Wednesday, April 22 2009
Happy Parilia!
I can't believe you forgot the marshmallows! What will we eat with the lark's tongues?
Regular readers of this blog (why does that phrase always make me think of bran cereal and prunes?) will note that I like a bit of comparative culture. Last April I made note of Grounation Day, the Rastafari commemoration the visit of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie to Jamaica in 1966. This year I got interested in the Roman festival of Parilia.
Most folks take today as Rome's birthday, when the bizarre, tragic and utterly messed-up Romulus bested his former pack-mate and equally weird twin brother Remus and founded the city on the bank of the river where their unwed mom (to be fair she was dating the god of War) abandoned them to wolves. Roman history is like Peyton Place if Fellini and Michael Bay wrote the script.
But Parilia is much older than Rome, and began as a herdsman's tribute to Pares, the vaguely indeterminate patron of shepherds. According to Wikipedia,
The rural structure of the festival was carried out by the shepherd himself. After the sheep pen had been decorated with green branches and a wreath draped on the gate, the remainder of the ceremony took place in a sequential fashion. At the first sign of daylight, the shepherd would purify the sheep: by sweeping the pen and then constructing a bonfire of straw, olive branches, laurel, and sulfur. The noises produced by this burning combination were interpreted as a beneficial omen. The shepherd would jump through this flame, dragging his sheep along with him. Offerings of millet, cakes, and milk were then presented before Pales, marking the second segment of the ceremony. After these offerings, the shepherd would wet his hands with dew, face the east, and repeat a prayer four times. Such prayers requested Pales' assistance in freeing the shepherd and the flock from evils brought about by accidental wrongdoings (e.g. trespassing on sacred grounds and removing water from a scared water source). The final portion of the rural festival made use of the beverage burranica, a combination of milk and sapa (boiled wine). After consumption of this beverage, the shepherd would leap through the fire three times, bringing and end to the ceremony.
Mmm, vestal-y . . .
Man, artiodactyl herders know how to have a good time. But while I've had mulled wine, and I've had the modern literal descendant of burranica (a posset, or custard with sherry) I've never had milk and boiled wine as a refresher, even when I was working as a shepherd (long story, and I got fired by a dog). I'm going to save a bit of my glass of wine tonight and give that a try, just for history's sake.
The pictures above are for the later, more citified version of the ceremony, with less sheep 'n' leapin' and more solemn bean-burning. Although the R-twins chose to commemorate Parilia because they were rescued from the teats of a she-wolf and raised by a shepherd (see? Bizarre) it appears they had a special hatred of legumes as well. All I know is that if my family church had had more barbecues and sheep races I might still go there today.
And speaking once again of today, it is of note that in Quebec city on this day in 1664 the Governor banned littering the streets with 'straw, manure or anything else'. These were the first hygiene regulations in New France, and thus the first formally instituted in the country that would be Canada. Go sanitation!
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