By Sean Jobst
24 April 2026
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| "Walpurgisnacht" (circa 1865/1866), by August Albert Zimmermann, who came from a prominent Bavarian artist family |
Walpurgisnacht is an auspicious night (30th April) around which many unique legends and mysteries flow. That fact itself demonstrates an inherent energy to this night that others imbue with the “magic” of their will and consciousness – a feedback loop where a night itself (never mind the cosmic forces) is given sentience by conscious ritual and folk tradition; or even psychologically by the myths and stories created around it by others. Through the collective consciousness, Walpurgisnacht has also been ‘egregorized’ via a rich tapestry of regional German folk traditions further inspired by this night.
Walpurgisnacht is regarded as a liminal time where the “veils”
between this world and the spirit world are at their thinnest, so communication
between the two can have its deepest effects. As we will see later, there is a
“scientific” basis for this – but it also goes much innate and transcendent
than that as an explanation. Its an interplay between the multitude of cosmic
forces and energies we identify as Divinities. So, the “dark” energies of
Walpurgisnacht flow with the rising Sun and the Dawn Goddess(1) into a new day
known as Bealtaine in Gaelic lands but with equivalents in continental Celtic
regions.
The syncretism of Neolithic, Celtic, and Germanic within
German regions such as my own ancestral Schwaben, is a linchpin of my thesis as
we will see throughout this work. Perhaps this night is also unique coming as
it does from the season of Spring associated with Ostara, but with a Wintery
energy closely tied to the Wild Hunt.(2) I’m not the only one to see a link, as
this case has also been made by two practitioners of the distinct Heathen
tradition known as Urglaawe (associated with the Pennsylvania Deitsch and the
more western, Rhenish regions from whence their ancestors immigrated):
“die Walpurgisnacht: Holle, being known in the syncretic era
and being taken into the post-conversion era as Walburga, returns to the
physical plane from the Wild Hunt, and the time of fertile fields draws
near….The Dark Half of the Year ends on this night, and the parade of Wights
returning behind Holle is reflected in this last event that involves costumes
and masks.”(3)
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| "Wernigerode, looking towards the Brocken" (1825) by the Swiss painter, Johann Heinrich Bleuler (der Jüngere) |
The Brocken, Wild Hunt, and Bonfires
According to folklore and legend, this auspicious night is a Hexennacht
where witches from across Germany and continental Germanic regions took flight
to converse with the “witch-king” in the Harz mountains, from whom they
received their orders for the next year and held a large celebration on the
Brocken, the highest peak of northern and central Germany. This isolated area
long formed a terra incognita which happened to be one of the
last regions of Germany to be converted to the cross. Yet even after the new
religion outwardly converted the Germans, the inner Heathen soul remained,
flowing in our archetypes and expressed as a living practice throughout folk
traditions.
Even in the word Harz we see a continuity of folk
consciousness, coming as it does from Middle High German Hart (“hill
forest”) deriving from Proto-Celtic *Hercynia. The most famous
expression of this is the Hercynian, an expansive European forest from
the Schwarzwald in the west to the Carpathians in the east. Hercynian itself
has a Celtic etymology from Erkunia, with the noted Celticist and
linguist Julius Pokorny linking it to Perkʷu- "oak".(4)
Not only a Celtic connection to the Druids, but among Germanic tribes the oak was
associated with our Thunderer, Donar. Indeed, Perkun or Perkunas was his Slavic
and Baltic equivalent. His masculine energies flow alongside the feminine
energies of Holle or Perchta we most associate with Walpurgisnacht; just as
Wodan is co-leader with Holle of the Wild Hunt, a symphony of the divine
masculine and feminine weaving their harmonies throughout all life cycles.
Perhaps this is why Walpurgisnacht became symbolized by fire,
an element which can purify and destroy, but also break down decay into
nutrients to birth new life. And to apply the Law of Correspondence, it can be
approached as our own “rebirth” and to light the internal flame. It’s no
accident a night popularly associated with death and the undead comes on the
twilight of a great celebration of abundance and fertility, for the two are
complementary parts of the same cycle. Regions of southern and central Germany
have woven unique traditions around the mystical strands of this night. Spring
bonfires exist throughout but their exact timing and significance varied
according to region. Yet the existence of a general motif points to a broader
consciousness that linked all Germanic peoples, as expressed by the great
mythologist/folklorist Jacob Grimm:
“We know
that our forefathers very generally kept the beginning of May as a great
festival, and it is still regarded as the trysting time of witches, i.e. once
of wise-women and fays [fairies]; who can doubt that heathen sacrifices blazed
that day?”(5)
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| "Walpurgisnacht" (1829), engraving by the Hanover court painter Johann Heinrich Ramberg |
Is Walpurgisnacht a Historical Heathen Celebration?
