A Definition of Love

I've been reading bell hook's book, All About Love.  I'm less than halfway into it and over the past few days an idea has crept into my head.

In the Lore, there are many stories that describe other groups trying to barter for "ownership" of Freya.  Any witch could tell you, that ain't happenin'.  But the desire to gain control of Her has often been interpreted to mean an attempt to gain control of Her power.  Which leads to the question what is Her power?

Many scholars, men mostly, see her power as a goddess of love as the power over sexual desire and passion or pleasure. I'm not going to say that isn't an aspect of Her.  It is a valid interpretation.  But what if the definition of Love is not sexual desire or romance?

What if the definition of Love has more to do with spiritual evolution?  Bell hooks uses the definition from The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck to steer the discussion in her book around What is Love?, What does Love look like?, How do we love (verb)?.

"as the will to extend one's Self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth."

What this means is when you love someone, you behave in a way that respects and supports their soul.  You make decisions with their needs and best interests in mind. Not just the needs of their current self but their future self in a best case scenario.  You keep in mind not just who they are but who they could become.  And when it comes to self-love, you treat yourself the same. You make decisions that support your own evolution, without harm to others.

We often talk of the runes as "forces" in society, the cosmos, the world tree.  Like Fehu is cattle, mobile wealth, but also the force in the world that makes possible the cycle of birth-life-death/rebirth.  Like a type of gravity that pulls our souls through the different stages needed to begin, complete, and let go of this life and into the next if you believe in reincarnation.

If we take it a step further into the left-hand path, or apotheosis, Love is the force not just of spiritual evolution in this life but into another form of life.  If the ultimate goal of evolution is to eventually ascend to a god-state, then Love is the force that will propel that forward since It is the force of the soul's evolution.

Applying this to Freya's lore can completely alter it's esoteric meaning.  The most obvious story about Her right away in Snorri's version is around the building of the wall of Asgard.  The giant asked for the sun, moon, and Freya as payment if he finished the wall by the agreed deadline.  The Aesir really didn't want to give these things up so Loki was tasked with sabotaging the building of the wall in order to get out of the deal.  He did it by "distracting" the giant's horse.

Why did the giant want Freya?  The sun and moon make sense since both are part of the cosmic order, the celestial cycle that ensures the worlds will live, and with them the people that inhabit them will survive.  But why Freya?  Many scholars would have readers believe it is because of her beauty, her status, or because of her supposed ability to inspire ecstatic passion.  And there is definitely a place in spiritual practice for ecstatic experience. There are living traditions where dancing yourself into a trance is a form of ecstatic expression of spirituality. Christians rolling in the aisles when possessed by the Holy Spirit is another ecstatic religious practice. The Yogi using physical postures and trance states to evolve their spirit.

But this ecstasy,  this overwhelming force, isn't just an adrenaline ride.  What if the next step is a transformation of the Self?  The Love that floods into you that triggers the ecstatic experience could be literally altering your cosmic DNA, rearranging your Soul into something higher and more refined and powerful.  Through ritual practice, through a continued exposure and incorporation of this force, the soul itself could ascend.

Ecstatic Love could lead to the kind of spiritual development that could create a new god.  What if the giant wanted to be a God?

The Jotunn to this day have been demoted by heathens as forces of nature, mindless and dull witted, very Id driven.  It is often mocked and ridiculed when authors write articles about why the Jotunn should be considered gods and are worthy of worship.  Skadhi and Tyr are two that come to mind, Jotnar of high status who are worshiped as gods, allied to the Aesir through oath/marriage.

Perhaps there are Jotunn that were worshiped as gods, and are respected to this day as such.  But not all may have been. Maybe this is what that giant building the wall wanted, to be a god.

Freya's power may have been more than orgasmic or pleasurable. It could have been the power to transform the mundane into the sacred.  And so the pin-up posters of naked Freya, the poems to sex and gymnast postures, are a weak attempt to capture this desire, but also cheapen the Awesomeness of Her power.

Many of us feel God Hunger and want to reach out and connect.  We want to be closer to the Ones we worship.  It is Love that we feel.  In our limited human experience, it can often take the form of a sexual fantasy or a romantic feeling.  Not out of disrespect, but out of a limited toolbox of options for expressing this kind of Need.  It is lazy and easy to reduce a god of Her stature to a sexual fantasy so a human can better relate to Her.  Men especially, since they are socialized to want to own and control women they desire.  They have been objectifying goddesses as they objectify human women for some time now.

We have forgotten what it means to be in AWE of our gods.  We have belittled Their powers into posters, movies, and sound bites, something consumable for the masses.  If this is the definition of Love and Freya is a goddess of Love, then it is imperative we get passed the objectified image of Her in order to fully let Her in.

We have lost much to the Christian destruction of our pagan ancestors' traditions and rituals. We don't know what they said in prayer, what their daily practices of faith were.  Even the songs sung to light the hearth fire at the start of the day are lost to us.  But we can build new practices and write new songs. And if we keep this Love in mind, perhaps we can finally make the same deep and strong connections our ancestors did.