Runes

(Note: I have offered some interpretations of a few rune poems which are my readings only and should not be seen as “what the poems really mean.” I think my interpretations are reasonable, but I cannot read the minds of their long-dead authors).

So it should be clear by now that for me changeability is an important spiritual pursuit. A shift in consciousness is only a moment away (if only you decide to throw a spanner into the works of the current state you are in).

Of course, its very possible to get stuck. People do it all the time. Sufficient trauma, fear, anger or confusion can trap you in a very restricted range of conscious states for years. Your ability to connect to any kind of magical consciousness is severely inhibited by this restriction. Writers on runes/seid/magic/etc don’t often write about the parts of their lives that aren’t filled with magic, joy, ease, power, spiritual insight, and the rest of it. I think that is dishonest. I think our short-comings and our failures are also a part of our being and deserve to be acknowledged just as much as our wisdom and our creative wealth.

As I’ve discussed before, the root meaning of ergi, appears to be related to trembling, dancing – with a spontaneity so deep-rooted as to be organic. This is any state in which the socialised norms you live by, the defined identity you function within, are scattered to the wind by your pulsing flesh and its ability to shake, sway, hover and shudder.

So the opposite to this embodied magic, this “shameful” seethliness (again see that earlier post) is stillness. Stuckness. Predictability. A human body that is not moving. A body that is completely subservient to the abstractions of ego mind. A body that acts to serve linear, boring, obvious objectives. A body which dwells in the illusion that life is predictable.

For long stretches of my life I lived out stuckness and stillness. There is a particular coldness that can seep through your bones and into your heart. I still go back there fairly regularly, and although it usually doesn’t last long at all, while this stillness is in charge it lays claim to infinity.

That’s right, for all of my celebration of the bodymind’s ability to spontaneously transform I still sometimes allow myself to be fooled by the mythology of ‘everything is always going to be like this’. And of course the more you are convinced that this is the case the more you will act it out, creating a feedback loop filled with lonely despair.

In the Elder Futhark rune row we find two runes, Nauthiz and Isa, lined up consecutively. Nauthiz, Need, is “a difficult circumstance and drudging work”, for in the face of Nauthiz “the naked will freeze in the frost”. Then on the heels of Nauthiz comes Isa, Ice: “a river’s bark, and a wave’s thatch, and doomed men’s downfall” (these quotes are from the Old Icelandic and Old Norse Rune Poems, translated by Sweyn Plowright in his Rune Primer).

The stuckness I speak of, this state in which the magic of both embodied and mental spontaneity is suppressed, is the frost that kills the naked. Exposed to the elements, without protection and without the ability to act, to change, to move, to create safety, to build body heat, to alter circumstances, we are very much needful. As the still coldness comes over us our need becomes greater but it takes more and more effort to spark the fire of change.

The above-quoted Ice poem then expresses, at least in this particular thought experiment, the deception of the stuckness.

On the surface of the ice, freezing to death, there seems no motion, no change, only a stagnation that spirals closer and closer to death. Yet ice is the “river’s bark”. It forms a hard crust but beneath it the water still runs. Beneath the veneer of stillness (dare I say the illusion of a continuous ego?) the reality of change continues on regardless. What a shame to let the smallest and most illusory part of the river, its hard ice surface, determine the needy stagnation and demise of a being once trembling with life force.

The trick is even more wily than this! Perhaps ice is “doomed men’s downfall” because some folks, fooled into thinking its hardness is eternal, suddenly find it gives way and drops them into the roaring currents beneath! What a shock, to have built yourself a psychological ring wall, only to have the ground give way. These are the risks we run when we forget that belief is cheap and change wins.

There is, therefore, a tragic air to the rune poems connected to Need and Ice. An atmosphere of suffering, freezing, dying, through the acceptance of simple illusions.

I am no stranger to these worlds of icy need. I have spent years frozen solid in their depths, or thrust with violence beneath the surface, struggling not to drown as change sweeps me away. It is easy to fear change, especially change that you must create yourself. AS hypothermia begins to kill us we feel the illusion of comfortable warmth. Hence it can sometimes seem that freezing naked in the frost is preferable to taking the risk of breaking the ice and breathing in life.

