“I see the promise,” said the woman. She pulled aside the ragged shawl of the Little Match Girl and showed her, just over her heart, a red stitched cross. “This is the Gebo rune, it is a promise made truly. You must honour that promise, or put another in its place of equal value.”
This quote is from the very beginning of a ‘sequel’ to The Little Match Girl offered to me by the goddess Hulda (you may know here as Frau Holle). I wasn’t expecting the Gebo rune to appear, but it became a motif threading its way across the whole story. It offered the proposition: what happens if we do not fulfill a soul contract?
There is nothing in the very sparse literature about soul contracts in the Northern tradition lore BUT there is a great deal about obligation, an assumption of some form of life after death, an agreement that the dead can knowingly ‘pass on’ their luck to another person, and a whole host of names for different parts of the soul about which we know next to nothing. Which is why we have to go searching for ourselves.
Just after recording Hulda’s take on The Little Match Girl I read The Valkyries’ Loom by Michèle Hayeur Smith – an excellent, incredibly detailed book about Norse textiles. It reminded me how fragile the archeological record is, and how easy it is to overlook the convenience of the straight-lined runes for stitching as well as for carving. The sacred space of the spinning and weaving-house is so far, far from our modern consciousness – and yet the trance states achieved even with a moderate skill with the drop-spindle are undeniable.
Have you ever knotted a thread to remember a promise? Sat spinning in the birthing room? Worked magic inside a back-strap loom? Worked, for hours, untangling balls of yarn? There is SO much magic in thread work. If we have severed ourselves from the spirit world, then spinning and weaving are, without doubt, two powerful ways to reweave the bridges between worlds.
Of course, in my tale, no one sews the threads in place – they become visible to The Little Match Girl on her death. A promise made during her life created them. The Gebo rune is the rune of gifts and promises – hers is a promise made truly, one given from the heart.
A soul contract may be a modern term, but the idea of being bound by fate and of participating in our own binding is ancient. The Gebo rune never demands a transactional reciprocity, rather it speaks to our own integrity – when a promise is made it becomes part of us, written into us, woven into us. Denying it is to deny part of ourselves.
The visceral magics of knot-making (sacred to Loki by the way), spinning (Frigga and Freyja) and weaving (the Nornir) allow us to work with the subtle energies of the soul – to make manifest that which binds us and so work with it.
Hulda offers The Little Match Girl an exchange for her promise – a promise made of equal value. An interesting way of considering devotional work with a deity – perhaps it is never as simple as a gift, perhaps it is always an exchange – a giving of what we can no longer carry in exchange for something we can.
Hulda’s Tale works on the supposition that unkept promises can stop us crossing over into our next stage of evolution. It might be death, or it might be a New Year beckoning – full of promise but with the potential to have you repeating the same mistakes and experience the same challenges as before.
Where does your spirit want to cross to? What is holding it back? Some of those constraints may well be practical, but others might be promises made long ago that now need to unpicked and released. This work might seem complex, but a great place to start is with an old ball of wall or string – the tangled the better. Work it through, straighten it out, unkink it – as above, so below, as without, so within.
If you would like to listen to all of Hulda’s Tale it is available in my Sunna’s Star Wheel subscription through December 2024 and January 2025. If you’ve missed it, never fear, we have a new tale shared in the Star Wheel every month.
