#Galdrastafur

[danieidiomas]

Stafir de insignia real, sigilo europeo antiguo para hechizos (para lección de curso online de Galdr o magia nórdica en Udemy). ¿Sabes cuál es?

DM para encargos --> https://www.instagram.com/dani_e_idiomas/

Crédito: Publicado en Instagram, original de Daniel Lucas Hernández (16/1/2023).

NUEVO CURSO DE INTRODUCCIÓN AL GALDR DE LAS RUNAS Y SIGILOS ESCANDINAVOS

Cupón válido hasta el 5 de febrero con el código ENERO2023

¿Quieres un mejor cupón? Envíame un mensaje privado y te haré uno mejor

https://www.instagram.com/dani_e_idiomas/

https://www.udemy.com/course/galdr-simbolos-magicos-escandinavos-runas-y-bindrunes/?couponCode=ENERO2023

[thorsvinur]

The oldest ones are from about the 17th century, and the tradition itself is inspired by continental Christian magic mixed with some elements of Icelandic folk belief.

However, not being ~1000 year old pre-Christian symbols doesn't mean people aren't allowed to enjoy them. It just means that they shouldn't be forced into a context to which they're quite foreign (Viking Era reenactment & living history, etc). 😉

[justins-galdrastafir]

Hi, I purchased this pouch recently for some small runes. The seller claims that the staves are Gandreiđarstafur. But it more closely resembles the Hulinshjalmur staves on your website. I'm not going to bug the guy for a refund since I basically just needed a small pouch and this one is nice. But it puzzles me how the seller managed to conflate those. Is this common? Does it come from a bad book or website?

What pouch? I didn't see a link.

The Gandreiðarstafur is one single stave, not a collection of them, so whatever the case, that assertion is incorrect.

My remaster of it is available for purchase from my shop page. It is one of the most impressive looking staves. The translation is "witch riding stave", however for the modern age I offer it as a stave for enabling travel (e.g. keep it visible to inspire you when saving up for a holiday overseas).

[titibaka-artist]

Stafur til að vekja upp draug.

[wanderingoneeye]

Creating galdrastafur

Do you know how you must cut [them]?

Do you know how you must interpret?

Do you know how you must colour?

Do you know how you must try?

Do you know how you must invoke?

Do you know how you must sacrifice?

Do you know how you must send?

Do you know how you must kill?

Whenever someone asks me how to get started on creating galdrastafur I always think of this poem from the Havamal. Odin in here gives you the starting point. First learn the elder futhark until you understand the meanings and names and then learn the younger.

Vikings did not use the elder futhark. They used the younger. For divination they used the younger futhark and for galdr they used the younger futhark. Viking aged magickal texts use the younger futhark.

You then study the terminal staves and their meaning. How they were used in galdrastafur creation by viewing old manuscripts like the galdrabók skuggis skreed and the like. You can find some of these on galdrastafir.org

You will need to study older manuscripts in order to see how they were used back then. What types of woods? What metals? What taufr? This takes years to develop so don't feel frustrated. I have been on the Norse path for more than 25 years. Start by learning the futhark and create your own runes. Sacrifice to them and learn more about them.

[moonandserpent]

Stafur til að vekja upp draug pendant hand carved by Moon and Serpent

Icelandic magical sigil (galdrastafur) to invoke ghosts and spirits.

For more, please follow my Tumblr or Instagram

[norsevikingqueen]

Makeup look inspired by Galdrastafur, Ginfaxi www.TheVikingQueen.com

[mannazandwyrd]

I was playing with finding the individual runes that make up Icelandic runestaves like the Rotaskross (protection plus, see my photo below), which are snowflake forms but with unnatural 8-fold or 10-fold symmetry, as a learning exercise when I realized:

1. I could also find the runes in natural snowflakes (which have 6-fold or 12-fold symmetry);

2. The shapes of the runes are based on the crystalline structure of water (which is in turn dictated by the shape of the H2O molecule, look at all those 60-degree angles); and

3. If you include both elder and younger futhark, all the runes can be found in a single snowflake.

No, really! But to include all the runes’ wisdom, a natural snowflake needs to have both a hexagon and a 6-point star at its centre, where it developed a degree of 12-fold symmetry without riming over completely. The central hexagon’s 6-fold symmetry contains isa/is, laguz/logr, teiwaz/tyr, gebo, kenaz, dagaz, wunjo, raidho/raeidh, berkana, hagalaz/hagall, nauthiz/naudhr, ar, eihwaz, and uruz. The 6-point star outside it adds the longer parallel lines needed for ehwaz, mannaz, and the S-form of sowilu/sol, as well as the lines needed to ingwaz/ing, othala, the E-form of sowilu/sol, and perthro. A 6-point star inside the central hexagon (so, 12-point symmetry) is needed to add thurisaz/thurs.

