Norse Goddess Magic (10 page)

SYMBOLS OF THE GODDESSES

Berchte, as has been stated, is a goddess of agriculture, and the
plow is one of her symbols. She is said to have taught people to grow turnips,
⁴⁴
another staple in the peasant winter diet. Both she and Holda are also involved
with domestic animals, the traditional preserve of the earth goddess. They are
especially associated with cattle and milk, but also with goats, sheep, and
pigs. Holda's cart is sometimes described as being drawn by cows, and Frigg's by
rams (this last is chiefly from Wagner's operas, but it does make sense that a
goddess of spinning and weaving would be associated with sheep and wool, as well
as flax). The Celtic Brigid is often accompanied by her favorite white cow.

This interest in farming and husbandry is all part of the sphere of the good
housewife. Norse women often took charge of most of the activities of the farm
when the men were away “viking,” sometimes for years at a time. Certainly the
care of most of the farm animals often fell to the women of the household, and
indeed still does today. “Butter and egg money” has long been the inalienable
property of the mistress of the farmstead.

When a culture begins to domesticate animals and to farm, it creates larger
communities and more complex social relationships, which are the sorts of things
Frigg takes great interest in. It also sets the stage for the development of
more advanced arts and crafts. Without the sophisticated kinds of political,
intellectual, social, and artistic developments that grow out of a more stable
society, Odin and his warriors, skalds, and magicians would have no context in
which to operate, and this is why, despite their temperamental differences, Odin
and Frigg are a good match.

Georges Dumézil, influential French mythographer and comparative mythologist,
introduced the theory of the three-part Indo-European societal structure, which
he claims can be used as a model for understanding all Indo-European religions
and societies. The first function was that of the priest or judge and
represented the social class of kings. The second function was that of the
warrior. The third was the provider, those who supplied the means to live, such
as farmers and craftsmen, and represented the yeomen or peasants. The Norse gods
and goddesses usually chosen to represent these functions are Odin and Tyr for
the first, Thor for the second, and Frey and Freyja for the third.

There is much controversy over whether this system can be applied in all
cases, and I won't go into the pros and cons of this theory here, but I would
like to make the observation that Frigg, often assigned to the third function
because of her interest in agriculture, crafts, and fertility, is also in many
ways similar to Tyr. She presides over vows and is concerned with order,
justice, and stability. She is also a queen. Seen in this light, she and Odin
represent a marriage of the two sides of the first function and, as a couple,
make the ideal ruling partners.

FRIGG AND FREYJA

Frigg is often confused with Freyja, or even thought to be the
same goddess. Certainly the two share a number of traits, and undoubtedly their
worship and attributes have been confused and melded together over the years.
They are, however, two very different goddesses. Odin and Thor are both battle
gods of sorts, but we don't go around saying they're the same.

In the
Prose Edda,
Freyja, the chief Vanir goddess, is said to be as
well-born as Frigg, the highest-ranking Aesir goddess (Gylfaginning, ch. 35). In
some ways the two can be seen as performing similar functions for each of their
respective groups of deities, thus leading to some of the similarities between
the two. The confusion may even reflect a merging of two different cults of
worship. The ancient Romans compared both goddesses to their goddess of love,
Venus, and the Christians carried on the tradition of confusing the two by
assigning to the Holy Mother Mary many of their beneficent attributes while
banishing all Heathen goddesses of any sort to the ranks of demons and labeling
them lustful and evil.

Fertility, Healing, and Love

Frigg and Freyja share a connection with the rites most closely
associated with women and traditionally performed by priestesses. Both are
petitioned for fertility and healing and are called on in marriage and
childbirth. Both possess magical hawk dresses that enable them to shape-shift
and travel between the worlds, and Frigg is sometimes credited with possession
of a jewel reminiscent of Freyja's Brisingamen, as is Gefjon, one of the
goddesses closely associated with Frigg (did the dwarves make these necklaces
for all the goddesses?).

However, despite these and many other similarities, the two goddesses have
very different styles and personalities; each has a very different “feel” to
her. The differences may not be clear when written down on paper, but if you
invoke both goddesses in ritual, the distinction is striking and unmistakable.
While they are both interested in many of the same activities, their reasons and
their methods are very diverse.

