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EPISODE 78: An Etymological Holiday Feast

 Transcription

Note: this is mostly an automatic transcription, lightly edited and corrected (though the transcript of the video voiceover is the actual script). Punctuation and formatting is not perfect, and the time-codes are slightly off.

MARK SUNDARAM: Welcome to The Endless Knot podcast –

AVEN MCMASTER: – where the more we know –

MARK: – the more we want to find out.

AVEN: Chasing serendipitous connections through our lives –

MARK: – and across disciplines.

[00:00:00] Aven: Hi. I'm Aven,

Mark: and I'm Mark.

Aven: Welcome to the endless knot today We're going to talk about feasts.

Mark: Yum.

Aven: Before we get to talking about the word feast and the video that we recorded last year for Christmas and for the holiday season, we have a couple of things. The first and most important is to thank two new patrons, H Johnson and Alyssa Paige Renner. Thank you so much for your new pledges.

Mark: Woo.

Aven: If you'd like to come and join the community and support us over at Patreon you can go to patreon.com/ theendlessknot .  And now of course we should also, before we get going, talk about our cocktails. It's been a couple of episodes since we've been able to have a cocktail. Since we were interviewing, since the last episode was with, Scott at  sound EDU. Oh, and of course we've had the bonus episode [00:01:00] with our talks at Thorneloe

Mark: Yes.

Aven: So now we're back to actual just chats and we have a cocktail. And this time, even though we don't really talk about one this in the video per se,  it is food-related and holiday related. So we are drinking a Christmas cake martini , which we haven't yet tried. This is a recipe that, I mean, martini, it's one of these martinis that's literally nothing to do with martini.

Mark: A martini And I'm making air quotes, which really works well in podcasts.

Aven: It's top podcasting. Yeah. But this one is built on a whiskey base, a scotch whiskey base, and then has a little bit of cherry Brandy or cherry heering in our case and lime and  orgeat and brandy or supposed to be cognac, but we only have brandy and then is garnished with cinnamon dusted [00:02:00] cherry and cinnamon sugar. Listen, I dusted that darn cherry. Look, look at that cherry. That is a cinnamon dusted cherry.

Mark: It's very dusty.

Aven:  I'm very proud of myself. So why don't we go ahead and try that. I suppose it's supposed to taste like a Christmas cake.

Mark: It's not unlike a Christmas cake.

Aven: Yeah. If your Christmas cake is soaked in whiskey, which ours certainly have been in the past. This year I think we used Brandy, but we've done whiskey in the past. Yeah. It's got the fruitiness from the,  the cherry and the lemon, which, there's usually lemon in it, and the cinnamon.  I mean, you could have a fuller range of Christmas cake spices, but  is not bad.

Mark: I think that the cherry we use to garnish is a little more upscale than the

Aven: Cherries we put in the actual

Mark: put in Christmas cake.

Aven: Yeah. But you know, this is only one cherry to, that we couldn't possibly afford to fill a Christmas cake with Luxardo cherries. [00:03:00]

[laughter ] It's tasty, even for someone like me who isn't a big whiskey fan, then those, there's enough other flavors. It's balanced nicely for me. You Like it. Yeah. I think, I think I quite like that as a Christmasy cocktail.

Mark: Yeah.

Aven: All right. Well, I think that's all the business we have to do. So do you want to just tell us about what we're going to listen to?

Mark: Yes. We're going to start with the word Feast. Which  as we'll discover soon, has kind of two meanings. The sort of meaning that probably first pops into your mind is the food meaning, but of course, it can also help us.

Aven: Always Food comes into my mind first,

Mark: but it can also have a, a religious meaning.

Aven: Mmm.

Mark: As in the feast of Steven.

Aven: All right. And this is the video that you made last December.

Mark: That's right. Yeah.

Aven: Okay. [00:04:00] So we will pause now and listen to that, and then we will come back and fill you in on some more details and then wander down a couple of rabbit holes. I think

Mark: The word feast didn’t originally have anything to do with food. That came later. Feast actually comes from the same root as festival, and is really about religion, and we can still use the word feast in that older sense when we refer to something like the Feast of Stephen, a day in the church calendar for honouring St Stephen, which you might know about as the day on which Good King Wenceslas looked out. This is what’s called polysemy, when a word, or indeed any sign or symbol, has multiple meanings. Feast and festival came, through Old French, from the Latin word festus, which as an adjective means “of holidays, festive, solemn, merry” and as the noun festum means “a holiday, festival, feast”, and from this same root, by the way, we also get words such as fair, festoon, and fiesta. Well this Latin word can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root *dhes- whose meaning isn’t entirely clear but which leads to various religious, including the Greek word theos “god”, which gives us words such as theology, pantheon, and polytheism. The root may ultimately descend from Proto-Indo-European *dhe- “to set, put”. But the more common modern sense of feast, as a lavish and elaborate banquet, comes from the fact that at many religious festivals you might expect to eat and drink well.

The funny thing is though, the word banquet had kind of the opposite meaning originally. The word comes into English from French, where it was formed as a diminutive of the word banc meaning “bench”, and had the earlier sense of a small snack that you would eat on a bench rather than a full meal sitting at a table. Our word bench, unsurprisingly, is related to this, as is the word bank, in reference to a moneylender’s bench or table. All these bench related words come from the other sense of the word bank, as in a riverbank, from the idea of a man-made earthwork for sitting on that resembled a riverbank, which by the way is another example of polysemy, bank and bank. All of these words can be traced further back, through the Germanic branch to the Proto-Indo-European root *bheg- “to break”, because a bank of earth is a feature where the contour of the ground is broken.

So the banquet moved from the bench to the table, becoming an elaborate meal, which could have multiple courses. And thus we have the word dessert. Because dessert comes from French desservire, literally “to un-serve” because it involved the removal of the what had been served earlier. This is why, by the way, dessert is spelled with two <ss> since the prefix is from the Latin prefix dis- “lack of, opposite of, away”, as opposed to desert, which is a combination of the prefix de- plus the unrelated stem serere “to join”. Now the stem of dessert comes ultimately from Latin servio “to serve, be enslaved”, from the noun servus “slave”, and it’s important to remember that although we get the words serve and servant from this Latin root, Romans didn’t have servants, they had slaves. Now the further etymology of this Latin root is uncertain, with some scholars suggesting that it might be from an unknown Etruscan source (Etruscan being a long extinct and little understood language isolate in pre-Roman Italy), but it’s also been suggested that it comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *ser- meaning “to protect”, from the notion that a servus was originally a “guard” or “shepherd” but later developed the pejorative sense of “slave”. If true, then it would be related to Latin servo “to keep, preserve”, which gives us words such as conserve and preserve, as well as English hero from Greek heros “protector”. All this talk of desserts of course reminds us of the traditional Christmas pudding, and I should note that in some places, such as Britain, pudding is a general word for dessert.

But if we want to move past traditional foods to actual ritual food as part of a feast in the religious sense, perhaps the most obvious place to see this is in the ritual of the Eucharist, a rite practised in some forms of Christianity in which the priest gives the churchgoers bread and wine as part of the church service (there’s that serve root again). The Eucharist represents the body and blood of Christ, as a reflection of the Last Supper of Christ with his disciples, before he was betrayed and eventually crucified, when he said, “do this in memory of me”, and depending on which form of Christianity we’re talking about the bread and wine are thought to actually transform into flesh and blood through the process of transubstantiation. The point being that in some religious festivals and rites, food often plays a important ritual role.

Now since I’ve been throwing around the words tradition, ritual, and rite, we should probably pause to consider those terms. The word tradition comes from Latin tradere “to give up, hand over, deliver”, a compound of trans “across, to the farther side of” and dare “to give”. So a tradition is something that is “given over” from one generation to the next. So many aspects of feasts and festivals, including specific foods, can be traditional, like that Christmas pudding. And what’s more, rites and rituals are generally speaking traditional, passed down over generations. The words rite and ritual come from Latin ritus “religious observance, ceremony”, which is traceable back to the Proto-Indo-European root *re- “to reason, count”, also the source of words such as reason and arithmetic, and is a variant of the root *ar- “to fit together”, also the source of words such as harmony, art, and order. Rites or rituals can be tied to seasonal or cyclical events, like planting and harvesting or the cycles of the sun and moon, they can be tied to contingent events like marriage, birth or death, or they may involve initiations or rites of passage. And specifically we can talk about rites of feasting and festivals, which include things such as Christmas and other festivals that take place around midwinter, like winter solstice and New Year celebrations.

Now anthropologists look at lot at ritual, specifically in the context of religion and myth. Going back to that example of Jesus and the rite of the Eucharist, we can see that the ritual is basically reenacting a story from the Bible, in that case the death and rebirth of Jesus, what’s called a dying-god pattern found in many religions around the world in which a god dies and is reborn often allowing for some kind of renewal. And many festivals involve some kind of reenactment of a traditional story or myth. The early mythologist Sir James Frazer, in landmark book The Golden Bough, saw this kind of ritual reenactment of a dying god myth as representing fertility rites, though it should be noted that Frazer’s theories have come under much criticism, mostly due to lack of evidence.

Let’s look at another example of a ritual that involves feasting, the potlatch, a kind of gift-giving feast practised by the Indigenous peoples of the pacific northwest coast of Canada and the US. The word potlatch comes from the Chinook Jargon pátlač “to give, a gift”, from the Nootka word pa'chatle “to give”, and depending on which First Nation you look at the specific details differ, however, basically a potlatch could be tied to a particular contingent event like births or weddings and would involve competitive gift-giving in order to enhance one’s prestige, and could be a major element of the economic system. Interestingly, the word potlatch may be connected with the word potluck. Though potluck probably comes from a combination of the words pot and luck and not the word potlatch itself, it’s possible potlatch influenced the modern sense of potluck or conversely the modern sense of the word potluck led to the colloquial use of the word potlatch with the same sense. You see, originally potluck referred to an impromptu meal thrown together with whatever was available to feed an unexpected guest, so it was the luck of whatever was in the pot. But now we use the word potluck to refer to a communal meal in which the guests each bring a homemade element of the meal, which is referred to in Alaska as a potlatch. Now sometimes a Christmas party can involve potluck contributions from guests, and so for the purposes of our story today, we’ll turn to the various midwinter festivals, like Christmas, and the role feasting plays in them.

