Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth
In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.
What Odinn Saw
Origin of the Runes I: The Historical Version.
Roughly 2000 years ago, a speaker—or speakers—of Common Germanic, the language from which English and its sister-tongues derives, took the concept of letters from either the Latin alphabet or from one of the North Italic scripts—Etruscan, et al.—and applied them to his (or her) own language.
Origin of the Runes II: The Mythic Version.
Oðinn hangs himself from a tree and stabs himself with a spear, a god paradoxically sacrificing himself to himself.
From this self-imposed shamanic ordeal, he gains knowledge of the runes—those building-blocks of existence—and their mysteries.
Two stories: mutually exclusive, one might think.
Here's the rub: from their very beginning, or at least from very early on in their history, the runes seem to have taken on a mysterious character (the very word itself means “mystery, secret”) and to have been used for magical purposes.
The same cannot be said, though, of either the Latin or (so far as we know) any of the North Italic alphabets.
The runes are something very different from the script or scripts from which they derive.
The runes aren't just an alphabet: they're Alphabet-Plus.
This conceptual expansion of writing is the Germanic Innovation: to view this set of symbols, not just as a method of transcribing sound, but as magical beings in and of themselves, no less than the constituent components of Being itself.
That's what Oðinn, shrieking, reached down and seized.
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