This is another important festival weekend for me, starting today with the Summer Solstice. Here in Eugene, this holy tide marks the time when nature is at her most abundantly and flamboyantly fertile, with food crops plentiful, torrents of brightly colored flowers everywhere, and the warmest part of the summer beginning to descend. Accordingly, in past years I have tended to honor Sunna and the landwights at this time, to mark the height of summer. (Back east, the height of summer really doesn’t arrive until quite a bit later in the season, so this is one festival that makes a lot more sense to me in the climate of the Willamette Valley.)
This year, however, I decided to add a new facet to the festival as a way of recognizing the discovery I made a while back (by way of research presented by Professor Michael J. Enright in his book Lady with a Mead Cup) that Wodan may have had pre-German origins in Romano-Gallic religion as an aspect of Mercury connected with kingship, known as Mercurius Rex or Mercurius Hrano (the latter name, meaning “the brawler,” being closely related to one of Odin’s names in the sagas, Hrani). This pre-German Wodan was married to a little-known goddess named Rosmerta, a goddess of prophecy, sovereignty and wealth who presided over the sharing of sacred drink (a central motif in the Northern Tradition even today), and who may thus have been Wodan’s earliest known consort. When His cult moved into the Germanic lands and then Scandinavia, She was replaced by the indigenous Germanic goddess Frigga.
For me, the mostly forgotten Rosmerta resonates strongly with Gunnlod, the one female in the pantheon whose central myth does revolve around sacred drink, and who is also in my UPG strongly connected with prophecy and wealth. (Her father Suttung was a collector of treasure, the Mead of Poetry being just one of His prizes, and there is a mention, in the version of the mead story included in the Havamal, of Gunnlod being seated in a “golden chair” which strongly suggests, for me, the high seat of seidhr.) Seen in this light, the mead story—in which a powerful giantess offers Odin a rare and special drink, and He accepts it—may be preserving an older story about Wodan’s marriage to Rosmerta, and also possibly how He first became king, through being wed to a goddess of sovereignty.
Given the strong pull I have always felt towards Gunnlod and Her story, I felt that the marriage of Mercurius Rex/Wodan and Rosmerta deserved its own special day in my religious calendar, and my intuition drew me towards selecting the Summer Solstice–a festival I have always felt was connected with the mead story anyway–as that day. So, today I set out early, in the cool of the morning, for the Owen Memorial Rose Garden, one of my power spots here in Eugene and a place which for me has connections with both Gunnlod and Rosmerta. On my way there I stopped at Sweet Life Patisserie to get some offerings, and once at the garden spent more than an hour wandering the perfumed pathways, soaking in the beauty and magnificence of the roses (and snapping a lot of pictures!) before settling into my special ritual spot to spend some time with Wodan and Rosmerta, contemplating Their extremely ancient story and the threads that drew them together and that bind them still, contemplating (as I always do when considering one of my Husband’s divine consorts) which facets of Their relationship reflect upon, or can teach me more about, my own relationship with Him. Rosmerta/Gunnlod’s influence on my own path is felt strongly in my relationship with the plant wights, my practice of wortcunning, and my love of brewing as a form of sacred alchemy. Sovereignty has, in the past few years, become an increasingly important concept in my life–and all the more so since taking my oath of service to Asgard and the Wild Hunt, and of renewed devotion to my own path, last September. As I grow older (I will be 46 this year) I find myself, more and more, embracing my path without apology and without feeling the need to explain myself to those who may not understand. More and more I’m accepting the fact that the strange religious life I’ve chosen will likely not ever receive understanding or acceptance from more than one or two people around me, at most, and that’s perfectly okay. I share what I do here in this blog in case some of it may resonate with others, in case some of my own experiences and discoveries may help guide others down their own (most likely very different) paths. But I don’t need understanding or acceptance from other people; I have all the acceptance and companionship I need from my wonderful partner Jolene and from my gods and spirits–who may make demands of me that almost all others would shrink from in horror, but who will never abandon me. This point is striking especially close to home for me right now as my soon-to-be ex-husband, the man I left to become the wife of Odin nearly nine years ago, recently contacted me to let me know that he was sending divorce papers for me to sign at long last, and that it will be an uncontested divorce with no financial demands made, and which he is paying for. Not insignificantly, the papers just arrived today, as I sat typing this post.
My meditations completed, I shared some of the cake I had purchased (tiramisu, in lieu of wedding cake) with Wodan and Rosmerta and left the rest of it for the landwights at the base of a rosebush, along with a libation of home-brewed lemon balm and red clover mead and an offering of a ring, adorned with a vintage brass rose, on a length of handspun silk. Then I slowly and reluctantly made my way out of the rose garden and home, before the heat of the day could descend in earnest. I’ve uploaded my photos from the rose garden to a Flickr set, which you can view as a slideshow here. No photographs could possibly begin to capture the vast size of the garden and the incredible variety of the roses that call it home–but I’ve done my best!
Tomorrow, my festival weekend continues with an outing to the Black Sheep Gathering, an annual sheep, goat and fiber festival here in Eugene which I have designated as a holy day in honor of Frigga, another one of Odin’s divine Ladies. Frigga’s lessons to me are also very bound up with sovereignty, but in a different way. Frigga teaches me the restraint that comes from power rather than from passivity, for though She may be quiet Frigga, the Queen of Asgard, is anything but passive! She teaches me that sometimes it is better to reflect than to speak, that some secrets were meant to stay within the heart, and that considered speech and action carry more weight and more power than impulsiveness ever could. My connection with Frigga is reflected in my spinning practice, in my love of handcrafts and hearth witchery, all of which are becoming more central to my path. Odin and the Wild Hunt teach me to walk the boundaries, to journey beyond the hedge, but Frigga and Rosmerta/Gunnlod show me how to keep the hearth fires burning, and mead always at the ready, to welcome Odin back from His travels–since, being mortal, I cannot always go with Him.
I will post more about our excursion to Black Sheep Gathering after the fact–along with more photos!
