What is a Rune

by Collin Cleary

  This part that seeks to understand goes by many names, but one of them is spirit. And since it is our spirit that strives to bring things out of the earth, out of concealment, and into the light of the sky, we identify our spirit with the sky as well. The spirit too is “up there,” akin to the idea and the ideal. It too rises above earth, which—unlike awakened spirit—slumbers in darkness. Thus, out of the distinction between earth and sky is formed the distinction between matter and spirit, and matter and form (though I use the language of philosophy here, these basic distinctions have been expressed in countless different ways and predate philosophy).

  We seek to know things that appear within these two ultimate horizons of sky and earth. In the sky the sun fascinates us—and punishes us when we peer into it, seeking to know it. We are drawn also to the stars in the sky, which reveal themselves when the sun is concealed, and show us the way. The seasons and the weather are objects of our curiosity as well, as they have the capacity to affect our lives in dramatic, even catastrophic ways. If we could learn their ways, we could, perhaps, improve our lot in life. On earth, we seek to know the ways of animals and plants and stones: where they come from, what their powers are, and how we might use them for our own ends. This curiosity, this desire to bring the natures of things out of concealment and know and master them is uniquely human.

  3. DIVINITIES & MORTALS

  But in fact there is a different, though related, human characteristic that is deeper and more fundamental than this—and that truly gets to the heart of what makes us unique. It is our capacity to be struck with wonder at the fact that all of these things are. We are stuck, in other words, by the sheer Being of things.10 I have termed this aspect of human spirit ekstasis. (For an extensive discussion, see “The Gifts of Odin and His Brothers.”)

  In fact, what makes this capacity possible is that we are mortal. We are the only animals that are aware of the fact that we will eventually die. The fact that I exist at all, and that my existence is so fleeting and precarious, fills me with wonder and with dread. This opens me to wonder in the face of the facticity of all else—especially that which, unlike me, is immortal. The constants of existence, in earth and sky, fill me with awe. These things are greater than I. These things are the gods, what Heidegger calls “the divinities.”11 Wonder at the Being of these constant features of life and existence as such is the intuition of the presence of a god. (See my essay “Summoning the Gods.”12)

  We can now see how the fourfold operates. Mortals live on the sheltering earth, underneath the sky. Living between earth and sky, mortals live between concealing and revealing, or concealing and truth. They draw things out of concealment and into the light, striving for the ideal of truth, clarity, and illumination represented by the daylight sky—while all the time recognizing that revealing never completely triumphs over concealing. The open sky never completely triumphs over the mystery of the sheltering, concealing earth. The uranic and the chthonic must share power. The very mortality of the mortals opens them to the uncanniness of Being itself: wonder in the face of the fact that things are at all. And in this wonder, they encounter the constants of existence: the immortals, the gods.

  This mortal existence—living between the sheltering earth and the mercurial sky, in awareness of divine presence—is dwelling. Heidegger tells us that

  Mortals dwell in that they save the earth—taking the word in the old sense still known to Lessing. Saving does not only snatch something from a danger. To save really means to set something free into its own presencing. To save the earth is more than to exploit it or even to wear it out. Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from spoliation. (PLT, 150)

  Mortals “save” the earth, and they “receive the sky. They leave to the sun and the moon their journey, to the stars their courses, to the seasons their blessing and inclemency; they do not turn night into day nor day into a harassed unrest” (PLT, 150). Here we see the anti-modern subtext in Heidegger: mortals (i.e., authentic, pre-modern men) practice what Heidegger calls Gelassenheit (letting-beings-be). They accept the earth and sky with a certain humility. They do not force them, and what appears within them, into pre-given categories. Nor do they attempt to break down the natural limits that sky and earth impose upon our lives (e.g., they do not seek to “turn night into day”).

  But there is more:

  Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities as divinities. In hope they hold up to the divinities what is unhoped for. They wait for intimations of their coming and do not mistake the signs of their absence. They do not make their gods for themselves and do not worship idols. In the very depth of misfortune they wait for the ideal that has been withdrawn. (PLT, 150)

  In other words, mortals let the gods come forth to them. They do not erect new gods or idols of their own creation and worship them (e.g., money, the state, the People, “democracy,” “equality,” “diversity,” etc.). And when it feels as if the gods may have abandoned them, they do not abandon their gods: they make ready for their return. This is what it means to dwell—in this intersection between ourselves (the mortals), earth, sky, and the gods.

  And in dwelling Heidegger says that we bring forth a world. The world “happens” in human beings drawing things out of concealment. In other words, in making truth (which, again, is simply revealing, or unconcealment; see Heidegger’s essay “On the Essence of Truth”). The world does not mean the planet or the universe. The world we live in is a “place,” but it is a place shaped through our attempts to understand, to bring things into the light, and to express what we have discovered. The world, in other words, is a human world; it is life in “man age.” It is earth and sky, and all that lies therein, as encountered—primarily—in the forms of myth, poetry, philosophy, and science (i.e., in the forms of human culture as such).13

  4. CONCLUSION: “POETICALLY MAN DWELLS”

  As I have noted, all of these forms are founded on ekstasis—in our capacity to be struck with wonder at the sheer fact that things are. However, the primary expression of ekstasis is to be found in poetry (which, in the world of our ancestors, is indistinguishable from myth). “Poetry” is derived from the Greek poiesis, which simply means “making.” What we call “poetry” is, in fact, the primary form of making.

