What is a Rune
Page 1
WHAT IS A RUNE?
&
OTHER ESSAYS
by
COLLIN CLEARY
EDITED BY GREG JOHNSON
Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd.
San Francisco
2015
Copyright © 2015 by Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved
Cover image: adapted from W. G. Collingwood’s title page for
Olive Bray’s 1908 translation of the Poetic Edda
Cover design by
Kevin I. Slaughter
Published in the United States by
COUNTER-CURRENTS PUBLISHING LTD.
P.O. Box 22638
San Francisco, CA 94122
USA
http://www.counter-currents.com/
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-935965-79-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-935965-80-0
E-Book ISBN: 978-1-935965-81-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cleary, Collin, 1973-
What is a Rune? : and other essays / by Collin Cleary ; edited by Greg Johnson.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-935965-79-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-935965-80-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-935965-81-7 (electronic book)
1. Neopaganism--Scandinavia. 2. Scandinavia.--Religion. 3. Runes. I. Johnson, Greg, 1971- II. Title.
BP605.N46C66 2015
299'.94--dc23
2013037993
COLLIN CLEARY
(Courtesy Max Ribaric/Occidental Congress)
CONTENTS
Editor’s Introduction:
The Philosophy of Collin Cleary
Author’s Preface
1. What is a Rune?
2. The Fourfold
3. The Ninefold
4. The Gifts of Odin & His Brothers
5. The Stones Cry Out: Cave Art & the Origin
of the Human Spirit
6. Ásatrú & the Political
7. Are We Free?
8. Heidegger: An Introduction for Anti-Modernists
9. “All or Nothing”: The Prisoner & Ibsen’s Brand
About the Author
To Edred Thorsson
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
THE PHILOSOPHY OF
COLLIN CLEARY
GREG JOHNSON
This volume is Collin Cleary’s eagerly-anticipated follow up to Summoning the Gods, his first collection of essays, published in 2011. As one might expect, the present collection develops the ideas encountered in Summoning the Gods, but these new essays (all of which have been written since 2011) give evidence of genuine intellectual growth. In my opinion, and that of the author, they are more philosophically sophisticated than Cleary’s earlier work. And they form more of a unity than the essays of the previous collection. Indeed, in this new volume we see the outlines of a coherent philosophy—something approaching what used to be called, in bygone days, a “philosophical system.” There were only hints of this in Summoning the Gods. This introduction attempts to provide readers with a brief guide to this “system,” weaving together the different strands that one finds in these nine unique essays.
As in Summoning the Gods, the principal philosophical influences on Cleary are G. W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger, especially the latter. There is scarcely a page in the present volume that is not marked by Heidegger’s influence. Indeed, one of the essays included here is an introduction to his thought. And it has the distinction of being quite possibly the best, brief, English-language introduction to the ideas of this notoriously difficult philosopher.
In Summoning the Gods, Cleary insisted that what we need is “openness to the gods,” which he argued (again drawing upon Heidegger) is founded upon “openness to Being.” In the essay from which the volume took its title (the most significant of Cleary’s early writings) he argued that it is in wonder in the face of Being that the gods are intuited. This idea is also central to the essays in the present volume.
While Cleary’s exploration of what it would mean to know the gods or return to belief in them is of interest to neo-heathens of all sorts, his own allegiance is to the Germanic tradition of his ancestors. However, there was relatively little actual discussion of the Germanic sources in Summoning the Gods. The present volume delves much more deeply into the Eddas, with essays covering the Germanic cosmology and anthropogeny. In truth, every essay in the present volume deals with the Germanic tradition, broadly construed: not just the Runes and the Poetic and Prose Eddas, but also Hegel and Heidegger, as well as Oswald Spengler, Henrik Ibsen, and others. This volume also contains Cleary’s essay “Ásatrú and the Political,” in which he argues that devotion to the Germanic tradition entails what is now called “White Nationalism.” This essay proved so controversial that “anti-racist” heathens, words evidently failing them, embarked upon an 18-month campaign of harassment and intimidation, including throwing a brick and a paint bomb through the window of my downstairs neighbor.