For example, Frigg and Freyja are both called on in matters of love. But the
kind of love Frigg represents is that of the long-term relationship, the kind of
love that also has social and economic consequences. Freyja, on the other hand,
represents sexual abandon and wildness, sex engaged in for fun or for magic,
passionate love that takes no note of consequences, unconventional and
unfettered love. In matters of healing, Frigg would govern areas where rest,
quiet, and recuperation are needed, while Freyja would be more useful in cases
where vitality and the strength to struggle against disease are required. In
many cases, such as childbirth, for example, a little of both is needed. Freyja
brings a kind of wildness, a freedom and restlessness, a passion, a desire for
adventure, and an unsettling, disquieting, and yet revitalizing kind of feeling.
Frigg brings feelings of safety and stability, quiet, peace, comfort, trust,
changelessness, acceptance, security, and the kind of independence that is based
on having adequate resources, knowledge, and skills. Mother versus Lover. We
need both, and it helps to know who you're asking for what. If they share
traits, perhaps it is because they share interests and collaborate, much as two
women who are friends might do. But then Freyja rides off with the Valkyries to
collect her share of the slain, while Frigg goes off to teach women how to spin
and men how to plow.

Women's Work

I think women today tend to trivialize Frigg's functions in
favor of the wilder and more uninhibited Freyja, a symbol of the powerful,
independent, and sexually uninhibited woman. For women who are still trying to
disentangle themselves from unfair societal restrictions, many of which stem
from the medieval Christian social structure with its roots in Roman feudalism,
a goddess devoted to marriage, children, relationships, and domestic skills is
much less appealing. But we need to try to appreciate what these skills meant in
the context of the society in which the figure of Frigg originated.

Women today feel restricted and undervalued when limited to the role of
housewife, a role that is perhaps based on memories of television from the
1950s, visions of perky wives in starched dresses baking cookies for the hubby
and kids and wailing over their laundry. This role is less vital and less
satisfying today, when technology has made the task of running a household much
less demanding than it used to be. (Yes, I know it's still hard, but we don't
have to haul our own water, build our own fires, and slaughter our own
livestock, among other things.) Many men, as well as women, feel just as limited
by dull and pointless office jobs that are far less demanding than a person's
role might have been on a Viking Age farm.

The mistress of a Norse household was first of all the manager of a vast and
varied enterprise staffed by a large number of employees. Hiring and managing
the household help was the wife's job up to our own time, when all but the
wealthiest households quit using large numbers of servants. Providing fire,
food, drink, clothing, and bedding, as well as incidentals like soap and
candles, for all the inhabitants of a Norse farm was much more complicated than
microwaving a few leftovers, and if the housewife didn't plan carefully through
the winter and spring, the consequences of running out of something around, say,
February, were very serious.

Brewing and Baking

The brewing of ale and mead was generally considered the
province of the women, and in Norse society this was more significant than
merely hosting a few drunken brawls. Ale was viewed as a spiritual substance,
imbued with the power to unite both gods and humans, and without which the high
feasts and rituals were impossible. Besides their use in worship and in the
practice of medicine and magic, mead and ale were used to formalize councils; to
seal important agreements and bargains, such as treaties, marriages, and the
transfer of property; to celebrate festivals; to display hospitality and
goodwill; and to honor all important life occasions. Indeed, contractual
agreements depended on intoxicating beverages to be considered valid, and the
sharing of drink was a key element in religious ritual.

The processes of both brewing and baking have something of the holy and
mysterious about them, even today. One takes these seemingly inert
ingredients—grain and milk, honey and water—and adds this magical substance
known as yeast (in reality the living cells of a small fungus), and after a
period of hours or months, the original ingredients have mysteriously changed,
transformed into something else—the bread rises, the ale or mead ferments. In
earlier times, when fermenting was left to the mercy of wild yeast from the air,
this change must have seemed even more miraculous. Therefore, brewing was
probably endowed with the formality of ritual, incorporating special ceremonies
and practices. In the Telemark district of Norway, the people prepared their ale
with great care for fear that any carelessness might keep the brew from becoming
strong enough, which would be not just an inconvenience but a sign of ill luck
and misfortune.
⁴⁵

Thus a woman's skill in brewing was more than just proof of her housewifely
prowess; it was proof of her holiness, her luck, and her kinship with the gods.
Hálfs saga
gives an example of the significance of brewing. King Alrek's two
wives, Geirhild and Signy, had an ale-brewing contest to determine which of them
would be queen. Geirhild called on Odin, who spit in her ale to ferment it, and
she proved the winner.
⁴⁶
This shows another point of similarity
between Odin and Frigg. Odin is considered the giver of the holy mead of
inspiration, but Frigg guides the people who brew its earthly counterpart.