  Heidegger tells us that “poetry, as the authentic gauging of the dimension of dwelling, is the primal form of building. Poetry first of all admits man’s dwelling into its very nature, its presencing being. Poetry is the original admission of dwelling” (PLT, 227). But what does this strange comment mean? Heidegger gives us a clue when he tells us elsewhere that “Poetry is the saying of the unconcealedness of what is” (PLT, 74). Poetry is the saying of Being.

  Poetry speaks when human beings are struck with wonder in the face of Being. As a very simple example, take the famous haiku by Bashō:

  Old pond . . .

  a frog leaps in

  water’s sound14

  Here the poet attempts to express a moment that others would hardly notice; a constellation of elements—pond, frog, the sound of the water—that others would take for granted. The poet, however, is struck by the fact that these things are, and he attempts to express the Being of these things, and the Being of this unrepeatable moment, in words.

  Other art forms have a similar origin. A painter passes a tree seen by hundreds of people every day, but something stops him in his tracks when he glimpses it and he is moved—he is impelled—to paint it. What has happened is that the artist has been arrested by an experience of the sheer Being of the tree—he experiences wonder at the fact that it is at all. Then he attempts to capture that Being in a painting—and to produce the same experience of wonder in the spectators who will gaze at his painting.

  Poetry registers the Being of beings. It is the most basic thing about us that makes us human. We are the beings who are struck by Being and moved to give expression to it. Poetry—which includes myth—is the primal form of this
expression. All else that is uniquely human is founded upon this and flows from this. This includes philosophy and science, which begin in revolt against the poets and poetic inspiration, yet are covertly dependent upon both. (See my discussion of poetic inspiration in science in “The Gifts of Odin and His Brothers.”)

  Even Aristotle, who certainly did not have the soul of a poet, recognized that “philosophy begins in wonder” (i.e., wonder in the face of Being).

  Poetry is expressed in language, but Heidegger tells us that language is “not only and not primarily an audible and written expression of what is to be communicated.” Primarily, language is what brings the Being of beings into the open and gives it expression. “Where there is no language, as in the being of stone, plant, and animal, there is also no openness of what is, and consequently no openness either of that which is not and of the empty” (PLT, 73). Here Heidegger turns the usual understanding of language on its head. Language is not primarily a form of written or spoken communication, but only secondarily. For there to be communication, there must be something to communicate. And what, at the most basic level, do we communicate in language? We communicate what things are. The registration of the Being of beings precedes all communication and the primary function of language is to, in a sense, “capture” this experience of Being.

  We are the beings who register and communicate Being in language, and we live in a world that is structured and informed by language. At the deepest level, what this really means is that our world is structured by our understanding of the Being of beings; our conceptions of what things are. And so Heidegger famously (or infamously) says that “When we go to the well, when we go through the woods, we are always already going through the word ‘well,’ through the word ‘woods,’ even if we do not speak the words and do not think of anything relating to language” (PLT, 132).

  What Heidegger means is that our encounter with beings is structured or conditioned by our concepts of those beings—concepts which we express in language. The well is not, for me, a unique individual—even if I am encountering it for the first time. It is a well; an object that shows up for me as agreeing with the concept I hold in mind of the kind of thing it is. Based upon this concept I expect, in advance, certain things of the well and not others. Depending upon the richness or poverty of my concept, the object will reveal its Being to me to a greater or lesser degree.

  In concepts, in language, we create a new world that expresses the Being of the world around us, as well as the world within us. It is as if we are the beings who want to capture and preserve all that is through our conceptual capacity—to snatch it out of the fleeting moment and away from change and decay, and preserve it in the amber of our words. Heidegger quotes Rainer Maria Rilke: “We are the bees of the invisible. We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible, to store it up in the great golden beehive of the Invisible” (PLT, 130).15

  And so we erect an alternate conceptual or linguistic universe of ideas, generalizations, classifications, myths, stories, theories, ideals, and standards (moral and otherwise)—a counter world much like Plato’s “realm of forms.” When we go to the well or through the woods—when we do anything at all—we are always simultaneously going through this conceptual counter-world as well.

  But conceptual worlds change—and may even be lost to us. When our ancestors walked on this earth, when they walked to the well or through the woods, they walked though the words of their poets. And the poets told them that they dwelt at the intersection of eight worlds, with their world, the ninth world, in the middle. What we have learned through Heidegger is what it means, in the most fundamental sense, to dwell in that world. To dwell in that world is to exist at a simpler and basic intersection—between the fourfold of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals. And fundamentally, dwelling in that world means poetically giving birth to the world itself. Heidegger also famously declares “world worlds” (PLT, 44).

