The Rauhnächte are the roughly twelve nights between Christmas and Epiphany, a stretch that German and Alpine folk belief treated as dangerous, porous and full of omens. Their oldest traceable ancestor is not Scandinavian but Anglo-Saxon: around 725 the monk Bede wrote that the pagan English began their year on 25 December and called the night before it Modranecht, the "night of the mothers". Everything else – smoke-cleansing, Perchten, the laundry taboo, wish lists – comes from very different centuries. Let's sort the layers.
Christmas is over, New Year hasn't arrived, nobody is sure what day of the week it is, and it's dark by half past four. German has a lovely phrase for this limbo: zwischen den Jahren, "between the years". The Rauhnächte fall right into that gap. How they are counted depends on where you ask. Most often they run from Christmas Eve (the night of 24/25 December) to the night before 6 January; in some places they start with St Thomas's Night on 21 December. In much of the Alpine region not all twelve mattered equally – four stood out: St Thomas's Night, Christmas Night, New Year's Eve and the eve of Epiphany.
In northern Germany the same span was simply called die Zwölften, "the Twelves". The idea is the same everywhere: a threshold time when the usual order loosens, when the dead and the spirits are abroad, animals speak and the future becomes visible. Search for "Rauhnächte" today, though, and you quickly end up among smudging workshops, oracle cards and the "ritual of the 13 wishes" – usually sold as ancient Germanic heritage.
It isn't that simple. What we call the Rauhnächte is a bundle of at least four time layers: an early medieval record of a pagan midwinter feast, a Christian festal season, an early modern folk custom, and a modern wellness and esoteric culture. Each layer is real. None of them is the others. Let's start at the bottom, with the oldest.
Bede, known as "the Venerable" (c. 673–735), was a monk at the Northumbrian double monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow and one of the most learned men of his age. In 725 he completed a textbook on time-reckoning, De temporum ratione ("On the Reckoning of Time"), written chiefly to explain how to calculate the date of Easter. In chapter 15, "On the English months", he does something unusual: he describes the calendar of his pagan ancestors. That is where we find the sentence this whole article turns on:
"Incipiebant autem annum ab octavo Calendarum Januariarum die, ubi nunc natale Domini celebramus. Et ipsam noctem nunc nobis sacrosanctam, tunc gentili vocabulo Modranecht, id est matrum noctem, appellabant, ob causam, ut suspicamur, ceremoniarum quas in ea pervigiles agebant."Bede, De temporum ratione, ch. 15 (725); Latin text after J. A. Giles, 1843
In our own English rendering: "They began the year on the eighth day before the Kalends of January, when we now celebrate the birth of the Lord. And that very night, which is now most holy to us, they then called by a heathen word Modranecht, that is, 'night of the mothers' – because, we suspect, of the ceremonies they performed in it while keeping vigil."
Three things stand out. First, the "eighth day before the Kalends of January" is 25 December in Roman reckoning, so the night in question is 24/25 December – today's Christmas Eve. Second, the word is plural. Matrum means "of the mothers", not "of the mother". The common English spelling "Mother's Night" is therefore misleading: this is not about a single mother goddess. Third – and this is often overlooked – Bede says outright that he only suspects the reason ("ut suspicamur"). He knows the name, and he knows people stayed awake through the night. What actually happened, he does not know.
In the same chapter Bede lists the month names. December and January were both called Giuli – the word that reappears in Old Norse as jól and survives in English "Yule". Alongside it stand names like Hrethmonath and Eosturmonath, the latter the famous source for the goddess Eostre, whom we examine closely in our article on Ostara. One thing to keep in mind: Bede is writing roughly a century after his people were converted. He is passing on knowledge about his ancestors' time, not describing rites he had witnessed.
That raises a genuine research question which deserves to stay open. Did the pagan year really begin exactly on 25 December – or did Bede equate a loosely defined midwinter new year with the Christian date his readers knew? Since, by his own account, the Anglo-Saxons counted in lunar months, a feast pinned to a fixed solar date would be somewhat surprising. Neither reading can be proven.
Bede gives no names, no goddesses, no images. Interpreting the "mothers" is therefore the work of modern scholarship, and two main candidates have emerged.
