Thursday, May 21, 2026

Walpurgisnacht – Part 3: Runic Astrotheology, Meditations on Ancestral Memory, and the Germanic Mother Goddess

By Sean Jobst

21 May 2026


Illustration of the Mother Goddess Frija, by
the German artist Carl Emil Doepler (1882)


In Part 2 I compared etymology between the “saint” Walpurga and ancient seeresses, and decoded word-play alluding to various Germanic Goddesses. The magic inherent within these words manifest multiple layers of meaning – on the exoteric, denotations of sovereignty or geographical concepts; on the esoteric level, meanings related to magical processes and the otherworld. I also cited direct correspondences to qualities attributed in lore to the Mother Goddess known in Old High German as Frija. Readers accustomed to Norse lore might be confused by how I seemed to mention Frigg and Freya interchangeably. Generally, in continental Germanic traditions she is one and the same Goddess, whose name combines terms denoting “lady”, “beloved”, “beautiful,” “free” and “courtship” since she epitomizes the feminine in its various qualities:

“We gather from all this, that the forms and even the meanings of the two names border closely on one another. Freyja means the gladsome, gladdening, sweet, gracious goddess, Frigg the free, beautiful, loveable; to the former attaches the general notion of frau (mistress), to the latter that of fri (woman). Holda, from hold (sweet, kind), and Berhta from berht (bright, beautiful) resemble them both.”(1)

Our festivals expressed a sacred balance of feminine and masculine, so that for example folklore recognizes Wodan and Frija (in such regional manifestations as Frau Holle) as dual hosts of the Wild Hunt.  The close connection between words and magic is inherent within this balance, with Frija’s magical qualities in German lore largely transferred to Freya in the Scandinavian sources – but the animating spirit being much the same.(2) This sacred balance was about divine energies playing out at all levels of the magical process.(3) “Odin taught Freyja the runes, and Freyja taught Odin magic, healing magic (White-magic, herbology),” as noted by the American Heathen researcher, scholar and poet Scott Carlson, whose work I highly recommend. He continues:

“Odin has access to his runes (constellations) for extended periods of time. Freyja represents youthfulness, fertility, growth, the maiden; she represents spring through early-summer of Mother’s-time. Freyja does not have nearly as much darkness hours and therefore does not see the constellations (runes) as Odin does, just as Odin does not have access to all the herbs, plants, trees in bloom, and more, that Freyja does; but their times meet and overlap. Mother’s-time and Father’s-time overlap twice a year, spring and fall. Fall is when days begin to get shorter and things go dormant; the Northern Pagan year will end shortly (Samhain). So, it is in the spring that maiden Goddess Freyja and God Odin are presented the opportunity to teach and learn from each other.”(4)



"Freyja" (1905) by Emil Doepler, son of Carl Emil
Doepler and a renown artist in his own right. 

"Idise" (1905) by Emil Doepler. The Idisi are
the continental Germanic equivalent of the
Disir - described in the first Merseburg Charm.



Natural Healers Turned into “Witches”; and the Shamanic Qualities of Frija

When we meditate on these primal energies, joining animism with cosmic cycles, we reveal even more layers of meaning enlivening Walpurgisnacht and its connection to “witches”. We can meditate on the magic inherent within Nature, including the biofeedback loop it shares with our will and consciousness, its cycles manifesting inner and outer changes; the Runes as sacred mysteries encoded within the cellular level, to processes of the Mind, across all levels of human action, extending up to the most transcendent, primordial cosmic forces – the sacred law of correspondence. The magical gifts flowing from these complementary powers were especially feared by the Abrahamic archons, who fear-mongered about the folk healers and herbalists they slandered as “witches” with their alleged nocturnal flights:

“Freya comes from the family of the Vanir, the even older gods. Thus, Odin’s knowledge of magic is rooted in the female primal ground. The shamanic knowledge, which was supported by the myth of Odin and Freya, stood in the way of the declaration of the ‘true faith in the one God’ by Christian missionaries. Shamans, with their direct access to the world of spirits and gods, were and are the rivals of the priests and their book religion. Nevertheless, many shamanic elements have been retained in simple folk medicine.”(5)  

Frija expresses these magical and shamanic qualities in continental lore, “conjuring” a healing spell in the Merseburg Charms alongside Wodan and an otherwise unmentioned figure named Sinthgunt, identified as sister of the Sun Goddess Sunna (so likely some astral deity). Frija appears in her functions as “a caretaker of family, fertility and health.”(6) She is also associated with Urlag, the primal layer of action and manifestation governing fate and consequences across past, present, and future: “She knows all urlag, knows the unfolding of all Being, and what is to come – though never speaks of such dooms and wisdoms. In this, she is the matron of great and deep insight, and certainly linked to skills of cunning and ‘seeing’. So too, would it be that she is the proper patroness of the forasagin – the seer of natural, inborn ability, one particularly gifted with vision or what would be considered ‘psychic’ ability in New Age or mainstream thinking.”(7)

Shamans are healers who administer to the wounds of individuals and tribe, transmuting themselves in the process. Seeresses engaged in these shamanic rituals from a high place (atop mounds or other thresholds), seen as “floating away as geese or swans,” which is why Freya was regarded as “a guardian of the geese; as a goose-maiden, she is the guardian of all souls.”(8) With this we recall her association with the Walkuries. The figure of “Mother Goose” in German fairy tales is commonly accepted to be Frau Holle, Perchta, Berchta, Holda – regional variations who all share the same feminine qualities of Frija (who should thus be viewed as the Germanic Mother Goddess whose energies flowed into these folkloric representations):

“A being similar to Holda, or the same under another name, makes her appearance precisely in those Upper German regions where Holda leaves off, in Swabia, in Alsace, in Switzerland, in Bavaria and Austria. She is called frau Berchte, i.e., in OHG. Perahta, the bright, luminous, glorious (as Holda produces the glittering snow): by the very meaning of the word a benign and gladdening influence, yet she is now rarely represented as such ; as a rule, the awe-inspiring side is brought into prominence, and she appears as a grim bugbear to frighten children with. In the stories of dame Berchta the bad meaning predominates, as the good one does in those of dame Holda; that is to say, the popular Christian view had degraded Berchta lower than Holda. But she too is evident.”(9)



