https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=dX6PZBS1Q9Q
So hello everybody, we are back with Richard Roland for another Universal History moment. And this time we’re gonna go a little more, a lot of people have been asking, when are you gonna talk about American stuff, American history? Because I understand most of us are in North America. And so Richard proposed that we look a little bit at the symbolism behind Groundhog Day. [“Groundhog Day”] [“Groundhog Day”] This is Jonathan Pagel, welcome to the symbolic world. [“Groundhog Day”] So we’re recording this, it’s January the 28th, the feast day of St. Ephraim the Syrian, by the way. And who we’re not gonna really talk about today, but it is his feast day. And if you watch this channel, then you probably- You know St. Ephraim is important. Yeah, you know he’s important. So it’s January the 28th, so this video will probably land sometime shortly after Groundhog Day, February the 2nd. And I’ve been, this is a topic and a holiday that I’ve been fascinated by for a really long time. And so I thought this would be a fun way to talk about universal history. We are gonna get back to talking about the grail a little bit more, and maybe some other Arthurian stuff in future videos. But I think that this is maybe an important thing to talk about, because it shows a way that there is a remnant, you could say like a ruin of a very important aspect of medieval universal history still present in our culture today in kind of this goofy way. And so I thought it would be kind of fun for people. And of course- I’m super excited, because I know nothing about the origin of Groundhog Day. There’s a Bill Murray movie that is of course pretty famous, which we will talk about a little bit, because I think it’s, and this is not, before we started recording, I said that some book was like the greatest book ever, and I was being a little facetious. This is not being a little facetious. I think that Groundhog Day with Bill Murray is one of the best movies ever made. And I have reasons for that, which I’m not gonna really necessarily get so much into today. But as we talk about the symbolism of Groundhog Day, you’re gonna be able to understand the Bill Murray movie, maybe a lot better. So let’s get to it. All right. So the- Because Europeans won’t know what Groundhog Day is. You have to start with that. Oh, but Europeans are supposed to know what Groundhog Day is. Oh, okay. Okay, all right, go for it. Okay, but let me, I’ll just explain what Groundhog Day is and how we observe it here in the U.S. of A. Although they actually also do it in certain places in Canada and certain places. It originally comes from Germany. So it originally comes from Western Europe. And there’s actually even a version of it in Ireland, which is celebrated not on February the 2nd, but on February the 1st, which is the feast day of St. Brigid of Gilder. So here’s what it looks like in the United States. There’s this weird tradition, what appears to be like kind of like a weird folk tradition that nobody really remembers the origins of. And that is that on February the 2nd, for some arbitrary reason, on February the 2nd, a groundhog, in other words, a marmot, this is like a really giant fat ground squirrel. I don’t know how to describe it if you haven’t seen one, just go Google that or something. In fact, I was once staying at the Ozark Heritage Center in Arkansas. We went there with our family and they just had groundhogs everywhere and they were extremely friendly. But basically it’s like, if you can imagine a squirrel without a tail, or just a tiny little tail, that’s as big as most dogs. They’re a little- They live underground. Yeah, they live underground, but they’ll come out, especially if they’re used to people to come out and you can feed them and stuff. It’s scary though, because like- They’re big. They’re big, yeah, they’re big. So the idea is, and this is celebrated particularly at one particular place in Pennsylvania. So we have this very famous groundhog, Huxatani Phil, right? And so the myth or the kind of the folklore is that if the groundhog comes out of his hole, so the idea is he’s been in hibernation for the last six weeks or so for winter. So if he comes out of his hole and he sees his shadow, then he’ll get scared by it, run back into his hole and go back into another six weeks of hibernation. And that’s how you know that there’s going to be six more weeks of winter. If he comes out of his hole and he doesn’t see his shadow, then it’s supposed to be an early spring that year. And so that’s the folklore. And of course, in practice, there’s always, he always sees his shadow, there’s always six more weeks of winter, because basically we’re materialists. And so we make the groundhog conform to when we say winter is over, rather than making winter being over conformed to when the groundhog says it’s going to be over, right? So that’s- He always sees his shadow basically. He always sees his shadow. Yeah. And so that’s the thing. And in the United States, there will always be like a little news story on February the 2nd, affirming whether or not Puxitani Phil sees his shadow, right? And then has to go back in the hole. So there’s a really famous Bill Murray movie, which you mentioned, that was made kind of based around this concept. And so in this case, you have this guy, a newscaster, a reporter named Phil who’s played by Bill Murray. And he’s kind of like most of Bill Murray’s characters, right? You know, very kind of world weary, very acerbic, kind of actually an awful person, but because he’s, you know, but always with this sort of brilliance where they don’t tell you he’s an awful person, they just let you pick it up in all these little ways. And you start to realize, man, this guy’s pretty terrible, right? And basically- But he’s funny because he’s terrible. But funny because he’s terrible, right? And so basically this character, this newscaster, Phil, he goes to sleep. So he has to go out and- And it’s on Groundhog Day. On Groundhog Day. He has to go on a Groundhog Day and do this fake, you know, do this fake news story about the groundhog seeing his shadow. And it’s stupid, it’s made up, he hates it. He’s really upset about it. He treats all of the people like his producer and his camera guy and treats them all really terribly. And then wakes up the next morning and finds out that he has to repeat the entire day. And he has to repeat the entire day over and over and over again until basically he gets it right. And in this case, getting it right means he learns to be a much more selfless individual. And he learns to, and then he wins the love. Learns to love, too. Yeah, well, he learns to, hey, this is important. It’s very important. Very important. Jackie, you made it very important. Yeah, it sounds like it’s corny or something like that, but it’s really important to understanding the story, is that he learns to love and then be loved by this woman in his life who had been treating pretty badly up to that point. So, I mean, it’s a great, fun movie. And most