Freya and Practical Magic

The Norse goddess of practical magic. A patient introduction to Freya, the cats, and what working magic looks like when it is done by someone with a household to run.

Most working magic in the western canon is taught by figures who are imagined to live in towers, caves, or wilderness. Freya is the exception. She lives in a hall called Folkvangr, which translates roughly to the field of the people. She has a chariot. The chariot is pulled by two large cats. She wears a falcon-feather cloak that allows her to travel; she also has, at home, a household to manage, a sister to keep up with, and a husband who is in the bad habit of disappearing.

Freya is the goddess of magic done by people who have other things to do.

What this looks like in practice

The Norse practice associated with Freya is called seiðr, and the working version of it — not the academic-historical version, the actual living tradition as practiced by working seers — has three useful qualities that the practitioner can borrow without claiming any deeper initiation.

First: it is brief. Most seiðr workings are short. Half an hour, an hour at most. The practitioner is not expected to disappear from the household for a weekend retreat to do the working. The working is integrated into the rest of the life.

Second: it is portable. The working can be done at the kitchen table, in the garden, on a chair facing the window. The elaborate temple is not the working. The elaborate temple was, historically, mostly unavailable to most working seers. The working seers worked at home.

Third: it is functional. The questions seers were asked in the historical record were not metaphysical. They were practical. Will the harvest come in. Is the missing person alive. Should I marry this person. What is wrong with the cow. Freya's magic was for the questions that real life kept asking.

The two cats

The two large cats who pull Freya's chariot are not decoration. They are the iconography's small joke about how a person actually runs a working magical life. The cats are not predictable. They cannot be commanded. They go where they go. The practitioner who works with Freya learns early that the magic does not arrive on a schedule. It arrives on its own time, like cats, and the working seer learns to be ready when it does rather than to try to force it.

This is, in our experience, the most useful single lesson the figure has to offer working practitioners. The magic comes when it comes. The practice is to be ready. Readiness, not control, is the entire technique.

A small Freya practice

For practitioners who have houses, jobs, children, and limited evenings: a portable working.

Once a week — the traditional night is Friday, which is named for Freya — take fifteen minutes in a quiet seat in the home. A chair facing a window is traditional. Sit with the practitioner's actual current question: not the abstract spiritual one but the real practical one. Should I take this job. Is this relationship going to keep being worth it. What is wrong with the way I have been spending money.

Sit with the question for the full fifteen minutes. Do not journal. Do not consult. Just hold the question. Let the mind wander. Let the body breathe. Let whatever wants to come up come up.

At the end of the fifteen minutes, write down one sentence — the most surprising or specific thing that came through during the sit. The sentence might be a memory. It might be a name. It might be a feeling.

That is the working. Do it weekly for a season. Over the course of three months, the practitioner will accumulate twelve sentences. The twelve sentences are usually pointing at something the practitioner already knew but had not allowed themselves to say. The pointing is the magic. Freya does the pointing. The practitioner does the saying.