How to Cast the Runes

Making or buying a set

A set of runes is twenty four small flat pieces of something, each with one letter on it. You can buy them in wood, stone, clay, glass and bone, and the material matters to your hand and to nothing else in the reading, so pick the one you like the feel of.

You can also make your own. Twenty four flat pebbles from the beach and a paint pen will do. A length of dowel cut into discs and a sharp knife will do better, and cutting the letters yourself is the fastest way I know to learn them. The Elder Futhark page describes every shape in plain words.

Whatever you use, make the pieces the same size and weight so that none of them can be told apart in the bag. The bag itself is anything with a drawstring. Mine is plain cloth.

Asking the question

Put the matter into one plain sentence before you reach for the bag. This is the step that decides the quality of everything after it.

A good question is about you and about now. How should I stand in this. What am I not seeing here. What does this week want from me. A poor question asks the runes to do your deciding, or to report on someone else's mind, and the answer to a poor question is always muddier. If you cannot get the matter into a single sentence, sit with the muddle for a day before you draw.

Say it quietly, or out loud if there is nobody to look at you strangely, and then draw.

The single rune

One rune for a plain answer. Reach in without looking, close your hand on the first piece that stays in it, and bring it out.

Lay it down the way it came out of your hand. If the letter is upright, read the rune as itself. If it is upside down, and it is one of the sixteen that can be read that way, read it reversed. Then look at the picture before you look up the keyword, and give it a full minute. Ice. Hail. A torch. The road. Hold the picture up against your sentence and notice where it lands.

Only then open the rune's page in The Runes. Most of the time the page confirms what the minute with the picture already told you, and adds a corner you had not thought of. For most days and most questions, one rune is enough.

The three rune draw

When a matter has more than one side to it, draw three, one at a time, and lay them left to right in the order they came out.

There are two ways to read the three positions, and you should decide which before you draw.

The first is the past, the present and what is coming. The left rune shows what has brought you here, the middle shows where you stand now, and the right shows the direction things are heading if nothing changes. I read that right hand rune as a tendency. It shows the way the ground slopes.

The second is the matter, the obstacle and the way through. The left rune is the thing itself, the middle is what stands in its way, and the right is what you can do about it. I use this one more, because it keeps the reading pointed at what is in your hands.

Read each rune on its own first, then read the three as one sentence. Three runes in a row talk to each other, and the conversation is usually the most interesting part.

The nine rune cast

The nine rune cast is the one that most resembles what the old lot casting probably looked like, and I keep it for the rare matter that is large enough to deserve it.

Spread a plain cloth on a table. Reach into the bag and draw nine runes together, hold them above the cloth, ask your question, and let them fall.

Some will land face up and some face down. Read only the ones that are face up. The ones that are face down are left as they are, and I take them as the part of the matter that is not ready to be seen yet. Do not turn them over to peek. Some days most of them land face down, and that is the whole reading.

Then look at where the face up runes have fallen. The ones near the middle of the cloth are close to the heart of the matter. The ones at the edges are the outer influences, the things happening around the question. Runes that have fallen touching or on top of each other are read together, as one idea leaning on another. A rune lying on its own, well away from the rest, is something standing apart from the whole business, and is worth asking about.

Read the pictures first, as always, then the pages. Write the cast down before you gather the runes up, because a nine rune cast has more in it than you will remember an hour later.

Reversed runes

A rune that lands upside down is read as its meaning blocked, delayed or turned against you. Fehu upright is wealth that moves; Fehu reversed is money going out the door, or a loss of something you had been counting on. Each rune page gives one paragraph on its reversed reading.

Eight runes look the same either way up and have no reversed reading: Gebo, Hagalaz, Isa, Jera, Eihwaz, Sowilo, Ingwaz and Dagaz. When one of these comes up it is simply itself, and if the day has a hard edge to it the hard edge shows in the runes around it. Nauthiz is argued over in the books, and I treat it as reversible.

In the nine rune cast I read a face up rune as reversed only if it is clearly upside down from where I am sitting. A rune lying sideways is upright.

The blank rune

Many bought sets come with a twenty fifth piece that has nothing on it, and the booklet gives it a grand name and a meaning about the unknowable. It is a twentieth century addition. The Elder Futhark has twenty four letters, every one of them a picture, and a blank is a picture of nothing. If a bag comes with a blank piece I leave it in the bag, or in the drawer, and I read with the twenty four. Perthro, the dice cup, already covers the unknown and does it with a picture.

Keeping a notebook

Write every draw down. The day, the question, the rune or runes, the position, upright or reversed, and two lines on what you made of it. Then, a week or a month later, go back and add a line on what actually happened.

This is how you learn to read. The pages here teach you the pictures. Your notebook teaches you how the pictures behave in your particular life, and nobody can hand you that.

How often to ask

Once a day is plenty, and once a week is often enough for most people. The runes answer a question well and answer the same question asked three times in an afternoon badly, because by the third time you are shopping for the answer you wanted. If a draw puzzles you, write it down and come back to it in a few days. The rune will still be in the bag.

A rune describes the shape of a moment and how to stand in it. Give the moment time to be what it is before you ask for the next one.

If you would like your own chart read, my readings are here.

Related pages
How to Cast a Hexagram · Tarot Spreads