Here is the story, as I know it.

There was nothing. Not emptiness, for there wasn't anything to be empty. Only Nothing. Then from the void burst the Light, and the universe was born. The explosive dust of celestial afterbirth spiralled into those great screaming angels of fire; the Stars. And they sang their joy to the heavens. For most of time, it was just the Stars and the Planets and their hymns, resonating.

The world was born ages and ages ago, from fire and ice. The ice melted and became water, the fires cooled and became earth. And the sky held them together tenderly, the embrace becoming the winds. These elements spiraled together and apart again and again, until they birthed a new element; life.

Slow at first but ever faster, life grew and grew and grew. From the smallest smallest creatures came the plants, the fish, the birds in the sky, the things that creep along the ground, and our ancestors. Small, stealth things they were, our ancestors, and they waited, and survived, and grew. Soon they did not crawl but walked, lifted higher and higher by the hands of time and evolution.

We were born into this, the walking animals. We saw the patterns in nature, and we honored them. The earth that we come from, our mother, the sky above us, our father, the distant stars creatures just like us. We honor the blood we come from, the divine spirit within it, the spark of intellect it brings.

By seeing, knowing, and honoring nature we were changed. But so too was nature changed by our knowing it. The earth becomes a truly maternal energy by virtue of our identifying it as such. The sun & sky becomes the archetypal father, the harvest becomes the sacrificial victim, the moon and sea become tempestuous women, the dawn and dusk now sisters of the sun.

Ages and ages pass. The energies of life, and death, come to take names and distinct likenesses. I know them by certain names, but they are called many things. In truth they are beyond epithets, and it is our attempt to narrow these energies into something we can know that made manifest so many different deities, like light through a prism.

Like the Lady, who is three ladies. She is born in spring, new and young. Then she is called Freyja, and she is abundant. A bright and blissful energy of fertility and warmth. She grows alongside her brother, Frey, the lord of the harvest. Come Midsummer they are wed, and their union is the fruitful vegetation. The Lady is then called Frigg, and her energy has become calmer and more nurturing. But with the harvest, Frey must die. And so like the scythe to the wheat, the Lady cuts down her love. She becomes then the old hag of winter, called Marzanna. The warmth she radiated once was gone, replaced by the bitter frost. But like all things, the Lady also dies, and the stage is set for the cycle to begin again. And so the earth, also called Nerthus, is the Lady, who is three.