Clio/The Holy Blisful Martir

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"The Holy Blisful Martir"

Although it should be obvious from what has gone before, Clio wishes to make certain that readers are aware of her bias before essaying the very tricky topics below.

Clio is not a Christian - in fact she is not an anything, except perhaps a professional cynic. Furthermore, taking the long view as is her unavoidable habit, she is dubious of Christianity's historical record to date. On the one hand, she supposes that the excesses committed in the name of the Christ are no worse than those committed in the name of any other holy figure. (The Egyptian and Sumerian deities, she recalls, were particularly ruthless.) On the other hand, none of those gods had the spread and influence that Christianity has, which raises its potential both for great good and great damage. Clio tends to be naturally suspicious of power, as she finds it a universal corrosive.

But this should not affect Clio's ability to conduct a discussion of the cycle of Christian religious holidays. She will do her best to set forth the pertinent details of the life of the Nazarene, and if you sometimes detect that she considers these details more folklore than fact, please attempt to ignore it.

(N.B. Clio notes, upon rereading the material below, that she has used the term "Christian" in many places where some readers would undoubtedly prefer her to use the term "Catholic." Please see the Attic for comments on this, and read advisedly.)

Advent and Nativity

Advent, the anticipatory period prior to the Nativity, is the beginning of the Christian ecclesiastical year. As you'll see below, a compelling argument could also be made for Easter as the start of the Christian year, and indeed at one time it officially was. It was changed to distance the Christian holy cycle from the Jewish one, around the sixth century CE. Here we take the birth-to-death approach, which makes the Advent/Nativity season the beginning of the calendar and Easter the end, with not much of anything for the other half of the year except Assumption Day and saint's days (which Clio refuses to discuss; there are simply too many).

Clio uses "Nativity" here, from the Latin for "birth," because "Christmas" has become an overloaded term. As she discusses in "Three Minor Saints," there were already far too many festivals in the Yule/winter solstice period for the Christians to ignore, so they placed the birth date of their central religious figure there as a sort of trump card. In this way we have a Nativity, a feast of St. Nicholas, and a Yule holiday ... all of which have mingled and merged to make the curious amalgam known as Christmas.

The bare truth is that no one, not even Clio, is certain of the date when Jesus of Nazareth was born, nor where he was actually born, nor the circumstances of his birth. (Clio cannot watch everyone, and it is always a difficult task to guess which births will later turn out to be significant. If there were any omens and portents attendant on the Nazarene's birth, she managed to overlook them.)

Only two of the four biblical Gospels - which, bear in mind, are comparatively after-the-fact retellings of events which had previously been oral tradition - even bother to discuss the subject. The one which gives us the most clues, the account given by Luke, was written a minimum of thirty years after Jesus' death and probably much later. Given that by then the author of that account was surely faced with mutually contractory legends (including possibly the accounts of Matthew and Mark), it's amazing that he dared drop any hints at all.

From the perspective of an author of a heroic tale - if you will - one can sympathize with the problem that Luke faced: It was common lore that Jesus's parents were people of Nazareth. It was also common lore that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Given that these were a class of people who normally lived their entire lives without ever travelling more than a few miles, explaining this journey of some seventy miles is no minor matter.

Luke invents a census conducted by Quirinius, the Roman governor of Syria - a consequence of the famous "decree that all the world should be taxed" - an event which unfortunately links the world of lore and legend with real, verifiable history. Unfortunate, because the link is flawed. It would take Clio another four pages to explain why it is not possible that this event happened when and where Luke says it did, especially in light of Luke's dating the Annunciation in the reign of Herod. Besides, those four pages have already been written quite well by someone else. (See the Attic for details.)

Even if we take Luke and Matthew at face value as much as possible, it seems obvious that Jesus could not have been born in the winter, not with shepherds and their flocks sleeping out in the open. (Nor is the 6 January date, still celebrated as Nativity in some Eastern traditions and formerly considered the date of Jesus' baptism, very likely.)

The 25 December date has its most direct antecedent in a holiday called the Natalis Solis Invicti, the Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun. This was a feast after the winter solstice or Yule, and though a Roman holiday, actually was dedicated to a Persian deity, Mithras. This cult had such popularity among Romans that in 274 CE the emperor Aurelian proclaimed it the state religion! It is not unthinkable that this was early Christianity's biggest competitor. The temptation to co-opt the sun imagery - from sun god to son of God, as it were - must have been irresistable. The first recorded mention of 25 December being celebrated as Nativity was in 336 CE. The rest is left as an exercise for the student.

