Book Review – Wild Soul Runes: Reawakening the Ancestral Feminine
Book Review
Wild Soul Runes: Reawakening the Ancestral Feminine
By Lara Veleda Vesta
Published by Red Wheel/Weiser LLC
199 pages
Publication Date: May 1, 2021
“Runes are beings. Not merely shapes, not only sigils, not just magic,” says Lara Veleda Vesta in her new work Wild Soul Runes: Reawakening the Ancestral Feminine. Vesta, who teaches at the Wild Soul School and is author of The Moon Divas Guidebook and The Moon Divas Oracle, has delivered an intriguing new approach to build working relationships with runes.
Started as a “lived practice” in a year of personal turmoil, Vesta used scholarly research, and personal gnosis, to develop a thirty-three week program for the reader to become intimately familiar with each rune. Believing that “it is helpful to think of runes as ancestors,” she mingles ancestral and runic work as she reclaims the runes’ feminine component from their origin in Norse myth.
Using the twenty-four Elder Futhark and the nine Anglo-Northumbrian runes, the author devotes one week to each rune. During this time altars are created, meditations are done, lists of varied questions are asked of the different runes such as “Where did you begin?” or “Who are the giants?” Runes are toned and runes made. There are also Runic poems which the author translates as part of her runic practice. These are Anglo-Saxon, Norwegian and Icelandic poems. All this is done to try to understand and make deep connections with the runes to go beyond their typical casual use. The premise is to communicate with the runes to become their partner and help us, among other things, heal our ancestral line.
While fans of the Runes will flock to to this book and should, what one has to remember there is a large component of UPI (unverified personal gnosis) and each individual experience will not reflect the authors. She in fact encourages personal exploration, using her examples merely as a starting point. However, the discoveries made from working this rune program can be profound, and according to Vesta, “for those to whom they call, the voice is a recollection, the shape a coming home.”
Lara Veleda Vesta is an artist, writer, storyteller and educator living in Portland, Oregon.
Wild Soul Runes: Reawakening the Ancestral Feminine on Amazon
***
About the Author:
Raye Snover is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Daily News and The Village Sun. She was also co-editor of The Temple Bell –the newsletter for The Temple of Witchcraft
Having been a witch for over twenty years, Ms. Snover is a High Priestess in the Cabot Tradition and a member of The Sisterhood of Avalon. She is also a Veriditas trained Labyrinth facilitator, and lives in New York City.
