#74: Candlemas

                                    

Coming to the end of this cold, wet month, I’ve enjoyed Eleanor Parker’s book Winters in the World, an exploration of the Anglo-Saxon experience of the seasons through Anglo-Saxon poetry and historical and religious works.

Close to the weather

Several things struck me (apart from the beauty of Anglo-Saxon poetry such as The Seafarer, which I haven't read since my undergraduate days). Firstly, how dependent on and close to the weather people were then, since it could make the difference between famine or plenty. Also, the seasons gave meaning and structure to people’s lives much more strongly than they do now. Thirdly, how important communal celebrations were, and the sheer number of them that existed.

The origin of Candlemas

Often newly-introduced Christian celebrations were meshed into the year’s weather cycle. This happened with the 2 February Christian festival of Candlemas. The festival commemorates Mary and Joseph taking the 40-day-old Jesus to be presented at the temple. They were met by the elderly Anna and her husband Simeon, who recognised the baby as the Messiah. Simeon took him in his arms and spoke a prayer which became the Christian Nunc Dimittis: ‘Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation’.

Says Parker:

This means that Candlemas is a festival which has at its heart a meeting between childhood and old age, birth and death, and winter and spring. The dating of the feast was fixed by its biblical origin, because the period of purification appointed in the law of Moses meant it must take place 40 days after Christ’s birth. However, 2 February coincided with a significant point in the solar year: midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, it’s a time when the days are getting longer, daylight is growing stronger, and in northern Europe the earliest spring flowers are starting to appear. It was a natural time for a festival of light, and that was what Candlemas became.

So Candlemas fuses Christianity (and before that, Jewish law) and the natural rhythm of the year. People celebrated it, Parker tells us, by taking candles to church to be blessed, so echoing Christ being presented in the temple. Then, after a procession, people took the candles home and kept them all year.

Periods of dearth and plenty have disappeared in our age of supermarkets and year-round strawberries. But do we not still create them, showing that such rhythms are important, even if artificially-induced? For example, I’m just coming to the end of Dry January, which strikes me as a secular version of Lent.

Book recommendation

As for the book, it is scholarly but accessible. It explains clearly which sources are used and what they allow us to say, as in a two-page discussion of whether the modern word ‘Easter’ does come from the pagan goddess Eostre, the only evidence for which is one statement in Anglo-Saxon historian Bede’s Reckoning of Time, a discussion of the medieval church calendar. Parker thinks that on balance the festival may have been named for a Kentish goddess, and explains why she thinks so, briefly surveying the history of the argument and sources involved. It is brave not to fear losing the general reader by detailing sources and uncertainties.  

This is a good read for a chilly time of year. It encourages celebration or at least a marking of lean times, before the first blossoms appear. Happy Candlemas!

#73: The Places in Between

This book is a chronicle of Rory Stewart’s 36-day walk through central Afghanistan in January 2002, from Herat in the west to Kabul in the east, starting six weeks after the Taliban were removed from power after 9/11. Stewart likes a challenge. He decides to take the shorter, but harder and colder, route through the central mountains (rather than the longer southern route around them) since the Taliban still controls parts of the south. He goes in winter because he does not want to wait for the snow to melt.

In the footsteps of the first Mughal emperor

He discovers he is following in the footsteps of Babur, the first emperor of Mughal India, who crossed the mountains at the beginning of the sixteenth century when he was still prince of a poor part of Uzbekistan (before going on to conquer Kabul and then Delhi). Babur’s diary is a constant accompaniment on the journey, and Stewart comments on it: ‘What he did was very dangerous, but he never draws attention to this. Instead, he focuses on the people he meets and uses portraits of individuals to suggest a whole society.… He does not embroider anecdotes to make them neater, funnier, more personal or more symbolic.’

