#berchta

Hanns Lohrer: “Frau Holle” (“Mother Holle”, “Mother Hulda” or “Old Mother Frost”)

To Holda

I’m in the thick of illness again. It’s the day before the winter solstice, tea and diffusers are plenty in my room, and the rain forecasted by the weather app is defiantly becoming a thicker and thicker snow.

Holda is not typically a goddess of healing. She’s a goddess of home and hearth, of chores and domestic duties, and from my experience, a goddess of cycles and natural change — the things that must get done to keep the wheels turning. She’s a goddess of fall and winter, the hibernating and fallow seasons, the rest and resetting period that must happen in order for the next season to begin. Perhaps this is why she can be so stern: she knows what must happen, and if you know what’s best for you, you should too.

But I turn to her today in memory of the last time I was really sick: riddled with days of fever, slipping in and out of delirium, hitting the point where I began feverishly wondering if I was going to pull through (turns out I had covid). I had a half-awake, lucid dream suddenly of being in a dark wooden cabin that was blackened with age and my back to an ancient stone hearth where I was given a bowl of soup and brought to sit by the fire. Small blue flowers — either flax or cornflower — were pressed into my chest. Geese flew past the window which looked onto an expansive rolling field at late sunset.

Today I’m not nearly as sick as I was back then, but I’ve been ill for a few days and am facing a few more of bed rest with another bought of covid. I’ve dropped my pagan practice over the last two weeks due to rushing around. I think of Holda, and the last time I had covid, and with the solstice tomorrow (one of Her days) I feel the need to not be alone.

I light her electric candle and invoke her through prayer. I explain that I have nothing to offer but the light today for I am too sick to give my usual.

And I feel profound gentleness. My goddess, a Lady who goes by many names and faces, many likely forgotten to time. Gentleness, both vast and steady and old. I feel her with me and I stand, asked to be in peace and just rest. I feel the hearth shrine become beautiful. I feel her sweeping out the cobwebs of my lungs.

Goddess of Duality

One of the things Spirit has been showing me is how everything contains its counterpart. Frau Holle embodies this so fully. She’s shown me her stern side, she’s shown me her caring side, but more recently she’s been reminding me of her natural side — the face that screams along in the winter wind, the wild spirit who leads the Wild Hunt. In a winter storm she is both the blizzard and the walls of the house that shelter us from it. She is the hearth and the reason its thick bricks exist.

Perhaps it takes being such fierceness to be such gentleness.

'Krampus and Perchta' published in @monstermag 's Winter 2024 issue and selected as cover art ❄🌨

'Perchta' by Gerald Brom.