Franz von Stuck
Wilde Jagd, 1899
There is an archetypal legend on the northern peoples with many variations for a recurring wild hunt of innocent people by haunted riders who haunt people, sowing death, abuse or grab women and destroy everything and woe to those they meet on their way. Bloody, dark gods are usually related with that archetypal raid, which was probably established in the collective unconscious by the very frequent raids, looting and massacres by barbaric tribes, gangs of bandits the rural populations have suffered in ancient and medieval times.
The Wild Hunt is an ancient folk myth prevalent across Northern, Western and Central Europe. The fundamental premise in all instances is the same: a phantasmal group of huntsmen with the accoutrements of hunting, horses, hounds, etc., in mad pursuit across the skies or along the ground, or just above it. The hunters may be the dead or the fairies (often in folklore connected with the dead). The hunter may be an unidentified lost soul, a deity or spirit of either gender, or may be a historical or legendary figures, deities, etc.
Seeing the Wild Hunt was thought to presage some catastrophe such as war or plague, or at best the death of the one who witnessed it. Mortals getting in the path of or following the Hunt could be kidnapped and brought to the land of the dead. Others believed that people’s spirits could be pulled away during their sleep to join the cavalcade. Some references about the “Wild Hunt” you can read below:
Then the hunters were black and large and terrifying, and their hounds were all black and broad-eyed and terrifying, and they rode on black horses and black goats… (Anonymous monk, 1132)
The Wild Hunt…is ancient in origin, an embodiment of the memories of war, agricultural myth, ancestral worship, and royal pastime. Its most complete and well-documented traditions lie with the peoples of Northern Europe; however, there are reflections of the Hunt anywhere in literature or folk tradition where the dead travel together over the land, or heroes rise up to rout a foreign foe, or where representatives of the sovereignty of the land are pursued and hunted.
…chasing a beautiful Otherworldly maiden—perhaps a memory of grim night chases conducted by invading armies for purposes of stealing wives from their enemies. Such imagery also seems to refer to struggles for supremacy between rising patriarchal gods (embodied in the Hunt and its antlered warrior leader) and ancient European goddess cults. (Ari Berk & William Spytma, 2002)
