December 2008

Be healthy at Christmas

23 Dec, 2008  No Comment

Behind the modern rituals of Christmas lurk old traditions tied to our magical, pagan past. Words provide a link to that magic. Last year we looked at Yule, a word that predates most native languages of Europe. This year wassailing is our Christmas word. Wassail arrived in English from the Old Norse salutation ves heill meaning “be healthy” from vesa, to be, and heill, healthy.

The phrase arose among the Viking settlers of Northern England and was taken up by the natives in Old English as waes hael.

It then became a drinking salutation (the response is Drinc hael – drink and be healthy); then the sense extended to the liquor with which your health was drank.

It was with “wine and wassail” that Lady Macbeth dulled the senses of the chamberlains so that Macbeth could murder Duncan in his sleep.

The vessel for shared drinking of important toasts became the wassailing bowl and its use has driven the meaning of the word into its Christmas associations.

Wassailing’s most common meaning is door-to-door Christmas carol singing – a common practice in England. The Christmas wassail is the particular spiced ale or mulled wine drunk on Christmas Eve or Twelfth Night. It is not difficult to guess how the meaning of wassailing shifted from the shared drinking of mulled ale to house-to-house caroling. Warm spicy ale provides a necessary incentive to sing outdoors in the cold northern winter.

Twelfth Night (5 January) marks the end of the Christmas feasting. In the apple-growing areas of South-West England (and in the US where the tradition was taken), an unusual and distinctly non-Christian ritual is carried out on Old Twelfth Night (17 January), the wassailing of the apple trees. The connection to carol singing is, obviously, the imbibing of much mulled ale (and when you read about the ceremony it is evident that the wassailing bowl hadn’t been put down since the carol-singing of Christmas Eve).

The wassailing of the apple trees (or apple-howling) was once a magical ceremony to encourage the benevolent spirits to grant a good crop of apples for next year’s cider production. Songs were sung to the trees to encourage them:

Apple-tree, apple-tree,
Bear good fruit,
Or down with your top,
And up with your root.

Cider is poured over the roots of the best tree, cider-soaked toast is placed in the forks as offerings to the good spirits (for the robins), and a great noise is made to frighten off the evil spirits including firing shotguns through the branches. All this while much reveling occurs with cider, ale or mulled wine – not surprisingly the tradition is seeing a current revival in rural England.

Madrigal Communications wishes you a Merry Christmas and we leave you with an extract from the Yorkshire Wassail:

We’ve been a-while a-wandering
Amongst the leaves so green.
But now we come a wassailing
So plainly to be seen,

For it’s Christmas time, when we travel far and near;
May God bless you and send you a happy New Year.

Syzygy obscured

10 Dec, 2008  No Comment

This week’s word had an opportunity to come out of obscurity and shine brightly but the opportunity was lost in the clouds.

On Monday of last week the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Dr Nick Lomb, the Sydney Observatory’s astronomer was predicting a ‘rare cosmic alignment’ in the night sky above Sydney for about three hours. It was to produce a huge smiling face in the sky consisting of the planets, Venus and Jupiter, forming two brilliant eyes and the crescent moon, directly below, forming a big smile.

Syzygy derives from the classical Latin and Greek word, syzygia meaning yoke, pair, union of two, conjunction, copulation, from syn, together and zygon, yoke.

Technically, in astronomy, a syzygy is the conjunction or opposition of two heavenly bodies (the Sun, Moon or planets) in a straight line relative to the earth. Examples of syzygies are solar and lunar eclipses, transits and occultations, and can also refer to the times of New Moons or Full Moons (ie the Sun and Moon are in conjunction or opposition although not precisely in one line with the Earth).

Syzygy is also used (according to Wikipedia) to describe interesting configurations of planets in general, which, of course, our smiley face was.

The SMH reported that although Dr Lomb was not superstitious and did not believe in omens he had noted that the syzgyy was to appear on the eve of the Reserve Bank’s meeting considering interest rates (interest rates were significantly lowered).

However the cloud cover over Sydney obscured the syzygy and the reporting of it did not go beyond using alignment. However, do not despair, lets get ready to brush the word off when next we see our smiley face in the early hours of July 21, 2036.