Festivals, Rituals & Oral Tradition

Across every continent and in every age, human communities have gathered to mark the turning of the year, the passage from one stage of life to another, and the slow accumulation of shared story. Festivals and rituals give shape to time; oral traditions give shape to memory. Together they form the connective tissue of folk culture, the everyday ceremony by which a village, a clan, or a nation reminds itself who it is.

This guide explores the world of folk festivals, rites of passage, and oral tradition: why human beings need repeated ceremony, how the great calendars of seasonal festival grew up around the turning of the sun and the harvest, why every culture marks the threshold of adulthood with its own peculiar ordeal, and how the storyteller once carried the entire memory of a people on the tongue. The three branches of the subject are treated in greater depth in the sections on seasonal festivals, coming-of-age rituals, and oral storytelling, and in the deeper articles on Samhain, Midsummer, the Bar Mitzvah, the Quinceañera, the Griots of West Africa, and the Norse Skalds.

The Human Need for Repeated Ceremony

Ritual is older than agriculture, older than the city, older than the temple. Long before the first farmer sowed a field, small bands of people gathered to bury their dead with flowers and red ochre, to dance under the new moon, and to mark the moment when a child became a hunter. The earliest known ritual sites, from the cave of Chauvet in France to the painted shelters of the Drakensberg in southern Africa, suggest that even our remote ancestors paused, at certain moments, to do more than simply survive. They performed.

The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, in his classic 1909 study Les rites de passage, argued that ceremony does the work of carrying a person or a community from one state to another. A new season, a new marriage, a new king, a new corpse — each requires a turning, a hinge. The hinge is the ritual. To leave a state without the hinge is to remain suspended between two worlds, which the folklorist would call a kind of danger. Many folk beliefs about witchcraft, hauntings, and unlucky days can be traced to this anxiety about unritualed transition. The same anxiety surfaces, in slightly different forms, in the folk traditions of West Africa, of Latin America, and of the Slavic village.

Ceremony also relieves the burden of ordinary time. The French historian of religion Mircea Eliade famously observed that the sacred is, in essence, a rupture in the profane: by gathering at a fixed point in the year and behaving differently — feasting when we would fast, working through the night when we would sleep, wearing masks, speaking in unfamiliar voices — a community periodically reasserts that time is not a flat line. It has shape. It returns. The year, like the life, is a circle, and the festival is the moment when the circle closes and begins again. The seasonal festivals of the world, taken together, are an encyclopaedia of this human need.

The Calendar of Seasonal Festivals

Almost every traditional culture has built its year around a small set of great festivals that mark the solstices and equinoxes, the seeding and the harvest, and the slow lengthening or shortening of the days. The Celtic year, preserved in the medieval Irish texts and still partly observed in the modern European folk calendar, divided the seasons at Samhain (1 November), Imbolc (1 February), Beltane (1 May), and Lughnasadh (1 August). The four fire-festivals of the Celts were, in their original form, seasonal hinges: the death of the old year, the first stirring of spring, the flowering of summer, and the ripening of the harvest.

The Nordic peoples built a similar calendar around Yule (midwinter), the Midsummer fire, the autumn sacrifice (haustblót), and the spring sacrifice (vårblót). The same kind of fourfold division runs through the agricultural year of the Slavic village, the Jewish liturgical year, the Islamic calendar, the Hindu ritus, and the cycles of the Mesoamerican and West African worlds. It is, in some sense, a universal grammar: human beings, wherever they plant a crop, want to know when to begin and when to gather in.

These seasonal festivals, in their countless local forms, are the subject of the seasonal festivals section. Two of them, Samhain and Midsummer, are treated in separate deeper articles. What is striking, when they are placed side by side, is how similar their motifs are: bonfires on the hills, feasts of the dead, divinations by firelight, ritual bathing in dew, dances around a pole. The same human imagination, faced with the same turning year, invents the same ceremonies.

The Rites of Passage

Alongside the seasonal calendar, every traditional culture has marked the rites of passage of the individual life: birth, naming, the first haircut, the coming of age, marriage, the death of an elder, the funeral, the commemorative feast. The list of such rituals is, in effect, a list of the moments at which a community recognises that one of its members has changed.

Van Gennep grouped these ceremonies into three phases: separation, in which the person is taken out of ordinary life; liminality, in which they are held in a betwixt-and-between state, often subjected to instruction, ordeal, or symbolic death; and reincorporation, in which they are returned to the community in their new status. The pattern is visible, with local variation, in the Bar Mitzvah of the synagogue, the Quinceañera of the Latin American church, the Upanayana of the Hindu boy, the Seijin-no-Hi of the Japanese adult, and the secret initiations of the West African Poro and Sande societies. In every case the candidate is taken aside, taught, tried, and returned. The community has been reminded, in the body of one of its members, of what it means to belong.

