I apologize for the scope and clumsy wording of the questions; I've been seeing a lot of random social media posts about how The Church 'stole' Friday the 13th to overshadow Norse/Pagan rites of fertility centered around Freya.
What is the source of those claims, did Philip the Fair plan to subvert pagan concepts of the 13th by choosing to begin his arrests and prosecution on that day (is October and Samhain linked at all in this decision), and how important was Friday the 13th to Norse or pagan societies?
Thank you!
Friday the 13th to overshadow Norse/Pagan rites of fertility centered around Freya.
It cannot be emphasised enough how little we know about actual pre-Christian Scandinavian religious beliefs, rituals, theology or cult. All of our textual information was written up to centuries after conversion through a heavily Christian lens, or was written contemporarily by sources more interested in polemic than genuine anthropology. For reference, in the same chapter that Adam of Bremen describes Norse Pagan practices at Uppsala, he also lifts whole sections almost verbatim from Pliny's Historia Naturalis to describe how the Eastern Baltic is inhabited by Amazon women who give birth to dog-headed Cynocephali sons.