Seidr: The Norse Shamanic Practice of the Volva

By Thalira Wisdom | Updated March 2026

What Seidr Was and Was Not

The Old Norse word seiðr has resisted straightforward translation for over a century of scholarship. It is usually rendered as "magic" but this flattens a concept of considerable precision. Neil Price, in his foundational study The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia (2002, revised 2019), argues that seidr is best understood as a technology for working with fate: perceiving its current configuration, reading its trajectories, and in some cases, influencing the way its threads interweave.

This is a cosmologically specific claim. In Norse thought, fate (Old Norse: wyrd or urðr) is not merely the sum of causal events but a literal fabric, woven by the Norns at the well of Urd beneath Yggdrasil. Every being's life is a thread in this fabric. The threads are set but not absolutely fixed: they have direction, tendency, and susceptibility to influence. Seidr is the practice of learning to perceive the fabric and, with sufficient skill, to work within it.

Seidr was thus not sorcery in the sense of imposing a personal will on the world. It was something more like sophisticated cosmological surgery: reading the structure of reality at a level below ordinary perception and acting from within that structure rather than against it. The völva did not create fate. She became, temporarily, a conscious participant in the process by which fate was being woven.

The Völva: Who She Was

The völva was a travelling specialist. Unlike the domestic magic practiced within households (sometimes called galdr, spoken or sung spells), seidr required a specialist with extensive training, and that specialist moved from community to community rather than being permanently resident in one place. This mobility is itself significant: the völva occupied a liminal social position, belonging fully to no single household or community, and therefore able to perceive connections and trajectories that those too deeply embedded in a single social world could not.

The sagas give us several detailed portraits of völur. They are typically older women, though not always. They arrive with their own distinctive costume and equipment: a staff (the seiðstafr or gandr), specific garments (often blue, a colour associated with magic and the liminal in Norse culture), a hood, and sometimes specific items of jewellery including animal skins and ornaments. They are received with ceremony: given a high seat, fed specific foods, treated with a combination of respect and apprehension that accurately reflects their social position as powerful but uncanny.

The payment for a völva's services is not trivial in the sagas. Thorbjorg, the völva in Eirik the Red's Saga, is fed a dish of goat's milk and animal hearts. She is seated on a cushion stuffed with hen feathers. The community gathers to sing for her. All of this has a specific purpose: her arrival, her accommodation, her feeding, and the singing that attends her trance are all part of the ritual technology, not just hospitality.

The Ritual in Eirik the Red's Saga

The single most detailed surviving description of a seidr ritual appears in Eiríks saga rauða (Eirik the Red's Saga), chapters 3-4. A famine has afflicted the Norse settlements in Greenland. A völva named Thorbjorg (the "little prophetess") arrives at the farmstead of Herjolf. Her costume is described with extraordinary specificity: a blue-black cloak with straps set with stones all the way to the hem, a necklace of glass beads, a black lambskin hood lined with white cat fur, gloves of catskin with the fur on the inside, calf-leather shoes with long laces tipped with brass, and a staff with a brass-mounted knob set with stones.

She is seated on a high platform (a seiðhjallr) on a cushion of hen feathers. She is fed a specific meal. The following morning, she calls for women who know the vardlokkur (spirit-calling songs). Only one woman present knows them: a young Christian woman named Gudrid who had learned them from her foster-mother and is reluctant to use pagan magic. She is persuaded. She sings.

Price notes that the vardlokkur must have been sufficiently powerful to draw spirits to the ritual space, because Thorbjorg then provides detailed prophecies for all who ask. The quality of her trance is not described directly, but the change in her demeanour before and after the singing implies a distinct altered state. After giving her prophecies, she departs. The famine ends. The practical outcome is presented as straightforwardly as that.

Archaeological Evidence

The most significant contribution of recent decades to our understanding of seidr has come from archaeology rather than literary study. Neil Price's systematic analysis of Viking Age graves has identified approximately forty graves of probable völur across Scandinavia, and the concentration and consistency of their grave goods is striking.