The detailed survey of these ceremonies is given in the coming-of-age rituals section. The same shape can be discerned in the ritual of marriage, in the funeral, and in the elaborate wakes and keening sessions by which the Irish seanchaithe once marked the passing of a storyteller.

The Storyteller as Memory of the Community

In a society without writing, the storyteller is not a luxury. The storyteller is a kind of living book. The Griot of Mande, the Norse Skald, the Celtic bard, the Slavic skomorokh, the Homeric rhapsode, the Indian kathakaar — these are not entertainers in the modern sense. They are keepers of genealogies, custodians of treaties, composers of praise, and walking archives of the law.

The Greek poet Hesiod, in the prologue to the Theogony, invoked the Muses as the daughters of Memory. It is a useful phrase. The oral tradition does not merely recall the past; it composes the past into a shape the community can carry forward. Where the written record can be consulted, it can also be lost, burned, or censored. The spoken record is more vulnerable in some ways, and far more durable in others. A people without a written language can still preserve, in the mouths of its trained performers, the names of the great kings, the songs of the great warriors, and the genealogies that prove who owns which field.

The relationship between oral performance and ritual is intimate. In many cultures the storyteller only recites at certain seasons, in certain postures, and to certain audiences. To tell the wrong story at the wrong time is to break the order of the world. The detailed treatment of these traditions is given in the oral storytelling section, which surveys the great schools of memorised and improvised verse from Ireland to Japan.

Ritual and Religion

Folk festivals are rarely the same thing as the official religion that surrounds them. They are older, stranger, and far more local. The Catholic Church has long observed that the feast of All Saints’ on 1 November falls at the same moment as the older Celtic Samhain, and the church has been willing, in practice, to absorb the older festival into the newer. The Hindu festival of Diwali overlaps with older agrarian rites of light in the dark half of the year. The Christian Christmas is built on the bones of a Roman Sol Invictus and a Norse Yule.

This layering is one of the great sources of the richness of folk festival. A modern participant in the Mexican Day of the Dead may be drawing on the Catholic feast of All Souls’, the older Aztec month of the dead, and a still older Mesoamerican harvest rite — all at the same time. The religious and the folkloric traditions, in other words, are not opposed. They are woven together. The seasonal festivals section explores this layering in detail.

The Survival of Folk Festival in the Modern World

Many folk festivals have come down to us with their bones intact. The Swedish Midsommar still centres on the maypole, the cold potatoes and herring, and the singing of traditional songs. The Mexican Day of the Dead still returns the souls of the ancestors to the family altar. The Jewish Passover still tells the story of the Exodus at the family table, with the Seder plate and the four cups of wine, in a ritual whose roots reach back to a pre-Jewish agricultural spring festival of the kind described in the Bar Mitzvah article.

Other festivals survive only in the cracks. The old English May Day, with its hobby horse and its May Queen, has been resurrected as a community celebration in villages from Oxfordshire to Cornwall. The Beltane fire festival on Calton Hill in Edinburgh is a modern revival, but a careful one, drawing on the older Celtic calendar and the still-living folk customs of the Scottish Highlands. The Polish Noc Kupały survives in village bonfires and the search for the flowering fern, in a form recognisably close to the Midsummer of the Norse and Slavic past.

The driving force behind most of these revivals is the discovery that an industrial, urban, globalised life leaves certain human hungers unsatisfied. People want to sing together. They want to mark the season. They want a moment of the year that is, in some real sense, outside ordinary time. The folk festival, in the early twenty-first century, has often become the site of this search. In many cases the revival has crossed national boundaries: the Midsummer tradition, for example, is shared, in recognisably the same form, from the Swedish Midsommar to the Lithuanian Joninės, the Brazilian Festa Junina, and the French Feu de la Saint-Jean.

The Tourist and Commercial Exploitation of Folk Festival

The revival of folk festival has, inevitably, attracted commerce. The Running of the Bulls at Pamplona, the Carnival of Rio, the Oktoberfest in Munich, the Día de los Muertos festivities in Oaxaca, the Diwali lights of Varanasi: all of these have become, in varying degrees, tourist attractions. The work of the folklorist is not to condemn this — folk festival has always had its share of performers and onlookers — but to notice what is preserved and what is lost.

A festival that has been entirely invented for the camera is, in the strict sense, no longer a folk festival. It is a performance of folk festival. The line between the two is not always clear, and the most interesting cases are the festivals that have been partly revived, partly invented, and partly commodified, and yet have still managed to keep their older function alive. The Beltane fire festival in Edinburgh is one such case. The Notting Hill Carnival, which began in 1958 as a response to the racism of post-war London, is another. The common thread is a community that recognises its own festival, even when the cameras are rolling. The Latvian Jāņi, which had been suppressed for decades under Soviet rule, returned to its full ritual force in 1991; the Day of the Dead, treated in the wider Latin American folk tradition, has been re-imported from Mexico into the wider culture without losing its older function. These examples suggest that the commercial surface of a festival and its ritual core are not, in practice, always opposed.