Midwinter festivals, at least in cultures of the northern hemisphere, are quite common. Christmas itself lies in the centre of a whole season of festivals, some religious and some secular, that is sometimes referred to as Christmastide. In fact the date of Christmas itself is a kind of uncertain thing, insofar as the celebration of the birth of Jesus is concerned. As we’ll see, it probably has little to do with any historical date. There’s nothing in the Bible that provides any direct evidence for any sort of date. Early guesses often placed it in the spring, probably for symbolic reasons as a time of birth. The fourth century Roman calligrapher Furius Dionysius Filocalus gives us the earliest mention of the date December 25th, alongside the dates of various pre-Christian Roman festivities, so a long time after the events it refers to. All kinds of justifications for this were suggested over the years such as the belief that the crucifixion took place on March 25th and since Jesus must have been on earth a perfect number of years (because of course), working in nine months of pregnancy after conception on March 25th gives us December 25th. But the reality is that Pope Julius I just declared it so in the middle of the fourth century, and probably because there were a bunch of other festivals at that time of year in Rome, and why not piggyback on an already successful thing, amirite! This kind of blending of traditions is called syncretism, and we’ll be seeing a number of examples of this.

Now there are other feast days in Christmastide, for instance the Feast of Stephen which we mentioned before. Stephen was the very first Christian martyr, with his story being told in the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament. Basically he got on the bad side of Jewish authorities because of his blasphemous teachings, and was eventually stoned to death, so in Christian art he is often depicted with three stones sitting on him. Interestingly for our purposes, St Stephen’s Day has become associated with a distinctly unchristian ritual, Wren Day or Hunt the Wren, in various Celtic parts of the British Isles. Basically it involves the ritualized hunting of the wren, later a fake wren on top of a pole, with mummers dressed in straw suits, referred to as strawboys or wrenboys, celebrating and singing, and collecting money. This is one example of a widespread midwinter tradition of ritualized begging or otherwise earning hospitality at this time of year, which survives today in the form of Christmas carollers, and often also involved misrule in the form of disguises and the breaking of traditional societal norms. Mummers, by the way, are revellers who often perform little comic plays, often as street performances or going door-to-door. One typical plot involves a doctor who has a magic potion capable of reviving a vanquished character. Sir James Frazer, in one of his frequent leaps of imagination, saw this mummers play story as a descendant of pre-Christian fertility rituals. Now at this point you may be asking, why a wren? Well there’s a Christian folktale that God, wanting to find out who was the king of the birds, set up a contest to see which bird could fly highest and furthest. It looked like the eagle was about to win, but when the eagle finally started to tire, the treacherous wren, who had been hiding under the eagle’s wing somehow, suddenly soared off an won the honour. Now why God would need to run a contest is not really explained, and this may just be a rationalization, and another example of syncretism. Instead, the ritual, though only recorded from the late 17th century, might come from a pre-Christian source. The wren is the smallest bird native to Europe, and killing one was normally held as either wicked or unlucky, so having a day on which you were allowed to hunt wrens is another example of misrule and ritual reversal, and we’ll see more of these associated with the midwinter season. What’s more, the wren was a symbol of the past year in Celtic mythology, since it would still sing in midwinter, and the Old Irish name for the bird means “druid-bird”, so Wren Day may in fact descend from Samhain or Celtic midwinter animal sacrifice rituals, but we’ll come back to the Celtic midwinter traditions and the religious leaders known as the Druids later. By the way, Sir James Frazer similarly took this as an example of the sacrifice of an animal normally considered to be sacred at an annual festival. There’s also a story told in the Isle of Man in which a beautiful fairy lures men to their drowning in a river, who when challenged by the people, transforms into a wren and escapes, as well as stories about wrens betraying Irish soldiers who were fighting against Viking invaders by tapping on their shields, and similarly betraying that martyr St Stephen we started with.

But getting back to examples of syncretism, perhaps the most famous connection made between Christmas and a pagan festival is with the Roman festival Saturnalia. There’s no shortage of YouTube videos, podcasts, and blogposts about the relationship between Saturnalia and Christmas, so I won’t repeat all that, but for our purposes in looking at the relationship between feasts, festivals, and food, there are a few things worth pointing out. So Saturnalia was celebrated on December 17th and later ran through to the 23rd, thus spanning the winter solstice. It was preceded by the month-long Brumalia winter/harvest festival, which takes its name from Latin brevis “short” in reference to the gradual shortening of days leading up to the solstice. Saturnalia was held in honour of the Roman agricultural god Saturn, and was heavily influenced by the Greek festival Cronia and the god Cronus, also a god of agriculture. Saturn was associated with the harvest, and was held to have been in charge during a golden age in which humans lived in a world of bounteous abundance and equality, and so not only did Saturnalia feature much feasting, but also role reversal, in which masters waited on their slaves, and slaves or other lower status people might be able to insult or order about their social betters. It should be remembered though that afterwards people went back to their normal roles, so this breaking of boundaries really served to define those boundaries. Other aspects of misrule were also a feature, including pranks and legal gambling, as was gift giving, of either gag gifts or gifts of candles, perhaps representing the solstice as a time of the longest night and the lengthening of the days henceforth. Because of an odd, and yet in many ways appropriate, phonological similarity, the Greek god Cronus, father of Zeus, became associated with Chronos, the personification of time. There is in fact a logical connection there because a god of agriculture would obviously be connected to the seasons, from which humans gain their perception of the passage of time. In any case, from this blending we get the figure of Father Time, often depicted at New Year, with his agricultural implement the sickle or scythe. Another modern echo of Saturnalia may lie in the office Christmas party, which not only features a slackening of normal business place hierarchies and bosses often serving out food to their employees. Not that I recommend you take the opportunity to tell your boss what you really think of them! In the period of the later Roman Empire, in what was perhaps an even stronger influence on the date of Christmas, was the celebration of the Dies Natalis Solis Invictis or Day of Birth of the Unconquered Sun, celebrated on December 25th. In another example of syncretism, this worship of the sun god was absorbed from the older Syrian cult of the Unconquered Sun during the 220s and made official under the emperor Aurelian in 274. After Christianity was officially declared the state religion of the Roman Empire, there seems to have been a shift in celebrating the birthday of the sun god to the birthday of the son of god, if you’ll excuse the anachronistic pun which doesn’t work at all in Latin.

So with all these winter festivals clustering around the winter solstice, let’s have a look at the solstice itself. The solstice is of course a precisely measurable day, when the sun is directly overhead at noon, so it’s not surprising that many cultures have some sort of festival or ritual associated with it. The word solstice means literally “sun standing still” from Latin sol “sun” and sistere “to stand still”, a reduplicative form of stare “to stand”, because the sun appears to rise and set in the same places for a few days around the solstice. The solstice of course also marks the longest night of the year, with the days getting progressively longer afterwards, so many traditions celebrate it as the return of the sun, by lighting candles or bonfires (and remember the gift of candles in Saturnalia). Many stone monuments in the British Isles, such as Stonehenge in England and Newgrange in Ireland, are aligned so that the rising sun at the winter solstice appears through a particular aperture. And the game snapdragon played at least since the 17th century, in which a tray or shallow bowl of warm brandy with raisins in it is set alight, and participants are to snatch the raisins out of the flames and eat them, is often played around the solstice or Christmas. Furthermore, given that the solstice marks the winter season, when times are cold and harsh and food is about to become scarce, having a big feast makes a lot of sense. The winter season follows the harvest, and it is also a time of animal slaughter, when you would kill excess animals so you didn’t have to feed them all through the winter. Now some of that food would be preserved, but it makes sense to have a bunch of it right away while it’s fresh. And you might want to make sacrifices to the gods to make sure the food supply is good in the year to come when it’s growing and breeding season again. And in particularly cold regions you might decorate with the few plants that remain green in the winter, like conifers, holly, and mistletoe, as a symbol of life and rebirth. And we’ve already seen those myths and rituals associated with gods who die and are reborn, particularly relevant at the time of the rebirth of the year.

Another example of just such a midwinter festival which has influenced our modern Christmas traditions is the Germanic festival called Yule, a name now used to refer to Christmas itself, and if you want to see more specifics about Yule, you can have a look at our Christmas video from a few years ago. I won’t repeat all of that here, but there are a few elements I want to draw attention to. Yule, or Geol in Old English, seems to have encompassed the entire period, with Geolmonaþ being equivalent to both December and January. It seems to have involved the slaughtering of livestock, probably including sacrifices, which may survive in the tradition of the Christmas ham, as well as the beer produced from the grain harvest. The month before Yule was blotmonaþ “sacrifice month” or blodmonaþ “blood month”, corresponding to November, and suggesting animal sacrifice in the midwinter season. The word blot, meaning “sacrifice” in both Old English and Old Norse, is related to the word blood as well as to the word bless, coming ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European root *bhel- “to blow, swell”. In Norse tradition there were a number of blots associated with this time of year. There was the dísablót in honour of the Dísir, possibly originally fertility goddesses but later becoming more generalized, along with the Valkyrie, which was a more public festival held at the beginning of the winter season, known as Winter Nights, along with álfablót or “elven sacrifice” which was a more private ritual held in the home excluding strangers. Later on in the winter season, there was Þorrablót held at midwinter, which seems to originally have been a sacrifice to Thor, but later was reinterpreted as involving Þorri, the personification of frost. This tradition was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in Iceland, as a celebration of traditional Icelandic cuisine, referred to as þorramatur, consisting of various cured meats and fish served with dense dark rye bread, including pressed rams testicles and seal flippers cured in lactic acid and fermented shark, all consumed with copious amounts of brennivín, a kind of Icelandic aquavit. Such is the strong associations with traditional foods in these kinds of ritual festivities. In Anglo-Saxon England on December 24 was the Modraniht or “mothers night”. We don’t know much about this festival, aside from a brief reference from the undoubtedly biased Christian monk Bede, but it has been speculated that it might be connected with the Scandinavian Dísir or Germanic/Celtic Matres and Matronae or “mothers and matrons” that were venerated in Northwestern Europe, with votives and altars depicting the three deities in the first to fifth centuries.