The defining artefact is the staff: an iron rod, typically 60-150 cm long, sometimes decorated with bronze mounts or carved with geometric patterns. These staffs appear in the same graves as other distinctive items: unusually rich collections of exotic goods (imported jewellery, items from distant regions), animal materials in unusual combinations, and most significantly, seeds of Hyoscyamus niger (henbane), a potent hallucinogen known to induce dissociative states and visual hallucinations at controlled doses. In several graves, the henbane seeds were found in small pouches or containers near the body's hands, in positions suggesting intentional preparation for use.

The Oseberg ship burial in Norway (c. 834 CE), one of the richest Viking Age burials ever excavated, contained two elderly women. One of them, identified by her unusual goods and physical positioning as potentially a ritual specialist, was accompanied by a carved wooden staff. The grave also contained a small cannabis bag, a "witch's" pouch with seeds of henbane, and an extraordinary range of exotic items from across the Viking world.

Price's conclusion: the völva was not a literary fantasy but a real, historically documented social role, confirmed by material evidence that matches literary descriptions with remarkable precision. The staffs, the hallucinogens, the exotic goods, the high-status burials: the physical evidence and the textual evidence converge.

Odin, Freyja, and the Masculine Taboo

The mythology is explicit about seidr's origins and its gender politics. Freyja is the primary goddess of seidr in the Norse pantheon, and she taught it to Odin. This transmission is not incidental. It establishes seidr as belonging, in its deepest nature, to the Vanir tradition (the older gods of fertility, nature, and magic, distinct from the warrior Aesir), and specifically to its most powerful feminine expression.

Odin's learning of seidr from Freyja is told in the Ynglinga Saga (Snorri Sturluson, c. 1230), where it appears alongside his mastery of other shamanic arts: the use of runes, shape-shifting, animal-riding, and the ability to enter a deathlike sleep and send his consciousness elsewhere while his body lay inert. Snorri describes these abilities with matter-of-fact directness: Odin could enter trance, travel to other worlds in spirit form, and return with knowledge unavailable to ordinary consciousness.

What makes Odin's relationship to seidr theologically significant is precisely its transgression. Odin is the king of the Aesir, the warrior god, the Allfather. By practicing seidr, he violated the fundamental gendered structure of Norse magical practice. He did it anyway because he understood that wisdom has no gender allegiance. The magic that could read fate at its deepest level was women's magic, and if he wanted access to the deepest level of fate, he had to endure the consequences of crossing that line.

Ergi: The Cost of Knowledge

In Lokasenna (The Flyting of Loki), preserved in the Poetic Edda, Loki systematically attacks each of the gods with their most shameful secrets. When he reaches Odin, the accusation is: "You beat the drum on Samsey, and you practiced seidr as witches do; in the likeness of a wizard you traveled over the world, and that I thought the hallmark of a pervert." (Lokasenna 24, trans. Larrington)

The word Loki uses is ergi: the noun form of argr, meaning one who takes a receptive role that is culturally feminine. In Old Norse society, this was not primarily a sexual insult (though it had sexual dimensions) but a cosmological one: it accused a man of not maintaining the proper direction of force in the world. A warrior's magic (galdr, runic work) was active and projective. Seidr was receptive and yielding. Practicing it as a man meant crossing a fundamental ontological boundary.

Odin does not deny the accusation in Lokasenna. He deflects it, noting that Loki also has participated in unmanning acts. This is not a denial but a recontextualisation: everyone has their transgressions; his is knowledge-seeking. The exchange reveals something profound about Odin's character. He is the god who will give up everything, including social honour and cosmological propriety, to know what can only be known by going where he is not supposed to go.

Seidr and the Norns: Reading the Web of Fate

The Norns (Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld) sit at the well of Urðr beneath Yggdrasil and weave the fates of all beings. Their names mean, approximately, What Has Become, What Is Becoming, and What Shall Be. The three temporal modes of existence are held simultaneously in their weaving. Nothing in the Norse universe is outside their fabric.

The völva's seidr connected her to this weaving. Her trance was a form of conscious entry into the fabric of fate: she aligned her perception with the Norns' perspective, allowing her to see the past, present, and possible future configurations of specific threads. She could not override what the Norns had determined; she could perceive and report it.

The most famous völva in the entire mythological tradition is the unnamed seeress of Völuspá (The Seeress's Prophecy), the first and most important poem in the Poetic Edda. She has been raised from the dead by Odin specifically to tell him the history of the world from its beginning to its end, including the events of Ragnarok that Odin most fears. Her knowledge encompasses all of time. Her trance has given her access to the Norns' complete weaving. This is the völva's power at its apex: not merely reading a community's immediate fate but perceiving the fate of all existence.

