Walpurgisnacht
& the Rites of Spring
Today, the 30th of April, and therefore the eve of May 1st is Walpurgisnacht.
It’s a holiday, sometimes holy day, observed principally in Northern Europe, Germany and across Scandinavia.
For Christians its the feast of St Walburga, an eighth century English born German abbess. Originally a Benedictine nun she became the abbess of a double monastery in Heidenheim. It would seem that pretty much from her death, her story was bound up with Waldborg, a not fully forgotten local fertility goddess.
We are seriously talking spring and spring things here. While the saint’s canonization probably was a coincidence of time and place, the near immediate identification of the saint and the goddess made the holy day more about the coming of spring and fertility rites than anything else.
By the sixteenth century the holy day begins to be identified with witchcraft, and as that tradition evolves into modernity, as the eve of Beltane.
The saint was considered to have power to resist rabies and whooping cough, as well as against the ravages of witchcraft. And at the same time witchcraft is celebrated on this day, as a witch’s sabbath. The burning of bonfires and straw men blending the two faces of the moment. Not to forget the various aspects of fertility.
Kind of another Halloween.
And. So. Big day for the earth centered. And, together with May 1st, a two day celebration of our mother the earth.
A holiday not all peaches and cream. Birth, death, rebirth, renewal, the great circle. Everything that goes with that in a real world.
All that…
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