Stewart tries to follow Babur’s lead by painstakingly describing people and places as he asks for hospitality each night. He generally rejects journalistic or political generalisations, and is unwilling to search for premature meanings, often leaving conversations and episodes open-ended without trying to analyse them. Like Babur, Stewart tries not to embroider, commenting early on that ‘abrupt episodes and half understood conversations already suggested a society that was an unpredictable composite of etiquette, humour and extreme brutality’, and describes an episode in which one of his companions points a gun at children for fun.

It’s clear that Stewart knows a great deal about which local people hold power in the different areas of the country, and about Western intervention, but this is mainly cleared to the sides of the main story – his trek in freezing temperatures, often living only on bread, spurning lifts when offered, experiencing great kindness from hosts who are much poorer than him. For most of the journey his closest companion is a semi-domesticated mastiff with yellow wolf’s eyes whose trust he slowly gains, who he names Babur. His relationship with the dog is for me the most touching thing in the book.

Detailed descriptions as a form of respect

Another joy of the book is its descriptive detail. One night just over halfway through the journey, Stewart is attacked by some boys throwing stones at him, and asks an old man if he can walk with him to escape the intimidating attentions of three other men. He is then invited by a man called Aktar to stay in his house and then to a castle guest room, where he is allowed to light a small fire but not the stove for lack of fuel. Stewart is ill and stares at the castle ceiling for hours:

[it] was made from a frame of poplar branches, their brown, curled leaves still attached. The mud floor was partly covered by a shabby striped blanket, two pieces of dark felt and a small cheap rug in the Bokhara style. Mattresses were stacked in the corner under a grimy white sheet. The walls were undecorated except for a photograph of my absent host, the feudal lord Bushire Khan, with a pencil-thin moustache and a trilby hat. He looked like a 1930s Shanghai gangster.

I woke later feeling a little better to find a girl by the fire. She looked about 17. Her beautiful pale face was scrunched in concentration as she crumbled dry animal dung into the hearth. Both her hair and eyebrows were very black, as though she had dyed them. She wore a gold cap in a blue embroidered turban and, over her dress of blue chintz, a purple waistcoat and a green embroidered wool cardigan. A pair of blue corduroy trousers showed beneath the skirt. She raised her head and met my eyes. I smiled. She looked at me expressionlessly and then turned and left the room.

Such descriptions are a form of respect for the country, and allow us to take our time imagining the journey, the landscape, the people.

The minaret of Jam

During the journey he comes across the minaret of Jam, a solitary column in the midst of mountains, decorated with turquoise tiles and densely patterned bricks. Stewart thinks this could be the remains of Turquoise Mountain, the capital city of the Ghorid empire, before it was destroyed by Genghis Khan. This had been excavated under Western-led programmes before but when Stewart visited, after a decade of destruction of cultural heritage under the Taliban, no one outside the region knew whether it was still standing.

Bushire, a powerful military man in the area, tells Stewart he gets money from foreigners to direct a society which protects the tower. He tells Stewart they have sold most of the things they have dug up. Stewart asks him:

‘What have you found out about the life of this ruined city?’

‘I don’t understand. What do you mean?’

I tried again. ‘Have you found out roughly what the plan of the city was… where the bazaar was, the religious schools?’

‘No.’

‘The smaller mosques, the gardens, the military barracks?’

‘No. You are asking difficult questions. We just dig downwards and we find a jumble of things.’

Bushire says the city has been destroyed twice, once by hailstones and once by Genghis. The group laugh when Stewart tells them they are destroying what remains.

Stewart would like to see the villagers employed by an official archaeological team and the site enclosed and monitored, and laments that the ‘international community’ did not act before it was too late.

The minaret of Jam

Local, personal meaning

Stewart says at the end: ‘Nothing in my life has brought me as much fulfilment as my walk in Afghanistan and my work in Afghanistan.… I hope, therefore, the book will survive not as a metaphor of something international and political, but as a chronicle of an experience which found its deepest meaning when it was at its most local and most personal.’

He subsequently returned to the country and set up the charity Turquoise Mountain which restores buildings, has built a clinic and a school, trains craftspeople and helps them launch businesses. It has since expanded to Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and the Levant.