ABSTRACT
Every story is told for an audience. Pieces of the narrative that follow were addressed, initially, to various audiences: friends, colleagues, co-workers within seidr. The account of my first encounter with oracular seidr was written for two friends; later, part of it was incorporated into a paper given to the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness (Blain, forthcoming) and used again, together with Jordsvin’s narrative of visiting Hel’s realm, at a folklore conference (Blain 2000). Other pieces come from fieldnotes, from poems, from email discussions, from a website I constructed to share with others who journey in quest of knowledge of self. The narrative is, of course, partial, selected for the particular readership of this book.
