The Daily: 13 October 2023

Friday the 13th

Today is judged unlucky by many. It is the weekday named for the goddess, Frigg, mother and matron of the Norse. She is wife to Odin, the wanderer and all-father in the Nordic pantheon. She is mother to Baldur, the golden summer lord who dies from a dart of mistletoe wielded by her other son, the blind god, Hodr. Frigg is sometimes conflated with Freya, the Vanir goddess of passion and war, but this may be no more than a modern inability to hear the difference in their names. Their personalities were wildly different.

Frigg presided over the home, over married women, over birth and over hearth magic. She created the seidr, the tools of healing and foresight. She was accounted wise and steadfast, giving sound advice and remaining calm in the midst of upheaval. She fiercely protected her children and all those who called on her. But she was a quiet deity. She watched and saw all, but she rarely spoke. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that her words are seldom found in the sagas. She was a woman, unconcerned with the affairs of men, taking pains to avoid war and passion — unlike Freya who courted chaos — and so the scribes were uninterested in what she represented.

Over time, particularly under the influence of the sky gods of desert and steppe, Frigg was relegated to the inferior realm of woman-things. But there is a memory of feminine power and mystery that cloaks Frigg, and domestic deities like Frigg, in frightening shadows. It is not enough to forget these strong and, more importantly, uncontrolled feminine deities; they and the women who honored the womanly divine must be silenced.

Mortal women were easily censored. A few burnings in a community and the rest of the women rigidly policed themselves and their daughters for generations, often forgetting what it was they were forbidden to know and speak.

Gods and ideas are trickier. They are not so easy to kill. And so men turn to ridicule and demonizing. Frigg was reduced to a pale figure in the dark corners of the home, her name hardly remembered — except in the ancient northern name of the sixth day of the week. Frigg’s symbols, particularly those associated with prophecy, were turned into evil; and evils from other cultures were heaped onto her memory — such as an association with the ill-favored number thirteen.

The number thirteen is considered unfavorable for the rather petty reason that there are thirteen moon cycles in the solar year. The cultures that most annoyed the Roman Empire were also those that followed luni-solar calendars, that is, they were not following the Roman ordering of time. They looked to the moon. Perhaps because they were irritatingly independent in this manner, or maybe because there was a memory of all the times that those barbaric cultures with different calendars brought down the Empire, the civilized elite viewed the moon as treacherous and capricious. Cultures that followed the moon were, likewise, deemed duplicitous, not to be trusted, uncivilized and uncivilizable. All lunar things took on this taint — including the number of months and, significantly, the number of times a woman menstruates in the year. And then, in a brutally neat trick, women and all things that men could not control — from ovulation to ordering the household to the changing face of the moon — were dumped into this bin of deceitful lunar darkness.

Thus the number thirteen is unlucky. Friday, named for the shadowy but powerful mother goddess, is similarly unlucky. Taken together, Friday the 13th is ill-luck magnified. But it’s worse today. A Friday the 13th in October, the Roman solar month that corresponds to the last month in the northern luni-solar calendars, the end of the harvest and the end of the year, the season of death and the Wild Hunt and the Dark Mother who takes all back into her bosom — well, this day is outrageously inauspicious, a symbological affront to the whole patriarchal project.

So today is considered unlucky.

Unless one is already… sinister…

And she smiles her sharp, feral grin…

Rather Friggy Music

Here is music that gives a sense of the world of Frigg — this YouTube video is an album teaser for Seidfylgjur by Rúnahild, who calls herself a “free spirited ethereal folk & folktronica project, hailing from an off-grid wooden cabin in the mountains of Norway”. If you’d like to explore more of Rúnahild’s art, go here.

A few autumnal poems flowed out this week, proof that I am starting to feel better after this miserable summer. Thought it was an auspicious day to share a few.

at times we climb some crag
clambering above the clinging fog
blinking down from new found height
at a sea of confusion
and all our efforts
to rise above entanglement
are lost to this occlusion
our monuments and memories
sanctified still life rendered
in sundering isolation
peer out at us
from the pale murk of time
bleary exhaustion painting faces grey
like smooth new pavements
reflecting our needling fears
whispering in the glaucous light
this too shall fail
and monoliths crack
crumbling to dust
to sully fingernails of the unborn
away with your eternities, fools!
there is aught but this flow
time dripping from tree limbs
bereft of leaves in autumnal twilight
you are already forgotten
mislaid in the mists
and never more material
than laughter
or tears
your striving buys no time
nor memorial...
but show care to an ailing insect
and you are re-membered
to the very edge of being...

i am pursued by the uncanny
synchronicity flows around me
in words overheard
merrily skipping after unspoken rumination
in double impressions
of silhouette and facade in dark mirrors
in oracular dreams
made tangible in mundane morning light
what are these things
that scorn definition,
dancing away
from the rigid rules
of approved perception?
why are they?
and why do they come to me?
is it the whiff of witch
drifting off my skin?
or perhaps the innocence
that never loosed its hold
on my heart?
i see, perhaps, because 
i did not learn not to…
and this vision
leaves its eerie mark

hoary skies lowering
brooding on grey mountains
while leaves scatter
freed from summer’s mooring
riding northerly gales
to the song of soughing branches
through staccato raindrops
— in this dark fall
i am lulled to sleep

©Elizabeth Anker 2023