Anti-Santa, Pagan figure or companion to Saint Nicholas? Who is, really, the Krampus? Let’s find out! Ready, set… Krampus!
Hello everyone, I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome to my Symposium. I’m a PhD and a University Lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of Magic, Esotericism, Paganism and all things occult.
Today’s video is brought to you by the friend of the Symposium, Vocatus! Thank you so much for commissioning this video and I truly hope you’re going to enjoy it.
As you know, my channel is all about disseminating academic scholarship and, different fields of research will employ distinct methodologies in their enquiry. That’s because different fields that look at a phenomenon – say, a religious one – will investigate diverse elements and offer knowledge from different perspectives. So, where the historian of religion will reconstruct a religious practice based on documented evidence and factual developments over time, the anthropologist of religion will be more concerned with the process of belief-making and how practitioners conceptualise their practices. As a result, in the latter field, it may be less relevant whether what practitioners believe did historically occur as, in the here and now, that narrative is shaping how they ritualise, form and live their beliefs – a perspective equally deserving of scholarly inquiry.
That said, when it comes to the figure of the Krampus, there is hardly any historical academic scholarship. There are a few books on the history of the Krampus but they’re not authored by scholars nor are they peer-reviewed and hence not academic sources; namely, the kind of sources I use as references for my content on this channel. There are, indeed, more anthropological and ethnographic accounts of the Krampus and those will be the main sources and analytical lens for this episode.
What I realised researching for this episode is that most of the information found online on the Krampus are more modern reports of folk beliefs associated with the Krampus and other resembling figures, rather than historical representations of the myth and practices surrounding this creature. Academic studies on the Krampus are mostly context-sensitive. Not only are they specific to a country but also narrow down the study to a local area within that country, highlighting that sometimes generalisations make us lose the nuances specific to a place and lead to lumping together elements that were not perceived as combined in their native conceptualisation.
So, sticking to what the research suggests, Krampus is the main protagonist of Krampus Night, Krampusnacht, a winter festival originating in the Alpen regions of Austria, Southern Germany and Northern Italy. This is a folk Catholic celebration that takes place on the eve of Saint Nicholas’ feast day, in-between the 5th and the 6th of December, and features a procession and public embodiment of the Krampus – an animalistic and demonic creature – through the use of costumes and masks. (Peterson, 2019, p.7).
The term Krampus got popularised in the late nineteenth century thanks to the media phenomenon of the postcard in Austria-Hungary emerged in Vienna in 1897 to then spread to many other German-speaking cities. People began to send each other red postcards in the weeks leading up to Christmas that depicted the Krampus, often with a short poem and the tagline ‘Greetings from the Krampus’. Most of the postcards depicting Krampus fall into two categories: children and sex. Either the Krampus punishes mischievous children or he becomes mischief personified, often accompanied by a scantily clad young woman posing erotically (Rest & Seiser, 2018, p.45).
Annually in Bad Gastein, Austria, troupes of furred, horned man/beast hybrids walk on the streets during the nights of the 5th and 6th of December. These are usually young men in layers of up to six mottled, long-haired animal skins growl, Steel bells hang from their leather belts and create a deafening clatter as they advance in a procession, performing a series of inhuman jerks.
Contemporary Krampus processions take many forms depending on the region in which they occur. St. Nicholas leads the Krampuses in their procession and a Krampus follows the saint’s cues in the home, waiting to be “released” upon the kids. Here we have a subservient beast, set loose by an agent of Christian “goodness” as a signifier of potential punitive measures, hereby keeping the saint’s pureness and piety intact. This emphasis on children and social control is waning as these processions – Krampusläufe -proliferate into urban areas in Austria, Germany, and abroad (Peterson, 2019, p.47).
Interestingly, I couldn’t find a consensus as to when exactly Krampus got associated with the patron of children, Saint Nicholas but at some point, in history, he began to be perceived as his companion. We know that Saint Nicholas became popular in Germany around the 11th century and plays and processions in his name are said to stem from the Middle Ages (Honigmann, 1977, p.264).
So we do have some clues here. The Krampus thus becomes the shadow of Saint Nicholas, in a dichotomy between evil and good that appears foundational in the Christian belief system and is reflected in other figures; such as the devil and god or demons and angels.
Now let’s talk about recent re-interpretations in American pop culture.
