Not just a religiously rich, important and awesome movie, Groundhog Day is also a great secular holy day. Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow yesterday, meaning six more weeks of winter. Slate took the occasion of running a previously published piece on the origins and meaning of the day, written by Timothy Noah.
The piece argues that the holiday goes back to pre-Christian pagan rituals.
The determining factor, then, is whether it’s sunny or cloudy on Candlemas Day, an early Christian feast day commemorating the baptism of Jesus that involved a lot of candle-bearing and therefore, inevitably, the casting of many shadows. Like many other Christian festivals, Candlemas co-opted an earlier pagan rite, and nowadays Wiccans are much keener about celebrating it than most Christians.
Um, how many things are wrong with this? It is true that Candlemas falls on February 2. But, Candlemas Day doesn’t commemorate the baptism of Jesus. Not even close. The other names for the festival might give you a clue about what is actually marked. In my church, for instance, we call it The Purification of Mary and the Presentation of our Lord because, well, it commemorates when Mary went to the temple for purification rites and presented Jesus publicly. Jesus wasn’t baptized by John until many decades later.
You get a basic fact like what Candlemas commemorates wrong and it kind of casts doubt on the whole piece. Not to mention that Noah asserts the pagan connection without substantiating the claim elsewhere in the piece. There is literally no explanation — we are just to take him at his word. That’s my biggest beef with the “Christian holy days co-opt pagan festivals” meme that is so popular with the mainstream media. They just run with the story instead of investigating some tangled and complex histories that may not fit into the preferred narrative.
But what’s with this purification and presentation stuff? Well, according to the Torah, women who had given birth were considered unclean for a particular period of time. Here’s how Leviticus 12 begins:
Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the children of Israel, saying: ‘If a woman has conceived, and borne a male child, then she shall be unclean seven days; as in the days of her customary impurity she shall be unclean. And on the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised. She shall then continue in the blood of her purification thirty-three days. She shall not touch any hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary until the days of her purification are fulfilled.
I quote from Leviticus for a point. So often you’ll have someone write that, say, Christmas and Easter are arbitrarily chosen days that copy some pagan festival. And while I don’t want to wade into that fight and while it’s certainly true that there are overlaps in various cultural celebrations, it’s interesting to note that the birth of Christ was actually likely marked as occurring 9 months from when early Christians believe he was conceived. And people used to believe (or perhaps still do?) that great prophets were conceived and died on the same day. So if Jesus Christ died around Passover, that meant he was conceived at that time, too. And you add 9 months and voila! you get Dec. 25 (for the presumed year of his birth).
Now if you add 40 days to Dec. 25 you get Feb. 2! So convenient of these co-opters of pagan rituals to have Leviticus to fall back on, eh? In the Western liturgical calendar, this feast is the last festival determined by the date of Christmas and shows that Epiphany is drawing to a close.
Fun Candlemas fact, by the way, is that the Nunc Dimittis was uttered by Simeon on this day. And prophetess Anna was also in the temple and offered prayers and praise to God.
The reader who submitted this story had another complaint. To substantiate his “baptism” claim, Noah links to a site labeled “Belarusian School of Icon Painting,” that is riddled with bizarre errors and extra-biblical contentions:
The post also includes a link to a website on tourism in Belarus that - after quoting the wrong chapter of Luke - claims that “on the 40-th day after birth of Christ Joseph and Mary took their child to Jerusalem Cathedral to baptise and made a religious offering - two pigeons.”
Cathedral? Baptize? If this was Noah’s source, shouldn’t he have checked the information somewhere else?
Also, if a news or newsy website is going to link to outside sources, how responsible (if at all) are they for what they link to?
So quite a few questions raised by this piece on Groundhog Day. I’m wondering whether no one brought all these embarrassing problems to Slate’s attention five years ago when the story first ran. The beauty of the internet is that you get to fix egregious errors. Hopefully Slate will be able to do that before too long.
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Comments (21) |
February 3, 2009, at 2:42 pm
we had a lovely candlemas liturgy last night at our church. it was well attended and our choir were superb!!
February 3, 2009, at 4:00 pm
*rolls eyes*
Which pagans, where, exactly?
For us Irish pagans (or half-pagans) the big day is not the 2nd but the 1st of February - St. Brigid’s feast day, the traditional start of Spring, and marking the old Celtic festival of Imbolc.
For us Irish half-pagans, the Feast of the Presentation is marked more by the blessing of the throats (which really should be done on the 3rd, the feast of St. Blaise, but we get to incorporate the Candlemas with the blessing involving candles in a two-for-one deal).
We don’t, however, have groundhogs.
February 3, 2009, at 4:02 pm
This was essentially the claim made in Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac on NPR yesterday, as well, that the Christian feast is a co-opting of a pagan one. What’s odd is that Keillor made the point that it was the 40th day of Christmas, but it didn’t seem to dawn on the writers that the choice in dates had to do with Christmas and not to do with Celtic paganism.
This is what happens when people are clueless about liturgical calendars and their inner logic.
February 3, 2009, at 4:03 pm
The Belarusian site is really confused; they mix up the baptism, the presentation, and the circumcision all together. We celebrate (or used to) the Feast of the Circumcision on 1st January - hey, Noah, what pagan festival are we co-opting there?
