Meditations on OS: Odin's Voice

Technically I began writing this essay on 26 September 2021. The ideas however began forming years earlier. OS has enabled me to give this essay a voice. OS freed it from the captivity of time, of space, of procrastination, of lethargy. Revised 3 October 2021.

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As I begin my meditations on the fourth rune OS, I consider Hávamál verse 149:

“A fourth song I know: Should an enemy put
A tie onto pliable limbs;
Then I speak the spell, the shackles break from the feet
And the fetters from the hands.”[1]

With this verse it is the act of “speaking” or “chanting”[2] that not only realizes the intended effect of OS but which aligns it to the Old English Rune Poem (OERP). The OERP tells us:

“Os (God) is the origin of all language, wisdom’s foundation and wise man’s comfort, and to every hero blessing and hope.”[3]

Guido Von List emphasized the relationship of OS to the mouth and to the power of speech. Also importantly he associated the word Os to As and Ase – meaning “one of the Aesir.”[4] With OS, the Northern spiritual relationship is quite evident. While the OERP points in this direction, the Icelandic Rune Poem (IRP) leaves little room for doubt.

“Óss (God) is the originator of old
and Asgard’s lord
and Valhalla’s leader.”[5]

OS is the rune of Odin, the All-father, Asgard’s lord, and the ruler over Valhalla. Odin is not only “one of the Aesir,” but the highest and most ancient of all gods.[6] Odin is known as the god of poetry. In Skaldskaparmal (“The Language of Poetry”), Snorri explains that there are two categories into which all poetry is divided—language and verse-forms.[7] Hence, by extension, Odin is the god of spoken language. Beyond that, Odin is also the god of written language as he “took up the runes” and gave them to mankind. The reference then in the OERP to an Os (God) as the origin of all language is only a thinly veiled reference to Odin.

Turning once again to the well-known verses of Rúnatáls-þáttr-Óðins “Odins Rune Song” 139-40, we read:

“I ween that I hung on the windy tree,
Hung there for nights full nine;
With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was
To Othin, myself to myself,
On the tree that none may ever know
What root beneath it runs.
None made me happy with loaf or horn,
And there below I looked;
I took up the runes,
shrieking I took them (aepandi nam),
And forthwith back I fell.”[8]

It is Odin’s cry (ON: aepandi nam) that allows him to gain the knowledge of the runes themselves. The power of that cry, of Odin’s voice, is conveyed through OS. It is the sounding of that voice that frees us from the shackles not only of an external exoteric enemy, but also of those with which we bind ourselves. OS overcomes our internally imposed limitations and constraints. It provides us with the power to overcome fears that hinder our progress. Karl Welz declared, “I free myself, and I am free from material restriction, from material bonds.”[9]  OS frees us from self-imposed mental shackles and thereby unlocks the door to the Creative Rune Realm. It is there that we are able to create through the extraordinary power of will.

Considering the runes in sequence, OS importantly follows THORN. While THORN is unbridled runic energy, OS provides newfound ability to control such energy and use it for good and for order. In that regard OS points directly to the fifth rune, RIT, the rune of cosmic order. Odin serves as our model as we begin to shape our universe. We must recall that Odin shaped Earth from the corpse of the primal giant Ymir—represented by THORN. While Odin shaped the multiverse at a macrocosmic level, we shape our own personal universe at a microcosmic level. In so doing we establish order where once there was chaos. We see then at a runic level the transition from THORN as pure unbridled Odic energy to OS as the controlled creative application of that force. 

Considering the relationship of OS to other runes, we must highlight the connection between OS and FA. Symbolically these runes are counterparts to each other. Rudolf John Gorsleben pointed this out in his magnum opus, Hochzeit der Menschheit (Zenith of Mankind),

“The OS Rune is the counterpart to the FA Rune. Its image is its reversal. If the FA Rune is ‘Va-Runa,’ the sender, the giver, then the OS-Rune, Osrus as a female name, is the receiving one. FA = (Pha)llus and OS = (Sch)=oss (womb)! From the motherly Ur-ground of love grows all there is and into the motherly womb the unfolded world returns again after eons, in order to rise again to a new sequence of creation, in eternal change between being and non-being, fertilized by the male spirit, the breath of God. His breath became this world.”[10]

OS as womb or mother provides another insight into its importance as a rune of manifestation—a rune that literally gives birth to a world. Siegfried Kummer calls OS “the rune of Odin-Wotan.” He writes of, “Odin the OD-bringer, Odebar (the stork) who brings the children.”[11] This etymological link emphasizes Odin as a life-giver. In addition to the creative powers of OS are its spiritual aspects. Kummer indicates that Odin was a “wind god.” He writes,

“In the language of our fathers, breath is synonymous with spirit. Without the breeze no fire burns, without breath there is no life.”[12]

The Voluspá tells how Odin breathed spirit or soul into Ask and Embla the first two humans.

“Then from the throng did three come forth,
From the home of the gods, the mighty and gracious;
Two without fate on the land they found,
Ask and Embla, empty of might.”

“Soul they had not, sense they had not,
Heat nor motion, nor goodly hue;
Soul gave Othin, sense gave Honir,
Heat gave Lothur and goodly hue.”[13]

The spirit that Odin breathed into Ask and Embla differentiated them from the purely material. They were alive as the trees Ash and Elm but without spirit or soul. Welz describes OS as providing new spiritual insights and a parting from the shackles of the material world,

“I experience the breaking of the ties of my attachment to the material world. I recognize the narrow point of view that I used to have and which bound me to the material planes… Now I can see the world with the spiritual eyes of a Rune Master.”[14]

OS then provides the ability to break from the bondage of the material world. Von List applied the motto “Your spiritual force makes you free!”[15] to OS. Through such freedom we are indeed able to tap into the Creative Rune Realm and to shape our universe. We are able to construct a world of cosmic order and truth – of rita – a principle realized in the fifth Armanen rune, RIT.

Notes:

1. Karl Hans Welz, Letter of Instructions # 4: The Rune OS. https://runemagick.com/rune_magic04.html 

2. The relevant phrase is svá ek gel, in the Old Norse. This may be translated as “so I chant” or “I chant the spell.” See Aelfric Avery, Völuspá and Hávamal: Old Norse Text and Heathen English Translation (Vavenby, CA: Woodharrow Gild Press, 2018). 

3. Stephen Pollington, Rudiments of Runelore (Cambridgeshire, UK: Anglo-Saxon Books, 2011) 46. 

4. Guido Von List, The Secret of the Runes, trans. Stephen E. Flowers (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1988), 51. 

5. Pollington, 54. 

6. I have borrowed this phrase from Snorri Sturluson’s Gylfaginning. While it appears to be a reference to Odin, Snorri is not explicit on this point. Snorri Sturluson, Edda, trans., Anthony Faulkes (North Clarendon, VT: Everyman, 1995), 8. 

7. Sturluson, 64. 

8. Henry Adams Bellows, trans., The Poetic Edda: The Mythological Poems (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), 60-61. 

9. Welz. 

10. Rudolf John Gorsleben, Hochzeit der Menschheit, trans., Karl Hans Welz. English language translation 2002 of the German language edition of 1930, 433. https://runemagick.com/gorsleben.pdf 

11. Siegfried Kummer, Holy Rune Might, trans. Aelfric Avery (Vavenby, CA: Woodharrow Bund Press, 2019), 78. 

12. Kummer, 78. 

13. Bellows, 8. 

14. Welz. 

15. Von List, 51.