Al Ridenour, author of The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas: Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil, is back with his new book, A Season of Madness, Fools, Monsters, and Marvels of the Old World Carnival, which explores customs and celebrations that will appeal to any reader interested in the Krampus and old, world traditions and monsters.
We spoke to Ridenour about A Season of Madness and all of his other projects in this exclusive interview.
I’ll admit, when I first saw the title of the book, I thought, ok, I guess this is going to be an exploration of the freak show or the side show culture. And then when I picked it up, and knowing your previous work, I said to myself, this makes a lot more sense.
Al Ridenour: You are not alone. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve mentioned this to and I have an interests in side shows and so forth. I mean, as Americans, we don’t really have carnivals in the old world sense. And everybody I’ve mentioned it to, I think so far have been Americans and confused. England doesn’t have much of a Carnival. Germany has Carnivals and the Netherlands have Carnivals, but yeah, it’s just it’s not part of our landscape. And then when I actually saw them, I went back to those traditions, the folk tradition and, you know, this area of the world, then I said, ok, yeah, I get it.
How would you describe it to those people who when you say carnival, as you say at the start of your book, people think of the Tilt-A-Whirl and cotton candy. This couldn’t be farther from that world. How would you describe the old world Carnival to them.
Ridenour: Carnival is like Halloween. It’s like Halloween, plus Christmas, plus various frat-style pranks, plus demolition derby. Carnival takes many different forms. It’s kind of a cultural kind of steam vent to let off steam before what was once a very important period of Lent before Easter. So it was the time to indulge, to get drunk, to eat a lot of meat, and to just basically make a fool of yourself. The fool, the Joker in your card deck, that’s an icon of carnival for a lot of countries, although in other countries, you have more bestial animalistic figures that stalk the land more like the Krampus.
And what happened with me is when I was researching the Krampus book, I kept running into figures that were shaggy and kind of ominous figures also wearing bells frequently. And I kept wondering, is this some strange version of the Krampus? And I was soon disabused of that notion that these are actually Carnival figures. And I realized that some people, even friends who grew up in Germany who are making a documentary about Krampus and Krampus culture, misidentify Carnival figures as Krampus. The traces are related, but they fall at a different time of the year. And honestly, the Krampus tradition, which Americans know pretty well now, is sort of a small subset of the carnival season, which can actually begin in the sort of far reaches of Christmas. Carnival is called the fifth season in Germany because it’s a long period of time.
Americans should think of carnival in terms of Halloween and Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras is a carnival celebration because Louisiana was Catholic. In Philadelphia, the Mummer’s Parade which is on January 1st now, a long time ago in certain regions was part of Carnival. Carnival can begin as early as November 11th in Germany, and it ends on whenever the first day before the first day of Lent, but it also never on a fixed date, and this can also makes it confusing for Americans, because it’s on a lunar calendar, because it’s fixed to the old Jewish feasts of Passover. The Christians use that for their dating at the Last Supper and the Passion and all that. It’s the Easter story, so it changes every year.
It’s interesting that your research on your previous book led you down this rabbit hole. And boy, I mean, there are so many different stories and traditions in this book that it must have really opened up a giant sardine can, so to speak, for you.
Ridenour: Yeah, it’s so giant. When I was doing the Krampus research, I decided to stay in Europe, so there’s a whole Latin American Carnival, which maybe Americans are actually a little more familiar with from Brazil and so forth, which I didn’t get into. And even much of Europe, I neglected. I will honestly say, I also filtered the stories based on personal interest. And having written about the Krampus, I have sort of a love of the folk horror genre, so I zeroed in on traditions that involved costumed figures that reminded me of him, but I also focused on not the Carnivals in big cities so much, but in kind of the outreaches. These represent kind of the older way that Carnival was celebrated, which would be involved in house to house visits like the Krampus troops did in the old days. Now, even Krampus is sort of a big city thing that turned into a sort of a municipal parade and that’s the same course that a lot of Carnival celebrations took. The traditions began largely as something akin to our trick or treating or Christmas caroling. It’s that kind of door-to-door costume visits.
