Myths of the Holidays: Who Makes The Krampus Seem Jovial By Comparison?

Krampus by Alexey Andreev
for Nyssa Part 1:
Love Notes To A Stranger

Have you noticed you can’t go far this Christmas season without seeing the krampus, a devil-like consort to Saint Nicholas? All of the sudden, the devilish fellow seems to be everywhere.

But it is far less likely that you have encountered another Christmas-time mythic character, that of Frau Perchta. She makes the Krampus seem amiable to boot.

Perchta asks,"have you been weaving your flax little girl? Have you been good? Are you eating the awful gruel and fish that are to be consumed on my holiday?" If the answer is no, the poor children are disemboweled, and their insides are stuffed with straw and stones. So, you know. Don't mess up. By comparison to the two of them, Saint Nicholas' 'present' of coal seems benign.

We may wonder what the sense is in these dark figures, during a time that we mistakenly assume should be lighthearted and merry. All three of them are the same in this one way: All of them represent the darkest time of the year, a time when the fields lie fallow, when the unconscious gestates. Sounds pretty abstract, what it means is that there’s a part of our conscious mind that wonders “What have I done well this past year? What can I do better in the future?”

There is also something to be said for the fact that in the parts of the world these myths came from, it is bitter, bleak and awful cold.

The solstice is a passage from darkness back to light. And out of that can spring guilt. The Germanic psyche demanded something else, a force both benevolent and terrible, to keep them in line. Krampus charges out of the frigid night, howling, beating the christ out of women and children with sticks, and carrying the especially bad ones away.

If we are in doubt of the sacred origins of holidays, we might consider some of the ideas put forth in Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane,

(photographer site)

The New Year coincides with the first day of Creation. The year is the temporal dimension of the cosmos. ‘The world has passed!’ expresses that a year has run its course. At each New Year the cosmogony is reiterated, the world re-created, and to do this is also to create time - that is, to regenerate it by beginning it anew. This is why the cosmogony myth serves as paradigmatic model for every creation or construction; it is even used as a ritual means of healing.

Thus, the role served by this entity which rewards and punishes, is to cut what we might call the karmic ties with the previous year. This seems an unusual attribution for the seemingly benevolent Santa Claus, but this is only because the holiday has become so desacralized that he has merely become a stand-in, a cardboard cutout, signifying nothing. This connection between karma and the eternal return of the holiday cycle is not without precedent.

Again we can turn to The Sacred and the Profane, “...to Indian thought, this eternal return implied eternal return to existence by force of karma, the law of universal causality. Then, too, time was homologized to the cosmic illusion (Maya), and the eternal return to existence signified indefinite prolongation of suffering and slavery.”

These karmic ties don’t require an actual belief in karma within the Buddhist or Hindu framework of reincarnation. What it refers to is an element of our memory. Consider something that you own that has a great deal of “sentimental value.” Pick it up. Hold it in your hand. Think about the people you associate with it. Grab hold of those emotions, and travel back to the time that the object brings you to. That’s your karmic tie. You are bound to those things.

The same is true of the memories and emotions we hold onto of those we love, who are now gone, and of the life we lived which is also gone. Of course, outside a framework that espouses transcendence, these are neither positive nor negative in themselves, but they are attachments. From this, we can see that a mythic symbol serving some kind of ethical function would arise, when it comes to recapitulation and renewing. To renew, the soil must be tilled. Some attachments can be maintained but others must be severed.

The winter solstice is a passage from darkness back to light, and out of that can spring guilt, no pun intended. It is the negredo process, the fallow soil, frosted over; petrifaction. We need something that comes from outside, a bestial or demonic Other, a force both benevolent and terrible, to keep our sorry asses in line.

The joyous, peaceful facade of the deritualized festival, stripped of any reference to a surrogate victim and its unifying powers, rests on this basis of sacrificial crisis attended by reciprocal violence. That is why genuine artists can still sense that tragedy lurks somewhere behind the bland festivals, the tawdry utopianism of the “leisure society.” The more trivial, vulgar, and banal holidays become, the more acutely one senses the approach of something uncanny and terrifying. The theme of holiday-gone-wrong dominates Fellini's films and has recently surfaced in various different forms in the work of many other artists.

Maybe something could be drawn from the relation between the much the kinder, gentler Coke-a-Cola Santa, Saint Nick, Christ and his misattributed birthday (if “he” had one at all), and these Pagan throwbacks from the Swiss Alps. It's late and I don't care enough at the moment.

This much I know: Krampus and Frau Perschta would totally kick both Santa and Jesus' ass. That's for damned sure.

This article was first published in The Immanence of Myth by Weaponized Press. 

A Dark Modern Fairy Tale

Now, for those that don't want the print version, the eBook version is available through Scribd, full color. 8 pgs of this unique illustrated story is free, full version $2.99.

Included after the fold, additional concept art and sketches from the contributing artists (credits on cover):

Heart Art - Indie Production 101

Lilith sketch by ... me.

