TEUTONIC MAGIC - Awaken Video

as much as the words, shapes the quality of the energies it raises. The best gaidrar, of course, are chanted
or sung rather than spoken, with each word given its full vibrational and rhythmic value. When this is
done right, the rhythm of the spell will also regulate the breath of the vitki, putting her/him into a state of
trancelike concentration. It is best if this can be done with the rite of hallowing the circle; Thorsson's
Hammer Rite (Futhark), with its slow incantation of each of the runes and necessary breath control, is a
good ritual for this purpose. Rhythm unifies the physical and the mental being. If the spell can be
accompanied with drumbeats and dancing, so much the better. If the setting does not permit this, the vitki
should strive as greatly as possible to create a rite which has a similar effect on the consciousness of the
worker. The most important words of the galdr should of course fall on the emphasized beats of the
incantational rhythm, which, in Teutonic poetry, are usually those that share the wished-for rune sound in
alliteration or, if necessary, consonance.
Image may be thought of as the means by which the sense of the galdr is translated into mentally
and emotionally striking terms. This is also some of the purpose of symbolism: a candle lit may show the
fire of a person's life; the candle snuffed out is that person's death, the fire of life gone from his/her eyes
and her/his body cooling. If this is done in the proper way and under the proper conditions, it will cause
the like happening in the target who has been identified with the candle.
The use of image and symbol in your galdrar should be done so as to give you a full emotional and
mental awareness of the might with which you are working and the end to which you guide it. A couple
of lines of poetry should be able to create the same effect in the prepared mind as an entire guided runic
meditation. The power of poetry lies in its compactness: through sound and image it can encode a vast
amount of passion and magical power in a very little space, filling the mind with the wholeness of a
concept that would have taken a thousand ordinary words to communicate.
Also hidden in the use of image is the thought behind "the power of the true name"-that which is no
less that the absolute understanding of a person or thing expressed in a single word or image and which
can be reached only through immediate mystical experience or by the power of skaldcraft to
communicate(and at the same time gain power over) it (ansuz). This is also one of the ideas behind the
Germanic riddle-poetry known as kennings-to demonstrate the fullness of your knowledge and hence of
your power. By calling a warrior "oak-of-battle," the skald communicates the warrior's strength, her/his
endurance, his/her unyielding courage in a fight, and her/his rulership over other warriors, as the oak is
usually the tree of rulership in the Indo-European tradition. With this understanding, you might strengthen
the oak's trunk with tiwaz and set the sun-wheel of sowilo to shine through his/her branches for vktory; or
you might blast the mighty oak with the lightning-stroke of thurisaz.
Those kennings which refer to kinship - calling Thorr "son of Jord (Earth)," for instance-are
effective because, knowing a person's kin, especially forebears, you know more of the layers which have
shaped that person and hence more of that-which-she/he-is. You can see this in the sagas, which usually
start by telling about the grandparents and parents of the hero in question. Certain elements of this power
may also have been borrowed from Finnish magic, in which, to enchant someone, you must know that
person's full lineage-all that has gone into creating the person of the moment and that still works within
that person's being.
The image in magical poetry both encodes an idea or force in magically understandable and hence usable
form and gives it the capability to impact upon all levels of the mage's awareness, concealing it and
bringing it forth at the same time. For both of these reasons it is important in Teutonic magic to keep as
closely as one can to words with Anglo-Saxon roots. Firstly, monosyllables have more gut-level impact
and are more immediately descriptive than polysyllables, being usually the first words associated with
images in a child's mind. This is especially noticeable and powerful when you are dealing with
onomatopoeic words-roar, crash, etc. Generally speaking, the more concrete and basic an image is, the
easier it is to visualize and the more powerful its effects will be. Secondly, every word in a tongue is a
product of the unconscious thought-system from which it has stemmed, and hence it carries certain
implications about the workings of the universe. Thus, words grounded in the Germanic world-view will
be more powerful in runic work because these words come from the same framework of thought that
produced the runes as we know them. An exact etymology is not as necessary for poetic work as it is for
scholastics; nevertheless, you should be able to tell the difference between words of Germanic and words
of Romantic origins, and likewise between words with Indo-European and non-Indo-European roots, the
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