Norse Goddess Magic (9 page)

HOLDA AND BERCHTE AND HOLIDAYS

Both Berchte and Holda are particularly associated with the Yule
season. They travel the country at this time, between the solstice and Twelfth
Night, bestowing their blessings on the land and checking up on the housekeeping
and spinning. If all is in order, they reward the virtuous worker with a fine
new spindle or some particularly good flax. If the worker has been slothful and
sloppy, they spoil and tangle all the thread. Holda has many traits later
ascribed to Santa Claus; she punishes naughty children and rewards good ones,
and travels about with her muffled servant, Holle-peter, or Ruprecht,
²⁴
like the European Saint Nicholas and his aide, Black Peter. In Franconia as late
as the nineteenth century, a boy dressed in a cow's hide and carrying a bell
acted the part of Eisen-Berta (“Iron Berta”) and gave treats to good children
and rods to bad ones.
²⁵
The people in other areas had a procession
during Yule in which a figure representing Holda and dressed in straw and other
oddments entered each of the houses of the village to the accompaniment of
fiddlers.
²⁶

In many places in Europe it was the custom to finish all the spinning by the
end of Yule or run the risk of offending the goddess. In fact, she is believed
to spoil any unfinished spinning she finds on the last day of the year; the wild
version of Berchte is said to wipe her behind with it.
²⁷
During the
Yule season itself, no spinning is done at all, because it is a time considered
holy to the goddess and is supposed to be a time of rest. This goddess seems to
recognize the importance of both working and resting at appropriate times.
Besides, a good housewife should be fully occupied with supervising the Yule
festivities if the festival is being observed properly.

People of other German districts would fill their distaffs at the beginning
of Yule and spin it all off by Twelfth Night. Here the magical act of spinning
is performed during the holy nights, perhaps to draw the notice of the goddess
and win her favor. The idea of finishing all old work at the end of the old year
and beginning fresh in the new one ties in with the whole Germanic concept of
Yule as a time between worlds when the old year that is ending overlaps with the
new one being born. It is a time to abandon ordinary work and everyday concerns
and to concentrate on holy things.

In some places, the Carnival season in February signaled an end to work. The
time before Lent was traditionally associated with women, particularly
housewives, in many Germanic cultures. At Shrovetide in England, women still
hold pancake races in which contestants run through the streets flipping
pancakes on skillets. In parts of Germany the Thursday before Shrove Thursday
was called
Weiberdonnerstag
(“wives' Thursday”). On this day the women
took a holiday from their household duties and carried a barrel of wine around
the village on a cart drawn by cows, after which they retired to an inn and
drank late into the night. (Marion Frieda Ingham, who wrote her dissertation on
the goddess Freyja, suggests most of the drinking may have been done by the
joyous throng, rather than by the women, but I would imagine they imbibed their
fair share.)
²⁸

Although not specifically associated with Frigg or Holda and Berchte, these
customs seem to have some relation to older festivals. The pancake races are a
celebration of housekeeping skills (it's not easy to flip a pancake while you're
running), and the Weiberdonnerstag procession with its cow-drawn cart is very
similar to the procession of the goddess through the land at Yule or in spring.
All the festivals have in common the participation of women who are resting from
their work and running a bit wild, which is characteristic of the Yule
celebrations of Holda and Berchte.

In one German legend, Berchte sticks her head in the window of a spinning
room on Twelfth Night and finds it filled with merrymakers. Enraged, the goddess
hands in a large number of spindles that have to be filled with thread within
the hour. In the midst of the general consternation, one bold girl runs up to
the attic for a roll of cloth, which the people wrap around the reels; the cloth
is then covered with two or three thicknesses of spinning to make the reels
appear full. When Berchte reappears, she receives the skimpy reels and walks off
shaking her head; one gets the impression she is not really fooled.
²⁹
It can be inferred that the goddess can be satisfied with only a token amount of
work, because it is the gift of the holy act of spinning itself that restores
the bond between herself and humans.
³⁰

In Austria and other parts of Europe, the figure of Berchte/Holda is
represented by St. Lucia, also known as St. Lucy, Frau Lutz, or Spillelutsche
(“Spindle-Lucia”). The name also appears as Spillaholle or Spillahulla,
³¹
showing the close ties between Lucy and the goddess Holda. Like her Heathen
counterparts, this goddess-turned-saint is associated with Yule and with
spinning. In Denmark her day is celebrated on December 13, the beginning of the
Yule season. On that day all spinning ceases, and Lucy comes to check up on the
work and to punish the lazy and reward the good. Sweden also celebrates Lucy's
day. Early on that morning, the eldest daughter of the house, or sometimes the
prettiest girl, rises before the others and, attired as “Lussi-Bride” in a white
robe and a crown of candles decorated with greenery and red berries, proceeds to
serve coffee, pastries, and
gløgg
(a truly potent alcoholic drink) to the
whole household.