Another concern the present volume shares with the preceding one is the concept of “mytho-poetic thought.” In fact, this idea will provide a kind of thread that can help guide us through these essays and allow us to see their unity. Mytho-poetic thought is the central concern of the essay with which the volume begins, and from which it takes its title, “What is a Rune?” This piece was originally an address given at the Rune-Gild Moot in the fall of 2011, where Cleary and several others were made Masters in the Gild. In this essay, Cleary understands the runes as examples of what the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) referred to as “imaginative universals”: concrete symbols denoting a whole class of phenomena (as opposed to “intelligible universals,” which employ abstract concepts rather than symbols). Cleary writes that our ancestors “literally saw cattle [Fehu]” as more than cattle; as a manifestation of a fundamental principle or force at work in the universe. In the case of each rune, our ancestors took some feature of their “lifeworld” (a term Cleary borrows from Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology) and understood it to “stand for” or to express something more general or fundamental.
The trouble, however, is that that lifeworld has been lost to us—and the Runemasters of old left us no clear accounts of the meanings of the runes. Cleary’s recognition of this represents, for all intents and purposes, a re-evaluation of the approach he took in earlier essays like “Philosophical Notes on the Runes,” which were heavily dependent upon Edred Thorsson’s brilliant but speculative interpretations of the runes. The conclusion to this essay is somewhat bleak. If, in losing the lifeworld of our ancestors, the runes no longer speak to us directly, if they require a “philosophical” interpretation which is largely groping in the dark, then it seems that we can never truly recover their meaning.
The specific problem of reappropriating the meaning of the runes is not solved in these pages. And it leads Cleary back to the problem he has been dealing with from the beginning: the question of whether we might be able—somehow—to recover the mentality of our ancestors; to begin to see the world as they did. If this were possible, then perhaps the runes—and the myths, and the gods—might speak to us again. But how can we enter back into their lifeworld—or, perhaps, live and think as if that lifeworld were our own? In the present volume, Cleary makes considerable progress in dealing with this more fundamental problem. He begins by recognizing that if we are to find our way back into the world of our ancestors, we cannot assume we know what a “world” is.
Thus, his essay “The Fourfold” begins with Cleary’s attempt to recover what Heidegger would call the originary sense of “world.” The term itself is Germanic, and comes from the Old English weorold: wer, which means “man” + eald, meaning “age.” So t
hat “world” literally means “age of man” or “man age.” (Here and throughout the volume, Cleary follows Heidegger in using etymology as a philosophical tool.) Our world is not nature or the planet: it is all of this as cognized and interpreted by us. Our ancestors lived in a world—a “man age”—that was a response of the spirit of our people to their circumstances and surroundings. This response was in the form of “mytho-poetic thought,” but Cleary recognizes that this term is actually a misnomer; that what we are actually talking about is not so much a form of “thinking,” as a way of being in the world. As a first step toward understanding our ancestors’ way of being in the world, Cleary explores Heidegger’s phenomenology of “dwelling” (Wohnen), which the German philosopher argues is the Being of human beings.
Heidegger understands dwelling in terms of four moments or aspects: earth, sky, gods, and mortals. Cleary warns his readers that he is freely adapting (though, it must be added, not distorting) Heidegger’s account. In Cleary’s version of the Heideggerian fourfold, the earth shelters but it also conceals. We live upon it, but we look to the sky as an emblem of our aspirations. The earth and sky are ultimate horizons in which everything appears for us. This idea is already present in “What is a Rune?” where Cleary argues that the Ingwaz and Tiwaz runes represent earth and sky, respectively. And within the horizons of earth and sky all the other runic symbols appear (Cattle, Ox, Wagon, Torch, Hail, Harvest, Elk, Sun, Horse, Day, etc.). The exception is Ansuz, the god rune, the rune of Odin. It is a third “horizon,” that of the uncanny.
