St John’s magical eve

Charles A. Coulombe on fire and water – and ghost stories

The place of fire in Catholic liturgy is essential – we must have candles at every Mass, there must always be a light in front of the Blessed Sacrament. Solemn High Masses require torches, Requiems need yellow candles. Certain of our liturgical celebrations commemorating particular feasts are especially based upon the interplay of light and darkness: the blessing of the Epiphany Water in the Byzantine Rite, and the Candlemas, Holy Saturday Vigil, Tenebrae, and Rorate Masses come to mind. These are ceremonies that – even for the untutored – nevertheless powerfully suggest the lines from the Last Gospel, “the Light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” In them, the reality of Christ as the Light of the World in the midst of the darkness under which we all labour is brought home.

At the same time, in all cultures but especially those of European derivation, the natural highpoints of the year – the Equinoxes and Solstices, as well as the Cross-Quarter Days between them – have been a huge part of human experience; sacred in all pre-Christians religions, they were cleansed of their pagan associations and baptised by the Church.

Whether it be pine trees, holly, and mistletoe at Christmas, or eggs and rabbits at Easter, the Catholic (and Orthodox) folk imagination repurposed any number of customs from their former use to the worship of Christ and the veneration of His Mother and the Saints. Despite the desire of Wiccans and extreme Protestants alike (albeit for opposite reasons) to use this reality as proof of Catholicism’s underlying paganism, what it really shows is the baptism of natural religiosity and its reorientation toward proper ends.

Many of the Church’s feasts as a result are also festooned with various folk beliefs – some intended purely for children, others taken more or less seriously by adults. So it was with tales of talking or praying animals on Christmas Eve, balancing an egg at Easter, or foretelling whom one might marry on All Hallows’ Eve. Indeed, eves of major feasts tended to acquire peculiar reputations – not merely Halloween, but May Eve or Walpurgisnacht, Lammas Eve, Candlemas Eve, St Mark’s Eve, and on and on. An upcoming summer feast which epitomises all these things is Midsummer Night – St John’s Eve.

Enchanted evening

The feast that enchanted evening precedes is the Nativity of St John the Baptist – whose birthday is the only one other than those of Our Lord and Our Lady observed on the Church calendar. As Dom Gueranger tell us: “Though at Christmas, the severity of the season necessarily confined to the domestic hearth all touching expansion of private piety, the lovely summer nights, at Saint John's tide, gave free scope to popular display of lively faith among various nationalities. In this way, the people seemed to make up for what circumstances prevented in the way of demonstrations to the Infant God, by the glad honours they could render to the cradle of his Precursor. Scarce had the last rays of the setting sun died away, than all the world over, from the far East to the furthest West, immense columns of flame arose from every mountain top; and, in an instant, every town and village and smallest hamlet was lighted up.” Indeed, the good Benedictine’s enthusiasm for this custom was enormous:

“It may almost be said of the ‘Saint John's fires,’ that they date, like the festival itself, from the very beginning of Christianity. They made their appearance, at least, from the earliest days of the period of peace, like a sample fruit of popular initiative; but not indeed without sometimes exciting the anxious attention of the Fathers and of Councils, ever on the watch to banish every superstitious notion from manifestations, which otherwise so happily began to replace the pagan festivities proper to the solstices. But the necessity of combating some abuses, which are just as possible in our own days as in those, did not withhold the Church from encouraging a species of demonstration which so well answered to the very character of the feast. ‘Saint John's fires’ made a happy completion to the liturgical solemnity; testifying how one and the same thought possessed both the mind of Holy Church and of the terrestrial city; for the organisation of these rejoicings originated with the civil corporations, and the expenses thereof were defrayed by the municipalities. Thus, the privilege of lighting the bon-fire was usually reserved to some dignitary of the civil order. Kings themselves, taking part in the common merry-making, would esteem it an honour to give this signal to popular gladness; Louis XIV, as late as 1648, for example, lighted the bonfire on the ‘place de Greve,’ as his predecessors had done. In other places, as is even now done in Catholic Brittany, the clergy were invited to bless the piles of wood, and to cast thereon the first brand; whilst the crowd, bearing flaming torches, would disperse over the neighbouring country, amidst the ripening crops, or would march along the ocean side, following the tortuous cliff-paths, shouting many a gladsome cry, to which the adjacent islets would reply by lighting up their festive fires.”

In some parts, the custom prevailed of rolling a "burning wheel"; this was a self-revolving red-hot disk, that rolling along the streets or down from the hilltops, represented the movement of the sun, which attains the highest point in his orbit, to begin at once his descent; thus was the word of the Precursor brought to mind, when speaking of the Messias, he says: “He must increase, and I must decrease”. The symbolism was completed by the custom then in vogue, of burning old bones and rubbish on this day which proclaims the end of the Ancient Law, and the commencement of the New Covenant, according to the Holy Scripture, where it is written: “.... And new store coming on, you shall cast away the old. Blessed are those populations amongst whom is still preserved something of such customs, whence the old simplicity of our fore-fathers drew a gladness assuredly more true and more pure than their descendants seek in festivities wherein the soul has no part!”

