The Wild Hunt: Symbolisms, Meanings, and Folklore (Part 1)

Part 1: Introduction; various cosmic and natural symbolisms; timing and relation to holidays

by Sean Jobst

29 December 2020

"The Ride of Asgard" (1872) by Norwegian painter 
Peter Nicolai Arbo, portraying the Wild Hunt

   There is an undercurrent of ancient wisdom deeply embedded in folklore and traditions. This is a basic truth I have come to recognize these past few years, leading me on a journey I can only describe as enlightening. It was a task I took up in my past examinations of folklore, identifying remnants of the ancient Germanic goddesses Zisa and Ostara, and the various traditions and legends around the auspicious time of Walpurgisnacht. Using that same basic format, I will now examine traditions, folklore, and legends about the Wild Hunt - a pan-European motif with its regional variants. I will focus more on the Swabian and Alemannic, Flemish, and Iberian traditions of my ancestral lands, with parallels in nearby cultures so as to gain a deeper picture of what this mysterious Hunt symbolizes. As I have examined with those other three articles, there are many layers of meaning - each one has lessons for us about our ancestors, our selves, our psyche, our environment, and the cosmos.

   The Wild Hunt gradually evolved from a mythological theme with obvious roots in the Pagan European past, to a mysterious Christianized folkloric trope filled with dark imagery. Common themes remained throughout, including a balance of various forces - the unseen with the seen, the "good" with the "bad", the living with the dead, natural and cosmic. The great German folklorist Jakob Grimm described it as a "solemn march of gods" who visited "the land at some holy tide, bringing welfare and blessing, accepting gifts and offerings of the people" but also floated "unseen through the air, perceptible in cloudy shapes, in the roar and howl of the winds, carrying on war, hunting or the game of ninepins, the chief employments of ancient heroes: an array which, less tied down to a definite time, explains more the natural phenomenon." It was degenerated by the Christians into "a pack of horrid spectres, dashed with dark and devilish ingredients"(Grimm, 947).

   Such an "infernal host" is a departure from the original Pagan lore where it involved individuals with actual bodies rather than incorporeal ghosts, as well as traveling more over the ground than the air. Perhaps this is part of the Christian (and Abrahamic) drawing away of spiritual forces from the Natural world into a distant Cosmos - yet there is a place for a balance of the two within the original folklore. Yet even the Infernal Hunt has an ancient origin: "This is the sign of an imminent death, and this motif has a long history"(Lecouteux, 102). Its a rite binding together the perceivable realm of Nature with its darker, more esoteric aspects that are as real but less quantifiable. The Wild Hunt "primarily concerns an initiation into the wild, untamed forces of nature in its dark and chthonic aspects"(Greenwood, 195), hence we "Wild" is combined with "Host, Hunt, Army" in its regional names. 

   I perceive it as a "host" of supernatural elements which simply means a mysterious realm that coexists within our own but is the matter of legends; a "hunt" involving an "army" insofar as what is "hunted" is either an impending death, trying to "ride" the chaotic forces within Nature or the Psyche so as to facilitate the ultimate self-growth, or seasonal connotations involving the liminal times when the most changes occur on all those levels. In its most ancient roots, the French scholar Claude Lecouteux saw the Wild Hunt as a merger of fertility and agricultural rites and ancestor veneration, with Georges Dumézil's third function of common folk within Indo-European societies: "That this kind of kinship appears from the northern to southern extremes of the Germanic area and poses a challenge to the law of ecotypes cannot be a coincidence. Instead it shows that what we find here are beliefs of a venerable antiquity, from a time before the various Germanic ethnic groups went their separate ways. What we have here supports the hypothesis of an Indo-European origin for the Wild Hunt"(Lecouteux, 192).

