Category Archives: History

Candlemas (February 2, 2019)=Beginning of Spring

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Marking the 40th day after Christmas, Candlemas celebrates the triumph of light/spring over darkness/winter. Candles blessed on this day were among the most powerful talismans available to ordinary folk in the Middle Ages.

Candlemas, the name taken from the custom of blessing the year’s supply of candles on this day, is the 40th day after Christmas and marks the day Jesus was brought into the Temple by the Mother of God and acclaimed by the elder Simeon as “the light of revelation to the Gentiles and the glory of … Israel.” He also told the Mother of God that a sword would pierce her own heart during the ministry of her Son.

Candlemas, attached to the older feast of Imbolc and the quarter-day between Winter Solstice and Vernal Equinox and thus marking the first day of spring, was even more popular than Christmas in many areas (such as those under the influence of Byzantium and Byzantine Christian culture). People would flock to the churches to obtain the candles blessed on this day as the power of these candles to dispel darkness, death, illness, demons, and nearly anything else that might be considered dangerous to humans was widely reputed to make them the most powerful weapons in the medieval arsenal against evil.

It was also common in western Europe for new archbishops or other leading churchmen to receive their pallium (the “stole,” a vestment similar to a scarf that drapes around the shoulders) on this day, woven from wool sheared from lambs on St. Agnes’ day (January 21).

10th century illumination of St. Gregory the Great wearing his pallium.

10th century illumination of St. Gregory the Great wearing his pallium.

St. Agnes in Prague

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A view of the St. Agnes convent in Prague; the national museum’s stunning collection of medieval art is displayed here.

In the well-known Christmas carol, “Good King Wenceslaus looked out” from his castle in Prague and saw a poor beggar struggling to get home during a blizzard. The king asked his page if he knew who the poor man was and the page answered that he did; the poor man, the page told the king, that the poor man lived several miles away in a hovel near beneath the bluffs overlooking the river that runs through Prague. The poor man’s house was also on the edge of the forest, near “St. Agnes’ fountain.”

St. Agnes was a Czech princess who was born in AD 1200. She became a Franciscan nun–known as “Poor Clares”–and established a convent along the edge of the river, on what was then the edge of the city, right against the forest and in the shadow of the bluff on the other saide of the river. There was a well and a fountain in the convent courtyard which the nuns used for their drinking water. The convent is now the site where the National Museum of the Czeck Republic displays the collection of medieval art.

The princess shared a name with a much earlier St. Agnes, a young woman who lived inn Rome and who was executed for her Christian faith during the Great Persecution of Diocletian in AD 304; this Agnes refused to marry because she wanted to embrace life as a Christian ascetic. Agnes’ bones are conserved beneath the high altar in the church of Sant’Agnese fuori le mura in Rome, built over the catacomb that housed her tomb. Her skull is preserved in a separate chapel in the church of Sant’Agnese in Agone in Rome’s Piazza Navona.

According to Robert Ellsberg, in his book Blessed Among all Women: Women Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for our Time,
“…the story of Agnes the opposition is not between sex and virginity. The conflict is between a young woman’s power in Christ to define her own identity versus a patriarchal culture’s claim to identify her in terms of her sexuality. According to the view shared by her ‘suitors’ and the state, if she would not be one man’s wife, she might as well be every man’s whore. Failing these options, she might as well be dead. Agnes did not choose death. She chose not to worship the gods of her culture. …Espoused to Christ, she was beyond the power of any man to ‘have his way with her’. ‘Virgin’ in this case is another way of saying Free Woman.”

This Roman St. Agnes was very popular throughout Europe during the Middle Ages. The well and fountain in Prague might have been associated with a church dedicated to her even before the princess built her famous convent there.

The young woman martyred in Rome was a member of a very prominent and wealthy family, which is why the Roman authorities cared that she had embraced the illegal Christian faith. The princess who became a nun evidently knew St. Clare herself, the founder of the Franciscan nuns and a friend of St. Francis of Assisi. Both women named Agnes–the Roman virgin-martyr and the Czech virgin-princess-nun–live on in the Christmas carol we sing every December.

The Magi and Their Dream

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The magi have a dream in which an angel warns them to avoid revealing the location of the Christ-child to King Herod. So they go home via another route; as a result, King Herod slays all the boys in the region of Bethlehem who are 2 years old or younger.

In the gospel according to St. Matthew, we read that the Magi–the 3 kings–were on the road for 2 years, following the star that announced the birth of Christ to Judea but had to consult King Herod about where in Judea the new-born king might be located. Herod consulted religious authorities and scholars who told him that Bethlehem was the most likely location. He sent the Magi there but asked them to come and tell him where in Bethlehem they found Christ. They did locate Christ, worshipping him with gold, frankincense, and myrrh. (One story says that the gold was later stolen by the two thieves who were later crucified alongside Jesus. Another tradition suggests that Joseph and Mary used the gold to finance their travels when they fled to Egypt from Bethlehem.) But an angel warned the Magi all in a dream not to reveal the location of the Christ-child to King Herod and so they returned home via a different route, avoiding Herod. When Herod realized the Magi were not coming back to him, he ordered all the baby boys in the Bethlehem region to be killed, hoping to eradicate the baby who was the threat to his rule. But an angel had warned Joseph in a dream to take his family to Egypt and so they escaped, just in the nick of time; they returned to Judea only after Herod was dead.

The star the magi had followed was most likely a conjunction of Saturn (indicating the Last Days) and Jupiter (indicating a great king) in Pisces (associated with Judea and the people of Israel). Dreams were taken seriously as visitations of God, the angels, or other spirits. Dreams and astrology were acceptable tools of divination to discover or understand the will of God and were not considered “magic” by most people until fairly recently. But people who had such dreams might become proud or arrogant, telling others how special they were for having received such a visitation from God in a dream; many spiritual teachers had to warn their disciples against taking such dreams too seriously or becoming arrogant because of them. Rules were established for how to interpret such dreams and how much attention they should be given. But dreams can still inspire us or lead to new inventions, as this recent New Yorker article attests.

A shrine of the Three Kings at Cologne Cathedral, according to tradition, contains the bones of the Magi. Reputedly they were first discovered by Saint Helena on her famous pilgrimage to Palestine and the Holy Lands. She took the remains to the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople; they were later moved to Milan before being sent to their current resting place by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I in 1164.

Read more about the Magi in previous posts here and here.