people have probably seen it. And if not, like, if you’re just like really young and you didn’t grow up watching that movie, then you should go watch it because I think you’d be surprised how good it is. So, I wanna talk about why is this a thing? Like, of all the most arbitrary things, like I used to joke that February, like, just really got the short end of the stick as far as months go, because it already has fewer days. And then it just has like a bunch of seemingly arbitrary, made up stuff going on in it, like Groundhog Day. It’s like, what’s this about? Well, Groundhog Day is actually the one remaining remnant within American popular culture of actually a very important holy day in the history of Western Europe and the history of Eastern Europe as well, just within the Christian tradition. And that’s a feast day. In the Orthodox Church, we call it the meeting of the Lord in the temple. In the Western tradition, it’s sometimes referred to as the purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Blessed Virgin Mary. Or more colloquially in the old English tradition, it’s called Candlemas, right? The reason it’s called Candlemas is because this is the day in the Christian tradition when you traditionally, you get a whole bunch of candles. You either make them or you buy them. And then you bring them to the church and you bring them to the church for a couple of reasons. One is to give them, in the Middle Ages, you would give, so they actually had these groups of laypeople that would come together in a guild. They were called Candlemas guilds. And what they would do is they would either make or buy a lot of really, really big candles. And then every year on Candlemas, they would donate the majority of these candles to the parish. And it was how the parish, I mean, candles were pretty expensive in the Middle Ages, illumination. Sometimes they were called illumination guilds. Like illuminating things, especially, most importantly, illuminating the host at the moment of the elevation so that people could see it. Especially if it’s kind of dark outside, there’s no electric lighting, things like this. This is a really important function. So it was a way for laypeople to serve the community. They would give the candles so that the church would have candles for the year, basically. Right, but then also, they would get their own candles blessed. And so you’d get a holy candle and you could take this holy candle home. And if there was sickness in the house or there were other reasons to suspect demonic activity. And I don’t say that at all cynically. In fact, I have, hold on. I still have a handful of my own holy candles left over from last year. So if there’s sickness in the house or some other like hint of demonic activity, you light the holy candle to drive out the darkness and to drive out the demonic influences. So that’s why it’s very often referred to as candleless. So the event that this feast celebrates in the life of Christ is of course, Mary and Joseph coming to the temple, bringing the Christ child, presenting an offering of two young turtle doves. And as they’re doing this, they’re met by these two figures who kind of represent the, you could say like the last of the old guard of the righteous remnant of the Old Testament. So one of them is the Elder Simeon. And there’s this whole tradition about the Elder Simeon that he’s actually several hundred years old. It doesn’t say this in the Bible. What it says in the Bible is that he is, that the Lord had promised him that he would, it just says he’s of a great age and that the Lord had promised him that he would not die until he had seen the Lord’s Christ, until he’d seen the Messiah. But there’s a tradition about him that says that he is extremely old, several hundred years old, and that in fact, he’s one of the original translators of the Septuagint. Oh, interesting. So there’s this, maybe the best way to understand that is simply to say that he’s got this explicit tie to the Old Testament, right? So that he’s one of those 70 elders who translated the Septuagint into Greek. So he’s got this explicit tie to the Old Testament. So he’s, you could say like the last guard, the last, I know that technically speaking, like John the Baptist is sort of the last Old Testament prophet, right? But you could see Simeon as also kind of filling that role to a certain extent, right? He’s the archetypical last elder of Israel, right? That at this point in time, the faithful people of God in Israel have been, it’s just a very few, it’s a very small remnant. And of that small remnant, Simeon is kind of the type of all of them. Yeah, and he also, if he’s a translator of the Septuagint, that he also represents something like the last breath of the Old Testament, and that will be illuminated by the candle, right? Will be illuminated by Christ and will be revealed, like it’ll be revealed for what it is or for what its purpose is. Yeah, so there’s that, and of course, what does he pray? He says, mine eyes have seen your salvation, right? A light to be revealed to the Gentiles and the glory of your people Israel. So the idea is that you have something that was the light, was the glory of Israel, which could be the Torah, right? Could be the law of the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures. And then it’s revealed to the Gentiles, revealed to the nations, sometimes it’s translated, but it’s really Gentiles, right? The light dawning on the Gentiles, right? And so it’s this light moving out of a place of darkness and obscurity into kind of a more open place, right? And attached to this, there is the symbolism of, attached to this is the prophecy which Saint Simeon makes about, to the mother of God, about her own sorrow at the foot of the cross. And he says that this child has been brought into this space, brought into the world for the rising and falling of many in Israel, and for a sign that will be spoken against. Of course, the sign that will be spoken against is the crucifixion. And then he says, but a sword will pierce your own heart also, right? And so he’s talking about the sword piercing the heart of the mother of God at the moment of the crucifixion, her anguish. And this is like the predominant perspective that we get in Orthodox Holy Week, is mostly from the perspective of the mother of God, watching her son in the lead up to the passion, watching her son on the cross. Yeah. And so all of this is under, is really important to understand what’s going on in this holiday, and I swear it is in fact connected to Groundhog Day. Well, for sure, like already, you can see the idea of the perpetual, if you think understand theophany, because often we think of theophany as the baptism of Christ, but theophany and its more original symbolism had to do with light, had to do with the revelation of the divine logos, of the light shining onto the world, which made sense after the birth of Christ, which is the solstice at the darkest day, where the sun is hidden, where the light still looks like it’s going down. You don’t know yet that it’s coming