None of this is to claim that Walpurgisnacht is a solely
Heathen celebration without any input from the Christian era. For
example, I agree with the English historian Ronald Hutton that Walpurgisnacht’s
“association with witchcraft stems from early modern Christian fears, not
Heathen ritual.”(6) These fears gave rise to “dark” folklore linking the night
to the “infernal” workings of “witches” made into pariahs to be suppressed and
even hunted down, a murderous mandate (“suffer not a witch to live”- Exodus 22:18)
expressed by the same Bible which inspired messianic fanatics to rampage across
Europe, destroying our sacred groves and trees (Exodus 34:13, Deuteronomy 7:5, 12:3),
and slaughtering untold numbers of our ancestors who dared to preserve an
Indigenous “idolatry” that offended the insecure, delusional chief desert archon
of Abrahamism.
Yet as demanded by natural law, some balance had to be
restored so that from the ashes of this murderous superstition this association
with “witches” nonetheless inspired many a poet and writer to create great
works. As we will see in a later section, Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote about
Mephistopheles and Faust following his own descent from the Brocken in 1777. In
his posthumous “Dracula’s Guest” (1914), the Irish novelist Bram Stoker
imagined Walpurgisnacht as the night “when the graves were opened and the dead
came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held
revel.” The American science-fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft described such
“infernal” qualities in “The Dreams in the Witch House” (Weird Tales,
July 1933, pp. 86-111).
Certainly, Walpurgisnacht as we know it today didn’t
exist by that name among our Heathen ancestors. Robert Sass, who
reconstructs Saxon Heathenry called Aldsidu, disputes its historicity since
“fixed solar dates were unknown to the Germanic tribes as their calendars were
lunar based. The word ‘moon’ and ‘month’ are related in all Germanic languages.
A ‘month’ to the Germanic Heathens was ‘a cycle of the moon waning and
waxing.’” There were three holidays, “all on full moons”: Winter Nights (start
of Winter), Yule (mid-Winter), and Sigrblot (start of summer). “There are no
mentions of ‘witch holidays’ in the sagas/eddas, nor any historical source from
the Heathen period.”(7)
I concur with this regarding the strict historicity,
yet my approach is that underneath the outer imagery of “communions with the
devil” and other Christian vestments, are deeper remnants of indigenous Heathen
lore transposed upon a Christian holiday. For when we speak about how
conversion happened, with all its accompanying atrocities, we also recognize
the adaptability of our ancestors. The power of our spiritual connection to our
biospheres was such that the Church ultimately had to appropriate whatever it
could not stamp out – and not merely to facilitate conversion. An excellent
overview of this historical development is given by Völkisch, a Saxon German
whose videos on Heathen myths, traditions and weltanschauung I highly recommend
for their conciseness yet profound wisdom. He describes Walpurgisnacht as
"a mix of old Pagan spring or summer rituals and later
Christian traditions as well. Its origins go back over thousands of years and
blended folklore, seasonal change and religion. Long before Christianity spread
through Europe, people in Germanic and Nordic regions celebrated the arrival of
what we call today spring, or then they said just summer because there was only
summer and winter. And it was around the end of April. Bonfires were lit to
drive away the winter spirits and celebrate the return of the sun, the light.
Loud noises, dancing and rituals were meant to protect crops and livestock. It
marked transition into fertility, warmth and growth.
“The name Walpurgis comes from St. Walpurga, an English missionary who worked in what is today Germany. She was canonized on the 1st of May. Over time her feast day became associated with the already-existing spring festival. The church often merged the pagan celebrations with Christian figures to ease the conversion. So the night before the 1st of May, April 30th, became Walpurgisnacht. With the witches and folklore, by the Middle Ages the night gained a darker, more mystical reputation. People believed witches gathered on mountains, especially the Brocken. These gatherings were said to involve dancing with ‘the devil’ and casting spells. In response, villagers lit fires and made noise to ward off witches and evil spirits. This imagery became deeply embedded in what is today German folklore.”(8)
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| "Der Kampf um den Ruhm" (1895) by the German painter Hermann Hendrich, most known for his Romantic and Wagnerian themes |
Folk Traditions as the “Unconcealing” of Hidden Truth
Deepening my own understanding – and expanding my own
consciousness – in the five years since I started writing about or meditating
upon Walpurgisnacht, I propose a new approach to how these outwardly
Christianized festivals or celebrations relate to our more ancient (and I’d
argue, innate, balanced and ancestral) past. In “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit” (“On
the Essence of Truth,” 1931/1932), Martin Heidegger argued that since Plato and
Aristotle, there has been a dominant understanding of truth as Veritas –
the “correctness” of statements about the world. To reverse the resulting
diminishment of Being, Heidegger proposes embracing the pre-Socratic approach
of Truth as Aletheia “unconcealment” – the World revealing itself
from what has been “hidden” from Being.
