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Chapter 7. At the Well of Urð 176
individuals, the ancestors, the land and land spirits, and the Gods through acts
based on the spiritual principles of the ancient Germanic peoples.
The purpose of these approaches is to allow the individual to act in such a way as
to be in accordance with the knowledge of the Tree and its currents without actually
having any direct, conscious access to knowledge. Accessing knowledge directly is an
arduous path requiring sacrifices that many are not willing or are unable to make;
this path will be discussed in greater detail below. But, engaging in proper action,
i.e. those actions which are of maximum benefit to all, has the effect of bringing
quality to life. One can eat in a healthy fashion, a take care of the body with
only minimal knowledge of medical or dietary sciences, so it goes with acting in a
spiritual manner to maintain spiritual health.
There are ways to access knowledge, albeit in a slightly indirect fashion through
the use of symbols, without having to engage in years of sacrifice and strenuous
searching: the Germanic forms of divination. There may have originally been many
forms of divination practiced by the ancient Germanic peoples, but only a small
handful have been passed down through the lines of folklore. The main forms of
divination as of the 20th century are omens or “lucky-signs” (ON heill = “omens
of luck”) and the “reconstructed” reading of runes. The third method is not often
thought of as divination but is more a way to “change luck” through minimal action:
hex-signs and songs or charms.
Divination, in the old Germanic sense, is like throwing small objects into the
Well of Urð and watching the patterns that form. Unlike many other forms of
divination in use around the world which purport to read the future, the Germanic
forms read only the present or the past. Anciently, divination was used to glimpse a
situation in a broader scope than what would normally be possible so that changes
could be made as necessary. “Reading-the-future” is inconsistent with the Germanic
worldview. For many of the modern reconstructionists, divination is considered to
be “reading the waters in the Well of Urð” or as it is usually called, the Well of
Wyrd. 6
The Germanic idea of reading omens is a very complex lore involving much time
out in nature. An omen or a lucky-sign is an object, animal, bird, fish or plant
that is situated in a background in such a way that it carries some kind of meaning
for an individual. Modern psychology has been using various oracles for years for
determining the unconscious or subconscious status quo. It is interesting that some
sciences have taken up the use of divination, particularly the I Ching, for the same
reasons that the Germanic peoples did: to read the present.
“But what significance has such ‘fortune telling’ for our own time? Even
those who accept the idea that the I Ching is a storehouse of wisdom will
6 See Edred Thorsson’s At the Well of Wyrd (Samuel Weiser, New York, NY) 1988.