Repost: Festival of Sleep Day!

January Third is a day of holidays.  It is Throw Out Fruitcake Day, Humiliation Day, and my favorite, Festival of Sleep Day.  So in celebration, we'll look briefly at Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep.

He lives in Erebos.  Since Erebos is the land of perpetual darkness, he can catch a few extra winks.  He catches a ride on his mom's (Nyx) dress and floats around during night (much like Isabella's boyfriend).  He has a twin brother, Thanatos.  Thanatos is the incarnation of the peaceful death.  He has some regular brothers that make up the Oneiroi, or dreams.

To make people fall asleep, he has a variety of instruments, on being a branch that drips water from the river Lethe.  Another is an upside down torch, although I'm not altogether certain how that symbolizes sleep.

I don't know about you, but I've already taken my nap and celebrated this special day.  *yawn* Maybe we can stretch this one out to the twelve days of Sleep Festival....

Beware the Ides of the New Year????

O.K., I know this should be a post about the Ides of March, since it is, well, the Ides of March.  However, Today is another Roman holiday.  It is the day to honor Anna Perenna, the Roman goddess of the New Year.  Never heard of her?  Well shame on you!  There is a lot of stuff out there about her.  The following information comes from OGOD - The Obscure Goddess Online Dictionary - a very powerful reference that we here at Bubo's Blog have voted as the best compilation of obscure female deities anywhere.  Check it out for the full story!

Anna Perenna is the Roman Goddess of long life and renewal, health and plenty. Her two names both make reference to the year: anna means "to live through a year", while perenna means "last many years" (still seen in the English words annual and perennial). She seems to be concerned with cycles of renewal, and connecting the past to the present; She Herself is described in some legends as old, and in others as young. Sacrifices were made to Her with the intent "that the circle of the year may be completed happily".

 In one legend, Anna Perenna is an old woman who brought the plebeians cakes and kept them fed. For these reasons She was always popular with the common people, and after Her death She was considered a Goddess.

In a later legend Anna is a young woman, the sister of Dido, Queen of Carthage. After the death of her sister, Anna fled to Rome, where the hero Aeneas had settled. Here she ran afoul of his wife Lavinia, and in despair she killed herself by drowning in the River Numicius. Afterwards she was said to have been given the surname Perenna, and worshipped as the nymph of the river.

In yet another tale, She is again an old woman. The God of War, Mars, was in love with Minerva, the Goddess of War and the Arts and a sworn virgin. He asked Anna Perenna to intercide on His behalf; instead She dressed Herself up as Minerva, and, veiled, came to Mars. When He tried to kiss Her She laughed and laughed at Him in scorn. Minerva's main Roman festival, the Quinquatrus, was held just 4 days after Anna Perenna's and this is usually the explanation given for why they are linked in this legend.

The Festival of Anna Perenna on the 15th of March was beloved by the common people, though it was also an officially recognized holiday. On the evening of the 15th, people would gather at the 1st milestone on the Via Flaminia in Her sacred grove of fruit trees (in bloom at that time of year) by the banks of the Tiber, and camp out, some bringing tents, others making little shelters from leafy tree branches. There they picnicked merrily into the night, feasting, dancing, singing, and celebrating with much wine, toasting to health and long life. It was believed that one would live as many years as the cups of wine one could drink, and so it was of course traditional therefore to get very, very drunk.

Well, sounds like a winner holiday to me!  Thanks again to OGOD.  Happy celebrating!

Bobbing for Apples

O.K., so I'm surfing around on the Internet, totally shirking my duties, and I run across this Roman mythology connection to Halloween.  It seems that there was a holiday called Feralia that was designed to give peace to the dead.  Sacrifices were made in honor of them, prayers said, and all that good stuff.  The problem is that it was celebrated on the 21st of February.  Hmmm....

I dug a little further and found that Pope Boniface IV replaced this celebration with All Saint's Day.  This was observed on the 13th of May.  O.K., getting closer....

Then, Pope Gregory III moved the date to November 1st (I suppose to coincide with Samhain). Alright.  Now we're talking.  But, you may say (out loud if you are a little strange), why did you title this entry "Bobbing for Apples?"  Well (I might say back to you if you are a bit schizophrenic), it comes from me typing Feralia into Google.

It seems that there was another Roman festival that might have been pulled into the Halloween celebration the same way as Feralia.  This festival was to the goddess of fruit trees, Pomona.  She was associated heavily with apples.  The theory is that her festival on August 13th was pulled into the Samhain makeover and all that is left now is the bobbing for apples part.

So, dress up your kids or yourself, your dog or cat even, and have fun this Halloween.  Just make sure that while you are engaged in all that tricking and treating stuff that you take some time out to bob for an apple or two and remember poor Pomona, who lost her holiday.  I fear it is pretty much gone forever, as I do not foresee a It's the Great Apple, Charlie Brown coming anytime soon.

By the way, the goddess Pomona does live on and can be found at her blog, Goddess of Pomona, although she very much downplays her deitic roots.

April Fool's!

Several years ago when I still had a chalk board (oh, I miss that chalk board), I had the vocabulary words for that week on the board.  We had a test that Friday, which just so happened to be April 1st.  The poor students came in and thought that I had carelessly left the words on the board.  They chuckled and tried to keep a straight face.  They snuck glances when they thought I was not looking.  The delighted in getting one up on the teacher and felt relieved that they were going to get away without having studied (yet again).  However, being the mean and utterly evil teacher that I am, I had decided to play a trick on those unsuspecting children.  The Thursday afternoon before, I carefully erased the words and replaced them with misspelled versions.  When they found out, they cried foul.  I laughed at them and teetering on if I should or should not count the test, one student snottily said, "If you had studied, you would have known the words were misspelled" (you gotta love teacher's pets).  I won't say if I really did count the grade or not, but let's just say I am very susceptible to the dark side of the force.

Now, April Fool's day has been with us for a very long time.  The same jokes get used over and over again.  All of us remember getting fooled at least once, few of us can really tout having a really cool joke to play on others. But where did this holiday start?  It seems that for years people have not known the answer.  In 1708, in the British magazine Apollo, the question of the holiday's origin was raised, even then with an unsatisfactory answer.  Oh I know you have heard something about the calendar change causing problems and such, but there are many possible origins.  You can read about them here: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/April_Fools_Day_-_Origin/

Of course, the one we're interested in is mythologically oriented.  Here is the account, according to the page listed above:

In Roman mythology Pluto, the God of the Dead, abducted Proserpina and brought her to live with him in the underworld. Proserpina called out to her mother Ceres (the Goddess of grain and the harvest) for help, but Ceres, who could only hear the echo of her daughter’s voice, searched in vain for Proserpina. Some scholars theorized that the fruitless search of Ceres for her daughter (commemorated during the Roman festival of Cerealia) was the mythological antecedent of the fool’s errands popular on April 1st.

And that is no April Fools!