Milky Way Swan Panorama, from Wikimedia Commons


Free Cosmic Bear illustration, from StockCake



Milky Way as “Swan Road”; Orion’s Belt Stars; Cosmic Bear; and Othala Rune

The Milky Way is often called the “Swan Road” since its core sets from spring to early autumn is the constellation Cygnus, whose own etymology is from the Greek word for “swan”. Closely associated with the Northern Cross, highly visible in the northern skies this time of year, this constellation and its swan symbolism is embedded within Greek mythology.(10) Relating it to Germanic mythos, Cygnus’ wings span the “Swan Road”, whose “bridge” correlates to Frigga and the “Swan Maidens” as primal laws of all-knowing, all-consciousness. The Great Bear (Ursa Major) “awakens” to move up the cosmic axis: “and once our cosmic Bear is overhead (spring/rebirth), the rebirth of valiant ancestry takes place, the rebirth of Nature takes place.” “Mother Goddess Frigga is the giver of gifts; she gives fruits of the earth during Mother’s time,” relating to Spring.(11)

Expressing the animistic/cosmic balance of masculine and feminine, the Maibaum – as a ritualistic and folkloric representation of the Axis Mundi - honors both Frija, the Mother Goddess personifying Earth at full fertility, and Balder, the Shining God representing the sun’s life-giving rays at their pinnacle, as well as the soul’s resurrection into more incarnations – just like turning of the seasons. Both were encoded within folklore, heraldry and toponyms, as I have reclaimed from within my own blood memory.(12) As Balder’s mother, Frija is similarly “bright” and “luminous” as Perchta. In Sweden and parts of Germany, the three stars of Orion’s Belt were known as “Frigg’s distaff” or “Freya’s spindle”(13), so we could also relate it to the Norns. Containing the North Star, the “Little Bear” (Ursa Minor) is allegorized as Freya’s high-seat or central “throne” around which the sky rotates. As such she has close correspondences to Venus, whose name survives in Romance language terms for “Friday” just as Freya’s does for Germanic languages.(14)

The Mother Goddess’ cosmic “dance” around Earth appears in the form of the five-pointed star, regardless of how this visceral image has been co-opted by certain political or kitsch movements. This “dance” correlates to the Othala rune, expressing ancestral inheritance harkening back to the most primal creative energies. “The Proto-Indo European name of Mother Goddess Frigg is Priya (pronounced Pre-yu), and means to love. The 5 pointed star of Mother Goddess, seen in the seed pattern of the apple and pear (fruit associated with the feminine) is also attacked in Abrahamic mythos: Chiun (Amos 5:26) and Remphan (Acts 7:43) both relate back to the name Priapus, a Heathen deity with the ability to stand on it’s own, hence the 2 legs of the rune. The name Priapus (Priya+pus) relates to the swollen womb (pus), the sacred enclosure. Thus, Abrahamic lore, as in every other instance in their texts, attacks the feminine, the Mother Goddess and her 5 pointed star (Othala).”(15)



Pleroma, the Galactic Center



Paranatellon as Ancestral Memories, and the Ethno-Cosmic Observer Effect

One might naturally ask why the same cosmic phenomenon were conceived as different Deific forces by different people? For this a powerful solution is given by the Gnostic visionary John Lamb Lash, whose distilling the Sophianic narrative from the Nag Hamadi texts expresses the primal Myth common to all: Emergence of the Earth from the physical and dream body of the Aeonic Mother Gaia-Sophia, known by different names among the various ethnikos across the entire world. This is the primal Memory from whence the various tribal origin mythos emerge, to then tell the “rest of the story” of how each ethnikos arose in specific biospheres. Animism is the universal default without being “universalist”, for we each have an individual and a specific tribal/ethnic interaction with our shared Earth Mother, even if most have lost the conscious awareness and perception of that primal reality.(16)

Animism and Cosmic cycles are intricately woven together, with the Earth part of a three-bodied sentient cosmos along with the Sun and Moon (which is why those two celestial bodies specifically were always conceived as Deities by every indigenous culture), distinguished from the other planets or stars, and her cycles regulated by cosmic movements. Scattered in the various tribal origin Myths are the emergence of Earth and human beings out of the elements, referring to each people as truly autochtonous to specific biospheres (notwithstanding migrations across centuries) to which they form a biofeedback interactivity. Yet there are also fragments which speak of cosmic origins, of our relations to the stars. The narrative is that the Anthropos (human species) arose from a Divine Experiment and that from the Aeonic Mother’s ecstatic plunge from the Pleroma (Galactic Center) emerged the Earth. Our cosmic components then “seeded” into specific biospheres (as per the scientific findings of panspermia), shaped into materiality by the various metals, liquids, and minerals of the Earth.(17)

John Lamb Lash proposes not only observing but visualizing the sky. “The complete tapestry is the nine-episode Sophianic narrative, the Fallen Goddess scenario” from which the Anthropos emerged and later arose as distinct peoples. Earth as part of the three-body cosmos embedded within the celestial realm of eighty-eight starry constellations. “The Constellations are mythic images, to borrow a term from Joseph Campbell. As such, they are eternal entities whose habitat is human imagination, yet they are supercharged with the power of living creatures. They are animated and animating, for they embody ‘meaning’ as a higher form of vitality.” This active imagination of the observer expresses scientific findings about the double-slit experiment, which demonstrates that a particle changes through effects of an observer. Applying the law of correspondence, as occurs to the tiniest particles would also apply to the constellations. Rituals and agricultural events were often modelled after these images.



"Vädersoltavlan" (1636), by the Baltic
German painter Jacob Heinrich Elbfas.
It shows a "weather sun" phenomenon
in the skies over Stockholm, 1535.



While there’s an overall sky tapestry we collectively observe, the mythic images change with the observer’s biosphere. He cited two examples of such cultural anomalies as part of “the actual living, interactive perception of the cosmos.” First, how Inuit elders have recorded the Sun appearing at a different place in the sky for their people. And second, he observed at the latitude of Finland “a selection of the sky locally that reflected to them themes, images and heroes in the Kalevala.” Being that the stars are a “mirror of the psyche,” this is why Orion the Hunter is represented as “Átse Ats'oosí” (First Slender One) to the Diné (Navajo); the Pleiades perceived as “seven sisters” to some cultures but as a swarm of bees or flock of birds to other cultures; or, to bring it back to my original point, how Orion’s Belt and the Ursa Major were associated with Frija to Germanic cultures while the Romans perceived those same bodies as associated with Venus.   

Not only the mythic images, but the zodiac systems differing according to cultures reflect this unique ethno-observer effect, a biosphere’s specific connection to the cosmos – just as our various Pantheons reflect our distinct ethnic interface with the Divine. “If you go forward and approach the tapestry, bringing yourself up to it very closely which is comparable to the local being in a local setting, you'll see fine threads.” Those individual threads are the Paranatellon, those starry constellations “rising besides” the main constellations. These are neither fixed nor universal, but “change in interaction with the observer.” Deconstructing the Greek word reveals Para “beside, from, near, for” + (gen)na “birth” + teleos “aim, purpose”. Indigenous stargazers worldwide detected and derived an enduring purpose from observing these secondary constellations, whose specific images they read according to their distinct ethnosphere.