For a different take on a midwinter festival, the Inuit tradition Quviasugvik has a different kind of tie to seasonal food production, marking the beginning of the hunting season. Quviasugvik, meaning literally “time of happiness” from quviasuk- “to be happy”, occurs around late fall, early winter, or at the winter solstice, and though traditions differ, it frequently involves shamans known as anggakuit entering a hut in the evening and offering  prayers for the community and to propitiate the spirits of the dead and the goddess of the sea, Sedna. Again, there are different versions of the story, with different motivations, but one way or another Sedna is cast overboard into the water by her father who then chops off her fingers so she lets go of the kayak which she’s clinging to, and the fingers become seals and other marine animals that the Inuit hunt, and Sedna becomes the goddess of the sea and marine animals. Because Sedna is a vengeful figure she must be placated in order to have a good hunting season. On the following day after the prayers, the whole community would participate in various rituals, including a tug-of-war with a sealskin rope with two teams designated as the ducks and ptarmigans, and if the ducks win the weather will be fine through the winter, but if the ducks lose it means a long and difficult winter. There is also a ritual in which everyone sits in a circle around a container of water, with each eating their meat at the same time while wishing for good tidings from Sedna, and then each in turn from the oldest to the youngest scooping a drink of water from the middle and stating the time and place of their birth. Today, in the Iñupiaq language, quviasugvik is now used to mean “holiday”, and in Arctic Quebec and Labrador quviasuvvik refers to Christmas, no doubt reflecting the suppression of indigenous cultures by the Canadian colonial government.

In another example of a differing climate and food production season, the ancient Greeks held a festival in honour of the gods Poseidon, Demeter, and Dionysus at the winter solstice. The winter setting is a while after the grain harvest, which would have been more appropriate for Demeter, goddess of agriculture, but timely for the grape harvest, as Dionysus was associated with wine. Again, the specifics differed from city to city, as do the names of the festivals. At Eleusis the festival was called Haloea from the Greek word halos meaning “threshing floor” where the edible part of the grain is separated from the chaff, an appropriate location for Demeter, with the men and women separated on the first night. The women celebrated inside with copious wine and food, and especially with cakes in the shape of genitalia, both male and female. They would hold up either these cakes or other symbols of genitalia, engage in lewd banter, and the priestesses would tease them by whispering in their ears about promiscuity. The men outside would light bonfires, that common element of light in the darkness of the winter solstice. In another version of the festival called Peloria, a great feast was held with tables heaped with food, at which strangers were welcomed, prisoners were freed, and slaves were served by their masters, much like the Roman Saturnalia. These are the basic common elements of all the versions of this festival: excessive feasting, reversal of social norms, and especially scurrilous conduct with the men and women separated at first and then coming together the next day to engage in lewd banter with each other. And the symbolism of Poseidon, one of the most lustful gods, who reigned over not only the ocean but also inland streams, suggested male potency, watering the fertile fields, associated with Demeter, thus ensuring successful crops in the new year.

And speaking of the new year, it is thus not surprising that the turning of the year is often (though admittedly not always) around the time of the winter solstice, with the year being divided into appropriate seasons.

The word season is actually directly connected to agriculture. Season comes through Old French from the Latin word serere “to sow, plant”, which is not at all related to the verb serere “to join” that we saw before as lying behind the word desert, so there’s another example of polysemy for you. It ultimately comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *se- “to sow” which also gives us the word seed through the Germanic branch. So a season was originally a time for sowing seeds, and later broadened to refer to other important times in the agricultural year.

Winter is a Germanic word. Its deeper etymology is not entirely certain. It might come from the Proto-Indo-European root *weid- “to see” which came into the Celtic languages with the sense “white”, in which case winter is “the white season”. But more likely it comes from the root *wed- meaning “water, wet”, which also gives us the words water and wet, in which case winter is “the wet season”. Depending on the climate where you live, you may have differing opinions about this etymology! But this word is not the usual Indo-European word for this season. Proto-Indo-European *ghei- means “winter”, and produces Latin hiem meaning “winter”, as well as the verb hiberno “to pass the winter” from which English gets the words hibernate and hibernation, which may have first been used to refer specifically to the winter dormancy period of animals by Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of evolutionist Charles. That same Proto-Indo-European root lies behind the name Himalaya, along with the root *(s)lei- “sticky”, so literally “the place where snow sticks or stays”, and through Greek kheima “winter weather, cold, frost” gives us the mythical animal chimera meaning literally “year-old she-goat” from the notion of counting years in winters. But I don’t think you’ll see Santa’s sleigh being pulled by chimeras!

Now of course there are two solstices in the year, the winter and the summer, and it’s been argued that Old English and other Germanic languages may have originally had a two-season system, with Old English winter and sumor. The word summer and Old English sumor come therefor from a common Germanic root which is traceable back to the Proto-Indo-European root *sem- “summer”, with a variety of descendants in other Indo-European languages meaning either “summer” or sometimes “season” or “year”. It comes into Irish as sam meaning “sun, summer” and may lie behind Samhain meaning something like “summer’s end”, the Irish harvest festival that may have influenced Halloween, unless it comes from a different root *sem- meaning “together”.

Certainly as we have the seasons now, there is a division into four. Between winter and summer is spring, whose etymology is exactly what it sounds like, the springing of the year when the plants begin to rise from the ground, and by the way you can compare this with the spring of water from the ground. This word is traceable back to the Proto-Indo-European root *spergh- “to move, hasten, spring”, and though the verb springan is found in Old English, spring as a name for the season didn’t occur until around 1400. Before that, the season was referred to with the Old English word lencten, later shortened to lent, a word that was later adopted to refer to the 40 days of abstemiousness leading up to Easter in the Christian calendar, in which, among other things, Christians are supposed to abstain from particularly lavish foods. The word originally had nothing to do with Christianity though, and was just a seasonal word, coming from the Germanic elements *langaz “long”, from which we get the word long, and *tina- “day”, ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *dyeu- “shine”, which also led to the Latin word dies “day”, thus giving us the English words diary and diurnal, but is surprisingly unrelated to the English word day, which comes instead from the Proto-Indo-European root *agh- meaning “day”. So the idea of the season Lent is that the days are growing longer, leading up to the summer solstice.

Now before the Christian period of Lent, which begins on Ash Wednesday, is Fat Tuesday, also known by its French equivalent Mardi Gras, or simply Carnival. The word carnival probably literally means “flesh-raising” or in other words the “removal of meat” because during Lent meat is one of those lavish foods often given up. So Fat Tuesday / Mardi Gras or Carnival is the last chance to enjoy meat (think carnivore) and fatty foods for a while, and also features a number of other excesses and reversal rituals in which you can flout the normal boundaries of society. There was a medieval folk etymology that carnival meant “flesh farewell” from Latin vale “goodbye”, but in fact the etymons in question are caro “flesh”, originally a “piece of flesh” and levare “to lighten, raise, remove”. That first element caro is kind of interesting, as it goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *(s)ker- meaning “to cut”, hence that meaning of “piece of flesh”. This root also gives us the word share, from the notion of cutting something up into portions, which is something you might do with your food. This root may also lead to another root *kerp- “to gather, pluck, or harvest”, which led to the Latin word carpere “pick, pluck”. This Latin word is perhaps most famous from the phrase carpe diem, usually translated as “seize the day”, but the metaphor at work there is really a harvesting metaphor, like “harvest your crops when they’re ripe before they go bad!” When prefixed with Latin ex- “out of”, carpere eventually gives us the word scarce, which develops from the sense of being “plucked out” and therefore “rare”, and meat and other foods might well be scarce after the harvest season and into the lean winter months. Another word we get from Proto-Indo-European *kerp-, through the Germanic branch, is harvest, and Old English hærfest was the original English term for the season between summer and winter.

By the 14th century, harvest in this sense began to be replaced by autumn, which came into English through Old French from Latin autumnus meaning “autumn”. Earlier etymology than that is uncertain, with most dismissing it as coming from another one of those unknown Etruscan sources, though one Latin etymologist posits that it might mean “drying-up season” and giving the root as *auq-, or perhaps *saus- “dry”, a root which not only gives us the words sear and sere through the Germanic branch, but also austere, through Greek and Latin. The Romans themselves connected the word to the verb augere “to increase”, and though it may not come from that source it may have been influenced by it. Whatever the case, we also have the word fall, from the idea of the leaves falling from the trees, and though some Brits dismiss this as an Americanism, fall first appeared in British English in the 1660s, a shortening of the expression fall of the leaf from the 1540s, and was preserved in American English though later dropped in British English.

And those are the seasons of the year. As for the word year itself, it comes from a Proto-Indo-European time word *yer- “year” or “season”, but also comes into English through Greek hora “season, time of day” giving us the word hour. This root may be traceable further back to the root *ei- meaning “to go” from the notion of time proceeding, in which case it would appropriately be cognate with the word January, the first month of the year. Except it wasn’t always. In the original ten month Roman calendar, the year began with March (the month of the god of war Mars according to the Romans), which is why December literally means the tenth month, even though we now count it as the twelfth, the name just stuck. In the old Roman calendar December was followed by a bunch of days that didn’t belong to any month, before the next month of March started again, but later on those extra days were organized into the months of January and February. January comes from the word ianus “archway” and the name Ianus (or Janus as he’s now called), god of doorways and of the beginning of the year, who is usually depicted with two faces pointing in opposite directions, thus looking forwards and backwards and symbolizing both beginnings and endings. By the way, we also get the word janitor from this word, as Latin ianitor meant “doorkeeper” as the word janitor in English originally did before broadening in meaning to “caretaker of a building” in the 18th century. In the feast called Kalendae, sacred to Janus, which ran from January 1st to 3rd, the Romans engaged in feasting and merrymaking, as well as the exchange of gifts thought to bring good luck in the coming year, gifts of figs, honey, pastry, and coins.

Today the most common New Year tradition is fireworks, as well as other types of noisemakers, and I should note at this point that the word bang comes into English from Old Norse banga “to pound, hammer” (perhaps reminding us of Thor’s famous hammer), ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *bheg- “to break” which we saw before as lying behind the word banquet. And speaking of noisemakers, they also make an appearance at Christmas in the form of Christmas crackers, traditional accompaniments to Christmas dinner. These were originally called bon-bons, invented, so the story goes, by one Tom Smith of London a sweets manufacturer, and you can see the similarity in the appearance of Christmas crackers and candy wrappers. When his sweets started to become less popular, he began to include other things like love messages and trinkets, and got the idea of adding the crack when he notice a log he had thrown on the fire crackling. These then started to be marketed as Cosaques in reference to the Russian soldiers known as Cossacks because of the sound of their cracking whips or gunfire. The paper hats that we now find in Christmas crackers are said to be a holdover of an old Saturnalian tradition.

