Making Personal Runes
Hi! I just saw your post about making your own runes and I was just wondering if maybe you have any tips for how to come up with your own symbols? I've been thinking about it for a while but I guess I'm just not sure where to start :/ any advice you may have would be supercapprec, thank you! 💜 ~clearlystormy
An excellent question! And yes, I might have a few. :)
Personal rune sets, as the title implies, are highly individualized and the symbolism and interpretative methods are unique to each practitioner. Just as folks who read cards or tea leaves have their own correlations for certain symbols, so too do the rune readers.
When creating your own rune set, start with simple symbols that have meaning to you. Some examples can be found in books like Kate West’s “The Real Witches’ Book of Spells and Rituals” and Ann Moura’s “Grimore for the Green Witch.” You can use symbols from astrology, astronomy, chemistry, pop culture, weather forecasting, musical notation, random household objects, whatever you like. Heck, use emojis if you want! Just keep the choices simple.
And when I say simple, I do mean simple. Whether you’re drawing them or pasting on printed icons, it’s best to have symbols that you can instantly recognize at a glance and which are all distinct from each other. Hard to complete a reading if you don’t know what you’re looking at, after all!
Pick symbols until you feel like you’re got a good starting number, say 16 - 20 or so. You can always add more if you need them. Lay all your symbols out and assign clear, unique meanings to each one. (I would suggest assigned multiple related meanings to each rune, just to allow for interpretation in a reading and to keep you from having to make too many pieces to complete your set.) These meanings don’t have to be vetted by anybody else and they don’t have to conform to any established system unless you want them too. The symbols and their representations need only have meaning to you, since you’ll be the one reading them.
Say you want to include The Sun in your rune set. There are definite established meanings for The Sun in iconography, but if you think The Sun in your set should represent something different, go for it. If The Sun in your runeset represents danger and exposure and pain because you get easily sunburnt, then so be it. No one’s going to be using these runes but you.
Finally, make sure you write EVERYTHING down. You’ll need the reference later. If there are highly specific things to remember for certain symbols, record that too. Use this correspondence list to guide your interpretation when you cast your runes for a reading.
Happy Witching! :)