The first are the Matronae: female guardian deities venerated in Roman times above all in the Rhineland. Well over a thousand votive stones are known, most of them from the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. The typical image shows three seated women, two wearing large round bonnets, the one in the middle younger and bare-headed. Many carry Germanic or Celtic epithets such as Aufaniae or Vacallinehae. In Latin they are Matronae or Matres – "mothers". The echo of Bede's matrum noctem is obvious. The scholar Philip A. Shaw pointed out in 2011 that the Matronae inscriptions at least partly support Bede: collective "mothers" were indeed venerated in the Germanic-speaking world.
The second candidate are the dísir, the female guardian spirits of the kin group in Old Norse tradition. A sacrificial feast in their honour, the dísablót, is recorded, and according to Snorri there was an assembly and market at Uppsala called the Dísaþing. Rudolf Simek suggests reading Modranecht as a link between the West Germanic Matronae cult and the Scandinavian dísir festivals.
It's an elegant idea, but it has snags. The Matronae stones come from the Roman Rhineland, around half a millennium before Bede and hundreds of miles from Northumbria. The dísir sources are Icelandic texts of the 13th century, and the dísablót, as far as we can tell, sat around the Winter Nights in October or – as the Dísaþing – in late winter, not at midwinter. A direct cultic thread from Cologne through Jarrow to Uppsala is not attested; it is an intellectual bridge. Simpler explanations are possible too: ancestral mothers of the family, birth-helpers, or fate-women like the Norns.
Did the Scandinavians have anything similar? Here the trail runs thin. Norse Yule was a major midwinter feast with sacrifice, drinking and community – but the detailed accounts again come from Christian times. The key passage is in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla (c. 1230), in the saga of Hákon the Good (chapter 13 or 15 depending on the edition). Snorri says King Hákon, raised a Christian in England, made a law that Yule should begin at the same time as the Christians kept it. Before that, Snorri writes, Yule had begun on hǫkunótt, "that was midwinter night", and was kept for three nights.
The word hǫkunótt occurs only in this one passage, and its meaning is unknown. Turning it into a Norse "Mothers' Night" is tempting but unsupported. Snorri, moreover, is looking back some 270 years. For more on the feast itself, see our articles on the Germanic festivals and on honouring the ancestors at Yule.
The bottom line: a pagan midwinter feast among Germanic-speaking peoples is well attested – among the Anglo-Saxons by Bede, in the North by Snorri and skaldic verse. A pagan feast of "Twelve Nights" is not. The number twelve comes from somewhere else.
The most obvious explanation for the twelve nights is Christian. In the West the early Church celebrated Christ's birth on 25 December; in the East it was originally celebrated on 6 January, the feast of the Epiphany. Between the two dates lie exactly twelve days, and that span grew into one continuous festal season – the Twelve Days of Christmas.
It is often said that the Council of Tours "established" the Twelve Days in 567. That's an overstatement. Canon 17 of that council regulates monastic fasting and explains that, because every day between Christmas and Epiphany is a feast, monks may eat at midday during that time. The first three days of January are expressly excepted: litanies were to be held on them to counter pagan New Year customs. So the Church already treated the turn of the year as contested ground in the 6th century – but the target was Roman Kalends celebrations, not Germanic mothers' nights.
There is a second, popular theory: the twelve nights are the gap between the lunar and the solar year. Twelve lunar months come to about 354 days, the solar year to just over 365. The remaining eleven days – or twelve nights – supposedly felt like "dead time" outside the normal order. The idea goes back at least to the late 19th century, to the folklorist Rudolf Kleinpaul (1898), and today almost every Rauhnächte guide presents it as fact.
It is a theory, though, and one with a counter-argument from the oldest source itself. Bede describes how the Anglo-Saxons actually handled the problem: they counted lunar months and, in certain years, inserted a whole thirteenth month – an extra "Litha" month in summer, which is why such a year was called Thrilithi. As far as we know, the gap between moon and sun was filled by an intercalary month, not by twelve exceptional nights at the winter solstice. There is no source for a Germanic calendar with twelve "balancing nights". As a modern interpretation the moon-sun theory can stay on the table. As proof of origin it doesn't work. If you'd like to see how far the two rhythms drift apart each year, try our lunar calendar.
