Groundhog’s Day, February 2, as Americans and Canadians know but most non-North Americans may not, is all about Punxsutawney Phil up in western Pennsylvania predicting the weather for the next several weeks. No one takes this seriously as meteorological prognostication, although, truth be told, old Phil out-predicts the folks on television as often as not. And, of course, the terrific 1993 Harold Ramis movie, using Phil and his annual antics as a backdrop, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, has become a classic, forever altering the aura of the phrase “Groundhog’s Day.”

Some people profess to see deep spiritual meaning in that movie, something sort of vaguely Buddhist I think, about reincarnation or parallel universes or some such subject I neglected to study in college. So I don’t know about that. But what’s interesting to me is that Groundhog’s Day did not start out as the tall-tale, pop-folk folderol it is today. It started out associated with—as is most everything of this sort, even Valentine’s Day and Halloween—the spiritual. Groundhog’s Day goes back to the Old Country, otherwise known for practical purposes as Europe but really meaning most of the time Britain. But goes back to exactly what?

February 2 is a significant date in the Christian calendar. It’s Candlemas, which is also known, with slight variations according to religious tradition, as the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple. But the Church calendar is coincidental with—and hence very likely an overlay on—much older Celtic agricultural observances. In this case, Groundhog’s Day has to do with a very ancient, astronomically linked celebration called Imbolc, which later became Brighid’s Day and even later, after the Christianization of the British Isles, Saint Brighid’s Day.

There is a great deal of lore and legend associated with Imbolc, much of it involving Cailleach, the hag of Gaelic tradition. And yes, that lore and legend very much includes weather prognostication and careful observation of the emergence from hibernation of badgers and snakes. Imbolc is about halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, and markings on ancient megaliths testify to its origins in astronomical observation. It was a time thought to be a harbinger of spring on account of the onset of ewes’ lactation in expectation of spring lambs, and the blossom setting of certain plants, principally the blackthorn (itself associated with much lore). Such ancient celebrations are not unique to the Imbolc crowd, of course; for example, in the Jewish calendar the minor festival of Tu Bishvat—which fell this past Wednesday—has origins of a similar sort.

Here is how the British Almanac of 1828, at page ten, describes the matter, and you will see right away the connection between Candlemas and Groundhog’s Day (as well as note the association of New Year’s Eve with the Festival of the Circumcision):

Our ancestors had a great many ridiculous notions about the possibility of prognosticating the future condition of the weather, from the state of the atmosphere on certain festival days. The Festival of the Circumcision (January 1) was thus supposed to afford evidence of the weather to be expected in the coming year. For St. Vincent’s Day (January 22) . . . . The Conversion of St. Paul (January 25) was . . . Candlemas day (February 2) supplied another of these irrational inferences from the weather of one day to that of a distant period:

If Candlemas day be fair and bright
Winter will have another flight;
But if Candlemas day be clouds and rain
Winter is gone and will not come again.

In other words, if Phil sees his shadow (“fair and bright”, as the old poem has it), we’re icily in for it; if not (“clouds and rain”), then not.

The much older Scottish Gaelic verse goes (in translation) like this:

The serpent will come from the hole
On the brown Day of Bríde,
Though there should be three feet of snow
On the flat surface of the ground.

As the British Almanac quote shows, many days we today in America rarely take heed of were once believed to be predictive of this and that. We have no secular American equivalent for St. Vincent’s Day, let alone the day of the supposed conversion of St. Paul. For some reason, however, Candlemas translated into Groundhog’s Day has stayed with us, except that most likely it is Imbolc or Brighid’s Day that has stayed with us, carried to the New World by Scotch and Irish immigrants. That is how we got from poetry at Candlemas in medieval Britain to hundreds of television news reporters converging on Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to record Inner Circle guys in black top hats and tuxedoes talking earnestly to an allegedly 132-year-old groundhog.

You can’t make stuff like this up, folks. Happily, we don’t need to.