A couple of days after the birth of Embla the Manitokan, I woke up from a dream which I titled “Yellow Panties”:
We are camping out on the banks of a river in no-man’s land, my husband and I. There is a younger couple staying close by and we intend to go have dinner with them... The scene shifts to the interior of a cave. This, apparently, is the destination we sought, the “restaurant”. On our way back, I recognize places we passed through going there. The young woman knows her address, street name and number, but I do not know mine. I am confident, nonetheless, that I will find my way home. We go into their room with the younger couple. I never see the man, I just sense his presence, and that of a young son as well. The image of the blond woman, however, is clear to me. There is a double hook on the wall, reminiscent of horns, and on the right-hand hook hang bright yellow panties. The panties fall off the hook. Laughing we hang them up again, as if they are a piece of art...
By evening, the meaning of the yellow panties came to me and I reached into my tarot bag for the 9 of Birds from Rachel Pollack’s Shining Tribe Tarot.
 9 of Birds from The Shining Tribe Tarot by Rachel Pollack |
Can you see why the yellow panties lead me to this card? Of course you can, given how emphasized the vulva, which panties ordinarily cover, is in the image! And look at the stylized owl at the bottom of the card! Doesn’t it give the impression of a double hook? The owl is a well-known symbol for wisdom due to its farsighted, nocturnal vision and the popular belief that it can turn its head backwards. Those are traits the owl shares with the völva (Icelandic for a ‘seeress’; the word is derived from Lat. vulva, volva meaning ‘womb’), who can see far into the past and the future.
The yellow triangle on the figure emerging out of the tomb points me back to a blank yellow road sign I was making in a dream, as I embarked on my Manitokan-project (see link above):
I sit on the ground and hammer on an iron rod to which is fastened a blank, pointed, yellow sign.
 wielding the hammer! |
In my blog on the Manitokan, I wrote: “As it is with dream symbols, this simple image is pregnant with meanings. Suffices to say here, that I had thought about putting up a sign at the entrance to the grove to indicate that it is dedicated to Freyja. That the sign in my dream is yellow, I take as a positive omen. It may indicate that by following the path onto which I am treading, something which was previously buried in the unconscious will emerge into the light. It may point to this path as a way towards liberation of the female energy trapped in the treetrunk [...]. That it is blank and of my own making, tells me that I am deliberately heading towards the unknown. The act itself, hammering an iron rod, would traditionally be associated with the masculine, and calls to mind Thor and his legendary hammer. Here I am channelling my power into a creative act that seems to lead towards increased consciousness.”
I am in awe of the resourcefulness of my unconscious in conveying guidance to me. The day before the dream about the yellow panties, I had set my mind on following a different road. I wanted to engage in further studies. But no, said my unconscious, you will be better served by following the sign you were making in your dream. Pursue the road onto which you have embarked, my dream advises. Do not be led astray! I decided that the sign intended for the entrance to Freyja’s Grove would be my next project.
It was last night that I came to this understanding. I woke up this morning with the word “owl” twice repeated in my mind, and before even contemplating the dream beyond the yellow panties, I knew exactly where to go. I needed to free the daughter of the Farmer at Fossvellir from her imprisonment in a cave.
Behind my drive to understand this old Icelandic folktale is a personal experience, a connection my dream shines light on in order to make me see why the fate of the farmer’s daughter has had such a hold on me:
tumbling on the chair in the kitchen nook oblivious of my torn panties when his anger hits me like a slap in the face like a stab in the heart. Indecent girl! He curses me with vehemence with rage I curl up in shame defenseless frozen she sinks underground my young vulva, my enemy I became two. Oh, I hated that girl. The knife turned against myself with vehemence, with rage I screamed every time she stirred up the memory, why did you do it! go away, get lost, go to the bottom of the sea! |
My mission to free the daugher of the Farmer at Fossvellir is an act of redemption for the cruelty I vented on the girl in myself who stood on the threshold of puberty. The fate of the daughter in this folktale makes me understand that my painful experience is rooted in the collective, driving both him who caused the wound and me, the wounded, who perpetuated it.
