I am picking up on a thought-provoking question in relation to my Runes course: http://www.rune-path.com/ What is the connection between the Norns of the ancient Norse, the Morai of the ancient Greeks and the concept of Karma that has come to us from the Vedas of India?
The way I see it is this:
The Norns of the Ancient Norse seem to me to exactly equate to the picture depicted from the Vedic roots of Hinduism/Buddhism: namely: ‘the operation of karma’.
Our True Self exists eternally and is one with God and with everything.
But our True Self chooses to incarnate in order to experience manifestation and growth. This is just as the Divine itself functions. The Divine manifests universes (and destroys them: it’s the dance of Shiva Nataraja, the playing of Krishna’s flute).
The three Norns of the Ancient Norse are Urd, Verdandi and Schuld:
Urd is our fate created from our past.
Verdandi is our becoming (or our present) and
Schuld is the debt we create in this life that will manifest in our future (incarnations).
They are the three sisters of Wyrd. They sit beneath the World tree by the Well of Time and they carve our karmic fate on wooden lots and they are present at every human birth.
They equate to the Greek’s Morai: the three Fates: Lachesis, Atropos, and Cloto. The Morai don’t carve lots to decree our lives but they spin the thread, weave it into our life, then wield the shears to gut the thread when we are to die.
Both the Norns and the Morai are obviously cultural representations of the even more ancient awareness of the Indo-European peoples of Karma.
And of course the truth is that Indo-Europeans also entered India (see the hotly debated ‘Aryan invasions’) and so Indian Karma, too, is one of the branches of this most deeply ancient awareness of the Indo European peoples.
In each of our incarnations, we are the inevitable outcome of a facet of our past.
And we incarnate this time to work with a facet (or facets) stemming from our past.
We do this in order that we may experience growth and thus raise our awareness this time.
We grow in this life through manifesting (or failing to manifest) our potentials and through doing the concrete work we incarnated to do. These are not ‘negative’ as is portrayed in some of the more ‘world-denying’ or more intellectualising forms of Eastern Sprituality.
So not only this mundane work just ‘mundane’ if you see what I mean. We also grow through bringing enlightened awareness to these egoic scripts, emotions and potentials, at the same time as doing the mundane work and making the mundane achievements.
This ‘egoic self’ is not of course our true self. Our egoic self is not the true reality that lies immanently beneath or beyond this physical and psychomental realm: the realm that in Hinduism is termed ‘Maha Maya’.
But I want to state my belief that our worldly self has a crucial reality. This is because it is we actually incarnated to work at. That is its supreme value. That is why it must not be denied or devalued. On the relationship we develop towards it depends whether we will raise our consciousness this time.
In my Runes Course, you receive two audio-files for each rune. The first audio-file is a presentation of the way the rune you are focusing on has been anciently understood. The second sound file is a guided journey to shamanic drumming which enables you to discover your own relationship to that rune. For example Fehu is the rune of wealth and value issues in your life. Uruz raises the question ‘Have you enough strngth in the varius areas of your life?’ and so on through the Futhark.
My email is michaelconneely@gmail and you can enroll on the website: http://www.rune-path.com/