Brittany & Loretta Ritualcravt School
Conquering Your World with the Younger Futhork
The world can be harsh place, difficult to live in and nearly impossible to navigate your way to a life that makes sense. Despite the many reports that tell us we live in one of the most peaceful and prosperous times in human history, life is still harsh.
We also know the importance of having a spiritual connection that can help bring meaning a purpose to our existence. Yet, many of the spiritual paths today leave us unfulfilled because of the constant preaching of peace, love and light that simply do not work.
We know that life can be hard, and to get shit done, you want to kick some ass and make it happen. Sitting quietly, meditating on gratitude and peace feels nice, but just doesn’t work.
Finding Your Strength from Arcane Wisdom
For the ancient rune masters, survival meant enduring some of the harshest conditions. The runes they used reflected those conditions and what it took to survive them. Their wisdom and strength live on in the Younger Futhork runes.
Embedded in these mysteries are the secrets we can tap into to give us the strength and power we need to endure the conditions of life, today. Not to make the world a better place; not to calm everyone down and be complacent.
Rather, they can give you the strength you need to endure the toil, to rise above it, and make the world your place – rather than settling for a place made for you by someone else.
Tapping into these Secrets
If you are ready to tap into the secrets of the Younger Futhork, I recommend you start with the Old Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems, as translated by Bruce Dickins.
You can find them here - https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Rune_poems
Pull out a blank piece of paper, and with an open mind, scribe the shapes of the runes. As you draw each rune, contemplate the message of each stanza from the poems. What do these words mean to you, in your life and in your world today?
Don’t think of this as an exercise to build your divination skills. These runes are a tool for you to access different strengths you hold within that are uniquely suited to help face your daily challenges, and conquer them.
Look at the runes in this way – they are the connections between the subtle parts of your consciousness and the subtle layers of reality that shape the life you lead. When you connect to the runes, on this level, you now have powerful ways to insert your Will and intentions into the very fibers of existence.
Putting Them to Use
For example, take the first rune, Fe. The poems tell us that wealth is a source of discord. We must also know that the word Fe is the origin of our English word, Fee. It is also the first rune of the set, inviting us to engage with the opportunity before us.
In this way, Fe can be the rune of investing time, effort and energy into a project or new beginnings. Looking at it this way, you are invited to ask yourself, what are you willing to pay and endure in order to make things happen? Knowing that what you want will not come for free.
Do the same for the next rune, Ur – as it is the ruiner of the harvest and a constant drizzle, what is it that can go wrong. What is it that can drown your best laid plans. Know, knowing that, what can you do to prepare so that doesn’t happen, knowing that it could? How can you best prepare for the worst, so that it doesn’t happen, or to mitigate the damage done?
Each of the runes presents you with these opportunities to face the harsh realities of the world before you, as well as mustering the strength and wisdom to overcome them.
Thus, the Younger Futhork runes become powerful tools for facing the harsh realities of life, finding the strength to hold your ground and gaining the power to push forward against all opposition.
Going Deeper, Gaining More
If you are ready to discover more, join us, at RitualCravt, Saturday August 11th at 5pm to delve deeper into the mysteries of the Younger Futhork and unlock their secrets for conquering your world.
Author: Kaedrich Olsen author of Runes for Transformation and founder of GaldraKraft, has been an ardent student of Old Norse literature, runes and mysticism for 30 years. Building upon the wisdom from the Viking rune masters, he has developed practical techniques for transforming one’s life. The people he helps learn to connect with and become the embodiment of their own higher being. In doing so, they surmount the blocks which have prevented them from achieving their ideal lives and become the creators of their own greatest reality.
Become the Sacred King
Can there be a seat of power that is not corrupt and despicable? Is it possible for you to rise the pinnacle of power, in your life, and not lose yourself?
What if it is possible to rule over the realm of your life, in a wise and powerful way that is beneficial to everyone in your life?
Sitting high atop the hierarchy of archetypal expression of the sacred masculine, we find the King. As a wise and powerful expression of the divine masculine, the King knows how to best make use of all of the sacred archetypes of masculinity.
Ordeal of the King
This is not as easy as it might sound. Connecting with the King means you learn to take full, honest stock of your own strengths and weaknesses. This includes learning how to reach out and ask for help, or delegate tasks to the appropriate source of help. It also means a willingness to buttress and fortify the weaknesses of those you hold dear, with your own strengths.
The King, much like Mercury, is the intermediary between the divine and the mundane. Connecting with your own inner King archetype gives you divine authority over your own domain in this world and in your life. And, more importantly, it gives you
permission to have your own domain.
