352 THE GERMAN PASSION-PLAY 



picture placed on a level with the Son, or crowned by 

 the Trinity (e.g. Diirer's Maria Himmelfahrt), they 

 did not stay to inquire into fine dogmatic distinctions. 

 The folk -literature teems with proof of this. What 

 might possibly have been highly imaginative allegory 

 in the Minnesingers' verbose adoration, became an ex- 

 pression of unqualified folk - belief in the mouths of 

 the Mastersingers. Such divine attributes as eternal 

 existence, creative power, dispensation of mercy, sove- 

 reignty over hell, and the divine title to the worship 

 of animate and inanimate nature are all associated with 

 the Virgin. A few extracts from a fourteenth-century 

 Meistersong will help to emphasise her real position in 

 folk -belief. " She is with them (i.e. the three persons 

 of the Trinity) one Godhead bright." King David saw 

 her " standing by God in golden robes and passing in 

 and out of the Godhead, even before she was born as 

 the Virgin. Who can be mispleased that she is so 

 gloriously united with God ? " Later the Virgin herself 

 is introduced saying : " I helped him to make all things 



1 In Ostendorfer's woodcut the Virgin carries the keys of heaven and hell ; she 

 is appealed to as goddess of life and death (p. 175) to stop the plague, and receives 

 votive offerings representing healed limbs. To her the peasants appeal with milk- 

 pail, sickle, and hay-fork in hand, with offerings of fruit and fish. In this respect, 

 as goddess of fertility, she receives votive presents of seed-basket, fodder-pannier, 

 pitchfork, and scythe ; while cooking-ladle and pot, spindle and lirefork, show her 

 relation to the old domestic goddesses of heathen times. In short, it is she who 

 bears the halo, crown, and sceptre, and the child but completes the notion of the 

 primitive mother-goddess. The reader will be able by the aid of a magnifying 

 glass to recognise most of the things referred to in this description. In addition 

 there would certainly be inside the building little wax images of babies, thank- 

 offerings for fertility. In the unique copy of an unknown master's Die Wunder 

 von Maria Zell in woodcuts from circa 1503, which is in the possession of Herr 

 A. Coppenrath of Regensburg, we find the Virgin as goddess of fertility granting 

 children to barren parents, helping women after childbirth, and curing all 

 diseases, especially those of young children. 