Midsummer night

Although the St John’s fires are not as general as they were in the mid-19th century when the Abbot of Solesmes was writing, they are still to be found throughout Europe in the Midsummer night, from the West of Ireland to Poland and the Baltic States, and from Scandinavia to Iberia and Italy. The Roman Rituale has a proper blessing for St John’s fire, and the Congregation for Divine Worship’s 2001 Directory on Popular Piety declares that, “The custom of the St John bonfires, indicative of a people with burning and childlike faith, continues in some places to this day”. Today, of course, they are also apt to be major tourist festivals as well, and heavily promoted by the local municipalities.

Not surprisingly, given St John the Baptist’s title, there were and are also many customs having to do with water, which was believed – according to the locale – to offer special blessings either on the Eve or on the Day. Bathing in neighbouring bodies of water – rivers, streams, lakes, ponds, or even the sea itself – was seen variously to give the bather added strength, beauty, or protection against evil. This was true also of the dew that on the eve or early in the morning of the day. In some spots, squirting onlookers with water is also seen as a way of playfully invoking the Forerunner’s blessing!

But bonfires and bathing are not the only custom associated with St John’s Eve. Another seemingly universal one is the gathering of particular herbs and plants during this night. Which ones are gathered specifically varies from place to place, although they always include St John’s Wort, and very often yarrow; others may include fennel, rue, rosemary, lemon verbena, mallows, laburnum, foxgloves, elder flowers, goatsbeard, bracken, and masterwort. Some might be placed in water and left overnight, and the water used for face-washing in the morning; or they may be blessed by a priest and hung over doors and windows to keep out witchcraft and evil spirits. But perhaps the most sought after was the mythical fernseed, which – if harvested just before Midnight – would give the finder invisibility. Given that fern has only spores, this was a particularly difficult thing to find.

Nevertheless, as with the other nights mentioned, St John’s Eve was also a time when witches and the fairy folk were particularly active. The unwary in Wales who went out to gather herbs might find themselves taken for a ride on a fairy horse should they unwittingly tread on one of the St John’s plants. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was set on this night for this very reason – 16th century audiences were very much aware of these beliefs. Indeed, they were as omnipresent in Europe as the fires themselves. Washington Irving, in his short piece “Christmas Dinner,” relates how the servants of the Manor House in which he was staying (actually Aston Hall, near Birmingham) believed that on “Midsummer Eve, when it was well known all kinds of ghosts, goblins, and fairies become visible and walk abroad…”

Similar beliefs could – and can - be found all the way across Europe to Russia, where Gogol wrote his chilling “St John’s Eve” and Modest Mussorgsky composed Night on Bald Mountain (immortalised by the inclusion of Tchaikovsky’s version in Walt Disney’s Fantasia) inspired by local folk beliefs. So it is that in many places, St John’s Eve is – as with Christmas Eve, May Eve, and Halloween – seen as a great time for telling ghost stories and other tales of the uncanny, often having to do with legends peculiar to the neighbourhood.

These customs were not left behind when Europe crossed the water to the Indies and the Americas. While Voodoo practitioners danced on New Orleans’ Bayou, St John and Louisiana lore held that the State’s Loups-Garou (werewolves) had their annual fete on the night, more savoury lore was widespread in the New Worlds. As in Catholic Europe, it was widely held in areas settled by the French, Spanish, and Portuguese that washing one’s face in dew gathered on the early morn of St John’s Day would certainly increase one’s beauty. Northeastern Brazil sees dancing throughout the night around the bonfires, in thanksgiving for the rains which have usually just ended by then. Spanish-speaking Latin America is also devoted to this festivity – as much as Mother Spain is. From Mexico to Argentina, the typical use of fire and water, adopted to local conditions and often combined with Indian dances (depending on the area’s ethnicity) can be seen. The popularity of the great fiesta of San Juan in Camaguey, Cuba, which lasts from the eve of St John to that of Ss Peter and Paul on the 28th, is so great that it defied the Communist government’s suppression of most such fiestas.

But it was in Canada that Our Lord’s First Cousin truly came into his own. On 24 June, 1497, John Cabot, an Italian mariner in the service of Henry VII, first sighted Canada. In keeping with contemporary practice, he claimed the land for England – but this had no more immediate effect than Sir Francis Drake’s claim of California for Henry’s granddaughter. Nevertheless, St John the Baptist is the patron of Anglo-Canadians – which is why the Anglican Ordinariate Deanery that covers the great Dominion of the North is named after him. This patronage is one of the few things Anglo-Canadians have in common with their Francophone countrymen.

