Abstract

Sifting the Cinders of the Cathars

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 12 December 2002

S George and the Dragon

S George is another early saint with no confirmed history except that he came from the east. He was, of course, martyred, the later Church seemed to have agreed, it being a necessity for any saint in the early days of Christianity. The story of S George, the princess and the dragon comes from the Legenda Aurea, the lives of the saints of Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, about 1280 AD. An English version was printed by Caxton in 1483. It is of the form of the typical solar myth of Marduk and Tiamat. The bullying dragon, which lived in a lake near the towm, was consuming a human child daily, and it was the turn of a beautiful and chaste princess, the king’s daughter—the very image of S Catherine and S Agnes. The dragon was approaching the rock to which the sorry princess had been chained, curiously dressed as a bride! S George, a military tribune in the army of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, was passing by and heared of the tragedy. Mounted on his horse and armed with his lance, he rushed to the scene just as the monster was about to devour the royal virgin. S George forced the beast to submit, and the princess led it back, oddly enough, by the princess’s girdle. The king and the people were overjoyed until he promised to release the monster once more unless the whole town converted to Christianity. Grateful but over a barrel, they agreed. 20,000 converted and S George beheaded the monster.

The place of the events is given as Libia (Libya) or Lydda, both places where Phœnician lived and offered their children to the god Molech in pre-Persian times, and perhaps in Africa, even later. The dragon might be a memory of the tophets preserved by Christians as an awful Pagan abomination. The legend continues that, in the persecution of Diocletian, S George was martyred. Refusing to abjure the Christian faith, he was put to death seven times in succession by different means, but was miraculously restored to health each time except the last. This ia plainly an allusion to the Cathar belief that souls were incarnated on earth seven times, and only after the seventh did they achieve perfection and return to God. The legend is genuinely old. In 346 AD, an inscription in a Syrian church already calls S George a holy martyr, and E A Wallis Budge considers dates back to 197 AD. S George was certainly worshipped as a holy saint throughout the Near East from the third century onwards. Crusaders are said to have brought the story to England. Perhaps it was the heretics.

E R Leach, a Cambridge university anthropologist thought the cult of S George was older than S George himself! The same story appears in classical literature as the story of Perseus and Andromeda, and the stories told about S George’s martyrdom were suspiciously similar to those about the death of the god, Adonis, the death and resurrection of whom preceded the death and resurrection of Christ. The sixteenth-century Christian commentator, Hospinian, said:

In allegory, S George stands for Christ, the Dragon is the Devil, and the citizens are the human race redeemed by Christ.

These are stories based on the myth of the defeat of chaos and the good creation that follows, just the story of Genesis in the Jewish scriptures, although there the chaos is not mythologised into a monster. These stories were enacted at the new year festival that originally was held at one of the equinoxes, latterly the spring equinox. Medieval Europe celebrated the new year, not at Christmas, but at Annunciation Day, 25 March, until the Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1582. The modern image of an aged year, about to die, and a baby new year, just born, was for long actually a battle between the two, the old being the dragon and the new being the hero. Either way:

Most scholars agree that the new year celebrations at their most basic are a mimesis of death and rebirth or recreation.

Alison Jones, Larousse Dictionary of World Folklore

The original S George was the archangel Michael, who was the Persian Mithras and the Babylonia Marduk. All are good gods—sun gods—and the dragon is chaos or evil. The dragon Ladon lay coiled around the tree which bore the golden apples of immortal life in the Garden of the Hesperides, as in the Adam and Eve story. He had as attendants numerous beautiful maidens who helped Hercules to kill the monster. Hercules is a sun god. The people of the Hebrides, remote islands of the west coast of Scotland, called S Michael, “the god Michael.” Good prevails and, where the victim is depicted as a beautiful maiden, the god wins her too, whence the wedding dress, presumably. The sky represented by the sun is male and the earth is female. The sky fertilises the earth with rain and the womb of the earth bears crops. The woman is the earth goddess, Persephone—Israel personified as the daughter of Zion for the Jews—who in Christian mythology became the Church itself, metaphorically the bride of Christ. The earth goddess married the revivified sun god in a hierogamos to produce all the fruits of summer.

Edward III made S George the patron saint of the chivalric Order of the Garter, based on the Knights of the Round Table. The feast day of S George is 28 April.

The “mummers” were masked thespians who enacted the story of S George and the Dragon at the end of the year. This was at first the spring equinox, but because, in northern Europe, it became the winter solstice, the mummers could perform at both of these times with justification, and in different places, so they did. It comes from the old habit of “guising”, dressing up in animal costumes and masks at the new year:

If anyone, at the calends of January, goes about as a stag or a bull—that is making himself into a wild animal and dressing in the skin of a wild animal, and putting on the head of beasts—those who in such wise transform themselves into the appearance of a wild animal, penance for three years because it is devilish.

