An excerpt from the Book of Rune Secrets (on Amazon)
KEY CONCEPTS: mobility, beginnings, wealth, luck, charisma, initial conditions, baggage, debt, ownership, freedom, non-violence
To the ancients, cattle represented a sort of mobile wealth that had to be nurtured. It also represents something less pleasant, and that is the idea of our own position, according to the wealth we were born into, or begin with, as we awaken to our study of the runes.
We all begin as cattle, as one of the herd. There are always pressures to fit in and follow. It is tempting to assume that we are autonomous. In the beginning though, we are just another person, and we are much more ‘like everyone else’ than we know. In some ways this is a good thing, in many ways, it is a bad thing. If we seek the independence and freedom that we deserve, we must accept this starting point and work from there.
So to begin the path of the runes, we are concerned with our initial condition and the luck we have had, or not had, up until that point. When we first begin to become conscious of ourselves, we see that there is much in our lives that seems to be our ‘default’ — a given. It was not put there by us consciously — so in essence we do not ‘own’ it. We simply carry it as baggage, or debt, or chains which immobilize us and prevent more consciously created circumstances.
Luck is just a kind of innate ability to deal with meaningless disorder. Until we take control of ourselves our circumstances are essentially luck of the draw, formed by our position in the herd and the conditioning that the herd imposes upon us. We have had good luck, or bad luck — but it is all the same. We do not own our own destiny.
This initial, inherited luck, is a power known as “Hamingja”, a kind of gravitas or charisma. It is increased through acts of courage and honor; the pursuit of truth. Charisma is essentially our ‘likability’ and it is the first trait that emerges from within that can influence our luck. Charisma is our ability to adapt to and exploit social situations on the fly.
The magic of influencing our luck depends on how we use our luck to consciously build our initial conditions. The more our conditions are actively and positively constructed, the better our ‘luck’ will become, as it emerges from within us, and from the situations we naturally create for ourselves — whether we know it or not. Luck is not indifferent chance. Chance comes from outside, and luck from within.
Wealth can be defined in many ways. The simplest and most contemporary measure is money. It is better to think about it in terms of ability to blunt necessity and to extend one’s personal power over the universe. Money is a trivial concern next to this latter, truer wealth.
Fehu challenges us to think differently about wealth, and about ownership and debt. Ownership could be viewed as a form of violence. It requires force on the fringes of any system that makes it central, and that force alienates rather than integrates, separates rather than unifies. In large systems, like nations, it causes war and poverty, so the violence of ownership is very real.
Money, as it exists in today’s world, is debt — and when we need money, when our actions revolve around getting money, we see that our actions are not free. To become free, we think we need money, and we are taught to accumulate wealth by this system’s rules. Then, in getting money, we are absorbed into a system in which nothing is free. What we own, ends up owning us.
The secret of Fehu is that real wealth is a type of freedom. Ownership and money are illusions at this level of wealth. When we define wealth as freedom, we can see the chains of our modern world much more clearly. This is a powerful step in separating ourselves from the herd.
We can start over whenever we want. We are much less rooted to one place than we believe. We can pick up and go. We can start every day new. We can even harness this energy to make every minute count.
The first thing to be free from is our limiting past. Our baggage. Our debt. Starting fresh, we immediately recreate the majority of our initial conditions. You can feel this fresh start in your body, it is very real. This is among the secrets of Fehu.
The energy of Fehu flows from dependence on the herd toward independence as an individual. When we seek such independence, it is a movement both into ourselves and outward into the world. We intend to learn the way of freedom. By the end of the First Aett, the rune Wunjo, we return to bring the joy of this freedom into human communities, generating a new, exponential cycle of authentic wealth, and we do so non-violently.
