Saint John the Baptist (São João Batista)

 

John the Baptist, (between 8 and 4 BCE-about CE 27), according to all four Gospels the precursor of Jesus Christ, born in Judaea, the son of the priest Zacharias and Elizabeth, cousin of Mary, the mother of Jesus.  John was a Nazarite from birth and prepared for his mission by years of self-discipline in the desert.  At about the age of 30 he went into the country around the River Jordan preaching penance to prepare for the imminent coming of the Messiah.  He baptized penitents with water as a symbol of the baptism of the Holy Spirit that was to come.  With the baptism of Jesus, his office as precursor was accomplished, and his ministry came to a close soon afterwards.  John angered Herod Antipas, the Judaean ruler, by denouncing him for marrying Herodias, the wife of his half-brother Herod, and was imprisoned (see Luke 3:1-20). At the request of Salome,   daughter of Herodias and Herod, John was beheaded (see Matthew 14:3-11).  In art, John the Baptist is represented as wearing a garment made of hair and often carries a staff and a scroll with the words “Ecce Agnus Dei”, or “Behold the Lamb of God”, a reference to John 1:29. The feast of his birth is celebrated (in the West) on June 24; the feast of his death, on August 29.[1]

Saint John the Baptist has always been the most important saint along the Portuguese coast.  The popular cult of the Portuguese folkloric São João has no similarity in the rest of Europe.  Surprisingly, it is common in the North of Africa, where it is still religious and not folkloric.  John has a prominent place as patron saint of parishes and many chapels and altars all along the coast, from the Algarve to the Minha.  The Biblical texts only tell us of his adult life.  He is said to have been a man who lived without any comfort, a preacher and a stubborn baptizer, an energetic man.  He is the precurson of the Messiah, for the Christians and for popular Judaism.  In the Portuguese cult he is shown in two ways:  as a fat little boy playing with a lamb, or as an adult man wearing a loincloth made of sheepskin (which was the dress of the ecstatic prophets and the emblem of the Essenians).  

São João is associated with a popular Phoenician solar divinity, with Hebraic messianism, and with a web of prophetic tendencies and oriental mystiques.  Above all, São João is the solar god called Baalseiman (Lord of the Heavens) by the Babilonians.  He was shown as a child or as an adolescent.  His partner was the Moon, Ishtar among the Babilonians, Astarte among the Phoenicians, and Anta or Anat among certain peoples of present-day Siria.    

There are two festivals of the Sun, in the solstices, both celebrated in Portugal with bonfires.  The Winter solstice corresponds to the birth of the young Sun, as the birth of Mithra had been in Persia and in Rome through the influence of the oriental religions.  In both the solstices the popular ceremonies of the Sun last twelve days, corresponding to the twelve signs of the Zodiac (people say today that the Sun has "twelve rays").  In the popular rites the solstices begin on the 13th:  the 13th of December and the 13th of June.  The 13th of December is also the day of Santa Lucia (that is, Light; because of ancient influences it is said that "it is because of Santa Lucia that the night is shortened and the day grows" and around Christmas the day has a "sparrow’s beak").  In the Minho region, until recently, the period of twelve days was celebrated with fasting and public singing, prohibited later "because of the abuses" (orgiastic) that these practices caused.  The Christmas tree is kept lighted for twelve days (this period began to be counted starting on the 25th of December).  

The festival of the Summer solstice is part of the popular tradition.  The twelve days of the ancient ecstatic orgy began on 13th of June.  Santo Antonio was the winner in all of this because his festival became contaminated by the sun-worshipping orgy through the coincidence of dates.  Antonio of Lisbon (or of Padua) ended up by taking on the characteristics of the taciturn São João.  

The rooster is also associated with the Sun.  Roosters were sacrificed (they are plucked, roasted and eaten) in the bonfires of the solstices.  The rooster represents the Sun:  the colors of its plume, its gracefulness, its masculine air, the symbol of vigilance, and above all the fact of being in tune with the Sun by announcing its arrival and becoming quiet the moment it disappears, caused people to consider this noble fowl the emblem of the Sun.  The Christian ceremonies are popularly called missa do Galo (mass of the Rooster); the Missal of Matthew, in the medieval liturgy of Braga, mentions two masses on Christmas eve, that of the Rooster (missa Pulorum) at night, and that of the Moon, at dawn.  The roosters ended up by getting confused with the galli, men of Galácia, or Gálatas, who emasculated themselves for the Great Mother Goddess during the Latmentations of Thamus/Attis.  In the Minho people used to offer castrated roosters to certain Ladies of the Lamentation or Ladies of Sorrow.  

In the Beira Litoral region, around the time of the festival of São João, it is common to put up arches of wood adorned with boughs.  The top of these arches is triangular, which is the form of the Sun in the ancient oriental religions; in the center of the arch a star with five or six points is placed; this star is called the "sign of Seimão" (Seiman), emblem of the Sun.  It was also a custom around São João time to send off into the air a paper balloon filled with oil or resin smoke; in the recent past this had the form of a horse or was called "cavalo" (horse) with reference to the Sun being imagined as a horse galloping through the firmament.  The little balloons (balõesinhos) of Santo Antonio and São João, lit today with an electric light, are vestiges of the ancient homages to the Sun.  

Julius Caesar, in Bello gallico, says that during the solstices the Celts of the Peninsula sacrificed a man locked up in a cage made of wooden beams.  We have been able to discover in the toponymy of some villages the place of this sacrifice (connected to the lamentations of Thamuz), which was of a man deified for the circumstance.  There are vestiges of this sacrifice, which was substituted by that of a rooster or by a cloth dummy suspended on a pole and wrapped in aromatic herbs and burnt in the bonfire called "galheiro".  Veiga de Oliveira says that on the poles of the bonfires of the Algarve the people used to hang reed or wooden cages, which contained anthropomorphic images made of bread dough, together with other cakes and cookies, which are eaten roasted.  In other regions we know that a live cat was thrown into the bonfire.  

