A spell on the beach

Know anything about Runes?

To early people writing was a very serious thing - it was full of magical power.

In Europe our Germanic ancestors used a runic alphabet as their form of writing. They used it to identify their possessions - combs, brooches, shields, cattle, wives - help them to make calendars, encode secret messages, mark their sacred monuments and burial sites. They also used them to cast spells - make love charms, curse their enemies, cause their neighbours crops to fail, cure the pox. Usually the ceremony of writing the runes was accompanied by a chant or prayer and sometimes a curse to make the spell. They called this a rune as well, and the two runes combined – written and spoken - made the magic work.

They called it the ‘whispering, secret talk.’ I love that…the whispering, secret talk - it sounds so completely magical.

Ingwaz is the rune of harmony, approval, unity, agreement, love, peace. It’s an important rune, a powerful rune, a very positive rune. It was used to make fertility magic; magic for farming, growth, health, balance. It was the rune of the god Ing, and associated with Frey - god of the weather, generation and fertility - and it’s particularly potent at the time of the new moon.

I built this sculpture on Dinas Dinelle beach last summer – it’s the Ingwaz rune. I like to go there to watch the small planes at Caernarfon airport. They’re pleasure craft and go around and around in a ten mile circle, landing, taking off, then landing again. Don’t worry I’m not an airport freak, the airport is a really a landing strip and the planes are micro-lights, biplanes, and single engine Cesna’s…actually that does make me a plane freak doesn’t it.

It was a beautiful sunny day and the tide was out. The beach has a high pebble ridge along its length, falling away to firm sand at low tide. I found an old, rusty bike wheel, a broken branch and some polythene. I wanted to leave behind a statement about how beautiful the day was and how positive I felt on that day.

Yes, I’m bonkers - but you probably know that anyway, and if you need even more proof - here’s the whispering, secret talk I chanted to make the magic work.

Ingwaz
Rich dirt
My seed to grow
My hearth to simple burn
Rest godly laboured
Not worn in toil
Blessed by new life born

There you go, if you knew nothing about runes before, you know a little now… did the magic work?

Not so far I’m afraid.

Wierd weather at sea...

We went across to Trevor at the weekend. I’ve always thought that Trefor is an odd place - it’s quiet, empty, even a little unsettling, tucked away at the northern entrance to the Llyn. Trefor used to be a quarry town and the quarry buildings still perch on the side of Yr Eifl like a huge, grey fortress in a fantasy novel. The beach is littered with chunks of quarried granite, sometimes we take a drive down to the beach to watch the sea, and that’s what we did this weekend despite the snow and rain. It is just the place for a weird event.

I sat in the car counting the grey waves rolling in and as I watched out over the sea a strange milky white light began to develop. High in the sky at first but moving quite quickly, it seemed to fall into the sea where it hovered just skimming the waves, shimmering and pulsing. Something was happening out at sea, something strange and something that I’d never seen before.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeSuddenly I was in a Spielberg film - and it was running in my head as I watched the sea. A UFO had cloaked itself inside a cloud of light so that it could come close to the earth and take up seawater to restock its depleted cooling tanks. The aliens had found a way to power their ship using seawater as both a coolant and a quasar synthesised fuel, but had begun to run dangerously low on their way to Alpha Centauri where they we due to seed a barren asteroid with synthetic sub-lifes. They urgently needed the water to cool the dark matter held within the crystalorator, and were only minutes away from exploding. I held my breath. If they were too late then this would be the end of the world. I watched and waited for the craft to appear from inside the cloud. Streams of vapour spiralled down from the craft and dissipated as the strange white light continued to shimmer, inside the shimmer something started to change as gradually a multi-coloured band of light emerged from the cloud, hanging above the water where it glowed and became stronger with each passing second. It was beautiful. I must have been seeing the light from the engines as they prepared to warp.

“Take me with you. Take me with you. Klaatu barada nikto” I cried!

The skies opened, we were hit by a massive hail storm, and by the time it was over both the light and the spaceship were gone. It must have been the kinetic energy from the ship reaching warp that had caused the storm, I knew that the ice crystals wouldn’t last long and if I was to get one back to my laboratory in time to analyse it I’d have to move fast.

I could have gone on. The movie was still running in my head - but I gave up there. It was time to go, and as I turned the car to drive up the steep road from the beach the credits began to roll. Keifer Sutherland had played me.

Keifer Sutherland, good choice!