Alexandra Chauran - Runes for Beginners

introduction

L ife is full of confusing decisions that might create big changes in ones life path months or years down the road. Sometimes it can feel like theres a fifty-fifty chance that what youre picking is the right choice for you. Perhaps youre trying to figure out whether or not to stay with a partner, wondering if he or she is the one for you. It could be that youre choosing between two college majors, each equally compelling and with similar job-market potential. These are huge decisions, and flipping a coin just doesnt seem to give these choices the respect they deserve. What if I told you that theres a way that you can connect to the divine and with your destiny that feels tangible? You can hold in your hands the key to your past, present, and future. Runes are sacred objects that you can touch and feel that allow you a sense of control over the mysteries of life. Runes are also concepts. Just as the word love written out on paper by your beloved can make your heart sing, runes were designed long ago to evoke feelings and a sense of wonder.

What Are Runes?

Runes typically refer to a collection of stones, pieces of wood, or other materials with sacred symbols inscribed upon them. Each rune tells a story. When runes are scattered on a surface, pulled from a bag, or carefully laid out in patterns, they can tell your lifes story.

The word rune may come from the very old Proto-Germanic root word run-, meaning secret, whisper, or mystery. The runes are forces of naturemysteries in the religious sense of spiritual truths, rather than a mere puzzle to be solved. Essentially, runes are ideas expressed in symbols that make up scripts that predate our Latin alphabet by hundreds of years. Written rune symbols are called staves. The runes are also called the futhark (and later due to language changes, futhork), which is the combination of the first six letters.

There are various proposed origins for runes because ancient evidence shows them spread across a wide geographic area. Norse legend says that the god Odin himself first discovered runes, but modern scholars believe that they were derived from an even earlier script, perhaps Etruscan in origin and blended with the ritual symbols of Teutonic shamans. Runes were used in the first or second century of the Common Era by Germanic peoples, also known as Gothic, Suebian, or Teutonic peoples. Use of runes in modern times is not limited by ethnicity or nationality, and modern Germanic languages include Afrikaans, Flemish, Frisian, English, Gaelic, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and more. Claims of ancient runes discovered in North America were met with shock and renunciation by rune scholars. Modern-era runic systems such as Dalecarlian runes, the Runes of Honorius, and Witchs Runes have also been developed.

What little Scandinavian ancestry I have may not offer me a direct line to the ancient ones who used the first runes; nevertheless, I do find practical uses for these magical scripts. In fact, runes were my first official divination tools as a child, probably because stones and markers with which to make cheap and temporary rune stones are easy to come by. Divination is the art of telling fortunes with specialized tools and includes discovering past, present, and future knowledge. Runes are printed, painted, written, etched, or carved individually onto objects.

A collection of these objects that represent an entire runic alphabet, each with their own individual written rune, are sometimes called trollrunes (because trolls were associated with prophecy and magic), a set of runes, or simply runes. Ancient peoples may have used these runes for divination and magic. Magic, to the ancient world and some modern practitioners, means creating change in ones world by using ones mind and spirit. Runes can act as a tool for magic and divination by allowing our minds to focus upon goals and probable outcomes. Because the runes were considered so sacred and might not have been used secularly, especially after their decline in use as a script, their use only in a sacred context now builds their power over time. It is believed magical symbols, used over and over again, can take on their own power in the collective human subconscious, much like how a wagon wheel wearing a rut in a road can make the path more evident and more easily traveled by that wagon over time.