Perchta the belly-slitter and her kin: a view of some traditional threatening figures, threats and punishments

Straying beyond the strictly prescribed limits of one's own community can be seen as behaviour crying out even more loudly for verbal control. Newfoundland threats have been recorded that discourage such behaviour in children, but the corresponding cautionary narratives feature both children and adults, some of whom return from their experience "in the fairies" suffering from mental or physical injury (Widdowson 1977, 124-8; Narvaez 1991, 336-68). While fairies are generally at the back of such experiences in Newfoundland, people who went astray in England were pixy-led, pouk-ledden, or, proverbially, led by Robin Goodfellow (Briggs 1977, 330-1 and 333; Wright 1970, vol. 4, 531 and 635; Wilson 1970, 681). In Germany spirits such as the Buschmutter, Rauhe Else or Rubezahl are or were to blame, and in Russia the leshii or wood-demon can still be cited (Hoffmann-Krayer and Bachtold-Staubli 1927-41, vol. 4, 776-8 and 1370; Warner 2000, 81-6). The primordial experience, profoundly exciting but potentially terrifying, of straying into the unknown is almost bound to be associated with alluring yet threatening figures. In the absence of these, it is "it" that leads astray. Russian is truer to the underlying experience, in which the lost person is so to speak out of control, when it says, impersonally, "in the forest there takes place leading astray" for what we would express personally, if also, significantly, in the passive, as "I/we etc. get lost in the forest" (Warner 2000, 86). German can also somewhat comparably on occasion refer to an impersonal "it," or "a magic," that causes disorientation (Hoffmann-Krayer and Bachtold-Staubli 1927-41, vol. 4, 776-8).

Conclusion

The main aim of these notes has been to draw some Continental traditional punishments and threatening figures, with the cautionary narratives and sayings clustering around them, into the orbit of anglophone experience, thus, it is to be hoped, making them less remote and a little more comprehensible. Many webs have been woven around such figures over the decades, and around the punishments they are said to mete out. To pull the webs aside can help us glimpse the figures beneath as they really are. Such attempts must not of course be allowed to damage the figures themselves. Familiarisation must not breed contempt. For this author at least, Perchta and her kin remain potent figures, charged with significance. Their essential mystery remains untouched by the necessary task of demystification.

Notes

[1] Begagged, or rather begaged, with the second syllable pronounced as that of engaged, is a west-country word meaning "bewitched" (Wright 1970, vol. 1, 226).

[2] It is hard to agree with Rumpf in her contention that the name Posterli, belonging to a German-Swiss manifestation of Perchta, contains the Slavonic element post, meaning "fast" in the sense of "abstinence from food" (Rumpf 1976, 233; 1991, 33). The root is surely a native one (Hoffmann-Krayer and Bachtold-Staubli 1927-41, vol. 5, 1793-4 and 1796, footnote 278).