This approach is most pertinent to Walpurgisnacht and its
magical connotations given that it expresses the occulted. And if ritual
and folk traditions also play a psychological role, then it expresses the
Jungian formula of “making the unconscious conscious”. Since awakening to my
own ancestral ethnic faith(9), my approach has been folkloric and esoteric –
the Pagan/Heathen traditions of a converted people are not completely lost but
survive in residual forms through folk traditions, symbols, and archetypes. In
an esoteric level, we can also know both ourselves, our individual
consciousness, and our “folk” soul by reclaiming our Indigeny – as descendants
of tribes(10) – to decode the various layers “concealing” these through
centuries of imposed social conditioning.
Heimlich A. Laguz, the Australian founder of Chaos Heathenry, argues
brilliantly that Aletheia is animistic, for it “expresses truth as a process of
unfolding relationships and context between things.” While Veritas is based on
objectification – “truth as a matter of accurate statements about properties
possessed by contextless, disembodied entities” – Aletheia “looks always to
context, connections, horizons of uncertainty.” There is “incompleteness” to
Heathen tradition which is a liberatory and transcendent: “When we accept
incompleteness, we accept our mortality, and we accept the inherently
mysterious nature of existence.”(11)
None of this is to suggest there “isn’t” a place for Veritas. My own personal rigor as a researcher, seeking and verifying sources for my various writings, commits me to it. Yet much wisdom and Gnosis can come from a balance of the two. Aletheia embraces Runa, “Mystery,” exemplified by the Wanderer – whom my continental ancestors knew as Wodan – embracing His own mortality to know and seek the Runes.(12) Aletheia as a “sacred opening” can be found in ritual, which opens up communication between the three parts of ourselves: Conscious/middle self, Superconscious/higher self, and Unconscious/lower self. Ritual expresses itself through a feedback loop, also understood through the multiple layers of meaning behind our myths and lore:
The middle self is our brain, which processes information –
the process of veritas. This isn’t to be confused with Mind (highest
self), for which we can borrow the Greek term Nous. We can communicate
with the lowest self through the highest self, which is why the Ansuz
“commanded” the zwerge (dwarves) with the “blueprint” (tools and
‘weapons’) of what we want to achieve. We shine our lower self as a “mirror”
(through which we perceive ourselves; the face gives the personality) to
project the things we want as long as its on one of the pathways our highest
self has chosen in our current incarnation. Through Ritual, our ‘zwerge’
(emotions) receive the higher messages and relay their own, which will then
‘manifest’ what we will. Ritual cleanses the lower self so we can project our
will. Our subconscious then takes it as a “command” to wander out (much as
Wodan epitomizes) and manifest. And so we can “uncover” another meaning behind
the “creation” lore about Wodan (higher self), Vili (lower self), and Ve
(middle self), especially since the latter two are never separate from Wodan.
As I study the specific aspects of Walpurgisnacht, Aletheia
through ritual is also how I see the value of this night as an ‘unfolding’
given meaning by the collective unconscious across centuries so that what was
appropriated by Christians to replace pre-existing festivals, can be re-Heathenized
by our conscious will. For how these traditions have developed, I incorporate
another approach by the Germanic scholar and runologist Edred Thorsson, who
mentioned a two-fold system of Arfr – the transcendent “heritage”
inherited through traditions – and Sidr as the “true custom” of the Germanic
peoples, conveyed through symbolism, mythology, and customs. These are the
“deeper Runa” concealed behind the outer Futhark.(13)
Walpurgisnacht expresses Sidr (not to be
confused with Seidr, although Magic is very much associated with
this night) as a Folk Tradition involving various rituals and customs built
into it through the centuries by the living traditions of the people.
