In 1506, the town of Zerbst in Germany staged its Corpus Christi procession, and someone wrote down who was in it.
The script survives. It lists Saint Nicholas, in a bishop’s cope and mitre, staff in one hand, three gold balls in the other, his hand raised in blessing. A few lines later it lists the archangel Michael, elegantly turned out, a cross at his head. And it says what Michael is to do.
He is to lead a devil on a chain.
That is 1506. A saint and a chained devil, walking in the same procession, on the same day, on purpose. Nobody in Zerbst thought this was transgressive. It was the program.
I bring this up because of the other story, the one you have almost certainly been told: that Krampus is a survival from pre-Christian paganism, a horned god the Church could not stamp out, smuggled into Christmas in disguise. Britannica says a version of it. The Smithsonian has said a version of it. The version they say usually includes the detail that Krampus is the son of Hel, the Norse goddess of the dead.
There is no source for that. Not a weak source. None. Krampus does not appear in any Old Norse text, and Old Norse was never spoken in Austria or Bavaria, which is where Krampus is actually from. The claim gets repeated because it got repeated, and it gets repeated because it sounds like the kind of thing that ought to be true.
You can trace where it comes from. In March 1958 a folklorist named Maurice Bruce published a short piece called “The Krampus in Styria” in the journal Folklore, in which he announced that there was little doubt as to Krampus’s true identity, because in no other form was the regalia of the Horned God of the Witches so well preserved. He cited nothing. He did not need to, in his own mind, because he was working from Margaret Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis, which held that the early modern witch trials had been the suppression of a real surviving pagan religion. Historians now regard Murray’s thesis as pseudohistory. It rests on taking confessions extracted under torture at face value when they fit and discarding them when they do not.
So Bruce built his Krampus on a foundation that has since been removed, and the building is still standing, held up by nothing but citation.
When scholars actually went into the records, they found something else. In the 1980s the ethnologist Hans Schuhladen worked systematically through the historical documents and found no pagan origins at all. His earliest source is 1582, in the Bavarian town of Diessen, where men who had “hunted the Percht” were paid for it. Not ancient. Early modern, and Christian, and municipal enough to have an expense line.
And the word Krampus is later still. Al Ridenour, whose 2016 book is the best thing written on this in English, points out that Krampus barely appears in print before the mid-1800s and only becomes the standard name for the figure with the boom in Krampus greeting cards around 1900. For centuries before that, the figure was called Percht, after Perchta, and Perchta is a couple of hundred years older than he is. The devil got famous. The witch was there first.
Which leaves the question of where he actually comes from, and the answer is sitting in the Zerbst script.
Look at how Krampus is drawn in the oldest images we have of him, the postcards of the 1890s and 1900s. Absurdly long tongue lolling out. Long pointed horns. Claws. Cloven hooves. Black all over. A tail. Chains. A birch rod.
Now look at how the Devil is drawn in the Codex Gigas, in the Smithfield Decretals, in a hundred manuscripts of the High and Late Middle Ages. Long tongue. Horns. Claws. Hooves. Black. Tail. And in the mystery plays, Satan is chained by the archangel Michael and dragged off, and he is played for comedy, and audiences loved it, and the plays ran for centuries until the Reformation shut most of them down, except in the Catholic Alps, where they did not.
Krampus is not an old god. Krampus is the medieval stage Devil, still in costume, still on his chain, who never went home after the play ended.
And Saint Nicholas is holding the other end of the chain for a reason. The earliest surviving life of Nicholas, written sometime between 814 and 842, is full of exorcisms. He drives the demons out of the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. He is called the most active banisher of demons. A saint who has beaten a devil owns that devil. So the devil walks beside him, bound, doing the ugly half of the job the saint cannot be seen to do himself.
That is a stranger and better story than “ancient horned god.” It means Krampus is not a pagan holdout at all. He is a Catholic holdout. He is the part of Christianity that was willing to look at a child and say: there are consequences, and here is what one looks like, and it has a tongue.
The ugly sweaters can stay. But he was somebody first.