Before I go to the story, I feel like reflecting briefly on two tarot cards which mirror the wounded heart: the 3 of Swords in the Rider-Waite deck and the 3 of Birds in Rachel Pollack’s Shining Tribe Tarot. Where the former shows stabbing as a fait accompli, indicating that something is finished and has left us in pain, the latter takes us further and shows how the pain can be transformed and healed.
 3 of Swords from The Rider-Waite Tarot designed by Pamela Colman Smith |  3 of Birds from The Shining Tribe Tarot by Rachel Pollack |
In the 3 of Swords we see the pierced heart under crying clouds, reflecting our mental state under such conditions. In the 3 of Birds, Rachel shows us how we can transform the pain by taking hold of it and reliving it instead of pushing it away. The red hand has dug deep into the wound in an effort to grasp the meaning that underlies the suffering. What task is called for? How can I transform the hurtful experience into something constructive and useful? According to Rachel, the three swords transform into: a red snake symbolizing visions, light which represents self-knowledge, and a river that shows released emotions (see her book The Shining Tribe Tarot: Awakening the Universal Spirit).
In my dream about the yellow panties, yellow is the predominant color, pointing towards self-knowledge, but the river is there too, and the dream itself is a vision of transforming events taking place beneath the surface. By following the unravelling ball of yellow thread handed me by my dreams, I feel confident that I will unearth the key to some mysterious part of myself.
So here is the story, titled “The Farmer at Fossvellir”. Foss means ‘waterfall’ in Icelandic. The name of the farm is derived from its location on fields by a waterfall. The events are believed to have taken place in the eighteenth century.
The Farmer at Fossvellir |
from Icelandic folk-and fairytales, III, collected by Jon Arnason (I have left intact the jumping between past and present tense typical of the oral tradition) |
In earlier times, a farmer lived at Fossvellir on Langanes (‘long-point’). The farm was located a short distance from Saudanes (‘wether-point’), but is now deserted. This farmer had many young children, but one daugher was oldest. She was given the task at night to drive the milch ewes out to the Foss-river which cascades down from the heath, not far away from the farm. In late summer, the girl complained to her father that she had been pursued by a rock giant for two consecutive nights. Crying, she asks him not to make her drive the ewes the third night. The father becomes angry and accuses her of inventing this story in order to evade having to tend the ewes. “You will, nonetheless, drive the ewes tonight,” he says. So that is how it had to be and she took the ewes out to the Foss-river that evening.
When, at bedtime, the girl has not returned, the farmer begins to suspect that his daughter has been telling the truth. He sets out to the Foss-river, but the girl is nowhere to be seen, and he returns devastated by sorrow and regret. At dawn the following day he rides over to Saudanes, to see the minister who resided there, and gives him a detailed account of the situation. The reverend says that he cannot free her from the giants to whom she has been bewitched – “and we must, without delay,” says he, “send a messenger up north to Muli (‘projecting mountain’), to the minister there who is my brother. He will be able to have your daughter released.” At that, the minister writes a letter and expedites it with a messenger to his brother. The messenger arrives at Muli and delivers the letter to the minister, along with the Saudanes-minister’s greeting. The minister reads the letter and said: “These are bad news, for the farmer’s daughter is in the hands of the most evil giants here in the north, and if we have not arrived before three suns have set at Saudanes, these evil beings will have bewitched her so potently that it will be beyond repair.” Having said this, the minister prepares in haste to leave with the messenger.
They ride night and day and manage every time to exchange their out-worn horses for fresh ones. Even so, they did not arrive at Saudanes until three days had passed. Then the Muli-minister said it was already too late. They nonetheless gave in to the farmer’s pleading and both clergymen went with him to the Foss-river and to the waterfall that is in the river. The Muli-minister pulls out a wand and strikes on the rock. At that, a large door opens into a cave. The minister conjures the one who is in charge to appear, and immediately a dreadful giant comes to the door. The minister asks if he has abducted the farmer’s daugher. The giant says that this is true. “Let us see her!” the clergyman says. The giants then let her come to the door with an iron chain around her waist.