Hard at work on Word of Traitors, as are many of the artists.

Please help support us in getting this material produced. We have a way to go the next 20 days but it can be done if you get active along with us! 

Here's two videos about some of the dioramas I've just started building - which will be integrated digitally with mixed media pieces.


Video 1.



Video 2.

Here I am, babbling more about found art, working with what you have. Again, I had a lot I wanted to say about serendipity but talking to a camera you're holding it awkward. Feel free to ask me directly if you have questions about process, especially if you're an artist yourself.

Nyssa: A Dark Modern Fairy Tale

By James Curcio

"A modern dark fairytale." Or so I say... I realize it is considered in bad form to analyze your own work. In some ways we're furthest from it. But I'd like to make some crucial points about storytelling, especially within the framework of a modern fairytale. Why not a story I wrote?

Sea Fang by Stas Prohortsev

So, Nyssa: Love Notes To A Stranger.

What is this story really about? What is the nature of a fairytale but to use elements of the unreal to talk about dimensions of our psyche, or psychological experience that are quite real?

I wanted to create the first issue of a series told not by the protagonist but by someone else. And I wanted to make it an unreliable narrator, a narrator who gives us this protagonist almost like she is hidden in the shadow created by his projection. I spent about two months thinking about writing this seemingly simple short story, because this was a challenge.

Not that the initial semblance of who and what Nyssa was took very long to germinate. I got my initial concept in a few minutes, on a cold overcast morning sitting on the subway on my commute to work when I was working as a UI designer for TLA.

But I wanted to open up the opportunity for an ongoing series about a character, and I didn't want to introduce the character from the inside. So it took me a good two months of thinking to figure out the angle I wanted to take. We're talking about a 3000 fucking word story here. I almost never take so long on such a small amount of text.

As I said, we first meet Nyssa from a distorted perspective. The protagonist doesn't really know her, even though he is increasingly obsessed with her. In that same way you don't really know the barrista you have a crush on. They're like these far off symbols to us, that we dream of one day having a real relationship of some kind with. But generally, that never comes to be.

Nyssa, Part 1: Love Notes To A Stranger (Unillustrated)

A dark modern fairy-tale.

I am beginning work on putting together this piece as an illustrated story, but have released the text online eBook for those that want this (cheaper) version. Pick it up for $.99 on smashwords. It'll be showing up in Amazon's store in a week or two. It's live now on Amazon's Kindle store as well.

Are you an artist interested in collaborating on the illustrated version?

[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]

Sacred Christmas, and Disembowelment

(photographer site)

I generally try to stay out of commentary about Holidays. But you know, I'm going to. Some thoughts, as creatures stir all throughout the house...

I think it's fair to say that, for most people who would frequent this blog anyway, there is an evident divorce between anything resembling the sacred, and the experience that we have of Christmas. Hopefully, many of us can incorporate the idea of intentional family - the people you live for and would likely die for, or togetherness, into whatever it is that we do. (Why this isn't part of our day to day experience rather than something we only intend on a few days of the year is beyond me, and also beyond the scope of a little rambling blog post.)

What is Christmas for many people that I know?

Swig as much alcohol as you imagine you can stomach, and waddle through an awkward mine-field of hazily recalled, distant relatives.

What else is it?

Being dragged to Sunday mass in the freezing cold. The service, aside from its rare moments of beauty -- usually provided by the music, if the choir isn't cringingly awful -- being something to be silently endured. (Personally, I usually find myself fantasizing about having sex on the pews as part of some sort of joyful, unintentionally sacrilegious orgy. Choir girls -- with ID -- angels, whatever. Hey, it passes the time.)

And let's not ask what it is for the people in the photo to the left. That just stopped my reverie cold in its tracks, and replaced it with a desperate need for about a 5th of scotch. Moving on...

It is possible that some might actually maintain a handhold on the sacchirine myth of a perfect world of sugar plums (the fuck are sugar plums?) and eagerly anticipated presents, parents that never fight, and a fluffy Christmas tree that magically floated in the window without puncturing a thousand holes in daddy's clumsy hands. Obviously the damn thing also wasn't carrying a host of slumbering insects and a family of enraged squirrels. Kids don't scream, snow doesn't melt, and Mommy's drinking isn't eating its way through her liver.

Fuck. Obviously I have my own biases based on personal experience. No way I know what the holiday is for several million people.

This much I do know: it doesn't have anything to do with the sacred. The clamboring of the marketplace scares away the sacred, the sense of time which holidays attempt to re-connect us with. In their most traditional sense, cultural rules and chronological time is cast aside in lieu of primal, universal forces and sacred time.

