My husband Thomas, who is German, was checking out the news from Europe on his cell phone on the night of April 30 when he turned to me and said, “The witches are jumping over the fire in Sweden!” There was a hint of “bravo!” in his voice, a stirring of the native psyche that piqued my curiosity.

“Why do they jump over the fire?” I asked.

“It’s Walpurgisnacht,” he answered, as if that explained everything.

Naturally, I began to pepper him with questions like “What does Walpurgisnacht mean?” and “Did you go to it? Did you see it happening when you were a child?” He remembered that near Wolfsburg, where he grew up in northern Germany, the bonfires were lit when he was a child. Not only did the witches jump over the fire, they rode on broomsticks! And there was something about a powerful nearby mountain, the top of which belonged to East Germany, so the revelers could not go there.

For someone like me, who grew up in the Deep South in the fifties and sixties, legends of Old Europe tap some kind of awe. Like all immigrant Americans (and we are all immigrants, unless we are indigenous First Nation people), I do not have the connection to the land, terrain, and place of my ancestors that I’ve experienced in many of my friends who were born in Europe and lived their lives there. Even though my maternal grandfather was half German and his mother, my great-grandmother, Maria Magdalena Will, was born and grew up in northern Germany, I’d never heard of Walpurgisnacht.

My Celtic ancestors stir from their sleepy repose when I hear about the ancient rites of northern Europe. A little research into Walpurgisnacht revealed some interesting things. Every year 25,000 to 30,000 people gather at the festival in Lund, Sweden to celebrate on the evening of April 30 each year—and this happens in cities all over northern Europe. Not only were “witches jumping over fires” on April 30 when Thomas was a kid, they are doing it now and they’ve been doing it for at least a few thousand years.

Today it’s a time when the young people take to the streets to party—a time of carnival, carousing, dancing, and imbibing spirits around big, blazing fires. It’s a celebration of witches. This year, the party-goers, witches and bonfires were constrained. Needless to say, the authorities of Lund could not allow a massive gathering at this time of COVID 19. In order to keep young people from celebrating their special night…no matter what!… stinky chicken poop was thickly spread about in the parks of the city and in the place where the annual celebration takes place.

Intrigued, I did some further digging. Walpurgisnacht has come a long way its origins, through a labyrinth of centuries thickly overlaid with religious murk. This ancient time of celebration stopped being the Celtic holy day of Beltane (the first of May) sometime in the eighth century CE, thanks to a missionary and monastery abbess named Walpurga. Born in Devonshire, England, she was sent to Germany to convert pagans to Christianity. Walpurga’s uncle was Saint Boniface and her brother was Saint Winibald, who also governed an abbey in the German town of Heidenheim, a city so named because it was the place of a sacred spring where the local pagans had worshipped from time immemorial. The Christians called this place Heidenheim or “home of heathens.” She had plenty of work to do!

Saint Walpurga – Painting by the Master of Meßkirch, c. 1535–40 (left) and a statue of Walburgis at Walburgis Kapelle at Kirchehrenbach, Germany (right).

Aggressively outspoken on her beliefs, Walpurga was a powerful zealot who railed against pagan rites, sorcery, and witchcraft. She was ambitious as well—many “heathens” were baptized in her church, called Heidenheimer Kloster (translation: Heathen-home Cloister). Interestingly, she became abbess of Winibald’s monastery after he died. Sibling rivalry? Nepotism? Well, you gotta wonder about there being three saints in one family.

Walpurga must have scared the hell out of people with long harangues on the relationship between witches, whooping cough, the plague and hell. After her death, the ancient Celtic ritual that had existed in Europe for at least two thousand years was renamed (to commemorate the good works of Walpurga) and made into a Christian celebration of the witches being driven away, killed, or burned. (They had to jump over the fire.) The eve of Beltane, deeply rooted in the psyches of the indigenous people of the region became “the night of Walpurga,” and the locals continued to celebrate on that day but under completely different auspices.

What were her qualifications for sainthood? Walpurga was canonized after her death by the Roman Catholic Church when her bones were placed in a rocky crevice and they began to exude a healing oil. Hmm. Such things were famously profitable back in the Dark and Middle Ages, when miracle cures abounded, mostly associated with the decaying bones, dried fingers, powered blood, rotten shrouds, and tufts of hair of various saints. These relics brought in not only money for the Church but also obedience that sprang from a proliferating fear of nature, evil, death, and the afterlife. Who wouldn’t be scared, when suckled and fed from cradle to grave on terrifying threats of hellfire and damnation? Who wouldn’t quake in their beds at night, especially during a “plague,” after religious zealousness has put the fear of God in you and both repressed and demonized all things pagan?

