Friday the 13th

The sixth day of the week was a High Holy Day (Sabbat) in honor of the Goddess.

Friday is Frigga’s day.  Frigga, the queen of the chief Norse god Odin, is the goddess of heaven, of love, fertility, motherhood and domesticity.  Friday (named after the Goddess herself)  was actually considered quite lucky by Teutonic & Pagan peoples, especially as a day to get married — because of its traditional association with love and fertility.

She is associated with Venus, which is why the Romance languages call Friday things like vendredi (French) and viernes (Spanish) and venerdi (Italian) and dies veneris (Latin) and vineri (Romanian) – all meaning "Day of Venus") while Germanic languages stick to Frigga-based words such as - apart from “Friday”, obviously - Freitag (German) and vrijdag (Dutch) and fredag (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish).

Friday - a day sacred to the goddess queen, mistress of the skies and of the heart and hearth, a seer, a visionary and a magician as well as a noble, loving spirit.  Friday - a woman’s day devoted to a weekly celebration of womanhood.

 And thirteen, a number that is considered to have great power in many belief systems, and seems to hold the world in thrall somehow. It is a number that is deeply womanly, tied in with the 13 lunar cycles of the year and the 13 menstrual cycles of woman – symbolizing conception, birth and death. (13 cycles every 28 days = 364 days).  In ancient gematria, the number 13 symbolizes the “Vesica Pisces”, (fish) the sacred symbol of the Goddess, and when added together, 13 (1+3) equals 4 – the ancient symbolic number of the Goddess as Great Mother of All That Is.” 

 Just to digress a wee bit, the fish (symbol of the Vesica Pisces and representing the sacred feminine Goddess) was the feast food prepared and eaten on her celebration day – hence the earliest origin of the custom of eating fish on Friday.)    

Still more about the number 13 -  

Did you know, for example, that 12 spheres around a 13th sphere create a compact geometrical shape in 3-dimensional space? A thing of perfect simplicity and beauty?

And in history, we see twelve disciples and their leader, Jesus; we see 12 knights of the round table with their leader, Arthur, and we see the 12 high priestesses with their Goddess Isis, and the 12 women who gathered under the moon with the Goddess Frigga/Freya. 

 In the cosmos, there are 12 constellations that are related (revolve) around the sun.  In nature, turtles, often used to symbolize motherhood (think Turtle Island = Mother Earth), have 13 cornea plates on their shell, and crabs (symbolizing Cancer the ruling planet of the Moon) have 13 plates on their shell as well.

13 is the seventh number in the Fibonacci sequence to (1,1,2,3,5,8,13), an important, mysterious and powerful sequence of numbers that is also related to the Golden Section. It is also a prime number.

So there is something all-round magical about the number 13. But for our purposes today, the most magical thing, the most sacred thing, is the link of this number to the sacred feminine - it is the number of a woman.

Friday the 13th is therefore doubly lucky, doubly womanly, doubly sacred - if you are the sort of person to make these connections. Friday, the day of a powerful goddess - allied with 13, a sacred and powerful number intimatey connected to womanhood.  It is our day to celebrate and honor all things woman.

So what happened to all the feasting, and dancing and singing and honoring? 

No one can really say for sure, but there are some very interesting hypotheses out there…..

Ancient artifacts, depictions, statuary and temples, dating back some 35,000 years have been found to support the theory of Goddess worship and matrilineal focused societies.  The "Earth Mother of Laussel," for example — a 27,000-year-old carving found near the Lascaux caves in France often cited as an icon of ‘mother’ focused spirituality — depicts a female figure holding a cresent-shaped horn (in the shape of the moon) bearing 13 notches. As the solar (masculine) calendar triumphed over the lunar (feminine) with the rise of male-dominated civilization, it is surmised, so did the "perfect" number 12 over the "imperfect" number 13.   

There are some who speculate that the number 13 may have been purposely vilified by the founders of the patriarchal religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) in the early days because it represented femininity.

