The Wild Hunt

"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."

---William Shakespeare---

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.