Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things

by Charles Panati

  The Greeks adopted the Egyptian idea of birthday celebrations, and from the Persians, renowned among ancient confectioners, they added the custom of a sweet birthday cake as hallmark of the occasion. The writer Philochorus tells us that worshipers of Artemis, goddess of the moon and the hunt, celebrated her birthday on the sixth day of every month by baking a large cake of flour and honey. There is evidence suggesting that Artemis’s cake might actually have been topped with lighted candles, since candles signified moonlight, the goddess’s earthward radiance.

  Birthdays of Greek deities were celebrated monthly, each god hailed with twelve fetes a year. At the other extreme, birthdays of mortal women and children were considered too unimportant to observe. But when the birthday of the man of the house arrived, no banquet was deemed too lavish. The Greeks called these festivities for living males Genethlia, and the annual celebrations continued for years after a man’s death, with the postmortem observances known as Genesia.

  The Romans added a new twist to birthday celebrations. Before the dawn of the Christian era, the Roman senate inaugurated the custom (still practiced today) of making the birthdays of important statesmen national holidays. In 44 B.C., the senate passed a resolution making the assassinated Caesar’s birthday an annual observance—highlighted by a public parade, a circus performance, gladiatorial combats, an evening banquet, and a theatrical presentation of a dramatic play.

  With the rise of Christianity, the tradition of celebrating birthdays ceased altogether.

  To the early followers of Christ, who were oppressed, persecuted, and martyred by the Jews and the pagans—and who believed that infants entered this world with the original sin of Adam condemning their souls—the world was a harsh, cruel place. There was no reason to celebrate one’s birth. But since death was the true deliverance, the passage to eternal paradise, every person’s death day merited prayerful observance.

  Contrary to popular belief, it was the death days and not the birthdays of saints that were celebrated and became their “feast days.” Church historians interpret many early Christian references to “birthdays” as passage or birth into the afterlife. “A birthday of a saint,” clarified the early Church apologist Peter Chrysologus, “is not that in which they are born in the flesh, but that in which they are born from earth into heaven, from labor to rest.”

  There was a further reason why early church fathers preached against celebrating birthdays: They considered the festivities, borrowed from the Egyptians and the Greeks, as relics of pagan practices. In A.D. 245, when a group of early Christian historians attempted to pinpoint the exact date of Christ’s birth, the Catholic Church ruled the undertaking sacrilegious, proclaiming that it would be sinful to observe the birthday of Christ “as though He were a King Pharaoh.”

  In the fourth century, though, the Church began to alter its attitude toward birthday celebrations—and it also commenced serious discussions to settle the date of Christ’s birth. The result, of course, marked the beginning of the tradition of celebrating Christmas. (See page 67.) It was with the celebration of Christ’s nativity that the Western world returned to the celebration of birthdays.

  By the twelfth century, parish churches throughout Europe were recording the birth dates of women and children, and families were observing the dates with annual celebrations. Around this time, the birthday cake reemerged, now topped with candles.

  Birthday Cake and Candles: Late Middle Ages, Germany

  As we’ve seen, the custom of a birthday cake was observed for a brief time in ancient Greece. It reemerged among German peasants in the Middle Ages, and through a new kind of celebration, a Kinderfeste, held specifically for a young child, or Kind. In a sense, this marked the beginning of children’s birthday parties, and in many ways a thirteenth-century German child received more attention and honor than his or her modern-day counterpart.

  A Kinderfeste began at dawn. The birthday child was awakened by the arrival of a cake topped with lighted candles. The candles were changed and kept lit throughout the day, until after the family meal, when the cake was eaten. The number of candles totaled one more than the child’s age, the additional one representing the “light of life.” (Belief that the candle symbolizes life is found throughout history. Macbeth speaks of life as a “brief candle,” and the proverb cautions against “burning the candle at both ends.”) The birthday child also received gifts and selected the menu for the family meal, requesting his or her favorite dishes.

  Our custom of making a wish and blowing out the candles also stems from the German Kinderfeste. Birthday candles were to be extinguished in a single breath, and the wish, if it was to come true, had to remain a secret.

  German birthday lore has one custom we do not observe today: the Birthday Man, a bearded elf who brought well-behaved birthday children additional gifts. Although the Birthday Man never achieved the stature of a Santa Claus or an Easter Bunny, his image could still be purchased in the form of a German doll well into the early part of this century.

  The child’s birthday party began with the thirteenth-century German kinderfeste. Worship of Artemis (right), goddess of the moon, initiated the use of candles on celebratory cakes.

  “Happy Birthday to You”: 1893, Kentucky

  This melody, regarded as the most frequently sung music in the world, was first published in an 1893 book, Song Stories of the Kindergarten, under the title “Good Morning to All.”

  Written by two sisters from Louisville, Kentucky, the tune was never intended to be sung at a birthday celebration, but was a morning classroom welcome to youngsters. Through theft, it became a birthday tradition.

  Mildred Hill, who composed the song’s melody, was a church organist, concert pianist, and authority on Negro spirituals. Born in Louisville in 1859, she died in Chicago at age fifty-seven, a few years before her tune received its “happy birthday” wording.

