—(monocled man) I say, good chap: if Sheldon Cooper were a witch—
—Which? Which what?
—A heathen witch, man! E gad! If Sheldon Cooper believed in magic, he would at least have the decency! And the sense of obligation! To see them as dead historical artifacts to be dissected the way a REAL white man dissects one of the lower forms of life, like a Eskimo or a Syrian Jew or something along those lines, you see, my good fellow…. (becoming angry) And you remember, you remember, you little; you little: GIRL, you remember, that man evolved from an ape: he didn’t evolve from a child, or an artist, or a god: for it is a Far, Far Nobler Thing, to be descended from an ape, which exists to be dissected for Science, than a child, or an artist, or a god, that Science must PUNISH, my little one, with thrashings and gashings…. When I take you back to Pilsbury Abbey, ~girl~ I’ll have my manservant Gaylord give you a good—ah! My monocle! Help me look for it! My eyesight is perfect in both eyes: but I need it for my Image…. (now in a rage) And to think they wanted runes to be different just because World War II was come and gone! What’s a few dead Jews, eh, compared to the Real White Man—no Artist, mind: I said a WHITE man: don’t you know those dem epithets have artists, too?—compared to the true and proper white ideal of culture as a dead artifact to be dissected for Science…. I’m talking about MEN, you little girl…. Everything can be intellectualized, dammit: and it’s to be intellectualized ~as I damn well please~, mind! If I want to take the worst bits of Christianity: like its belief in unchanging fossilized Scripture, and use it to do religion like you damn hick who never heard of SCIENCE ever does: what them, eh? (laughs in a scary way) What’s to say about few letters can’t be Scripture? Scripture must be OBEYED!! You see magic marks, fluid like the rivers of Africa, fluid like the waters of the fjords before men had settled into proper little Christian villages like the one before Pilsbury Abbey, though I forget what it’s called…. But I see: Something That I Understand And That You Do Not, you dirty-child-ape! Bah! Artists! Pretty soon they’ll be singing those blacc sinful music, that rock n roll! Humbug, I say! I take refuge, in HUMBUG!

…. (distant shouting) You can’t do this to the runes, you know! (slower) You’ll be hearing from my lawyer! (door slams)

~Alrighty then.

But yes: anything can be intellectualized; and anything can be about sex and money.

Anyway: like when I do a Tarot deck that has a real book, for the catalog, I’ll first read the book (ie “The Book of Runes”), and then I’ll meditate on the symbols of the oracle (ie “The Elder Futhark Runes (25 Stones)”), probably while re-reading much of the book.

And yes: I apologize (albeit insincerely) for making it about money and sex, and not the evolution of the monkey-race, right….

I guess that the ‘grand’ thing I would say is that, of course the corpse mentality doesn’t go down without a fight: I wouldn’t expect it to…. And when people don’t like you, they don’t like you, right. They probably don’t like themselves.

…. Wow, this is interesting.

So yeah, some of the glosses are similar and others rather distinct from the KindleUnlimited book by Lisa Chamberlain I read—people would make fun of Lisa, if they knew her name, right: but she’s great when you want to start out, and start out on a budget. I feel like Led Zeppelin should have had a song, “I’ve been spending $711 dollars on every book—and they’re written for robots cut off from the law of life; kinda makes my life a drag!”…. Yeah…. But yeah, I feel like it’s kinda poetic, you know…. I feel like this emoji is called for: 🏂

Right?

You know, it’s like: sometimes he just streamlines and makes concise the glosses, and other times he kinda challenges you, and makes the runes more, say, more abstract, I would say, more philosophical, like they’re for spelling out philosophical-poetry messages, you know…. I’m sure that for some people there was an aspect of them having that literal or you could say a primitive meaning: even in Ancient Greece life was pretty primitive: I feel like it’s a valid style that’s lost in translation, very often…. But yeah, with a more archaeological stance, sometimes it just…. I don’t know: a different feel, to be sure….

…. (Preface) As stilted as it sounds to stroll down “oracles do not tell fortunes” lane—I guess as an Aquarius, I’m allergic to all stereotyped phrases and modes of expression; as a social work student, as I once was, although I never completed all that, but I once was, and I felt there was something hidden behind the door of the “sympathy vs empathy” cliche, but I hated that expression…. Really I hate all opposed-synonym things, synonym vs synonym, the death struggle: but what they meant was, “don’t pity people”, right…. The line “An Oracle does not give you instruction as to what to do next” is gold, though. I remember when I was young and ignorant, I wanted divination to be like getting a quest from a quest-giver in a video game, right…. Guess what, bitches: video games are NOT, real fucking life, ok….

