What is the Wyrd?

Wyrd is a lovely word.

Perhaps I should just leave this blog at that.  At least I know I would definitely be right; but that would be more of a blag than a blog.

I have to admit, I have so far done less research on this word that I might ordinarily do, for almost anything I would write.  This is partially a sign of me learning to chill out a bit more, but it is also a reflection on how little we understand the word.  Wherever I look, people have the oddest ideas, that are very much based in 21st century distortions of understanding.  Most of my research has been primarily internet based.  I’ve not had so much luck with finding older sources, but according to the internet sources, the older sources don’t actually seem that much clearer about what wyrd is either.

As this is the case, and as I have such a certainty about what it is, my intuition is more likely to hit upon more surprise connections which might otherwise have been poo-pooed by etymologists.  My approach leans towards the more semi-scientific.  I do not like assertions that do not match factual knowledge, but I dislike lack of knowledge being used as an assertion.  In essence if something has a strong apparent connection, I will accept that as a probability, rather than a possibility that cannot be accepted without finding the correct evidence and the correct paper trail.  If the paper trail/evidence is no longer there, then taking that approach would mean that the knowledge doesn’t just become lost; it is literally thrown away, for no better reason than an inability to see how a word might be able to travel a thousand miles, and change its spelling to give it a slightly different meaning.  This is of course something that happens to words all the time, but if the etymologist is unable to see the change happen, then as far as the etymologist cares, it never happened.  The new word is just a coincidence.

So wyrd is an interesting one due to the sparsity of evidence surrounding it, which is probably largely due to the fact that even back in the days its use was common, the ability to understand it, was probably still relatively unusual.

Looking at the Norwegian origin of the word, it seems that the d is actually a thorne, so should be pronounced as a hard ‘th’.  It also seems that the W is not pronounced the modern way, but is instead supposed to be a long ‘oo’ sound, based on the fact that a W is actually a double U.  So it now stops resembling our modern word ‘weird’ quite substantially.

A lot of people will say that weird and wyrd do not have a connection because of that.  I would assert they still definitely do have a connection because wyrd is definitely weird, but you might not realise that if you are not familiar with it.  Meanings that I have seen attached to it are woolly.  We have ‘fate’, ‘chance’, ‘becoming’, ‘turning’, ‘twisting’, ‘happening’, and ‘wort’.  All these words have been connected with it within the webpages I have checked.  Fortunately all of these do connect with my understanding of wyrd, and are pretty good words to be interchangeable with aspects of wyrd, but all of them leave you very much in the dark about what wyrd actually is.  Something that has just occurred to me, which will probably really annoy etymologists is, we are told that God is the word, and the word is God.  Word is surprisingly close to ‘wort’, and wort is connected with wyrd, and this whole field of study is one that surrounds deities, spirits, esoteria, etc.  That seems like the most amazing coincidence, but in probability, there is going to be some linkage somewhere there.  Whether God is connected with ‘wort’ or not, God is what a lot of people consider to be the thing that has the greatest ‘worth’.  Language is very fluid really.

Fate and chance together confuse, because modern folk think of fate as being what the future holds, what is fated to be, the story of our future written down for us to head out on that path.  Chance on the other hand has us thinking that this future could all change from one to another, on the flip of a coin, or a roll of a die.  So if wyrd is related to these words, that is quite a range of meaning.  All the way from all things are decided into the distant future, to whoops, lost that coin toss, better choose a different fate.

The understanding related to becoming, turning, and wort, are all far easier to understand, but they are not given the same focus in defining ‘wyrd’.  With magic being so closely tied to fate and chance, I imagine that in the absence of experience, people just drifted towards fate and chance because they are obviously powerful words in that connection.  There is something much more mundane about becoming and turning.  We become hungry and turn over in bed on a daily basis, so the words have little romance to them.  We rarely feel that fate has determined we should get a sandwich, or that chance has determined we might like it better lying on our right side.  That would seem weird and esoteric.  Fate and chance have that connotation, so they became more readily attached to wyrd, a word that also has the esoteric connotation.

Becoming and turning, are just too ordinary to be used, though they are far more appropriate in my opinion.  The word ‘wort’ kind of muddies the waters even more because it is both esoteric and normal.  Most commonly used by herbalists, and anyone who now studies the plants to which herbalists applied the word.  Wort will generally refer to a healing potential.  One that has some good worth, as that word seems to have also grown from the same root.