This is an idea explored elegantly by Eliade in the Sacred and the Profane. Let me give a kind of Jungian reading of this idea, because it's quick and to the point. If we imagine the orbit of the Earth around the Sun as the psychological circle that all of us live in relation to, then the element of the sacred which is meant to permeate holidays originates from that supposedly fixed center-- the transcendent, the Sun. Of course, in the material world, the Sun is hurtling through space as well. But metaphors have never needed the agreement of empirical fact to have psychological impact.

There is a lot more I could say about the co-opting of holidays by political and cultural ideology-- the forces of consumerism and corporatism hiding behind the benevolent masks of smiling St. Nick having the most sway in this case.  But, instead, I'd like to show just a taste of some of the more horrifying beings lurking behind that mask, elsewhere in history and our imaginations.

I've been doing a bit of research today as I return to the text of Nyssa as Jenx and Vika do their things with the first round of photographs. I don't want to give up why it's relevant, but part of the research has led me to the Krampus, which I've written a little about here, and Perschta, his female counterpart. There is a really solid core idea of the psychological nature of winter in these two, Perschta, a swan goddess (or mythological being) of light, and at the same time, a horrifying figure that makes the Krampus look good natured.

All three of them: St. Nick, the Krampus, and Perschta are the same in this one way. All of them represent the darkest time of the year, a time when the fields lie fallow, when the unconscious gestates. Sounds pretty abstract, what it means is that there's a part of our conscious mind that wonders "What have I done well this past year? What can I do better in the future?" It wants to orient in relation to a larger picture of the self, and put us in accord with some kind of personal or cultural myth as a result.

The solstice is a passage from darkness back to light. And out of that can spring guilt. We need something else, a force both benevolent and terrible, to keep our sorry asses in line. Krampus charges out of the frigid night, howling, beating the christ out of women and children with sticks, and carrying the especially bad ones away. Perschta asks,"have you been weaving your flax little girl? Have you been good? Are you eating the awful gruel and fish that are to be consumed on my holiday?" If the answer is no, the poor children are disemboweled, and their insides are stuffed with straw and stones. So, you know. Don't fuck up.

And...Santa just gives you a bit of coal. For once Capitalism sees fit to work us with the carrot rather than the stick. If you're good, you get new toys that you can stuff full of firecrackers and blow up in the front lawn the next day. (Or maybe that was just me.)

Maybe something could be drawn from the relation between the much the kinder, gentler Coke-a-Cola Santa, Saint Nick, Christ and his mis-attributed birthday (if "he" had one at all), and these Pagan throwbacks from the Swiss Alps. It's late and I don't care enough at the moment. This much I know: Krampus and Frau Perschta would totally kick both Santa and Jesus' ass. That's for damn sure.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

The Krampus and Nyssa (comic)

I recently completed a comic script for a first issue I plan to produce in 2010 2012. I've kept this mostly under my hat - it'd ruin the story to share the script with everyone, and this one takes a much more sparse approach than some of my past work anyhow. The story will be told as much with picture as word, if not more so. No spoilers, I want to tell the story the way it is meant to be told.

But I did want to talk a little about some of the inspiration for this story. Maybe it'll help to continue to show what I'm talking about in terms of how myth informs art- especially when you get around to actually checking out the comic, if you do.

My first thought with this script was that I wanted to tell a dark Christmas tale. I wrote it around Halloween, and it seemed that doing something moody for Halloween was just too damned easy. But I didn't want to use any of the Santa Claus cliches, nor did I want to participate in that Hallmark figure. Christmas has a darker past, and Saturnalia has a certain warm fuzzy place in my heart (especially after several absinthe saturnalia parties...) However, the Saturnalia festival is too similar to the Dioysian festivals of the Greeks, in many ways they serve the same cultural function, and I'm already doing enough with that in the Fallen Nation material. So where to start?

As you may or may not be aware, Saint Nicholas was originally said to be accompanied by an Incubus. This in itself is a bit peculiar- an Incubus is a male Succubus, though in many cases it is said these beings can change gender, and are one and the same. What an odd consort for a gift giving saint! It gets stranger. This being, called the Krampus, is said to torment young boys and girls, beating them with a switch, chase them, and otherwise terrify them half to death. He is generally personified with a long, almost snake-like tongue, black, white, or red skin and fur, and a face that isn't even fit for radio.

Even more interesting, there is a day, December 5th, which is commemorated in some places by the "running of Krampus," when men dress up as this horrific creature, and run around whacking children and maidens alike. I'd like to mention that the possible sexual overtones in the latter case are fully evident in more recent (1950s- ) Krampus art. So yeah, one day a year, Uncle Bobby or whatever dresses up like the devil and beats girls with a switch.

At the same time, I had been playing around with a story about a loner that works at a video rental store, and who makes up fantasies about the store goers- and who eventually becomes obsessed with one particular girl. These two blended together nicely, I think. I won't ruin the story for you with any spoilers, but this is where the story began.

I hope you check it out when it finally becomes available.

Update: See Mythos Media. This appears in the illustrated collection Words of Traitors, and Nyssa #1 to be published December 2012!