Portals, Patterns, and Pathways: A Handbook for Rune Magicians, Star Gazers, and Myth Makers

Every liminal space between runes is a mystery school, and its curriculum is mythology - a paleolithic bone broth for our soul!

The runes map a mythical or imaginal realm where cosmic blueprints share their stories and wisdom through archetypal figures, deities, personifications, alchemical images, and symbols. Years ago, Imelda Almqvist wrote in her Rune Journal: 'Every liminal space between runes is a mystery school, and its curriculum is mythology!' This insight proved to be incredibly fertile ground for mapping the liminal spaces between the runes. The letter sequence of many early alphabets appears to be connected to the night sky and star patterns. Does such a correspondence exist for the runes? Does the Poetic Edda contain astronomical numbers and references to celestial events? Before the Enlightenment, astronomy and astrology represented different faces of one unified field of study. What happens if we arrange the Runes of the Elder Futhark in a Circle and then look at that circle the way an astrologer reads a natal chart? This book shares the author’s discoveries, and she hopes that its readers will join her on this adventure!

Imelda Almqvist is an international teacher of Sacred Art and Seidr/Old Norse Traditions (the ancestral wisdom teachings of Northern Europe). She has presented her work on both The Shift Network and Sounds True. She appears in a TV program, titled Ice Age Shaman, made for the Smithsonian Museum, in the series Mystic Britain, talking about Neolithic arctic deer shamanism. Her fourth book, about the pre-Christian spirituality of The Netherlands and Low Countries, has just gone into production. She has already started her fifth book: about the runes of the Futhark/Uthark. In response to the 2020 pandemic she has opened an on-line school, called Pregnant Hag Teachings, to make more of her classes available on-line.