How to cast runes on a cloth

There is something entirely different in not drawing one rune from a pouch but throwing them all in front of you. The signs scatter across the cloth. Some land face up. Others hide. Some end up close together, some far from the rest.

What appears in front of you is not a row but a small map. And the very way the runes fell becomes part of the reading.

The simplest way

Take a light cloth and spread it in front of you. Put your question into words. Take a handful of runes and throw them onto the cloth. Then look at the ones that landed sign up. Do not try to read everything at once.

Start with the one rune that drew your eye first. What image is it? What does it add to your question? Then look at its neighbours. There is no right number here. There is only what you decided to read this time.

Why a cloth?

There is a very old echo in it. Around AD 98 the Roman writer Tacitus described a Germanic way of casting lots. A branch of a fruit tree was cut into small pieces, marks were put on them and they were scattered over a white cloth. Then three were picked out and the result interpreted. It is almost impossible to read that today without thinking of runes.

But one honest pause has to be left here: Tacitus does not call those marks runes. And he does not speak of the Elder Futhark, reversed meanings, or reading every sign that landed face up. So modern casting of runes on a cloth is not a preserved two-thousand-year-old ritual. It is rather a modern practice with a very old gesture inside.

And what does the place a rune fell in mean?

Here you can make the ritual as simple or as complicated as you like. You can read only the runes themselves and give their positions no meaning. Or you can settle it with yourself in advance:

These are already modern rules, and different people use them differently. The most important thing is not to make up a rule after you have seen the result. Decide how you read before the cast. And then let chance do its part of the work.

And the runes that fell face down?

You can simply leave them lying. Not because there is an old rule that «these runes refused to speak». But because the limit makes the reading clearer. Twenty-four signs may be lying in front of you. But you do not need to hear all twenty-four at once. Sometimes what stayed visible is already enough.

Do not try to read the whole picture at once

Casting is easy to turn into a complicated system:

But if you are only starting, try the other way. Look at the first visible rune. Then at the second. Ask what happens between their images. And only then look at the whole picture.

A ritual does not grow deeper with more rules.

Sometimes the depth begins where the rules grow fewer.

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