The Wild Hunt appears to have been incorporated into several different myths; in some areas it seems to have been part of a fertility cult with the Huntsman/woman being wild spirits (selvaggi, salvatici or homines selvatici) , which may explain their connection with animals, notably the stag.

In other places the Hunter was not a God, but the leader of the fairies, such as Gwyn ap Nudd who was seen as the leader of the Welsh fairies (the Tylwyth Teg) and who led the Hunt in Wales and the West of England.

Toward the end of the middle ages, however, the Wild Hunt became more and more associated with witchcraft. Instead of saying that the Hunt was led by a spirit of God and featured many other spirits, it began to be said that witches participated in the Hunt and that their leader was either Satan himself or a demonic spirit. This belief also seems to have become muddled up with the idea that Witches rode in procession to Sabbats upon animals, or flew in the sky, and this idea became one of the major charges used in European witch hunts.

As the old name was corrupted and its meaning lost, leadership of the Hunt was transferred to real or imaginary leaders of the past. In Denmark its leader was the celebrated King Waldemar, hero of many tales or else King Christian II.

In nineteenth-century England the demonic huntsman might be any one of a number of local heroes or villains, usually of the landowning class - often a hunting squire such as Dando and his Dogs, condemned to. hunt for evermore for hunting on a Sunday, or someone who had otherwise achieved fame or notoriety, for example Sir Francis Drake and 'Wild Darrell', the Marcherlands it was Edric the Wild, and in the southeast it was associated with Herne the Hunter.

Though the ancient Herlething was forgotten under that name, beliefs connected with it long survived not only in traditions such as these concerning spectral huntsmen and their hounds, but probably also that of the sinister 'hell waine' listed by Reginald Scot in his Discovery of Witchcraft (1384) among common apparitions.

Belief in the hell wain as the wagon in which were borne the souls of the dead sturvived luntil recently in Wales and the West Country, and seems to underlie the many reports of phantom coaches with headless horses from East Anglia and elsewhere.

More recently the myth of the Wild Hunt has been separated from its connection to demonolatry, and has become gradually incorporated in modern culture as a fantasy prop. Modern Pagans have made Herne the Hunter on of their God and a powerful myth for men in particular. Listen to Bjork’s song : “The Hunter”. Because of this masculine attributes as well as the wildness of nature he represents, Herne is often confused with the Green Man or the Lord of Misrule that belong to different myths.