But I am still here, and so many times I have found my ability to transform and been rescued from the clutches of mono-consciousness. Yet still I have my time in the frozen cave, still I have my times laying out on the bark of the river, cold and shivering.

Perhaps what saves us when we are freezing to death in the rigidity of single-minded consciousness is shivering. If our power to change can be accessed at any time with the shaking, swaying and trembling, then perhaps shivering is the door through which we might escape the seemingly infinite halls of icy despair. We find, in the gateway to the ice-world (Niflheim?), that again our body tries to remind us of its powers. We shiver, our body vibrating and shuddering to generate new warmth and life and change.

Perhaps then Need and Ice also offer a gift – the opportunity to remember our transformative powers. To remember the infinite creativity of the flesh, its embodied spiritual riches. Perhaps those of us who often find ourselves exposed and freezing are being offered a valuable lesson, spiritual instruction.

“Need is tight in the breast; but it often
happens for humans’ children to help and to save
each, if they listen to it early”.

“Ice is over-cold, extremely slippery;
it glistens glass-clear, most like gems;
it is a floor wrought by frost, fair to look upon”.

These are from the Old English Rune Poem, again Sweyn’s translations.

If we listen to the tightness in the breast early it might save us. And as slippery as ice is, nonetheless it is fair to gaze at. Compelling though the illusion of being stuck is, we may find beauty even in the threat of stagnant and rigid death.

Perhaps there is another path into the realms of altered consciousness that seid opens up for us. Perhaps instead of seeking the change, the shift, the movement into other worlds, we could embrace and pursue stillness, rigidity. Perhaps by carrying this intensely icy needfulness to its very end we can pass through it and into the heart of the seething fire. Perhaps we can subvert the seemingly involuntary law of hard ice armour by volunteering for it. Perhaps we can dissolve its unconditional rule by choosing it instead of unwillingly and wretchedly submitting.

“Need is tight in the breast” – perhaps it calls us to recall and rekindle the fire in our hearts, reminds us of the pulsing rhythmic law that rules our blood and our body and the roads of all the worlds. Perhaps there is no need to lament the hard gauntlet of psychophysical rigidity, of illusory ego, of our forgetting of our powers of seething transformation. Perhaps Need and Ice deserve gratitude.

I have ridden far on the back of my horsely unconscious this morning. I have let the waters of reflection spill out into words. Am I cold? Does my frostbite ache? Most certainly. Does my heart feel the weight of constriction? Sadly it does.

But have I recovered my imagination, my flexibility, my memory of the worlds beyond the domain of ice-clad death? I have. When we pass into the lower worlds without guile or motive we sometimes find new roads and camp fires tended by the welcome sight of a one-eyed wanderer. There the naked, freezing in the frost, beguiled or betrayed by ice, might find healing with the hospitality of a god of change. Woden is a god who frees us of fetters (so the Eddas tell us). Perhaps he has power even to dissolve the tightness of cold on the heart that lives to sing.

I am going to start a little experiment of chanting, either inwardly or outwardly, the runes of Need and Ice (you can use whichever of their archaic names seems right) when I find myself struggling with the forces of these runes. Embrace their presence. And see what comes of it.

In my last piece I had a bit to say about the conscious and unconscious minds. Specifically, I suggested that the unconscious mind is much more powerful, more creative and generally wiser than the conscious (ego) mind. I also suggested that trance – be it seidh related or something else – helps us to disable the conscious mind so that the unconscious mind can run the show for a while.

But I didn’t exactly define what I mean by unconscious mind, and this term is not exactly something which I’ve prized from historical seidh lore.

Before I answer this question I want to take a moment to reflect on various authors’ attempts to reconstruct a map of human psychology using old Heathen terms. Folks talk about the fetch, the hyde, önd, ödr, the hamr, and so forth. There is hugr (mind), related to Old Norse hugrunes, and it is tempting to speculate about Old Norse minni (memory) too.

Edred Thorsson even constructs a whole model in his book Runelore that is based on Jungian ideas. This approach gets some flack from other Heathens for quite shamelessly crossing different traditions/ideologies, but you have to admit it has a daring ambition to it – and some of Jung’s ideas are not so far from Heathenism, either.

