The Denali Institute of Northern Traditions

Ragnar is the Erulian* Philosopher of Denali. He began his esoteric training in the Rosicrucian discipline, a time-honored mystery school with early Germanic ties. After fifteen years of initiatory advancement in that work, he awakened his deep soul connections with the Elder Northern tradition and its runic mysteries. In his teachings, he integrates his many years of occult mystery school study into the Elder Northern tradition in a seamless manner to fill in the gaps caused by a thousand years of suppression, while staying true to the foundation points of the Elder tradition that survived centuries of abuse. 

He is the American-born son of Ragnar Hagmann Holm, Sr. who was born in Drøbak, Norway, and who immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1900s. He grew up on the East Coast and moved to the northern world of Alaska in 1961 when the region was still a remote frontier.

He has lived among the Eskimo people of the tundra, learning their shamanic traditions directly from the Elders in villages and while on long winter sled trails that tested human endurance. He is one of the few teachers of Northern lore who has living experience with the brutal winter survival conditions of the Northern landscape as well as the hypnotic beauty of the nearly 24-hour Northern summer sun. His writings bring the Northern landscape of the Old Ones to your doorstep, the same Earth-song that inspired Yggdrasil cosmology and the runes.

He began his professional career as a forester, which helped establish his deep connection with Earth mysteries, and for most of his working life has been an individuated, self-employed business owner. Like the Vikings of old, he is an Arctic-trained cold-weather warrior. He is a former Infantry unit commander in the regular U.S. Army and Army National Guard exclusively in the Alaska theater. Along the way, he was appointed to activate and lead a Rosicrucian Pronaos (provisional lodge) in Anchorage, Alaska in the 1970s and was a founder and first board president of what grew to be the largest non-denominational metaphysical church in Alaska in the 1980s. These intense real-world experiences flavor his dynamic teaching methods which are the hallmark of Denali Institute.

* Erulian is a term derived from the name of an ancient Germanic tribe known as the Heruli. They were known for their skills in runic lore. As time passed, this (or its alternative form – Erilaz) became the designation of the wisest and most skilled rune masters in the Northern tradition.