Even the spelling betrays the dispute: Rauhnächte, Raunächte, Rauchnächte – all three forms are in use. Behind them are two explanations, each of which regards the other as a folk reinterpretation.
The first derives the word from German Rauch, "smoke": during these nights house and byre were smoked out with incense and blessed herbs. Kluge's etymological dictionary of German takes this line and notes that the humanist Johannes Boemus (1520) and the chronicler Sebastian Franck (1534) describe such smoke-cleansing at this season. The University of Innsbruck's database of feasts and customs likewise derives the term from "smoking out the house", probably done originally by a priest.
The second goes back to Middle High German rûch, "rough, hairy, furry" – as in the old German trade term Rauchwaren for furs. On this reading they are the nights of shaggy, fur-clad figures, the Perchten and demons. The Duden dictionary leans this way.
Who is right remains open. One thing is clear: both explanations lead to the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, not the Viking Age. There is no Old Norse or Old English counterpart to the word.
What most people associate with the Rauhnächte is the rural custom collected by folklorists in the 19th and early 20th centuries and summarised, for instance, in the ten-volume Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens ("Dictionary of German Superstition", 1927–1942). This custom is genuine, organically grown and highly regional. It is, however, largely Catholic in character and, in the form we know, a child of the early modern era.
Smoke-cleansing: In Tyrol, as the Innsbruck folklorists describe it, embers from the hearth were carried in a pan, topped with incense, blessed palm sprigs or herbs, and taken through house and stable with prayers while a second person sprinkled holy water. Missing the smoking was thought to bring misfortune or death. In South and East Tyrol people held their hats over the smoke to avoid headaches in the coming year. This is a Church blessing custom, not a pagan offering.
The laundry taboo: A widespread rule said no white washing should be hung out during the Twelves. The reasons vary: the Wild Hunt might get caught in it and carry it off, or the sheet would be needed as a shroud in the new year. Some families still observe it – usually with a grin.
Rest from work: In many regions spinning was forbidden, and spinning wheels were put away. In legend, anyone who spun anyway had to reckon with Frau Holle or Frau Perchta, who punished lazy or disobedient spinners.
Omens: The Rauhnächte were days of lots and portents. People threw shoes over their shoulders, poured molten lead, or listened at the stable door to hear whether the animals spoke on Christmas Night – whoever heard them, it was said, would die within the year. A widespread notion holds that each of the twelve nights foretells the weather or fortune of one of the coming months. That mapping is early modern farmer's-almanac logic, not a Germanic rite.
In the Rhineland, where we live, the Rauhnächte were never as pronounced as in Bavaria, Austria or Thuringia. Our regional link to Mothers' Night is a different one – more on that below.
The Rauhnächte come with their own cast. In the Alps the best known is the Percht. Her name is tied to the feast itself: in Middle High German, 6 January was called berchttac or berchtnacht, "the shining day" – a rendering of Epiphany, the "manifestation". The 11th-century Mondsee glosses already have a "Giperchtennacht". According to the usual interpretation, the feast-name gradually became a figure: Frau Perchta, who checks during the Twelves whether people have spun, fasted and kept order. Whether a pre-Christian goddess stands behind her is disputed; the trail through the feast-name points rather to a Christian medieval origin.
Today's Perchten runs, with "beautiful" and "ugly" Perchten (Schönperchten and Schiachperchten), furs, bells and carved wooden masks, are documented in the Salzburg region since the first half of the 19th century, though churchmen were already complaining about masked New Year processions in late antiquity. The silicone masks, fire shows and light effects of modern Krampus and Perchten shows are younger than most readers of this article.
In central and northern Germany Frau Holle plays a similar role, roaming during the Twelves, rewarding the diligent and punishing the idle. Here too, the figure is tangible in medieval and early modern sources, while her derivation from a Germanic goddess is a 19th-century interpretation, above all Jacob Grimm's.
