CHAPTER XII
THE TEUTONIC RELIGION. WITCHES
The Teutons, that race of northern peoples called by the Romans,
"barbarians," comprised the Goths and Vandals who lived in
Scandinavia, and the Germans who dwelt north of Italy and east of
Gaul.
The nature of the northern country was such that the people could
not get a living by peaceful agriculture. So it was natural that in
the intervals of cattle-tending they should explore the seas all
about, and ravage neighboring lands. The Romans and the Gauls
experienced this in the centuries just before and after Christ, and
England from the eighth to the tenth centuries. Such a life made
the Norsemen adventurous, hardy, warlike, independent, and quick of
action, while the Celts were by nature more slothful and fond of
peaceful social gatherings, though of quicker intellect and wit.
Like the Greeks and Romans, the Teutons had twelve gods and
goddesses, among whom were Odin or Wotan, the king, and his wife
Freya, queen of beauty and love. Idun guarded the apples of
immortality, which the gods ate to keep them eternally young. The
chief difference in Teutonic mythology was the presence of an evil
god, Loki. Like Vulcan, Loki was a god of fire, like him, Loki was
lame because he had been cast out of heaven. Loki was always
plotting against the other gods, as Lucifer, after being banished
from Heaven by God, plotted against him and his people, and became
Satan, "the enemy."
"Him the Almighty Power
Hurl'd headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms."
MILTON: Paradise Lost.
It was this god of evil in Teutonic myth who was responsible for
the death of the bright beautiful sun-god, Baldur. Mistletoe was
the only thing in the world which had not sworn not to harm Baldur.
Loki knew this, and gave a twig of mistletoe to Baldur's blind
brother, Hodur, and Hodur cast it at Baldur and "unwitting slew"
him. Vali, a younger brother of Baldur, avenged him by killing
Hodur. Hodur is darkness and Baldur light; they are brothers; the
light falls a victim to blind darkness, who reigns until a younger
brother, the sun of the next day, rises to slay him in turn.
Below these gods, all nature was peopled with divinities. There
were elves of two kinds: black elves, called trolls, who were
frost-spirits, and guarded treasure (seeds) in the ground; and
white elves, who lived in mid-heaven, and danced on the earth in
fairy rings, where a mortal entering died. Will-o'-the-wisps
hovered over swamps to mislead travellers, and jack-o'-lanterns,
the spirits of murderers, walked the earth near the places of their
crimes.
The Otherworlds of the Teutons were Valhalla, the abode of the
heroes whom death had found on the battlefield, and Niflheim, "the
misty realm," secure from the cold outside, ruled over by Queen
Hel. Valkyries, warlike women who rode through the air on swift
horses, seized the heroes from the field of slaughter, and took
them to the halls of Valhalla, where they enjoyed daily combats,
long feasts, and drinking-bouts, music and story-telling.
The sacred tree of the Druids was the oak; that of the Teutonic
priests the ash. The flat disk of the earth was believed to be
supported by a great ash-tree, Yggdrasil,
"An ash know I standing,
Named Yggdrasil,
A stately tree sprinkled
With water the purest;
Thence come the dewdrops
That fall in the dales;
Ever-blooming, it stands
O'er the Urdar-fountain."
Voeluspa saga. (Blackwell trans.)
guarded by three fates, Was, Will, and Shall Be. The name of Was
means the past, of Will, the power, howbeit small, which men have
over present circumstances, and Shall Be, the future over which man
has no control. Vurdh, the name of the latter, gives us the word
"weird," which means fate or fateful. The three Weird Sisters in
Macbeth are seeresses.
Besides the ash, other trees and shrubs were believed to have
peculiar powers, which they have kept, with some changes of
meaning, to this day. The elder (elves' grave), the hawthorn, and
the juniper, were sacred to supernatural powers.
The priests of the Teutons sacrificed prisoners of war in
consecrated groves, to Tyr, god of the sword. The victims were not
burned alive, as by the Druids, but cut and torn terribly, and
their dead bodies burned. From these sacrifices auspices were
taken. A man's innocence or guilt was manifested by gods to men
through ordeals by fire; walking upon red-hot ploughshares, holding
a heated bar of iron, or thrusting the hands into red-hot
gauntlets, or into boiling water. If after a certain number of
days no burns appeared the person was declared innocent. If a
suspected man, thrown into the water, floated he was guilty; if he
sank, he was acquitted.
The rites of the Celts were done in secret, and it was forbidden
that they be written down. Those of the Teutons were commemorated
in Edda and Saga (poetry and prose).