It also needs needle-form spiky edges with lots of consummate V’s. That adds fehu/fe, ansuz/os, algiz/yr and kaun, as well as repeating isa, laguz, and tyr.

Do such snowflakes exist naturally? OP’s photo is very close, but a bit too rimed to see the structure clearly. This macro shot by John Entwistle (from this article) shows it better:

(OP’s photo source, btw, is almost certainly Alexey Kljatov’s instagram feed. He describes his macro photography methods here:)

So, a single snowflake contains all the wisdom of the runes. Mind = blown.

I’m sure I can’t be the first to notice this and write about it - please let me know who else did if you run across it.

Does this mean Odin’s Sacrifice took place in winter?

Edited to add: I’m now creating a Kickstarter Make100 campaign to make a rune card deck with its seeds in this post! Stay tuned for details, it’ll launch soon.

[thorraborinn]

Do you have any info on the Ginfaxi symbol? Seen a heathen who had it tattooed on their throat and immediately had alarms go off in my head.

I'll post what I know about Ginfaxi, but it won't tell you anything more about the person you saw than you already know. I like thinking and writing about this stuff so I wrote a lot but, yeah, none of this is really going to narrow anything down for you. I'm trying to put the rest behind a break but Tumblr doesn't like breaks anymore, and keeps moving this one around, so we'll see what happens.

I assume that what you mean by "ginfaxi" is this:

This isn't the only symbol that gets called that (more on that below) but it is the most common, and it's what comes up when you Google it. I don't really know anything about how modern people are using ginfaxi but here are some off-the-cuff thoughts:

it's probably on its way into popularity because Ægishjálmur and Vegvísir are too well-known to be mysterious and cool anymore

while less common than those, it's been commercialized for just as long. You, anon, probably know this already, because you probably googled it before asking me, and turned up all the same tchotchke shit that every other "Ancient Viking Magic" symbol is slapped onto. That has more determination over how people relate to it than any 18th/19th century black book does.

there's higher-than-average risk of it being made into a symbol of "Viking warriors" or similar because of its actual historical association with glíma even though conceptually it's closer to staves for winning at chess (which do also exist) than it is to actual combat

yeah I do think it has potential to be a "swastika with plausible deniability" but I honestly don't know if people are doing that and if anything its touristification might be the thing that prevents it

it occurs to me that TikTok is probably a serious vector for how people are experiencing this stuff, and it's something I know absolutely nothing about other than that people like to put runes and stuff on their faces. So I dunno, that could be an influence here.

When you're trying to figure out what it means when you see a galdrastafur on someone, it doesn't necessarily do you any good to learn about its background and history if the person who got it inked didn't bother to research that themselves, and I'm disinclined to believe that someone who got a vaguely swastika-like symbol on their throat did that. I have no idea if the symbol has any more frequency among racists than it does among sorta "general population" heathen/viking-interested people who relate to the past basically through the lens of the tourist gift shop, who would have been getting "Celtic" symbols if it were still the 90's, which seems to be the majority of people involved with this stuff at all. A radically different group of people also comes to mind: in my experience in east coast US, some crusty gutter punk types also use symbols like Icelandic galdrastafir and runes, and they're also more likely to get a tattoo on their throat or face or whatever than the average viking enthusiast. I know a guy who used to put runes and stuff on his panhandling signs and claimed they did get him more cash, and whether it was magic or just drawing attention or what didn't really matter to him.

Anyway, the point is, I think that tattoo was a bad idea, makes someone look like a nazi, and you should side-eye them until you know better, but for better or worse there are other possible explanations for how that symbol got there. I'm not making excuses for anyone, just stating the blunt fact that there are non-nazis who attracted to this symbol and decorate itself with it without even thinking about any of this.

It shows up in that annoying graphic of "Norse" symbols with no context that occasionally makes the rounds (that manages not to include a single symbol from the actual Viking age), with an incorrect or at least misleading description:

And as much as this sucks that is probably the main way that people experience symbolism that is related (whether in a historical or a recently-contrived way) to "the Norse."

