Seid is a collective name for various shamanic practices of the ancient peoples of the north, mainly Scandinavians. During the heyday of the Viking civilization, women were more often engaged in seid due to the fact that men did not like the moment of "mastering" the spirits of the participants in the ritual - proud northern men always wanted to control everything on their own. However, although in the mythology of the Scandinavians, the goddess of war and love Freya was the main giant in conducting seida, the all-father Odin also possessed the seida technique. There is an opinion that among the peoples of the north the Finns most often resorted to seids and, accordingly, achieved certain heights in this, possibly because they often used female choirs in their rituals. In the modern world, the revival of seida is gaining popularity and not only in the regions of northern Europe. How do you become a modern Scandinavian shaman?
The first and most basic thing that a beginner seid-master needs to develop in himself is the ability to visualize. That is, the ability to mentally imagine everything you want. Various things, familiar and unfamiliar people, wide open spaces, forests and rivers - what has already been seen or what the imagination will draw. But visual sensation alone is not enough - it is necessary for the shaman to be able to fully experience what he has imagined - to hear, touch, smell. Of course, such total immersion comes with the experience of constant practice.
The first step to achieving such an effect is to try to maximize all your feelings in reality, that is, to feel things and places that have long been familiar to you, but in a completely new way, on a different level. Next, give the object drawn by the imagination a certain emotion or endow it with some unusual force and thereby make it transform. You can only change the appearance of the object (make a chest of drawers out of squirrel) or go further and give free rein to your imagination: a lop-eared dolphin riding a unicycle; water pouring from one container to another - like sand with the sound of driving foam on glass; steel-colored carrots flavored with potatoes in honey, etc. With these exercises, you can expand the range of visualization possibilities and learn to "draw" objects faster and empower them.
The most common technique of northern shamanism is the so-called travel. This is a kind of transition from our world to the worlds of other beings (as was the case with the Scandinavians with their travels on the World Tree Yggdrasil), or an opportunity to enter your own body and look at yourself from the inside.
To make such a journey, certain conditions must be created. A surface that is hard enough to fit on it, lying at full height, complete calmness and tranquility, as well as any object or musical instrument with which you can beat the beat. For quieter travels, a metronome is well suited, but if you want to saturate the rite with various colors, then the beat will have to be changed - for which any tambourine or drum will do. Modern conditions allow us to cheat a little and record the beat of a drum that changes the rhythm in certain places.
In order to successfully carry out the transition from our familiar world to some other world, the seid-master needs to visualize a certain passage between the two worlds - it can be a cave, a hole or a tunnel, as a more modern version.
Of course, the success or failure of such a journey entirely depends on the shaman - on his ability to visualize, relax, on the correctly selected rhythm during the ritual or smooth transitions from one rhythm to another. But as they say, there would be a desire …