Perchta

By the last of the twelve nights the flax should be gone from the distaff, the fish and gruel should have been eaten, and the bowl should be back on its shelf. In the Alpine valleys of Austria and Bavaria the households that got this right slept easy. The ones that had not been listened for the latch. What came through it, in the telling, was a woman with one enormous foot, and she carried a knife.

Perchta worked her way through the Rauhnächte, the rough nights running from St Thomas’s Night in late December to the eve of Epiphany, and her business was inspection. She looked at the distaff. A girl who had spun her allotted portion of flax or tow across the year woke to full spindles, thread turned gold, and sometimes a silver groschen sitting in the bucket at the well. The grain would come up well that season too, which was also her doing. It was a good arrangement as long as the work got done.

For anyone who had left tow on the distaff, the mildest sentence was a scratched face and smacked fingers, and the scar stayed so the whole valley could read it. Past that the knife came out. Jacob Grimm recorded the full version: the belly opened, the cavity packed with straw, the wound sewn shut with a plowshare for a needle and chains for thread. A variant fills the belly with stones instead and sinks the body in a well. In gentler districts she settled for sending an Alp to sit on the sleeper’s chest until morning.

Idleness was not the only charge. Eating anything but the permitted fish and gruel on her fast days drew the same treatment, and John B. Smith, writing in Folklore in 2004, argued that this was the older half of her job. On 6 January the knife could be turned aside by a belly full enough to deflect it, while a slack, underfed belly was slit and the gap packed with rags. Read that way she began as an enforcer of communal obligation, hunting the people who spun on holy days or held back from the collective feast, and only later hardened into a bogeyman for lying children, as Alpine women moved into the textile economy and thrift became a virtue worth frightening into them.

She has two faces and the sources decline to choose. In one she is white as snow and beautiful. In the other, the Tyrolean one, she is a small old woman with a deeply lined face, quick bright eyes and a long hooked nose, her hair loose and her clothes gone to rags. The constant across both is the foot: one of them oversized, described as a goose’s or a swan’s. Grimm thought it gave her away as something more than human, half swan maiden and half spinner, the splayed foot of a woman who has worked a treadle her whole life. He noticed the same broad-footed Bertha surfacing across half of Europe, Berhte mit dem fuoze in German, Berthe au grand pied in French, Berta dai gran piè in Italian, and somewhere behind them the memory of Charlemagne’s mother, Bertrada of Laon, called Bertha Broadfoot.

She does not travel alone. Her train is made of children who died before baptism, and in Styria she was the Perchtl, or Perchtlgoba, to whom a careful farmwoman left milk. One farmhand at Kalwang thought this was nonsense and set out to prove it. On Perchtlnacht he shut himself inside the stove and put his eye to a bore hole, and when the Perchtlgoba came through with her retinue she told them to cover the opening. He came out blind. A year later he climbed into the same stove and waited for the same procession, and this time she said to uncover the opening, and his sight came back.

Where she comes from is a harder question than her admirers like. Perchta is not attested before the thirteenth century, when she turns up in Latin as Domina Perchta, and the earliest solid evidence of anything like a cult is disapproving. Thomas Ebendorfer von Haselbach condemned it in De decem praeceptis in 1439, and the Bavarian Thesaurus pauperum did the same in 1468, both describing ordinary people setting out food and drink for a figure they called Fraw Percht in the hope of abundance. The name is disputed too. Grimm took it from Old High German beraht, bright; Eugen Mogk from pergan, to hide or cover; others simply from giberaht naht, the night of Epiphany, which would make her a personified date rather than a deity.

It was Grimm, in 1835, who promoted her into a white-robed pre-Christian goddess of spinning, gave her Berchtold for a counterpart and set her at the head of the Wild Hunt, and that is the Perchta most people have met. Folklorists have been backing away from it ever since. Grimm’s own contemporary Johann Andreas Schmeller thought the calendar explanation sufficient on its own. Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann called the hunt for a pagan Yule goddess behind the name a habit of Romantic-mythological scholarship rather than a finding. Erika Timm’s reconstruction has her assembled after the Migration Period out of Germanic and older Alpine material rather than inherited whole from anywhere, and Marianne Rumpf read Domina Perchta as a near relative of Frau Welt, an allegory of society rather than a survival from before the church. The goddess is a nineteenth-century idea.