The Goddess is mentioned (by name) 49 times in the Old Testament.  Ancient Babylonian texts pay homage to her and Homer wrote poems to her.  “Goddess culture” didn't 'fade away', but rather fell victim to centuries of persecution and suppression.  The attempts to destroy the Goddess and all traces of her is recorded from as early as 1800 BCE. Her temples and shrines were taken over or desecrated, destroyed and burned. The original meanings and representations of the sacred symbols of the Goddess and her wisdom (apples, trees, snakes, etc.) were rewritten to represent temptation and evil.  Instead of revering her, people were taught, mainly through superstition to fear and revile her - and every practice around her.

And there were some bad things that happened on Fridays and involved 13’s to reinforce the superstitions……..

In Norse Mythology, twelve gods were invited to a banquet at Valhalla. Loki, the Evil One, god of mischief, had been left off the guest list but crashed the party, bringing the total number of attendees to 13. True to character, Loki raised hell by inciting Hod, the blind god of winter, to attack Balder the Good, who was a favorite of the gods. Hod took a spear of mistletoe offered by Loki and obediently hurled it at Balder, killing him instantly. All Valhalla grieved.

And, it was on a Friday (supposedly) that Eve tempted Adam with the forbidden fruit. Adam bit, as we all learned, and they were both ejected from Paradise.

Tradition also holds that the Great Flood began on a Friday; God tongue-tied the builders of the Tower of Babel on a Friday, and the Temple of Solomon (which was originally a temple to the Goddess Asharte/Astarte) was destroyed on a Friday.

 Then there is the Last Supper - held on a Friday, with 13 present - at which Jesus’ fate was sealed by the 13th man, Judas - and after which the Lord was crucified on a Friday.

The Knights Templar (a sect many surmise protected Mary the Magdalene after the crucifixion of Jesus)  held Friday the 13th as a holy and sacred day, and so it was on Friday October 13, 1307, that officers of King Philip IV of France carried out a raid on their main temple that left several thousand Templars — knights, sergeants, priests, and serving brethren — dead or in chains, charged with heresy, blasphemy, and various obscenities and subject to excruciating tortures and execution  by burning at the stake.

 Speaking of executions, Friday became known as “execution day” – criminals were typically hung on Fridays, (Hangman’s Day in England) and Friday was the day many of the “wyches” were gathered, put on trial and having been found ‘guilty’ of heresy, blasphemy and various obscenities themselves, burned at the stake.

Here’s another  “Goddess Legend” around Friday and the number 13:

In order to stop the worship of the Goddess Freya, she was banished to a mountain top with her beloved (black) cats and kept prisoner in isolation. 

One night the Goddess called to the 12 Wyches (healing wise women/priestesses - pronounced wee’ka) by ‘coercing’ the wind to carry her voice down from the mountain.  She had called the women to gather with her spirit under the light of the full Moon and sent her beloved black cats to carry her essence to the circle.  The women, thrilled to be reunited with their Goddess, were dancing in ‘spirited abandon’ when (as the legend goes) the Devil, enticed out of the darkness by their sensual movement, joined them, creating a circle of 13.  (This is where 'dancing with the devil' and the coven of 13 originated.)

After that, Friday, which had been the feast day of the Goddess, became known as the "Wyches Sabbat"  - or Witches Sabbath.   The Wyches, instead of embodying the essence of the Goddess as nurturers, healers and wise women, were linked with the attributes of the Devil - some early religious leaders and priests convinced the pagan (read heathen) people who still worshipped her that women were without souls and could not stop themselves from using their sexuality to seduce, undermine or curse men, and thus needed to be protected from themselves as well as protecting others from them. What had once been sacred and revered was forever after associated with darkness, temptation and evil.

So, instead of hiding our heads under the covers on Friday the 13th - I encourage all of us to take back Friday the Thirteenth as our day of divinity - to celebrate the Great Mother, the Goddess, the Deity in whose image we were created!! 

Eat fish, dance with abandon, savor each minute of the day!! It is time to reclaim our herstory - as 'ourstory', it is time to begin the process of rewriting and restoring our geneology.

It all begins with a subtle little shift.................