Archbishop Theodore, Liber Pentitentalis (690 AD)

Plainly the Church was not keen on it. The hero S George faces up to an Infidel and a Dragon (a hobby horse), with other characters being a Fool, a man dressed as a woman (Maid Marian), probably for no other reason than that, like Mrs Worthington’s daughter, it was unladylike for a woman to go on the stage, so the man acted the maiden who was Kore Persephone, the revival of nature when the summer sun triumphed. W C Hazlitt confirms that Maid Marion was usually a pretty boy of feminine appearance. At some stage in the play, the summer sun, S George himself dies and is resurrected by the Doctor, another character. A name for the fool was  Bedlamer. He carried a horn to toot at people, and gave rise to the expression “horn mad”.

Mumming seems originally to have been the practice of the period of misrule in the twelve days of the new year celebration. People dressed eccentrically, especially cross-dressing. It is said to have been the memory of the Roman Saturnalia, or rather its extension called Sigillaria or festival days, but it was such a widespread festival, it seems less likely to have been a trasfer from Roman habit as a common Aryan celebration. Christians tried to ban it at the Synod of Thurles, which forbade cross-dressing. The Council of Constantinople (680) confirmed the ban on “disguising and mumming that is used in Christmas time”. Visiting each others’ houses was part of “mummery”. The continuous festival of Saturnalia, Sigillaria, Lupercalia and Bacchanalia lasting from Christmas to Easter is still celebrated in Germany as Fasching. There is no doubt that people dressed themselves as animals, rams, stags, and cattle, for example, as Bishop Faustinus published a sermon condemning it. Moreover, in 1348, “for the disguising of the court at the feast of Christmas”, 80 tunics of buckram and a great many “whimsical dresses” were ordered by the chancellor of the English king.

Olaus Magnus wrote:

That after their long winter, from the beginning of October to the end of April, the northern nations have a custom to welcome the returning splendour of the sun with dancing, and mutually to feast each other…

Summer Battles

Hazlitt adds that the Goths and Swedes had a mock battle in honour of May Day between summer and winter. It was a wider custom than Hazlitt allowed. The hint of the annual battle remains in some of the customs preserved until recent centuries in the UK. According to the Reader’s Digest Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain, at St Columb Major in Cornwall, the custom of “hurling the silver ball” was kept every Shrove Tuesday. The silver ball was made of applewood, painted silver, and the custom was to pass it among team members, just like rugby or netball, to try to score in one or other of two goals, two miles apart. Each team had an arbitrary number of participants. Before the game started each of the members of the two teams had a chance to see and handle the ball to bring them luck. If the game pertained to the battle of the summer and the winter suns, the ball standing for the sun might be expected to be painted gold not silver, unless it was meant to be the wan sun of the British winter which often is silvery when seen through Britain’s permanent clouds. Or perhaps the winter and the night-time sun were equated with the moon.

Another football type of game was held at Corfe Castle also on a Shrove Tuesday. The game was played from Corfe to Swanage, supposedly to keep a right of way to the harbour by Purbeck marble cutters. It sounds like a later rationalization. St Ives has its own ceremony of hurling the silver ball but held on the Monday of Candlemas week in early February. This is not a contest but the ball is passed from person to person in a chain from church to the beach, and the holder of the ball at noon when the sun was at its height won a token prize.

Hullaton in Leicestershire had its own battle game. Traditionally, a hare pie was first eaten, but its remains were taken to Hare Pie Hill where they were spread on the ground, apparently in a fertility ritual. Meanwhile, three “Bottles,” which were, in fact, barrels, were ceremoniously paraded up the same hill. One was empty but the others contained nine pints of ale each. The “Bottle Kicking” game began in which two teams of youths struggled to carry one of the partly filled bottles over a brook. The victorious team could take time out celebrating on its contents. The ritual was repeated with the empty bottle, and then with the last partly filled bottle. When the result was clear, the scorer announced the winners and was chaired to the town cross and the real festivities began.

Atherstone, in Warwickshire, had a solar game held on Shrove Tuesday at 3.00 pm when a large inflated bladder was thrown from a window of the Three Tuns in Long Street. Two teams fought for the bladder until 5.00 pm, when whoever had possession of it won for his team. After 4.30 pm, the bladder could be burst and hidden. The bladder was supposedly a bag of gold supplied by King John, but although the king might have recognized the tradition by offering a prize, it is one of its type. Or, “King John” might have been the god’s name!

Another solar football match was held in Alnwick, in Northumberland, on Shrove Tuesday. The game was almost orthodox Rugby scrummaging, but each team had 150 members. The goals were themselves highly decorated like Christmas trees and a goal was called a “hale.” The first team to three hales won.

Workington, in Cumberland, also had a football game at Easter played by a team of coalminers against a team of dockers, perhaps a sign that it was not an ancient tradition, or had been made into a competition lately. The game though was unorthodox, as football games go, because it had no rules, and anyone could join in if the fancy took them. The goals were a mile apart.

