Continuing our theme of using runes to help us “quicken and be wise” as it says in stanza 141 of the Havamal I would like to look at bind runes.

In the Hafskjold-Stav tradition we construct bind runes around the Hagl rune - this means you can have up to six runes around the Hagl. Bind runes can be constructed for various purposes including transformation of circumstances but today I am concentrating on how they are used as teaching devices, perhaps most specifically as aide-memoires.

If you are confronted with a bind rune with absolutely no explanation of what it means you might be cleaver enough to draw out a teaching from it and it could be a good exercise to try but that isn't what is expected. The great thing is that bind runes are relatively easy to memorise and reproduce compared with memorising pages of writing from a manual. Well written manuals are great, just so long as you have access to them, but, as I have repeated several times in the past few days, Stav doesn't depend upon access to anything you can't carry in your head. Hence, teach the basics from the bind-rune.

Ivar taught four bind-runes to cover the fundamental aspects of the Hafskjold-Stav tradition. There are known as the craft, ethical, healing and esoteric bind-runes. I will look at the ethical and healing ones in the next couple of weeks when I cover Stav for health and well-being and Stav as a martial art. I have made up some bind-runes of my own and it is a good exercise to take some subject you are familiar with and construct your own bind-rune to sum up the essential aspects of it.

The teaching will be covered by the six runes and the way they are arranged around the hagl. If you can't put the teaching into six runes then you are making it too complicated or you are trying to include another subject which needs another bind rune of its own. There is a third factor as well as the associations of the runes and their order there is the matter of how you read it, a progressive bind-rune is read clockwise from the top and each lesson builds on the previous one. A balanced bind-rune has the lessons in the way the runes correspond to each other across the lines of the Hagl. The runes in the top half may have a different significance to the ones in the bottom, as is the case with the healing bind-rune seen below.

If you are working with a progressive bind-rune then it teaches you how to follow a procedure in the right order. If you look at the survival bind-rune below, you will see that it covers the factors which will keep you alive in a survival situation.

These are important but only relevant if you apply them in the right order, you can last three weeks without food but be dead in three hours from severe exposure so the vital lesson is to read it in the right way and follow its priorities.

On the other hand the healing bind-rune is all about balancing exoteric (the top three runes) and esoteric factors (the lower three) in health and well-being. It covers ingestion, digestion and elimination, physical strength and vitality and mental health. But it also makes sure that you consider the esoteric aspects of health and well-being, the megin as well as the mott, the unconscious impulses as well as the ones we are aware of etc. More detail on that next week, for today consider them as an example of teaching runes.

Regards,

Graham