The gate of the year

7. Illustration from the Menologion of Basil II, a manuscript compiled around the year 1000 for the Byzantine Emperor Basil II, now in the Biblioteca Vaticana (Vatican Library), Rome (Ms. Vat. gr. 1613). It shows the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, a ceremony which was required when a Jew had a firstborn male, to be consecrated to God, and is related in the Gospel of Luke: “When the time of their purification according to the Law of Moses had been completed, Joseph and Mary took him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord” (Luke 2, 22).
Jewish law prescribed that forty days after a child’s birth, the purification of the mother and the presentation of the firstborn at the Temple had to be performed. Since it had been established that Jesus was born on December 25, the forty day fell on February 2, the day in which Christian liturgy celebrated the Purification of the Virgin. It seems not a case if this feast was placed just at the beginning of February, a month which was, in ancient Rome, dedicated to purification ceremonies (februo, “to purify”, “to expiate”), under the patronage of Juno (Iuno Februata). Afterwards, the liturgical reform has restored to the feast on February 2 the significance of feast of the Presentation of the Lord.
This feast was also called Candlemas, because candles were blessed and then distributed among the worshippers, because they were regarded as endowed with virtues which protected against calamities, storms and even at the moment of agony. The ancient use of lighting candles had a cosmic significance: a symbol of the new vital fire that reappears in nature, preparing the rebirth of spring (Cattabiani 2003). Like all moments of passage, the first days of February constituted like a suspension and a contact between different dimensions, order and disorder, world of the living and world of the dead. Figures that were able to transmigrate between the two dimensions, the Wild Man and/or the Bear, became the protagonists in these days, as a witness of the permanence of beliefs of pre-Christian origin in popular religiosity. Throughout Europe was diffused a folk saying, according to which on February 2 the bear (or a substitutive animal, or the Wild Man himself) comes out of his hibernation (interpreted as the capacity to go into a state of temporary death) and observes the weather. If it is cloudless, he returns in his den and the winter shall prosecute for other forty days, if instead it is cloudy, the bear comes definitively out of his refuge, thus signaling the end of the cold season. In different places the coming-out of the bear was celebrated with feasts and masquerades, as it is done still at Prats-de-Mollo, in the Basque country, while elsewhere these event has been transferred in the Carnival period, particularly on Shrove Tuesday (Gaignebet 1974, p. 18).

[Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Menologion_of_Basil_037.jpg]




Feasts

Back

7. Illustration from the Menologion of Basil II, a manuscript compiled around the year 1000 for the Byzantine Emperor Basil II, now in the Biblioteca Vaticana (Vatican Library), Rome (Ms. Vat. gr. 1613). It shows the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, a ceremony which was required when a Jew had a firstborn male, to be consecrated to God, and is related in the Gospel of Luke: “When the time of their purification according to the Law of Moses had been completed, Joseph and Mary took him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord” (Luke 2, 22). Jewish law prescribed that forty days after a child’s birth, the purification of the mother and the presentation of the firstborn at the Temple had to be performed. Since it had been established that Jesus was born on December 25, the forty day fell on February 2, the day in which Christian liturgy celebrated the Purification of the Virgin. It seems not a case if this feast was placed just at the beginning of February, a month which was, in ancient Rome, dedicated to purification ceremonies (februo, “to purify”, “to expiate”), under the patronage of Juno (Iuno Februata). Afterwards, the liturgical reform has restored to the feast on February 2 the significance of feast of the Presentation of the Lord. This feast was also called Candlemas, because candles were blessed and then distributed among the worshippers, because they were regarded as endowed with virtues which protected against calamities, storms and even at the moment of agony. The ancient use of lighting candles had a cosmic significance: a symbol of the new vital fire that reappears in nature, preparing the rebirth of spring (Cattabiani 2003). Like all moments of passage, the first days of February constituted like a suspension and a contact between different dimensions, order and disorder, world of the living and world of the dead. Figures that were able to transmigrate between the two dimensions, the Wild Man and/or the Bear, became the protagonists in these days, as a witness of the permanence of beliefs of pre-Christian origin in popular religiosity. Throughout Europe was diffused a folk saying, according to which on February 2 the bear (or a substitutive animal, or the Wild Man himself) comes out of his hibernation (interpreted as the capacity to go into a state of temporary death) and observes the weather. If it is cloudless, he returns in his den and the winter shall prosecute for other forty days, if instead it is cloudy, the bear comes definitively out of his refuge, thus signaling the end of the cold season. In different places the coming-out of the bear was celebrated with feasts and masquerades, as it is done still at Prats-de-Mollo, in the Basque country, while elsewhere these event has been transferred in the Carnival period, particularly on Shrove Tuesday (Gaignebet 1974, p. 18). [Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Menologion_of_Basil_037.jpg]