  Mildred’s sister, Patty Smith Hill, born in 1868, wrote the song’s lyrics while principal of the Louisville Experimental Kindergarten school, where her sister taught. As one of the country’s first kindergartens to apply modern methods of education to young children, the school, and the Hill sisters, were honored in an educational exhibition at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.

  With a lifelong interest in teaching children, Dr. Patty Smith Hill came to Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1906. Three years later, she became head of the Department of Kindergarten Education. Though Dr. Hill was a professor emeritus at Columbia and won a host of honors before her death in New York City in 1946, she will probably always be best remembered for her contribution to “Happy Birthday to You.”

  The Hill sisters copyrighted their “Good Morning to All” song on October 16, 1893. But it appeared without authorization in a songbook edited by a Robert H. Coleman, and published by him in Dallas on March 4, 1924. While the song bore its original title and first-stanza lyrics, Coleman altered the second stanza’s opening to read “Happy birthday to you.” And through Coleman, the Hill sisters’ line “Good morning, dear children” became “Happy birthday, dear [name].”

  Over the next decade, the song was published several times, often with minor alterations in its lyrics. By 1933, its widely accepted title was “Happy Birthday to You.” A year later, when the birthday tune was belted out nightly in a Broadway musical, As Thousands Cheer, a third Hill sister, Jessica, tired of the blatant theft and total absence of royalties, took the case to court. She won. The Hill family owned the melody. They were entitled to royalties every time the song was performed commercially.

  Most people, worldwide, were shocked to learn that the familiar tune was copyrighted. Western Union, which had sent some half a million singing birthday greetings via telephone and singing messengers, ceased offering the selection. It was dropped from As Thousands Cheer, And when Broadway backers of another show, Angel in the Wings—which had opened with a score containing the tune—found that they would have to pay the Hill family royalties for every performance, the sho
w’s composer penned another melody. And in the later hit play Happy Birthday, its star, Helen Hayes, spoke the lyrics so the producers could avoid royalty payments.

  Dr. Patty Smith Hill died at age seventy-eight, after a long illness, aware that she and her sister had started a modern, worldwide birthday tradition.

  Death Traditions: 50,000 Years Ago, Western Asia

  The earliest evidence of a funeral tradition has been traced to Western Asia’s Neanderthal man, a member of our own classification, Homo sapiens.

  Illustrations often depict the Neanderthal as a primitive creature with a heavy brow, thick, large nose, and brutish expression. Actually, many Neanderthals possessed classic European features and fair, hairless skin. From unearthed skulls, archaeologists calculate that Neanderthals had a brain capacity equivalent to our own.

  Neanderthals began the practice of burying their dead with ritual funerals. They interred the deceased’s body, along with food, hunting weapons, and fire charcoals, and strewed the corpse with an assortment of flowers. A Neanderthal grave discovered in Shanidar, Iraq, contained the pollen of eight different flowers. Even fifty thousand years ago, man associated fire with funerals, for there is evidence of torches at Neanderthal gravesites, though their meaning remains unknown. Much later, the ancient Romans believed that flaming funeral torches guided the departed soul to its eternal abode; our word “funeral” derives from the Latin funus,“torch.”

  In addition to the word “funeral,” the Romans gave us the modern practice of candles at death services. Lighted candles around the body supposedly frightened away spirits eager to reanimate the corpse and take possession of it. Since the spirits’ domain was darkness, they were thought to shun light.

  Fear of spirit possession by the dead led to the practice of wearing black at a funeral.

  As we are about to see, it was fear of the spirit world, more than respect for the beloved deceased, that served as the origin for most of our modem death traditions.

  Black for Mourning. We say we wear black to a funeral as a sign of respect for the deceased. But it was fear of a dead relative, foe, or stranger that formalized black as the standard color of mourning in the Western world. The custom is ancient.

  Early man believed that without continual vigilance, the spirit of the dead reentered and possessed the body of the living. Anthropological evidence suggests that primitive white men painted their bodies black at funerals to disguise themselves from spirits. And there is more recent proof, in this century and the last, of black African tribes coating their bodies the opposite color, chalk white, to evade recognition and possession by the recently deceased.

  Extrapolating from black body paint, anthropologists arrive at black funeral attire—which in many societies was worn by the closest relatives of the deceased for weeks or months as protective camouflage. The veil covering a mourner’s face originated from this fear. In Mediterranean countries, a widow wore a veil and black clothing for a full year to hide from her husband’s prowling spirit. There is, after all, nothing intrinsically respectful about the color black, but for a white-skinned person it is the antithetical mask.

  Coffin. Our word “coffin” comes from the Greek kophinos, meaning “basket.” It was in baskets woven of plaited twigs that the ancient Sumerians, about 4000 B.C., interred their dead. But again, it was fear of the deceased that accounted for the origin of a coffin in the first place.

