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The common person, when hearing the word Walpurgis Night, will mostly think about the eve of the first of May spring celebration. This goes along with the gathering of witches at certain places for the witches’ Sabbath, as is famously decribed in Goethe’s Faust.
But indicatively there gapes a vast disparity between the holiday and the woman that gave it its name, for she is a Christian nun and saint and not to be conjoined with any of those nightly gatherings and blasphemic goings-on.
In order to solve this disparity one must dig deeper, and explore sources that paint a more encompassing picture of the dark past than superficial impression will allow. For this we shall look at three characters in which Walpurga can be encountered in the cultural records.
Saint Walpurga
The saint Walpurga (in German also Walburga or Walburg) of Christian churchly history is an Anglo-Saxon nun of the Benedictines, who contributed to the conversion of the yet pagan Germans as the abbess of Eichstätt monastery (Franconia) in the eighth century. She is seen as a cousin of the saint Boniface, while her supposed royal ancestry is not agreed upon. Her day of death is the 25th of February, either in 779 or 780. Her sanctification was on the first of May, thus the connection with Walpurgis Night.
Furthermore it is said: „The fourth of August is the day of her advent, the 12th of October the day of the elevation of her bones“, and „of the mortal remains of the saint only the breastbone is left in Eichstätt. The limestone plate, on which it rests in the altar of the crypt chapel, is said to assume a bluish colour in October and overflow with a vapourish substance that clots into pearls until February, which is there led into a golden cup drop by drop“ (Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, based on Rochholz: Drei Gaugöttinnen). This Walpurgis oil is sold to visitors and is to be poured into a specific rock crevice in order to appease the stream Ordelbach, which springs forth from the respective rock.
Walpurgis is as well a patron against the black plague, helps against abdominal sickness and eye complaints. According to the legends she also helps starving children, which an attribute of hers, the three grain spikes, seems to point at. So is reported by her biographer Wolfhard of Herrieden, although it must be said he wrote down her story only 200 years after her lifetime.
As can be seen, the reports on saint Walpurga’s life oscillate somewhere between history and legend and have been developed over a longer period of time.
Walpurga’s mirror
This becomes even clearer when looking at the mythical material that has been passed down in folk belief besides churchly tradition. I again quote and translate the handbook of German superstitions:
Saint Walpurga has an oil flask and three grain spikes as her attributes, which label her as a protector of the fields. Besides the first of May the harvest days are consecrated to her. According to the folk belief of Lower Austria and Bohemia there are nine Walpurgis nights. If leaving open a small window in the house during these nights, one can hope to find a piece of gold put there by Walpurga on the morning of the last night. This is because she is persued by ghosts in this night and flees from village to village, trying to find a place to hide. Her preferred hide-out is behind a window cross, and in gratitude she will put there a small piece of gold. She appeared once to a peasant, persued by riders on white horses, as a white woman with fiery shoes, longflowing hair, a golden crone on her head, and in her hands a triangular-shaped mirror and a spindle. Another time she asks a farmer to hide her inside a sheaf. If one pray a Lord’s Prayer for the salvation of Walpurgis at midnight in each of the nine nights, they will have a golden nugget thrown into the room through the window. The witches can during these nights aks the saint for various things, namely small, triangular mirrors, which show all the future. If you receive a thread from her spindle, you can be sure not to perish in any menace. To her churches all kinds of myths are attached. That of Wilgefortis was transferred onto her as well. On the Walpurgis Night see Mayday and Philippus.
Remarkable similarities to Germanic mythology can be seen here. The mythical figure Walpurga is apparently no other than the Woodwoman that the Wild Hunter persues through forest and field in the night, to thrown her crosswise on his steed before him once he gets hold her. Was this scene maybe re-enacted in the folk customs for a longer time? Its symbolic meaning points at the attainment of fertility, just like her three grain spikes. The same goes for the gold one receives for helping her on her flight from the ghostly riders.
