Conversation

mixmage:

Hey Widow… It was fun chatting with you after the bout, but I can’t help feeling we got cut short before we’d really scratched the surface. There’s so much more to say.

Because these staves are not just inert shapes, and when you inscribe them onto you, you become theirs – long before you can truly say that *they* are *yours*.

Know you how to cut them? How to colour them? To test them? To send them?

More than a simple adornment, each embodies an energy, a process, an entity – and not all of them will share a table.

Are you prepared to speak *to* them? Speak *for* them? To do as they bid at any hour of the day or night?

I dedicated myself to them long before I etched them onto my skin… By then they were already bone-deep in my being. They pulsed in my marrow, stole my sanity, whittled away my friends until only the longest suffering stayed by me. I can count them on one hand with digits to spare.

I carved my oath upon my heart in a shitty hotel room in Paddington, with its shagged-out bed and full-width mirror. Totally alone.

All this years before I earned the right to bear their marks.

Tread carefully, know what you are asking for before you offer your self, your soul and your sanity.

 

Widow:

Everything you have asked, I cannot say yes! I feel slightly ashamed that I didn’t respect The Futhark Symbolism as deeply as you’ve expressed. I just read about them a few weeks before I noticed them on you.

May I ask, why you offered yourself & in return for what?

 

mixmage:

I offered myself to the runes and the entities they are, to the Deities they bind together, the forces of nature so strong we personify them as Giants… All in return for knowledge and power.

To serve them on this world, to earn my reward.

I asked “my life as initiation”… I can hear the Oathbreaker laughing far away as he takes me literally. It will be my whole damned life (and any in the next world) until he reveals all he has to show me.

So I went hunting. Petitioning other keepers of knowledge, other deities. Offering out my service, my blood and essence, my mouth for them to speak through. It scared most people away. It broke my body and mind.

But I get ahead of myself.

I first learned of the runes in 1991. I began to hunt out books that could teach me more – how to use them, how to corral the forces that flowed through them, how to master them. It scared the shit out of me. I clearly saw how powerful they could be and it paralysed me. I couldn’t bring myself to use them.

I carved the shapes onto 24 rocks – blood, sweat and blisters to scratch them deep. I coloured them, then was struck with fear. They were too powerful. I buried them in the Earth and went back to reading about how other people used them.

20 years ago, after my life completely fell apart in Hong Kong, I returned to England and swore to become the person I was destined to be. I left the previous version face down in Hong Kong harbour and cut myself off from anyone who had been part of his life. I made new friends, talked openly about the occult and all its myriad streams. Laid myself open to whatever was to be.

It didn’t take long.

 

Tags: deities, initiation, runes