Divining by the Old Letters

Runecasting is the divinatory use of the runes, the characters of the old Germanic alphabets such as the Elder Futhark, each of which carries a name and a web of associations drawn from Norse cosmology and the surviving rune poems. In modern practice runes are inscribed on tiles, stones or wood, drawn or cast, and interpreted for guidance. It is important to distinguish the genuinely ancient runes, an attested writing system used across the Germanic world from the early centuries CE, sometimes in charm-like and ritual inscriptions, from runecasting as a formal divination method, which is very largely a twentieth-century construction. Medieval sources associate runes with magic and with the god Odin, who in the Eddic poems wins them through self-sacrifice, but they do not describe the tile-drawing oracle practised today, which was assembled by modern occultists and Pagans from the historical alphabet and its poems.