Hamingja Paperback

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Throughout my 30 years of working with the runes, they have taken on various aspects depending on who I was and what I was doing at the time. The best way I can try to explain them is almost as their own organisms that live symbiotically with the individual who has chosen to “take them up.”

Advisors, sages, teachers - but also sometimes potent forces of upheaval and reorganization, acting almost like a powerful hallucinogen can, to forcibly show a different perspective that may at first feel completely foreign or uncomfortable.

At other times, they seem to be like trees planted on the estate. They grow, spread root and leaf widely, and spring from small seeds, become saplings, and eventually, mighty giants that we have grown alongside and know by name and appearance, as well as the countless layers of experience we have with them.

Like the rings of a tree, the rune is a series of many circles, concentric, expanding, leading us wider and wider and then back in to the heart. They are repositories of deep, hidden information, as well as storage vessels of things that we do not wish to forget. 

At other moments, I feel them almost as unseen aquifers beneath the surface, powerful, flowing up from unknown depths to feed my own roots and send me further skyward on my own travels or tribulations.

My good friend and brother Vegtam refers to each one of the Elder Futhark as its own god-form, enthroned in a great circular room, where each can be approached and communicated with, at once outside of ourselves and yet still part of that dark and vast universe that lies within each of us.

Whatever they are, they are to you.

This is the central point I’d like to make at the outset. The runes can only be approached from an experiential position. They cannot be understood nor utilized from “without.” It is a relationship, and as such, it must begin with introduction, then conversation. Getting to know them as you might a new acquaintance who you desire as a friend.

From there, the relationship deepens, as all of them do, through time. Time, and closeness. They are internalized. They begin to root themselves in our consciousness, and if fed, they grow. You will begin to see them everywhere, their stave-forms, and more than this, you will see their meanings in many places and situations and happenings.

Their hidden selves will begin to emerge over time, revealing themselves to you, and you begin to see the way they weave together, interconnect, branches and roots and leaves flowing into each other, and forming a network of information - of spirit.

A great map between all roads and rivers in this cosmos and consciousness, each one contained within and interfacing with another.

Importantly, you will be able to use this map.

Not only in your spiritual work, to understand yourself and the world, and your own place in it, but in the seemingly mundane as well. You will begin to “think runically” as though they had permeated and augmented your mind and acted as keys that have lit up pathways otherwise dark and dormant.

Interpersonal relationships will be seen and understood through this lens. Situational awareness and the ability to better see cause and effect. “Because this, then that,” with increasing accuracy, and yet -

None of this is supernatural.

It is in fact the most natural thing there is. These are organic spiritual technologies that have been developed and left to us now to puzzle out, to use, to rediscover and to hand back down to those who come after us. They remain evergreen and strong, just as they were at their inception.

Will you follow in the footsteps of their original master and take them up?

What follows here is a practical application of the runes on the individual’s life - used only in one of their many, many aspects as a focus, a guide, and a map for who we may yet become…

But only if we are willing to sacrifice what we are now.

- Paul Waggener, Midwinter 2025
Ulfheim, Virginia, United States of America