12/6/22: DER KRAMPEN IST DICH BEOBACHTEN – THE KRAMPUS IS LOOKING AT YOU W/ CHAD LEWIS

Krampus has become an American Tulpa who manifested out of nowhere to constitute Christmas pessimism. This sinister creature is the mirroring entity of an ancient Phoenician god known as Molech and is charged with punishing unruly children with beatings and more severe punishments. Also regarded as the counterpart of Santa Claus, Krampus has come to represent the cynicism of the age where commercialism and greed have soured people about the season. Tonight on Ground Zero, Clyde Lewis talks with paranormal researcher and author, Chad Lewis about DER KRAMPEN IST DICH BEOBACHTEN – THE KRAMPUS IS LOOKING AT YOU.

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12/6/22: DER KRAMPEN IST DICH BEOBACHTEN – THE KRAMPUS IS LOOKING AT YOU W/ CHAD LEWIS

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In one of those Christmas carols, they sing on the radio there is a lyric saying that Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. With scary ghost stories that tell of the glories of Christmas a long time ago.

Well, as much of you know, Halloween is fleeting, but the scariest stories come from old pagan Christmas traditions that were terrifying as the night were longer and darker and things that go bump in the night were accompanied by screams in the woods and entities that would either scratch on the windows or knock on the doors.

There is an old superstition that states that when the winter wind blows and a person hears three knocks it means someone has died. In many paranormal stories we hear that when three knocks are heard at the door and no one is there, it means someone has died or is about to. Since these knocks are normally heard before someone dies they are a classic omen or harbinger.

This belief is sometimes known as the “three knocks of death.”

The Irish and the Scots both have traditions that state three knocks on a door or three taps on a window especially when heard at regular intervals, lasting for two minutes, means death.

According to several Native American tribes, when the thumping of a stick 3 times on the ground is heard or the beating of a drum 3 times is heard it means someone will die.

This superstition also pops up in Arab and Jewish traditions.

In America, people have told tales for years that involve three knocks and death.

Sometimes relatives pass down family “stories” that involve a grandparent who heard three mysterious knocks only to receive word afterward a beloved relative died, sometimes at exactly the time the knocks were heard.

These knocks are described as out of the ordinary. Those who have heard them state they were very loud, or that when they were heard they caused a feeling or sensation of fear or creepiness.

Most often these knocks or taps are heard on doors or windows. But other stories mention knocks on walls or even sounds that seem to come from inside the walls or from every corner of the room.

It is stated that the cause for these knocks is never found. For instance, if a door is opened no one is there. These stories often occur in winter and it is stated after the knocks are heard and the door is opened no footsteps are seen in the snow.

In an offshoot of this superstition some believe when three knocks are heard it means the devil or an evil spirit wants to come in.

Christmas has always been traditionally associated with sinister creatures from the woods and ghosts of hungry children knocking on doors. Their hollowed-out eyes are never seen in the winter darkness.. only their ghoulish voices asking for cookies Bread or milk,

But always remember it is the demons that knock three times unannounced. There are many people who will swear by the idea that during the darkest winters they have been haunted by beings that have no explanation.

Is it all that coincidental – or is there something evil afoot?

Christmas has always been a traditional ancient feast that has many positive associations for people around the world. While the bible places the birth of Christ in Bethlehem it does not say when, but by the 4th century, the churches in the East were celebrating it on January 6 and the Churches of the West on December 25.

One thing is certain about Christmas – it is rooted in many traditions and superstitions relating to nature that existed long before Christmas and many have continued in one form or another to the present day. The many strands of Christmas can be seen in the variety of different traditions associated with or originating in, places all over Europe.

One of the things that are not talked about is that many of the ancient Christmas traditions were based on midwinter nature worship.

The Church exerted its power and authority over pagan practices and in more recent centuries as the industrial revolution took people away from the land and into the cities and factories. Many of the old traditions were abandoned and some of the them survived.

The predominant figure of Christmas has become Santa Claus and originated in the stories around St Nicholas, the 4th century Bishop of Myra Turkey, giving anonymous gifts to help people in need or trouble.

In many European regions, St. Nicholas came door to door with a bishop’s miter and crosier on his feast day, December 6. He was accompanied by his helper Ruprecht or Krampus as he is known in the Alpine regions. Krampus is depicted as half goat and half demon and punished misbehaving children with a rod.  He would hit the naughty with a stick and throw the naughty children in a basket or a bag. Some unruly children were thrown over bridged into rivers and lakes.

