The Runes are one of the most striking of Aryan world-ordering tools available to those Questing to bridge Natural Law and Spiritual Truth. So ‘simple’ in form are these concise and direct glyphs of fate-force, that anyone of the blood in possession of the skill to carve or even draw these symbols – and undertake the Sacrifice For Understanding them – can draw on the might and wisdom of this Aryan Tradition no matter their material-financial resources. The carving or drawing we leave up to those of you drawn to this powerful tool for the Quest; what is much more rare and priceless in a form untarnished by empty theory and wishful thinking, the experiential wisdom of Those Who Know, it is part of Our Mission to equip you with here on this website.
Heill!
I. Of all the questions we receive about Aryan Spirituality, by far the most are queries about the runes: what do they mean? What can they do? How does one learn and grow in their use?
These are daunting questions to meet. The very word, rún (like its lesser-known English cognate roun, which is much closer to the Old Norse pronuncation as well), literally means ‘secret’, and not only from the necessary practice of safeguarding the mysteries from the fumblings of the profane and vulgar. The teachings of each rune constitute a landmark of initiation, a self-transforming process of hard-earned wisdom that cannot simply be conveyed in convenient textual form.
“I know that I hung on a windswept tree-
Nine long nights,
Wounded with a spear, dedicated to Óðinn,
Myself to myself,
On that tree of which no man knows-
From where its roots run.“With no bread did they refresh me nor a drink from a horn,
Downwards I peered;
I took up the runes, screaming I took them,
Then I fell back from there.”
II. In truly runic (i.e. mysterious) fashion, these secrets stealthily continued even through the later times of the Icelandic sagas, for those who can learn by reading between the lines. The warning should be well taken to heart, in the saga of Egill Skallagrímsson, when the skald encounters the ill-carved runes of an ignorant páśu. The uninitiated pretender had tried affecting a girl through carving runes he did not truly know, and it took the fortunate arrival of a genuine initiate to correct that health-destroying work.
That the runes rightly kent had tremendous power and insight to offer is apparent from an introduction to the Ljóðatal, a further speech of the Hanged God’s immediately following our earlier quotation from the Hávamál (specifically the Rúnatal). Truly beginning to understand the secrets, though, most often is demonstrated in the myths with the help of close spiritual allies – most notably the valkyrja’s speech of the Sigrdrífumál.
III. We can learn from this, like Sigurðʀ, how the runes may be wielded to effect, but it is obvious in the lecture from Brynhildʀ that rune-wisdom is a matter first and foremost of LEARNING, that one must KNOW the runes to work them rightly. Learning to know the wisdom of explicitly SECRET (ᚱᚢᚾᛟ) things, though, is not a plainly marked path laid out for the lazy desiring the easy.
Hangaguð’s winning of this wisdom was at the precise opposite of little cost, and the Secrets are KEPT Secret except from those willing to brave the labyrinth of riddle to seek through their own sacrifices. It is for this reason that some of the most piercing and plainly open insights into the runes’ nature are wound through the concealment of what are called the rune-poëms.
