Birth: A Spiritual Bomb

It is widely believed in Norse mythos that women as a whole are naturally gifted in magick and prophecy. I won't go into detail here because that could be a book in and of itself, but suffice to say even a skimming of the Eddas and Sagas will illuminate the reader to this view.

I am more interested in speaking about my own experiences and how the process of birth created a fundamental change in my spirituality. There was much horror involved in the process, and in some ways I felt as if there was a rift created in my spirit whenever I became a mother. I think this process explains some of the reasons that females in the northern tradition have traditionally been assumed to be naturally prophetic.

In shamanic cultures worldwide, there is evidence for a traditional process of "facing death" in order to become a true shaman, and in turn create the ability to communicate with the spirit world. A ritualized or ceremonial death on both the physical and astral plane unlocks one's ability to transcend the mundane world and experience and communicate with the spirits.

It is my view that females in the Norse tradition, particularly the Vanic side which includes seidhr, were considered naturally prophetic or magickal because of the experiences they faced giving birth. This is true for all women in my belief, and particularly in a time when the process of birth was often a game of Russian roulette, fraught with mortal danger.

Even in modern society, with medical technology reducing the risks, birth always has and always will be a risk. And when things go wrong, women are often pushed to the limits of mortal experience. My own experience was similar to this.

Pregnancy and birth for me were not an easy process to say the least. My daughter is nearly three years old and I have only just recently began to feel as if I am truly healed from the experience to a point where I can contemplate being a mother again somewhere in the distant possibilities of the future. Sparing the worst details, due to scheduling and timing I was not in labor until my due date was past by a week.

My daughter was also a large baby, which resulted in her being much to large to pass through my bones, in a word she was stuck and there was no possible way to have her naturally. This coupled with the fact that an inattentive nurse pulled my epidural completely out of my back, I was left to suffer the worst of my labor with no medication even to near the end, yet still there was no way I could give birth to this child. Suffice to say if this had been the old days, I would have died.

I lay in the bed for seven hours helpless, and experiencing a pain that I never could have imagined existed. I became an animal rather than a person as family looked on helplessly. I truly believe that this time was when my belief in the Christian God suffered it inevitable death completely and wholly. I knew nothing then but blood, pain, and hatred.

I began to hallucinate. Each time the pain hit me I saw a woman creature in the air above me, half beauty and half corpse, whom I now recognize as the Goddess Hel. I felt as if I was dying, and this creature was both causing my pain and encouraging me to fight it, to fight for life. This went on until my doctor finally arrived, and in horror rushed me into emergency surgery.

It is a pain I can not describe, the pain of the most horrific of deaths I battled that night. And somehow we both made it out alive, my daughter as healthy as a child could be, and me a living ghost, an empty shell. I felt as if I myself were a newborn, and that all that I had known before had been wiped away. I had been reborn, and without meaning.

My physical healing was swift enough but emotionally was more than a battle. Yet with each day that passed I felt something growing within me. I felt a sense of power, of knowing, and connection to life that I had never known. My intuition grew by leaps and bounds. I was no longer a prisoner of the life I had before, and leaving behind situations and people who had enslaved me for years was now effortless.

I found Freyja not soon after, and not soon after that I met an individual who captured my heart with a word, and holds it still to this day, like a treasure.

Now that enough distance as passed, I can look back on this experience and see that this was my death ordeal. I feel as if Freyja was there all the while, guiding me through Hel and into the life that I was meant to live. I feel as if my spirituality has a power and a substance that owes much to my experience. And when I hear of the shaman's ordeals, and the women's gift of prophecy, I feel these things make sense to me in away that no other path ever could compare to in the least.

I also feel as if healing is a lifelong process. I feel scarred by my life before the ordeal, and the blindness I lived in. I feel scarred by what I went through and what I saw. But I also possess the wisdom that even the deepest cuts will heal, with time, with patience. I possess the wisdom that even in the darkest hour, there is much light to be had in the future. And when we live through pain and suffering, it may feel as if we are overwhelmed forever, defeated. Yet light is still in our worlds, waiting for it's time to shine out on us, and blind us with it's beauty.

My reward. 

In Frith,
Cena