Of course the celebration of New Year hasn’t always been popular or encouraged. Medieval Christians downplayed it as being kind of pagan, with for instance the Anglo-Saxon Archbishop Wulfstan of York condemning “the nonsense which is performed on New Year’s Day in various kinds of sorcery”. In Scotland of the 17th century, radical Protestants stamped out all the merrymaking associated with Christmas as being too Papist, which then became part of their secular New Year tradition called Hogmanay. The dour Scottish Protestants then condemned Hogmanay, but the tradition continued. The origin of the word Hogmanay is much debated, but what is clear is that it certainly doesn’t come from a Celtic root. Most likely it comes from Old French aguillanneuf a contraction of accueillis l’an neuf “welcome the new year”. The most famous rituals of Hogmanay include first-footing, in which a tall dark man carrying coal must be the first to cross the threshold in the New Year in order to bring good luck. Also the tradition of singing Robert Burns’s Auld Lang Syne at the stroke of midnight has become a general New Year tradition not just for Hogmanay. The oft misunderstood Scots title of the song can be translated literally into English as “old long since” or in other words “old times” or “days gone by”. The word syne, cognate with since, comes from Old English siððan “afterwards, hereafter” from the Proto-Indo-European root *se- meaning “long, late”, which may be related to the other Proto-Indo-European root *se- meaning “to sow” which as we’ve seen gives us the word season.

Now getting back to the concept we started with, polysemy, the word season has another sense, one more directly related to food, seasoning as in ingredients you add to food to add flavour, such as salt, spices, and herbs. So how do we get from seasons of the year to seasoning in our food? Well it comes from the idea of ripening food such as fruit to make it more palatable, so seasoning food by adding flavourings to it is akin to seasoning food by ripening it.

And that brings us back to where we started with food and feasting. The tradition of having a Christmas ham may go back to the Germanic Yule boar or Sonargöltr in Old Norse, meaning “sacrificial boar”, which was sacrificed in the sónar-blót (there’s that sacrifice word again), part of the Yule feast. There was a ritual involved called the Heitstrenging in which oaths were taken, often after considerable feasting and drinking, with hands laid on the bristles of the boar. The boar was associated with the Norse fertility god Freyr, and it was customary to sacrifice a boar as part of the pagan Yule celebration to ensure fertility in the coming year. This is reflected in the song “The Boar’s Head Carol”. And as we’ve already seen, slaughtering most of your livestock before winter makes good sense, since then you don’t have to feed them all when food is scarce, and a new set of animals will be born in the spring.

The other traditional meat served at Christmas is the roast goose, which may be tied to the English harvest festival of St. Martin’s Day or Martinmas, which falls on Nov. 11, and which picked up its elements of feasting and harvest celebration in addition to its religious elements after the fact, because of its timing. It’s connected with eating goose, though, because of a story about its eponymous saint, Martin of Tours, who upon hearing that he was to be made a bishop and not wanting the job, tried to hide in a goose pen until the cackling of the geese gave him away. This feast day, interestingly, has further connections to Carnival, as Martinmas is often seen as a mini-carnival coming before the abstemious period of Advent, itself seen as a mini version of lent, leading up to Christmas.

Now whether you’re feasting on goose or ham, celebrating the festivals of midwinter or Christmastide, seasoning your banquet for the festivities of the solstice, or in any way marking the turning of the seasons, I hope this video has brought some light to the darkness.

Mark: So I have a few little details, things that I didn't have time to include,

Aven: Which is kind of amazing cause we included an awful lot in that one.

Mark: But there's always more. It's endless.

Aven: It's an endless knot.

Mark: So, the starting point of course was feasts and meals and food and stuff. So I talked about words like feast, banquet and potluck. but the, you know, the sort of obvious word, the umbrella term meal. I didn't mention, and originally the word meal. Referred to the timing of the repast. so it comes from the product into European root *me-, which means to measure.

[00:40:00] Aven: Okay.

Mark: and also gives us words such as measure, meter and moon and month, you know, which is a period of time measured by the cycles of the moon. So a meal is literally a measured or fixed time for eating.

Aven: Right. Okay.

Mark: So it doesn't refer directly to the food you're eating.

Aven: Right. Interesting.

Mark: by the way, the original sense of the word meal is preserved in the word piecemeal. Literally measured piece by piece,

Aven: oh? Yeah.

Mark:  So it's the same. It is the same word meal. The meal and piece meal is meal, but it's that earlier sense of the word. whereas the, the word meal in the other sense, such as oatmeal. Is unrelated. It comes from a separate route. that means to grind.

Aven: Connected to milling.

Mark: Yeah. So, the, that root is *melə-  Proto-Indo-European *melə- . so it's, it's the source of words such as mill, molar --teeth you use to grind your food-- maelstrom. I quite like that ... a [00:41:00] storm that grinds you up, "moulin" the French word for mill as in Moulin Rouge.   A word that, that over the course of, I think it was, was it this year or last year, it became a, a sort of political word of interest, emolument.

Aven: Oh yeah. I don't even know... the political cycle goes so fast now, I can't remember...

Mark: When it was, but it was suddenly in the news. Well, this comes from, the idea of a payment to a Miller. So an emolument is what you paid a Miller

originally.  Immolate which is

Aven: to burn. completely.

Mark: Yeah. and it, so it's from the religious sense, originally, like a sacrifice.

 and it comes from the idea of originally to sprinkle,  with a sacrificial meal.

Aven: Yes. Right? Yes. Which is an important part of a Roman sacrifice, is to take with sacrificial meal in the sense of grain

Mark: milled grain. Yeah. So it, immolate does, is not [00:42:00] connected to any burning root

Aven: It's just that you also burn the sacrifice

Mark: burn the

sacrifice. So it has kind of drifted in that direction. also malleable from Latin malleus hammer.

Aven:  Right. It's something that can be. Shaped,

Mark: shaped, yeah. Maul as in, an animal mauling you chewing you up or wxhatever.

Aven: Nice.

Mark: and, interestingly, if you've been keeping up with recent videos that we've been doing, blini or blintz, which I talked about in the video, Sabbath.

and while we're at it, I may as well mention that the word food can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root Paul meaning to protect or feed, which also gives us the words feed, fodder, and forage.

Aven: Okay. That makes sense.

Mark: Now, I also talked about, the development of the dessert and all that stuff about multiple courses in meals.  and [00:43:00] so, just a bit more detail about that. it's, Particularly tied to this shift from, the 'service a la francaise', in which, there's a setting, setting of a variety of dishes on the table at the same time.

Aven: Right? You put everything out,

Mark: everything at once. shift from that practice to what's called the 'service a la russe'  presenting a meal in courses.

Aven: Okay.

Mark: And so that's where we get that idea of 'un-serving' dessevir and, and then for dessert,

Aven: Interesting because way back to the Roman meal was served in courses.

Mark: Ah, okay.

Aven: Because you brought each table in. So you had the, in a Roman sort of, you know, fancy or formal dinner, you had people lying three to a couch in a horseshoe shape, three couches, three whatever you want to call them, couches, seats, and three people on each. So you'd have nine [00:44:00] but only in a horseshoe shaped because you have to leave one side open because the slaves would bring in. They bring in the first course, which would be tables for each couch, and would go in front of the people, which would have the food on it, and then you'd eat the food, and then that whole table would be taken away and another table would be brought in. rather than bringing individual dishes in. I mean, there were, you know, of course there were different ways that it was done. It wasn't always done the same way, but that was basically what it was. And so you'd have. A series of sort of appetizer things, and then main dishes and then fruits and nuts to finish off. the, Roman dinner went from eggs to nuts of, Oh no. From eggs to fruit. Okay. ab ovo ad mala because eggs were considered the sort of to have some sort of kind of eggs, egg dish in the first course, and you'd have fruits and nuts in the

last,

Mark: that sort of reminds me of the tradition of the, the omelette course,

Aven: except that, [00:45:00] that you think of the omelette course coming last. That's a dessert element It's the other way around. The eggs were the first course

Mark: Well, the, servic e a la francaise I think became sort of the, the thing for formal dining in kind of the 17th century or so.

Aven: yeah I mean, obviously there's a millennia, a millennium or more between the Roman dining habits and what you're talking about. So I'm sure it went through many, many different permutations

Mark: well, in, in, in the middle ages. It was also That same idea, you would put all the food out, right,. but, it came to be replaced by service a la russe, the, the Russian style, over the course of the 19th century.  and we even know how that happened. So it was the Russian ambassador, Alexander Kurakin, who was credited with bringing this, This style of eating from Russia to France in 1810 at a meal in [00:46:00] Clichy, a French town. Clichy? On the outskirts of Paris. So this guy Kurakin he was not, well liked by Catherine the gr eat, by the way.

After her death, he sort of, his star sort of went back on the rise again. He sort of came from a kind of family of sort of diplomats and so forth. but he was sort of. Back on the, you know, on the,  on the inside of political affairs after her death. And as a result, he eventually became an ambassador and was eventually posted to France, where he was, historically important in warning the Russians of Napoleon's intentions to invade Russia.

Aven: Okay. And also dinner service,

Mark: and also dinner service . Yeah. So that's, that's another claim to fame. He has a third claim to fame. so in Paris's, you know, elite, Kurakin was famously referred to as a diamond princev in reference to his sort of [00:47:00] magnificence and richness of his clothing. He wore very ornate. capes and clothes and things.

Aven: maybe even diamonds,

Mark: maybe even diamonds, probably some of them were, well. The really kind of entertaining story is that well entertaining, but also maybe slightly disturbing. it was, it was one of these fancy outfits that saved his life during a fire that happened during a ball given by the Austrian ambassador, Schwarzenberg on July 1st, 1810, while, escorting the women out of the blazing hall.

Aven: Escorting? A hand, gently cupping the elbow as he just "let me take you to safety this way, ladies."

Mark: Well, you know, he was a, he was a classy guy, I guess well, while performing this. Particular function. he tripped and fell to the ground and was [00:48:00] trampled by the panicking crowd because, you know, the building was burning down. However, his richly decorated coat protected him from the worst of the intense heat. And so he survived. he was still kind of, you know, badly burned and, and, confined to bed for several months afterwards, but he survived because of his, you know, diamond.

Aven: Privilege.

Mark: Yup. So, you know, word to the wise: wear jewels all over your clothes, it will protect you from fires.

Aven: Yeah. Don't take our advice on anything ever. And especially not that.

Mark: One last point about, different serving styles. There is also a less formal style known as service a l'anglaise. the English service as it is, well, so-called in France.

Aven: we were assuming, I think all of us were assuming these are French terms.

Mark: With the [00:49:00] hostess, serving out the soup at one end of the table and later the host carving a jointed meat at the other end, and then the servants kind of ferrying food.

