What is a Rune?
A rune is a mystery. All traditional cultures have schemes for articulating higher consciousness and the magical world we all live in, whether we know it or not. The rows of runestaves form a symbol system that a living esoteric culture in North West Europe was encoded into about 2000 years ago.
Some very clever and forward-thinking initiate of that time saw that writing was the future, and created the Elder Futhark. It imitates the form of an alphabet, put together from Etruscan letters plus symbols from the ancient Germanic symbol hoard. So the runes comprise a whole system of esoteric teaching hidden in something that looks like an alphabet. In preliterate societies, alphabets are elite magical tools, encoding and compressing timeless magical and mystical wisdom. And of course gods of writing are also gods of magic. There are three mediaeval / ancient rune rows, known as the Elder, the AngloSaxon (or Anglo-Frisian) and the Younger. The Anglo-Saxon and the Younger rows are associated with mediaeval poems which give us the traditional meanings of the runes. The Elder is the most familiar to modern students of rune-magic.
Making the Runes Your Own
God of the runes Odin or Woden got the runes originally by a very extreme process, hanging on the tree Yggdrasil, pierced by a spear, for nine nights. You don’t have to go that far, because Odin has done it for us. But if you want to work magic with the runes – divinations, spells and so forth – it is vitally important that you get an organic, personal knowledge of what each rune means for you. The most thorough way to do this is to make a set. They don’t have to be fancy – it is better to create your own set on white cartridge paper with a sharpie than it is to buy a set made by someone else (especially a mass-produced plastic set).
Runes for Magic and Transformation
You will find runes, meaningful staves,
very powerful staves,
very strong staves,
that Fimbul dyed,
that the Ginnregin shaped,
that the God Hropt carved.
Havamal 142, trans. J. Chisholm
Once the runes are yours you can employ them to work spells, to do any magic you want. Beyond this, the runes are an articulation of inner truths. You can contemplate them and the rows they are part of in ways which are limited only by your imagination, to call upon these mysteries to reveal the hidden sides of your nature, the dimensions of being you have always suspected are there but never articulated.
