Krampus
A horned, hairy devil with a long red tongue, a chain and a bundle of birch twigs, who comes with St Nicholas on the evening of 5 December in Austria and neighbouring Alpine lands. The saint rewards the good children; Krampus threatens the naughty ones.
Meaning
In Austria he is the Krampus, once also Grampus; in some places he was called Bartl or Klaubauf. Susanne Breuss, a curator at the Wien Museum until 2023, writes that he was originally the devil, as his Rhineland name, Düvel, shows. The pair stand for good and evil: Nicholas, the messenger of heaven, brings light, and his servant, a terror figure in the language of folklore research, comes from hell. The Vienna Morgen-Post of 1881 described the visit as it used to be: a stately figure in a cleric’s robes with a flowing white beard and a mitre, followed by a monster half bear and half goat, with a horned head, a glowing red tongue hanging down over his shaggy chest, a rattling chain and a sharp birch rod, and a basket on his back with room for bad and lazy children. National Geographic writes that on the next morning, 6 December, children look in the shoe or boot they left out for presents or a rod. Krampus runs, the Krampuslauf, in which men dressed as devils chase people through the streets, are held in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Slovenia and the Czech Republic, and Krampus nights have spread to American cities such as Washington, D.C. and New Orleans. Breuss writes that despite all criticism the custom is alive today.
Origin and history
Where Krampus came from is not settled, Breuss writes. There are signs that he arose in the middle of the 17th century from the medieval custom of the child bishop, who for one day took the power of the abbot or mayor and visited children on the eve of St Nicholas. With the Krampus came a tamed devil, kept under the saint’s control. In Vienna, sources going back to the 17th century show the two entering houses together, usually on the evening of 5 December. Clement Miles (1912) found the same figure across the Alps: in Tyrol the Klaubauf, “a shaggy monster with horns, black face, fiery eyes, long red tongue, and chains that clank as he moves”, in Lower Austria the Krampus and in Styria Bartel.
He has had critics. Breuss records objections from the Enlightenment reformers of Emperor Joseph II’s time to the rough excesses of the custom; in the interwar years Vienna’s Social Democrats campaigned against the “Krampusunfug”, the Krampus nonsense, which they said only frightened children. Commerce went the other way: by the 1860s Vienna spoke of a Krampus market, and in 1932 the Catholic Reichspost complained that shop windows were so full of Krampus figures it seemed to be his feast rather than St Nicholas’s.
Pagan spirit or Christian devil?
Miles thought the “heathen origin” of these figures evident, though he admitted their pedigree was hard to trace. Breuss gives a later and Christian origin: a devil brought into the St Nicholas visit in the 17th century, kept under the saint’s control, and still dressed mostly in black and red, the colours of hell. National Geographic derives the name from the German krampen, a claw.
Read next
- Next in Christmas symbolsChristmas stockingA stocking hung by the fireplace on Christmas Eve for Santa Claus to fill. Clement Clarke Moore’s poem of 1823 has “the stockings were hung by the chimney with care”; older European customs put the saint’s gifts in shoes.
- Krampus began as the devil, tamed and led by the saintThe DevilTrump XV of the tarot: a horned, bat-winged figure with two chained people at his feet. A. E. Waite read it as ravage, violence and fatality.
See also
St Nicholas and Santa Claus, Nativity scene, Star of Bethlehem, Advent wreath, Christmas tree, Holly.
Sources
- Der Krampus (Susanne Breuss, Wien Museum Magazin, 2020), Susanne Breuss, curator at the Wien Museum 2004–2023; Wien Museum Magazin, 3 December 2020, Wien Museum, article text
- Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan (Clement A. Miles, 1912), Clement A. Miles, Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912); Project Gutenberg e-text 19098, Internet Archive (Project Gutenberg text), chapter VIII, St. Nicholas's Day
- What is Krampus? Explaining the horrific Christmas beast (Tanya Basu, National Geographic, 2018), Tanya Basu, National Geographic, 5 December 2018 (first published 2013, updated), National Geographic, article text
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
Added .