On the last night of April, in the central German uplands, fires are lit on the highest peaks. The largest is on the Brocken, a 1,141-meter mountain at the edge of what was once East Germany. The fires have been lit there in some form for as long as German chronicles have recorded the place. The night is called Walpurgisnacht. It carries the name of an English nun who died in Bavaria in 779. It is associated with a witches’ sabbath that was invented in 1668. It contains a Goethe scene from 1808 and a Mendelssohn cantata from 1833 and the cut first chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula from 1897. It is still observed by hundreds of thousands of people every year across Sweden, Finland, the Czech Republic, Germany, and Estonia.
The shape of the night, the bonfire lit on the cross-quarter day between spring equinox and summer solstice, is older than any of those layers. The contents have changed every few centuries. The shape stays.
Saint Walburga: An English Nun in Bavaria
Walburga was born around the year 710 in Devonshire, in southwestern England. Her father was Richard the Pilgrim, a Wessex nobleman who died in Lucca in 720 on his way to Rome. Her mother was Wuna of Wessex. Her uncle was Saint Boniface, the apostle to the Germans, the man Pope Gregory II met in 718 and formally commissioned in May 719 to convert the still-pagan tribes east of the Rhine. Her brothers Willibald and Winibald both became missionaries with their uncle and both became saints in their own right.
Around 748, Boniface recruited Walburga from her convent at Wimborne to join the mission. She crossed to the Continent with a group of English nuns. After spells at Bischofsheim and elsewhere she was made abbess of the double monastery at Heidenheim am Hahnenkamm in Bavaria, succeeding her brother Winibald. She died there on February 25 in 779. The original double monastery was dissolved during the Reformation in 1537; a successor Benedictine convent was established at Eichstätt and continues there to this day, while the male house at Heidenheim was secularised in 1803.
Her cult began modestly. She was venerated locally as a healer and protector against pestilence, rabies, and storms. The defining moment came nearly a century after her death. In 870 her relics were translated from Heidenheim to Eichstätt by Bishop Otkar of Eichstätt and enshrined in the church of Holy Cross; the May 1 commemoration is the date of her remembrance, and the canonisation later attached to Pope Adrian II is hagiographic tradition rather than firmly documented history. From the stone of her tomb a clear oily liquid began to seep, which was collected and distributed as a healing substance under the name Walpurgisöl, Walburga’s oil. The phenomenon is still observed at her tomb today and continues to be sealed in small vials by the Benedictine sisters of Saint Walburg’s Abbey in Eichstätt.
The translation date, May 1, is the reason her name attached to the night before. Her actual feast day in the calendar is February 25. But the medieval Church marked the translatio with its own observance, and that observance fell on the night of an existing pre-Christian fire-festival that the missionaries had not been able to suppress. Saint Walburga’s name became the cover under which the fires kept burning.
She had nothing to do with witches. The association was made for her, posthumously, by people writing 800 years after her death.
The Walpurgisöl is still collected by the Benedictine sisters of Saint Walburg’s Abbey in Eichstätt every year. Small vials of the clear liquid are distributed to pilgrims as a sacramental. The phenomenon has been documented continuously since the year 893.
The Brocken: A Real Mountain
The Brocken is the highest peak of the Harz mountains in central Germany, 1,141 meters above sea level, in the present state of Saxony-Anhalt. Its name has been read variously as a “broken hill” (Latin mons ruptus) or as a large shapeless mass; an older folk derivation from a northern German word for bog (referring to the wet plateau on the summit) is also cited but considered doubtful by most modern toponymists. The first documented ascent of record was by the physician Johannes Thal of Stolberg in the Harz in 1572, who collected botanical specimens and published a flora of the mountain. The name itself appears in the Sächsische Weltchronik (Saxon World Chronicle) as early as 1176.
