This Article is written by the talented young artist Iwobrand. A page will appear very soon showcasing his impressive works, in a new collaborators tab. Iwobrand will also be working with Mimirs Brunnr (video) on an exciting future project.
Mimirs Brunnr
Once the winter solstice has gone by and the year is coming to an end, the Wild Hunt is roaming the lands, led by the storm god Woden, haunting the farms and villages during the 12 nights of Yule. In many cases, offerings are made to the mythical hunting party, which we know of from reports, where people claim they have seen them sweeping about. Although the Wild Hunt is not malevolent itself, it is still dangerous to cross their way. Oftentimes the spirits of the dead follow the Wild Hunt, dead ancestors are even invited into the homes of the people and given food and drink in many regions during Yuletide.
A well-known figure even outside of Germany is the Krampus or Percht: the horns of a goat, a grotesque face with pointed teeth and a wicked stare, covered with fur and bearing a whip or scrubby rod. Its undeniable demonic appearance has often been put into analogy with the Christian devil, or it has been deemed a demonisation of the Gallo-Germanic pagan goddess Perchta.
This demonic figure is not the only creature that we find. In opposition to the Perchten, or, to be more specific, the Schiachperchten („ugly Perchten“), in some regions of the Alps there are also the so-called Schönperchten („pretty Perchten“), who give a cheerful and fair, often red-white, appearance and perform festive dances, rather than scaring away children and beating girls with their rods – which is what the Schiechperchten or Krampen do. Towards the north there are many similar creatures, like Knecht Ruprecht in Germany, and the Julbocken in Scandinavia.
These were two descriptions of different phenomena within Germanic folk tradition, one a narrative report from Yuletide folk belief, the other a physical ritual from the realm of Alpine Yuletide folk customs.
Yet is has been claimed that both have a common origin. Lily Weiser gives highly interesting insight in her short book on Germanic initiation rites (Altgermanische Jünglingsweihen und Männerbünde, 1927). In comparison to the cult practices of primitive peoples, she describes the period of initiation as a time of separation from the tribe, asceticism, and in general a changed mental state. The human psyche can go through fundamental changes here, including memory loss, maturing of so-far childlike traits and ultimately the re-embodiment of an ancestral persona. The initiates are considered dead by the members of the tribe now, their neglected state makes them literally look like corpses. Through these frame conditions the initiates may reach a state of ekstasis, the dissociation of spirit and body that is also a precondition for the shamanistic practice of metempsychosis.
We know about a similar ecstatic state from the Norse Berserkir („bear-skins“), whose trance-like rage was feared in battle by the enemy. Very similar are the so-called Úlfhéðinn (“wolf-skins”) that we apparently see depicted in ornaments from Sweden and Alemannic Southern Germany.
What the initiates experience during their transition period in the woods could probably only be understood by someone who did undergo the same procedure. After their return to the tribe they are considered reborn and now full members of adult society.
The Perchtenlauf procession however is also connected to agriculture: By roaming the fields and making a lot of noise, the demonic Perchten prepare the soil for a good harvest in the coming year. The same also applies to the Wild Hunt – more evidence for their sameness. Weiser illustrates these cult practices as a form of fertility magic. This makes sense especially for Germanic people, as the cold winters of northern Europe cause nature to die, and the return of spring must have been yearned for to an even greater extend than in today’s modern comfort society.
Weiser’s approach was later picked up by Otto Höfler in his book on cult societies of the Germanic people (Kultische Geheimbünde der Germanen, Bd. 1, 1934), in which he mainly writes about the Wild Hunt and similar phenomena around Yuletide in Germany and other Germanic countries. Höfler however shows that the Wild Hunt is tied to ancestral cult even more than fertility magic, which is more seen as a secondary effect by him. In general we can probably say, that vegetative and ancestral cycles of death and rebirth aren’t mutually exclusive, but go along hand in hand.
In terms of ancestral reincarnation, Höfler draws parallels with Norse mythology as well: Óðinn is not only the god of wind, wisdom and magic, but also a psychopomp who guides the souls of the dead into the underworld, or to Valhöll, if the person has fallen in battle honourably. It thus becomes sensible that an initiate in ritualistic separation would reincarnate as an honourable warrior of his kin, inspired by the magic of his god Óðin
Not only does Tacitus mention ritualistic sword dances in his Germania. The notion that the initiates form a spiritually inspired warrior caste is in line with his report on the Germanic Harii, which Weiser brings up as a possible precursor of the Wild Hunt:
” „As for the Harii, not only are they superior in strength to the other peoples I have just mentioned, but they minister to their savage instincts by trickery and clever timing. They black their shields and dye their bodies, and choose pitch dark nights for their battles. The shadowy, awe-inspiring appearance of such a ghoulish army inspires mortal panic; for no enemy can endure a sight so strange and hellish.“ (Germania 43, 4)”
Höfler supplies a vast number of historical sources that make it most probable, that the Wild Hunt and secretive processions acted out by disguised humans around the time of Yule and Carnival (Fasnacht) must be one and the same. A huge merit of Höfler’s book is, that it points out how important cult practices are for the understanding of the pre-Christian psyche and thus Germanic paganism. Other than remaining an abstract and rational doctrine, the belief becomes something tangible and real.
Claude Lecouteux has argued, that phenomena like the werewolf, witches and other shape-shifters are in their core not so much linked to cult practices, but to spiritual doubles. For anyone who never witnessed them, the reality of such travelling outside of the body in an altered shape will probably be hard to believe, and the question would be how this can explain the Wild Hunt. An explanation arguing towards cult practice would go without a range of equivocal presumptions, and it could make us realize just how different the mindset of people of the past was from the modern one.