From the time the City of Quebec was founded in 1608, the French of the St Lawrence Valley lit the bonfires and claimed Saint Jean Baptiste as their patron. As with the patron Saints of the British Isles, St John the Baptist’s Day became both a religious and a patriotic festival. After the flames and tales of the Eve, High Mass would be followed by speeches, parades, and banquets. The Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, founded in Montreal in 1834, soon had branches in Francophone communities throughout Quebec; spreading to the French- Canadian Communities in the United States in 1900, within 14 years there were chapters from Montana through the Midwest to all of New England. The song “O, Canada” – today the National Anthem – was composed for the 1880 parade in Quebec City, and St Pius X officially made The Baptist the French-Canadian patron in 1908.

Unfortunately, the secularising current of the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s had the same corrosive effect on the observance of La Saint Jean Baptiste that it had on most other aspects of Quebecois life. Nevertheless, despite the best attempts of officialdom to call the great day merely “La Fete Nationale,” as with St Patrick his name is harder to eradicate than his veneration. In New England, the States of Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Vermont celebrate “Franco-American Day” on the feast.

Celtic Cornwall

Today, while Ireland, Scotland, and Wales still boast fair numbers of bonfires on St John’s Eve, the only part of England where they remain common is Celtic Cornwall, where they are generally sponsored by the Old Cornwall Societies. Neo-Druids gather at Stonehenge for the Summer Solstice, but they are manifestly not interested in commemorating the Forerunner of Our Lord. So, it might well be wondered what relevance all of this old and foreign lore has for us now.

The answer is – quite a bit. On the one hand, the importance of St John the Baptist – last of the Old Testament Prophets, First Cousin to Our Lord and his way maker cannot be over-emphasised – hence the feast we are celebrating. Beyond that, in kindling a St John’s Fire ourselves – and blessing it according to the formula in the Rituale – we are affirming our own unity with the totality of the Church in time and in Space: Europe, the Americas, and such outposts as Goa and Malacca; Latin, Germanic, Celt, Balt, Slav, and Magyar. There is also, as Dom Gueranger points out, the wisdom of uniting pleasant practices with religious fervour. Moreover, as with processions, the lighting of bonfires is a sort of symbolic reclamation of space for the Kingdom of Christ – a public acknowledgement of His Sovereignty over us all.

Whether you gather herbs, throw water around, or tell chilling tales is your own affair; but surely, this spring, we shall welcome the prospect of a free summer night illuminated by holy fire!

‘After the flames and tales of the Eve, High Mass would be followed by speeches, parades, and banquets’

Prayer

P: Our help is in the name of the Lord. All: Who made heaven and earth. P: The Lord be with you. All: May He also be with you.

Let us pray. Lord God, almighty Father, the light that never fails and the source of all light, sanctify + this new fire, and grant that after the darkness of this life we may come unsullied to you who are light eternal; through Christ our Lord. All: Amen

The fire is sprinkled with holy water; after which the clergy and the people sing the following Hymn: Ut queant laxis 1. Ut queant laxis resonáre fibris Mira gestórum fámuli tuórum, Solve pollúti lábii reátum, Sancte Joánnes.

2. Núntius celso véniens Olýmpo Te patri magnum fore nascitúrum, Nomen, et vitae sériem geréndae Ordinae promit.

3. Ille promíssi dúbius supérni, Pérdidit promptae módulos loquélae: Sed reformásti genitus perémptae Organa vocis.

4. Ventris obstrúso récubans cubíli Sénseras Regem thálamo manéntem: Hinc parens nati méritis utérque Abdita pandit.

5. Sit decus Patri, genitaéque Proli et tibi, compare utriúsque virtus, Spíritus semper, Deus unus, omni Témporis aevo. Amen.

1. O for your spirit, holy John, to chasten Lips sin-polluted, fettered tongues to loosen; So by your children might your deeds of wonder Meetly be chanted.

2. Lo! a swift herald, from the skies descending, Bears to your father promise of your greatness; How he shall name you, what your future story, Duly revealing.

3. Scarcely believing message so transcendent, Him for a season power of speech forsaketh, Till, at your wondrous birth, again returneth, Voice to the voiceless.

4. You, in your mother's womb all darkly cradled, Knew your great Monarch, biding in His chamber, Whence the two parents, through their offspring's merits, Mysteries uttered.

5. Praise to the Father, to the Son begotten, And to the Spirit, equal power possessing, One God whose glory, through the lapse of ages, Everresounding. Amen.

P: There was a man sent from God.

All: Whose name was John. Let us pray. God, who by reason of the birth of blessed John have made this day praiseworthy, give your people the grace of spiritual joy, and keep the hearts of your faithful fixed on the way that leads to everlasting salvation; through Christ our Lord.

All: Amen.

Prayer Source: Roman Ritual, The, Complete Edition by Philip T. Weller, S.T.D., The Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee, WI, 1964