The version of the symbol I've been talking about is the most well-known because it comes from Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri by Jón Árnason, the most important folklore and fairy tale collection from Iceland. I'm not sure where he got that particular image. When he was writing in the mid-19th century, he said that ginfaxi and gapaldur (which often accompanies ginfaxi) were among the most widespread symbols with the most variety of uses, and even mentions them before ægishjálmur. Ginfaxi was probably always used in glíma, and since that's the context it appears in in magic books while other uses seem not to have been recorded, the association with glíma became stronger over time. It was to be written on a piece of paper or wood-chip and put in the toe of the left show, while gapaldur was supposed to be under the heel in the right shoe (there is some variation in the procedure). According to Grunnavíkur-Jón Ólafsson (via Jón Árna) the two symbols together were also used for spookier things like going into hills (i.e. like huldufólk do, I guess, there's no additional context) and repel sendingar (sort of like ghosts raised by hostile wizards to harm someone) but I don't know where Grunnavíkur-Jón wrote about that or anything else about this. Here is a variant gapaldur from Jón Árnason:

According to Jón Árnason (link in Icelandic), it was rumored that the two staves were composed by hiding the names of different æsir in them. To me, that implies either a method of encoding that is totally opaque to me, or that belief pertained to an entirely different set of visual symbols (either of these are highly plausible). It seems the names ginfaxi and gapaldur (or gapandi) were better-known than the actual visual symbols themselves, and there are many variants that look hardly anything like the one in Jón Arna (this is not surprising -- there are also many symbols called ægishjálmur other than the one we all know). Probably many more people suspected others of having used symbols like these to gain advantage over them, than actually used symbols themselves, so that the idea of ginfaxi would precede anyone knowing how to actually draw it, and perhaps there never really was an original or fixed shape.

Jónas Jónasson (another folklore collector) identified this one from Lbs 977 4to as another ginfaxi although I don't know how he knows it's that and not gapaldur:

This one comes with a formula to recite that invokes Óðinn and Frigg and is specifically about winning at glíma.

These two are from the Galdrasýning á Ströndum website (only on the Icelandic version of the page for some reason), not sure where they got them either. With these you're supposed to carve them on a piece of turf when the moon is waxing and drop some of your own blood into them, then put them in your shoes and recite a verse.

I think it's worth showing what glíma is. True, when an Old Icelandic text refers to people doing an action that is uses the verb glíma to describe, it's talking about actual fighting, but this is the stuff that the glímugaldrar ('glíma-magic') that we have is about:

[yes-sikorskiy-yuriy]

Gandreistarstafur - Witch's Staff "Go where you want"

Icelandic scientist Horstein Konradsson began collecting Galdrastafur in 1890, but it wasn't until 1934 that he collected his data sets and wrote them down, including hundreds of magic symbols. His style was unique, using two-tone black and red for dramatic effect. This manuscript appears in several other manuscripts, but not the first - it must have been Thorstein's favorite work.

Source: justins-galdrastafir

[kjarnisvartrstjarna]

Galdrastafir - Sigilos Mágicos Islandeses

Os Galdrastafir são símbolos islandeses e aparecem por volta de 1400 a 1800 (do final da meia-idade ao início do período moderno). A maioria é do século 17, e existem centenas deles.

Muitos sites gostam de afirmar que o Vegvisir/Vegvísir é uma "Bússola Viking" - isso não é verdade! O "Período Viking" termina antes de 1100 E.C. e que existem 8 pontos como uma bússola é apenas uma coincidência. Muitos sigilos têm 8 pontos, ou 6 ou 4.

Eles pegam emprestado conceitos de tempos pagãos, de vikings, de deuses nórdicos, mitos e folclore, e de personagens rúnicos, mas também refletem questões atuais para sua época e fortes crenças cristãs (luteranas). É provável que o Galdrastafir tenha ganhado popularidade na Islândia depois que outros símbolos foram vistos em grimórios de meia-idade da Europa continental.

Desde 1800 E.C., o Galdrastafir foi desenhado e redesenhado, muitas vezes em compilações, e em muitas ocasiões feito com elementos ausentes ou adicionados que mudam sua aparência original. 

Se você estiver interessado em usar esses símbolos, faça-o com sabedoria. Os significados das runas esotéricas (contemporâneas) têm pouco a ver com Galdrastafir. Ásatrú, Odinismo e Xamanismo (todas religiões pagãs ou pagãs da nova era) adotaram alguns dos símbolos para uso em seus próprios sistemas de crenças - isso não significa que os símbolos sejam pagãos ou simbólicos de qualquer grupo em particular. 

