The Wild Hunt: Symbolisms, Meanings, and Folklore (Part 2)

Part 2: Frau Holle and Perchta; seasonal symbolisms of the Wild Hunt

by Sean Jobst

31 December 2020

"Frau Gode" by the German painter
Ludwig Pietsch (1824-1911)

   Continuing from Part 1 concerning the Wild Hunt, special attention should be made about the Germanic goddess variously known under her regional names as Perchta/Berchta in Southern Germany, Frau Holle in Central Germany, and Frau Herke/Freke/Gode/Wode in Northern Germany (Heath, 5). She is Vrouw Holle in Flanders and the Netherlands. All share such close associations with Frija, the wife of Wodan, that we can hypothesize they're one and the same - as is most pronounced with the Wild Hunt: "Frau Holle, elsewhere called Perchta, rushes through the airs at the head of her procession, and the people below either put some food on their roofs, or set a special place at the table"(GardenStone, 110). She is mentioned in many fairy tales and folklore. Jacob Grimm conceived of Holle as originally a sky goddess associated with weather forces, highlighting patterns with other mythologies:

   "Frau Holle is represented as a being of the sky, begirdling the earth: when it snows, she is making her bed, and the feathers of it fly. She stirs up snow, as Donar does rain: the Greeks ascribe the production of snow and rain to their Zeus; so that Holda comes before us a goddess of no mean rank. The comparison of snowflakes to feathers is very old; the Scythians pronounced the regions north of them inaccessible, because they were filled with feathers. Holda then must be able to move through the air, like dame Herke. Her annual progress, which like those of Herke and Berhta, is made to fall between Christmas and Twelfth-day, when the supernatural has sway, and wild beasts like the wolf are not mentioned by their names, brings fertility to the land. Not otherwise does 'Derk with the boar,' that Freyr of the Netherlands, appear to go his rounds and look after the ploughs. At the same time Holda, like Wuotan, can also ride on the winds, clothed in terror, and she, like the god, belongs to the 'wutende heer'"(Grimm, 267-268).

   Whereas Mutter Erde (Mother Earth) personifies the landscape, Frau Holle is that aspect which is the seasonal and weather change. For Paganism knew the deities as allegories for various forces of Nature, the Cosmos, and the Psyche, but also very real entities since there is a power and consciousness within everything. Frau Holle unites both the upperworld and underworld, the weather being an interplay of both upon the landscape. She is said to live in a cave, which represents inside the earth. She was a goddess of healing, much like the healing connotations of Wodan in the continental sources (such as the Merseburg Charms). Her close link to Wodan can be seen in her names of Frau Gode or Wode, as there was a time when "G" and "W" were used interchangeably. Another variation is Frau Herke, a female version of the Old English Herla whose own named derived from a Proto-Germanic word meaning "host leader" and thus referred to Wodan: "This would place Frau Herke in the same category as Frau Gode/Wode, as being names that appear to have come from the custom of married women being known by their husband's first name. However in the case of Herke, not only does she potentially take Wodan's name, but in some places she's also believed to take his role as leader of the Wild Hunt"(Heath, 6).

"Perchta" by contemporary American
artist Scott M. Fischer

   Who is Perchta? Her name means "the bright one", deriving from Old High German beraht, bereht -> Proto-Germanic *brehtaz. The feast of Epiphany is called Berchtentag in her honor. The Austrian mythologist Lotte Motz saw Perchta as the South Germanic equivalent of Holle, while Grimm notes Perchta was known "precisely in those Upper Germa regions where Holda leaves off, in Swabia, in Alsace, in Switzerland, in Bavaria and Austria"(Grimm, 272). Both share the role of "guardian of the beasts" and oversee spinning during the Raunächte, which connect them with goddesses of fate, the Norns - and the act of spinning an allegory for both "weaving" ones deeds into the Web of Wurt and magical-shamanic qualities: "That a godhead visits humans and intervenes in their concerns is indeed a rare and characteristic phenomenon. Just such a divinity is encountered, even in modern times, in the regions of German speech. Folk traditions have preserved the features of this female deity so that, with minor variations, she emerges as a well defined and vivid creature. Though she belongs to widely separated geographic areas and is designated by many names we cannot doubt that the many individual spirits had arisen from one basic form"(Motz, 1992, 11).

   She would receive flax from shepherds in the Summer and bless their flocks. She traveled through the countryside, inspecting for any signs of laziness in spinning; failure to fulfill this task in a timely manner would lead to Perchta cursing with bad luck for the next year. "People also say that Dame Holle begins to move about during the Christmas period. This is why serving women replenish their spindles or roll large amounts of yarn or fabric around them, and leave them there over night. They say if Dame Holla sees this she will say, 'For every thread there will be a good year'"(Praetorius, 403). Folklore identifies snow as occurring whenever Frau Holle or Perchta makes her bed. Even the clouds were taken as symbolic: White, fluffy clouds were her hanging her clothes out to dry in the sun; more elaborate clouds were her "weaving" - its not for nothing that Grimm noted the Wild Hunt being "perceptible in cloudy shapes". A Munich manuscript from the Alderspach Monastery alludes to those who "garnish their table for Percht"(Lecoteux, 18), a remnant of the ancient Pagan practice of libations and setting aside food for one's ancestors at the table.

   Perchta is dual-natured, alternately appearing as a young maiden or an old "hag" depending on what is reflected back at you through your own deeds. The term "hag" was a Christianized term used to describe an old woman, often in the medieval context of accusing her of "witchcraft", often being the herbalists and midwives with knowledge of natural lore and herbalism. Even in the term "hag" Perchta's ancient healing abilities were evident: The Hagal Rune meant "all-protecting" and Germanic  warriors would inscribe it upon their shields. Conversely, her violent qualities include cutting open the stomachs of those not using their time wisely and the symbolism of those standing in the way of her Wild Hunt with their entrails trailing behind them is a visceral allegory for what we can call Shadow Work or a profound examination of the self. In their fairy tale, the Grimm Brothers stress Frau Holle's dual role as benevolent to the girl who willingly helped and as a "hag" to the girl's lazy half-sister. This represents the Yuletide rewarding those who have been good and punishing those who have been bad, later Christianized as Saint Nicholas giving either gifts or coal in a child's stocking. Perchta is thus an example of syncretism and survivals of pre-Christian Alpine Paganism within ostensibly Catholic traditions.

"Berchtengehen", Illustrierte Chronik der Zeit (1890)

   Celtic Origins. Noting the distinct differences between Perchta and her more northern cousins, German linguist Erika Timm made a compelling case that Perchta arose from an amalgamation of Alpine Celtic traditions with the Germanic Migration Period. Among other qualities, her association with iron, including in her "eiserne nase" (iron nose), could harken back to the advanced iron works of the Alpine Celtic cultures such as Hallstatt that the Suebi, Alemanni and Bavarii absorbed. Rather than just from Germanic Beraht, Timm proposes a Celtic etymology for Perchta's name in Brixta, a Celtic goddess linked to healing wells (Timm, 317-318), which would lend further relevance to Perchta's healing qualities and her association with wells and other water sources. Such water sources as wells, springs and swamps could be seen as "cauldrons" of Frau Holle or Perchta, betraying Celtic imagery: "The Celtic gods who emulated the Great Goddess Cerridwen also had cauldrons, including Dagda, the benevolent Sky God, and the Lover of Dana (Dea Ana), the Earth Goddess, who had a cauldron 'that would never empty and go dry'"(Storl, 46). The latter is especially tantalizing if we recall the Wild Hunt in Asturias was led by a goddess named Dianu.