It is believed that Krampus derives from the much earlier pre-Christian Norse mythology and that he was the son of the god of the underworld Hel. While the name Krampus is believed to originate from Krampen meaning ‘claw’, Ruprecht is believed to be from “Hruodperaht” meaning “gloriously shining one” another name of Wotan.

Their negative status is likely the result of Christian attempts to assert dominance over the pagan peoples of the time. Krampus is an evil fertility demon who scares children (reversing his earlier role as fertility god with his hazel wood rod.

During the 12th century the church tried to end the Krampus celebrations but it seems that, like with many popular traditions, they re-surfaced and were re-integrated back into church traditions. Unlike the ‘demonized’ Krampus, the Christian St Nicholas distributed typical gifts of nuts, dried fruits, chocolate, spices and toys.

Krampus while well known all over Europe and Slavic countries his presence is relatively new in the United States as many of the darker characters of the season were not acknowledged by the puritan religions.

Krampus has become an American Tulpa that has manifested out of nowhere to be the representative of Christmas pessimism.

But originally it was believed that he was created by the devil to be the evil version of Saint Nicholas. Rather than rewarding good children with candy and presents, Krampus was charged with punishing unruly children with beatings and more severe punishments.

In some ancient cultures, there was a popular myth that during a solar eclipse or during the winter solstice – evil spirits could enter into our world through a mirror. The prevailing myth is that, throughout Europe, the demonic entities that followed or accompanied Santa were called the ‘mirror opposite‘.

While Krampus like Santa is part of the legend — Santa as far as we know has never been sighted as an entity because we are told that we are not to peek at his handiwork.

But this is not the case of Krampus, who as a Christmas demon has allegedly been sighted in the times before the Winter Solstice.

You see Krampus is a representation of the Horned God Molech.

However, the twinning aspect somehow melded the two personalities of both Santa and Krampus – creating a character called Ruebezahl, another hairy and evil “Álfar” who instead of moving back and forth through the open hearth of a fireplace or entered and exited the world through a mirror.

Krampus is the mirroring entity of an ancient Phoenician god known as Molech. The traditions of Christmas – believe it or not – can be found in the Old Testament, thousands of years before Christ. If you open the Bible to Isaiah 57:5, you read about the ancients placing idols of worship under a tree:

“You burn with lust among the oaks and under every spreading tree; you sacrifice your children in the ravines and under the overhanging crags.”

In the tenth chapter of Jeremiah, we can also see that the decoration of trees was a custom that happened before Christmas:

“For the customs of the peoples are vanity. A tree from the forest is cut down and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman. They decorate it with silver and gold; they fasten it with hammer and nails so that it cannot move.”

The customs were to set fires and make sacrifices near the oak and evergreen trees and also in the sanctuaries in front on idols. They did so in the valley of Ben-hinnom.

In ancient times, anxieties that existed when the darkness gathered were released by sacrificing a child to the horned god, Molech. Krampus seems to be the mirror image of Molech. What is even more chilling is how Molech and the horned Image of Krampus have evolved over time and how in biblical times the ancients knew of the sacrifices to the horned one.

Another horned God that looked more like the devil bull was Baal.  Baal was another horned God worshipped by the Canaanites with whom they were constantly fighting over the same patch of land in the Levant. In ancient art, Baal’s associated animal was the bull  not the goat, which may or may not be associated with the Minotaur myth via ancient Minoan bull cults.

Many see a resemblance of Krampus in the design of the Baphomet.

“Baphomet” never even existed historically as a deity but was made up out of whole cloth by the Inquisition in order to slur the Knights Templar whose riches they coveted. There was some minor usage later by occultists, but Baphomet has never been worshipped in any fully developed religious sense. The current Satanic temple, a  group that uses “satanic” imagery to troll  Christians, has brought this figure back into the limelight by attempting to place amusing statues of a goat-headed figure teaching starry-eyed children into various civic buildings.

The characterization is uncanny as Krampus also gathered children together before taking the naughty ones away from their parents and sacrificing them.

There are many of the Christian faith that considers the Krampus to somehow be part of the  “occult.”

But then so are Santa, and the leaves elves, gift giving, Christmas trees, and caroling, too, since they all are part of the same para-Christian mythology deriving from the extremely pagan solstice celebrations.

