(HSL stands for Heathen Soul Lore)
Winifred Hodge Rose
There are four areas where Aldr plays a significant role in our lives. One is in our health and life-span, and our nourishment in all forms and all levels: physical, energetic, spiritual. A second is Aldr’s connection with the Norns and orlog. Third is Aldr’s role as our ‘time-body,’ the soul who provides our stability and continuity in time, as our Lich-Hama provides our shape and stability in space. Aldr wraps all these things up into our Werold, our experience of our own life and the world around us, extended across our life-span. The exercises in this Step seek to familiarize you with these different aspects of Aldr.
Reading
First read Book I (Heathen Soul Lore Foundations), Chapter 7: “Aldr and Orlay: Weaving a World,” or the website article of the same name. This will give you general, research-based information about Aldr.
https://heathensoullore.net/aldr-and-orlay-weaving-a-world/
Then read Book II (A Personal Approach) Chapter 7: “Exploring your Aldr, Orlog, Werold,” or Study Guide 7 of the same name on my website, and work through those exercises in your Daybook or Workbook. This will help you learn more about your own Aldr.
https://heathensoullore.net/study-guide-7-exploring-your-aldr-orlog-werold/
Practice Notes
Note that several of these exercises are long-term, life-review activities. All of the exercises here will require time, patience, and depth-work on different levels, working in your Daybook over time.
Also: please consider your comfort level and psychological wellbeing as you approach these exercises; they may go deep into your past and orlog. If you feel any of them could be destabilizing or harmful in any way to you, obviously don’t do them. You may be able to return to them later, after more soul lore work, or may simply decide to skip them.
Bindrunes
I have designed bindrunes that express some of my perceptions of each of the souls, shown in Book II and in the Study Guides on my website. If you have some familiarity with rune-lore, I encourage you to use my Aldr bindrune for meditation, and / or create your own Aldr bindrune and use that one. If you are not up for creating a bindrune right now, you’re also welcome to meditate on a single rune, or several, that seem related to your Aldr soul.
Work with your soul-tokens, if you are using them
When you are doing the reading, writing the exercises, meditating, communing with the Deities and spirits, using divination or spaeworking, and working with bindrunes or single runes, keep your token(s) with you. If you are creating a specific Aldr token, such as a strand of yarn, cord, or thread that will eventually be braided or otherwise combined with tokens for your other souls, begin work on this now.
Divination and spaeworking
If you like to use runes or another system of divination, by all means use them to explore more questions and insights about your Aldr soul and record them in your Daybook. Likewise, if you are experienced with spaeworking, seidhcraft, or similar esoteric or magical work, these are excellent ways to explore the souls, but should not be pursued before learning proper methods and precautions as I discussed in the earlier Steps.
Aldr Initiation Ceremony
If you wish to perform an Aldr initiation ceremony, and hallow your Aldr token if you have one, the text for the Aldr ceremony is here: https://heathensoullore.net/aldr-initiation-ceremony/