TEUTONIC MAGIC - Awaken Video

2: URHDR’S WELL: THE WORKINGS OF WYRD
Perhaps the most notable difference between modern thought-patterns and those of the ancient Germanic
people, which relates to the most essential theory of runic working, is the concept of time and being in
relationship to time. Modern Western culture has absorbed the threefold Greco-Roman concept of time as
“past” (that which has gone before), “present” (that which is), and “future” (that which will be). It is easy
to associate these concepts with the three Norns Urdhr, Verdhandi, and Skuld. It is also incorrect. The
Germanic time-sense is not threefold, but twofold: time is divided into “that- which-is,” a concept
encompassing everything that has ever happened-not as a linear progression, but as a unity of interwoven
layers and “that-which-is-becoming,” the active changing of the present as it grows from the patterns set
in that-which-is. That- which-is is the Germanic “world,” a word literally cognate to the Norse ver-öld,
“age of a man.” One will notice that even in modern English, there is no true future tense; the future can
only be formed through the use of modal auxiliaries. For the Teutonic mind, all that has been is still
immediate and alive; the present only exists as it has been shaped by the great mass of what is, and the
future only as the patterns of that which is becoming now should shape in turn. Without this
understanding of time in the Teutonic world, your power of reading and writing the runes will be at best
limited, at worst in error and unpredictable in result.
The Teutonic conception of time and being is fully expressed in one of the most ancient images
of the Germanic peoplesthe ever-green tree with the well at its foot. This is best known as the Norse
Yggdrasill, described thus in the Poetic Edda:
I know an ash that stands, called Yggdrasil
a tall tree, wet with white dews,
dews dripping down into the dales.
Ever green it stands over Urth’s well.
From there come three maidens, deep in lore,
from the water that stands under the tree.
One is called Urth, the other Verthandi,
the third Skuld. Scores they carved,
laws they laid, lives they chose.
They worked Orlög for the sons of men. [1]
The tree upholds the Nine Worlds; it is the ever-growing manifestation of that-which-is and thatwhich-is-becoming,
rooted in and shaped by the well which defines and contains time as the tree defines
and contains space. The tree represents the body of Ymir, the set form and space; the well and the
nourishing, shaping waters flowing up from through the tree and back are the powers embodied, at the
beginning of all things, in the cow Audhumbla. The maidens referred to are the three Norns; their names
mean “that-which-has-become” (Urdhr), “that-which-is-becoming” (Verdhandi) and “that-which shouldbecome”
(Skuld). Urdhr is the greatest of the three, the other two being extensions of her power. Her
name is cognate to the Anglo-Saxon Wyrd or modern English weird, the root of which means “to turn”
and from which several Germanic verbs meaning “to become” are derived. The word “Wyrd” has been
translated as “fate,” but the essential concept behind it is entirely different from the Greco-Roman idea of
fate.
In the Prose Edda, Yggdrasill is described as having three roots with a well under each:
“The third stands over Niflheimr, and under that root is Hvergelmir, and Nidhoggr gnaws the tree from
below. But under that root which turns towards the Rime-Giants is Mimir’s Well, wherein wisdom and
understanding are stored; and he is called Mimir, who keeps the well... The third root of the Ash stands in
heaven, and under that root is the well which is very holy, that is called the Well of Urdhr.” [2]
9