The Breath of the Symbol
A Shaman Portal Event with Andreas Kornevall - Tue May 9, 2023 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM EDT, 8-9:30pm London time.
By Andreas Kornevall
The most powerful symbols we possess are our letters. Our alphabet contains 26 phonetic-letter-glyphs, these glyphs have built our world: everything that you know and all knowledge leans on them. The great writer and magician Alan Moore says it better:
"Two dozen phonetic glyphs, they are the titans on whose shoulders the entire Earth is resting. Alive as abstract animals, they animate us, galvanise our inert culture with sublime significance.”
Here is an old Icelandic magical idea: the images and meaning letters produce in our minds are only secondary in power, instead, it is the shape of the letters themselves that are animated and have the primary agency. This understanding still dwells in Icelandic rune magic - where staves (or lines) are known to have a power "within" themselves. Therefore, combining rune-stave shapes, the magician can catch a thief who has stolen a cow from a nearby farm, or speak to an old ancestor under the hill.
Photo above: a modern reconstruction of energy moving within the lines in Icelandic Sigil Magic from the book: Pagan Sigils: Illustrated Guide to The Non Christian Symbols of Western Occultism: 3 (by Mark B Jackson).
Hidden in our society, manipulative magic is practiced every day where we are made to move towards certain lifestyles, which we often don't desire. No-one is wanting to be addicted to Tik Tok, or to scroll needlessly over the blue shimmer; we are being driven by forces that want to have us within an algorithmic award system, catching us like a digital river-current. Logos work in a similar way in their design, they become magical sigils and start to empower part of our response system towards a lifestyle, often one that is detrimental to our ecologies. Logo design and algorthmic award systems are psychologically overpowering for young people and they have few tools to resist this current.
On 9th of May, at Shaman Portal, I will be speaking about how rune magic can work into this perception, I will speak of what resilience we can build and present how we can create something called a “Demblem” to disarm some of the most addictive and negative effects of incessant "logo" exposures and the synthetic intelligences that shape our behaviour.
We will lean into the question of how to become spell-breakers. Especially with writing, as we are always taught to look "through" it, but we never to look at it. Since our early education, we look beyond the graphic and straight into the image it produces; we bypass the symbol itself.
Peter Schwenger in his great book Asemic, The Art of Writing, describes how it is always something else that is far more important than the letters themselves. The primary is the image making, not the shape. In medieval rune magic we shift this awareness and learn to look at the very graphic element. Just like you do with Chinese rice paper symbols or in Calligraphy.
With a symbolic practice and perception, we can position ourselves into to the "way" we think and how we can move away from that which we are "programmed" to think. I propose this as a way of psychological resistance to machine based control. I propose to begin to develop magical letter systems that can have a resilience and distance from synthetic intelligence and dampen our urge of creating Syntheos, which is Syn - Artificial and Theos - Gods. This syntheos can be felt by the rise of AI and also the overbearing control and influence algorithm awards systems are having on us.
We will look into the idea of going out to find an Eco-Asemics (which is nature's own letter making through natural shapes) and to learn to read glyphs that nature provides (read Chaise Levy’s essay on the Ash runes on this substack), in the bark, on the snail, tortoise shell, stars, patterns in the waters: we are looking at our real Mother Tongue alphabet. Here lies a"resistance" as reading natural glyphs and working with them is an intuitive process and will stand beyond any AI structure or what any synthetic intelligence can be programmed to reach.
Eco-Asemic writing offers us a glimpse of the "organic" intelligences and the spirits own poetic insight and significance: like tracking animal prints, the symbols partake in our myth-making and in creating meaning to our lives.
In Eco-Asemics, we are learning to read and create from natures own grammar.
This is an attempt to nudge towards a post-literate movement to resist the solely human dominated creation of making meaning, especially mythic and symbolic meaning. In the movements of the leaves, in the swaying of reeds, we are receiving symbols that are pure enough to drink (metaphorically) and always fresh.
If all this interest you, see you at the Shaman Portal event on Tuesday.
“I know that I hung on a windswept tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows
from where its roots run.
With no bread did they refresh me nor a drink from a horn,
downwards I peered;
I took up the runes, screaming I took them,
then I fell back from there. “
Carolyne Larrington, The Poetic Edda (Oxford World's Classics) (p. 32, stanzas 138-9). OUP Oxford.
