Berkana Day 3 - Quickening the Witch's Blood and Embracing the Dark Man

I was expecting another dream, like the ones I've had with the previous two runes, to help me dive deeper into the symbolism of Berkana, but last night didn't bring me any dream visions. However, I'm suddenly gaining a lot of language for what used to be wordless territory, and so I feel I'm meant to share that here.

In my Day One exploration of the Uthark meaning of the Berkana rune, I learned that it is the rune of witchcraft according to occultist Thomas Karlsson. Guided, perhaps, by the Dark Lord himself, I have recently acquired two books about witchcraft and the witches' devil. They are The Witches' Devil by Roger J. Horne and the Song of the Dark Man by Darragh Mason (affiliate links).

It's becoming more and more apparent to me that Wiccans were in denial all along: witchcraft and the devil do go hand in hand. Perhaps this is why Wicca never worked for me, and why it felt like another formal religion with not as much tooth and claw as my red, feral soul yearned for deep down.

Now, I'm not here to review these books. Firstly, I'm only about a third of the way through both, but enjoying them immensely and will probably finish them by the end of the week, even though it's already Friday. (Having the Song of the Dark Man as an audiobook on Spotify helps, as I can finish it while doing chores.) Secondly, I don't really enjoy doing book reviews. 

However, these books led to the admission that yes, I'm a witch by blood. My mother was a witch, and so was my paternal grandmother, although neither of them used that term about themselves. This is helping me put my failed religious conversion as a teenager into perspective. I'd already flagged to the spirits that I was a witch when I played with the faeries and started trying various forms of divination as a child. You can't just pack your witch's hat away. It won't do you any good once the fire in your witch's blood has been lit by the Old One.

My mother tried to convert to Christianity, too, after she left my dad, but it didn't 'take.' And although my grandmother recanted her divinatory practices and stopped reading coffee grounds for other villagers when she was still a young woman, she slipped back into her old ways. She taught my sister and me how to perform molybdomancy, for instance. 

The Birch Phallus

So, while the birch rune, Berkana, is essentially feminine, I instinctively knew there must be a strong link to the witches' devil (which is not necessarily the same as the Christian devil, by the way). Then, after listening to the Song of the Dark Man this morning, it dawned on me what the connection was: the maypole! (Not that the word maypole was mentioned in the book, but listening to folkloric stories helped me remember.)

As a Swede, I grew up dancing and jumping like a frog around a giant birch phallus. I can't stop laughing when I think about the blatant pagan symbolism... Hello, Frey! How on earth did we get away with that for a thousand years after being Christianised? This is one of the ways we preserved the witch's fire in the blood of those who belonged to the Old One.

Making this connection also reminds me of the two frogs, strong symbols of Heka, that jumped across my threshold only a month or two ago, as I set out on my runic self-initiation journey and found a name for the path of my Craft: DrakRuna.

Love,
Lisa

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