchful eye of Tyr on my desk hutch above me and it’s one more admission that may drive fellow Norse Pagans into Thor-levels of rage and that is this. Our gods were far from perfect, however, unlike other aspects of Divinity, ours don’t pretend to be.

I don’t know about you but I take comfort in that.

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