WOMAN AS WITCH 37 



feast - days, especially on Midsummer Night ; many 

 spend the night in the woods, and if a stone taken 

 from the Agneswiese be laid in the water of the spring, 

 and then under the pillow, prophetic dreams follow. 

 The spring is supposed to be sacred to a fay, Agnes, 

 who is friendly to mortals. Margretha Beutzins, tried 

 for witchcraft in the sixteenth century, confessed that 

 she and other witches fetched water out of a stream, 

 boiled it with herbs in a large caldron over a fire, and 

 bathed the devil therein. This bathing ceremony in a 

 sacred stream at witch -gatherings or on Midsummer 

 Night appears to be very general. In Thuringen, near 

 TiefFurt, is a sacred spring still called Weihbrunnen; 

 this well is one of the wells from which children are 

 brought, that is, the well of a goddess of fertility and 

 there are legends about children being found there, who 

 afterwards return to dance round the well. On the 

 Virgin Mary's birthday the festival of maids, as it 

 was still called at the beginning of our century the 

 maidens in Thuringen used to rise before daybreak and 

 bathe with the water of a sacred spring, which made 

 them beautiful. In Hesse bathing in Frau Holle's 

 pond, or in various sacred wells, makes barren women 

 fruitful. Here we have the same notion of fertility due 

 to the sacred water of the goddess ; but in later days 

 she has been replaced by the Virgin Mary. In Halle is 

 a well termed the Freucklerin well ; it is said to be so 

 called from an old woman, who had a great knowledge of 

 how to cure diseases, and we evidently have a trace of 

 an old healing goddess. In Steisslingen, in Swabia, the 

 wells are decorated on May Day ; there is dancing and a 



