NAVIGATION

Freyja is a Sex Goddess!

Freyja Oil painting by Swedish artist Anders Zorn  [1901]
Private collection. Exhibited at Lund's Konsthall, 1975-76

Freyja is often mistaken as a goddess of love and even fertility, this is certainly inaccurate. She is actually a goddess of sex and wanton as well as a battle goddess. Loki accuses her in the poem Loksenna of sleeping with all the gods.

Loki
30. Be thou silent, Freyja!
I know thee full well;
thou art not free from vices:
of the Æsir and the Alfar,
that are herein,
each has been thy paramour.

Freyja
31. False is thy tongue.
Henceforth it will, I think,
prate no good to thee.
Wroth with thee are the Æsir,
and the Asyniur.
Sad shalt thou home depart.

Loki
32. Be silent, Freyja!
Thou art a sorceress,
and with much evil blended;
since against thy brother thou
the gentle powers excited.
And then, Freyja! what didst thou do?

Thorpe B The Poetic Edda Loksenna

See also: http://tinyurl.com/fxbr4

The Truth about rune magic

Let’s take a look at Rune Magic.  For a start, many misleading books have been written about this subject filled with misinformation.  Many of my students in the past have asked of me “What book on runes should I purchase or what rune groups should I join?” Well the honest answer is that in no single book, group or person will you find the answers to runes or rune magic.

In simplest terms, it is a case of the individual rune student filtering out the rubbish from the good as many of the rune books currently available have some elements of truth in them, some more than others.  If you are searching to join the camaraderie of a decent rune group, here are a few guidelines in your search for truth in rune magic books or when seeking out rune groups.

1.  Avoid joining up cult status based rune groups.  Cults operate by inflicting their cult leader’s ego via imposed group peer pressure on you in an attempt to isolate you from all your real friends at the onset.  Avoid also rune groups with racist, political or hidden agendas, “inner-circles” or who readily and openly advertise for new membership.  They usually make great spurious claims about having a large following, warning you of an impending World Cataclysm which only they seem to have the answer to, tell you that it is your destiny or special mission on Earth and claim secret knowledge or sacred writings handed down to them exclusively.  What a load of rubbish.  You have a brain use it.

2.  Don’t buy books, which mixes traditions in some sort of New Age “stir fry” magical cocktail or worse still, tries to justify mixing traditions by rubbishing of the traditions of  “Old Ways”. 

3.  Strongly adhere to the verifiable 24 Elder Fuþark rune traditions.   Forget 25 runic systems, Armenian Runes or any other made up system especially if they have political agendas attached to them.

There are some very good books written on runes, mainly out of print still and more than likely not in English out there still in circulation possibly in specialist bookshops.  The essence of rune magic will be found in ancient herbal healing books and not in modern rune magic books so begin your search there.  But when you are searching for that special book which draws you, please be weary when shopping in New Age esoteric bookshops that there are books about the runes which are written by some authors who do not really understand what they are dealing with.

These authors mix and match with traditions, leave the gods out of the equation altogether or pursue an invention of strong but flawed ideas without any basis in fact, tradition or evidence. Very often filling in the gaps with elaborate ideas of their own re-designing the runes into something totally alien to what they actually are?  Avoid buying Instant rune divining kits, rune grimoires or oracle kits.  There is no such a thing if you follow in the traditions of the past.  For the want of a better word, the runes have become in this sense a New Age toy.  Surely you cannot simply make up a New Tradition without any basis in fact or historical evidence, add racist agendas to it or base it on which person you happen to be sleeping with at the time?

A good start point would be intuition.  Should intuitive ability be entrusted to a man rather than a woman on matters of family in divination?  Depending on your point of view, my case for woman taking a lead in Earth based fertility magic is as follows:

Famous image of Goddess Freyja from a 12^th century wall painting from a German Cathedral

Menstruation, the supposed scourge of the active modern woman, is a bleeding cycle rhythm characteristic of all women of childbearing age and as such looked on by primitive cultures as magical.  The feminine mysteries most probably developed and evolved from this a fertility goddess.  Consider this, if a woman was regular with her menstrual cycle, and hence not pregnant, she bleeds some thirteen times a year.  By co-incidence, calendars used in ancient Northern Europe were based on a lunar cycle of thirteen moons per year.  These were marked in runes on wooden rune staves or rune almanacs.

It should be noted that the word month is derived from the same root as the word moon.  In common with the Celts, the Teutonic races followed a thirteen-month year.  Thirteen should really be the number most associated with the lunar cycle and female fertility.  It is surely not an evil or unlucky number as it has been generally intimated. This approximately four-weekly shedding of blood by menstruating women must have as a consequence had an effect on primitive women’s perception that menstruation is a necessary part of the fertility process.  I have little doubt that female magical fertility rites of spilling sacrificial blood grew out of this belief and that female magic preceded any of the masculine magical systems.  Hence woman must have first thought of the very concept of divinity.  God is female!

 Freyja and Svipdag

REMINISCENCES OF THE SVIPDAG-MYTH

The mythic story about Svipdag and Freyja has been handed down in popular tales and songs, even to our time, of course in an ever varying and corrupted form. Among the popular tales there is one about Mærthöll, put in writing by Konrad Maurer, and published in Modern Icelandic Popular Tales.

Ref: http://www.northvegr.org/lore/rydberg/107.php

Rock carvings of the Bronze Age from Vitlucke, Bohuslan in Sweden, depict sun discs with arms and legs transformed into warriors wielding axes, which suggest a belief in a Sky God.  It has been suggested by many writers that there was a belief that the Sky God had intercourse with the Earth Goddess as part of a divine marriage, as Bronze Age carvings on a cremation urn from Maltegarden in Gentofle would suggest.  According to some accounts, Tyr, the Germanic Tiwaz who was of the Aesir, was the original Sky God.  Modern followers of this God of victory in battle revere him for his courage in sacrificing his hand to bind the Fenris Wolf whom all the Aesir feared except Tyr.  In Asatru circles, the followers of Tyr are called Tyrians and the display of courage is their trademark.  Bearing in mind that medical advances and our knowledge of the biological and physiological processes controlling fertility is a product of the 20^th century, human continuity even a hundred years ago was assured only if the female of the species remained capable of bearing children frequently.  Another factor in human existence, which we “moderns” take for granted, is the security of the food chain.  Instead of being able to go to the supermarket as we do, our ancient predecessors very existence depended on the fertility of the fields they tilled, the fruits, which they gathered, and the animals, which they bred or hunted.

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