On the second Tuesday after Easter, at Hungerford in Berkshire, the Hocktide Festival was held supposedly in memory of another John—John o’Gaunt—who supposedly gave the town special hunting and fishing rights in 1364. A horn was blown to summon commoners to an annual court convened to consider the dispensation of rights. But the court also elected two “Tuttimen” (flower-men) who carried long poles decorated with scented herbs, flowers and ribbons. They were entitled to a kiss and a tithe from every woman they met, and in return she got an orange from another man called the “Orange Scrambler”. The event ended at lunchtime with a celebration in the local inn. It sounds as though an older tradition has been conflated with the one instituted by John o’Gaunt, or the “o’Gaunt” part of the “John” is meant to be explanatory.

The meaning even of the word “Hock” here is uncertain, but seems to pertain to binding. Thus Hockday was when certain rents were paid by tenant farmers to their landlord, and the slang expression to be in “hock” means to be in debt. Half the annual rent was paid on Hockday and the other half at Michaelmas, corresponding to Beltane and Samhane. The old tradition was that Hocktide consisted of the Monday and the Tuesday of the week after Easter, when the women on Hock Monday, then the men on Hock Tuesday, would bind passers by of the opposite sex with ropes and commit them to a donation. Latterly the donation was usually for church maintenance. The hint is of diluted fertility rights, but “hoge” or “hooch” in Middle Dutch means “wedding,” with the suggestion that the Hockdays might be a memory of the spring hierogamos of the summer sun and the Nature goddess.

The tradition possibly lasted at Hungerford precisely because it was tied to the John o’Gaunt concession, the women’s half of the custom having disappeared sooner because it was not thus attached. It was probably disapproved of by the Puritans but was revived briefly at the restoration, only to fade out for good in most of Britain.

At Helston in Cornwall, S Michael fought the Devil and was victorious. The victory is celebrated on the nearest saturday to the feast day of the Apparition of S Michael the Archangel, the town’s patron saint, on 8 May. A lot of these solar customs are associated with churches dedicated to S Michael, and many are also linked to churches dedicated to S Nicholas. “Nicolaos” in Greek means “a victory of the people”. Curiously, this is the same day in the Orthodox calendar as the feast day of S John the Theologian, the author of John’s gospel and supposedly Revelation, the man considered to be especially revered by the Cathars. On this day, the people dance the Furry, Ferrie or Floral Dance through the streets of the town. The celebrations begin with a mumming play, acted latterly by schoolchildren, called the Hal an Tow. The words of the songs of the play relate to Robin Hood and make it clear that the festival celbrates the victory of summer over winter:

Robin Hood and Little John,
They both are gone to the fair,
And we’ll go to the merry green wood,
And see what they do there.
For we were up as soon as any day
For to fetch the summer home,
For winter now is gone-O,
and summer now is come,
Where are those Spaniards,
That make so great a boast?
They shall eat the grey goose feather,
While we shall eat the roast.
As for the brave S George,
S George, he was the knight.
Of all the knights in Christendom,
S George is the right.
God bless Aunt Mary Moses,
And all her powers and might,
And send us peace in Merry England,
Both day and night.

The quatrain about the Spaniards looks to be an insertion from the time of the Armada, and the lyric seems to confirm that S George is really equivalent to the archangel Michael.

At Padstow in Cornwall, at midnight on May Eve, the “Obby Oss” (Hobby Horse) ceremony began. “Hobby Horse” is a diminutive of “Robin Horse.” People walked through the town until about 2.00 am singing the Morning Song. Early on May Day, the town was decorated with greenery, and the maypole in the square was decorated with greenery, ribbons and flowers. Eventually the Obby Oss appeared. It was a man wearing a gruesome mask and a skirt consisting of a wide frame covered with black material to resemble the body of a horse. The Obby Oss danced and cavorted along the streets with the accompanying crowd singing the Day Song. Attendants called “Teasers” constantly baited the Obby Oss, which responded by snapping at them. He would try to trap any pretty girl he saw under his skirt. The revelry continued until the Obby Oss died at midnight. The Obby Oss was plainly wicked winter having a last fling before it died.

It is possible though that half of the tradition has been lost, the full ceremony being a clash between the dragon, the Oss, and S George. The Larousse Dictionary of World Folklore (LDWF) states unequivocally that the May Day festival celebrates…

…the annual battle between winter and summer, and to ensure that the summer would win and the sun return.

Arawn in Welsh mythology is the winter sun, and therefore the prince of the underworld. The conflict of Holgar with Arawn is the battle between summer and winter. In the old Teutonic traditions, the change from winter to summer was enacted in ceremonial battles, just as it was in ancient Persia and Babylonia.

Minehead Hobby Horse appeared on May Eve. It was a nine foot wicker frame, covered with painted sacking and ribbons. The operator was concealed inside. The horse cavorted around the town for three days with its company of drummers and accordionists. Various villages in the north west of England, like Antrobus, had a mumming tradtion that included a hobby horse and its driver. Other Lancashire towns, like Burscough, held a “Pace-Eggers” procession. Pace eggs are decorated boiled eggs—Easter Eggs—“Pace” being a corrupt form of “Pascal.” Dressed in strange outfits, some of them identifiable with the characters in the mummers plays, the participants cavorted in procession around the town.

