You don't likely know this, but there were traditionally two nights of the year when evil powers held sway and rose up to torment the living. One is still observed, though it is now basically a Capitalist holiday for buying candy and wearing sexy wizard costumes. People of all ages use that night to have fancy dress parties and behave in an uncouth manner. Children go about their neighborhoods or to special candy dispersal events and fill bags and pillowcases with tooth-rotting goodies that will last until the man in the red suit comes down the chimney.
We’re used to this, now, because in late August or in early September, Halloween decorations begin to pop up all over the retail-verse and huge displays with 350-piece bags of candy are made available to buy for the low low price of 25% more than what they cost last year. The kids have to have candy and they enjoy dressing up like their favorite pop culture creatures and the adults need an excuse to start the darker half of the year with too-tight outfits and bad decisions.
The other monster holiday is St. Walpurgis Night, or as it is called in Germany Walpurgisnacht, which falls on April 30th. On this night, too, all the powers of dread are out in their fullest potency, and similar rituals of self-preservation and banishing dark spirits are observed, especially in the older parts of the country. New England, especially, had an awareness of this bleak and spooky night in Spring, but we have all but forgotten it now.
The Spring version of an evil night has its roots in the depths of European tradition sweeping back in huge arcs of history to a time when the world was still a terrifying place to live. Well before Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm terrorized children with tales of candy houses and grandma-devouring wolves, dark things wandered in the forests. Great swaths of unexplored woodlands and mountains hunkered like black fog across the land. Within those halls of primordial forests, bears, wolves and other large fauna dwelled that could (and sometimes did) prey on humans. There were other things in the shadows, too and it was a time when no one was educated and everyone was susceptible to the frayed ends of half-mad superstitions that still exist in such places today—out on the fringes of society—where myths grew in the minds of our ancestors and preyed on them in their dreams.
Enter St. Walpurga. She was a missionary to Frankia (now France) in the 9th Century, and whose feast day is in February, but whose canonization occurred to coincide with May Day (May 1st). Her history is fairly straightforward for that period, though not a great deal is known about her. However, just like November first is All Saints Day, and Halloween (All Hallow’s Eve) is the celebration of the evening before, Walpurgisnacht—St. Walpurga’s holiday—is the evening celebration prior to, and the day. Because of its coincidence with older pagan rites and holidays (a habit that has left no original Christian holiday celebration in its right season) the pagan and the religious holidays blended and became solidified in time. The same has happened with many such holidays. Walpurgisnacht was likely still observed, at least in tradition, by the original European settlers that came to the New World in the early 17th Century and so lived on in the hearts and minds of the New Englanders until early in the last century, but has now gone almost fully silent.
During her feast, ancient celebrants would playact moving the reliquaries containing her sacred remains from Frankia to their final resting place in Eichstatt as had been done in the 800s. In later years, pilgrims hiked to her tomb which was said to produce an oil that repelled or defeated witches, thus lending depth and credence to the eve of her celebration being a time when evil was in full tilt.
In fact, in England and Ireland, the halfway point between the Spring equinox and Midsummer (The June solstice) was known as Beltane in pre-Christian celebrations. Pagans would burn fires and lay sheaves of grain on the blaze to thank the goddesses of growth for their help in providing a harvest the year previous and as a propitiation for the coming growing season. St. Walpurga’s iconography is almost always shown with a bishop’s crook and a sheaf of wheat, symbolizing (perhaps unconsciously) the pagan influences her canonization date may have sought to repress or absorb. Nevertheless, the Christian influence of St. Walpurga was that of an anti-evil power; those powers were often the scapegoat for bad harvests and poor growing seasons, blights, famine and pestilence. The celebration of her holy days, once melded to the older traditions, became an apotropaic, especially during the medieval period and later, of an increasingly hysterical fear of witches, evil spirits, sprites, demons, wights, banshees, haunted features of the land (evil standing rocks or cursed bridges) and anything else the religious powers could conjure to frighten the superstitious and credulous population’s children and scare the yokels into piety.
