Fire and Rain, Answering the Rune's Call

Book excerpt: This series rises out of my personal journey with the Runes that began during a Mask Dance workshop in Northern Germany, the birthplace of the runes. During the week I spent in a lovely seminar house secluded in among the trees bordering the heather of the Lunebergerheide, I found myself tasked with telling the story of the Runes as one of creation, not destruction. We used shamanic drumming and rattling to drive the visionary state and a specific body posture to guide our experience. My time was spent deep in a philosophical discussion with the energetic field of the Runes. It was impressed on me that the two fundamental distortions in the historical practice of Runes were the suppression of sexual energy in Christianity and the Germanic tribe's practice of ritual killing to gain personal power. I was shown how this combination inherently leads to atrocities. My first step was to seek out any creation stories I could find that were related to the runes. Somewhat to my surprise, I did not find any direct or obvious correlations between the runes names and the stories. In fact, the use of the runes as an alphabet turned out to be driven by the Christian Church. Then I looked into the current practice of Rune Stances and found their origins were both recent and suspect. Along the way, I had to admit that if the creation story of the runes was readily accessible, they would not have had to grab hold of an ignorant mixed-blood New Mexican to tell their tale. What I had to offer was my own idiosyncratic view of the situation. Since I had experience with ecstatic trance postures, I wondered if rune shapes corresponded with ancient ecstatic body postures. Once I turned towards the much older and more mysterious visionary roots of the Runes, my path to a runic story of creation began to open. I ended up with a mosaic of a sacred World Tree made of ancient bits and pieces. I hope they can open creative experiential doors for those drawn to work in the runic realms. Keywords: Ancestry, Creation Myths, Ecstatic Trance Postures, Epigenetics, Rune Stances, Runes, Sacred Speech, World Tree, Shamanism, Sustainable