It is said that on this night "anything can happen" and that "everything is sacred".  Things are seen s if stripped of their terrestrial nature, and they are permeable to all the desires of humans, because they are connected to the Sun, the supreme lord of life and regulator of the Cosmos.  The night of São João is still one of mystery and of ecstatic exhilaration, two thousand years after Bel Sheiman disappeared from the provinces of Lusitania.   

The rituals of São João are the same as the prophetic rites of the Chaldeans.  The most common method used by the sorcerer’s apprentice in Chaldea is the same one that existed in Portugal twenty or thirty years ago:  using a glass of water in which the sorcerer placed the yolk of an egg, then deducing from the configuration that the yolk assumed the answer of the omen asked of him, having first codified the similarities between the shapes of the egg and the things that were being asked to predict.   

Another custom consisted in throwing leaves into the wind and finding the prediction of his wishes in the direction and the shape that they took.  The methods of predicting on the day of São João are infinite, and in anyone’s grasp, since anything can happen and everything is sacred, anyone can invent and use the method he wants as long as he establishes the rules and his own code.  

The holy baths of São João are a speciality on this night, as they were the obsession of certain Jewish sects, like the Essenians who were also worshippers of the Sun, and they are still in use in Islam and in the popular Judaism of North Africa.  Some authors maintain that John the Baptist had been an Essenian:  his religious function was to promote holy baths, "baptize" in the river, which was a pre-Christian Semitic custom.  These baths are still taken, although with the word "bath" we can understand only going to a fountain (or seven fountains) and only wetting one’s hands.  

All along the coast, at midnight, an archaic rite is practiced, which everyone says has therapeutic value.  It is called "passage of the broken child" (passagem do menino quebrado) .  "Broken" refers to the hernias the children suffered from.  The children are passed between two branches of certain trees "the oak or the willow" from the arms of a man (João) to those of a woman (Maria), with the man telling the woman to take the boy who is now cured.  This strange rite is also common in the popular culture of the Magreb.  The rite reproduces a new fecundation (passage of John to Mary) and a new birth (passage between the branches of a tree, which is usually the oak, a sacred tree among the Canaanites and the Hebrews.  

The rituals of São João have a strong licentious overtone today because they were once ecstatic and orgiastic.  São João is a marrying saint, and the collective weddings in Oporto (and by influence, those of Santo Antonio de Lisboa) are vestiges of an ancient revelling inside the temple.  These rituals were directed towards the Sun and were condemned by Yaveh.  The Bible left us an interesting detail about these rituals honoring the Sun in a Phoenician temple dedicated to Baal on Mount Peor, which specialized in sacred prostitution.  The sexaul promiscuity of the Hebrews with the Canaanite women in the temple of Baal Seiman, at time of war, caused the well-known slogan "Make love, not war" to be put into practice.  From the point of view of the Hebrew leaders, the visits of their fighting men to this temple to lie with Canaanite women was the root of their successive defeats.  Yaveh put an end to this state of affairs:  he told Moses to sacrifice all the "headmen of Israel" and anyone who was found in "flagrante delito", men or women, in the temple of Baal Seiman on Mount Peor; a raid was carried out, some men were captured and sacrificed in the way Yaveh had said:  "placed with their faces towards the sun, and their bellies slit", a holocaust carried out in the name of Yaveh-Sun attacking the victims through their sexual parts.  

The contagious ecstasy and the multitudinous frenzy, a common formula of the cult among the Hebrews, Phoenicians, and Egyptians, became integrated into the solar cult of São João, by the first Christians of Palentine and by the Jews, because the saint is common in the popular traditions of both religions.  Saint Jerome, one of the first Christian theologians, visited the grave said to be that of Saint John, in Sebaste (Samaria) and was impressed with the collective raptures, the phenomena of possession and collective delirium which surrounded the cult of the saint.  "Men howled like wolves, barked like dogs, roared like lions, whistled like serpents, snorted like bulls; some twisted their necks and touched their backs with their heads, the women hung themselves by their feet without their clothes falling down; similar scenes took place in front of the tomb of the Precursor".   

These collective raptures still exist, with a great deal of reduction in ectasy, in the north of Portugal on the night of São João.  With several processes, one of which is loud music, and disrespect for convention, the people reach a state of euphoria and of individual freedom that is not too distant from these ecstatic practices, which once were carried out in honor of Saint John.  

In Braga, after visiting the chapel of São João, the way in which the people free themselves from inhibitions is very simple:  they go out into the main avenue carrying a little plastic hammer (formerly a piece of leek), join the compact crowd and walk up and down the street, dozens of times during a night, hitting others "softly" and with a smile.  At first sight the process seems too simple and childish to be connected to the orgiastic festivals of Seiman, but there is a connection.  In the thick crowd that wanders along the avenue, up and down, the tapping of the little hammer on a stranger’s head, without distinction of social class or age, and the smile given and received, eliminates the effects of the daily isolation of people in society, and produces a lack of inhibition.  People lose their individual personality and begin to feel part of an egalitarian multitude,i.e. a human mass.  The crowd becomes like an immense brotherhood.  The simple tapping, given and received, is the link that connects the individuals, and blends them into a crowd where their individual personality ceases to exist.  They are no longer thousands of individuals but an immense community of people that exchange gestures of kindness represented by the reciprocal touch of the hammer.  We find in this little hitting of the hammer the foundation of religion (religare, communicare, communio) which is the same of the ecstatics.(. . .)  

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