ÅRSGÅNG: "OMEN WALK FOR THE YEAR TO COME"!

An Old Norse form of divination

I invite you all to perform an Omen Walk (or twelve separate omen walks) to collect pointers on what the imminent year 2025 will bring you personally and us collectively!

Yuletide is the period when the light returns. The Winter Solstice used to mark the beginning of the New Year in Scandinavia. This shifted after the advent of Christianity, when the church fathers superimposed Church Feasts on the existing calendar, which featured more ancient heathen festivals.

As the year 2025 dawns, we are naturally curious about what this new year will bring: blessings or misfortune, crises or opportunities? (Or most likely a mix of both?)

Årsgång or Omen Walk

The Årsgång or Omen Walk (literally The Year's Walk or Walk of the Year) was generally performed on either Christmas Day or New Year's Day, but this is not written in stone.

Other good days are the winter solstice, the summer solstice, New Year's Day and the Feast Day of St. Lucia (December 13th). An Omen Walk can also be performed on days of personal importance, such as birthdays, your wedding anniversary, the anniversary of the death of a loved one (or a divorce), the date of the publication of your first book - and so forth.Any day that holds strong personal significance for you is a good day for Årsgång!

In Scandinavia the most powerful (and holy) day of the week used to be Thursday (literally Thor's Day, named for Norse god Thor). This was the day when the þing (“Thing”, the letter þ is pronounced like an unvoiced "th" or θ) was held, so the ancestors and deities arrived to assist with the meting out of justice and passing of verdicts.

The Thing (þing in Old Norse and Icelandic, nothing to do with the English word for an object!) was the governing assembly of an early Germanic society, made up of the free people of the community presided over by law-speakers.

Time of Day

The most powerful time to perform Årsgång is just before sunrise (at daybreak), or during the hour of sunset (my personal favourite). Here in Scandinavia, around the time of the Winter Solstice at our Forest House, that means around 2. 30 pm in the afternoon (but it obviously depends on how far North you are). In Arctic Sweden the sun does not rise at all, at this time of year, so people there have to be a bit more creative and use other markers!

The Swedish author Johannes Bjorn Gårdbäck provides the rules of engagement for Årsgång (in his wonderful book Trolldom: Spells and Methods of the Norse Magic Tradition):

Do not speak to anyone along the way
Do not turn around once you leave the place of spådom [divination, prophecy, prediction]
Do not talk to anyone about this until you have “slept on it”!

Other authors and experts have written about their own versions and interpretations of Årsgång. Run a Google search on the word and a fair amount of material will come up!

Årsgång is a useful at any time there is a need for divination or a "reading of the signs" (a process called “ta tydor” in Swedish).

In the years when my main professional focus was on offering one-to-one shamanic healing sessions I would use the walk back from the school my children attended (after dropping them off) into my daily omen walk, with a special focus on receiving information for the session I was about to do. It never failed! It often provided spectacular insights as to what a specific client needed on that specific day.

In its most basic form you need to set out on a walk alone and in silence (having someone with you who wants to chat is not helpful!) Before you even take one step, take some deep breaths, focus properly, and set a strong intention that you wish to receive information on a specific subject or question. (Obviously for a new year this is a request for essential pointers for the year to come - and how to prepare yourself for what this brand new year might bring).

Once you start your walk, everything is information! From the number plates of cars, to snatches of conversation overheard, the formation on twigs on the pavement (inviting spontaneous rune readings, for the rune magicians among you!) and so forth. The question is always: what does do those signs mean to you? Årsgång is a very personal practice.

You will interpret certain signs differently from me. Say you pass a traffic jam on your route. This could be interpreted as “I am completely stuck” (negative) or “if I don’t slow down, something or someone is going to force me to slow down. I had better do it voluntarily!” (A more positive take). I did many years of Omen Walks in an inner city environment (London UK)! They are not just a “thing” for an unspoilt rural setting. You can as easily perform them in Central London or on Manhattan!

Of course Årsgång in the countryside is a more quiet affair, and you will see different things: how is cattle behaving? What are the sheep or horses doing? How are they positioning themselves in a field? (You could draw some spontaneous systemic constellations type conclusions from that - assuming you have training in family constellations work!)

Pay attention to clouds, to trees (including fallen trees and twigs), wild animals crossing your path, birds and bird calls, feathers found etc. Pay attention especially to odd occurrences or striking coincidences. In London I once found a cluster of chicken bones by my garden gate. Someone had abandoned a take-away and, apparently, those bones had been picked clean by small wild animals. For me that omen pointed at an intense period of working with the Bone Mother).

If you encounter a neighbour or person from your village (or town/city), try not to see them as "themselves" (i.e. the person you know) but view their appearance and behaviour as a clue for you instead: what are they doing, saying, wearing? How are they moving? What are they carrying? What is the message or symbolism in that? If you meet your neighbour and he or she is carrying a large pile of firewood, maybe you need to stock up or prepare for severe winter weather? Then again, perhaps the information is symbolic and relates to the state of affairs between you and your significant other (you need to stoke or rekindle the fire between you, and so forth).

Here is a very practical example: in London someone once parked a van in front of our house, literally minutes before a client arrived. The van sported a large logo saying “CACTUS”. I asked the client about the issue she had brought to our session. Her reply was: “I want to work on my complete lack of personal boundaries”. Wow!!

Bring a notepad (and/or sketchbook) as many of these communications from spirit can be very fleeting and ephemeral (hard to remember later, however striking or significant they were at the time!)