A dragon slaying adventure is attached to Burley in Hampshire. The dragon lived on Burley Beacon, terrorizing the townsfolk, demanding milk, a popular failing of dragons, or it would eat all their sheep. Eventually, the townsfolk hired a knight who slayed the beast. Beacons were places where fire signals were built, and that therefore associates them with sun ceremonies.

Another such tradition with no preserved custom is remembered at St Leonard’s Forest, to the west of East Grinstead. S Leonard was supposedly wounded while ridding the forest of a monstrous dragon. Where the saint’s blood fell, lilies of the valley sprang up. The tale is set in the sixth century but seems to be another vague memory of the solar celebration. Perhaps these stories got associated with a churchman because he suppressed the custom, and was remembered as himself killing the dragon.

A dragon slaying tale is associated with Brent Pelham church in Hertfordshire. On the north wall of the nave is the tomb of Piers Shanks who killed the dragon of Great Pepsell’s Field. The eleventh century tomb shows the dragon but other than a story that the Devil demanded Shanks, body and soul, in return for the death of his pet, there is no more to the legend and again no custom. Shanks refused the Devil his request saying his soul was God’s only, and his body would lie where his arow fell. Thereupon, he took his bow and shot an arrow into the church. It is a Christianization of a solar myth.

A custom of the Isle of Thanet in Kent might have been introduced when Jutes from Denmark occupied the land in the fifth century. A hobby horse with a wooden head and manipulable jaw is operated by a man otherwise covered in a white sheet. It is called the Hooden Horse (Odin’s or Wodin’s Horse). At midsummer and Christmas the horse emerges to collect alms for the poor, reminding us of Robin Hood.

It might surprise some Christians to realise that, on May Day, the choristers of Magdalene College, Oxford, sing a carol while facing east to the rising sun at 6.00 am in the morning from the very top of Magdalene Tower, Oxford, built in 1492. The bells of the chapel then peel and Morris Men begin dancing in the street to entertain the crowd that gathered even at this early hour on the nearby bridge. The ceremony is accepted as utterly Christian but it reminds us of those primitive Christians of Pliny and the Essenes, and might be a link with them over two millennia that embraces the Cathars, and a Christianity that still embraced open veneration of the sun.

The May Queen

In 1597 AD, the rolls of the West Riding church courts record:

Ffrancis Thompson and George Allen did in a most contentious manner bring into Hunsingore church a toy, called the Flower of the Well, in the time of Divine Service, whereby the Vicar was disturbed in saying the said service.

The rogues were whipped round the town. The same West Riding court sessions report that at Aldborugh, people, “having followed their vanities all the night in seeking their Mammet (Mahomet, meaning a false god) commonly called the Flower of the Well” and that they would “bring the same in a barrow into the church in prayer times” and they “proceeded forward with such a noise of piping, blowing of an horn, ringing or striking of basins and shouting of people that the minister was constrained to leave reading the prayer”. The Flower of the Well is two hoops crossing each other to make a sphere which is garlanded with flowers, especially crown imperial lily. In the center of the hoop was either an image or doll of the May Queen, or a pretty girl selected to wear the decoration as the May Queen.

The tradition is to pick a pretty girl as the Queen of the May. She was adorned with flowers and ribbons like the maypole. The maiden then led the ceremonies. Although this aspect of the tradition has survived, originally there was a King of the May, a Spirit of Vegetation and others, perhaps traitionally adding up to 13 main participants. The King or the Spirit of Vegetation might feign sleep in a field, and be woken by the Queen with a kiss (or vice versa), whereupon they dance off into the greenwood to consummate the revival of Nature. Others take their cue from this and roll naked in the foggy dew.

At Castleton, in Derbyshire, a Garland King and Queen rode through the town with a band playing and Morrismen dancing on Oak Apple Day, 29 May. The Garland was a bell shaped frame decorated with greenery, flowers and ribbons and weighed 56 pounds. The Queen who accompanied the King simply wore a hood. Since the restoration of Charles II, the ceremony has been thought to be symbolic of it, and so the participants wear Stuart fashions rather than anything more medieval. It looks to be much older. The Garlanded King sounds much like the Jack in the Green of other customs, who might have been originally incinerated on a pyre. The lighting of bonfires were also a feature of May Eve to encourage the return of the sun, and eating charred buns might stand for ancient sacrifices. Several Derbyshire villages had garland ceremonies, and the garlands are sometimes preserved, often in a church, even when the ceremonies have lapsed, as many now have.

The fairy tale of the sleeping beauty is derived from the vegetation and sun cycles. The barran queen (the Nature goddess as the winter landscape) at last has a baby daughter, and the king invites twelve wise women (fairies) to his celebration. A thirteenth is slighted, a hint perhaps that the number of lunations in the year is not twelve exactly. A thirteenth begins without being completed, and so one of the coven has unfairly been omitted. The slighted guest curses the child to death, but the other wise women commute the death to sleep, a promise that the Nature goddess never dies. A young prince—the summer sun—eventually revives the princess after her winter “death”.

