There are two main methods for doing a reading, pulling individual runes from a bag and placing them on a surface, and throwing them onto a surface. Both methods involve a variety of techniques.
The simplest method is to jostle the runes in a bag, then reach in and pluck out a given number of them
Single Rune Readings:
A single rune can inform you of what conditions are at play regarding your question. Let’s suppose you ask a question such as “will I win at Bingo Thursday night.” The Harvest rune would indicate that you will, whereas the Scythe rune would tell you that you will not. However, say you pull Flight rune. It does not answer your question directly (although its presence may warn you about being too chatty and therefore too distracted to see the winning number of your board).
There is a way to get more direct answers from a single rune, such as YES, NO, and an answer interpreted as UNCERTAIN. It involves reducing the runes into positives, negatives, and neutrals.
Here are the correspondences for that method.
Positive Runes:
Sun
Star
Harvest
Romance
Negative Runes:
Moon
Waves
Scythe
Crossroads
Neutral
Woman
Man
Flight
Rings
You will notice that the Eye rune is absent from this list. This is because the eye represents the person to whom the question pertains. Your options for its use in a direct reading are to remove it from the bag, or to interpret it as being the answer known to you through your own intuition. As mentioned earlier, most people have a feeling for what an answer will be in a reading and are looking for the runes to give them an external confirmation, and so the Eye simply looks back at you with the knowledge you already suspect. If you are certain that you or the person asking the question has no sense about the answer, then I suggest removing it from the bag before pulling a single rune to give you one of three possible answers.
Should you pull a neutral rune as your answer, this means that the future is not set in stone. In fact, the future seldom is, and the main reason for getting a reading is to avoid doomed situations or recalculate your approach to them. Many times it is best that we do not have an answer, as we have much to experience and learn through our troubles and failings. If we had the means to travel exclusively along the golden path, many of life’s lessons would never be learned. We would have no practical use for faith, and hope would have no meaning. When a neutral rune appears in such a reading, take time to consider possible outcomes. This is a time to process through your fears, as well as to feel excitement for possibilities. After having done this, and I would say no sooner than after a 24-hour period, you may ask the question again to see if your future is in less flux.
A different method for answering simple yes or no questions requires a triple rune reading as described shortly.
Double Rune Reading:
This is where the combinations given earlier come in handy. With the presence of two runes, you can ask more complex questions, such as “are there forces as work against me.” In this instance, the presence of, say, the Man and Scythe runes would not only indicate an affirmative answer, but suggest that some male person is the force working against you.
Triple Rune Reading:
Three runes will also allow for a quick yes or no answer. You may remove the Eye, Woman, and Man runes from the bag, jostle them in cupped hands, then drop them onto a soft surface. If two or more land face up, your answer is Yes. If two of more land face down, the answer is No.
X Rune Readings:
I am not going to go into each number combination up to 13 since that is unnecessary. Suffice to say that you can choose to use any number of runes you wish. If you enjoy working with numerology, you can choose a given amount based on that. For instance, say you want to learn more about a certain person. You could use numerology to break the letter of their name, or their date of birth, into a single number between 1 and 9, and utilize that number of runes in your reading. There are plenty of resources online describing how to this so I will avoid that tangent here.
Tableau Reading:
Those who have worked with Lenormand cards will be familiar with the Grand Tableau method of reading them, in which all 36 cards are laid out on a table, often in 4 rows containing 9 cards each. While there are variations of the method, the reader most often looks first for the card that signifies the querant, such as the man or woman card. Those cards nearest to the signifier card have the most influence on them. Cards behind the signifier card represent aspects of the past, whereas those in front speak of things to come.
Although we have far fewer runes to work with than a Lenormand reader has cards, our method will be to pick them one by one from the bag, place a set them down in a line. The Eye rune will serve as the signifier, therefore those behind it will represent things in the past, and those ahead of it will tell of future events. Should the Eye rune appear at the very beginning of a line, then the reading has nothing to say about the past, and similarly should it appear at the very end then nothing of the future is foretold. Those runes closest to the Eye are the aspect of the situation impressing on them the most.
