Living Runes: Theory and Practice of Norse Divination

ISBN-13: 9781578636662

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser

Publication Date: 06-01-2019

Pages: 224

Product Dimensions: 5.20(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

Galina Krasskova is a free-range tribalist Heathen who has been a priest of Odin for more than a decade. Her primary interest is Heathen devotional work, and she has both written and lectured extensively on the subject. Krasskova is a Northern Tradition shaman currently residing in New York, where she is pursuing her masters in religious studies. She is the author of several books, including Exploring the Northern Tradition.

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CHAPTER 1

Odin: The First Rune-Master

Odin is the high God in the Northern Tradition. In both the surviving sources and in modern Heathenry, He is referred to variously as the All-Father, Victory Father, Hanging God, Old Man, or Old One-Eye. One of the defining aspects of His nature, as attested to in the Norse myths, is His insatiable thirst for knowledge and wisdom. This thirst for knowledge led Odin to seek out the runes, and He did so by sacrificing Himself on the Norse World-Tree: Yggdrasil. Modern Northern Tradition Shamans such as Raven Kaldera refer to Odin as the God of the Ordeal. The Ordeal Path as practiced by modern Northern Tradition Shamans (and others) involves the "intentional and careful use of pain in order to put the body into an altered state." One could say that the use of pain in such a fashion lies at the heart of Odin's sacrifice to win the runes.

The story of Odin's primary ordeal is told in the Havamal, one of the lays of the Poetic Edda. The reader is told that in search of wisdom, Odin hung Himself for nine days and nights on Yggdrasil, the World-Tree. Although Odin is usually viewed as a God of kingship, He also holds a place within the Northern Tradition as a God of shamans. The idea of a great cosmic tree that supports the universe and which can be utilized by shamans in spirit-travel is common to many northern European cultures, most notably the Yakut and Buryat. The Tree shows up again in Jewish Cabbala in the guise of the Tree of Life, and has one of its earliest manifestations in Sumerian stories of the Goddess Inanna. It is by traversing the World-Tree that Odin is able to move from His role as sacred king to that of Shaman. The key to this transition from temporal to liminal power was His sacrifice by hanging.

During this ordeal, He starved Himself and stabbed Himself with His own spear, shedding His own blood. Eventually He died. It is through His death and rebirth that He gained access to the runes, the keys to the secrets of the universe:

I ween that I hung on the windy tree,
Hung there for nights full nine;
With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was To Othin, myself to myself,
On the tree that none may ever know What root beneath it runs.

Odin then recited the charms that He learned, and set down the formula for making appropriate sacrifices by providing a list of ritual acts including divination, blood offering, petitioning the Gods and making actual sacrifice. Although many modern Heathens look at this passage as esoteric lore solely concerned with the reading of runes for divination, many scholars, most notably, the German historian Rudolf Simek, believe it to be a complex list of ritual actions, one that specifically references sacrifice. Odin's sacrifice permeates modern Heathen consciousness. It is one of the defining moments in the religion's mythos.

The use of pain as a spiritual tool is quite controversial in modern Heathenry. It is, however, part and parcel of Odin's story. In his book Dark Moon Rising, Raven Kaldera notes that "cultures all over the world have explored ways to use the power of pain as a spiritual tool." He references the Lakota sun dance and the Hindu Kavadi, and notes that "the technique of applied pain is probably older than that of psychoactive substances," yet another Shamanic practice with which Odin is associated. Although Northern Tradition Shamanic practices are somewhat outside the scope of this book, the idea of sacrifice (whatever that might mean to the individual) to gain wisdom is deeply entrenched in the core cosmological ethos of northern religions. This has evolved within a small subsection of the modern Northern Tradition into the practice of ordeal work.

Ordeal work refers to a body of practices used to bring about a deep catharsis for purposes such as self-growth, religious sacrifice, or a rite of passage. These practices quite often involve physical pain, and are usually done in a spiritual or at least a carefully crafted context. Practitioners maintain that when utilized in a controlled manner, ordeal practices have the power to heal, transform, and render the practitioner receptive to their Gods.

