The Morality of the Seiðman

There is a wyrd clarity of vision that comes with seið.  Clarity isn't all it's necessarily cracked up to be though.  For example, decisions are often easier to make for the ordinary person than for the seiðfolk.  A ordinary person sees mores in black and white-something is either god or it's not.  For the ordinary Ásatrú man (or woman) 'oath-breaking' is a strict no-no; for the seiðman maintenance of luck is much more important so the breaking of an oath becomes a matter of convenience (no wonder we were often viewed as 'perversions of humanity').  Where breaking an oath is very wrong in the eyes of the ordinary man, the seiðman prefers blithely to dump it.  There is no real evil or good for the Hexemeeschder de Welt; it all falls into some kind of gray zone.  Murder?  Homosexuality?  Rape of innocents?  Wyrdly enough, they are all just actions in a long string of actions which make up our lives.

I wouldn't exactly call seiðfolk amoral, however.  Perhaps, 'morally different' would be more politically correct.  Of course, for the ordinary person this line of action (or inaction, as the case might be) is disgusting, perverse or sick.  They see the individuals out there; we see the strings which tie things together.  Let's take a particularly disgusting example--Jon Benet.  The media get a hold of a story like this and within the span of a few hours the country is genuinely enraged.  People are flocking to stare, raise their fist up in protest.  There MUST be a guilty party and she MUST be hung.  Laws MUST be drafted to protect the children of this great country!  "It shouldn't hurt to be a child!"  Bumper stickers.  T-shirts.  News stories.  The people have the right to know!  The seiðman sits back in his chair and calmly asks "Who's getting the money?"  Children die every minute of the the day and all of a sudden the media grabs this one and strings it out for two long years.  Surely someone is making bucks off this.

The seiðman's perspective is very different than the ordinary person's, you see.  Of course, I didn't dislike Jon Benet--I didn't even know her.  In fact, I've only been to the city she lived in once.  She's a news story, that's all.  I've not even got any real evidence that she ever lived.  Her death is little more than a distraction, something to misdirect the public's attention while other more menacing strings are being pulled in the background.  Something to make Joe Q. Public ignore the fact that his government is more securely locking down his purse-strings while stealing away rights.  Something to make him ignore the fact that the federal government is taking control of the supposedly sovereign State that he lives in, his county government, and his community.  "Look over here, dummy, at this important thing!  Ignore that man behind the curtain! Don't look so narrow-mindedly at your own backyard, you idiot!  Check out these inhumane things happening in Afghanistan!"  The seiðman calmly asks "Where is the luck of your community?"

It shouldn't hurt to be a child?  Since when does any of us skate through life pain free?  Of course, it hurts to be a child at times; at other times it's great.  Some children will suffer through an entire short life-span of less than 10 yrs. and then die.  Suffering is one of the drawbacks of the privilege of spending a few years on this Midgard highly dependent upon the amount of luck one walks into this world with.  Every one should have the same chance at life?  Since when was the playing ground ever even?  The son of crack-addicted parents has the same chance at a college education as the boy born with a silver spoon in his mouth.  Yeah, right.

This is not even the point folks!  The game is this:
"Distract Jane and Joe Q. Public!"  Smack Joe Q. really hard upside the head with an emotional fish: keep him busy being an emotional wreck so he doesn't see what's happening behind the scenes in his community or his legislature.  Get him interested in passing new laws to protect children, and he'll be so emotionally blinded that he won't be able to think of anything else!  Get him all wrapped up in one, single isolated case that he won't notice the feds prying more and more into personal life through Medicare, Medicaid, Managed Care, Social Security, increased taxation (without representation).  Keep him all tied up running around with this one story for two so that we have time to erode away more and more of his rights.   Hey, look, two kids shot up a school in Columbine, Colo.!  This is a great chance two make him believe how caring we  are and how nasty his neighbors and friends really are!  (Keeps them from forming together as a tight-knit physical community!)  Publish this:  'President Clinton cares about his American numbers. . . er, I mean, people, and passes an executive order saying that All children caught carrying firearms in the schools should be expelled."  Heh, keep them emotionally blind-sided, and they'll think we're loving, caring superheroes!"
Wake up, folks.  When does any school in the US allow children to carry guns, huh?  What do you need an executive order for?  If a kid doesn't get expelled, fire the principle!  The President of the United Stated has nothing to do with your school system!  Remember?  Pay attention, folks!    

Our leaders have told us that everyone deserves the right to standard health care.  If a man is sick, he deserves the right to the same care in New York as in New Mexico.  They have told us that our children deserve the same educational standards being applied across all 50 supposedly sovereign States.  English should be the official language.  There should be a computer with access to the Internet in every home.  Children should be expelled if they carry weapons to school.  The seiðman calmly, but with a twinge of cynicism, asks:  "At what cost?"  For these things, people are expected to willingly hand over their traditional culture, their oral traditions, their cultural heritage, which they do.  Why?  Because they have become convinced that communities are incapable of taking care of themselves--only the Great White Father is displaying concern for the health and welfare of His children.  Wyrdly enough, Mr. Concern-for-my-Well-Being doesn't even know my name, He instead assigns me a number, but I'm not a number!  I have a history.  I have people.  I live in a world where neighbors call me when they hear that I've picked up the flu.  I live in a community which does care whether kids carry guns to school.  I live in a world where the stories of elders are still cherished despite the federal government who is trying it's damnedest to convince me otherwise by redirecting my attention to computers or atrocities taking place in countries I've never been to against people I've never met.

I am a seiðman; I not a blind, rainbow-colored, politically-correct, neo-shaman.  I don't trust a politician of any flavor.  I find politics which try "to tie communities together all across the land" boring, inefficient and not worth my time.  Get it?  I'm not a liberal!  Liberalism interferes with clarity as much as conservatism.  I don't get teary eyed when a great man from some other community dies or is killed unless it affects the luck of my community.  Some consider me amoral, perverse or disgusting when I refuse to jump on the newest humanity-bandwagon.  Geez, what is the bandwagon this month anyway?  Female circumcision?  A Cuban child-refugee?  The spotted owl?  Bosnia?  All a bunch of distractions.  Amorality starts with assigning people numbers instead of names.  That's the way it starts.  Any guesses on the way it ends? Our ancestors were bright about a lot of things: one of them was that the world ends at the property line.  If people keep their own yards clean, there winds up being no dirty yards anywhere and no need for a federal set of laws being passed regarding dirty yards.  The seiðman asks while non-chalantly placing the níðstang:  "Hey, is that your trash in my yard?"

A seiðman should live in a community, a town, in a place where people have names and faces.  He should look to the luck of that community and those people.  He should be a fastidious reader of the Waters flowing out of the Well of Urð rather than of the newest chakra tuning manual published by Llewellyn or (disgusting) of the humanity bandwagon tracts we often try to pass off as newspapers.  He should never confuse morality with "putting on the blinders" that are provided by the media.  Morality should have something to do with reality, at least!

How realistic is this, though?  For communities to start looking to themselves, I mean?  How the Hel should I know?  It's not been done in my short-lifetime of almost 50 yrs. At least, not outside small communities where it worked just fine.  People have been giving away their rights to their homes, livelihoods, and child-rearing to a number-bestowing, amoral government for a long time.  SeiðR might bring an odd type of clarity and a different morality with it, for sure, and the ability to make those 'clear cut decisions' might become slightly feebler at times, but I can see the two men vying for a position behind that curtain.  I've looked and I'm unimpressed.  They are both BS artists, they have my number (I'm sure of it).