Mistress of the Wild Hunt: Our Continental
Germanic goddess Frau Holle, by the German
illustrator Ludwig Pietsch, circa 1860

   Who leads this mysterious Wild Hunt? Given the regional variations as well as the multiple layers of meaning, its not surprising there are various figures given. The two most common ones though are the Germanic god Wotan (Wodan) - seen for example in the Alemannic name Wuotis Heer (Wuodan's Army) of Schwaben and Schweiz - and his wife/consort, the continental goddess Frau Holle, whose name varies in more northerly regions to direct correlations to Wotan's name (i.e. Frau Holda, Frau Gode, etc.) to the Perchta or Berchta "bright one" of Alpine regions. Her qualities are multifaceted, to be unraveled as our story continues, but suffice to say the two aspects - masculine and feminine - balance these natural forces: "not only Wuotan and other gods, but heathen goddesses too, may head the furious host: the wild hunter passes into the wood-wife, Woden into frau Gaude"(Grimm, 932). 

   Its no accident the common theme of Wild Hunt folk traditions are "constantly driven by continuous natural processes"(Bächtold-Stäubli, 632), invested with supernatural qualities to symbolize the mysteries inherent within Nature, that remain regardless of the social changes occurring in the life of a people: "Another class of spectres will prove more fruitful for our investigation: they, like the ignes fatui [will-o'-the-wisps], include unchristened babes, but instead of straggling singly on the earth as fires, they sweep through forest and air in whole companies with a horrible din. This is the widely spread legend of the furious host, the furious hunt, which is of high antiquity, and interweaves itself, now with gods, and now with heroes. Look where you will, it betrays its connexion with heathenism"(Grimm, 918).

   Throughout Europe's Wild Hunt traditions, there is the leadership of either a masculine or feminine figure, both combining airy and earthly qualities. The masculine usually personifies wind or ecstasy, and is a psychopomp who has specific relations to death. The feminine usually personifies the earth's fertility, and has a more general relation to the Otherworld. A Flemish fairy tale associates the Wild Hunt with an old woman who has a large eye on her forehead and lives in a castle with her souls (Bächtold-Stäubli, 635), which calls to mind some Alpine lore about Perchta or Slavic tales of the Baba Yaga. Given the common use of an eye symbol to ward off the "evil eye", it could be that she not only ushers souls into the Underworld but also wards off death from the living. We will see this same meaning later with the Wild Hunt's association with liminal times between the Winter Solstice (midwinter) and leading up to Spring, with all the seasonal and esoteric connotations that entails. Perchta holds healing qualities as much as her deathly connotations.

   Frau Holle and Wotan had their parallels in Celtic lands like Gaul and Celtiberia, with similar imagery of hunter and otherworld archetypes. Aside from a horned wild huntsman, there is a female figure who rides across the night skies. The Wild Hunt is known in various Spanish regions as the Galician Estantiga or Hoste Antiga "the old army", the Asturian Güestia "host", Leónese Hueste de Ánimas "troop of ghosts", Castilian Estantigua, and Extremaduran Hueste de Guerra "war company" or Cortejo de Gente de Muerte "deadly retinue" (Risco, 389-395). Its no accident the folklore survived most in those regions with the strongest Celtiberian connection. Here too we find a goddess who joins the fertile earth with the deadly realm. In the sixth century, archbishop Martin of Braga described legends among the peasants of northwest Iberia about a goddess "Diana" at the head of a troop traversing the night skies. Rather than being the Roman goddess of the hunt - medieval missionaries conflated all Indo-European goddesses with her given their own Roman bias - "commingled here are Diana of antiquity and Di Ana, a Celtic goddess who is also called Anu. The existence of a god Dianum speaks to this hypothesis. This deity, who was perhaps the Asturian Dianu, no doubt came from Di Anu, who was taken to be a masculine figure"(Lecouteux, 11).

"Nerthus" (1905) by the German illustrator
Emil Doepler (1855-1922)

   Sea connotations. Could this Asturian goddess Di Anu relate to the Irish river goddess Danu? The common element of "dan" relating to rivers, such as in the Danube which nurtured many of the earliest Proto-Celtic cultures. At first glance this appears unrelated to the Wild Hunt with its airy, forest, and underworld qualities. Yet all are connected to the interplay of forces within the rich animistic tapestry of ancient Celtic and Germanic tribes, as we can see in the etymology of related words. Nebulous which describes the airy, esoteric and mysterious, has this pedigree: Latin nebulosus "full of mist, foggy cloudy, Old High German nebul "cloud, fog", Proto-Germanic *nebulaz "fog, mist, darkness" -> Proto-Indo-European *nebhos "cloud, vapor, fog, moisture, sky". Water being seen as conscious, containing a spiritual essence, can be seen in the water-sprites (neck, nixe - literally "to cleanse") of Germanic mythology, for example in the great Neckar River of Swabia, which itself comes from the Celtic nikros "wild water, wild fellow" and Proto-Germanic *nikwus -> Proto-Indo-European *neig "to wash". All conjure up images of not only a physical but also a spiritual cleansing.