Aven: Right.

Mark: And then the various other dishes, the vegetables or whatever, what have you, were served by the diners themselves, right.

Aven: Which is basically how  dinner. You know, Thanksgiving or Christmas something now.

Mark: Yeah. And it's less formal. It's a sort of family style, I guess you can always say,

Aven: but with somebody carving

Mark: with somebody carving, but you know, that is the tradition. That's the ritual. Again, I'm doing air quotes. The ritual now is right. The, the father of the household or whatever, ritually carves the Turkey at the table and, you know, it gets served out. Now I talked about, you know, new year's traditions. There are, of course, many, many different new year's traditions around the world and in many different times of the year, that is considered new year. The couple [00:50:00] that I will mention, that specifically involve food. The Babylonians started their new year at the beginning of the planting season in spring. and they would, at that point hold an 11 day festival.  There's similar, feast related festivals in other parts of the world, at around the time of Midwinter, such as Yalda night, which is an Iranian festival held on the winter solstice and featured the eating of food such as nuts and fruits, such as pomegranates and watermelon, as well as the reading of poetry well into the night.

so I will, ask our listeners if they want to send us in their, new year's or solstice related, food related traditions. I'd love to hear more, you know, I only know a few, but, I'm sure there are lots of interesting ones out there.

Aven: We already talked about the Snapdragon, which is ours,

Mark: yes, exactly.

Aven: Because we do a solstice Snapdragon and have infected [00:51:00] others with it.  

Mark: Now, next, a little bit more detail about the word season.  it's interesting that the food sense of the word season as in to season your food by adding. Salt or spices or whatever. That's first attested in the, in the middle English poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, believe it or not, which is a story tied to this time of year. It's a story that takes place between Christmas and new year, and describes a lot of lavish feasting during the festive seasons. A lot of the fancy parts of the poem describe in detail the, that festival the feasting.

and there are additionally some fascinating parallels between this medieval poem and the old English poem, Beowulf and the dr Seuss story. How the Grinch stole Christmas, which famously features roast [00:52:00] beast instead of roast

beef. So basically there's an underlying folktale folk tale motif of a strange, supernatural, monstrous, being coming to the hall at sort of Christmas, Yule, and causing trouble of some sort.

 and so the Beowulf poem, although it's not specifically described as this happening at.

Aven: Christmas.

Mark: It's, there's a very close parallel to this story in the Norse tradition that there must be some relation between the two. it's, in the, North saga, King Hrolf saga or Hrolfs Saga Kraki, in which the monster comes every year at Yule  specifically,

Aven: you talk about this in your, Yule video,

Mark: I talked about this in the annual video, and so you can, if you know, you can go back and have a look at that one, if you want to hear more about all of this. But, evidently, Ted Giesel, Dr Seuss,

Aven: otherwise known, and only known as [00:53:00] dr Seuss.

Mark: he was a student at Oxford university while, JRR Tolkien, who was a notable scholar and translator of Sir Gawain and the green Knight and Beowulf, as well as of course author of the Lord of the rings, you might've heard of that,

Aven: rings a bell.

Mark: Well, he at that time held the Rollinson and Bosworth professorship of Anglo Saxon at Oxford while, dr Seuss was a student there, student of English literature. So he may well have, Heard about Gawain and the Green Knight from, Tolkien and was inspired to create the Grinch. So, I mean, basically the Grinch is Grendel, is the green Knight there. It's, it's all the same.

Aven: It's all coming together. Yeah.

Mark: So in terms of seasons. What do you have

to tell us about seasons?

Aven: So this is a little, I mean, it's not directly related to what you're talking about, [00:54:00] but

since the only. Connection I can ever make to anything is classical. I mean, I know nothing about anything else.

Mark: And Snapdragon

Aven: and Snapdragon. Yeah, I go, I got one. One thing. no, I was just, I was thinking about seasons. You talk about the four seasons, and I just thought it'd be interesting to look back to one of the earliest  classical descriptions of seasons that we have, which is in Hesiod. So Hesiod, of course, wrote two works. See, this is works and days then. Yeah. So this is the works and days. which is his . Do I get into the discussion of who Hesiod is... Anyway,

Mark: he tells us in that poem right.

Aven:  Very important key: if we believe that, and if that's the same person as wrote the Theogony. Right. Anyway,

Mark: Does he describe himself in the Theogony?

Aven: Yes. Yep. Yeah, maybe let's not  get into it anyway. Hesiod  is traditionally the name of the poet who wrote [00:55:00] two works. Known as the theogony and the works and days. The Theogony Is a, story about the creation of the universe and cosmogony and, and the birth of the gods. But the works and days is, a much more sort of down to earth, literally work. Addressed at least nominally to his brother.

Mark: His lazy ass

Aven: brother

Well, his fraudulent brother, lazy, lazy, and frsaudulent brother. And some other fragmentary stuff that's, or stuff that's lost and only exist in fragments. he wrote some time between the eighth and sixth century BC around the same time as Homer and he lives in Boetia. Yeah. I know it all complicated. Anyway, point being, this is one of the earliest works we have in Greek, written down as literature. And it's, it's got all sorts of things that, you know, like the Pandora story is in there though. It's also in the other one, but the Pandora story is there [00:56:00] there's some other stuff that's important. He has one, there's one issue that's really famous is that he talks about two Strife. How there's good strife and bad strife. The good strife is the kind of rivalry that makes you want to outdo your neighbor bad strife is the kind that leads to war, the idea of competition versus

Mark: right. So very folksy philosophy.

Aven: Yeah. There's a lot of, advice and gnomic stuff, a lot of stuff. about this is how the world is. This is how you should live. And so, yes, it is. Yeah, it is. It's absolutely, and so he's addressing his brother Perses and he's telling him to be sensible and not steal  their inheritance. And he has a lot of bad things to say about corrupt judges.

But a lot of the poem is just about farming and about what you should do. And so what I thought I'd just spend a little time on is thinking about the seasons, because a lot of it's about what to do when, right it's the works and the days, right. [00:57:00] What days should you do the works, right? what was interesting about it is how he tells what those seasons are. So you're talking about winter and summer and spring and fall, of course, are the seasons we think of. He doesn't, he never uses words like that. He, all of his seasonal markers are so there's astronomical ones, the stars when particular constellations rise and set, there's weather really like when the winds blow and certain things happen, and then there's nature. So that's when animals, certain animals do certain things, or if certain plants do certain things, and that's what marks you as what you should do now. I mean, that's not particularly surprising. We all know that the year works in those ways. the probably astronomical is the one we use the least. Now, if you think about how, how you run your days, I mean, we know when the solstice is but we don't really sort of move that way except that we're [00:58:00] told that it's happening, but the others, all make sense. But I think it's kind of interesting that he's not thinking in terms of now in the winter, do this in the summer. Like it's not that he might not. Divide the year into four, but he doesn't do that in any kind of formal way. So for instance, after a lot of stuff where he just basically tells a lot of, advice about not being greedy and not being lazy and all of that sort of stuff, he finally turns to specific advice when he gets into that, it starts with when the Pleiades daughters of Atlas are rising, begin your harvest and your plowing when they are going to set. Now the edition here tells us that the Pleiades rise in early may. So that's when you begin your harvest. And that already is a thing that we, we've talked about this before, the difference between the Mediterranean seasons and the, you know, you couldn't harvest anything in may in Sudbury.

Mark: Right.

Aven: You'd be lucky to be harvesting anything other than a Crocus.

Mark: you could harvest some mud.

Aven: Yeah. That's about [00:59:00] it. And you plow when they're going to set, and the edition tells us that's November. Okay. Okay. 40 days and nights they are hidden and appear again as the year moves round when first you sharpen your sickle This is the law of the Plains and those who live near the sea and those who inhabit rich country, and I just have to read this because it's the translation that is on line that's, you know, a free old one, right? Those who inhabit rich country, the Glens and Dingles, far from the tossing sea.

Mark: Dingles!

Aven: Dingles. I love the word Dingles. It's one of my favorite, like landscape words. that's irrelevant. I just wanted to get it in. So he says, you have to make sure you plow at the right time. If you don't, you're going to be in trouble. foolish Perses work the work which the gods ordained for men lest in bitter anguish of spirit you with your wife and children, seek your livelihood amongst your neighbors and they do not heed you.

Mark: brothers are always lazy ass.

Aven: Yeah. He doesn't like his brother. and he tells you [01:00:00] various offensive things about getting women. And  oxen and slaves and things. Let's leave all that aside. so that's, you know, one set of instructions and then the next marking point when the piercing power and sultry heat of the sun abate, and Almighty Zeus sends the autumn rains, which that edition tells me is October and men's flesh comes to feel far easier for then the star Sirius passes over the heads of men who are born to misery only a little while by day and takes a greater share of nights. So Sirius is starting to set right. And then when it showers its leaves to the ground and stops sprouting the wood, you cut with your ax is least liable to worm. So when it gets cooler, when it starts to rain, when the trees lose their leaves and stop sprouting, that's when you want to cut your wood down. And then he goes on to talk about, there's a whole big long thing about cutting down wood and making plows and ships and various other things like that. So again, so now we have a [01:01:00] season and he does mention the autumn. Sure. But you see this sort of, he's not marking it by a calendar. He's marking it by what happens when. Then when you hear the voice of the crane who cries year by year from the clouds above, for she gives the signal for plowing and shows the season of rainy winter. But she vexes the heart of the man who has no oxen. So that's presumably when the cranes who are migratory birds, right. So. We would here probably say like when the geese start to fly, right? And so

Mark: I guess, you know, he's, he's living in a very rural area, not in an urban center. So how would you know what time of year it is? Well, you look for signs in nature,

Aven: that's all. I mean. This isn't surprising or anything, but I think it's just interesting to see, how a calendar, you know, he's trying to give you.  As it were, a formula. So he is trying to write down a calendar in a way that is not just do it when you think you need to

[01:02:00] Mark: It's a farmers almanac.