Three things made the Brocken specifically suited to become a sabbath site in the imagination of 17th-century Germany. First, it is the tallest peak in northern Germany, visible from enormous distances. Second, the summit is exposed and almost treeless, a wind-blasted plateau where rock formations dominate. Two of these formations were already named in folk tradition by the 16th century: the Teufelskanzel (Devil’s Pulpit) and the Hexenaltar (Witch’s Altar). Third, the mountain produces a striking optical illusion called the Brockengespenst or Brocken Spectre, in which a climber’s shadow is cast across mist below, often surrounded by a circular halo. The phenomenon was first scientifically described by Johann Silberschlag in 1780, but had been seen and feared for centuries before.
From 1961 to 1989, the entire summit was a Soviet military exclusion zone, fenced and inaccessible to civilians, used as a Warsaw Pact signals-intelligence listening post. The Brocken was directly on the inner-German border. Today it is a tourist destination accessible by the narrow-gauge Brockenbahn steam railway, with a hotel and a restaurant on the summit.
How a Saint’s Day Became a Witches’ Night
The witches’ sabbath, as a coherent concept, did not exist in early medieval Christianity. Folk traditions of nocturnal flights and ritual gatherings existed everywhere in Europe, but they were not systematized into the canonical “sabbath” until the late 14th and 15th centuries, in the context of the early modern witch trials.
Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum, published at Speyer in 1487, is often blamed for inventing the sabbath. The text describes nocturnal gatherings of witches with the devil, but it does not name the Brocken or any other specific mountain. The naming of these assemblies as sabbaths, with their location fixed at particular peaks, develops slowly across the next two centuries through trial records, demonological treatises, and folk repetition.
The text that locked Walpurgisnacht and the Brocken together in the German imagination was Johannes Praetorius’s Blockes-Berges Verrichtung, published in Leipzig in 1668. Praetorius compiled folk reports, classical references, and confessions extracted under torture from accused witches in central Germany, and produced an enormous illustrated book describing the Brocken sabbath in detail. The book had a frontispiece showing the mountain swarming with witches arriving on goats and brooms.
The historian Carlo Ginzburg, in Storia notturna (1989), traced the sabbath’s component parts back to much older European shamanic substrata. His earlier I Benandanti (1966) had documented surviving Friulian agrarian sects in the 16th century who described nocturnal soul-flights to fight witches over the harvest. Ginzburg’s argument is that the inquisitorial sabbath was a late synthesis: a hostile reading of folk traditions of ecstatic flight, projected back as devil-worship. The Brocken got the role in northern Germany. The Benevento walnut tree got it in southern Italy. Local geography supplied the venue, and the structure stayed the same.
Goethe’s Faust: The Walpurgisnacht Scene (1808)
The Walpurgisnacht scene in Goethe’s Faust gave the night its canonical literary shape. The scene appears late in Part One of the tragedy, published in 1808. Faust, accompanied by Mephistopheles, climbs the Brocken on the night of April 30. They pass real Harz rock formations as they ascend, the Devil’s Pulpit and the Witch’s Altar, all of which Goethe had seen on his own walking tour of the mountains in 1777. The mountain comes alive around them. Will-o’-the-wisps dance. Witches and warlocks fly past on goats and broomsticks. They reach the summit and watch the sabbath in progress. Mephistopheles introduces Faust to the assembled crowd, and Faust dances with a young witch until she sings something that breaks the mood. He sees a phantom of Margaret, the woman he has destroyed. The vision is the moral hinge of the play.
A second scene immediately follows, the Walpurgisnachtstraum (Walpurgis Night’s Dream), an interpolated theatrical piece-within-a-piece in which figures from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream appear alongside political and literary satires of the day. It is widely considered one of the strangest passages in Goethe and is sometimes cut entirely in performance.
Goethe drew on Praetorius and on the lingering oral folk tradition. He was also drawing on his own direct experience of the place. The mountain in Faust is recognizably the Brocken, with its real rock formations named, and it is set on the actual calendar night.
Mendelssohn’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht (1833)
Goethe wrote a long ballad poem in 1799 called Die erste Walpurgisnacht, the First Walpurgis Night. Its plot is unusual. It depicts a community of pagan Druids and their followers, somewhere in the Harz region, who use the witch-folklore of their Christian persecutors against the persecutors. The Druids stage a fake sabbath on the mountain, complete with masks, drums, torches, and fires, in order to terrify the local Christian patrols and clear space to perform their actual May-Day rite to the high god Wotan in peace.