The use of pain-based rites for spiritual reasons had many corollaries in the ancient world. Priests of the Goddess Cybele, for example, would slash their bodies with knives, giving their own blood in offering. At its most extreme manifestation, devotees would castrate themselves in a similar manner at the conclusion of rituals filled with ecstatic dancing. During specific religious festivals, Hindu devotees may perform Kavadi — piercing the body with hooks or spikes, ideally to provoke spirit possession. Lest this be mistaken for an Eastern phenomenon, it is worth noting that numerous Native American tribes still perform the sun dance, a sacrificial dance in which dancers have hooks inserted into their flesh, which are then secured to a central tree or post (again, we see the imagery of the tree recurring as a central theme). They then dance until the hooks tear free of their flesh. We also have the example of the Spanish Christian flagellantes who still perform rites of flagellation in honor of Christ. By engaging in such practices, practitioners of the ordeal position themselves as living sacrifices to their Gods. It is not coincidental that the majority of ordeal workers within the Northern Tradition are devotees of Odin. Although Odin is not just a God of the ordeal (far from it), ordeal work is one of the many things for which He is known. He is a God of sacrifice, most especially the sacrifice of the self. Historian E. Turville-Petre points out that

the sacrifice of Odin to himself may ... be seen as the highest conceivable form of sacrifice, in fact so high that, like many a religious mystery, it surpasses our comprehension. It is the sacrifice, not of king to god, but of god to god of such a kind as is related in Scripture of the sacrifice of Christ.

Nor was this similarity with the sacrifice of Christ lost on early converts to Christianity. One of the earliest known Anglo-Saxon Christian poems, The Dream of the Rood, dating from the 7th century CE, uses imagery suited to both Christ and Odin. Pagan themes abound:

The young hero stripped himself — he, God Almighty — strong and stout-minded. He mounted high gallows, bold before many, when he would loose mankind. I shook when that Man clasped me. I dared, still, not bow to earth, fall to earth's fields, but had to stand fast. Rood was I reared. I lifted a mighty King, Lord of the heavens, dared not to bend. With dark nails they drove me through: on me those sores are seen, open malice-wounds. I dared not scathe anyone. They mocked us both, we two together. All wet with blood I was, poured out from that Man's side, after ghost he gave up. Much have I born on that hill of fierce fate. I saw the God of hosts harshly stretched out.

Here the reader is presented with the image of a warrior-Christ, courageously sacrificing Himself. The poem is told from the perspective of the tree itself, and the reference to the tree as a gallows willingly mounted would immediately conjure the image of Odin to the Pagan mind. One of his by-names is, after all, the "Gallows God," (Yggdrasil being a type of gallows). Christ like Odin is also viewed as a mighty king, and both shared the attribution of "Lord of Hosts."

In short, both Odin and Christ hung and died. Both were pierced by a spear. Both rose again into new life. Both were seen as sacral kings. The difference between Them lies in the reasons behind Their respective sacrifices: Christ, according to common Christian interpretation, hung to free humanity of its sins — in other words, as a scapegoat; Odin hung for Himself alone, to deepen his wisdom and expand his power to order the world. He hung to gain sovereignty as a king, not just over the temporal world but over the spirit world, as well. The only way to gain and master the wisdom of the dead was to die. Folklorist James Frazer points out that kings were often revered not merely as rulers but also as priests, intercessors between the human world and the Gods. This stemmed in part from the ritual deification of the king as a divine figure himself. In Odin, the function of king is united with the function of priest, magician, and Shaman. That union occurs through purposefully sought-after ordeals, and each ordeal involves some form of sacrifice.

