TEUTONIC MAGIC - Awaken Video

of the goddess is shown forth most openly as she brings new life from her womb. In a number of
Northern countries it was the custom to dress a young girl in birch limbs and/or flowers and have her
travel through the village on May Day or on one of the other spring celebrations. This is probably a
survival of the goddess Nerthus’ spring procession in which the goddess was drawn about in a wain,
spreading her fertile power through the land. Her power was renewed by a human sacrifice at the end of
the journey, and students of folklore will at once be aware of a great number of folk customs which are
obvious survivals of this practice.
The bringing-forth in the spring is prepared for by the concealment of the fall, and it was at this
time that the folk of the Norse countries made their gifts to the land, at the festival called Winter- nights,
disablot (sacrifice to the goddesses), or alfablot (sacrifice to the elves). The disir are lesser Vanic
goddesses, usually bound to a single family or person. They are often dead female ancestors who watch
over the births and deaths of their descendants and advise or protect; they are closely related to the
kinfylga and the valkyrja. They have also been described as the “attendant Norns,” “those who come to
every child that is born to shape its life.”2 These beings have survived in children’s stories as the fairies
bestowing gifts-writing weird-at a baby’s christening.
As a rune of bringing-into-being, Berkano is mighty as a shaping force in itself, the thought being,
as written in the Prose Edda, that the layers laid at birth (coming into being) will remain powerful
throughout life. This is also written forth in the “Havamal” passage. The sprinkling with the waters of life
is an old pagan custom; in this case, the magical action taken is that of enclosing the child at birth in the
protection of berkano, which remains around him throughout his life because it has been written as his
orlog, his first layer of weird.
Berkano is the rune of the mound itself, as apart from the initiation within the mound. It is the
equivalent of the alchemist’s athanor, the oven or “womb” in which transformation takes place.
Berkano may be used for female fertility magic and in working with women’s mysteries. It is
particularly mighty in all matters regarding birth and bringing-into-being.
This rune is effective in reaching your disir to call on their guarding might or asking for their wise
rede in some matter, as Odhinn often asks for Frigg’s.
Berkano is used for concealment, protection, and nurturing, especially of children. It is a good rune
for passive warding.
In workings of woe, Berkano may be called upon as the rune of the goddess in her being as the
Grave-Mother, the devouring bog.
Berkano is the rune of hidden transformation and growth.
Ritually, Berkano embodies the need for silence and the dark cloth which covers magical
implements between use or in the process of creation. It is best for this cloth to be made of linen, as flax is
closely associated with Holda, a later German name for Nerthus.
Used with other runes, berkano hides their workings until the unified result is ready to be brought
fully into being.
The stone associated with berkano is jet a black fossil wood which shows the enclosing and
secretive nature of this rune. Jet is said to be used in seeing that which is concealed and in healing female
problems.
Berkano: Meditation
(after the poems of Seamus Heaney)3
You are standing beside a low stone wall, overgrown by blackberry vines, the dark drops of their berries
hanging heavily down. Carefully you push the vines aside, hoisting yourself up and over the wall. On the
other side you see the low-growing brown cattails and green turf of the bog, laid aside in square black
cuts where the peat-harvesters have ripped it away. The peat squishes under your feet as you pick your
way carefully through the little white bog-daisies and whispering rushes, following the jagged slabs of
granite that show a safe path. A small, clear stream of water winds around the rocks, rising and falling as
your weight shifts. The ground here is soft, betraying. The little spring runs into a silent black pool like
the mouth of a sacrificial cauldron open to the gray sky. Here and there the green moss is stained brown
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