However, unlike its Autumn cousin, Walpugisnacht did not hold the (also) pagan origins of dressing up as the scary monsters in order to frighten them away, at least not initially. Rather, some traditions involved bonfires and draping one’s hovel with Spring-sprouting wheat, berries and other warding magic. The fresh smell of some of these herbal protections scared off the evil spirits and other demonic influences that sometimes prowled around seeking to devour the unwary. All across Europe, people will have bonfires, make loud noises, dress in funny costumes (less common, now) and play gentle pranks on their friends and family in celebration.
In his less well known short story, “Dracula’s Guest”, Bran Stoker writes about an Englishman caught in a Spring snowstorm on Walpurgisnacht in the forested hills of the Carpathian mountains. The unwitting traveler insists on touring the landscape despite warnings from his innkeeper about the date and once free of his carriage, hastens for cover as hail pelts him and drives him into the cemetery of an “unholy village” and then into a tomb for shelter. Inside, a beautiful woman with rosy cheeks and full lips is spiked to the marble slab within by a huge iron rod piercing the entire building. The woman is apparently asleep. Lightning hits the rod and blows the tomb to marble shreds and the Englishman is flung among the surrounding gravestones. While unconscious, he is attended by a huge black wolf until soldiers dispatched by the man’s innkeeper rescue him. He is informed later that the maitre d received a wire from none other than Count Dracula to inform him of his guest’s travails.
In Finland, where the holiday (called Vappu) is one of the four big religious celebrations (along with Christmas, New Years and Midsummer Night) many different odd traditions are observed, specifically by engineering students. Among them is drinking a lot of low-alcohol sparkling wine overnight from April 30th to May 1 and consuming a sweet deep fried batter sprinkled with sugar (we call this funnel cake).
Like all things that reside still in our modern traditions, though we have lost the main thrust of their original value either by the comingling of religious feast days with pagan rites, there are some things that it is better not to forget. Next week on Tuesday, after the sun goes down and while you set out tomorrow’s clothes and drink a restoring cup of herbal tea, under the eaves of the small knot of trees by your house or in the shadow of the huddling thicket of magnolia or juniper trees in the midst of your neighborhood, something will stir. The birds will stop singing. The crickets will cease to stridulate. No sound will emanate from nature. The unspeakable things that dwell in the shadows and thrive on this night will have free reign for just a few hours between sunset and dawn. Will we see the signs?
Your friend who believes her neighbor is part of a coven of witches will see strange red lights in the second floor window of that woman’s house. You may hear the howling of wolves though there are no wolves near where you live. Did you see a shape scurry quickly through the Spring mists of the local cemetery? Do you feel that sensation of being watched that makes your blood run cold and turns your skin into gooseflesh? Is the air suddenly filled with sweet scents and the gentle murmuring of a song that mesmerizes you? That one coworker who always wears black will appear even more furtive and shifty as the sun nears the horizon that day. If you read the newspapers for April 30th, the law log may have some interesting details that you’ve never before noticed. A young woman who shows up at the local emergency department with a strange neck wound and a bad case of mysterious anemia.
High up in the hollers between the wooded arms of the mountains where such nights are darker and quieter than in our small, well-lit Southern burg, even stranger things may happen. Perhaps some sheep have been “stolen” from a barn. Bizarre prints appear in the ground as if from some huge invisible alien foot tread near a highland farm; ancient and mysterious books once sought for burning by the church go missing from the small library’s special collections. Tomes like The Necronomicon, De Vermis Mysteriis, The Eltdown Shards, all gone and no one knows where.
This is the season to listen to the oldtimers and follow their doings. It’s not safe in the woods on Walpurgisnacht. The unseen barriers between parallel worlds are thinnest. It is then, as Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith tell us, when those who seek to summon the dark powers rub their clawed hands in glee and dance around a red fire with glinting knives and nefarious intent.
We don’t celebrate Walpurgisnacht anymore or even know much about it, but just like at Halloween when, all pageantry aside, we hurry home as the shadows lengthen in quiet fear of some eldritch nightmare that may be following us, the night of April 30th is no less perilous to those who walk unheeding after dark. Perhaps we ought to remember that, of all times of the year except its Autumnal cousin, May Eve, Walpurgisnacht, is when it is deadly in the wilds to stray.
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