Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.    

                                 THE REDUNDANCY OF GUY FAWKES

Recently, one of this country’s best novelists, Paula Morris, wrote a very good opinion piece about Matariki and the continuing celebration here of Guy Fawkes night. As she correctly pointed out, Guy Fawkes night in New Zealand is not only founded on an otherwise minor piece of British history, but is also celebrated in the wrong season. In New Zealand , the 5^th of November is early in summer when the days are long, meaning that fireworks have to be postponed until late in the night if they are to have any real effect. In Britain, of course, the 5^th of November is in winter when days are short and fireworks can burn brightly in the sky as early as 4pm.  By contrast, Matariki is in the Southern Hemisphere mid-winter, when the Matariki stars (the Pleiades or “Seven Sisters” if you prefer) are rising and the event, marking the beginning of a new year, is played out in darkness. Here is a festival in which light overcomes darkness, as is the case in many ancient festivals around the world.

Matariki, then, is appropriate for our climate and our seasons. Guy Fawkes isn’t.

But there’s another problem with Guy Fawkes night. It is really commemorating religious bigotry. The Guy Fawkes festival supposedly celebrates the thwarting of a Catholic plot, in the early 17^th century, to blow up the English parliament. But this is only a half-truth. The reality is that the secret service of King James 1 knew about the plot long before it was put into action, and allowed it to develop until the point when it would be most dramatic to arrest the participants – Guy Fawkes, Catesby etc. The plotters were on the fringe of English Catholic society. Their plan had been rejected and condemned by more level-headed Catholic leaders before a small group decided to go ahead with it. But to be able to arrest men on the point of a terrorist act gave the King’s parliament the excuse to bring down harsher penalties on Catholics who refused to join the newly-devised state church, the Church of England.

In many ways, the Gunpowder Plot was the 17^th century equivalent of the Reichstag Fire. There is no question that there really was a Gunpowder Plot, but it was allowed to reach its dramatic “discovery” because king and parliament already wished to impose greater penalties upon Catholics. This “discovery” made a very dramatic excuse for what king and parliament intended to do anyway. As for the Reichstag Fire, it was long assumed that the Nazis themselves fired the building in order to blame Communists and Socialists and imprison them. But most historians now understand that the firing of the Reichstag really was the work of van der Lubbe, a (rather feeble-minded) Dutch Communist. The point is, however, that this suited the Nazis fine. They now had an apparently respectable excuse to do what they intended to do anyway. It was the same strategy three centuries later.

That Guy Fawkes night was celebrated so long in Britain was that it asserted Protestant Supremacy and kept before (gullible) populations the idea that English Catholics were treasonous and possibly terrorists. In effect, it was a perpetuation of religious bigotry, including the ritual burning of the Guy.

But was this what the festival became over the centuries? Basically, despite the trappings including bonfire and the burning of the Guy, by the 20^th century Guy Fawkes night had become little more than an excuse, in the middle of winter, to have bonfires and fireworks – really a perpetuation of ancient pre-Christian pagan Northern European winter fire festivals.

And in New Zealand? The story of “gunpowder, treason and plot” had become little more than a distant folk tale. Most New Zealanders saw it as nothing but an excuse for fireworks and horseplay, even if it was celebrated in the wrong season. Apart from a few staunch English immigrants, there were no sectarian overtones. As a kid, I knew the story of the Gunpowder Plot, but I remember asking my mother why we were observing it in New Zealand. She replied that we observed Guy Fawkes night because we didn’t really have a defining moment in New Zealand history to celebrate. The Americans had the 4^th of July. The French had Bastille Day. Other countries had independence days to celebrate and all had an excuse for fireworks displays. But we had no excuse for that sort celebration and so we had kept with the remembrance of an otherwise irrelevant English tradition.

The conclusion I have come to is that, if we are foolish enough to set off fireworks in summer, why not do it on the 6^th of February, Waitangi Day. It would be just as out of season, but at least would not drag a history of religious bigotry with it.

FOOTNOTE: Having said all this, there is one fly in the ointment. While introducing the Matariki observation, one pundit said on television that at least Matariki wasn’t an “imported” festival, like Christmas and Easter. But this is to ignore the fact that for many thousands of New Zealanders, Maori and Pakeha, Christmas and Easter are still an important part of their religious observance. These religious observations have little to do with the climate or season. And they were not designed to make pundits shoot cheap shots.