We can access “the phylogenetic memory circuits of the Earth, a membrane of the composition of the biosphere.” Just as iron is one of the crucial elements in the constellations: “The iron in the blood probably connects to the iron in the Earth. Somehow its in the bioelectromagnetic field of the Earth which we’re immersed in those memory circuits. It’s a blood knowledge.”(18) As the individual braids of the cosmic tapestry, through the paranatellon Mother Earth is “making accessible to the folk memory of all people the particular story of their origin, people, and race-romantic identity that they can revive because they remember it and can relive it now.” “She is distributing the local variant of that folk memory which applies to the people in all of these settings; rewriting and offering it now into the imagination and into the endopsyche of peoples all around the world….She's offering that braid of every indigenous folk memory to reawaken the sovereignty of the people.”(19)



"The Wild Hunt of Odin" (1872) by the Norwegian
painter Peter Nicolai Arbo



Wodan, Sacred ‘Grimnir’, and the Esoteric Symbolisms of Anointing

One other central feature to a Germanic astrotheology is the Bear as ancestral totem, whose terrestrial cycles also correspond to movements of the “Bear” constellation, and the seasonal symbolism we already related to “Walpurgisnacht”, the Maibaum, and Wild Hunt. Returning briefly to paranatellon, the Greek term for initiates of the Pagan Mysteries happens to be Telestai “those who are aimed, have purpose”. Every ethnikos had their own indigenous initiates of these Mysteries, such as Druids across the Celtic world or the various Männebünde (warrior initiates) and Seers and Seeresses across the Germanic world. Among the warrior initiates devoted to Wodan were those who wore bear skins to channel the “Wode” that also came through the ancestral “Bear” – the anima or spirit. (As we will see soon in an upcoming passage, Wodan was not simply a “war god” but warriors as one of the tripartite divisions of Germanic society, and with their own relation to magic and animism would obviously share devotion to Wodan).

Their processions later inspired the rich folklore about the Wild Hunt, as well as the nightly processions ascribed to “the undead” – a later Christian demonization of the masculine magic just as those ascribed to “witches” demonized the feminine magic. For the Abrahamics could only project their own literalism upon a lore that is so primal and transcendent it has multiple layers of meaning we can continuously discover across time and space. The bear's cycles were also symbolic of the folk and tribe, of the Othala Rune of ancestral inheritance which is encoded in the Mother Goddess’ cosmic dance. Other Runes encode various movements of the Great Bear, marking various occasions and seasons of the Germanic festival calendar:

“As we are told in Hovamol stanzas 139 through 145, the runes are Oðin’s, but the beginning Gods (ginnregin) made them. We are also told, in Alvissmol stanza 30, that night is called night by men, and grímu by ginnregin (beginning Gods). In the preamble of Grimnismol we are told that Oðin called himself Grimnir and wore a dark blue mantle, the color of the night sky. Later in stanzas 46 and 47 of Grimnismol it is revealed that Oðin is called Grímr, the same as he was called by ginnregin, and Grimnir. There is no doubt that Oðin is the ruling God of the night-sky. Furthermore, the fires of the first two stanzas, which Oðin (Grímu) was bound between, are the sunset of the year (fall) and the sunrise of the year (spring), as this is the time when winter-nights are upon the North, and that is the time of Oðin’s-time, Father’s-time. Oðin (Grímu) takes on all the attributes of that season from harvest (reaping-time), through Samhain, the feast of Ullr, Jul (Yule) and the fimbul-winter (three months of bitter cold and snow), up to spring when things begin to thaw and then grow. Modernity depicts a figure known as the Grim-Reaper; indeed, the Grim-Reaper is Oðin. However, the time after the crops in the North are harvested, and things remain dormant for several months is a Natural occurrence, not something commanded by Oðin; Oðin is the ruling night-sky God who puts on a dark blue mantle to preside over that time, when hunting and bloodshed must take place for survival, and there was a daily struggle for life for our ancestors, our folk. This time of struggle and bloodshed has led to the mistranslations, misinterpretation, (intentionally or otherwise), and a literalist interpretation of poetry (Poetic Edda) and lore, separated from Northern Nature, and erroneously declared Oðin to be a God of War. Knowing this, then, Oðin’s runes are the constellations of the Night-sky as viewed in the holy Northern lands; constellations our ancestors viewed. The runes, then, are Folkish, ancestral, depictions of the constellations, or portions of the constellations viewed in the night sky.”(20)



"Dezember" or "Wotan mit Wölfen" (1906),
by the German Symbolist painter Hans Thoma



Years before I knew about this passage or a lot of this knowledge, I cited a related word whose synchronicity is now revealing itself through this article. In one of my essays on mind-viruses and medical tyranny from 2021, I traced this Germanic word and its etymology (also with an homage to my Iberian side): “We return again to the ‘occult’ nature of words and their multiple meanings. Proto-Germanic *grimo ‘mask’ originated the Old English grima ‘mask, helmet’ and Old Norse gríma ‘mask, helmet’ and grímr ‘person wearing a mask, helmet’. Through Gothic derived Spanish grima ‘disgust, uneasiness’, Gallego grimo ‘fear, creeps, uneasiness’, and Portuguese grima ‘aversion, disgust, antipathy’. The English grim ‘fierce, cruel, savage, severe, dire, painful’ and French grimace ‘grotesque face, ugly mug’ are other derivatives of this word for ‘mask’. All stem from Proto-Indo-European *ghrey ‘to paint, streak, smear’ and *gher ‘to rub, stroke’, with their ritualistic connotations of anointing; and *ghremno ‘angry’, with social masks used to manipulate through fear and hysteria.”(21)

Relating these words back to this season of “Walpurgisnacht” and the Maibaum, while such words have been inverted via social masks or personas – the outer trappings of authority used now to control and manipulate – they express very primal truths. “Walpurga” and her anointing – or how churches were constructed atop our sacred wells and groves with their healing properties – could represent a natural yearning for a feminine counterpart to a masculine anointer. Yet the true ritual anointing was the hieros gamos, sacred marriage. The person performing the ritual is the “anointing agent,” and clearly “those who anoint must in some sense be more powerful than those whom they anoint.”(22) So one figure now becoming synonymous with “the anointed” inevitably means disempowerment of everyone else who mentally subjects themselves to this “salvationist” agent.