   Conflation with Diana. We have already seen how medieval authors tended to conflate all the Pagan goddesses to the Roman goddess of the hunt, Diana. This was due both to their own Roman bias and their associating all with what they defined as "devilish" qualities - celebration of the female form, the primal power of the forests, and practicing witchcraft. Written between 788 and 800, the Passio Minor describes Irish "Saint" Killian's attempts to convert the people of Franconia to Christianity. Locals told him about the worship of a "Diana of Würzburg": "We want to serve the great Diana, as our fathers did and in doing so, have prospered well to this day"(Timm, 208). Noting how the Roman cult of Diana had never appeared in that region, Grimm suggests this "Diana" was Frau Holle: "As it is principally in Thuringia, Franconia and Hessen that Frau Holda survives, it is not incredible that by 'Diana' in the neighbourhood of Würzburg, so far back as the 7th century, was meant none other than she"(Grimm, 286). Timm further identified her with Frija.

   Remnants into the Christian era. Horrified by her beloved place within the Germanic memory, Christian missionaries lamented continued reverance for Frau Holle. In his Dictionary of Superstitions (Aberglaubensverzeichnis), written sometime between 1236 and 1250, the Cistercian monk Rudolf observed: "In the night of Christ's nativity, they set the table for the Queen of Heaven, whom the people call Frau Holda, so that she might help them"(Heath, 11). Even the founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther, warned in his Exposition of the Epistles at Basel (1522): "Here cometh up Fraw Hulde with the snout, to wit, nature, and goeth about to gainstay her God", a phrase that Martin Bucer translated into Latin as "verenda nostra hera" (Our Venerated Lady), a term confined to the Virgin Mary (ibid., 12). The Church tried to stamp out the folklore about "Frawen Percht", complaining about locals who preferred to chant "Domina Perchta" than say prayers to Mary. People would also leave food out for Perchta during these nights leading up to Epiphany, seeking her blessings for the next year.

   As was common for various goddesses elsewhere, with the coming of Christianity the figure of Mary often took on the roles and qualities of Frau Holle or Perchta. We know at least two that were not in original Christian tradition: Her association with snow and overseeing spinning and sewing. "If, independently of the christian calendar, there was a Holda, then neither can Perahta be purely a product of it; on the contrary, both of these adjective names lead up to a heathen deity, who made her peregrination at that very season of yule, and whom therefore the christians readily connected with the sacredness of Christmas and New Year"(Grimm, 282). There remained festive days honoring Holle, alongside the Christian ones (Motz, 1984, 152-153). Finally, there is evidence from the 6th century that Holda was also given the title "Queen of Heaven" alongside Mary (Timm, 23) during that century defined by syncretism as a step towards Christianization.

   Ostara and the Coming Spring. Just as Frau Holle or Perchta seemed to personify Winter, the Spring season was associated with the Germanic goddess Ostara, who represents "the transition from the death of winter to vernal life, and the Christian celebration integrated many pagan rites, such as the din intended to drive off the demons of winter"(Lecouteux, 197). The 19th century German folklorists Wilhelm Mannhardt and Friedrich Liebrecht both expressed the view that the Wild Hunt was connected to rituals for expelling Winter (ibid., 178). The Romanian scholar of comparative mythology, Mircea Eliade, cited an 8th-century text that spoke of how "the Alamans sought to expel winter during the month of February"(Eliade, 268-271). Ancient Alemanni lore has survived in Fastnacht traditions, with the various masked "witches" and "forest spirits" in processions symbolic of either Winter itself or forces of Nature seeking to drive Winter out with their presence while ushering in Spring.

This motif can variously be seen in the Perchta masquerades of Germanic Alpine lands, the Calends of March masquerades in French areas of Switzerland, and the parades of Lombardy, Venice and Piedmont to "burn the old one" (brusar la veccia), the "one" meaning the "year", "which can be likened to the ancient Roman festival of Anna Perenna that fell during the Ides of March"(Lecouteux, 178). The Lithuanian-American anthropologist Marija Gimbutas identified the goddess Holle with the duality of Winter/death and Spring/life: "[Holle] holds dominion over death, the cold darkness of winter, caves, graves and tombs in the earth....but also receives the fertile seed, the light of midwinter, the fertilized egg, which transforms the tomb into a womb for the gestation of new life"(Gimbutas).

   Cycle of Death and Life. Even in the darkness of Winter there would be symbolic expressions of Spring, such as in the Wild Hunt candlelight processions of the Spanish Campaña. Here we see another lesson of the Wild Hunt: the boundary between death and life is not always clear, both operating as part of a cycle. There was the idea of the dead forming a processon and reentering their old villages for warmth and food, guided by a fire left specifically for them. This liminal time between Winter and Spring was taken as symbolic of the dead, such as in the Roman cult of the Lares. "In France and the Germanic countries this setting took the form of the fairy feast, the table set for Dame Abundia, Percht, or the Parcae"(ibid., 179), the "fairies" perhaps being a loose allegory for Ancestors and not the Sidhe of Ireland. The Wild Hunt in Asturias was associated with the buena genta, "the good folk", similar to the Sidhe. The theme here was expelling the "demonic" dead spirits and inviting the "good" ancestors. The Dutch fairy tale of "The Legend of the Wooden Shoe" contains interesting Druidic themes:

   "In years long gone millions of good fairies came down from the sun and went into the earth. There, they changed themselves into roots and leaves, and became trees. There were many kinds of these, as they covered the earth, but the pine and birch, ash and oak, were the chief ones   The fairies that lived in the trees bore the name of Moss Maidens, or Tree 'Trintjes'. The oak was the favourite tree. Under its branches, near the trunk, people laid their sick, hoping for help from the gods. Even more wonderful, as medicine for the country itself, the oak had power to heal   the oak, with its mighty roots, held the soil firm"(Griffis).

   Frau Holle represents the motherly, love-energy the nurturing aspect of the atmosphere. She and her Wild Hunt brings forth life as much as death. Fertility depends on precipitation from the sky, hence the link between storms, Wild Hunt, and fertility. The dead also have power over the elements. Georges Dumézil identified these legions of the dead roaming the earth under the guidance of their leader as connected to the third function of fertility. "The passage of the Wild Hunt, which, in the traditions after the Middle Ages, was closely connected to food and drink, is perfectly logical to us once we grasp the role played by the dead. They presided over the fertility of the soil and the fecundity of livestock. Thus it was necessary to propitiate them if they were regarded as neutral or well-intentioned or to drive them away and send them fleeing if they were seen as wicked. In one way or another, the Wild Hunt fell into the vast complex of ancestor worship, the cult of the dead, who are the go-betweens between men and the gods"(Lecouteux, 199). Eliade makes a similar point:

   "Agriculture as a profane skill and as a cult touches the world of the dead on two quite different levels. The first is solidarity with the earth; the dead are buried like seeds and enter a dimension of the earth accessible to them alone. Then, too, agriculture is preeminently a handling of fertility, of life reproducing itself by growth. The dead are especially drawn to this mystery of rebirth, to the cycle of creation, and to inexhaustible fertility. Like seeds buried in the womb of the earth, the dead wait for their return to life in their new form. That is why they draw close to the living, particularly at those times when the vital tension of the whole community is at its height - that is, during the fertility festival, when the generative powers of nature and of mankind are evoked, unleashed, and stirred to frenzy by rites and orgies....As long as seeds remain buried, they also fall under the jurisdiction of the dead. The Earth Mother, or Great Goddess of Fertility governs the fate of seeds and that of the dead in the same way. But the dead are sometimes closer to man, and it is to them that the husbandsman turns to bless and sustain his work"(Eliade, 295).

