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

   In Feistritz, a woman who was preparing to boil and scald her
   skeins was visited by another woman, a stranger, who offered to
   help. On going to a neighbour's to borrow a seething-tub, the
   first woman was warned not to return home, since it was Ember
   Friday and her strange visitor might be the Quatemberca. Sure
   enough, the stranger then appeared at the window of the
   neighbour's house, saying: "Lucky for you that you didn't come
   back home with the tub. Had you forgotten that today is Ember
   Friday? After boiling the skeins, I would have boiled you"
   (Rumpf 1991, 29)!

I believe that the well-founded motif of boiling alive in the second story throws light on the similar threat of boiling alive in the first, where it is, however, unexplained by the immediate context. For an audience familiar with all the tasks associated with spinning the message would have been clear enough. Like their Feistritz counterparts, the spinning women of Ronchi in our first story will in due course have to boil their skeins. Here they too are in danger of receiving supernatural "help" that will in fact switch to the punishment of boiling alive. Abhorrent this may be by our standards, and if we take it literally, but it is hardly out of place or unexpected in a world where only the most powerful deterrents will ensure conformity to unwritten rules.

What the fictions under consideration convey is that if you spin or perform related tasks on a holiday, you can expect a penalty to match. [3] Boil skeins, and you will be boiled alive. Spin, and your guts will be spun out of your belly. This threat is also quite well documented, and, again, the punishment matches the offence (Wolfram 1980, 46). Is it here, then, that we have to seek the origin of Perchta's gastrotomy? No. Punishment and offence are admittedly congruous, but the connection between them is secondary.

Occasional Lack of Fit between Punishment and Offence

In fact, Perchta's gastrotomic proclivities, no longer fully understood, have been unconsciously adapted in various ways, fittingly or otherwise, by a process akin to the linguistic one of popular etymology. In the most up-to-date material, that provided by Wolfram in the AFA, evidence of her concern with spinning is marginal, for the simple reason that such an activity was already largely obsolete when the relevant surveys were made, even if it was resumed for a time after 1945 (Wolfram 1980, 47). She herself lived on, however, her main function now being to discourage such vices as slovenliness, sloth, and disobedience. Putting it differently, such a potent instrument of social control as Perchta had proved to be was too valuable to be discarded.

If we look at the AFA map showing punishments attributed to Perchta, we see that, within a fairly narrow band extending southwards from north of the city of Salzburg, and then eastwards through Styria, she is said to cut open the stomachs, usually of lazy or untidy people, and to fill them with domestic refuse, chaff, or splinters of glass (Wolfram and Kretschmer 1979, map 113d). That the punishment of lazy or untidy people should involve unswept dust or refuse makes sense, but why should the refuse be put into their stomachs? Compare another incongruous fact. At Schottwien, about seventy kilometres to the south-west of Vienna, Percht scrapes the tongues of lying children with glass. That also makes sense, in a rather horrible way. Less clear is why the best safeguard against this punishment is to eat a hearty meal (Wolfram 1980, 50). What we must proceed from is that the common denominators in all this seem to be eating and stomachs.