Saint Andrew – Superstitions about a night with magic, undead, garlic and poetry

The night was a magical time in the popular faith, a time of great changes, a favorable time for birth, for death and for the rebirth of various worshipped deities. At some holidays of the year huge fires were lit, in some regions games were held the night before a funeral. In popular belief, the night of 29 to 30 November was called the Night of the Undead, which was a night of fear, because it was believed that the spirits of the dead come out of the tombs and take to battle with the “living undead”. The most dangerous undead were the werewolves believed to inhabit the air, among the clouds or above the clouds. They were considered “responsible” for eclipses because they would “bite” from the Moon or the Sun Because it was believed that the spirits of the dead “swarmed” on the night of Sântandrei were doing various “acts of divination” For example, girls thought they could find out your fate and its qualities. In the church tradition, St. Andrew the Apostle was the first preacher of the Gospel to the Geto-Dacians, in the territory between the Danube and the Black Sea. The saint arrived in our places around 55 A.D.In the popular beliefs of many places in the world it was believed that garlic has beneficial powers: in Greece in Scandinavia, in northern Germany, in Asia Minor and in Central America.St Andrew – The feasts of the wolf

The calendar period of over three weeks between November 14 (Autumn Philippi) and December 6 (Santa Nicholas) gathers numerous holidays, customs, ritual acts and magical practices dedicated to the wolf. Ethnologists sometimes refer to this period under the name of Dacian New Year, given the numerous links between Dacians and wolves. It is often given a quote from Mircea Eliade in this regard that the Dacians called themselves wolves, or “those who are like wolves.

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