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HOESES. 663
our children s game) took away their sacred horse from the
Lutizers, and rode home to Saxony on it himself: Burcardus
Halberstatensis episcopus Luiticiorum provinciam ingressus in-
cendit, vastavit, avectoque eqiio quern pro
deo in Rheda x
colebant,
super eum sedens in Saxoniam rediit.
May we then adopt the hypothesis, that Dietmar and the
Augsburg chronicler mean the sacred horse of Badigast at
Rhetra, and Saxo and the author of the Vita Ottonis that of
Sviatovit at Arkona ? Each of these gods 2 had horses hallowed
to him, and others may have had the same. And so in Germany
too, horses may have been dedicated to several deities, and
divination performed with them under similar forms ; especially
to the gods Frouwo (p. 656) and Wuotan (p. 154-5-6).
Some accounts of the reverence paid to sacred horses in Ditmarsen
have a doubtful look. The Eieswold or Eiesumwold on
the confines of N. and S. Ditrnarsen is said to have been a holy
wood, in which human sacrifices were offered, and white horses
consecrated to gods were maintained. 3 This is simply an unauthor
ized appropriation of the statement in Tacitus to a particular
locality. There is more of local colour in what Bolten 1, 262 re
peats after the suspicious Carsten, that at Windbergen there*
stood a grove set apart to Hesus (!), which is still called Hese
and an
or Heseholt. 4 In the grove two white horses, a young
old, were fed for the god, no one was allowed to mount them, and
good or bad auguries were gathered from their neighing and
leaping. Some talk of ten or even twenty horses. A priest of
the god stuck staves in the ground, led the bridled steed along,
and by certain processes made it leap slowly over the staves.
Joh. Aldolfi, i.e. Neocorus, who is cited in support, says nothing
at all about it. The immunity from mounting is another point of
agreement with those Slav horses.
1 Not in rheda (Wedekind s Notes 1, 173). Khetra, a chief place of Slav
heathenism, placed by Adam of Bremen in the land of the Eetharii, where stands
Eiedera itself
the temple of Eedigost Dietmar ; gives the Lutiz town in the grau
the name of Eiedegost.
2
Sviatovit or Svantevit has been confounded with St. Vitus, sanctus Vitus
(conf. Acta sanctor. 15 Jan. p. 1018) ; but we cannot possibly make the god
Svantevit originate in Vitus.
3 Falk s Collection of treatises, 5, 103. Tondern, 1828.
4 This Hese-wood may however remind us of the silva Heisi, Hese on the
Euhr in Westph. (Lacombl. no. 6. 17. 64. 260) and the silva caesia of Tacitus.
VOL. IT. Q