I first came across the Womanrunes in Shekinah Mountainwater’s book, Ariadne’s Thread: A Workbook of Goddess Magic in the early 1990s. I found them mildly interesting and thought vaguely about writing the symbols on a blank bundle of cardstock I had lying around, but never did and eventually passed-on the book to someone else. But I never completely forgot the Womanrunes. With recent talk about ‘the return of the Divine Feminine’, now seems like a timely occasion to re-visit the subject. Fortunately, there’s a person who’s written a whole book about them which greatly helped me understand them better, and I’ll include the citation in the bibliography at the end of the lesson.
The history of these runes is simple. At the Sumer Solstice in 1987, feminine-spirituality pioneer Shekinah Mountainwater said “Goddess-lightning struck. I fell into a state of enchantment and, in a single day, the symbols for my Womanrunes were born…Suddenly, I was liberated, and the new symbols poured out beneath my pen. Like the priestesses of old, I opened myself, and the Goddess sent me Her magic.”
Mountainwater originally created 35 Womanrunes, but the next author to deal with them to a great extent, Molly Remer, shows the rune-set expanded to 40. A couple of Womanrunes, Remer depicts differently from Mountainwater’s original set. The rune originally termed ‘The bowl’ Remer changed to ‘The Cauldron’ and ‘The Lightning Bolt’ has been changed into ‘The Snake.’ Rather than ditch one and go with the other, I have kept both versions of the same card in my deck and labeled them with the same number, followed by a and b. A bowl and a cauldron, and a snake and a lightning bolt, have fundamentally different energies, though they may share some similarity in meaning. This may run counter to Mountainwater’s intent, but I see divinatory sets of symbols are a sort of vocabulary, and the larger the vocabulary, the clearer Deity/Universe/Spirit can communicate with you. So I think expanding the number of runes in the Womanrunes is a good thing.