Bill Petro

HISTORY OF REEK SUNDAY, Part 3: LOCATION

In County Mayo in Ireland, Cruach Phadraig — as it is known in Irish — is also called “The Reek.” It stands at 764 meters or 2510 feet elevation. It is located about 5 miles from the lovely town of Westport, an Irish Tidy Town. St. Patrick’s “Confessions” tells of his slavery in the wood of Fochluth. Evidence relating to the history of St. Patrick suggests that this location was actually on the west shore of Ireland in this area.

Westport is a popular tourist destination in County Mayo, not only as a launching point for the pilgrimage, but for its picture postcard beauty. In the center of the town is an octagon with a pillar featuring St. Patrick. On each of the eight sides is a panel illustrating an event from his life.

The Book of Armagh, a vellum book on display alongside the fabled and ornately illustrated “Book of Kells” at the Trinity College Library in Dublin, is thought to have been written by the hand of Patrick himself and tells of him hearing of the Wood of Fochloth and agreeing to undertake a mission there because of the children crying with a loud voice saying “Come O Holy Patrick to save us.” Though Patrick began his evangelization of Ireland in 432 AD, it wasn’t until 9 years alter that he reached Croagh Patrick just before Easter of 441 AD, or more specifically before Lent.

Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian
www.billpetro.com

HISTORY OF REEK SUNDAY, part 2: PILGRIMAGE

Pilgrims, nature lovers, archeologists, historians and hill climbers come from all over the world to climb the mountain. This pilgrimage has been going on for centuries, and an older one for millennia. More on that later.

The current one has been going on in an active way since 1905 with the dedication of the new St. Patricks Oratory. Pilgrimages had fallen off following the Great Hunger (Potato Famine) of the 1840s and efforts were made to revitalize it. On Sunday July 30, 1905 there were 10,000 pilgrims in attendance of the new church. Night pilgrimages were performed until 1973, but they are now held during the day, sometimes barefooted.

An older tradition goes back even further. Pre-Christian artifacts have been discovered by archeologists suggesting a Celtic hillfort that circled the top of the mountain. On the summit have been found amber, blue and black glass beads dating to the 3rd century BC. The mountain seems to have been revered long before Patrick, and was perhaps the reason he had his fast and contest there. It was believed to be the seat of the old Celtic fertility deity Crom Dubh, often translated as the Dark Stooped One. In pre-Roman times, Crom Dubh seems to have been considered a despotic deity with evil powers.

Throughout Ireland, the Festival of Lughnasa is celebrated at the end of July as the start of the harvest festival in honor of the deity Lugh, the ancient pagan god of the Tuatha De Danann, a people whose name is now encompassed in the Irish word for August — Lughnasa. Lugh, personified as both young and strong, grasped harvest riches from the hands of fate each year by defeating the older god Crom Dubh. Each year the ritual involved cutting the first of the harvest and taking the head of Crom Dubh from its sanctuary and temporarily burying it in a high place. This head (right) survived until it was recently stolen from the wall of a ruined church on the Dingle Peninsula, County Kerry, Ireland.

Locally in County Mayo the celebration is known as Domhnach Crom Dubh (Black Crom Sunday), but it is also known as Garland Sunday, Garlic Sunday, the last Sunday of Summer, and Domhnach na Cruaiche — Reek Sunday.

Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian
www.billpetro.com

HISTORY OF REEK SUNDAY

This week I’m in Boston. But last year at this time I was on the west coast of Ireland, where they say, “West o’ here, da next parish over, dat’s Boston.”

This Sunday, the last Sunday in July every year, marks Reek Sunday, or Garland Sunday in Ireland. At this time between 25,000 and 40,000 people will walk the 3-hour round trip up the Reek Mountain, or Croagh Patrick in County Mayo, Ireland, the sacred mountain of St. Patrick in a popular pilgrimage in honor of the patron saint of Ireland, commemorating his driving the snakes from Ireland. Over 100,000 people a year visit Croagh Patrick.

In this history miniseries, we’ll look at the Tradition, the Pilgrimage, and the Location.

The Tradition

On the summit of this mountain it is believed that St. Patrick fasted and prayed for 40 days in 441 A.D. The story goes that at the end of this fast St. Patrick threw a bell down the mountain side and banished all the serpents from Ireland. The fact that snakes never were native to Ireland does not diminish the tradition. Some believe that the banishing of the snakes represents either certain pagan practices or outright evil. In any event, the pilgrimage in honor of St. Patrick goes back to this date. Radiocarbon dating of the remnants of a dry stone oratory is dated at between 430 and 890 AD. This oratory or place of worship is similar in design to the magnificently preserved Gallarus Oratory found on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, Ireland. The bell we have now dates from 600 to 900 AD and is kept by the National Museum of Ireland.

As to the Saint’s bell, the so-called “Black Bell of St. Patrick” it remained a highly venerated relic with an old reference in O’Flaherty’s History of West Connaught dating back to 1098 AD. The tradition is that the bell was originally made of a shiny white metal though it became black from constant pelting at the demons in the form of black birds and venomous snakes who came after St. Patrick on the mountain. Patrick banished these powers into the hollow of Log na Deamhan (Lake of the Demons.) The devil’s mother, Corra (the fiery one,) escaped and flew into the lake south of the mountain, known since as Loch na Corra.

Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian
www.billpetro.com

Movie Review: Hairspray

Kenetic! That word alone captures the energy of this movie. This is easily the most enjoyable film of the summer (so far) that starts the viewer with a grin and the ends with applause. It is tempting to say this is the best movie musical since Grease. Sure, other musicals have been good (Moulin Rouge) even Academy Award winning (Chicago) but none of them were so exciting, so electric. This movie worked!

The characters were classic and endearing.

• Nikki Blonsky plays the pleasantly plump heroine Tracy Turnblad who captures our hearts with her opening song “Good Morning, Baltimore.”
• Christopher Walken was a jewel, as Tracy’s father who is delightful in his scenes with other characters.
• Michelle Pfeiffer plays Velma Von Tussle, the TV station manager, faded beauty queen and mother of an aspiring “Hairspray Queen.”
• Jerry Stiller (yes, father of Ben) who played Wilbur Turnblad in the original movie appears in this one as Mr. Pinky.
• James Marsden as the eponymous Corny Collins, the handsome host of the local teen dance show, pure white bread but an interest in making the show more integrated. He shows us that there is life after being an X-man (Cyclops).
• Zac Efron plays Link Larking, the show’s hunk-o-rama and the love interest of Tracy. He’s also the heartthrob in Disney’s “High School Musical.”
• Queen Latifah was big, blond, and beautiful. She consumed every scene she was in, both in terms of her presence and her voice. She can rock, she can do gospel. When she cut loose, it was like Aretha Franklin in the “Blues Brothers.”
• John Travolta as Edna Turnblad, Tracy’s mother, was the big surprise. He dressed in drag and a fat suit and many wondered if it would work. It did. He effected a Baltimore accent — where they make “on” a two syllable word — and it was delightful to see him dance with both daughter and husband.

You were waiting to see if he would make a “tip of the hat” to any of his iconic movies. Would it be “Saturday Night Fever,” “Urban Cowboy,” or “Grease?” No, it was “Pulp Fiction” where he dances with two fingers dragged across his face. Everyone in the audience caught it.

Often throughout the movie one is reminded of other movie musicals. For example, the “dancing in the street” scene in Hairspray hearkens back to one of the scene in “The Blues Brothers” but it’s done better here. One of the conflicts set up in this movie is between the “nice” white dancers who appear daily on the TV dance show, and the black dancers who are showcased only once a month on Motormouth Maybelle’s (Latifah) hosted “Negro Day”. The dancing by the blacks, led by Maybelle’s son (Elijah Kelley) is so vigorous that one is reminded of the virile Sharks street dance in “West Side Story”. The final dance-off scene at the end was like “Hand Jive” in Grease, but was so much better that it blew away the competition. The black “girl group” showed us what “Dreamgirls” should have been, but never achieved.

This movie is based on the 1988 John Waters film, which was turned into a Broadway musical in 2002. Waters has a cameo as a flasher in the current film. Though set in Baltimore, it was actually filmed in Toronto.

60s nostalgia is currently in full bloom not only because it’s the 40th anniversary of “The Summer of Love” but also with such new hit series like AMC TV’s “Mad Men” about 1960’s Madison Avenue advertising men. But by trimming some of the issues from the original movie/show, Hairspray managed to get out with a PG rating. The 60’s of this movie is not the 60’s we usually refer to — this is before the Beatles, before the death of JFK, before drugs and free love. This was an era when kids talked about cooties and teens were most concerned about the latest dance, their image, their hair, and their hairspray.

And it works.

Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian
www.billpetro.com

Perhaps the saddest book I’ve ever read, the first “new” J.R.R. Tolkien book in 30 years is “…long and sad in the telling, as are all tales of Middle Earth.” While it is beautiful in its composition and deep in its scope, it contains in it at all times a sense of “doom” that seems inescapable, and yet this doom is clearly within the scope of the freewill of the characters. A tragedy beyond anything Shakespeare ever wrote, one cannot shake a sense of Hamlet.

One must appreciate the tone and theme of Tolkien’s previously published Silmarillion to fully enjoy this book, though this book’s scope is more limited both in terms of time and people. Nevertheless, there is a lot to take in and most of Beleriand is used as the canvas for this portrait. For that reason, the reader will find that the map is a bit more abbreviated than that in the Silmarillion. While this is the most recent of Tolkien’s posthumous works, it was one of the first he set his hand to, starting back in 1918 and working off-and-on, for years, as he did with the larger Silmarillion. But it was his trilogy The Lord of The Rings from which he got his fame.

The nature and effect of evil is a major theme, both in terms of evil personified in Morgoth (to whom Sauron was but a servant), as well as the effects of pride and hubris in the protagonists. The ending had a more than one crescendo, and moved me to tears. Only the Silmarillion has done this to me before, as one finally realizes the tragic and poignant fate of the Elves, the Firstborn of Middle Earth.

Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood Tolkien fanatic
www.billpetro.com

070707

July 7, 2007.

Even more — seven AM, seven minutes and seven seconds: 07:07:07 07/07/07. That won’t happen again, at least for 12 more hours. It would make James Bond envious.

Of course, we recently had an event like this at three minutes and four seconds after 2 AM on the sixth of May of this year, namely 02:03:04 05/06/07.

I mentioned something similar last year, on April 5 at two minutes and three seconds after 1 o’clock, the time and date was 01:02:03 04/05/06. What is unique about this current phenomena, however, is that it doesn’t change if you live in Europe or someplace that uses dd/mm/yy format.

These kind of things happen more frequently than you’d think. I remember when I was a kid, being impressed that pennies that were dated 1961 had a date that looked the same upside down.

Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian
www.billpetro.com