Since
the cult classic movie Groundhog
Day came out in 1992 the minor
folk holiday of the same name
has taken on a new meaning. Now it denotes being stuck in a time loop,
living the same day over and over
and over. It has certainly seemed so the
last four years as I predicted with dread in 2017:
Wake Up!
Groundhog Day 2017
6:00 am
Wake Up!
It’s yesterday again!
It will always be yesterday again.
If you don’t
get your ass out of bed right now
and do something
today will replace it
in the time loop.
Trust me.
You don’t want that.
Today is going to be a
Motherfucker.
Wake Up!
—Patrick Murfin
But
this year seems different, as if that old clock
radio finally flipped over to a new day. Who knows?
Maybe we learned something. Anyway, the old ogre is gone and something resembling
hope is in the air. But whether
there are six more weeks of Winter or not seems to depend on
whether that hope is stronger than the despair
of the raging Coronavirus pandemic that
blew in like a lion last March. I know, I
dreadfully mix metaphors
Meanwhile
it is time to reflect on this strange demi-holiday.
Despite
the despair of meteorologists and rationalists
Groundhog Day continues to grow in
popularity and spread every
year. From an obscure folk custom observed by a handful of German immigrants
and their decedents in isolate pockets of Pennsylvania in the late 18th
and 19th Centuries it has spread
nationwide.
In
2015 Wikipedia
identified no fewer than 38 woodchucks
dragged from their winter
hibernation and exposed to the sky across the U.S. and Canada. Come hell
or high water virtually every news
broadcast in North America today
will feature stories about one or
more of the creatures and whether he—almost always identified
as a male but most frequently a she—will
see his shadow supposedly signifying six more weeks of winter weather.
These
local observations got big boost with the release of the movie Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell in 1992. The
film has become a beloved classic with
a cult following often compared to Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life.
It was filmed in my neck of the woods, as a noted TV weatherman used to say, in Woodstock, Illinois.
Just
after 7 am Woodstock Willie will
make his grumpy appearance from the Gazebo as he has every year since the
film came out. The city has stretched the celebration into a week-long festival in hopes of luring pilgrims and tourists. It works.
The Woodstock ritual is now
the second-most famous celebration
in the country behind the original at
Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, which
the McHenry County town portrayed in
the film.
But
this year due to the plague most of
the festive events in town have been
canceled. Willie will be yanked from his comfort but a
thin crowd, masked and social
distancing will observe standing in
the deep snow on Woodstock Square. At this writing it is not known if Willie
will himself be masked, a precaution that
also might save his handlers from
being bitten.
Part
of the spreading appeal of the celebrations is because they are a welcome, if silly, relief from the dreary tedium of the depths of the winter, long after the razzmatazz of the Holidays have past when everyone in cold climes is sick to death of snow, ice, howling winds,
and leaden skies. But a philosopher might speculate that
the surging popularity of Groundhog Days mirrors the growing anti-intellectualism of modern America and the spreading animus to science now officially embraced by a major political party and reflected in rejection of evolution, denial of climate change, anti-vaccine hokum, and a general
rejection of rationality. Or maybe that would be reading too much into a harmless
custom.
So
how did all of this come to pass? Some claim religious roots stretching back to Neolithic Europe. The growing neo-pagan movement is explicit in
laying claim to it, but Catholics have their own customs which may, or may not have been cribbed from older traditions.
Groundhog
Day has been traced to pre-Christian
Northern European folk traditions stretching
back in the mists of time. It is
notoriously difficult to pin down
precise origins of such oral
traditions or to know the complete
religious significance of them.
Tales about a beast—usually envisioned as a bear or a badger that had powers
to predict or control the weather seem
to have originated in Norse and/or Germanic tribal societies and spread by diffusion or osmosis to
other European peoples including the Slavs
to the east and the Celts to the
south and west. The celebration of the
animal was tied to the half-way point between
Winter Solstice—Yule—and the Spring Equinox.
Although
most of the animal and weather lore that leads directly to Groundhog Day are of
Northern European origins, modern Wiccans
and neo-pagans have identified
it with the Celtic festival of Imbolc
one of the four seasonal quarter
festivals along with Beltane (Spring/Easter), Lughnasadh (Mid-Summer) and
Samhain (Fall/Halloween) that fall between the solstices and equinoxes. Traditionally it was a festival marking the first glimmers of spring while still in the grip of the cold and dark of
winter. As such it was distantly related to transition predicted by the Norse totem animal, but had no known direct corresponding myth.
Instead
it celebrated the goddess Brigid patroness of poetry, healing, smith crafts, midwifery, and all arts of hand. In some stories
her feast on February 1 celebrated her recovery
after giving birth to the God—the Green Man—who will come into his own and rule from Lughnasadh to
winter.
In
Ireland with the coming of Christianity the Goddess and her
festival became identified with St.
Brigid of Kildare, along with Patrick
and Brendon one of the three Patron Saints of the country. Now thought to be apocryphal, St. Brigid in lore was first recorded in the 7th Century and expanded upon by later monks and scribes. She was described
as the daughter of a Pict slave woman converted
by Patrick himself. Born in 451 in Faughart,
County Louth she became a holy woman, nun, and abbess who
founded a monastery on the site of an ancient temple to the Goddess Brigid in Kildare. She assumed many of the pagan goddess’s attributes and performed many miracles. Stories about the Goddess and the Nun are
so intertwined that it is impossible to figure out if the holy
woman was real or an invention of
the Church intended to comfort converts
with familiar and beloved tradition.
Today
the best known tradition associated with the Feast of St. Brigid is the making
of the off-center straw crosses from
last season’s straw that are hung as
talismans in Irish homes through Lent until Easter.