back, that it’s actually, it’s moving up, right? It’s moving into its revelation. And so to think of theophany, epiphany, as the first glimmers of that light, and the beginning of the showing of what has happened on Christmas morning, moving in now to Simeon recognizing and saying, now the light, he even uses the image of the light, which will be a sign. So, I mean, it’s very powerful. Yeah. So we’ll come back to the light and the darkness here in just a second, because that’s really important to this. I do want to point out though, that there’s also this particular feast has these, this really explicit, if you look at the iconography for this feast, it’s very explicitly tied up with the idea of the temple, of the sanctuary, of the holy place, and of the reception of the Eucharist. And so if you look at an icon of the feast, what you’ll typically see is the mother of God handing the Christ child to Simeon, but Simeon has his hands covered with his robe. And if you look at something like an icon of the communion of the apostles or something like that, you’ll see the same kind of thing in an icon. You never see people taking communion with their bare hands. They’ve always got their hands covered with, usually with like their outer garment or the robe or something like that to receive the Eucharist. And then behind them, in the icons of this feast, behind them, there’s always this very curious looking structure. It’s got four pillars and then a dome, usually a dome or kind of a roof over the top of those pillars. And then very often there’s a curtain that can be drawn around them. Yeah. And so in the tabernacle of Moses, right, obviously the whole thing was a tent. But then when Solomon builds his temple in the temple of Solomon, there was this pillared curtain, right? So like a tent inside of the temple basically enclosing the holy of holies, right? The place where the Ark of God was supposed to rest. And in the Ark, you’re supposed to have the, obviously you’re supposed to have the tables of the law and the 10 commandments or the tables of the law and the manna and so on, right? Well, obviously, as we’ve talked about in the series, at some point, the Ark went missing, right? And so at some point, these things are missing from the holy place, the most holy place in the temple. And they’re certainly not present in the second temple, right, by the time of Christ, right? There’s no Ark in the temple, which is why the parallel feast to this feast, you could say like the four feasts together have, I’m gonna try to do a piece on this for the symbolic world block. So maybe- Cool. It’s already written, I just need to like finish it up. But in the winter feast of the church, you have this like chiastic structure where you have like starting with the entrance of, I keep hitting my microphone, starting with the entrance of the Theotokos in the temple and then going to Christmas and Theophany or Epiphany and then finishing right at the beginning of the Lord in the temple, right? Yeah. So it’s a really nice structure. And so at the parallel feast to this one, the entrance of the Theotokos in the temple, that’s a big deal because it’s the first time the Ark has actually come to the second temple. But anyway, that’s a different video, different discussion. Yeah, and so now you have like the glory descending on the Ark basically, like one of that type of imagery. Yeah, so this structure, this four-pillar structure with the dome on top, this is a giborum. And as you know, in early Christian architecture, when Christians started being able to build their own church buildings, before the iconostasis really develops, right? Before that really existed, what you had was this giborum. This is this canopy with a curtain that could be closed at certain points during the liturgy over the holy table. Right? By the way, the giborum, you can see it still if you look at images of the communion in the apostles, usually Christ is under a giborum. And in the Ethiopian church, it’s they still, most of their altars have a giborum. Like the ones that I’ve seen, they still use that structure. Coptic churches still use that often as well. And there is even a little bit of a tendency now in the modern Orthodox churches to reintroduce it into the practice. I saw a giborum, there’s one even in South Carolina at a Greek church that I went to where I saw. There are some very old Greek churches like in Greece that still have them and even some very old Western churches in like the Netherlands that still have them. So yeah, yeah. So when you see a giborum in an icon, right? Which as you just pointed out, anytime someone is being given communion in an icon, there’s always a giborum in there somewhere, right? So this is a way it’s doing two things. One is it’s this explicit tie from the Jewish temple to the Christian temple, right? But then also it’s this, it’s a sort of a shorthand to tell you something Eucharistic is happening and kind of the meaning of this feast, right? And so you have Sibmian here standing in front of the giborum. And even a lot of times on the altar under the giborum, you’ll see a gospel book, which is of course an anachronism from like a purely like boring sense of understanding things, right? But for us, we see it as a fulfillment. What’s supposed to be in the most holy place that isn’t is the tables of the law, right? But the tables of the law in the Christian church are replaced by, we don’t have a Torah scroll in the altar. We have the gospels, right? So there’s this, you know, kind of all this great symbolism, which again is part of that thing of like the hidden glory of Israel now becoming the light for the Gentiles, right? And so you’ve got Sibmian in the attitude of someone receiving communion, standing behind, in front of this structure, which is all about the reception of the Eucharist, all about communion, right? And he’s receiving the Christ child. And if you look at the hymns of the Orthodox church around this feast, like the Festal Meneon, they talk about this idea of the Eucharistic symbolism that’s going on here. It’s really explicit in the hymns, but then they also tie it back to another meeting of the Lord of the temple, right? Which is in Isaiah chapter six. So in Isaiah chapter six, you have a prophet who goes to the temple and he meets with God. And in this story, what you have is a prophet who’s waiting at the temple because God isn’t there, but then God shows up to the temple, right? And so it’s kind of this inversion of the Isaiah six story. And so there’s one of the hymns, I wish that was in the hymn, I wish that I had the Festal Meneon over here, I think it’s over on the shelf. But one of the hymns says something like, the seraphim who is Mary, right? So in that story in Isaiah chapter six, right? Isaiah has this vision of God and he sees him and he says, woe is me, I’m undone, I’m a man of unclean lips, I live in the midst of the people of unclean lips, for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts, right? And so a seraphim takes a pair of tongs, takes one of the coals from off the heavenly altar and comes and touches it to his lips. And then when he touches it to his lips, he says, see, this is, your sin has taken away, you’ve been purged, you’ve been cleansed, right? And so the hymns around this feast in the Meneon, they take that symbolism. And it talks about the seraphim who is Mary brings the burning coal that is the Christ child, right? And gives it to the prophet Simeon, right? And at that point, he’s able to say, now let your servant depart in peace. In other words, I’m ready to die now. And in the middle ages, this is very closely associated with the idea, this might seem weird to us now, except for those of us who are maybe more traditional Christians, but even then, like if you’re a convert, it’s hard to think about things this way. But in the middle ages, one of the main things that people prayed for, almost the only thing that people prayed for if you were very poor, was that you would have enough anticipation of your death, that you would be able to make one final confession and receive communion before you died, right? They called it like your, they would refer to it as like your traveling money. In other words, like that you’d be able to receive the Eucharist one last time before you make the journey, right? To the next life. And so they saw Candlemas as being like sort of an example of this, that he receives Christ one last time before he crosses the river into death. And so there’s a bunch of really cool, beautiful Eucharistic symbolism in here. And of course, in the Orthodox Church, when priests take communion, right? When they give themselves, or when they take communion, they say, see, this has touched my lips, my sins purged, right? So they say those words from Isaiah when they receive communion. So there’s this really beautiful kind of triangulation between the feast of the meeting of the Lord in the temple and the meeting of the Lord in Isaiah chapter six, and then the reception of communion in the ancient church. So I just wanted to point all that stuff out because it really helps us understand the symbolism of this feast and kind of what this feast is about, right? This feast, it’s about illumination, it’s about fire, it’s about the hidden glory, right? Kind of being- It’s about lights. Right, it’s about light, yeah. It is definitely about the light manifesting itself more and more. Yeah, but it’s not just about light manifesting itself because it’s always light that comes with, because there’s also an element of it that is actually about a prediction of darkness, right? Because of Resinian, right? He has this beautiful moment of light, and then he says, he’s gonna be a sign that is spoken against, he’s talking about the passion. And he says, a sword is gonna pierce your own heart also. So it’s also the promise of darkness, it’s the promise of a wound, but ultimately it’s the promise of Pascha, right? Which is the preeminent Christian festival of light breaking into the world, right? Coming out of the darkness. So why February the second, right? Well, obviously February the second is 40 days after December the 25th. So it’s 40 days after Christmas. And so it’s the 40 days of the Virgin Mary’s purification. However, February the second- I mean, people don’t know anything about this. Like you have to just say- Okay, yeah, sorry. Yeah, go ahead. That women would have to purify themselves after a certain amount of time, that they had to do that regarding their menstruation, but they also had to do it regarding after giving birth to a child. So according to the law of Moses, 40 days after giving birth to a child, women were supposed to present themselves at the temple of God or the tabernacle of the temple of God and bring an offering for their purification, either like a young lamb, or if you’re poor, then you could bring like two turtle doves or two young pigeons. I think I’ve read from one historian that like at the time of Christ, people only ever brought the two birds. But anyway, and so you’re supposed to bring an offering and it’s basically, you could say it’s- I don’t know, we probably don’t wanna get into this too much, but you could just say like in the Old Testament and the Mosaic law, there are certain things that bring you very close to life, like the beginning of life or very close to death. And it’s like those things are too holy. And so if you were exposed to them, or if you participated in them in some way, then there has to be this reintegration of you into kind of the normal liturgical community, like the normal community of the people of Israel. And so that’s what this is about. Birth being extremely close to like the beginning of life, but also very close to death. Yeah, like both of those things at the same time. And so a woman at the end of, and we still do this in the Orthodox Church today, there’s the ceremony of churching for a woman and her child, which we’re gonna be doing here in just a couple of weeks. Nice. Because we just had a baby a few weeks ago. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you, thank you, yeah. And so all of this, and again, like you can even understand that purification, right? It’s something that’s hidden. So like a woman after she has a child, she’s supposed to be hidden, sequestered from the community of the people of God, right? Almost because she’s like too special, she’s like too holy. She can’t yet integrate into the life of the community, right? And then at the end of that time, that hidden glory is now revealed into like a more public kind of a life. However, the traditional date for Good Friday is of course, March the 25th, which at one point in time was the spring equinox. I know that the solstices and equinoxes, they move around a little bit. But at one particular point in time, that was the traditional date of both Good Friday and the Annunciation, right, is March the 25th. Lots of people out there might wanna like argue about this stuff. All I can say is I don’t care. I don’t care. Yeah. This is, these are the traditional dates. That’s all that needs to be said about it. So what you have to realize is that this situates the meeting of the Lord, which is 40 days after, you know, this situates the meeting of the Lord or Candlemist as being halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Nice, yeah. So to me, this sort of reveals or sort of brings out one of the most important facets of universal history. Okay, and this is why this is justly a universal history video, not just Richard talking about, you know, feasts that he likes, right? And Groundhog Day. And Groundhog Day. Because one of the most important elements of universal history is the way that the, is understanding the way that the Christian story maps onto and it fulfills the sort of old agricultural cycle of the year, which is present. It’s not just pagan or is present in both paganism and Judaism. Both paganism and Judaism have this old, this agricultural cycle that by the way, predates the law of Moses. When God starts telling the children of Israel, here are the feasts of the agricultural