Twelve Drummers Drumming
A nearly 350-year old Twelfth Cake, believed to be the same one offered to Samuel Pepys at Sir William Penn’s house.
It’s Three Kings Day, the Feast of the Epiphany, the Twelfth Day of Christmas (unless in your tradition the Twelfth Day was yesterday, which is another story). Time to get down those evergreens so you won’t bring bad luck on your household for the rest of the year. Did you have your Twelfth Night party last night? Did you get the bean (or pea)? Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?
I love ritual, the more ancient the better. Religions all over the world encode the moral values of their societies, but they also answer a more basic need: the compulsion to reduce the vastness of time and space to human dimensions. That’s what liturgical calendars and seasonal rituals do; they mark the year in bite-size chunks, wrap us in a comforting illusion of time repeated, cut infinity down to size. What does it all mean, why are we here, is this just a moment in the infinite slipstream of the time-space continuum? No! It’s Twelfth Day, when the Three Kings visited Baby Jesus, isn’t that better? And it was Twelfth Day on January 6 last year and it will be again next year too, and there’s your nice comforting box, no infinite slipstream here, no sirree bob.
But I’m rambling.
One of the reasons I’ve got a tiny soft spot for the Catholic Church (and I do, actually) is because its liturgical calendar preserved centuries’ worth of pagan ritual, though naturally coated with Christo so the pagan bits wouldn’t be quite so obvious. Christmas is the perfect example. December 25 was the date of the winter solstice in the old Julian calendar, and as such was celebrated as the birthday of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun (along with a bunch of other solar-related gods, including Mithras). It made perfect sense to the early Christian bishops to turn the birthday of the Unconquered Sun into the birthday of the Unconquered Son, since that way people could still have their party. Very good for brand loyalty.
By the way, it’s always funny to me that so many Protestants seem to think that paganism survives only in Catholicism and not in their own pure and reformed faith. This from people who believe in a dying and rising god whose sacrifice somehow ensures the immortality of all. Nope, nothing pagan there. As a student once wrote in a Christian History 101 class, “before Jesus was born, Christianity was just another Hellenistic mystery cult.”
The trouble with Protestants is that they’re always trying to get rid of the fun parts of paganism, like trick-or-treating, while keeping only the serious and basically worthless bits, like believing that being born again into a personal relationship with Dionysus will secure you a nice spot in the afterlife.
Goddammit, I’m rambling again.
Back to Christmas: the Twelve Days are the season of revelry between two major feasts on the Christian calendar, Christmas Day on December 25 and Epiphany on January 6. The liturgical history is complicated, but roughly speaking, Epiphany started out as the day when Eastern churches observed Jesus’s birth and baptism, while the Rome-influenced churches in the West fixed on December 25 as the Nativity. When the greater church tried to organize its calendar and get everybody on the same page, the two feasts were reconciled by making December 25 Jesus’s birthday and January 6 the day of Jesus’s baptism. As the mythology of Baby Jesus and the whole Nativity story developed, January 6 also came to be designated as the day when the Three Kings or Wise Men arrived with their gifts (hence Three Kings Day).
Parallel to all this liturgical evolution, of course, was the fact that throughout pagan Europe it was customary to celebrate an extended season of revelry around the time of the winter solstice — Yule, Saturnalia, what have you. The Christmas season, with its Twelve Days of feasting and games, is simply the Christianized version. Scratch the surface of most Christmas traditions and you’ll find some ancient pagan rite lurking beneath.* Sometimes you hardly have to scratch at all.
Epiphany is no longer much of a holiday in the Anglo-American tradition, but it’s still a big deal in some Catholic cultures. In Latin America and parts of Europe, for example, it’s the day when the Three Kings bring gifts to children. Back when Anglo-Americans were still celebrating Twelfth Day (and Night) the holiday was associated with drinking, feasting, and games. Our modern Christmas fruitcake is descended from Twelfth Cake, which was baked with a bean and a pea hidden inside. When the cake was cut, the man who got the bean was King For A Day and the woman who got the pea was Queen. The cake motif shows up in Three Kings Day celebrations as well; a baby Jesus (plastic, not real) is hidden inside the cake. Whoever gets it is endowed with some special privilege or task, depending on the individual culture.
The days in between Christmas and Epiphany all used to be celebrated with particular rituals too, though most of those have gone by the wayside. Nobody blesses the horses on the Feast of Stephen anymore or makes Childermas pudding with red sauce to look like the blood of the slaughtered Innocents. I’ve heard a rumor that some people in the UK still pour cider on the roots of trees to bless them for the coming year, and I can only hope it’s true.
When I invent my own religion I am definitely going to have wassailing, Yule logs, fortune-telling, mistletoe, and every other pagan thing I can drag in. I’ll even work in some kind of horse-blessing ritual. In the meantime I reckon I’ll go have a fig newton as my Twelfth Cake.
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*If you’re interested in this sort of thing, there’s available online a lovely little book from 1912, Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, by Clement A. Miles. The section on “Pagan Survivals” describes quite a few European customs associated with Christmas and the Twelve Days.
12 Responses to “Twelve Drummers Drumming”
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B. Dagger Lee says:
Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz
I’m late for the cake.Is it you who introduced me to the term “theft of enjoyment”? From Zzzzyzzzek?
I think about it a lot.
