The Old Goddess ©2000 Max Dashu. Excerpted from The Witches' Goddess, Vol X in Secret History of the Witches.

The Old Goddess of the pagans lived on in popular speech, in rituals of hearth and earth, in festival custom with its cargo of symbol and myth. She was still seen as the source of life power and wisdom. People prayed to her for well-being, abundance, protection, and healing. They invoked her in birth, and the dead returned to her (especially the unbaptized) and moved in her retinue. They said that the Old Goddess rode the winds, causing rain and snow and hail on earth, and that she revealed omens of weather and deaths and other momentous things to come.

Across Europe, Friday was observed as her holy day, beginning with its eve on Thursday night. The dark of the year was sacred to Old Goddess. On winter solstice nights, she was said to fly over the land with her spirit hosts. Tradition averred that shamanic witches rode in her wake on the great pagan festivals, along with the ancestral dead.

Reverence was made to Old Goddess in planting and harvesting, baking, spinning and weaving. The fateful Spinner was worshipped as Holle or Perchta by the Germans, as Mari by the Basques, and as Laima by the Lithuanians and Latvians. She appears as Befana in Italy and as myriad faery goddesses in France, Spain, and the Gaeltacht. In Serbia she is Srecha; in Russia she is Mokosh or Kostroma or the apocryphal saint Paraska.

I call her the Old Goddess because she was commonly pictured as an aged woman, and her veneration was ancient. While the goddesses of the various ethnic cultures have their unique qualities, they share certain traits, some international deep root of commonality. Old Goddess is like the weathered Earth, ancestor of all, an immanent presence in forests, grottos and fountains. In her infinitude she manifests in countless forms, as females of various ages and shapeshifting to tree, serpent, frog, bird, deer, mare and other creatures. In the middle ages and even under the downpour of diabolism during the Burning Terror, she remained beloved by the common people.

THE OLD GODDESS / FRIDAY GODDESS OF THE WITCHES

Andra Mari ... (Euskadi / Basques)

Laima ... (Lithuania, Latvia)

Nicniven, Gyre Carline ...(Scotland)

Hulda ... (Denmark)

Holle, Holda, Fraw Holt ... (north Germany)

Perchta, Perhta Baba, Zlata Baba ... (south Germany, Austria)

Fraw Saelde, Zälti ... (Austria)

Luca, Szepasszony... (Hungary)

Saint Friday ... (Estonia)

Mokosh / Paraskeva ... (Russia)

Dame Habonde, Abundia ... (France)

Befana (Epiphania) ... (Sicily)

Signora Oriente, Diana, Signora del gioco, Sapiente Sibillia ... (Italy)

Rest at link above. Includes Frau Holle, Divine Spinners, and Stone-Riasing Spinsters