Ior carries me to the salty, ever-moving, great oceans of water that encircle the globe.  It opens the way for me to experience the World Serpent, Jormungand, one of the three greatly feared and loathed offspring of the Wolf Chieftess and the Trickster god.
Ior speaks to me of borders and thresholds, of ambivalence and androgyny, of single lines that demarcate and writhing serpentine bodies that can exist on both sides at once.
Ior holds the essence of dual nature, of ‘both and’ and ‘neither nor’.
Jormungand, the androgynous World Serpent thrashes and coils in the Midgard ocean causing destruction and devastation.  Her absence would cause an even greater catastrophe than his presence does.
A deep relationship with Ior creates a place of balance, a place from which we can learn to come to terms with the extreme and destructive forces of nature and not always fight against what’s happening.
It’s true that many lives are lost, not just human, and great destruction occurs in the face of hurricanes or tsunamis or violent storms at sea and we of course are saddened and stunned by the losses.  However, the huge upheavals on the earth, the forest fires, the earthquakes, the erupting volcanoes, aren’t about us, nor are they bad or evil.  They just are.  Sometimes daffodils bloom and gentle rains fall and sometimes a great avalanche thunders down the mountain.
The World Serpent Jormungand is daughter son to Angrboda and Loki, sister brother to Hela and Fenrir.  The three siblings were stolen from their mother by the high gods and cast away, chained and confined.  But even the great powers of order cannot hold back forever the inevitable return of chaos.
The Ior rune can teach you how to see the curve that exists in the seemingly straight line, how to be on both sides of something simultaneously without needing to make a choice of one over the other.  Living with Ior as the ouroboros you can come to understand what it means to devour yourself by eating your own tail.  Then you can know the end and the beginning as one.  This is how you partake of them both.
Working with Ior is about being willing to sail to the edge of the map, to the places we’ve been told cannot be known or the places we've been told  we cannot go.
In ancient times the mapmakers drew maps of the world as they knew it and around the edges of the map they’d write:  Beyond This There Be Dragons. 
It was believed that if you sailed to the edge of the world, you’d fall off and there you would have to face the great dragon.
Are you kept inside the realm of what’s known and what’s allowed, what’s orderly and what’s safe by the fear of meeting the dragon when you sail off the edge?  
You don’t have to go there alone.  
Journey with Ior to Jormungand.  
Sister brother son and daughter knows what it’s like to be cast away.

There is a tremendous amount of global earthquake activity happening right now, these last couple of weeks, as well as a volcano erupting in the ocean just off the coast of Oregon and plumes seen rising from many supposedly extinct volcanic craters.
There are some who would say that times of war, revolution, rioting, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc. are caused by Jormungund thrashing in the great ocean of Midgard.
Has this enormous serpent played a role in the past, perhaps triggering or causing massive destruction or even extinction events in the history of the earth?
Do we really think we can detonate nuclear bombs in the body of the Earth, pressure shot chemicals into her and gouge out enormous craters and not have repercussions?
Even the greatest forces of so-called order, religion, politics, society and science, are no match for the power of destruction that is unleashed when the great World Serpent thrashes in the waters of Midgard.  These are just a few of the points we discuss in the Nine Worlds class when talking about the realm of humans.
The live, completely unedited audio recordings of these nine classes are available for purchase.  Please contact me by Email if you're interested.
Ingrid, the Rune Woman
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