The runes of the historical record served language and charm rather than a fixed oracle. In modern rune divination Mannaz is read for the self, humanity, the mind, community and ones relationship with others. These associations belong to the twentieth-century reconstructionist and esoteric revival, popularized after 1982, and are presented as a symbolic tradition rather than an ancient or predictive practice.
All three surviving rune poems associate this rune with humanity and human community rather than with a specific virtue or object, and the modern divinatory keyword sense of the self and the individual mind draws on that broad human-centred attestation, though it generally sets aside the Old English stanza's specifically Christian meditation on mortality and mutual failure between kinsmen in favour of a more neutral, twentieth-century reading of the self as psychological subject.
The Armanen-descended rune-magic tradition transmitted into English chiefly through Thorsson's work also treats Mannaz 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.