"St. Swithun’s Day: A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "A Handbook of Saxon Sorcery & Magic" and "Hallowed Ground: The Folklore of Churches and Churchyards"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
July 14
St. Swithun’s Day: A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall
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Winchester,
the year 971: A procession of monks carries a coffin of bones across the
cathedral close, from a weathered outdoor grave toward a magnificent new
basilica built specifically to receive them. Contemporary chroniclers record
miracle after miracle attending the move (the sick healed, the blind restored)as
Bishop Æthelwold formally installs the relics of a man who had died over a
century earlier in near-total obscurity. On this day, in England at least, that
man is still remembered—though almost entirely for something the medieval monks
who moved him never claimed happened at all.
Every July
15th, somewhere in England, someone will glance at a rainy sky and mutter a
version of the old rhyme: St Swithun’s Day, if thou dost rain, for forty days
it will remain. The popular version of the story (the one repeated in almanacs
and, per today’s celebration, in more than a few history calendars) holds that
the saint was reburied against his wishes in 971, and that the rain which
followed was his posthumous fury. It is a wonderful story. It is also, as far
as the actual medieval record is concerned, backwards…
A Saint of Myth and Legend
The “real” Swithun is almost frustratingly thin as a historical figure. He served as Bishop of Winchester from his consecration in 852 until his death roughly a decade later, and contemporary documentation amounts to little more than his signature as a witness on nine surviving royal charters and a single terse entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. What little later writers preserved of his character (although it took over a century for anyone to bother writing it down) describes a bishop who made his diocesan rounds on foot rather than on horseback, who invited the poor rather than the wealthy to his table, and who convinced King Æthelwulf to donate a tenth of the crown’s lands to the Church. His best-attested miracle, fittingly modest, involves restoring a basket of eggs that workmen had maliciously smashed on a bridge—which is why medieval art typically depicts him holding broken eggs at his feet, a detail considerably stranger and more charming than anything the “rain legend” suggests.
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The most famous detail of his story in verifiable medieval tradition is Swithun’s own deathbed request, recorded by the twelfth-century chronicler William of Malmesbury: that he be buried not inside the cathedral, but outside its north wall, “where passers-by might tread on his grave and raindrops fall on him from the eaves.” It is a request built entirely from humility, and it is old enough (Malmesbury was writing in the early 1100s, drawing on tradition already established by his time) to represent something closer to genuine medieval memory than later embellishment. The man who asked to be rained on in death has, appropriately enough, become the patron saint the English pray to for relief from drought.
When It Rains, It Pours
Here is where
the popular version of the story runs directly against the medieval sources it
claims to summarize. Every writer close to the actual event, such as
tenth-century biographers Lantfred and Wulfstan, both working within a
generation of the 971 translation, agree that Bishop Æthelwold moved Swithun’s
remains indoors in accordance with the saint’s own wishes, communicated
through a vision, not against them. There is no contemporary mention of a storm
at all, let alone one framed as divine anger. The idea that Swithun was moved
against his will and punished his movers with forty days of rain cannot be
traced in the historical record any earlier than the seventeenth or eighteenth
century—a full seven hundred years after the event it claims to describe, and a
direct inversion of what the earliest sources actually say.
So where did
the rain actually come from? The antiquarian James Raine
offered one plausible answer: Durham chroniclers recorded a genuinely
catastrophic downpour on St, Swithun’s Day in 1315, a real and memorable
weather event that later storytellers may simply have grafted onto the older,
gentler translation legend. Others have proposed the pattern runs deeper
still—scholar John Earle suspected a pre-Christian day of augury lurking
beneath the Christian feast day, and the comparison holds up reasonably well:
France attributes near-identical forty-day forecasting power to St. Medard’s
Day in June, Flanders to St. Godelieve, Germany to the “Seven Sleepers,” Russia to Sampson the
Hospitable—a whole scattered European family of saints, none obviously related
to one another, all pressed into service as unwitting weather prophets. That
kind of pattern, repeating independently across regions with no shared textual
source, tends to point toward something older than any one saint: a seasonal
turning point the culture needed to explain long before it had Swithun’s name
to hang the explanation on.
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There is, delightfully, a genuine kernel of meteorological truth buried under all of it: mid-July is roughly when the jet stream tends to settle into whatever pattern will broadly hold until late August, which gives the proverb a real, if modest, statistical logic. The Guinness Book of Records has nonetheless caught the rule failing spectacularly on more than one occasion—sunny in 1924 followed by thirty wet days out of the next forty, and the reverse in 1913—which feels like exactly the kind of detail Swithun himself, a man who asked only for a humble grave under a dripping eave, would have found quietly amusing.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS: DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern
Occultist is proud to present today’s “Daily Occult Review” from our
ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... In honor of
St Swithun, the Anglo-Saxon world he belonged to, and the churchyard folklore
that outlived him...
A Handbook of Saxon Sorcery & Magic: Wyrdworking, Rune Craft, Divination & Wortcunning
By Alaric Albertsson |
Llewellyn Worldwide
Swithun lived
and died a Christian bishop, but he lived and died an Anglo-Saxon one, in
the same cultural world of wyrd, wortcunning, and folk custom that Albertsson’s
handbook sets out to reconstruct for modern practitioners. Rather than treating
Anglo-Saxon England as a footnote to later Wiccan and Druidic revivals,
Albertsson goes directly to the source: rune craft using the
thirty-three-character Old English Futhorc, herbal healing via wortcunning,
soothsaying, and the consecration of a ritual seax. It is a useful reminder
that the same culture capable of producing a bishop remembered for humility and
a broken-egg miracle also carried, just beneath the surface, an entire living
folk-magical tradition that Christianity absorbed rather than erased—the same
undercurrent, in miniature, that quietly rewrote Swithun’s own translation into
a tale of a wrathful, weather-commanding spirit centuries after the fact.
Hallowed Ground: The Folklore of Churches and Churchyards
Mark Norman | Crossed Crow Books
If Albertsson
supplies the world Swithun came from, this volume supplies the exact tradition
that turned his memory into a weather proverb in the first place. Mark Norman’s
Hallowed Ground surveys the surprisingly rich body of folklore,
superstition, and quiet pagan residue attached to English parish churches and
their graveyards—the divination customs once practiced on consecrated ground,
the clergymen rumored to keep their own occult libraries, the vestiges of older
belief worked into the very stonework of buildings built to replace it.
Swithun’s own legend, humble deathbed request quietly inflated over seven
centuries into a tale of divine tantrum, is precisely the kind of transformation
this book is built to explain: not a single invention, but the slow,
collective, half-remembered work of a churchyard tradition that never fully
stopped being magical, no matter how many centuries of respectable Sunday
worship were built on top of it.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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