The Sun and the North Star

An ongoing online immersion into the rich living tradition in Scandinavia, both ancient and modern.

Join us in the next phase of this spiraling project, The Sun and the North Star. The first months will focus on the art of Skaldic storytelling, Ceremony, Blots, Poetic Metres, Storytelling performances, Runic Lores (especially singing the runes) and magic.

Throughout the course you will be supported and encouraged to work with stories, myths, and folktales to find the rituals and ceremonies hidden within, and bring those to life in your practice and community.


The Sun and the North Star is an ongoing journey. We will offer one teaching session per month, and will also hold a council once a quarter, lining up with the seasonal festivals. Sessions will continue throughout the year. You can join anytime, and get up to date through listening to and learning from the recorded material to experience the Journey so far.

This journey is open to all the members of the School of Mythopoetics and also those just starting out. (Please note, you’ll need a membership to the School in order to participate in The Sun and the North Star.)

Watch an overview of the Course:

The Journey So Far

(Already Recorded for You)

1. Runic Scripts and the Mythopoetic Imagination

We will lay the groundwork of establishing an understanding of symbols, what they are and how they are different from signs. We will learn about the underlying wisdom in Northern mythology and its relationship to personal and universal destiny and fate by studying the concepts of “Urlog” and the “Wyrd” which are presided over by the three Norns: who are the past, present and future. We will inquire into the “Well of Memory” and its relationship to the Tree of Life – Yggdrasil.  Opening up the pathway of how to become “Tenders of the Well” which will be part of this journey.

2.  Drinking the Blood of Dragons: Learning the language of the Land

In this lesson we will pay attention to the patterned language of place.  Bird sounds, animal tracking, marks in bark and following the movements of the rivers will all be guides and grammar that forms a “language” a Mother Tongue.  We will discover how we can write poems from these natural shapes through the techniques of the asemic tradition and new and ancient writing, with practical advice on how to develop a language from the Earth for interspecies dialogue.  

To use our hands to conduct new lines and shapes, expressing our emotions in lettered shapes found in streets, trees, feathers, rocks, furs, snail trails, or ripples of water. To become founders of new alphabets, and play with whim, explorations, spell-meters, new hidden passes and obscurities. To free a magical language from the landscape and from within us - to retrieve new hieroglyphs. When we read the lines of the leaves, the Earth's language becomes mysterious.

3. Yggdrasil: Inner Journeying in the Tree of Life

We begin by reading the Edda and especially Odin’s initiation on the Tree of Life, followed by a meditation on the runes and how they are embedded within the poetic voice from nature and the Ash tree. We will examine the runes as animated symbols when chanted. This session will also explore the special polytheistic mindset of Northern Europe and how the perception of self was closer to the idea of a “psyche,” which is a more nuanced, complex and poly-sensory notion of the self. Andreas will demonstrate how the multi-self perception relates to the Tree of Life and the deep psychological significance this Universal Tree plays in today’s ecological crisis.

4. Tracking Spirit Realms: Mytho-cartography

We will discover ancient symbols such as chevrons, spirals, runes and other dynamic lines and learn how to combine them to create chants and spells.  This work is similar to shamanic journeying, visualizations and meditations.  The aim will be to learn to create inner song lines from our own life’s experiences.

Galdr & Poetic Spell Meters:

This session will include a practical session on what is an oracular practice and what is oracular language?  When we understand symbols as animistic and alive, then what role does ritual have in creating a relationship to the symbol? Using gentle visualisation techniques, we will go on a journey to retrieve an “unbidden” image and learn to craft this image into a poetic metre called the Galdralag (A Spell Metre), a writing technique seen in the Edda. There will also be a practice on how to write spell metres and how we can transform them into a song or chant for beneficial purposes.

You will be taught how to write in the traditional poetic metre which was given to us from Odin in the Poetic Edda.

5. Brewing the Mead of Poetry

A practical session on pottery, beadmaking, buckskin, carving, whittling, fire-by-friction, mead making. Creating libations that are part of the ceremonial work in this course, to create something of beauty to offer the world.