The Greek chrestos “anointer” – simply referring to the animistic ritual initiation of magic and empowerment, with its unique expressions across ethnospheres – was inverted into a “christ” which transposed the “messiah” mind-virus that arose in a specific corner of Levant, among a specific people, and then absorbed the traits of various Gods and coopted their Mythos so as to convert all “the nations” to this messianic hyperstition across a fabricated linear timeline. Meanwhile, the feminine was inverted into a devotion to local “Virgins” (a crude christianization of local fertility and Mother Goddesses consolidated into one “Mary” figure) and localized “saints”, complete with the imagery and healing qualities associated with the ancient nurturing, motherly Goddesses.(23)



"Germania in Ketten", by the great
German Heathen painter and mystic-
revivalist Ludwig Fahrenkrog


"Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer" (1818), by
the German Romanticist painter Caspar David Friedrich



German Idealism and the Wotanic Spirit

I end this article with some wisdom from a key figure of German Romanticism: Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801). As a true polymath, he channeled Wotan (as He was now known in the evolving Hochdeutsch), even if unconsciously. Fresh out of the Enlightenment, itself an aesthetic/philosophical return to the Classical Pagan world of the Greeks and Romans, Germania also found new enlightenment – yet there was something missing, a Sehnsucht unable to find its complete fulfillment. Many German philosophers arose proclaiming Idealism – the restless spirit of Wotan, for there is no end to attaining the Mysteries. They were unconscious Heathen revivalists, tapping into an ancestral memory nurtured across all German regions – bounded to unique tribes organically formed into länder, but also able to unite when necessary, such as with the liberator Hermann (“Arminius”) at Teutoburger Wald. This was also the real meaning behind the Sachsen poet August von Fallersleben (1798-1874)’s words “Deutschland über alles”, uttered in his 1841 poem.

Another polymath, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), expressed the Wotanic quest for continuous self-knowledge in Faust, with all that entails of adventures and overcoming any ordeal to seek Gnosis. Yet he channeled energies of the Wanderer within his own life – searching for knowledge and wisdom across Germania, travelling to Italy, hiking excursions to the Brocken where he found much inspiration. I am proud to say that Schwaben bore several of these Idealists. Schiller (1759-1805) evoked “die Götter”, acknowledged the enchantment of Nature, and proclaimed the aesthetic as morality. Hölderlin (1770-1843) personified mystical links between a transcendent Mind and the inherent magic of Words. Schelling (1775-1854) formulated a Naturphilosophie which is an unfolding Animism conceived within the Romantic philosophy transcending the strictly “logical” which forgot itself as Philo (“love of”) Sophia (“Wisdom”, the Earth Mother).

The Sachsen Novalis himself sought a synthesis between naturalism and theism into what he termed “Religion des sichtbaren Universums“ (religion of the visible universe), perhaps observing the skies as much as the Nature all around him. Others have termed his philosophy magical idealism“. Yet no matter what term is given, his philosophy was very much Heathen – tapping into the indigenous wisdom of Deutschland. He perceived the external world as a “great runic script” with deeper magical meanings just waiting to be discovered. In the following passage, he tapped into a Wotanic spirit yearning for a higher awareness, related as much to the Gnosis within as to visualizing the constellations. Perhaps these words from around 1790 expressed his own timeless initiation into the Mysteries:

“The Voice must certainly have spoken of our Master, for he knows how to collect the indications that are scattered on all sides. A singular light kindles in his glance when the sublime Rune is unrolled before us, and he looks discerningly into our eyes to find out whether for us too the Star has arisen that shall render the Figure (of life-itself) visible and comprehensible. If he sees us sad, that our night is not breaking, he comforts us and promises future joy to the faithful and assiduous seer.”(24)








Notes:

(1) Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, Vol. 1, London: George Bell & Sons, 1882, p. 302. .. It makes sense that in Scandinavia, with its harsher winters, faint summers, and more seasonal shifts in daylight than Germania, there would be greater divergence between the two and more significance given to Freya, who thus assumed more of Frija’s magical functions.

(2) Archaeological evidence, surviving folklore, and the secrets contained within etymology reveal many of the same central lore as the Norse Eddas, but also many distinct elements which should be acknowledged and can be used to build a distinctly continental Heathenry, especially in South German regions which absorbed much from the Alpine Celts. Its about celebrating what is truly within one’s bloodline and ancestral memory down to the most local level possible, striving for the authenticity and gnosis which most comes from the ethno-biosphere. While at some level recognizing an over-arching unity, especially when it relates to our worldview, cosmology, and common destiny, what we could call the “Faustian Spirit” to borrow a most pertinent phrase from Oswald Spengler.

(3) This is contrary to the imbalance of some modern neo-Paganisms, such as Wicca: founded by people with suspicious links to intelligence agencies and Kabbalistic occult groups, as well as a granddaughter of a Frankfurt School subversive psychoanalyst (Adler). Their imbalance is a henotheism which reduces the multitude of sacred feminine energies to one “goddess” whose origins they trace to the Levant, viewing them all as Astarte and turning the wild, horned gods of European forests into an Abrahamic-inspired description of Baal. Wicca started as an inversion of Celtic traditions but serves now as a confused syncretism designed to forestall a truly authentic return to the folk faith of every people, who are expected to subsume all their indigenous Pantheons into this Levantine henotheistic cauldron that can still only be defined by the same Abrahamic paradigm it pretends to oppose (but as any dialectical antithesis, that paradigm needs an “adversarial” spirit it holds within itself).

Another imbalance is expressed by self-professed “Thursatru/Rokkatru” groups, which worship Loki and the various forces of chaos and decay which were acknowledged but never venerated in any way, shape or form. Whereas Wicca is an imbalanced worship of the feminine, this current represents another imbalance: Worshipping and internalizing Loki as the androgynous spirit of self-loathing and envy. I have concluded that Loki is the same energy force as Yaldabaoth, the delusionary, pathetic imp who claims to be the “creator god” but is envious of the various ethnic Deities, whose powers and transcendence he can never achieve. Internalizing this energy only disempowers and is self-destructive to those who embrace it, contrary to how the delusionary imp inverts his role.

Yaldabaoth morphed into the “god” of Abrahamism, egregorized only by the collective energies and powers of human beings who call him different names according to Abrahamism’s three iterations. Yet while aspiring to be the “one god”, there are clues even within these “holy, revealed” scriptures where he recognizes the existence and powers of the real Deities, merely proclaiming himself “jealous” and demanding only he be worshipped. Likewise, there are clues within various mythologies about Yaldabaoth and the forces of decay and self-destruction he represents – the Archons, the mind parasites who intrude minds, working through mind-viruses and the various archonic programming it has spawned from that initial mind-intrusion.

(4) Scott and Billie-Jo Carlson, Northern Paganism: The Runes, 2019, p. iv. 

