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Runes have always been mysterious and forbidding. The very word "rune" means a secret, a mystery. In popular folklore runes are dangerous, evil, pitiless, and destructive. But how did runes get so wicked a reputation?

Part of it can be attributed to the magical efficacy of the runes. Rune magicians were feared for their power to command and destroy. Each time the might of the runes was revealed through an act of magic, their authority grew. Coupled with this is the natural human tendency to fear what is not understood. The mystery of the runes heightened their dreadfulness. In the Middle Ages everybody believed in magic, and runes, the most secret and most potent system of magic, was the most feared.
When the Church solidified its power in the north to the point that it felt confident in attacking the pagan gods and branding them as devils, and all their works as devilish, it is not surprising that runes came under especially severe censorship. Just carrying the runes was enough to get you burned alive in Iceland as late as the seventeenth century.

This kind of absolute suppression is impossible to resist. It is amazing that runes survived as long as they did, and it is a tribute to their potency. As more and more common people renounced the old gods and embraced Christ, there were few dedicated or brave enough to seek out and preserve the vanishing wisdom, which had been handed down from master to disciple, communicated from mouth to ear in solitude.

Runes became associated with stories of human sacrifice that probably had their foundation in kernels of fact. The Druids did sacrifice men in Gaul, as Julius Caesar attests in his Gallic Wars. Although the Druids were a Celtic order, it is certain they would have known rune magic. Druids were the most learned pagan scholars of their day. Their order was based in England but extended into Gaul, and they were notorious as magicians among the Romans. Recent archaeological evidence suggests that the Vikings also sacrificed men ritually, although not on a wide scale. Tacitus in his Germania speaks of the German slaves who purified the ritual chariot of the goddess Hertha on her sacred island, after which they were drowned as sacrifices.

The Church and her newly converted did nothing to minimize this connection between rune magic and human sacrifice, as can be seen from this passage from the Old English poem Andreas:

Casting lots they let them decree
Which should die first as food for the others.
With hellish acts and heathen rites
They cast the lots and counted them out.

This sort of extreme hysteria was the rule rather than the exception once the popes gained confidence in their power, and it goes far to explain the utter annihilation of runes as a magical system. Runes were anathema both to the priests from Rome and to their zealous converts. It is always the way that those inspired by religious fanaticism repudiate most strenuously the very practices which they themselves formerly believed in and followed. There is no stauncher prohibitionist than a reformed alcoholic.

With the rise of the Romantic movement in Germany in the eighteenth century (it started somewhat earlier on the Continent than in England), those most romantic of cultural relics, the runes, were rediscovered. Unfortunately there was very little accurate information available, and several crackpot schemes and notions gained currency. Even so, runes remained an integral part of German occultism through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while being virtually ignored in English-speaking nations.

The adoption of runes by those preaching doctrines of Aryan purity and the supremacy of the "master race," doctrines embraced with such enthusiasm by the Nazi movement, dealt another blow to the reputation of the runes, one that endures to the present day. In fact the Nazis were not very good occultists, but their use of some runes and related symbols tainted them in the world mind.

For example, Llewellyn's Rune Magic Cards have a swastika on the card for the rune Sigel, the Sun. The swastika is an ancient symbol of solar force found all over the world. In Teutonic myth it stands for the flaming meteor of Thor's hammer, which is supposed to have fallen from the Sun. Thor is a solar deity. On the Rune Magic Cards, the swastika turns in a positive sunwise direction, the opposite to the Nazi emblem. Even though the swastika is the most appropriate symbol to represent the active power of the Sigel rune (which of course was the sign of the dreaded SS), many of those who see it react to it as an evil, or even a racist, symbol. This is the continuing legacy of the centuries of unreasoning fear and detestation that still cling to the runes.

Eventually the runes will purge themselves of their evil connotations, at least among occultists, as they become so common that they are understood for themselves, not for the destructive baggage of vicious tumors and corrupting fables that presently encumber them. But this process may take decades. Every user of the runes must personally come to terms with their legend in his or her own mind.

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What Makes Runes Powerful?