Definição e significado de Galdrastafir 

Galdrastafir (pl. de galdrastafur) é uma palavra islandesa que se traduz como [galdra]  mágico [stafi] sigilo ou símbolo. Steven Flowers escreve que eles herdaram da antiga designação técnica de runas como símbolos ou paus, porque muitas vezes eram esculpidos nesses objetos para fins talismânicos. Um bastão (do inglês antigo: sigilos pl. de bastão) é geralmente algum tipo de suporte de estrutura reta: bengala ou bastão; uma pequena viga ou suporte; ou as linhas desenhadas segurando notas musicais e outros símbolos. No entanto, o galdrastafir é melhor definido como um sigilo - um sinal ou símbolo mágico inscrito ou pintado ou até mesmo um selo de tipo de família. Eles geralmente eram projetados para controlar os elementos ou orientar os desenvolvimentos. Por si só, a palavra stafr em islandês também significa uma letra (do alfabeto) ou caractere e também significa tradição ou sabedoria.

O Museu de Feitiçaria e Bruxaria da Islândia tem um catálogo abrangente de Galdrastafir em sua página da web chamado sigilos Mágicos.

Propriedades mágicas eram propostas pelo criador do sigilo, muitas vezes um mago da velha escola, feiticeiro ou xamã. As lendas islandesas falam de quase todos os magos formados no exterior (Alemanha ou outros países nórdicos) com o propósito de se tornarem clérigos cristãos. A população em geral era analfabeta. Na Islândia, essas pessoas eram chamadas de galdramenn ou seið-maðr / kona. Especula-se que eles desenhariam, riscariam, entalhariam ou gravariam linhas e símbolos, muitas vezes personagens rúnicos, e empregariam processos ritualísticos enquanto moldavam os sigilos.

Use o senso comum. Como escrever uma runa em um pedaço de papel resolve alguma coisa? Isso soa supersticioso, não é? Por outro lado, se a runa é usada para provocar ação, ou outra perspectiva, ou como um lembrete - então você vê que pode ter algum tipo de impacto. - Tyriel 2011

Os aspectos de galdrastafir estão imersos na história germânica, conexões com deuses e deusas pagãos nórdicos e caracteres do alfabeto rúnico que remontam a séculos. Também parece provável que a forma que essas insígnias assumem foi inspirada pelos sigilos encontrados nos grimórios do continente - a Chave do Rei Salomão sendo uma das candidatas mais prováveis. As runas eram usadas para escrever em todas as regiões germânicas e escandinavas até cerca de 1000 E.C., momento em que seu uso diminuiu, exceto para marcar túmulos, itens pessoais e menos frequentemente para amuletos e amuletos. De 800 a 1200 E.C. as pessoas colonizaram e povoaram a Islândia e carregaram consigo as práticas mágicas, seus deuses e runas. 

Publicado originalmente em https://galdrastafir.com Traduzido por Svart Stjarna

[writingpagan]

Let’s not forget about Icelandic Magical Staves (Galdrastafir). These staves have been found in grimoires dating to the 17th century and older ones have roots in paganism, while more “recent” ones have Christian influence. With Iceland’s harsh climate, the staves are a magic for farmers to deal with the climate and thieves. Always be careful when using these.

[justins-galdrastafir]

Looking for the fishing staves and a little info on their different meanings. Not much info out there.

Fiskistafur and Veiðistafur

Hello whoever you are. There is a lot of information out there. The problem is tracking it down. I’ve written three times about fishing staves with the following links:

https://justins-galdrastafir.tumblr.com/post/133053248332

https://justins-galdrastafir.tumblr.com/post/164042046257

https://justins-galdrastafir.tumblr.com/post/167468252142

If you want more specific information, you can email me from my new website http://galdrastafir.com/main.htm

[titibaka-artist]

Icelandic magical symbol, Stafur til að vekja upp draug, To invoke ghosts and evil spirits.

https://www.etsy.com/se-en/listing/636930148/stafur-til-a-vekja-upp-draug-icelandic

[wanderingoneeye]

Runic Petroglyphs

Here are a few more petroglyphs found among the Sami and Rus tribes in the area before (long long before) runes and rune staves were a thing.

You can already see some of the symbolism we use currently developing and what they meant before christiandom spread like the plague it is and infected the North.

The first few are just "people" of various types but near the bottom where you see the little circles they represent the shamans. The ones with circles "around" the person and above them are those who are under a magickal spell of some type.

The little "cup" piece we use in Galdrastafir now was actually the hammer used to bang the drum (yes shamanic drumming was a huge thing, this is how you go to the underworld and the world of spirits)

You can see other symbols used in the vegvisir and ægishjalmur in the elks near the bottom. These were the magical symbols of prehistoric norsemen (not the vikings, think more caveman) I have hundreds of these and will be uploading more as I get time.