After a period of vacancy and silence

Em Hotep, everyone.

We've been rather quiet in here for a while. This is just a thread to ask how we're all doing, and to see if there can be any future plans in store for the forum, like coming up with new threads or discussion material, or how we should properly treat it. I might personally be thinking on it. I feel, however, much has been already exhausted, for a time, but new ideas can always crop up again anyways.

How's everyone been doing, however? Anything you wish to share? Personally been studying the good old runes of the Elder Futhark that has kept me preoccupied for a while.

hi mystic,
since you asked me to work on my typing (and its working btw, so thank you )i have a question for you.

why dont you start a topic about, in this case your rune workings, instead of focussing on the death end street?

i myself have been focussing on one particular rune for a while now to help get this site on the role again: ansuz. as it promotes communication, understanding and inspiration.
since you are saying you've been bussy with the runes for a while now, you probably know a lot more about them and the paths they offer to the user in a spiritual sense then me. seems to me as quite an interesting topic to have on this site.

all roads start with a first step anyways...

Still learning.

Also you might wish to combine Ansuz (ᚨ) with a few other runes... one or two... to give a more cohesive, clearly defined and focused purpose... like Dagaz (ᛞ) and Kenaz (ᚲ), which will be like a breakthrough of illumination unto that communication and inspiration with a better knowledge of how to proceed and torchlight the way (Kenaz - literally its meaning, "torch"; but encompassing of more aspects and attributes underneath its surface conceptual umbrella which requires a careful study and digestion of knowledge not to keep it to a shallow level of very superficial understanding that doesn't really suffice to make up for its deeper complexity of energetic implications). And, if the deeper language of intentions when using runic formulas aren't enough, you can devise energetically charged word spells that function according to the rune formulaic purpose and then amplify and conclude it by the power of the specific runes but it has to be perfectly matching the energies of the runes in some sense and be bound towards the target aim. But I also think it might work the other way around too; you can first invoke the energies of the runes and then use those energies to charge a certain spell. However, I don't recommend putting any spell on this forum, thank you. Also responsibility is advised (but more on that later).

Great subject, though. It's a magickal language that can work as good supplement to different kinds of work and spiritual practices as well as to organize and re-purpose, or bring forward, certain energies in the mind and subconscious to work more effectively towards certain aims. There are a few more elaborate purposes I'm figuring on, though, but it's just in the prototype phase and nothing I can share here directly.

Also remember to respect the runes. They're like holy charged sigils but still very different from normal sigils. Their magick shouldn't be misused or abused or you might invoke their merkstave (reversed or upside down) attributes and even fall out of favor with certain of the energies of the runes. They're a language of underlying universal currents, one could say, very much like the Tarot cards of the Major Arcana, and could get you into a lot of trouble if disrespected. Not saying this for you necessarily, but to make up, responsibly, for my former words giving certain suggestions that can potentially ramify into different directions...

i have a general question, that actually popped up again after reading your post. when i was studying islam in a broad spectrum, i once stumbled upon a text stating that it's not allowed to alter the energy of stones. now back then i was on a very strange path and it made me angry, simply because on the inside of the ka'aba these days, are walls of marble and carved in them are quran texts. to me thats altering stone energies. i could be very wrong off course, but i got angry anyways and blocked myself further.

so my question is, do you think the carving of runes alter the stone's energy in any way?

I think that's just blind religious dogma to prohibit the use of certain talismanic magick on the properties of stones which they might fear or use to instill fear to shy away from totally natural magickal practices. You're free to magickally alter the energy of stones, including minerals and crystals, by such practices as energetic programming and using them for energy work and projection, and I do believe that carving the runes with a strong energetic intent and knowledge of the runes upon stones might indeed alter their vibrations to a noteworthy extent, since it'll now be carved with the rune(s) and become somewhat consecrated and programmed by those energies.

Are you currently into Islam? What's your path directly? You know we aren't much in favor of the monotheistic religions around here, but it's due to a deeper reason of them usurping great power in the world, proselytizing upon the weak and naive, blinding by dogma, chaining by dogma, converting by the sword, religiously imperialistic spreading their scourge over the world, destroying old cultures and religions by ruining temples, statues, defacing ancient knowledge, etc., etc., persecuting certain wisdom traditions, and enslaving people under a false light that only few rare individuals truly pierce - but those esoteric sects or mystics are usually labelled as heterodox by the majority of the followers of those religions, which tells there's something fundamentally wrong and flawed about those religions in the first place, not to mention denying the existence of other gods than there only being some supposed cosmic tyrant as it were, that punishes with hellfire, demands obedience and scares people into submission. See what that does to the human mind, what the consequences of such teachings are. That's not at all to say there's no divinity, but that's it's way more complex than just one god alone than what these religions make it out to be. How else would we have our diverse Pagan beliefs, traditions, cultures and systems, outside of the Abrahamitic faiths? How else such deities as found in the Ancient Egyptian pantheon? Given, they do sometimes have a supreme deity, as it were, like a creator of the gods, as Atum, but it's also usually tied to a very different theology - way different than a deity that interacts with humanity, orders him/her around and imposes religious laws upon him/her for the total incompletion, imbalance, dogma, fear and even fanaticism of him/her due to their minds being closed by so much restriction and abhorrence for life and, equally as bad, suppressing half of humanity, like the place of women in those religions and hence also denies us all half of our collective wisdom, the feminine side, and left is only an unbalanced masculine side bent upon total havoc, destruction, control and domination. They would, in part, call this proposition that I come with as the Serpent, and blame it upon Eve. Not to criticize your own faith, however.

