What the Belly-Slitter Can Teach Us About Being a Strong Woman
I'm coming a little bit out of my wheelhouse in writing this article. I am a man writing about "Strong Women", and I'm not an expert scholar in myths and legends. However, whilst this may at first appear a weakness, I believe, it also contains a strength. I have two daughters, both in their twenties, which means I have seen them struggle with certain issues, and I've tried to understand these things from both a male and female perspective, which may give me the perspective of somebody who tries to understand things from an "outsider" perspective, which I believe has some value. Also, by recognizing that this area isn't one I'm familiar with, I researched with a large amount of effort, that sometimes academics, like me, don't bring to a subject because we are too comfortable in it. I would also like to thank Jane Phillips for giving up her time, to have the long conversations, I felt needed to have to produce an article of any value/worth.
Frau Perchta's Refusal to be Defined
There is something about Frau Perchta that appeals to me precisely because she refuses to behave like the sort of female figure modern culture normally gives us as an inspirational role model i.e., She is not gentle, endlessly accommodating or particularly concerned about whether anyone likes her or not. She belongs to the winter darkness of Alpine folklore, particularly the traditions of Austria and southern Germany, with related Perchta or Pehtra traditions extending into Slovenian regions. She is associated especially with the Twelve Days between Christmas and Epiphany, when she was believed to travel through communities, inspect households and judge whether people had fulfilled their responsibilities. Those who behaved properly might be rewarded whilst those who were negligent, greedy, inquisitive or lazy could expect something considerably worse. In the most gruesome stories, Perchta cuts open the offender's belly, removes the intestines and replaces them with straw, stones or rubbish, giving the origin of her most memorable reputation as the “Belly-Slitter.” We should be slightly cautious about calling her straightforwardly an “ancient pagan goddess,” However, Jacob Grimm and later writers interpreted Perchta as the survival of a pre-Christian goddess. However, academic scholars have disputed whether the evidence actually allows us to trace her back so confidently. In fact, it may be safer to describe her as an old Alpine supernatural female figure whose folklore may preserve or incorporate pre-Christian elements. Yet for me this uncertainty makes her more, rather than less, interesting. Folklore is rarely a fossil preserved perfectly from antiquity. Stories change because the people telling them change. Perchta herself seems to have changed considerably. Scholarship suggests that she was originally less a supernatural factory supervisor punishing laziness than an enforcer of communal rules, including prohibitions against spinning at inappropriate sacred times and obligations to participate in communal feasting. As textile production became increasingly economically important, particularly to peasant women, the stories evolved and her concern with appropriate labor increasingly became a concern with whether work had been completed or not. That distinction is important because Perchta's first lesson for the modern strong woman is not simply "work harder". It is much more sophisticated i.e., know what is required of you, do what genuinely belongs to you, and know when work itself must stop. We have created a strange modern ideal of female strength in which the “strong woman” is frequently the woman capable of tolerating the largest quantity of work, responsibility and emotional pressure without complaining. She works, manages a household, remembers birthdays, looks after children or parents, maintains friendships, supports her partner, remains attractive, keeps fit and somehow smiles throughout the whole performance. Then we praise her resilience. Perchta offers a darker alternative. There is a time for the spindle to turn and a time when the spindle must be put down. Strength is not demonstrated by accepting every task placed in your hands. Sometimes strength begins with asking whether that task should have been yours in the first place.
