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Wyrd, Runes, & the Wisdom of the Hávamál with Lonnie Scott · Coffee & Divination

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  my approach to tarot has changed over time you know cause when you first get your hands on the cards you're just kind of learning what they are what what what what are the keywords associated with all these things and if you read enough you research enough you quickly find out that there's no such thing as one true way to do any of this stuff and that's the chaos magician in me you know like there's it there isn't ever going to be one true way to do this stuff so I I found what continually worked for me and I developed different spread techniques where you know can I get a sufficient answer with divination if I'm using just three cards do I need nine do I need you know do the opening of the key and have all of them out on the floor I don't recommend it not my thing hurts my knees to be honest I don't have a table big enough for that welcome to coffee and divination a podcast about the arts of obtaining hidden knowledge in changing times join me Joanna Ferrar to chat with experts from around the world on tarot runes geomancy and the many ways divination can help us navigate and plan our paths ahead before we dive into today's conversation a quick announcement that I'm really excited about registration is open for the very first Online Divination Intensive which is beginning in late November of 2026 it's gonna be a very limited course just 8 people so we can really dig into everyone's divinatory practice together all the information is over on the coffee and divination.com website as I record this I am in Japan on a pilgrimage trip for the month of October into November but of course I am also excited to keep talking to my guests and to all of you over on Instagram at coffee and divination today's guest is Lonnie Scott who is a heathen practitioner an author a paranormal investigator and the longtime host of Weird Web Radio which I'm sure many of my listeners are already familiar with for the past decade he's interviewed people from across the worlds of paganism folklore divination and the paranormal he's also the founder of the Wayfinder tradition and he is a heathen an animist and a chaos magician he is also the author of the Javamahol words of the Caffeinated One his modern coffee fueled reworking of the wisdom contained in the first section of the Havamal that was the jumping off point for our conversation today but we went in some very interesting directions as you will hear it was very thoughtful and funny conversation and I really enjoyed the chance to get to talk to Lonnie here on coffee and divination as I've enjoyed his show for years so make yourself a cup of something good coffee is appropriate for this one and enjoy the conversation so it is my pleasure to welcome on to the show Lonnie Scott and some of my listeners may know him from his podcast already and either way it is so wonderful to have you here well thank you very very much I'm stoked to be here cause your podcast is one of my favorites oh yeah well that's a really lovely thing to hear so you probably then know our traditional first question which is what was your first introduction to divination whether you practiced it or somebody around you read cards or did something else when were you first kind of like interested or around it I wonder about this sometimes because you know memory can be tricky with this sort of thing and I I don't quite remember if I got a reading from someone first or if we just started playing around with cards first but when I was in my early teens a small group of friends and I decided when we got into the occult and everything else that we were going to try it and one of our biggest motivators was Astral Travel we wanted to figure that one out spoilers no I didn't but we used a friend of mine's mom had one of the Thoth decks Aleister Crowley's deck and free to Harris and um we would take cards out of that deck put them on a kitchen table and then go into a back bedroom and then try to see if we could see what it was I'm still not convinced that anybody was doing what was called astral travel but I think one guy was particularly very skilled at remote viewing because he not only better than chance he was nearly perfect every time in fact you go forward a couple decades he got so spooked by all of his experiences that he ended up being one of those Christian ministers that preaches against the evils of witchcraft a path I do not recommend so I know that was one of my earliest exposures to tarot cards and then at some point I just had a deck your your standard issue yellow box wait Smith deck and tried to learn it through a book that I also I got my hands on all of this somewhere in the range of 14 to 16 years old and uh yeah that that that would have been my earliest exposure to tarot and divination in general which is what I my favorite form of divination so you're interested in astral travel I it interestingly I was always interested and still am obviously in Dream Magic and the whole introduction for me for Lucid Dreaming was that crossover with astral travel and astral projection and all of that and I was able to teach myself lucid dreaming but the the astral travel it's always much more tricky so I'm with you I I figured out lucid dreaming um in fact it's one of my favorite things to this day uh it it's fascinating and and I'm it's very frustrating cause it's very inconsistent as well you would think you know I'm it today I'm 49 years old I'm talking about a thing I discovered when I was like 13 you would think I would have gotten better at it by now but that's just one of those things I'm not you know I'm just I'm lucky as you or anyone else whenever it finally happens maybe I missed it how old were you when you were first doing that remote viewing version shall we say