The historical runes served language and charms rather than a standardized oracle. In the modern revival Eihwaz is commonly read for endurance, the world-tree axis, protection and transformation through the meeting of life and death. These keyword meanings belong to the twentieth-century reconstructionist and esoteric movement, popularized after 1982, and are offered here as a symbolic tradition rather than a documented ancient divination.
The yew's association with graveyards and with longevity in later English folklore, yew trees are among the longest-lived organisms in Europe and commonly stand in churchyards, has fed into the modern divinatory reading of Eihwaz, which treats the rune as marking the world-tree axis, endurance and the connection between life and death. This reading draws loosely on the yew's own documented cultural associations but, as with every rune's modern divinatory use, the specific practice of consulting Eihwaz as an oracular sign is a twentieth-century construction.
The Armanen-descended rune-magic tradition transmitted into English chiefly through Thorsson's work also treats Eihwaz as usable actively rather than only read passively: chanted aloud as galdr, or carved into wood, metal or a bind-rune combining several staves, for an intended practical effect. No source earlier than the twentieth century attests any such active magical use of this specific rune, and the practice should be understood as a modern reconstruction built on the reconstructed name and the rune poems rather than as a recovered ancient technique.