At Hitchin in Hertfordshire, a procession of “Mayers” was held from the early morning of May day. The Mayers sang the Mayers’ song accompanied by traditional instruments, while dancing and cavorting around. Leading the procession were two couples, the first being two men dressed as Mad Moll and her husband, a shabby pair, and the next two, again men, but youths dressed as gentry. Mad Moll and her husband, dressed in dirty tatters and patches, had blackened faces, whereas the Lord and Lady were dressed in bright colours, bedecked with ribbons and trinkets. The Lord carried a sword, while Mad Moll and her husband acted mischievously. The others acting as Mayers dressed eccentrically but also bedecked in greenery, flowers and ribbons. The revelry lasted all day. The custom looks like a memory of the hierogamos, but with the tatty old pairing of the previous year also remembered as a jokey old couple. At Cambridge, poor children dressed up as the poor May Queen, and begged money for her.

Ickwell Green, Bedforshire, had a similar custom on May Day, and had a permanent maypole on the village green. Barwick in Elmet, in Yorkshire, had a famous permanent maypole 86 feet high. Every three years on Easter Monday, it was customary to lower it so that a team of “Polemen” could renovate it. Belton in Leicestershire and Wellow in Nottingham were also among places that had a permanent maypole. Belton possibly refers to Beltane.

At one time, every village of any size had a permanent maypole. Those that did not used to cut down a tall straight elm tree and decorate it suitably. In Wales, it was traditionally a birch tree. One tradition was for rival villages to raid each other trying to steal their maypoles, possibly another form of mock battle of the winter and summer suns. Stukeley says that maypoles served as the Hermes of Roman times, which is to say a phallic post. The Roundhead Long Parliament of 1644 banned them. The Protestants considered enjoyment and mirth to be a sin. One of them wrote in 1660:

Maypoles, players and jugglers, and all things else now pass current. Sin now appears with a brazen face.

Whalton, in Northumberland, had a midsummer festival held on Old Midsummer’s Eve (4 July). Called Whalton Bale, it refers to the great fire built on the green, “bale” being the Saxon word for fire. The accompanying festivities included Morris Men, sword dancing. fiddlers and pipers. Birse, in Aberdeedshire, had a Beltane ceremony on May Day until Victoria’s time. A bonfire was lighted on a knoll, and the throng proceeded round it three times in a sunwise direction. Various other ceremonies associated with a Nature religion were conducted.

A tradition in Perth on May Day that the local Scots still called Beltanday in the eighteenth century, was for the boys and cowherds to go to the moors and cut a circular trench in the peat so that they could all sit round a “table” in the turf. They built a fire in the center and made a custard or porridge of milk, eggs and oatmeal which they ceremoniously ate sitting in the circle around the fire after they had deliberately spilled some on the ground for fertility. Meanwhile an oatcake was being baked on a stone set in the embers. When the cake was done, it was divided into the number of pieces corresponding to the number present, but one piece was rolled in the ash of the fire to blacken it. All the pieces were then put in a bonnet and drawn out as if drawing a lottery. The holder of the bonnet had the last piece. Whoever had the blackened morsel was the “hallowed” person to be “sacrificed”. The “sacrifice” was to jump three times over the hot embers.

The third Council of Constantipole (680) decreed:

These bonfires that are kindled by certain people on new moors before their shops and houses, over which also they used ridiculously and foolishly to leap by a certain ancient custom, we command them henceforth to cease.

Pope Zachary in 742 repeated the ban. Tyndall, who came to know the reality of what he was saying, told us:

If the meat be over-roasted, we say the bishop has put his foot in the pot, or the bishop has played the cook, because bishops burn who they lust and whsoever displeases them.

Morris dancing is an old tradition that has seen a revival in England in the last half century. Oddly, its name and therefore presumably its origin is “morisco,” the word used of the Spanish Moors, driven out by Ferdinand and Isobella in the fifteenth century. W C Hazlitt, in Dictionary of Faiths and Folklore, admits that this derivation of the word “Morris” is very doubtful, but nothing better has been suggested.

Beggars used to ring a bell in the hope of getting alms, or clack together their wooden dishes to show they were empty. These were characteristics too of Morris dancers, who made it part of their dance or costume, and might suggest that Morris men were dancing beggers performing for money. The Romanies or Gypsies are considered to have been dancing beggars from India. The Spanish Gypsies made a similar sound to the clacking beggars when dancing with their castanets. “Morris” is “Romish” but for the change in order of the consonants, a common form of punning, and one wonders whether the dancing beggars were mocking the Catholic Church in some way, their meretricious dancing being meant to scorn the posturing of the Roman Cardinals and Bishops.