The clergymen are taken aback by her fearful appearance, she’s become big like a giant and blue like Hel (in Norse mythology the goddess of death who was half blue and half skin color). No human resemblance could be seen except the baptismal-cross on her forhead which was white and with natural skin color. When she sees her father, she asks the giants to allow her to kill him, for he is to blame for all her misfortune. But the Muli-minister orders her to go back into the cave and never again come before the eyes of man.
The Muli-minister then asked the rock-giant: “Are there many giants in your cave and what do they sustain themselves on?” The giant replied: “We are five and get our food from a lake full of fish which is in our cave.” The minister then conjures the giant to go back in. The cave closed on his heels and the minister stepped away from the door.
It is rumored among wise men, that red runestaves are still to be seen on the rock, in the place where the door was. But as he witnessed this whole event, the farmer became overwhelmed by sorrow and lived but a short time afterwards. Following this, farming was discontinued at Fossvellir and nobody has lived there ever since.
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When put in the context of myth, The Farmer at Fossvellir teaches me that the pubescent girl is conceived of as a threat. She creates a split in the father who desires to possess his daugher. The daughter is tabu. The father abhors his illegitimate desire and projects his negative feelings on the daughter who becomes the culprit. If the father does not recognize or denies his desire, it goes underground where it becomes magnified and distorted. The daughter will then have to engage in a subjective wrestle with her father’s shadow who gobbles up her libido, her creative energy, while on the surface she has to fulfill the role of a dutiful and obedient daughter. As long as this struggle goes on, she is trapped in her role as the daughter of a father who thwarts her need to discover her talents and blossom into the unique individual that she is meant to be.
Like a dream, the folktale takes us beyond the rational. If we open ourselves up to it, it speaks to us holistically and we may find it difficult to rationalize the meaning we derive from it. Clearly I cannot prove that my understanding of this tale is right. I can only say, that for me it is. I take what is not said in the story to be just as important as that which is. Silencing of that which we despise in ourselves is a defence mechanism, rendered all the more forceful by the demand that we become imitations of the church’s interpretation of the perfected male-Christ. The quest for immortality, granted humanity through Christ’s sacrifice of his bodily existence, was driven mercilessly by the masculine force embodied by the male gods of my ancestors like Odin and Thor, precursors of the Christian god adopted by Icelanders in the year 1000. All those many centuries later, The Farmer at Fossvellir betrays an acute tension between the heathen past and the Christian church. The tale forces me to look my alliance with the repressive powers in the eye. It is not without pain, that I see in the Muli-minister’s banishment the reflection of my own attitude toward the girl in myself, whom I dispelled to the bottom of the sea for having accidentally exposed herself in the kitchen nook of my childhood. The Farmer at Fossvellir brings home the message, that the distant reality of the human race still informs the life of modern man.
The eighteenth century, when the events described in The Farmer at Fossvellir were supposed to have taken place, was a dismal period in the history of the Icelandic people. The previous century, sometimes referred to as the age of witchcraft, had been marked by burnings at the stake. In the pulpits, nature in its broadest sense was reviled as the devil’s playfield and the vigilant eye of a punishing god upheld as a deterrent against the sins of the flesh. In the tale, the daughter becomes a scapegoat for the irreconcilable split between heaven and hell advocated by the servants of the church.
The tale presents the father figure on two levels, the earthy farmer on the one hand and the spiritual fathers, representatives of the heavenly father, on the other. The latter decree that the daughter is a victim of enchantment by evil forces. This is emphasized through repetition. Her accusations against her father are silenced by the reverend father who shuts her up in the cave. She is a threat, not only, I suspect, to her own father whom she wants to kill, but also to the churchfathers and to the general image of the Father with all the power invested in it.
