Advanced Rune Magic: The Greater Mysteries of Nordic Spirituality

TWILIGHT AND DAWN

HOW IT ALL BEGAN . . .

Twilight rules in the mythical realm before time. All that can be seen is the silhouette of an enormous tree, its branches swaying softly in the breeze that comes from no place and goes nowhere. The otherwise serene air carries the barely audible sounds of a wounded man close to death. Far up in the tree, his shape can be made out. He’s been hanging there for nine days and nights without food or drink, bleeding from a self-inflicted wound. He is the true seeker, the one who never stops and never rests—always wandering, always searching for ways to expand his consciousness and slake his unquenchable thirst for knowledge. But in this empty realm before time, all that exists is the tree: the mighty mother who will give life to all things that ever come to be, and who will swallow them up again when their time is done. He has used all his strength to climb this wondrous tree, tie himself to one of its mighty branches, and stab himself with his spear. His blood drips steadily onto the branches below, slowly shading the evergreen foliage red.

He can feel them lurking in the shadows—the three cruel women who will become the weavers of fate once the Universe is born. But for now, they don’t show themselves. They hand him no food, they hold no horn to his lips so that he may drink, and they do not dress his ever-bleeding wound. They watch from the shadows in silence, unmoving and emotionless, as his life slowly drains away.

Now the last drop of his blood leaves his body. He draws his final breath, the air barely getting past his swollen tongue, burning his parched throat on its way into his lungs. Nothing has been revealed to him; his sacrifice was for naught. He exhales that last breath and lets it all go: his hopes and his dreams, his desperation and his disappointment. As the air leaves his chest, he lets his head droop downward with a strange sense of relief. He has given his all, and—even though he has failed—this thought sets him free. As his chin comes to rest on his chest, his eyelids grow heavy and he closes them for good. And suddenly, he sees! He sees the things to come, the things that will be: the intricacy of how it all works, how one thing causes the next and how it is all connected in this marvelous and deadly frightening web of causality. He sees the creation, destruction, and rebirth of worlds, Gods, Giants, Dwarves, Elves, Humans, animals, plants, and myriad other lifeforms. One after the other, images assault his weakened frame, demanding entry into his now-fractured mind until they condense into radiant red staves representing the whole Universe that has not yet come into existence. When he had climbed Yggdrasil, he was Odin. But now he is Fjolnir and Fimbultyr, Omi and Oski, Herjann and Helblindi, Gondlir and Grimnir, and countless others. Screaming, he takes up these mysterious staves deep into the shattered core of his Self; then the great mother suddenly releases him and he falls back toward nothingness.

Or, to say it in the words of a Norse poet:

I know that I hung, on a wind-swept tree

for all of nine nights,

wounded by spear, and given to Odin,

myself to myself,

on that tree of which no man knows

from what root it rises.

They dealt me no bread, nor drinking horn.

I looked down, I drew up the runes,

screaming I took them up,

and fell back from there.

Havamal 138–39 (trans. Chisholm)

THE TRUE SEEKER

This is a book for those who want to see what Odin spied when facing his imminent death. It is a book for those of us who are chasing the great Mystery, those with a fire in their belly that keeps them ever restless and always seeking—for more knowledge, more insights, more consciousness. Runa, the great Mystery, cannot be known as it can’t be put into words.* It can only be encountered by directly experiencing it, and each of those experiences again stokes the eternal flame, which in turn keeps us searching and hunting to find it once more. The Runes of the Elder Futhark are twenty-four facets of this great Mystery: twenty-four interfaces that allow us to interact with certain aspects of Runa as a means for healing. Thus, we may reconnect with our roots, our past, and with nature, in order to transform ourselves. Each Rune contains vast amounts of energy, emotion, and experience. Each one is linked to the innermost core of consciousness, to the void out of which it manifested and to which it shall again return. Each one is closely interwoven with the everlasting cycle of life and death. This is what makes it so difficult to define these mysterious signs, or to to simply say “Fehu stands for wealth” and leave it at that. Such a statement may be true on one level, but if you really want to understand any Rune, you must delve far deeper than that, for there are many—perhaps countless—other levels to explore and integrate. You cannot know a Rune in a purely intellectual way. If you wish to discover the inner tension it holds—the wealth of knowledge, the connectedness to your psyche and your innermost being, to the natural world, the Universe, life, death, consciousness, the Gods, the Wights, the Giants—you must experience it.

But let us start at the beginning . . .

THE EMERGENCE OF THE UNIVERSE

It was in the earliest times that Ymir dwelled.

Neither sand nor sea, nor cold waves, nor earth

were to be found. There was neither heaven above,

nor grass anywhere, there was nothing

but Ginnungagap.

Voluspa 3 (trans. Chisholm)

Many creation stories begin at a similar point: there is an emptiness in which creation takes place at the behest or direct action of some divine spirit. Norse mythology has a rather different story to offer, however.

Ginnungagap essentially means “Yawning Void.” This emptiness contained the potential for everything and therefore allowed for nothing to ever manifest. Darkness canceled out light, heat canceled out cold, height canceled out depth. But one day an opposing pair of elemental forces escaped the clutches of the seemingly almighty void. The pair immediately split, each trying to get as far away from the other so that it could come into existence without being canceled out by its opposite. They didn’t get very far, though, as they were suddenly gripped by a hidden structure that seemed to have emerged at the same time as Ginnungagap. This structure would later become known as Yggdrasil, the great World Tree. It was an ash or a yew tree, and its roots reached far down into Ginnungagap and there are no stories and no lore about how it came to be as no one yet existed who could witness its birth. Nevertheless, the pair was still far enough apart that they could manifest. The first one to come into existence was a hot spark of pure energy that burst into a fiery world called Muspelheim. Its counterpart became Niflheim, the world of mist, the source of all water. The mist in this cold and hostile world stemmed from a huge geyser in its center, called Hvergelmir (“boiling cauldron”). The water that it emitted wasn’t clear drinking water but was laced with yeast, venom, and salt. More and more water gathered, and when it couldn’t be contained any longer, it started to flow out of Niflheim and was inevitably drawn back toward Ginnungagap. As the once-hot water was flowing through empty space, it chilled and froze. The pleasant sound of rushing water turned into a grating din as the newly formed sheets of ice started to rub against each other. The waters continued to flow out of Niflheim, relentlessly pushing the ice forward until it reached Ginnungagap. The noise increased as the sheets of ice began to pile up—the ones at the bottom cracking under the immense weight, as greater quantities of ice tumbled into the void, starting to fill it up.

The boundless energy of Muspelheim could not be contained, either. Glowing sparks, each as hot as the sun, were hurtled out of this fiery furnace and drifted toward Ginnungagap. There they hit the sheets of ice, melting it upon contact, creating pools of murky water. More sparks floated down and hit the water with loud hissing noises, heating it up and returning it into its original boiling state. No one was present to behold this impressive spectacle, to hear the incredible commotion of screeching, cracking ice, the hissing of searing hot sparks landing on ice and water, boiling, evaporating, charging it with the boundless energy of Muspelheim until suddenly there was a scream so loud that all the other sounds seemed to fade away instantly. In the middle of this chaos there now stood a figure so large that it defied description, shouting at the top of its lungs. Ymir, the first being, had been born.