On St Faith's Eve
Subversion and Sweetness in the Autumn Dark
Hello, dear readers, both old and new. I must begin this sharing with a small apology for not having written anything here, or anywhere, for so long. It has been a most difficult summer.
If you have been here for a while, you may recall that my Plant Spirit Challenge in May was to journey with the hawthorn tree, and what a wild enchantment that has been! I have learned so much about boundaries, borders, and how power is wielded, and in the most striking and surprising of ways. But the events bringing that learning have led to an ongoing decline in my husband’s mental wellbeing. He has given me permission to share that he navigates the world through autism, post traumatic stress disorder, and probable chronic traumatic encephalopathy (a degenerative disease stemming from repeated head injuries), and that has made it challenging for me to find time to write, as you can imagine. Now, with the darkening evenings I am though feeling an increased need to settle in and share. Hopefully, I will be able to do that more soon. In the meantime, here is a little autumn weaving to keep you company on this lovely night.
Tonight is St Faith's Eve, and so we have come to the time of year when, if we choose to follow the folk traditions of our ancestors, we are utterly OBLIGED to turn our minds to baking and the eating of delicious cakes. I am especially looking forward to soul cakes and harcake for Hallowmas, Cattern cakes for Catterntide, the warm jollity of Stir-up Sunday, lamb's wool for wassail, and all manner of other cosy kitchen exploits.
After the flurry of activity, and often anxiety, over harvest preparing and eating these foods would have been a welcome opportunity to turn back to the hearth and home, to gather in celebration, and to assure wobbly hearts, rumbling bellies, and the waiting dark, that we had gathered enough to see us through until spring.
Although most of us no longer live in a world of harvests and winter fires, the bones of us have not moved far from that way of life and there is something reassuring about living seasonally, seeking out the ingredients and recipes that our grandmothers and their grandmothers would have used as a prayer in the dark, seeing their hands in our hands, kneading the dough, baking the bread. And so today has brought St Faith's Eve and Faith cakes.
St Faith was a young woman in 3rd Century France. Her sisters were named Hope and Charity; an echo of the Three Fates found in so many cultures. Faith is said to have been martyred, having refused to denounce her Christian beliefs, and the method of her dispatch was to be baked on a brazier and then beheaded. I am not convinced that St Faith truly existed, and neither were our ancestors as, rather than spending her Feast Day (6th October) in contemplation of the things we do to one another, they saw it as an opportunity to bake cakes for their baked saint! It's interesting that today is also the feast day of St Aurea of Paris, whose name comes from the Greek for 'golden' and who is connected to bread ovens and the baking of bread.
Returning to St Faith, her cakes, which should be completed before midnight on St Faith's Eve (5th October, or 18th October by the old calendar) by three maidens, who must each turn the cake around three times in complete silence, are traditionally a simple concoction of flour, salt, sugar, and water. Some recipes even include sand to allow initials to be carved in the dough. These are known as 'dumb cakes', hence the silence, which were often cooked on saints' feast days (St Agnes', St Mark's, St John's, St Anne's Eve), and at other liminal times, such as midsummer, All Hallows, New Year's Eve, when it was believed that the boundary between this world and the next was at its thinnest and that divination was particularly effective. St Faith's Eve was a time to dream of future husbands.
Having baked the cake, it would be cut into three pieces, one for each young woman. Then each third would be broken into three times three, and each of the nine pieces would be passed three times through the wedding ring of a woman who had been married (preferably happily) for seven years. The nine pieces were then eaten (sand, not included) whilst reciting,
"Oh, good St Faith, be kind tonight,
and bring to me my heart's delight,
let me my future husband view,
and be my vision chaste and true."
The wedding ring would then be hung from the bedhead, presumably the women all slept in one big bed or used different wedding rings, and prophetic dreams were assured, especially if the dreamers had walked backwards to their bedroom.
I am not in need of a husband just now but I still love to follow our folk traditions in my own somewhat non-traditional way. It matters to experience them through touch and movement, rather than only the intellect and imagining. I learn so much about the spells woven, and why they mattered, by doing so. In making St Faith Cakes last year, I felt how, after a busy spring and summer on the land, this invitation to create woman space, and a space where non-verbal communication, and so deep connection, was required would have been an important medicine. And, in a world where exclusively female space is often considered threatening and subversive, remembering that women were once denied pockets lest we conceal seditious pamphlets in them, the excuse of seeking a husband would have smoothed over any objections from the men.
May the three sisters stir us up a delicious and subversive cake for us all on this chilly autumn night. Have Faith.
References:
http://www.theoldfoodie.com/2006/10/womens-cakes.html,
https://greenteaoverrice.com/.../saint-faith-cakes-for.../
and the book, 'Maypoles, Martyrs, & Mayhem: 366 Days of British Myths, Customs, and Eccentricities' by Quentin Cooper and Paul Sullivan.
Ah! So good to hear from you.
Had not heard of this bake and what a lovely explanation of dumb cakes. I rather think our young maidens dream of other maidens these days!