And then there is the Wild Hunt, the "Furious Host": a train of the dead and of spirits roaring across the sky on stormy winter nights, led in some regions by Wode or Wodan, in others by Frau Holle, Perchta or the Devil. One of the earliest detailed accounts comes from the Anglo-Norman monk Orderic Vitalis, who tells how the priest Walchelin met a host of the dead one night in January 1091 – the familia Herlechini. The close link between the Wild Hunt and the Rauhnächte as we know it was fixed mainly in the legend collections of the 18th and 19th centuries. Whether it goes back to Odin as a god of the dead is an old research question that is still unresolved.
For roughly the last twenty years the Rauhnächte have enjoyed a boom only loosely connected to the old rural customs. Guidebooks, online courses and magazines offer smudging rituals with sage and palo santo, journaling prompts for every night and, above all, the "ritual of the 13 wishes": you write thirteen wishes on slips of paper and burn one unread each of the twelve nights, handing it over "to the universe"; the last remaining wish is the one you must take care of yourself.
If you enjoy it, celebrate it – just know what it is: a modern ritual from the world of mindfulness and esoteric self-help, spread above all since the 2000s and 2010s through books, blogs and social media. We have not found it in the great folklore collections of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and newspaper articles calling it one of the "oldest" Rauhnächte rituals give no source. White sage and palo santo come from the Americas anyway.
Modern heathens who celebrate Yule and Mothers' Night today often handle this more consciously, treating their rites as new creations built on the sources rather than as unbroken tradition. More on that in our article How do heathens celebrate today?.
Here are the layers once more, cleanly separated:
Now for the part that particularly pleases us in Alsdorf. If Modranecht really has something to do with the Matronae – and, again, that is a possibility, not a proof – then its oldest visible background lies not in Scandinavia but right here. The densest concentration of Matronae stones is found between Cologne, Bonn, Jülich and the northern Eifel. The temple precinct at Pesch near Nettersheim and the Görresburg are places you can visit today and stand among the foundations.
These stones say nothing about 24 December, nothing about twelve nights and nothing about smoke. But they show that people in our region, some 1,800 years ago, set up altars to motherly guardian powers and thanked them – "fulfilled the vow willingly and deservedly", as the formula votum solvit libens merito on many stones roughly runs. So if you light a candle on a dark December night and think of the women in your family who came before you, you are standing in a very old tradition, not an invented one – just one we don't know in every detail.
The Rauhnächte are not a museum piece from the Viking Age but a fabric woven over centuries: Anglo-Saxon farmers keeping vigil, monks ordering the feast days, Tyrolean farm wives with their smoking pans, legend collectors – and us. Knowing which thread comes from where doesn't make the fabric poorer. It makes it honest.
When are the Rauhnächte? They are usually counted as the twelve nights from Christmas Night (24/25 December) to the night before 6 January. Some regions start on St Thomas's Night, 21 December, or count only four especially important nights.
What is Modranecht or Mothers' Night? According to Bede (725), the pagan Anglo-Saxons called the night before 25 December Modranecht, "night of the mothers", and began their year with it. Bede does not say what was celebrated; he only suspects ceremonies performed during a night-long vigil.
Are the Rauhnächte Germanic or Norse? Only in part. A pagan midwinter feast is attested among the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians, but the twelve nights themselves appear as a Christian festal season, and most customs date from the late Middle Ages and early modern period.
What does the word Rauhnacht mean? That's disputed. It comes either from German Rauch, "smoke" (smoking out house and stable), or from Middle High German rûch, "hairy", after the fur-clad figures. Neither leads back to the Viking Age.
Why shouldn't you hang out laundry during the Twelve Nights? In early modern folk belief the Wild Hunt could get caught in washing on the line, or the sheet would become a shroud in the new year. It is a later superstition, not a recorded Germanic rule.
Is the 13 wishes ritual ancient? No. It is a modern ritual that spread mainly since the 2000s through self-help books and the internet. It does not appear in the historical folklore collections.
For courage. For remembrance. For legends that live on.
The Wild Hunt · Frau Holle & the old goddess · How do heathens celebrate today? · The Germanic feasts · Þorrablót – the winter feast.
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