New Moon St. Mark’s Day: is it real?
In the film New moon from the twilight saga, Bella arrives in Volterra, Italy just in time to stop Edward from revealing himself as a vampire to a crowd of mortals at the Saint Mark’s Day festival on March 19. Festival-goers, dressed in red hooded robes, march in a procession with a statue of Saint Mark to the church in the center of town. In it Twilight In the world, “St. Marcus” is celebrated by mortals for ridding the city of vampires, when he himself was, in fact, a vampire. Volterra is the home of the Volturri, the lawmakers of the vampire world. Mark is one of them. Some Twilight fans wear red on March 19 to commemorate this holiday.
New Moon the author Stephanie Meyer borrowed the fictional Saint Mark’s Day from the real European celebration of Saint Mark’s Day. She changed the date: Saint Mark’s Day is April 25. Because the date coincides with the celebrations of Easter (a mobile holiday; the date varies, but usually occurs in March or April) and a number of other Eurasian spring festivals, Saint Mark’s Day is believed to be a Christianized version of a much older pagan observance. In the book Ostara, Edain McCoy writes: “As was done with many pagan festivals in Europe, the early church attempted to refocus the symbolism of Ostara [the spring festival for Germanic Pagans] on the Feast Day of San Marcos. Instead of being a festival of rebirth, the imagery of San Marcos focused on death and martyrdom, through which the Christian revival is achieved.
Saint Mark is traditionally considered the author of the Gospel of Mark in the Christian Bible. He is believed to be the companion of Saint Paul, the great early Christian evangelist, referred to in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles as “John Mark.” A disciple of Paul, Mark is believed to have used Paul’s preaching as the basis for the Gospel. He is also remembered as the founder of the Coptic Church. Coptic tradition holds that Mark appears in the Gospels as the young man who brought water to the house where the Last Supper of Jesus and his Apostles took place, as the young man who fled naked when Jesus was arrested, and who spilled the water that Jesus turned into wine at the wedding in Cana.
Mark is said to have been martyred on April 25, 68 in Alexandria, Egypt. A group of local people resented his attempt to turn them away from their traditional gods. They put a rope around his neck and dragged him through the streets until he was killed. The main sanctuaries of him are in Egypt and Italy. The Italian shrine to him is the Basilica of San Marco in Venice, which is traditionally said to be the place where Mark’s remains are buried. So he really does have a connection to Italy, though not specifically to the city of Volterra.
Perhaps because of his martyrdom, many curious traditions arose over the centuries about the celebration of the feast of Saint Mark. In 17th to 19th century England, especially in the north and west, folklore held that the specters of those who would die the following year would process, in the order in which they would die, through the churchyard and into the church at midnight on St Mark’s Eve. Some said that the procession would be of coffins, or of decapitated or rotting corpses. Others said that the procession would be of specters identifiable as ghosts, and that one could sit and watch the procession as it passed and thus know who was going to die.
To see these specters, the folklore said, one had to fast. Another legend said that one had to be present in the cemetery on the eve of Saint Mark for three years in a row, and only in the third year would one see the specters. Sometimes these living observers would see their own specters and die soon after. Another superstition regarding Saint Mark’s Eve is that on this night, witches who had sold their souls to the devil (or written their names in the devil’s book) and wished to retain their supernatural powers had to walk three times around the church backwards, look through the keyhole, and recite certain words, or their powers would be lost.
Another traditional activity on the eve of San Marcos was to remove the ashes from the hearth. If the ashes formed the shape of a shoe, someone living in the house would die during the year.
Saint Mark’s Eve was one of the three nights of the year associated with the dead. The others are the eve of Saint John and the eve of All Saints. According to some legends, in these three nights those who have died can return to earth as spirits. This belief about Halloween is a Christian appropriation of the Celtic harvest festival of Samhain, the point at which the veil between the living and the dead was thinnest, and also the midpoint between autumn and winter. Similarly, Saint Mark’s Eve marks the midpoint between spring and summer and is associated with the pagan festival of Ostara. Saint John’s Eve, traditionally celebrated on June 23, is associated with the pagan festival of the summer solstice.
However, not all legends associated with Saint Mark’s Eve are associated with death. The night was also one where the young women tried to guess who their future mates would be. There were several ways to achieve this: by picking twelve sage leaves at midnight, going nine times around a haystack while reciting: “Here is the scabbard, where is the knife?” or baking a silly cake, eating a piece of the cake, and then walking with her back to bed without saying a word (hence the word “silly”). If a woman did any of these things, but especially if she prayed to Saint Mark while she did them, she would see the shadow or glimpse the man she would one day marry. However, if she went to bed without seeing that shadow and she dreamed of a freshly dug grave, it meant that she would die single.
However, these are largely English customs. In Italy, if Saint Mark’s Day is celebrated, it is with banquets, drinks and/or bread offerings to the less fortunate. The custom of wearing red and having a procession seems to be an invention of Stephanie Meyer.