Underlying this tale, staged on the human plane, on a specific Icelandic farm, is an archetypal pattern. Just as the mother of Freyja, goddess of love and fertility, is hidden from view in the myths, so is the mother of the farmer’s daughter in the tale. Freyja’s father was Njordur, a fertility god and the archetypal farmer. The fertility cult was based on the cyclic rythm of the moon and the seasons, the cycle of death and rebirth which is echoed in the menstrual cycle of woman.
The symbol of Freyja’s initiation into womanhood was a gold necklace, Brisingamen, which, as the story (recorded by Christian scholars) goes, she acquired by sleeping for four consecutive nights with four dwarfs who had their abode in a rock.
 The High Priestess from Tarot of Northern Shadows designed by Sylvia P. Gainsford |
Sylvia P. Gainsford captures the essence of Brisingamen, as I understand it, in her tarot card of the High Priestess whom she depicts as a winged Freyja in the nude. As can be inferred from her cascade of golden hair, this priestess is a personification of the sun, who is feminine in Norse mythology and Germanic languages, while her blue wings and horned helmet allude to her lunar nature. What we get is a female figure who is whole in herself. Freyja’s necklace is here composed of the crescent and the full moon with, in the place of the heart, a six pointed star-pendant. The six pointed star signifies the merging of the elements of fire (the upward pointing triangle) and water (the downward pointing one). The coming together of those opposites symbolize the coniunctio, or ‘sacred marriage’, which underlies the seidur, an ecstatic rite of divination and healing, practiced by the völva and taught to Odin and the aesir-gods by Freyja. It depicts an intercourse between the conscious and the unconscious, between our solar and lunar natures, which is a prerequisite for any original creation and healing to take place.
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It does not take much ingenuity to see the common motive behind the folktale The Farmer at Fossvellir and the myth about Freyja’s affair with the dwarfs. Dwarf or giant, both were associated with the moon, who was a primary divinity before the aggressive aesir-gods, incarnations of the solar principle, won out over the fertility deities of peace and plenty. Consequently Njordur and his children, Freyja and Freyr, were adopted into the heavenly household of the aesir presided over by Odin All-Father. Odin was jealous of Freyja’s liaison with the dwarfs and had her jewel stolen from her. She was to be his lunar lover mirroring his solar splendor, his muse. He wanted her for himself, completely. No more messing around with the old moon-god was an urgent message patriarchy sent out to women.
The theft of Brisingamen indicates a reversal of roles that was enforced by demonization of woman’s menstrual nature, held sacred by the fertility cults of old. Menstruation was widely believed to be caused by the moon-spirit, and a girl’s first bleeding was frequently referred to as a deflowering. Menstruation thus had a sexual connotation in the minds of men. The monstruosity of the farmer’s daughter in the eyes of the clergymen in the folktale bespeaks patriarchy’s attitude towards woman’s menstrual power. Her gift, symbolized before by a gold necklace, has become a curse, symbolized by an iron chain by which she is bound to primitive, mortal nature.
As Odin stole the jewel from Freyja, he also stole the mead of poetry from Gunnlod, a giant maiden. After tricking his way into Gunnlod’s rock, Odin lay with her for three nights, swallowed up the precious mead to the very last drop and left Gunnlod crying behind. Because of this lauded feat, poetry was attributed to Odin as his gift but Gunnlod disappeared from view, completely. I was adamant at the injustice I saw in this account which showed no concern for Gunnlod. Where is she? What happened to her, I kept asking myself.
I now wonder whether she is not the farmer’s daughter in the tale and whether the lake full of fish in the giants’ rock is not of the same substance as the precious mead, the living source at the root of our being. The fish is a fertility symbol associated with the origin of life. Before it became a sacramental symbol in the Christian tradition, it was associated with the great goddesses of the fertility cults. Many a folktale relates how the dream of a sterile queen leads her towards a stream where she is to catch and eat a fish that will restore her fertility.