Both Berchte and Holda are in the habit of stopping any unwary person who is
rash enough to be out on Twelfth Night and asking him to mend her wagon or plow.
The goddess then gives him chips as payment, and the next morning he finds that
the chips have turned to gold. This goddess appreciates those who are skilled
with their hands (so remember your pocketknife when you go out on Twelfth
Night).

However, Berchte has no patience with greed. In an old story, a master
wheelwright is returning from work on the eve of Twelfth Day and meets the
goddess and her weeping children on a riverbank. She asks him to use his hatchet
to mend her broken plow and then offers him the fallen chips as payment, which
he refuses. At home he finds that one chip, which had lodged in his shoe, has
turned to gold. The next year one of his men, who had heard the story, waits at
the same place on Berchte's Night. When she encounters him, the goddess demands
to know what he is doing there at that hour and, exclaiming that she is better
provided with tools that year, strikes him in the shoulder with her own hatchet.
³²

In all her encounters with humans, this goddess is looking for people with
practical skills, but in none of these stories does she demand any unusual or
heroic acts. In the past, spinning and mending wagons or plows were all fairly
common crafts, which any moderately competent person would have known how to do.
Holda and Berchte are not asking great deeds of you but only that you be able to
take care of yourself in the everyday world, that you exhibit a few simple
skills—any skills—and show that you are neither too proud to work with your
hands nor too selfish to help a fellow being in need.

Gifts of food and drink, particularly milk, are often left out for Holda or
Berchte during Yule. Certain foods are to be eaten on the goddess's night as
well, usually a porridge, dumplings, or a cake of oats, and often herring as
well—the standard peasant fare. This is a meal even the god Thor enjoys on
occasion, as mentioned in the Hárbarðsljoð (st. 3). If Berchte finds that her
special dish has been omitted, she cuts open the person's belly, takes out any
other food she finds there, fills the space with straw, and sews it all back up
with a plowshare for needle and a chain for thread
³³
(a condition
anyone who has been to a really good New Year's Eve party will recognize
immediately).

This sort of thing is similar to shamanic visions in which the initiate is
eaten or torn to pieces as part of a visionary experience. In
Laxdæla
saga
(chs. 48 and 49) a man dreams that his
dís
(a guardian spirit,
usually female) removes his intestines and replaces them with brushwood. Later
he is wounded in battle and assumed to be dead, but he survives, claiming that
his dís had returned and replaced his organs, which she had presumably taken for
safekeeping.

HOLDA AND BERCHTE AND THE WILD HUNT

Both Holda and Berchte at times lead the Wild Hunt, a frightening
procession of the dead who ride through the winter storms accompanied by
fearsome black dogs and usually led by the god Wodan (Odin). The Hunt itself is
often held to symbolize the storm wind howling through the skies, and the wind's
bride (
windsbraut
) was the whirlwind, a force associated with Holda.
³⁴
When the goddess leads the Hunt, her train often includes wild women, as well as
hounds and other wild beasts, and usually they ride during the winter season
between Yule and Easter. A Fastnacht procession in Nuremburg, Germany, in 1588
featured a Wild Hunt procession led by a figure who represented Frau Holda
riding a black horse and who blew on a horn, cracked her whip, and shook her
hair about madly.
³⁵
In other parts of Germany they held the
Perchtenjagd, or Perchtenlauf (“Berchte's hunt” or “run”), in which young men in
masks and odd disguises, such as black sheepskins or headresses made of white
cocks' feathers, went through the villages ringing cows' bells and cracking
whips and generally making merry.
³⁶
Sometimes they danced, leaped
into the air, or jumped over wells or brooks.

When taking Wodan's place as leader of the Hunt, the goddess is called Frau
Gode (Frau Gaue, Frau Wode, i.e., “Mrs. Odin”). Like Wodan, Frau Gode rides
during “the Twelves”; that is, the twelve nights of Yule. If people leave their
doors open, she sends in a dog that sits by the hearth and disturbs everyone's
sleep with its whining; in addition, it brings danger of sickness, death, and
fire. This pest cannot be gotten rid of until the next Yule, when the Hunt
passes by again.
³⁷
Frau Gode's Hunt, like her husband's, is also apt
to snatch up the unwary or unwise person and carry him away, often leaving him
dead or mad after the experience.