(5) Wolf Dieter Storl, The Untold History of Healing: Plant Lore and Medicinal Magic from the Stone Age to Present, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2017, p. 98. .. My blog essays from 2020/2021 detailed how the same control system was behind the State, Abrahamic religion, and Big Pharma. I described its personification in King James, who presided over the most brutal and sadistic “witch” hunts in Scotland, wrote a manual on “demonology”, corporatized medicine while suppressing native healers of the Highlands, and later as King of England published his famed namesake Bible which still today is treated as sacrosanct and “supernatural” by many Christian groups. I also traced Big Pharma to pharmakos “sorcery”, also the name of a scapegoat ritual in ancient Athens, where Axial Age shenanigans began the gradual erosion of Hellenic folk-faith. This is the same scapegoating spirit which demonizes the human body’s own abilities to healing and immunity. There is obviously a place for modern medicine, guided by balance and discernment; but the coercive State-backed, profit-motive of Big Pharma owes more to Archonic mind-intrusion than anything truly healing.

(6) Tobias Wolfsberg, The Merseburg Charms: Ancient Spells and Germanic Magic, Nightfall Arcana Press, 2025, p. 34. .. The magical phrases of the Merseburg Charms are an indigenous German expression of a most-ancient tradition across the broader Indo-European spiritual traditions, from its farthest west – the Irish charm of “ault fri halt dí & féith fri féth” (“joint to joint and sinew to sinew”) Miach incanted for Nuada’s new arm (see the Cath Maige Tuired), citing nine days which has obvious correspondences to Odin/Wodan; to its furthest east branch, where a Vedic hymn of natural healing incants: “Let thy marrow unite with marrow, and thy joint with joint. Thy blood, thy bone shall grow, thy flesh grow together with flesh” (Atharva Veda, IV, 12).

(7) James Hjuka Coulter, Germanic Heathenry: A Practical Guide, 1st Books Library, 2003, p. 66.

(8) Storl, op. cit., p. 268.

(9) Grimm, op. cit., pp. 272-273.

(10) William Tyler Olcott, Star Lore Of All Ages, New York/London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911, pp. 169-176.

(11) Scott and Billie-Jo Carlson, Northern Paganism: Exposing Abraham, 2020, pp. iii-iv, 82-83.

(12) The name of one of my ancestral villages, Baldern (part of the larger town of Bopfingen), on the länder boundaries of Württemberg and Bayern, clearly indicates an ancient sacred site honoring Balder. This is especially with its overlooking hill dominated by Schloss Baldern, which even before Alemannic settlement was site of a Celtic hill-fort. Family memories passed down to me continuously cite this hill – weddings and masses in its former chapel (later moved downhill in town), and mein Ururgroßvater working as a groundskeeper, harkening back to the ancient Celtic and Germanic forest protectors. Such winding hills were used for shamanic purposes in ancient times, the primal meditation of a labyrinth procession later encoded into cathedral architecture, and indeed a “Catholic” shrine was placed along the hill much as it was around groves and healing wells.

More recently I discovered that the family crest of another of my paternal lines – the Neuners (from the Mittelhochdeutsch niun “nine”, meaning an ancestor was member of a town council of nine – the symbolism of nine preserved from Heathen times), from the Swabian part of Bayern – contains two swans. That was the family line of mein Urgroßvater, whom I always felt a strong personal connection to even though he died in combat as a Wehrmacht Gebirgsjaeger in the Caucasus, 1943 – more than forty years before I was born. His only child was my Oma, whose maternal side are my Swabian ancestors from Baldern and my Spanish side that settled in Ellwangen. I strongly encourage others to search and meditate upon ancient meanings contained within their own bloodlines and surnames, unlock the mysteries of your own Memory.



Among my oldest family photos is this postcard of
Schloss Baldern, overlooking the village, late 19th century


(13) Lewis Spence, Dictionary of Non-Classical Mythology, 1913; New York: Cosimo, 2005, p. 70.

(14) Germanic: Freitag (German) [or Freidich in my ancestral Schwäbish], Friday (English), Vrijdag (Dutch/Flemish), Vrydag (Afrikaans), Freideg (Letzeburgesch), Fredag (Danish/Norwegian/Swedish), and Fostudag (Icelandic). Romance: Viernes (Spanish), Venerdi (Italian), Vendredi (French), Venres (Galician), Vienres (Asturian), Divrendes (Catalan/Occitan), Vineri (Romanian), Veneris (Latin), and Venderdi (Romansh); the only anomaly is Portuguese Sexta-feira, “sixth day,” although this too being feminine expresses the Venusian format. Just as interpretatio romana compared the Germanic Frija to Venus, so too was the indigenous Goddess Ataegina of the Celtiberians and Lusitanians compared to Venus. All are unique expressions of Mother Goddess energies connected to distinct biospheres.

(15) Carlson, Northern Paganism: The Runes, p. 16. .. Priapus is a Greek fertility deity related to the masculine generative power. The Hellenes portrayed him as perpetually erect but impotent, which could be symbolic that the masculine generative power is “impotent” unless joined in Hieros Gamos with the feminine generative power. Priapus also representing protection from the evil eye, demonstrates the masculine expression of magical power – just as Odin/Wodan “sacrificed” one eye to attain the Runes (Mysteries). Just some “unverified” speculative gnosis on my part.

(16) Perhaps this primal reality is why throughout both the Germanic and Celtic mythos, a “veil” is said to exist between this world and the otherworld, save for those auspicious times when its at the thinnest – “Walpurgisnacht,” Bealtaine, and Samhain. The “veil” could be an allegory for whatever obscures conscious perception of the living Earth, especially with how these festival times correlate to specific cosmic phenomena with close correspondences to nature cycles – As Above, So Below. It all points to Animism, the intrinsic interaction between Anthropos, Earth, and the Cosmos.

(17) See my article, “A Broad Overview of Cosmology. Towards a Gnosis of Earth-Cosmos,” 20 Oct. 2022, <https://sjobst.blogspot.com/2022/10/animism-and-lessons-of-earths-power-3.html>. Recognizing there is a cosmic material within us should not be confused with the New Age “starseed” and “galactic federation” drivel, which is nothing but a world-denying escapism - another iteration of the off-planet archonic salvationist mind-virus which hates the Anthropos and our sacred connection to a sentient Earth. No wonder then that such psyops are saturated with the imagery and symbolism of Merkabah mysticism, easily manipulated by the control system.

(18) Stressing this is again my own Gnosis, but this could be another layer of meaning to Donar’s Hammer: It was forged from iron by the “dwarves”, who also represent the lower self – that part of you that receives “commands” from the Divine (Ansuz/Aesir) and then shines as a “mirror” (through which we perceive ourselves, the “face” giving the personality) to project the things we want so long as its on one of the pathways our highest self has chosen in our current incarnation. Through ritual such as what we also “forge” with the iron within our blood and the Earth’s memory, we can also cleanse the lower self. One of the powers represented by Donar is the Earth’s electromagnetic field. In his Protector role, he battles Jormungandr, the “world serpent” who could also be allegorized as contraction which must be balanced and checked out by his force of expansion. I meditated upon this during one of my hiking excursions here in the Southeast US, comparing Germanic and Native American mythology and cosmology in my ensuing article: “Hiking Up the Serpent Mound, Autumn 2022 - Path of Souls, Kundalini, Gnosis, and Esoteric Meaning of the Serpent,” <https://sjobst.blogspot.com/2023/01/hiking-up-serpent-mound-autumn-2022.html>.