Going back to my dream about the yellow panties, and given my mission to free the daughter of the Farmer at Fossvellir from her imprisonment, I believe that the food my husband (‘my masculine counterpart’) and I seek, is fish from the lake in the cave. What I seek, consciously, is integration of the energies of which I was inadvertently robbed when I was on the threshold of puberty.
The folktale takes us beyond the established sanctuary of a church to the cave, held sacred by the ancestors as the symbolic womb from which our species emerged at the dawn of civilization. As the place of our common origin, the cave imparts a feeling of unity and equality. The attitude of the clergymen, on the other hand, is dialectic and exclusive. They oust as evil the unifying feminine power invested in the daughter by shutting her up in the cave which, on a psychological level, lies beyond the limits of the rational mind.
 Priestess from The Gill Tarot Deck created by Elizabeth Josephine Gill |
Take a look at the Priestess, source of living water, in The Gill Tarot and compare it with the image of the farmer’s daughter in the door of the cave as seen through the eyes of the clergymen - huge, blue, awesome and in chains. The latter is like a distortion of the former, isn’t she? It does not seem farfetched to surmise that what is at stake for the churchfathers is regression to a belief system in which a priestess, völva or sibyl, played the key role. As I said before, völva is derived from Lat. vulva, volva which means ‘womb’ just as Delphi, where the oracle resided, means ‘womb’ also. The cave, too, is an image of the womb of the earth. And so is the tomb in Rachel Pollack’s 9 of Birds an image of the womb. Through her biological make-up, woman as völva is the guardian of the secret of creation. In the emerging female with the yellow pubic triangle, I see the farmer’s daughter broken free of her shackles. This yellow triangle, I sense, is a crucial signpost on my personal way to freedom.
The motive behind the folktale intimates a parallel between the farmer’s daughter and Freyja, daughter of the fertility god. The former becomes a human incarnation of the goddess who was publicly reviled as a bitch by the lawmaker and Christian missionary Hjalti Skeggjason in 999. The Muli-minister takes the missionary’s curse a step further and locks the farmer’s daughter up in the cave. According to rumor, the storyteller reports, the clergyman did so by applying rune magic, the very means for which the church persecuted the oppressed populace by fire. This gives the tale an ironic twist. The hypocrisy of the churchfathers is unmasked. The parish name Saudanes (‘wether-point’) may well be another venomous dart aimed at the servants of the church. Saudur (‘wether’) is a ‘castrated male sheep’, which by way of association would intimate the sterility of the religion the clergymen uphold, while the daugher’s relationship with the milch ewes points to the abundance in nature that nourishes man.
If you take another look at the High Priestess in Tarot of Northern Shadows figuring Freyja, you will see a red f-rune engraved on her shield. The f-rune is the first rune in the runic alphabet which to the ancestors represented the order of the universe. A rune was not simply a letter, it was also a key to the mystery of creation. In the worldly sense this rune is associated with fé, which in Icelandic can refer to either livestock, and sheep in particular, or monetary wealth. On an inner or spiritual level, it stands for evolutionary power, the fire that drives our growth and development. The key word for the fé-rune in an old Icelandic rune poem is aurum which is Latin for ‘gold’, and more specifically red gold. There is reason to believe, that the incipient movement inherent in the fé-rune was brought about by the menstruation of the human female, aptly referred to by the Chinese as the first tide.
The red gold is the fire that drives a woman along a cyclic spiritual path where she has the possibility to refine her talents, to make of herself a poem in co-creation with her instinctual nature. That patriarchy has made every effort to bar woman from this creative source, is depicted in the folktale The Farmer at Fossvellir. A better known example is the biblical tale of Eve’s temptation in the Garden of Eden, where woman’s initial impulse towards knowledge is attributed to machinations of the devil in the guise of the serpent who, through it’s rejuvinating shedding of the skin, is mythologically associated with the womb and the moon. She shall be a victim of her feminine nature through suffering, god decrees. The Word has tremendous power, be it in Eden or in the Icelandic eighteenth century countryside. The lesson I take away from these tales is that the pubescent daughter triggered the splitting of the god-image into ruler of the underworld and heavenly father.