I found that it’s interesting you you compared Carnival it to a combination of some of the holidays we would understand or know the roots of here, but in terms of the Halloween connection, so much of these celebrations have to do with masks and costumes. And that seems to be pretty pervasive in Carnival, would you say?
Ridenour: Masks, I mean, everyone can understand without knowing anything about this, that a mask allows you to sort of act out your forbidden impulses or act out another side of your personality. So, yeah, masks afford that possibility.
One of the early chapters is the “sardine versus the sausage”. What is the significance of both in Carnival?
Ridenour: It’s kind of integral to understanding what this is. As I was saying, Catholics and the Orthodox still celebrate Lent. It’s still important, not like it was in the Middle Ages, but even today Catholics give up meat on Friday or every Friday of Lent. And then they fast a little on those two days, but it used to be that you gave up meat for the entire Lent season and you couldn’t eat dairy either. So that meant no butter, no eggs. In England, the only vestiges of Carnival after it became Protestant in England was what they called Pancake Day. It was the day to use up all your eggs and butter and milk and all that sort of thing. It’s also the name in Russia, where isi is sometimes called the Butter Fair. So you were getting rid of all this stuff.
The sardine would have been what you were eating for 40 days in Lent, so you could try to get as much sausage as you could before that started. The sausage, the pig, it’s the perfect metaphor for Carnival. It’s stuffed, the sausage is stuffed to exploding. It’s made from an animal that doesn’t behave in a particularly elegant way. So yeah, there’s even a Bruegel painting, which has characters doing battle with sardines, holding sardines and sausages and all sorts of other symbols of the two seasons at war with each other. The whole friction isn’t really understood in our culture anymore, but everybody still likes to let off steam whether or not Lent is a big part of your life. In Spain they also have an interesting celebration called the Burial of the Sardine. It’s kind of a sort of anticipatory anger toward the sardine and Carnival.
Unfortunately, it’s not the end of the sardine, it’s when the sardine comes in. They make giant papier-mâché sardines rather than bury them there, they don’t usually burn them, but they do in some. I think in Madrid they actually have a little funeral for a sardine. Mock funerals are a big part of Carnival, actually, especially at the end of the season. The last chapter of my book is called “Killing Carnival” so there’s usually some kind of effigy that represents the spirit of Carnival; the Carnival King that’s destroyed. It end up being a mock mourning, kind of mock satiric religious service because the powers that be were religious. Mocking religious, and now more political figures and anyone in power, anybody who thinks a lot of themselves, is always in the spirit of Carnival.
Are fertility rites also a part of Carnival?
Ridenour: Yeah, but they’re not exactly fertility rites. Again, coming from the folklore world, you would think of sort of nude frolics out by the stones or the standing stones. It’s not, but fertility in this sense is, well, it’s human fecundity, it’s human reproduction. And so in the traditional culture, that means marriage and producing children. Carnival was also used to enforce social expectations. so if there was someone in the community who hadn’t married by a certain time who rejected what the community thought were suitable suitors, they would be kind of humiliated in a ritual involving writing on them or pulling a log. There’s a strange connection with logs and unwed women. Later it was turned towards men too. It happened in Germany and Austria, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Poland, and also Ukraine. The purpose is to encourage the community to keep reproducing to make those babies.
So there’s the human reproduction, that kind of fecundity, but there’s also the soil. A lot of the rituals are designed to, or at least passively designed to, help the crops grow. The celebrations occur in February and March, so it’s largely still frozen. It’s sort of a good luck for the coming year and in an agricultural community, that means good crops. Even some of the passion stuff that I wrote about in my last book, it’s the same thing. And then some of the dances are similar in the sense that the higher the costume figure jumps, the higher the grain’s supposed to grow. Plows are involved in a lot of rituals in a number of different countries and they’re used symbolically to remind us that this is an agricultural celebration or it begins with those roots. So fertility is in there.
