Friday is named after a goddess, and English only coined goddess around 1350
Goddesses have ruled dawn, war, the harvest, the sea and even the fate of warriors. English speakers borrowed a Latin feminine ending to name them, first around 1350, and one of them still sits in the calendar: Friday honours the Anglo-Saxon form of Frigg, wife of Odin.
The word itself is a hybrid, joining Germanic god to the Latin-derived suffix -ess. It follows a habit shared by Egyptian, Classical Greek and several Semitic languages, which also built their word for a female deity by adding a feminine ending to the word for god.
In some traditions a goddess sits at the very top. Shaktism, one of the three main Hindu sects, holds that the source of all reality is the Supreme Goddess, Mahamaya. In certain forms of Tantric Shaivism, Shiva and Shakti together form the ultimate principle, with the goddess as God's active, creative power. Vajrayana Buddhism pictures reality as two deities in union, wisdom as female and compassionate skill as male. In one experiment giving psychedelics to leaders of various faiths, participants generally reported that the divine they met felt feminine.
Many goddesses were linked to roles expected of women, such as weaving, motherhood and fertility, but plenty were not. Inanna, the most widely worshipped goddess of Sumer, later merged with the Semitic Ishtar. The Hittites made Arinniti, a sun goddess, patron of their empire and monarchy, and their Kubaba became Cybele to Phrygians and Romans. In Greece, Athena governed strategy and war, and Nike personified victory.
Northern Europe offers some of the most varied figures. Celtic goddesses could be lovely or hideous, young or ancient, and might shift into crows, cows, wolves or eels; in Ireland they were tied to sovereignty and to mountains, rivers and holy wells. Norse belief handed goddesses a central role in death: half of those killed in battle went to Freyja's field Folkvangr, while Ran received the drowned, and the norns and valkyries were bound up with fate. Across the Atlantic, the Aztec water goddess Chalchiuhtlicue was symbolised by jade, whose sheen resembled water.
Source: Goddess
