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 confused 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.
Deities and ideas are trickier. They are not so easy to kill. Thus 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 lunisolar 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.
So today is considered unlucky.
Unless one is already… sinister… I happen to deem it auspicious. This one especially so.
In the past twelve months we have had Friday the 13th in September, just ahead of the end of the harvest, leading into the season of death and the Wild Hunt and the Dark Mother who takes all back into her bosom. We had a Friday the 13th just ahead of the winter solstice, on St Lussi’s Day. We missed the vernal equinox, but here we are just ahead of the summer solstice, the night of faerie mayhem, with another Friday the 13th. I understand mathematically why this is so, but it’s more fun to think about it as a sort of dark energy vortex of synchronicity, tying three of the four solar events in the last twelve months to this lunar day.
But ok, here’s the math again. The 13th day of the month will fall on Friday about once every 212 days, and we have one or two in most calendar years. Our cycle of weeks were created to match the moon cycle as close as that is possible. However, the calendar months don’t match much of anything, except February which — being the former last month of the year — is short to make up for all the monthly overages during the rest of the year. February has been engineered to nearly match the lunar cycle. (I am not sure that this was intentional since the Romans had no love for the moon, but it is a strange coincidence if coincidence it is.)
The earth turns on its axis once every 23 hours and 56 minutes and a handful of seconds, or one day. It takes the moon 29.5ish days to orbit the earth — a lunar month. It takes the earth 365.25ish days to orbit the sun — a solar year. So there are about 12.38 moon cycles, or lunar months, in every year. Obviously, we have a critical lack of whole numbers in our time keeping, so the days wobble around. We jiggle them back with our odd system of civic months, which adds a day or two on to every lunar month except in February which gets the leftover days. We also have to add a day every four years or so, which happened last year, throwing the days of the week off of the days of the month that little bit more.
The result of all this wonky calendrifying is that Friday the 13th rarely follows patterns like this. We have just one in calendar year 2025, and yet that one falls just before the summer solstice, while the two preceding ones — Friday the 13ths that were unusually close together — matched up with the other solar events. It feels uncanny. I love it!
I thought December felt like a bonanza of goddess energy. I didn’t realize that it would keep going. However, this is it, the only Friday the 13th in 2025. So make the most of it!
Or just wait for 2026… when we have 3!
Mercurial Views
Just after sunset, from now through the end of the month, look for Mercury hanging over the western horizon. At -0.8 magnitude, this is as bright as the tiny planet gets. And it’s still high in the sky at 9pm, so even those of us under looming western mountains will get a sight of this treat.
©Elizabeth Anker 2025
By My Solitary Hearth 
It has been said that history is written by the victors. Such seems to be the case with Frigg. History can be seen as the struggle within society between hierarchical and horizontal forms of organization. Although patriarchal social organization has dominated for the last 10,000 years or so, the horizontal cultural narrative, exemplified by Frigg, has continued as a necessary counter valance to the chaos and violence of Freya and the patriarchal cultural narrative. All I can say is T.G.I.F(rigg).
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