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After watching it, I thought, dang! That Aunt T... Yeah, she's a witch in a way, but not the Hansel and Gretel type. She's actually a goddess, known variously as Frau Holle, Holda, and Hulda, and others also connect her to Berchte or Perchta...or plain old Momma. She is best known to most in America through the tale "Frau Holle" by the Brothers Grimm. In that tale, she is noted as a spinner of cloth, a fastidious homemaker, and a bringer of the snow (when her feather bed is shaken). She is also a kindly granny who provides refuge to an ill-treated girl who falls into a well and ends up in the realm of Frau Holle.
"Holda (also known as Holle, Huld, and Frau Holle) is a Goddess from Northern Germany. Her name means "friendly, benevolent one" (in Old High German the word "Hold" meant benevolent or faithful) or "hidden one". She is said to dress in white with keys on her belt. The keys were often worn by women who were head of their household to indicate their status. She is described as having ugly, big teeth, a big nose and a flat foot, which is a result of her love of weaving. The foot can flatten a due to the frequent pressing of the peddle on the loom. Her home is widely accepted to be Hohe Meissner mountain in Westphalia. She is said to dwell there in Kitzkammer cave where her cats live (who may be girls who Holda has turned into cats to live and work with her for a time as a consequence of their laziness) and have a lake known as Frau Holle lake where she keeps the souls of newborns and infants who die." (www.eplagarthrkindred.org/HoldaArticle.doc)
See the connection? The ill-treatment of the children by the parents, the kindly granny whose realm is reached by water and who provides refuge, the focus on chores and that in this case Aunt T works with needlepoint (akin to spinning). But there's more!
Holle Teich
Am Grunde eines kleinen Sees soll der Eingang zu Ihrem unterirdischen Reich liegen. Hier h"utete sie die Seelen bis zu Ihrer Wiedergeburt. Aus der Tiefe brachte sie die Kinder in die Welt. Junge Frauen wurden schwanger, wenn sie Blumen in den See warfen oder darin badeten...
Der Frau Holle Teich mit seiner Holzskulptur der Frau Holle ist zum mythischen Mittelpunkt des Meissners geworden.
In jugendlicher Sch"onheit steht sie am Rande des Teichs. Der Sage nach soll Frau Holle hier ihr unterirdisches Reich gehabt haben. Hier brachte sie die Kinder aus der Tiefe des Wassers ans Licht der Welt, sodass noch bis in j"ungster Vergangenheit Frauen mit Kinderwunsch kleine Opfergaben in den Teich warfen, um mit Kindersegen begl"uckt zu werden. Auch holte Frau Holle gerne spielende Kinder in die Tiefen des Teichs, um sie festlich zu bewirten und dann wieder nach Hause zu schicken.
Das von den Br"udern Grimm aufgezeichnete M"archen Frau Holle hat hier unverkennbar seinen Ursprung. Erstmals genannt wird der Frau Holle Teich 1641 in einer Beschreibung des Niederf"urstentums Hessen als "Frauhollenbad". Zuvor wurden die Geschichten rund um den Teich m"undlich weitergegeben.(
The Frau Holle pond, with its wood sculpture of Frau Holle, became the mythic center of the Meisners.
In youthful beauty she stands at the edge of the pond. The legend holds that Frau Holle has her underground realm here. Here she brought the children from the depths of the water to the light of the world, so that up until the recent past, women who wished to have children threw little offerings into the pond, in order to be lucky and blessed with children. Also kind Frau Holle gladly played with the children in the depths of the pond, in order to festively entertain them, and then again send them home.
The fairy tale "Frau Holle" noted by the Brothers Grimm has its recognizable origin here. Frau Holle's pond is described for the first time in 1641 in "Niederf"urstentums Hessen" [a regional geography of Hesse] as "Frau Holle's Bath." Before that the history was passed on around the pond through oral tradition.
In many traditions, children are brought to our world from wells, ponds, lakes, rivers.
In Yorubaland, Nigeria, Africa, the Mami-Wata has much the same role as Frau Holle in this regard as a guardian and keeper of children's souls in the water. I went to Nigeria in 1996 through the sponsorship of Mike Warren, an American who had been appointed a chief through his marriage during Peace Corps service in Ghana to Mary Warren, a woman of chiefly lineage in Ara, Oyo State. Mary told us her parents had difficulty conceiving, so they made the appropriate prayers and sacrifices to the Mami-Wata ("water-mother," a river goddess), and in return, the Mami-Wata gave them one of her children for their own to raise, in this case, Mary. One recognizes these Mami-Wata children by the fact that until a certain age, one must not cut their hair, unlike other children. So in traditional Yoruba towns, when you see a pampered child with long dredlocks, I was told this is a sign the child is a gift of the Mami-Wata.
There is an additional layer of shamanic worldview here too. When Aunt T mentions the ways children get to her place, they are all liminal places, threshholds, "betwixt-and-between," traditional shamanic routes between the worlds. The swimming hole and the swimming pool are the same as the well and the pool in the Brother Grimm's tales. But she also mentions the other ways: coming down chimneys (passing between the upper and lower worlds), standing on a street corner (the crossroads), opening a door and there they are or on door steps (the threshhold between inside and outside).
"Mother Hulda is one of Germany's most durable female legendary figures and one who without doubt represents a pre-Christian heathen deity who survived in popular belief and in the memory of common people well into the nineteenth century" (
By the way, to me Aunt T looks a lot like what I remember of my Great-Grandma Head, who died in the 1970s when I was a boy. Her family was from the South and her maiden name was... HAMNER. She was a professional seamstress too...
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