I stopped using this account for some time due to things I was dealing with, but I've been well. Regarding the runes, in addition to what the other users have said, it might be useful to learn the Galdr and Standhr, essentially body positions and chants that go along with each rune.

Would you say that the English language has lost some of its magick essence or potential when converting from Futhorc to the Latin alphabet, at least in the language of the common and non magickal folk?

Aetherian wrote:I stopped using this account for some time due to things I was dealing with, but I've been well. Regarding the runes, in addition to what the other users have said, it might be useful to learn the Galdr and Standhr, essentially body positions and chants that go along with each rune.

Agreed. In the process of learning that. I've also done my own experimental practices in a similar vein, but they could be responsible or less so, however I'm figuring out through certain albeit careful trial and error... but I think it has had good effects thus far.

i have been rereading all night and it was not about the energies of stones, but about the properties of stones. which is something different. and that makes that i made a mistake back then by blocking that.
i like researching things i don't understand, this was one of them. thank you for pointing me in the right direction.
also, i will be meditating on the runes you mentioned and combine the three.

@aetherian: could you tell me more about the chants and body positions or give me a link to research. i'd like to test those too.

now the side note islam:
i totally understand your point of view. not saying that i wholly agree, but i get the point. for me personally, i like the study of religions and religious texts. and what once started out as a search for more happy living turned out to be a travel tru daath, working with o9a, understanding the workings of current 218 and 182, learning from several voudou spirits, helping jinn and lots more. the strangest thing to me was that all these can be applied within the darker workings of islam.
the sad part of it, is that most sufi groups and general islam especially, turn their eye on this truth and stay within the paradigm you describe and thereby fail to see the Truth.

so what path am i on? to be honest i have no clue. i go where the path leads me. what i would call the essence of islam, is not what today's islam is about or any other religion. am i faithless? no definitely not, but i do have despair when i notice what is going on in the world, so i refuse to bow for such.

Islam in its ancient form is Goddess-revering. Even today it retains Her symbols.

thank you vedantablack. its not often i meet someone who knows that and doesn't use it in a derogatory manner.

kenaz, dagaz and ansuz. what came up after meditating on them:

i'm dutch so the words are kind of tracable to my own language. kenaz is kennis which means knowledge. dagaz is dag which means day and ansuz is more in the corner of german speech and is einsaz, it means beginning. so in a sense these three runes to me became coming forth by day.

because kenaz is connected with heat and i for myself have a sort of discussion going on at home about whether something is a dandelion or an ulcer, i was quite surprised to find this debate in the runes. now ulcers in ayurveda medicine have to do with heat and drought. im no expert in ayurvedic medicine, but i found it interesting, because these 2 easily connect with the red desert. which has actually nothing to do with it. dandelions however heal ulcers and in the spiritual sense are a gift of lovers.

ansuz can be explained as godhead, which to me is my own godhead. it can also be explained as a certain tree and in my spiritual life i've befriended several trees so i reached out to them and they told me its my familytree. so for me ansuz has to do with head of family and ancestorwork.

dagaz didn't ring any bells until i looked at the picture and it started changing and told me a story about lovers. 2 triangles kissing, exchanging while staying separate. it reminded me not to be afraid to be. it sort of became a mirror, but in a different sense then im used to. the mirrors i'm used to mirror and then run with the knowledge, leaving me bleeding to death. in this case it was a mirror that uplifts to growth and new adventures that lay beyond. a promise so to say. very loving kindness in feel.

overall i really enjoyed this little introduction to the runes and i find it more in the area of feelings. my experience with pathworking with several card decks was more mental, so this was a nice surprise.

I suppose I've earned the right to exercise my Ego a bit... though I want to get out of the practice of talking about Myself, so this will be the last time for a very long time.