…. This is a good book. I wish I could read it all tonight, even though that’s not what I do, and not how I normally feel.

…. I have gradually come to the realization that witchcraft and new age psychology and the rest of it, are about practical living rather than moralism—they’re not about religion (or Christianity!) just made a little tolerant and we’re done: Ralph actually doesn’t mention the heathen gods or religion at all in his intros, and his rune meanings de-emphasize the specific named gods, you know—let alone the kinda…. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with tolerant Christians; it’s just that sometimes the moralism remains, possibly.

But yeah, I do still think it’s ok, even sensible, that he emphasizes basically an honesty and integrity focus, rather than a rewards focus, in the intro. Rewards working can keep you entertained, it’s true, but it’s not just his background as a guy from a film star family who probably already had money and who probably the now-departed 20th member of the succession of centuries had already made him aware of how people feel about wealth and glamor in small town America and indeed much of the world. It’s also because, it’s just good advice, you know. If you were working primarily for rewards, you probably wouldn’t endure long enough to receive the real rewards, you know!

But it’s not about intellectualism. Learning the secrets of God and universe, and living, requires a brain; but it so not just about ~all that~, you know….

…. But yeah: although it’s not a university press book that costs twice as much and doesn’t have runes (or whatever the emotive/practical content would be in another sort of book)—not that that’s an inherently bad kind of book, but I do think I’ll probs not buy another like that for five to ten years I bet: the art books especially I’ll borrow if that, because you really could make an art history book magical if you wanted to, or if that were allowed in your stance towards the world, right~ it’s not like a history of war where the alternative to pedantry might well be rage…. I’ve read a lot of history, though: I learned that one way to end a terrorism war is to lie to the “Volunteers”, basically~~ not the worst message, or so bad, but yeah, not the BEST, right—but yeah, Ralph does still include a perfectly serviceable introduction to the history of the runes and their place in the recorded past, you know…. He’s not talking about common gossip you already know and need zero background knowledge for, and he doesn’t pretend that he is, right.

…. It’s curious that “only nine” of the runes don’t have a reversed form, but I still think I probably won’t use reversed runes, since some of them can’t be reversed. It seems asymmetrical. (As a Wiccan, I believe that holidays should be symmetrical—and everything! 😸). I actually felt the same way about the Marseilles Tarot—well, actually I hated that deck, although I like runes. Although it’s funny, because Marseilles is a lot more like runes than the average deck; it’s primitive. Primitive is a style….

I feel like he should have put the rune meanings before the spreads, but whatever. It doesn’t really matter.

I feel like I could use the Three Lifetimes Spreads for tarot or other oracles.

…. The chapter with the three poems (they’re not really spreads) isn’t immediately useful, but I do think it’s incidentally quite curious that for Ralph, “rune” can mean “poem”, basically, in addition to its more, I don’t know, concrete meaning. (IS the main meaning more concrete?) “Rune” means “mystery”, basically.

And this is from before, but I happen to think that it’s quite funny how this book sold a million copies in the United States. I don’t think that there are a million neopagans, no matter how you define it and how many associated labels you bring in, in my country. Of course, it’s been sold over several decades, so you maybe have to consider that—by comparison, the Bible has sold many billions of copies or whatever, nobody really knows, even though there aren’t many billions of Christians; it has to do with the aspect of time—but also you have to consider that there are some witches that didn’t buy this specific book, you know. (Not every young person went to a Beatles’ concert in the 60s, or likes “Star Wars”, etc. etc.) But there are certainly many Germans and Nordics in America; some of them probably picked up the book the way you might watch an opera with a fanciful-magical plot, you know. I don’t know quite rightly how to define that way, you know: but plenty of Americans want to wipe that snide smile off the face of the French when they equate Americans with McDonald’s and country songs about trucks and so on….

…. (looks up) But yeah, there might be a million American neopagans, but probably there aren’t, so certainly some people who bought this book got it out of the, I don’t know, the nebulous area between entertainment and commitment, you know, even if we define commitment in non-religious terms.