February 3, 2009, at 4:11 pm
I would also note the discussion on the movie at discover magazine: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/realitybase/2009/02/02/groundhog-day-at-the-religion-and-science-brawl/
The later is I think a bit over the top, but he does make an interesting point.
February 3, 2009, at 4:12 pm
Fr. Andrew, thanks for that link (http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2009/02/02).
Very cool site even if Keillor’s write-up of the day is questionable.
February 3, 2009, at 5:26 pm
The Belarussian site appears to be written with a less than stellar command of English. Between lack of knowledge about the Bible and difficulties with English, the errors are perhaps understandable. Think of Jerusalem ‘Cathedral’ as ‘important religious building or shrine’—Temple is a similar idea. Think of ‘baptise’ as ‘perform a religious ritual given to a child’ (at least among many Christians)—Presentation to the Lord is a similar idea. What’s really strange is that Slate would offer this as an authoritative source about Candlemas.
February 3, 2009, at 7:20 pm
I can forgive a Belarussian with less than perfect English trying to translate into the nearest equivalent concepts; I can’t excuse a journalist using that as his one and only source (and apparently not knowing enough about either Christianity or Judaism to go “Hey, wait a minute…”).
I mean, I know nothing about Buddhist customs or rituals for the birth of a child, but I think if I saw a reference to a Buddhist ‘baptism’, I might go “I don’t think that’s exactly it, somehow.”
February 3, 2009, at 9:04 pm
So what is the historical status of there being an early February Celtic festival (Imbolc or Oimelc) mid-way between Winter Solstice & Spring equinox?
February 3, 2009, at 11:12 pm
In Russian there are two words that can be translated into English as “cathedral.” One of the words that means “cathedral” also means “temple.” I think this word is the same in Belarusian. So, the “cathedral” mention on the Belarusian website is probably just a case of a non-native speaker of English selecting the wrong translation of the word “khram.”
However, you would think that an English-speaking journalist might notice that the Belarusian website’s claim doesn’t make sense…
February 4, 2009, at 10:14 am
There is less a Christian co-opting of a pagan holiday and more like a case of unfortunate timing since there is a Neo-Pagan holiday around this time (Feb. 1 or 2) (and in all likelihood and old Celtic holiday too). But I agree in that the timing of Candlemas has nothing to do with it, unless you think that the coincidence of Christmas and Yule are related.
February 4, 2009, at 10:31 am
I often wonder if the writers of the articles that find their way here are notified of the sometimes dubious honor. I occasionally daydream about being a journalist—even a religion-beat writer. Nowadays that dream includes a fantasy sequence in which I am lauded or vilified on this site. I could envision a scenario where a story is rewritten or correction issued after being discussed here.
February 4, 2009, at 11:47 am
Jason,
Though they more frequently write us personal and private notes after being featured here, most journalists are aware of being noted on this site.
I’m sure this is due in some part to tracking links and in other part to simple Google News Alerts.
Also, I find your dream life to be very funny.
February 7, 2009, at 3:24 pm
I am bemused by Christian resistance to the idea that some of their holidays may be Pagan retreads. The Buddhists are much calmer. When they-opt some local Pagan tradition they say it was the product of an early enlightened one preparing the ground for the word of the Buddha.
February 7, 2009, at 3:34 pm
But if the Buddhists were told they picked a day because it fell on a pagan festival and it didn’t, they would probably feel differently.
February 8, 2009, at 2:32 pm
Mollie, despite all the numerical explanations that have been provided, and for which I am grateful, I remain unpersuaded that the presence of so many Christian holidays on or around the same days as the Pagan Wheel of the Year is a coincidence.
February 8, 2009, at 2:37 pm
Since there are Christian holidays on almost every day of the year, depending on the calendar, I guess it would be hard to avoid overlap.
But each and every holiday and Pagan festival has its own origins. Sometimes Christians coopted the Pagan day, sometimes it went the other way, sometimes it’s coincidence. You have to really understand each day. And its laziness to just make an assumption.
Not to mention that different Pagan traditions keep completely different days or were adopted at different times as things spread. Again, each and every festival day has a unique and sometimes unknown origin. It just depends.
February 8, 2009, at 3:03 pm
Heh. I should have specified major Christian holidays.
February 9, 2009, at 10:41 am
[…] Get Religion blogger and religion-beat journalist Mollie Hemingway, while discussing a major religion-based factual error in a piece by Slate.com, made this assertion concerning the media and the “pagan” roots of modern holidays. You […]
February 9, 2009, at 2:05 pm
I don’t think the issue is so much whether Christianity borrowed holidays (although there are a few documented cases), but that some of their many holidays became popular because they coincided with similar pagan rites. A ritual of purification during what the pagan Romans already considered a time of purification may not have been intentional, but it’s certainly convenient.
I think Mollie pretty much sums it up in her comments above.
February 9, 2009, at 3:59 pm
Jennifer’s suggestion as to why some Christian holidays may have gained in importance through coinciding with then-current Pagan holidays may have some merit. It may also still be going on, with a different cast of characters, in modern times. I’ve seen Jewish writers complain that the holiday of Hannukah would not have gained the emphasis it gets in modern Jewish culture were it not a counterpoise to Christmas as it is celebrated today.