Customs and Superstitions of Easter

Across Brittany, a number of curious customs and strange superstitions were once very closely attached to the principal Christian festival of Easter and the Holy Week that led up to it.

Heralding the beginning of Holy Week, Palm Sunday was traditionally the day when, immediately after morning mass, people would take blessed sprigs of boxwood or laurel and place them on the graves of loved ones; a practice that still survived into the 20^th century. These blessed evergreens were also planted in the strips of a family’s uncultivated land; typically, at the end of the furrows.

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While this latter custom seems to have died out by the middle of the last century, the habit of placing, for good luck, a branch in each room of the house as well as in the stables was still noted in the early 1960s. Planting a branch of evergreen in the fields was possibly a means of invoking the dead, whose souls were said to do penance there, to aid in the fertility of the field and to protect the sown crops from harm.

Traditionally, church bells were not rung here between Maundy Thursday and Easter Sunday; a mark of mourning for the death of Christ before they rang out again, in celebration of the resurrection, on Easter Day. It was on Maundy Thursday that the eggs that were popularly exchanged as gifts on Easter Day were coloured; typically, these were dyed red at home with onion skins.

According to legend, the church bells did not sit quietly in their towers but on Good Friday made a pilgrimage to Rome where they were blessed by the pope himself. They returned full of pious vigour on Easter Sunday, laden with eggs – treats for the children – dressed as red as the pope’s cardinals. Some tales say the bells were accompanied on their homeward journey by angels carrying baskets filled with flowers and eggs which they distributed near the houses of deserving children.

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Serious misfortune was said to fall upon anyone who spun yarn on Maundy Thursday or Good Friday. The latter was also regarded as a most inappropriate day to do the laundry, for it was said that whoever boiled laundry on Good Friday cooked the blood of Christ. It was believed that a person who slept in a bed whose sheets had been washed on this day risked dying there within the year.

In some parts of the region, popular prohibition against doing the laundry seems to have once encompassed all of Holy Week for fear that it would result in someone in the family dying in the year ahead. However, Holy Week was also traditionally the time when many Bretons gave their house a thorough cleaning and revived the external whitewash.

In western Brittany, many people chose to fast from the evening of Maundy Thursday until noon on Good Friday; a day especially shrouded in superstitions. For instance, those who ploughed on Good Friday were said to make the earth bleed all year round. It was also considered particularly unlucky to slaughter any animal on this day or to sow any kind of grain. However, it was regarded an auspicious day for sowing cabbages, onions and pumpkins; onions were said to be protected from drought and insects if sown on this day, while the largest pumpkins were assured if sown in silence but in parts of eastern Brittany, pumpkins were believed best planted during Holy Saturday. Flax, once a very important crop in Brittany, was not sown during Holy Week for fear that the seed would be destroyed by fleas.

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Good Friday was the most auspicious day for grilling a sardine, which, when hung from the ceiling was said to protect the house from bothersome flies over the year ahead. Likewise, sprinkling a little broth, made of pork fat, into the ponds and streams nearest the house on Good Friday was recommended to shield one against the bothersome clamour of croaking frogs throughout the coming summer evenings. While the bread baked on that day was believed to hold special properties; if placed in a pile of wheat, it provided protection against mice and other annoying rodents. 

The day was also one in which it was also customary for those that lived close to the coast to visit the seashore to collect barnacles and whelks. Unfortunately, I do not know why this was once so. However, I am fairly certain that people were not upset if it rained on this day as it was said to signal an abundant harvest in the months ahead.

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Spring lambs were taken to the fields for the first time on Good Friday and this was also the day that those who kept bees, placed a small cross of wax, blessed by the local priest, on top of the hives in order to secure good fortune over the coming year. However, in some parts of the region, it was a blessed branch of boxwood that was put on the hives.

The chicken eggs laid on Good Friday were thought to bring good luck to the household and were kept as talismans to protect the house against fire over the year ahead. Here, people traditionally refrained from eating eggs during Holy Week but then ate as many as a dozen on Easter Day. Care having been taken with storing the eggs laid on Good Friday as it was believed that eating the first egg laid on that day would protect one from illness for the following seven months.

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In Brittany, it was popularly believed that children needed to be washed on Good Friday in order to protect them from scabies but the power of the day also offered other marvellous cures. For instance, it was said that only a healer born feet-first on the afternoon of Good Friday was powerful enough to straighten the spines of those who suffered from rickets. Likewise, the seventh child of a family of seven boys was thought to possess the gift to cure fever and scrofula but only on a Good Friday.

One cure for scrofula noted in the east of the region required the healing ritual be performed before sunrise but only if both healer and patient had not broken their fast; the patient was even forbidden to eat or drink before noon. After making several signs of the cross, the healer dipped their middle finger in holy water and traced a wet circle around the sufferer’s sores in expectation of a cure.

Holy Saturday was traditionally the day when priests blessed the water that the faithful would take home to pour into their own stoups. This water was usually held in large copper basins placed in the middle of the church and it was from these basins that the women of the parish would fill their own containers. Accounts tell that this was often a most undignified affair with much jostling and even fighting for pole position, convinced, as they were, that those who took the first water would be more highly favoured than the others. On returning home, the women sprinkled their animals with this holy water in the belief that their cows would produce better and more abundant milk than their neighbour’s animals.

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As well as using-up whatever fresh eggs remained from the previous week of abstinence, eating eggs on Easter Sunday was thought the best way to assure the fertility of the household’s domestic animals. While Easter Sunday was the day to break eggs, Quasimodo Sunday was traditionally the day to break the pots and plates that had been chipped and damaged over the previous year. Another curious belief here noted that a seaweed commonly known as ‘marine mistletoe’ was held to cure epilepsy but only if harvested at precisely three o’clock on the morning of Easter Sunday by a person with a perfectly clear conscience.

Belief in the transformative power of Easter can also be seen in its employment against the supernatural. For instance, in parts of Brittany, it was believed that werewolves could only be killed when struck three times by a dagger made of silver melted from a crucifix or shot by a ball moulded from the same source but only if the haft of the knife or the stock of the rifle had been rubbed with wax from the Paschal candle. It was also said that even that bird of ill omen, the magpie, crossed its nest on Good Friday. Roosters born on this day were thought to crow unusually early and to possess the ability to foretell death, which they did by altering their usual cry. Around the Bay of Saint-Brieuc, sailors once believed that fish spoke to each other in Breton on Easter Day.

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The arrival of Easter Monday saw a swift return to business as usual, for this was traditionally, in western Brittany, the day that the backbreaking work of the great clearings began.

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