Name Meaning:

Billow

Also Called:

Udr, meaning Frothing Wave

Color:

Light blue

Animal:

Sea birds of all kinds

Specialty:

Unn is the keeper of the sea’s relationship with the Moon – it is said that she is the long-distance lover of Mani the Moon god – which means that she is also the keeper of the tides’ rhythm. She is also a worker of time-travel magic, and mathematics.

Her Gifts:

Memory of other times. Working with time. Lunar cycles. Accepting the tides of life. Getting your head around the abstractions of higher mathematics.

Altar items:

Light blue glass sea floats. Figures of seabirds. Round iridescent moonlike shells. Pictures of the moon over the ocean. Strings of small shells, which she enjoys counting. If they can be strung in mathematical sequences such as the Fibonacci, all the better.

Invocation

image by Fireheart Tashlin

Hail, Lady of the Tides,
Heartbeat of the ocean against the skin of land,
Keeper of the memory of Time,
Keeper of the dance of months and years,
In and out, back and forth forever,
The hourglass and the spilled sand.
Hail, Lady loved by the Moon-god,
Silver track on the shimmering water,
Counting shells and sea urchins,
Counting stones and waves,
Counting lines in the sand,
You who understand the language
Behind the numbered count of time,
Help us to remember what is important,
And, even more, help us to forget.

Ritual: Counting Tide

If time management is difficult for you, if minutes and hours and days seem to slip away with no awareness of them, if you have no circadian rhythms – and you actually want to change this – ask Unn to make you more holistically aware of the rhythms of time.

For this ritual, you will need a string and some shells or shell beads. You will also need to know the times of high tide and low tide during the day you are doing this, because this ritual has two parts, and you will be doing them at those times even if you are living inland. You’ll start with high tide and then go to low tide, even if those are on two different “days” of our making – Unn doesn’t necessarily calculate “days” the way we do. If you can do this on a day when the Moon is more toward full and clearly visible in the sky for at least one tide, so much the better.

If you are a math geek, come up with a mathematical pattern that is simple and can be strung for at least a little ways with the beads you have. If you aren’t one, use the Fibonacci pattern – 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 45, and so on. (If you don’t know how it works, find out yourself before you do this rite.) Sit on the shore or before your bowl of salt water at high tide and speak her invocation. Tell her what it is that you need, and string the beads carefully and mindfully. When you are done, pour them all off the string again into a bowl. (Sometimes there needs to be undoing before there can be doing, and this is Unn’s chance to undo some of your bad habits.) Then come back later at low tide and do it over again. This time, knot the string and take it home with you. Wear it around your neck for a period of time, to help your mind get used to the constant feel of time passing and flowing around you.