Milking and Butter- and Cheese-Making

The tasks of milking and making butter and cheese, another
traditional province of women, are also tinged with mystery and magic. Butter
was a highly regarded commodity in the past. In Norway old legal documents
regarding estate settlements and taxation frequently mention butter among the
assets; in fact, the value of the land itself was expressed in measures of
butter (
lauper smør
). Because it could be produced in excess of a
family's need, it was used as legal tender in trade, like money.
⁴⁷
Butter was also valued by supernatural beings, particularly the
nisser,
elflike creatures similar to the Scottish brownies. Each household had its
personal
nisse,
who helped with chores around the house and barn and
generally looked after the family's interests. In return, every Yule the nisse
expected to receive the annual gift of a bowl of rice porridge topped with a
large piece of butter. If the butter was omitted, the nisse would avenge himself
in some fairly serious manner.

Like ale and bread, the magical attributes of butter arose in the past from
the uncertainty involved in making it. Despite the dairymaid's care, any number
of disasters could occur during the process—the cow might fail to produce, the
milk might be sour, and the butter might fail to churn despite all efforts.
Unaware of scientific reasons like improper cream temperature or low fat
content,
⁴⁸
people in the past could only assume that either lack of
luck or some sort of supernatural interference was to blame. Therefore, the
dairy was surrounded by as much ritual as the brewery or the bakery.

The Magic of Spinning and Weaving

Although Norse women were skilled at a great number of crafts,
the occupations most strongly symbolic of the housewife were spinning and
weaving. Spinning on the distaff was a skill every girl was expected to learn.
Through medieval and into early modern times, spinning was regarded as the
perfect female occupation, one that required little training or capital and
could be easily integrated into the other duties of the household, because it
could be started and stopped frequently with no adverse effect on the product.
⁴⁹
Spinning was considered a vital part of a woman's life and being. Women of
wealth and power, criminals serving time in jail, prostitutes in between
customers, even the mad and the maimed—all women were expected to spin, and
indeed, it was considered their intrinsic, god-given right to do so.
⁵⁰

Spinning was so universal an occupation among European women that a number of
goddess figures are associated with it, and one must be careful not to regard
them all as patrons of spinning or to consider them all the same goddess.
However, Frigg and her German counterparts, Holda and Berchte, seem more
strongly connected with this occupation than most, and thus Frigg can be thought
of as the patron of all working women.

Weaving, which follows spinning in the creation of cloth, was also the
province of women in Norse culture and remained so well into the Middle Ages. It
is very likely that weaving was once performed by two or three women together,
judging from how the threads of the weft (those running crosswise) run in pieces
of cloth from the Viking period.
⁵¹
We of the post–Industrial Age tend
to take for granted the importance of textile production by European women.
Women wove the cloth that provided all the clothing of the household, both for
men and for women, a fairly critical job in a cold climate.

We are enthralled by the adventures of Viking merchants and explorers, but
without cloth for tents, awnings, wagon covers, and the all-important sails for
the famous Viking ships, those adventurers would not have made it very far. The
Norse produced many beautiful forms of art, but paintings were not among among
them. Instead, they used woven tapestries as wall hangings. Therefore, many of
the great artists of that culture must have been the women who designed and wove
them.

The cloth-making industry was a very important and lucrative one throughout
the Middle Ages and up through modern times, and until the medieval guilds took
over the prestigious art of weaving, it was an industry almost exclusively
dominated by women. Cloth was a major export for a number of northern European
countries and kept more than one kingdom's economy afloat. When King Charlemagne
received a valuable chess set from the great caliph Harun al-Rashid, he could
think of no richer gift to offer in return than his country's finest, a woolen
cape dyed vermillion.
⁵²
Only in modern times, when cloth is
mass-produced by machines and the textile industry has been handed back to women
workers—minus much of its prestige and pay—have we ceased to regard its
manufacture as valuable.

Spinning and weaving, like brewing, have a magical side to them. The act of
drop-spinning involves taking a bunch of loose fibers on a distaff in one hand
and forming a thread by a combination of twisting and drawing out fibers in a
continuous line with the other hand. The twisting process is aided by the
turning of the spindle, around which the finished yarn is wound to prevent the
thread from unraveling.

The spinning process is suggestive of the power that brings things into
manifestation, the shaping might that defines the fate of all that exists. For
this reason, spinning was associated with the Norns, the Norse incarnations of
time and causality. Paul C. Bauschatz, author of
The Well and the Tree,
associates the name of one of them, Verdandi (“Becoming”), with various root
words that all relate to the concept of “turning.”
⁵³
The spiral-like
movement of spun thread reminds one of the cyclical nature of the Germanic
worldview, in which life was seen as a continuously repeating pattern rather
than a linear progression.