A friend who knows my particular interests sent me a link to this interview with Ingrid Kincaid, “the Rune Woman”. I wish this channel were hosted on a platform that allowed bookmarking podcasts at a particular time stamp. The interesting stuff here begins about 47:30. I’d link to it if I could.
Ingrid sees her mission as “bringing back this awareness of the spiritual heritage of the people of Northern Europe”. She adds that “we need to remember who we are so that we know where we’re going. We’re people who’ve lost our way”.
We used to be tribal people too, she says. “We don’t need to go to somebody else’s culture and take that from them, if we can just go back through our own line and re-connect with our own heritage, where the people that we we call our ancestors, where they lived in connectedness to the earth.”
Standard fare, so far.
Then Erik Arneson, the interviewer, asks Ingrid, who lives in the Pacific Northwest, whether there is still a locality to her spiritual practice or whether the rune beings are more tied to her ancestry than to a location.
An insightful question. Ingrid says they are more tied to her ancestry but they are not out of harmony with her location because, although their wisdom is location-specific for things like climate and terrain, the “truth is still there about the way life is”.
She goes on. We haven’t lived in these places long enough for the land spirits and beings here to recognize us. We haven’t been here long enough to belong; we are still walking as strangers here.
Further, we don’t belong in Europe, either. We weren’t born there. Often, we don’t even speak the language.
That leaves just our ancestors, who care about us because we’re family.
That’s an answer we might have expected. It’s the dilemma of modern Americans who don’t yet have a spiritual culture connecting them to the land, whose European ancestors gave up their ethnic gods a thousand years ago, and who are nevertheless dissatisfied with Christian religion.
After that Ingrid and Erik riff on nomadic life, on rootedness and wandering, and the Jewish people carrying their gods with them in the form of teraphim. I don’t fault them. That’s exactly where I take this discussion at this point, but it’s a subject for another time.
- S01E10 Ingrid Kincaid the Rune Woman (Oct. 16, 2019), at Arnemancy, visited Oct. 18, 2019.
Related Post
- A Product of Your Culture (Oct. 6, 2019).
Updated Oct. 28, 2019 to add link.
