Soul cake

I feel like I was rather spoilt with nice things for Christmas this year. A good many of them were books, but also among those nice things was Sting's new album If On A Winter's Night. I love, love, love it. But I appreciate that it's probably not for everyone — it's in the line of traditional, largely celtic and medieval, music, and it's melancholy. Interesting is that in his blurb in the cover (which is quite an interesting read, for a potted history of Christmas outside of the Church) he says “Like many people, I have an ambivalent attitude towards the celebration of Christmas. For many, it is a period of intense loneliness and alienation. I specifically avoided the jolly, almost triumphalist, strain of the Christian carols”. It’s a shame he doesn’t know that the intense misery of humankind is the very reason why the Christian carols are triumphant about the birth of a Saviour.

There is one song on the album called Soul Cake, which I like, among others. I got to musing about the term "soul cake" and to thinking that I quite liked that concept, and that maybe 2010 would be the year of keeping my eyes open soul cakes. You know, those morsels that delight your soul. Not necessarily the essential things — those would be soul bread — but the extra delicacies you come across that especially move you, or transport you or set you singing ...

But then I googled the term, which is perhaps just as well before I went around using the phrase, because a soul cake is actually "a small round cake which is traditionally made for All Souls' Day to celebrate the dead. The cakes, often simply referred to as souls, were given out to soulers (mainly consisting of children and the poor) who would go from door to door on Hallowmas singing and saying prayers for the dead. Each cake eaten would represent a soul being freed from Purgatory" (from Wikipedia). Or elsewhere it says that "Soul Cakes are an echo of the sacrificial foods of the Celtic festival of Samhain held in early autumn. These little cakes were traditionally set out with glasses of wine on All Hallows Eve (31st October) for the souls of the dead. On All Saints Day (1st November) children would go "souling" calling out "Soul, Soul, for a Soul Cake: pray you good mistress, a soul cake". And elsewhere again it says that before the reformation poor Christians offered up prayers for the dead in exchange for these cakes from their wealthier neighbours. Or Sting himself, in the video that plays on his website, says the soul cakes were there to appease the ghosts of the past.

I mean, I'd be all for the idea of letting souls out of pergatory, if I believed that souls went to such a place, and that all it took to release them was the consumption of a little cake. But I don't. And I think it was a terrible sort of wickedness to lead people to believe (and so burden them with the idea) that they could buy, or eat, the salvation of the soul of another.

But despite all that, here is the song. For some reason I find myself taken with medieval traditional songs. This video is the album version, which I have included, though it's not the greatest sound (and you needn't watch it), because it's the only version I found on Youtube that includes the trumpeted refrain of God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman, which I like (and I don't think Sting intended it, but the words of the first verse of that carol would be rather apt) .

And here is a live version performed by Sting on the Today show. Other songs on this album that I really like are There Is No Rose Of Such Virtue (a 15th-century English carol), Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming (a 15th-century German carol) and Lullaby For An Anxious Child (and on the video Sting speaks curiously about the dual purpose of lullabies to both soothe and disturb children). Interesting he has also set The Burning Babe, a poem I've always liked by Robert Southwell, a 16th-century English Jesuit martyr, to music, though it isn't perhaps the way I would have chosen to do it. And I do love his closing song You Only Cross My Mind in Winter (you can listen to snippets of them all here).