Krampus

Also Known As: also Kramperl, Klaubauf, Bartl; in the older records the same masked figure appears as Percht
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: Alpine Mythology, Germanic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: A horned, fur-suited devil who walks with Saint Nicholas in the first week of December, carrying birch switches and a basket for children who have earned them.
Role in Mythos: The punishing half of a two-man act, whose threat gives the saint’s rewards their weight.
Relation to Humans: He exists entirely in relation to children, and his power lies almost wholly in the fear of what he might do rather than in what he actually does. Adults meet him too, in the street runs and house visits, where the switches land for real.

The bells arrive before anything else. They are cowbells, worn low on the belt in a cluster, and a running man sets off twenty of them at once, so the sound comes up the village street ahead of him like weather. Then the smell: wet sheepskin, pine resin from the mask, schnapps. In the Gastein valley in Salzburg the fur suits weigh as much as a small child, and the men inside them are sweating in the snow. The horns on the masks are real. They came off a ram or a goat, and they were boiled and set into carved pinewood by someone in the village who does this every winter.

Krampus is not one monster. In most of the Alpine world he is a species, the way a werewolf is a species, and a village can hold ninety of him at once. The singular Krampus, the famous one, is a job rather than a person: the devil who walks beside Saint Nicholas on the evening of 5 December, while the bishop hands out nuts and oranges to children who can recite what they were supposed to learn. Nobody ever gave that devil a name, so he ended up with the name of his kind.

The name itself is young and its meaning is not settled. It may come from the Old High German krampe, a hook or a claw, or from the Bavarian dialect word krampn, meaning shrivelled, dried out, dead. Either way it describes something about how he looks rather than anything he did, which is fitting, because Krampus has no myth of his own. There is no tale in which he was born, defied a god, or was chained under a mountain. He has a costume, a season, and a function, and that has been enough for four hundred years.

What he does inside a house is the oldest part of the record. The saint sits down, opens a book, and reads the names of the good children. The Krampus stands behind him with the basket on his back, and the basket is the point: it is understood, without anyone needing to say it, that the bad ones go in it and do not come back. Then the twigs come out. In most places the birch never really lands, or lands lightly, and the whole thing is theatre with a real edge to it, which is why the mask has to be convincing. A frightening face is load-bearing. It is what makes a threat that will never be carried out worth believing.

In some Austrian valleys the visit gets away from the script. Bands of Krampuses come through the door at Bad Gastein, knock furniture over, wrestle with the grown men of the household while the children watch from behind their mother, and then hand out bags of sweets on the way out. Out in the street, at the big runs in Salzburg and Bad Goisern and across the border in Toblach, hundreds of them flood the road at once and the switches are used in earnest, aimed at the backs of the thighs of anyone who came to watch. Getting caught hurts. That is part of what people came for.

The story you will usually be told about where this came from is that Krampus is a pagan survival, a horned god who was still walking about after Christianity arrived, sometimes said to be a son of the Norse goddess Hel. There is nothing under that. When the ethnologist Hans Schuhladen went through the historical records systematically in the 1980s, the earliest thing he found was thoroughly modern: in 1582, in the Bavarian town of Diessen, men who had “hunted the Percht” were paid for it. Reports multiply through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Bavaria, Tyrol and Salzburg, and in all of them the masked runner is a Percht. The word Krampus is not there at all. The archbishops of Salzburg tried repeatedly to ban the custom, which later looked like proof of its heathen pedigree, but the bans were about public order: masked young people out at night, drinking, dancing, fighting, and worst of all, boys and girls doing it together.

The pagan pedigree was supplied later, by people with a use for it. Austrian folklorists of the early twentieth century, among them Viktor von Geramb and Richard Wolfram, worked from a German-nationalist conviction that the masked winter rites were an ancient Germanic inheritance with a layer of Christianity smeared over the top, and that the job of scholarship was to scrape the Christianity off. A Nazi weekly ran a photo essay on the Gastein Perchten run in 1940, praising a custom “frequently banned for its pagan roots” for preserving the peasant Volkskraft. The men who put the horns on the masks today believe the old story sincerely, and they learned it from the folklorists, not from their grandmothers.

