Walpurgis Night on the Brocken

The Harz is old highland, worn down and thickly wooded, and the Brocken rises above it as a bare head. At that height no trees grow; there is only granite, low scrub and a wind that seldom drops. On some three hundred days a year the summit sits in cloud.

For the people in the villages around, this was not meteorology but a message. A mountain you almost never see, where it almost always storms, where snow lies while the corn ripens below, is no ordinary place. They called it the Blocksberg, and they knew what happened there.

Those who went up anyway came back with stories. There were rings in the grass where nothing would grow. There were stones that looked like an altar, like a pulpit, like a washbasin for witches, and they were given those names. And there was, above all, the figure in the mist.

The date is no accident. In the early Middle Ages the old spring festival fell on 1 May, the night when the cattle went out and summer began. The church laid over it the feast of Saint Walburga, an English abbess canonised on 1 May. So the heathen night acquired a Christian name and stayed exactly what it was: a threshold night, in which the ordinary rules did not hold.

What people told was this. On the night of 30 April the witches anoint themselves with grease, sit astride a broomstick, an oven fork or a black goat and speak the charm. They fly out through the chimney, away over the woods, from every quarter of the sky to the Brocken. There the fire burns. There the devil sits enthroned, and one by one they come forward, do him honour and then dance with him, backwards, until the cock crows.

The farmers took it seriously enough to act against it. They laid brooms handle-upward before the door, painted tar crosses on stable doors, rang the bells and made a din with whips and kettles to keep the witches out of the air. In some Harz villages this is still done on 30 April, though it has long been chiefly a festival of bonfires and costume.

The most stubborn proof that something was on the mountain was furnished by the mountain itself. Approach the summit with the sun low behind you while mist hangs ahead, and suddenly an immense dark figure stands in the vapour, sometimes ringed with coloured light. The figure moves as you move, raises its arm as you raise yours, and vanishes when the mist tears.

It is your own shadow, cast on the mist. It is called the Brocken spectre, and it can be seen on many mountains, but nowhere as often as here, because nowhere else do the clouds sit so often on the top. To those who did not know, it was unmistakably a spirit, larger than a man, mimicking the climber as though mocking him.

In 1808 Goethe put the mountain permanently on the map. In Faust he has Mephistopheles lead his scholar up on Walpurgis Night, straight through the brood on the rocks, and since then the Brocken has been not merely a Harz summit but an address in world literature. Today a steam railway runs to the top, there is a visitor centre, and every year on 30 April thousands gather in Schierke and Thale dressed as witches and devils. The fire still burns. Only now there is beer for sale beside it.