By Lambe Lamis 
In the movie The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Bella arrives in Volterra, Italy just in time to help save Edward from revealing himself as a vampire to a throng of mortals at the St. Marcus Day festival on March 19th. Attendees of the competition, clad in crimson, hooded robes, march in procession bearing a statue of St. Marcus to the church in the middle of town. In the Twilight environment, “St. Marcus” is celebrated by mortals for owning rid the city of vampires, when he was, in actuality, a vampire himself. Volterra is the house of the Volturri, the lawgivers of the vampire globe. Marcus is a single of them. Some Twilight followers dress in purple on March 19th to mark this getaway.
New Moon author Stephanie Meyer borrowed the fictional St. Marcus Day from the authentic European celebration of St. Mark’s Working day. She altered the day: St. Mark’s Working day is April 25th. Because the day coincides with observances of Easter (a moveable feast the date differs, but it usually happens in March or April) and a range of other Eurasian spring festivals, it is believed that St. Mark’s Working day is a Christianized edition of a much older, Pagan observance. In the e book Ostara, Edain McCoy writes, “As was done with numerous Pagan festivals in Europe, the early church tried to refocus the symbolism of Ostara [the spring festival for Germanic Pagans] on to the Feast Working day of St. Mark. As an alternative of remaining a festival of rebirth, the St. Mark’s imagery was concentrated on demise and martyrdom, via which Christian rebirth is attained.”
St. Mark is historically regarded as to be the author of the Gospel of Mark in the Christian Bible. He’s considered to be the companion of St. Paul, the good early Christian evangelist, that the Ebook of Acts of the Apostles refers to as “John Mark.” A disciple of Paul, Mark is believed to have employed Paul’s preaching as the foundation for the Gospel. He is also remembered as the founder of the Coptic Church. Coptic tradition retains that Mark seems in the Gospels as the young gentleman who carried drinking water to the residence where the Final Supper of Jesus and his Apostles took area, as the young male who ran absent bare when Jesus was arrested, and to have poured the drinking water Jesus turned into wine at the wedding ceremony at Cana.
Mark is claimed to have been martyred on April 25th in the calendar year 68 in Alexandria, Egypt. A group of neighborhood people today resented his making an attempt to transform them absent from their classic gods. They put a rope around his neck and dragged him by means of the streets right until he was lifeless. His important shrines are in Egypt and Italy. His Italian shrine is the Basilica de San Marco in Venice, which is traditionally claimed to be the spot wherever Mark’s continues to be are buried. So, he actually does have a connection to Italy, nevertheless not specifically to the city of Volterra.
Possibly because of his martyrdom, several curious traditions grew up more than the centuries about the celebration of St. Mark’s feast working day. In seventeenth via nineteenth century England, specifically in the north and the west, folklore held that the wraiths of these who would die the next yr produced a procession, in the order they would die, by the churchyard and into church at midnight on St. Mark’s Eve. Some explained the procession would be of coffins, or of headless or rotting corpses. Other individuals explained the procession would be of identifiable, ghost-like wraiths, and that a single could sit and look at the procession as it went by and hence know who was likely to die.
To see these wraiths, folklore claimed, one particular had to be fasting. Another legend held that just one had to be current at the churchyard on St. Mark’s Eve for three yrs in a row, and only in 3rd yr would one particular see the wraiths. Occasionally, these dwelling watchers saw their own wraiths, and died not long immediately after. Another superstition relating to St. Mark’s Eve is that on this night, witches who had marketed their souls to the satan (or published their names in the devil’s e book) and wished to preserve their unearthly powers experienced to stroll three situations close to the church backwards, peek as a result of the keyhole, and recite sure words, or their powers would be missing.
An additional conventional St. Mark’s Eve exercise was stirring the ashes of the fireplace. If the ashes shaped the form of a shoe, another person who lived in the domestic would die for the duration of the yr.
St. Mark’s Eve was a person of 3 evenings of the year linked with the lifeless. The many others are St. John’s Eve and All Hallow’s Eve. In accordance to some legends, on these 3 nights individuals who have died can return to the earth as spirits. This belief about All Hallow’s Eve (Halloween) is a Christian appropriation of the Celtic harvest competition of Samhain, the position when the veil between the residing and the useless was at its thinnest, and also the halfway level amongst autumn and winter season. Equally, St. Mark’s Eve marks the halfway issue in between spring and summer time and is involved with the Pagan pageant of Ostara. St. John’s Eve, typically celebrated on June 23rd, is linked with the Pagan feast of Midsummer, or the summer time solstice.
Not all of the legends connected with St. Mark’s Eve are related with dying, nevertheless. The evening was also a single when young gals would test to divine whom their foreseeable future mates would be. There were a variety of means to carry out this: by buying twelve leaves of sage at midnight, by strolling 9 moments around a haystack though reciting, “Here’s the sheath, now where’s the knife?” or by baking a dumb-cake, eating a piece of the cake, then walking backwards to bed without saying a word (for this reason the phrase “dumb”). If a girl did any of these factors, but specially if she prayed to St. Mark even though undertaking them, she would see the shadow of, or capture a fleeting glimpse of, the guy she would someday marry. Nonetheless, if she went to mattress without the need of seeing such a shadow and dreamed of a freshly-dug grave, that intended she would die unmarried.
These are mainly English customs, while. In Italy, if St. Mark’s Working day is celebrated at all, it is with feasting, consuming, and/or featuring bread to the significantly less lucky. The customized of carrying red and having a procession seems to be Stephanie Meyer’s invention.