#verbal magic

And the world hears.

You caress with your voice, your breath a lover’s finger that trails down the spine of fate,

And the world hears.

You command, you seduce, you bargain,

You kiss, you whisper, you shout, you sing

To paint yourself a world with breath and words,

Does speaking a charm in its "non-native" tongue diminish its efficacy in any way?

In fact, in some senses, speech during a ritual is critical to the success of the operation and, since speech is an incorporating act - it establishes a channel of communication between speaker and hearer - it must be carefully controlled. Some rituals specify that certain parts must be performed in silence, presumably because speaking will dissipate or misdirect the healer's control over the powers he expects to release.

An alternative to speech, language may be written, and a written formula may encompass and preserve the power of the charm and the ritual. Runic characters cut into horn, wood or bone and smeared with the charm-worker's blood, may have allowed better, more precise or more permanent control than mere spoken words.

Runestaves, the characters themselves, allowed communication between the worlds of men and gods, the secular and the sacred; it is likely that runes were used in divination and sortilege as a means of interpreting the flow of events. Runes and charms could both mediate between the inner and outer realms, the home and the wide world.

[...]

Charms are well evidenced in the Old English corpus, being mostly either non-religious or of only a vaguely religious character. Prayers do not seem to form part of the tradition outside of the specifically Christian, and mostly Latin, formulas present in the Lagnunga. Charms are potent in themselves, forms of word and deed which unleash power, while prayers are appeals to outside powers for their intervention. Spells are an attempt to bind these powers to the user's will."

Impossibility formulas are a verbal means of magic which express (as is common in incantations) the wish to attain a particular concrete aim (that illness should end, the disease demon should depart or the grain should grow, etc.). These are arranged into some sort of parallel grammatical structure which follows the metaphoric vision of incantations. Similes as well as metaphors, which are syntactically more hidden, are evidently means of analogic magic (may X happen just like Y) and provide the most common structure for incantations worldwide.

Impossibility formulas provide very widespread and varied subgroups of this type of magic (at least in European cultures). The lead sentence of the similes refers to some ‘impossibility’ in an affirmative or negative form, i.e. stating it as ‘truth’ or ‘a lie’. This may be a natural image, process or empirical fact (rocks grow no wool, water will not run backwards). It can also be a reference to a rite which is supposed to be carried out while reciting the text, e.g. this grain of barley (which the charmer throws into the well) will/will not sprout.

Finally, and most relevantly to our present subject matter, the simile can refer to a mythical or legendary event or a miracle (such as cannot take place in the present context, e.g. Christ can/cannot be born once more). After the lead sentence the wish is introduced in a clause starting with as/when/if. This wish can be formulated in several different ways in terms of its truth value or logical structure, as compared to the content of the lead sentence. It can be an affirmative, optative or negative statement, depending on the truth value of the lead sentence (the process of recovery, for example, can be connected in a logically straight or a reverse fashion to the impossible condition depending on the concrete content). The text may specifically include an impossible condition (e.g. the onset or return of some trouble may be tied to a condition) or give an ‘impossible’ task to a belief creature. As we shall see, the possibilities are extremely varied. Structures of the if – then, when – then, just as type can serve as frames for the emergence of spontaneous texts. The ‘impossibilities’ of the lead sentence, as we mentioned above, are permanent elements of the texts, either as natural images fixed in a poetic form or as fragments from biblical texts or motifs of legendary recoveries. According to twentieth century practice, these are then applied to the familiar structure, or adjusted to the momentary situation of recovery, as textual motifs known from oral tradition (incantations and other genres). In the process of cultural transmission, these motifs find their way into other types of incantations, as well as into different genres.