I am so appreciating the positive magic potential of the Runes.
I have just finished teaching the first of the three Aetts. The Aetts are the three groups of eight Runes each into which the Rune Alphabet is divided into, working with my Latvian group.
Their commitment to the positive magic of the runes has been awe-inspiring.
So much to learn and grow through!
The first group of eight Runes is what it takes to be successful as a human being. The second Aett is about learning through the sometimes terrible challenges of life. The third Aett is about sharing in God-consciousness.
I thought it would be interested to share how the Runes arose in my life.
Weirdly, and unknowing as to reasons or the forces driving me, I enrolled for the Oxford University English course which taught the roots of English.
I studied: Old Norse, Anglo Saxon, and Medieval Welsh. So I first learned the runes studying Old Norse in Oxford in 1969. I remember loving the Norse epic, The Havamal, The Sayings of the High One, the epic powerful Völuspá: the Words of the Seeress and the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf.
But I am coming to believe now that some destiny made me choose that English Course option, studying Norse and the Runes. It only got as near to modern times as Shakespeare!
As my life unfolds, I may get to know my full connection with the Runes and its real and full role and reason.
One of my teachers at Oxford University was the son of JRR Tolkien.
The subject of JRR Tolkien’s son’s teaching was ‘Indo-European sound changes’, in other words: Philology, and specifically within that: the evolution of words in that part of the Indo-European Language Tree occupied by the Norse and Germanic peoples who invaded Northern Europe, part of whom were the Anglo Saxons.
The Anglo Saxons invaded England around 450 AD and they practised ethnic cleansing on the indigenous Celtic-speaking Romano-British peoples in England who had lost their ability to defend themselves because they had been part of the Roman Empire for four hundred years. With the invasion of the city of Rome in 410AD by Alaric the Goth, and then the arrival of the Anglo Saxons in England, the partying of the Romanised British rich in their villas came to a dreadful halt!
King Arthur is said to have tried to save Britain and Avalon, but the Anglo-Saxons were mercilessly unstoppable and the Celtic people in England either died or fled to Wales or even fled to Northern Spain.
What happened next in England is that the Danes and Vikings then invaded (the Vikings were the descendants of the Norse).
But the real change was when the Normans invaded in 1066. The Normans destroyed the Anglo Saxon nobility and church hierarchy totally with their MacDonalds-ised organisational blueprint and the language of English received a huge Norman French overlay. With the agreement of the Pope, Anglo Saxon Bishops and priests in England were replaced by the aspiring younger sons of the invading Norman upper class.
But since those days studying Anglo Saxon and Norse at Oxford at the end of the Sixties, I have also studied the Irish Druid Path and also Vedic Astrology.
Amazingly and fascinatingly, there are strong similarities between the ancient Indian language, Sanskrit, and mythology of the Sanskrit-speaking Vedic peoples (the Indo-European Aryans who invaded Northern India and whose religion became Hinduism and then off-shoot into Buddhism as well), there are strong similarities between Vedic language and myth and the Gaelic speaking Irish.
Amazingly there are also strong parallels between some Vedic Myths and some Norse Myths.
This is because it is the case that the Indo-Europeans invaded outwards from a common place of origin. They spread out into Europe and reached the Norse Lands, Britain and Ireland as well as Spain, they invaded down into Italy and Greece and their descendants reached North Africa – and they also invaded in the other direction into Asia Minor and into Northern India, as well, conquering the indigenous people there and creating the predecessor of the caste system.
The whole Aryan and ‘Aryan invasion model’ became very unpopular due to Adolph Hitler’s use of it, and due Christian Barnard and Apartheid, but the truth is that modern DNA testing now reveals strong links between Irish and SE European genetic stock, and evidence dos show that waves of invasion definitely occurred.
