Clio/Three Minor Saints

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Three Minor Saints

Clio is somewhat nonplussed by the idea that holidays have become an industry, despite having the perspective to realize this is nothing new (the Saturnalia rites became a frenzy of merchandising almost from the start). She is amused to see what these three saints' names have become associated with; she does not believe the saints themselves would be as amused.

In each of these cases, the saint has all but vanished; in the industrialized world where these holy days are most widely observed, nothing remains but a frenzy of buying and selling. Clio is by nature non-interventionist. While inwardly she may agree with the Nazarene's impulse to cast moneychangers from the temple, all she permits herself to do when these holidays draw near is watch. Sometimes she laughs. Sometimes she winces.

Of Martyrs and Mating

Poor St. Valentine. Both of them.

Valentine may have actually been two Valentines. The written record is apocryphal, and Clio was spending most of her time then watching the rise of Constantine, not minor Roman martyrdoms, so she's not sure herself.

Valentine #1 may have been beaten and beheaded by Claudius II in 269 CE. The only reason we know about this Valentine is that there was a St. Valentine's church in Rome around 350 CE; the existence of the church is verified, but the Valentine story is not. The second Valentine was a bishop of Turni, near Rome, who was brought to the big city in or around 273 CE and tortured and executed by a prefect named Placidus (a bit of a misnomer, that). The problem is, both Valentines may be the same person - some say that Valentine was not killed in 269, but went to Turni and became a bishop instead. There may be various other Valentine legends muddying the waters as well.

All of these Valentines, however, are noted for one thing first and foremost - their death. Even originally, their lives held little connection to love, lovers, romance, or any such symbolism. St. Valentine's feast day is the fourteenth of February; the fact that a holiday of romance is held on the same day is mostly a matter of convenience and coincidence.

For a very long time, there persisted a popular notion that birds chose their mates on St. Valentine's feast day. Chaucer perpetuates this idea in Parlement of Foules, but he may have been referring to another feast day, that of Valentine of Genoa, which is in May. May strikes Clio as a much more likely day for birds mating than February, which in the Northern Hemisphere is often quite dismal. It's true that the idea is a lovely one - if birds choose their mates then, why not humans? - but Clio has a more direct predecessor for the same idea.

Clio believes that this feast of love was once a feast of something rather more direct. The Roman Lupercalia was a fertility rite, plain and simple, and it occurred at what would be exactly the correct time of year. Furthermore, at least one Lupercalia custom survived almost intact, well into the Christianization of this pagan holiday.

During the Lupercalia, the names of young women were put into a box. Then the young men would draw names out of the box, and the couples so formed were considered mates for the year, which began in March by the reckoning of that time. When the Christians claimed the holiday, they not only named it after the nearest saint's day, but they censored the box game, replacing the names of potential lovers with the names of saints, whose virtues the young people were then to emulate. (Now you know why Clio favors pagans over Christians.)

Human nature being what it is, by the fourteenth century Gregorian, the game had reverted to its original, more interesting form. In France in the 1600's, the wrinkle was added of letting the ladies draw from the box as well. Gradually this custom became less an outright handfasting than a declaration of amorous intent, and the Lupercalia box became the pastime of giving and receiving valentines.

Our martyred Valentine may have been innocent of the games played in his name, but even so, St. Valentine is the patron saint of lovers and betrothed couples, among other things, and his name is invoked in prayers for a happy marriage.

Stories and Shamrocks

Clio has heard so many things about the man she will have to call St. Patrick that she cannot sort out the true from the false. Again, she was mostly watching an important event elsewhere - the fall of the Roman empire. So she cannot ascribe to him a definite surname, place of birth, date of birth, or even date of death. Nor can anyone else. For Patrick, our best source is his own words - his Confession, which is basically a report to his bosses defending his activities while a Christian missionary to Ireland. But Patrick is either very vague or deliberately obscure - for example, he names a place of birth, "Bannavem Taberniae," but no one has ever been able to deduce where that was.

