Bodagetta, bodagetta, bodagetta, bah. Rah, rah, rah, sis, boom, bah! Weagle, weagle, war damned eagle!
One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them in and in the darkness bind them.
Stop, in the name of the law!
Kýrie, eléison; Christe, eléison. . .
Hey, battah, battah, battah, battah, battah, battah—Swwwwwwwing battah. (He cann’t, he cann’t, he cann’t, he cann’t swwwwwing battah.)
Bloody Mary.
Some of my examples may be flip but I use them to prove a point. We often chant when we expect the chanting to cause a change outside of ourselves. And what we chant indicates what we find sacred.
But there are some chants that we use to generate an internal change:
Oṃ maṇi padme hūm.
God grant me the serenity . . .
Hashivenu Adoni elecha . . .
Austri, Vestri, Sudri, Nodri, ykkarr megin vaka hirzla fastr!
And I don’t mean affirmations, a la Stuart Smalley. (As a matter of fact, have a look at TBWFiles post on “Visualization” for this week.) I mean substantial mystical incantation; not the kind of chanting that has handrails and a giftshop.
In völvaspæ, we have two kinds of enchantment: the long chant and the short-cyclical chant. These are the vardlokkur and galdr respectively.[1] Of course, in further posts, I will discuss things like vocalizations and yoiking—some things my Northern European ancestors share with my Mvuskogee ancestors.
Some sources define vardlokkur as a sort of galdr; but to me, they seem very different. To me, a vardlokkur is a song of at least three sections (forgive me for showing my loss of music theory here) like an intro + middle 8 + outro. A galdr may be long but it has a cyclical, nearly monotonous character. Both are used for inducing trance and performing seiðr, but galdr’s repetitive nature seems to indicate that it is more goal-oriented whereas I find vardlokkur more useful for its general, lulling, sight-inducing quality.
But that’s me.
It’s also my experience that when dilatants hear vardlokkur, they get a little freaked out. But that’s also my experience. If you read my post on “Trance” in TBWFiles, you know what I mean. It could be the combination of the haunting sound in (in my case) an archaic language mixed with the strangeness of trance to the uninitiated—it could be the effect that vardlokkur can have on the hearer as well as the vocalist. Whatever it is, there is a completely mystical quality to vardlokkur that is strange. But it is unfamiliar by design. Estrangement (Verfremdungseffekt, in theater or literary studies–ooh, another V word) is what keeps us from losing ourselves in passivity during oracular work.
Plus, one of the tricks with vocalizations in mystical practice is that we have to say things in formulae rather than shooting from the hip or going with our gut. Someone untrained wouldn’t get that, enjoy that, or appreciate that. (Once, this was about 2008, I tried sharing a bit of a vardlokkur with someone whose reply was, “I just don’t like being told what to say.” *headplant*) Many times, newer practitioners don’t value or even realize the discipline that has to go into mystical chanting. Often, we have to learn the words of others, in the language of others. And we have to pronounce them precisely for them to have any meaning at all. Just ask anyone practicing Enochian or The Barbaric Names.
Some folks might want to believe that this is a fib that magicians like to tell in order to be elitist, but the truth of the matter is that if we believe that sound produces effect (and most Pagan religions employ incantations for this reason)—the wrong combination of sound would, therefore, create the wrong effect or no effect at all.
With such incantations, intent doesn’t matter a smidge.
The vibration, the resonation, and the pronunciation (especially of vowels, in my experience) make all the difference. Therefore, those working with dead-languages have to rely on the opinion of linguistic reconstructionists. That’s a bit above my paygrade, especially in terms of Hittite or Sumerian where the phonetic structure is um, er, can I say—alien? But in terms of Old English or Old Norse, we have etymological structures that help us as guideposts.[2]
Plus, if you are working with a living-language, you are in luck as you can find those that still speak the language to give you a hand—help you understand the plosives from the sonorants and the vowels that could be misunderstood as English fricatives.[3] This is especially true of languages that have different phonetic structures. Consider—I had a teacher once (ironically a Postcolonialist from Australia) who, while planning her honeymoon, asked me why Maui was pronounce mauw-ē and Kauai (actually Kaua`i) was pronounced cow-ī. In her opinion, they should have rhymed.
I’m working on longer sets of vardlokkur for Ulfarnir[4] with some of my more musically inclined Pagan-friends. It’s fun, but it’s hard work—and a real learning experience.
If you need some to start you off, I recommend these by Faenon (on DeviantArt).
Aaaaaand . . . I would be remiss if I were to not discuss this last thing about vardlokkur.
I have seen dozens of posts on the web about how vardlokkur is the original word for Warlock.
Let me dispel this popular piece of misinformation.
Warlock comes to us by the Old High German and Old Norse wær = vow and leogan = lie. Originally it applied to giants (like Philistines) and cannibals. It doesn’t get the ck ending (as a replacement for the ch sound) until 1300 at which time it becomes associated with “male” and—of course, because Europe is Roman Catholic by then—“of the devil.”
Contemporary Icelandic tends to keep-hold of most Old Norse meanings and “vard” means “get” and “lokku” is “lure.” This makes total sense since a vardlokkur is intended to call the spirits—to lure them, to get their attention.
What’s more, to “guard” in Icelandic is “vörður” and “songs” is “lög.” We call vardlokkur ward-songs even today.
Dual meanings were not lost on our brilliant ancestors.
To confirm this, the Oxford English Dictionary of Usage states that, “Old Norse varðlokkur . . . incantation, suggested already in Johnson, is too rare (occurring once), with regard to the late appearance of the -k forms, to be considered [as the origin of warlock].”
In other words, vardlokkur is not the origin of the word Warlock and has abso-freaking-lootly nothing in common with its root meanings—except for, perhaps, Catholic hatred.
[2] And I’d love to talk to you about The Great Vowel Shift one-day. (It answers why the difference between an “a” and an “o” in the second syllable changes the first vowel sounds in words like “women” and “woman.”)
[3] There are very few Mvskogeean words in my natural lexicon; I mean, we didn’t speak Creek at home—right? But I know enough to know that “hvtke” (white) is either hoot-key or haht-ki depending on where your kin is from.
I’ve heard some folk try to pronounce Southeastern tongues as if they were English. *shrug*
[4] We have some old and proven galdr, some that I’ve been using since the 90s—but I realized we had no long-songs.
This post is for Rowan Pendragon’s The Pagan Blog Project, picking up where TBWFiles was–at “V.” The Pagan Blog Project is “a way to spend a full year dedicating time each week very specifically to studying, reflecting, and sharing . . . . The project consists of a single blog post each week posted on prompt that will focus on a letter of the alphabet” (http://paganblogproject/).
Witchcraft From Scratch 