-BDL
January 7th, 2007 at 11:09 am EST -
Violet says:
B. Dagger Lee! I’m delighted to see you here, even with your - THWACK! - futuristic genderless bees.
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B. Dagger Lee says:
I’m delighted to be here. You won’t even notice the bees after awhile. I’m told they’re good for the arthritis. Actually, I’ve been here before and noticed there was serious discussion going on! I tiptoed out, but now I must go where the buzz drives me.
yrs, BDL
Was it you who was talking about Zyzek?
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Violet says:
Was it you who was talking about Zyzek?
It’s possible I was talking about “theft of enjoyment” somewhere, but I’ve never engaged in any extended conversation about his work and I’m sure you and I have never had a dialogue about Zizek. So I’m probably not the person you’re thinking of. Berube, maybe?
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simply wondered says:
The cake motif shows up in Three Kings Day celebrations as well; a baby Jesus (plastic, not real) is hidden inside the cake. -
can’t you americans afford real baby jesuses (that’s not a word i’ve had to spell before) any more? in britain we only recently gave them up because the lucky winners kept breaking their teeth.
and the cider pouring certainly does continue in some parts - not so much in west london, alas as here we appease our cthonic deities in other ways - usually with a spilt kebab on the way home from the office party.
the most interesting thing is the way here in britain the celtic revival started representing much more modern habits as ancient ones rather than vice versa; or at least the written evidence seems to indicate they were not practised before certain times (many being elizabethan (re)inventions)and yet the insistence was that they were ancient druidic and the like.
tho i do not argue with the christian appropriation stuff. st brigid being my favourite! i’m not sure whether her assimilation was a huge victory for the power of ur-woman or just the opposite - probably the latter as usual… -
simply wondered says:
king for a day - bloody hell, that would be a tannist king and what happens to yer king for a day after 24 hours? an honourable retirement i imagine …hmmm oh no that’s rather nasty! still, the crops have got to grow and you can’t really belive that cider will do the trick when there’s perfectly good royal blood available. great fertiliser; we should use more of it.
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B. Dagger Lee says:
Well, Zizek be damned! Anyway, I hope you’re going to participate in the counterrevolutionary, counter-Poprah book club reading of the complete works of Shulamith Firestone over at IBTP.
–BDL
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Violet says:
and the cider pouring certainly does continue in some parts
That’s it. I’m moving to the UK.
When I invent my own religion I think I’ll opt for the version of the fertility ritual where the farmer and her husband go out and have sex in the field to show the Earth what to do. Mythic inflation — are you familiar with that concept? The enduring and frankly hilarious tendency of humans to imagine their own role as being of stupendous and critical importance in keeping the universe running. Much emphasis on showing the poor baffled gods what to do.
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simply wondered says:
do you know a play called ’setting the share’ by peggy riley (los angelina writer living in england)? has a similar theme about recreating the fertility of the land - i’ve way oversimplified it though. she weaves so many themes into a play it makes your head spin.
are they ’showing the earth what to do’ or showing it they know the right thing to do??? i always thought it was the latter that was invoked as the point of such ritual - that and the giving something back to the bounty that sustains us but is vast and uncontrollable. honouring the other world beyond the thin door - thinnest at times such as mid-winter when life and death are closest. -
Violet says:
are they ’showing the earth what to do’ or showing it they know the right thing to do??? i always thought it was the latter that was invoked as the point of such ritual - that and the giving something back to the bounty that sustains us but is vast and uncontrollable. honouring the other world beyond the thin door - thinnest at times such as mid-winter when life and death are closest.
I think it started out as the former (showing Earth what to do) but with growing sophistication of thought can certainly become metaphorized as the latter. Rather like the sacrifical lamb thing, where Jesus’s death is interpreted in highly metaphysical terms about sin meaning humans are outside God’s grace and so by taking on the human condition (sacrificially) Jesus mystically brings us back into communion with God. But that is the endpoint of a development that began thousands of years ago as a very primitive scapegoat kind of device, people really thinking that god had to be propitiated with a blood sacrifice.
The motif of showing the gods what to do is ubiquitous in early ritual, along with explicit statements that if people don’t go through the ritual the gods won’t know what to do and/or the gods need to be encouraged, etc. Now you are absolutely correct that there is almost certainly a two-way thing there, even if it’s not clearly articulated: we’re not only showing the gods what to do/encouraging the gods, we’re also demonstrating that We’re All Right Jack and we deserve to have our crops grow, etc. But there is no getting away from the extremely primitive, mythic-inflation flavor of much early ritual. (And by this the god shall see our fucking and be moved to spill his seed…)
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Violet says:
Which is not to say mythic inflation has gone away or isn’t present in modern, allegedly more sophisticated forms of religion.
I was thinking of mythic inflation when I was reading up on Dutch Sheets recently — he and that whole group of prayer warrior/prophecy/New Apostolic Revival people sell Christianity as being a way that the individual can exert profound influence on history through prayer. Theoretically God is using the believer to effect His aims (though why is the believer necessary if God is omnipotent?), but this nice distinction is rarely observed in practice. The appeal to mythic inflation is naked: Be a History Maker, You Can Decree The Course of Events, You Have the Power to Change History, etc.
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Violet says:
Anyway, I hope you’re going to participate in the counterrevolutionary, counter-Poprah book club reading of the complete works of Shulamith Firestone over at IBTP.
I just read through the Oprah thread to see if a date has been set. Sometime in February?
I will be delighted to come. I shall bring seven-layer cookies and a big pot of chai. Or, alternatively, a bottle of Tequila and some shot glasses.
