Overview: Here within the most glorious pages of Portals, Patterns, and Pathways: A Handbook for Rune Magicians, Star Gazers, and Myth Makers, author Imelda Almqvist explains how every liminal space between runes is a mystery school, and its curriculum is mythology - a paleolithic bone broth for our soul!

Verdict: The runes map a mythical or imaginal realm where cosmic blueprints share their stories and wisdom through archetypal figures, deities, personifications, alchemical images, and symbols. Years ago, Imelda Almqvist wrote in her Rune Journal: Every liminal space between runes is a mystery school, and its curriculum is mythology!

This insight proved to be incredibly fertile ground for mapping the liminal spaces between the runes. The letter sequence of many early alphabets appears to be connected to the night sky and star patterns. Does such a correspondence exist for the runes?

Does the Poetic Edda contain astronomical numbers and references to celestial events? Before the Enlightenment, astronomy and astrology represented different faces of one unified field of study. What happens if we arrange the Runes of the Elder Futhark in a Circle and then look at that circle the way an astrologer reads a natal chart?

Author Imelda Almqvist is an international teacher of Sacred Art and Seiðr/Old Norse Traditions (the ancestral spiritual wisdom teachings of Northern Europe) and also has a Forest School in Sweden, which means if anyone were to be termed a dutiful, and knowledgeable scholar on the liminal space between runes, amongst other things, then it has to be her.

For those new to what we are talking about here in this book review, well, my upbringing informed me that the liminal space between runes refers to the potent, often unmapped, energy and meaning that exists in the transitions between individual runic symbols, rather than focusing solely on the runes themselves. This concept is explored as a mystery school, a veil, or threshold where mythology, magic, and personal experience meet.

Taking those one at a time, a Mystery School, as described by Almqvist, is a theory that the spaces between runes are not merely empty gaps; they are considered active spaces, or mystery schools, where the curriculum is mythology. Thresholds of Transformation are liminal spaces that represent the holy pause or in-between moments where one state of being dissolves and another takes shape.

Finally, the Veil is one between worlds where in Norse tradition, the liminal is understood as the Veil, a space that is neither here nor there, often where the physical and spirit worlds meet, particularly during times like Samhain (late October to early November).

Thoroughly bedded down within historical source material, what we get here is an uber comprehensive summary of, perhaps, decades of both research and subsequent teachings. Teachings that astutely include astrology, mythology, astronomy and even, as aforementioned, Shamanic practices.

In closing, Portals, Patterns, and Pathways: A Handbook for Rune Magicians, Star Gazers, and Myth Makers shares the author’s discoveries, and she hopes that its readers will join her on this adventure. And, trust me on this, I have now read this book twice through, my partner once, and we both agree that if you ever needed a book in your life that brought you all the information you could ever need on this subject matter in one easy-to-read and easy-to-understand informational prose, well, this (and by leaps and bounds) is the one!

About the Author - Imelda Almqvist is an international teacher of Sacred Art and Seidr/Old Norse Traditions (the ancestral wisdom teachings of Northern Europe). She has presented her work on both The Shift Network and Sounds True. She appears in a TV program, titled Ice Age Shaman, made for the Smithsonian Museum, in the series Mystic Britain, talking about Neolithic arctic deer shamanism.

Her fourth book, about the pre-Christian spirituality of The Netherlands and Low Countries, has just gone into production. She has already started her fifth book: about the runes of the Futhark/Uthark. In response to the 2020 pandemic she has opened an on-line school, called Pregnant Hag Teachings, to make more of her classes available on-line.

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