We bring things (and, indeed, ourselves) out of the earth, out of concealment and into the light of the sky. In the sunlit revealing that cancels concealment, we strive heavenward (a universal symbol) towards the truth and the achievement of the ideal. The ideal—or ideals—are the gods, the eternal verities that give meaning to life. As Cleary states in his early essay “Summoning the Gods,” we are struck with wonder at these constants, precisely because unlike them we are mortals. The recognition that my existence is fleeting and precarious is itself an occasion for wonder—and dread. And it opens me to wonder in the face of the Being of all else.
Cleary points out that this fourfold of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals founds a number of symbol and idea complexes. Ingwaz, Tiwaz, and Ansuz have already been mentioned. Onto the dyad of earth and sky we can also, of course, map the chthonic and uranic, matter and spirit, matter and form, feminine and masculine. It is universally the case that the sky and its sun are truth, openness, goodness, freedom, the ideal. And that the divinities have some relationship to the sky, dwelling either close to it (on a mountaintop or in a high fortress) or beyond it (as in the case of the Judeo-Christian “heaven”). The earth is darkness, sleep, death, imperfection, natural necessity, the unconscious. (And interestingly, there is a tie between most of these “earth aspects” and what the moon has always symbolized—the moon which reigns over us only when, of course, the sun has hidden itself and the sky is dark.)
Human dwelling, for Heidegger, is to be in this intersection between earth, sky, divinities, and mortals. This dwelling is a dynamic mode of being, in which mortals “receive the sky” and “save the earth.” But Cleary quotes Heidegger as saying that this “saving” really means “to set something free into its own presencing.” Mortals draw things out of concealment and into presence in myriad ways—through science, philosophy, art, religion, poetry, and also just plain and simple poking about. Mortals are drawn forward by their orientation toward the ideal, and by wonder in the face of what is.
This wonder is what truly makes us human, and in the present volume he dubs it ekstasis and identifies it with the phenomenon of óðr, of which Odin is the personification. Cleary explains why he chooses to “speak Greek” in lieu of using the original Old Norse term in “The Gifts of Odin and His Brothers.” This terminological choice is, however, a source of potential confusion for readers. Given the Heideggerian influence on Cleary, some well-informed readers may assume that he is employing Heidegger’s concept of Ekstase. However, Cleary is using “ekstasis” in a sense different from Heidegger’s, though one that is still in the spirit of Heideggerian philosophy. He means by it our capacity to “stand outside ourselves (ek-stasis)” and to be seized and fascinated by the Being of things.
As Cleary discusses in more than one of these essays, poetry is the primary expression of ekstasis. “Poetry” derives from Greek poiesis, which simply means “making.” Poetry is the primary form of human making—the most human of human activities. For it is through poetry that we give voice to Being. And this activity is precisely what our own Being consists in. As we shall see in a moment, Cleary holds that our human “saying of Being” plays a crucial role in the Being of the cosmos itself. (This is the point at which, one might say, Cleary fuses Heidegger with Hegel.)
Poetry is language, and Cleary follows Vico in thinking that the primal form of language was poetic. And he follows Heidegger in holding that the registration of Being is the primary function of language, not interpersonal communication. As we have seen, Cleary believes that there is a basic tie between the poetic and the mythic. On the most fundamental level, both emerge from ekstasis. And so religion and mysticism emerge from ekstasis also—an issue Cleary deals with in “The Stones Cry Out: Cave Art and the Origin of the Human Spirit.” In the same essay, Cleary also argues that ekstasis is at the root of philosophy and science. Through their registration of Being in these different forms or modalities—but principally through poetry and myth—our ancestors created their lifeworld. That is to say, they created a framework in which they interpreted their surroundings and circumstances.
