Nordic shamanism refers to the pre-Christian trance and magic practices of the Old Norse world, above all seidr, a form of ritual magic and divination most strongly associated with women called völur, and galdr, rune-based chant magic practised by both genders and linked closely to the god Odin. Scandinavia’s conversion to Christianity from around 1000 CE broke the unbroken line of this practice, so what is taught today as Nordic shamanism is a modern revival, built carefully from the Eddas, the sagas and comparative scholarship rather than from a living teacher-to-student chain.
That distinction matters, so I will not blur it. This is reconstruction, done honestly, and that is still a real and worthwhile practice. It is also a distinct tradition from Sámi shamanism, its geographic neighbour, even though the two influenced each other historically. If you came here looking for the Sámi noaidi and the sacred drum, you want the separate article on Sámi shamanism instead.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Seidr | Norse ritual magic and divination, strongly associated with women |
| Völva | The seeress or practitioner of seidr |
| Seiðhjallr | The raised seat a völva sat on to perform seidr |
| Galdr | Chanted rune magic, associated with Odin and more often practised by men |
| Heathenry / Ásatrú | The modern religious movements reviving Norse practice today |
What was seidr, exactly?
Seidr was a form of ritual magic in the Old Norse world used mainly for divination and for seeing into the fate of individuals or a whole community, performed by a practitioner called a völva, a term usually translated as seeress or wise woman. The clearest surviving description comes from Eiríks saga rauða, which describes a völva named Thorbjörg arriving at a farmstead in Greenland, seated on a raised platform called a seiðhjallr, while a specific chant called varðlokkur was sung by someone present to help call in the spirits she needed to see clearly. She then answered questions about the coming season and about individuals in the room.
Seidr was not a soft or safe thing to be associated with in Norse society. The sagas and legal sources treat it with a mixture of respect and real unease, including for men who practised it, since it was coded as women’s work and a man taking it up could invite the serious insult of ergi, a word carrying both magical and sexual shame. That discomfort is itself evidence of how much cultural weight the practice carried.
What is the connection between Odin and shamanic initiation?
One of the more startling things in Norse mythology, for anyone who already knows the broader shamanic pattern, is how closely Odin’s own central ordeal matches shamanic initiation elsewhere in the world. In the Hávamál, Odin describes hanging on the World Tree, Yggdrasil, for nine nights, wounded by his own spear, given neither food nor water, in order to win the knowledge of the runes. That is a death-and-rebirth structure, achieved through deliberate suffering and isolation to gain spiritual knowledge, strikingly close to the initiatory ordeals reported of shamans in Siberia and elsewhere, and scholars of comparative religion, including Mircea Eliade, have pointed to exactly this parallel. Odin is also linked directly to galdr, chanted magic worked through the runes, and to seidr itself, which some sources say he learned from the goddess Freyja.
What is galdr, and how does it differ from seidr?
Galdr is chanted or sung magic worked through runes, used to bind, protect, curse or heal, and it sits on the opposite side of the Norse magical world from seidr in both technique and social coding. Where seidr involved trance, a seeress and often an audience waiting on her words, galdr was closer to a spoken or sung spell cast by the practitioner’s own direct action, and it was practised more openly by men without the same social unease seidr could carry. The two were not entirely separate in practice. Odin himself is associated with both, and a working practitioner in the old sources might use elements of each depending on the need.
How did Christianity end the unbroken practice?
Scandinavia’s conversion to Christianity unfolded over roughly two centuries, from the later 900s through the 1100s, moving fastest where kings had the most to gain politically from aligning with the Christian church and the wider European order it connected them to. Seidr and galdr did not vanish overnight, but they lost royal and social protection, were increasingly recorded by Christian scribes as dangerous or demonic, and the direct teacher-to-student transmission that had carried them eventually broke. What survived did so mostly as folklore, saga material and later folk magic traditions in rural Scandinavia, rather than as a continuous religious practice.
What does the modern revival of Nordic shamanism look like?
From the later twentieth century onward, Heathenry and Ásatrú, modern religious movements reconstructing pre-Christian Norse and Germanic practice, have grown steadily across Scandinavia, Germany, the English-speaking world and beyond, with Iceland formally recognising Ásatrú as a state religion in 1973. Within this wider revival, practitioners have worked to reconstruct seidr specifically as a practice, drawing on the saga descriptions, academic research into Norse religion, and comparative shamanic technique, since the original line of oral transmission cannot be recovered. Done honestly, this looks a great deal like what happens with Celtic reconstructionism: real scholarship, real respect for what is actually documented, and honesty about where documentation runs out and informed reconstruction begins.
How does Nordic shamanism compare with the tradition I teach?
What strikes me most, trained as I am in a living Mongolian and Siberian lineage plus core shamanism, is how much the Odin myth validates the pattern I already know from the inside: initiation through ordeal, isolation and a kind of death that is survived rather than avoided. The practical shape of seidr, a seated practitioner, an audience, a chant that calls in help from outside, also resembles practices I have encountered in other traditions more than it resembles the solitary drum journey I mostly teach. The honest difference is continuity. What I was taught came to me through living teachers who were taught by living teachers. Seidr, as practised today, is a careful and often very skilled rebuilding from texts, which is a different kind of authority, not a lesser one, but a different one. For how this honesty plays out across several European traditions at once, see Shamanism Was Never One Thing, and for the broader distinction between inherited and reconstructed practice, core shamanism versus traditional shamanism. If you want to start with the one universal technique almost every tradition on this site shares, the drum journey, the Elements of Shamanism training is where I teach it from the ground up.
Frequently asked questions about Nordic shamanism
Not quite. Viking-age Norse religion was broader than shamanic practice alone, including worship of the gods, seasonal ritual and ancestor veneration. Seidr and galdr are the specific strands of that wider religion that function as trance and magical practice, and they are what people usually mean by Nordic shamanism.
The sagas and eddic poems describe practices, seidr performed by a völva, galdr chanted through runes, that fit the broader pattern of shamanic trance and magic recognised across many cultures, even though the Norse themselves did not use that word. Whether to call it shamanism outright is partly a modern category question, but the functional similarity is well documented.
Norse sources consistently code seidr as women’s magic, and a man who practised it risked the serious social insult of ergi. The reasons are debated among scholars, but the social coding itself is clearly and repeatedly attested across the sagas and legal texts.
It is an honest reconstruction rather than an unbroken lineage. The original teacher-to-student transmission ended with Scandinavia’s Christianisation roughly a thousand years ago, so modern practitioners rebuild the practice from the Eddas, the sagas and scholarship, which is a legitimate but different kind of authority from a continuous living tradition.
They are separate traditions belonging to different peoples who happened to be geographic neighbours. Nordic shamanism (seidr, galdr) belongs to the Germanic-speaking Norse world and is today a reconstruction. Sámi shamanism belongs to the Sámi, a living indigenous people, and has a damaged but unbroken connection to its own history.
About the author. Carolin Mallmann is a shamanic practitioner and teacher and the founder of One Shamanism. She trained in Mongolian and Siberian lineages and in Core Shamanism with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and teaches practitioners internationally.
Shamanic work supports, but does not replace, medical or psychological treatment.
