No, the above picture is not a Cosplayer, Ren Faire-attendee, 4-Chaner, LARPer or furry. That’s an Alpine villager dressed as a Perchten, an attendant of the Slovenian goddess Frau Perchta or Pehta Baba. The costume is part of a midwinter ceremony in which villagers dressed as Perchten tromp through town to scare away evil spirits and stray dead souls.
Originally, the word Perchten (plural of Perchta) referred to the female masks representing the entourage of Frau Perchta or Pehta Baba as is known in Slovenia, an ancient goddess (some claim a connection to the Nordic goddess Freyja, though this is uncertain). Traditionally, the masks were displayed in processions (Perchtenlauf) during the last week of December and first week of January, and particularly on 6 January. The costume consists of a brown wooden mask and brown or white sheep’s skin… The Roman Catholic Church attempted to prohibit the sometimes rampant practise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but later condoned it, resulting in a revival.
Which is evidence to me that being born 800 years before the release of World of Warcraft is no reason not to start playing.
I often suspect that nerd culture, a large majority of which looks to pagan Europe for inspiration?¢‚Ǩ‚ÄùLord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft, etc etc etc?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùis to a large extent the survival of those times and those impulses, which is why it is ghettoized in our post-Christian, globalized, corporatized culture, and socially shunned. It’s also a place where a lot of the smartest people hang out, or pass through in their early-to-mid teens and spend their lives with fond, inspiring memories of. And why role-playing sessions, costume fairs, Society for Creative Anachronism meets, etc., also tend to have the air of the forbidden, held in clandestine places where… god forbid… somebody might see us doing this. (Although a lot of this has mainstreamed of late, and of course, these areas are not without their own monotheist influence, from the overt or covert Christian agendas of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkein to the Christian “guilds” that pop up in SCA or WoW to the insidious “Twilight” virus that has so unfortunately taken root in Nerd-dom.)
At the very least, there is something deep within people that used to express itself as 3-day Perchten romps through the town square, or other pagan ho-downs from around the world, and now probably expresses itself as 3-day Warcraft binges. However, I, for one, am of the mind that it’s time to get out of the ghetto and do it the old way, which, let’s face it, is bound to get everybody laid. (That’s why it’s called paganism, that’s why the church hates it, and that’s why it’s Awesome.)
If all Hollywood can do now is copy nerd culture and endlessly churn out comic-book movies while yabbering on about their Twitters, then by god, they ought to be able to handle Horny Goat Men tromping down Rodeo Drive.