maybe oh we were 13 14 years old doing stuff around that age yeah yeah so after that then what was the path for you into occultism of other kinds through that did that stay steady and you're like I'm I'm bitten and now I'm just doing this or did it ebb and flow no it's been steady it's it's it's a fundamental part of my life now that early window you know I wasn't raised in any religious framework you know I I I explain often that my parents are what I call coffee table Christians uh they they had you know cause back in the early 80s you know they they had in late 80s I mean they they had you know that big Bible that collected an inch of dust on it underneath the coffee table that had a glass top it was on that bottom shelf they had a Jesus staring at a clock thing by one of the doors that looked a lot more like Ewan McGregor as Obi Wan and that that that was the religious framework I had you know my family we weren't church goers we I was never baptized you know nothing like that but I got really spiritually curious in my teens and the occult was the thing paganism is the thing that resonated with me when I found it it seemed fascinating to me that there could be more than one god there could be goddesses there could be all these spirits there could be elves there could be dragons there could be whatever you cause back then you there wasn't a lot out there but the things that were available presented a very fantastical spiritual world view and I just got interested in whatever I could get my hands on and in in that time frame the first book I really read on any of this was Celtic Magic by DJ Conway I I do not recommend it but it's where I Learned that this stuff was possible and then we got our hands on anything else we could like a Buckland's Big Blue Book of Wicca and Scott Cunningham's work and Sylvia Brown had a lot of books back then and you're like this lady says she talks to spirits I wonder if I can and you know they printed these little little bitty paperback books it would be like your guide to astral travel and the chakras and visual visualization and we anything we can get and then of course the bottom shelf at our local Walden Books uh was uh the Satanic Bible with Anton Lavey and you know the Necronomicon so we can summon all the evil of the multiverse for five 90 Nine and courtesy of Avon Books that's a good deal there you know and off to the races we went and we were just it was just a small pack of friends and I we were willing to experiment we were we'd go to the cemeteries and try to summon stuff we would test out the local folklore and we would go try to find the haunted cemeteries and see if we could find the ghost you know whatever it was we just we didn't just want to read about it we thought immediately okay this is real how do we go experience it now and started to figure that out what locked all of this in for me though was around the time I was 17 I found two things at the same time was chaos magic when a friend of mine gifted me a copy of Liber Null and Psycho not by Pete Carroll it's funny when he handed it to me he was really into like Golden Dawn stuff and ceremonial magic and he says I think you'll like this it's really dark which after I read it and have come to understand this all this a lot better he clearly didn't read it I liked it a lot and I ruins at the same time you know there was the other thing that I found a book on rune magic and how that might work and these things just seem to go hand in hand they certainly woke up something in my mind that said this is what you're looking for this is the operating manual to the magic you've been looking seeking and I've used those as cornerstones in my work ever since there's an enormous breadth of different authors mentioned there and I will say hearing the DJ Conway Celtic Magic book I'm like that's that's a name I've not heard in a long time yeah I had that book as well also would not recommend but the Silver Raven Wolf books are still on pride you know have a pride of place on my shelf you know nice baby baby witch books that I had so yes there's a lot there was a lot of creativity and a lot of really interesting things out there even though it was in comparison to what we have now what we would call slim pickings but there was a lot of really incredibly diverse selections even then even when there were the you know fewer range than we have right now so you had an enormous interest in all of those different those different branches that you mentioned and also something that you have spent more time on in your show talking about is also paranormal investigation and that connection of these forms of magic to the other world in that way so you mentioned like kind of doing that stuff was that also going that was going from when you were a child as well then yeah oh my gosh yes the house I grew up in you know had all its creaks and sounds and weird noises that we called George and I think most house ghosts in in at least in America are probably named George it seems to be consistent I don't know if it was ever a ghost or not but we had we had a little weird experience all the weird sounds the doors closing and things like that and uh I had one of my very first like real paranormal experiences in in an old funeral home when I was staying with a a group of friends we were a pack of kids going skating you're right and this is a different pack of like pack of friends than than to my occult experimenting friends and we were staying with another friend who's gonna who's older he could take us around go to different places and in that night um I woke up we were sleeping as a group in a room I woke up in a room that I don't know what a funeral home calls it I just know that it that's the the Long Room where my experience tells me that there's going to be a coffin at one end people are gathered at the other and that this is the viewing right and in the middle of the night I wake up and I