Category Archives: Witchcraft

Walpurgis Night (April 30)

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Title illustration of Johannes Praetorius (writer) (de)' Blocksbergs Verrichtung (1668) depicts the witches' festival and worship of the Devil commonly imagined to be celebrated on Walpurgis Night.

Title illustration of Johannes Praetorius (writer) (de)’ Blocksbergs Verrichtung (1668) depicts the witches’ festival and worship of the Devil commonly imagined to be celebrated on Walpurgis Night.

The current festival is, in most countries that celebrate it, named after the English missionary Saint Walpurga (ca. 710–777/9). As Walpurga was canonized on 1 May (ca. 870), she became associated with Beltane/May Day. The eve of May Day, traditionally celebrated with dancing, came to be known as Walpurgisnacht (“Walpurga’s night”). The name of the holiday is Walpurgisnacht in German and Dutch, Valborgsmässoafton in Swedish, Vappen in Finland Swedish, Vappu in Finnish, Volbriöö, (Walpurgi-öö) in Estonian, Valpurgijos naktis in Lithuanian, Valpurģu nakts or Valpurģi in Latvian, čarodějnice and Valpuržina noc in Czech.

The German term is recorded in 1668 by Johannes Praetorius (writer) as S. Walpurgis Nacht or S. Walpurgis Abend. An earlier mention of Walpurgis and S. Walpurgis Abend is in the 1603 edition of the Calendarium perpetuum of Johann Coler, who also refers to the following day, 1 May, as Jacobi Philippi, feast day of the apostles James the Less and Philip in the Catholic calendar.

The 17th century German tradition of a meeting of sorcerers and witches on May Day is influenced by the descriptions of Witches’ Sabbaths in 15th and 16th century literature.

In Bohemia (known today as the Czech Republic), Walpurgis Night is pálení čarodějnic (“burning of the witches”) or simply čarodějnice (“the witches”) and is the day when winter is ceremonially brought to the end by the burning of rag and straw witches or just broomsticks on bonfires around the country. The festival offers Czechs the chance to eat, drink and be merry around a roaring fire. (The Prague Post has an article about this, with a familiar-looking photo, here.)

In Estonia, Volbriöö is celebrated throughout the night of 30 April and into the early hours of 1 May, where May Day is a public holiday called “Spring Day” (Kevadpüha). Volbriöö is an important and widespread celebration of the arrival of spring in the country. Influenced by German culture, the night originally stood for the gathering and meeting of witches. Modern people still dress up as witches to wander the streets in a carnival-like mood.

From Bram Stoker’s short story, “Dracula’s Guest,” an Englishman (whose name is never mentioned) is on a visit to Munich before leaving for Transylvania. It is Walpurgis Night, and in spite of the hotelier’s warning not to be late coming back, the young man later leaves his carriage and wanders toward the direction of an abandoned “unholy” village. As the carriage departs with the frightened and superstitious driver, a tall and thin stranger scares the horses at the crest of a hill.

In some parts of northern coastal regions of Germany, the custom of lighting huge fires is still kept alive to celebrate the coming of May.

Elizabeth, the Feminist Vampire for Women’s History Month

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Looking out from Castle Annaghs in Waterford, Ireland. This is the area in which the dearg-due is reportedly buried.

Looking out from Castle Annaghs in Waterford, Ireland. This is the area in which the dearg-due is reportedly buried.

Elizabeth, the dearg-due in the Come Hell or High Water trilogy, has a starring role as the central Bad Guy in CHoHW, Part 2: Rising. She stalks the streets of Prague, killing–only!–men and helping reawaken the 1350’s curse that will threaten to destroy the city.