Wyrd can certainly be healing as far as the practitioner of the esoteric arts is concerned.  The point at which its healing potential occurs, is at the point of becoming or happening, when the wyrd wakes up, so to say; when the nature of the world turns, and twists to reveal something new.  It is not fate or chance, because when it does wake up, it can be used to adjust fate and chance.  It can shape them.

Now this sounds more like the kind of thing that we expect when we hear wyrd.  That already is beginning to sound weird too, so that brings those two words closer together; much to my satisfaction.

If you have read this far, then you probably have more than a passing interest in magic, otherwise you may have already unsubscribed from the blog because I’ve obviously gone bonkers.  My semi-scientific approach would like to assert that it largely considers magic to be a form of strategic planning.  Rather than actually construct a plan, the magician would favour instead focussing on the desired outcome.  When the wyrd is in the correct condition, then the magician’s world becomes more flexible, and that enables the possibility of laying down a new path that will lead to that outcome.

The real difference between a magician and a standard strategic manager, is that the magician does not know what the steps will be that lead to the fulfillment of the plan.  They know the desired result, and they are forcing that result into place, with the understanding that the necessary steps will slide into place as they are needed, just through chance.  Naturally a simple hedgewitch would clearly have difficulties in achieving world domination using this technique, but Donald Trump on the other hand, who already seems to have many of the skills and opportunities available, would probably find it very beneficial in promoting a positive mindset in going about such an endeavour.  As a result, a Donald Trump with minimal magical ability, could go a lot further than a relatively powerful witch who does not happen to be in the right position, with the right contacts, and the right knowledge, and experience.  Unless that witch was to start at a really early age anyway.

I consider the largest part of magic to be psychological, and related to NLP.  There are obviously going to be aspects that are a lot deeper and a lot more esoteric, but that is simply a side effect of having only had a couple of centuries to build up our scientific knowledge.  It is currently only about a decade since all doubt was wiped out that trees are able to communicate with each other.  We still have a lot to learn in science, and as we do, a lot more esoteric stuff will seem relatively ordinary.

Unfortunately ordinary is not weird, and when things are not weird, it does seem to be more difficult to summon the phenomenon of wyrd.  In order to summon it, we need to be able to confuse ourselves, to push our point of view, our understanding of the world, our perspective to a point where we are not sure how the world works.  We need to almost deliberately confuse ourselves to enter the state of mind where it is apparent.  Hence the use of repetitive ritual, strange sounds, macabre surroundings, twilight, candles.  In order to reach the state of mind where we can shut down our preconceptions about our destiny, and realise that really, anything could happen in the next fifty years, we just need to shake away our reliance and faith on what we consider to be real.

Once our reliance and faith in what is real has been shaken off we find ourselves in a situation we have been in before, when the world was our oyster, and literally anything could happen with the rest of our lives.  We have managed to adopt part of the mindset we had in the highchair as babies.  If you want to know what that mindset is, just look in the eyes of a newborn.  They have not got a clue what is going on.  Luckily we still have some rough idea, unless we have entered the state of mind by using some powerful hallucinogens anyway.

The baby looks at the world with eyes of amazement.  There are a few built in mechanisms at work.  Babies like faces for instance.  That is built in, which is handy for certain meditation techniques.  They have no relative scale on which to judge faces though.  All faces are good.  Only later do some faces get recognised as looking unusual compared to the standard run of faces that generally come past, the baby will gradually learn to become less comfortable with those faces.  Likewise, it will also begin to recognise negative emotion attached to faces, and start to develop the narrow bandwidth of experience in which it feels comfortable.  At first though, it is just happy, and it likes faces.

The central aspect of the infant mind that the magician wishes to capture is the flexibility.  At that point, before an infant can even see nasty faces as a negative, its future interpretation and relationship with the world is flexible.  If you were to give it nothing but nasty faces, it would learn that nasty faces are normal, and it would be happiest in a world full of nasty faces.  It would consider all those with smooth skin, without hooked noses, and jagged teeth to be odd looking, and probably a bit scary because of it.

As an adult, our natures are very solidly formed, our destinies are to a degree writ before us, because we have been shaped into  a particular shape to fit into the world we have entered.  The magician seeks to regain the state of flexibility that allows other worlds to be constructed into which they might be able to travel.

Usually those worlds are pretty much the same as this one, except they might have an additional favourable result for a job interview, or perhaps a chest of treasure found in a cave, whatever the subject of the spell is.  If the magician were to be able to lay down a future into a radically different world, the magician bears the risk of having his neural pathways drastically rewritten to enable him to be a part of that world, but that is a deeper issue related to beliefs in karma.

