Freya goddess of sexuality -A Norse goddess of love and fertility Friday is named after her. This is Venus's day and ruler of the signs Libra and Taurus.

She is Scandinavian mistress of all the gods who was also the ruler of death. Leader of the Valkyries, war's corpse-maidens, this goddess was also the one to whom love prayers were most effectively addressed.

She is the most beautiful of all goddesses. She wore a feathered cloak over her magical amber necklace as she rode through the sky in a chariot drawn by cats, or sometimes on a huge golden-bristled boar who may have been her own brother, the fertility god Frey.

Like Persephone, the Greek death queen, Freya was also the spirit of the earth's fertility. Like Persephone, Freya was absent from earth during autumn and winter, a departure that caused the leaves to fall and the earth to wear a mourning cloak of snow.

And like Hecate, Freya was the goddess of magic, the one who first brought the power of sorcery to the people of the north.

Despite her connection with death, Freya was never a terrifying goddess, for the Scandinavians knew she was the essence of sexuality.

Utterly promiscuous, she took all the gods as her lovers-including the wicked Loki, who mated with her in the form of a flea. But her special favourite was her brother Frey.

But Freya had a husband, an aspect of Odin named Odr. He was the father of her daughter Hnossa ("jewel"). When Odr left home to wander the earth, Freya shed tears of amber.

But always she was "mistress," for that is the meaning of her own name, and a particularly appropriate double entendre it proves in her case.

Text from Patricia Monaghan's The New Book of Goddesses and Heroines Published by Llewellyn, copyright 1997. Used by permission of the author.