The light of your life was given to you by your parents to keep and share with your children. In Runic Alchemy we learn how to create and grow the seed of Crystal, even if everybody already has it. This is what we already do to live, so we need to learn from ourselves.

Othala Rune

Othala rune name means own land, heritage, inherited estate.

The idea of home was invented by life eons before any sign of humanity on the scene: hole, cave, nest, hive.

However, the principal evolution in the idea of a home made by humans is bringing artificial fire inside, the source of warmth and light.
Another significant step forward was extending the home to a tamed and ordered part of an initially wild environment, having your water source, and growing your food instead of hunting it outside.

To make our artificial, tamed segment of reality work, we have to invent and implement certain rules and keep following these rules to maintain order within our home space, to keep it alive.

Keeping fire inside, not letting it go out, but not letting the house catch the fire - this is probably the brightest symbol of the idea of home.

At the same time, the light and warmth of the hearth, oil lamp, or candle was bringing all the family together.

Protecting this light, passing it from ancestors to descendants, preserving and teaching rules in the form of traditions - this is a key part of making a home last for generations and preventing premature death of its inhabitants.

And this is how life itself, being preserved and passed from parents to children across the unimaginably long chain of ancestors, and hopefully projected far into the future, is sitting in the very core of the idea of home.

According to Norse creation myth, this light of life was breathed into our first ancestors, trees Ask and Embla, by the same three brother gods, who created our world, the Midgard. "Allfather" is one of Odin's names. Some scholars dispute if it really is and does this paternal role extends to absolutely everything in the world, but for humankind, he is explicitly described as a creator.

So with the help of the Othala rune, following back along the chain of our ancestors, passing the light from hands to hands, we can connect to our very divine source, to the light shining for us from the past and lighting the way to the future.

From the Runic Alchemy perspective, the Othala rune spans across four top levels: Water, Air, Emptiness, and Earth.

It shares its diagonal bars with almost all runes we already know, except Isa which has no diagonals, and yet more runes that wait for us ahead. It makes this rune so multifaceted and gives it an integrative role.

When previously we were doing all the runes in a sequence - they were connected and smoothly shifted from one to another, but still they were separate.

When you do the Othala rune it feels like all the puzzle pieces click into their right places to make a big part of the whole picture clear and those runes start to work with each other within the Philosopher's Stone, even if it's not complete yet.

To do Othala I suggest making such a double handful gesture, like warming your palms around the candle or mug of tea.

• Your straight fingers will make ascending and descending bars from the level of Air to Water and back, similar to Tiwaz.
• Your bent lower parts of palms will meet where wrists touch each other, so they repeat the Algiz rune and connect the Air and Emptiness.
• And finally, your forearms starting from connected wrists will spread down to elbows - this is our triangular "roof" of the "Earth house" - crystal with a tip touching Emptiness.

This rune has multiple transitions going in parallel, still, we can use breathing to follow along.

• When you breathe in - feel how Air from your chest ascends through and above your head, to the Water and also descends to the solar plexus at the level of Emptiness. It will be similar to what we did for Tiwaz and Algiz.

• By the way, during the same inhalation, we also feel Earth rising from the lower belly upward to the solar plexus. We remember this transition from the Dagaz rune when Earth was becoming harder and denser on its way to Crystal form.

• On exhale we release Water from the top to flow down to us to guide us as Tiwaz and calm our hearts as Laguz. At the same time, we get the clear Sky of Algiz which is lit with the golden light of the Sowilo thanks to the transparency of our Crystal achieved with the help of Hagalaz, Naudiz, and Dagaz.

You will find peace, light, warmth, and safety of Othala to be very stable between your hands, so you can quickly detach it from breathing and just be there.

Wunjo Rune

work in progress

See how the descending bar of Laguz touches the top ascending bar of Sowilo? There is a rune for this — Wunjo. It means Joy, Bliss, and I call it also Love and Mercy in a wide sense.

Raido Rune

work in progress

It means ride, journey. Digging deeper into Proto-Indo-European, we come to more general meanings: "move," "flow," "stream," "pour," and even "rain."

To further highlight the relevance to Water, it's worth mentioning the English 'rivulet' derived from the Latin 'rivus' and Proto-Slavic "rěka," which means river in all the modern Slavic languages.

From a Runic Alchemy perspective, the 'leg' we added to Wunjo to get Raido represents the descent of transparency from Emptiness to the Earth, the same as in Sowilo and Naudiz.

So this is our interpretation of this rune:

• The journey to the light takes place in the Earth on its way to transparency.

If we recall that the transparency of Earth comes through ordering raw chaotic Earth, just as in physical crystals where chaotically placed atoms are aligned into a crystal grid, we are meeting the 'navigational' aspect of the rune Raido in the sense of helping Light find its path through the dark Earth.