The Religious-Political Function of Folk Festival

Folk festival is rarely innocent of politics. The Feast of Saint Patrick, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was used by the English to mark the Irish as an inferior people, and then was reclaimed by Irish nationalists in the nineteenth and twentieth as a celebration of Irish identity. Cinco de Mayo, in the United States, has become a celebration of Mexican-American identity that is, in many ways, distinct from the historical battle it nominally commemorates. The summer solstice in Latvia, the Jāņi, was suppressed for decades under Soviet rule, when the singing of traditional Latvian songs at the midsummer fire was treated as a quiet act of national resistance.

Folk festival can also be the stage on which a community rehearses its relationship with power. The medieval Carnival, with its temporary inversion of authority — the Lord of Misrule, the mock king — was, in the reading of the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, a permitted safety-valve by which the lower orders reminded the higher of who, in fact, did the labour. The same motif returns in many folk traditions: the Norse Skald’s lausavísur could be a coded satire of a king; the West African griot’s praise could be a reminder to the chief that his ancestors’ deeds bound him too.

Festivals and the Making of Community

It is no accident that the word community itself is built from the Latin communis, “shared.” A community is, in part, a group of people who have shared experiences. The shared experience of a festival, repeated year after year, is one of the most powerful ways in which such a group maintains its sense of itself.

In a small village, the festival is the moment at which the year’s work is symbolically completed. The harvest is in, the cattle are in, the field is bare; the community gathers to give thanks and to tell stories. The songs sung at that moment encode the history of the place: who founded the village, who died in the great fire, who drained the marsh. The tohunga whakairo of the Maori, the Norse Skald at the Yule feast, the Griot at the naming of a child, the padrinos at the Quinceañera — all are performing the same essential task. They are reminding the gathering who they are.

In a larger, modern, urban society, the function of festival is harder to see but no less real. The city festival, the diaspora festival, the national holiday, the church calendar — these are the modern equivalents of the village bonfire. They are the moments at which a group, scattered across the year by the busyness of ordinary life, gathers and remembers. The Midsummer festivals of the Baltic world are perhaps the clearest example in Europe of this binding function in the modern state: festivals that were suppressed for decades under foreign rule, and that returned in 1991 as central national holidays, with the Latvian Līgo songs inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage.

The Revival of Folk Festival in Contemporary Europe and North America

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen an extraordinary wave of folk-festival revival across Europe and North America. In Germany, the Mittsommer has been quietly restored in many villages, drawing on the older Slavic and Nordic neighbours. In the Baltic states, the midsummer Jāņi, Jaanipäev, and Joninės are now treated as central national holidays, with state recognition and elaborate public celebrations. In Britain, the May Day and the Midsummer have been revived in villages and towns, often with the involvement of Morris dance sides, mummers’ plays, and folk choirs.

In North America, the picture is more layered. The older Puritan suspicion of folk festival has, in the last fifty years, given way to a renewed interest. Wiccan and neo-pagan groups, drawing on the older Celtic and Germanic sources, have established public rituals at Samhain, Beltane, and the solstices. The Day of the Dead has been re-imported from Mexico into Mexican-American communities and, from there, into the wider culture. The African-American harvest festivals of the American South, with their roots in the older West African agricultural cycle, have become recognised in the wider public calendar as Kwanzaa.

The driving force behind most of these revivals is, in the end, the same: a community that has lost touch with its own older ceremonies, and that finds itself, in the quiet of a winter evening or the warmth of a midsummer night, wanting them back.

Festivals, Rituals, and the Folklorist

For the folklorist, a folk festival is never simply a spectacle. It is a living text. To watch a Midsummer fire in the Baltic, a Quinceañera in Mexico, a Bar Mitzvah in a Brooklyn synagogue, a Seijin-no-Hi ceremony in Tokyo, a Day of the Dead altar in Oaxaca, or a Seder in Jerusalem is to read a chapter of human history, written in motion, in song, in food, and in the gestures of the gathered.

The sections that follow are an attempt to read three of those chapters in more detail: the turning of the year in seasonal festivals; the marking of the threshold of adulthood in coming-of-age rituals; and the keeping of the community’s memory in oral storytelling. The deeper articles then open two of these chapters more fully, in the older Celtic New Year, in the Midsummer fires of the north, in the folk roots of the Bar Mitzvah, in the Aztec and Catholic roots of the Quinceañera, in the Griot tradition of Mande, and in the Skaldic tradition of the Norse.