@tehwatever
Well, the lore is for example
this. But I’ll make it easy for myself now, because you probably won’t understand German. Not that I blame you in any way. ;-)
That’s why I’m now looking for a reasonable English translation and I’m also adding more German information. I hope my personal word is enough that I don’t want to add anything to myself or be biased in any way. The only thing I want here is an exchange of information between the different religions.
And of course I respect Islam as much as any other religion. When I have my personal beef with Christianity, especially the Evangelical one. But that does not mean that I reject Protestants. I simply do not share their (especially radical) beliefs.
The Pentecost fox (pengsvoos, pinkestfoss, pinkstervoß) is one of the earliest references to Donar. In the past, it was customary to leave home with a leashed fox at Whitsun to collect donations. The fox was a constant companion of Donar in summertime. In Holstein the boy who carries the fox around is called Hans Voss (WoW players know what is meant).
The fox symbolized the rain, which was existentially important before a harvest. The fox may be a dog-like, native predator, but it was always equated with fertility and harvesting. Especially fans of the anime Ōkami to Kōshinryō should know what this still means in our present time.
In today’s fairy tales, myths and fables, the fox is portrayed on the one hand as a clever, cunning, agile, very alert animal that often exploits the weaknesses of others to compensate for its own limited physical strength, but on the other hand as devious, deceitful, deceitful and showy. The archetypal pattern underlying its behaviour corresponds to that of the trickster. However, this is only the responsibility of the Christian-influenced medieval representation.
The truth is: Among the Germanic tribes, red-haired animals were usually attributed to the god Thor or Donar and were therefore holy. Here the fox was not so much considered a sneaky creature, but helped lost hikers and travellers back on the right path to reach their destination safely. For the Celts the fox embodied wildness and cleverness. He was also highly appreciated as a diplomat by druids in difficult situations.
Folly and wisdom are close together in the fox, as they are in the trickster and fools. While the fox was regarded by farmers as an intruder, robber and greedy eater, who was legendarily after the feathered animal (goose, chicken), other people valued its instinctive certainty and wisdom, it was considered a symbol of longevity and cunning. Also as a messenger or as the spirit of dead souls.
In ancient Greece, the fox was assigned to the god Dionysus, the god of intoxication and ecstasy (here he was called “Bassareus”, who dressed in fox fur. Because of its reddish colour it was considered a
fire demon. Among the Germanic tribes, the fox was the symbolic animal of the tricky god Loki, in the Celtic tradition a soul companion, who, like the Greek fox, who opens doors and gates (both spiritual and physical).
In our German culture, the fox played an important role as a fertility demon, to which strong sexual instincts were ascribed as a companion animal of witches. But foxes were also thought to be the souls of witches who go out and cause damage while the witch’s body lies half-dead in bed. In the Middle Ages, the fox was often considered the embodiment of the devil because of its red fur. In Christian times, like many animals of the old gods, he was demonised, and in biblical language he was associated with deceit, malice, excess and greed.
To put it in a few words: the fox was only seen as something bad in the Christian Middle Ages. Before that he was a symbol of fertility and your weather demon. Why a demon? Because the weather had something demonic, even for the early Europeans. It was a response to the arbitrariness of the weather. Only Christian missionaries interpreted this as a will against God. And in doing so, they took advantage of the historically traceable changes in climate. At this point one must say from a purely scientific perspective: Christianity owes its rise to climate change alone.