see a figure of a woman who is almost impossible to see so that statement is weird the way I describe it is when light catches smoke just right it's so translucent it's like she had light herself as though she was made of light but was not emitting light if that makes sense but it just seemed that she was walking through the room so I'm curious I'm thinking I've just scored the Jackpot here I'm following her very carefully trying to wake up my friends in the sleeping bags who are not happy on touching them she gets to the end of the room I pause probably hold my breath I can't quite remember exactly what I did at that point I'm not sure that if I was excited or scared or both she stops pauses for a couple what felt like an eternity was probably more like 30 seconds and then turns to her left if I remember correctly and goes through a wall and that's that's it so I'm looking frantically I've got a friend up now helping me who's not sure I'm even wondering if I've done drugs and you know we are looking to see if we've been tricked basically was this a prank you know we're looking for some kind of projector or anything and can't find anything they were remodeling that home at the time too and then later they they found in that room that we were in through that wall there was a short hallway that had been walled over and a door that had been like an exit entry door that had also been walled over sometime in the past so in my mind that was probably what paranormal investigators would call a residual haunting for whatever reason whether it's geologic or weather related or something to do with the electromagnetic field or something we're not even aware of like something was just right in that moment to play back something that was recorded in the environment I I think that's pretty cool I don't think I could have interacted with that you know ghost in any kind of way but it was still something that convinced me there's more out there to find so that's that's been kind of fuel to pursue that interest as well I think that's that's very fascinating and it's also so important to have places where these types of conversations can can uh happen because as I am very aware you know there's a lot more people out there that have had these types of experiences that just haven't had the right opportunity to share them so then our culture doesn't encourage us to talk about it so people will be like oh well it's a thing weird thing that happened but it's probably never happened to anyone else and it's like if we actually each talked about all the additions of all of those different stories it's uh it's quite a quite a few of us that is correct yeah so then we this is obviously podcast about divination so with all this interest in spirit contact and all the that early you know contact work of that how did that play into you developing a tarot practice cause I know you are obviously a very proficient tarot professional and you also have well we'll get into the book in a little bit but how have you developed your systems of how you divine and how does that relate to the ways that you sort of define yourself as a pagan or a cultist so tarot is is my favorite form of divination my approach to tarot changed over time you know cause when you first get your hands on the cards you're just kind of learning what they are what what what what are the key words associated with all these things and if you read enough you research enough you quickly find out that there's no such thing as one true way to do any of this stuff that's the chaos magician in me you know like there's it there isn't ever going to be one true way to do this stuff so I I found what continually worked for me and I develop different spread techniques where you know can I get a sufficient answer with divination if I'm using just three cards do I need nine do I need you know do the opening of the key I have all of them out on the floor I don't recommend it not my thing hurts my knees to be honest I don't have a table big enough for that and then I I came up with different ideas through the the Tarot Professionals Association run by Marcus Cats and Tally Goodwin I was I'm part of their social media team and have been for a long time and as part of that in our Facebook group I would do these post called Tarot Create and I was basically coming up with different ways to approach your tarot in fun and engaging ways and some of my favorites were things one one of my absolute favorites was based on a Slipknot song called Devil and I where I thought well shuffle your deck really good and then with whatever question you've got and then go find the devil card and then just you know put the devil card in the middle now wherever you found it the card on top of it's gonna be one thing the card under it's gonna be another thing and and it just got inspired by listening to a song and those were for my own kind of readings have always been one of my favorite things to do if I drill in and think what is the topic that I'm wanting to address what's what's going on in my life that I wanna ask about what card indicates that by itself sort of a significant or I can't say it significator give up yes but not the traditional sense of it I don't think in the way it's usually taught uh cause for me it could be any card in the deck I'm not looking for just a court card or anything like that and go find it and then you know decide if there's gonna be cards on top of it under it they're gonna be associated with that in some way I like to do that but over time it has become something that I've bridged in a sense with my spiritual life as a heathen so every deck I get I consecrate and dedicate to the goddess Freya once I'm done with that I'll determine if I wanna read with it or if it's just something in my collection I do that by going through the cards cause I'll buy cards that interest me enough that the arts compelling enough to at least excite something