Gracen asks: How did the tradition of predicting weather by checking to see if a rodent did or didn’t see their shadow get its start?
Like so many holiday traditions, the origins and progression of Groundhog Day to what we think of it today as are a bit murky.
However, we’ll try to shed some light on the subject, starting with the day of the year. Groundhog Day is celebrated on February 2nd because it is approximately halfway between the winter solstice (Northern hemisphere), when the Sun is at its southernmost point in the sky, and the March/vernal equinox, when the Sun is in the same plane as the Earth’s equator, making day and night approximately equal length.Much like that there was a Celtic “end of autumn” celebration called Samuin (also called Samhain), that is the root of Halloween, there was around this halfway point (approximately on February 1st), a Celtic festival called Imbolc (also called Imbolg) which was simply a celebration of the start of spring. Whether this festival was the direct root of Groundhog Day isn’t completely clear, but certain elements of it do come into play.
During Imbolc, the celebrants would feast, have bonfires, purify themselves, and practice divination. Among the things they’d try to divine was the weather, including using badgers and serpents to help them try to predict said weather, watching to see if badgers and serpents were about, or still in their dens. This is referenced in various Gaelic songs, such as in this snippet (translated):
The Day of Bride, the birthday of Spring,
The serpent emerges from the knoll,
‘Three-years-olds’ is applied to heifers,
Garrons are taken to the fields.
As happened with the Samuin festival that gave rise to Hallowmas and Halloween, the Catholic Church’s attempt to replace Samuin, the church also seems to have attempted to replace Imbolc with Candlemas on February 2nd, 40 days after Christmas. (Although some argue that Candlemas was an attempt to replace other festivals, like the Roman feast of Lupercalia, though there is a much stronger correlation and evidence pointing to the church attempting to replace Lupercalia with what is now Valentine’s Day, rather than Candlemas).
As mentioned, Imbolc was not just a feast, but also a purification / fire festival, which may or may not have given rise to Candlemas being centered around the burning of candles. Also, the end of this 40 day period would have been the end of the Jewish law purification period for Mary after having given birth to Jesus. (Of course, December 25th was chosen by the church for Christmas to replace pagan celebrations, with the actual birth day of Jesus still hotly debated among theologians, even recently by Pope Benedict XVI who stated in his book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, that he thinks even the year commonly used today is wrong, not just the day.)
In certain areas, Imbolc was also celebrated as the festival of the goddess Brigid (goddess of summer), and in a similar fashion, an attempt at replacement included a feast day on February 1st to the Catholic Saint Brigit of Kildare, who some scholars believe never actually existed at all, just made up specifically for the feast day as the first documented evidence of her didn’t pop up until well after her death.
While some of the similarities between Imbolc and Candlemas in theme were very likely intentional (such as the fire / candle and purity aspects), others were probably not. Soon after Candlemas was established, the former tradition of weather prediction began being associated with Candlemas. For instance, in this little snippet from an old Candlemas song:
If Candlemas day be dry and fair,
The half o’ winter to come and mair,
If Candlemas day be wet and foul,
The half of winter’s gone at Yule.
Similar to how during Imbolc we know they looked for signs of certain animals like snakes and badgers (and possibly others) emerging from their winter homes as a means of predicting weather, other peoples throughout Europe also looked for signs of animals that hibernate as a way to predict the weather. This is why in some regions the day of Candlemas is also called “The Day of the Bear” or “The Day of the Badger”.
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