The dance is said to have been introduced into England by the ubiquitous John o’Gaunt (1340-1399). Both sword dancing, linked with winter and the death and resurrection rituals, and folk dancing linked with spring and early summer and standing for the victory of the summer sun over the winter sun, and the revival of Nature, are both older than this rationalization. Perhaps John o’Gaunt is again a memory of the Cathar god. It was immensely popular by the time of Henry VIII (1509-1547). The first mention of Morris dancing is in the Privy Purse expense account of Henry VII (1485-1509), for January 1484, where £2 are allocated for it, in the period when he was contesting the monarchy with the usurper, Richard III (1483-1485). Many traditions of the poor only come into the spotlight of history when they attract the attention of the upper literate classes who then write about them, or more mundanely cost them in their accounts.

Since John o’Gaunt was the Duke of Lancaster, it is appropriate that Lancashire had a solid tradition of Morris dancing. The Bacup Morris Men, called the Britannia Coconut dancers, performed, at Easter and midsummer, their Coconut Dance, and were called “Nutters.” Is it just a joke? Eric Maple (The Dark World of Witches) tells us witches were called “Nutters” in Lancashire. The “nuts” were wooden discs on their knees, waist and palms that they clacked in rhythm as they danced a seven mile circuit of local hamlets. The Roundheads ended Morris dancing, as they ended most of the things that ordinary people liked to do, in their enforcement of the Old Testament Jewish sabbath in daily life.

Appleton, in Cheshire, had a festival of “Bawming the Thorn.” The town had a thorn tree that was said to be a cutting from the Glastonbury sport, associated with Joseph of Arimathea in the Arthurian Cycle, and so presumably flowered in winter. “Bawming” the thorn meant decorating it with ribbons and garlands, and was done on midsummer’s day, simulating it flowering in summer because it would not of its own volition.

On 12 August at Marhamchurch, a revel was held for S Morwenna. A Queen of the Revel was selected from among the schoolgirls, and she was crowned by Father Time in front of the church where the saint once lived in her anchorage. The Queen of the Revel on hoseback led a procession to the “revel ground.” Sports and feasting occupied the rest of the day.

The May Day ceremonies in the Isle of Man sound more complete than most. A pretty girl, the daughter of a wealthy local farmer, was chosen in each parish to be the Queen of the May. She was finely attired and was accompanied by about 20 maids of honour. A captain and his guard were also selected as partners to the maidens. They were accompanied by musicians playing violins and flutes. The interesting part is that a mirror image of these also played a part. A man was dressed as a Queen of the Winter, and he had a gaggle of “maids” in attendance. They dressed in old woollen hoods, tatty furs and old heavy winter coats. The Winter Queen too had a captain and a guard similarly attired. They had a “band” playing pots and pans with wooden spoons and tongs.

The two teams of guards met on the common to defend their maids in a mock battle. Perhaps this was a game like those described above, or elsewhere evolved into it, but it seems that it was, at first, part of the drama, and the guards of the May Queen were meant to be beaten, causing great anguish when the May Queen was captured by Winter and had to be ransomed. The ransom was the cost of the day’s revelries, explaining why the maid’s father had to be wealthy. The ransom agreed, Winter and its forces withdrew to a nearby barn or hall and shed their mumming gear, emerging to join the fun. The Queen of the May and her maids sat at a long table and her captain and his men sat at a table facing them, while the space between was the part of the green used for dancing. Various elements of this can be seen in different traditions already described, suggesting that they are already attenuated from their origins.

Winter Customs

One of the games enjoyed by adults as well as kids at Halloween is trying to bite apples, no hands, floating on water or hanging by strings. This custom is eerily reminiscent of the plight of Tantalus, who was hung on the tree of life but could not reach the fruit, and could never slake his thirst either. This myth is probably connected to the Green Man or Jack in the Green who is trapped in a cage of greenery decorated with the customary flowers and ribbons. He was the same as the wicker man, and was burnt as a sacrifice to the sun, originally, but in the end a corn doll was burnt and the man became a mumming character.

Lewes in Sussex had an elaborate Bonfire Night tradition that stems from the battle of the two suns, but one which showed the winter sun winning. After a procession to the bridge, a lighted barrel of tar was hurled into the river Ouse. As the barrel floated downstream, its flames gradually being extinguished, the summer sun was overcome. In the time of Mary Tudor, the town was strongly Protestant, and suffered its townsfolk being burnt at the stake by the Catholic Queen trying to impose Catholicism. So, they gladly preserved the old solar tradition as their memorial to the gunpowder plot.

At Hatherleigh and Ottery St Mary, burning tar barrels were rolled or pulled on a wagon through the town, latterly on 5 November, but originally plainly a Catherine wheel type of ceremony to remind the waning sun to return.

A Samhain ceremony was held at Balmoral, in Aberdeenshire, where the British queen has a castle. A large bonfire was lit in front of the castle, and a cart with an effigy of “Shandy Dann,” accompanied by bagpipers, led a procession to the blaze. Once the assembly reached the fire, the effigy was indicted with witchcraft and consigned to the flames. A barrow in Fortingall, in Perthshire, used to be the scene of another Samhain bonfire. The mound was piled even higher with gorse and furze and set alight. Eveyone celebrated with dancing around the fire, feasting and apple-ducking. The practice was ended by the wealthy landowners who claimed it disturbed the game than many of them use as a tourist business for rich shooting parties.

