12.04.2020

Last night was warm so we slept with the window open and I woke to a polyphonic dawn chorus of ambulance sirens. Sleep was fitful for both of us. Waking up every hour and a half or so. I wonder if it’s the stress of the situation we’re in but these mice are really fucking getting to me. I can’t tell if it was a dream, or auditory hallucination, but I was hearing squeaks and scuttles all night. This morning we went up on the roof for coffee and saw mice poo in the staircase. I think they’re taking over all the apartment buildings.

An ambulance picked someone up in my street in the middle of the night.

Today is Easter Sunday, Wednesday was Passover and Ramadan is coming up. I don’t normally put much significance on these events, apart from maybe to wish a Jewish friend the best on Passover, who I once had the honour of joining for a seder dinner, and got to look at their Haggadah (the Jewish Passover handbook). Ramadan’s a bigger deal because I live in a Muslim area, so I wish a lot of friends and neighbours Ramadan Mubarak – and notice slightly odd opening times in shops, and occasionally a slightly grumpy hypoglycaemic Muslim. This year though, they seem more meaningful. It feels like we’re living through an event that could be canonised the way Passover was by the Jewish slaves in Egypt. I wondered if maybe this period would birth new traditions like our November the 5^th Guy Fawkes celebrations. Depends how it all turns out I suppose.

Last year I made a film in the East London mosque talking about the tradition of Zakat, which is like a very early form of taxation. Muslims are expected to pay a percentage of their wealth as Zakat, which is then distributed to Muslims in need. It’s one of the five pillars of their faith. I was blown away by Friday prayers. Seeing all the people move in unison before something greater than themselves, and hearing the beautiful call to prayer songs ring out was very moving. A kind old Mosque administrator showed me round the building and pointed out where they left a gap in the wall so it didn’t block the light to the star of David stained glass window in the synagogue that stood behind it. I wonder how Ramadan will play out this year. Usually Muslims congregate after dark in each others homes to share iftar, which is their fast breaking celebration. I wonder if it will be a more solemn affair this year, because friends and families won’t be able to see each other except over video calls. But maybe it will have greater significance as people look for meaning.

Easter, and I expect Christmas this year will have much of it’s commerciality stripped from it. I wonder if people will be more likely to ignore it, or take it more seriously. I expect by that point, when it’s getting dark at four in the afternoon people will be crying out for something to celebrate, even if it’s not necessarily the birth of Jesus. These things are deeply ingrained in us, they will find a way.

There’s a reason Sol Invictus, the Roman celebration of the unconquered sun, also took place on the 25^th of December. Saturnalia, the festival of the god Saturn took place between 17^th and 23^rd of December and involved feasting, gift giving, and putting a Saturnalia tree in your house. And many of our Christmas traditions have been handed down from Germanic tribes of Saxons, Jutes, Angles, via their winter festival Yule. Hanging wreathes and kissing under mistletoe are likely to be ancient Britonic druid traditions. All these things go back to the beginnings of time. We need these celebrations. In the secular consumer age we live in (or, lived in), magic symbols like crucifixes have been replaced with equally potent magical brand sigils and runes, or logos. I wonder if the spells and wizardry of commerce will lose some of their potency this year.

Easter is no different. On the surface it’s about the rebirth of Christ, three days after his crucifixion. But that story is much older. It’s about the rebirth of nature. The eighth century monk Bede, from whom we learn most of what we know about that period from his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, written around 730CE, tells us Easter took its name from an Anglo Saxon goddess. “Eostre was a goddess of spring renewal and that’s why her feast is attached the the vernal equinox.” The symbol of Eostre was a rabbit, or hare. That tradition possibly comes from the even earlier Sumerian goddess Ishtar, who was hung naked on a stake, resurrected and ascended from the underworld. The date of Easter isn’t fixed, it depends on the movement of the moon, which itself has strong pagan connotations.

The ancient Greeks believed Zeus allowed Hades to kidnap his daughter Persephene because her mother Demeter would never allow her to marry the god the underworld. When Demeter noticed she was gone, she abandoned her duties of looking after the grains and the fertility of the Earth in order to find her daughter. Eventually, after a long winter of nothing growing, Helios, the sun god who saw everything from his chariot told her what happened. She was fuming. She harangued her husband until he finally gave in and made Hades give his daughter back. But Hades was a crafty bugger. He tricked Persephone to eat some pomegranates before she left, and because she had tasted food of the underworld, she was obliged to go back every year over the winter, in which time her mother searches for her again and nothing grows. Easter is the time she re-emerges from the land of the dead.  

At Easter we celebrate emerging from darkness into the longer days, Jesus’ sacrifice and rebirth, spending time with our families eating chocolate, or even just noticing it’s Easter, however we do it, remembering that we will rise again from this deathly period might be particularly useful this year.

We have an innate need to celebrate these annual temporal landmarks, we don’t just do it with Easter and Christmas. Humanity has a collective circadian rhythm, defined by the movements of the planets and moon. We may think we have conquered time by inventing clocks and train timetables, but it’s much bigger than us. Aside from the solstices when we celebrate Christmas and in summer when people still celebrate at Stone Henge, where the sun rises and sets directly in the middle (also true of the streets of Milton Keynes). Then we have the equinoxes, Easter in Spring and various harvest festivals in Autumn. Then we have what’s known as the solar cross quarter days which are mid way between the equinoxes and solstices. Between winter and spring there is the imbloc cross quarter day, usually in Early February, which is when Americans celebrate Groundhog Day, and other countries celebrate St Valentine’s Day. Then after Easter and before summer solstice we have the next solar cross quarter day, Beltane, May Eve. We celebrate May Day in the UK with a bank holiday, beers and Morris dancing, it’s now considered a workers’ day, but all over Europe they have May Queen festivals. Then in the Autumn Equinox we celebrate the harvest, in Germany for example with Oktoberfest, which is actually in September. Finally, after that we have the solar cross-quarter day known as Samhain, or Halloween, when Persephone goes back into the underworld. Traditionally we remember those we have lost, for example with The Day of the Dead in Mexico, and observe the gate between the worlds of the living and dead hanging slightly ajar on Halloween.

It’s strange observing these times in isolation. We marked Easter with a nice breakfast and a quiet moment looking at the city from the roof. Now I’m going to have a beer.

Enjoy the long weekend and take it easy.