Frau Perchta's Lessons on Judgment
The second lesson Perchta offers concerns something women are often encouraged to distrust in themselves, which is judgment. Perchta judges people. Indeed, judgment is practically her occupation. Her standards may appear absurdly severe e.g., the modern workplace would presumably consider disembowelment a disproportionate response to an unfinished project, but folklore often works through exaggeration. The punishment makes the rule impossible to forget. Perchta distinguishes between diligence and negligence, generosity and greed, appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Earlier traditions could even punish people for working when they were supposed to be observing a holiday, demonstrating again that her morality was not simply an equation in which more labor always meant greater virtue. For modern women, there is something liberating in recovering the ability to make distinctions. Women are often told not to be “judgmental,” but almost every healthy boundary depends upon judgment. Deciding that somebody has treated you disrespectfully is a judgment. Deciding that a relationship has become exploitative is a judgment. Refusing to lend money for the fourth time is a judgment. Saying, “I don't want you speaking to me like that,” requires us all, regardles of gender, to first decide that the behavior is unacceptable. A woman who cannot judge cannot establish meaningful boundaries because she has surrendered the authority to determine what may enter her life. This is where the image of the Belly-Slitter becomes unexpectedly powerful as metaphor. Perchta doesn't inspect appearances, rather she opens the body and looks inside. I would never suggest taking the mythology literally, but symbolically the question is magnificent i.e., if Perchta opened us up at the end of the year, "What would she discover we had allowed ourselves to be filled with?" e.g., other people's expectations? Resentments we were afraid to express? The need for approval? Comparison with other individuals? An exhausting determination to be liked? etc. Strong womanhood begins partly with an internal inventory i.e., What belongs inside my life, and what have I allowed somebody else to put there? Perchta is frightening because she possesses standards and apparently feels no obligation to apologize for having them. Modern women needn't imitate her cruelty to borrow something from that certainty. There are situations in which “no” is a complete moral response. There are people who do not deserve another chance simply because they ask for one. There are relationships in which being understanding has quietly become tolerating the intolerable. There are moments when kindness toward ourselves requires disappointing somebody else. Perhaps we should think of Perchta's knife symbolically as the instrument that cuts the unnecessary away, such as obligations accepted through guilt, friendships maintained from habit, expectations inherited from family, and identities constructed principally to satisfy other people's ideas about who a woman ought to be.
Frau Perchta, Femininity, Appearance & Power
Perchta's third lesson concerns the relationship between femininity, appearance and power. Folklore does not give us a single neat image of her. She may be imagined as frightening and grotesque, sometimes with an unusual or enlarged foot, whilst other traditions allow a more benevolent or majestic side to emerge. Slovenian material, for example, records a tall, powerfully built female figure associated with groves, mountain chasms and lakes, carrying a golden spindle and capable of blessing shepherds' flocks. This instability is precisely what interests me. Perchta refuses to remain either beautiful or ugly, benevolent or terrifying, nurturing or punitive. She contains contradiction. Women, meanwhile, still receive surprisingly narrow instructions about acceptable femininity i.e., be confident, but not intimidating, be sexually attractive, but not overly sexual, be successful, but don't make other people feel unsuccessful etc. Even the phrase “strong woman” can become another role that women are expected to perform perfectly. Perchta gives women permission to become more complicated. You can be compassionate and angry. You can love somebody and still refuse what they ask of you. You can be nurturing without becoming responsible for everybody's emotional wellbeing, You can enjoy being beautiful without making beauty the foundation of your value, and you can age without treating every visible sign of aging as evidence that you are disappearing. There is something especially valuable in an old, strange, potentially frightening female figure occupying the center of her own mythology rather than existing as somebody else's mother, wife or romantic prize. Western folklore is filled with frightening older women, and historically those representations deserve careful analysis, but we can also reclaim something from them, and that is that the woman who has ceased organizing herself around whether other people find her pleasing can appear enormously powerful. Perchta doesn't ask the village whether her nose is attractive. She isn't trying to look twenty-five. She arrives with her standards intact. That gives us a healthier definition of confidence. Confidence isn't believing everybody will approve of us, rather it is recognizing that we can remain ourselves when somebody doesn't. A young woman who learns that early possesses something more useful than beauty because she possesses the beginnings of sovereignty.
