Hello fellow occultists,
As I dive deeper into symbol sets of all kinds in my craft (ancient alphabets, planetary symbols, alchemical symbols, sigils, and glyphs that pop into my head during trance work), it makes me curious. Is there a set of symbols that you prefer to work with? If so, why? Is there a system that you use to create those symbols/sigils? Do you prefer symbols that are historically established or entirely intuitive?
I did my best to "modernize" the anglo-saxon futhorc (along with the later additions, including the northumbrian runes), which uses the 33 rune-row instead of the more popular "elder futhark" that uses the 24 rune-row derived from the Kylver stone. After watching most of Dr. Jackson Crawford's youtube series on norse runes and their ancient use in traditional scandinavian folk practices, I decided to go with his suggestion of using either the "younger futhark" (which uses the 16 rune-row that the old norse and the vikings themselves actually used) or the old english anglo-saxon futhorc, which is what served as the precursor for modern english. Because these alphabets were primarily used, even in magic rituals, as a form of writing, not as esoteric images use in divination spreads, I had to do the hard work Dr. Crawford suggested and make some difficult choices regarding how to properly assign all the necessary phonetic sounds to each rune.
However, after a lot of effort and homework into linguistics and the international pheonetic alphabet, I came up with a personalized system that allows me to convert any modern english word into raw phoenetic syllables, and then convert those syllables into runic letters, and then write them using the 33-rune row of the northumbrian anglo-saxon futhorc as inscriptions on talismans, or whatever I wish. As for divination, I do actually have a set of these runes that I handcrafted out of ash-wood chips, marked with a thumbprint of my own blood, and then painted over with red acryllic. However, I don't use them in "spreads" like tarot cards, or draw them one-by-one out of a bag. I grab a handful at a time and throw them into a bowl, then I spit into the bowl and use my hand to stir them around before I reach into the bag and grab another handful and throw that into the bowl, spit, stir it around, and repeat this until all the runes are in the bowl. Then I just look at them. I look for lines, overlapping corners, whichever ones are touching or close by each other. I just let go and let whatever I am meant to see come forward to me, my eyes will naturally "know" what I am meant to look at. I try to relax my ego and let the process take control of me instead of being in control of it.
Additionally, when I do this kind of divination, I am not considering the "esoteric" meanings of the runes, only their sound, their actual intoned physical sound, as a kind of vibrational energy. Each rune has it's own "tune", and that "tune" is actually the manifestation of the esoteric meaning of the rune, in objective reality. What is immediately obvious is that the objective reality of the rune, that is to say, how it looks, how it sounds, how it is used, is sometimes completely different from whatever people will tell you the esoteric meaning of the rune is. All I will say is that this is something to meditate upon and to reflect upon, and something I realized about the way most people are doing runic divinations these days that confused and troubled me, which I had to address somehow. This is how I did so, but everyone is different. What I had to go through, all this effort and personalization, may seem unecessary to most people, but for me, I needed to strip away all the misconceptions to get at the real living truth of what the runes DO, and then ask myself if they seemed like a useful tool in my life for doing whatever they might allow me to do. You see, I have a specific task for which I use them, and a specific way I carry out that task, which I try to align with the ancestral practices and traditional way that the runes were used and the actual power they might contain.