   As part of the animism at the heart of their worldview, Celtic and Germanic tribes saw water as living consciousness, many containing sprites while more prominent bodies of water were often personified as goddesses. In Celtic cosmology, the Otherworld contains a celestial, middle, and underworld realm. Ours is the middle, equivalent to the Germanic middle-earth. The underworld is the lower realm, associated with water, minerals, and fire - like the distant southerly realm of fire called Mudspelli or Muspilli in continental Germanic sources. Water, mist and fog were viewed as liminal places, where the veils between worlds was very thin. Mist itself resulted from a mixture of the sky (cosmos) with water, and one perceives the mist as encompassing one's vision upon the earth and can seemingly walk into mist to "disappear" into another world (i.e. outside our immediate realm of vision). No surprise then that Celtic peoples would invest such places with the mysterious - the Iberians saw Finisterre "end of land" overlooking the Atlantic as the conduit through which souls entered into the Otherworld to ultimately be reincarnated back into the middle realm. For the Irish, the Otherworld of Tír na nÓg "land of the young" could be arrived at through one or two ways - one was through water, beneath a lake or the ocean west of Ireland; and the other through an underground passage, such as a sidhe (mound) or cave. 

   Both elements are contained within the Germanic folklore about Frau Holle, who appears in the Grimm fairy-tales as a figure whose realm is reached by descending down a well. The link to the ancestors can also be seen in her association with mounds. Its been my contention that our southern Germanic tribes absorbed much from previous Neolithic people and Celtic cultures of the Alpine regions, seen in our cosmology compared to the later conceptions of the Norse. South Germanic tribes believed "the souls of the dead returned to certain sacred lakes from which they were incorporated into new human beings. This is strongly suggested at least by the derivation of the word soul (from proto-Germanic *saiwa-lo, 'belonging to the lake, deriving from the lake') from a term for 'lake,' or 'inland sea' (*saiwaz), together with the fact that the word soul is indigenous only to the South and East Germanic linguistic areas, whereas in the north there were originally other designations for it"(Hasenfratz, 72). The "sea" here refers to a landlocked water source, not the open ocean.

   Relation to Nerthus and the Meadow. Could Holle be linked to the mysterious goddess Nerthus described by the Roman Tacitus in Chapter 40 of Germania? Holle travels on a wagon accompanied by a man, while an image of Nerthus is described as wheeled on a wagon by a priestly figure to a sacred grove on an island somewhere around the North Sea. A sea goddess like her would have little relevance to our southern tribes, so she was simply given more land qualities - but the symbols remained the same. Rather than the Valhalla of Norse sources, continental Germanic sources refer to an otherworldly realm alongside that of Hel, called "the Meadow". Whereas Hel was closely tied to mounds and just chthonic forces, the "Meadow" - known as Waggs to the Goths, Uuaga in Old Saxon, and Vangr to the Norse -> all stemming from Proto-Germanic *Wangaz - was given forest imagery and thus related to more primal forces on the earth, exactly those active most on the Wild Hunt. It survived in the Alemannic topographical names Wangen "green field, meadow", a realm for the "glorious dead" (ibid., 73) first chosen by Frija rather than Wodan. 

