Originally Posted by
misanthropist
This quote came out of a really unrelated thread where for whatever reason I insisted on dragging it into this weird hijack but now I am hijacking my own train of thought and it's become so strange that I'm just going to put it in its own thread.
This spiralled out of a fairly innocuous (though interesting) comment:
When this came up I was focused on a slightly different aspect of the discussion and didn't get into what is actually my favourite part of the above: the general theme of shamanism, music, and wilderness. This is really strange ground for me because I have often said that I haven't got a spiritual bone in my body. But as I age I am finding weird stuff speaks to me that I never expected. Conceptually, I mean, not in the sense that random objects are now talking to me. Despite radically reducing my alcohol intake I have experienced no hallucinations (or any effects at all, other than thirstiness) even though thallucinations were the one thing I was looking forward to.
Anyway, I don't think I even have a great post to get this going, so instead I'm going to put a piece of music here and talk about it for a second.
This is a band, in a sense, from several countries in Europe. They use instruments based on artifacts found in ancient archeological sites in northern Europe, and work from the descriptions that people in ancient Greece and Rome wrote down to try to recreate the sound of tribal Europe, up to about a thousand years before the Vikings. This song I have been cranking up recently and I thought it might speak to you in this kind of complicated way: it's a blessing being placed upon a warrior who has been tied up and taken prisoner by his enemies and a woman is helping him to escape. I think this is quite beautiful imagery because you get the sense of the quiet, brave, supporting strength of this woman who is rescuing a man taken in battle...this is the kind of thing which always fascinates me because of the dynamic of the male and female roles, which clearly these people had understood in a totally beautiful way. The group's name, Heilung, means "Healing" and the idea is that by connecting to our ancient past (plus a healthy dose of reverb) we can spiritually heal ourselves, I guess? I frankly never had much interest in spiritual healing because I never felt that there was a part of myself that I was neglecting, although since I first discovered this group a couple of years ago I feel, somewhat disorientingly, that they are feeding a part of me that I did not realize was there.
Sometimes I do a little bit of volunteer...I guess I'd hesitate to call it "counseling" because I'm not any sort of legitimate clinical counselor and I am super careful never to give advice, but just to talk about my own experiences and how I got through them. I listen to guys from a particular and often troubled background and just let them talk and sometimes I talk about my own life if I think they might relate. Anyway if I get to know them well, sometimes I put them on to this music and the reaction is practically universal: I have found everyone to be moved by it on a level they did not expect. So I don't know if this is some similarity between their tastes and mine, or if it's employing some of the devices SS mentions above, or what. Or in the case of this song at least maybe it's just the motif of the woman rescuing the warrior that gets a grip on the particular kind of guy I'm talking to, I'm not sure.
I believe this particular song is in Icelandic; sometimes they sing in German, sometimes proto-Norse, early stuff had some English in it which personally I found distracting but I don't think they use it at all anymore.
Anyway here we go with a song only AD 1090s kids will remember: