SOCIETY — 177/262 — Saint John's Eve
St. John’s Eve is one of the European folk traditions that takes place on the eve of the feast of St. John the Baptist, from the 23rd to the 24th of June.
Although the name in some languages refers to a Christian celebration, it is actually a much older pagan custom. This night marks the celebration of an important moment in the year – the solstice – which is reflected in the names of this festival in Germanic and Scandinavian languages (such as Midsommer).
The celebration of this festival takes place after sunset, ideally in nature, where people dance around the fire, sing, make merry, and participate in various rituals. Men jump over the fire, which symbolizes courage and skill. Women demonstrate their endurance by dancing around the maypole or seek their future husband through the tradition of floating a wreath of flowers. The girl must weave the wreath before midnight and then send it down the stream. The young man destined for her is the one who retrieves her wreath from the water.
It was also believed that on St. John’s Eve, herbs have the greatest power. Therefore, at this time, they were added to meals or brewed into healing infusions that could bring luck, love, or a bountiful harvest.
According to tradition, a girl could also see the face of her chosen one if she placed nine kinds of flowers under her pillow, which she had silently picked that night without looking back. The nine herbs included daisy, rose, catchfly, cornflower, stonecrop, chickweed, thyme, violet, and bellflower.
— The days around solstice have traditionally been a time of magic and invocation, often through dances, yet in the late Middle Ages these dances reached new heights. Occurences of choreomania, the dancing mania or dancing plague were so tightly bound to midsummer and St. John's Day that they became known as St. John's Dances. In June 1374 one such dancing plague spread from Aachen along the Rhine to Cologne and Utrecht, with hundreds of people dancing and jumping wildly through the streets and churches, until they entered trance-like states and visions, became unconscious or died of exhaustion. They were described as screaming, crying for help and calling out demons – though with the dancing people travelling from one region to the next, taking their customs and languages with them, it is questionable whether these “demons” were actually such.
Over the centuries, many different explanations for this phenomenon were provided. Contemporary chroniclers called it “possessions”, and priests tried to heal the victims with prayers and holy waters. Modern scientists thought ergot poisoning responsible, caused by a fungus in rye bread which contains chemicals similar to LSD and could lead to hallucinations, albeit not at this scale. Even newer research therefore speaks of a mass psychogenic illness caused by psychological distress. Most instances did, after all, take place at a time of great uncertainty: the Black Death had raged just two centuries ago, famines and a weak economy followed, the schism of the Church caused the people to lose trust in its authority. Yet other researchers wonder if the medieval records are not, at least in parts, made up or greatly exaggerated. Ritualistic dancing was, in the end, both a pagan custom and a strongly gendered phenomenon (most of the dancers were women and girls), giving the Church much reason to denounce it as a mania and an un-Christian act that had to be banned.
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