How I became aware of Frigg

by Jessica Pape-Green

[This post was originally posted to WordPress and may have formatting errors as a result to being moved here.]

This post is part of the "30 Days of Deity Devotion"

I don't think I really noticed Frigg my first time around the "interested in Norse mythology" block (high school). When I started poking at the idea of becoming heathen back in... I want to say 2012? I still didn't really pay attention to her. In fact, the idea of working with gods put me off, made me sick, because of how traumatized I was by my experience with Christianity.

Originally, I had only wanted to learn more about Norse mythology because I wanted to read runes better. I wanted to learn more about Norse paganism because it was interesting. Everything from there was just a "gateway" or "slippery slope" to the next thing. I took a lot of interest in Yggdrasil and eventually had a mini-altar for it. My interest in Yggdrasil grew into an interest in Heimdall because of their connection and because Heimdall was aligned with my interests at the time and became he was a very safe god to start working with.

During this time, I was aware of Frigg, but didn't pay much attention to her. I feel like most modern women are trained not to look at or care about homemakers. Like, I respected stay-at-home moms and homemakers, but I didn't think twice about it, and no one really understands how hard and demanding it is until they've done it.

When you're brought up a modern feminist, all too often you're trained with idea of "Well, that's all fair and good, but it doesn't have anything to do with me."

After I moved, I found it hard to keep up with Heimdall. He had been my Study Buddy, basically, and I had no time to study and I didn't have the energy when I did have the time. I tried to keep up my relationship, and he was patient, but that's the thing about Heimdall - he's not really there if you don't spend a good amount of time and energy connecting. He has a shitton of other stuff to do, so he rarely purposefully seeks out people's attention.

Less than a year ago (I honestly don't remember exactly when), I was taking a bath and listening to a witchcraft book. This book was about hearth-based witchcraft, which I had grown an interest in, in an effort to finally get a hang of this homemaker thing. It reached a chapter on goddesses of hearth & home, and I wasn't looking for any new gods, but I let it play anyway.

And then it goes over Frigg. And it's a very basic intro, telling me nothing that's new to me, but it's like I suddenly went Galaxy Brain. I sat up, grabbed my Kindle, and started browsing my various mythology resources to make sure I'm remembering her correctly. And it just felt so right. This was who I needed to work with now. I'd been having trouble with Heimdall because I didn't need Heimdall for my new life, I needed a take-no-shit grandma to take me under her wing.

Shortly after that, we got our farmer's market gig that we hadn't even applied for this year. Within a month, someone on Tumblr referred to me as a Friggsperson when I hasn't identified as such. Old me would have resisted that and current me had a brief moment of feeling like I hadn't "earned the title yet." (I then realized that Friggsperson/Friggswoman isn't a title or even an oath; it's a description of what your relationship to Frigg is.) It was another galaxy brain moment like

"Oh shit, I guess I am a Friggswoman."

Some pagans who mostly work with one god feel "called." Some describe being able to look back on their life and see that the god in question had been trying to get their attention for quite a while. That's both similar and dissimilar to my experience with Frigg. I don't think she sought me out or had been calling me, but I think she knew where I belonged and was waiting for me to get there. It feels like destiny, like I had to go on the religious journey I went on in order to get to her, similar to how I had to have a shitty on-off boyfriend and a huge betrayal from my best friend and happen upon a funny animorphs blog in order to get to where I'd find my wife and be open to her.

And it really didn't hurt that I'd gotten that Galaxy Brain moment on a Friday.