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Norse religious worship is the traditional religious rituals practiced by Norse pagans in Scandinavia in pre-Christian times. Norse religion was a folk religion (as opposed to an organized religion), and its main purpose was the survival and regeneration of society. Therefore, the faith was decentralized and tied to the village and the family ...
In many cases these magical practitioners would have had assistants to aid them in their rituals. In pre-Christian Norse mythology , seiðr was associated with both the god Óðinn , a deity who was simultaneously responsible for war, poetry and sorcery, and the goddess Freyja , a member of the Vanir who was believed to have taught the practice ...
There has long been an academic debate on whether the seeresses' practice should be regarded as shamanism. However, this does not pertain to the concept of shamanism in a wider definition (see e.g. the definitions of the OED), but rather to what degree similarities can be found between what is preserved about them in Old Norse literature and the shamanism of northern Eurasia in a more ...
Old Norse sources also describe rituals for adoption (the Norwegian Gulaþing Law directs the adoptive father, followed by the adoptive child, then all other relatives, to step in turn into a specially made leather shoe) and blood brotherhood (a ritual standing on the bare earth under a specially cut strip of grass, called a jarðarmen).
A female ritual specialist named Gambara appears in Paul the Deacon (8th century). [316] A gap in the historical record occurs until the North Germanic record began over a millennium later, when the Old Norse sagas frequently mention female ritual specialists among the North Germanic peoples, both in the form of priestesses and diviners. [317]
The third chapter is devoted to an examination of the literary and archaeological evidence for Seiðr practices in Norse society. Price starts with an examination of the god Óðinn, noting his literary associations with sorcery and shamanism, as well as identifying the shamanic and magical associations of those supernatural beings that served ...
Huginn and Muninn's role as Odin's messengers has been linked to shamanic practices, the Norse raven banner, general raven symbolism among the Germanic peoples, and the Norse concepts of the fylgja and the hamingja.
Scholarly theories have been proposed regarding Sleipnir's potential connection to shamanic practices among the Norse pagans. In modern times, Sleipnir appears in Icelandic folklore as the creator of Ásbyrgi, in works of art, literature, software, and in the names of ships.