What is most interesting is that when the Catholic Church spoke of Krampus. they did not condemn him as the demon of Christmas but as a demon who defies Satan and attempts to bind him in the chains of hell.

The Roman religious system says Krampus comes with his chains to bind Satan, but as any historian can tell you, Krampus was himself a demon and his chains served a more sinister purpose.  In like manner, the Roman Catholic system promises its adherents that their chains of religious control are for their good and for the binding of Satan, but in reality, some people believe that they are Satan’s minions serving a far more eternally damning purpose.

They claim that you should be fooled by the Miter of the Vicar of Christ because he is the false prophet that denies Christ and embraces pagan rituals rather than fundamentally Christian ones.

Rowdy winter celebrations have long been a part of European culture, and Krampus festivities are an extension of these rites. The creature itself appears to be a combination of the Devil as portrayed in medieval plays with a mischievous and destructive class of Alpine spirits called, Perchten.

In the folklore of Bavaria and Austria, Perchten was said to roam the countryside at midwinter, and to enter homes during the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany (especially on the Twelfth Night). She would know whether the children and young servants of the household had behaved well and worked hard all year. If they had, they might find a small silver coin the next day, in a shoe or pail. If they had not, she would slit their bellies open, remove stomachs and guts, and stuff the hole with straw and pebbles.

There are ugly Perchten who have fangs, tusks, and horse tails which are used to drive out demons and ghosts. Men would dress as the ugly Perchten during the 16th century and went from house to house driving out bad spirits.

Throughout 19th-century England, tales of demon-like characters were told, including the tale of ‘Spring-heeled Jack’, a small demonic gnome that was able to leap into the air and terrorize people. Some say that Spring–heeled Jack was a horned, oily-skinned blue demon with a pointed head. Some say he spewed forth a blue flame from his mouth and that he had sandy hooked claws that felt cold like a corpse.

In the Winter of 1855, after a light snowfall, it was reported that hoof-like marks appeared in the snow. The footprints measured 1.5 to 2.5 inches wide and eight inches apart. The footprints were seen throughout the countryside for a total of 100 miles and even though they would veer off at various points the greater part of the hoof prints were moving forward in a straight line.

Some of these hoof tracks were seen going up walls, on rooftops, haystacks and leading up to and even into various drain pipes that some say were only four inches in diameter. Villagers in the south side of Devon, England reported sightings of a horned devil-like figure walking around looking into windows. Many townspeople armed themselves and attempted to track down the beast responsible, without success.

As the Daily Mail reported back on March 13, 2009, in the article “Ancient Mystery Returns As ‘Satan’s Hoofprints’ Are Spotted In Devon Back Garden“:

Scientists from the Centre for Fortean Zoology inspected the prints which measure 5ins (13cm) long with a stride of between 11 and 17ins (28 and 43cm)… Some villagers blamed the church, which had recently changed the standard prayer book, for letting the devil into their communities. Others blamed animals, pranksters, and even a weather balloon – but the phenomenon, described as the ‘great Devon mystery’, was never explained.”

The prints did resemble those of a goat and skeptics brought up the possibility that rabbits or even an escaped kangaroo from the local zoo may have caused them. Still, there is no explanation for the curious hoof prints in the snow.

The demon-haunted world was respected in the 18th and 19th centuries and Christmas was not celebrated in the way we do it now. It was frowned upon by the church to openly celebrate Christmas. Many church leaders shunned the celebrations because of the pagan origins and the demonic legends that surrounded it.

Christmas has literally cleaned up after 200 years and the darker stories are not shared that much in the United States anymore, but they remain in Denmark, Iceland and in European traditions.

Krampus is just one more reminder of what Christmas was. Now it has come to represent the cynicism of the age where commercialism and greed have soured people about the season.

In recent years,  Krampus has become a bit of a pop culture phenomenon, expanding past his original European birthplace to become known all over the world, and he has appeared in countless books, TV shows, and movies over the years, as well as igniting Krampus festivals and parades in other countries outside of Europe, including the United States. Although evil, Krampus has in many ways been commercialized almost as much as Santa Claus, and he may have lost his frightening edge a bit but is still not something any kid would want to see towering over their bed at night or scratching on their window wanting to come in.

 

SHOW GUEST: CHAD LEWIS

Written by Ron Patton