[To be continued in Part 3, about the role of Wotan and the Wild Huntsman archetype, as well as other aspects of the Wild Hunt....]

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Eliade, Mircea. Traité d'histoire des religions. Paris: Payot, 1949; Patterns of Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

GardenStone. Goddess Holle: In search of a Germanic goddess, trans. Michelle Lina Marie Hitchcock. Norderstadt, Schleswig-Holstein: BoD - Books on Demand GmbH, 2011.

Gimbutas, Marija. Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe. San Francisco: Harper, 1991.

Griffis, William Elliot. Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1918.

Grimm, Jakob. Teutonic Mythology, trans. James Steven Stallybrass. London: George Bell and Sons, 1882.  

Heath, Catherine. "From Fairytale to Goddess: Frau Holle and the Scholars that try to reveal her origins." 2013.

Lecouteux, Claude. Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and the Ghostly Processions of the Undead. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2011.

Motz, Lotte, "The Winter Goddess: Percht, Holda, And Related Figures," Folklore, Vol. 95, No. 2, 1984, pp. 151-166.

Motz, Lotte, "The Goddess Nerthus: A New Approach," Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Älteren Germanistik, Vol. 36, 1992, pp. 1-20.

Praetorius, Johannes. Saturnalia. Leipzig: 1663.

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

Timm, Erika, and Gustav Adolf Beckmann. Frau Holle, Frau Percht Und Verwandte Gestalten: 160 Jahre Nach Jacob Grimm Aus Germanischer Sicht Betrachtet. Stuttgart: Hinzel, 2003. 

The Wild Hunt: Symbolisms, Meanings, and Folklore (Part 1)

Part 1: Introduction; various cosmic and natural symbolisms; timing and relation to holidays

by Sean Jobst

29 December 2020

"The Ride of Asgard" (1872) by Norwegian painter
Peter Nicolai Arbo, portraying the Wild Hunt

   There is an undercurrent of ancient wisdom deeply embedded in folklore and traditions. This is a basic truth I have come to recognize these past few years, leading me on a journey I can only describe as enlightening. It was a task I took up in my past examinations of folklore, identifying remnants of the ancient Germanic goddesses Zisa and Ostara, and the various traditions and legends around the auspicious time of Walpurgisnacht. Using that same basic format, I will now examine traditions, folklore, and legends about the Wild Hunt - a pan-European motif with its regional variants. I will focus more on the Swabian and Alemannic, Flemish, and Iberian traditions of my ancestral lands, with parallels in nearby cultures so as to gain a deeper picture of what this mysterious Hunt symbolizes. As I have examined with those other three articles, there are many layers of meaning - each one has lessons for us about our ancestors, our selves, our psyche, our environment, and the cosmos.

   The Wild Hunt gradually evolved from a mythological theme with obvious roots in the Pagan European past, to a mysterious Christianized folkloric trope filled with dark imagery. Common themes remained throughout, including a balance of various forces - the unseen with the seen, the "good" with the "bad", the living with the dead, natural and cosmic. The great German folklorist Jakob Grimm described it as a "solemn march of gods" who visited "the land at some holy tide, bringing welfare and blessing, accepting gifts and offerings of the people" but also floated "unseen through the air, perceptible in cloudy shapes, in the roar and howl of the winds, carrying on war, hunting or the game of ninepins, the chief employments of ancient heroes: an array which, less tied down to a definite time, explains more the natural phenomenon." It was degenerated by the Christians into "a pack of horrid spectres, dashed with dark and devilish ingredients"(Grimm, 947).

   Such an "infernal host" is a departure from the original Pagan lore where it involved individuals with actual bodies rather than incorporeal ghosts, as well as traveling more over the ground than the air. Perhaps this is part of the Christian (and Abrahamic) drawing away of spiritual forces from the Natural world into a distant Cosmos - yet there is a place for a balance of the two within the original folklore. Yet even the Infernal Hunt has an ancient origin: "This is the sign of an imminent death, and this motif has a long history"(Lecouteux, 102). Its a rite binding together the perceivable realm of Nature with its darker, more esoteric aspects that are as real but less quantifiable. The Wild Hunt "primarily concerns an initiation into the wild, untamed forces of nature in its dark and chthonic aspects"(Greenwood, 195), hence we "Wild" is combined with "Host, Hunt, Army" in its regional names. 

   I perceive it as a "host" of supernatural elements which simply means a mysterious realm that coexists within our own but is the matter of legends; a "hunt" involving an "army" insofar as what is "hunted" is either an impending death, trying to "ride" the chaotic forces within Nature or the Psyche so as to facilitate the ultimate self-growth, or seasonal connotations involving the liminal times when the most changes occur on all those levels. In its most ancient roots, the French scholar Claude Lecouteux saw the Wild Hunt as a merger of fertility and agricultural rites and ancestor veneration, with Georges Dumézil's third function of common folk within Indo-European societies: "That this kind of kinship appears from the northern to southern extremes of the Germanic area and poses a challenge to the law of ecotypes cannot be a coincidence. Instead it shows that what we find here are beliefs of a venerable antiquity, from a time before the various Germanic ethnic groups went their separate ways. What we have here supports the hypothesis of an Indo-European origin for the Wild Hunt"(Lecouteux, 192).

Mistress of the Wild Hunt: Our Continental
Germanic goddess Frau Holle, by the German
illustrator Ludwig Pietsch, circa 1860

   Who leads this mysterious Wild Hunt? Given the regional variations as well as the multiple layers of meaning, its not surprising there are various figures given. The two most common ones though are the Germanic god Wotan (Wodan) - seen for example in the Alemannic name Wuotis Heer (Wuodan's Army) of Schwaben and Schweiz - and his wife/consort, the continental goddess Frau Holle, whose name varies in more northerly regions to direct correlations to Wotan's name (i.e. Frau Holda, Frau Gode, etc.) to the Perchta or Berchta "bright one" of Alpine regions. Her qualities are multifaceted, to be unraveled as our story continues, but suffice to say the two aspects - masculine and feminine - balance these natural forces: "not only Wuotan and other gods, but heathen goddesses too, may head the furious host: the wild hunter passes into the wood-wife, Woden into frau Gaude"(Grimm, 932).

   Its no accident the common theme of Wild Hunt folk traditions are "constantly driven by continuous natural processes"(Bächtold-Stäubli, 632), invested with supernatural qualities to symbolize the mysteries inherent within Nature, that remain regardless of the social changes occurring in the life of a people: "Another class of spectres will prove more fruitful for our investigation: they, like the ignes fatui [will-o'-the-wisps], include unchristened babes, but instead of straggling singly on the earth as fires, they sweep through forest and air in whole companies with a horrible din. This is the widely spread legend of the furious host, the furious hunt, which is of high antiquity, and interweaves itself, now with gods, and now with heroes. Look where you will, it betrays its connexion with heathenism"(Grimm, 918).

   Throughout Europe's Wild Hunt traditions, there is the leadership of either a masculine or feminine figure, both combining airy and earthly qualities. The masculine usually personifies wind or ecstasy, and is a psychopomp who has specific relations to death. The feminine usually personifies the earth's fertility, and has a more general relation to the Otherworld. A Flemish fairy tale associates the Wild Hunt with an old woman who has a large eye on her forehead and lives in a castle with her souls (Bächtold-Stäubli, 635), which calls to mind some Alpine lore about Perchta or Slavic tales of the Baba Yaga. Given the common use of an eye symbol to ward off the "evil eye", it could be that she not only ushers souls into the Underworld but also wards off death from the living. We will see this same meaning later with the Wild Hunt's association with liminal times between the Winter Solstice (midwinter) and leading up to Spring, with all the seasonal and esoteric connotations that entails. Perchta holds healing qualities as much as her deathly connotations.

