Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's getting on for midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. (Any question received after then will not get an answer, and will likely just be deleted.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.

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With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***  

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Hello, and thank you again for these Q&As.

1. Venus charities: what are suitable ones, other than for the performing arts?
Are women's domestic violence shelters Moon charities, Venus charities, or both?

2. Mars charities: do sports charities count as well as veterans' organizations? What others?
I was reading Christopher Warnock's pages on William Lilly, and of course the subjects are all very 16th century and don't take account of what exists now.
I've read plenty of times on here about literacy charities for Mercury, but less so about some of the other planets.

3. I would like to learn about runes as an alphabet and in their basic occult meanings. I am not planning to use them for divination myself, but, for example, when I see sets of runes on jewelry in a pagan store, or on someone's t-shirt, I would like to have a reasonable idea when they are a meaningful arrangement and when they are a pattern of random letters - or if I see a divination spread to have a rough idea about it as I would about tarot. I would like to learn about both Elder and Younger Futhark, and other common variations. Maybe also to recognize the most famous historical inscriptions? I have known a few of the letters for a long time, but really not the whole set(s).

What books or online documents would you, or other community members, recommend for this?

[ecosophia]

1) All arts and crafts, performing or otherwise, correspond to Venus, and so do all women's charities. (All men's charities correspond to Mars, and all charities for intersexed or otherwise difficult-to-assign persons correspond to Mercury.)

2) Mars rules all charities for men, everything for veterans and active duty military, and museums having substantial collections of arms and armor. Also historical museums devoted to past wars. As for Mercury, anything that has to do with language, writing, communication, books -- libraries are a good choice -- and, as noted above, intersexed persons. Anything that has to do with trade, theft, or spying also counts -- a museum of espionage (they exist) would be an option.

3) That's not a subject about which I'm well informed. Anyone else?

[(Anonymous)]

3) I spent some time in that space (more theoretical than practical) since I really liked vikings. Sweyn Plowright's "The Rune Primer" is exactly what it says on the tin, and good for cutting through a lot of the BS that shows up in that space. Edred Thorsson's "Futhark" is something of a classic and quite workable, though I have pretty mixed feelings about him. There is a really strong left-hand path (western sense, not vamachara) streak to his work and his Rune Gild really put me off when I looked at them. He suffers some criticism for not being "historically accurate" which really varies by issue. He has the habit of transcribing larger trends in german occultism into his runic system to fill in missing material from the original sources. I really like that approach but a naive reading tends to lead to an accusation of making stuff up. He's an inescapable major figure, that's why I recommend him.
The particular runic system and alphabet are partially independent. Younger futhark is the one used by the vikings and is the subject of most of the historical inscriptions, but it also feels very incomplete to me. The elder futhark has a smaller corpus but it interfaces in more obvious ways with both natural patterns and with the older underlying indo-european religious tradition. It probably isn't a coincidence that the later latin, greek, and egyptian writing systems all had 24 characters as well. Most books on the subject deal with this one. The anglo-saxon futhorc (not a typo) has 33 characters and is the topic of the most comprehensive of the actually extant rune poems. The added runes also deal nicely with Arthurian themes (ie. stone, spear, and chalice). I would be willing to bet money that it could be cleanly interfaced with druidry though that isn't a project I've seen anyone attempt. Alaric Albertsson's book on the subject is good history with a very fluffy approach to spirituality. Finally, the Armanen Runes are associated (somewhat wrongly) with Nazism. They are a pretty recent invention and since my interest was more history and theory than practice, I only gave them a cursory examination.
On modern inscriptions, elder futhark seems to be the most common on printed viking-themed media despite not being historical (it should be the younger futhark). I suspect this is a result of the popularity of occult books dealing with the elder futhark. Also, the blank or "wyrd" rune is a modern invention; it doesn't exist in any system prior to the 70's when a man named Ralph Blum released a book on the subject. Some people have been able to get his system to work. The divinatory meanings weren't recorded and thus aren't standardized, so you'll see a lot less consistency in readings between practitioners than with a system like Tarot or Geomancy.

[realmscryer]

The book Futhark: A Handbook of Rune Magic by Edred Thorsson might be a good place to start. I have been using it for my initial rune explorations and like it so far.

[robertmathiesen]

Ralph W. V. Elliott's book Runes (1959; 2ns ed., 1989) is a very good historical introduction to the various systems of runes, though of course a bit dated by now. Martin Findell's book Runes (2014) is also very good. Both are by professional academic runologists, but Findell ends his book with a few sensible pages on the modern use of runes for magic. For the history and current practice of esoteric and magical runology, "Edred Thorsson" (in mundane life, Stephen E. Flowers) seems to me to be by far the most knowledgeable author. (The "woke" have enormous problems with him, which I take as a compliment to him.) He began as a very promising academic, but competitors in the dog-eat-dog worlid of academe sabotaged his further career by "outing" him as an esotericist and magician. Kiss of death, that proved to be ...

Runes

[(Anonymous)]

Check the Asatruar websites. Diana Paxson's is a good start.

[lp9]

I like Diana Paxson's book, "Taking Up the Runes," and Paul Rhys Mountfort's "Nordic Runes."