[This is a multipart series relating to the RUNA Talks of the summer of 1991.]
Thirty-two years ago this summer, I undertook a series of talks on the subject of the Word RÛNA. I tell the story of the talks a bit in the text of HISTORY OF THE RUNE-GILD (Arcana Europa). These talks were held every week on Saturday morning at 10:00 at the Irminsûl-Hof in Austin, Texas. Written versions of the talks were published in 1996 Rúnarmál I which is available at www.seekthemysteries.com. I began the talks speaking to an empty room on June 6. James entered the room about half-way through, and from him the word spread about what was going on. The next talk was attended by about twenty people. No one who attended any of the Talks remained unchanged.
Eight talks occurred in the Saturday morning cycle. Three others included in the text were based on talks given at other times during that summer. To give an overview of the whole series, the titles of the Talks were: “On the Thews,” “The Power of the Word in Operant Runology,” “The Words and the Word: Auxiliary Formulæ,” “The Polarian Method and RÛNA,” “Universalizing the System,”“Head Staves,” “Transformation and RÛNA,” “Is RÛNA for All?,” “RÛNA and WYRD,” “Modeling and Re-Modeling of Self and Culture” and “RÛNA as a Trans-Æonic Word.”
What I am presenting here is necessarily fragmentary and in order to understand the message of the Rûna-Talks entirely, I think the student would have to read them all in their entirety in sequence. However, as in every case when dealing with the Mysterious, fragmentary information can have its own kind of message given the right reader(s). The Romantics extolled the virtues of the Fragmentary as a concept in and of itself.
From Talk I: The Concept of Rûna
RÛNA means the Secret or Mystery (Rune), and the ultimate Secret is housed in the concept of Secrecy itself. It is not that something is being consciously concealed, it is a matter of approaching the Form or Principle of Hiddenness itself which lies at the root of the mystery.
RÛNA is a noun, but its force, its effect, if you will, is dynamic and verbal.
The novelist John Fowles, writing in his philosophical treatise The Aristos (p. 28), explains this phenomenon quite well when he says:
Mystery, or unknowing, is energy. As soon as a mystery is explained, it ceases to be a source of energy. If we question deep enough there comes a point where answers, if answers could be given, would kill. We may want to dam the river; but we dam the spring at our peril. In fact, since ‘God’ is unknowable, we cannot dam the spring of basic existential mystery. ‘God’ is the energy of all questions and questing; and so the ultimate source of all action and volition.
Continuing with Fowles’ metaphor for a moment, the Rune (RÛNA) is the ultimate source of all waters, and the runestaves are the springs feeding the rivers of meaning in this world of Midgard.
Also, when confronting the very concept of the Secret itself we soon come up against an ancient dichotomy: a polarization of ideas. Such polarizations are not an obstacle, but a bridge for the Runer. There are the "Secrets of Nature," and the "Secrets of the Soul." This describes the two poles of RÛNA— one outer ("out there," in Nature) and one inner ("in here," in the mind, soul or spirit of the individual human being.)
Scientists spend their time trying to "figure out" the "secrets of nature." The fact that there is, much to most scientist’s chagrin, a great deal of the Mystery in what they are trying to do is revealed by the curious, but well-known and uncontested phenomenon that occurs whenever one of these scientists unravels a "secret of nature." The first thing that happens is that a myriad of "new secrets" present themselves to be unraveled. The scientist is not creating the Known, but the Unknown.
At the same time mystics spend their time trying to "figure out" the "secrets of the psyche." Many, especially in our modern age, attempt to do so by looking to scientific methods, and by seeking to "demystify" magic.
Both the "scientist" and the "mystic" most usually miss the point of their endeavors because they consider themselves on the same path (in the case of the "modern mystic" who says things such as "magic is just undiscovered science," or they see themselves as absolutely unrelated to one another (as is most often the case with the materialistic technician).
In reality these tendencies betray the fact that these are two polar opposites, with both existing on the same spectrum. This is why each contains the seed of its opposite in practice. The Runer, one aware of, and working with, RÛNA, is conscious of this polarity and is able through this knowledge to avoid the pitfalls inherent in the situations.
Manifestations of these two Runes (inner and outer) are present in the symbolism of each of the runestaves. The basic definition of RÛNA as "Sense of the Hidden" accounts for both ends of this spectrum. The sense is an inner, subjective, numenon, while the hidden itself is an outer, objective, phenomenon.
So the question looms: What are we to do with this knowledge? The answer to that question is contained in the galdr: reyn til runa! This is an Icelandic phrase which means alternately: "seek the mysteries," or "try for the mysteries."