Epiphany and Candlemas

Just as it is useful to treat Christmas and Nativity as two separate celebrations with different motivations, so it is with Twelfth Night and Epiphany, the former a secular feast, the latter a spiritual one. Both happen on 6 January, but may descend from completely separate traditions.

The strict Christian tradition holds that Epiphany celebrates three spiritual manifestations of the Christ: His appearance as the Christian God upon the arrival of the Magi, his baptism on the banks of the Jordan, and the water-to-wine miracle at the marriage feast at Cana. However, none of the Gospels gives a date, or a clue to the date, of any of these events. So why 6 January?

The only clue we have in religious tradition is the Egyptian festival of the birth of the Aion - a holiday which may well have influenced the Christians, but is not worth detailed discussion here.

The twelve days from Christmas to Epiphany may be a migration of the old folk-soothsaying custom of using the twelve days prior to the New Year as a marker of the year to come, one day per month. Clio believes this bears some similarity to the idea found in Celtic and other traditions, that each year ended in an "intercalary period" - days which belonged neither to the old year or new, and which were customarily a time to pause and reflect, clean up affairs, make resolutions, et cetera.

There is also an age-old confusion between celebrating Nativity on 25 December and on 6 January, as explained above. Adding to this confusion is the famous Eleven Days, the shift in time experienced by England when converting to the Gregorian calendar. (For a time, some calendars labelled the holidays "Old Christmas" and "New Christmas.") So what appear to be two separate holidays may, in several ways, be a single holiday that moved. It seems likely that, for the Aion or other reasons, 6 January was the original date, and 25 December the comparative newcomer.

Twelfth Night, as a separate entity, seems to stem definitively from the medieval practice of celebrating the holiday season for an extended time, which again descends from a long winter solstice celebration or possibly an intercalary festival period. Some Twelfth Night customs have migrated to Carnival time, as Clio will discuss below.

A comparatively latter-day custom is that of "formally closing" the Christmas season, by burning the greenery and decorations in a large public bonfire. At one time, this took place on Candlemas, 2 February, but gradually the season shortened, and now Twelfth Night is the time for this.

Candlemas itself has points of interest. Celebrated on 2 February, it is the Christian holiday which most directly corresponds with a pagan holiday - Imbolc - on both celebratory customs and date. Imbolc (also the Roman Feast of Lights) is on 1 February or thereabouts. Before the Reformation, this was an occasion for candlelit processions; these days it is primarily significant as the time when the year's altar candles are blessed; both of these rituals, though, can trace their ancestry to the very early history of the human race.

Officially, in Christian tradition, Candlemas celebrates the presentation of Jesus in the temple and the purification of Mary. These are the same event; the infant's first entrance in the temple was also the mother's first since the birth, and she was required by Jewish law to make an animal sacrifice to "cleanse" herself.

Clio will one day write an essay on the myriad human customs involving distaste for female reproductive acts, but for now she will limit herself to saying that, since this event was supposed to take place forty days after the birth by law, placing it at 2 February is precisely no more and no less spurious than placing the Nativity at 25 December.

Carnival and Lent

Clio believes that Carnival may have the distinction of being the Christian holiday celebrated by the most non-Christians. People may dye Easter eggs or buy candy in huge quantities, but that hardly counts. The number of people who actually make Easter observances, she believes, pales by comparison to those who take place in some activity in the name of the Lord of Misrule.

There are two reasons for this. First, Carnival is an easy holy day to celebrate, at least in its modern, corrupt forms. Second - and presumably you see this coming - Carnival, unlike Easter, is considerably older than Christianity.

But let us consider strict Christianity first. Shrove Tuesday, as the name implies, was originally a time of shriving - that is, confessing. It was a day of penitence, of expiating one's sins, and bore more resemblance to certain Jewish traditions than anything else.

Some of the odder customs relating to Shrove Tuesday only make sense in this light. For example, it is relatively clear that the various traditions having to do with eating (or flipping, sometimes in a race, as in Olney in England) pancakes all descend from the practice of using up eggs, milk and especially fats which would be forbidden during Lent, as do the German traditions of making fried foods, especially Faschingskrapfen, Carnival doughnuts. (The French term "Mardi Gras," or "Fat Tuesday," doesn't mean that the Tuesday is big; it means that on that Tuesday you eat fats.) Those of the Jewish persuasion will recognize a similarity to the removal/disposal of chametz, forbidden leavened food, prior to Pesach. The very name "Carnival" - from Latin for "farewell to meat" - owes its genesis to customs of repentance.

