Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The Domovoi, Grandfather of the Russian house, had a counterpart the tradition spoke of far more warily. She lived in the same dark geography—behind the stove, under the floorboards, in the corner where the roof-beams settle—but where the Grandfather was the house's honored ancestor, she was its uninvited resident : the Kikimora , the little crooked woman of the night hours, wild-haired, thin as a spindle, hen-footed in some provinces, so slight she could slip through the keyhole—and, in the tellings that raised the hair of every listening child, glimpsed only as a whirring in the dark: for the Kikimora's signature, her office and her obsession, was spinning . On nights when the house slept badly, she came out to the abandoned distaff and spun—backwards, tangling what was straight, knotting what was smooth, wetting and twisting the thread—and the whir of her wheel in the blackness was a sentence pronounced on the household: someone would sicken; something would break; the luck...

When the snow comes thick over Hesse and Thuringia, the country people of the old time did not speak of weather fronts. They looked up and said, with the satisfaction of those who know their neighbors: Frau Holle is making her bed. Up there, above the visible, an old woman was shaking out her great featherbed, and the loosened feathers were falling on the world. It is one of the tenderest images in European folklore—winter as housekeeping—and it survives in German speech to this day. But the old woman behind the saying is no nursery invention. Frau Holle— Holda , the Gracious One, as the older records name her—is among the last openly surviving goddesses of the Germanic world: mistress of spinning and of snow, guardian of the unborn and the newly dead, leader of night-companies through the Twelve Nights of midwinter, dweller in wells and mountain lakes—and the medieval Church knew her perfectly well for what she was, denouncing by name, in penitential after penitential from the eleve...