DRAMATURGICAL NOTE Bonfire Night or St. John’s Eve By Amy Stoller Midsummer Eve, June 23, is Bonfire Night; a pre-Christian celebration in its Christian guise as St. John’s Eve. Like all of Ireland’s ancient holidays, it is a petition for fruitfulness—of land, sea, and people—and the warding off of ill luck. It is traditionally celebrated with the bonfires that give it its name—literally bonefires, with animal bones tossed into the peat used for fuel. The fires are built on a hilltop, or the gap between two fields, or at a crossroads, and lit at sundown (around 10:00 in June). The night is spent in singing and dancing, telling old tales, and praying for a bountiful harvest. Once Áine—goddess of the sun, fertility, and cattle—might have been invoked. Now maybe an old man leads the villagers in a simple prayer: In the honour of God and of St John, to the fruitfulness and profit of our planting and our work, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Lady Francesca Wilde (Oscar’s mother), tells us what happens next. “When the fire has burned down to a red glow the young men strip to the waist and leap over or through the flames…he who braves the greatest blaze is considered the victor over the powers of evil, and is greeted with tremendous applause. When the fire burns still lower, the young girls leap the flame, and those who leap clean over three times back and forward will be certain of a speedy marriage and good luck in after life, with many children. When the fire is nearly burnt and trampled down, the yearling cattle are driven through the hot ashes, and their back is singed with a lighted hazel twig. These hazel rods are kept safely afterwards, being considered of immense power... Whoever enters his house first with the sacred fire brings the good luck of the year with him.” “Them old piseogs!” says Tom. (A piseog, or pishogue, is a superstition.) He’s been to London, and has lived in the modern world. But now he’s back in the stony, unforgiving fields of rural Connemara—a place untouched by electricity, running water, or farm equipment powered by anything other than man and beast. Old methods, and old customs, like Tom’s father, are not easily dislodged. And so Tom is the first to enter his home with a piece of lighted turf, to bring luck to the household. You can drive old gods underground so far and no further, before they have their say.
Illustration by Micheál mac Liammóir for his story, St. John’s Eve, published in Fairy Nights (Oícheanta Sí) in 1922.