Folks, we have a problem.

It's the Eve of Beltane. The time has come to go up to the top of the Holy Mountain and enact the ancestral rites that bring Winter to an end and assure a fruitful Summer to come.

Well, but: the king has turned to the new god, and forbidden—on pain of death—the Old Gods and the Old Worship. He has sent soldiers to ring the Brocken, our Holy Mountain, and ordered them to kill anyone who attempts to ascend.

But the ancient rites must be enacted, lest the Wheel should cease to turn.

So what do we do?

This is the story that the poet laureate of German Romanticism, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), tells in his poem Die Erste Walpurgisnacht, “the First Walpurgisnacht.” Goethe's poem was later set to music by composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) in a pagan cantata of the same name (Op. 60), which premiered in 1843.

In Germany, Walpurgisnacht looks a lot like Halloween does here in the States: it's a haunted time, a night when the ghosts and monsters come out. How did it change from Holy to Haunted? That's the tale that Goethe and Mendelssohn tell in Die Erste Walpurgisnacht.

OK, so here's what we're going to do.

The king's men—the ones blocking the way to the Mountain—are Christians, right? That means, of course, that they're gullible and superstitious.

So we're all going to dress up like ghosts and monsters. The soldiers will beshit themselves with fear and run away, terrified.

Well, that's what we do, and what do you know? It works. The nazzes can't get away fast enough, and we enact our holy Rites in peace.

So that's what we do now, every year.

And unto ages of ages.

Above: The Teufelskanzel (“Devil's pulpit”) or Hexenaltar (“Witches' altar”) on the top of Mount Brocken. The Brocken is the highest of the Harz Mountains, long famed as the site of the Walpurgisnacht witches' sabbat.

For more on both Die Erste Walpurgisnacht, and the German Walpurgisnacht itself, see:

John Michael Cooper (2007) Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Walpurgis Night: The Heathen Muse in European Culture, 1700-1850. University of Rochester Press.