Finding Your Values to Become the King
But first you need to take the time for introspection to contemplate what your values in life are, what ideals you hold dear, and establish an ethical code.
This may not come all at once, but as you learn how to engage this divine aspect of your being, and start to embody your own understanding of the King archetype, this code for living your life will become more apparent. This is where the Warrior aspect comes in, as it will give you the strength and power to act, honorably, upon this code.
Step Into Your Sacred Power
Join us, Sunday July 8th at RitualCravt, to learn how to step forward into the world with leadership, claim the domain of your life with wisdom and power, in order to become the divine authority to rule your own realm of life.
Author: Kaedrich Olsen author of Runes for Transformation and founder of GaldraKraft, has been an ardent student of Old Norse literature, runes and mysticism for 30 years. Building upon the wisdom from the Viking rune masters, he has developed practical techniques for transforming one’s life. The people he helps learn to connect with and become the embodiment of their own higher being. In doing so, they surmount the blocks which have prevented them from achieving their ideal lives and become the creators of their own greatest reality.
Fairy Tales are for Witches
Image- 'Tree of Life' by artist: Kako Ueda
Within our culture of information, it is hard to find secrets anymore. We share our daily lives and intimate details in public forums. If we want to learn how to do something, we can find a video for it. The world of secret knowledge is dissipating. But there are still secrets to be found in plain sight if you know how to look for them. Fairy tales hold some of our most secret teachings from a time we can’t easily access because they were created before there was written language, before the printing press, before the internet. These oral tales, passed down generation to generation, imbued the wisdom of our great, great, great, great, great grandmothers and grandfathers. Fairy tales are our bones, a skeletal system that is ancient and eternal, holding up the ideas about how the human psyche develops. Their themes span across literature, time, and culture, providing a guide to the universality of the human condition. Reading the tales for their individual symbolism leads us down rivers of blood, flowing through generation after generation. Some of these paths lead to the heart of it all, and some to small capillaries that reveal our own dead ends. It is in these stories that tales of human individuation are encoded if we learn to follow the signs.
As we first approach the fairy tale, it is best experienced the way our ancestors experienced it, orally and in a group setting. In Fairytale Circle, held each month at Ritualcravt School, we gather within this ancient circle and read aloud the tale, listening together to uncover its hidden mysteries. Parts of the tale surprise us, a mismatch to our expectations of what we thought the story told. Parts of the tale are as familiar as the color of our eyes, bringing back memories and feelings of nostalgia we long ago tucked away in our childhood - or calling to our ancestral memory. The first question we ask as we read the beginning of the fairy tale is what is incomplete, what is missing? This will give us clues as to what direction the tale might take in order to bring about resolution. Working with fairy tales asks us to look inside at what is incomplete in our lives and what cries out to be transformed. It tells us that we are not alone on this path and that generations before us have struggled with the very same things. It is memory held within our soul.
But fairy tales are not for the faint-hearted, and the fairy tale journey can be a long and arduous one. They deal with our most basic instincts and drives, those unconscious forces that lead us to behave in ways we don’t understand. Fairy tales are full of appetite, sex, and violence. Sometimes they are obvious, and sometimes they are in disguise, hidden in the imagery of the tale. Most of the tales illuminate childhood trauma, dismemberment, the devouring mother archetype, and death. For example, in the tale “The Girl Without Hands”, the heroine lays down both of her hands and lets them be cut off by her father to protect him from the Devil. In “Hansel and Gretel”, the old woman with red eyes built a little house made of bread and roofed with cakes to entice the children so she could cook them and eat them. In the tale “Mother Hole”, the heroine experiences a heavy shower of gold that covers her as a reward for her service to the old woman at the bottom of the well. (This might represent the fertility of the Gods showered down upon her, and there is an uncanny parallel to our current president’s situation in this archetype.) The hardships that the characters experience in the tales offer universal guides in how to cope with these hardships ourselves. If you want to learn about how to handle grief and loss, there is a guide in the fairy tale. If you want to figure out how to bring about regeneration and renewal, you can find that secret key in the fairy tale as well. How do your instincts create challenges in your life? When is it helpful to be guided by those strong energies, and when do they cause chaos in your world?