You mentioned the pranks and some of the hijinks earlier. Is there one that stands out to you as being a good example of some of the behavior that would go on during one of these festivals?
Ridenour: A lot of just ridiculous pranks. Speaking of plows, plows are dragged over cobblestone streets and seed is scattered on the pavement, which is essentially a ridiculous, fruitless gesture. There’s also the end of Carnival. I mentioned killing Carnival in Hungary and Romania and I think the Czech Republic, there’s a funeral for the double bass, which is the favorite instrument for party music. So it’s usually not actually buried, but they can be held in cemeteries. Absurd gestures like that are part of it. In Germany, there’s a custom of writing fool’s books. And the person who’s costumed as a fool carries the book and he writes embarrassing things about the community in it. He will read them to people as he approaches them on the street. So there’s a lot of humiliation involved in Carnival.
You know, it’s all supposed to be good natured. And if you grow up in this world, you expect it. It’s kind of like, you know how to take the joke, you expect it. There may be something there that you don’t like, but it is a lot of that kind of rough social interaction, but you know what’s coming. Similar to the Krampus tradition too, it sounds appalling to Americans. But when you grow up with it and you eventually get to be on the other side of it, which would apply to these traditions too, when you get to be the one dishing it out.
Speaking of the Krampus, there are a few other really interesting monster figures in the different regions that are a part of Carnival. Is there one that you felt was like most closely related to that, to the figure that you spent so much time on?
Ridenour: I would say so. It’s also because it’s in Slovenia, which is just south of Austria. In fact, it used to, well, a lot of Europe used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but it’s called the Kurent. Like Krampus, it has a shaggy sheepskin suit and a carved wooden mask as a face and it’s another one of these characters that drags the plow around from house to house. And again, the old customs at least involved house visits. Krampus troops show up at these events too. And I remember early on looking at photos and and thinking “wait, what am I looking at here”? But the Kurent, it looks, it looks like Krampus. It’s comes out of, it comes out of a culture that in that part of Slovenia, there’s a lot of German speakers there too.
The Kurenz also brings fertility, which we don’t really talk about with the Krampus, but when I was in Austria, I remember people turning to me and explaining the tradition to me. And they would say, “good luck”, which again, in an old agricultural society, that means you’re going to have good crop. He also has a little stick covered with hedgehog bristles that he threatens the children with. I found a 19th century illustration and there’s screaming, crying kids in it too. So it just can’t help but remind you of the Krampus.
The other one that I liked a lot was this whole tradition of the Carnival Bear, which in most cases was someone dressed up, right?
Ridenour: Yes, looking sometimes more and sometimes less like a bear. Sometimes they call things bears that we wouldn’t recognize as being bears. The classic examples are in the Basque region from the French and Spanish border, the Pyrenees. One of them uses an actual taxidermy bear skin with a head worn on top like a helmet and then some kind of lips out underneath the jaw, so it looks very much like a bear, but I suspect that a lot of these suits were very rough. They didn’t look like bears. There were no apes or monkeys to reference, or if there were, we didn’t know. Bears were kind of a go-to analog for men or for sort of the idea of the wild man.
And the wild man was also iconic of Carnival, especially in Germany and also in France. There are legends from medieval France with a half-man, half-bear hero character. The bear festival is funny because the person playing the bear is actually accompanied by hunters. The hunters actually help him catch people in the crowd. They point out likely candidates. And as with the Krampus traditions, it’s a guy playing the bear. And there’s a lot of guys grabbing women, which is, in the Basque region, it’s just fine and has been an old custom. The Krampuses, who are likely 20-year-old men, go after girls their same age and there’s a lot of playful, happy screaming.
At the end of the ritual the bear is shaved, so there’s a lot of clowning around with shaving cream and a not-sharp razor. And the bear, at that point, peels his bear skin off, and he emerges as a man. The one idea behind this is it’s kind of the young Basque men throwing off their wild side. And now you’re a man, and now you take on the responsibilities, you raise the family. So again, a lot of these crazy rituals still reinforce traditional expectations of what that helps the societies thrive. There’s some other kinds of bears, but those are like the classic ones in the Basque regions.