Invading peoples brought with them their language and their Gods, but mostly always there was syncretisation with the spiritual beliefs and practices of the local people they invaded too. The Key to the Indo European people’s waves of inavasion was their possession of the technology and blacksmithing of Iron, their horse-drawn chariots, their hierarchical social structure and their superior farming methods.
This point I just made about invaders and traders adopting local beliefs and practises and creating spiritual syncretisation, is what lies behind the story of the invading Norse learning much from the spirituality of the indigenous Vanir people, and their futile attempts to slay Gullveig, and the story of Odin learning from magic from Gullveig.
Meanwhile I have just finished the first of the three Aetts into which the Rune Alphabet is divided into, working with my Latvian group. Their commitment to the positive magic of the runes has been awe-inspiring.
But now to return to my personal story in this vast backdrop of human history.
I discovered there was a family link in my life to the runes when I met my father, twenty years after I had studied Norse at Oxford University. I only met my father once. It was in the same year as I found my Irish mother.
The meeting with my father was not a success as he asked to borrow money from me. However he told me how his family worked on a farm in the Danzig Corridor just over the border as it was then with Germany.
When he was out in the fields one day aged 13, Hitler’s shock troops invaded with no declaration of war. He watched as Nazi soldiers executed one in ten of the males in the village because a youth had thrown a stone at a troop carrier.
This was after Luftwaffe had strafed the place before the troop carriers drove in.
There was no return to his village, so he made his way to Danzig along a road where very many died as a result of the Luftwaffe strafing, joined General Sikorski’s Polish Forces in exile and got to Norway and thence to Scotland by British destroyer and was posted at an airfield in SE England, where, after the end of the war, he met my mother who was stationed in the RAF huts as a land girl, her family of 13 being unable to support her further in Ireland. I am a secret from her family as she was not married when I was born, and we had to go into one of the now-infamous Bon Seccours Convent Orphanages in England.
But to return to what my Polish father told me: he told me when we met that his mother used the Runes in telling people their future, and it went back in the family.
My mother told me that my father beat her up when she told him she was pregnant. And by coincidence, my mother told me that her mother: my maternal grandmother in Ireland read tea leaves and also kept ‘a Book’ in other words arranged marriages for the local farmers. I was very pleased indeed to have met my maternal grandmother just once just before she died, though I had to meet her incognito, so as to ‘preserve the secret of my mother’s sin’: I was posing as a tourist enquiring after rental of their holiday cottage.
So it turns out that prescience is part of my destiny on both my mother’s and my father’s side. It turns out that prescience is one (just one) of my fates. I have my Moon in a place of my Vedic birth chart which is called Gandanta, which is a spiritual knot that the more you try to untie it the more it tightens, but it does bring prescience and mysticism (if you physically survive): http://www.mastervedicastrology.com/gandanta.html
So after studying the Runes at Oxford, it was my Polish father that put me on to working with the Runes for divination. He talked quite a bit about my Polish grandmother who he never saw again after the Germans invaded (though he did correspond with her after the end of the war).
So I think it has been a life-time of a meant unfoldment of a destiny in some ways because when I went to Oxford as an undergraduate, i found myself studying Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse and medieval Welsh. JRR Tolkien’s son lectured me. And then I found out about my grandmothers.
The next step was that I then went on to learn Tarot just a few years after finding my father when I found myself next door to a Tarot reader from a remote Scottish island, and she said I took to it like a natural.
Then just after that I started practising astrology and my then teacher said she felt I had studied astrology in a past life because I took to it so quickly.
Then the Ogham followed: The alphabet of the ancient Irish Druids that has many correspondences, but the principal correspondence is with the energy and spiritual meaning of trees. The Ogham happened suddenly when Saturn transited over my Ketu (my South Node in my birth chart) which can release past life skills/people/experiences etc.
And now I come to the present day when I feel I have got so much out of the teaching of the Runes to the Latvian group. I have come to really appreciate how positive and strengthening the runes actually are!
You would be most welcome to study with me on my course:
