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It's a truism of religious iconography that every detail bears meaning. So let us ask: Why is the Rällinge Frey stroking his beard?

Surely every pagan must be familiar with the Rällinge Frey. This charming little bug-eyed god was discovered, at his eponymous location, in Sweden—big-time Frey Country back in the old days, be it noted—in 1908.

Wearing nothing but a pointed (skin?) cap—or is it a helmet?—the little bronze god sits cross-legged, sporting an noteworthy erection. His left hand—the forearm is now missing—rests on his left knee. With his right—the strong, or dominant, hand—he strokes (or grasps, or tugs) his beard.

Why?

One can hardly fail to notice, of course, the beard as analogue to the god's phallus, or to appreciate their mutual, um, stroke-ability. The artist here has deftly created a visual dialectic, stunning in its elegant simplicity. This is a god who specializes in the erotic, with all that that implies, but there's more to him than that, far more.

Like every other part of the human (or divine) body, beards bear symbolic meaning. Beards mean: male. They mean: maturity, experience. Thus, in an extended sense, they also mean: wisdom.

Now that the wearing of beards has become culturally fashionable again, I've had occasion over the last few years to watch men interacting with their beards. (Unlike interacting with one's phallus—though, as noted above, certainly analogous to it—it's something that you can acceptably do in public.)

Again and again I've watched men stroke their beards while thinking something over. Stroking the beard means reflection. It means deliberation.

What the artist is showing here is Frey's other side. He's not just the handsome fertility guy with the big toothsome cock, though he's that too. To consult one's beard is to consult one's wisdom. ("Let me consult my beard on that," goes the old Russian proverb. One could even view the beard as a symbol of the Received Tradition, making the Bearded the repository of the Lore.) This is a god who thinks. This is a god who considers. This is a god who reflects before he decides. He's not just cute and good in the sack, but smart and thoughtful, too.

In the latter days of the Greenland Norse colony, it so happened that the episcopal seat fell vacant.

It had been 20 years since Bishop Álf died, and in all that time there had been no word from Norway, and no bishop for the Greenlanders. The great cathedral at Garðar had fallen into disrepair: the wall-hangings were threadbare and rotting away, the eucharistic vessels dented and dull.

At the Althing one year there was much discussion of this.

“Maybe we need to start sacrificing to Þórr and Frey again, like we used to in the old days,” said one man.

In the West Telemark Museum in Eidsborg, Norway, you can see numerous small wooden figures of “house-gods.”

Some of them date from antiquity, discovered, anaerobically preserved, in bogs.

Some are more recent.

In Norway's remote, rural Telemark region, house-gods such as these were kept at certain farms well into the 19^th century. Associated with a specific farm and with the family that lived there, they were regarded not so much as gods, but as heirlooms, talismans that warded off misfortune and ensured good harvests and many offspring both to the family and its livestock.*

They say that one such house-god was called the Pork King. At holidays, it was customary to anoint this figure with lard or butter. At Yule, before the family took their traditional pre-Yule baths, the first to be bathed in the purifying waters was the Pork King himself. Only the mistress of the farm was permitted to be present for the bathing of the Pork King. Not even the farmer himself could witness this sacred ablution.

 Caput apri defero,

cum ingenti priapo.

The Yule-analogous holiday of Terry Pratchett's Discworld is, of course, Hogswatch.

And the—really, what else can one call him?—patronal god of Hogswatch is, of course, the Hogfather.

Like the wild boar that he originally was, the Hogfather (of the BBC series, anyway) wears tusks.

In Norse, one might say: Hogfather = Frey. Tusk-Frey, one might kenningly call him.

According to Edred (“Bad Boy of Ásatrú”) Thórsson's ground-breaking 1999 work of revisionist witch history, Witchdom of the True, those seeking Keltic origins for Wicca are barking up the wrong tree of life.

They should instead, he says, be sniffing around the roots of Yggdrasil. Historically speaking, the Lord and Lady of modern Wicca, he holds, are actually none other than Frey and Freyja.

It's a contentious idea, especially among contemporary heathens.

We don't know whether or not the heathen English worshiped Frey and Freyja. It's certainly possible that they did, but we have no proof. (Anglo-Saxonist Stephen Pollington calls the evidence "circumstantial.") Considering how little we know about pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon religion, the lack of evidence doesn't prove much.

If, however, the Hwicce—the Anglo-Saxon tribe which, according to maverick archaeologist Stephen Yeates, gave rise to modern witchery—did indeed know Frey and Freyja, we can say what they would likely have called them. Both Norse names have cognates in the Old English word-hoard.

Listen well, now, for this is the story of Grandfather Sheaf.

Long ago our people lived on the shores of the Northern Sea, and we knew neither bread nor beer, neither brewing nor baking. We hunted and fished and gathered, as our people had always done, since the time of the Great Ice and before.

One day in spring, with the ice newly broken, a ship came slowly to shore: a long ship, with a high, antlered prow. The strange thing was that this ship was completely empty. But going down to meet it, we saw that indeed the ship was not empty, for in it lay a babe, a man-child asleep and naked, and cradled in a shield, and under his head a barley sheaf.

I've never much been one for religious jewelry, but that doesn't mean I haven't generally got a god or two tucked somewhere or other about my person. You could call them “pocket gods.”

The Norse called them hlutir and carried them in pouches. (Hlutr is the same as English lot, as in “drawing lots,” which gives one something of an idea of their cultural importance.) The witch-wife Heiðr once told Ingimund the Old, while he still lived in Norway, that he would settle in an undiscovered land west over sea, and that the sign of the truth of her seeing would be this: that the little silver hlutr of Frey that he always carried in his pouch would be lost, but that he would find it again buried in the ground when he dug to raise the pillars of his house in the new land. And so indeed it came to be when, years later, he settled in Iceland.

Which pocket-gods I carry depends on the season and the vagaries of my own thought and mood. Shown above are two that are frequently with me, both worked in Baltic amber: a Sun-disc and a Thunder-ax. Sun and Thunder are two of my best-loved gods, and I like to bear their main (power) with me as I go through my day.