in me but I need certain cards to look at me in a way that it's almost like they're winking back yeah we're ready to play if I see that in those cards then it gets into the reader the reader pile once I've done that I you know riffle the deck really good like if I'm gonna do some kind of reading and then I shuffle it nine times all the while visualizing that I'm pulling the cards through the nine worlds associated with Nordic mythology then I cut the deck in three for Urth Verdandi and sigloth these are your three Norns Verdandi is the one who's becoming she's the present she's the weaver of them all I don't do fortune telling so I like to talk to that particular pile what's going on now what do I need to know now and then that's how I draw my cards beyond that it's it's just experiments you know what what cards can or interest me what kind of reading am I gonna do what kind of reading is being asked for from me and get them involved in in other shapes like I did come up with a series of spreads at one time I was playing with where I would draw the cards in the shape of runes that produced weird results but you know cause I'm kind of trying to decide again like I I've never been a big fan of this position means this question this position means that one decisions are gonna be made with each card in each position it's not been my jam I like to draw cards and look at how they relate to one another is the figure in this card looking at the figure in this card is it looking away from that does the fire in this card look like it's gonna burn the card down here or does it look like it's going away just looking at how they they relate to one another is is my favorite way of approaching it I don't know now I think I'm rambling no no that's not as I'm prone to a tarot so that's a that's you have already now several times drawn in uh things that have to do or at least traditionally people think of them as more to do with the Norse uh the Norse well we are gonna talk about the Norse but Norse runes and so I've had a few people on who talk about runes not as many as I would like probably considering how much I work with the runes as well it's just yeah it's just less common still I feel um which is always interesting to me maybe it's just the circles I run in and it's all different when it comes to how you balance that you clearly have I am assuming perhaps that you have a strong rune practice as well from what I heard and what I know how do you think with the distinctions between when you choose to like reach for tarot as opposed to rune sure I I I did experiment with combining them when I was coming up with the runic shape tarot spreads I was I was just kind of curious if I could capture you know like if fehu for instance the first rune in what is called the elder Futhark uh if it's associated with wealth in some way just very generalizing this then what happens if I'm laying out tarot in that form does it do the cards speak to me in a different way because of that sometimes yes sometimes I don't think it felt any different why would I draw tarot or runes yeah that was part of your question too I don't use runes very often for divination to be honest I like runes for contemplation for magic for making things sacred it it's it yes I do use them for divination but not quite the same when I use rooms for divination I I like my room sets on wood I make them myself I have a process by which I do that I will take all 24 in my hand I have a reading cloth I just throw them and then whatever lands face up or the ones that I'll read and I'll remove the ones that are faced down and then take them set them aside I'll just relax my vision and look at them and how they're laying on the cloth if any shape presents itself you know like an animal or you know a symbol of some kind or another or a big rune itself I'm looking almost looking at it first almost like an omen I guess or like you would cloud gaze and whatever pops up there may influence what I go do going forward if I don't really notice anything that's fine too and then I'm looking are some grouped together very close are some kind of overlapping is one really far away or a group of them far away you know like it just depends are are some close to me are some further away the cloth itself is not physically made into any kind of quadrants or different spaces but visually I'm thinking about it in different elements so that that also has an application how I would use them but as far as rune readings go they're a much more spiritual thing for me they're a more religious thing for me I don't typically offer those as a service to other people I've done them in ritual um I've done them especially in like ADF I used to be a part of a big ADF Grove and there's a part of ADF core order of ritual where they say to you're reading the omens I'd cast runes for that beyond that it it's again runes are something I love for contemplation meditation and magic not my first choice for divination yeah it's very interesting so we are now since we have begun speaking about runes I feel like Odin is basically now implicitly sort of in the room with our conversation and that brings us to yes so that now brings us to talking a little bit about your book so okay can you can you tell us what the what was the impetus for writing it like when did the idea come to you and what was the process for that for and also tell us a little bit about it obviously just sure my book is called The Java Mall words of the caffeinated one it is my take on my rewrite basically of the first 80 some stances of the havamal the Havamal are is a poem that exists in the Poetic Edda which is a collection of poems and stories where we get most of what what we refer to as Norse mythology or Nordic mythology the Nordic story world the havamal originally is a poem full of practical wisdom in in the first part of it you know those first 80 some stances on how to live in a world