The poem is a defense of pagan continuity. The Christians in it are afraid. The Druids manipulate that fear deliberately. It is one of Goethe’s clearest statements of religious sympathy for the older tradition.
Felix Mendelssohn set the poem as a secular cantata for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, his Op. 60. The premiere was in Berlin on January 10, 1833, conducted by Mendelssohn himself. He revised it substantially and published the final version in 1843. The work runs about 35 minutes. Mendelssohn admired the text intensely and corresponded with Goethe about it before the poet’s death in 1832. Goethe never heard the music.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Guest (1914)
Bram Stoker’s short story Dracula’s Guest was published posthumously by his widow Florence in 1914, two years after his death. The story is widely treated as the original first chapter of Dracula (1897), excised by the publisher to shorten the novel. Some Stoker scholars dispute this provenance, but the story is set in the Dracula world and clearly involves the Count’s network. The setting is Walpurgisnacht.
An unnamed Englishman, traveling out of Munich, ignores the warnings of locals and his coachman. He takes a side road into a deserted valley. He shelters from a hailstorm in the marble tomb of the Countess Dolingen of Gratz, in Styria, die in Steiermark sucht und fand den Tod, who in life sought and found death. A great wolf, larger than any natural wolf, finds him there and protects him from the storm and the cold. A telegram from Count Dracula reveals that the wolf was sent to guard him. The story ends as the protagonist returns to Munich.
The Walpurgisnacht setting allows Stoker to draw on the existing Western literary tradition of the night as a moment when the dead walk and the boundary between worlds is thin. The setting is geographically accurate. The folk warnings the protagonist ignores are the kind a Bavarian peasant of the 1890s would have given.
The Flying Ointment Question
The image of witches flying to the Brocken on broomsticks anointed with magical salves became canonical in the early modern period. The historical question is whether such ointments existed and what they actually contained.
The historian Carlo Ginzburg, in Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (1989), argued that the flight experience was real but pharmacological, produced by tropane-alkaloid-containing plants applied to the skin or mucous membranes. The candidate plants are well documented in early modern materia medica: henbane (Hyoscyamus niger), belladonna (Atropa belladonna), thornapple (Datura stramonium), and mandrake (Mandragora officinarum). All four contain the alkaloids hyoscyamine, atropine, and scopolamine, which produce vivid hallucinations including sensations of flight, transformation into animals, and meetings with otherworldly beings.
The American historian Thomas Hatsis, in The Witches’ Ointment: The Secret History of Psychedelic Magic (2015), assembled the surviving recipes from medieval and early modern sources and worked through the pharmacology in detail. His conclusion is that the ointments were real, that they were used by some practitioners across the late medieval and early modern period, and that the experiences they produced match the shape of the reported sabbath visions surprisingly closely. Whether any individual confession to attending a sabbath was extracted under torture, fabricated by the inquisitor, or based on a real ointment-induced experience cannot be determined from the trial record alone.
The plant most associated with Walpurgisnacht specifically in German folk tradition is henbane, Hyoscyamus niger, which grows abundantly in the Harz region. Henbane was sometimes called Bilsenkraut in German, and its use in flying-ointment contexts is documented in the German-language witchcraft literature from the 15th century onward.
Modern Survival: Where the Fires Still Burn
The fires on April 30 are still lit in significant numbers across northern and central Europe.
The largest single Walpurgisnacht observance in the world is in Uppsala, Sweden. Roughly fifty thousand students and visitors gather along the Fyris river for the forsränningen raft race, then process to Carolina Rediviva, the university library, for the spring chorale at three in the afternoon. The Uppsala student spring singing is documented from 1823 (originally near Uppsala Castle); the modern donning-of-the-caps ceremony at Carolina Rediviva was instituted in the 1950s by the then vice-chancellor Torgny Segerstedt.
Sweden. Valborgsmässoafton is one of the most observed unofficial holidays in the country. Bonfires are lit in every town. Choirs sing welcoming spring. The university city of Uppsala has the largest single observance: students of the university gather at Carolina Rediviva for a chorale, then process to bonfires across the city. The day is officially listed as a de facto national festival even though it is not a public holiday.
