Katie Gerrard - Seidr: The Gate Is Open

The Gate is Open has been many long years in preparation. Almost from the moment I started working with the High Seat Rite I had a feeling that this book was calling to me to write it. Over a decade later and through many different formats and rewrites, here it is. I feel I should add an apology here to those who have been waiting years to either publish or read it! The first time I saw the word seidr being used was a brief mention in Kveldulf Gundarssons Teutonic Religion . and Jan Fries book Seidways had been published the year before, it seemed impossible to find out anything more about the contemporary use of the word. At that point, Jan Fries book was almost impossible to locate. Whether it was the elusiveness of the term that excited me, or whether it was the concept of a Northern Tradition female centred tradition, the desire to find out more was awakened in me, and my journey was to begin.

As 1997 progressed, more and more information began to become available. Diana Paxsons article The Return of the Volva was published in 2001. Throughout these years, I was unable to meet anyone that was already working with seidr. Instead I turned to every primary and secondary source on seidr that was available to me and pieced together rites. These have developed over the years and been added to as more and more people have been kind enough to allow me to share my experiences with them and make suggestions.

The overriding purpose of The Gate is Open is to share my experiences with a wider audience. These rites and rituals have been developed very much as part of the wider pagan community, whether that has been at conferences, private events, or with the small pagan groups that I have been a part of over the years. Seidr by its very nature is difficult to define, partly because we dont have a large amount of information about the seidr of the past, but also because in modern practice the word is used to describe so many different things. Due to this, The Gate is Open is not a definitive guide to the practice, merely one persons work.

The Gate is Open is designed predominantly as a practical book for those who want to learn from and experience my path to the Seer. Whether you have been involved in shamanic and spiritual religions for many years, or are just starting out, and whether you work individually or as part of a group, you will hopefully find that this book will both serve as a guide to piecing together your own spiritual practice, and will give you a collection of rites and ideas that are being successfully worked by others.

Although this is a practical book, much of it is taken up with information I have found through researching the subjects along the way. This information is included to ensure that my thought processes and the sources I have used are clearly identifiable to my readers who want to find out more information or who want to make sure that they understand where different ideas have come from. Although this veers the format slightly into the academic and ethnographic, the reader is encouraged to be under no illusions to the purpose of the book, which is for a modern pagan practitioner to share with other modern pagan practitioners. To give simply the rites would be to take away from the journey that birthed them and would deprive the reader of the ability to decide for themselves the validity of the primary and secondary sources that went into their creation. This is a spiritual journey laid bare for an audience who are either already treading a similar path or are looking for guidance in order to follow a well trodden path to a similar end point. In anthropological terms, I have not gone native , for I have never been anything but native . I am so native that I will never be able to produce a document about my spiritual work that stands up to rigorous academic scrutiny, therefore I ask you, as a reader, to understand this and to see The Gate is Open for what it is, an account by a practitioner sharing their knowledge. Firstly, I am a practitioner, secondly a guide and a teacher, thirdly a folklorist and historian, and lastly, an anthropologist.