The Healing Runes

Preface
by Thomas Moore

It is the human condition to be in need of healing, for we are not, not any of us, fully sound, fit and hale in body and soul. So, an essential part of our lives must be dedicated to some kind of "medicine," in the best sense of the word. The trouble in modern times is that we pursue healing piecemeal and incompletely. We separate, each from the other, the sicknesses of body, emotion, meaning and connectedness. We have a tendency to trust both the mind and machinery too much, thinking that if we could only understand the basis of our distress, we might make it right, or if we could find the best expert having the newest technologies, then we might possess the elusive elixir of physical and emotional health.

People who live or have lived outside the bubble of modern sensibilites look upon illness and healing differently. The ancient Greeks would make a sacrifice at the temple of the healing god Aesculapius and spend the night in hope of a cure. Some communities today consult a diviner or a shamanic medicine person who knows herbs and dreams. Modern people sometimes try to borow folk techniques and medicines, but we know that we can't just suddenly go primitive and pretend that modern medicine and therapy never happened. Our challenge is to become aware of sesrious holes in our approach to healing ourselves, learn fromas many sources as possible how we might re-vision or methods and atitudes, and then develop newly animated ways of healing.

We realize that we need insight, especially in distrubances of the soul~addictions, depressions, emotional upheaval, relationship breakdowns, all kinds of acting out~and so we flock to therapists and buy books that tell us what we're doing wrong and how to get back on track. But I suspect that our quest for insight doesn't go nearly deep enough. It isn't sufficient to cling to a new theory or therapy that promises salvation from soul distress. We have to live daily from a deeper place, thereby healing many of the divisions in vision and philosophy that lie at the heart of our wounds.

We need nothing less than a revolution in our ways of knowing and understanding. In modern life we tend to turn everything into a mental issue. In sports we like to discuss statistics, instead of enjoying athletics. In education we stuff the brain with facts, instead of addressing ways of understanding things we cannot quantify. In psychotherapy we look for causes and explanations, instead of seeking ways to heal the individual soul. to ease the anziety and distress of modern times we need to depen our knowledge to a point beyond mere explanation, to a place where the soul is moved and therefore touched and healed.

I used to think that intuition was the answer, and that we could somehow squeeze brilliant ideas from this neglected organ of the mind. Now, I've leaned that intuition is not a mental activity at root but a posture in the world and a method of knowing that offers guidance to the soul, even as it fails to satisfy the mind's longing for clear and unambiguous explanations.

I've learned that real intuition requires skills and attitudes that are more demanding than those of the mind; it demands some concrete object, image or ritual procedure, and it doesn't act in a vacuum. It presents no sure knowledge, but rather offers information that is poetic in nature, and often ambiguous, ambivalent, paradoxical and elusive. Its answers to our problems are neither immediate nor fully conclusive, but rather take time to unfold and may never stand fully revealed.

Because the knowledge that rises out of the intuition ~and out of the oracular ~ is so deep-seated, it appears to belong more in the realm of religion than psychology, and so some people are hesitant to approach it lest they transgress their beliefs and theological convictions. We are all influenced, too, by Western religion's long suspicions about paganism, superstition and magical practices. Study after study has shown that the churches make careful distincitons about oracles. they seem to be most interested in protecting the notion of free will for humans, and divine freedom as well. They resist a kind of magical universe in which certain actions automatically and necessarily produce effects, and they warn against any individual's taking personal advantage of that magic.

Yet, the oracular is an integral part of all religions, from the Greeks consulting the oracle at Delphi, to the Priests of the Old Testament dedicated to reading the signs of nature, to St. Augustine. In his Confessions, Augustine asserts his love of he oracular and tells the moving story of how, in the midst of his agony over the disastrous way his life had gone, he heard a child's voice telling him to read. So he picked up a Bible and read the first words that presented themselves to him. He describes this as a technique~divining the passage that will set a meaningful life course. The words he read advised him against a wasted life, and talking them to heart, he embraced an altogether new direction, becoming a bishop, theologian and saint.

As oracular tools, the Runes provide a way of deepening reflection and stirring the soul where it counts, where meaning coalesces and emotions find their place. This is indeed the edge of religion, but think of what the Runes do in the medieval view of philosophy, as servants to theology. there need be no conflict, but rather, the one can ground the other.

I am convinced that all healing ultimately comes from a shift in deep imagination, and this is what the Runes do when read sensitively, as in this edition: They ground the interpretations of our own lives and anchor our decisions in the very quick of the heart.

If we suffer from any universal disease, it is shallowness of imagination. The Healing Runes offers a remedy for that malady. In so doing, it promises not just relief from anxiety, but profound gifts that signal the presence of soul~intimacy, pleasure , beauty, piety and love.