Hanging on Yggdrasil was not the only sacrifice that Odin made in the surviving mythos. In addition to His sacrifice on the World-Tree, He also hung suspended between two fires in the Grimnismal and plucked out an eye in payment for a single drink from the Well of Memory and Wisdom. This willing loss of an eye is particularly interesting. Odin is never depicted in any known image or account with both eyes intact. The resulting iconography of the one-eyed God is one of the defining symbols within Norse cosmology. Unlike the blind seer, Tiresias, of Greek mythos, Odin was not blinded as a result of experienced wisdom or by a punitive Deity; rather, He chose to partially blind himself in order to gain wisdom. His blinding, then, was an act of power.

The submission to pain as an act of personal empowerment raises many questions not only about the nature of pain but also about the nature of personal agency. A clear distinction must be drawn between pain as a cause of action and pain as a kind of action. It is this latter manifestation of pain that is illustrated in Odin's story. Here, pain is used not as an externally repressive measure, but as an expression of personal sovereignty. Anthropologist Talal Asad notes that "when we say that someone is suffering, we commonly suppose that he or she is not an agent. To suffer ... is, so we usually think, to be in a passive state — to be an object, not a subject." In Odin, however, the reader is presented with the image of a suffering body engaged in an act of power, or, as modern ordeal workers might phrase it, "hunting for power." In this context, pain loses its emotional charge and becomes a consciously applied tool in a greater process of development. Pain becomes something more than a private experience or an experience of utter loss of control. It becomes an act of power.

Not only pain, but blindness and the paradox of sacrificing sight in order to gain vision, permeates Odin's mythos. Several of his heiti, or by-names, refer to His vision: Blindr ("blind one"), Gestumblindi ("the blind guest"), Tviblindi ("doubly blind"). According to Indo-European historian Kris Kershaw, depending on the context in which the symbology of the blind God is used in the poetic sources, it designates Odin not only as one who is Himself blind, but also as one who has the power to strike others blind (as a battle tactic, or perhaps a blindness of ecstasy or desire — two qualities also associated strongly with this God). We also have Gunnblindi ("he who strikes others blind in battle"), Herblindi ("he who strikes armies with blindness"), Bileygr ("weak-eyed"), and Bálegyr ("flaming eye"). If the eyes are the windows into the soul, as the saying goes, in sacrificing one eye, Odin sacrificed part of His soul in exchange for wisdom, which hearkens back to the Eddic proverb that a gift demands an equal gift in return.

Odin is one of several mutilated or self-mutilating Gods in Northern European mythology. In Irish mythology, for instance, King Nuada of the Tuatha de Danaan lost an arm in battle and later replaced it with a functioning silver replica. In the Norse pantheon, the God Tyr sacrifices a hand. There is the blind God, Hodr, but almost no information about His function has survived. Although the particulars of Hodr's blindness are unknown, in the cases of both Nuada and Tyr, their respective sacrifices occurred as a necessary exchange for the protection and security of their people: Nuada lost his arm in battle, ending a great war that was destroying his people, and Tyr sacrificed his hand to Fenris, the wolf of chaos and destruction, in order to bind the animal and thus prevent it from its fated goal of bringing destruction to the Gods. It is a small step from the idea of physical mutilation as sacrifice to the idea of human sacrifice.

In Germania, the Roman historian Tacitus makes note of human sacrifice to Odin, and apparently this was done in a very specific manner: usually by hanging the victim while piercing his side with a spear. One of the most well-known examples of a sacrifice of this kind to Odin occurs in Gautrek's Saga, a 13th-century retelling of the story of the Odinic hero, Starkadr. It includes a tale of sacrifice centering on Starkadr's King, Vikarr. While sailing, King Vikarr and his crew (which included his friend, blood brother, and one of Odin's chosen heroes, the aforementioned Starkadr) experienced horrible storm winds. They cast runes to determine how to calm the storm, and as the storm winds abated, it was revealed through divination that Odin demanded a sacrifice. Turville-Petre notes that Odin was usually placated by royal victims, perhaps a nod to his role as sacred king. The majority of recorded victims in the surviving skaldic narratives were kings or princes, usually warriors. The men drew lots to determine who should be sacrificed, and, predictably, it turned out to be the king himself. (By drawing lots, the choice was automatically put into the hands of Odin and the Fates). Therefore the men decided to hold a symbolic sacrifice rather than actually kill their King. The men fastened a cord made of calf gut loosely around Vikarr's neck, tying the other end to a thin branch. Neither would bear a man's weight. Starkadr then struck the King with a slender reed, uttering the words, "Now I give thee to Odin." At that moment, the reed became a spear and the cord a rope noose and the King was sacrificed.