To get the hang of this, I suggest doing this type of reading a few times, making sure that each rune if placed faced up (I will write about a variation on this method shortly).
Each rune modifies the one beside it, the way that words come together to form a sentence. Here is an example:
Moon / Man / Scythe / Waves / Flight / Eye / Sun / Woman / Rings / Harvest / Crossroads / Star / Romance
A story is being told here… What has been unknown to the querant is that a man with intentions to do harm has caused trouble, which will soon be confirmed through some message. A positive change to these troubles will soon be initiated by a woman the querant is connected to, and after a period of further turmoil the outcome will be one of fulfillment and joy.
Once you have gotten the hang of that, you might try a variation in which you place the runes in a line in whatever manner you draw them from the bag, either facing up or down. One method would be to close your eyes while doing this, however this may result in a crooked line. A better way would be to reach into the bag and grasp each rune while regarding the surface which your thumb covers, placing the thumbed side up. This will result in fewer runes presented face up, and the benefit of this is that those runes that are not relevant to your question will not need to be considered. For this method we do not consider the Eye to be a signifier, so it is given meaning much as the other runes are, the Eye representing that which needs to be seen or indicting psychic phenomena. This allows for the Eye to be placed face down and dismissed if that is how it is drawn from the bag. The upward facing runes are read as a sentence, from left to right.
Experiment with these methods to find the type of reading that works best for you.
The Petite Tableau:
This layout is a mini version of the Grand Tableau utilizing 9 runes in 3 rows of 3. The rune in the center speaks of the situation being answered. Those on the left talk about past influences, while those on the right represent the future outcome. Those on top are positive influences, and those on the bottom are negative ones (think of Heaven above and Hell below). Some readers look at these two lines differently, seeing Consciousness or Will on top, and Unconsciousness or thoughtless drives on the bottom.
Let’s look at such a layout.
Sun / Flight / Man
Star / Rings / Romance
Waves / Crossroads / Harvest
Beginning in the center, we see that this reading focuses on Rings, on some type of combined venture, be it a group or perhaps an artistic project. In the past we have the Star, suggesting that up to this point this venture has been positive. Going forward is Romance, so the future holds passion. This is overall as positive reading. Above we have a sunny past, some type of message, and the Man, which could either signal a person or the projection of energy. Beneath all this are the Waves, so turmoil of some kind, and the Crossroads, suggesting that negative forces have sought to oppress them, however the future hold Harvest, again a positive outcome. We can go further and see the relationship that the Rings have with Flight, suggesting that some type of contract or notes would be helpful. Rings and Crossroads tell us that the key to getting unstuck is to seek help from others or to involve new element into a task.
Spreads:
Just as there are spreads in Tarot, in which each place indicates a different aspect of a question, spreads can be created for the Witch’s Runes as well. Take for example the Celtic Cross spread popular in Tarot. Though there are slight variation of this spread, cards 1-6 are commonly defined as follows.
5
4 1&2 6
3
Space 1 represent the situation affecting the querant.
Space 2 is the challenge affecting the situation.
Space 3 is the underlying cause of the situation.
Space 4 represents past events relevant to the situation.
Space 5 is the present situation.
Space 6 is the near future.
Let’s say that space 1 is occupied by the Harvest rune, and space 2, place on top of it or at its side, is the Crossroads rune. This reading would tell of a situation in which someone is unable to move forward to reap the rewards they have hoped for. On from there… the Moon in space 3 would speak of anxieties that have inhibited success. Romance in space 4 would warrant questions being posed to the querant, for a love affair or passionate endeavor has something to do with the situation, and is perhaps the source of the anxieties expressed by the Moon. In space 5 contains the Rings, and again, further information would need to be asked, such as if the querant is in the process of entering into any new commitments or working with others. Space 6 gives us the current outcome, let’s say it is the Man rune, this could be an actual man entering the picture to bring a resolution, good or bad, to the situation, or it could imply that direct action is needed to change the situation. Spreads have their place, however they tend to give responses that are more vague, since any rune on its own is more of a theme than an answer. To help resolve this, you can pick another rune from the bag and place it with another in any given space to act as a modifier. For example, were we to do this with the Man rune, and blindly picking one of the remaining 7 runes to modify it with (say we have picked the Scythe rune), we now have a better idea of what the Man represents, either an actual person seeking to sabotage the querant, or an action that the querant will take resulting in a negative outcome. For a reading such as this, we would not want to leave it there, but would put the runes back in the bag and ask a follow up question, such as “what steps can be taken to produce a positive outcome.”