   Cosmic connotations. This link of the Meadow with a celestial deadly troop can be seen in the cosmic symbolisms given to the goddess Frau Hulde or Frigg in the Low Countries. A Middle Dutch term for the Milky Way was Vroneldenstraet "the highway of Frau Hulde". As noted by the pioneering work of the Flemish-French scholar Louis De Baecker (1814-1896), the Flemish knew Orion's Belt as Friggiarocken "Frigg's Distaff", later Christianized as Marienspinrokken "Mary's Distaff". Many Germanic goddesses were portrayed holding a distaff, and many were Christianized as the Virgin Mary so as to appropriate their worship into the Christian fold, such as I found when I studied traditions about Zisa and Ostara. The Norse also associated Orion's Belt with the goddess Freyja, who appears to be the same goddess known to our continental tribes as Frija, Frigg, Holle, Hulda and other regional names. The distaff also relates to the spinning connotation, as we will see more later in relation to Perchta. De Baecker also noted how the Flemish name for Ursa Major was de Woenswaghen "the Chariot of Wodan", thus the close association of Wotan with this Goddess. In Galicia, the Camino contains cosmic symbolisms such as following the pilgrimage routes to the Campus Stellae (Star Field): "Santiago is associated with the Milky Way as the road of the dead"(Lecouteux, 138), perhaps remnants from the ancient Celtic traditions of Galicia.

"The Wolves Pursuing Sol and Mani" (1909), by the 
English illustrator John Charles Dollman (1851-1934)

   Dates of the Wild Hunt. There is no set date for the Wild Hunt across all areas, because these "corresponded to a pre-Christian cycle of movable feasts, which depended on lunar phases. Furthermore, the Celtic and Germanic calendars were most likely superimposed on two ancient apportionments of the year: two large seasons - summer, which runs from May 1 to November 1, and winter, which runs from November 1 to May 1"(Lecouteux, 199). As noted by Philippe Walter, a professor of medieval French literature at the University of Grenoble, notes these apportionments "have undergone a more or less marked Christianization by virtue of being fixed to specific periods in the calendar," original movable feasts fixed so as to be "integrated in to the Christian calendar"(Walter, 74). 

   Contrary to the fixed celebrations of the Roman calendar and later Christianity, Celtic and Germanic calendars were lunisolar, harmonizing the phases of the sun with those of the moon. Both had two seasons - Summer and Winter - each divided in a quarter. Celtic months began with each full moon, and the Germanic on each new moon. Celtic and Germanic holidays were both marked by full moons. There is evidence the Celts celebrated the Winter Solstice - unlike the Germanic tribes - although not the Equinoxes or Summer Solstice. Wild Hunt traditions in Celtic and Germanic lands were connected to Winter, beginning sometime in mid-late October. For the Germanic, it was the full moon that was called Winter Nights; for the Celts, it was Lughnasa, either the ninth or tenth moon of the year dependent on a lunar leap year.

   The dates generally appear between Martin's Day (November 11), to Advent (the four Sundays before Christmas), Winter Solstice, the Twelve Days of Christmas, Epiphany, and leading up to the end of Winter. "In the Palatinate, for example, the Wild Hunt was abroad during Advent, but in Swabia it appeared precisely on the day of St. Thomas (December 21)"(Lecouteux, 193). Even the Christianized days were taken as personifications of previous deities: "The Westphalian name for the Wild Hunt leader [Goi] could quite conceivably be a recollection of the past. This would not be the first time that the name for an important festival was anthropomorphized - for example, the Befana is the personification of Epiphany and Perchta personifies Christmas"(ibid., 195).

   Samhain. The recurring theme throughout all these differing dates are their liminal and transitory nature: "All the year's transitional passages have the distinctive feature of permitting communication between the otherworld and our world, evidence for which is provided by the invasion of the undead and spirits during these times"(ibid., 197). These include Celtic Samhain, a time when the boundaries between worlds was at its thinnest and the Army of the Sidhe left the Underworld to roam the earth: "In the Intoxication of the Ulstermen, several festivals were organized for Samhain. Following the feast arranged by Fintan, all the nobles, who were already fairly intoxicated, engaged in a wild race across Ireland, following Cuchulain, and at the passing of this furious troop, hills were flattened , trees were uprooted, and the fords and streams were emptied of their water"(Jouet, 104). Around Hallweijn in the Netherlands, there is a corpus of ballads that are connected to Samhain and the ancient Celts of the Low Countries (Smedes, 70-94). Not exactly our modern fixed Halloween, Samhain was marked the tenth or eleventh full moon of the year, dependent on a lunar leap year and usually sometime in November.

