Wyrd Part 2: In the Beginning was the Wyrd

First Published in ORB No.98, July 1990

True to form the Christ people placed the birth of their God at the time of the birth of the sun – the Winter Sunstead – their version being a word-play – ‘birth of the son’, the son of God. Even before this the Judaic Old Testament uses a clever word play to twist the concept of Wyrd, for Genesis maintains: “In the beginning was the Word”. It maintains of course that the Word was God.

What is the origin of the term ‘word’? ‘Word’ in modern German is ‘wurt’, but in Old High German the word ‘wurt’ meant Wyrd. To emphasise this point the Old Saxon for ‘Wyrd’ was ‘Wurd’, phonetically’ similar to ‘word’. The Norse word for Wyrd is Orlog, which is literally ‘primal layers’ or ‘primal word’. The last part ‘-log’ is the same as the Latin for ‘word’: we still use the word ‘log’ for a book of record, or of records of any kind. So we, as Heathens, are safe to say – IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WYRD.

And so it must be that the Cosmic Mind existed before all things. The Cosmic Mind must have been there in order that Creation could take place. Even certain sections of modern science have turned full circle and ditched the idea of a mechanical universe in favour of the idea of the universe being more like a vast thought-pattern. So what is the Wyrd and how are its workings?

To answer this question we can only scratch at the surface, for only a part of Wyrd can be comprehended at a time. But we can get slight hints at the workings of Wyrd. Orlog has its similarity to a Flemish-Dutch word ‘oorlog’ which means ‘war’. I am led to believe that the word ‘war’ is an Indo-European root word meaning: 1.To will/choose; 2. To speak; 3. To wind or turn.

These words and meanings seem to have little link, and not much with Wyrd, until we contemplate their word-association. ‘To will’ hints at the Will of Wyrd – that which is, and that which is to be – evolution – for Wyrd is ever evolving and changing. ‘To speak’, of course, gives us the ‘word’, which is touched upon in the first paragraph here. “To wind or turn’ is associated with change, with evolution, and also ‘wind’ is to spiral. Scientists now consider the universe to be a vast spiral.

War is seeming conflict, but not so if we look-closely at it, for war can have very strange results. The same with Wyrd, for on the surface the Cosmos appears to be a war of opposite – Light and Dark, Day and Night, Summer and Winter, Hot and Cold, Fire and Ice. But not really so, for because those are the totality of Wyrd, they are in truth harmonious. ‘It is this harmony of opposites which causes the eternal process of Birth-Life-Death to Rebirth, of Creation-Preservation-Destruction to re-Creation. This process we call ‘evolution’ and this is the ever upward-growing spiral. Wyrd is in a constant state of flux and change.

Having made the above statement it will be obvious to all who can comprehend the workings of Nature that there are Eternal Laws which govern all things. These Eternal Laws are immutable and unchangeable. The cycles of Nature are eternal, for Nature works not upon a linear scale, but on a cyclic course. These cycles remain the same for eternity. We could thus say that Wyrd is constant change that forever remains the same.

The workings of Wyrd are contained within the symbolic system we call the Runes, each Rune being an aspect of Wyrd. We could say that the Runes are the Secrets of Wyrd and the secrets of Nature in its entirety. The Runes existed in the beginning. It was Odin who learned of them by his sacrifice so that we may use them to aid us in our battle against those forces that seek to destroy the Wyrd.