It was around 9 pm on Christmas Eve and I was driving in a car with my family in the Swiss countryside. Along a series of increasingly quiet and narrow roads, illuminated by yellow lanterns in the villages and completely black in the fields, we reached our destination – the village of Zifen.
The streets were absolutely silent. Not a soul was moving and we wondered if we were in the right place. Then, turning into the alley towards the church, we noticed them in the headlights: men in tall black hats.
I was in Qifen in the last dark hours before Christmas, because that's when the lights in the village go out and silent people in hats as tall as houses walk through the streets. Around the neck of each walker is a heavy bell with a gong. At the head of the procession is a man with a white beard, holding a long staff with a sooty rag at the end. The men's hats, as I read online, had to be seen to be believed: from what little information I could find, they were strange structures, eerie chimneys rising 20 or 30 feet.
Switzerland isn't the only place where ghostly rituals are performed in the winter darkness. As the days get shorter and night falls – and, it must be said, farmers have time – people do strange things. IN South Tyrol in December, demonic Krampus– neighbors in elaborate, blood-chilling disguises are running through the streets. Between Christmas and January 6th in Germany hairy monsters marching through dark alleys. At the end of February, when the days grow longer but darkness still reigns, chaotic carnival celebrations take the stage and upend the usual order of things. Around the same time, huge costumed monsters Chaggyatta in Valais in Switzerland are roaming through villages, scaring children and possibly a few adults.
What is it about the darkest time of the year that triggers these rituals? What does it mean when someone wears a goat fur mask or a twenty foot tall hat?
“We have a long and rich history of blackness,” says Nick Dunne, professor of urban design at Lancaster University in the UK and author of the book. Dark Affairs. And while the absence of light has many negative connotations (after all, it is a condition in which human ancestors may have been at greater risk of encounters with nocturnal predators, and in which today you are at greater risk of stubbing your toe), this negative interpretation is also attached to us. “It's worth remembering that we are born with two innate fears: falling and loud noise. We are not born with a fear of the dark,” he says. Indeed, it's the contrast with darkness that makes light interesting, says Tim Edensor, professor of social and cultural geography at Manchester Metropolitan University, who worked with Dunn.
Moreover, equating darkness with evil and good with light may be a relatively recent invention. Edensor attributes this to the rise of Christianity, a view echoed by Susan Greenwood, an anthropologist of magic at the University of Sussex. But even if you separate darkness from evil, darkness still has power, she says.
“In much of northern Europe there is a myth about the Wild Hunt, this ghostly cavalcade that roams the wilds,” says Greenwood. “They are led by a deity, usually Odin or Woden, on horseback, and are accompanied by a pack of truly ferocious wild hounds or black dogs.
“When I was doing fieldwork, I was working with a group of pagan witches in a coven, and they set a challenge: you had to walk through the forest alone at night, call the Wild Hunt and call the dog to earn the right to the forest,” says Greenwood, who bravely walked through the dark forest alone. “It was just terrible,” she recalls. “These myths and legends, whatever we call them, they are powerful.”
As we entered the village of Zeifen, we passed by many hats. They were leaned against the wall of the barn, each mounted on a supporting frame similar to those used in an orchestra to carry drums, so that the weight fell on the owner's shoulders and the brim rested on the head. We took a wrong turn and found ourselves in pitch darkness, racing along a path between fields when more people in black hats appeared ahead of us. We stepped aside and let them through.
We got to the gas station (closed, like everything else in the village on Christmas Eve). At this point we began to notice that other people were gathering. Until now the streets were dead. But now there were nine or ten more of them, their faces dimly lit by the street lamps. As we waited, more and more dark figures emerged from the city's alleys. There were no merchants or sellers of festive mulled wine, no noise, only rare quiet voices.
At 9 pm the church on the hill rang the bell. And at the last blow the light went out. The street was filled with blackness. A sudden noise was heard in the distance, the incredible roar of countless bells. The walk has begun.
Villager Franz Stohler, an 87-year-old expert on the tradition from Zeifen, says the walk has followed the same route around the ancient village center for more than 200 years. Nynichlinglers, as the walkers are called, walk because in the past the villagers believed that on these darkest and shortest days of the year, a window to another world would open in the ground and spirits would be released. The sound makes them return from the village for another year.
The sound of bells in the darkness attracted me like a magnet. Now they were moving along the old streets of the city, and I followed the sound with increasing persistence. Then, in the distance, a camera flash illuminated a hellish sight: shrouded in the smoke of village fires, a huge black organ, as tall as the houses on either side, rose and rolled across the square. When the camera flash went off, we again saw nothing, only heard the fantastic ringing of bells. But they were getting closer.
As they passed me, again illuminated by the camera flash, I saw the tallest hats at the front of the procession, and the shorter hats at the back, in rows of three, until at the end people appeared in simple felt shepherds' hats and long dark coats, jingling their bells. I ran alongside, covering my ears with my hands, watching the undulating movement of the tallest hats, which were three to four times taller than those who wore them. They walked on, turning into a darkened gas station and turning onto a country road, winding their way through the city. Our group lost each other in the night and cacophony, fragmented by the strangeness, but miraculously found each other again.
The hats are an addition to the old tradition, Stoler says, but the rule is that the tallest hats should go first. When he was a young man, after World War II, the tallest hats were only three feet or so high. Since then they have grown and grown, although now they are as high as they can be, he thinks; the ancient route passes under power lines, which impose a natural limit on the height of the hat.
At some point, a car rushed down the street, clearly heading to neighboring Basel and using this road for its intended purpose: as a modern highway. What must they have thought as hundreds of faces emerged from the shadows on the side of the road, a woman waved furiously at them and made them turn off the lights, and then out of the inky blackness a huge centipede of men in black bell hats crawled out of the alley and crossed their line of sight. They must have felt a surge of unease—here, on Christmas Eve, or perhaps on the way to Mass, a fragment of an ancient, strange past had stopped their progress.
On some level, these rituals of darkness are intended to keep people in line, Greenwood says. Krampus scares children to remind them of the punishment for disobedience. The man standing in front of the Nynichlinglers has a rag on a stick to attack anyone who might sneak a peek through their window. (These days, Stoler notes, spectators are welcome, but the stick holds up.) Other rituals have similar morals. But they are also about the change of year, the beginning of the end of short days. “It's about reaching the deepest and darkest point of winter and bringing back the light. It continues right up until Christmas,” says Greenwood. “This is the return of the light.”
Stoler says that today a walk through Nünichlingler is, above all, an expression of joy. The young people walking along it – always young people from the village – at the end feel that they have been through something and come out on the other side. The darkness won't last forever.
As we followed the walkers again into the fields outside the town at the end of the procession, at a signal from the leader they silenced their bells. The black hats fell like fallen trees onto the grassy hillside. The men disappeared back into the village on their way to dinner, again indistinguishable from the crowd.
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Sasha Roger Cuba translated for Mr. Stoler.