   Frau Holle and Wotan had their parallels in Celtic lands like Gaul and Celtiberia, with similar imagery of hunter and otherworld archetypes. Aside from a horned wild huntsman, there is a female figure who rides across the night skies. The Wild Hunt is known in various Spanish regions as the Galician Estantiga or Hoste Antiga "the old army", the Asturian Güestia "host", Leónese Hueste de Ánimas "troop of ghosts", Castilian Estantigua, and Extremaduran Hueste de Guerra "war company" or Cortejo de Gente de Muerte "deadly retinue" (Risco, 389-395). Its no accident the folklore survived most in those regions with the strongest Celtiberian connection. Here too we find a goddess who joins the fertile earth with the deadly realm. In the sixth century, archbishop Martin of Braga described legends among the peasants of northwest Iberia about a goddess "Diana" at the head of a troop traversing the night skies. Rather than being the Roman goddess of the hunt - medieval missionaries conflated all Indo-European goddesses with her given their own Roman bias - "commingled here are Diana of antiquity and Di Ana, a Celtic goddess who is also called Anu. The existence of a god Dianum speaks to this hypothesis. This deity, who was perhaps the Asturian Dianu, no doubt came from Di Anu, who was taken to be a masculine figure"(Lecouteux, 11).

"Nerthus" (1905) by the German illustrator
Emil Doepler (1855-1922)

   Sea connotations. Could this Asturian goddess Di Anu relate to the Irish river goddess Danu? The common element of "dan" relating to rivers, such as in the Danube which nurtured many of the earliest Proto-Celtic cultures. At first glance this appears unrelated to the Wild Hunt with its airy, forest, and underworld qualities. Yet all are connected to the interplay of forces within the rich animistic tapestry of ancient Celtic and Germanic tribes, as we can see in the etymology of related words. Nebulous which describes the airy, esoteric and mysterious, has this pedigree: Latin nebulosus "full of mist, foggy cloudy, Old High German nebul "cloud, fog", Proto-Germanic *nebulaz "fog, mist, darkness" -> Proto-Indo-European *nebhos "cloud, vapor, fog, moisture, sky". Water being seen as conscious, containing a spiritual essence, can be seen in the water-sprites (neck, nixe - literally "to cleanse") of Germanic mythology, for example in the great Neckar River of Swabia, which itself comes from the Celtic nikros "wild water, wild fellow" and Proto-Germanic *nikwus -> Proto-Indo-European *neig "to wash". All conjure up images of not only a physical but also a spiritual cleansing.

   As part of the animism at the heart of their worldview, Celtic and Germanic tribes saw water as living consciousness, many containing sprites while more prominent bodies of water were often personified as goddesses. In Celtic cosmology, the Otherworld contains a celestial, middle, and underworld realm. Ours is the middle, equivalent to the Germanic middle-earth. The underworld is the lower realm, associated with water, minerals, and fire - like the distant southerly realm of fire called Mudspelli or Muspilli in continental Germanic sources. Water, mist and fog were viewed as liminal places, where the veils between worlds was very thin. Mist itself resulted from a mixture of the sky (cosmos) with water, and one perceives the mist as encompassing one's vision upon the earth and can seemingly walk into mist to "disappear" into another world (i.e. outside our immediate realm of vision). No surprise then that Celtic peoples would invest such places with the mysterious - the Iberians saw Finisterre "end of land" overlooking the Atlantic as the conduit through which souls entered into the Otherworld to ultimately be reincarnated back into the middle realm. For the Irish, the Otherworld of Tír na nÓg "land of the young" could be arrived at through one or two ways - one was through water, beneath a lake or the ocean west of Ireland; and the other through an underground passage, such as a sidhe (mound) or cave. 

   Both elements are contained within the Germanic folklore about Frau Holle, who appears in the Grimm fairy-tales as a figure whose realm is reached by descending down a well. The link to the ancestors can also be seen in her association with mounds. Its been my contention that our southern Germanic tribes absorbed much from previous Neolithic people and Celtic cultures of the Alpine regions, seen in our cosmology compared to the later conceptions of the Norse. South Germanic tribes believed "the souls of the dead returned to certain sacred lakes from which they were incorporated into new human beings. This is strongly suggested at least by the derivation of the word soul (from proto-Germanic *saiwa-lo, 'belonging to the lake, deriving from the lake') from a term for 'lake,' or 'inland sea' (*saiwaz), together with the fact that the word soul is indigenous only to the South and East Germanic linguistic areas, whereas in the north there were originally other designations for it"(Hasenfratz, 72). The "sea" here refers to a landlocked water source, not the open ocean.

   Relation to Nerthus and the Meadow. Could Holle be linked to the mysterious goddess Nerthus described by the Roman Tacitus in Chapter 40 of Germania? Holle travels on a wagon accompanied by a man, while an image of Nerthus is described as wheeled on a wagon by a priestly figure to a sacred grove on an island somewhere around the North Sea. A sea goddess like her would have little relevance to our southern tribes, so she was simply given more land qualities - but the symbols remained the same. Rather than the Valhalla of Norse sources, continental Germanic sources refer to an otherworldly realm alongside that of Hel, called "the Meadow". Whereas Hel was closely tied to mounds and just chthonic forces, the "Meadow" - known as Waggs to the Goths, Uuaga in Old Saxon, and Vangr to the Norse -> all stemming from Proto-Germanic *Wangaz - was given forest imagery and thus related to more primal forces on the earth, exactly those active most on the Wild Hunt. It survived in the Alemannic topographical names Wangen "green field, meadow", a realm for the "glorious dead" (ibid., 73) first chosen by Frija rather than Wodan. 

   Cosmic connotations. This link of the Meadow with a celestial deadly troop can be seen in the cosmic symbolisms given to the goddess Frau Hulde or Frigg in the Low Countries. A Middle Dutch term for the Milky Way was Vroneldenstraet "the highway of Frau Hulde". As noted by the pioneering work of the Flemish-French scholar Louis De Baecker (1814-1896), the Flemish knew Orion's Belt as Friggiarocken "Frigg's Distaff", later Christianized as Marienspinrokken "Mary's Distaff". Many Germanic goddesses were portrayed holding a distaff, and many were Christianized as the Virgin Mary so as to appropriate their worship into the Christian fold, such as I found when I studied traditions about Zisa and Ostara. The Norse also associated Orion's Belt with the goddess Freyja, who appears to be the same goddess known to our continental tribes as Frija, Frigg, Holle, Hulda and other regional names. The distaff also relates to the spinning connotation, as we will see more later in relation to Perchta. De Baecker also noted how the Flemish name for Ursa Major was de Woenswaghen "the Chariot of Wodan", thus the close association of Wotan with this Goddess. In Galicia, the Camino contains cosmic symbolisms such as following the pilgrimage routes to the Campus Stellae (Star Field): "Santiago is associated with the Milky Way as the road of the dead"(Lecouteux, 138), perhaps remnants from the ancient Celtic traditions of Galicia.

