Eskelde

“I was dancing with an immortal august woman, who had black lilies in her hair, and her dreamy gesture seemed laden with a wisdom more profound than the darkness that is between star and star, and with a love like the love that breathed upon the waters; and as we danced on and on, the incense drifted over us and round us, covering us away as in the heart of the world, and ages seemed to pass, and tempests to awake and perish in the folds of our robes and in her heavy hair. Suddenly I remembered that her eyelids had never quivered, and that her lilies had not dropped a black petal, or shaken from their places, and understood with a great horror that I danced with one who was more or less than human, and who was drinking up my soul as an ox drinks up a wayside pool; and I fell, and darkness passed over me.” W.B. Yeats, Rosa Alchemica

 Othin, chief of the gods, always conscious of impending disaster and eager for knowledge, calls on a certain volva, or wise-woman, presumably bidding her rise from the grave. She first tells him of the past, of the creation of the world, the beginning of years, the origin of the dwarfs, of the first man and woman, of the world-ash Yggdrasil, and of the first war between the gods and the Vanir. As further proof of her wisdom, she discloses some of Othin's own secrets, and the details of his search for knowledge. Rewarded by Othin for what she has thus far told, she then turns to the real prophesy, the disclosure of the final destruction of the gods. This final battle, in which fire and flood overwhelm heaven and earth as the gods fight with their enemies, is Ragna Rök, "the fate of the gods". The wise-woman tells of the Valkyries who bring the slain warriors to support Othin and the other gods in the battle, of the slaying of Baldr, best and fairest of the gods, through the wiles of Loki, of the enemies of the gods, of the summons to battle on both sides, and of the mighty struggle, til Othin is slain.

--Macbeth

A practitioner of seiðr is a seiðkona (female) or a seiðmaðr (male).