Collin Cleary - What is a Rune? & Other Essays

W HAT IS A R UNE?

&

O THER E SSAYS

by

C OLLIN C LEARY

E DITED BY G REG J OHNSON

Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd.

San Francisco

2015

Copyright 2015 by Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd.

All rights reserved

Cover image: adapted from W. G. Collingwoods title page for

Olive Brays 1908 translation of the Poetic Edda

Cover design by

Kevin I. Slaughter

Published in the United States by

C OUNTER- C URRENTS P UBLISHING L TD.

P.O. Box 22638

San Francisco, CA 94122

USA

http://www.counter-currents.com/

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-935965-79-4

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-935965-80-0

E-Book ISBN: 978-1-935965-81-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cleary, Collin, 1973-
What is a Rune? : and other essays / by Collin Cleary ; edited by Greg Johnson.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-935965-79-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-935965-80-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-935965-81-7 (electronic book)
1. Neopaganism--Scandinavia. 2. Scandinavia.--Religion. 3. Runes. I. Johnson, Greg, 1971- II. Title.
BP605.N46C66 2015
299'.94--dc23
2013037993

C OLLIN C LEARY

(Courtesy Max Ribaric/ Occidental Congress )

C ONTENTS

5.

To Edred Thorsson

E DITORS I NTRODUCTION

T HE P HILOSOPHY OF

C OLLIN C LEARY

G REG J OHNSON

This volume is Collin Clearys eagerly-anticipated follow up to Summoning the Gods , his first collection of essays, published in 2011. As one might expect, the present collection develops the ideas encountered in Summoning the Gods , but these new essays (all of which have been written since 2011) give evidence of genuine intellectual growth. In my opinion, and that of the author, they are more philosophically sophisticated than Clearys earlier work. And they form more of a unity than the essays of the previous collection. Indeed, in this new volume we see the outlines of a coherent philosophysomething approaching what used to be called, in bygone days, a philosophical system. There were only hints of this in Summoning the Gods . This introduction attempts to provide readers with a brief guide to this system, weaving together the different strands that one finds in these nine unique essays.

As in Summoning the Gods , the principal philosophical influences on Cleary are G. W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger, especially the latter. There is scarcely a page in the present volume that is not marked by Heideggers influence. Indeed, one of the essays included here is an introduction to his thought. And it has the distinction of being quite possibly the best, brief, English-language introduction to the ideas of this notoriously difficult philosopher.

In Summoning the Gods , Cleary insisted that what we need is openness to the gods, which he argued (again drawing upon Heidegger) is founded upon openness to Being. In the essay from which the volume took its title (the most significant of Clearys early writings) he argued that it is in wonder in the face of Being that the gods are intuited. This idea is also central to the essays in the present volume.

While Clearys exploration of what it would mean to know the gods or return to belief in them is of interest to neo-heathens of all sorts, his own allegiance is to the Germanic tradition of his ancestors. However, there was relatively little actual discussion of the Germanic sources in Summoning the Gods . The present volume delves much more deeply into the Eddas , with essays covering the Germanic cosmology and anthropogeny. In truth, every essay in the present volume deals with the Germanic tradition, broadly construed: not just the Runes and the Poetic and Prose Eddas , but also Hegel and Heidegger, as well as Oswald Spengler, Henrik Ibsen, and others. This volume also contains Clearys essay satr and the Political, in which he argues that devotion to the Germanic tradition entails what is now called White Nationalism. This essay proved so controversial that anti-racist heathens, words evidently failing them, embarked upon an 18-month campaign of harassment and intimidation, including throwing a brick and a paint bomb through the window of my downstairs neighbor.

Another concern the present volume shares with the preceding one is the concept of mytho-poetic thought. In fact, this idea will provide a kind of thread that can help guide us through these essays and allow us to see their unity. Mytho-poetic thought is the central concern of the essay with which the volume begins, and from which it takes its title, What is a Rune? This piece was originally an address given at the Rune-Gild Moot in the fall of 2011, where Cleary and several others were made Masters in the Gild. In this essay, Cleary understands the runes as examples of what the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (16681744) referred to as imaginative universals: concrete symbols denoting a whole class of phenomena (as opposed to intelligible universals, which employ abstract concepts rather than symbols). Cleary writes that our ancestors literally saw cattle [ Fehu ] as more than cattle; as a manifestation of a fundamental principle or force at work in the universe. In the case of each rune, our ancestors took some feature of their lifeworld (a term Cleary borrows from Edmund Husserls phenomenology) and understood it to stand for or to express something more general or fundamental.

The trouble, however, is that that lifeworld has been lost to usand the Runemasters of old left us no clear accounts of the meanings of the runes. Clearys recognition of this represents, for all intents and purposes, a re-evaluation of the approach he took in earlier essays like Philosophical Notes on the Runes, which were heavily dependent upon Edred Thorssons brilliant but speculative interpretations of the runes. The conclusion to this essay is somewhat bleak. If, in losing the lifeworld of our ancestors, the runes no longer speak to us directly, if they require a philosophical interpretation which is largely groping in the dark, then it seems that we can never truly recover their meaning.

The specific problem of reappropriating the meaning of the runes is not solved in these pages. And it leads Cleary back to the problem he has been dealing with from the beginning: the question of whether we might be ablesomehowto recover the mentality of our ancestors; to begin to see the world as they did. If this were possible, then perhaps the runesand the myths, and the godsmight speak to us again. But how can we enter back into their lifeworldor, perhaps, live and think as if that lifeworld were our own? In the present volume, Cleary makes considerable progress in dealing with this more fundamental problem. He begins by recognizing that if we are to find our way back into the world of our ancestors, we cannot assume we know what a world is.

Thus, his essay The Fourfold begins with Clearys attempt to recover what Heidegger would call the originary sense of world. The term itself is Germanic, and comes from the Old English weorold : wer , which means man + eald , meaning age. So that world literally means age of man or man age. (Here and throughout the volume, Cleary follows Heidegger in using etymology as a philosophical tool.) Our world is not nature or the planet: it is all of this as cognized and interpreted by us. Our ancestors lived in a worlda man agethat was a response of the spirit of our people to their circumstances and surroundings. This response was in the form of mytho-poetic thought, but Cleary recognizes that this term is actually a misnomer; that what we are actually talking about is not so much a form of thinking, as a way of being in the world. As a first step toward understanding our ancestors way of being in the world, Cleary explores Heideggers phenomenology of dwelling ( Wohnen ), which the German philosopher argues is the Being of human beings.