HA HA!
That's what I love about this site (and I genuinely mean this in a complimentary way)....where else can you ask a simple question of asking for help in purchasing a few sparklers to make it more fun for the boys when we burn garden waste and you get a full on history lesson?
Reading it back in England with my family enjoying our home in France, has made me smile.
:-)
I taught my two girls when they lived in Edinburgh a few years ago to crache on the Heart of Midlothian. They told me the Asian tourists were aghast at the sight of buxom French wenches heartily spitting away :)
All this reminds me of "1066 and all that" ; Cavaliers (Wrong but Romantic) (say, Montrose) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive) (say, the Wee Frees).
And Mr Connolly : "Thou shalt not!!!" "Yes I f***ing will"
Heh, Robert Graves got a long measure out of the same sort of thing with the "White Goddess". All made up as he went along too....
Scots from the west also celebrate Samhain so no doubt they took it with them too. Looking up the pre-American pumpkin thing, I found that carved out neeps (swedes in the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary) with candle stubs in them were left outside homes to guide the dead through their hours on earth. When the North American native people's pumpkin harvest was transplanted on to All Hallows it became completely corrupted into first lanterns indoors then later the scary thing. All pure American invention and commercialised beyond recognition.
As for Calvinists... My family came from Free Church backgrounds and to say they turned their backs on religion is putting it mildly. The Reformed Free Church or Free Church of Scotland, whichever one prefers to call it whilst spitting*, is equivalent of a cocktail of cyanide and strychnine and yet even they look liberal compared to the Dutch Reformed Church or the USA's mass of very violently 'christian' evangelical churches. The vast majority of Scots Calvinists do watch TV on Sunday, as too they do washing, cook, listen to or play music and even (whisper quietly) attempt to procreate. Things have changed BUT there is still vast room for improvement like dropping rabid hypocrisy now they do not object to Hallowe'en...
*Presbyterianism began with John Knox, whose statue can be seen within the church and whose grave lies in the former churchyard of St Giles which is now tarmaced over and used as a car park behind the building. There is a marker in the ground. On the High Street by St Giles, there is a heart shaped mosaic on the pavement. This represents the Heart of Midlothian and marks the entrance to the old Tollbooth which served as Edinburgh's prison, court and council offices. Many executions were carried out in public there including William Brodie. Edinburgh people still show their contempt for the old prison and public authority by spitting into the Heart of Midlothian. The catholics usually then go behind the cathedral and spit on the Knox marker. There is also a place in Dundee where he is said to have stood when he held one of his firebrand sermons where protestant Dundonians spit on a particular cobblestone because of the years of hardship and deprivation his doctrine gave them. He had studied under Jean Calvin in Geneva. What a miserable lot!
Yes, interesting how the pope who they did not like, to put it mildly, in those days and the Year King were conflated. Two weird birds with one hot stone, so as to speak. Frazer is supposed to be the 'father' of British and American social anthropology, but I get the feeling his way of fancifully interpreting and then embellishing these bits of culture, mythology, religion and history were also useful because it kept a lot of us working to prove, disprove or generally get confused by the whole Golden Bough packet. It also led to populism of such things as the Bhagavad Gita but a completely bowdlerised version at that and some of the fictional spooky elements of Hallowe'en (correct spelling, but spell checks don't like it, so there you go...) are the outcome of his contribution.
Anyway, BS it is, but like much BS it earns a lot of people a lot more than the usually boring version of what something is really about.
Ha, where is this fine gentleman operating, Celeste? I'd go a country mile for a proper chipper. Does he do curry sauce too?
Logic of mushy peas : easily eaten after a hard day at t'mill. I'm old enough to remember the shawlies queuing up at Mrs Fishwick's chippy (no Chinese takeaways in those days) with the china bowl before 6.00 pm (pubs opened at 6.30 round our way, chip supper obligatory before for the dad). You could get scratchings for nowt !
Ach, reminds me of an Irish pub in Kilburn I used tae frequent, "we'll have no talk of da Black North in here boys"
There's fairly good evidence that at least one of the "plotters" was a government provocateur, and the whole thing was a set-up.
"Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
Guy Fawkes and his companions
Did the scheme contrive,
To blow the King and Parliament
All up alive.
Threescore barrels, laid below,
To prove old England's overthrow.
But, by God's providence, him they catch,
With a dark lantern, lighting a match!
A stick and a stake
For King James's sake!
If you won't give me one,
I'll take two,
The better for me,
And the worse for you.
A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope,
A penn'orth of cheese to choke him,
A pint of beer to wash it down,
And a jolly good fire to burn him.
Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring!
Holloa, boys! holloa boys! God save the King!
Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray!"