Harder to interpret are the fiery shoes, but fire is usually linked to fertility and vitality as well. Rocholz sees them as golden shoes. They could possibly also point at a passage through borders between different realms.
Walpurga is apparently a kind of chief witch, and another important point are the numbers given here: Three grain spikes, three times three = nine Walpurgis nights, triangular mirrors as a gift for the witches. And on top of this, the witches can see the future in these mirrors, thus becoming seeresses. The number three here makes one comparison fly in one’s face, namely that with the three Norns of Nordic mythology, who embody the past (Urðr), the present (Verðandi), and the future (Skuld).
Behind the name-giver of Walpurgis night, so much should have become clear, there is much more than merely the Christian saint. In folk belief the mythical character Walpurga has a depth of meaning that can not be explained only through the formation of legends around the Anglo-Saxon abbess anymore. The Walpurgis myths are old folk traditions that were projected onto the Christian saint as a substitute figure during the conversion to Christianity.
On the name Walpurga
On the meaning of the name Walpurga etymologists are not always of the same opinion. The most common explanation is that of Wal- as going back to Old High German waltan, which means to keep, guard or protect. The second part, -purga, is derived from Old High German burg, meaning enclosure or protection.
Why though a name made of two parts that both mean more or less the same? Most Germanic names are formed of two complementary parts, so that usually the first part gives closer definition to the second: Siegfried is the one who creates frith (unity) through victory, Brunhild is the fighteress in the coat of mail. Only later we see random combination of name elements, so that names without coherent meaning or doubled meaning emerge.
An alternative interpretation to this double-meaning is given by Klaus Gelbhaar, who associates the first part of the name with the same syllable Wal- that we can also find in Walhalla, the well-known hall of the Norse god Óðinn. The word here refers to the fallen and slayn, who the god gathers in his hall, thus called Valhall, Valhöll in Old Norse. The meaning of the name Walpurga would thus be „guardian of the fallen“, or maybe more in general „keeper of the dead“. As Wolfgang Thiele und Herbert Knorr show in their book on the continuity of early churches and astronomically aligned cult sites in Westphalia, the early churches of Wormbach and Meschede, which are both dedicated to Walpurga, were located on the so-called Totenweg („way of the dead“), an old traffic route which seems to have been used to carry the deceased to their last rest for a very long time.
The seeress Waluburg
On an old pot sherd from the 2nd century CE found in a former Roman military camp in Egypt, an inscription says in Greek letters:
Βα̣λουβουργ Σήνονι σιβύλλᾳ
Waluburg, seeress of the Se[m]noni
The pot sherd is probably some kind of pay list. So Waluburg was the name of a seeress in Roman service. The Semnoni were one of the most important Germanic tribes and settled near Berlin around the river Elbe back at the time. Tacitus reports about a fetter-grove of the Semnoni and customs associated with this sacred site.
That a Germanic seeress ends up in a Roman military camp in Egypt is not necessarily surprising. Especially Germanic nobility often ended up in Roman captivity as hostages during the wars.
The seeresses Ganna and Veleda from the Rhine area, who lived shortly before Waluburg, were highly regarded by the Romans. The mentioned pot sherd was found near the oracle site of Elephantine on an island in the river Nile, so that we can assume there to be a connection between the seeress Waluburg and the site.
As is known, the three Norns sit at the waters of the Well of Urd too. Roman historian Cassius Dio tells us of a strange encounter of the military leader Drusus with a seeress at the banks of the river Elbe, which took place when he invaded Germanic territory in the year 9 BCE. And Plutarch reports from a similar time about women close to the Suebic leader Ariovist, who „ divined on the basis of their gaze into the swirls of the rivers and their conclusions from the eddies and the murmuring of the streams“. (Plutarch, C. 19.).
