An interesting Suavic, though more generally, European, custom involves jumping over fires typically done on June 23rd.
Oskar Kolberg in “Lud” his ethnographic super treatise on Polish folk customs mentions this custom several times.
For example, he cites to a description of this custom from the town of Bilcz near Sandomierz brought to Kolberg’s attention by Jan Kanty Gregorowicz via his “Village Pictures” (Obrazki Wiejskie) volume 4 (in Kolberg’s Lud volume 1 – dealing with the region of Sandomierskie that is the region about Sandomierz) . Therein, we hear of two teams of village women who spent the entire day preparing for the sobótka (that is the “Sabbath”) on the night of the 23rd. Then, sat the evening approached, they headed out into the fields where they tried to set up a fire, interestingly, with leaves of Artemisia (bylica). They started dancing around their fires while holding hands with their respective “teammates”. Then a lot of the villagers showed up including the landowner and the local officials. The women would make garlands for one another, different types of which were given out to different participants (with specific reasons for why each got that particular wreath, some being more desirable than others). Some of the young men that in the meantime had gathered began to jump over fires. More dances followed as well as more jumping by the young gents. Then, inevitably, the women and men were paired up – interestingly, through songs, that is their names were matched up in the songs by the singing groups somehow. More dancing followed. Then some drinking until daybreak. Interestingly, the name that keeps coming up is the Green (think rebirth of nature) or White (think the Sun) John. The entire enterprise has an erotic as well as solar connotation, of course, not the least given the dancing around the fire which probably symbolized the Reborn Sun.
Kolberg (Lud, volume 10) reports the same for part of the Great Duchy of Poznan, specifically near Pleszew, Konin and in the forest parts of Kujavia.
Similar Saint John’s Eve festivities took place all over Poland. In Kolberg’s description of the customs of Mazovia (Lud, volume 24) the theme of fires and garlands or wreaths comes up again.
Here we have young men setting fires on the shores of the Vistula and young women placing the wreaths on the water with little fires on them and sending them down river.
Once again bylica is involved (see here and here); in this case, the bylica is tossed onto the straw roofs of those dwellings home to single women – where the Artemisia gets stuck on the straw, the occupant will get married that year.
As an aside another interesting custom mentioned here has to do with the fern flower (kwiat paproci or in Lithuanian, paparčio žiedas) which, apparently blooms on the Eve of Saint John’s Eve.
What is interesting is that these Polish customs also appear in other parts of Europe. James George Frazer‘s “The Golden Bough” once again points the way. Interestingly, he cites similar dances coming from the area known as the Lechrain (around the River Lech) – here it was pairs who would jump over the fire. Given that the area was formerly inhabited by the Vindelici and given the “Lechitic” origin of the Poles according to their myths, this is particularly interesting. Here is that description that caught Frazer’s attention tom “Aus dem Lechrain” by Karl von Leoprechting.
Another author cited by Frazer is Wilhelm Mannhardt. Curiously, Mannhardt was well aware not just of Leoprechting’s work but also of Kolberg’s description of the Bielcz custom when he wrote his Der Baumkultus der Germanen und ihrer Nachbarstämme (“The Tree Worship Among the Germans and Their Neighboring Tribes”). If you are interested in “tree worship” among the Suavs you can look up gaj (meaning tree grove) or gaik (meaning a small tree grove or a small, decorated tree) or maik (play on “May”) which may also have an etymological connection to Gaia.
Also, curiously, Mannhardt points out that the same custom was already observed by Byzantines in the 12th century citing Theodore Balsamon and as his explanation for how this “northern European” custom made its way to the Eastern Empire specifically suggests that it may have been the Suavs “or other” peoples who brought it there! (More likely this goes to the cult of Iasion and Demeter – aka Gisanke and Demeter? – in which Zeus also got involved )
What did Balsamon write? This canon lawyer was a writer of a number of works including commentaries on the Ecumenical Council of 692 (also known as the Council in Trullo or the Quinisext Council) whose Canon 65 read as follows:
“The fires which are lighted on the new moons by some before their shops and houses, upon which (according to a certain ancient custom) they are wont foolishly and crazily to leap, we order henceforth to cease. Therefore, whosoever shall do such a thing, if he be a cleric, let him be deposed; but if he be a layman, let him be cut off. For it is written in the Fourth Book of the Kings ‘And Manasses built an altar to the whole host of heaven, in the two courts of the Lord, and made his sons to pass through the fire, he used lots and augurs and divinations by birds and made ventriloquists [or pythons ] and multiplied diviners, that he might do evil before the Lord and provoke him to anger.'”
Balsamon (who, by the way, elsewhere also wrote on specifically Suavic customs) was commenting on this custom some half a millennium later and yet was able to provide a lot of details suggesting that the custom continued in his time (translation is Robert Browning’s):
“On the evening of June 23 men and women gathered on the seashore and in certain houses and dressed a first-born girl in bridal garments. After drinking together and leaping and dancing and shooting in Bacchic fashion, they put sea water in a narrow-mouthed bronze vessel, together with objects belonging to each of them; and as if the girl had obtained from Satan the power to foretell the future, they called out questions about this or that good or undesirable thing. And the girl picked out objects at random from those that had been put in the vessel and displayed them. The foolish owners took them and were told what was to happen to them, be it lucky or unlucky. On the next day they went with the girl to the seashore with drums dancing, and took great quantities of sea water and sprinkled their houses with it. Not only were these rites celebrated by the cleverer – – but throughout the night they lit fires of dry grass and jumped over them, seeking omens of good or bad fortune and other matters by daemonic methods. And the ways by which they went in and out, and the rooms in which the magic rites were celebrated, and the surrounding ground, they decorated with gold-embroidered cloths and silk tissues. And they crowned them with leaves of trees to honour and welcome, so it seems, that Satan whom they had made their familiar.”
Here is an interesting description of similar festivals in Bretagne (former Venetic territory) from volume 10 of Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” (third edition).
For another version of the same festival, this time in Bohemia (Jan of Holešov) see here.
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