Witch meme!
As a response to certain people always telling us their demigod loves us, I've made this
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Witch meme!
As a response to certain people always telling us their demigod loves us, I've made this
A Brief and Study
Unfortunately, my mother raised me business-minded, sooo... yeah
13 Ways to Honor Lady Freyja in Your Life
Freyja (lit. "The Lady" in Old Norse) is the Vanir Goddess of the domains of Love, Sex, Fertility, Death, War, and Magic. She is a major goddess in the Norse Pantheon, and is widely credited with teaching the Aesir Seiðr, a longstanding tradition of fate-weaving whose practice goes back to women in late Iron Age Scandinavia.
Freyja has many associations, both within traditional scripture and modern pop culture and witchcraft. Animals associated with Freyja are cats (Her chariot is pulled by two cats, as shown above), boars (Her mount, Hildisvini, is a giant boar), and falcons (Her cloak, Valshamr, allows her to transform into a falcon and fly across the nine realms). She's associated with the colors White, Red, and Gold, and the traditional crystals associated with her are Amber (known as "Freyja's Tears"), Red Jasper, and Rose Quartz. Some flowers and herbs that are associated with The Lady are Daisies, Common Milkwort (known as "Freyja's Hair" in traditional Scandinavian), Columbine, Mugwort, Primrose and Roses. Her day of worship is Friday, and her associated number is 13.
Below are some things you can do to honor Her:
Transitions and the Gods
One of my favorite special-effects sequences is in the movie 2012, where, as Los Angeles is sliding into the Pacific Ocean, the protagonist has to drive as fast as he can through town to a private airport on high ground. The buildings on either side of the street waver and begin to fall, raining giant bits of debris into the streets. On the big screen, if the viewer lifts his eyes from the action, he can pick a random floor of any of the falling buildings and watch the meticulously-detailed little people running back and forth inside the glass windows, trying to find their footing as their particular skyscraper totters to its final collapse. The end of the world is happening very suddenly, all at once.
Some cataclysms are like that. I imagine the Roman city of Pompey was treated to an apocalypse of that sort when the volcano Vesuvius blew, sending out a dense pyroclastic flow which hit the city and covered it swiftly with a hot mantle of ash and poisonous vapor. There was not enough time, or oxygen in the air, to flee doom’s descent.
On the other hand, most cataclysmic transitions in the history of human civilization have run a lot more slowly. While the Romans of Pompey probably fled screaming before all-encompassing, rapid-fire destruction, a later generation of Romans, those who lived through the fall of their Empire, went through a very different experience. When the city of Rome itself fell to barbarians in A.D. 476, that too was probably a pretty cinematic disaster-type experience. But for most people, those who lived a hundred miles down the road in various villages, smaller cities and farms, systemic collapse moved much more slowly.
At first, there would have been annoyances. A few shops in any given community probably had to close once it became clear that the supply-chain bringing them inventory was shut down for good. Travel to far-flung places probably ground to a halt gradually as stories came back about blocked roads, the lack of police patrols on highways, and rumors of other major cities having to close their gates to prepare for siege operations by the “orcs” running loose away out yonder.
As local magistrates and government officials discovered that they were no longer being paid, they had to close the doors of their offices and look for work elsewhere. A good many people probably found that the economy no longer sustained good-paying jobs, and they were forced to work at whatever they could . . . at whatever poor wages were offered. As parties of barbarian “hoods” began arriving here and there in the countryside, and stories of their violent depredations started to spread, there was probably, typically, some wealthy local landowner, someone who’d run a big agricultural operation for lucrative markets locally and for export as well, who may have lost his markets, but still had a work force and a band of armed men, perhaps former soldiers, to police his property and keep that work force in their proper places.
Now, his security personnel probably became, in effect, a little army, and local independent farmers were offered deals. “Bring your implements and your skills, join my work force, set up on my land, give me a part of what you produce, and I will offer you protection.” Life became simpler, more local, and less dependent on the imperial systems which had once sustained it. There was less luxury, no more consumption of manufactured products from far away, more necessity to grow it, recycle it, or make it if you needed it, whatever it was. In some distant places, cities fell, populations were decimated by war, famine, and pestilence, but for most people, summers, for instance, remained calm, warm affairs, lived to the music of the humming locusts, and the routine sounds of people engaged in hard labor. At night, despite the collapse of systems and the fall of governments, in more remote places the quiet stars would have shone overhead as they always did, and the seasons would have wheeled by in their eternal succession.
At that time, most people living within the former Empire were either Christians, or on the verge of conversion. And here’s why. A century previously, while the Empire was still whole, the Christian emperor Theodosius had used his autocratic power to order the closing and destruction of all pagan fanes and temples, and with it, prohibited all teaching and acts of devotion to the gods, on pain of incarceration or even death. The ancient gods, suppressed and forbidden, withdrew into the shadows where only a few die-hard crypto-pagans carried on their rites secretly, until, in most cases, those old believers died out. In some cases, it is possible that traditions were held and maintained by certain communities until the present day. Those traditions, of course, would have changed over time. Dionysus's thyrsus may have become the witch’s broomstick, and sophisticated neoplatonic rites held by classically-educated Roman crypto-pagans may eventually have provided the frameworks and foundations for certain kinds of rural rites performed secretly in the dark shadows of medieval forests. Most people, in the meantime, comforted themselves with the teachings of the church, and found a different kind of stability in the rites and cyclical life of masses and feast days, sacraments and seasons.
In the current day, we see some signs of systems-collapse, of the decay of long-established understandings. Even the seasons of the year seem to be losing their structure and stability. If we are on the verge of a transition to a new order of things, I expect that for most of us, the changes will come without the sudden spectacular and dramatic effects that we might anticipate as cataclysmic transition takes place. The problems facing us will be serious, and then, as in the past, spirituality will become one of our most powerful resources in facing the challenges coming down the road.
In the western hemisphere, Christians have well-documented historical models of how to cope during a civilizational apple-basket turnover, and Muslims practice a faith that formed its models in the very world left behind by the systems-collapse of the Roman, and neighboring Persian Empires.
Western pagans, on the other hand, have only the model of a retreat into secrecy and shadows. What would we do under modern circumstances of slow, but catastrophic, change? While new, intolerant Theodosius-like leaders are a possibility, so also is the chance that, without the kind of wide-spread net of authoritarian bishops such as late Rome had, pagans could well remain free to live and worship as they choose. At least in some places. In a dark time where people might have a more deeply felt need for gods, might paganism gain a greater strength and rootedness? If it does, what will our models of spiritual stability be, and how do we avoid becoming what our monotheistic forbears became, medieval oppressors of those who did not believe as they believed? More in the next entry.
Samhain Ultramarathon 13/100
It's hard to get into it all because there was SO much, but yesterday was very enlightening from a very important historical book I stumbled across on The Internet Archives to discussions I has with my Spirit Guides and Familiar. It was all just much needed feelings of inspiration and new lessons, and I feel like a snake which has shed my skin very overdue!
New emotional beginnings.
People be calling my faith to complex because I recognize multiple divinities, aspects, and perspectives and embrace them. Even though some of the religious perspective I have do conflict at times (christianity, paganism, and astrolatry).
Meanwhile they only believe in one true deity yet have multitude of discrepancies and conflicts within their teachings and instead of challenging it or thinking about it or accepting it, they just get pissed at you for questioning in the first place and go back to their “simplicity”.
We are not the same.