Here is what Clio does know about St. Patrick: He was born in either present-day England or Scotland - a Celt. He was raised as a Christian; his grandfather was a Christian priest. He was captured and taken to Ireland as a slave as a teenager, escaped to the European continent, obtained his clerical training in Gaul, and was appointed missionary bishop to Ireland by Celestine I in either 431 or 432 CE. There is a well-known legend that he had a dream that told him to return to Ireland to preach there. This may have been invented after the fact, to explain his return to a land which could not possibly have held many good memories for him. At any rate, he never left Ireland again.

One more thing is clear: While St. Patrick was not the first Christian in Ireland, or even the first missionary, he was vastly more successful than his predecessors. To claim that he founded the Christian church in Ireland is justified. The many miracles attributed to him are rather more dubious, but to his credit, Patrick himself never claimed to have performed any.

So how did St. Patrick's Day, the seventeenth of March, become the drunken festival of Irish nationalism as celebrated in the United States today? Well, to begin with, Clio feels she must point out that St. Patrick's day in Ireland itself is rather different. It is a quieter, more reverent holiday, as befits a man who is primarily a religious, not a political, icon.

It began as a show of solidarity for immigrant Irish in New England. They had many enemies and detractors (such as the original Ku Klux Klan), and they felt that by parading their numbers they might make a show of strength. In the late 1800s, the event gained further popular support, as the United States citizens tended to be in favor of independence for Ireland.

Clio finds it somewhat ironic that the primary means by which St. Patrick's Day is celebrated - among the secular and devout alike, alas - is the consumption of alcohol. St. Patrick himself apparently practiced and preached abstinence from the same, myths about his teaching Ireland to make whiskey notwithstanding.

The shamrock, on the other hand, is a legitimate symbol of the holiday. St. Patrick used it to teach the lesson of the Trinity, how the three Christian avatars could actually be the same god and yet distinct. Clio cannot resist noting that the shamrock has a much older use with the same basic idea - in a Celtic fertility rite, where the leaves represent the forms of the triune Goddess - something Patrick would almost certainly have known about.

'Tis the Season - For Whom?

Once on a time, there was a bishop in Lycia (in Asia Minor) in the fourth century. His name was Nicholas. There was a church of St. Nicholas in Constantinople in the sixth century. He has been a very popular saint, with all manner of churches and places named after him since then. He is the patron saint of children, sailors, merchants, pawnbrokers, and more besides. His feast day is the sixth of December. Those are the facts. Everything else is legend.

Once on a time, the Romans held a feast, the Natalis Solis Invicti, the Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun. This feast descended from the Persian worship of Mithras, the sun god, which had proven so popular among Romans that Aurelian proclaimed it the official Roman state religion. It took place just after the winter solstice, to mark that the days were again becoming longer, that the longest night of the year had ended. This is the same event that the pagan holy day Yule celebrates, in essence. Yule is generally around the twenty-first of December. The Roman feast was on the twenty-fifth.

Once on a time, from the seventeenth of December to the twenty-third, Romans celebrated the Saturnalia, a great feast in honor of the god Saturn, a Carnival-like time when social conventions were overturned - masters and slaves were equal during the feast days, public behaviors which would normally have been criminally lewd were overlooked, and the king of the revels had one duty - to bring laughter to his subjects. (The dethroning of this king recalls an earlier time, when the "king" of the feast was killed at its end - a ritual to bring life back to the soil and put an end to winter ... appropriately appropriated for the festival of an agricultural god.)

Once on a time, for several weeks in November, the Teutonic and Celtic people - not yet converted to Christianity - celebrated the Kalends, the celebration of the arrival of the new year. After the Christians arrived, these celebrations lasted from early November to the end of January.

With all of this going on, it seems inevitable that there should be some sort of celebration going on during this time of the year. And it seems inevitable that St. Nicholas - a saint whose public profile seems to fit this jolly time well - should be pressed into service as its Christian face. But the Christians had a lot of pagan activity to contend with in December, so they played their trump card, so to speak - they placed the birth date of their central religious figure there.

It seems like an unfair trick - but claiming Christmas in one's name is, in this day and age, something of a Pyrrhic victory. Clio observes wryly that while the twenty-fifth of December may be sacred to the Christ, looking around at the commerce and the commotion of that month, it is clear who the holiday really belongs to - and in whose image the damage is being done.

Poor cuckolded St. Nicholas, forced to do the bidding of Mammon in a red suit.

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