Huntly, in Aberdeenshire, was the center of the society of the “Horseman’s Word,” a sort of witch or masonic society but comprising only men in trades connected with horses, such as farriers, blacksmiths, farm hands, and so on. New members were intitiated around Samhain, often Martinmas (11 November). Only an odd number of initiates could be confirmed at a time, thirteen being the preferred number. Invitation to the ceremony was a single horse’s hair. Initiates had to take with them a loaf, a jar of jam or berries. and a bottle of whisky. The center of the initiation was to be told the “Horseman’s Word,” that they were never to reveal. The first thing they were asked, apprently as part of the ceremony, was whether they remembered what they had just been told. When they replied that they did, they were asked to repeat it, and naturally failed if they did, havuing been told not to do so. Finally, they shook hands with the Devil, a man bizarrely dressed in skins and holding a hoof out to the new members as a hand, and the rest of the night was given over to celebrating.

Martinmas was the time for sampling the wine harvest after drawing the liquor from the lees. S Martin is Dionysos. Celebrants spent the day drinking toasts to the saint in the vin nouveau. It was a boozy day.

In the Teutonic lands, Yule was celebrated with bonfires to stimulate the ascent of the sun, and lamps illuminated houses decorated with evergreens to simulate summer. Storms raged outside, and the northerners saw them as the Asgardsreid, the Wild Hunt of the gods. Asgard was the home of the gods, a northern Olympus, with twelve rooms of which Odin’s Valhalla was one. The rainbow was the bridge between Asgard and the world.

The Yule Log burnt over the twelve days of the winter celebration, and its ashes or a charred brand were kept until the following year to sprinkle on the new log, so that the fortune would be passed on from year to year. The animal of winter was the boar, and one was killed and roasted, its head serving as the centre-piece of the feast with an apple in its mouth signifying the death of winter. Today, a mince pie and a glass of sherry might be left out for Santa Claus to amuse the children, who were amazed to find them gone in the morning when they found their stockings filled. Originally, the meal was left out for family spirits returning for the Christmas celebrations.

In Germany, the goddess, Diana, is Holle, Holde, Hulla or Hulda. She is a sky and storm oddess who has a wild hunt. Christians said the wails of the participants were the wails of unbaptised infants, part of the Christian propaganda to get everyone committed to Christianity before they could even think. No parent, in those ignorant and superstitious times, liked to think that their dead child was left wailing around the stormy skies on cold winter nights.

The Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance is now held on the first sunday after 4 September, but the traditional day was originally Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas. It is a new year festival, perhaps a stylised Wild Hunt. Six dancers cavort to the sound of an accordion. Each dancer carries the skull and antlers of a reindeer stag on a stick, three painted white and three painted red or black. Other chararcters include a Hobby Horse, Maid Marian, a Fool and a Bowman. In some districts the Fool was called the Squire, and some mummers also had a Lord and Lady. A female Fool called “Bess” was not unknown, a female Tom-a-Bedlam, as Hazlitt called her—the Bedlam was a name of the Fool. He thought the characters had originated in the mumming in the twelve days of Misrule at the New Year, referring to New Year’s Day as the Festival of Fools.

The Bowman twangs his bow and the Hobby Horse snaps his jaws creating the rhythm for the tunes. The procession first tours the local farmsteads and hamlets for about 20 miles around the village, bringing luck to the community, then they gathered in the afternoon for the dance or the “running.” The climax is when the two sets of antlers engage in a mock battle. At one stage the Bowman stalks the deer, firing imaginary arrows at them, making it look like and ancient hunting ritual. The clue is the new year setting showing that again it is a solar battle between the good summer sun and the wicked winter sun, the annual battle of order and chaos, in Babylonian and Persian symbolism, whereby each year re-enacts the creation of the ordered world from chaos. W C Hazlitt, in Dictionay of Faiths and Folklore, tells of the Jesuit Weston who, in 1600, found fault with the “coming into the hall of the Hobby Horse at Christmas,” affirming that:

He would no longer tolerate these and those so gross abuses, but would have them reformed.

He sounds more like a Roundhead, but sports like the Hobby Horse seemed already to be in decline as Shakespeare confirms in Hamlet, and the Roundheads gave them the final push.

The twelve days of Christmas, ending the old year or at the beginning of the new, echo the year in miniature, and in the Zoroastrian scheme of things, the year itself echoes the whole of history, the “Time of Long Dominion,” which took 12,000 years to play itself through. The old Persian new year ceremonies will have enacted the whole of human existence from Creation to Eschaton in these twelve days, and the Iranians of northern Europe will have been likely to have had similar traditions.

