Freya Speaks
by Ember Cooke
Freya
on the Brising Brothers
The thing you have to remember about ugliness is that it's only skin deep - a matter of perspective. Those dwarves were offering me something they knew I wanted in return for something they desperately wanted, but thought they could never have: Beauty. And yes, Me.
They could create it, yes, but they did not believe they could have it, much less embody it. Yes, they disgusted me, but they were still alive. Everyone has needs. No, I don't just mean sexual, though that too. I mean emotional. People need to be touched. Don't you feel that?
What did the dwarves have but each other and their craft? It wasn't enough. So they used what they had to get what they needed. And so did I. It was a fair exchange, and I did not come out worse for the bargain. From my touch they can now create far more beauty in the world than they could ever before that necklace. The necklace is just the beginning. It's a symbol. A doorway.
Freya on Possession Trance
I am very kind to horses. I know horses. Sometimes I am a horse myself, yes? (Freyja is sometimes called "The Mare of the Vanir".)
That's a joke, but it's not. Seidh is my way in many ways, and if I am to teach it to others I must understand its practice, and you being a horse for me to ride is your Seidh... think you that I have never gone in the other direction simply because I am the rider with you? No, you would not ride me, of course, but that doesn't mean nothing can teach me. All "mysteries" have source. We do not simply craft your "mysteries" out of nothingness. Something from something from something in effect after cause and over and over in cycles. If I cannot understand my own magic from both sides I am hardly worth my title.
So you are afraid of being ridden by me. It cannot be helped. Do you avoid everything you fear?
Fear is not something to be banished so that work may be done. Fear is something to be worked through. If you wish to grow in my direction, you must accept the fear, not wait for it to depart. I cannot stop your fearing me, because it is not me you fear, but the loss of yourself. You know you will not be lost, and you fear it anyway, because you do not understand the paradox.
There are elsewheres within yourself you may be without departing and still make room for me, and most of them are quite pleasant, really. You have a well developed creative mind, after all, from childhood on. I can send you in instead of out, and would you know the difference? No, but perhaps understanding that you fear less, no?
Or do you fear missing as much as you fear getting lost? You don't want to not know what I am doing with you. You don't want to not remember. You want the proof of the walking dream to validate you, but at the same time you do not want to be gone for what I do with you. Is it a hope, then, or a fear that drives your work in this?
Freya on Freyr:
My brother has his own goals, and if they happen to coincide with mine, who am I to complain? You underestimate him, though. There are ways he has with men and women that have nothing to do with my ways. Because he is so often underestimated, he is often unexpected - subtle. People have grown used to me. They think they see me coming. That's not particularly true either, but let them think it, it only makes my job easier.
My brother, though, people know on the surface who he is, and some dig deeper, and most even who dig deeper find themselves ignoring what they find, not because it does not fascinate, but because it simply does not register in its simplicity. Simple things are not easy things. The deepest mysteries of the earth are the simplest things by far. Life is very, very simple.
When it becomes complicated it may be understood by categorization. It's when things are at their least that they are most, and most confusing. My brother always speaks of seeds. He's working on the same point slowly, the patience he is driving is required for the lesson. By delaying what he tells, reiterating, he draws back your attention to the simplicity, and the mystery of what he has first said. Do not mistake this for him having little to say.... but you must wait until its proper time, and he knows when that is, and if you don't like the timing, there's really nothing you can do... a plant dug up before its time bears no fruit.
Freya on Death:
Your society values life so greatly they have forgotten how to value death. Once death was valued as greatly, and that gift was offerred to me at times, as blood upon my altars. Your values now tell you this is a great wrongness. You set out to consume the carcass, but bear no witness to its demise. You know, logically, that this is not right, but in your hearts you cannot bear to watch what you are so often told is only the destruction of value, having no value of its own.
How can it lack value, when you feed off it? How can you help but feed off it? It is what it means to be alive that you feed off the dead.
Oh, does that sound disgusting to you? "Eaten alive" sounds worse, no?
You are horrified by the thought of war because your heart is gentle, and you would wish to cause no more harm than you must. The harm is already caused. Your people overun the world, and that is to be expected from such inventive beings. But you must choose. You cannot be masters of the world and serve only half its purpose. If there is to be life there MUST be death, and if you will not deal that blow then someone else will, and with far less care.
Animals do not live longer for your failure to make the proper sacrifices. You are simply saved from watching them bleed. And so they die with no care for their pain or the value of their death whatsoever, and you worry that animal sacrifice is a waste?!
Everything we do teaches you to be mindfull of your actions. Mindfull of the effect you have on the things around you. This is very simple and yet so nearly impossible that those who wish to maintain the thought must pare down their life to a mere shadow of its full activity. The human brain cannot comprehend everything that goes past its senses at the kind of speed that would be needed for you to truely notice everything you do to the world you live in. We ask far less of you than we might, but we will never ask less of you than you can do.
How may you value death? Witness it! To feel the blood with your bare hands is at least a metaphor. It's a metaphor best understood through experience, of course. It is to hold power in your own hands, but you deny it, because it seems ugly. That power is anyone's. Do you fear yourselves? Do you fear each other? Perhaps you are wiser to fear yourselves, but it gets you nowhere. To cause a death would be, in a sense, to teach you ultimate control within your context.
Do you fear what you will feel, what you will see? Yes, of course you do. Death is "the great unknown", but it's not, it's the other half of a cycle you fail to understand despite embodying it. And you will never understand if you cannot bring yourself to face what you imagine to be a horror.
Death, you have read, and intellectually agree, is neither good, nor bad. It merely is. But you do not believe it. You follow as though it were instinct, the belief that death is the worst kind of evil, second perhaps only to pain. Your animal instinct will tell you that only your own death is this evil, but your empathy carries that intuition out to cover all of your kind - all you can identify with. In this sense vegetarians are in a way more advanced than their omnivorous fellows - they are, one supposes, able to empathise with far more kinds. Of course they're forgetting the plants, but that's neither here nor there. In the end they, too, have missed the point. It is not the avoidance of death that drives life, but the consumption of it. So you consume the dead. So death ultimately consumes you. It is a cycle so simplistic you fail to address it entirely, but everything you do kills something. Step on a blade of grass. Suffocate a bug with your car. Never mind food.
And what of war? War is the natural result of two populations that want one resource. Sometimes that resource isn't what it seems. Oil, you hear people declare, is the resource of conflict in your Middle East. Look again - what argument of morality is tossed into your teeth as propoganda?
They do not battle for mere physical resources, but for the limited resource of their God's favor. Whether it be truely limited or not is completely beside the point, of course - they believe it is, and so for them it is.
All resources could be used to better effect with a certain amount of creativity. I suppose that is the up side of your devaluing of death - it brings out your creativity as a group, this perpetual avoidance.
Artwork by Telari.