that is harsh where you've got to rely on each other where you may not always be able to trust everybody where you've you know you've got to be a friend you've got to respect your friends you've got to deal with your enemies in a certain way and then there's a chunk I didn't leave in but then there's a section where it's like I'll tell you Loe Fafner if you'll listen blah blah blah and it kind of gets repetitive in that section and then the end of the havamal gets kind of mystic that's where you get you know I know I hung on a windswept tree for all of nine nights wounded by spear instead of where Odin hangs on the tree to get the runes there's that section and then there's a section of do you know how to carve them do you know how to read them do you know how to read them the section also talking about the runes again the spells where Odin says I know how to you know raise a man from the dead I know how to blunt your swords I know how to adjust the weather he just brags but so I a lot of things went into me creating this book one Jackson Crawford who's a Nordic language and Old Norse language and Nordic mythology kind of expert does a lot of cool videos on YouTube he did a thing called the Cowboy Havamal where he had just rewritten the the havamal the first 80 some that practical section um as though his cowboy grandfather or whatever were giving Old West wisdom and I thought it was really neat I would often be at like a heathen event or something and I'd I'd make just comments I thought were funny changing the way we would talk about the havamal and I always kind of made it about coffee and I was at the northeast thing which is a big heathen gathering inclusive heathen gathering going on in Pennsylvania in fact today there's they're there this year right now so I hope they're all having fun without me there was one morning I got up a couple years ago and I went up to the like the dining hall and there's a staff that works in there looking for coffee and they hadn't made it yet and they told me they're like no one's ever here this early and I'm like well hi I'm I'm just got here last night I'll be in here this early and they're they were funny about it and they got coffee out and meanwhile some other people came in and joined me and they're like Lonnie you're always so chatty why are you being quiet and I was like well if the first stanza of the havamal says something like when you're new in a place and you don't have coffee yet sit down shut up until you get coffee I think we'd all be wiser for it and when I got back home I thought well I'm gonna I'm gonna see if I can do this and rewrite those stanzas in a more modern way that is making coffee sort of the central theme of everything and I would post it one day at a time on Facebook one stanza every day and it got hard after a while but what I found was it deepened my knowledge of the havamal and you know I'm I'm ordained clergy in the truth were an international heaven organization I think it's always anything I can do to deepen my own spiritual spiritual life is good and this exercise certainly did that but as I worked through it people started encouraging me to publish it and like we want this in print we want to be able to reference this anytime we we can so I finished it sat on it finally came up with a plan on how it was gonna get published thank goodness a friend of mine Laurie she was going to start a publishing company of her own called Fourth Dwarf Productions and that's where you can find the book links to it anyway it's on Amazon Lulu and you can find links to that through fourth dwarf and it just became it became a thing in the world every stanza's got something to do with coffee it is in a more modern framework but it is true to the wisdom that was given to us in the havamal in that stanza at the same time so it it was it was a labor of love for people who have not read it you should read your version of it you should read other people's versions of it I'm a huge fan of the havamal and all forms so it's it's wonderful to see it in an in another form as well so there are things about it that are universal many of the the great philosophical texts of humanity there's also things that are very much products of its time and like is that kind of what you mean by it got hard when you were going through it like what what were some of the difficulties that you encountered when you were trying to finish it when you were going through it past the first initial excitement stage yeah oh there's there's just well one it's a daily exercise into trying to remain true to what the hit the Hava Mall is trying to say and make that relevant today in a different way of saying it and make coffee the central figure that that got challenging there are things about the havamal that are dated like there's but that section I really didn't include in this like that that gets into that load of fafnir section where it gets into don't trust a woman kind of stuff shall I cut that part out of this interview no I'll leave it in okay no leave it in you should absolutely trust women the the challenge was really just kind of that was was trying to remain true to the project because there's some of those things it was kind of it's tricky you know like there's a section of the Hava Mall where they gets real involved about talking about you know making sure you have your weapon and this and that and I was like well what am I gonna for that and I decided to go the route of some of those are the the fool's traveler leaves home without their a way to make coffee and you know just stuff like that and I and and I think about some of these things really bring memories to mind like I'll never forget a truth moot we had in Memphis and the truth we'll do annually these get togethers in different places where we go and just have like uh four or five days together as a community and the first morning we all wake up a bunch of us are going to go