Originally posted: Mon, Sep. 26th, 2005 19:28

This came out of a conversation I had with fenris23 years ago about how because of voudou's extreme synchretism it was virtually identical, pantheon structure wise, as the norse gods. Further the magickal system Seidr seemed very likely to involve drumming or other shamanic practice and possesion. Prior to this point my magick was all Golden Dawn and Crowly with a heavy concentration on evokation practice. A voudou asatru mix sounded way cooler to me at the time.

First part of the "system" was to establish if the correspondences between systems or pantheons fit.

Odin – Papa Gede
Loki – Papa Legba
Thor – Chango
Tyr – Ogun
Freya – Ezrulie Freda

The idea was just to get the underlying archetypes lined up but I found the names a personalities similar enough to suprise me.

Odin and Gede are both sex death magik kind of guys both only have, or show, one eye. Both are associated with crows.

Loki and Legba, both are magik trixter crossroads guys associated with fire and to a lesser degree serpents. This match was a little harder but the modern voudou Legba evolved out of the younger african god Exu Eleggbarra. I choose to think of Legba as Loki after he was punished with the snake, making him much more Promethean.

I'm going to skip Xango/Thor and Ogou/Tyr for now as I don't work with them much.

Freya on the other hand…

Freya and Ezrulie are a very good match. Love/sex both unmarried. The fact that one of the more common second names of Ezrulie is Freda I find perfect.

The next step, of course, was contact. I tried the western mystery tradition methods that I knew with no results. A new system required new methods. Or really old ones.

* * *

So like I was saying I needed new methods if I was going to have success with voudou asatru. Golden Dawn evokation was beneath the dignity of these beings and invokation was too abstract and detached. I began a little mild research into ancient norse practices of Seidr and into the practice of North American Voudou. There was very little written about Seidr so I was forced to concentrate on the voudou practices.

Problems became apparent quickly. Voudou religious practices were designed for a fair sized congregation. It needed a priestess/priest, altars, veves, offerings, drummers, drums, dancers, a peristyle and so on. This was incompatable with me. I was a solo practitioner with no resources. I was a very solo practitioner.

If I had studied voudou sorcerors instead of priests everything might have developed differently but oh well.

I isolated the main parts that I needed were the three roles as priestess, drummer and dancer/host. I couldn't hire drummers or buy drums but I did have a bit of a CD budget.

The next weekend I went down to the old broadway location of Banyan books to check out their CD selection. BAnyan books is the Vancouver New Age/Alternative religion bookstore. It is and was quite large. I believe at this point the small collection of international CDs was quite new. That trip I only found one CD I could use. Traditional African drumming for Exu. Exu as I said was a precursor form of Legba.

I got the CD home and listened to it. I had no idea what to do with this.

* * *

So I was stuck with a CD I barely understood as music and no idea how to use it for magick. I spent about three days straight listening to it. Nothing happened on its own. I decided I needed some kind of ritual. I had the right dosage (I assumed), I just needed to mess with set and setting.

Obviously I needed to dnace to the drumming but I couldn't get into it enough to let go. Plus I still needed to perform the priestess functions as well. I mapped out a little ritual involving litanies in french and veve drawing.

Now at the time I was quire into triphop music like massive attack and portishead (my first forays outside of classical and jazz). All of the music featured remixing and sampling heavily. I decided to give it a try. Using my dad's computer I put together a track of instrumental clips over the drumming. Now to your ears this track would sound awful, the most sophisticated effect I managed was matching the tempo of the samples to the drumming, but I could listen to it and I could dance to it.

Now I had my set I just needed my setting. My bedroom wasn't going to cut it. Nah lets skip this part. Lets just say I found a freespace large enough for my altar and dancing.

That's about it. For the first experiment. I made contact with Exu Loki. It was different than I expected and there were a lot of glitches to work out. I've since gotten way more into the remix side of things and I discovered my Mes Tet.

This writing stuff is harder than I thought. This has taken me something like a week to write. (And something like month to get around to posting)