Bear in mind Frazer made an awful lot up as he went along. The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion as the original title was, was looking at cultural phenomena rather than theology, therefore mythology was pulled in rather than religion alone. His account of the annual sacrifice of the Year King has not been verified by field studies in any society or detailed analysis of Celtic mythology in the case of the almost identical Irish and Scots Samhain. The Puritans in the Americas did not manage to get that past Catholic migrants who took Samhain with them, one of the pre-Christian rituals that called back the light, thus fire is an important part of the festival, and the souls of the dead are freed for an evening to take the dark back to the underworld. Apparently, it is considered highly likely it was originally celebrated on the day of the winter equinox, 21 December, which as we know was sequestered and moved to 24 December to celebrate Christ's birth although originally that was celebrated in March. The view is that they needed to separate the ritual and would have made it 1 November except that that was another 'pagan' Nordic celebration associated with the end of harvest, so they plonked it on 31 October conveniently, therewith killing off the Norse festival by having a more powerful event immediately before it.
The pumpkins come from the seasonal harvest of the staple food of indigenous people that the settlers then adopted, thus in the USA carved pumpkins were associated with the harvest season in general long before becoming the emblem of Halloween.
Celeste, Guy, aka Guido, Fawkes was a member of a group of five, eventually eight provincial English Catholics who planned the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 but were caught with 20 barrels of gunpowder under the House of Lords. His death sentence was to be drawn backwards to his death, by a horse, his head near the ground. He would be "put to death halfway between heaven and earth as unworthy of both", in other words hanged. His genitals would be cut off and burned before his eyes then his bowels and heart removed. He would then be decapitated, and the dismembered parts of his body displayed so that they might become "prey for the fowls of the air". In fact, he was so badly injured by having been tortured that he fell from the scaffold ladder and broke his neck before he could be hung, his body simply dismembered and sent to different parts of England to be displayed. He was never burned. That appears to be something taken out of the burning of the Year King from Samhain that also represents his execution. The fireworks and bonfire do not mark the explosives plot as generally thought but because the king and his nobles were not blown up. the lighting of celebratory fires and the shooting of muskets in the air in celebration using wadding that burned instead of balls and also wealthier people set off the rockets newly imported from the East (China). Thus, with the merging of culture artefacts we get two festivals that have been invented, modified, reinvented and bowdlerised over time.
Being an anthro has its uses sometimes, especially when dealing with what has become a great big bundle of BS!
Well we really have a confusion of ancient so_called Celtic practices and Christian myth. At one time I think according to Frazer's Golden Bough Samhain was where a King was sacrified to ensure the return of the light and the recommencement of the agricultural year some fourmonths hence. Other Indo European cultures have the same festival witness the Hindu/Sikh festival of Diwali putting fire in the sky to encourage the return of light. As for the fires of Samhain those crafty Christians not only built their churchs on ancient sacred sites but also appropriated Celtic myths to their advantage thus the rebirth of the world at Samhain became analogous with the Resurrection. How the Americans ever became involved is a mystery given that the Puritans would have had little truck with such practices. One can only believe that deeper Ur-beliefs overwhelmed the Calvinist dogma of those days.
Never heard of it either, Cara. You can usually buy bangers in your local tabac (I sell them in mine).
Lol, especially with these false clowns frightening everyone around the cities. Oh, the Addams Family is on Channel 23 tonight :)
Why Guy Fawkes' celebrations here? Storming the Bastille, throwing rotten tomatoes at Hollande or something else must be far more appropriate ;-)
Incidentally, I have seen 'Happy Halloween' streamers in a local square. That is quite an extraordinary thing to say for All Souls Evenings, hallows being the souls of the departed especially saints as it is. As for the one I saw saying 'Happy Pumpkin Day', I think I am getting lost. When I studied beliefs and rituals there was no mention of happy pumpkins I came across, unless I missed it by not going to the Scoobydoo and Shaggy lectures!
Quite rightly, Cara ! Lancashire even - and we did have both for Bonfire Night :)
You learn a new thing every day. I assumed from the mushy peas that you were from the North! Thanks for clarifying that.
Parkin is a rather sticky gingery confection not unlike pain d'épices.It is popular in the North of England. Not to be served with mushy peas though.They would go with a pasty and chips..
Excuse my ignorance Ian…what is parkin and why the mushy peas? I originate from Devon and Cornwall so not big on mushy peas!!
Lol re the neighbours, perhaps I will let it look like we are simply burning garden waste as I don’t wish to fall out with them so quickly. Thanks for the reply, I will have a closer look in our supermarkets as I have not seen any yet…maybe because we don’t seem to have many English in our area… I will check others further afield.
And make sure you have parkin and mushy peas :)
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