Krampusnacht

My sister sent me a photo of Krampus celebrations last week in Europe.  She asked me to explain how this was not traumatizing for children.  Knowing my bread and butter is the symbolic world, she was confident I would be able to explain why these celebrations persist, why they are well attended, and perhaps why they are growing in popularity and making their way into the psyches and celebrations the world over.  The photos she sent were terrifying.  If you go online and goggle Krampusnacht, you will see the macabre celebrations and more than enough images of cowering children.

Krampus, in central European popular legend, a half-goat, half-demon monster that punishes misbehaving children at Christmastime. He is the devilish companion of St. Nicholas. Krampus is believed to have originated in Germany, and his name derives from the German word Krampen, which means “claw.”

This is how I responded to my sister’s question about Krampus and trauma:

Deep in our soul we know these monsters exist. The ritual parade and Krampus events touch it and contain it. The monsters we know to ward off the monsters we don't know. The terror they feel is real but they learn to regulate and recover. Exercises the psyche muscles so there is no trauma. Trauma is the failure of the imagination to experience and recover from the terror.

This is loaded.  Perhaps I can unpack it here.  For a long time, I have advocated reading fairy tales to children.  Not the Disney versions, but the fairy tales in their original nature, ‘raw in tooth and claw’.  Many are surprised at the original tales.  Some scholars argue that they were never intended for children, but I disagree.  I believe they were intended for children and adults alike.  To believe that we protect our children by denying them a calibrated experience of horror and darkness and death, and even evil, is miscalculated.  In so doing, we raise generations of children unable to regulate their own emotions, or dig into the deeper wells of their resources and find courage and resilience and forbearance. 

On time, when she was about 7, my granddaughter asked me to play ‘Hide and Go Seek’ with her.  As we negotiated the terms of engagement, who would hide, who would seek, and how many seconds counted out loud to give adequate time to hide, how many seconds before the shout, “Ready or not, here I come!”, she added an unexpected rule.  “No going downstairs” she declared.  “But all the best hiding places are downstairs” I argued.  She explained that she was too scared to go downstairs by herself.  This surprised me.  Our downstairs is not a dungeon, a cold cellar, or a spider and crawly hole, but rather, a walk-out family room with floor to ceiling windows, thick carpets, pot lights, and warmth. 

Rather than give into her fears and de-potentiate the inherent value of children’s games and children’s play, I suggested a game before the game.  Let’s play ‘Grow Courage.’ I suggested.  She cautiously agreed.  I explained how the new game worked.  She was to move toward the stairs and stop when the feeling of fear got to be too much for her.  When she stopped, she was to announce, “Enough”. Aas Games Master, (making it up as we go), I would give her courage growing secrets.  “Tell me 3 things you can see…. 3 things you can hear…. 3 things you can smell…. 3 things you can taste…. 3 things you can feel.”  She played along, concentrating on her senses she soon forgot about the imagined dragons or trolls or hags that lived in the basement of our home.  In turn I named 3 things for each of my senses, standing beside her, accompanying her.  Next, when she was ready, she was to take a deep breath and move further toward the basement.  A step at a time. I would have to say it took about 20-30 minutes to descend the 13 stairs into the basement, but she learned that the power of her senses, the tuning into her body, the regulation of fear against courage was attainable.  The game of ‘Hide and Go Seek’ was almost anti-climactic.  In the game before the game, she learned she could regulate, recover, discover, and calibrate.  I like to believe this was a life lesson that would stick and she would learn to trust her felt sense over her dark fantasies. 

Please note, this is not the same as avoiding fears or repressing feelings.  To agree to play the original game on the main level of the house and not conquer the basement, the fears would grow rather than shrink.  As C. G. Jung says, we do not become enlightened by turning to the light, but rather, by making the darkness conscious. 

Monsters live in the darkness of the unknown.  We carve gargoyles into the corners of our gothic cathedrals because these are the monsters we know.  These are the monsters we have met who stand sentry at the corners of consciousness and spew out the flooding emotions away from our foundations.  They prevent the eroding of our sense of what endures, what is sacred, and what gathers us together in unity.  Yet, we also know there are always barbarians at the gates, snakes in the garden, and darkness in the stranger’s heart.  The cosmos is populated with monsters we have not met and should they invade the centre, we would surely be lost. Our borders must neither be wide opened or an iron curtain.

Krampusnacht is Dec. 5, the eve of St. Nicholas Day on Dec 6.  Krampus is the dark shadow of St. Nickolas.  There is no light that does not cast a shadow.  Our fairy tales remind us that demons gather at the threshold, trolls gather at bridges, dragon’s slumber in lairs, and hag’s guard the moat.  These resistant energies remind us that everything cannot be colonized or conquered.  Entropy is the third law of thermodynamics.  Entropy is not the foil of evolution, but its emergent principle.  Without chaos and disorder, there is no transformation.

We often experience solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Diwali as feasts, rituals, and festivals of light.  And they are.  The truth we also need to remember is that they come out of the darkness.  With flickering lights, they hold back the dissolution, the entropy, and the monsters that gather at the margins.  They call out our courage.  They demand our experience.  They teach us the full meaning of awe: surprise and fear.

So, as we wind down the year, as the darkest and coldest times visit us here in the northern hemisphere, as the monsters who parade and populate our fantasies stir, may we stand beside our supports and learn to take things one step at a time.  May we burrow into our blankets, mull our spices, bake our holiday treats, and sip our coco bathed in warmth and light. And, beneath the awe of our festive lights, lurking in the shadows of the unknown, outside our borders in the cold and the dark, may we also remember that we are braver than we know, more resilient than has been tested, and more courageous and caring than we ever expected.