Thirdly, the winter festival included a commemoration of ancestors. It was a feast, not only of riotous life, but of the dead. For, to the thinking of the Germano-Keltic peoples, the dead kinsmen were not altogether outside the range of human fellowship. They shared with the living in banquets upon the tomb. They could even at times return to the visible world and hover round the familiar precincts of their own domestic hearth. The Germans, at least, heard them in the gusts of the storm, and imagined for them a leader who became Odin. From another point of view they were naturally regarded as under the keeping of earth, and the earth-mother, in one aspect a goddess of fertility, was in another the goddess of the dead. As such she was worshipped under various names and forms, amongst others in the triad of the _Matres_ or _Matronae_. In mediaeval superstition she is represented by Frau Perchte, Frau Holda and similar personages, by Diana, by Herodias, by St. Gertrude, just as the functions of Odin are transferred to St. Martin, St. Nicholas, St. John, Hellequin. It was not unnatural that the return of the spirits, in the ‘wild hunt’ or otherwise, to earth should be held to take place especially at the two primitive festivals which respectively began the winter and the summer. Of the summer or spring commemoration but scant traces are to be recovered[932]; that of winter survives, in a dislocated form, in more than one important anniversary. Its observances have been transferred with those of the agricultural side of the feast to the _Gemeinwoche_ of harvest[933]; but they are also retained, at or about their original date, on All Saints’ and All Souls’ days[934]; and, as I proceed to show, they form a marked and interesting part of the Christmas and New Year ritual. I do not, indeed, agree with Dr. Mogk, who thinks that the Germans held their primitive feast of the dead in the blackest time of winter, for it seems to me more economical to suppose that the observances in question have been shifted like others from November to the Kalends. But I still less share the view of Dr. Tille, who denies that any relics of a feast of the dead can be traced in the Christmas season at all[935].