WOMAN AS WITCH 27 



covered all things became hideous and horrible, but 

 the legend retains its significance all the same. The 

 devil as a minor person seated at the feet of his grand- 

 mother, who with corn ears and apple is obviously a 

 goddess of the harvest like Ceres, worshipped by fair 

 maidens with dance and song. I know no legend more 

 striking than this in the manner in which it shows the 

 origin of witch ceremonies in the old worship of a 

 goddess of fertility by her woman devotees. But this 

 same superiority of the devil's mother or grandmother 

 over the devil is marked whenever we find traditions 

 about them. 1 She cajoles him and wheedles secrets out of 

 him, and at Soest is said even for a time to have banished 

 him to the Brocken in the Harzgebirge on account of 

 his idleness. Not only in Westphalia, but right away 

 down to the Danube, we find traces of the devil's 

 mother as a person of great importance. She builds a 

 palace on the Danube, she hunts with black dogs in the 

 night through Swabia, and wherever the devil himself 

 can achieve nothing there he sends his mother. 



The devil's dam, hunting with black dogs through 

 the night, directly associates this goddess with a number 

 of female deities who ride with their dogs and a wild 

 following through the dark on Twelfth Night, May Day, 

 Midsummer Eve, or at Yule-tide. Thus in Mecklenburg, 

 Frau Gode, described as a weather-witch, hunts through 

 the night, sometimes on a white horse, sometimes on a 

 sleigh drawn by dogs. She eats human flesh, she brings 

 the plague, and no spinning must be done on the nights 



1 The fact that we hear of the Teufelsstiefbruder but never of his father is. 

 also not without value as determining the mother-age character of the civilisation, 

 from which this mother and son dual deity took its origin. 