The maiden, the mother, and the crone are recurring figures within fairy tales, and the mysteries of their symbolism are woven throughout these stories. The young feminine is often the hero of the tale, struggling with the challenges of puberty and the patriarchy, such as “Little Red Riding Hood” who’s red cape may represent her sexual development. The mother archetype is often missing or is a ghostlike figure in the tales. In Cinderella, the mother archetype is represented by Cinderella’s visits to her grave and the feminine gifts granted to her by her by her fairy godmother. The crone archetype is often the agent of change in the fairy tale. Without this force, the heroine or hero will not develop and not move forward towards the sacred marriage at the end of the tale. She is essential for the transformation process just like she is the essential nature of the transformation process in our lives. We rejoice when she is introduced in the tale even if she has a reputation for evil because we know psychic change is coming. How does the Dark Goddess work in your life? What is your relationship to meeting her?
The magic of three is the number of synthesis. The heroine or hero must engage in activities that move them forward three times. The resolution will not come from the first attempt - those things are considered luck and not a sign of lasting change. The second attempt could be a coincidence and not a sign of commitment to the change. Transformation only occurs after it is a pattern of behavior, developed out of conscious decisions, represented by the third cycle. In “Rumpelstiltskin”, the heroine cries at the impossible task of spinning straw into gold to save her life. Her tears call Rumpelstiltskin to her, and she makes a deal with him three times. What deals have you entered into and what costs have they exacted? What initiations have you gone through that you have integrated into your being?
The change process is not experienced alone. There are always helpers and guides along the way. Often they can do the work the individual heroine or hero doesn’t have the capacity to do themselves. They can be special objects or animals, often representing ancestors, like the horse Falada in “The Goose Girl” who remembers the heroine’s royal blood even though she herself cannot speak of it. Sometimes they are mice, donkeys, white kittens, swans, or bears, but in whatever form they take, just like the white rabbit in “Alice and Wonderland,” when the animal appears, you follow it down the (w)hole. The reward for doing so will be gifts that can be gained in no other way. What animal guides are showing up in your life, and are you listening to their messages for your change process?
Often there is a resolution in the form of a sacred marriage at the end of the fairy tale for the heroine or hero, but there is almost always a horrific end to the antagonist. The sacred marriage is not about the saccharine sweet romance between a prince and princess. It is the conjunction of the opposites bringing together things that previously seemed incompatible. It is the celebration of the work that was done to create something new and vibrant from something ancient and decaying. It is the creation of the third way of being that is different from the path that has been traveled before, and it should resolve the problem that was presented in the beginning of the tale. In “Donkey Skin,” the heroine arrived at the palace in her beautiful dress, with her blonde hair all alight with diamonds and her blue eyes sweet… The king noticed the charms of his daughter-in-law, and the queen was delighted with her. The prince himself found his happiness almost more than he could bear. The kings of the surrounding countries were invited to the wedding, and they came mounted on huge elephants. Her father wept with joy, and her fairy godmother arrived too. The fairy tale ending means that one cycle of rebirth has been completed and, like the cycle in the spinning wheel of time, it will turn again. The fairy tale ending asks you to look at what you have completed in your life and to celebrate your accomplishments, banishing all those things that held you back. What in your life is ready to be released with the turning of the wheel?
Fairy tales are not children’s stories. They are tangled and thorny maps into the woods that reveal ancient paths, dark secrets, and wisdom as old as the Witch’s world itself. They are our Book of Shadows, and they are our Grimoire. Join me monthly at Ritualcravt to explore the mysteries that they contain.
References:
Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales (1993) Barnes & Nobel Inc.
Perrault’s Fairy Tales (1969) Dover Publications
The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images (2010) Taschen
Kaplan, Sarah, What Fairy Tales Tell Us About Where We Came From. Washington Post January 21, 2016.
Liabenow, Alonna, "The Significance of the Numbers Three, Four, and Seven in Fairy Tales, Folklore, and Mythology" (2014).Honors Projects. 418. http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/honorsprojects/418
Shesso, Renna Basic Char-Tarot Symbols-3rd Session-Chart (2005)
Author: Amber Raye Ellis, MA, LAC, is a therapist and archetypal guide that has her degree from Pacifica Graduate Institute in depth psychotherapy. She uses myth, fairy tales and images to help people uncover the unconscious patterns that guide their life experiences. Amber is Hellenistic in her Pagan practice and has worked in dedicated coven environments for over a decade.
On Death and Dying
I first tasted death when I was very young. My birth mother had had a strong sense of social justice and walked the walk. She had no reservation about fighting for equality and she put her literal life on the line to meet injustice where it stood. She lost her life to a police baton. In that loss, her warrior spirit passed to me. I always look down at my legs and i know that her spirit is what keeps them strongly planted in the earth, never to shake in battle.
