Starting the New Year With Ancient Alpine Traditions

When this pestilence that has changed the world began 22 months ago and I started to work from home – I have been in the office exactly one time since – I thought that the approximately two hours saved because of the no longer necessary daily commute would allow me to continue with this blog in full force.

It didn’t. I used the extra time and long nights to finally translate my novel from German into English (working title “Amanita”), started learning Welsch, finished my funeral celebrant course, got certified as a Death Midwife (probably worth a later blog post), got deeper into witchcraft, and a number of other little projects.

But writing this blog? For some reason I was totally blocked. It felt more like “under these circumstances, what do I have to say, really?”

Yet here we are, and it that’s because a good friend needed some help these days. And for that reason, I rummaged through my bookshelf as well as my own memories and dug out some valuable information on those ancient traditions during the Rauhnächte. Not only to aide her in what she needed and still needs to do in the coming nights, but hopefully also for anyone reading this blog.

I mentioned something about the Alpine traditions of fumigating with incense, including during these nights, in this earlier post as well as in that one, but here is the long and short of it. The Rauhnächte are the twelve nights after the Winter Solstice. To get the calculation right, one has to consider that the Sun appears to “stand still” — what the term Solstice actually means — for three days. What is meant by that is that over the year, would you get up early enough to watch the sunrise every day, you would notice that from the Winter Solstice on the sun rises a tad further north from the previous day’s sunrise. The sun does that until it reaches is farthest northern point at the Summer Solstice, whence it slowly returns to its Winter spot.

The crucial point here is that at both, the Winter and the Summer Solstices, the sun doesn’t make that daily sunrise move. Considering it’s wicked cold and people are hungry, it’s a frightening realization that the Sun isn’t moving, possibly isn’t going to return. No summer, no harvest.

But after three days of “standing still”, the bright star does what it is supposed to do, it rises further North every day.
And the night following the day when the sun does that is the first Rauhnacht. Typically, that’s the night from December 24th to the 25th. Add another 11 nights, and you arrive at the night from January 4th to the 5th as the 12th, the last Rauhnacht. There’s one more important night after that, the Perchtlnacht, when Mother Percht visits the homestead and blesses family, house, livestock, barns, and stables.

There are a couple of theories whence the term “Rauhnacht” comes. Some speculate that it is a corruption of “Rauchnacht”, German for “smoke night” describing the tradition of smoking incense to further different causes in different nights. Here, the guttural German ch sound would be suppressed into a sometimes voiced and other times a breathed, voiceless, “h”, depending on the region and its dialect.
Another theory claims the term roots in the Middle High German “ruch”, which means “hairy” and stands basically for fur. The thought is that the Rauhnächte are very much connected to livestock and making sure that the farm animals stay healthy and thrive the next year.

Whatever the provenience of the word, the key point is that there are certain magical and divinatory things one can do on each of these nights. And so I thought why not share exactly that, the traditional stuff we do in the Alps during each of these nights. And thus I am going to blog every day now with some ideas and suggestions on what to do.

Here are a few things that you can do to make the work during the Rauhnächte more fruitful.

• Get a journal and take note of your experiences and dreams during that time.
• Pull a card from your favorite Tarot or a stick from your Ogham. Or any other divination method.
• Observe the weather.
• Be aware of who you meet and which unusual animals you see.
• Any omens or strange encounters?
• Light a candle at night and think about what happened that day, particularly relative to this list.

A few general rules about the Rauhnächte:

• Do not wash anything and don’t clean out the stables. Well, that might have been something people were able to adhere to centuries ago, but it doesn’t seem practical nowadays. So, the suggestion is to not do that at least on the most important nights: this the first one, New Year’s Eve, the last, and the Perchtlnacht.
• All wheels should be stopped from turning. This refers mainly to the spinning wheel, but also mills. The reason for this rule is that this is the time when the Wheel of Fate is turning, and you don’t want the spinning or mill wheel become, or interfere with, that wheel.
• No gambling. Sorry, Las Vegas. There is a plethora of tales talking about people violating this rule and getting into trouble.
• Don’t cut hair or fingernails. Otherwise, you can be plagued with headaches and infected nailbeds in the next year.
• Close doors quietly. If you slam them shut loudly, be prepared to suffer bad luck in thunderstorms and lightning.
• Bring back things you’ve borrowed to avoid loss of energy and disease.
• Attach missing buttons so you don’t lose money the next year.

Talking about the next year: each of the twelve Rauhnächte represent a month of the next year. I will get into that more when I describe the individual nights. So, this night stands for the month of January.

So, here we are, the first Rauhnacht is about to start (or has already started). It’s the night from December 24th to December 25th and is commonly referred to “Weihnacht” in German. While it has become a term used by Christians, the name stems from that semi-pagan time in the Alps when people started to speak German and only urban centers slowly adopted Christianity. We know that the term is that old because its plural, which we use to wish “Frohe Weihnachten” to one another is still Weihnachten and not the more modern Weihnächte. The plural actually refers to all of the Rauhnächte and tells us that these nighs are sacred, “geweiht”.

This is the night of the family. It’s a good practice to light a candle for any family member, even close friends, and contemplate your relationship with them. If you get gifts for them, ponder the symbolism behind the gifts. Remember, everything that happens during the Rauhnächte has some relevance in the next year.

Animals, pets and wild ones, are your family and friends, too. All of nature is, really. You could place a gift (milk, honey, incense etc.) at the root of a tree or in water (a little creek as much as the ocean). Half a walnut shell could be a big enough vessel to put in some little gift. Store it on a rock, a fence post, or let it bob on the waves of a lake. The intent to give is the most important part of this exercise.

Your ancestors are also your family. Light a candle for them and let it burn all night in their honour and rememberance.

This is a good start for the next twelve nights. Tomorrow I will continue with the second one.

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More magical Alpine traditions can be found in my book “Mountain Magic”, available at lulu.com (preferred) and distributers such as amazon.com