The night of St. Thomas (December 21st), popularly considered to be the longest night in the year, is the date consecrated by Saxon superstition to the celebration of the games which elsewhere are usual on All-Halloween. Every girl puts her fate to the test on that evening, and there are various ways of so doing, with onions, flowers, shoes, etc.
One way of interrogating Fate is with a sharp knife to cut an apple in two. If in doing so no seed has been split, then the wish of your heart will be fulfilled.
Similar games are also practised on Sylvester night (December 31st), which night is also otherwise prophetic of what is to happen during the coming year. If it be clear, then the fowls will lay many eggs that year, and bright moonlight means full granaries. A red dawn on New-year’s Day means war, and wind is significant of the pest or cholera.
[CHAPTER XXX.]
SAXON CUSTOMS AND DRAMAS.
Some of the Saxon customs are peculiarly interesting, as being obviously remnants of paganism, and offer curious proof of the force of verbal tradition, which in this case has not only borne transmigration from a distant country, but likewise weathered the storm of two successive changes of religion.
It speaks strongly for the tenacity of pagan habits and trains of thought, that although at the time these Saxon colonists appeared in Transylvania they had already belonged to the Christian Church for over three hundred years, yet many points of the landscape in their new country received from them pagan appellations. Thus we find the Götzenberg, or mountain of the gods,[61] which rises above the village of Heltau; and the Wodesch and Wolenk applied to woods and plains, both evidently derived from Woden.
Another remnant of paganism is the feurix or feuriswolf, which yet lingers in the minds of these people. According to ancient German mythology, the feuriswolf is a monster which on the last day is to open his mouth so wide that the upper jaw will touch the sky and the lower one the earth; and not long ago a Saxon woman bitterly complained in a court of justice that her husband had cursed her over-strongly in saying, “Der Wärlthangd saul dich frieszen!”—literally, “May the world-dog swallow thee!”
Many old pagan ceremonies are likewise still clearly to be distinguished through the flimsy shrouding of a later period—their origin piercing unmistakably through the surface-varnish of Christianity, thought necessary to adapt them to newer circumstances, and, like a clumsily remodelled garment, the original cut asserting itself despite the fashionable trimmings now adorning it. Thus, for instance, in many popular rhymes and dialogues it has been clearly proved that those parts now assigned to the Saviour and St. Peter originally belonged to the old gods Thor and Loki, while the faithless apostle Judas has had thrust upon him the personification of a whole horde of German demons. As to St. Elias, who in some parts of Hungary, as well as in Roumania, Serbia, and Croatia, is supposed to have the working of the thunder-bolts, there can be little doubt that he is verily no other than the old thunder-god Thor under a Christian mask.
One of the most striking of the aforementioned Christianized dramas is the Tod-Austragen, or throwing out the Death—a custom still extant in several Transylvanian villages, and which may likewise still be found existing in some remote parts of Germany.