"The Wolves Pursuing Sol and Mani" (1909), by the
English illustrator John Charles Dollman (1851-1934)
 

   Dates of the Wild Hunt. There is no set date for the Wild Hunt across all areas, because these "corresponded to a pre-Christian cycle of movable feasts, which depended on lunar phases. Furthermore, the Celtic and Germanic calendars were most likely superimposed on two ancient apportionments of the year: two large seasons - summer, which runs from May 1 to November 1, and winter, which runs from November 1 to May 1"(Lecouteux, 199). As noted by Philippe Walter, a professor of medieval French literature at the University of Grenoble, notes these apportionments "have undergone a more or less marked Christianization by virtue of being fixed to specific periods in the calendar," original movable feasts fixed so as to be "integrated in to the Christian calendar"(Walter, 74). 

   Contrary to the fixed celebrations of the Roman calendar and later Christianity, Celtic and Germanic calendars were lunisolar, harmonizing the phases of the sun with those of the moon. Both had two seasons - Summer and Winter - each divided in a quarter. Celtic months began with each full moon, and the Germanic on each new moon. Celtic and Germanic holidays were both marked by full moons. There is evidence the Celts celebrated the Winter Solstice - unlike the Germanic tribes - although not the Equinoxes or Summer Solstice. Wild Hunt traditions in Celtic and Germanic lands were connected to Winter, beginning sometime in mid-late October. For the Germanic, it was the full moon that was called Winter Nights; for the Celts, it was Lughnasa, either the ninth or tenth moon of the year dependent on a lunar leap year.

   The dates generally appear between Martin's Day (November 11), to Advent (the four Sundays before Christmas), Winter Solstice, the Twelve Days of Christmas, Epiphany, and leading up to the end of Winter. "In the Palatinate, for example, the Wild Hunt was abroad during Advent, but in Swabia it appeared precisely on the day of St. Thomas (December 21)"(Lecouteux, 193). Even the Christianized days were taken as personifications of previous deities: "The Westphalian name for the Wild Hunt leader [Goi] could quite conceivably be a recollection of the past. This would not be the first time that the name for an important festival was anthropomorphized - for example, the Befana is the personification of Epiphany and Perchta personifies Christmas"(ibid., 195).

   Samhain. The recurring theme throughout all these differing dates are their liminal and transitory nature: "All the year's transitional passages have the distinctive feature of permitting communication between the otherworld and our world, evidence for which is provided by the invasion of the undead and spirits during these times"(ibid., 197). These include Celtic Samhain, a time when the boundaries between worlds was at its thinnest and the Army of the Sidhe left the Underworld to roam the earth: "In the Intoxication of the Ulstermen, several festivals were organized for Samhain. Following the feast arranged by Fintan, all the nobles, who were already fairly intoxicated, engaged in a wild race across Ireland, following Cuchulain, and at the passing of this furious troop, hills were flattened , trees were uprooted, and the fords and streams were emptied of their water"(Jouet, 104). Around Hallweijn in the Netherlands, there is a corpus of ballads that are connected to Samhain and the ancient Celts of the Low Countries (Smedes, 70-94). Not exactly our modern fixed Halloween, Samhain was marked the tenth or eleventh full moon of the year, dependent on a lunar leap year and usually sometime in November.

   11/11. Christianized as St. Martin's Day, November 11th marks the beginning of the Carnival season throughout Germany and the Low Countries. That social norms would be "released" during this time harkens back to the Roman Saturnalia more than an actual Christian day, so its not surprising there would be supernatural legends associated with the Wild Hunt: "Some experienced hauntings on all of these days. St. Martin's Day (November 11) was the occasion for the passage of the bird of St. Martin, a kind of fire dragon; the wild herdsman; and the Kasermandl (Alps), a kind of demon that took possession of chalets after the livestock had been taken down to the lower valleys for the winter and that often bore the features of dead cowherds who were condemned to return, because they abused the livestock in their keeping. In Burgenland, Austria, Lutzl (Lucy) passed at this time. She was the woman of the solstice, who roamed with veiled face. She was also armed with a kitchen spoon that she used to beat people in their houses and a knife for opening their bellies (the gastronomy motif, which is also common in traditions concerning Percht). Clad in black and white, she was accompanied by monstrous figures, and her trajectory was a quest in which she begged for the deceased foodstuffs, the 'bread of all souls'"(Lecouteux, 198).

Yule illustration from "Die Gartenlaube" (1880)

   Other auspicious times before Christmas. In Silesia and Austria, the twelve days spanning the time from St. Lucia (December 13th) to Christmas "prefigured what would take place in the twelve months of the new year, and numerous divinatory practices took place at this time"(ibid., 198), including various prohibitions related to spinning - a symbolism that figures prominently within stories about Frau Holle and Perchta, as we will see later. In Switzerland, the three days before Christmas were called bolster nächt "noisy night" and "hunt of the sträggele": "The sträggele was the equivalent of the Howler (Schrat), a kind of dwarf that was sometimes combined with a nightmare (mar)"(ibid., 194). This term is also used for the masks used in Carnival processions, and this time roughly coincides with the Winter Solstice. 

   Midwinter and the Winter Solstice. Despite contrary belief, including held many modern Pagans, Yule is not the same time as either the Winter Solstice or Christmas. As noted by the Swedish ethnographer Andreas Nordberg, backed up by early medieval sources describing the actual traditions of Germania, Scandinavia and England, Yule was originally three full moons after Winter Nights (mid-late October), thus usually sometime in January. It was only fixed to the Winter Solstice and Christmas to align it with the Roman Christian calendar under converted kings such as Hakon of Norway. It was also a three-day celebration and not the "12 Days of Christmas" some link it to. Likewise, according to the Julian calendar then prevalent the Winter Solstice itself was around 14-15 December, coinciding with the Christianized feast of St. Lucia, which Scandinavian folklore still considers the longest, darkest night of the year. Midwinter, midpoint between Winter and Summer, would have been around 14 January in the Julian and 20 January in the Gregorian calendar (Nordberg, 102, 148-150). The timing of Christmas has more to do with Roman Saturnalia than Germanic Yule.

   Nevertheless, as a season this time represents something auspicious so its no surprise Wild Hunt traditions abound. They looked at the winds and storms "howling" over the land and sweeping through the forests, the darkness and cold reigning supreme during this time, as a symbolic playing out of spiritual forces in the physical realm - the Wild Hunt. Being outside during this time might lead to being swept up in this cavalcade, while others of a more magical and shamanic inclination openly sought it out (Lecouteux, 187-188). It was naturally a more contemplative time, as one prepared to survive the winter one would also reflect more on the ancestors. The realms of the living and dead were especially permeable during midwinter according to the ancient Germanic peoples (Simek, 373), while many traditions describe the riders as resembling the land spirits, who were themselves often linked to the dead (Lecouteux, 191-192), such as the link of the sidhe in the Irish Wild Hunt, or the buena gente "good folk" of Asturias. "The Wild Hunt fell into the vast complex of ancestor worship, the cult of the dead, who are the go-betweens between men and the gods"(ibid., p. 199).

"Der wilde Jägd" by the German painter
Johann Wilhelm Cordes (1824-1869)

   Raunächte. Also known as "between the years", these are the Twelve Nights between Christmas and 6th January (Epiphany). It seems to be remnant of a memory before the lunisolar conception of time was overturned and the Church/Imperial successors of Rome forced a fixed calendar upon Germanic tribes to more easily control them; when the "missing" twelve nights were added to the end of the lunar year to reconcile it with the solar, making these transitory days outside of normal time. Just as with other auspicious times, laws of Nature are temporarily suspended, so various divinatory practices were common. There were folk legends throughout Europe of people engaging in magic who then "turned" into werewolves around this time. Aside from the "shape-shifting" Perchten of Alpine regions, there were also legends in the Ardennes (Wolf, 615-616), a forested region of eastern Belgium whose name comes from Arduinna, the ancient Belgae goddess of the Hunt. More on this later in a section about the shamanism within the Wild Hunt, but suffice it to say these were allegorical not literal transformations.