…. I’m going to have to read these rune interpretations much slower than the more kinda plain parts of the book, take an extra day or two to finish the book, than I’d thought. Also I’m not going to be able to comment at the present time about what they mean.

…. But yeah, I feel like plenty of authors put the runes in the old order—including say Lisa Chamberlain, and not just the ones employed (imprisoned?) in dusty university attics, you know: the old order is perfectly permissible…. But Ralph’s order is equally fine, you know; he’s not doing anything different than what the old rune masters of the old centuries did, really: it was an intuitive ordering of the magical symbols; they weren’t set in their first order by 19th-century philologists…. It is useful to study the ‘history’ of magic, since it is helpful to know other people’s intuitions, since our day is not alone, and also other people’s intuitions can serve as thought-fodder for one’s own magical adaptations, right…. And, equally, one can simply receive new wisdom and set things down in a new way, which may very possibly be passed down through the generations, right….

…. Afterword: I’ve heard Ralph’s non-Germanic influences described as “Jewish and Chinese” (not a direct quote: it was wordier, lol): but after meditating through the runes and rereading the relevant part of the book for that, I’d have to say that the non-Northern stuff is, perhaps, Greco-Christian, and certainly and especially Hindu ideas, you know.

…. Afterword (x2): Although I have to say—Ralph does defend eloquently the necessity of invention, of intuition in rune-work, and he does write, in the “core”, perhaps, part of the book, serviceable and okay/basic descriptions of the runes, and includes various other curious chapters, right—but I have to say, a close re-reading and meditating on the runes reveals many of Ralph’s descriptions to be guarded and vague, you know…. Not so much ‘incorrect’ in a frontal way, as just kinda excessively and regularly guarded about very primal, nature-derived, non-baroque/artificial/conceptualized things, you know…. I mean, some of them are grand Ideas, but not in the computer-age (or midcentury, for that matter) way of ‘conceptualization’, you know…. And some runes are meant to knock you across the head, you know: sex, power, gender, animal; stuff like that—he Surely doesn’t let you feel That, right….

Basically, there IS the aspect of 1982 being a LONG time ago, already…. And he wasn’t a young man in 1982, either; he was fifty: half a century old. Not that being “old” is bad—I hope to be a rather old man someday, you know; one day they’ll be all like: are you as old as those Gen Z oldsters, old man?…. But yeah: conceptualization can be a problem exacerbated by a certain lifespan development stage and generation, and fifty in 1982 isn’t, you know, perfect, or anything….

And I do realize that sounds recentist, since the runes have been around for hundreds and hundreds of years: but things do change, and there’s no One Perfect Interpretation of the runes, the way there’s One, Holy, catholic, and beat-you-on-the-ass Church, you know…. There wasn’t even a small elite collection of opinions that everyone drew their comments from, you know: we just happen to have a small random sample of old thoughts that happened to survive, by the whim of Loge, you know…. (Perhaps Loge had a reason…. But perhaps it’s all a trick, you know: a test…. “I wonder what would happen if I….” Does God ever get curious, right?)…. People wouldn’t have necessarily drawn their training even from manuscripts that didn’t survive, either; it would have come from people you knew: your father, or more likely, your mother, right…. Ralph’s book doesn’t claim to be the words of the Last Runemaster, you know, but, at risk of being the sort of dipshit that Churchill was to Clement Attlee, you know: he also, indeed, was not, the thing that he did not claim to be!

…. But yeah: a lot of random ranting on the internet about Ralph: lots of kinda historically-inappropriate (like, universalizing the 18th century, basically: it’s the Pre-Incarnate Christ, you know: Kant was never born, and he can never die!) “historical accuracy” stuff, delivered with your typical Christian sense of wounded insecurity and negativity, you know…. Sorry, atheist, not Christian. Ah, Holy Mother! I ought to keep them all straight in my head! 😁

The Book inside Ruth Penzich's Rune Dictionary cover is The Book of Runes: A Handbook for the Use of an Ancient Oracle: The Viking Runes with Stone: 10th Anniversary. The Publication line reflects the actual book with Ruth's information beneath.

3/14/22

The runestones included are alright. The book, however diverges drastically from all historic evidence of meanings. At times it seems as if the author simple makes things up.

The book should be listed under games or toys. ( )

I like the picture in the beginning and I saved it for that reason only. He's too modern for my taste when he's talking about runes. ( )