get coffee and find out the coffee thing is broken in the the dining hall that this campground gave us and panic set in and me and some others we piled into a car cause we knew there was like a bait shop when you first got into this national forest some kind of bait supply shop we went in there and it turns out they had Justin Timberlake pictures all over the place in this thing so he must they must be big fans I know he's from the area and they had a little coffee pot and little Styrofoam cups and they they sold us those and it was just like the best coffee you ever had thinking you weren't gonna get any but when we were on the way to the car to make that trip a guy I know was in the in the campgrounds he was getting out this whole campground coffee making kit he's like well I'm fine I don't know about you guys and he he is at the heart of some of those stances when I'm talking about you know like whenever you're on the road make sure you have a way to make your own coffee cause the way to get it might be far away I had a Gwendolyn Reese who's a friend of mine and another like Hellenist you know Greek Pagan over here in in our little corner of things and she was talking about the the role of philosophy in sort of the modern pagan movement and how really in her opinion and I I agree with her we haven't spent enough time I think in at least in some corners of the occult world and the Neopagan movements really thinking about what philosophically we have to offer to the rest of the world and how you know philosophy sometimes just gets shunted into its little historical corner or very dry uh things where it's really about did you remember to have a a copy maker with you did you remember to do these things actually in your life as opposed to maybe have some values have some grand thoughts about how you should act but no real advice about what that means on the ground yeah I think that that then plays into when you do think about adapting something like that this did you have any push back from people that were like no these things should be kept pure is there any sort of puritanical things that you've had to fight against or is it more everyone's just like no we should absolutely adapt them for new times yeah I I haven't been yelled at yet and in in fact I expected maybe a little pushback from some of my more academic friends uh I I mean I'm I'm very good friends with uh Doctor Matthias Nordvig uh he teaches Nordic mythology at the university of Colorado in Boulder and is he has had some podcasts and things I'm friends with the Hilder publication people they're wonderful people very solid academic minded they like it at least they like it enough not to tell me they hate it hahaha so one of the other things that then comes in particularly since you are practicing a lot from more of a heathen background which some listeners may be slightly less familiar with is there's a concept which I am very fascinated with that perhaps you could talk a little bit about which is the concept of weird and what that is in terms of how we think about like fate and how each of these different sort of roles of like well it's partially ties into philosophy as well of how we are navigating what our our strands of fate are and things like that but could you maybe talk to us a little bit about that sure um the word weird that you're referring to is like w y r d that that is the more Anglo Saxon word for it it's it comes from it's the the name is borrowed directly from one of those Norns you know Yourth and that they're the same thing right and it's and largely referencing a well that they tend it's also the name of one of those wells it's a complicated subject it with miles of words written about it where people try to pick it apart but in my worldview informed by all of that weird is in in in a way it's what connects us all and in and in another way it is it's it's not like fate but it is this moving force of all the things that have happened in the past every all the decisions that have been made as they get closer and closer to you all the actions that have happened the natural occurrences that have gone by these all become this power that is just pushing into the present and that has likely outcomes and in an in a heathen world view it's not so much that we think of it as fate like this future that is written that you can't avoid although we have ideas that might relate to that but again it's tied into the past that's a word called the orlog but weird being this this this whole concept of everything's unfolding in a way that makes perfect sense because all the past is pushing forward to become those conclusions I mean does that make sense it it's it's the it's it's not as mystical I guess as maybe the Greeks thought of fate and when you get into the Norse and more dramatic thinking people a fate becomes more of a debt or just likely outcome and weird is that force that pass that is unfolding and pushing it all forward mm hmm and so then that those those strands of of that that pushing forward then for those of us who practice magic then there's there's the part of it where then we will take the active role in what we choose to do with that so you mentioned how for for you runes are much more like you know for magical operations for you know spiritual work I am going to assume and I I think I remember that bind runes would be a part of that for you and I some people who are listening might be very familiar with what Bind rooms are but for those who are not could you just maybe introduce kind of what those are and then give us some of your thoughts on that uh huh Bind Rooms is taking you know one or more rooms and combining them it really is but to back up a little bit like runes themselves are alphabets right and the one that I reference mostly is the elder Futhark it's the oldest one that we know of in a complete set there's 24 of them it's also oddly the one we know the least about