The Hunt is not solely for the purpose of terrifying mortals, however. Its
passage is supposed to ensure the fertility of the fields. Reapers in some areas
of Germany used to leave the last few stalks of the harvest for Frau Gode,
sometimes decorating it with leaves and flowers. In other districts the same
gifts and chants were offered to Wodan.
³⁸
This association of Wodan
and his wife with the harvest is echoed in a procession that took place in
northern England at certain times of the year, but particularly in the autumn.
This festival included a giant's dance featuring huge figures of Wodan and his
wife Frigg as well as a folk play in which two swords were clashed around the
neck of a boy without hurting him.
³⁹
This last custom is reminiscent
of the gods hurling weapons at Balder without harming him.

OTHER DEITIES ASSOCIATED WITH FRIGG

Nerthus

While she is not the same goddess as Frigg, the older Germanic
deity Nerthus has some definite similarities and seems to have bequeathed some
of her functions to Frigg. Most of what we know about Nerthus comes from the
Roman historian Tacitus, writing in the first century CE. In his
Germania
(ch. 40) he identifies this goddess with the Roman Mother Earth and describes
how she was carried through the land at certain times in an ox-drawn wagon to
bring fertility to the fields and the people. During her procession all weapons
and iron objects were put away and a holy peace was kept. Afterward, the goddess
and the wagon were bathed in a lake by servants who were then drowned, and
Nerthus retired to her island until her next journey.

Both Nerthus and her later German counterparts, Holda and Berchte, make an
annual progression to bring fertility to the land. In each case the goddess
travels in a wagon drawn by cattle, and certain tools—iron objects and weapons
in Nerthus's case, implements of spinning in Holda's and Berchte's—are hidden
and their use prohibited during the holy period. Also, Nerthus shares with Holda
an affinity for lakes and bathing. Perhaps the drowning of her servants
indicates a belief that the world of the goddess could be reached by passing
through water.

Brigid

Although I personally dislike the practice of taking the gods of
one culture and trying to equate them with the gods of another, the Celtic
goddess Brigid shares so many similarities with Frigg and her German
counterparts that she deserves a closer look. The Irish goddess Brigid, who was
known as Ffraed in Wales and Bride in Scotland, later had to be made a saint
because the people wouldn't give her up after they became Christian. Like Holda
and Berchte, Brigid is a goddess of craftsmen, especially smiths, and of
childbirth, prophecy, and poetry. On her feast day certain types of work were
prohibited, typically spinning, milling, carting, or other work involving
wheels. Washing, plowing, and smithwork were sometimes also restricted.
⁴⁰

Like Holda and Berchte, Brigid makes a procession through the country to
ensure the health of the cattle and crops. The house was traditionally cleaned
in her honor, and gifts of butter, bread, and porridge were left out for her in
the cottages or at special healing wells. Brigid's Eve was often enlivened by
wild processions of masked revelers called “biddies,” similar to the festivities
at Perchtenlauf.
⁴¹

Brigid is strongly associated with midwifery and childbirth. Christian
legends depict her as taking care of the newborn Christ, wrapping him in her
cloak and providing him with milk. She was also said to have helped the Virgin
Mary to slip unobserved into the temple for her purification after childbirth.
To do this, Brigid drew the crowd's attention to herself by wearing a headdress
of lighted candles, just like the Swedish Lucy. These images are obviously
remnants of Heathen lore that were later grafted onto the Christian saint to
make her acceptable to the Celtic people.

Brigid's Day is celebrated in the Celtic countries on February 1, the day
before the Christian feast of Candlemas, but the beginning of February also
seems to have some connection to Frigg and her German counterparts. The second
month of the Icelandic year, Gói or Gómánuðr, roughly corresponds to February
(February/March, to be exact). In Iceland it was celebrated by the mistress of
the farmstead, who rose early in the morning and went outside clad only in her
shift to welcome Góa to the farm, after which she gave a feast for the other
wives in the neighborhood.
⁴²
The season of Carnival, which is
celebrated just before Lent in many European countries, also falls in February
and was often associated with Holda and Berchte. An old German folk custom
maintained that if women danced in the sun on Candlemas, their flax would
thrive.
⁴³