Almost
all of the original traditions associated with the Goddess Brigid and Imbolc
had been eradicated or simply faded away 18th Century even in Gaelic speaking regions. In the 20th Century Wiccans and other
neo-pagans have attempted to revive the old Celtic traditions and in the process invented rituals and lore to fill in the lost gaps. Many believe the Quarter Festivals and old
Gods and Goddesses are accessible
spiritual metaphors for worship
of the natural world and the timeless rhythm of the seasons.
That
included borrowing from St. Brigid, as well.
Her straw crosses are now
described as not Christian at all but as ancient symbols representing the Four Quarter Festivals and the Four Cardinal Directions. There is no way to prove or disprove that
assertion.
The Rev.
Catharine Clarenbach, a Unitarian Universalist minister explained how modern practitioners view Imbolc in an entry
on Nature’s
Path, a U.U. pagan experience and
earth centered blog hosted by the
religious site Patheos. She called it
“a light not heat holiday” in which the slowly
lengthening days and first tenuous
hints at Spring-to-come give
hope to those trudging through the hard days. “When people are desperately ill, hope can fuel the long slog toward wholeness and healing,
even if that healing is not a cure.”
That
certainly ennobles the day beyond
the giddy fantasy of groundhog magic.
But
our trail to modern Groundhog Day does not end with the re-invention of
Imbolc. Indeed other than sharing a
date, the two celebrations have little in common.
Over
in England and Scotland a different Christian
tradition evolved—Candlemas observed
on February 1, the eve of St.
Brigid’s Day and often confused as British
equivalent. But Candlemas has very
early 4th Century Christmas roots as
the Feast of the Presentation
celebrated by early Church patriarchs
including Methodius of Patara, Cyril
of Jerusalem,
Gregory the Theologian, Amphilochius of
Iconium, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysostom. It
celebrated the presentation of Jesus
at the Temple in Jerusalem as an infant.
The celebration slowly spread from the Levant to the rest of the Church and Roman Empire. When the date of Christmas was finally fixed on December 25, the Feast of the
Presentation was added to the liturgical calendar forty days later on February 2.
That date by happenstance nearly coincided
with the old Roman festival Lupercalia
which simultaneously celebrated the
Roman version of the Greek God Pan who was sacred to shepherds
in the Spring lambing festival and Lupa the she-wolf who
suckled Romulus and Remus, legendary twin founders of
Rome. In evolving Roman practice it had
become a major popular holiday in Rome itself and associated with the revelry
and abandon of other feasts.
Lupercalia was outlawed by the ascendant Christians but still widely, if
covertly, celebrated by ordinary Romans.
The official Feast of the Presentation, coming just before Lent was
hoped to ease acceptance of Church teachings.
Pope Gelasius I began calling
this festival, which set off the carnival
season, the Feast of the Candles,
later known as Chandelours in parts
of France, the Alps, and the Pyrenees
and as Candlemas in Britain. It
connections to Lupercalia have caused
some modern neo-pagans to view that celebration as a Latin equivalent of the German and Norse totem animal observations. That is highly speculative and tenuous at best.
But
in Scotland we do find Candlemas as the first indication that the Northern
European custom had been introduced to Britain.
An early Scots Gaelic proverb went:
The serpent will
come from the hole
On the brown Day of BrÃde,
Though there should be three feet of snow
On the flat surface of the ground.
Although
it was a serpent, not a bear, that
was mentioned, the emergence of a totem animal to herald Spring was clearly
there. Over time looking for badgers
stretching their legs at Candlemas became a folk tradition in rural areas of
Scotland and England.
Without
mention of an animal witness this early English verse asserts
If Candlemas be
fair and bright,
Winter has another flight.
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,
Winter will not come again.
But
that custom was never wide spread and did not seem to have
traveled to the New World with early
settlers from the colonies.
It
took German peasants lured to frontier areas of Pennsylvania in the
late 1700s to do that. The use of groundhogs for prognostication rather than bears or badgers—both of which were far
more dangerous and hard to manage than the lumbering and common local rodents—was well
established when the first recorded note
of the celebration was made in English in
an 1841 diary entry by Morgantown shopkeeper James Morris:
Last Tuesday,
the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the
Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops
back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the
weather is to be moderate.
All
across central and western Pennsylvania where Germans had settled in large
numbers local Groundhog lodges sprang up in many towns to
celebrate the annual appearance of the weather predicting critters. An elaborate
communal meal called a Fersommling featuring groaning tables, orations, skits,
and music led up to a ritual presentation of the local
groundhog. These lodges and festival
gatherings were also an important tools to preserve German cultural
identity in communities pressed hard by Englanders—native English
speakers. Only the Pennsylvania
Dutch dialect was allowed to be spoken at 19th Century Fersommlings fines
levied for each English word uttered.
In 1887 in a burst of civic boosterism Colby
Camps, editor of the Punxsutawney
Spirit promoted his home
town as the official Groundhog Day
home and the local beast, always named Phil
generation after generation regardless
of gender, as the town’s official
meteorologist. The first story rapidly
got picked up by other local and national
publications which eagerly reported the result of Phil’s observation. It became an annual tradition and publicity
for the event and town grew year after year.
By the 1920 towns from the East Texas Hill Country and North
Carolina, many with their own German immigrant populations, to Ontario and French speaking Quebec were hosting
their own celebrations.
Then, as noted, the 1993 movie inspired still more.
Today the accuracy
of the various groundhogs is in dispute.
Backers, including local Groundhog society boost accuracy rates of
between 80 and 90%. Cold hard statistical analysis refutes that unsubstantiated claim. A study of several Canadian towns with
Groundhog celebrations dating back 30 to 40 years found only 37% rate of
accuracy. The record at Punxsutawney
dating all the way back to that first 1887 outing is hardly better—only
38%. Both are much worse than random 50/50 odds.
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