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Edred Thorsson on Rune-Song
Edred Thorsson interviewed in June 2021 about the new Arcana Europa edition of Rune-Song: A Guide to Galdor. You originally wrote and recorded the material for Rune-Song nearly thirty years ago. What was the general situation at the time that compelled you to undertake this project? After the publication of Futhark by Weiser in 1984, a number of people with whom I spoke expressed their anxieties about pronouncing the difficult words in Old Norse or Old English that appeared in that book. Additionally, when I heard people talk about these topics, it was clear that such anxieties were well placed, as many...
The Wayfarer’s Legacy
Image: Untitled monoprint by Nigel Pennick © 2020 Through an empty land of abandoned field enclosures and plots where cottages once stood, overgrown with wild flowers and trees, inhabited only by birds and feral animals, a spiritual traveller was passing. Amid the abundant wasteland, the wayfarer was confronted suddenly by an ostentum of an eldritch beast that seemed to beckon towards a certain spot illuminated by a magic light. This manifestation of the numinous was so striking that the wayfarer felt compelled to mark and honour the place lest the spirit depart never to return. Now and again such events...
How Edred Heard the Word
The following is an excerpt from the History of the Rune-Gild (Arcana Europa / Gilded Books) by Edred Thorsson: The “Wicca-world” of Austin, Texas circa 1973 was typical of the Wicca-world in general. There was the lay scholar who ran the Nexalist Collegium—a man with many books. He believed in things such as the identity between the Semites and the Welsh. The coven N— belonged to was run by his on-again, off-again girlfriend. There were all the usual irregularities, most of which slip my mind now, but the upshot of it all was that the things which seemed out of step with...
Laying the Foundations for a New Pagan Philosophy
I first heard the name Alain de Benoist in a side comment made by my dear late Doktorvater, Edgar Polomé, in a lecture on ancient Germanic religion. In our age, dominated as it is by ideologies of various sorts, Benoist is often categorized as a political theorist of the “French New Right.” Indeed, he is that. But even a brief survey of his writings reveals a thinker with a breadth and depth of intellect and intellectual capacities that far surpass those of the typical “theorist” of our dreary times. He has written on topics ranging from myth and religion to...
Preface for Nigel Pennick's "The Eldritch World"
The modern world is a wasteland. We can say this in a polemical sense, but there is also a more immediate way in which modernity has quite literally wasted the land. We might speak of deforestation, urbanization, and the accompanying loss of biodiversity, but on an even deeper level, there is a sense in which the land has lost its meaning. This is especially true in America, where people of European descent have set down only the shallowest of roots in a land that has been ours for just a handful of centuries. The gods of the indigenous peoples still...