(19) The direct quotes and most of this section, while interspersed with some of my own observations, are my notes from three online lessons of John Lamb Lash: His 2018 talk “The Aeonic Earth Mother Guides the Native Peoples into Their Racial Memory-Lines”; the Nemeta.org course on “11 Skywatching,” <https://nemeta.org/course/11-skywatching/>; and his recent interview by Disco Orpheus, “The Man on the Stick and the Question of Suffering”.

(20) Carlson, Northern Paganism: The Runes, p. ii. I can only recommend this book again, for he exhaustively and conclusively reveals many correspondences with each Rune and the constellations, cycles of nature, the Deities, etc..

(21) See my article, “Addendum 2:0: On Death Pathology, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Occult Truths, and the Masks of Authorities,” 6 Nov. 2021, <https://sjobst.blogspot.com/2021/11/addendum-20-on-death-pathology-neuro.html>.

(22) John Lamb Lash, Not In His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief, 15th Anniversary Edition, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2021, p. 64.

(23) I examined this appropriation within two articles. First, resolving my previous interest in Mariology to my recently awakened Paganism in “Blessed Mother Goddess: Syncretism in Mariology and Marian Veneration Cults,” in The Real & The Illusory: Essays on the Perennial Philosophy, ed. Troy Southgate, Black Front Press, 2018, pp. 131-155. Second, my blog article on “Zisa, A Swabian Goddess,” 2 Oct. 2019, <https://sjobst.blogspot.com/2019/10/zisa-swabian-goddess.html>. In that second article, I examined Zisa as a uniquely Swabian Goddess, the consort of Ziu – the same God known to the Norse as Tyr and Anglo-Saxons as Tiw. She was a localized fertility Goddess who, as consort to Ziu the Germanic Sky Father, represents this “sacred marriage” of animism and the cosmos. Now adding another layer of meaning, Zisa can also be seen how the localized Alpine setting perceived (and received) the sky with its rich tapestry of constellations.  

(24) Novalis, The Disciples At Sais and Other Fragments, 1790; London: Methuen & Co., 1903, p. 92.

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

Walpurgisnacht - Part 2: Decoding the Secrets Hidden in Etymology and Hagiography

by Sean Jobst 

29 April 2026



The most well-known image
of Walburga was made by the
Master of Meßkirch around 1535
nearly 800 years after her death



Walpurgisnacht’s namesake was the Benedictine nun Walpurga, who proselytized to Germanic Heathens in northern Bavaria in the 8th century. Stories of her “miracles” were such that she was canonized a hundred years after her death. I intend to show that when we decode the secrets hidden in etymology and mythic symbolisms within her hagiography, and draw correspondences to known Heathen traditions – that Walpurga as the “saint” (not as the actual historical person), was a Christianized archetype created by the Church/State authorities to co-opt and ultimately replace veneration of various Germanic Goddesses; and to demonize liberatory magical practices (as opposed to their own dark bind-magic of archonic control).(1)

She was born in 710CE into an aristocratic Anglo-Saxon family of saints in Devonshire - her parents were Richard the Pilgrim and Wuna of Wessex, while her uncle was the infamous Boniface, who chopped down Donar's Oak of the Chatti in Hessen (who were descended from the Irminones just like the Suebi, Alamanni, and Bavarians). Boniface sent for his nephews, the saints Wunnibald and Willibald, and his niece Walburga to join him in efforts to convert Bayern, Schwaben, Franken, and Hessen in the 740s.(2) All of this “saintly” family actively burnt down sacred groves and carried out instructions of the Church (and the Levantine spirit possessing it) to build new Christian sites over the pre-existing sacred Heathen sites to harness their spiritual energy and thus facilitate conversion. She was made a nun in the Bavarian town of Heidenheim, whose monastery was founded by Willibald.

Using Heidenheim (“Heathen home”) as their base was meant to symbolize “conquest” over the Heathen. Yet the very existence of Heidenheim and similarly named towns throughout Bayern and Schwaben reveal lingering remnants of Heathenry, for despite the oft-repeated claims of Christian apologists – who repeat ad nauseum the “2,000 years” mantra or otherwise rewrite history to assert our ancestors “eagerly” adopted the new religion convinced by its “superior” arguments – South German regions still held on to our ancestral folk faith well into the 7th and 8th centuries before they were converted – and even then only after a long process of syncretism and absorption by the church. Remnants survived longer in folklore and customs, as one modern Heathen writer has eloquently expressed:



"Germania in Ketten", by the German
Heathen artist and mystic Ludwig
Fahrenkrog. It perfectly captures 
resilience and determination of the
spirit, overcoming adversities



“This continuity is not found in textbooks or official holidays. It is found in the patterns of folk life: in the way bread is baked in a certain village, in the way a harvest is celebrated, in the carvings on an old barn beam, in lullabies passed down through grandmothers’ lips. In Northern Europe, these echoes abound. In Swabia, the Fasnet masks worn during pre-Lenten processions still bear the faces of pre-Christian spirits – wild men, hags, horned beasts. In Sweden, the Majstång [May Pole] raised on midsummer recalls a world where trees were not timber but ancestors. In the Harz Mountains, the Walpurgisnacht fires still burn on April’s final night, flickering shadows across rock formations said to be the seats of ancient witches.

“These are not accidents. They are survivals. Even when Christianity swept the North, it did not erase these customs. It baptized them. It dressed the old gods in saints’ robes and renamed the sacred groves as ‘Devil’s Forests.’ It reoriented time itself – marking years not by the sun’s turning but by the birth of a single foreign prophet. But the old rhythms did not vanish. They were absorbed. Transmuted. And in some cases, buried.”(3)

Desiring to break the indigenous cohesion of an area, the church tended to send foreign priests, monks and nuns to convert local tribes to Christianity. So it was that the church sent missionaries from newly converted regions of the British Isles to convert Germania, bending it to the political authority of the Merovingian/Carolingian dynasties.(4) After Willibald died in 751, Walpurga rose to become the monastery’s abbess and its superintendent after Winibald’s death in 760.(5) She propagated for the destruction of sacred groves throughout Germania, culminating in felling of the Saxons’ Irminsul (with its deep and transcendent symbolism for all continental Germanic tribes) by Charlemagne’s christhadist armies in 772. Walpurga died on February 25, in either 777 or 779. This day became her initial feast day until her canonization by Pope Adrian.(6)






Constructing a Mythic Hagiography

Walpurga’s canonization commenced with a ceremony on May 1, 870, when her relics were moved from Heidenheim. “Her bones were 'translated' (that is, moved) on May 1 - which became her feast day - sometime during the 870s to Eichstätt, where her brother Willibald had been bishop. Ever since then an oily liquid has oozed out of the rock on which her tomb rests and has been renowned among pilgrims for its great healing power.”(7) This indicates that, much like Heidenheim, Eichstätt was a sacred site in Heathen times, perhaps a healing spring. We can certainly point to the widespread devotion to the Celtic healing Deities, Grannus and Sirona, when Celtic tribes still held sway over the lands we now know as Schwaben and Bayern. Willibald clearly would choose a site that held some significance to the Heathens he was trying to convert.