More directly to the understanding of the meaning of wyrd.  When the wyrd is stirred up, that is when this kind of alteration of the world becomes possible.  All it is likely to be is just a slight reshuffling of chance, the reordering of a few minor details, that will lead to positive changes later.  In more mundane terms it connects strongly with NLP, though I do not rule out that things may get a lot more weird in the minds of someone who has immense control over their ability to exert immense control over their perspective and cognition.

When what I consider to be wyrd rises, there is a perceptible shift in perception.  Feelings obviously become different because feelings are very flexible, they are perhaps an early warning system for things our perceptions have identified, but that they consider might not necessarily be something that we need waste conscious effort dealing with.  A little alert system.  So in situations of high wyrd, feelings do become extreme, and this may make it difficult for people to get there, as they may feel intense fear, or intense happiness on the way, it can all get a bit topsy turvy.

Once the state of mind hits though, the flexibility of perception becomes obvious.  Nothing is quite how it was.  It becomes more fluid.  Our vision enters a similar state to that of the infant before it has decided that nasty faces are bad.  Once an infant decides nasty faces are bad, its emotions will adjust to make sure it remembers that.  Depending upon how bad it thinks those faces are, it will exaggerate features and make them seem even more threatening, just to make sure the conscious mind gets the message.  In the state of wyrd, these exaggerations become adjustable, that matching of visual image to archetypal fear can be changed.  All our preconceptions, and beliefs that have become ingrained throughout our life, are for that short period more easily shaken out of their lazy, rigid, structures.  This give us the opportunity to lay down new rules for how we view the world.  Incidentally if we consciously shake off the perception that any faces are bad, we do begin to widen our range of acceptability for faces, and we do open up a greater ability to enter different alternative environments in greater comfort.

Unfortunately, unlike the infant who has a new brain, that is primed and ready for programming, adults are technically set into the best pattern for enabling their minds to exist in the particular life they have adopted.  Adults also do not have the easy flexibility.  It may be that second childhood could return some of this flexibility, but until then, we need to work very hard to make the slightest changes to the way we perceive and fit in with the world.  The only way we can do that is by throwing our minds far out of their comfort zones, into areas where they need to start becoming flexible again in order to find explanations as to what the hell is going on, why is everything so weird, do we need to construct some kind of novel solution to regain our normal bandwidth of experience.

My belief is that when the mind is that weirded out that new connections become a necessity, that is the point we can say we are stepping across the boundaries from the mundane, into the wyrd.  When it happens it is noticeable.  Visual perception, as it becomes less certain, starts to billow.  As though everything is kind of amorphous.  An awareness of the details that we usually filter out starts to increase as well.  This lends an extra air of weirdness and can amaze our minds enough to send them a little deeper.

As we do go into such states of mind, our neural pathways do rewire to allow us to see these details without being quite so freaked out.  As this happens the billowing and amorphous nature of the perceptions settles down, and the extra awareness can become assimilated into our normal perceptions.  For me, this is most noticeable with land contours.  For four decades I never really realised how little I noticed land contours.  After adjusting my perceptions to accept a little more of the world around me, land contour are now a permanent new feature.  Before, I would look at a field and think, ‘this is a flat field, and there is a hill on one side’.  Now I see dips, bumps, waves, a huge complexity of slopes and shapes, all across the field.  As I am a painter, this is hugely beneficial.  I imagine if I was a golfer it would also seriously raise my putting ability.

In conclusion, I would say that we all have a narrow band of awareness, because our minds, thanks to evolution, like to save any extra additional energy they can get, just in case.  This is set early in life, according to the kind of life we lead, because those are obviously the perceptions we need for that life.  If we want to change our lives, then it is a necessity to change our understandings and perceptions, in order to gain the greatest advantages in that new life.  I believe the wyrd to represent that state of mind where this becomes possible.  The wyrd is essentially the way to turn back to the state of growth, and learning that we could make use of in our childhoods, to enable us to become all those amazing things we are told are our possible destinies.  It is a reset method, which has limitations due to deeply ingrained neural pathways, but can be used to increase our awareness, and raise our abilities, and set new intentions for future development.  Nothing to do with the wyrd has any necessity to be supernatural, it is just a process of shifting our state of mind into the state it needs to be in order to make change to our lives most effectively.

Whether there are any kinds of non psychological effects that can be achieved by controlling and guiding the development of our perceptions and cognition is subject matter for an entirely different blog.  For the purposes of this particular post, I stand by my belief, that despite the esoteric spelling and cultural baggage, wyrd is best described as being the growth state of an infant’s mind, reawakened in an adult mind.  What the adult does with that ability could fill books.