The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas: Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil
By Al Ridenour and Sean Tejaratchi
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8 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5While it wasn't quite what I was expecting, I loved it nonetheless. It might be too dense or deep for the light reader but I personally found it fascinating. Author, Al Ridenour not only discusses the legend and customs of Krampus but spends a lot of time going into to other dark folkloric holiday traditions of Austria and Europe. It really helps put Krampus in perspective knowing his origins and the other dark beasties and witches that come with him. There are also tons of high quality photos of masks, folk customs, vintage drawings and more that enhance the author's message. a fascinating read around the holidays and a must for anyone who ever wanted to unearth some bizarre and different customs than our own!
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The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas - Al Ridenour
The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas:
Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil
by Al Ridenour
©2016 Al Ridenour
ISBN 9781627310413
Feral House
1240 W. Sims Way Suite 124
Port Townsend, WA 98368
www.FeralHouse.com
Design by Sean Tejaratchi
Bibliography and other supplemental material:
http://krampuslosangeles.com/book/
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Map of Significant Towns & Landmarks
Introduction
The Dead of Winter
Chapter One
Gruß vom Krampus, the Dark Companion
From Alps to Internet
The Krampus Arrives in America
American Misconceptions
Krampuskarten
The Krampus By Any Other Name
Knecht Ruprecht
The Christkind and the Weihnachtsmann
Père Fouettard, Hans Trapp, and Schmutzli
Zwarte Piet
Frightful Stories for Better Children
Roots of the Kinderschreckfigur
Chapter Two
The Devil at the Door
Meeting the Krampus
The Rempler
Gastein and the Krampus
Where the Krampus Runs
The Run Versus the House Visit
Traditional Figures of the Krampus Troupe
The House Visit
Troupe Life
Suiting Up
Masks
That Furry Suit
Switches, Bells, Basket, and Chain
Modern Trends in Mask and Costume
Chapter Three
The Beast Pursues His Game
A Cruel Sport
The Prey
Injuries and Aggression
Under the Influence
Show and Spectacle
True to the Good Old Ways
Women and the Tradition
Krampus Unchained
Rite of Passage
Regional Variations
Chapter Four
The Church Breeds a Monster
A Not-So-Jolly St. Nicholas
Unseemly Holy Legends
The Devil in Medieval Christmas Plays
King Herod, Earthly Devil
The Devil’s Stagecraft
Nicholas in Paradise Plays
Jesuit Pedagogy and Nicholas
Nicholas Meets the Perchten
Nicholas Play or Nicholas Parade?
St. Nicholas Gets Rowdy
Strange Company for a Saint
Carnival Influences
Early Tyrolean Diffusion
Scenes from a Nicholas Play
Existing Nicholas Plays and Parades
The Boy Bishops
The Feast of Fools
The Old Ways: Kalends and Saturnalia
Chapter Five
Frau Perchta, Witches, and Ghosts
Witch and Goddess, Benevolent Monster
Who Are the Perchten?
Perchta and Epiphany
Celtic or Germanic Goddesses?
From Perchta to Perchten
Domestic Oversight and Female Perchten
The Belly Slitter and Her Dreadful Way
A Mother Goose Tale
Foods for Perchta
Perchta and the Heimchen
Holda-Holle
Frau Holle Tales
Frau Holle Country
Enchantress in the Mountain
Holda Becomes a Witch
Herodias, Perchta, and a Hissing Head
Loyal Eckhart, Ghosts, a Jug of Beer
The Inexhaustible Sacrifice
Magic in the Venusberg
Witchcraft Born in the Alps
Witch Hunting and Hauntings in Tyrol
Witch Fires
La Befana
Perchta by Any Other Name
Ghostly Company
Chapter Six
The Haunted Season
Unholy Nights
Companies of Ghosts
Wuotan and the Wild Hunt
The Night Folk
Wild Hunters
The Wild Hunter Türst
The Twelve Nights, the Rauhnächte
Rauhnacht Superstitions
Ausräuchern (Censing)
Knocking Nights
The Glöcklern
Pelzmärtel, the St. Martin Monster
Release the Wolves!
Winter Comes Early
Halloween Leans Toward Christmas
A Dark St. Lucy
Bloody Thomas
Bavarian Forest Rauhnacht Celebrations
The World of the Krampus
Chapter Seven
The Perchten
A Parade in Gastein
Finding a Pagan Percht
The Habergeiß
A Spirit of the Fields
Cave of the Habergeiß
Goats Everywhere
A Scandinavian Connection
Origins of the Habergeiß
Disciplined by a Goat
Magic Rite or Playful Celebration?
