Comments on: Rune Courses and Titles: A Caution

By: Vanr

Vanr — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 16:44:55 +0000

Hmmmm….
I wanted to set this comment under “A Social Network Exclusively For Rune Study?”. Misplaced, but still valid.

By: Mahryan

Mahryan — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 15:00:28 +0000

I agree Vanr on all your points.
I’m finding it especially challenging as I’m mostly trying to follow along on my e-mail alerts (while supposedly doing paid work), so don’t know who’s replying to what! Still, it sort of illustrates what I see as Mike’s point (which I agree with) about the interrelations of past and future with our present (as in all over the place!). How Mike put it is essentially how I’ve always understood (attempted to that is) the three Norns and Wyrd/Orlog.
I think that Tyriel is making a different point though – also one I agree with – that while we can draw on traditional thought and any ancient knowledge running through our current bodies and minds, we have to create our own understanding resonate with this 21st century time.
There is a lot more I am thinking about this time in Midgard and comments entwined in this thread about what is/is not sane?
Anyway, wild [and a little crazy :-)] though this discussion is, obviously many of us are thoroughly enjoying it. It’s great to know we are all out there thinking about this together!

By: Vanr

Vanr — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 13:23:40 +0000

Runesecrets are on fire!
This torrent of ideas and opinions is magnificent.
Though, Tyriel it’s getting more and more difficult to follow the discussion.
Instead of a centralized article and the comments below, wouldn’t be more easy to have discrete discussions (aka comments under discrete triggering articles) about eg technical issues, community main lines, community members and their interests etc?

By: Tyriel

Tyriel — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:25:53 +0000

And I see a lot of backward thinking coming from the habits and assumptions of Tradition. It’s no longer credible (speaking for myself) to romanticize the past. I acknowledge it first as a psychological construct, then as an actual actor. Of course one must take into account the power of momentum. Could we stop on a dime? Perhaps not. Can we crash into a brick wall..? Time will tell!

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 05:59:11 +0000

The past is in the present. All the layers in the Well of Urd exist now; that’s what’s so wyrd about it. I am who I am now because of my past, which is present. Erdred wrote some good stuff on this in….’The Germanic Way’ (?) . It’s a booklet. He really nailed the time sense in a way that made it real to me.
The present is but the crest of the wave of the past. He points out the importance of the past in the Germanic Way, and the relative unimportance of the future as a causal energy in the moment. We make the future NOW, based upon what we have made with with our life (lives) in the past. It’s as if the actions of the past have created deeply set patterns of thought, feeling, values, behavior that we operate with in dealing with the present.
Runes are, according to Tradition, at the very deepest levels of the past…..here and now.

By: Admin (Tyriel)

Admin (Tyriel) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 05:12:12 +0000

Anyhow we’re getting entirely off topic, a problem I hope to somehow solve with the new social interface to the site. For now we’re restricted to the comment system.

By: Admin (Tyriel)

Admin (Tyriel) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 05:08:11 +0000

If I could chose a small staff to write for Rune Secrets, I’d probably want Mike on it. Probably ;)

As to the ‘we may interpret them in our own unique 21st century ways’ I must respond with a question I mean you to take seriously: Where is the past? Do you believe we can time travel to it? Certainly if it were in a place still, apart from where we are now, its perspective would largely be irrelevant, no?

And yet you’re right — there is something ‘deeper’ something that links the people who must have lived then to us. But if it exists anywhere, I must argue that it exists in the present, and must be found there. Even those ancient stones we often catch ourselves revering as sacred, they too are 21st century, and seen through the lens of the present. How could they be otherwise? They didn’t look like the ruins and artifacts they do now, to the people who made them. They were something else to them, and cannot be that to us.

I fear that we must cope with this loss of our collective past, our history — that it represents a deeper loss we each feel individually, about ourselves. If that is what you mean by our folk soul, by the ‘primordial depths’ then sure. But our folk soul and primordial depths both are mistaken if they seek to recreate the past. No new memories can be made save by action in the present.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 02:27:07 +0000

The runes are a common language of the inner mysteries. We may interpret them in our own unique 21st century ways, yet the meanings we derive/create follow some kind of deep pattern that is part and parcel of each rune. Rune meanings are not arbitrary, although they appear not to be limited by fixed interpretations.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 02:23:24 +0000

Interesting post. I like your description of chaos and order. The value of the inherited traditional runes is that they are part of a continuum of our folk soul. The oldest, most ancient and primordial runes may be different from the Elder Futhark, yet they are all related in some kind of sequence. Guido von List came up with his 18-row Armanen Futhork while temporarily blinded. Maybe he actually did recover an ancient version of the runes….
In any event, we need not invent anything new but rather draw upon the primordial depths of the runes. That practice seems to waken something within.