Die Roggenmuhme
The Rye Aunt
The Rye Aunt is a female cereal demon and children's fright of German folk tales, who lives in grain fields.
The Rye Aunt wanders up and down in the fields, feeds on the grain and tears out the immature ears. If she is angry with the farmer, she punishes him by drying out his fields. In general, however, the appearance of the Rye Aunt in the fields is a sign of a good harvest. During the harvest, she flees into the last truss. The Rye Aunt receives a share of the harvest, which is either left behind or thrown into the field. This custom is to propitiate the Rye Aunt and bring about a fertile next year.
The Rye Aunt is generally thought to live underground, in the empire of the roots or in a cave.
The Rye Aunt punishes lazy maids, who have not spun off their spinning rocks in the Boxing Week. The breath of the Rye Aunt brings illness and death.
Appearance
The Rye Aunt is often described as completely black or snow-white, and of superhuman size. Her arms are long or made of iron. Her fingers are fiery or iron. It is also said that the Rye Aunt has claws on her hands, which may also be made of iron.
The Rye Aunt has unusually large breasts that are so long that she can fold them over her shoulders. She also has more than two breasts. These can be black, iron, wooden or silver. They are pointed and hard, have glowing iron tips or are fiery. The breasts are filled with tar, poisonous milk or blood.
The Rye Aunt is described as an old womanwith a wrinkled face featuring stinging awns, a crooked nose, and wears glasses. She is sometimes even described as headless or said to have an iron heart.
In addition, she can change her shape, for example into a turtle, a snake, a frog, a wolf, a black cat, a horned animal or a dog with a blanket.
The Rye aunt is often dressed in black, but has also been seen dressed entirely in gray. Her clothes are ragged. Sometimes the Rye Aunt also wears a red skirt, or she wears a red dress and a red cap. Sometimes, she wears blue coat and wide flowing skirts. Often the Rye Aunt wears a white headscarf like a reaper. Sometimes she walks on crutches.
The Rye Aunt is associated with several weather phenomena. When the wind blows through the cornfield, people say that the Rye Aunt moves over the grain. She is also traveling with the whirlwind.
The Rye Aunt appears in particular at midday between 12:00 and 13:00. If she encounters someone in the fields at midday, she kills them or frightens them, casting spells. If she finds women who have recently given birth in bed between 12:00 and 13:00 and between 18:00 and 20:00, she does the field work for them. If she does not find women in childbed at the specified time, a misfortune will happen to the mother and the child.
The Rye Aunt is often seen as a child scare. Her activities as a child-scaring figure are extremely varied.
In their tale no. 90 The Rye Aunt, the Brothers Grimm tell that the Rye Aunt swaps human children with changelings, but brings back the right child if the changeling is not suckled. Elsewhere it is said that she steals illegitimate children at midnight.
The Rye Aunt lies in wait in the field for all those children who want to pick cornflowers in order to scare and punish them. She also lures children into the field by waving her arms. She abducts children by putting them in her big bag or basket, of by taking the children under her wide flowing skirts to bring them to the empire of the roots. She may also pull children to her with an iron fireplace poker and has them guarded by a toad. She leads children astray in the field and lets them starve to death, or she comes with her flock of elves and lays the children on cushions of flowers, whereupon they fall asleep and never wake up again. The Rye Aunt appears as a witch when she casts spells or the Evil Eye on children, She may also appear as a nightmare when she sends evil spirits to disobedient children at night.
Children often have to suck on the breasts of the Rye Aunt. Sometimes, disobedient children get the big breasts beaten around their ears. The Rye Aunt is said to, hug children so tight that they are pressed against her breasts die as a result from suffocation or getting crushed in her embrace. The Rye Aunt also crouches in wolf form, hiding in the grain, and is accompanied by small dogs that lure children into her iron embrace. She is also regarded as the mother of the rye wolves, who eat the children.
The Rye Aunt chases children on horseback or runs as fast as a horse herself. In the latter case, she chases children to death in races. She can also fly and takes children to the sea to drown them there. If she accosts children, they must die.
The Rye Aunt demands that children eat a slice of bread spread with tar. If they do not comply, she cuts off their heads. She also smears children with tar from a bottle or covers their eyes with tar. She also scratches out children's eyes or blows out their eyesight. The Rye Aunt strangles children, twists their necks or cuts off their heads, and also cuts off their necks, noses, ears, or fingers. She also beheads children with a sickle, a knife or a saw. She cuts off the children's legs with a scythe. The Rye Aunt also tears off children's legs.
The Rye Aunt binds children into a bundle with a thread or ties the children to a thread and then beats them up. She pinches children with iron pincers or uses a pinch. She stabs children with pikes, of which she has three, one by the head and one in each hand. The Rye Aunt also stabs children with stalks or drives nails into their heels.
In her hand, the rye maid carries a rod or whip, which is to be regarded as a lightning rod. She also has a sceptre or an iron scourge, which she uses to beat children. She puts children in a nail barrel and rolls them around in it or drags them into a cave and crushes them there with a giant meat grinder. Otherwise, she also crushes children in an iron butter churn.
The Rye Aunt also bites and eats children. To get hold of children, she sets out traps. She slaughters and eats the children or kills and roasts them using her burning breasts and fingers. The Rye Aunt also throws children into a cauldron of hot water or sucks their blood.
All these stories were told children to deter them from wandering through the fields, which posed several dangers, including getting lost and freezing to death at night, encounters with dangerous animals, suffering injuries from farm equipment used on the fields, or merely the destruction of crops and yield loss by walking over the fields.
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I have listened to "Fade to Black" thousands of times since I was 13(many, many, many moons ago), but this morning, it caught me right beneath the ribs, and I cried like a 2-year-old.
Thanks, Metallica. I needed that.
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So a band called Twin Temple will be supporting Till on his solo tour, and the flying monkeys are already in full throated cry. "OMG, HDU support a rapist!"
Shut the fuck up. If you don't want to support him because you've chosen to believe his is a predator even though no evidence was found and no victim came forward to law enforcement when begged to do so, fine. Your business. But Till is not even under suspicion by anyone in law enforcement, and no one has come forward with any evidence that he is anything but a dude who has indiscriminate sex with consenting partners who might've regretted it later. That sucks, but it's not assault.
Leave Twin Temple alone and go back to pretending you hate Rammstein even though they're #1 on your Spotify playlist.
I hope Twin Temple has fun and makes bank.
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The Becky Hogan contingent are being brutally unfair to Becky Lynch. I guarantee that WWE called her and begged her to help them when Rhea went down. Becky had planned to go home and hang with her husband and daughter for a while. Further, as far as anyone knows, Becky is currently working without a contract. In other words, she's doing them a favor right now. She owes them nothing, contractually speaking, and could have held them over a barrel for ungodly money or flat-out told them to piss up a rope. She didn't because she's a smart professional.
If you really want to blame somebody, blame Liv Morgan. In her first big story, she hurts a megastar on a stupid move that shouldn't have hurt anyone.*
*I don't think anyone is to blame. Accidents happen in wrestling. But if people want to fling shit, then Liv Morgan is the obvious culprit. She botched, and here we are.
Stop taking it out on Becky because you think she's ruining Liv's big chance. Liv ruined her own big chance, and if she's truly good at her job, she'll make it work anyway.
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