My Runelore

Kari Tauring, 2006

Through Nordic studies of the past two decades and from my personal experience and understanding, I give you this artistic presentation of how the runes came to me.

It begins in a time before Adam and Eve when Lilith was the first woman to marry the human male, Adam. Those were turbulent times since Lilith was used to being treated as a goddess. She got fed up with Adam since his mind was not as well developed and he had a very small sense of self. He wanted to be dominant, as persons who lack self esteem often do. So Lilith took her children by Adam (as well as her children conceived through others) and moved East out of Eden. This was the first Indo-European migration of the Goddess centered peoples. These were the women to whom Cain and Able (Adam's children through his second wife, Eve) went to find wives for themselves.

The matrifocal culture of the Great Goddess continued to migrate West and North, mixing with the populations of Babylon, Greece and Crete. In around 8,000 BC Taautos, a priest of Ba'alat Nikkal (the goddess of the moon) played his flute so well that She granted him knowledge of the runes shapes and meanings. He wrote them down. At the same time his far cousins were painting hallstringgar on rocks in Sweden!

Pursued ever by the patriarchal religions they moved into Northern Italy and Hungary. As Amazon warrior tribes they went North into Sweden and East into Siberia with their blood, agricultural traditions, religion, trade and the alphabet. They met with indigenous peoples and coexisted for many centuries, sometimes peacefully and sometimes with war. The dualistic deity system as described in the Eddas and Sagas of Scandinavia echoes this tense relationship. The Vanir (led by the twin goddess and god, Freya and Freyr) were in possession of the mysteries of the runes. The Aessir women, Frigg and the Norns, had the knowledge of the runes. But Odin, chief god of the Aessir wanted them. Unlike Taautos, he couldn't just play his flute for them. He had to hang from the World Tree for nine days to get two runes from each of the nine worlds of Yggdrasil (the cosmic World Tree). In this way he becomes enlightened and able to understand the entire cosmos all at once.

The runes show up here and there in a written form throughout history but are mostly kept through the oral tradition of the women of Lilith. It was so long ago that the women of the Great Goddess came North. They enjoyed a separate but equal standing with a focus on women as perpetuators of humanity, culture and religion. The rune symbols are all available in nature. All of them may be found in any single tree. They connect to our genetic code and can be read by women through their moon blood. Understanding them as sounds, symbols, and meanings was an art.

After the son's of Eve made it up to the Northlands and through the coming of Christianity, women's traditions were outlawed and called evil. Their bodies became evil in the sight of the new god and their knowledge of their own bodies was lost to them. There were midwives who kept the knowledge and traditions hidden in children's stories, songs, and herb lore. Many of these women were destroyed by the new Church beginning in the 1200s ACE up until well after the reformation. Thousands of women who had knowledge of the sacredness of their bodies, the connection of their blood to the rest of nature, and the importance of this balance died cruelly.

Today, we can pick up these threads of teaching in the songs, stories, and mythologies of our ancestors. We can unlock the genetic memories and the tribal karma through study and use of the runes.

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