On a whim I was watching the above video about the Slavic Whisperers, Orthodox healers in Poland. As I listened to their talk about their art and their “spells”—and watched one in action—I kept thinking of the Nine Herbs Charm.

It’s the whispers, the flare of the candle, the whole of it. The Anglo‑Saxon charm says to sing it three times into the mouth, into the ears, and into the wound, then over the herbs themselves before you make the salve. In the video the healer whispers and prays while setting herbs in a similar manner. Tell me that isn’t the same technology: voice as wand, breath as carrier, prayer as medicine. Such an ordinary scene if you think about it. Backdate the clothing, roughen the kitchen, keep the candle and the bundle of green things, and it mirrors those gone times. A cloth, a handful of plants, breath laid on words. Half the power is knowing the names. The other half is saying them like you mean it.

“Woðen took nine glory‑twigs and smote the serpent into nine pieces.” – so sayeth the Nine Herbs Charm. The Nine Herbs Charm is likely Christianized gealdor—Anglo‑Saxon spell‑song—the cousin to Norse galdr. The charm doesn’t just “say some words”; it tells you to sing it three times, to breathe it into the mouth and the ears and the wound, to sing over the herbs before you make the salve. It calls plants by name like they’re people, bosses a serpent by name, counts in threes and nines, and drops that line about Woðen taking nine “wonder‑wands” to smash the poison.

The Slavs and the Anglo‑Saxons aren’t close cousins, but they share ancestors way back—really way back. So why the similarity? It’s too close to shrug off.  Watching the Slavic whisperers work—short prayers, repeated, whispered while herbs are set alight—it’s the same engine under a different hood. As if gealdor survived there too, and what we’re seeing is the art that made it through all the Christian repainting. The whisperers look to Jesus and Mother Mary. The Nine Herbs Charm looks to Jesus and Woðen.

Was gealdor—galdr—so widespread that it could have survived that far north with such distant cousins? Yes. It was common across much of Europe. In Norse, Hávamál’s Ljóðatal is a brag‑list of sung spells; Eiríks saga has a völva calling for varðlokkur (spirit‑luring songs) and Guðríður steps up; saga verse even carries a spell‑meter, galdralag, in long pieces like Buslubæn. Law codes in Norway and Iceland ban “blót ok galdra” (sacrifice and spells)—which you do when a thing is popular enough to annoy priests. In Old English, gealdor is all over Lacnunga and the Leechbooks: the Nine Herbs Charm is only one example; there’s also Wið færstice and more. Preachers railed against “galdorcraft,” meaning people were using it. On the continent you get the Merseburg Incantations—same grammar, different dialect. And outside the books you find runic amulets and scratched prayers across Scandinavia.

All that points to galdr being very old—at least Migration Period, likely earlier. Yes, humans everywhere sing magic; but the way these whisperers work, coupled with what we know from the Anglo‑Saxons and the Norse, looks like a single ancestry.

Oh, I’d love to learn from these ladies!