Whatever the limits fixed for the beginning and end of the Christmas festival, its core is always the period between Christmas |239| Eve and the Epiphany--the "Twelve Days."[97] A cycle of feasts falls within this time, and the customs peculiar to each day will be treated in calendarial order. First, however, it will be well to glance at the character of the Twelve Days as a whole, and at the superstitions which hang about the season. So many are these superstitions, so "bewitched" is the time, that the older mythologists not unnaturally saw in it a Teutonic festal season, dating from pre-Christian days. In point of fact it appears to be simply a creation of the Church, a natural linking together of Christmas and Epiphany. It is first mentioned as a festal tide by the eastern Father, Ephraem Syrus, at the end of the fourth century, and was declared to be such by the western Council of Tours in 567.{37} While Christmas Eve is the night _par excellence_ of the supernatural, the whole season of the Twelve Days is charged with it. It is hard to see whence Shakespeare could have got the idea which he puts into the mouth of Marcellus in "Hamlet":-- "Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad; The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So hallow'd and so gracious is the time."{38} Against this is the fact that in folk-lore Christmas is a quite peculiarly uncanny time. Not unnatural is it that at this midwinter season of darkness, howling winds, and raging storms, men should have thought to see and hear the mysterious shapes and voices of dread beings whom the living shun. Throughout the Teutonic world one finds the belief in a "raging |240| host" or "wild hunt" or spirits, rushing howling through the air on stormy nights. In North Devon its name is "Yeth (heathen) hounds";{40} elsewhere in the west of England it is called the "Wish hounds."{41} It is the train of the unhappy souls of those who died unbaptized, or by violent hands, or under a curse, and often Woden is their leader.{42} At least since the seventeenth century this "raging host" (_das wuethende Heer_) has been particularly associated with Christmas in German folk-lore,{43} and in Iceland it goes by the name of the "Yule host."{44} In Guernsey the powers of darkness are supposed to be more than usually active between St. Thomas's Day and New Year's Eve, and it is dangerous to be out after nightfall. People are led astray then by Will o' the Wisp, or are preceded or followed by large black dogs, or find their path beset by white rabbits that go hopping along just under their feet.{45}