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Adrian Bott Profile picture
@Cavalorn
Sep 24, 2020 • 3 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
Halloween traditions we don't do any more: the Snap-Dragon!

Better known as a Christmas tradition, this involved a bowl full of raisins in flaming brandy. Participants had to snatch up still-burning raisins and eat them. #FolkloreThursday
Wikipedia is jolly good on the topic and even provides the accompanying chant, which begins:

Here he comes with flaming bowl,
Don't he mean to take his toll,
Snip! Snap! Dragon!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap-drag…

#FolkloreThursday
And of course, OF COURSE someone has connected it with 'druidic fire-worship'. Sake.

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More from @Cavalorn

Adrian Bott Profile picture
Mar 29
There is no evidence for any pagan springtime celebration having used rabbits and eggs in a symbolic manner.

Whenever anyone refers to this, they are actually referencing the 19th century habit of *imagining* a pagan precedent for a known secular or Christian tradition.
See, for example, Holtzmann in 1874: 'The Easter Hare is unintelligible to me, but probably the hare was the sacred animal of Ostara.'

'Probably.'
This activity was absolutely rife. You did not need to show any evidence to support your theories, because what you were doing was engaging in informed, imaginative reconstruction.
Read 15 tweets
Adrian Bott Profile picture
Mar 18, 2023
Yearly reminder that while the idea of a goddess called Ostara has been around since at least 1797 and was later independently postulated by Grimm, the pagan festival called Ostara that falls precisely on the Spring Equinox was invented by Aidan Kelly in the early 1970s.
The Anglo-Saxon festival of Eostur that gave its name to Easter was *not* associated with the Spring Equinox, and is far more likely to have been marked by a full moon, meaning the date would shift rather than being fixed.
St Patrick's Day is therefore not a Christianization of the old pagan Spring Equinox festival of Ostara, because there was no old pagan Spring Equinox festival of Ostara.
Read 12 tweets
Adrian Bott Profile picture
Mar 17, 2023
Once again, if you believe that St Patrick must have driven out 'the pagans' because 'Ireland never had snakes!' then you are missing something very basic

We only discovered that Ireland had never had snakes VERY RECENTLY.
Back in Patrick's time they didn't have access to 20th Century studies of the fossil record to tell them it has ALWAYS been like this.

They only knew there were no snakes in Ireland in their time. So they explained that with a saintly myth.
And it wasn't even an original myth. And it was added centuries after Patrick's life.
Read 6 tweets
Adrian Bott Profile picture
May 1, 2022
oh hey, happy Bealtaine to those who celebrate
As usual, 99% of what we think we know about this is wrong, but who cares

The historical record is not a measure of canonicity, and there is a certain joy in remembering things that never were

See the all-important story of Queen Ynci of Lancre
"where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom*"

*Made it up and extrapolated from associated sources**

**had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too.
Read 5 tweets
Adrian Bott Profile picture
Mar 27, 2022
people stop assuming pagans were obsessed with 'fertility' challenge
things pagans depended upon that had nothing to do with 'fertility':

- successful hunting
- successful fishing
- crops not blighted
- prosperous trade
- successful raids
- living to old age
- recovering from illness
- house not falling down
- food stores not being eaten by rats
euphemisms prudish Victorians employed used in order to avoid mentioning sex:

- 'fertility'
Read 9 tweets
Adrian Bott Profile picture
Mar 21, 2022
"A dreadful hybrid has of late years appeared in the Berlin Easter markets and shops - a monster defiant of all known classification laws, subversive of the Darwinian theory, and infinitely perplexing to the student of animated nature. This is an astounding combination...
... of the two leading Easter symbols, a nondescript creature, half hare, half egg, which plunges the spectator into dire doubt, never to be resolved by any trustworthy authority...
... as to whether the hare is hatching the egg or the egg producing the hare from a tenancy in itself inconceivable.'

'A Journalist's Jottings', William Beatty-Kingston, 1890
Read 8 tweets

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