Finland. Vappu combines Walpurgis Night and Labor Day into a single 36-hour student carnival, particularly intense in Helsinki and the engineering universities. Engineering students wear white caps. Sparkling wine, herring, ring-doughnuts called munkki, and a funnel cake called tippaleipä (thin batter dripped through a funnel into hot oil) are traditional. Statues across Finland are dressed in student caps overnight.
Czech Republic. Pálení čarodějnic (the burning of the witches) is observed across the country. Effigies of witches are mounted on bonfires and burned in towns and villages on April 30. The custom retains an explicit reference to the witch-burning tradition that the night accumulated in the 17th century. In modern Czech practice it is treated as a community spring festival rather than a religious observance.
Germany. The Harz region has commercialized the witches’ tradition extensively. The town of Schierke at the foot of the Brocken hosts a Walpurgis festival every year with thousands of costumed visitors. The narrow-gauge railway runs special trains to the summit. The town of Thale stages a witches’ market and dance. Most of this is tourist theater; some of it is community ritual that has continued since the 19th century.
Estonia. Volbriöö, observed especially in Tallinn, has become a women’s festival; women dress as witches and walk the streets together. The night before May Day is treated as a moment of inversion in which traditional restrictions briefly do not apply.
The bonfires across this whole region are doing the same thing. They mark the cross-quarter day between spring equinox and summer solstice, the moment when the seasonal balance has clearly tipped. The Celtic sister-festival on the same night and morning is Beltane (May 1), with its own paired fires for cattle to walk between. The Old Irish records of Beltane and the German records of Walpurgis are not directly related, but they describe the same agricultural moment in two different ways. Both involve fire. Both mark the boundary the year crosses on the night of April 30.
Inversions: The Church of Satan and Other Late Borrowings
On April 30, 1966, in San Francisco, the carnival barker and former police photographer Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan. He chose the date deliberately. Walpurgisnacht as the Christian-inverted night of the witches gave him the symbolic frame he wanted: an explicit, theatrical, non-supernatural inversion of Christian categories, designed to provoke and to declare what he called the Year One of Anno Satanas. LaVey published The Satanic Bible in 1969 and ran the Church of Satan as a media-savvy organization until his death in 1997.
The choice of Walpurgisnacht for that founding shows how durable the night’s inverted reputation has remained. By 1966 the actual folk practice was largely forgotten in America, but the literary tradition through Goethe, Mendelssohn, and Stoker had kept the date culturally legible. LaVey could rely on his audience to understand the gesture without explanation.
A more obscure inversion: the Bavarian Illuminati were founded by Adam Weishaupt in Ingolstadt on May 1, 1776, the morning after the night of Walpurgis. Whether the date was deliberate is disputed; Weishaupt was a professor of canon law and would have known the symbolic weight of the choice.
The pattern repeats. Movements that want to mark a break with established religious order keep choosing the same night.
What It Means
Walpurgisnacht is one of the cleanest examples in European history of a date that has held its shape while its contents have repeatedly changed.
The shape is older than its name. A fire on the highest local peak, on the cross-quarter night between spring equinox and summer solstice, is documented in archaeological evidence across northern and western Europe long before any of the Christian calendar layers were laid down. The names piled on top, in chronological order: the pre-Christian fire night, the feast of the translation of an English saint to a Bavarian church on May 1, 870, the witches’ sabbath of the early modern demonologists, the Brocken sabbath fixed by Praetorius in 1668, Goethe’s Faust scene of 1808, Mendelssohn’s cantata of 1833, Stoker’s posthumous short story of 1914, the modern Swedish valborg and Finnish vappu, the Church of Satan’s 1966 founding. Each layer added to the night without erasing the layers below.
Underneath all of this, the night is a marker. European communities lit fires on hilltops and stood around them on April 30 because the year had crossed a threshold visible in the landscape, and the human response to that crossing was to burn something bright in the dark.
The contents change. The mountain stays the same. The fire is older than any of its names.
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Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil. Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1808
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- Kramer, Heinrich. Malleus Maleficarum. Speyer, 1487
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