academically it has been reconstructed you know what they may mean by knowing more about futharks which are collections of runes as alphabets that come from later periods and the way they can reconstruct them is through rune poems that's where we have found most of what these things mean some people think the rune poems are like mnemonic devices to help you remember what each letter is etcetera etcetera etcetera you will find corners of Heathenry as practitioners and academics who say runes were only alphabets and just alphabets and that's it full stop they're wrong it would be the only alphabet in the history of ever that that would be true of and I just don't think that's possible not to mention we have weird stuff that survived in the archaeological archaeological record we have stories in in the surviving lore that reference ruins in like magical ways anyway you know the elder Futhark I just want to explain that's that's where the idea of runes come from when I'm talking about runes I'm talking about the elder Futhark um those 24 runes so if I have some magical goal in mind that one room doesn't come you know doesn't work as my focal point or as the thing that I carve into the candle or the thing that I put into wood or you know I draw into the dirt or whatever I'm going to do or chant repeatedly I may need to combine one or more of those rooms into a new shape now you can do it as a shape and then you know like sigils sigil magic from Chaos Magic is very similar to what you would be applying here Laura Tempest Zakroff has a wonderful way of approaching sigils that you could take that way of doing them to runes to to create blind runes I can hear like an academic person just moaning in pain when I say that we can allow that we'll just keep it we'll keep it off the mics it's okay there are no degrees being earned here go away yeah there's other ways where like I like to make a wheel sometimes like a three or or six or nine or some I like to work in groups of threes'cause threes and nines are pretty sacred in Heathenry that the numbers that show up a lot so you know I might just create just a three armed something and then put the runes at the end of each one of those lines where now I'm not creating a new shape out of them but I'm I'm combining them in something that brings them together you might just write them repetitively nine times in rows and put them together you know that there's we don't know how they were really used before conversion came to the north these people didn't write their stuff down we don't everything we know about what they did from the written record was written two and three centuries afterwards of of conversion so we have to be careful about a lot of that stuff for me that I get very excited about that because it means I can be creative I would be anyway but again chaos magician you're only stopped by what you can imagine right so approach the runes I say you know with with some reverence understand what they are learn the rune poems and and really respect what we do know about these things and then get really creative you know like have fun and see what happens but yeah bind runes would be the way to go whenever you you're gonna combine one or more of them in some way that you want to visually represent them and again you would create a new shape out of them or you can create double you know triple or somewhat armed objects to draw them on the end of those lines you can draw a straight line down and put them along the edges of the line that way there's all kinds of fun ways to do this yeah and then that's that's even more important cause what you're touching on is again is that nuanced understanding of learning the poems or at least you know going to some of the source materials to understand what the meaning to these letters might have been to the best of our modern understanding before you go into your UPG and you start exactly creating which is which is wonderful and I'm sure it's what everyone has done before I practice a form of grammatamancy which is with the Greek alphabet because we do know that they did that there's there's records we still have some of the some of those uh records do still exist very few but they did survive from western Anatolia so so it's like yeah they were doing it in Greece they're they're doing it everywhere people are just gonna do that we're gonna take our letters and then we're gonna know what those letters represent and then we'll probably also do magic with it too so the alphabet we have now in English you ever chanted ah yes indeed it is it is absolutely still present it's just how people are thinking about it that's right and they get used to create sigils and things now so there's no there's no escaping it I think as long as there's been something that a human with a creative mind could turn into something else for magic they've been doing it is there anything about making bind runes that you'd want to tell people is a mistake you've made in the past or something that you're like but don't do this or any other advice that you think with runes or with similar things like that that is something you Learned from either not getting an interpretation correctly or doing a thing that you're like nope I won't do that again not so much a mistake that I've made that's a mistake I've seen a lot make and it is very simply this if you enter into the world of Heathenry it's a minefield of problematic sources to good sources there's a lot of folkish people out there and folkish referring to those who believe that Heathenry is only for white people basically they're morons and they're wrong but they're out there they've done a lot of writing and they've they've put ideas in the world like suggesting it's possible to reclaim the swastika as a holy symbol because for a very long time it was a holy symbol it was a sun wheel probably there's there's it it's been a symbol to a lot of cultures around the world