Bearing all this in mind, I am personally hesitant to speculate on what a full ‘Heathen psychology’, cobbled together from old words/concepts, might look like. There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is that in modern Western cultures there are a vast number of ‘psychologies’ and often they use the same terms in different ways. Given how varied the religion and culture of old Europe was I am a little hesitant to say “this is how these old psychological terms fit together”. I’d rather give myself the freedom to be a little open-ended.

You find a useful analogy with the runes. We talk about Elder, Younger, and Anglo-Saxon Futharks as though these were very clear, discrete scripts. Nevertheless, no two Futhark carvings from days of yore that I have seen have been exactly the same. There are general trends over time and space of course (e.g. Younger Futhark scripts appearing in the latter Dark Ages in Scandinavia), but not the tight delineations that only really make sense if you are used to a mechanised and fairly abstract modern world.

As a result it’s easy to spot modern rune authors (or modern speculators on Heathen psychology) who are just making up a load of codswallop – but very hard to decide who is right about specific details when comparing authors who have done their homework. I don’t want to spend my time splitting hairs, I want to spend my time doing rune and seidh work!

In any case, all reconstructed systems are likely to fail sooner or later. There is almost always going to be some kind of exception or ambiguous circumstance and we easily risk trying to force reality to fit our (more or less) abstract model if we only have one set way of understanding things. Of course, it is very helpful to learn about as many different models as you can – you’ll have access to lots of different perspectives. This goes for both modern psychology and for reconstructing Heathen psychological ideas.

So having cleared the ground, what do I mean by the unconscious?

I’m using the term unconscious in a very broad way. It can refer to any of the following, and lots of other things
too:

* Autonomic nervous system
For example regulating breathing and heartbeat.

* Immune system
Did you know that hypnosis can significantly improve your immune response? Its been clinically proven over and over again.

* Sympathetic nervous system
For example the fight/flight reaction which can put you into some very interesting states in which you can do things you normally wouldn’t be able to.

* Digestive system
In fact I’ve read that the area around your gut lining has the most neural connections of anywhere in your body other than the brain. This might be why constipation and other stomach problems are often associated with depression or (in my and a few other people’s subjective experience) with magical/spiritual ordeals.

* Subterranean reasoning
I sometimes solve answers to rational problems by asking my unconscious to figure it out. When it is ready I just get an ‘aha!’ moment and there’s the solution. This might not work for everyone; and for some, such as my brother who is a mathematician, the conscious mind might well be able to get to the answer easily enough without deeper assistance.

* Subterranean skill development
When I want to learn new musical techniques, for example, I rarely practice much. I instead strongly intend for the skill to develop, then forget about that intention. It tends to organically emerge in the course of my usual jamming and rehearsing of existing material. In this way I’ve learned to do quite a few things as a bassist and guitarist that at first seemed impossible.

* Root source of inspiration
That part or aspect of my brain and body which can make me see new wholes out of fragments, new angles on old problems, or synthesise music in ways that I can subsequently analyse to see how it works but which I could never have consciously invented

* Intuition
For example, when I was younger I had several very bad experiences with manipulative magical demagogues. I started to realise that each of these people caused a sense of unease in my mind when I first met them. Since then I’ve learned to listen to these kinds of messages. Sometimes they’re wrong; other times they’ve given me valuable fore-warning and I’ve been able to avoid or minimise a lot of pain. Also, people that emit these warning signals tend to recognise if you’re picking up on them and that can also help keep you safe because they can tell you are onto them.

* A source of meaningful or prophetic dreams

* The parts of me that don’t over think things and are therefore much better at designing and activating magic spells (with runes this is assisted also by spending many years chanting runes, meditating on runes, memorising rune poems, etc, so there are plenty of seeds buried in my mind).

* The part of me which dips into the web of Wyrd and provides a rope up which gods and spirits can climb; and which can interface directly with the imaginal realities of the world around me while my ego just spins around in a stew of its own garbage.

* The part of me that can draw strange non-rational (as opposed to irrational) patterns in the shape of my life at times, and which helps me therefore to understand my place in the web of Wyrd.

Ok, so it’s evident that some of the things in this list I could refer to by archaic or mythological names if I wanted to, and that in fact might be an interesting way to make richer magical practices. But I am resistant to just labelling these various aspects of my unconscious for fear of limiting myself and for the reasons already discussed above.