The fact that the Waluburg attested in the 2nd century is seeress is important insofar as Christian nuns can be seen as a Christian contuniation of the same function. Just like the pagan seeress can be seen as a female cleric, some Christian saints like Hildegard of Bingen and Mechthild of Magdeburg, were still seeresses as well. Their visions are written down in texts like Hildegard’s Scivias or Mechthilds The Flowing Light of Divinity. Thus we can conclude a connection between the functions of the pagan seeress Waluburg and the saint Walpurga beyond mere similarity of name.
Whether Waluburg is an older form of the name Walpurga will be hard to say, since etymology does not always give clear answers. But as we see, there are a couple of names that share a remarkable similarities, both in regards to name and function, among similar figures in the Germanic world. At two more of them we will look now.
Vǫlva and Veleda
In the Old Norse Edda the seeress is called vǫlva. Right away the similarity between the first syllable and Wal- can be noticed. The common interpretation of the Old Norse word however goes back to a word for staff or wand, so that vǫlva would mean „wand-carrier“. The same meaning is attributed to the Wal- part in the name Waluburg by Rudolf Simek.
That the ancient seeresses walked about carrying a wand or staff is easy to imagine. Even more meaningful and insightful for the symbolic meaning of the wand is the word root behind the word for wand: according to etymology, vǫlr goes back to Indogermanic *welH-, which means as much as „to turn, wind, roll“. It points at a turning motion or cycle, like that of birth and death. The name Walpurga, as „keeper of the dead“, implies a persistence of the soul after death. But first and foremost the meaning of the word fits the gift of divination: If the course of events is looked at as an eternal recurrence of similar patterns, they indeed become forecastable. The future is already present in the past.
The name of the well-known seeress Veleda has a very similar sound as well. According to scholarship her name is however related to the Celtic-Irish filid and the Gallic *veled-, which mean nothing other than druidess, or more literally: seeress. Furthermore we have Latin vultus für „face“, and Cymraeg-Welsh gweled for „to see“.
It becomes clear quite fast that Veleda is no common name that would be given to any girl at her birth. Much rather it denotes exactly the function that the seeress had in life, and would thus be a byname, epithet or title, which she received after the initiation into her position. And from this right away follows the question whether there were not many women who did bear this name, before and after. The one seeress Veleda mentioned in Roman records would then only be the most well-known example in the genealogy of the Veledas, the seeresses of the Rhine.
The three Walpurgas
Walpurga can be found as a saint, mythical figure, and seeress. It is now time to join the threads and make a hypothesis on how the saint Walpurga and the heathen Walpurgis night are connected.
If the name Veleda was a title then the same might apply to the names Walpurga and Waluburg. The woman hallowed by this name were known for their divination and benevolent effect on fertility of soil and sib. Among the folk they were highly regarded as wise women, and due to this veneration comparable to the later Christian saints. It comes of no surprise that in the time of conversion people projected their notions onto a Christian saint of the same name all the easier. Because for the people the two were one and the same. The original Walpurga was thus witch and saint at the same time. The seeresses name kept on circulating beyond the original tribal territory throughout the following centuries and stayed fruitful for the creation of myth and folk custom alike.
Sources
René Wernitz, Irene Krieger: Seherinnen an Elbe und Havel, moz.de 2016. https://www.moz.de/lokales/rathenow/seherinnen-an-elbe-und-havel-48510068.html
Wolfgang Thiele, Herbert Knorr: Der Himmel ist unter uns, Bottrop 2003.
Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer, Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli, Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens,
Berlin und Leipzig 1932.
Ernst Ludwig Rochholz: Drei Gaugöttinnen. Walburg, Verena und Gertrud, Leipzig 1870. https://archive.org/details/dreigaugttinnen00rochgoog/page/n15/mode/2up
DWDS: Wurzel, vǫlr. https://www.dwds.de/wb/verwurzeln#:~:text=vǫlr%20%27runder%20Stab%27%2C%20got,(s.%20d.)%20dargestellten%20Wurzel%20ie.
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