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Intro To Runes

The word Rune means secret and to whisper and came from the time when knowledge was orally transmitted from generation to generation before writing was invented.  The Teuton Druids preferred to rely on memory for the oral save transmission of runic worshipping and their secret wisdom. It is wrong to assume that runelore has died out.  On the contrary, it has been preserved in the most unlikely places and in the most unexpected ways.  This was necessary by the persecution directed against runic magicians.  You will often read that the runic magicians died out in the seventeenth century, but what happened was that the catholic church officially banned the use of Runes in 1639.

Rune lore was never discriminative by gender.  Both men and women were eligible to become shamans.  When men became to preoccupied with the art of war, only women were left behind to continue with the Rune lore and therefore we see many references in Norse literature associating it with women.   The clearest description comes from the Saga of Erik the Red and was written in the thirteenth century:

She wore a cloak set with stones along the hem.  Around her neck and covering her head, she wore a hood lined with white cat skins.  In one hand she carried a staff with a knob on the end, and at her belt, holding together her long dress, hung a charm pouch.  She wore calf skin shoes and cat skin mittens to cover her hands all the time.

There is other documentation that shows that Runes were used for magic and divination.  Tacticus, in his Germania, Chapter 10, describes the Teutonic method of consulting Runes:

Their method of casting lots is a simple one:  they cut a branch from a fruit-bearing tree and divide it into small pieces which they mark with certain distinctive signs and then scatter them at random onto a white cloth.  Then the priest of the community, if the lots are consulted publicly, picks up three pieces, one at a time and interprets them according to the signs previously marked upon them.

This is exactly the traditional method of runic divination, the one commonly used until the time of the Industrial Revolution in those areas that had been settled by the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, or by the Danes and Vikings.  By going underground, the runic system survived as an unpublished, and unpublicized magico-mystical tradition. 

In the nineteenth century, the teaching first began to be written down in a formulated and coherent fashion.  The bulk of this work was done by the German and Austrian occultists, sometimes using material that had been orally transmitted, but more usually working via the method of analeptic recall.   Unfortunately, runes did not achieve popularity because of WWII when Hitler used some of the Rune symbols for their cause such as the Aryan symbol of the sun-wheel, the swastika, and Himmler used the notorious emblem of SS written Rune style.  After the collapse of the Nazi war machine, the allies very naturally wanted nothing to do at all with Runes.

In occult circles, it was not until the mid eighties when interest in the Runes had reached a high pitch, that the guardians of runic tradition gave the order for a further release of information, and this time of a deeper and esoteric nature. 

Silvana's Magical World of Runes
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