Aven: It is. Exactly. And it's an early one for that, but it reminds us that the seasons come in ways that are specific to a place. I guess that's what I'm saying. . You know, the seasons matter because of where you are and how what you need to do is associated with that so then it's time to plow. And he talks about how fast you have to plow and have to, when you have to sow seeds and the prayers you have to do, he talks about who you need to pray to you, and what you need to do in order to be able to do what you need doing. But if you plow the good ground at the solstice. In the winter,  you will reap sitting, grasping a thin crop in your hand. So if you wait too long and you don't plow until the solstice, you won't have a good crop. Hmm. Then he talks about, but if you, if you're lucky, if you plow late when the, you might find this remedy when the cuckoo first calls in the leaves of the Oak and makes men glad all over the boundless earth. If Zeus should send rain on the third day and not cease until it rises neither above  an Ox's hoof [01:03:00] or fall short of it then the late power will vie with the early So if you're lucky, if you plow late, but you get a lot of rain at the right time, you still might be okay. Then he tells you to not be lazy, even in the winter.  while it is yet mid summer command your slaves, it will not always be summer build barns,

Mark: Of course.

Aven: avoid the month Lenaeon, which is late January, early February, tells me my edition. wretched days, all of them fit to skin an ox and the frost, which are cruel when Boreas blows over the earth So this is about the time and the calendar. Yes, but also about the North wind Boreas and how it's very cold and blows through everybody. And there's nothing you can do except to stay inside. Even the octopus sits inside. it's the weirdest line. And he said, I'm going to tell you, it, it does not blow through the tender maiden who stays in doors. The wind, with her dear mother, Ameren does yet in the works of golden Aphrodite and who's washes her soft body and anoints herself with the [01:04:00] oil and lies down in the inner room within the house on a winter's day when the boneless one, an octopus or a squid, says my notes gnaws his foot in his fireless house and wretched home. So in the deep winter, like when it's really cold out and everybody has to stay in doors because it's really cold. So the octopus stays inside his home with no fire and gnaws his foot when he, that's how you know it's really bad winter.

Mark: Is that a thing that happens with octopuses? Do they gnaw their feet?

Aven: I have no idea what it's about. I genuinely am completely baffled by that. The rest of it is all like, then the horned and unhorned denizens of the word with teeth chattering pitifully flee, you know, everybody's cold. Everybody's whatever. Everybody's unhappy. All makes sense. Why this sudden reference to octopuses.

Mark: Okay. So all of the cephalopod biologists out there. Please, send in your explanation as to why they would be gnawing [01:05:00] their feet at this time of year.

Aven: I mean, I get the fireless homes, but I think octopuses have fireless homes. All the year.

Mark: Though octopuses are pretty clever. I wouldn't

Aven: anyway, it's very weird. and then  talks about like how you should dress in the winter and all of these things. and do all these stuff, until the year's ended. And you have days and nights of equal length and Earth the mother of all bears again, her various fruit And then when Zeus has finished 60 wintry days after the solstice than the star Arcturus leaves the Holy stream of ocean first rises brilliant at dusk after him the shrilly waiting daughter of Pandion the swallow appears to men when Spring is just beginning before she comes prune the vines for it is right So right so we have both an astronomical and a natural sign We have Arcturus rising at dusk and the swallows returning right But then when the house carrier, [01:06:00]  the snail climbs up, the plants from the earth do escape the Pleiades then it is no longer the season for digging vineyards, but to whet your Sickles and Rouse up your slaves. that it's hot and get up before the sun because the sun is going to be so hot, et cetera. But then when the artichoke, I'm not giving you all this, but just it's the signs of what the seasons I that I find it interesting, but when the artichoke flowers, apparently that's June and the chirping grasshopper sits in a tree and pours down the shrill song continually from under his wings in the season of wearisome feet

Mark: wait, in trees?

Aven: The grasshopper

Mark: Grasshopper's in trees.

Aven: Yeah. The chirping grasshopper sits in a tree.

Mark: Do they sit in trees? I thought they sat on grass.

Aven: I think actually probably means cicadas, which do sit in the trees.

Mark: Oh, okay.

Aven: I don't know.

I mean, I'm just reading a translation here.

Mark: Are they tree hoppers.

Aven: I think you're being a little literal . [01:07:00] I will say, this is the season of wearisome heat then goats are plumpest and wine Sweetest women are most wanton but men are feeblest

Mark: maybe because of wine,

Aven: because Sirius parches heads and knees and the skin is dry through heat. The dog star apparently makes women lusty and men weak

Mark: dog days.

Aven: Yes. This is indeed where we get our phrase dog days of summer . So then again, set your slaves to winnow Demeter's holy grain when strong orion first appears. and then he goes through when Orion and Sirius  come into Midheaven and rosy fingered Dawn sees Arcturus and cut off all the grain grape clusters and make wine. But when the Pleiades and Hyades and strong Orion begin to set, then remember to plow and season. And so the completed year will fitly pass beneath the earth He's done his whole season all the way around and then he goes into an a long off side, long thing about, but if you want to sail and go on the seas, [01:08:00] boy, Oh boy, is that a stupid idea? But here's the time when you should do it. So only for that aside. Anyway, I just, I think it's, you know,  in that list. There weren't four  seasons. Right.There's a whole bunch of much more specific marking. Yeah. About what you should do. which, of course makes sense. An agricultural year does not only go in four seasons. There are not only four things you have to do in the agricultural year. There's a whole bunch of stuff you have to do. but I, I do think it's really interesting that combination of the astronomical and the natural, because it suggests that people are Tracking or that it's a useful thing to say to people, Oh, watch for this constellation when it starts to rise at dusk, or when this is doing, you know, that that's a meaningful thing that people will be able to track and be able to Mark their time by. Right. which, you know, I don't think, now  I obviously tell time in a completely different manner, but even if you're talking to somebody who's lives on the land In some way as a farmer or Hunter or something [01:09:00] Now how much do they know  when the constellations rise? You know? To what degree is that a way that people, but of course people did for thousands of years thinkin those ways. And I just think that's an interesting, even though we, we Mark our years with the solstice, we, we look on the Google calendar to tell us when the solstice is, right. I do not Mark the place on the horizon that the sun is rising and wait until the day that it starts to move back and then say, that was the Solstice.

Mark: We don't spend all our time outside, like

Aven: We spend almost no time outside. And for most people who live in cities, they can't even see the constellations most of the time. I mean, I have my few things that I know about, like I know, Orion is up in the winter and I can see it, but I don't not a detail I just know a couple of things Nothing that I don't really know So anyway That's really all I wanted to say about seasons but I thought that was kind of interesting

Mark: This suddenly made me think of the what the etymology of the word Almanac is [01:10:00] and actually I bet you can guess broadly where it comes from. I mean what language it comes from

Aven: Arabic?

Mark: Yeah. Yes, exactly. So I looked it up to see exactly what the dealy was, but, yeah, so the dealio so from Anglo Latin, the old French, medieval Latin, but it's. Not everyone necessarily agrees on this etymology, but it is sometimes said to come from Spanish, Arabic, al manakh meaning calender, Almanac, but possibly ultimately from late Greek almeni  Ooh, Nope. almenichiakon, meaning calendar.

Aven: I suppose. Nobody on this podcast can see my raised eyebrows,

Mark: which is said to be of Coptic origin.

Aven: Okay. Interesting.

Mark: Yeah, so, and  according to, etymonline, he writes a, this word has been the subject of much speculation. [01:11:00] Originally a book of permanent tables of astronomical data, one year versions combined with ecclesiastical calendars, date from, the 16th century. Okay. Astrological and weather predictions appear in 17th, 16th, 17th century. the useful statistics are a modern feature, and that is according to the OED

Aven: Okay

Mark: So there you go There's the Almanac so another, detail I want to kind of return to from. The voiceover that we heard some time ago now so I mentioned, Celtic rituals that take place around mid-winter. so on that topic, we get the somewhat confused connection, between Druids, mistletoe, . And mid winter, basically from the Roman writer Pliny

Aven: Pliny the elder.

Mark: Yes. Who recorded that the Gauls used mistletoe as an antidote to poison and as a [01:12:00] fertility inducer to livestock and that the Druids regarded it as especially sacred when it was found growing on an Oak tree rather than the more usual Apple tree.  and so you get this sort of super.  Mistletoe,

Aven: the fancy mistletoe

Mark: the fancy mistletoe if it's growing on the Oak rather than the normal

AppleTree. All of this is, is relevant, to, to Druids plausibly because the word Druid is etymologically connected to the word tree. So the tree worship and so forth seems to have been a thing for

Aven: Yeah that gets metnitoned over again by people. Yeah.

Mark: More reliable than Pliny. and so there was a special ritual for collecting, ritual for collecting, this super mistletoe, the super effective mistletoe, that involves special animal sacrifices and feasting so you can. I guess, imagine therefore, the connection between, the sort of fertility [01:13:00] inducing mistletoe and this time of the year that's

Aven: Fertility inducing.   I don't know what that means.

Mark: I don't know. You use it to make your,

  but and this time of year that is connected with renewal and rebirth and all that. Right. So you can see that it might, hanging up mistletoe might be a, you know, kind of, uses a special symbol around the, the solstice and the turning of the year. Right. But it might simply be that, the, you know, the hanging and mistletoe at this time of year is just another example of a plant that stays green during winter like Holly and conifers right So it's a broader from that broader category

Aven: and that there's nothing particularly special about mistleto, and also that it's easily. Not easily gathered exactly because it's a bit prickly, but it's because it's a vine. You can kind of pull it off the trees. You don't have to hack it down as branches. Right. 

Mark: As for that kissing part, the kissing under the mistletoe. [01:14:00] it might simply be connected to the fertility association of the plant, but there's another more Christian explanation.  it was a custom, in the 14th century in Britain to hang a small effigy of the Holy family just inside the entrance to a house. and that would be then decorated with some form of greenery, either Holly or mistletoe or whatever was available. And then the Holy family was later removed as being possibly idolatrous, you know, worshipping of idols and whatnot.

Aven: Yeah.

Mark: leaving only the mistletoe under which people entering the house would naturally greet each other

Aven: Just the general kiss greeting Yeah

Mark: And then after a while, that greeting of Christian Love gradually turned into less pious and chaste kissing. a little more raunchy kissing maybe,

Aven:  or maybe in part as the kiss of [01:15:00] greeting became less common.

Mark: Yeah. And so,  there was a tradition that evolved, or you know, that sort of evolved from this, this thing, in which you would remove one of the berries from the sprig of mistletoe with each kiss. And then once all the berries were gone, the kissing had to stop, you know, a bit of kissing, but not too much.

  and as a sort of final point about all this, since it's become the tradition now, for me to ruin Christmas with a very lascivious or crude Christmas etymology or story, if I haven't already done that with this, you know, kissing under the mistletoe, I will, point out the etymology of the word mistletoe.