My sister was killed in a very public manner. Their were news stories, media on our lawn, phone calls and a film crew at her funeral. This was when I first called in the shadow of Mictecacihuatl. I asked to be hidden and embraced by death, and she obliged. I didn’t know who I was calling on at the time. But when timing was right we met a few years later. Since the night of my sisters death,
She has walked with me. Santa Muerte has been my companion in Death work before I could say her name.
Death and I broke bread multiple times in between 12 and 18. Denver used to be a very different city, pre gourmet cup cake shops. Violence often tore through the flesh of the night sky, claiming a son to be swallowed up never to fulfill the ancestral dreams. I still set lights for Them. Asking for nothing forever knowing I have a lot to live up to. Your ancestors aren’t only those that share your bloodlines. Sometimes they are the ones who’s blood fed the earth in order for you to survive.
At 18 my father left this plane. She came full of mercy and love. Muerte knowing She was taking an accomplished soul did so peacefully, leaving an offering that would memorialize his legacy endlessly.
She has been a constant accomplice in life.
Knowing She is forever the shadow I can call in, the warmth I can fall into, the warrior I can ride into battle next to, the magic I can loose myself into has been the most powerful feeding in this lifetime. I feed Death and death feeds me. She feeds my work, my magic and is my life’s blood. She makes herself known to all around me and invites those I love to fall into her embrace when needed. Working with the Dead will always be a place of power and a place of protection for me. Working in death is truly working with the most powerful and eternal form of life.
Author: Loretta Ledesma, founder of the Mile High Conjure Gala, is Santisima Muerte devotee and practitioner who has had a relationship with the Santa Muerte for many years. She approaches the work from an eclectic and close relationship with the dead. Loretta walks her spiritual path openly and comfortably with the less freely-talked about workings and brings deep knowledge and experience of this strangely beautiful wisdom to her teachings. Find her at Ritualcravt or follow her on Instagram @thedeathwitch
A Message from the Star
The past year, it has often felt like the world is imploding…and yet I feel hopeful. We’re in what feels like a neverending watershed of disclosures of abuse, assault, and harassment by those with power. Some of our icons have been taken down by the truth of their past actions. The shine of our everyday s/heroes has been dulled as they refuse to hold perpetrators they admired accountable. The noise of social media arguing has become deafening.
And yet…I feel joy. Because mold can only grow in the dark. It can’t survive the light. Now we know. Survivors don’t have to suffer in silence anymore. We know who is clinging to the old ways of thinking – “don’t let a person be defined by one mistake” – and we can decide to create something different. A world where our bodies of decision makers begin to reflect our communities. Where "America's Dad" is finally forced to face a small degree of accountability for countless rapes, where a Southern trans woman can win an election because she wants to fix traffic congestion on a state highway, where record numbers of women and people of color are running for office, and where, no matter how painful, truth that has long been hidden is finally coming to light.
Although I often feel tired, I also feel inspired and I am ready to invoke the power of The Star in all I do. The Star brings joy, inspiration, and hope. She comes when you most need her, which may be different than when you most want her. Whether you are feeling helpless or ready for battle or simply numb, I invite you to join me in invoking The Star. May this tarot spread help you begin to illuminate the dark places and envision a brighter way of being.
3-card reading inspired by The Star
Card 1: What is the root of my joy?
Card 2: What is the root of my inspiration?
Card 3: What is the root of my hope?
Reader tip: If you pull cards with dark or challenging messages, do not get discouraged. Try to think beyond the literal meaning. You may have a block related to the message of that card and if you are able to work through it, you may be able to access something wonderful. Do you find joy, hope, or inspiration from helping others who experience tough situations? Are you inspired to do better when confronted with something awful? Have you conducted yourself in ways that you are not proud of and can you pledge to make amends and do better going forward? Sit with the cards if you pull something that makes you uncomfortable. There may be more wisdom there than you think.
Author: Sterling Moon has been reading cards for over 20 years. A friend’s sister gave her a deck when she was just a teenager, and she was absolutely fascinated by them. Her mom got her a book that took her deeper, and she was officially hooked. In 2013, she began reading and teaching professionally when she became one of the first instructors at Share Denver, a community craft space in the Park Hill neighborhood of Denver, Colorado. Sterling has provided readings and educational workshops for a variety of individuals, businesses, organizations including the Horseshoe Market, the Denver Public Library System, Denver Yelp, and private parties. Learn more about her work at www.sterlingmoontarot.com, and come sit with her at Ritualcravt every other Sunday. To follow along with Sterling via Instagram @sterlingmoontarot