Freya is one of the most misrepresented figures in Norse myth. Popular culture tends to reduce her to a love goddess — beautiful, desirable, defined by her relationships. The actual Freya of the Eddas is something far more complex and considerably more powerful: she is a warrior who takes half of those slain in battle. She is the greatest of seiðr practitioners, and she taught that shamanic magic to Odin himself. She drives a chariot pulled by great cats. She is not someone who needs rescuing.

Freya belongs to the Vanir, the second tribe of Norse gods alongside the Aesir, and this distinction matters. Where the Aesir — Odin, Thor, Tyr — tend toward order, law, and the structured exercise of power, the Vanir are associated with fertility, magic, nature, and the wilder forces of existence. Freya brought seiðr to Asgard after the war between the two divine families ended; her magic is older and stranger than the rune-craft Odin is known for.

Working with Freya in my practice has meant learning to hold complexity without needing to resolve it. She is simultaneously the goddess to call when you are looking for love and the goddess to call when you need to go to war — and in a Freyjan context, those two things are not as different as they might seem. Love requires tremendous courage. War requires knowing what you are fighting for.

Her sacred animals — the cats, the falcon — appear in my life with enough regularity that I have stopped being startled by them. Amber is her stone. Her day is Friday — Freya's day — and I try to do something that honors beauty and pleasure on Fridays, because Freya also takes genuine delight in the good things of life. That delight, that unashamed enjoyment of beauty and pleasure and connection, is part of what she teaches.

The offerings she most appreciates, in my experience: mead and honey, flowers (especially red or gold), amber, and sometimes the performance of something beautiful — a song, a poem, a piece of artwork made with care. She is moved by beauty and by genuine emotion. Meet her there.