Runes are the manifest symbols through which rune magic is worked. They can be employed for all of the magical purposes that other magical systems serve, but they possess unique aspects that make them superior for certain uses.

Because they were forged over the centuries in the same creative fire that shaped the pagan gods of the Teutonic peoples, runes are indispensable in magical dealings that involve the northern hierarchy. They are a key that unlocks the powers of these gods, and they are a book that unfolds the secrets of their personalities. Before the rediscovery of runes, the Aesir, lords of Asgard - who number among their ranks Odin, Thor, Tiw, Heimdall, Baldar, Loki, Frija and Hel - were difficult to integrate into modern ceremonial magic. An elemental wildness distinguishes them from the more civilized gods of Greece and Rome and the abstract, almost technical natures of the angels and spirits of Hebrew occultism. It would be absurd to invoke the Aesir with Hebrew numerology or Greek words. Yet before the rebirth of runes, the magus had little option.

Because runes form the magical language of the northern gods and express the forces upon which those gods are framed, manipulating the runes gives direct control over the actions- not just of the deities but also of the spirits and lesser entities of Norse mythology, which all arose out of the same primeval crucible of mythic archetypes. They are more than just arbitrary symbols chosen to represent occult forces by the Germanic shamans; each rune contains in its structure the same essence that is in the god, spirit, or magical potential to which it corresponds. It is the magical name of that god or natural power.

Anyone seeking to contact and communicate with the northern hierarchy - whether for purposes of worship, divination, or active magic - must use the runes. It is possible to invoke the Aesir without runes, but this is akin to driving a nail with a rock when a hammer is sitting within easy reach. It makes no sense. More and more, those with Teutonic roots are seeking to know the gods of their ancestors. Runes are indispensable in building this bridge to the past.

Perhaps because they rested forgotten for so many centuries, the runes remain undiluted by modem skepticism and rationalization. Of all the symbolic tools of magic, they are the most powerful for causing material change in the world. Rune magic makes things happen - often violently, sometimes unpredictably. Most potent physically, rune magic is also most dangerous to the unwary. The elemental powers contained and defined by the runes are not conscious in the human sense, but they possess a type of animation and awareness not unlike the self-awareness of animals, plants, or embodied spirits - a watchful, quick, sometimes malicious awareness that might almost be called mad in its unexpectedness. But madness is a human concept, and the runes are true to themselves and terribly sane.

All types of occult work that seek material change - or transformations on the human level of emotions and urges that are linked to the body - can be fulfilled with rune magic. Rune magic also embraces the spiritual level of the human soul, and great works of the spirit are possible using the runes. The point that should be grasped here is that runes are weighted more toward the physical, tangible end of the scale than any other ancient magical system. It may be that in their beginnings all magical systems were mainly concerned with material change, but it is only the runes that have descended through time in their pristine, primitive state.

Another unique aspect of the runes has to do with their structure. Because they are simple letters that can be carried in the head and inscribed on any surface as easily as the alphabet, they are the most compact and accessible of magical systems. Bulky temple instruments are not needed in rune magic. They can be written anywhere on virtually anything in moments when an emergency arises. No one can ever take the runes away or destroy them; they live in the mind.

In their portability runes resemble the Hebrew letters, which are combined into magical names and words of power based upon the numerical values of the letters in the system of Jewish occultism known as the Kabbalah. At one time each letter of the Hebrew alphabet also had its elemental meaning, independent of its numerical value. But in modern times, the natural powers embodied in the Hebrew letters have largely been forgotten, displaced by the number values.

As is true of the Hebrew letters, the runes can be combined both occultly in numerical and symbolic groupings and phonetically to form words and sentences. The same runes can both embody a magical desire in their combination of elemental potentials and explicitly define that desire in words. These methods complement and support each other, and are frequently encountered together on rune artifacts made for magical purposes. For example, the sixth-century Lindholm amulet of Sweden bears the intelligible inscription of its magician maker: "I am an Herulian, I am called the Cunning One." But it also bears a string of runes that cannot be translated, because they convey only an occult, not a literal, meaning.

Donald Tyson -  https://www.llewellyn.com/encyclopedia/article/2354

https://www.llewellyn.com/encyclopedia/article/2351

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