Sometime last year, being 2020 for future reference, after ruminating days on end about something unrelated, I came to a "great realization" about the world I've been incarnated into. I'd run out of other places to look for answers and came across this ineffably large pit, best I can describe it. The "nature" or formulaic principles of life (as pretentious as this will sound) beyond how I imagine it's intended for me to perceive it while in a physical shell, because the consequences of this were awful enough that I did everything in my power to try and forget about it. For the first time in my recollected existence I felt as though there were truly no ultimate purpose to doing anything whatsoever. The world itself, reality as I'd accepted it and everything in it was just a means to an end. Death, life, birth, renewal, meaningless, my own included. I mentally felt as though I had slipped into a giant, starless abyss from which I'd never escape. I remember sitting for hours with my head in my hands nauseously trying to escape from it. Time seemed like it was going on around me as opposed to my being in it, like the wind. It was honestly awful. It got bad enough that I at one point wanted to just curl up into a ball and starve, wither away and let the worms have me not out of suicidal ideation, but because there truly seemed no sense in doing anything else. I mean this in the same way as choosing to reverse after taking a turn to a dead-end.

I tried to communicate this with a then-trusted individual best to my ability, someone I'd erroneously thought was a Friend at the time and was not taken seriously by them at all. In fact they essentially shrugged me off knowing full well I was experiencing a mental crisis if not partial breakdown with no one else to rely on. This and other prior acts really opened my eyes to how detached from their actions some people can become when they're so enraptured by their own Ego, because later on this same person would go on to act in other just deplorable ways, reacting to things in ways I'd never think to do to a "friend" understanding their consequences, and they'd deny it ever having had taken place repeatedly despite "evidence" in plain text. Mostly to preserve their own loyalist, do-no-wrong image of themselves, all the while contradicting it in my face. Pretty remarkable. So in act of self-preservation (and I'm damn glad I decided to do this), I confronted them about it. Of course the outcome was just disgusting, it floored me and if I were wiser I'd have run for the hills then and there. Fortunately it was, eventually, quietly advised to me to avoid that person and never contact them again (and to choose more carefully who I interact with).
This is all far too dramatic to get into again and I prefer to leave the past where it is. In summary, A tough lesson learned that not everyone is who they seem online (and even offline), not to mention an even stricter lesson remembered for another time in that I have to be exceptionally careful about who I choose to trust in life. I will not forget this again. I make it a mental note to 'read' single day at breakfast. In fact where before I'd struggle with feelings of loneliness and total isolation I now value solitude in the extreme, preferring it as opposed to interacting with anyone at all. I look back on that small event and others as lessons that were trying their best to reach me, ones I was too idealistic to listen to. I now spend pretty much all of my time alone and in both senses of Silence. It's something I really never expected to occur, but then again certain other things have brought me the knowledge that I'm never truly alone in this world, despite what I believe about it. So I feel in good company. Also spending so much time by myself has allowed me to adapt to it, I'd just needed to accept that whether I like it or not I am, at heart, an unusually absolute loner and elitist. There's no sense in saying "I understand" and then trying to repeatedly work around it, so that was stupid on my part. I can certainly see Myself only ever having 2 or 3 (temporary, mostlike) friends for the remainder of my entire life that do not exist within my, by default, closest circles. I also wouldn't put it past myself to decide to disappear altogether from the online world quite soon for a good few years. Maybe longer. I have little need to appear socially on it anywhere, anymore.

Anywho, on that mess --- I practiced mindfulness and other mental techniques to distance myself from that whole revelation, got back on my feet and kept moving... Eventually I stopped waking up with it on my mind all day, then before long it was all morning to conquer, and now things are mostly back to how they were. I became my own "shrink" for a while, with some help. I wake up thinking of nothing other than what to do today and haven't thought about it actively in months, now. I prefer to never go back there and leave it for some other hermit-philosopher individual to happen across (or, preferably, not) as I'm certain many have before me. I'm just glad I'm not completely bonkers, I worried for a while there I would be. I try to rationalize it by telling myself it was all in my head and nothing monumentally important, and to be frank, for now, that's good enough. Whatever it was is none of my business at the moment anyway, I have other more personally important things to concern myself with.


So overall, I'm well. I can confidently say that my average mood now is , compared to when surrounded by the chaos created by personal links.


All of the above and more positive "great experiences" this year, a few of which you're awares yourself, Mystic ...

Good to hear you're on a better road. I can relate to parts of it, more in terms of your own internal experiences than external encounters with others, but in a different way. Some of it reminds me of core principles in what I termed as "undeath" in another thread but more elaborated and containing of inside details behind the whole phenomena. Life simply is seen through, in a way, and it may or may not lose interest, apart from that you know to carry on out of necessity and also your spiritual growth, towards which, in the end, nothing can truly compare - so you become something like a spiritual shade that hovers above the world in your seeking to Understand. And in that process, life might be assimilated again, but more like a tool for higher consciousness than as a lived experience taken for granted, unless you lose yourself in the tool so much so that you start taking life for granted again. I'm somewhere on the latter end - trying to adapt to this world anew but incorporating all I've learnt from before. Wish you well, Tehom, and good luck on your journey for now.