  In Northern Europe, drastic measures served to prevent the dead from haunting the living. Frequently, a dead man’s body was bound and his feet and head were amputated. To further handicap him, en route to the grave-site a circuitous course was followed so he could not retrace the path to his former home. In many cultures, the dead were carted from the house not through the once-familiar front door, but via a hole in the wall cut out for the occasion and closed up immediately afterward.

  While burial six feet underground was viewed as a good precaution, entombment first in a wooden coffin was even safer. Nailing down the lid afforded additional protection. Not only were many early coffins secured with numerous nails (far too many, archaeologists contend, merely to prevent a lid from sliding off during a procession), but once the coffin was lowered into the ground, a large, heavy stone was placed atop the lid before soil was shoveled in. A larger stone topped off the closed grave, giving birth to the practice of the tombstone.

  Later in history, of course, relatives affectionately inscribed a family member’s tombstone and respectfully visited the gravesite. But before these civilities arose, family and friends never ventured near their dead.

  Hearse: 16th Century, England

  A hearse was originally not a vehicle to transport the dead to a final resting place but an ancient agricultural implement—a rake. The route from rake to hearse is not straightforward.

  After a Roman farmer plowed his fields, he raked the land with a hirpex, a triangular tool of wood or iron with spikes attached to one side. In 51 B.C., when the Romans, under Caesar, completed their conquest of Gaul, they introduced the hirpex(Latin for “rake”) to Western Europe. Inhabitants of the British Isles called the tool a “harrow.” The name changed again in the eleventh century when the Normans invaded England, giving “harrow” the pronunciation herse.

  The conquering Normans observed that the raking device, when inverted, resembled their ecclesiastical candelabra. In time, the church’s candelabra was renamed herse, and as additional candles were incorporated to honor a growing list of saints and to celebrate new holidays, the herse grew larger and larger.

  The church candelabra, resting on the altar, had always been an integral part of a funeral service. The larger ones now were placed over the bier during the services for distinguished people. By the fifteenth century, the rake’s progress was such that it measured six feet long, skewered scores of candles, and was a masterpiece of craftsmanship. Now it rode on the lid of a coffin during a funeral cortege. In the next century, in England, the entire wheeled cart drawing the coffin became known as a “hearse,” the later British spelling of herse. Thus, the agricultural rake became the funereal wheeled cart or hearse. The route from wheeled cart to limousine is far more straightforward.

  It is interesting to note that the snail’s pace of a funeral cortege is not only a mark of respect for the dead. It recalls earlier days, when lighted candles were a ceremonious part of a funeral march. For no matter how reverently slowly the mourners chose to stride, the solemnity of their pace was also influenced by the practical need to keep the candles burning. This pedestrians’ pace still suggests a limit to the motored hearse’s speed.

  Hands Joined in Prayer: 9th Century, Europe

  For our ancestors, one of the most ancient and reverential gestures that accompanied prayer was the spreading of arms and hands heavenward. In time, the arms were pulled in, folded across the breast, wrists intersecting above the heart. Each of these gestures possesses an intrinsic logic and obviousness of intent: God resided in the heavens; the heart was the seat of emotions.

  The still later practice of joining hands in an apex seems less obvious, if not puzzling.

  It is mentioned nowhere in the Bible. It appeared in the Christian Church only in the ninth century. Subsequently, sculptors and painters incorporated it into scenes that predated its origin—which, it turns out, has nothing to do with religion or worship, and owes much to subjugation and servitude.

  Religious historians trace the gesture back to the act of shackling a prisoner’s hands together. Although the binding vines, ropes, or handcuffs continued to serve their own law-and-order function, the joined hands came to symbolize man’s submission to his creator.

  Substantial historical evidence indicates that the joining of hands became a standard, widely practiced gesture long before it was appropriated and formalized by the Christian Church. Before waving a white flag signaled surrender, a captured Roman could avert immediate slaughter by affecting the shackled-hands posture.

  For the early Greeks, the gesture held
the magic power to bind occult spirits until they complied with a high priest’s dictates. In the Middle Ages, feudal lords adopted the joining of hands as an action by which their vassals did homage and pledged fealty.

  From such diverse practices, all with a common intent, Christianity assumed the gesture as a sign of man’s total obedience to divine authority. Later, many writers within the Christian Church offered, and encouraged, a more pious and picturesque origin: joined hands represented a church’s pointed steeple.

  Rosary: Pre-500 B.C., India

  The term “rosary,” meaning “wreath of roses,” first appeared in fifteenth-century Europe. But the practice of reciting prayers on a string of knots or beads goes back to the Indic priests of the Middle East prior to 500 B.C. It also developed in the Western world before the dawn of Christianity—and for a very practical reason.

  According to many early religions, the frequent repetition of a prayer was believed to increase its efficacy. To beseech the gods, the God, or a saint for deliverance from, say, a plague by reciting a prayer a hundred times was twice as effective as saying the same prayer only fifty times. Many religions prescribed the exact number of repetitions of a specific prayer. For instance, the traveling Knights of Templar, founded in the year 1119 to fight in the Crusades, could not attend regular church services and were required to recite the Lord’s Prayer fifty-seven times a day; on the death of a fellow knight, the number increased to a hundred times a day for a week.