The father who desires to possess his daughter projects his subjective femine side onto his flesh and blood offspring. That the male needs to be in touch with his feminine side is born out by our story. When the churchfather locked the instinctual powers up in the cave, he cut the farmer’s lifeline to the wellspring at the root of his being. As a result he fell into depression and suffered an untimely death. In other words, the farmer’s unconscious feminine nature had the better of him. The moral of the story is, that the repressive diabolization of nature upheld by the servants of the church leads to ruin. Man has to own his primitive nature and deal with it consciously.
The tale is about the farmer as is emphasized by its title. What I am concerned about is the daughter’s fate. How do I free her? What rune will undo the Muli-minister’s spell? I opt for the s-rune encompassing the power of the sun.
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I read the Sun-rune as the source of life and guiding light of consciousness. I believe that the secret inherent in this rune will melt away the ice of inertia in which the farmer’s daughter is trapped. It will restore the ousted Daughter to her former status as avatar of the sun, equal to the Son, her twin and masculine counterpart. She will shine once more at the heart of being and promote love and peace amongst men and women. I will look to the tarot Queen of Wands as a beacon on my mission to free the captive.
 Queen of Wands from The Rider-Waite Tarot |
In the tarot system, the Queens represent the element of water and Wands the element of fire. What the High Priestess in the guise of Freyja represents on an archetypal level – you remember the six pointed goldstar-pendant at her heart level, symbolizing the union of the elements of fire and water - the Queen of Wands incarnates on the human scale.
The most important quality I see in this queen now is her uninhibited awareness of her sexual power. Not only is she conscious of it, it is clear that she also feels totally at home in it. The firm grip she has on her wand shows that she knows how to channel and direct this energy in an enlightened manner. A girl at the age of puberty is unconscious of the power that resides in her, she does not know the value it has for her personal growth. As long as her feminine power is not upheld to her as a gift that she should appropriate and assimilate, she may allow herself to be robbed and exploited in myriad ways.
A staff was the attribute of the völva and so the Wand, representing the element of fire, distinguishes this queen from the other queens in the tarot deck. She stands for one aspect of the feminine, as does the völva. The flaming red lions adorning the back of her throne represent wild fiery nature, while the golden yellow that reigns in the foreground shows that she has transformed this primitive animal drive into light. She does not shy away from her strong emotions nor does she let herself be owerpowered by them. She recognizes them as a power source that begs to be channelled into a creative act or expression. Her distant look tells me that this queen is a visionary, she understands how the past informs the future. The tiny black cat at her feet, also an attribute of the völva, is the mystery in this card, her shadow.
 the yellow sign pointing the way into Freyja's Grove |
It came as an afterthought, when I contemplated the sunny signpost, that it forms a rune called Wunjo which means 'JOY'. This rune, I all of a sudden remembered, my Viking ancestors eliminated in the 8th century when linguistic changes required a revision of the runic alphabet. I know nothing worse than having joy taken away from me. Yet I do it to myself, over and over again. This is where my road sign points to, to the missing key.
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reproduced by permission of Rachel Pollack. Illustrations from the Gill Tarot and Rider-Waite Tarot Deck®, known also as the Rider Tarot and Waite Tarot, reproduced by permission of U.S. Games Systems, Inc., Stamford, CT 06902 USA. Copyrights © 1991 and 1971 respectively by U.S. Games Systems, Inc. Further reproduction prohibited. The Rider-Waite Tarot Deck® is a registered trademark of U.S. Games Systems, Inc. Illustrations from Tarot of Northern Shadows reproduced by permission of the company © 1997 AGM AGMuller Urania, Switzerland. Further reproduction prohibited. Text: © 2010 Hallfridur Ragnheidardottir. |