   In Switzerland and Alsace, a mysterious figure named Hutata - who receives his name from the scream he unleashes - is on the move during the twelve days of Christmas (Lecouteux, 194). Throughout the Balkans, Anatolia, and Greek lands, the Kalikanzari are goblins residing in the underworld who come to the surface for two weeks after the Winter Solstice to wreck havoc (Puchner), their name coming from kalos-kentauros (centaur) conveying the same idea about a shamanic transformation (Ginzburg, 169). They thus resemble the Perchtenlauf processions of people dress in costumes and goat and other animal masks, around this same time in the Alpine regions. There is a tradition of ushering in the New Year with noise and clamor, seen in our own modern fireworks and general celebratory atmosphere for New Year's. It was believed that the Wild Hunt should start in the exact middle of the Raunächte - New Year's Eve - so that the Wild Hunt with its symbolism sets the tone for the next year. 

   The Twelfth Night (5th January) was associated with Frau Holle/Perchta, which Grimm traced in its Old High German name Perahtun naht "the luminous night". This time would coincide more or less with the actual historically-attested Germanic Yule than the Winter Solstice or Christmas. Grimm further writes in his Teutonic Mythology (Volume 1, Chapter 13): "Her annual progress, which like those of Herke and Bertha, is made to fall between Christmas and Twelfth-day, when the supernatural has sway, and wild beasts like the wolf are not mentioned by their names, brings fertility to the land....At the same time Holda, like Wuotan, can also ride on the winds, clothed in terror, and she, like the god, belongs to the 'wutende heer'. From this arose the fancy, that witches ride in Holla's company; it was already known to Burchard, and now in Upper Hesse and the Westerwald, Holle-riding, to ride with Holle, is equivalent to a witches' ride. Into the same 'furious host', according to a wide-spread popular belief, were adopted the souls of infants dying unbaptized; not having been christain'd, they remained heathen, and fell to heathen gods, to Wuotan or to Hulda."

   These Nights finally culminated on January 6th in the day known to Christians as the Epiphany - but here too there were deep remnants of ancient Celtic and Germanic heritage - joined as the two were in the Alpine regions of Swabia, Bavaria, Switzerland, Austria, Piedmont, Tyrol and Northern Italy. Closely associated with Epiphany was Perchta as a mother goddess ruling over "the fairy women who enter houses on certain nights to grant their inhabitants prosperity if they find a meal prepared for them"(Lecouteux, 150). The night troop of Corteo della Berta traveled on the night of Epiphany in the Haut-Adige region, and the Redodesa passed through midnight on Epiphany accompanied by her twelve children in the Cadorino and Belluno regions, although they were more silent than the Wild Hunt (ibid., 150-151). In South Tyrol, a child's dragging shirt tails are tied and he is called Zuserbeutlein, "a made-up term of endearment that is possibly a compound word of zuserl, meaning 'waxwing,' which is considered a nuisance bird in Schwabia, and beutlein, meaning 'little sack.' The bird reference likely refers to the cries uttered by the child as it stumbles in his large shirt, falling farther and farther behind, and the little sack is likely his clothing"(ibid., 151).

[To be continued in Part 2, beginning with the qualities of Frau Holle/Perchta and how those qualities relate to various symbolisms of the Wild Hunt. In honor of these liminal times, I will focus on the Wild Hunt both sides of the New Year]....

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Bächtold-Stäubli, Hanns, and Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer, eds. Handwörterbücher Zur Deutschen Volkskunde. Berlin: Walter de Gruyber & Co., 1941.

Ginzburg, Carlo. Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 

Greenwood, Susan. "The Wild Hunt: A Mythological Language of Magic," in James R. Lewis and Murphy Pizza, eds., Handbook of Contemporary Paganism. Leiden: Brill, 2008, pp. 195-222. 

Grimm, Jakob. Teutonic Mythology, III, 1883, trans. James Steven Stallybrass. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004.

Hasenfratz, Hans-Peter. Barbarian Rites: The Spiritual World of the Vikings and the Germanic Tribes. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2011.

Jouet, Philippe. L'Aurore celtique. Fouesnant, Bretogne: Yoran Embanner, 2006.

Kershaw, Priscilla K. The One-eyed God: Odin and the (Indo-) Germanic Männerbünde. Washington, D.C.: Journal of Indo-European Studies, 2000.

Lecouteux, Claude. Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and the Ghostly Processions of the Undead. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2011.

Nordberg, Andreas. Jul, disting och förkyrklig tideräkning: Kalendrar och Kalendariska riter i det förkristna Norden. Uppsala: Gustav Adolfs Akademien för Svensk folkkultur, 2006.

Puchner, Walter. Die Folklore Südosteuropas: Eine komparative Übersicht. Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2016.

Risco, Vincente, "Creencias Gallegas. La procession de las animas y las premoniciones de muerte," Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares, No. 2, Madrid, 1946, pp. 389-395.

Simek, Rudolf. A Dictionary of Northern Mythology, trans. Angela Hall. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993.

Smedes, E. "De keltische achtergrond van het lied van Heer Hallewijn," De Giids, August 1946, pp. 70-94.

Walter, Philippe. Christianity: Origins of a Pagan Religion. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2006.

Wolf, Johann Wilhelm. Niederländische Sagen. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1843; reprint, 2017.

Dominion and Smartmatic contributed to 2020 election fraud; Uncovering Globalist connections, ties to foreign regimes

by Sean Jobst

19 December 2020

   In my previous post, I cited problems with the massive mail-in voting system that was rushed with no consistent safeguards nationwide - and, in many cases, electoral offices violating even their own states' laws (i.e. backdating ballots to meet election day deadlines, send ballots en masse and not just those who had requested them, not verifying signatures or addresses, etc.). This blatant disregard skewed the election for Biden as happened in the largest cities in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona. There are various statistical anomalies too, but this will be the subject of another post. The subject here are the other component to the mail-in system - a reliance on Dominion Voting machines to process and tabulate votes in swing states. 

   The oligarchs behind these machines have operated in United States elections under different names, with Dominion Voting Systems merely being the latest incarnation. Although based in London, Smartmatic has close ties to the Venezuelan Communist regime through its CEO, Antonio Mugica. It worked closely with the state-owned Bitza software company to ensure that Hugo Chávez could rig the 2004 presidential recall election, and has been used by his successor Maduro to ensure one-party Communist rule. Smartmatic entered the U.S. market by buying a failing American company called Sequoia Voting Systems: "After losing money for several years, on March 8, 2005, Sequoia was acquired by Smartmatic, a multi-national technology company which had developed advanced election systems, voting machines included. In November 2007, following a verdict by the CFIUS [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States], Smartmatic was ordered to sell Sequoia, which it did to its Sequoia managers having U.S. citizenship. Sequoia Voting Systems was acquired by Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems on June 4, 2010." 

   The Sequoia-Smartmatic connection was decisively outlined on several occasions. On March 30, 2005, the Michigan Department of Management and Budget Acquisition Services issued a document: "Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary company of Smartmatic International Corporation." On November 8, 2007, a Smartmatic press release announced a rebranding of Sequoia: "Leading voting technology provider Sequoia Voting Systems is pleased to announce the sale of the company to a group of private U.S. investors led by Sequoia's current executive management team." A Delaware court decision ruled on April 4, 2008 that "Smartmatic promises to grant to Hart a license to use its intellectual property currently found in Sequoia's machines." The Canadian-based corporation Dominion then bought Sequoia according to a press release on June 4, 2010: "Dominion Voting Systems Corporation today announced that it has acquired the assets of Sequoia Voting Systems, a major U.S. provider of voting solutions serving nearly 300 jurisdictions in 16 states."

