History
They attach the highest importance to the taking of auspices and the casting of lots. Their usual procedure with the lot is simple. They cut off a branch from a nut-bearing tree and slice it into strips. These they mark with different signs and throw them at random onto a white cloth. Then the state’s priest, if it is an official consultation, or the father of the family, in a private one, offers prayers to the Gods and looking up towards heaven picks up three strips, one at a time, and, according to which sign they have previously been marked with, makes his interpretation. If the lots forbid an undertaking, there is no deliberation that day about the matter in question.
The Idea of Divination
We do divination to gain an understanding of patterns in events in our lives, and these in turn to help us to get an idea of what might happen next. A moment’s thought should tell us there is no such thing as a future, at least not in any fixed sense. If there was a fixed future, then there wouldn’t, from a magical point of view, be much point in knowing it, because there’d be no opportunity to change it. Rather there are a range of possible futures, different possible outcomes of where we are now.
Some futures are obviously highly probable – we’re highly likely to see the sun appearing to come up in the East tomorrow morning. Some are highly unlikely – such as the sun appearing in the West at dawn. With our divinations we are looking at probable futures somewhere between these extremes, and trying to discern the most likely one.
So what are these relative probabilities based on? The influence of the past plus the decisions we make in the present. There’s a model of how this happens embedded in the very structure of the English language, as it is in other Teutonic tongues.
The future tense in English is not simple, unlike in say, French. We have to use a compound tense, we have to say ‘I will go later,’ or ‘she is going to pay the bill tomorrow.’ So as you can see, the English version of the future is not a fixed thing but something that is dependent on will and action – I will, I am going and so on. This Teutonic metaphysics of time is reflected in our divination scheme when we divine with runes.
Runecasting Technique
All of the following assumes you’ve made the runes your own, by creating your own set of runes and learning their meanings until they’re second-nature.
There are many ways to do a rune-reading, and there are plenty of books that tell you about them. I’m going to present a simple one which is useful for most situations, based on the idea of the three Norns. Three is a sacred number in many cosmologies – the Christians borrowed it from much older worlds for their Trinity. In the Germanic world of time, it refers (amongst any other things) to three cosmic women who represent the impersonal, timeless process behind manifestation. Even the Gods are subject to them.
The names of these 3 women are Urdhr, Verdhandi and Skuld. Those names represent ‘that which has passed’, ‘that which is turning’ and ‘should’. Therefore the past, the present and what should become, the most probable outcome.
We use three steads or positions and each of these steads has a meaning:
Urdhr is the root of the query. This is a completed, fixed influence.
Verdhandi is where the situation is now. It is the decision point, the moment when we have free will and can influence the probable outcome.
Both the past and the present impact the probable future.
Skuld is the most probable outcome, the line of least resistance to the forces of the other two.
The technique then is to prepare your space, centre yourself, invoke Woden or your own higher consciousness and ask your question.
Then draw your three runes, and place them in their steads.
The next stage is the hardest – interpretation. All runes have many meanings, which include bright and dark sides. Which aspect will be to the fore in your reading?
The best way of deciding whether a rune is in its better or worse aspect is to look at the relationships between the runes in the reading, their contexts. Contemplate the relationships of the rune in the Urdhr stead and the rune in the Verdhandi stead to the rune in the Skuld stead. Are their influences together harmonious or not?
A useful tool for this is Edred Thorsson’s Runic Aspectarian, which he publishes in his book Runecasters Handbook – At The Well of Wyrd. A final note on divination: If you want to become a master diviner, give away a lot of readings.
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D. Lee, Sheffield, GB