Sunday child
The term Sunday child originally referred to a figure in European folklore and has undergone a massive change in meaning - from "ghost seer" to "lucky child".
Originally the term “ Saturday child ” should be, because it referred to people who were born on a Saturday and therefore had certain magical powers and abilities. Saturday, that is, the Jewish Sabbath , was celebrated as the sacred day of the week until the early Middle Ages , and children born on this day were specially blessed. It was not until the 13th century , at the Council of Arles , that the sacred day of the week was finally and bindingly moved from the Jewish Sabbath to Sunday within the sphere of influence of the Roman Church, because this was also intended to clarify the difference between Judaism and Christianity . The belief that children born on the holy day of the week were particularly gifted persisted, and so the term “Sunday children” came about. They, too, were originally able to recognize and fight demonic beings or to banish them in the grave through their immanent powers. In the sphere of influence of the Orthodox churches, Saturday was still sanctified, and so the "lucky children" are still called "Sabbatanios" ( Greek ) or "subatnik" ( South Slavic ).
One of the characteristics of the Sunday children was not, as today's usage suggests, the ability to give happiness to other people and to be happy oneself. They were mind-sighted, that is, they could see or smell a demonic fiend or an undead revenant hidden from mere mortals. The British folklorist Abbott reports that a Macedonian “sabbatanios” was protected against attacks by returning dead, but was in turn able to destroy such a vampire . He writes that a Saturday child banished such a revenant into a stable and pierced him there with a long iron nail. From different parts of Europe - mainly from the Balkans and from the Anglo-Saxon-Irish area - reports have come down that speak of the destructive effect of the body fluids of a Saturday or Sunday child. Above all, saliva and urine should be mentioned here, which let a revenant or vampire disintegrate into dust as soon as he came into contact with it. In the 19th century it was still customary among the southern Slavs to fetch a “subatnik” if there was reason to fear that someone who had recently died would leave the grave at night to plague the living. The ghost seer then walked across the cemetery on a horse - mainly a white horse - until the animal could no longer be moved or shied away. Then the vampire's grave was found, and the “subatnik” could either drive a long hawthorn stake into the ground or urinate on the ground above the suspicious corpse, whereupon the vampire would instantly rot or crumble to dust. In German-speaking countries, Sunday children were also sent through the cemetery on horseback, but they no longer had the ability to destroy the revenant, which is known in the popular belief of Southeast Europe. At most they could banish the undead in the grave by certain, only fragmentarily handed down measures or bring about his redemption by praying.
But under the influence of Christian doctrine, which denied the existence of ghosts and undead revenants, belief in the magical powers of Sunday children flattened over time. At best, they could still foresee the death of people if, for example, they saw a funeral procession, invisible to others, stop in front of a house in the neighborhood. If they saw a funeral procession pull over their own house, they knew that they themselves would soon die. In the Rhineland , the Sunday children often had to drag a dead person to the cemetery on their shoulders (in dialect: “ne duude pööze”) and show him his future grave - probably a faint reminder of the times when it was believed that the Saturday or Sunday child could ban a potential revenant in his grave.
The gifts associated with the existence of a Sunday child were undesirable because they meant that the person in question foresaw the death of friends, relatives and neighbors, and often enough his own end. The belief that the Sunday child often comes into contact with death made the person concerned often an avoided outsider in the village community. A legend from the Bergisches Land , which was recorded towards the end of the 19th century, is about a spiritually minded girl who, on certain nights, has to go to battle against evil spirits, accompanied by two large dogs. Everyone in her village, especially the children, is afraid of her, and the storyteller adds that this Sunday child did not have a long life. Therefore, the suspicion arises that the frequently heard synonymous term " child of happiness " was originally intended rather euphemistically and rather meant the opposite. Therefore, in earlier times the parents tried to protect their child, born on one of the magical Saturdays or Sundays, from his fate, but this often did not help because the fateful forces were stronger.
After the fading of the revenant faith in Western Europe, which was opposed by the Catholic and especially the Protestant Church, other abilities were ascribed to the Sunday child, such as the ability to heal through the laying on of hands or the administration of special medicines. In the Anglo-Scottish borderlands and rural areas of southern England, around 1870, faith healers practiced using tinctures in which they had mixed their urine. Something similar was reported from Betws-y-Coed in North Wales around 1910 . The last phase of the decline of the original belief in the magical powers of the Sunday child is the view that such a talented person brings luck and, for example, can predict the lottery numbers or that you will be lucky if you touch a Sunday child.
literature
- George F. Abbott: Macedonean Folklore. Cambridge 1903.
- Hans Bächtold-Stäubli [ed.]: Concise dictionary of German superstition . Berlin 1927–42, 10 volumes (reprinted Berlin 2000), especially volumes 7 and 7 8th.
- Maja Boskovic-Stulli: Kresnik-Krsnik, a being from the Croatian and Slovenian folk tradition. In: Fabula. 3 (1960), pp. 275-298.
- William Henderson: Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders. London 1878.
- Rudolf Kleinpaul: The living and the dead in popular belief, religion and legend. Leipzig 1898.
- Friedrich S. Krauss: Popular belief and religious custom of the southern slaves . Munster 1890.
- Friedrich S. Krauss: Slavic people research. Treatises on beliefs, common law, manners, customs and the Guslar songs of the southern slaves . Leipzig 1908.
- Peter Kremer: Where horror lurks. Terrifying story of bloodsuckers and headless riders, werewolves and revenants on Inde, Erft and Rur. Düren 2003.
- Peter Kremer: Dracula's cousins. On the trail of the vampire belief in Germany. Düren 2006.
- Charlotte Latham: Some West Sussex Superstitions Lingering in 1868 . In: The Folk-Lore Record. 1 (1878), pp. 1-67.
- Mary L. Lewes: Stranger than fiction being tales from the byways of ghost and folklore. London 1911.