The translation of earlier works on natural philosophy meant a greater acceptance of magic so long as it was "natural", harnessing the power of natural properties, and not the "demonic" variety of powers and entities outside the Church.(8) Examples of the Church's magical traditions include the Latin Mass, modelled after previous Roman rituals; doctrine of the Transubstantiation; consecrated altars; blessed candles and oils; and specified incantations used for exorcisms and other occasions. So it is that such magical qualities were invented for Walpurga, first mentioned by Wolfhard von Herrieden's Miracula S. Walburgae Manheimensis (895/896), but especially the late 10th-century Vita secunda. Finally in the 11th century, Anno II, the Archbishop of Köln, declared that “Walpurgisnacht” would be celebrated from sundown on 30th April.(9)

As we will see later, the dating is no accident, designed to co-opt indigenous European festivals coalescing around the 1st of May. And since Germanic and Celtic days began with the moon, significance would also be given to the night before. Knowing this the Church had to construct a mystique around Walpurga, as well as an obvious financial interest in promoting pilgrimage to her site and power of their own “acceptable” magic over that of the Heathens. She was turned into a “protectoress against magic”(10). For this and other aspects of her folklore, James Hjuka Coulter, who reconstructs continental Heathenry as Irminism, argues that she was based upon Walburga Frouwa, known to the Norse as Freya:



"Freyja and the Necklace" (1890), by
the Irish painter James Doyle Penrose


“The Frouwa is infamous for her abilities at magan-craft and witching (she taught the feminine (magical) disciplines to Wodan), and it is of no surprise to find her as the patroness of witches, and the center of praise on Walburganaht (a long-standing witches’ holiday). The Frouwa’s wain is drawn by cats - the popular image of a witch accompanied by a (black) cat originates from the association of the felines to the Goddess. Over the ages, many superstitions regarding cats (and their association to Walburga Frouwa) developed, and along a common theme: treating the creatures well brings the luck and favor of The Frouwa upon one’s self and home.”(11)

Hagiographies were written after the (real or imagined) mortal lives of their subjects, filled with more apocryphal and mythic stories intended to supplant the living traditions of people they were seeking to convert: “In other instances, older pagan deities were quietly absorbed into Christian hagiography. Tales of a female figure leading nocturnal processions, for instance, sometimes fused with certain saintly legends. While the text itself might avoid explicit references to ancient gods, the new saint’s attributes might echo the older spirit’s domain over fertility or winter storms. Churches in remote regions sometimes dedicated feast days around the same calendar dates once associated with pagan festivals.”(12)



Engraving of Volvas by the Swedish artist
Gunnar Forssell, for an 1893 edition of the Eddas



Decoding the Secrets of Etymology

Walburga’s etymology bearing such a close relation to ancient Germanic folk magic and witches cannot be accidental. “Clairvoyant, wise women played such an important role among the forest peoples that it astonished the Romans. In the Germanic-Celtic settlement area, they were known under the names Wala and Voelva and in southern and central Germany as Walburg and Walburga, which means 'staff bearer' (Germanic waluz = stave, staff; from Indo-European *uel = turn). They carried wands with which they were able to steer things magically.”(13)

Historical Germanic seeresses lent their names to the Walpurga archetype. A Greek inscription from second century pottery on Elephantine Island in Egypt mentions a seeress named Waluburg who served the Roman governor, calling her “Se[m]noni Sibylla,” or “Sibyl from the Semnones”, a Germanic tribe that lived between the rivers Elbe and Oder.(14) Roman statesmen like Tacitus already regaled their fellow Romans with the mystique and qualities of Germanic tribes, so its no surprise some military leaders employed seeresses of “barbarian” tribes they associated with more primal forces than the cosmopolitan ethos that hastened Rome’s spiritual and military decline. These Romans were reminded of their own ethnic faith which lost much to the decadent processes of Empire.



 "Veleda, profetisa de los germanos" by the
Spanish illustrator Juan Scherr, Germania
(Barcelona: Montaner y Simon, 1882)



In the early third century, Roman historian and senator Cassius Dio mentioned a renowned seeress named Veleda. The contemporary German folklorist and ethnobotanist Wolf-Dieter Storl traces her etymology: “The Veleda or Weleda goes back to the original Celtic velet or fili, which means 'visionary' or 'poet'.”(15) Cassius recounted that Veleda was succeeded by another seeress named Ganna, whose name related to Proto-Celtic *geneta “girl”.(16) Walpurgisnacht is most prevalent in areas of southern and central Germania settled earlier by Celts, coinciding with the Celtic festival of Bealtaine. Lingering Celtic traditions merged with the Germanic landscape – and the folk traditions it inspired. Both peoples followed a lunisolar calendar, so Coulter links Walpurgisnacht to “the full moon of Wunnimanod”(17), roughly corresponding to May.

The seeress (or perhaps her title) Ganna was known in Longobard (Lombard) lore as Gambara, who sought the assistance of the Goddess Frea – their name for Frija, the wife-consort of Wodan (or Godan among the Longobards). Austrian philologist Rudolf Simek linked Gothic walus “staff, wand” – recall that word’s direct link to Walburga – to Longobardic Gand-bera “wand-bearer.”(18) Both these could also relate to Wodan, who as The Wanderer traversed across the worlds carrying the staff of a traveler (or pilgrim, as both conveyed esoteric ideas). Here we see the shift of letters, with Frija's qualities often attributed to Frau Holle, who was often known as "Gode" the wife of Wodan in some German regions. So we establish yet another link between Walpurga and the night processions called the Wild Hunt (although recast in Christian terms as infernal “witches”).