cycle, that wasn’t the first time that they’d ever heard of them or celebrated them, right? He’s just telling them, here’s how you celebrate these in a way that shows that you’re my people, right? But everyone basically has these feasts and more or less with certain variations, pretty much every culture in the world that lives within the same kind of climate and climate cycle has the feast right around the same points in time. So what universal history does, one thing that we’ve talked about is the way that universal history shows how a group of people try to tie themselves into the Christian and the Roman story, right? But another thing that universal history does, that’s kind of part of this in this broader, expansive way that I’m using the term, is it shows how does my daily life tie into that story? Mm-hmm. So sometimes people will make a big deal about the fact that for instance, in Celtic paganism, they had these sort of quarters of the year, and these were the days that fell exactly between those each solstice and equinox, right? There’s one on this date, right? In Ireland, it was celebrated on February the 1st, which happens to also be the feast day of St. Brigid of Kildare. It was actually the patron saint of my new daughter, so there you go. It’s all connected. And so people will make a big deal about this, and they’ll be like, oh, this is just like, see, it’s just a Christianizing of this older pagan thing. And again, to that I have to say, one, I don’t care. You guys can be complaining, we’ll baptize shark week. I’m sure you’ve seen that meme. It’s like, listen, if you guys keep complaining about this stuff, we’re gonna make shark week and it’s gonna be a Christian holiday. You don’t have to deal with it. But I mean, in another sense, you have to realize that this is the way that things work, right? This is the way that reality manifests, and this is the way that we know each other and the world that we live in, and it’s the way that we know God, right? Is the way that these things manifest themselves in time and the recurring cycles of the seasons, which were made by God, right? And so it’s kind of like preposterous to think, and this is why I get heartburned from these people who are like, oh, well, this, a long time ago when I was a pastor of a church, there was a big fracas because we had a Christmas tree up in like the foyer, the foyer, which is what Baptist called the Nerf X. Yeah. And some people are like, oh, well, that’s a pagan holiday. And they sent me like this DVD series, you gotta take the Christmas tree down for this pagan holiday, right? I know you know what I’m talking about, right? But the reason that stuff gives me heartburn is because it’s like, you think God doesn’t own the days of the year? Like he made the year, he made the agricultural cycle, he made the solstices and the equinox, like he made these things. And so why would he not, when he manifests himself in the world, right? When he becomes incarnate, he becomes incarnate taking on human nature in this full, complete, total way. But he also like becomes incarnate at a particular point in time, at a particular place in history. But what the whole sort of Christian year shows is the way in which that particularity, you could say again, like the glory of the people Israel becomes a light to the nations, right? And so Christ doesn’t just fill up the 33 years that he’s walking around on planet earth, but actually fills up all of time with himself, right? So there’s no other way that the stuff could manifest, right? This is a feature, it’s not a bug. In understanding the relationship of the times of the year to the life of Christ via the Christian liturgical year is vital, is absolutely vital to the reading of medieval literature. Just to take as a, for instance, Arthurian literature, every great Arthurian story happens at a particular Christian feast day. Yeah, sometimes it’s Pentecost, sometimes it’s Christmas. Sir Gowan and the Green Knight happens on the feast, not at Christmas, one of my many, I mean, happens during Christmas time, but doesn’t happen on Christmas day, which is one of my many beefs with a recent film. Yeah. It happens on the feast of the circumcision of the Lord, which was very popular in England at the time that that poem was written. And also it’s like, don’t you, if you cut something, a monster in two, and you don’t understand that there’s a relationship between the circumcision and that, and that it’s like you’re missing out on some of the story of what’s going on. And I don’t wanna like, I don’t wanna sound impious about this, okay? But first of all, you have to understand in the middle ages, people thought this was a pretty good joke, right? There’s a beheading, it happens on the feast of the circumcision of the Lord, like people were aware, right? But also like, if you don’t understand that that story begins on the feast of the circumcision, you won’t actually understand anything about the story, right? Which is like what to do with the remainder. Exactly. That’s what the whole story is about. That’s what the whole story is about. I mean, it’s about, you know, like the sash and everything is always about, it’s always about that. And so, yeah. And so if you don’t understand this stuff, then you won’t be able to read medieval literature, right? And kind of know what it’s about. So to me, like if you wanna understand something like medieval universal history, one of the most important things you need to do is say, well, how did a certain group of people, how did they celebrate this feast? What did they do for Christmas? What did they do for Easter? What did they do for, if you wanna understand like who they really were and what they thought about themselves, it’s not just how did they write themselves into the larger narrative on this really meta-cultural level, but how did they see themselves as being a part of that story in their day-to-day life? For instance, Candlemas, England, huge deal, huge deal. And in fact, if you lived in a town that was large enough to do this, most Candlemas celebrations were celebrated by a sort of mystery play slash procession before mass. So you’d get one of the women of the town to dress up like the Virgin Mary, which of course for them meant you should dress her as beautifully as you could afford to do, right? Cause they weren’t interested in the fact that, okay, yes, obviously Mary and Joseph were quite poor. You know, for them it was, you know, this is they’re trying to show her as who she is, right? She’s the queen of heaven. She’s the mother of God, right? So we wanna show that in the way that we dress her. So they would dress her up. You’d have an older man in the town playing Joseph. She would be carrying like a little doll, right? And then you’d have a whole procession, right? A whole procession with everyone bringing, again, bearing candles. Everybody would light their candles and they’d bear them together in this big procession to the parish church. And then they’d have like an older man meet you at the door of the parish church and you’d come in. And what would you do? You’d celebrate mass and of course receive the Eucharist. Right? So there’s this whole, you know, there was like this very, you know, it was very festal. There are whole carols. Like we know about Christmas carols, right? But there actually used to be carols for everything. And Christmas carols are the only things that have really survived because Christmas for most people like living in the West, most evangelicals is kind of the last surviving vestige of the Christian year. Like even more so than Easter. Yeah. You’re right. Yeah, even more so than Easter. Like I know that, you know, at the churches where I served, Christmas is a much bigger deal than Easter, right? And that’s when, you know, even a Baptist church, like they’ll break out the nativity scene. They’ll put some graven images right up there in front of the pulpit for everyone to look at for the entire month of December. You know, it’s kind of, but it’s just like when Christmas hits, that’s when our nostalgia really kicks in for, not just for like, how did my family celebrate, but also like a wider cultural nostalgia kind of kicks in. And we do things and we sing these really old songs. Those are the oldest hymns in any given Protestant hymnal are always going to be your Christmas carols, right? That go back, you know, as early as the 15th, 16th century, right before the Reformation, right? And it’s just like when we hit Christmas, a certain nostalgia kicks in. But there used to be carols for everything. And there are beautiful, interesting, fascinating carols. Even some- Candlemas carols. Candlemas carols. Even some written by Puritans in like Colonial Williamsburg. Wow. In fact, can I just read you a couple? Is that okay? Do we have time? Sure, it’s up to you. All right, so one thing to know about Candlemas, so this is like a little kind of a superstition around Candlemas is that Candlemas is actually when you’re supposed to take your Christmas decorations down. Right. So you put them up on Christmas Eve, you take them down on Candlemas. I thought you put- We took them down on Epiphany. Yeah, well, let me just read you. All right. There’s a little bit of a conflict there. All right, so this one is a poem from Colonial Williamsburg, okay? When New Year’s Day is passed and gone, Christmas is with some people done. So some people stop celebrating Christmas on New Year’s Day. Right. But further some will it extend and at 12th day, their Christmas end, which is what you- There you go, that’s me. Yes. At Candle and some people stretch it further yet, at Candlemas, they finish it. The gentry carry it further still and finish it just when they will. They keep good wine and eat good cheer and keep their Christmas all the year. There you go. So some people are always partying, right? And I do have neighbors who keep their Christmas lights up just all year long. And I don’t know what’s going on there, but they seem like- But we tend to keep the Christmas lights outside. People tend to keep them until the end of- Of winter, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the inside decorations go down at Epiphany. Yeah, Christmas lights aren’t quite the- They’re not quite as good as a holy candle, but in our modern age, they’re pretty darn close. They’re pretty close. That’s right, they’re pretty close. Yeah, I’m a big fan of- On Christmas lights. Please just make your yards go crazy on Christmas. I think that’s great. So this, but I’ll read this other one. This is- All right, okay. This, real quick, this is like a late 1500s. This is a Candlemas carol. It’s called Down with the Rosemary and So. And you can find people singing it on YouTube, but it goes like this. Down with the rosemary and so, down with the bays and mistletoe, down with the holly, ivy all, wherewith you dressed the Christmas hall so that the superstitious find no one least branch there left behind. For look how many leaves there be neglected there, maids trust to me, so many goblins you shall see. So it’s like for every leaf of Christmas decoration you leave out, you’re gonna have that many goblins defending these demons after Candlemas, right? So yeah, so it’s, and that’s kind of like a silly little rhyme, but you can again see, there’s something about the day going back to Simeon’s prophecy, right? It’s this revelation of light, but it’s also there’s some kind of a prediction of the monstrous, of something that’s going to happen. So all of this is, I think, pretty important to understanding. So where did we get Groundhog Day from? All right, let’s go with Groundhog Day now. So Groundhog Day, in various places in Europe, this day, February the 2nd, probably because of some, well, for all the reasons that we just talked about, right? You’re halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, right? All this stuff became a day of what you could call, what’s sometimes called weather lore or weathermancy, right? So it was basically like trying to predict the weather, how good of a spring, like how good of a spring are we going to have? When can we start planting? Like all this different stuff, right? It’s all tied up in this stuff. And so what happened is that in pretty much all Western European traditions, they started using the weather on Candlemas Day, which again hits at this midpoint, but it’s significant for these other spiritual reasons. And for them, like in the middle ages, if you were like, well, there’s like a meteorological reason and then a spiritual reason. And like, if you tried to tell somebody in the middle ages that those were just like separate things that didn’t have anything to do with each other, nobody would, they’d look at you like you’re a crazy person, right? And they’d be right. Yeah, they’d be right. So they use the Candlemas weather to predict the beginning of spring. And usually in Germany, the animal in question was actually a badger. And so in fact, in Nova Scotia, which is up in Canada or so I’m told, it’s called Dachs Day with Dachs being like the German word for a badger. Yeah, okay. So not Groundhog Day, but Dachs Day. Sometimes also though, it’s a fox or a bear. For our purposes, it can basically be any hibernating animal, like anything that goes to sleep in the winter and then wakes up in the spring. Interesting for the bear. How would they get the bear to come out of during hibernation? Sounds a little trickier. Well, that’s what they tended to use badgers. An angry badger is still a handful, let’s say, but not quite to the level that an angry bear is. That’s right. Grumpy, angry bear. So when the Pennsylvania Dutch, when they, these are like basically immigrants from German speaking areas of Europe and they migrated to this part of Pennsylvania where there were no badgers. But what did they have that hibernated in the winter? Groundhogs. Right. Mammoths, right? And so that’s kind of the origin of that. So basically what you have is there’s this obscure weather lore practice that is, well, it’s not obscure, it’s like pretty widely practiced, but it’s on the fringe of the thing that the feast