Three Aettir / Three Soul Families

Aettir

I just had the coolest idea! I am going to take the three aettir of the futhark (the 3 rows or families of runes) and link them to my 3 primary ancestral ethnic families! Now, I am saying right from the get-go, this is my own personal gnosis. I make no claims that what I am going to do applies to everyone. This is my personal path, blazened toward the knowledge I am seeking within the depths of my own soul and kinfolk Folksoul.

The first aett (which I consider to be the eldest) I assign to my likely eldest European roots - my Slavic ethnicity.

The second aett goes to my ancestral family between my eldest and youngest European roots - my Germanic ethnicity.

The third aett goes to my youngest European roots - my Celtic ethnicity.

As I learn more, I will weave together my families by linking each rune also to one of my ethnic roots. I will evaluate each rune independent of the family aett it is in, thus weaving together the runes and my ethnic families. Who knows, maybe some runes will be wildcards from one of the smaller ethnicities found in my genetic ancestry. The future is open and I'm anxious to see what I will discover about myself and my tribes as I do this.

My Ethnic Families

Slavic Witch

I'm taking a new turn in my own soul crafting. New genetic Family Finder results from Family Tree DNA have come in for me (they update results when new techniques become available, see my previous post for the graph), showing my autosomal ancestral ethnicity to be at least 16% Central European - in places like Slovakia, Hungary and the steppes of Russia in other genetics results - and up to 21% adding in my Finnish Saami results (who closely share genetic roots with the Slavic peoples). While my ancestral ethnicity is predominantly Celtic-Germanic (31% and 35% respectively), both my ancestral genetic motherline (U5b1b1-T16192C!) and fatherline (I-M223) have deep Slavic roots, as do the Saami - making my Slavic ethnic ancestry to be at least 21%. 

The large majority of my ethnic ancestry I now know to be Germanic, Celtic and Slavic. Given this, I now am calling myself a Celtic-Germanic-Slavic heathen witch. I need to find out more about Slavic folkways, so the future holds a turn to discover the folkways of my Slavic ancestors . At this point, I know very little about Slavic paganism, but new offerings in my witchcraft shoppe for this tribe of my family are in the works. A pretty complex task, but I'm sure I'll be able to weave all of my ancestral streams together quite nicely in my own soul crafting practice. After all, it's who I am, and I think I am woven together very well.

Oskapt - Fire and Ice

On a forum I frequent, it was asked:

In The Saga of the Volsungs translated by Jesse L. Byock there is an interaction where Sigurd said: "What is the name of that island where Surt and the Aesir will mix together their blood?" Fafner answered: "It is called Oskapt, the uncreated." Does anyone have any insight into Oskapt?

This is an interesting idea - I like to speculate about interesting ideas.

Google translates oskapt as "terrible." I've also seen the word translated as "unshapen" and seeming derivatives of the word are associated with the idea of something which may not be of the normatively experienced natural worlds (that is, "unnatural") - so, oskapt may refer to a deeper or alternative level of nature which precedes mental, psychological or material constructions. In other mystical systems (from my learning as a kabbalist primarily), "terrible" often is a term applied to a level of Being "above" (in terms of extension into manifest reality) the created worlds, a correspondence which is in agreement with the Germanic ideas of some place which is both "uncreated" and "terrible." In kabbalah, the "terrible" universe is called atzilut, or universe of divine emanation from which creation is forthspoken via utterance, then shaped and then made manifest. Taking the correspondence further, it may be that the "place" of oskapt corresponds to some high unmanifest place from which that which is to become manifest first comes forth, if that makes sense. It's interesting to me the the word oskapt could be divided into "os" ("mouth") and "kapt" (or West Germanic Dutch "kopt", a form of koppen - like German "kopf") which can pertain to both the head in general (and to the crown of the head more specifically), making "oskapt" pertain to the "mouth of the head" - this is congruent with the idea of forthspeaking.

So, it seems to me that this island "Oskapt" may refer to a "place" within the Folksoul within which we all mix with one another as a unified community before extending out as individuals (or tribal families of individuals like soul families) into created reality.

Another interesting correspondence is that in kabbalah, the "terrible" place is also called the place of "terrible ice" (despite that it exists in the fiery Universe of Atzilut), so Oskapt may also be an "island" of "Niflheim within Muspelheim" in Germanic cosmology.