April 30th marks the time of year known as Walpurgisnacht, which according to folklore was the time
April 30th marks the time of year known as Walpurgisnacht, which according to folklore was the time of year that witches gather on mountain tops and get up to the kinds of things that over-imaginative Christian folk imagined that unmarried women got up to when they were unsupervised. Hanging out with demons, cooking suspicious things in cauldrons over bonfires, dancing about with no clothes on, flying about on farming equipment, that kinda thing.Perhaps unsurprisingly, Walpurgis Night, named for an England-born nun who became a saint after the citizens of the Bavarian town of Eichstätt called upon her to protect her from witches in the 800s, was something of a corruption of pre-Christian traditions that the Church came to disapprove of but as they weren’t able to get people to outright stop their traditions they changed the meaning instead.So while previously it was a tradition many places in Europe to light bonfires on April 30th as part of the May Day spring celebrations on May 1st, the meaning was changed so that the bonfires folks would likely have made anyway were said to keep witches away instead, as May 1st was also the day Walpurga was made a saint.In more recent years Walpurgisnacht, which is celebrated in both some central European and Scandanavian countries, has survived as a festival akin to Halloween in countries with a lot of Irish or American influence, complete with a tradition for young people to pull pranks, like trick or treating! -- source link
#irregular incidents#european folklore#history#witchcraft