Aven: It's totally your favorite. Yes. Well, the etymology is,

Mark: so mistletoe is a compound where it basically consists of, the second element is old English tan. So tan becomes toe, [01:16:00] meaning twig. And the first element is  old English mistel, which. Means mistletoe. It refers to the plant, but it goes  back to the Proto-Indo-European root *meigh-  which means to urinate or in the case of birds to defecate, because the mistletoe seeds are propagated through bird droppings is good. This is science. This is serious business. so the next time you're kissing under the mistletoe, you might want to remember that you're actually kissing under a poop twig.

Aven: Or not, you might not want to remember that, actually.

Mark: I think you should. I mean, it's for science.

Aven: All right. Well, on that note,

Mark: on that note, let's return to rites and rituals, a little bit more detail about that So I I mentioned the word rite and ritual.  The word rite usually though not always preserves the specifically religious sense of the Latin word [01:17:00] ritus. whereas ritual can refer to either a religious or a secular activity, but there are exceptions to this. So for instance, you would talk about like, a Rite of passage, which can be religious, but it doesn't have to be religious.

Aven: Could be like your first Shaving with your dad Exactly Exactly Passage

Mark: But there's  a tendency for rite to maybe be a little more formal, religious,  ritual being more secular. but more importantly, one thing that I didn't have time to talk about, was. The issue of liminality I was talking a lot about this you know theories about ritual and so forth. And liminality is a really important concept to that area of study So liminality is the state of being outside of, or between boundaries. So it comes from a Latin word that means that, you know, the, the shore basically the boundary between land and water whatever boundaries boundaries basically it's

Aven: the [01:18:00] idea Yeah

Mark: and so liminality might, for instance, refer to one being one might be sort of during an initiation ritual. One might be, for instance, you know, if you're being. Well, like a hazing ritual or something like that, you, you're sort of

Aven: moving from one state

Mark: to one state to another. And so during that process, you would be sort of stripped of your status

Aven: and then reemerge and then come

Mark: on the other side with another status

And so this state of liminality can also be found in a, lots of other types of festivals and rituals and so forth. So this is a common thing, and we can see that in, in a lot of the things that we that we talked about

Aven: to, talked about in there. Yeah, the new years in particular, it's an obvious place of liminality

Mark: between one year and another, so I believe you have something to tell us.

Aven: Well, I was just talking with the idea of rites and rituals and feasts I thought I'd talk a little bit about [01:19:00] a rite or a ritual a Roman ritual of feasts that is sort of  in some ways the Mirror image of what we've been talking about because you were talking about feasts as, a time when, as part of a religious rite, you get together and everybody eats things So there's an interesting feature of Roman religion that is called the lectisternium and I will come back to what that word comes from, which is a ritual. performed, especially in times of emergency, but can also be performed. There are some that are sort of prescribed as as rotating feasts throughout the year, which is when you feast the gods. Now all sacrifice to some extent is a feast to the gods, right? Yeah. You give the gods their portion, whether that's, the blood or the smoke or whatever it is the fat or you burn some of it and you eat the rest of it Yeah So you know feasting one of the reasons feasts [01:20:00] are associated The word feast becomes the word feast is because a lot of rituals long before Christianity had to do with food. Food. Well, you, you sacrifice an animal to the God. Right. But that results in a bunch of flesh, which then is cooked and served to the celebrants.

Mark: It'd be a shame to let that go to waste.

Aven: Yeah. And it's, it's part of participating in the, in, in that communion with God. . In some form or another but the lectisternium is a little more direct than that. You put,  effigies of the gods. So statues, there's some argument about exactly, this is one of the many Roman rituals where we get it references to it a lot but not a lot of exact details So either statues of various gods or maybe Bundles of herbs with masks on them. It's not clear on couches. That would be the  and you put them on their couches and you put food in front of them. So you [01:21:00] make a dining, like it's a dining scene. Think of a nativity scene, but instead of a nativity scene, you hit basically have like the gods statues of the gods laid out on the dining couches, and then you put food in front of them. And they eat the food.

Mark: Right? So that lecti part comes from the Roman word for bed,

Aven: the bed or couch. And then sternium comes from sternere to strew to lay out. So it's a lectisternium. It's a laying out of in front of the couches.  So Livy tells us the first one that happened of this, and there's debate about where it comes from. Was it, there was a Greek rite. That was similar called the kline, which just means couch and the theoxenia, which is a banquet for the gods. But  in that case, the gods sort of host it so the gods are there, but then the people eat. But in the Roman version, it's just for the gods and  you put the images on the couch or the couches, the couch is also called a [01:22:00] pulvinar okay.  And the ceremony is meant to propitiate the gods and repel the pest, a pestilence or an enemy. So it's in the time of plague or in particular at enemies. So Livy tells us it was first done in Rome in 399 BC,  there was a great. crisis. And they consulted the  Sibylline books, which were these books of prophecy that Rome sort of ran their religion on the basis of, that's for another discussion, and they told them to do this. and then usually it was like pairs of gods. And then this case, it was Apollo Latona who's, a version of Apollo's mother, Hercules, Diana mercury, and Neptune. Hmm. And so they were the gods that were put out, they were fed. And, there are other crises where this happens Then there's a couple of other rotating cult, performances that this becomes a thing. And then later on that it can also be private, lectisternia. At a birth for instance, you might do a little feast for the gods to have them come and look over the [01:23:00] baby

 it's not really clear if it's Greek in origin or whether it's Etruscan in origin, because just like with words religious rituals. Etruscan, but I mean like that is a lot of Roman religion does seem to have Etruscan roots Of course Etruscan is like this black hole because then you don't have to find roots for Etruscan stuff which seems unfair

Mark: Some of the Etruscan stuff comes from the Greek Yeah

Aven: But some of it doesn't Yeah So anyway, I think it's, it's kind of interesting because it's very specific. it is a feast, but it's one which now we're not told, like, you know, they lay the food out. Obviously the gods don't actually eat it. What happens to the food? Like we aren't stold that kind of detail as you would imagine. So I don't know. But it unlike normal sacrifices where the blood pours on the alter or whatever, and then everybody's very. [01:24:00] Open about the fact that everyone that eats the food themselves, that's not what happens in these lectisternia. So whatever does happen to that food, it's a little more complicated. It's not a sharing  in the food by the communal group. Anyway, so I just thought that was kind of interesting. And in particular that idea of, The lectisternium and the pulvinar the couch is mentioned in a particular poem That I will speak about at any time if given the slightest opportunity to do so.

Mark: I think I'd like to give you that opportunity right now. This is an avid poem that you're talking.

Aven:  No, no, no. It's Horace. This is Horace

Mark: Horace. Of course.

Aven: Horace, of course, yes. This is the Cleopatra poem, the Cleopatra ode. So it's book one 37 of Horace's odes, and it's the poem that celebrates the victory over Cleopatra at Actium. Right.  And it starts with very famously [01:25:00] Nunc est Bibendum. Now it is time to drink. Right. And then

Mark: I'm often troubled by how to, how to translate that into an idiomatic way in English.

Aven: I mean, very literally, it is now. It is to be drunk. . Now, one must drink, I think no one must drink. It's normally translated as now it's time to drink. Okay. And I think that's a good way to do it. but, I'll just read the very first part of it. In Latin. nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus  nunc Saliaribus ornare pulvinar deorum tempus erat dapibus sodales Now it is time to drink now with freed foot  the earth must be struck Now it is time to decorate the couches of the gods with Salian feasts That's Salians Don't worry about what that means but it's a reference to a [01:26:00] place friends now. It is time to do this. Friends. and  then he goes on to say, that's because up til now we couldn't have feasting because we were worried about Cleopatra, the mad queen coming and destroying the Capitol. But now that she's been driven to suicide, we're fine, and everything's, it's time for celebration. So this is talking about a festival of celebration. A Thanksgiving festival. Right, right. but he specifically mentions now you must Put feasts on the couches of the gods. So that's my tenuous connection to the lectisternium Right But I mean it is It's now it's time to drink Now it's time to eat And now it's time to feed the gods This is this is what you do when you're celebrating a great triumph. Remember that the lectisternium is connected to triumphs. And so that is one of, you know, the, the ritual of the triumph because Augustus Octavian as he was then did celebrate a triple triumph at the end of, Just sort of civil war and one of the triumphs was over Egypt. Right? So there's [01:27:00] a connection there to that. and also the sort of understood connection to using the lectisternium in times of great crisis did the, didn't do it during crisis, but it's kind of a reaction to that crisis. but the, that connection of feasting, right. To a religious ritual is really what I brought in point out. It's a really good poem. I'm not going to read it all to you, but it's a really good poem. everyone should read it and then think about it, and there's lots and lots and lots to think about and about how Cleopatra is portrayed, but that's beside the point for the moment. But I know that the nunc est bibendum now it's time to drink has become a phrase Right It's a thing

Mark: That's a phrase that gets quoted

Aven: all the time and I know that there's a particular poem that gets written with the same opening

Mark: Yeah It inspired a bit of medieval doggerel

and

I am going to read the whole poem because the sound of it is really crucial here Yeah Even

Aven: if even if you don't really know what it means, so nunc est bibendum means now it's [01:28:00] time to drink and what you then have as a whole bunch of datives for now it's time to drink for this person and this person and this person and this person. Right? Like so if you know that, you can probably kind of catch some of it as you go.

Mark: Well, I'm also going to read a translation of it afterwards, as I was, you know, kind of digging through my files to, to find the text of the poem, I uncovered the fact that we had written a translation of this Christmas card for our Christmas card, which is in verse and rhyming

Aven: cause we're really very clever.

Mark: We've obviously spent some time on this.

Aven: Back in the day when we used to write our own Christmas cards for years, our Christmas cards were translations of Latin poetry. I want you all to sit with that for a moment and realize that this is what we sent out to people. This is before we had children, right? So we didn't have like pictures of kids to put on our Christmas cards.

Mark: Well, a little bit of background to this, so you know, in, in a lot of medieval Latin, secular. Songs and poems and so forth. they often contain sort of parodies of [01:29:00] religious stuff, of ecclesiastical hymns or whatever. so this drinking song, begins with, you know, it's got this classical reference to Horace in the title, but the sort of the beginning of the poem proper begins  with the first line of a sixth century, him, for the morning office. Iam lucis orto sidere 

Aven: now as the rising of the, the light is rising,

Mark: and. The fifth stanza is a parody of the last line of the Athanasian creed. 