Return home and write up your notes in full! Then keep those notes at hand as the year starts unfolding. You may want to collect twelve Omens, one for every month of the year. An equally valid way of doing this is to perform an Omen Walk for 12 consecutive days (1 - 12 January) and collect one significant omen a day, where January 1st represents the first month (January 2025), January 2nd the second month (February 2025) and so forth.

Below you will find a fascinating (if slightly frightening!) passage from the USC Digital Folklore Archives:

"The informant heard this particularly sinister and magical ritual from a Swedish friend from Malmö when she was studying abroad a few years ago in Europe.

The pseudo-pagan ritual [not my words IA!] of Årsgång, which, when translated to English, means Year Walk, was meant to reveal visions of the future to a person willing to perform the walk. In order to perform the ritual, the walker would have to make several sacrifices and meet multiple requirements. The first requirement was that the ritual be performed on a certain night, most often Christmas or New Years’ Eve, sometimes at the winter solstice, but always at midnight. For an entire day before taking the Year Walk, the walker must sit inside a dark room, and is not allowed to eat or speak. This was meant to disconnect the walker from the physical world, and open them up to the spiritual world before the ritual. The walker was to emerge from the room and walk counter-clockwise around the building. The walker would then go up to the door of the church and blow into the keyhole, renouncing their faith temporarily. This would fully open the walker up to the world of the spirits and visions of the future, but it also invited great danger. Year Walking was full of risks.

One could expect to encounter many terrifying Swedish entities, such as the brook-horse (bäckahäst) and the huldra. The brook-horse took the shape of a normal horse, and it would invite children to ride on its back. Each time a child mounted the brook-horse, its back would lengthen to accommodate yet another rider. When the horse felt it had enough riders, it would jump into a body of water, drowning all of its riders and taking their souls for its own. The huldra was a deceptively beautiful female entity, who often had bark and treelike features growing on her back instead of skin. Said to be the forest guardians, they would lure people to their homes to either marry them or kill them. Either way, the victim would be lost forever.

The walker’s ultimate goal was to look into the windows of the church (or to reach the town cemetery, depending on the locale) in order to receive visions of the future. If the walker encountered any of the Swedish entities, including the two mentioned above, the walker could escape with his or her life if he or she was able to resist the entity’s temptation. Visions of the year to come would appear in the cemetery or in the windows of the church, and the things the walker saw would symbolize the events to come that year. The Year Walk would end once the walker made it back to the church to reclaim his or her faith.

Årsgång was more commonly performed centuries ago, when magical beliefs ran much deeper in Scandinavia. The ritual was a feared one; not all walkers returned with their lives, and others went insane upon returning from the walk. Of course, the steps of Year Walking vary, as it’s a very localized ritual, mostly passed down by word of mouth."

In his doctoral dissertation on magic in Swedish black art books, Thomas K. Johnson, Ph.D. briefly discusses the ritual of Årsgång. Click on the link to access the free PDF version online.

Enjoy your Årsgång and pitch it just right! As you become more experienced you might be ready for the extra instructions that make the experience more intense or hard core (and yes, more daunting)?!

You could even perform an Årsgång for your entire community or to track key events unfolding in the world. Just like a rune magician could pull a rune for every month of the upcoming year. But that is a topic for another day. The Universe is always communicating with us and your own intention and focus will open and close certain doors, in terms of what you receive. Your own mindset will also shape the interpretation (as I hope I have illustrated in this piece).

BEST OF LUCK!

And let me know in the comments how you get on!

I try (but sometimes fail) to get out at least one essay a week (sometimes several), due to travel, international teaching commitments and family care responsibilities (our family lives with Alzheimer’s and I have written several posts about that). All artwork shown in Substack posts is my own, unless credited differently! If you would like to see regular posts about about Nordic spirituality and my life as a Forest Witch (and of course short videos of all the wildlife here!), please follow me on Instagram or Facebook, thank you!

Imelda Almqvist, Forest House, Sweden

BIO FOR IMELDA ALMQVIST

Imelda Almqvist is an international teacher of Sacred Art and Seiðr/Old Norse Traditions (the ancestral wisdom teachings of Northern Europe). So far she has written four non-fiction books and two picture books for children. Natural Born Shamans: A Spiritual Toolkit for Life (Using shamanism creatively with young people of all ages) in 2016, Sacred Art: A Hollow Bone for Spirit (Where Art Meets Shamanism) in 2019, Medicine of the Imagination - Dwelling in Possibility (an impassioned plea for fearless imagination) in 2020 and North Sea Water In My Veins (The Pre-Christian spirituality of the Low Countries) will be published in June 2022.

The Green Bear is a series of picture book for children, aged 3 – 8 years. The stories and vibrant artwork, set in Scandinavia, invite children to explore enchanting parallel worlds and to keep their sense of magic alive as they grow up.

Imelda has presented her work on both The Shift Network and Sounds True. She appears in a TV program, titled Ice Age Shaman, made for the Smithsonian Museum, in the series Mystic Britain, talking about Mesolithic arctic deer shamanism.

Imelda is currently working on a handbook for rune magicians (about the runes of the Elder Futhark) and on more books in the Green Bear Series. Imelda runs an on-line school called Pregnant Hag Teachings, where all classes she teaches remain available as recordings which can be watched any time!

Website:

http://www.shaman-healer-painter.co.uk/

Substack: https://substack.com/@imeldaalmqvist

YouTube Channel: youtube.com/user/imeldaalmqvist

Online School: https://pregnant-hag-teachings.teachable.com/courses/

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