Sortilege:
This is my favorite method for reading these runes. It involves throwing them together onto a designated area and seeing what relationship each has with the other. There are various ways to go about this. First, let’s look at the throwing area itself.
You do not need anything special to throw them on, though a soft surface is preferred for the longevity of your runes. You can easily cast them on your bedspread or carpet. Some people, myself included, enjoy using a casting cloth. These can often be found on sites like Etsy, or if you have some artistic talent you can create something of your own. Such cloths are usually broken up into sections, and like the Petite Tableau we looked at earlier, these usually include a center, with items on the left relating to the past, and those on the right occupying the future. Similar also to the Petite Tableau, many readers consider the top to represent positive influences, whereas the bottom shows negative influences.
However, you do not need a cloth at all. A popular style of reading is to look for the Eye, note it as center, and consider the areas left of it to be past, and ahead of it to be the future.
If you cast all the runes, some of these will land face down, the Eye possibly being one of these (as mentioned previously, the Eye represents the querant and those runes closest to it are of special interest). Therefore some folk will begin a reading by placing the Eye in the center of their throwing area. We will begin by doing that.
Now that the Eye has been placed, the remaining runes will need to be mixed up. You can do this by jostling them in the bag. Once that is done, I pour them all into one hand, then cup my hand together, jostling them some more while asking my question. Then I thrust my hands outward above the Eye, and part them so that the runes fall as they may.
I ignore those runes that have handed face down. They have nothing to say about this reading. If their presence distracts you, then you may remove them, careful not to change the orientation of those that have landed upright. However, I prefer to leave them.
Sometimes, you will see that there is an upright rune that has been covered by one facing down. If the image on the upward facing rune is mostly eclipsed by the back of one upon it, then I consider this to be its own sign. I interpret this to mean that the upward facing rune is a condition that is being repressed. For instance, if I see that the Star rune is covered up by any rune that has landed face down, then I consider that the wish of whomever I am reading for is being oppressed.
You begin a reading by looking at those upright runes closest to the Eye. Once you take note of those runes, study how they relate to one another.
I have designed my set of Witch’s Runes so that they come to a point at the bottom. This makes it clearer to me where an individual rune is pointing.
For example, let’s say that the Scythe rune and the Harvest rune are pointing towards one another. This would indicate to me that the two are working together. I would read their relationship as meaning that an end must come in order to reap the harvest. Depending on the nature of the reading, this could indicate that stocks must be sold to acquire the investment one desires.
But let’s say that the Scythe points to the Harvest rune, and the Harvest rune points away from it. This would indicate to me that the Scythe is targeting the Harvest, and that the Harvest is unaware of this sneak attack. In this instance, it would mean that some force is keeping the Harvest from being realized.
Take note of any rune that points to another. Understand that distance plays a part. If the Scythe is far off in the past, and the Harvest close to the Eye in future, then this is not an immediate concern, as it simply illustrates that there was a threat to prosperity sometime in the distant past.
Often you will notice that rune tend to cluster together like cheerios in a bowl of milk. These runed are intimately connected.
Runes that land upright but far away from the Eye exert less influence on the situation at hand. The Waves far to the right may be a warning of troubles to come, but they would represent something so far in the future that another reading may be needed to interpret the meaning.
Sortilege is a practice that takes some getting used to, though many people have a natural affinity for it. As with anything, practice makes perfect.
Final Note:
These are just some of the more common methods for doing a reading with the Witch’s Runes. Feel free to experiment and try out new methods and create your own. You may find that the methods and interpretations which I have described do not fit with what feel intuitive to you. If this is the case, go with your own gnosis. Divination is a language through which spirit speaks to us, and just as words have different connotations for different people, so do the Witch’s Runes. What is most important is that you begin the conversation.
