FAMILY SEAL

The image seen here is a digital representation of an ancient family artifact known in its native Viking time period as a family seal. This particular seal belongs to my dad's family, who were named after the famous ship destroying weather phenomenon of Viking legend known as Maelstroms. What is seen here is created completely from memory of seeing it with my own eyes. The actual artifact was forged thousands of years ago out of liquefied metal poured into a wooden mold, coated with a special heat resistant black paste with a name I couldn't begin to pronounce. The paste had a tendency to chemically bond with the metallic surface under the intense hot conditions and thus once the seal was cool and solid enough to handle, As much of the paste was swiftly wiped off the raised surface as possible. What little residue remained was removed when the raised surface was polished. Not all of it could be removed and thus the overall design ended up outlined in black. The remaining paste covering the teeth on the ends and the edge of the disc was left alone for rather aesthetic reasons. During the cooling process, while the seal was still resting in the mold, paste covered sticks were carefully placed and pressed into the metal to spell out the family name in runes.

The three figureheads seen are representative of the three ancient family totem animals. The Cave Lion. The Cave Bear. The Dire Wolf. The disc is a simplistic representation of what is currently called the Backer Hagens Grid. The Maelstroms had an extremely strong connection with the planet and its wildlife. As a result, they preserved the original fundamental Shamanic beliefs of the Viking's ancestors. Thus, in complete defiance of current written history, my dad's family held claim to being the beating heart of Viking civilization itself. As a result, my dad's family was also a very harsh critic of how the ancient Viking civilization itself is portrayed in written history. Fortunately, records of this ancient legacy are finally being slowly corrected via recent archaeological investigations and re-examining of historical accounts from neighboring people of their established branch communities across the entire Northern Atlantic region. We shall see just how much of Viking legend is nothing more than entertaining stories and how much is actual history that was selectively distorted with the rest of ancient history, for the sake of preserving the petty ego of established corrupt clandestine organizations.