Happy New Year!
Christmas season is over, but as Steve observed, it lasted the full 12 days of Christmas and felt like a true season, as opposed to a crazy ramp-up to a one-day celebration. Part of it is the fact that as opposed to what I experienced in the States, January 6th means something here. Well, at least on the countryside it does. For starters, there was a whole other big church service with orchestral mass in Admont for Epiphany. Since we had played at Christmas, we were, let's say, strongly encouraged to play again at Epiphany. The service and music playing was followed by the usual glass of wine at the church choirs own wine bar (located in a room in the monastery....yeah, that's Catholic Austria for you...), and by a delicious meal cooked by my father: venison stew with dumplings and home-baked cake with nuts and dried fruit.
But aside from this Catholic and "last binge" end of the season, there is also a fairly pagan-flavored meaning to the night of January 5, which has to do with it being one of four "special" nights, called "Rauhnächte". They are the eve of winter solistice, Christmas eve, New Year's eve and the eve of Epiphany, and in the Alps, they are crammed with traditions and customs. My mother, Steve and I witnessed a Glöcklerlauf, in a town about 40 minutes by car from Admont. For some reason neither of us thought of bringing our cameras. Do not ask me why. But since we didn't, here's a nice photo of what the Glöckler look like (from Kleine Zeitung, here is the link to the story):
So, to explain this further: The headgear is mostly out of paper, and illuminated from the inside with candles - and just like the Christmas trees with real candles, nobody is too concerned, or, at least, they are not willing to give up on an old tradition just because of a heightened safety-awareness of today (there were kids' groups of them, though, too, and they had battery-operated lights). They are wearing white such that if you see them from a distance, they blend in with the snow, and all you see is the colorful shapes dancing over the slopes, as they go from farm to farm to drive out bad spirits and bring good luck for the new year. They have cow bells around their waste, for some added efficiency in scaring those spirits away. Now, I don't want to lead your imagination astray with that photo and the talk about snowy slopes and farms: We saw them on Stainach's village square, to which we paid a modest admission, and there was no snow. But they were still a very spectacular sight and sound. The town switched off all lights, so the headgear really glowed, and in case you have limited experience with cowbells: a concentration of some 150 of them makes quite a racket! Oh, and if you are wondering: we asked one of them, the headgear weighs around 20 kg.
Now, you might think that after years, I was happily re-united with a tradition I grew up with - but as a matter of fact, I saw these guys for the first time. They are a tradition of a region that is, well, at least some 40 minute drive away, whereas in the lower part of the valley that I grew up in, we did not have Glöckler. Instead, we have "Perchten", which are groups of people dressed as old women in black, with black-painted faces or black veils over their faces. They come to your house, symbolically wipe or broom some parts of it (unfortunately, they rarely stay long enough to do a thorough cleaning job), and usually give you a quick brush over the arm or back, as well. They don't speak, you hand them a couple of coins, and send them on their way. What's it all for? If only I knew. Presumably something to do with the new year and good/bad spirits, too. I could do my research on the interwebs, but with things like this, the results are often not that enlightening - too many "new-agey" or "overly quaint" explanations and interpretations, and it's not like there is any sort of ultimate "truth" about it anyway. There are several tales about a "Mutter Percht" that I keep hearing from people at home. Usually, the protagonists are the spooky, sometimes-good-somtimes-bad mother, her trail of ghostly children which she leads through those dark, mysterious winter nights, and someone far too nosy having a more or less fortunate encounter with them. The children are the souls of children who died un-baptised, and you are supposed to leave a bowl of milk of them on the table on the eve of Epiphany.
Is that the original deal? I don't think so, because many of these traditions are suspected to go way back, as in, way before Christianity. Presumably, they were embraced or tolerated by the Catholic church (perhaps after failing to eradicate them), and the tales embellished with religious meaning ("un-baptised children"). As already indicated, the traditions change in appearance and superstitious details from valley to valley, even from village to village. In other regions of the Alps, for instance, "Perchten" is the name for quite different characters, which look more like the "Krampus" that roam my hometown on December 5th. If you do a google image search, you will come across people with scary-looking wood-carved masks, and most likely not find a single depiction of the "old women in black" that I know. Both the masked "Perchten" that get all the "air time" on google and the "Krampus" of December 5th may be remnants of old mask traditions, perhaps to do with the winter solistice as a pagean celebration. Conversely, I'd be surprised if the timing of Christmas three days after the winter solistice was pure coincidence. And while there is all this spirit-chasing and/or luck-wishing riffraff
roaming the streets, the Catholic church is sending out their own
emissaries of New Year's blessings: kids dressed up as the three kings,
singing a song, saying a poem, writing a chalk blessing on your door and
asking for a donation for a good cause.
But in the end, I am out of my league. I am an atmospheric scientist, not an anthropologist. They are traditions, and whether people know their entire cultural history is only partly relevant. The traditions are very much "alive", much to the annoyance of "traditionalists", who want things to be "pure" and invariable in the face of changing times ("it's been that way for many HUNDREDS of years, it would be a tragedy if it got lost because people give up their farms to work in the city/watch too much TV/the rotten youth and their video games/this internet-thing..."), and hobby scholars, who are looking for systematic patterns ("this gear is typical for village
X and NEVER gets used in village Y, and this song ONLY gets sung at
that day..."). The Glöckler tradition was only brought to Stainach in the 1930's from a different town, and as of very recently, the "Glöckler-frontier" has moved even farther: there is a group of them in Admont now, it must be a development of the last ten years at best, because I had no clue. Steve also pointed out that the Glöcklers' headgear sports quite a curious mix of religious, patriotic, pagan, astrological, and random other symbolism: biblical scenes, the sun and the moon, symbols for trades and crafts, scenes of daily life, local landscapes and buildings, zodiac signs, flags of the village and the Austrian provinces, scenes from Grimm's fairy tales (on the children's headgear)... Who knows what's next, and it's good that way. Just as long as our house is blessed, those spirits are driven away and we all will have a ton of luck in the New Year.