This framework was not a theory or an idea, but rather something within which our ancestors dwelled. (As Heidegger famously said, “Language is the house of being.”) It is important to understand that this lifeworld both is and is not a conscious construction. Certainly, men consciously engaged in poetry, and consciously added to the store of myths. But the impulse to do so and what emerged when men felt that impulse are both a product, as Cleary points out in “Ásatrú and the Political,” of the unique, genetic nature of a people, in its encounter with its particular geographical and historical situation.
In “The Ninefold,” Cleary expands upon the Heideggerian theory of dwelling given in “The Fourfold,” to offer an account of the fundamental features of the lifeworld of the ancient Germanic peoples. Just as Heidegger argues that to be human means to dwell in the fourfold intersection of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals, Cleary argues (in essence) that to be German (or Germanic) is to be in Midgard, at the point where eight other worlds intersect.
Drawing freely upon the Eddas, and the ideas of Edred Thorsson, Cleary treats these eight worlds as four fundamental pairs of opposites that govern or inform our own world. The opposition of Asgard and Hel is the opposition between total light and total darkness, total truth (or revelation) and total concealment. (Here Cleary essentially superimposes Asgard-Hel onto Heidegger’s sky-earth.) Alfheim-Svartalfheim is the opposition between free, creative human Spirit (Hegel’s Geist) and dark, natural necessity. These all lie along the vertical, Irminsul axis (or World Axis), and all have to do with Spirit understanding itself in opposition to “the unconscious, the hidden, the ungraspable.”
The horizontal plane, which also contains four worlds, is concerned with fundamental dualities in nature. Muspelheim-Niflheim is the opposition of solve to coagula (or Strife and Love). Finally, Vanaheim and Jotunheim are opposing types of change: regular, orderly change (as in the cycles of nature, the growth pattern of the organism, etc.) versus its almost inexpressible other: a force that blocks or opposes order. There are many parallels between Cleary’s four opposites and dualities found in the philosophical, mystical, and esoteric traditions. Here I will just note that his understanding of the Vanaheim-Jotunheim opposition is not unlike Plato’s “unwritten doctrine” of the One and “Indefinite Dyad.”
In Midgard these opposites all meet and
blend. I might add to Cleary’s interpretation by making the Hegelian point (with which he would surely agree) that this makes Midgard a concrete whole in a way that the other worlds are not. Since one member of a pair of opposites has its identity only through the other, in a sense its identity lies outside itself. In other words, Muspelheim is only an “abstraction” considered apart from Niflheim. It is only when fire and ice meet that something concrete comes into being—quite literally, in this case (if one accepts the Germanic cosmology). In Midgard all these opposites are dialectically reconciled. Midgard is, in truth, the whole. The other eight worlds are symbolic expressions of fundamental truths about Midgard.
Now, this might immediately elicit the objection that Cleary has in fact returned to the approach of earlier essays like “Philosophical Notes on the Runes,” in which he tried to “philosophize” (or perhaps “rationalize”) things. But this is not the case. In “What is a Rune?” Cleary makes the argument that mytho-poetic thought is not simply philosophy dressed up in images. And, as noted earlier, he recognizes that mytho-poetic “thought” is primarily a way of being in the world, rather than a way of thinking.
But what exactly does this mean? Near the end of “The Ninefold,” Cleary tells us that for our ancestors Muspelheim and the other worlds were both actual places and symbols. Although Cleary does not put it precisely this way, the reason for this is that all places and all things were taken by them as symbols—both real ones, and those projected by the imagination. Cleary offers a “back door” into the world of our ancestors through the philosophical interpretation of symbols. But he recognizes that this is not enough. He writes, “I have no solution to the problem of how to recover the mytho-poetic mind. Perhaps the right approach is to try, deliberately, to read the world as an emblem book: to see things as symbols, to deliberately try to see the world as a poet would.”