is about. Yeah. And in the United States, we’ve totally forgotten the feast, right? We’ve totally forgotten the feast. But everyone remembers the little minor weather lore practice that’s associated. It’s like Halloween, you know, it’s the same as the, how Americans celebrate their holidays. Right. Christmas too. Right, yeah, like we take the fringe thing and we put that. The gift giving, that’s the feast. You take the monsters coming out, that’s the feast, and now the badger’s coming to light. Yeah, and so we take the thing that’s sort of like the fringe part of the celebration of the holiday, which there’s nothing wrong with that in its place, it’s fine. But then we take that thing, we put it in center, it becomes the most essential thing. But I do want to talk real quick now, now that we kind of understand like the background and kind of the spiritual and the medieval map of this feast to talk about what it means for the groundhog to see its shadow and to go back into hibernation. Right, so the whole idea of seeing its shadow is that it’s clear and sunny on the day, right? You’re in the middle of winter right now, right? So six weeks into winter, you got six more weeks of winter coming. So if it’s the middle of winter, and in this particular climate, like Northern European climate, and it’s bright and sunny and kind of a warm day, such that this animal, which is coming out of death, right? It’s coming out of sleep, it’s coming out of the earth, comes up out of death, it sees the light, but you could say it like sees the light too soon. And so it turns around and goes back, right? Back into death, right? There’s almost something that seems to me to be here, about kind of the dangers of, you could call it like the danger of premature enlightenment or the danger of unearned wisdom, right? In a way, it’s almost related to like, you know, the parable of the sower goes out to sow the seed, and some of the seed falls on rocky ground and it springs up really quick. And then the sun comes out and it withers and dies because it had sprung up so fast in the shallow earth that it wasn’t able to put any roots down. And so… Well, or what about, I’m surprised that you see it that way. Like I would tend to see it as something like, the light casts a shadow, right? And so you have this sense that when light arrives, it both reveals the light, but it also reveals the darkness. So that’s why Simeon says, this is for the rise and fall of many, right, in Israel. So the badger comes out, and the question is, which way is it gonna go? Is it gonna go towards the light or is it gonna go towards the darkness? So if it sees the darkness, then it goes back into darkness. If it sees the light, then it comes out into the light. So you could see the moment of revelation as a kind of, it’s always like a double revelation, which is why that’s how Christ presents it, as exactly what Simeon says, as something which reveals both the glory and the scandal. All things will be revealed. And so you actually see the sins of everybody, and you also see the goodness in the world. So that seems to be something like that, which is that would be the way I would interpret it. No, I think you’re right. And I don’t see this… Let me try to reframe what I’m saying a little bit. Because you could say there’s a… So man is microcosm, right? That’s the most important medieval idea, right? If you wanna understand anything about how they thought about the world in the middle ages or medieval literature, you gotta be able to understand what does it mean for man to be a microcosm of the cosmos, right? Like a little cosmos. So on a cosmic scale, the ultimate day of revelation is the last judgment, right? When the fire of God, the light of God, reveals light and darkness. But then also in some kind of a way, in like a participatory way, that day is Pascha, right? That’s the day when we say, let God arise and let his enemies be scattered, right? That’s the day of his uprising. That’s the day when he scatters the enemies of God and he invites those who are his into the light, right? And then on a personal level, you could say that that moment, this is what St. Maximus the confessor says. He says that the moment of the dismissal of the catechumens in the divine liturgy corresponds to, participates in the moment of the last judgment. So that’s the moment where you sort of cast out, you send out the people who are not ready for the light. And then those that are, now they get to come receive it. How do they receive it is in the Eucharist, which is kind of what this feast, the mystery of this feast is about. That’s an interesting idea. Like it seems related also to the idea of Adam and Eve, because you could see it that way. Like Adam and Eve, they eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. And then they move, let’s say towards the tree of light. And that light exposes their shadow in their case. Like they see their shadow. They’re ashamed of that which is reveals, you could say. And then they turn back into their hole and try to hide themselves. So yeah, that’s exactly it. Like that’s exactly it. So I kind of see those things. Like I don’t think these takes are like contradicting. No, they’re not. Yeah. Because you could say it’s something like trying to take communion too soon. Like if you were a catechumen and you went up and you tried to take communion, like. It would be to your judgment. Right, it would be to your judgment. I’ve seen priests say like, if a non-orthodox person comes up, he says, I’m not gonna give you communion, not because of me, because of you, I wanna protect you from the fire basically. Right, yeah. So this is also, I think very closely associated with the idea of Lent. So the way to kind of think about Lent, right, is because we start Lent literally with the last judgment, right? Yeah. That’s, you know, meet fair Sunday, right? It’s the Sunday of the last judgment. So we begin Lent actually with the last judgment. So it’s exposing, here’s who you are and here’s who you aren’t, right? And for most of us, that’s just not a great experience. Like most of us, if we’re really honest with ourself and we listen to the gospel on the Sunday of the last judgment and we start to say, well, I haven’t fed Christ, I haven’t clothed him, I haven’t visited him in prison, you know, et cetera, right? So then what do you do? You go back, you kind of go back into death, right? And so your life becomes more austere. The church services become more solemn and even, you know, darker. Like you see the six weeks of the badger or the marmot as Lent basically. So it’s six weeks long, okay. So in Groundhog Day, the film, right? I’ve often heard people basically say the movie is about purgatory. Right? Which is not wrong, but it’s not exactly right either. It’s the same, it’s similar. So here’s what’s interesting. There have been a lot of film theories. You can go out there and find how many days did he do? Like how many times did you do Groundhog Day, right? Over and over again, you can find like how many times, you know, and some people