Grove Koger
The night of April 30-May 1 doesn’t just mark the end of one month and the beginning of another. It’s also Walpurgis Night (or Walpurgisnacht in German and Dutch)—a reference that may have meant something to your ancestors, if they were European, but probably not to you.
In short, it’s the night before the feast day of Saint Walpurga, an 8th century missionary. Walpurga was born in 710 in what’s now England and, after a suitable period of evangelizing, was appointed head of a monastery in Heidenheim an der Brenz (or simply Heidenheim) in what’s now southern Germany. She died on February 25, 777, and was canonized on May 1 a century or so later. I understand that early representations show her holding a stalk of grain—perhaps an example of the Christian church’s habit of adopting older, “pagan” concepts, traditions, festivals, and so on as its own.
Now in Europe, May 1 has traditionally been thought to mark the beginning of summer, falling as it does more-or-less halfway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. The Romans celebrated Floralia in honor of flower goddess Flora two days before, and marked the occasion by carrying bouquet of wheat ears (remember those representations of Saint Walpurga) to a shrine. What’s more, the month-long Mysteries of Dionysus and Aphrodite—which involved carrying torches about at night and indulging in general drunkenness and licentiousness—came to be celebrated every three years at about the same time of year. These celebrations also coincided with the Gaelic festival of Beltane, which involved setting bonfires and, depending on which ancient source you believe, burning an enormous “wicker man” inside of which animals and even people had been imprisoned. (The unnerving 1973 Robin Hardy movie The Wicker Man depicts just such an event on a Scottish island in modern times.)
Add a saint’s day to this heady mix, although the date may have been chosen in the ninth century by coincidence, and you have something of a head-on conflict between old and new, “evil” and “good.” And this is where Walpurgis Night comes in, for the intercession of Saint Walpurga was thought to be especially efficacious against evil, and this particular night was also believed to be a witch’s sabbath. In other words, Walpurgis Night allowed those who celebrated it to keep a foot comfortably in each camp.
Halloween, of course, is treated extensively in folklore, literature, art, and music, and while Walpurgis Night has its own small body of folklore, it doesn’t seem to have generated any memorable music that I can identify. Literature is a somewhat different story, as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe set Scene XXI of his play Faust on Walpurgis Night atop Brocken, the German mountain where the Brocken Spectre is often seen. A survey of art, I’m glad to say, turns up several lively representations, and today’s images include works by, top to bottom, Mariano Barbasan Lagueruela, Albert Welti, and Augustus John (whose ink and watercolor sketch was apparently inspired by the scene from Faust).
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