Krampus

Over the weekend I became mildly obsessed with KRAMPUS, a pagan demon from Eastern Europe who somehow survived the Judeo Christian purge on false idols and is now associated with the dark side of Christmas. He's the reason why European kids don't suffer the plague of holiday entitlement. He doesn't mess around with lumps of coal when kids are naughty not nice. He tortures the little fuckers with birch rods, hot tongs and other implements, and drags them off to Hell.

His closest American analogue may be Gene Simmons from KISS. (No, really.)

Big thanks to my Pal-Who-Hates-the-Internet-But-Maintains-an-Interesting-Expatriate-Blog-Anyway for arranging the introduction. (Waving. Hi, Mister X!!!!)

From the looks of him, Krampus is a survivor from a very early shamanistic tradition that may date all the way back to the Indo-European tribes who inhabited what's now Eastern Europe and the Arabian Peninsula back in 2500 B.C. or so. Krampus's protruding tongue is reminiscent of Kali, the Hindu goddess of mayhem and the consort of head Hindi honcho Shiva, upon whose prostrate form she's often pictured standing.

(One is not up on one's comparative mythology, but if one were, one might speculate that back in matrilineal times, Kali and Shiva were the same divinity, that they were cleft in two following the rise in popularity of the purely masculine Sky God model of divinity. One has read The King Must Die after all!

Sky Gods must be heroic. Their consorts, in contrast, are underhanded, sneaky and at times, downright evil. One even sees this to some degree in the respective personalities of Zeus and Hera.)

The earliest Indo-European traditions may also survive in the strange Himalayan religion called Bon which is the traditional animistic faith of Tibet, Mustang and Nepal. Buddhism didn't reach Tibet until the 7th century AD, after all. In some remote parts of the Himalayas, in fact, unadulterated Bon is still practiced. The reason Tibetan Buddhism is so different from its spare, pared down counterpart practiced in Japan and China is that it conscripted the animistic Bon pantheon and turned them into saints and demons.

Interesting factoid imparted to me by my Tibetans back in my ESL tutoring days: In Tibetan culture, sticking out one's tongue is a traditional form of greeting, a display of respect actually. Buddhists explain this by saying you can see the mantras a person has recited on that person's tongue. But suppose the custom dates back to some prehistoric, Indo-European greeting ritual? This speculation sheds some light on Krampus's out-thrust tongue: The Judeo Christian tradition has always been down on syncretism.

Krampus, then, would seem to be an Eastern European cousin of Maximon, the last of the Mayan gods, sometimes known as St. Simon, whose Lake Atitlan sanctuary in San Iago I visited in February 2002.