say, well, to learn all the information that he learned, it had to have been like 10,000 years or something, you know, something insane. Okay, taking that stuff aside, the original script and the notes, the director had it be like a thousand years. But in the final script, the one that actually got filmed in the director’s notes for the film, he has it as a 40 day period. Nice. So it’s 40 days of what? Basically learning how to repent. Yeah. Right? That’s what Groundhog Day is. It’s 40 days of learning how to repent, not repentance as just saying, oh, I’m sorry, my bad. Right, that’s not repentance. What is repentance? It’s turning around. It’s a change of mind. It’s a change of heart. And that’s basically what Phil in that movie, who is the Groundhog, right? He is the Groundhog, right? In fact, at one point he kidnaps the actual Groundhog and like they drive off a cliff together because he’s just like wants to end all of this, right? But what is he doing? He’s going back down into the earth. Yeah, he’s going back down into death with the Groundhog, right? And so for Phil- That’s what happens when he wake ups in the morning and the day is repeated. The Groundhog hasn’t moved on. The Groundhog has gone back into his cave and gonna stay in that cave until the sun, the sun is really ready. He’s ready to see the sun, like you said. Yeah, yeah. And so when he’s able to actually see the light and not be scared by his own shadow, right? And you could go a whole direction with just talking about the shadow, right? But when he’s able to not be terrified by his own shadow, in other words, his sin, right? This false personality, it’s not really true to himself. It’s just like the armor that he’s built up against the world around him. That’s when he’s able to enter into this loving relationship and that’s what, that’s Posca, right? That’s what breaks the spell. That’s when he gets out, right? Nice. So anyway, I think that- That’s amazing. Yeah. It’s so, once we see it, it’s actually so obvious. Right. There’s a relationship between all these things. Yeah. I haven’t thought about Groundhog Day ever in my life, even though I enjoyed the movie, but I didn’t, I watched it so long ago that I wasn’t thinking about symbolism at that time. So I didn’t think about how it could be related to Lent and to Posca and to the idea of, let’s say, purging your passions in order to be ready to emerge, let’s say. Yeah. That’s wonderful. Yeah. So that’s all I have. That’s Groundhog Day. Yeah. So guys, this is great stuff. So this is a, like I said, I hope that people understand, maybe it’s just as a last thing. I hope people sort of can start to see the connection between this and the broader idea of universal history, right? Is that you have to think of history as being in, you can think of it as like a series of fractals or wheels within wheels, or however you want to talk about it, right? Of you’ve got, here’s the story of history, right? This is what Vodoloskin and like, Loris, right? He gets this so beautifully, right? He understands this so well. Is history, it’s not just a line, right? It’s not a complete circle. It’s more like a spiral, right? But the way that you live that spiral out is in the cycle of the Christian year, right? As you’re moving towards the end of history, and people get hung up about, okay, well, when is that? When is the end of history? Well, the short answer, this is also in Loris, okay? The short answer is the end of history is when you die. Right? Yeah. Like when is the last judgment or the rapture? Like, don’t worry about whenever that is supposed to happen. The thing that you know is going to happen is that you’re going to die, right? And for you, that is the last judgment, right? Exactly. And so, yeah, so to understand the way that you actually participate in that spiral, you could say, is by attaching yourself to the Christian year, which has left many little remnants, like little ruins in the world around us today, things like Groundhog Day, right? Well, when Groundhog Day comes around this year, instead of saying, oh, what a stupid thing, I guess we have six more weeks of winter because eroded in the ground in Pennsylvania says we do, you know, go to church, get a holy candle, light it, keep out the darkness, right? And wait for the light of Pascha. Well, thanks for that. You know, this is great. And so don’t worry, everybody, we will back with more universal history. We’re gonna go back into some Arthur and move on to the millions of things we could talk about in terms of universal history. So Richard, thanks again. This was really, this was a nice surprise for me. And thanks everybody for paying attention and we’ll talk to you very soon. Hey, symbolic world gang. I just wanted to take a quick moment to tack on to this video about universal history and the symbolism of Groundhog Day to actually mention to you something that’s gonna be happening in the North Texas area. So if you’re able to get yourself down there towards the end of the month of February, 2022, we are hosting an Orthodox Arts Festival. So this is the Festival of Orthodox Christian Art. It’s being hosted by St. Constantine and Helen Antiochian Orthodox Church in Carrollton, Texas. So it’s the North part of Dallas. It’s February the 18th through the 20th. Check out orthodoxartsfestivaldfw.com. We’ll put a link in the description of this YouTube video. Again, that’s orthodoxartsfestivaldfw.com. And you can get all the information that you need to have about how to get tickets and what the schedule is gonna be. We’ve got a ton of great speakers. We’ve got a keynote address on the role of the arts in Orthodox theology by Peter Butinoff. Currently he teaches theology, spirituality, and the arts at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary. He just actually finished co-editing an amazing book on Arvo Part. And he also has a podcast called Luminous Conversations on Sacred Arts, which has all kinds of stuff, all kinds of really, really interesting stuff you guys would enjoy. There are also on Saturday, there’s gonna be presentations, workshops, and demonstrations by local Orthodox artists and also people who like to talk about these things like me. I’m gonna be giving a talk on literature and the sacramental imagination. There’s gonna be a bunch of other really great people there, including some symbolic world folks. Josh Sturgill from the 8th day Institute, he’ll be there, he’ll be talking. Deacon Anthony Stokes, they’re gonna be talking about beauty and the liturgy, the role of quality music in our worship. And some other great talks on writing, on architecture in the Orthodox tradition, on reading, on how to actually like look at and study icons. It’s gonna be a lot of great stuff. There’s gonna be some films that will be shown there as well. And some workshops, some hands-on stuff and demonstrations. And that will all end with Pan-Orthodox Vespers at 5 p.m. on Saturday. So anyway, it’s gonna be a great event and I look forward to seeing you there. If you’re looking for me, I’m the tall Orthodox guy with a beard.