Secrets of the Scandinavian gods. The road of runes #1
Studying the existing knowledge about the universe, including esoteric ones, is one of my hobbies. Today my wife Olga Tedda and I invite you to an amazing journey into the world of runes.
The word "runes" means "secret". We find prototypes of some runes among the very first signs that were written by human and clearly have magical goals. These signs date back to the seventeenth and sixteenth millennia BC.
About the III-I millennia BC the earlier systems of magic signs began gradually to turn into so-called sacred alphabets. At that time, they were perceived precisely as sets of sacred symbols with the phonetic values assigned to them, which allowed using these letters for writing. This understanding relates not only to the runic alphabet, but also to other sign systems. For example, the Hebrew alphabet, the magic and sacred use of which symbols is widely known.
Today it is commonly believed that the classic runic system - FUThARK was formed already by the middle of II century from ВС. The name FUThARK was formed on the phonetic values of the first six runes (Fehu, Uruz, Thurisaz, Ansuz, Raido, Kano). The area of its distribution was extremely wide: almost all northern and central Europe. This explains the variety of names of the same runes: at different times and in different regions there were different versions of the pronunciation of the same words.
Classic, or Elder, FUThARK contains 24 runes. Sometimes the so-called empty rune or Odin's rune is added to the runic set. This approach was proposed by Ralph Blum, who did it similar to the Tarot cards, where sometimes there is the so-called White Card. But the origins of Torot and the runes are completely different. Speaking of runes, a blank sign in the alphabet is nonsense. And yet, most runic sets that you can buy today will consist of 25 runes, because an empty rune will be there. But in fact, it is quite comfortable with us. An empty rune will come in handy if one of your their runes is lost. You can just draw on the empty rune the symbol that we need.
Over time, FUThARK has been constantly changing. Today, there are about ten different variations of it, which differ both in the number of signs in the alphabet and in their writing, both in time and place of their creation. These revised runic characters often have nothing to do with the classic FUThARK. Sometimes they are called Junior Runes. They were used mainly for writing, and this distinguishes them from the characters of the Elder FUThARK, which always kept sacred meaning. Some of the Junior Runes (eg, Icelandic, Northumbriae, Anglo-Saxon) also became subsequently considered sacred and used for divination and magic.
To be continued...