In the far north the shortness of summer and the length of winter
so impressed the people that when they made a story about it they
told of a maiden, the Spring, put to sleep, and guarded, along with
a hoard of treasure, by a ring of fire. One knight only could break
through the flames, awaken her and seize the treasure. He is the
returning sun, and the treasure he gets possession of is the wealth
of summer vegetation. So there is the story of Brynhild, pricked by
the "sleep-thorn" of her father, Wotan, and sleeping until Sigurd
wakens her. They marry, but soon Sigurd has to give her up to
Gunnar, the relentless winter, and Gunnar cannot rest until he has
killed Sigurd, and reigns undisturbed. Grimms' story of Rapunzel,
the princess who was shut up by a winter witch, and of Briar-Rose,
pricked by a witch's spindle, and sleeping inside a hedge which
blooms with spring at the knight's approach, mean likewise the
struggle between summer and winter.
The chief festivals of the Teutonic year were held at Midsummer and
Midwinter. May-Day, the very beginning of spring, was celebrated by
May-ridings, when winter and spring, personified by two warriors,
engaged in a combat in which Winter, the fur-clad king of ice and
snow, was defeated. It was then that the sacred fire had been
kindled, and the sacrificial feast held. Judgments were rendered
then.
The summer solstice was marked by bonfires, like those of the Celts
on May Eve and Midsummer. They were kindled in an open place or on
a hill, and the ceremonies held about them were similar to the
Celtic. As late as the eighteenth century these same customs were
observed in Iceland.
A May-pole wreathed with magical herbs is erected as the center of
the dance in Sweden, and in Norway a child chosen May-bride is
followed by a procession as at a real wedding. This is a symbol of
the wedding of sun and earth deities in the spring. The May-pole,
probably imported from Celtic countries, is used at Midsummer
because the spring does not begin in the north before June.
Yule-tide in December celebrated the sun's turning back, and was
marked by banquets and gayety. A chief feature of all these feasts
was the drinking of toasts to the gods, with vows and prayers.
By the sixth century Christianity had supplanted Druidism in the
British Isles. It was the ninth before Christianity made much
progress in Scandinavia. After King Olaf had converted his nation,
the toasts which had been drunk to the pagan gods were kept in
honor of Christian saints; for instance, those to Freya were now
drunk to the Virgin Mary or to St. Gertrude.
The "wetting of the sark-sleeve," that custom of Scotland and
Ireland, was in its earliest form a rite to Freya as the northern
goddess of love. To secure her aid in a love-affair, a maid would
wash in a running stream a piece of fine linen--for Freya was fond
of personal adornment--and would hang it before the fire to dry an
hour before midnight. At half-past eleven she must turn it, and at
twelve her lover's apparition would appear to her, coming in at the
half-open door.
"The wind howled through the leafless boughs, and there was every
appearance of an early and severe winter, as indeed befell. Long
before eleven o'clock all was hushed and quiet within the house,
and indeed without (nothing was heard), except the cold wind
which howled mournfully in gusts. The house was an old farmhouse,
and we sat in the large kitchen with its stone floor, awaiting
the first stroke of the eleventh hour. It struck at last, and
then all pale and trembling we hung the garment before the fire
which we had piled up with wood, and set the door ajar, for that
was an essential point. The door was lofty and opened upon the
farmyard, through which there was a kind of thoroughfare, very
seldom used, it is true, and at each end of it there was a gate
by which wayfarers occasionally passed to shorten the way. There
we sat without speaking a word, shivering with cold and fear,
listening to the clock which went slowly, tick, tick, and
occasionally starting as the door creaked on its hinges, or a
half-burnt billet fell upon the hearth. My sister was ghastly
white, as white as the garment which was drying before the fire.
And now half an hour had elapsed and it was time to turn.... This
we did, I and my sister, without saying a word, and then we again
sank on our chairs on either side of the fire. I was tired, and
as the clock went tick-a-tick, I began to feel myself dozing. I
did doze, I believe. All of a sudden I sprang up. The clock was
striking one, two, but ere it could give the third chime, mercy
upon us! we heard the gate slam to with a tremendous noise...."
"Well, and what happened then?"
"Happened! before I could recover myself, my sister had sprung to
the door, and both locked and bolted it. The next moment she was
in convulsions. I scarcely knew what happened; and yet it
appeared to me for a moment that something pressed against the
door with a low moaning sound. Whether it was the wind or not, I
can't say. I shall never forget that night. About two hours
later, my father came home. He had been set upon by a highwayman
whom he beat off."
BORROW: Lavengro.
Freya and Odin especially had had power over the souls of the dead.
When Christianity turned all the old gods into spirits of evil,
these two were accused especially of possessing unlawful learning,
as having knowledge of the hidden matters of death. This unlawful
wisdom is the first accusation that has always been brought against
witches. A mirror is often used to contain it. Such are the
crystals of the astrologers, and the looking-glasses which on
Hallowe'en materialize wishes.
