Once when I was traveling on the train from Cologne to Frankfurt, we passed a tower in the Rhine just outside the town of Bingen. It was the “Mouse Tower” I was told, a place where evil was taken from the countryside. It looked like any other stone tower I had seen while traveling through Germany, but this one had a rich history.
It was built by Hatto II, the archbishop of Mainz. Its purpose was to collect tolls from the passing ships and barges on the Rhine. Enrichment of self seemed to be Hatto’s purpose in life, even though he was a holy man of the church. But, it was in this tower, in the middle of a river, that the Archbishop met his doom. And who is to say where he ended up? Heaven? Hell? Or, does his soul still reside in that stone monument, forever tortured by mice.
In pre Christian German religions, a famine often called for a human sacrifice to appease the gods. Crops could fail due to weather, insects, or disease. And then hunger would spread through the people. One way of offering up a soul to the gods would be to let the rats or mice do the deed. For these animals were thought to be souls of the dead in some Teutonic cultures. The Goddess Perchta received these souls on the first day of their journey to wherever they were going. She is known in Germany legend as the “White Lady”, who could turn herself into a white mouse.
When a famine struck the region that Hatto ruled, the starving people asked him for some of the food he had stored away. Hatto would not share and told the people that being poor and hungry were the results of their laziness. He blamed them for things that were actually beyond their control.
I will tell you the story sometime, but in short he killed many of these people. They turned into mice and in turn, killed him. Turnabout is fair play, I guess.
So Hatto blamed his people for being hungry? That is one part of a story that hasn’t changed through time.
“When a poor person dies of hunger, it has not happened because God did not take care of him or her. It has happened because neither you nor I wanted to give that person what he or she needed.” – Mother Theresa
The image at the top of the post can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nuremberg_chronicles_-_Hatto,_Archbishop_of_Mainz_(CLXXXIIv).jpg
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