Rituals of Blessing and Reconciliation

Bringing ourselves together in community to re-enact the central ritual of reconciliation between the Sky Gods and the Earth Spirits.  We will explore what it takes to bring forth Wisdom (Kvasir) into these troubled and troubling times.

Together we will gather around the the great horn/vat of Odrerrir and make Mead together as medicine.

6. Utiseta: Traditional Solitary Meditation 

Discovering solitary meditation in the wild and what it can mean for us today.  Learning about the practice of staff and the cloak, and the tools we have available to us to work with the Utiseta practice from the Icelandic Sagas.  Returning to the settlement: Integrating our findings and our imagination Gathering to integrate what we have learnt - the integration and alchemical union of the Eagle and the Serpent and forming the be-winged serpent: the Dragon.  Taking what we have learnt and putting this all into practice with conversations and a final assignment. 

“In the current writing technology we use, we are missing the corporeal, the rhythmical and the echoes of the natural world. Our current mode of reading and writing is the master of information and utility. In my rune practice I am attempting to make markings and symbols more corporeal and less of the policing of form and grammar. People are often ranked about their “readability” which has stopped many people from sharing innate expressions. With runes and symbols we bring the language and writing back to its origins, back to the self, and into the dusk-light of nature’s own writing.”
- Andreas Kornevall

Course Structure:

  • One 90-minute lecture per month: a session to deepen into the material, learn about new practices, and study together

  • One 90-minute council per quarter: a session to story-share and have your process caught in community as well as build fellowship with other students in your part of the world

Lecture Times:
Mondays, 12pm Pacific / 8pm UK

Recordings will be available to participants.

Council Times:
TBD based on two groups

Cost:
$55 USD / month
All students will also need to enroll in the School of Mythopoetics, at $20/month.

register

Meet Your Guides

ANDREAS KORNEVALL

Andreas Kornevall is an author, storyteller and ecological activist. He grew up in South America, Sweden and Switzerland, and now directs the Earth Restoration Service charity. In response to the sixth mass extinction, he was the catalyst behind the Life Cairn movement: memorials for species rendered extinct at human hands.

As a storyteller, he works with old myths and fairytales which shine a torchlight on life’s journey; his stories tend to gravitate around the Norse material which have led him to lecture and perform in universities and other educational centres. He is also a prize-winning author, whose work has been published in magazines such as Resurgence, The Ecologist, Permaculture magazine and in the Dark Mountain series. He is a member of the 'Forn Sed' (Old Customs Association) in Sweden which works closely with ancient Norse culture, traditions and spirituality, unearthing old legends, forgotten folklore and endangered Norse languages.

His new book ‘Waking the Dragons” is out through Green Magic Publishing. Through his charity he has planted over 200 woodlands in the United Kingdom and he has recently been voted by the University of Southern California as one of their 100 spiritual exemplars.

CHAISE LEVY

Chaise was born and raised in the homelands of the Tongva people, in Topanga, California. Topanga, “the place where the mountains meet the sea,” was the place that Chaise first encountered the power of words, story, and voices of the land. Chaise vividly remembers the first time that he heard the legends of the roundtable and the image of that young Arthur and wise Merlin was nurtured in his heart.

During his younger years, Chaise spent countless summers tutoring his tongue in the ways of poetry, acting in the plays of William Shakespeare, learning to put his body at the whims of the unbidden impulse in improv sketches, and devouring any book that he could get his hands on. His love of language, and story have been mirrored and deepened the arts of tracking, bird language, fire-by-friction. Chaise is deeply convinced that mythic gives us a door into the dreaming of the earth, and that if we imbibe the blood of dragons we will one day understand the voices of the birds.

Chaise’s study has taken him through a 3-year stint at the Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education, Dr. Martin Shaw’s School of Myth, the California Institute of Integral Studies and several years of mentorship with Andreas Kornevall.