Gradually - perhaps because preceding a forty-day period of repentance with a massive bout of same was too severe - the focus of Shrove Tuesday shifted from repenting one's sins to a last convulsive revel in them. This shift was aided by pre-Christian customs. The idea of this period of revelry has direct antecedents in the Roman Saturnalia, Twelfth Night, and other "intercalary period" festivals, where no sin was part of the "permanent record" and Misrule was king. Many Mardi Gras parades and celebrations owe their appearance and allegiance to the Lord Misrule. The wearing of masks, common to many Carnival traditions, is a mark of new-year or between-year celebrations. The New Orleans "king cake" custom, where whoever finds the marker in the cake is the king of the celebration (or, in latter-day office tradition, must buy the next cake), is stolen directly from Twelfth Night festivities.

After Shrove Tuesday comes Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent. Clio will not bore her readers with the obvious pedigree of ashes as a mark of penitence, especially since even biblical sources treat this as a custom long established. (It is, however, worth noting that in strict Christian tradition the ashes are made by ritually burning the previous year's Palm Sunday branches.) Originally only people who had reason to perform public penitence received the ashes; gradually this custom spread to the entire congregation (in keeping with the Christian belief, Clio supposes, that everyone has something to repent).

Lent lasts forty days, not counting Sundays. There is a widespread belief, dating back to circa 300 CE, that the forty-day length is because Jesus spent forty days in the desert between his baptism and the start of his ministry. However, the Latin for Lent, "Quadragesima," originally referred to forty hours, not forty days - a prolonged fast which directly preceded the Easter celebrations.

It is tempting to consider Carnival the end of the Christian year, Lent the intercalary period, and Easter the beginning of the new one. The observances support this idea - as did the ecclesiastical doctrine at one time. (See Advent, above.) Certainly Clio can see why the similarities between Purim/Pesach and the Carnival/Lent/Easter cycle might disturb early Christian authorities eager to distance themselves from Judaism ... even if she does not understand this fervent and habitual desire to deny one's ancestry.

Holy Week

The observances in the Christian Holy Week all tie into specific events, we are told, in the final days of Jesus. While Clio does not dispute that, she notes that the placement of the week as a whole on the calendar (and, by extension, Lent and Carnival, which backdate from Easter as well) is no less dubious than the placement of the Nativity.

The history of Easter's placement is muddled, even to Clio, but the most obvious influence is the Jewish Pesach. The predecessor of Easter, Pascha, takes its name directly from Pesach. Pascha is still celebrated in the Eastern churches. It is still possible to find many references to Pascha as the "Christian Passover."

The name "Easter" may descend from the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, Eostre - which would link this to the other major influence on Easter, an old-fashioned pagan springtime festival. But our only real source for the Eostre explanation is the Venerable Bede, so Clio invites you to take that with as large a grain of salt as you like.

Pascha treated Jesus' death and rebirth as a single event. But in the Western Christian tradition, the events (and days) became distinct from one another. Holy Week is a reenactment of the last days of the Nazarene's life - in essence, a passion play.

Palm Sunday, a week before Easter, marks Jesus' triumphant entrance into Jerusalem (where he was met by crowds waving palm fronds). The subsequent Monday through Wednesday are not major celebrations, but if we are following biblical sequence, then on Monday Jesus cast the moneychangers from the temple, on Tuesday predicted the destruction of Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives, and on Wednesday Judas Iscariot agreed to betray him to the priests.

The Thursday of Holy Week is still celebrated in some parts as Maundy Thursday. This is the day of the Last Supper and Jesus' arrest. The word "maundy" most likely comes from the Latin "mandatum," commandment, which would be the first word of Jesus' speech at the Last Supper had he given it in Latin and not Aramaic.

There are a number of conventions involving gift-giving on this day, the most interesting of which (via the British royal family) involves specially-minted archaic coins. Clio needs to check whether this custom is still being performed. She is sad that another old custom on this day, the washing of feet, has died out. She would love to see the Queen washing people's feet on Maundy Thursday.

The Last Supper is the genesis of Christian communion, and religious ceremonies on this day celebrate that, but Clio finds far more striking (and far more pagan) the custom of extinguishing the altar candles - to symbolize the temporary triumph of the forces of darkness.

