April 23 St George Despite the fact that very little is known about him, St George has been an object of devotion since the fifth century and perhaps earlier (there is a church dedicated to him in Constantinople which was supposedly built by Constantine the Great). During the Mmiddle Aages, he was best known for saving the kings daughter from a dragon. The story was usually set in Lydda, near where Perseus in the Greek myth rescued Andromeda, suggesting that George inherited the warrior-like qualities of the Greek hero. A very militant saint, he became the patron saint of England, soldiers and Boy Scouts. The English celebrate by wearing roses and raising his flag, a red cross on a white background. He is often depicted as a mounted warrior. But like Ares, after whom he may be modeled, George also has associations with the old Green Man. His very name means farmer. In Russia and in Eastern Europe, a boy is decked with branches and flowers and goes about the cornfields on St Georges Day. He may be a tree-spirit, like the Jack in the Green of May Day Mummers plays, or the Whitsuntide Basket (a man dressed in a greenery-bedecked frame on Whitsun, the Christian Beltane). Carinthian and Transylvanian farmers identify Green George with a birch tree or a willow tree, decked with flowers and set up in the center of a village for one day. The following day, Green George is represented by a boy clad in branches, leaves and flowers. In the evening, Green George is a leaf-clad puppet thrown into a running stream. Czechoslovakian girls practice divination on this day by weaving garlands and then tossing them up into trees or into rivers. If the garland gets caught in the tree, they will marry; if it falls out, they will be an old maid. If the garland is carried away by the river, they will leave the village; if it gets stuck, they will stay home. In Catalonia, his holiday is the occasion for a parade featuring a smoke-belching dragon and battles between Moors and Christians. Men give women roses and women give men books. The traditional treat is a an oblong pastry, bearing the saints name on one side and stripes of red and yellow on the other. [Rufus] Albanians slaughter a lamb on this day and smear blood on sills (recalling the Jewish holiday of Passover--see April 17Mar 28) to protect them from evil. Before an icon of St George, they pray: Holy St George, this year thou hast sent me this lamb, next year, I beseech you, send me a larger one. This is the name-day of the national hero George Castriota, who resisted the Ottomans in the fifteenth century. People go on picnics and weigh themselves holding sprigs of green. In Greece, George is a special favorite of shepherds. At Arachova, his image is carried in procession around the town, led by old men dancing to pipes and tabors. The water supply iwas curt off until the old men reached a line in the ballad where they siang: Dragon, set free the water, that the revellers may drink. St George or Mari Ghergis is the most popular saint in Egypt where he is associated with El Khider, the green man, who appears to travellers who are lost or in despair. On his birthday, Copts and Muslims travel to his tomb at Armant to celebrate. It is believed that he evolved from images of Isis, spearing her evil brother Seth, who turned himself into a hippopotamus and hidden under the waves. Or perhaps the monster under the water is the rising of the water itself, the seasonal flooding of the Nile. [Morrow] Blackburn, Bonnie and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Oxford Companion to the Year, Oxford University Press, 1999 Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology & Legend, Maria Leach, editor, Harper and Row 1984 Morrow, Susan Brind, The Names of Things, Riverhead 1997 Rufus, Anneli, The World Holiday Book, Harper San Francisco 1994 Spicer, Dorothy Gladys, The Book of Festivals, The Womans Press 1937
Posted on: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 16:52:29 +0000
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