The Ash Wednesday Code

For my functionally pagan friends I shall note that yesterday was Ash Wednesday in my Lutheran brand of Christianity. That means we had church, did a long public confession together promising ‘amendment of life’, and got ashes smeared on the forehead. Fifty years ago when I was a kid we Lutherans wouldn’t dare smear our foreheads because it was ‘too damn Catholic’. But then we discovered that Catholics have a lot of cool rituals that make us feel mystical and holy, so added forehead smearing to our repertoire of corporate spirituality. Technically, the ashes come by burning the dried palm branches from last year’s Palm Sunday parade. This isn’t without its hazards, however. My predecessor at one church accidentally also burned down a five-acre field trying to create the ashes. The stranger who stopped to help him futilely stomp it out eventually joined the church, so it was a net gain to the mission, though not a particularly efficient evangelism strategy.

A safer and handier way is to go to the Catholic bookstore and grab a box o’ ashes specially prepared for forehead smearing by the nuns of the Little Sisters of the Fire Pit, an order that, surprisingly enough, had its roots among hot dog vendors in the days of the Joan of Arc affair, who in addition to mustard and ketchup would provide a smear of the blessed saint’s still-warm ashes, thus warding off evil for a spell, though this, of course, cost extra. Interestingly, a decade later the vendors were still offering a smear of the miraculously still warm ashes as a side, the combination being known as the ‘St. Joan Special’, though it was often ordered with the phrase ‘dog ‘n St. Joan.’ The pornographers of the day took hold of this, and ‘doggin’ St. Joan’ became a favorite theme, which pissed off the Vatican and caused them to look toward the root of the problem, which, of course, led them to the hot dog vendors.

Now, the hot dog vendors were all single women—too ugly or poor to marry, or abandoned by their husbands, or outcasts trying to raise illegitimate children, or widows with no family (man) to support them. They eked out a living selling hot dogs in order to avoid falling into prostitution, though they kept the company of street people. The gaze fell upon them because there was a certain faction within the Vatican which, following the unintended consequences of enforced celibacy, suspected these women of sneaking into their dreams at night and heating up their dogs, as they called it. Additionally, the idea of eating a hot dog while at the same time being smeared with St. Joan struck them as a conspiracy to turn men into homosexuals; or at least to make them pussy-whipped, instinctively understanding the symbolism of it long before Freud showed up. Granted, it was a very small faction—a small appendage, as it were—but still, it had to be appeased. They wanted the hot dog vendors brought under control, if not thoroughly outlawed.

So the pope, being both sympathetic to the women’s plight and a pragmatic man, worked out a deal with the Flaccidites, as they came to be known during the controversy, defined in those days disparagingly as ‘men afraid of their boners.’ The pope declared the first day in Lent to be a meatless day, a day of fasting from meat, thus appearing publicly to discredit the vendors of the St. Joan Special. All of Western Christianity met this news with a shrug, since their diet was mostly meatless anyway, but the Flaccidites thought they had won a great victory, and celebrated the occasion in St. Peter’s Square on the night before the ensuing Easter with prayers of thanksgiving and a marshmallow roast. They sought to have the event incorporated into the liturgical calendar of the church, but they were ultimately defeated by the Great Marshmallow Drought, which went on for over five years, though it was recorded by no one but the Flaccidites. In its place, of course, we have what is now called the ‘Easter Vigil Service’; the vestiges of the St. Joan Roast, as it had been known, can still be seen in the worship rubrics of our modern service: “The congregation shall gather around a fire in the courtyard.”

Meanwhile the hot dog vendors, fed up with their stigmatization by the Flaccidites fought back by having the pope bless their ashes (called, liturgically, ‘covering your ash’) of St. Joan (the Flaccidites had never been aroused by the ashes), and began declaring that the meatless ashes were just as powerful—could bring the same thrill—as ‘dog ‘n St. Joan.’ Indeed, because of the papal blessing, these ashes were even more powerful, and they advertised them of course as getting you more bang for the buck. This sent the Flaccidites into a hysteria of hand-wringing. It came to a boil during the Great Marshmallow Drought (the ‘Unstickiness Era’ as it is also known) at the annual Marshmallow Roast. They were convinced the hot dog vendors were responsible for the drought, and so, gathered around the fire without marshmallows, they swore their lives to the extinction of hot dog vendors by taking a stick and impaling a hot dog on it and thrusting it into the flames and holding it there while singing all four verses of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. During the Amen they withdrew the now charred flesh (lit.: “barbecue”) and softly blew on it, intoning blessings to St. Joan the Hot. Then in an elaborate ritual best left to the imagination, they ate it. It was the eating of Joan the Hot more than the lack of marshmallows that caused the Flaccidites to lose favor with the pope, who ousted them (for a time) from the Vatican, though they never did quite disappear. They showed up a couple of hundred years later in America known as the ‘christian right’.

While the Flaccidites were busy ironically becoming what they most hated, the hot dog vendors were growing fabulously wealthy, for a couple of reasons. First, the elimination of hog dogs from the St. Joan Special created a huge profit margin; a saying among vendors was ‘ashes to ashes, maybe; dust to riches certainly.’ Second, a monopoly on the pope’s blessing gave the newly-created hot dog vendors’ guild absolute control over the price of ashes at a time when the smears were becoming the devotional rage in all of Europe—hundreds, thousands of courts and cathedrals ordered wagon loads of the blessed ashes of St. Joan, wanting to rub their faces in the good fortune it brought; though there were, of course, those who scorned it as nothing more than ‘kissing the pope’s ash heh-heh’. It didn’t matter to the Guild. Flush with money, and recalling their own experiences of hot dog vendoring as thrown away women and their fight to keep the Flaccidites from forcing them into prostitution, they decided that instead of each one grabbing private profits, they would build a cloister to provide sanctuary for any hot dog vendor wishing it, especially those on the verge of being forced into the sex trade. They supported the whole undertaking by preparing and shipping the blessed ashes of St. Joan so folks could mark themselves with good fortune. They called themselves the Little Sisters of the Fire Pit in honor of their beginnings, selling hot dogs there around the public fire pit where St. Joan became a marshmallow.

In due course, however, the more misogynistic elements of the Vatican and its culture joined with the remaining Flaccidites in their common fear that an image of St. Joan might bring about an unholy boner. They brought successful pressure to bear on the pope to call the day simply Ash Wednesday, and to remove all references to Joan, the Hot and otherwise, in what had by now become a purely religious observance. References to hot dogs and marshmallows were also eliminated, leaving only the ashes, and the imposition of the ashes was now put in the hands of the male priesthood. St. Joan had no say over her body of ashes anymore; it was controlled by men in robes and hoods.

But hidden behind the patriarchal facade lies the deeper celebration of the strength of women, a camouflaged expression of the divine feminine. It is this day which provides the Little Sisters of the Fire Pit all that is needed to welcome and nurse the most recent hot dog vendors that come their way.

Dan Brown, eat your heart out.

Larry