Perchten

Perchten are figures in winter processions and customs of the Alpine region, ranging from ornamented, benign appearances to the frightening Schiachperchten. In Kadmon’s account, the masked performers are more than spectacle: their disguises and behavior blur the boundary between ordinary people and the supernatural beings they represent. The book uses this tradition to draw a detailed comparison with Black Metal, especially its masks, assumed identities, vocal style, and noisy performance. That comparison is an interpretive parallel, not proof of direct historical descent.

Forms and Origins

Kadmon recalls encountering Perchten as a child in the lake district of Upper Austria. He distinguishes the beautiful Perchten, dressed in colorful clothing and glittering ornaments, from the Schiachperchten, whose forms were made uncanny through wooden or bark masks and coverings of fur, moss, and lichen. The figures were represented by local people, but the disguise could make a familiar neighbor seem changed into something other than an everyday person. For Kadmon, that tension between recognition and estrangement was central to their force.

The customs, as the essay describes them, have changed over time. Kadmon presents them as practices that survived from pre-Christian cultures; in some remote valleys, he writes, they remained sincere cultic customs until comparatively recently. In his account of the present, they are largely performed for show, entertainment, or kitsch. The passage therefore frames the figures through a contrast between ritual significance and modern display, while emphasizing that the forms themselves could persist even as their meanings shifted.

The book also places Perchten alongside the older worship of Perchta, described as a Germanic winter and sky goddess. It does not reduce every procession to a single surviving religious practice. Rather, it presents the customs as layered: masks and seasonal performances could retain traces of older beliefs while taking on later, more theatrical purposes. The distinction matters because the essay’s argument concerns resemblance and survival of motifs, not an unbroken account of one uniform tradition.

Mask, Performance, and Transformation

The mask is the essay’s clearest instrument of transformation. Kadmon cites the idea that a performer in a dangerous disguise may become subject to forces associated with the role, rather than simply pretending to be a supernatural creature. He also compares this process with shamanic practices in which animal coverings, ornaments, or painted bodies evoke an animal’s qualities. In this account, imitation can become identification: the disguise affects both the performer’s behavior and how the surrounding world perceives that performer.

This is presented as a psychological and theatrical change as well as a religious one. The masked person remains an ordinary villager beneath the costume, yet the performance suspends that everyday identity for a time. Kadmon describes this as a crossing between performer and represented creature, in which the boundary between them becomes uncertain. That reading helps explain why the customs could inspire both fascination and fear without requiring the figures to be treated simply as decorative costumes.

Noise, Movement, and Communal Rites

The Perchten tradition is also associated with loud processions and vigorous movement. Kadmon’s discussion places noise among the means by which winter rites could produce religious ecstasy: bells, drums, cries, rattles, and other sounds accompanied movement, music, disguises, and intoxicating drinks. The effect, as his cited folkloric accounts present it, was not quiet ceremonial order but an emphatic, collective performance intended to approach or represent another world.

The essay describes customs related to the Oskorei, a northern European procession tradition, in which young men rode at night and could behave noisily and disruptively. It also recounts beliefs that giving food or drink to such figures might bring prosperity. In some accounts, the taking of food or horses was understood as part of a bargain associated with fertility; later, as that cultic interpretation receded, people could see the disguised participants instead as troublemakers. This change in reception shows how the same disturbance could be understood as ritual obligation in one context and harmful misconduct in another.

Comparison with Black Metal

Kadmon compares Perchten customs with traits he identifies in Scandinavian, and especially Norwegian, Black Metal: demonic-looking face paint, death-associated emblems, assumed names, harsh or high-pitched voices, and performances built around noise. He treats the parallel as a convergence of forms. In both cases, disguise and altered voice distinguish the performer from ordinary social identity; in both, sound and appearance can evoke an otherworldly presence. Black Metal becomes, in his formulation, a modern musical counterpart to heathen noise, with electronic instruments replacing the older procession’s bells, drums, and cries.

The comparison also connects to the book’s account of Black Metal as a scene defined not only by music but by outlook and visual presentation. Its conventions were not fixed by a single rule book, and the scene’s styles and boundaries changed over time. Against that background, the Perchten parallel illuminates a recurring possibility: a style can work as more than decoration, marking belonging and dramatizing a claimed identity. The book describes the early Norwegian scene’s corpse paint as a developing trademark, while Kadmon reads related forms of masking through the older custom of performers embodying frightening figures.

The analogy remains an argument made by Kadmon, whose essay appears as an appendix, rather than a demonstrated genealogy of Black Metal. Its significance lies in how it makes the genre’s staged ugliness, pseudonyms, noise, and altered voices legible beside older winter performances. Perchten thus occupy two roles in the book: they are subjects of a folkloric account in their own right and a framework for interpreting how a modern musical subculture can turn costume and sound into an enactment of otherness.