And so, as they did all over Europe, North and South America, and everywhere else they went in the world, those savvy agents of the Roman Catholic Church replaced old pagan powers and deities with their own saints and rituals and cosmology. Walpurga was in high demand to help the devout with coughs, famine, plagues and storms—all things bad or scary. Worshipping at springs, groves, and wells was replaced by monumental gothic churches, abbeys, monasteries, and chapels.

It was brilliant as a strategy: celebrate the same days but for the opposite reasons and before long, the people won’t even remember the real purpose behind the ritual, the celebration, the holy day. (That’s the same Church that in 591 CE decided to officially turn Mary Magdalene into a prostitute (smearing her good name six hundred years after her death!) even though there was no mention of this anywhere in the New Testament of the Bible. Virtually every holy day of the Celts received the same treatment in a relentless zeal to convert literally the entire world to Rome’s version of organized, orthodox Christianity (as distinctly different than what Jesus actually taught).

Here is one historical window through which we may view the dilemma of humanity today and gain some perspective on how it came to pass that the most sentient creatures on this planet became estranged from Mother Nature.

You may remember from your own childhood the Maypole and May Day. In the Southland when I was a kid, it was the day at school when we decorated a tall pole with streamers and made cut outs of spring flowers and bunny rabbits. What you may not know is that May Day has its origins with the Celts, or as the ancient Greeks called them, the Keltoi—an indigenous people of cohesive spiritual beliefs and culture who lived and had developed settlements all across continental Europe, as far south as Mediterranean in France and into Spain, and all over what was Britain, Scotland and Ireland.

Beltane was (and still is) one of the four major sacred days of the Celts. Ancient Nordic and Germanic people, like Celts everywhere, enacted a ritual to celebrate the coming of spring after a long, hard winter, thus insuring fertility in the animal and vegetable worlds in the year to come. This holy day included games, feasting, dancing, drinking, and carousing— rowdy, risqué and outrageous were not only tolerated but encouraged. Let off some steam, the elders said. Celebrate life! Sexual liaisons of all kinds were freely engaged as a symbol of the continuation of life, with archetypal connections to the sacred marriage that insured fecundity in the year to come in countless cultures across the Middle East and Europe.

Historians now agree that the “witches” (the same ones what Walpurga railed against) who were tortured and burned during the Inquisition were wise women of great healing expertise and medicinal lore, midwives, rebels, iconoclasts, and anyone who was not Christian. “Witch” and sorcerer were names for those spiritual adepts who had regular congress across the worlds and had the spiritual power to mediate with cosmic, interdimensional, terrestrial and elemental forces. Such extraordinary women of mastery are called yoginis, siddhas, and dakinis in India and Tibet. As one source commented, the arts of the cunning woman, or the wise women of the forest, were particularly potent on the eve of April 30 and May 1st each year. This day was not determined by the Roman calendar but by a preternatural sense of timing in harmony with our own solar system, moon and primordial elements of life (earth, water, fire, air, space)—all for the most part beyond our collective ken in current times.

Somehow, it’s coming full circle. Today the eve of April 30 is celebrated in diverse places across the globe—in Sweden, Finland, Germany, Bavaria, Estonia and even in the U.S. Huge bonfires are lit, and witches are celebrated. In Finland this night is called Vappu; in Estonia it’s called Volbriöö. In Bavaria, it is known as Freinacht or Drudennacht. Its ubiquitous nature across northern Europe persisting to this day says to me that it is an archetypal event based in reality as it is, which transcends language and cultural differences. The mystics and wise women and men over thousands of years knew that this particular day in the earth’s progress around the sun had cosmic significance and therefore was vital to the health of our beloved planet and her creatures. It was a day set aside by the wise to commune with Mother Earth, to invoke her powers of regeneration.

Instead of seeking to ward off “evil,” we could focus our energies on getting back into harmony with the cosmos and with our little corner of it, the planet upon which we live and breathe. One way to celebrate Walpurgisnacht or Beltane is to open our minds to the ancient wisdom that affirms the basic goodness of the forces of nature in both their creative and destructive aspects. At the time of annual rebirth, we can return to the original patterns of nature—the underlying blueprint of life. Walpurgisnacht is a moment in which, through our prayer and intention, the revival of nature can begin to heal the world from the ravages of winter.

Keeping an open mind is always a blessed thing. I like to jump on every opportunity to re-affirm my faith in Mother Nature as the earthly dimension of the Cosmic or Divine Mother made manifest. This is a cosmology that strengthens and cultivates faith in the Earth’s power to move humanity (her creation) in a more positive direction than we have been going. Auspicious days like Beltane could be a time to acknowledge and converse with our Divine Mother through Mother Nature, to request her to allow the spirit of COVID 19, our current plague (and also her creation), to fulfill her divine purpose: to shape the future of this planet and its denizens for the greatest possible good. Let it be so!