The myth of the Wild Hunt can be seen in many countries, and exists in England, Scotland, Germany and Iceland, among other places. Simply put, the Wild Hunt (or wilde Jagd) is a procession of beings led by a spirit who roam through the countryside reveling, hunting, killing or eating everything in their path. The name of the leader of the Hunt varies from place to place, and strangely enough the leader was normally a woman, a deity. The most common name was Perchta or Hulda, which was put down by Latin authors as Diana or Herodias.

The Wild Hunt was often mentioned in the witch trials of the Middle Ages, allowing us to see the variations in local beliefs. In Southern Germany the Hunt leader was usually called Perchta, Berhta or Berta, and called "the bright one", which may explain why Latin authors called her Diana. In central Germany the Goddess was associated with agriculture rather than the Hunt as such, and called Holt, Holle or Hulda. Around 1100 the Huntress began to be called Pharaildis, which Burton, in his book Witchcraft in the Middle Ages suggests was a confusion between Frau Hilde and St Pharaildis, who actually had nothing to do with fertility. [1] The Huntress was also known as Faste, Selga, Selda and Venus. In France the fertility aspect of this Goddess was more evident, with the names Abundia and Satia being recorded, and in Italy she was known as Befana, Befania or Epiphania, the latter name probably coming from the Christian festival of Epiphany, where ancient New Year's rites were still celebrated. In some places, including England, the leader of the Hunt was male, and known as Herne the Hunter (in Windsor), Herlechin (sometimes spelt Herlequin, Harlequin, Hellequin or Hillikin), Herla, Berchtold, Berholt, Berndietrich and sometimes Hackel, Odin or Wuotan.

The male leaders of the Hunt were very specifically wild men, or wild spirits (selvaggi, salvatici or homines selvatici). Before the "Christianising" of Europe these wild men were probably fertility spirits, which may explain their connection with animals, notably the stag. The myth of the Wild Hunt became a popular literary and artistic device, which may be why it is still so familiar to us. In The Merry Wives of Windsor Shakespeare uses the myth and has Falstaff dress up as Herne:

"There is an old tale goes that Herne the Hunter,
Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns;
And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,
And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.
You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know
The superstitious idle-headed eld
Receiv'd, and did deliver to our age,
This tale of Herne the Hunter for a truth." [2]

Herne and his wild man counterparts were seen as erotic and sometimes brutal men, completely wild and strange. He is a personification of the wildness of the forest, something which, in these days of nice footpaths and picnic spaces, we perhaps do not appreciate as readily as our ancestors did. For them, when the forests were much larger and more dangerous, the spirit of the forest must be as mysterious and half-frightening as the forest itself. In England when Herne drove the Hunt across the skies people would hide away in their houses and lock away their animal, as any animal found out-of-doors during the Hunt would be chased and perhaps killed. In areas with a female Huntress she tended to be seen both as unfettered female sexuality, but also as a child-eater and vampire, bringing her into a connection not only with the myths about witches, but also the Goddess-figure of Lilith.

The Wild Hunt appears to have been incorporated into several different myths; in some areas it seems to have been part of a fertility cult with the Huntsman/woman being the deity of fertility. In other places the Hunter was not a God, but the leader of the fairies, such as Gwyn ap Nudd who was seen as the leader of the Welsh fairies (the Tylwyth Teg) and who led the Hunt in Wales and the West of England. [3] Toward the end of the middle ages, however, the Wild Hunt became more and more associated with witchcraft. Instead of saying that the Hunt was led by a spirit of God and featured many other spirits, it began to be said that witches participated in the Hunt and that their leader was either Satan himself or a demonic spirit. This belief also seems to have become muddled up with the idea that Witches rode in procession to Sabbats upon animals, or flew in the sky, and this idea became one of the major charges used in European witch hunts.

More recently the myth of the Wild Hunt has been separated from its connection to demonolatry, perhaps because of its popularity as a children's story and subject of art. Modern Pagans, especially those from Northern Europe or those influenced by Doreen Valiente in particular, have also embraced Herne the Hunter as a figure of the God and a powerful myth for men in particular. [4] Herne provides us with an image of a powerful and very masculine figure, but whose masculinity is in no way dependent upon the subjection of women. As a representation of the wildness of nature too, he is an ideal figure. I must express a little concern, however, that the figure of the Hunter appears to be merging with that of the Green Man and, to a lesser extent, the Lord of Misrule. While those figures bear quite a resemblance to one another, and may indeed be seen as aspects of the God, they come from rather seperate sources and have different histories.

The Wild Hunt is a popular and very long lasting myth, perhaps arising out of the pre-Christian Pagan religions of Europe, and it is remarkable that it managed to survive being associated with Witchcraft during the witch mania. Herne and his counterparts have rightly been rescued from children's tales and brought back to be a positive male image in Paganism, which sometimes seems in danger of being unbalanced by an over-concentration on the female aspects of the Divine.

Footnotes

1 Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (London: Cornell University Press, 1972) p49 note.

2 William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor Act IV, Scene IV in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Ed. W J Craig (Oxford University Press, 1987) p75. Read this section online (external link)

3 Charles Squire The Mythology of the British Islands: An Introduction to Celtic Myth, Legend, Poetry and Romance (London: Wordsworth Editions, Ltd, 2000) p155.

4 Doreen Valiente Witchcraft for Tomorrow (London: Robert Hale Limited, 1978, 2002 reprint) p51. This page deals with the representation of the Wild Hunt performed by Ms Valiente and others, and of its history as connected to Witchcraft.

© Sgeir. http://www.geocities.com/pagantheology/myth/wildhunt.html