Three Misconceptions About Seidr

What Seidr Was Used For

Neil Price's systematic survey of seidr references across the sagas and Eddic poetry produces a comprehensive picture of its applications. The range is striking: this is not a narrow divinatory practice but a full-spectrum technology for working with the non-visible dimensions of reality.

Divination and clairvoyance were the public face: the völva's ability to answer questions about the present and future state of individuals and communities. Weather working was critically important in a maritime and agricultural culture: the ability to call or restrain wind and fog had obvious strategic and survival value. Healing involved diagnosing the spiritual dimensions of illness (what spirit or disruption in the fate-web had produced the physical symptom) and then addressing those dimensions directly.

The more aggressive applications (binding enemies, sending harmful magic, causing madness or death) also appear in the sources, particularly in the family sagas where seidr is sometimes used in political and personal conflicts. Price distinguishes between "socially sanctioned" seidr (divination, healing, weather work for community benefit) and "unsanctioned" seidr (private harm magic), though the sources suggest the boundary was contextual rather than absolute.

Seidr as Shamanism: The Scholarly Case

The question of whether seidr constitutes "shamanism" in the technical anthropological sense has occupied scholars since Åke Hultkrantz raised it in the 1970s. The debate hinges on Mircea Eliade's definition of shamanism in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951): a complex of practices centred on the practitioner's controlled trance, soul-flight to other worlds, communication with spirits, and return with knowledge or power for the community.

By this definition, seidr is shamanic. The völva enters a controlled trance (through the vardlokkur singing, through her costume and equipment, possibly through hallucinogenic preparation). She projects her consciousness into other dimensions (the spirit world, the web of fate). She communicates with non-human beings. She returns with information that serves her community. The parallels with documented Siberian, Central Asian, and Sami shamanic practices are precise enough that scholars including Price, Hilda Ellis Davidson, and Clive Tolley treat the comparison as more than metaphorical.

The Sami (indigenous inhabitants of northern Scandinavia) practiced their own shamanic tradition involving the noaidi and the joik (spirit songs), and had extensive contact with Norse peoples throughout the Viking Age. Price argues that some features of seidr, particularly the staff-based trance and the spirit-journey to retrieve information, reflect direct influence from or parallel development with Sami shamanic practice.

The Spiritual Meaning of Seidr

Seidr's deepest spiritual teaching is about the nature of fate and the relationship between individual consciousness and the cosmic patterns within which it exists. The Norse cosmological understanding is that fate is real, structured, and perceptible to those who develop the capacity to perceive it. The völva's trance was a technology for developing exactly that capacity.

This is not determinism in the modern sense. The web of fate contains trajectories and tendencies; it is not a rigid predetermined script. The völva does not see a fixed future but the current configuration of forces and where they are tending. Her prophecy is a reading of the present more than a prediction of the future: she sees what is already in motion and speaks its likely conclusion. When Thorbjorg prophesies the end of the Greenland famine, she is reading forces that are already moving, not imposing her will on an open future.

The practice teaches that consciousness has dimensions ordinarily inaccessible to waking perception. The trance is not a retreat from reality but an advancement into it: a move toward a level of reality more fundamental than the social surface. The völva in trance perceives more, not less. Her closed eyes see further than open ones.

This understanding connects directly to the Hermetic tradition's teaching about levels of mind. The Corpus Hermeticum's Nous (the divine Mind) perceives reality at a level that ordinary intellect cannot access. The völva's trance is the Norse functional equivalent of Hermetic Nous-perception: a mode of consciousness that is receptive rather than projective, that aligns with the structure of reality rather than imposing on it, and that returns knowledge unavailable to the ordinary waking state.

The Hermetic Synthesis course at Thalira explores the convergence between Norse seidr and the Hermetic tradition's methods for accessing deeper levels of consciousness. Both traditions understood that ordinary waking awareness is not the summit of human cognitive capacity but merely the most socially available level. The völva's trance and the Hermetic philosopher's contemplative practice are different roads to the same territory: a mode of consciousness that perceives the structure of reality rather than merely its surface.