   Smartmatic entered U.S. elections during Chicago's city primaries on March 21, 2006, when problems related to the 19,000 Sequoia voting machines - worth $50 million - delayed results for a week. Although based in Boca Raton, Sequoia/Smartmatic president Jack Blaine testified before the Chicago City Council that his corporation was owned by the Venezuelan government and fifteen technicians came from Venezuela to repair the machines. Democratic Chicago Alderman Edward Burke raised concerns about this foreign subversion. In May and October 2006, Democratic New York Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney wrote letters to Treasury Secretary John Snow and his successor, Hank Paulson, stressing the threat using voting machines and software tied to a foreign regime had for national security. This led to a CFIUS investigation which Smartmatic escaped by selling Sequoia on December 22, 2006.

   Our story does not end there. On March 8, 2010, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice would force the divestiture of Election Systems & Software (ES&S), which cleared the way for Dominion to square away the U.S. voting machines industry through lucrative contracts with various states and counties. A far cry from their attitudes now, the gatekeepers at CNN were allowing an August 2006 report about Smartmatic's threats to electoral security. Even the New York Times expressed alarm about Smartmatic. Dominion entered into a contract with Smartmatic in 2009, in time to benefit from the DoJ decision in March 2010 - and thus began the consistent spate of real controversy about their use in various elections. 

   In March 2012, Dominion admitted a "shortcoming" in its software led to votes being given to the wrong winners in two city council races in Wellington, Florida: "County Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher, who insisted a computer glitch rather than human error was to blame for the fiasco, claimed vindication after Dominion Voting Systems released its statement." Waldeep Singh, Dominion's Vice President of Customer Relations, admitted in his statement: "The incorrect reporting of vote totals which occurred in the Wellington election was caused by a mismatch between the software which generates the paper ballots and the central tally system. This synchronization difficulty is a shortcoming of the version of software currently being used in Palm Beach County and that shortcoming has been addressed in a subsequent version of the software. These enhancements help to prevent such an anomaly from occurring in the future. Dominion is in the process of providing this newer version to Palm Beach County." 

   In 2016, Progressive activist and lawyer Dana Jill Simpson, a former employee of the Soros-linked Tides Foundation, brought her concerns about Dominion machines helping the DNC establishment steal the Democratic primaries from Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton, to the FBI but they ignored her. That same year, Fox News interviewed Princeton University computer scientist Andrew Appel, who demonstrated just how easy it was to tamper with the voting machines - he wrote a tampering program on a memory card, opened the lid and inserted the card with a screwdriver, in a process that only took seven minutes. At the DEFCON hacking conference on August 11, 2017, a CNNTech report demonstrated hackers easily breaking into those machines. In April 2018, New York Times Opinion shared a video, "How I Hacked an Election", with a demonstration by University of Michigan computer science Prof. J. Alex Halderman. It showed a mock election at the University, followed by him hacking the machines and manipulating the results. He warned how such machines are prone to cyber attacks "that can change votes".

   After "Maryland's main election system vendor was bought by a parent company with ties to a Russian oligarch" in 2015, which the state's election officials didn't find out until July 2018, Democratic Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin introduced the Election Vendor Security Act that would've prevented states from "contracting with firms owned or influenced by non-US citizens" according to an April 2019 report in The Guardian that also cited firms such as Dominion and Scytl. In December 2019, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren (MA), Ron Wyden (OR), and Amy Klobuchar (MN), and Democratic Congressman Mark Pocan (WI) sent a letter to the CEOs of H.I.G. Capital, LLC, which invested in the Smartmatic-linked Hart InterCivic. They warned of machines "switching votes" and counting "improbable results" that "threaten the integrity of our elections". Giving examples of "nearly three dozen backend election systems in 10 states" - vote switching in South Carolina, busted machines in Indiana, and paper ballots rejected by machines in Missouri - the letter concluded: "These problems threaten the integrity of our elections and demonstrate the importance of election systems that are strong, durable, and not vulnerable to attack." 

   In 2015, election officials in 31 states - representing 40 million registered voters - warned about outdated machines, with nearly every state "using some machines that are no longer manufactured" according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Even when state and local officials tried replacing outdated machines, many continued to "run on old software that will soon be outdated and more vulnerable to hackers" according to the same Associated Press that now determines elections and denies any flaws with Dominion in 2020. Denver businessman Eric Coomer, who became Dominion's Vice President of U.S. Engineering in 2010 and publicly expresses far-leftist  views, admitted in a 2016 video that Dominion did not update its software to protect against fraud. On August 13, 2019, the contract between Dominion and the County of Santa Clara in California included clause 2.26 that "Allows staff to adjust tally based on review of scanned ballot images."

An image from Dominion's website.
Keep in mind that in some states, not
all counties use the machines - but
the ones that swayed the election do.

   Several states and counties primarily relied on Dominion Voting machines for the 2020 election. I'll start with my neighboring state of Georgia. Following the contentious 2018 governor's race, Republican Governor Brian Kemp cultivated ties with voting machine corporations: In January 2019, he hired former ES&S lobbyist Chuck Harper as his deputy chief of staff. These ties led Oregon senator Ron Wyden to warn how the voting machine lobby "literally thinks they are just above the law, they are accountable to nobody, they have been able to hotwire the political system in certain parts of the country like we've seen in Georgia". In summer 2019, Dominion was awarded a contract worth $106,842,590.80 by the State of Georgia. That November, the state "rushed" to install 30,000 Dominion machines in time for the March 24th primary elections. 

   To "rush" through something would obviously make it prone to fraud, but exactly this occurred as a bipartisan agreement of the duopoly establishment in Georgia. On March 6, 2020, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger signed off on a legal agreement with the Democratic Party of Georgia to alter the state's absentee ballot procedures, including changing the manner the ballots were counted and jettisoning the requirement for signature verification. This agreement violated the Constitution, which enables legislatures as responsible for any electoral process changes. On election day, a software glitch delayed the counting of thousands of ballots in Gwinnett County, as occurred earlier with Spalding and Morgan Counties. Gwinnett County specifically blamed Dominion for the error. Given what we've already documented about such glitches in previous years' elections, the problems with Dominion machines appear to be structural.

   These and other problems forced Raffensperger and other officials to consent to a recount, but elections officials were instructed to report original vote totals despite several cases of recounts reducing Biden's alleged 13,000-vote lead. In Dekalb County, an error that added an extra 0 to 1000 votes gave Biden 9,000 votes in a precinct where his tally was actually 900. An audit added 284 ballots in Walton County, netting an extra 176 votes for Trump. More than 2,600 ballots were found to not be uploaded from a memory card in Floyd County, giving Trump an extra 800 votes. A similar failure in one Douglas County precinct uncovered 156 votes for Biden, 128 for Trump, seven for Jorgenson, and two ballots with no presidential selection made.  A memory card discovered in Fayette County uncovered 2,755 votes in a hand-tally - 1,577 for Trump, 1,128 for Biden, 43 for Jorgensen, and seven write-ins. A forensic test of a Dominion machine in Ware County ran equal number of Trump and Biden votes, which altered 37 Trump votes to Biden, in what USA Today blamed on "human error, not vote-flipping". A Voter GA press release confirmed it was indeed "flipped". 

