Runes
Ingwaz
The twenty second rune, Ingwaz, sounds as Ng, the sound at the end of the word ring. It is the sixth rune of Tyr's aett, the third row of the Elder Futhark. The shape is a diamond, four short strokes meeting at the corners, and in some old hands two small angles stacked one above the other to make the same closed figure. The thing it names is the god Ing, an old god of the field and the harvest, and through him it speaks of fertility, gestation, potential held and waiting, the seed in the ground.
The picture
A seed. Closed, complete, and doing nothing you can see.
That is the whole picture and I think it is one of the hardest in the alphabet to sit with, because we do not like waiting and we especially do not like waiting when there is nothing to look at. A seed in the ground is working the entire time. It is drawing water, splitting its coat, sending a root down before it sends anything up. If you dig it up to check, you kill it. Every gardener knows this and every gardener has done it anyway.
The diamond shape is closed on all sides. Nothing gets in and nothing gets out until it is ready. I read that as the rune of the thing that must be left alone. A pregnancy, an idea, a grief, a plan that is still too soft to say out loud. All of them have a season underground and all of them come up wrong if they are forced.
In ordinary life Ingwaz is the loaf proving under a tea towel. It is the application you have sent and cannot chase. It is the quiet month after a big decision when nothing seems to be happening and everything is. It is also the peace that comes when a long piece of work is finally finished and put down, and the next thing has not started yet. That gap is Ingwaz too.
When it comes up
When Ingwaz comes up I read it as a moment that asks you to let something finish forming. The work is done, or the work that can be done is done, and what remains is time. The rune is telling you that the quiet is a stage of the thing and a sign that it is on track.
It is a good rune. I want to say that plainly, because waiting feels like failure to a lot of people and the rune disagrees with them. Potential is real. The seed will come up. What Ingwaz asks is that you stop poking it, stop talking about it to everyone who will listen, and let the ground do what ground does.
There is also a thread of completion in it. Ingwaz can mark the end of one cycle and the stored energy for the next. If you have just closed a chapter, the rune says do not rush to open another one. Rest in the gap. Standing in this rune means trusting a process you cannot see, which is the whole of faith in one small diamond.
Reversed
Ingwaz looks the same whichever way up it lands, so it has no reversed position. Its hard side shows in the runes around it. Beside Isa, the ice, the waiting has gone on too long and something has frozen that should have sprouted. Beside Nauthiz, need, the seed is in poor ground and wants moving. Beside Hagalaz, hail, the season has turned against it. Read the neighbours. The diamond on its own is simply a seed, and a seed on its own is good news.
Across the traditions
In the tarot I put Ingwaz beside the Ace of Pentacles, the single gold coin held out of a cloud above a green garden, the gift of something that has not yet grown. That is my own pairing and nothing stronger. The Ace of Pentacles page in The 78 Cards goes further. The Empress sits nearby for the fuller picture of fertility. Ing is one of only two gods named anywhere in this alphabet, the other being Tyr, and I keep the mythology light on these pages because the picture does the work. There is no tree here, so I leave the Ogham out, though the Birch page under Celtic Tree Astrology is the natural next step once the seed is up.
What are you waiting on at the moment, and could you leave it alone a little longer?
If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.
The Runes
The other pages in this set, and where they sit in the Library.
See every page and post in the Contents.
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