South and east of the German-speaking valleys she keeps working under other names. Slovene tradition knows her as Pehtra baba, or Pehta in Upper Carniola, tied to spinning and thread and also to the laundry and the bread, and paid in wool, sheaves of flax and napkins left out for her; with Christianity most of her duties passed to St Lucia and St Gertrude. Storytellers were still telling Pehta tales to the ethnographer Milko Matičetov in the 1950s and 60s. Among the Slovenes of Carniola, Carinthia and Styria she acquired a husband, Kvaternik, the Ember-days man, who with his wife forbade spinning on the Saturdays of the Ember weeks. In Bohemia the peruchty came on Christmas Eve dressed in furs with a knife in a bloodied hand, which needed no explaining to anybody.

The processions are the part still running. In the Pongau and Pinzgau valleys of Salzburg, and across into the Tyrol and the Berchtesgadener Land, men come down the street as Perchten in carved wooden masks: the Schönperchten bright and ribboned, bringing luck and money, and the Schiachperchten with fangs and tusks and horse tails, hung with bells and chains, out to drive off whatever else is walking. Friedrich von Spaur watched a run in the Pinzgau in 1800, and men were already going house to house in the ugly masks in the sixteenth century. Whether any of it descends from the figure herself is contested, and at least one study finds no direct connection between the mythical woman and the men in the masks.

What she can do is bounded by the calendar and by the doorway. Inside the twelve nights, or the Ember weeks where those are her season, she enters any house she likes, reads a year of work off a distaff at a glance, fills a spindle or a bucket, quickens the grain, blinds a man for watching her and opens a body without ending it. She keeps company with the unborn as well as the unbaptised: a cave near Luserna in South Tyrol was said to hold Berchta and the children not yet born, and women who wanted one went up to ask.

Outside her nights she is nothing, and every countermeasure follows from that. Finish the flax before the holidays. Eat the fish and the gruel. Leave the milk out, keep the feast and turn up to it, and there is nothing left for her to punish. On the sixth of January a full belly turned the blade aside. The farmhand at Kalwang got his eyes back by climbing into the same stove and waiting an entire year for her to say the opposite word. She is exact, and exactness can be satisfied.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Frau Perchta?

Perchta is a supernatural woman of Alpine folklore in Austria, Bavaria and Slovenia who moves through houses during the twelve nights between Christmas and Epiphany. She checks whether the household’s spinning is finished and whether its fast-day rules have been kept, rewarding the diligent and punishing the negligent. She is known regionally as Berchta, Percht and, in Slovene, Pehtra baba.

Why is Perchta called the belly-slitter?

The punishment attached to Perchta is disembowelment. Jacob Grimm recorded that she slits open the belly of an offender, packs it with straw, and sews it shut using a plowshare as a needle and chains as thread; one variant fills the cavity with stones and sinks the body in a well. A milder sentence was a scratched face and permanently scarred fingers, or a nightmare sent by an Alp.

What does Perchta punish people for?

Two things above all: leaving flax or tow unspun on the distaff when the holidays arrive, and eating anything other than the permitted fish and gruel on her fast days. The folklorist John B. Smith argued in 2004 that the fast-day offence is the older of the two, and that Perchta began as an enforcer of communal obligation rather than as a punisher of laziness.

Was Perchta originally a pagan goddess?

There is no good evidence that she was. Perchta is not attested before the thirteenth century, and the idea that she is a surviving pre-Christian goddess of spinning comes from Jacob Grimm in 1835. Later scholars including Johann Andreas Schmeller, Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann, Erika Timm and Marianne Rumpf have treated her instead as a medieval figure, possibly a personification of the Epiphany itself.

What is the Perchtenlauf?

The Perchtenlauf is the masked winter procession held in the Pongau and Pinzgau valleys of Salzburg, in the Tyrol and in the Berchtesgadener Land, usually on or near Epiphany. Participants wear carved wooden masks as either Schönperchten, the beautiful kind that bring luck and money, or Schiachperchten, the ugly kind with fangs, tusks and horse tails that drive off spirits. An early eyewitness account comes from Friedrich von Spaur in the Pinzgau in 1800.

Related Entries

Krampus, Weiße Frauen, Pehtra Baba, Drude, Alp, Erlking, Wild Hunt, Zlatorog, Grýla, Kallikantzaroi, Baba Yaga, Diana