The Wild Hunt of Untersberg
The Kirchseeon Perchtenlauf
The Pinzgau Tresterer
Perchten in the Tyrolean Unterland
The Gastein Perchtenlauf
Schiachperchten, Witches, and Perchta
Chapter Eight
Pagan Roots and Final Questions
Too Bright to See
A Devil’s Cross
The Beautiful Ones Arrive
The Swiss Version
How Perchta Grew a Second Face
Influences from Venice
Between Carnival Amusements and Folk Ritual
Where Perchta Lived On
Healthy Skepticism
Lucky Strikes
Life Switches
and Smacking Easter
Battles in the Clouds
A Swiss Connection?
Flying Leaps
The Monsters Between the Years
Conclusion
Why the Krampus Must Come
Index
Acknowledgments
A Christmas Carol, illustration ...A Christmas Carol, illustration by Arthur Rackham (1915). British Library, London.
Introduction
THE DEAD OF WINTER
It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind.
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Festival
In his 1925 short story, Lovecraft describes a Yule-rite, older than man and fated to survive him,
a vision prompted by a trip to Marblehead, Massachusetts a few years earlier, where he perceived, in a flash all the past of New England—all the past of Old England—all the past of Anglo-Saxondom and the Western World.
His recent study of folklore combines with this vision in The Festival,
describing the survival of some clan of pre-Aryan sorcerers who preserved primitive rites like those of the witch-cult.
Lovecraft reports that at the time he had been reading Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, and while Murray’s theories have since been discounted, the author’s intuitions about the holiday’s connection to witchcraft and an older, darker world are in fact sound. It’s an intuition I believe we all share in some measure.
Christmas requires the darkness. Every child understands that it’s only at midnight the Christmas mystery unfolds. The holiday we’ve spun from sugarplums and annual TV specials can’t exist without those dark edges where imagination blooms. Not by chance it aligns with the long, black night of the solstice and Nature’s last breath. Skeletal trees or howling winds aren’t required. Even those who’ve grown up with the hum of Christmas air-conditioning have felt the uncanny as they await that curious night traveler traversing skies in archaic costume and prophet’s beard. Come late November, the child’s world of consensual reality begins to dissolve—magic elves crouch and spy in suburban homes, still-moist pines are suddenly hauled indoors, and parents whisper and sleepwalk through rituals they can’t explain. Tradition lies heavy as if overseen by long-departed ancestors.
In the 20th century, the Krampus has arrived in English-speaking lands like a thing long awaited. This menacing old-world companion to St. Nicholas shocks us with his brutal threats of punishment for naughty children, but somehow, also, he seems inevitable. In a secular society where the craving for the Other is more commonly satisfied through horror and fantasy than the midnight mass, this monstrous character seems custom-made to provide a thrill of holiday awe. It doesn’t hurt that he comes from the German-speaking world. Christmas in America, and a lesser extent in the UK, has long shown bias toward the German. Our Christmas tree, Santa Claus, Silent Night,
card exchanges, and even the libretto of The Nutcracker are all unashamedly Germanic.
Even the friction between the savage Krampus and our notion of the holiday as cozy domestic idyll is slowly working in the beast’s favor. For Americans who came of age in the rebellious punk-rock era, the Krampus now cuts a handsome figure. Somewhat myopically perceived as the anti-Santa,
he seems to express the requisite countercultural contempt for the Coca-Cola guzzling, bloated patriarch of all that is consumerist and parental. As Dead Kennedys fans succumb to reproductive urges, hanging up that family Krampus ornament purchased at an alternative craft fair becomes an increasingly important token of a fading rebellion. Slowly, or perhaps more quickly than we expect, the advance guard of American parenting is breaking ground for the Krampus alongside Grandma’s visit, the Christmas dinner, and other enduring family traditions.
Before the Krampus, the counterculture had no real figurehead for its holiday revolution. While neo-pagans of the 1960s gleefully dug out Christmas’ non-Christian roots, for Americans of the punk-rock generation, it was left to the arrival of slasher-Santa movies of the 1970s to really do some violence to the seasonal status quo. Growing out of 1974’s Silent Night, Bloody Night and Black Christmas (and the more finely-tuned psychodrama of 1980’s Christmas Evil) an entire cinematic genre of holiday horror was born.
What is significant here is the American idea of holiday horror beginning as something subversive, a knife-wielding intrusion from outside attacking the holiday ideal of domestic bliss. In Europe, we now see another tack taken, and the traditional folklore of Christmas has become integral to more recent horror films like Finland’s Rare Exports and Holland’s Sint (Saint
) with their Krampus-like and St. Nicholas-inspired figures coming from within the holiday traditions. The 2010 release date of the two films notably corresponds with the recent international uptick of interest in the traditions discussed in this book.
