Esoteric Coffeehouse

It’s almost April Fools Day, and you should be either thinking of a prank or considering how to avoid being ‘fooled’. That’s because, on 1st of April, there are only two types of people out there: the pranksters and those being played a prank.

Nobody has been able to decipher the actual origin of April Fools Day. Theories abound from attributing it to the Bible and the Gregorian calendar change to the Holi festival in India, which has similar characteristics. You can read all about it in the Wikipedia article (1). I’m interested so much in where the celebration came from but why it survives to this day. What makes us still enjoy playing the April Fools game in this day-and-age?

Before answering that question, it is perhaps a good idea to look at the characteristics of this informal celebration. As we all know, it always occurs on the 1st of April, which is the first month of real spring (after the spring equinox) and used to represent the first day of the Julian New Year (2). Thus, it is a time of unclear, tentative beginnings, where things are not yet settled in their ordered pattern. The weather is still capricious, windy and cold; winter wrestles with the spring, and nothing is certain yet.

This time of disorder, uncertainty and ambiguity is an ideal period for the emergence of the ‘fool’. The fool is a person socially defined as ridiculous, inferior or incompetent (3) or, an unintelligent person, somebody considered to lack good sense or judgment (4). The fool is someone who is made fun at. We can see from these definitions that the fool is a role assigned by the others, or perhaps assumed by someone by himself or herself – it does not exist outside a social environment. Thus, a fool is ‘made’ (5). A good example of ‘making a fool’ is certainly the April Fool prank. The prankster seeks to prove the ‘prankee’ as a fool – a gullible or weak-minded person. If the ‘prankee’ falls for the joke, he has been made into fool.

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We’re barely out of the Chinese New Year and the next celebration is almost here: Valentine’s Day. Since I can’t miss an opportunity to investigate a festival’s origins and mythology, I will proceed without much further ado.

A quick search on the internet will immediately inform you that the Valentine’s Day originates from the Roman festival of Lupercalia. But what was Lupercalia and how did it evolve into our modern Valentine’s Day?

In its classical manifestation, Lupercalia (“The Wolf Festival”) was a bizarre ritual where skimpily clad young men would run around whipping women with goat skin thongs. The women were also almost naked (1). The running men were called Luperci, the wolf people, and were divided into two “colleges” (2). The festival had enough importance to have Julius Caesar establish a third college, the Iuliani, which was first headed by his loyal general, Mark Anthony, of Cleopatra fame (3). The celebration perpetuated well into Christian Rome, before an archbishop of Rome forbade it.

Despite the fact that numerous Roman writers left testimonials about the Lupercalia, scholars are divided about the origins and meanings of this tradition. For instance, it is not clear what god was celebrated at the Lupercalia, if any at all. Some writers associated the celebration with the Luperca, the she-wolf who fed the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus (4). Other times it was associated with Evander, a legendary Greek hero who came to Rome from Arcadia (5). Most often, however, the celebration was associated with the god Pan, or Faunus as the Romans called it (6). In light of evidence, this is by far the most likely possibility.

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It is so bitterly cold outside, that it must be New Year’s Eve. Chinese New Year is here, heralding the year of the Ox. So I thought I’d switch gears a bit and analyze the image of the Ox to get an insight as to what this symbol means and what we can expect from an “ox year”.

Dictionary tells us that the ox is a castrated version of  bull (1). In other words, it is a bull whose wild, unpredictable energy has been converted to useful, manageable strength. Therefore, I will proceed by taking a look at the religious image of the Bull to decipher its general meaning.

Today, we associate bulls with energizing drinks, company logos, the astrological sign and rising financial markets. Chances are, unless you live on a farm, there will be very few instances in your life where you would actually meet a bull. Probably the only places that can still give you an idea of the force and stamina of the bull are rodeos and Spanish bullfighting. Therefore, we can only imagine the type of religious awe that this animal exercised in the early days of human history. The bull was an image of brute, untamable force that could destroy anything or anyone in its path. Thus, it was one of the first, and most pervasive religious symbols of mankind.

The Bull first appears on the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux in France, and most scholars accept that the images implied a cult of the bull (2). During the High Neolithic period, stylized bulls appear on pottery from the so-called Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey (3). In Sumerian-Assyrian culture, god Gugalana, the “Bull of Heaven”, is slain by hero Gilgamesh; the deity was no doubt associated with the Taurus constellation (4). The bulls are also prominent in Egyptian and Minoan Greek culture. The cult of the Apis bull was widespread in ancient Egypt, being associated with the slain god Osiris (5). The Bull also figured prominently in the religion of ancient Crete. The famous myth of the Cretan Labyrinth and the Minotaur must be a pale recollection of an earlier bull-cult. The Minotaur, the half-bull half-human creature destroyed by Greek hero Theseus, appears to have embodied the underworld god Minos, the archetypal king of Crete. Significantly, Minos was the offspring of the love between virgin Europa and Zeus in the shape of a bull god (6).

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Since tonight is Halloween, I thought that I might do some research into its origins and meaning found in the Celtic Festival of Samhain. Celebrated at the beginning of November, Samhain marked the coming of the winter months, with their dimming light and heightening darkness. The root of the word “Samhain” comes from “samhradh”, meaning “summer” in Irish Gaelic¹. While the exact etymology has not been confirmed by scholars, in Celtic tradition, “Samhain” corresponds to “end of summer” (a combination of samh “summer” and fuin “ending, concealment”).  Samhain and Beltanne (May Day) stood in opposition as the beginning of the season of winter and summer, respectively, but Samhain was a much more prominent festival and may have marked the beginning of the Celtic New Year as Frazer has pointed out ².

Samhain was, consequently, a festival of deepening darkness and budding light. It was a meeting place between two opposites – the winter and the summer, the dark and the light, death and life. As such, the festival contained both aspects of existence – although the darkness, increasing at this time, was more profuse and substantial.

In its ‘dark’ aspect, Samhain marked a period of destruction and chaos. Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this was the ritual killing of the Irish kings of Tara. According to Dalton’s evidence and interpretation, the kings that had behaved unsuitably or unpiously in office would be killed on the day of Samhain³. Ritual killing was also effected against animals: Samhain was the season when the cattle that would not be kept through the winter were slaughtered⁴.

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