Frau Perchta Punishes but She also Rewards
Yet the fourth lesson is perhaps the one I find most important because Perchta is not merely punitive. She rewards. Austrian traditions remember her as rewarding those who conformed to appropriate norms, behaved generously or completed their proper work, whilst stories associate her rewards with such things as coins, flax or golden thread. This matters because boundaries without generosity can simply become another form of fear. A strong woman isn't somebody who distrusts everybody, needs nobody and keeps the entire world at arm's length. Strength should enable anybody to give freely because they have learnt the difference between giving and surrendering ourselves. Perchta asks us to consider not merely what deserves punishment or rejection, but what deserves reward. What are you rewarding in your own life? When you continually answer work messages at midnight, you teach people that your time has no boundary. When you repeatedly return to somebody immediately after they mistreat you, you unintentionally teach them that mistreatment carries little cost. When you criticize your body every morning, you reinforce the idea that your body exists primarily for visual evaluation. But rewards can work in the opposite direction. Notice when you say no without manufacturing an elaborate excuse. Recognize when you leave a situation that once would have trapped you. Celebrate the morning when you look in the mirror without conducting an inventory of supposed defects. Reward yourself when you finish something difficult, but also when you make the mature decision to stop doing something that no longer deserves your effort. Perhaps importantly, reward other women rather than treating them automatically as competitors. Perchta's older connection with communal life is useful here. Strength does not have to be individualistic. One of the cruellest cultural tricks played upon women is persuading them to measure themselves constantly against other women, whether is is about being prettier, thinner, younger, more successful, a better mother, a better partner, or more desirable etc. A genuinely strong woman can look at another woman's beauty, intelligence or achievement without experiencing it as evidence of her own inadequacy. She can say, “She is extraordinary,” without adding silently, “therefore I am less.” This is where Perchta's winter setting becomes symbolically useful. Winter is not a competition between trees. Each tree loses its leaves according to its own nature. Each stands in its own shape. The landscape becomes bare enough for individual structures to become visible. Strong women don't need to become identical to one another. They need enough confidence to stand alongside one another without comparison turning difference into hierarchy.
Finally, Frau Perchta teaches us something that modern ideas about female empowerment sometimes overlook, which is, strength includes the ability to end things. She belongs to midwinter, to the strange period around Christmas and Epiphany when one year is dying and another is beginning. The Twelve Days create a liminal space in which ordinary routines are interrupted and the household is symbolically inspected before life moves forward. This makes Perchta an excellent figure for an annual reckoning, which is one of the reasons I wanted to include an article on her at this time of year (Jane had already written about the Goddess Freja, or I would have asked her to write about her). Imagine sitting down during those winter nights with two sheets of paper. At the top of one write, “What must I finish?” List the responsibilities that genuinely belong to you: the apology you owe, the promise you made, the project you abandoned through fear rather than choice, the conversation you keep postponing, the debt you need to address. Perchta is not an excuse for avoiding responsibility; quite the opposite. She asks us to own what is ours. On the second sheet write, “What must I stop?” That list may be more important. Stop chasing somebody who repeatedly withdraws. Stop maintaining a friendship solely because it has existed for twenty years. Stop apologizing for having ambitions. Stop agreeing to things while secretly resenting the people who asked. Stop treating rest as something you earn only after exhaustion. Stop dressing for an imaginary jury. Stop comparing your current body with the body you possessed at nineteen. Stop confusing being needed with being loved. The Perchta lesson is not “work until you collapse or the Belly-Slitter will come for you.” Folklore scholarship actually gives us a richer tradition than that caricature. Her rules historically concerned both appropriate work and appropriate cessation from work, generosity and communal obligation as well as diligence. That is why she remains such a compelling symbolic figure for strong womanhood. Strength is not hardness. It is discernment. It is knowing when to persevere and when to leave, when to forgive and when forgiveness does not require renewed access, when to help and when helping has become enabling, when to work and when to put the spindle down. A strong woman need not become cruel, invulnerable or frightening. But perhaps there are moments when she should be willing to "appear" frightening to somebody who benefited from her having no boundaries. Frau Perchta emerges from the Alpine winter carrying centuries of contradictory meanings. She is both, worker and guardian, rewarder and punisher, beautiful woman and terrifying crone, giver and Belly-Slitter. We do not need to believe literally in her knife to understand what it represents. Sometimes becoming ourselves requires cutting away what no longer belongs. Sometimes the strongest sentence a woman can speak is not an affirmation about everything she intends to become, but a quiet declaration about something she will no longer accept. Finish what is yours. Release what is not. Reward what deserves to grow. Protect the boundaries around your life. And never confuse being a good woman with being a woman who can be asked to tolerate anything.