A number of similarities can even be shown between the Wild Hunt and the 15th to 16th century Schembartlauf in Nuremberg. Some of the young men taking part in this public Carnival procession were also dressed up as wolf-men. One of their floats was called ‘hell’ and had the shape of a ship. Since the sun ship is often seen as a symbol for the descend and rise of the sun from the underworld, we are reminded of the stone ships and ship burials of northern Europe, as well as the mythical ship Skíðblaðnir, belonging to the Norse fertility god Freyr. Direct links are hard to make, but all these things seem to tap into the same archetype: Going into the underworld, in order to retrieve the solar powers that allow both the sun and man to be reborn with the coming new year.
Even though the original cult must have shifted into syncretic forms with the Christianization of Europe, it is stunning how much of the pagan basis had been preserved until the 16th or even 17th century. What the early modern writers often report as ghostly invasions of the Wild Hunt might well have been a group of cultists in costumes. The important thing about this however is that these people most likely did not see their performance as a form of banal acting or deception, as rationalistic scholars might raise the claim. The participants rather seemed to embody what they disguised as in a real sense, may modern man be able to empathise with this or not. The notion that there is something both supernatural and real about these processions must have been alive for a very long time, not only among the witnesses who observed them from outside, but also for the hooded folk themselves, who in later times were probably mostly the members of gilds.
The secret nature of these cult practises will to a huge extend be owed to protection against the church, which obviously took fierce action against such pagan cults. If we look at Lily Weiser’s comments on initiation, it’s very likely that originally most members of the tribe were initiated at some point in their youth. The mysterious nature would thus lay especially in the mysteries of the otherworldly realm that the initiates were trespassing.
One point that is in question is however, why do the initiates and/or initiators wear animal hides, and how does this relate to an ancestral cult? The blackfacing, which also often occurs in the procession, can be explained by the scary corpse-like or ghost-like impression that it gives. Wolf and bear hides however point towards a much more primordial aspect of the initiation: It must be linked to the interim of separation from the tribe, the stay of the initiates in the woods. Not only would the initiates have hunted animals for food. The killing of dangerous animals, like the wolf or bear, might also have been a test of courage, in the course of which the spirit of a totem animal could be taken over. Petroglyphs in Tanum (Sweden) show beastlike men with lures already in the Bronze Age.
We are with this potentially lead back into times of the European hunter-gatherers. This would also explain why there are many parallels within other cultures, like the Celtic, Slavic and Greek traditions. Just like the Wild Hunt is until quite recently linked to the warrior caste, the wolf cult might have been linked to the archaic prototype of the warrior caste – the group of predominantly male tribe members that scouted the woods for prey. Many of the initiates live from robbery, like some of the late Norse berserkers. We can find a similar right to robbery in the agōgē, the Spartan education program, where young males also had to leave civilisation and live wild for a certain time.
A report from 17th century Livland shows that even then members of syncretic cult societies still used to raid farms disguised as werewolves. The partitioners of the Wild Hunt thus embody not only ghostly ancestral souls but also the souls of the wicked natural spirits strolling through the forest in dark times of winter. The seemingly paradoxical fact that these spirits were venerated and mimicked, reflects the polar nature of pre-Christian cult. Death and winter are yet again parallelized, the human and the natural are synchronized.
The books written by Weiser and Höfler deal almost only with male forms of initiation. In pre-Christian times however, there must also have been initiation rituals for girls and female initiators. The Wild Hunt is not only lead by the stormgod Woden, but also by the goddess Perchta, Holle, Herke or Frick in different regions of Germany. If the initiation is a rite of rebirth, the female aspect would clearly be missing from a cult practice limited to the all male Männerbund. The solution to this gap will probably lay in the witch phenomenon of the late medieval and early modern era. Just like the Yuletide folk customs illustrated in this article, the witch phenomena most likely is a remnant of cult practises from pre-Christian times too. Shamanistic elements are clearly linked to the figure of the witch as well.
At first glance Norse berserkers, Lithuanian werewolves and the Alpine Krampus seem to be very different figures and indeed caution is necessary where any concrete analysis of these geographically dispersed phenomena is intended. The topic is extensive in its many shapes and aspects and a short article like this can only open it for further immersion. But the differences are probably mostly due to the extensive amount of time that these figures had to develop on their own in regional folk belief and folk customs. While all these cultural distinctions have a right on their own, it is still fascinating to also draw a line back into an ancient common origin.
If we search for the commonalities and basic meaning of all these remnants of the past, we find that even today there is a lot within our culture that points to the Wild Hunt and related phenomena. After all, we can say this: If the initiation rituals of our forebears tap an essential vein of the European soul and are not merely random superstition or self-deception, they should still affect us in the now and here.
Not only does modernity lack initiation rituals and a sense of belonging to a community, but also a sense of being a part of nature. More and more people are drawn into the woods and seem to search for an anarchic and primitive state, including bug-out-camping and survivalist training on the one and spiritual purification on the other hand. It seems like in times of disorientation and dissolution people are drawn back towards the primordial qualities that are buried in their folk soul. The heathen ways are indeed timeless and its practices at least potentially recurrent, because they are an expression of an inborn mythos. Time will tell how this mythos will manifest in the future, but the more a new pagan culture will develop, the more it will have to reconcile with the old.
Sources:
Höfler, Otto: Kultische Geheimbünde der Germanen, Bd. 1, Frankfurt am Main 1934.
Lecouteux, Claude: Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral Doubles in the Middle Ages, Rochester/Vermont 2003.
Lily, Weiser: Altgermanische Jünglingsweihen und Männerbünde. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen und nordischen Altertums- und Volkskunde, Bühl 1927.
Tacitus, Publius Cornelius: Germania https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~wstevens/history331texts/barbarians.html
Video of a Perchtenlauf in Pfarrwerfen 2016