Have the traditions been sanitized a bit over the years?
Ridenour: There’s a pattern I kept seeing over and over again with these old world traditions. And as I mentioned earlier, it is also what we have seen happen with the Krampus tradition. The Krampus tradition began with house visits that were not organized. And then as more and more people are out in the streets, crisscrossing, visiting houses, they sort of say, “Hey, that’s fun. Let’s watch the people on their way to the houses. Oh, I know, let’s have them go down this main street.” This eventually becomes “Oh, let’s just organize a parade”. You have this thing that starts out with a bunch of wild teenagers doing something and you turn it into a parade that has some rules and has some regulation and a certain expectation. T
The same thing has happened with a lot of these Carnival traditions, but those are kind of the Carnivals that I wasn’t as interested in. In Germany, for instance, there is a big split between the Southwest region and the rest of the country. In the Southwest, it’s a little more wild and it’s called Fasnacht down there, and that’s the one that really plays up the wildness or the foolishness of the carnival. The fool is important. In the North, it’s kind of funny because in the North, it’s marching bands, much more regimented and very political, sort of intellectual humor; two very different mentalities. And of course, the North was under Prussian influence, so it’s almost a militant feel. I lived in Berlin during carnival and that’s in that part of the country and it seemed very uninteresting to me at the time.
What happened in Bulgaria with some Carnival figures called the Kukeri is also significant. When they were under communist rule, the Soviet Union wanted to celebrate local cultures as a way to kind of keep people feeling a sense of identity with the Soviet Union. So they sponsored a carnival for these Kukeri figures, which are impossible to describe because they come in so many different varieties. They started offering a Soviet-approved expert at the event who’s studied it and gives a kind of introduction to each character and so it kind of becomes a cultural petting zoo where it’s very contained. The other thing they did, and the reason I mentioned this example is they started offering cash prizes for the costumes, and under that influence, a lot of the costumes grew a lot more elaborate. There’s certain regions that figures got 10 times taller, as they wear these crazy things on top of their shoulders, so they even changed what the look was because the money they were offering led to building a better suit. And of course, communities and individuals always have their competitive edge, especially when you put money into it like that. Most of these are very local customs, but yeah, it’s a pretty common pattern.
As far as other things you’re currently working on, I know you have your podcast Bone and Sickle.
Ridenour: The podcast grew out of my interest in the in the Krampus book and I wanted to keep talking about that kind of dark folklore. It comes out once a month and it’s sort of flash history, modified dark history or folklore and horror. The stories are all dramatized with music and sound effects too, so it’s not one of these talking heads show; it’s more like a radio play. I will also be ay the first Krampus America Convention on May 10th and 11th in Breverton, Washington, and I think they’re expecting a really good crowd there. So that’ll be exciting to see how that
goes. I know there’s some Austrian mass carvers coming and people from different
troops all over the country coming.
Are you still involved with the Krampus celebrations in Los Angeles?
Ridenour: Oh yeah, I just got a call from one of the venues and emailed one of the venues this week. They want to expand what we did last year, because we slowed it down during and right after COVID and we went dark for a few years and we lost a lot of really great venues. So there was a little bit of a hiatus, but yeah, we have been back for the last couple of years. We’re back full strength. It’s exploded; I can’t keep track of it.
We are also planning another book from Feral Houses. We’re actually looking at a box set that would focus on these seasonal celebrations, not exactly the four seasons, but we’re looking at a series that will eventually be a box set, so we’re very careful to make this book the same dimension as the Krampus book so we can fit it in that box, so look for another
couple of books.
A Season of Madness: Fools, Monsters, and Marvels of the Old-World Carnival is now available at finer book stores everywhere. Check out Ridenour’s website right here as well.
If you enjoyed this interview, check out our flashback interviews with the author about Krampus and Frau Perchta, “the Christmas witch”.
