The runic corpus is epigraphic rather than a proven divinatory set. In the modern revival Laguz is commonly read for flow, intuition, the emotions and the unconscious, the element that moves and yields yet is deep. This keyword reading belongs to the twentieth-century reconstructionist and esoteric movement, popularized in the 1980s, and is offered here as a symbolic tradition rather than a documented ancient divination or a claim about events.
The sea's dual character across the rune poems, source of both danger and, implicitly, of the trade and travel a ship's voyage makes possible, underlies the modern divinatory keyword sense of Laguz as flow, intuition and the unconscious, a psychological reading of water that owes considerably more to twentieth-century depth psychology's own water symbolism than to the Old English or Norse stanzas themselves, which describe a literal, dangerous sea rather than an inward, symbolic one.
The Armanen-descended rune-magic tradition transmitted into English chiefly through Thorsson's work also treats Laguz 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.