The honest genealogy runs through art and theatre. The devils of medieval German painting and engraving are already Krampus: hooved, horned, hairy, long-tongued. They stepped out of the manuscripts and onto the stage in the Nicholas plays and the Counter-Reformation Jesuit dramas, where a costumed devil dragged sinners to hell in front of a village audience, and from the stage they went out into the street. The Paradise Plays of Styria kept them. So did the Nicholas plays: at Bad Mitterndorf, still performed every 5 December and inscribed on Austria’s national inventory of intangible cultural heritage in 2020, a Krampus enters early, before the angel, and Lucifer himself turns up later as Prince of Darkness, and the whole masked procession is cleared through the streets by straw-wrapped men called Schab, cracking whips in an eight-beat pattern with five-metre horns rising over their heads.

Krampus became famous, as opposed to merely local, through the post. Cheap colour printing and the arrival of the postcard in Austria-Hungary in 1897 produced the Krampuskarte, mass-produced from around 1885 until the First World War and sent in the weeks before Christmas with the greeting Gruss vom Krampus. The cards ran to two subjects. One was children, being seized, stuffed into baskets, driven off. The other was sex: a leering devil with a young woman in a state of undress, or occasionally a female Krampus at work on a man. He was a Vienna media phenomenon before he was a national one, and confectioners sold little Krampus figures of wood and fabric and papier-mache, feet glued to a disc so they would stand, attached to boxes of sugar plums.

His powers, such as they are, are borrowed. He can enter any house in the valley, but only in the saint’s company and only in the first week of December. He can lay a switch across an adult stranger in the street and face no consequence, but only during a run, and only until the run ends. He terrifies children with total efficiency, and he does it on a bishop’s authority, on a chain, at heel. Take the saint away and he has no licence, no season, and no basket worth fearing. The current Austrian boom, in which the number of troupes exploded after 2000 until the Gastein valley alone had ninety-seven of them, is mostly invention: a handful of places practised this before the middle of the twentieth century, and the rest have been running for about as long as the men in the suits have been alive. The anthropologists who counted the troupes also examined the treasured old masks that were said to embody the identity of the valley, and found that the horns had been imported from Turkey.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who or what is Krampus?

Krampus is a horned, fur-covered devil from the folklore of the Alpine German-speaking world, chiefly Austria and Bavaria, who accompanies Saint Nicholas on 5 December and punishes badly behaved children while the saint rewards the good ones. In most regions Krampus is a type of creature rather than a single individual, and dozens or hundreds of them appear together at parades and house visits.

Is Krampus an ancient pagan god?

No. There is no historical evidence for a pre-Christian Krampus, and the earliest records of the masked winter runs, from 1582 onwards, call the figure a Percht and describe a custom the authorities treated as a public-order nuisance. The claim that Krampus is a surviving pagan deity was promoted by German-nationalist folklorists in the early twentieth century, and the figure’s traceable ancestry runs instead through medieval devil imagery and the Nicholas and Jesuit plays of the Counter-Reformation.

What does Krampus do to naughty children?

He threatens them, mainly. Krampus carries a bundle of birch switches and a basket or sack on his back, and children are told that the worst of them will be carried off in it, but in the traditional house visit the punishment almost never goes beyond a symbolic swipe with the twigs. The frightening mask and the noise exist to make a threat credible that is not actually going to be carried out.

What does Krampus look like?

A Krampus wears a hand-carved wooden mask fitted with real ram or goat horns, often with a long red tongue hanging out, and a heavy suit of sheepskin or goat fur hung with cowbells at the waist. He carries birch switches, and frequently a basket on his back. The look is borrowed directly from the devils of medieval German art.

Where does the name Krampus come from?

The name is not securely explained, and it is much younger than the custom. The two leading suggestions are the Old High German krampe, meaning a hook or claw, and the Bavarian dialect krampn, meaning shrivelled or dead. The word only became widespread in the late nineteenth century, when Krampus postcards made the figure famous across Austria-Hungary.