  In the following essay, we will explore the ninefold cosmological system that emerged from the minds of our ancestors when they dwelt poetically in this fourfold world.

  Counter-Currents/North American New Right,

  October 19, 2012

  THE NINEFOLD

  1. OVERVIEW OF THE GERMANIC COSMOLOGY

  This is the second of two essays on the Germanic cosmology or worldview. In the first essay, “The Fourfold,” I explored the very idea of a “world” itself, freely adapting Martin Heidegger’s analysis of the four moments of human “dwelling”: earth, sky, divinities, and mortals. This essay builds upon that foundation, and readers should familiarize themselves with “The Fourfold” before turning to it.

  In this initial section I will give an account of the details of the Germanic cosmology. I will draw freely from the available sources (chiefly the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson) and weave together a brief summary of the mythic material. My concern here is not to offer an exhaustive survey of all the Germanic cosmological information available in the primary sources, and still less am I concerned to identify where individual points are to be found in different source texts. (Interested readers can consult the sources on their own.) My aims here are not scholarly.

  My summary of the Germanic cosmology will attempt to present the available information in a coherent, non-contradictory account. As we shall see, however, this will prove extremely difficult. But this very difficulty will point us toward a way to recover the cosmology of our ancestors. And this will go well beyond merely summarizing what we know about its curious details. My real objective, in fact, will become an attempt to approach the cosmology from within and to make it our own. But getting to that point involves a difficult journey.

  As is well known, our ancestors believed in the existence of nine interrelated “worlds.” The central world is the one that we are on, Midgard. The other worlds exist on two planes in relation to us: a vertical plane, and a horizontal plane. On the vertical plane, two worlds exist above Midgard and two worlds below. But these are not “north” and “south.” The four geographic directions all exist on the horizontal plane,16 and in each direction—north, south, east, and west—is a world.

  Let’s begin on the horizontal plane with north and south, for the worlds there precede all the others in time. In the south is Muspelheim, which (according to the Prose Edda), is actually the first world that existed. (The Prose Edda does not make it clear if Muspelheim was first in the sense of being eternal, or first to be—somehow—created.) Muspelheim is a world of fire. We don’t have much information as to its inhabitants. In fact, all we really know is that the fire giant Surt lives there. It is said that he will burn the whole world when Ragnarok comes. (The universe begins and ends with fire—and begins again . . .)

  After Muspelheim, Snorri tells us that Niflheim came to be made in the north (though how it was made is a mystery). For some time, only these two worlds existed and—between them—Ginnungagap. This is a kind of void whose name has been interpreted as “yawning gap,” but—more interestingly—as a “space filled with magical powers.”17 I’m not going to dwell on the Germanic account of creation, because my purpose here is to discuss cosmology (the structure of the cosmos), not cosmogony (its origin). Nevertheless, it should be noted that what we have at the beginning is not a cosmos in the true, Greek sense of order (κόσμος).

  In Niflheim eleven rivers flow from a well called Hvergelmir. The eleven rivers are collectively referred to as Elivagar. These rivers are filled with eitrkvikja, which has been translated as “yeasty venom.”18 Why are these rivers filled with venom? Well, Snorri tells us that they are filled with countless serpents. When the rivers flow far from Hvergelmir and into Ginnungagap, their waters harden into ice. This ice is then struck by sparks and embers flung off from Muspelheim.

  The rest of the creation story will be very familiar to many of my readers. The frost giant Ymir—progenitor of the other frost giants—is created from the combination of fire and ice. The giant has a humanoid form, and this is an important point. The
very first, definite thing created by the purely impersonal, unplanned collision of fire and ice is something like an initial sketch of the human.19 Ymir survives by drinking the milk of the cow Audumla, who survives by licking a salty ice block. Soon, “a man” named Buri, who was “handsome and tall and strong” is formed out of the ice block.20 Here again, we see that it is as if the human is the end or goal of creation. Something approaching the human keeps popping up automatically out of the interaction of material forces, without anything seeming to direct the process.

  However, it is only with the grandchildren of Buri—Odin, Vili, and Ve—that true consciousness (or, rather, self-consciousness) comes on the scene. Prior to them, things happen, but in a kind of disordered, chaotic fashion. This is most apparent in how generation takes place in this earlier, “Titanic” period.21 A “man” is licked out of an ice block; out of Ymir’s left armpit grow a man and woman; one of Ymir’s legs mates with the other and produces a son (from whom the frost ogres are descended), etc.

  Odin, Vili, and Ve kill Ymir, drag his body into the center of Ginnungagap, and construct the cosmos out of his parts. The cosmos—an ordered system of the gods’ own design—comes into being where once there had been only chaos. In the center of this cosmos the gods build Midgard, a “stronghold” for men (whom they create out of two trees, Ask and Embla; see “The Gifts of Odin and his Brothers”). Midgard is round and is encircled by a world ocean. According to Snorri, giants occupy most of the beach front property, while humans live inland.