Since
the cult classic movie Groundhog
Day came out in thirty years ago 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 two years as the Coronavirus pandemic sent us all into isolation
and dread.
In 2020 in Woodstock, Illinois where the movie was filmed the usual enthusiastic crowd gathered on the Square after several inches of overnight snow for the annual prognostication by a supposedly hibernating large squirrel. All the other customary hoopla went on as planned. The spread of the Covid-19 from China to the U.S. had only recently been confirmed and although there was concerned chatter on TV and cable news, Americans were still going about their lives in what passed for normal during the sordid regime of the former Resident of the United States.
A month and half later the whole
damn country went into virtual lockdown and hospitals were overrun
by desperately ill patients. But
no body expected that when the next Ground Hog Day rolled around despite
vaccinations beginning to be accessible the epidemic would still
be raging and people were still masked, socially distanced, and
largely cloistered. It put the kibosh
on most observances.
This year the omicron variant which
spiked with record-breaking infections in January seems to
be beginning wane. Wide-spread
vaccination, the knowledge that the variant while extraordinarily contagious
is usually less lethal, and the simple fed-up exhaustion of folks
from isolation has allowed celebrations to resume only somewhat limitedly. But everyone seems to be nervously looking
over their shoulders for yet another variant and wave or for permanently
high levels of endemic disease.
In Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania,
Woodstock, and other locations woodchucks are on display this morning.
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 isolated 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 made 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.
Last
year due to the plague most of the festive events in town were canceled. Willie will be yanked from his comfort but a thin
crowd, masked and social
distancing folks observed while standing
in the deep snow on Woodstock Square.
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.
The Celtic/Irish goddess Brigid awakening and emerging in lore.
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 by the 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 in 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.
The Roman festival of Lupercalia celebrating Faunus--the Latin version of the Greek god Pan--as well as the she-wolf who sucked Rome's legendary founders Romulus and Remus evolved into a wild orgy. The Church may have cooped the celebration with Candlemas which also falls in the pre-Lenten Carnival season.
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 widespread and did not seem to have
traveled to the New World with early
settlers of 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 harder to manage than the lumbering and common local squirrel—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.
19th Century cartoons like this helped spread Groundhog Day from the rural German communities in Pennsylvania.
In 1887 in a burst of civic boosterism Colby
Camps, editor of the Punxsutawney
Spirit promoted his hometown
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.
This morning Woodstock Willie did not see his shadow.
But today will be filled
with news that Woodstock Willie did not see his shadow as the city was brushed
by a snowstorm that continues to dump many more inches on parts of the Chicago area.
Supposedly, Spring is at hand. And
perhaps, we hope, that the Winters of our discontent will also at long last pass.
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