From that time in the Middle Ages when witches were first heard of,
it has nearly always been women who were accused. Women for the
most part were the priests in the old days: it was a woman to whom
Apollo at Delphi breathed his oracles. In all times it has been
women who plucked herbs and concocted drinks of healing and
refreshment. So it was very easy to imagine that they experimented
with poisons and herbs of magic power under the guidance of the now
evil gods. If they were so directed, they must go on occasions to
consult with their masters. The idea arose of a witches' Sabbath,
when women were enabled by evil means to fly away, and adore in
secret the gods from whom the rest of the world had turned. There
were such meeting-places all over Europe. They had been places of
sacrifice, of judgment, or of wells and springs considered holy
under the old religion, and whither the gods had now been banished.
The most famous was the Blocksberg in the Hartz mountains in
Germany.
"Dame Baubo first, to lead the crew!
A tough old sow and the mother thereon,
Then follow the witches, every one."
GOETHE: Faust. (Taylor trans.)
In Norway the mountains above Bergen were a resort, and the
Dovrefeld, once the home of the trolls.
"It's easy to slip in here,
But outward the Dovre-King's gate opens not."
IBSEN: Peer Gynt. (Archer trans.)
In Italy the witches met under a walnut tree near Benevento; in
France, in Puy de Dome; in Spain, near Seville.
In these night-ridings Odin was the leader of a wild hunt. In
stormy, blustering autumn weather
"The wonted roar was up among the woods."
MILTON: Comus.
Odin rode in pursuit of shadowy deer with the Furious Host behind
him. A ghostly huntsman of a later age was Dietrich von Bern,
doomed to hunt till the Judgment Day.
Frau Venus in Wagner's Tannhaeuser held her revels in an
underground palace in the Horselberg in Thuringia, Germany. This
was one of the seats of Holda, the goddess of spring. Venus herself
is like the Christian conception of Freya and Hel. She gathers
about her a throng of nymphs, sylphs, and those she has lured into
the mountain by intoxicating music and promises. "The enchanting
sounds enticed only those in whose hearts wild sensuous longings
had already taken root." Of these Tannhaeuser is one. He has stayed
a year, but it seems to him only one day. Already he is tired of
the rosy light and eternal music and languor, and longs for the
fresh green world of action he once knew. He fears that he has
forfeited his soul's salvation by being there at all, but cries,
"Salvation rests for me in Mary!"
WAGNER: Tannhaeuser.
At the holy name Venus and her revellers vanish, and Tannhaeuser
finds himself in a meadow, hears the tinkling herd-bells, and a
shepherd's voice singing,
"Frau Holda, goddess of the spring,
Steps forth from the mountains old;
She comes, and all the brooklets sing,
And fled is winter's cold.
* * * * *
Play, play, my pipe, your lightest lay,
For spring has come, and merry May!"
Tannhaeuser. (Huckel trans.)
praising the goddess in her blameless state.
By the fifteenth century Satan, taking the place of the gods,
assumed control of the evil creatures. Now that witches were the
followers of the Devil, they wrote their names in his book, and
were carried away by him for the revels by night. A new witch was
pricked with a needle to initiate her into his company. At the
party the Devil was adored with worship due to God alone. Dancing,
a device of the pagans, and hence considered wholly wicked, was
indulged in to unseemly lengths. In 1883 in Sweden it was believed
that dances were held about the sanctuaries of the ancient gods,
and that whoever stopped to watch were caught by the dancers and
whirled away. If they profaned holy days by this dancing, they were
doomed to keep it up for a year.
At the witches' Sabbath the Devil himself sometimes appeared as a
goat, and the witches were attended by cats, owls, bats, and
cuckoos, because these creatures had once been sacred to Freya. At
the feast horse-flesh, once the food of the gods at banquets, was
eaten. The broth for the feast was brewed in a kettle held over the
fire by a tripod, like that which supported the seat of Apollo's
priestess at Delphi. The kettle may be a reminder of the one Thor
got, which gave to each guest whatever food he asked of it, or it
may be merely that used in brewing the herb-remedies which women
made before they were thought to practise witchcraft. In the kettle
were cooked mixtures which caused storms and shipwrecks, plagues,
and blights. No salt was eaten, for that was a wholesome substance.
The witches of Germany did not have prophetic power; those of
Scandinavia, like the Norse Fates, did have it. The troll-wives of
Scandinavia were like the witches of Germany--they were cannibals,
especially relishing children, like the witch in Hansel and Grethel.
From the fourteenth to the eighteenth century all through Europe
and the new world people thought to be witches, and hence in the
devil's service, were persecuted. It was believed that they were
able to take the form of beasts. A wolf or other animal is caught
in a trap or shot, and disappears. Later an old woman who lives
alone in the woods is found suffering from a similar wound. She is
then declared to be a witch.
"There was once an old castle in the middle of a vast thick wood;
in it lived an old woman quite alone, and she was a witch. By day
she made herself into a cat or a screech-owl, but regularly at
night she became a human being again."
GRIMM: Jorinda and Joringel.
"Hares found on May morning are witches and should be stoned,"
reads an old superstition. "If you tease a cat on May Eve, it will
turn into a witch and hurt you."
