• Water and Fire meet in the center.
• Fire, cooled down by Water, solidifies into the raw dark state of the Earth, which is like the slag that runs out of the fire. It occupies a lower middle position below the Horizon in the center, but above the Fire, just like the Earth's crust above the mantle.
• Water, after contact with a hot Fire, evaporates into heavy clouds of steam and smoke, the raw state of the Air, and takes the second from the top level below the upper world of Water but above the Earth and Horizon.
• It's now dark - raw Earth does not conduct Light from the Fire.
• The middle level is the horizon - a borderline of Emptiness between Air and Earth.

Primordial Fire has the quality of density, like lava.
Raw Earth is a solidity that is the isolated and condensed density of Fire.

Primordial Water has the quality of transparency.
Now Air is the lightest essence of Water's transparency, but in a disturbed, impure state of stormy clouds.

Dark clouds are swirling above the dark soil: a storm is coming.
White, white hail, icy seeds of the Order, is being sown from the Air to the raw Earth.
Light has no way to come from the Fire, it's trapped underneath, yet sudden flashes illuminate the dark sky. Blue-white roots of lightnings tear through the darkness of the Air and hit seeds of hailstones.

Nourished by roots of lightnings, sprouts of thunderstones grow from the seeds of hail deep down into the Earth and bear fruit in the first underground crystals.

Hagalaz rune takes its place.

Where is lightning coming from? It's the energy of the Fire that the Water accumulates when it evaporates into the Air. The same energy makes the initial raw Air stormy. So even if the Fire is locked below the dark Earth, its energy strikes back to the Earth from the Air above in the form of lightning.

Thanks to this power, lightning projects the principle of Order from hailstones down to the Earth. When hit by lightning, hailstones melt back into the Water and then instantly evaporate, but lightning energy, after going through the Water crystal, is modulated by its orderly structure. That's why it triggers the birth of order deep in the chaotic Earth.

You see a descending bar of this rune transiting from the Air down to the Earth and directly connecting the vertical axes of the first and last phases of the Philosopher's Stone.
Hagalaz is the most important and powerful rune of Creation, even if it represents such wild and destructive forces.

Its name means "hail," and hail is the aspect of a thunderstorm.

The Proto-Germanic word "haglaz" of the same meaning has unclear etymology, but often connected with ancient Greek word "κάχληξ" - pebble, small stone, gravel. An individual grain of hail is called "hailstone" (PG haglastainaz), which again points to the idea of the stone.

The god of lightning and thunderstorm Thor, carries a hammer, Mjollnir. Interesting how the word "hammer" can be tracked down to Proto-Germanic "hamaraz" and deeper to Proto-Indo-European "h₂éḱmō" with meaning "stone" again.

The first hammers made by humans were made from stone, most often from flint. Hitting the flint stone and making sparks from it was one of the most common ways of making fire.

The etymology of the "Mjollnir" hammer name is most likely PG "meldunjaz" and PIE "meldʰ-n-" - "lightning". (Compare with Russian "mólnija" - "lightning")

From the same root, Old Norse "mjuln" and Welsh "mellt" were derived, both meaning "fire". It's quite logical to expect fire both from natural lightning and from sparks produced by the stone hammer.

Another stone connected to lightnings is Lodestone - naturally magnetized by lightnings pieces of the magnetite, which were used as the first compasses. So Lodestone (Middle English "leading stone") is literally Earth ordered by Lightning, so it strives towards the North Pole and Polaris, supporting also the basis of a guidance aspect of the Tiwaz rune.

Let's do it:

• Place your left hand on the level of the chest with a palm turned down - it will be your hand of the Air.
• Place your right hand at the level of your belly with your palm turned up - it will be your hand of the Earth.
• With your breast full of Air, hold on for a moment and sync along your vertical axis - it's a left vertical bar of the Hagalaz rune.
• Exhale and transit your focus from the Air to the Earth level.
• At the same time, notice how something is being projected from the center of the left upper palm down to the center of the right palm. This is a diagonal descending bar of Hagalaz.
• Again, hold your breath for a moment and sync along your axis, finishing the right vertical bar.
• Breathe in and repeat.

As we saw in Isa rune - Ice is also a crystal, with ordered water molecules sitting in their places. That's why hailstones made of Ice are seeds of Order. Still, Ice cannot withstand the warmth of Fire: it melts into water as suggested by the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem. But a crystal made of ordered Earth can! Earth learns the Order from Lightning, telling the story of hailstones, and begins a slow and quiet transformation into its higher state, as we will see in the next rune, Naudiz.