There are so many ways to celebrate the changing of the seasons. One popular way is by following the eight holidays of the wheel of the year. For quite a while I did just that and made little rituals to celebrate Beltaine, Lithia, Lammas and all the others. I have really sweet memories associated with each and beautiful pages of my witchy journal to commemorate.
These days my pagan practice and craft is going off the path of the typical holidays of Neo-Paganism & Wicca and following a more intuitive path.
The solstices & equinoxes will always be an important to my practice and I have been celebrating the rebirth of the sun by giving my practice a rebirth in its own way ~ by giving my altar a tidy and even getting to know a new goddess!
Maybe you have heard her name Freya, Freyja, or even sometimes synchronized with another Norse goddess as Frigga. I like to call her Freyja and from what I have learned she rules over love, beauty, and witchcraft and - surprisingly - also associated with warriors.
Lately she came into my life and I have felt called to share about incorporating her into my cult of ancestor veneration, herbcraft and goddess worship.
Some of her associations, specifically with love and beauty go well with the path I have been on since my teenage years. At a very young age I was enamored with the symbolism of Aphrodite.
I see Freyja, Aphrodite, and Venus as different faces for the same primordial goddess. Each culture has a goddess like her, birthed by the union of the Earth and the Sea who symbolizes beauty and love. So it has felt very natural to include Freya in my practice of honoring beauty and art by creating a beautiful place for these goddesses to visit me in my home.
To mark the start of this new cycle of the sun and initiate myself into collaborating with this new goddess I decided to give my altar a tidy. I composted all of the dried flowers that had been there since fall and changed out the altar cloth for a unicorn design.
During the last few months there have been so many signs to explore the Norse pantheon and the language of the runes. I am a great admirer of mythology and folk tales from all over the world. But, as my ancestry is entirely European it just feels right to ask for the favor of the deities of pagan Europe. Since childhood I have aligned myself with the Greek pantheon and more recently the Celtic goddess Brigid.
In a string of synchronicities I was gifted with four ceramic cats made by a friend. At first I thought to dedicate them to the Egyptian goddess Bastet who is the protector of domestic cats. But then I kept hearing the name Freya or reading about her as I did research for other projects. And when I learned that Freyja travels in a flying carriage drawn by cats I was sure that a new path was opening before me.
I made a space for her alongside Brigid and Demeter. Each with certain artifacts like flowers, gems, and divinatory tools that I associate with them. There is so much more to learn about the runes, about Freyja, and the mythology of the Norse. But, this is exactly the kind of research that I love to do, that adds so much enchantment to my life.