"Valkyrie" (1864), by the Norwegian
artist Peter Nicolai Arbo



The wal- element of Walpurga could also relate to the walkuries, the messengers of death who chose selected warriors off the battlefield to take with Her into the Underworld. Norse tradition held that Freyja had first pick of these fallen warriors before Odin. Coulter draws a continental link to Walpurga: “Walburga Frouwa leads Wodan’s host of wish-maidens (walchuriâ) and is herself said to receive half of the battle slain (in her hall, Folcwise), with Wodan receiving the other half - hence, her name: ‘Protectress of the Slain’.”(19) Death bore a close relation with fertility within our cyclical worldview, so the Seeresses who bridged the different “worlds” united so many meanings within their very names. Frouwa combined all these cycles within Her realm – manifesting the masculine and feminine as complementary powers of divine balance:

“Freya transported the chosen slain to Folkvang, where they were duly entertained. There also she welcomed all pure maidens and faithful wives, that they might enjoy the company of their lovers and husbands after death. The joys of her abode were so enticing to the heroic Northern women that they often rushed into battle when their loved ones were slain, hoping to meet with the same fate.”(20)



"Wodan Frea Himmelsfenster" (1905), by the
German artist Emil Doepler, inspired by the
Langobard accounts.



Other elements in the “saint”’s name includes *walda, “power, ruler, might”, and *wala, “dead, battlefield”.(21) Old High German Walburga combines waltan “to rule” + burg “protection, fortress,” so that her name relates to “ruler of the fortress” or “protector of the realm”. The latter has magical qualities considering the central role of protection within all magical traditions, with one’s mind, will and body as “the realm”. Walpurga’s hagiography ascribes to her a bloodline that is aristocratic (“to rule”) and “saintly”, just as calling upon her provided “protection” from the feared witches and other specters. These qualities were constructed to mentally establish  the magical power of the Church over the subjugated Heathens, whose own magical powers were demonized – albeit actually so powerful the church “had” to appropriate and invert it all for their own purposes.

The -purgis and -burga elements could simultaneously relate to burg "homestead" or berg "mountain", both conveying images of the hearth and the motherly womb. The link between mountain and “breast” commonly expressed through mythology and toponyms conveys the same Animistic worldview all Indigenous peoples (no matter which biosphere) held as the natural state of Being. The Rune Berkanan expresses dual meanings of “birch” and “rebirth”, so that Walpurgisnacht occurring after Ostara and on the eve of May conveys new life springing forth from the darkness that precedes light, as we will see with the Goddess variously known as Frau Holle, Perchta, Berchta - and other correspondences in Part 3. This is also why in her imagery, Walpurga was often portrayed with a sun disc illuminating her head – a myth-theme also conveying ‘authority’ and spiritual powers:

“The porter who one evening refused to carry out Walpurga's orders and to light the lights of her monastery is the picture of the unintuitive man who always sees and never beholds, while a light welled up from Walpurga's pure heart and flooded around her figure, who in the middle of the night began to shine so brightly that the horde of nuns rushed over in dismay and, speechless with astonishment, surrounded the beaming woman.”(22)



"The Miracle of Saint Walburga" (1610), by the
Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens, expressing
her quality as a sea protectoress. Could this be
an ancestral memory of Nehalennia?


Notes:

(1) For more on this crucial distinction, see my article “Magic Occulted by Other Names: Demystifying Magic as the Path to Freedom,” in Imagination Transfigured: The History, Ritual & Symbolism of Magick, ed. Troy Southgate, Black Front Press, 2024, pp. 103-129.

(2) Rev. Alban Butler, “Saint Winebald, Abbot and Confessor,” Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints, Vol. XII: December, Dublin: James Duffy, 1866.

(3) Tobias Wolfsberg, Shattered Gods: Pagan Survival and Christian Suppression in Germanic Europe, Nightfall Arcana Press, 2025, pp. 89-90. I highly recommend his series, each volume devoted to a specific myth-theme or other aspect of the living Germanic Heathen tradition. For more on Fasnet, including my own family traditions (couched under the veneer of Catholic Carneval until I was able to see it fresh with newly awakened eyes), see my article: “Pagan/Heathen Origins of Swabian Fastnacht Celebrations,” https://swabian-pride.blogspot.com/2023/02/paganheathen-origins-of-swabian.html.

(4) This pattern expresses what psychologists call abuse-bonding, expanded to these processes of Abrahamic conversion and its salvationist mind-virus by what John Lamb Lash terms the “Victim-Perpetrator Bond” (see Not In His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief, 15th Anniversary Edition, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2021). I apply this model to the conversion of Germanic tribes and other Indigenous peoples in my August 2022 article, “Roots of Disconnect and the Need to Reclaim Indigeny,”< https://sjobst.blogspot.com/2022/08/animism-and-lessons-of-earths-power-2.html>.

(5) “Walpurgis, St.,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, ed. Hugh Chisholm, Vol. 28, 11th ed., Cambridge University Press, 1911, pp. 290-291.

(6) “Walpurga,” in Universal Pronouncing Dictionary of Biography and Mythology, ed. Joseph Thomas, Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1892, p. 2423.

(7) Richard M. Wunderli. Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992, p. 46.

(8) Peter J. Forshaw, "The Occult Middle Ages," in The Occult World, ed. Christopher Partridge. London: Routledge, 2016, pp. 34-48.

(9) Robert Sass, “The Origins of Walpurgis Night,” Aldsidu, Feb. 7, 2019, < https://www.aldsidu.com/post/asatru-s-most-embarrassing-time-of-the-year>.

(10) Doleta Chapru, A Festival of the English May, Dodgeville, WI: Folklore Village Farm, 1977, p. 3; and John Canaday, The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000, p. 98.

(11) James Hjuka Coulter, Germanic Heathenry: A Practical Guide, 1st Books Library, 2003, p. 81.

(12) Tobias Wolfsberg, The Wild Hunt: Death, Storm, and the Furious Host, Nightfall Arcana Press, 2025, p. 49.

(13) Wolf Dieter Storl. The Untold History of Healing: Plant Lore and Medicinal Magic from the Stone Age to Present. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2017, p. 267.

(14) Wolfgang Spickermann, "Waluburg," Brill's New Pauly, <http://www.encquran.brill.nl/entries/brill-s-new-pauly/waluburg-e12208850>.

(15) Storl, op. cit., p. 267.

(16) Ranko Matasović, Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic, Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2009.

(17) Coulter, op. cit., p. 234.

(18) Rudolf Simek, A Dictionary of Northern Mythology, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007, pp. 135, 333. 

(19) Coulter, op. cit., p. 81.

(20) H.A. Guerber, Myths of the Norsemen From the Eddas and Sagas, London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1919, pp. 131-132.

(21) Gunivortus Goos, Illustriertes Lexikon der germanischen Gottheiten, Usingen, Hessen: 2022, pp. 300-301.

(22) Annette Kolb, "Das Leben der Heiligen Walpurga," in Wege und Umwege. Berlin: Hyperion Publishing, 1919, p. 217.