Good Friday is of course the day of Jesus' crucifixion, and the only day of the year in Catholic tradition where no Mass is said. Why this dark day is called "Good" Friday is something of a mystery. First, it's worth noting that this is primarily an English-spoken custom. Other nations tend to call it Holy Friday or Great Friday. The "Good" may be a corruption of "God," as it is in "goodbye" ... or it may have been "good" all along, referring to the gift of salvation from sin made possible by Jesus's death (in good Christian doctrine). Before it was Good Friday, it was either the Day of Salvation or the Festival of the Crucifixion (which strikes Clio as an even greater oxymoron than "Good Friday").

The most prevalent secularized custom on Good Friday is hot cross buns, a ritual food particularly popular in England. If you are expecting Clio to tell you that these actually predate Christian ritual and aren't about the crucifixion at all, for once she will surprise you. She will note, however, that the Egyptians and many other traditions have used ritual breads stamped with various significant emblems at divers points in history.

There are any number of Good Friday superstitions. Clio's favorite is the one which says that breaking pottery on Good Friday is a sign of good luck; variants of this custom say that Judas is pierced with the shards of all pottery smashed on this day. In this way, and so many others, myth reduces Judas Iscariot to the status of B-movie villain, with handlebar mustache and black hat.

Clio has very little to say about Holy Saturday, or Easter Sunday itself for that matter - in the sense of religious mythology. She has already discussed the matter of its date (Easter is officially the Sunday following the first full moon following the vernal equinox, which is legally fixed for this purpose on 21 March). She has discussed its ancestry. She feels little need to note that it marks Jesus' resurrection. So let us consider some secularized Easter customs instead.

The practice of new Easter clothes is a New Year custom that migrated even further than usual (but also adds credence to the idea of Easter as a Christian New Year). The custom of Easter parades stems directly from the new clothes. After all, as one of Clio's sources points out, once you have new clothes, the next impulse is to be seen wearing them.

The Easter "bunny" really is the Easter hare. The hare is a very, very old symbol of the moon, of fertility, and of spring; this takes us back to Eostre again (both the hare and the egg, which we're coming to, were her symbols) but also goes back further, to the Egyptians and possibly before.

The Easter egg is possibly the oldest symbol of all these. Clio sees no need to explain how an egg symbolizes both fertility and rebirth, so she will instead simply note that one standing tradition had eggs being hung from maypoles, thus linking this practice to the Beltane festival, a very old celebration indeed. The process of dyeing the eggs bright colors is more mysterious, although Clio notes that coloring them red (to symbolize either joy, or the blood of Christ, depending on who you ask) is somewhat older than the idea of using all manner of colors, and may be the precedent.

It is also worth noting that eggs were a food denied during a strict Lenten fast, therefore the Easter celebrations involved eating eggs as a food that had been denied for forty days. Several traditional Russian Orthodox Pascha foods are heavy in eggs and other forbidden treats.

After Easter

The Christian calendar is rather quiet between Easter and Advent. Everyone needs an off-season.

Ascension Day comes forty days after Easter and marks Jesus's ascent into heaven after rising from the dead. In America, one of my sources notes, Good Friday and Ascension Day were the two holiest days of the year to the Pennsylvania Dutch, and carried all sorts of prohibitions against various kinds of work or activities, which is why this day came to be known as "Fishing Day" - since that was the typical recreation.

Pentecost comes fifty days after Easter and marks the descent of the Holy Spirit unto the Apostles. The name "Pentecost" is taken from the Jewish tradition (i.e. Shavuot, which comes fifty days after Pesach, and which has several common traditions). The day is considered the birthday of the Catholic church by some, since it could be said to be the day the Apostles received their mission (and legend has it that they were so vitalized by this that they baptized three thousand people).

Pentecost is still a very popular day for baptisms. In England, the white robes being worn by candidates for baptism gave Pentecost the name Whitsunday (white Sunday). Whitmonday, the day after, is still a holiday in some places, the only remaining vestige of a full week of Pentecost celebrations.

The only other Christian holiday of note is Assumption Day, which marks the death of Jesus' mother Mary and her ascent into heaven, and is on 15 August. Even such a relatively minor holiday is not free of date appropriation; the feast is much older than the Catholic dogma announcing its significance, and dates back to harvest festivals, including some sacred to the Roman Diana. These harvest origins are why many fishing communities perform the blessing of their boats on or around this time.

Clio notes that by claiming this holiday, the Catholics are in essence proclaiming Mary to have ascended into heaven and become a harvest goddess. Of course under a monotheistic system this viewpoint is considered most unacceptable.

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