I had big plans on New Year’s Eve. Not as in going out to parties, cracking open bottles of champagne, and shooting off firecrackers at midnight – my preschooler has put a hold on that kind of thing for a while – but plans to make commitments, set my intentions, commune with the gods. You know: Witch Stuff.
It’s a sad thing for an editor of The Wild Hunt to admit, but I don’t do nearly as much Witch Stuff as I would like. My coven meets on the sabbats, as we have for going on 50 years, but in between those spokes of the year I rarely will myself to actually go to my altar and dedicate myself to work there. So I was excited to actually have a plan of action. It was nothing terribly sophisticated – a basic candle spell – but I spent the days leading up to the New Year anticipating it.
[Pixabay]
The point of the spell was to buttress my intention to work on a project throughout the first six months of this year. I will turn 40 at Midsummer, and although I am ashamed to admit it, I’m having the banal panic of entering middle age. I wanted to have done more with the time I’ve had; I worry about what I will do with the time I have left. So I lit the candle on my altar, hoping it would light another in my breast that would help me be a better writer, a better Witch, a better version of myself.
The candle burnt itself out just after midnight, which seemed like a positive sign to me, but I wanted to double check. I took out my box of runes, a gift from a now-deceased friend, and pulled the slips for a post-magic check in. The rune divination I prefer to use is a Nine Worlds reading, in which the runes correspond to the realms of the Heathen cosmology. The main concern is reflected in the central position, which corresponds to Miðgarðr, and then the other runes can be understood as the entities of the corresponding realm commenting on that central concern. (Hvat er með ásum?
hvat er með álfum?, as the poem goes.)
The author’s rune reading [E. Scott]
The results were not especially surprising. The central rune was *dagaz, “day,” which I interpreted as a note that creation is an act of daily effort, an opportunity to take advantage of the gift sent to me by the gods each time I wake. Most of the other runes seemed to go along with this: the Aesir sent me *raidho, “ride,” which I understood as talking about a long journey that would often be difficult; the light-elves sent me *Tiwaz, which I read as both the constancy of Týr and the guiding light of a star leading on toward a destination.
The overall impression was straightforward: this is something that will take a long, daily commitment to accomplish, and it will be more fun to think about having done it than it will be to actually do it. But if that effort is put forth, I could accomplish what I set out to do.
The last two spots in my rune reading puzzled me, however. In the spot accorded to Hel, the dead sent me *elhaz, which the Old English Rune Poem glosses as “elk-sedge,” a swamp plant that wounds anyone who grabs at it. In the final position, Múspellsheimr, the fire giants sent me *thurisaz, which could simply be talking about themselves – the thurs – but in the Old English poem I had been using for most of this reading is “thorn,” sharp and painful, an evil thing to touch. Given that *elhaz had come up just before, I felt the “thorn” reading was the more pertinent one.
I couldn’t figure it out. Lots of runes about diligence, two runes about thorns. I didn’t think of this project as being particularly dangerous; at worst I would just fail to complete the project, which shouldn’t have mattered to anyone but myself. Was I actually putting myself in the clinch? Was I grasping after something that would leave me bloody?
My wife and I woke up before sunrise the next morning to the sound of our child vomiting in our bed. Some kind of stomach bug. Most of New Year’s Day was taken up by tending to him, but during his naps, I sat down and made a few halting attempts to start work on my project. It doesn’t look like much now, I told myself, but it won’t take long for it to all add up.
Then the next day I got the stomach bug. Couldn’t keep anything down but apple juice. I slept on the couch, hoping my wife could avoid it. But no such luck. The next day our kid felt better, I felt like I was starting to recover, and she was down for the count. Between all the illness and child-rearing and liquid dieting, I didn’t sit down to work at all for a few days.
And then as we were all feeling better, I saw that my country was bombing Venezuela.
And then as we began to recover from that shock, ICE shot a woman in the face in Minneapolis.
And then as I sat down to publish this, the chairman of the Federal Reserve published a video stating that the Department of Justice threatened him with a criminal indictment for not cooking the interest rates in the president’s favor.
And then, and then, and then –
And I look at the handful of notes and pages I have put toward my project since the new year, and it feels as though all my hopes are on the other side of a wall of thorns.
Thorns [SparrowsHome, Pixabay]
I have seen many people say that it is important, now more than ever, for artists and writers and thinkers to maintain discipline in their work, to keep to their practice even in the face of seemingly endless disaster. I expect the same applies to Witches, especially to those who believe their craft can have a meaningful impact on this darkening world.
The runes told me to be tenacious, even in the face of thorns. I struggle to see what use my magic or my words will be at this moment, and I already feel so far behind where I meant to be by the year’s 11th night that I wonder what the point is in returning to the work. Maybe there isn’t one. But I’ll only know if I follow the road the gods told me was ahead.
Here’s to pressing through the thorns.
Unnecessarily nerdy footnote: It’s an Elder Futhark set, which means many of the runes do not appear in the Icelandic or Norwegian Rune Poems. So even though the cosmology I’m working with is clearly Old Norse-Icelandic, my interpretations usually hinge on the Old English Rune Poem, because it’s the only poem that covers many of the runes in this set. If I were going for methodological consistency, I would probably prefer to use only a Younger Futhark set of runes – but then, those runes would not have come from my now-deceased friend. I’ll trade that connection for a bit of magical rigor any day.
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