   11/11. Christianized as St. Martin's Day, November 11th marks the beginning of the Carnival season throughout Germany and the Low Countries. That social norms would be "released" during this time harkens back to the Roman Saturnalia more than an actual Christian day, so its not surprising there would be supernatural legends associated with the Wild Hunt: "Some experienced hauntings on all of these days. St. Martin's Day (November 11) was the occasion for the passage of the bird of St. Martin, a kind of fire dragon; the wild herdsman; and the Kasermandl (Alps), a kind of demon that took possession of chalets after the livestock had been taken down to the lower valleys for the winter and that often bore the features of dead cowherds who were condemned to return, because they abused the livestock in their keeping. In Burgenland, Austria, Lutzl (Lucy) passed at this time. She was the woman of the solstice, who roamed with veiled face. She was also armed with a kitchen spoon that she used to beat people in their houses and a knife for opening their bellies (the gastronomy motif, which is also common in traditions concerning Percht). Clad in black and white, she was accompanied by monstrous figures, and her trajectory was a quest in which she begged for the deceased foodstuffs, the 'bread of all souls'"(Lecouteux, 198)

Yule illustration from "Die Gartenlaube" (1880)

   Other auspicious times before Christmas. In Silesia and Austria, the twelve days spanning the time from St. Lucia (December 13th) to Christmas "prefigured what would take place in the twelve months of the new year, and numerous divinatory practices took place at this time"(ibid., 198), including various prohibitions related to spinning - a symbolism that figures prominently within stories about Frau Holle and Perchta, as we will see later. In Switzerland, the three days before Christmas were called bolster nächt "noisy night" and "hunt of the sträggele": "The sträggele was the equivalent of the Howler (Schrat), a kind of dwarf that was sometimes combined with a nightmare (mar)"(ibid., 194). This term is also used for the masks used in Carnival processions, and this time roughly coincides with the Winter Solstice.

   Midwinter and the Winter Solstice. Despite contrary belief, including held many modern Pagans, Yule is not the same time as either the Winter Solstice or Christmas. As noted by the Swedish ethnographer Andreas Nordberg, backed up by early medieval sources describing the actual traditions of Germania, Scandinavia and England, Yule was originally three full moons after Winter Nights (mid-late October), thus usually sometime in January. It was only fixed to the Winter Solstice and Christmas to align it with the Roman Christian calendar under converted kings such as Hakon of Norway. It was also a three-day celebration and not the "12 Days of Christmas" some link it to. Likewise, according to the Julian calendar then prevalent the Winter Solstice itself was around 14-15 December, coinciding with the Christianized feast of St. Lucia, which Scandinavian folklore still considers the longest, darkest night of the year. Midwinter, midpoint between Winter and Summer, would have been around 14 January in the Julian and 20 January in the Gregorian calendar (Nordberg, 102, 148-150). The timing of Christmas has more to do with Roman Saturnalia than Germanic Yule.

   Nevertheless, as a season this time represents something auspicious so its no surprise Wild Hunt traditions abound. They looked at the winds and storms "howling" over the land and sweeping through the forests, the darkness and cold reigning supreme during this time, as a symbolic playing out of spiritual forces in the physical realm - the Wild Hunt. Being outside during this time might lead to being swept up in this cavalcade, while others of a more magical and shamanic inclination openly sought it out (Lecouteux, 187-188). It was naturally a more contemplative time, as one prepared to survive the winter one would also reflect more on the ancestors. The realms of the living and dead were especially permeable during midwinter according to the ancient Germanic peoples (Simek, 373), while many traditions describe the riders as resembling the land spirits, who were themselves often linked to the dead (Lecouteux, 191-192), such as the link of the sidhe in the Irish Wild Hunt, or the buena gente "good folk" of Asturias. "The Wild Hunt fell into the vast complex of ancestor worship, the cult of the dead, who are the go-betweens between men and the gods"(ibid., p. 199).

"Der wilde Jägd" by the German painter
Johann Wilhelm Cordes (1824-1869)

   Raunächte. Also known as "between the years", these are the Twelve Nights between Christmas and 6th January (Epiphany). It seems to be remnant of a memory before the lunisolar conception of time was overturned and the Church/Imperial successors of Rome forced a fixed calendar upon Germanic tribes to more easily control them; when the "missing" twelve nights were added to the end of the lunar year to reconcile it with the solar, making these transitory days outside of normal time. Just as with other auspicious times, laws of Nature are temporarily suspended, so various divinatory practices were common. There were folk legends throughout Europe of people engaging in magic who then "turned" into werewolves around this time. Aside from the "shape-shifting" Perchten of Alpine regions, there were also legends in the Ardennes (Wolf, 615-616), a forested region of eastern Belgium whose name comes from Arduinna, the ancient Belgae goddess of the Hunt. More on this later in a section about the shamanism within the Wild Hunt, but suffice it to say these were allegorical not literal transformations.