   Why did all these errors benefit Biden and recounts yielded Trump votes that had not initially been counted? We can expect that with such changes in only a handful of counties, there could be other errors in more of the state's 159 counties - enough to further decrease Biden's "lead" and perhaps flip Georgia for Trump. There is a pattern with several electoral races this year. A recount in an executive council district in Merrimack, New Hampshire found 1,600 extra votes that went to Republican candidate David Wheeler over Democratic councilor Debora Pignatelli. This was a 5% change that ultimately did not alter the outcome, but similar changes would likely alter results in states where Biden's "lead" over Trump was less than 1%. On November 16th, a commissioner race in Clark County, Nevada was thrown out - involving over 153,000 votes - due to discrepancies on thousands of ballots, although officials allowed the presidential race totals to remain on the same ballots. In Arizona, State Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Eddie Farnsworth ordered the seizure of Dominion machines in Maricopa County for a forensic audit after several reports of fraud. 

   The State of Michigan uses Dominion machines in 47 out of its 83 counties. A software glitch overturned the results of an Oakland County commissioner race in Rochester Hills, changing a 1,127-vote win for Democrat Dr. Melanie Hartman into a 104-vote loss that benefited her Republican opponent, Adam Kochenderfer. Another glitch in Antrim County found over 6,000 votes for Trump that had initially been counted for Biden, as the Detroit Free Press and other local media reported. After refusals by the state's Democratic election officials, a judge ordered the release of a Dec. 13th report that examined the Antrim County vote tabulators. Entitled "Antrim Michigan Forensics Report", it was authored by Russell James Ramsland, Jr., a Dallas, Texas-based cybersecurity analyst with decades of experience for such institutions as NASA and MIT. As a manager of Allied Security Operations Group, LLC, his report concluded:

   "The purpose of this forensic audit is to test the integrity of Dominion Voting System in how it performed in Antrim County, Michigan for the 2020 election. We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results. The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud. Based on our study, we conclude that The Dominion Voting System should not be used in Michigan. We further conclude that the results of Antrim County should not have been certified."

   Smartmatic chairman Mark Malloch-Brown is an aristocrat who has held many positions with the United Nations: High Commissioner for Refugees (1979-1983), World Bank development specialist (1994-1999), UN Development Programme administrator (1999-2005), and UN Deputy Secretary-General (April-Dec. 2006). While on UN assignments in New York, Malloch-Brown rented an apartment owned by Soros and the two worked closely on joint projects. In May 2007, Soros appointed him vice-president of Quantum Fund and vice-chairman of Soros Fund Management and Open Society Institute. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of International Crisis Group. Scytl, a competitor of Dominion and Smartmatic, is an election software company headquartered in Barcelona with its own history of involvement with elections worldwide. 

   Given Soros' connections with Catalan separatists I documented in 2017, I have to wonder if Scytl software manipulates elections as part of the global "Color Revolutions" championed by Open Society. Malloch-Brown's meddling in Philippines elections led the Filipino non-profit IBON Foundation to criticize him as "a foreigner who made a career out of influencing elections". We Americans now know only too well about these corporations manipulating elections, and can point to the connections Smartmatic and Dominion have exactly with those Deep State forces who have long dominated the intelligence and foreign policy establishment - and meddled in other countries' affairs. Now they are working in collusion with the Communist regimes of China and Venezuela (whose own subversion in Spain I also exposed  in 2017) in a joint effort involving election technology corporations founded and staffed by individuals with a myriad of Globalist connections.

   In 2014, Mugica and Malloch-Brown launched SGO Corporation Limited as a holding company for Smartmatic, perhaps to shield that company from scrutiny by hiding under a different corporate name. SGO's current director is Nigel Knowles, a former CEO of the law firm DLA Piper. This happens to be the same law firm which Kamala Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff, joined as a partner in 2017 and just recently left to take up his future anointing. The chairman of Smartmatic's Board of Directors is former U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Peter Neffenger. Former TSA Administrator under Obama, Neffenger was named a volunteer member of Joe Biden's Agency Review Team to support transition efforts related to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Given similar collusion of the DHS's first head, Michael Chertoff, with the Israeli Unit 8200-linked firm Carbyne, Neffenger's ties to Venezuelan and Chinese Communist oligarchs sets the tone for a Biden DHS as it joins efforts to oversee the greatest transfer of wealth in history using the Rona as its excuse - and the 2020 election was the crucial stepping stone.

   Dominion hired lobbying firm Brownstein Farber Hyatt & Schreck, one of whose lobbyists since April 2019 is Nadeam Elshami, former chief of staff of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Elshami is listed on the firm's website. Dominion's communication manager, Penelope Chester Starr, previously worked for the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative and was Vice-President of Teneo, a firm that helped manage the Clintons' foreign business interests and booked their speaking engagements. After Trump's inauguration in 2017, she co-organized the Canadian Women's March in solidarity with the march in Washington, D.C. The Clinton Foundation touts its direct links to Dominion via the Delian Project: "In 2014, Dominion Voting committed to providing emerging and post-conflict democracies with access to voting technology through its philanthropic support to the DELIAN Project, as many emerging democracies suffer from post-electoral violence due to the delay in the publishing of election of results. Over the next three years, Dominion Voting will support election technology pilots with donated Automated Voting Machines (AVM), providing an improved electoral process, and therefore safer elections."

   On July 16, 2018, Dominion was acquired by Staple Street Capital, a New York investment firm whose top three executives have worked for the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm whose investors and advisors have included Soros, various heads of banking houses, Clinton and Bush Administration officials, Bilderberg Steering Committee members, Saudi Prince Al-Walid, and a former deputy director of the CIA. Stephen D. Owens, William E. Kennard, and Hootan Yaghoobzadeh left Carlyle to establish Staple Street in 2009. An associate of John Kerry and the Clintons, Kennard served as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under Clinton before joining Carlyle, and later served as Obama's EU Ambassador. He was also a former DLA Piper partner. Epitomizing the revolving door between corporations and government, on Nov. 7, 2020 he was named Chairman of the Board of AT&T, the telecommunications giant with media holdings as the parent company of WarnerMedia.

   Since its establishment, Staple Street Capital has only received two outside investments, both from the Chinese investment bank UBS Securities according to SEC filings. On October 8, 2020, Staple Street sold $400 million worth of securities to UBS. Around this same time, Staple Street scrubbed its LinkedIn and deleted many photos from its website. What are we to make of these suspicious moves less than a month before the election? As with other Chinese "private" corporations, UBS is owned by oligarchs closely tied to the Chinese Communist Party. Dominion software has many components made in Chinese factories, including the LCD screen components and chip capacitors, so its not out of the realm of possibility there was a backdoor manipulation built into the technology. One of Dominion's subdomain, "dominionvotingSYSTEMS.com", leads to a data center in Quanzho, China. Another subdomain was traced to PowerLine Data Center in Hong Kong, whose website has simplified Chinese characters rather than the traditional ones used in Hong Kong. 

   Given the direct connections leading executives of Smartmatic and Dominion have with the political establishment in general and the Biden team in particular; the recent and ongoing news about an extensive compromise of many U.S. politicians by Chinese spies; and the stunning admissions by Chinese Professor Di Dongsheng about ties between Wall Street investment banks and the Chinese Communist regime, we can clearly see who would be the beneficiary from the election to such an extent they would actively manipulate the results in its favor. It speaks volumes about the collusion between the Establishment of the corporatist Duopoly Party, Wall Street and international banks, and the Communist regimes of China and Venezuela. And obviously, they see any grassroots swelling of nationalist-populist sentiment among millions of Americans as a threat to their interests. Public opinion is to be manufactured by these elites, and "embarrassing" opinions that would harm their own business and power interests are to be "corrected" by the ballot machines.