I do think about and seek out experiences characterised by önd and/or ödr – but I wouldn’t declare these to be the only real or true experiences of such things because there is no unbroken tradition for me to draw upon to make such a claim. There’s just my subjective experience which seems to fit with what these words might have meant to my ancestors.

Laterally-minded (a sign of a well-fed and active unconscious!) readers will be wondering how all of this fits with the debate over whether gods and the like ‘really’ exist as independent beings with their own agendas or whether they are part of some kind of collective unconscious, archetypal structuring principles of human experience.

I think this whole debate misses the point personally.

The thing is that archetypes in Jungian and post-Jungian theory seem to have independent wills of their own, just like gods. Conversely, gods affect the individual psyche in a way very similar to the way archetypes do.

Jung offered various definitions of “archetype” but I’m sure that at least once he suggests that they are not just structures of human consciousness or experience, but indeed are inherent structures of reality (or if you are a transcendental idealist, perhaps they are some kind of formal structure which comprises enabling conditions for the existence of consciousness in the world). In any case saying that the gods are inherent structuring principles active throughout reality seems like a pretty ‘hard polytheist’ description to me. So the debate could well be just a dispute over arbitrarily assigned names.

Jan Fries wins the prize for me (he often does). Considering that even recently invented deities can have a good deal of power (witness the Wiccan Goddess), he suggests that things are much more complicated that we can really understand and that while the gods might in fact be illusions, we humans are nevertheless still more illusory. Actually I should clarify – Fries attributes this point of view to something Loki suggested to him. It does sound a lot like something Loki would say. I think Fries is less interested in virtually irresolvable abstraction and more interested in spending time going to meet the gods, whatever their ontological status might be. What a great role model!

One of the richest explorers of ‘polytheistic consciousness’ I have encountered is the post-Jungian psychologist James Hillman. Hillman’s writing is astoundingly deep. I daresay he understands and feels the character of divine beings much more deeply than most hard polytheists (or even most theists), despite the fact that from his point of view he is ‘just’ taking about archetypes.

The lesson on this front is once again that belief is cheap (see my previous post)! Do your opinions help you
understand and relate to the gods, or hinder you? Learn all you can about archaic Germanic psychological lore and learn all you can about your own seidh/magical/trance experiences. Explore your consciousness and unconsciousness. But make sure you spend more time practicing than you do theorising (at least once you have sufficient grounding in the mythology and history). You’ll have a lot more fun, and frankly our ancestors probably spent more time practicing than theorising too.

Jan Fries has popularised the term Deep Mind. This can refer to any of the aspects of the unconscious I have suggested above, plus it can refer to the imagination, to spirits, to gods, indeed to the Axis Mundi itself. It is a psychological term which opens up into things that are far beyond the merely psychological. I think this is a really helpful concept. It keeps us on the path of opening into magical experience and new horizons of consciousness.

Given the extent to which I’ve been assassinating the reputation of the conscious or ego self, I feel I should mention something about this. Its not that I think the conscious ego self, which finds itself in its feeling of subjective separateness and language-bound narrative, is all bad. Following Nietzsche, however, I regard it as the more recent part of human conscious and consequently the least well developed. I think the only way to develop it is to get it into a harmonious relationship with both the unconscious and the world around it (remember that natural world thingy outside our smoke-choked cities?).

This will eventually lead to the conscious/unconscious split dissolving. At that point we might get to dial direct to the well of Mimir via the graceful branches of Yggdrassil (see Bil Linzie’s amazing writings for more on this). Sounds good to me.

Also, your unconscious is sensitive to what you feed it. If you feed it a steady diet of bad TV, fast food and consumerist “I want it yesterday” mentality then it will get sick and your conscious ego will suffer too. It might be helpful to treat it like a high-maintenance and very loving pet which can nevertheless eat you if you mistreat it.

Well this has been a lot of pontificating now and I really should be practicing what I preach. I’m going to try to discipline my garrulous mind and make the next few posts specifically practical in character. Of course for me writing can easily slip into a flowing, inspired consciousness in which one word leads to another word. So even this pulpit sermonising silliness is a kind of magical experience and practice. Jormangand, I suspect, likes to gnaw on his own tail when he gets the munchies.

Til next time!