The Lord of Misrule or the King of Misrule was a mumming figure who ruled over the twelve days of Christmas. He is the Lord of Chaos, out of which the good god has to make the good creation that the new year signifies. The Lord of Misrule is therefore the dying old year, and the dying cruel sun overthrown by the orderly new year and the beneficent summer sun.

At Hogmanay, the new year celebration in Scotland, people went from house to house wearing masks, as Guisers of Mummers, meaning they were disguised. Animals were said to speak and give advice, suggesting that animal masks were among the disguises, or that is what they were—animal disguises. The “first footer” into neighbours’ houses took salt with them.

Allendale Town, in Northumberland, had a tar barrel burning ceremony on New Year’s Eve. The “Barrel Men,” dressed in strange costumes, carried the barrels of tar to the market place to throw them on a bonfire. Festivities follow until the strike of the new year when people go “first footing” to let in the new year in people’s homes.

Sheffield, in Yorkshire, which used to be a steel town, has nearby villages with a tradition of sword dancing on boxing day. This was not the crossed sword dancing of the kilted Scot, and, to judge by the costumes, the tradition was not in its present form ancient. The Handsworth troop dressed rather like hussars, and the Genoside team wore Paisley shirts and white trousers with a single stripe down the side. Both also wore caps. Each team was of six men, a leader and a fiddler. The dancers held their own sword in their right hand, and the tip of their neighbour’s in their left. They moved intricately about the swords without releasing them, stepping over and arching under them, until eventually, and magically, they form a Star of David pattern called a “lock” or a “nut.” The hexagon that the swords made was lowered over the head of the leader, and he was symbolically beheaded by lifting off his fur cap. He fell dead but a doctor revived him! Though these traditions look to have been revived, they stem from the art of mumming, and the sword dance used to be part of the mummers’ plays, so it is in origin an ancient tradition, and relates to the solar dual. The winter sun is beheaded to make way for the rise of the summer sun.

Blidworth in Nottinghamshire had a traditional mummers play called the Plough Monday Plays, performed in January. A Soldier, S George, A Clown, A Doctor, and Old Eezum-Squeezum (the Devil) played out the ancient struggle of order and chaos and good and evil. Maid Marian is said to have been born here and Will Scarlett is buried in the churchyard.

Imbolc, in February, was a lambing festival associated with the goddess come saint, Brigit, or Brigantia.

The Welsh used to have a nation wide horse ceremony called a Mari Lhwyd, similar to the Christmas mumming ceremonies in England. Mari Lhwyd meant the Grey Mare. Plainly, the well known british music hall cross-dressed entertainer of a century ago, Marie Lloyd, took her name from this. It was a decorated horse’s head stuck on a pole, like the Abbot’s Bromley stags’ heads. The man carrying it wore a white smock. Other characters were a Leader, a Sergeant, a Corporal, and a Merryman. The Party moved from home to home singing, and were welcomed by the household singing back. The aim latterly was to collect alms at each house before mocing on, but presumably the spirit was that the ritual brought each house good fortune in exchange. The day ended in wassailing. At Tenby, in Wales, on New Year’s Day, children sprinkled passers by with pure rain water using box or holly twigs, perhaps a relic of an old purification ceremony.

At the New year at Stonehaven in Kincardine, the men made cages of wire filled with rags soaked in paraffin. They were suspended on a wire rope. When the New year was struck in, the rags were lit and the men walked the streets whirling the fireballs above their heads. The belief was that the fires scared off evil spirits and left the town secure in the coming year.

Burghead, in Morayshire, had a midwinter fire festival called “Burning the Clavie” held on 11 January. The “Clavie” is half a barrel filled with burning peat, staves and tar, carried on a long pole called a “Spoke” from a framework that a man could fit over his shoulders to facilitate carrying the dangerous object. The whole assembly was fixed together with nails but the tradion was that they could not be hammered home with anything other than stone, for iron must not clash with iron, if misfortune was to be averted. A team of men took it in turns to carry the Clavie around the town then up a nearby hill called the “Doorie.” There, more fuel was added to get the Clavie well alight then the blazing barrel was released down the hill. Locals then scrambled for a glowing emnber off it, which would bring them good luck in the following year.

At Lerwick, in Shetland, the last Tuesday in January was “Up Helly Aa” when blazing torches were thrown into a 30 foot boat decked out like the Viking ones, with a dragon as a figurehead. The boat had first been paraded through the streets by the “Guizers,” people dressed as animals. Celebrations followed the burning of the boat. Some say it was a mock Viking funeral, perhaps meant to be the death of the Old Year. Some say it remembers the original Viking who settled on Shetland who burnt their boats so that they could never get back. It seems unlikely that Vikings would want to take such a final act unnecessarily. If it was done, it showed that they had decided to settle there, not that they had to because their way back was closed. Again, ultimately, it is a celebration of the death and rebirth of the sun or the old year at midwinter

Further Reading

• More on heretical beliefs
• More on dualistic solar belief, and sun gods as atoning saviours
• More on Mithras

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