Aven: There's a lot of religious stuff. Yeah. and just a little other point. Classical Latin poetry did not rhyme That was not a thing. Rhyming was just not in Greek or Latin poetry. It did not rhyme. But in the middle ages, at some point. And I don't know when it is, like fourth, fifth century, something like that. They start to rhyme though. Not always. No, no, no. Not always, but it starts to be a thing that does happen. And this one

[01:30:00] Mark: does, especially in sort of popular.

Aven: And I mean for all we know, other stuff rhymed in Latin, but none of the written stuff we have rhymed. So just, it's an interesting little change.

Mark: Yeah. And not only does it run, these are short lines, so

Aven: they were very like doggerelly rhyming. Yeah, it's, yeah.

Mark: So I will read it first in Latin and then I will read our translation.

Nunc est Bibendum. Iam lucis orto sidere statim oportet bibere bibamus nunc egregie et rebibamus hodie   .

Aven: Okay. Let me just intercede. bibamus. Let us drink. You're going to hear that again and again. So yeah, bibamus is, let us drink. And rebibamus again. Let us drink again. Let's re-drink . 

Mark: Quicumque vult esse frater, bibat semel bis ter quater. Bibat semel et secundo donec nihil sit in fundo. Bibat ille, bibat illa, bibat servus et ancilla. Bibat hera, [01:31:00] bibat herus, ad bibendum nemo serus

Potatoribus pro cunctis, pro captivis et defunctis, pro imperatore et papa, bibo vinum sine aqua. Haec est fides potatica, sociorum spes unica: qui bene non potaverit, salvus esse non poterit. Longissima potatio sit nobis salutatio: et duret ista  ratio per infinita secula. amen.

Aven: Amen. Yes.

Mark: So here's our translation of this. It's time to drink. Now that the star of light has risen, we must at once begin our drinking. Let us now drink with might and main and everyday we'll drink again. If you want to be a brother, have a [01:32:00] drink, two drinks. Another. Have one more and drain your mug until there's none left in the jug. Drink up one and drink up all master mistress servants' hall. Drink up, man and his mate. Drink up now and don't be late. Here's to drinkers far and near and to those. No longer here. To the King and Pope, I'll clink and that's not water in my drink. Here's the faith of the drinking man. The only hope of our loyal band, unless he is skilled in potation, no man shall ever reach salvation. Every time there is a meeting, drink deep and let that be our greeting. And may it be that in this way we live forever and a day. Amen.

Aven: Wow. We had time to do good, good work.

Mark: There's a good transation. I like that!

[01:33:00] Aven: There's not just the, the parodies. You talked about the drinking for those no longer with us and stuff as part of the, is part of the prayer for the, the dead and for the Pope  there's a, a part of the mass that's also where you pray for the King and you pay for the Pope and you pray for that. Yeah. So there's a whole bunch of little bits of parody in there. Yeah. Right? So there's our wish to you for this holiday season. That's a Christmas card to you.

Mark: So, you know, as we said this. This line from Horace is became very popular and a lot of people quoted it and picked it up and did various things with it. And one of the more unexpected uses of this line,

Aven: I've just remembered what this is about.

Mark: So the word bibendum from this, from this line. Was used to refer to what is commonly referred to in [01:34:00] English as the Michelin man, the, the sort of official mascot of the Michelin tire company. He has a name and it is bibendum.

Aven: It's so weird.

Mark: this mascot was first introduced, at the Lyons exhibition, in 1894. And if you are a longtime listener of ours, you will know I have this fascination with world fairs. so the Michelin brothers had a stand at this and they kind of use this. so the Bibendum is one of the world's oldest trademarks, apparently. and they had this as a slogan, nunc est bibendum, which they took from, from Horace.  While attending this universal and colonial exposition in Lyons in 1894, Édouard and André Michelin , noticed a stack of tires that suggested to Édouard the figure of a man without arms. [01:35:00] And so, four years later André met a French cartoonist Marius Rossillon, who is popularly known as O'Galop.

Aven: Okay.

Mark: so he showed him a rejected image that he had actually originally created for a Munich beer brewery and beer company. and, which was a large. Regal figure holding a huge glass of beer and quoting the, the phrase, nunc est bibendum. André initially suggested replacing the man with a finger made, from tires

Aven: of course.

Mark: He saw this, this pile of tires and thought it looks like a man without arms.

So, thus, O'Galop transformed the earlier image into the Michelin symbol. today. bibendum is, you know, one of the most recognized mascots, trademarks, around the world.

Aven: And what is it he drinks?

Mark:  I'll get to that. So, in the [01:36:00] 1898 poster, Of this trademark, this mascot figure. It showed him offering, offering the toast, nunc est bibendum to his scrawny competitors. the bad tires, the bad tire companies with a glass full of road hazards. Things that might hurt your tire. Like, I don't know, broken glass and rocks and whatever.

Aven: A glass full of roads. That road hazards

Mark: glass full of road road hazards with the title and tag C'est à dire : À votre santé. Le pneu  Michelin boit l'obstacle so that is to say, here's to your health, the Michelin tire drinks up obstacles .

Aven: So weird, such a  weird place to go with that. And then the fact that the Michelin becomes the Michelin guide to restaurants eventually, right? Like, so there's [01:37:00] that coincidence, which is not. What that's in reference to because that doesn't happen until later. Yeah. But then you ended up with the Michelin guide to restaurants, which is both fine dining and feasting. Yeah. It's so weird. Wow.

Mark: So, yeah, the, the obvious, the implication is there that the Michelin tires will easily drink up those road hazards, but you know, the competitors won't

Aven: right.

Mark: so from. 1912 onwards, the tires became black in color because carbon was added as a preservative and strengthener to the basic kind of rubber that they were made out of. Tires used to be a different color, which is why the Michelin man is white, right? Because tires used to be white. Right. weird. So they used to be so that this gray, white, or light and translucent beige color. Until that carbon was added

Aven: to make, to make them

Mark: tougher or whatever. Right? [01:38:00] and so apparently Bibendum was briefly redrawn as black in color, but they very quickly changed him back, citing, sort of, you know. Printing and aesthetic issues for the change and denying that there was any racial concerns.

Aven: So it's always good when you have to deny that there are racial concerns? Yes.

Mark: A lot of people believed it was, I guess so.

Aven: Yeah, I know. That's why. Yeah,

Mark: but that's why it's a bunch of white tires. The guy made out a bunch of white

Aven: guys. I don't think I'd ever even thought of it. I have in my head a weird conflation between the middle street Michelin man and the state off marshmallow of Ghostbusters. In my head, they're kind of the same person, so. Yeah, well, and yeah. Anyway, so yeah, so yeah, 

Mark: Tires used to be white.

Aven: Weird. And drank up road obstacles

Mark: and so  this, this [01:39:00] mascot has become so ingrained in the popular consciousness that it is, it's become a word.  that is in the OED, the Michelin man, to refer to something not directly related to tires. So as the OED, defines it, the name of the plump tire man has entered the language to describe someone obese or wearing comically bulky clothing. EG. How can I wrap up warm without looking like the Michelin man? And that's the sense that I think of it in his being winter time, being bundled

Aven: up.

Mark: Bring us back to Christmas.

Aven: tangentially. Yeah, sure. Good try.

Mark: And so, yeah, at the ends they go on to say the Michelin man . Noun, a cartoon character whose body and limbs are composed of layers of pneumatic tires, giving a rotunda rigid appearance, hence allusively and in similes with a reference to a person resembling a Michelin man in some way, as wearing [01:40:00] heavy, heavily padded clothing, being overweight, et cetera.

and so. Michelin man itself, they had, the first citation they have is in 1954. in the observer, the Michelin man whose name is Bibendum is evocative of such delights as foreign travel, luscious food, and the best maps in the world.

Aven: Yeah.

Mark: And in 1972 in the guardian, the spirit of the French Michelin man is quietly pacing the British byways. Michelin will bring out their first guide to British hotels and restaurants in March, 1974.

Aven: Hmm.

 Mark: and in 1991, sports illustrated, Bonilla legged out 44 doubles this year, despite a body that puts most people in mind of the Michelin man. There's the obese references, but I honestly, I, I think of it as the being bundled up

Aven: wearing lots of layers. Yeah. [01:41:00]

Mark: So, yeah, that brings us back to fine French style dining. I guess

Aven: always looking for that circular narrative, aren't ya?

Mark: And so I guess as a final thing, I will, and this is maybe, you know, dooming ourselves, but I will point it that I am currently working on this year's Christmas video.

Aven: Yeah. You know, you remember how we talked about the magic video back before Halloween,

Mark: not the magic video. The monster

Aven: monster video. Sorry. And then you failed. Well, we, we haven't done the monster video and we'll, there'll be a monster video next Halloween. Yes. We put it on hiatus

Mark: until next

Aven: Halloween. So now you're going to talk about the video that was supposed to get out before. Christmas. Yes. Okay.

Mark: Which is about calendar and it will pick up

Aven: on a lot of the points

Mark: that a lot of the points that we, we've talked about today, you know, month names and day names, but, but [01:42:00] also, you know, kind of seasonal stuff.

Aven: And go into more detail about that.

Mark: Yes.

Aven: So watch out for that soon. Hopefully it'll be really soon,

Mark: right? I mean, I'm actually animating it now.

Aven: Yes, you are. So like at this point, I think it's actually gonna happen. Yeah, I hope so. All right. Well, on that hopeful note, this is our last episode before the new year. So to everybody who's celebrating any kind of turn of the year, change of the seasons over the next month or so, may there be lightness and brightness in that change for you because these are dark times. Seasonally and existentially, and we

Mark:  and, you know, climatically

Aven: yeah. So we need all the lightness we can get, I think. and we'll be back in January with more things. We have a whole bunch of more interviews we want to do with more people, but we'll also try to get, maybe [01:43:00] a couple of actual just themed chats too. You never know. Stranger

Mark: things have happened.

Aven: All right. Happy holidays.

Mark: Nunc est bibendum!

Aven: Bye.

For more information on this podcast, check out our website, www.alliterative.net, where you can find links to the videos, blog posts, sources, and credits, and all our contact info.

MARK: And please check out our Patreon, where you can pledge to support this show and our video project. You can go directly to the videos at youtube.com/alliterative.

AVEN: Our email is on the website, but the easiest way to get in touch with us is Twitter. I'm @AvenSarah.

MARK: And I'm @alliterative. To keep up with the podcast, subscribe on your favourite podcast app or to the feed on the website.

AVEN: And if you've enjoyed it, consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. It helps us a lot. We'll be back soon with more musings about the connections around us. Thanks for listening!

MARK: Bye!