#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!