It is, of course, not the shock of radical new juxtapositions or subversive frisson Europeans experience in the Krampus, as he’s been around in one form another since the 18th century. While English-speakers may correctly surmise that the tradition is one of some antiquity and even rather pagan, it comes as a surprise that this fearsome devil is hardly an isolated example of yuletide horrors. The Krampus springs from a deep-rooted European understanding of Christmas as a time of supernatural mayhem.
Literature is perhaps where we English-speakers best intuit the connection of our holiday to the darkness of the dying year. The longer nights are perfect for fireside retellings of what Christopher Marlowe and his contemporaries called winter tales
as in his 1595 play The Jew of Malta:
Now I remember those old women’s words
Who in my wealth would tell me winter’s tales
And speak of spirits and ghosts that glide by night.
A couple decades later, Prince Mamillius of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale defines the genre: A sad tale’s best for winter; I have one / Of sprites and goblins.
It was left to the Victorians to revive the holiday horror story as a bona fide tradition. In 1891, British travel-writer and humorist Jerome K. Jerome introduced an anthology of Christmas ghost stories, explaining, Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories. Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about specters.
Henry James even employs the then-common telling of holiday ghost stories as framing device for his 1898 gothic novella Turn of the Screw. But it is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol that most famously embodies the phenomenon.
Most Americans will be surprised that Dickens’ tale of chain-dragging, shrouded specters is but one of his efforts in the field. Published in 1837, The Pickwick Papers also notably contains The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton,
in which a mean-spirited gravedigger is dragged underground on Christmas Eve by a goblin. Much like Ebenezer Scrooge, his adventure leaves him a changed man. Also set during the holidays is Dickens’ 1848’s story The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, A Fancy for Christmas-Time
and 1851’s The Last Words of the Old Year.
Others of his many ghost stories, while not explicitly set during the holidays, were issued in collections marketed as Christmas reading.
Though no longer occupying the central place it once did, the tradition of the holiday spook story has been supported into the 21st century by British radio and television. In 1971, BBC One inaugurated an annual tradition with the series A Ghost Story for Christmas.
Running through 1978, it was resurrected by BBC Four with episodes in 2005, 2006, 2010, and 2013 featuring both original screenplays and traditional tales including those by Edwardian ghost-story master M.R. James.
Welsh Mari Lwyd. Photo by R. fiend (2011), (CC BY-SA 3.0).
However, outside cosmopolitan Britain and traditions maintained by the BBC, one also finds vestiges of an older, darker holiday closer to the world of the Krampus. The Christmas devil of Alpine Europe belongs to the wider family of Europe’s costumed mumming traditions, one particularly strong in Britain at Christmastime. These often-slapstick folk plays enacted throughout the island, with their common theme of death and resurrection, were once believed to represent vestigial forms of ancient fertility rites akin to those described in Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. While these notions are now largely discredited, there remains in these traditions something somehow undeniably witchy.
A case in point: the Welsh tradition of the Mari Lywd (grey mare
), a ghoulish horse skull paraded on a pole by men shrouded in a sheet. Once common throughout Wales, but now preserved only in certain regions of the southeast, this nightmarish creature parades through nocturnal streets, hovering at windows and thumping on doors in the weeks between Christmas and late January.
Also flying in the face of the peace and goodwill
of the modern Christmas is the strange Irish custom of Wren Day (December 26) in which wrenboys
dressed in shaggy straw costumes or ragged clothes capture or kill a bird and display the miserable thing on a decorated pole. The custom is said to offer symbolic retribution against a seductive Celtic goddess who would drown men in the sea, one only assailable on St. Stephen’s day when she would transform herself into a small and helpless wren.
Even in the US, in the backwoods settlements of Pennsylvania, and here and there throughout the Midwest, there once existed a rough and threatening Christmas figure known as the Belsnickel. Introduced by German immigrants in the early 1800s and persisting in certain areas into the 1930s, this frightening character appeared throughout the Christmas season toting a whip and dressed in ragged clothes or furs. Raising a ruckus in public streets and often entering private homes without the owner’s leave, the Belsnickel would terrify adults and scatter sweets for children, chasing them with his whip as they went for the bait.
