Page:Book Of Halloween(1919).djvu/153

Rh In Italy the witches met under a walnut tree near Benevento; in France, in Puy de Dome; in Spain, near Seville. In these night-ridings Odin was the leader of a wild hunt. In stormy, blustering autumn weather

Odin rode in pursuit of shadowy deer with the Furious Host behind him. A ghostly huntsman of a later age was Dietrich von Bern, doomed to hunt till the Judgment Day. Frau Venus in Wagner's Tannhäuser held her revels in an underground palace in the Horselberg in Thuringia, Germany. This was one of the seats of Holda, the goddess of spring. Venus herself is like the Christian conception of Freya and He). She gathers about her a throng of nymphs, sylphs, and