but the simple fact of it is if you're getting involved in Heathenry and you put a swastika on something your runes or make a bind rune look like a swastika or you put a swastika in your magic or wear it or whatever you're doing and try to tell someone with a straight meaningful face that it doesn't mean Nazi I'm afraid you deserve the harsh correction coming your way because it's ruined it's ruined it it it just it I can't look at that thing most of the world can't look at that thing without thinking Nazi that's that's one giant mistake lurking for people who may not just understand that you're you're being manipulated into thinking that thing can be reclaimed you're being manipulated into thinking it could still be sacred do not believe anyone who tells you that's possible unfortunate that we have to call that out still because I I feel like I would love to say that that is no longer really a thing in the the heathen sphere but it's also found in in a lot of other pockets of of some traditions where it gets into nationalist things or bizarre historical rants which are not not good so yeah it is and especially with this kind of stuff it is very important to be checking and vetting sources carefully Dr Jackson Crawford who you mentioned earlier is a huge we are huge fans of of him on this show and yeah my friends great scholarship there so there's there's a lot of very very good people out there as well yourself obviously very much included I I love uh Crawford stuff and another great resource especially for symbol sets and things like that that you could learn more about where they come from and why they might be used is a site is memus brunner dot info um that's run by some of the people who are associated with the Hilder publications and it it's an excellent resource for a lot of that stuff so you have a fantastic podcast of course which has been referenced a couple of times in this show is there anything about your own practice your own divination things that have changed drastically or unexpectedly based on people that you've met through your show or ways that you feel like that's really influenced your practice more than you might have expected when you when you went into it for sure I've been podcasting September of this year next month will make 10 years that I've been doing it the show is weird web radio it's available everywhere you get your podcasts I've had so many of them influence me in ways that you know I I can't even begin to describe it's really opened up I think before I started podcasting I had sort of almost um become too locked in to a certain way of thinking and interviewing people all across the board and spectrum of paganism and the occult listening to their experiences really helped me sort of decalcify I guess and and and and open up again to a lot more different experiences one in particular individual who I've had on my show several times had enormous influence on how I reshaped some of my usual work and now being very just what I do uh was Aiden Walker the author of Six Ways Weaving Fate Changeling and what a wonderful human being Aiden is and and a great writer he's just great at teaching certain ways of approaching this stuff not just Aiden though uh Laura Tempest Softcraft I her approach to sigils changed the entire way I thought about it forever it's like she took something that I thought was great and it can be but she showed me there's actually a graduate level to all of this and I'll forever be grateful for her her work for that reason I mean I'm leaving so many people out of course go on and on and on about how each one of these individuals I've spoken to have had an influence on the way I approach my work and my practice after 10 years of doing my podcast has formed itself into something pretty cool that is not what I was doing before I started this show it just simply isn't they they they've all had great influence on me and all in a great positive way podcasting is its own art form and it's also like what we each then listen to and take in and learn from each other is is such an important thing in this the modern day it's it's a really important art I agree I'm the lucky one and I both agree that's for sure um is there's so much that I have been so grateful to every one of my guests for so I wanted to know if there is a thing that perhaps you've been thinking about a lot that you might want to before we close out and talk a little bit about what you have going on and things like that is there anything you've been thinking about a lot that might be a piece of advice or just something that you've been mulling over a lot that you want to leave people with or something that just occurs to you that you want to touch on before we close out yeah just stay weird be you please be creative if you've got a book you wanna write write it if you've got a podcast you wanna start start it if there's some show you wanna film who cares if you have all the right equipment just do it it is the story it is the genuine you that compels people to consume it so please we are waiting on you to come do your thing and that's it just embrace who you are and be weird that's it I couldn't agree more that is a fabulous thing to leave people with so there is your book there is your podcast where can people find you other than there will of course be things in the show notes but anything else you want to share with people hmm you it's easy to find me and everything I do at Weird Web radio dot com and or you can go to patreon.com slash weird web radio everything I offer is available right there beautiful you keep it nice and simple that's always yeah very very good well I appreciate that very much I've really enjoyed your work over the years so I'm grateful as a listener to your show and it's been so lovely to to get to talk to you here on this this chance so I'm sure there'll be other excuses and reasons for us to talk again so it'll be good I hope so