These are but a few examples of an older, more dangerous Christmas with ties to the Krampus phenomenon. Slumbering for many decades, customs such as these and the darker notion of holiday-making they represent shows signs of return as a younger generation of both European and now American returns to the street with their horned masks, fur suits, and noisy bells. Having acquainted ourselves with a few examples of holiday ghosts, ruffians, and bugaboos from a more familiar English-speaking world, we may now be better prepared to undertake a journey to the snow-swept Alps where the Krampus himself arose.
Krampus card, (ca.1920-30), Austria.Krampus card, (ca.1920-30), Austria.
Chapter One
GRUSS VOM KRAMPUS, THE DARK COMPANION
From Alps to Internet
Heading into the Austrian state of Carinthia from Northeast Italy, the Eastern Alps startle you with their approach. There are no rolling foothills to warn you of what is to come. They leap into sight, jutting up brutally, like a craggy wall encircling a clouded kingdom of snow and stone. As my train climbed higher and was enclosed within those walls, I felt I had entered a sort of magic circle.
I had never seen a Krampus, but this Alpine climb seemed a fittingly dramatic overture to that experience. I was traveling from Venice to Austria’s Gastein Valley, a region known for preserving the Krampus tradition in its oldest form. Just outside the Austrian border, I passed through Italy’s Friuli region, one where 17th-century Inquisitors struggled against the benandanti, a secretive visionary cult accused of witchcraft. Later I would learn that this cult was one of the many threads connected to the mythology of the Krampus.
Racing through rugged precipices, it was all too easy to imagine some goat-footed creature uniquely adapted to haunt the villages below. In 48 hours, I would see young men donning animal hides and horns to play out a tradition with roots in the 18th century. I was a world away from my laptop and the Internet images that had sent me on the journey. In this dramatic landscape, I felt on the verge of a mythic encounter, but the truth is, like any English-speaker, the bulk of my knowledge and enthusiasm was fueled by Wikipedia, blogs, and Austrian tourism websites.
As any older out-of-touch individual will assure you, the Internet exists to destroy attention spans, literacy, taste, morals, and manners, that is—to do the Devil’s work. Perhaps it’s true, and who’s to say till the last LOLcat is counted, but one devil that has definitely expanded his reach online is the Krampus.
Beginning in the early 2000s, many English-speaking web users began stumbling upon strangely arresting pictures said to have something to do with an odd European Christmas custom. Mostly these were scans of pre-WWI postcards featuring what appeared to be a bishop accompanied by a chained, furry devil. The creature went by the name Krampus
and this peculiar word appeared in the German phrase "Gruß vom Krampus (
Greetings from the Krampus") emblazoned on the cards. Then there were the children—shackled and tethered on chains, caught in a basket carried on the creature’s back, or menaced by switches clutched in that devilish claw. It was the kids that threw us. If this was something to do with Christmas, it was light-years from the cloying celebration of childhood wonder marketed today. These jarring images were increasingly forwarded and reposted, studied with morbid curiosity, and eventually, in some quarters, gleefully embraced as a sort of countercultural holiday meme. Many of these images were channeled into pop consciousness by Chicago author and art curator Monte Beauchamp, who in 2004 published the first of several graphic compilations of Krampuskarten.
A decade or so later, the Krampus is more familiar. The St. Nicholas depicted in bishop’s costume is clearly not the American Santa Claus but his decidedly less jolly ancestor. Like his American counterpart, he rewards good children with gifts, but here the similarity ends. He not only withholds gifts from the unruly but sees to it that miscreants are punished. This ugly duty, however, is below his ecclesiastic dignity and falls therefore to the Krampus, who either punishes them on the spot or carts them off in a basket to later be rent limb from limb, tossed into a pit or lake, or eaten. So goes the story.
The Krampus Arrives in America
Somewhere around the same time, perhaps a bit later, another sort of image depicting the Krampus also began appearing on English-language websites. While the postcard images clearly reflected an artistic style and mode of child-rearing indicative of a bygone era, we now had photographs of dozens if not hundreds of people impressively costumed as the creature and massing on clearly contemporary European streets. This, we learned, was also the Krampus—as he lives today. The parade-like happening depicted we learned to call a Krampuslauf or Krampus run
(despite the leisurely pace better described as walking.
) Apparently, these had been going on for years, if not decades, but no one had bothered to tell Americans what we’d been missing.
Moorpass from Maishofen, Austria, visit Hollywood Boulevard. Photo ©Vern Evans Photo.