Containing as it does latent Heathen symbols and allegories, so too does it
convey the Arfr which could also lead to “higher” awareness or
Gnosis. I welcome all interested to ‘wander’ with me on this journey toward
the aletheia of Walpurgisnacht – beginning the next part with
the etymology and meaning of ‘Walpurga’, and what it may carry over from long
before any hagiography was constructed. (To be continued…)
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| "Victory of Light Over Darkness" (1896), by the great German Heathen painter and mystic leader Ludwig Fahrenkrog |
Notes:
(1) See my article, “Ostara: Germanic Goddess of Spring and
the Dawn,” April 11, 2020, < https://sjobst.blogspot.com/2020/04/ostara-germanic-goddess-of-spring-and.html>.
I argued for Ostara as an historical celebration of the Anglo-Saxons and
continental Germans, using etymology, folklore and comparative mythology.
(2) See my blog series “The Wild Hunt: Symbolisms, Meanings,
and Folklore,” published in five parts from December 2020 to March 2022. Each
part was devoted to a specific aspect or regional variation of the pan-European
Wild Hunt.
(3) Robert L. Schreiwer and Ammerili Eckhart, A Dictionary
of Urglaawe Terminology, Lulu.com, 2012, p. 66.
(4) Julius Pokorny, Indogermanisches etymologisches
Wörterbuch (Indo-European Etymological Dictionary), Bern:
Francke, 1959, 1059:822-23.
(5) Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, Vol. II, p.
614.
(6) Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of
the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1996,
p. 180.
(7) Robert Sass, “The Origins of Walpurgis Night,” Aldsidu,
Feb. 7, 2019, < https://www.aldsidu.com/post/asatru-s-most-embarrassing-time-of-the-year>.
(8) Völkisch, "Origins of Walpurgisnacht," Apr 17,
2026, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_lKRXBbnbU>.
(9) A process which included a Catholic Christian background
and then fifteen years as a convert to Islam, including as an initiate of a
Sufi tariqa, before finally realizing the spiritual implications of
myself as a man of German, Flemish, and Iberian heritage. Not a “conversion” so
much as an awakening to what was within the entire time. I summarized
that journey in a 2018 article: “A Spiritual Self-Discovery: My Journey from
Christianity and Islam - and Embracing My Germanic Roots,” <https://sjobst.blogspot.com/2018/09/a-spiritual-transformation-my-journey.html>.
I have grown and awakened much since then, with a journey which has only gotten
more intriguing and enlightening.
(10) Being a man of European heritage in America, I found some
wisdom by two Lakota thinkers, Vine Deloria (see his monumental ‘God is Red’)
and John Trudell (who reminded “whites” that we are descendants of “the tribes
of Europe” and the processes of how we became “civilized”). We can learn much
from unbroken Indigenous traditions to ‘unconceal’ our own repressed Indigeny.
My experience fighting alongside Native Americans in preserving mounds,
followed for an eye-opening trip to Pine Ridge in 2010, was an early “seed”
planted until finally blooming with my own rediscovery of Indigeny. I speak
more broadly about this in an Aug. 2022 article, “Roots of Disconnect and the
Need to Reclaim Indigeny,”< https://sjobst.blogspot.com/2022/08/animism-and-lessons-of-earths-power-2.html>.
As an Animist and Polytheist, I innately embrace the world’s diversity
and encourage everyone to reawaken to the richness of their Indigeny.
(11) Heimlich A. Laguz, “Chaos Heathenry: Incompleteness &
Elegance,” in Elhaz Ablaze: A Compendium of Chaos Heathenry, Elhaz Press, 2018,
pp. 69, 80.
(12) See my article, “Seek the Mysteries! Some Meditations on
the Othala and Tiwaz Runes, Wodan-Vili-Ve, and the Journey to Know Ourselves,”
Feb. 18, 2023, < https://sjobst.blogspot.com/2023/02/seek-mysteries-some-meditations-on.html>.
(13) This reminds me of the approach of Guido von List, whose Das Geheimnis der Runen (The Secret of the Runes, 1908) demonstrated how the Runes survived centuries of Christianization encoded within German architecture, heraldry and other symbols. Other scholars and mystics who reconstructed our folklore also followed this approach, giving an essential resource especially for we of continental Germanic heritage more interested in reclaiming ‘ours’ without just following the Eddas or Norse mythology as “always” the same as our regions. This is especially the case with those like myself from regions such as Vlaanderen and Alpine South Germany which also had a Celtic heritage upon which our Germanic ancestors also built. We can deconstruct regional “Catholic” folk traditions – clearly not ‘biblical’ - to “unconceal” our Indigenous traditions.