In his Master’s thesis on the figure of Krampus and its development in American pop culture, Peterson suggests that – along with representations in films and TV shows – two works have had a significant impact on the increasing popularity as well as the new imagery attributed to Krampus.
The first one is the publication in 2013 of Krampus: The Yule Lord, a dark fantasy novel by author and fantasy artist Gerald Brom that places the Krampus within a complicated cosmology in which post-Ragnarök Norse gods have evolved into the figures of contemporary US Christmas through the use of dark magic. In Brom’s universe, Santa Claus is Baldr, the Norse god of light in a new form, and the Krampus is a long-forgotten god of Yuletide joy. The author also attributes to his Krampus a fabricated heritage, turning the Austrian figure into the son of the Norse underworld goddess Hel and the grandson of mythology’s headlining trickster, Loki.
This representation of Krampus has gained traction in the US due to an article that appeared on nationalgeographic.com in December 2013.
The article, entitled, “Who is Krampus? Explaining the horrific Christmas beast” and authored by Tanya Basu proposes that Krampus’s name is derived from the German word Krampen, which means claw and is said to be the son of Hel in Norse mythology. This new genealogy for the Krampus has proliferated widely online and, Peterson argues, could be the basis for the figure’s popularity with North American Heathens and other Neo-Pagan practitioners (Peterson, 2019, pp.125–126).
But does the Krampus really have Pagan origins? Well, we know that there are references to festivals akin to Krampus Night dating back to the thirteenth century and that it is a common belief that the tradition has pre-Christian roots (Peterson, 2019, p.7).
However, Rest and Seiser argue that, after evaluating historical evidence, they could conclude that the idea that Krampus and Krampus-like figures have pre-Christian origins is not really a result of locally passed down knowledge, but a story deliberately disseminated by folklorists in the early twentieth-century (Rest & Seiser, 2018, p.43).
The two main theses often offered to assert a Pagan origin of Krampus-like figures are (one) that they derive from a Pagan deity or (two) from Pagan folk practices, which were banned by the Church at some point and then re-introduced in a Christian vest.
However, it was only in the 1980s that the ethnologist Hans Schuhladen worked systematically through the historical records and found no ‘pagan’ origins. His earliest source is, in fact, clearly modern, dating 1582. Here, in the Bavarian town of Diessen, those who had ‘hunted the Percht’ received a monetary reward. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reports from Bavaria, Tyrol and Salzburg flourished but, once again, the word Krampus is absent as all of these historical sources use Percht instead. This led to speculations of a possible association with the old deity Perchta, but the similarity between the two words seems to be the only clear connection between pre-Christian religious beliefs and the Krampus. As for the practices being forbidden, the numerous bans were not intended to eradicate superstition or pagan traditions but were imposed because the authorities saw them as a threat to public order, in the form of young masked people roaming the streets at night, drinking, dancing, fighting and possibly engaging in sexual activities (Rest & Seiser, 2018, pp.43–44).
Aside from the Pagan interpretation, we see in a contemporary secularised America Krampus as being opposed to Santa Claus, mirroring the opposition between Krampus and Saint Nicholas in Austria, yet with a late-capitalist undertone (Peterson, 2019, p.104).
Where Santa Claus symbolises consumerism and being good according to Christian values, Krampus embodies rebellion against the societal norms dictating how this festivity should be lived and celebrated. This echoes the romanticised interpretation of Satan we covered in another episode… and concludes this one.
Where Santa Klaus symbolises consumerism and being good according to Christian values, Krampus embodies rebellion against the societal norms dictating how this festivity should be lived and celebrated. This echoes the romanticised interpretation of Satan we covered in another episode… and concludes this one.
[hinting at herself] Krampus!
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REFERENCES
Honigmann, J.J. (1977) The Masked Face. Ethos, 5 (3), pp.263–280.
Peterson, K.A. (2019) Merry Krampus: Alternative Holiday Praxis in The Contemporary United States. University of Oregon.
Available from: <https://www.proquest.com/openview/ca0706d9c4dc3635e64b4cbb3656e185/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y> [Accessed 4 December 2021].
Rest, M. & Seiser, G. (2018) The Krampus in Austria: a case of booming identity politics. EthnoScripts: Zeitschrift für aktuelle ethnologische Studien, 20 (1), pp.35–57.
First uploaded 6 Dec 2021