Seeing the Edwardian-era graphics fleshed out in stunning modern costumes only fanned flames of interest outside the creature’s homeland. Americans were particularly eager to realize they could actually dress up as these devils, many of them not that different from the fantasy figures, Middle-Earth Orcs, or other monsters Hollywood had taught us to love. By 2011, National Public Radio and other media outlets were reporting that enthusiasts in Philadelphia were holding a homegrown version of the Krampus run. Within a few years, dozens of American cities were hosting runs and discovering the joy of extending the Halloween lifestyle into December. Today there are ongoing Krampus activities in Portland, Columbia, SC, Pittsburg, Bloomington, IN, and Dallas, to name a few. The event in Bloomington has grown to draw more spectators than any other American Krampus event, with an estimated 31,100 spectators attending in 2015.
By 2013, my friend Al Guerrero had founded the group Krampus Los Angeles, and since then we have co-produced a series of events including not only a Krampus run, but also costume lectures, films, productions of a 19th-century Austrian Krampus play in original translation, and participation with European groups. In 2014, we were joined in our Krampuslauf by three members of the Alt Gnigler Troupe from Salzburg, and in 20015, the entire 15-person Moor Troupe from the town of Maishofen, Austria, made a historic trek with us down Hollywood Boulevard. As there seems to be growing interest among European groups in visiting, we hope to continue and expand on this sort of exchange.
Around the time many of the homegrown troupes were springing up, the Krampus was appearing more frequently in American comics, graphic novels, and animated shorts. Particularly popular was the 2012 book Krampus the Yule Lord by fantasy artist Gerald Brom. Increasingly the devil appeared on T-shirts, mugs, and in the artisanal clutter of a hundred online Etsy shops. He began making walk-ons on US television shows, eventually in 2013 taking over entire episodes of shows like NBC’s Grimm and Lost Girl, aired on Syfy.
The Krampus was also becoming a popular star of straight-to-video features, including 2013’s Krampus: The Christmas Devil and Night of the Krampus. 2015 brought the particularly silly Krampus: The Reckoning and the anthology film, A Christmas Horror Story, starring William Shatner. All of these, however, pale in comparison to the advertising juggernaut Universal unleashed upon millions of Americans with its 2015 horror-comedy Krampus by director Michael Dougherty. Several more Krampus features, including one from Jim Henson Studios, are in production as I write this.
American Misconceptions
America’s recent love affair with the Krampus, like any infatuation perhaps, tends to distort the object of its interest. Brom’s Krampus the Yule Lord provided a specious backstory for the figure spun from Nordic mythology and presented him as an enemy of Santa Claus. Unfortunately the Nordic connection concocted by Brom has sometimes been accepted as fact and even repeated in a 2013 National Geographic article Who Is Krampus? Explaining the Horrific Christmas Devil.
As will later be discussed, the folklore may occasionally hint at a connection to Scandinavian tradition, but Brom’s presentation of the Krampus as the son of the divine Loki is pure fantasy. The Krampus’ furious opposition to St. Nick, an important theme in Brom’s book, has also been perpetuated in the comic series Krampus! by Brian Joines and Dean Kotz and elsewhere by those eager to see the figure viciously opposed to the Santa Claus of their childhood. This Americanized symbol of youthful rebellion has little to do with the Krampus’ traditional role working collaboratively with the saint. Though perhaps not exactly pleased with his chained subjugation to Nicholas, the Krampus known in Europe is more than happy in his role as dutiful punisher.
There is also the Protestant confusion between St. Nicholas and Santa Claus and the date with which the Krampus is associated. Europe’s Krampus makes his appearance with the historical bishop venerated as St. Nicholas. He appears on St. Nicholas Eve and Day (December 5–6). American Krampus stories, however, tend to bring in the red-and-white-clad fellow from old Coca-Cola ads, and set the story on Christmas. The urge to assimilate the European devil with Santa Claus and his traditions seems somehow to be a weakness of our genes.
The 2015 Universal movie Krampus, if nothing else, will remain as lasting memorial to the Krampus-as-Evil-Santa misconception. Dougherty’s beast squeezes down chimneys, drives a sleigh pulled by a sort of monstrous reindeer, and is assisted by elves, who ironically look more like the Krampus than the character himself, as some appear to be outfitted with genuine Krampus masks. The monster’s character design seals the deal, visualizing the Krampus as an oversized humpbacked being in a red fur-trimmed robe, white-bearded, and with ghoulish but human face resembling a rather exhausted Santa Claus.
One last misconception involves the provenance of the Krampus. While often understood as German, which he can be, he is really more distinctly Austrian. Though the custom is strongest in western Austria, throughout the country, you’ll generate lively discussion if you bring up the Krampus. In Germany, however, the tradition is only really practiced in the south. A northern Berlin urbanite, for instance, would almost certainly be familiar with the Krampus but merely as a curious custom belonging to the rustic south. Austria