The sacrifice of a king is well known throughout folklore. Folklorist James Frazer notes that kings were often sacrificed as old age or infirmity took hold. In other cases, the king might be sacrificed at the end of a fixed period of time. There is a story, for instance, linking Odin with this latter type of sacrifice. Frazer writes of King Aun of Sweden, who received the gift that he would be allowed to live and reign as long as he continued to sacrifice one of his sons every nine years. This continued for nine consecutive sacrifices until the king was so feeble and incompetent that his own people prevented the 10th sacrifice. There is no indication in the story of Vikarr that the king was anything less than capable. Rather, it seems that Odin as God of warriors might instead choose the best and most virile of kings to join Him in Valhalla, the hall the valorous were believed to go to after death.

It is clear from these examples that Odin is a fierce and complex figure within Norse cosmology. While I cannot speak for every devotee of Odin, I have found in nearly two decades of serving, honoring, and, most of all, loving Him, that He is 10,000 times more demanding of Himself than He is of His followers. Those who seek to work with the runes with any level of useful skill should meditate long and hard on the sacrifices Odin made and the trials He undertook in order to win the right to use them. Sooner or later, rune-workers, too, may be asked to pay a price. What that price is will vary from person to person, but in the world of the runes, as within the greater macrocosm of the Northern Tradition, there are no free rides. That, above all, is one of Odin's most important lessons. It is one to keep in mind as one begins exploring the runes.

The Runes as Spirit Allies

Working with runes takes immeasurable skill and endurance. Odin, after all, had to die for them, hanging as He did on the World-Tree for nine nights of agony. Runes are not easily won, nor are they easily wielded. They can be ruthless and brutal teachers. For all those Northern Traditionists who decry folks such as Ralph Blum dabbling in runic mysteries, the runes themselves are quite capable of keeping the unworthy and untested from making any useful headway. Working with them is almost like engaging in a cosmic tug-of-war with the will and the power they wield. Or sometimes it can be like playing with razor blades. The majority of them tend to be rather pitiless, at least until they have tested the rune-worker (and, many times, not even after that). There is nothing human about the runes and that is the most important thing to remember. The only humanity they hold is the blood that has been given them by countless vitki (rune-workers and magicians).

Runes are far more than a simple method of divination or even a system of magic. At their core, they are living keys to accessing and working the Wyrd, but even this function only barely touches on their true nature. The runes are alive. It's not enough to simply cast them; at the higher levels, one must realize that they have an instinct and intellect all their own, and a very potent will. They can be powerful allies or adamantly vicious enemies, but they are anything but static and inert sigils. This is something that most people who work with runes don't seem to realize. They're sentient. They are allies, in the traditional spirit-sense.

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Excerpted from "Living Runes"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Galina Krasskova.
Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
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Table of Contents

Introduction 9

Chapter 1 Odin: The First Rune-Master 11

Chapter 2 The Runes as Spirit Allies 21

Chapter 3 The Elder Futhark 37

Chapter 4 The Anglo-Saxon Futhorc 129

Chapter 5 Wyrd 157

Chapter 6 Galdr 163

Chapter 7 Divination 171

Chapter 8 Magic 191

Suggested Reading 203

Bibliography 207

Chapter Notes 211

Index 217