   In Switzerland and Alsace, a mysterious figure named Hutata - who receives his name from the scream he unleashes - is on the move during the twelve days of Christmas (Lecouteux, 194). Throughout the Balkans, Anatolia, and Greek lands, the Kalikanzari are goblins residing in the underworld who come to the surface for two weeks after the Winter Solstice to wreck havoc (Puchner), their name coming from kalos-kentauros (centaur) conveying the same idea about a shamanic transformation (Ginzburg, 169). They thus resemble the Perchtenlauf processions of people dress in costumes and goat and other animal masks, around this same time in the Alpine regions. There is a tradition of ushering in the New Year with noise and clamor, seen in our own modern fireworks and general celebratory atmosphere for New Year's. It was believed that the Wild Hunt should start in the exact middle of the Raunächte - New Year's Eve - so that the Wild Hunt with its symbolism sets the tone for the next year. 

   The Twelfth Night (5th January) was associated with Frau Holle/Perchta, which Grimm traced in its Old High German name Perahtun naht "the luminous night". This time would coincide more or less with the actual historically-attested Germanic Yule than the Winter Solstice or Christmas. Grimm further writes in his Teutonic Mythology (Volume 1, Chapter 13): "Her annual progress, which like those of Herke and Bertha, is made to fall between Christmas and Twelfth-day, when the supernatural has sway, and wild beasts like the wolf are not mentioned by their names, brings fertility to the land....At the same time Holda, like Wuotan, can also ride on the winds, clothed in terror, and she, like the god, belongs to the 'wutende heer'. From this arose the fancy, that witches ride in Holla's company; it was already known to Burchard, and now in Upper Hesse and the Westerwald, Holle-riding, to ride with Holle, is equivalent to a witches' ride. Into the same 'furious host', according to a wide-spread popular belief, were adopted the souls of infants dying unbaptized; not having been christain'd, they remained heathen, and fell to heathen gods, to Wuotan or to Hulda."

   These Nights finally culminated on January 6th in the day known to Christians as the Epiphany - but here too there were deep remnants of ancient Celtic and Germanic heritage - joined as the two were in the Alpine regions of Swabia, Bavaria, Switzerland, Austria, Piedmont, Tyrol and Northern Italy. Closely associated with Epiphany was Perchta as a mother goddess ruling over "the fairy women who enter houses on certain nights to grant their inhabitants prosperity if they find a meal prepared for them"(Lecouteux, 150). The night troop of Corteo della Berta traveled on the night of Epiphany in the Haut-Adige region, and the Redodesa passed through midnight on Epiphany accompanied by her twelve children in the Cadorino and Belluno regions, although they were more silent than the Wild Hunt (ibid., 150-151). In South Tyrol, a child's dragging shirt tails are tied and he is called Zuserbeutlein, "a made-up term of endearment that is possibly a compound word of zuserl, meaning 'waxwing,' which is considered a nuisance bird in Schwabia, and beutlein, meaning 'little sack.' The bird reference likely refers to the cries uttered by the child as it stumbles in his large shirt, falling farther and farther behind, and the little sack is likely his clothing"(ibid., 151).

[To be continued in Part 2, beginning with the qualities of Frau Holle/Perchta and how those qualities relate to various symbolisms of the Wild Hunt. In honor of these liminal times, I will focus on the Wild Hunt both sides of the New Year]....

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

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Ginzburg, Carlo. Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 

Greenwood, Susan. "The Wild Hunt: A Mythological Language of Magic," in James R. Lewis and Murphy Pizza, eds., Handbook of Contemporary Paganism. Leiden: Brill, 2008, pp. 195-222. 

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Wolf, Johann Wilhelm. Niederländische Sagen. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1843; reprint, 2017.