The dearg-due (Gaelic for “red blood sucker”) is an authentic character from the folklore of Waterford in the southeast of Ireland. Although the original story does not identify the dearg-due by name (I gave her the name “Elizabeth” and any Gaelic speakers will know something is amiss about the character from the moment we meet her in Part One: Wellspring because her surname is the Gaelic for “hag” or “witch”). In the original Irish folktale, a young woman in the countryside outside Waterford was in love with a local shepherd-boy and they wanted to marry. The girl’s father, however, struck a bargain with the local landlord and insisted his daughter into the arranged marriage with the landlord who was much older, as well as more wealthy. The landlord was an abusive husband (as we would now call him) and beat his young wife on several occasions, finally beating her death on one occasion.

Following her burial on the landlord’s estate — and the story is very specific that she was buried under or near the great oak tree that had stood on the estate near the river since the 1100s and was the site of the wedding of Strongbow [the first English knight to occupy Irish territory] and the daughter of the local Irish king — the girl rose from the grave to kill both her husband and her father (who had no doubt received great benefits from the marriage of his daughter to the landlord) and she continues to seduce and kill men — only men! — in revenge for the way she was treated in life. She kills the men during sex and laps up their blood or eats their organs, to sustain her own existence as one of the Undead.

The tale also stresses that the dearg-due is not effected by sunlight or garlic and cannot be destroyed but only forced back into her grave and pinned beneath the earth by the construction of a small cairn (“tower” or “pile”) of stones on her grave. The cairn will pin her under the earth until someone removes it, allowing the dearg-due to escape her grave and begin her rampages again.

There could well have been a young girl forced into an arranged marriage by her father and beaten to death by a rich, abusive husband near Waterford and that this gave rise to the legend. However, the story is also easily read as a shorthand version of Irish history: the young girl (poor, Irish, a Roman Catholic) is forced into an abusive relationship with the landlord (wealthy, English, a Protestant) in the very place where the English occupation of Ireland began centuries ago. She can be temporarily subdued but never destroyed and continues to rise again and again to attack her tormentor.

The dearg-due is a killer aligned with George and Fen’ka in the CHoHW trilogy but she could easily become a heroine in her own book or series, still coming to the aid of women in abusive relationships and slaying their abusers. What better way to honor both Women’s History Month and St. Patrick’s Day than by remembering the Irish female vampire, the dearg-due of Waterford?

Dec. 5, 1484: Pope Authorizes Inquisition Against Witches

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Francisco Goya's 1789 painting, "Witches' Sabbath"

Francisco Goya’s 1789 painting, “Witches’ Sabbath”

During what is known as the Little Ice Age, the grip of freezing weather, failing of crops, rising crime, and mass starvation resulted in an increasing fear of witches. On the request of German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, Innocent VIII issued the papal bull known as  Summis desiderantes(5 December 1484), which supported Kramer’s investigations against magicians and witches:

“It has recently come to our ears, not without great pain to us, that in some parts of upper Germany, […] Mainz, Koin, Trier, Salzburg, and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, heedless of their own salvation and forsaking the catholic faith, give themselves over to devils male and female, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurings, and by other abominable superstitions and sortileges, offences, crimes, and misdeeds, ruin and cause to perish the offspring of women, the foal of animals, the products of the earth, the grapes of vines, and the fruits of trees, as well as men and women, cattle and flocks and herds and animals of every kind, vineyards also and orchards, meadows, pastures, harvests, grains and other fruits of the earth; that they afflict and torture with dire pains and anguish, both internal and external, these men, women, cattle, flocks, herds, and animals, and hinder men from begetting […]”

Pope Innocent’s statement also includes a warning against sexual encounters with demons. It was thought that a succubus collects semen from the men she seduces. The incubi or male demons then use the semen to impregnate human females, thus explaining how demons could apparently sire children despite the traditional belief that they were incapable of reproduction. Children so begotten – cambions – were supposed to be those that were born deformed, or more susceptible to supernatural influences. The book does not address why a human female impregnated with the semen of a human male would not produce a regular human offspring. But in some Viking lore the child is born deformed because the conception was unnatural.