see · festival of seven lamps north noemic midnight vigil candle
volume vii · pages 088–090 · ed. l. m.
an upper-valley winter rite; oldest documented 1689; older than its document. the question of why seven, briefly examined.
The seven lamps are lit, by long custom, on the eve of the winter solstice, along the sill of the meeting house of the upper valley. The rite is described at length in the festival entry (see festival of seven lamps); the present entry concerns its origins. The earliest documentation is a churchwarden's account dated 1689, recording the purchase of "seven lamps and one for spare", the spare being a feature retained without explanation to the present day. The rite is older than this record, but how much older has been the subject of three plausible accounts.
The pastoral account. The first account, given in a parish history of 1722, holds that the seven lamps commemorate seven shepherds lost to a particular storm in a particular winter, the year of which has never been reliably given. The account has the virtue of locality and the defect of unfalsifiability. No record of any storm of that name exists; no list of seven shepherds has ever been produced. The parish history itself contains six errors of dating in twelve pages.
The dialect account. The second account, the most often cited in the village today, holds that "seven" is a translation error from the north noemic word setha, which means not the cardinal seven but a small handful, conventionally any number from five to nine, used when the speaker does not wish to commit to a precise count. On this reading, the festival commemorates a small handful of lamps lit for any number of small handful of years, and the present count of seven is the work of a tidy-minded printer in the eighteenth century. The dialect account is supported by the persistence of the spare.
The administrative account. The third account, the present editor's, holds that the rite arose from no event at all, that no original storm or shepherd or word is involved, and that the lamps are lit because the lamps are lit. This account has the virtue of requiring no evidence and the defect of explaining nothing. It is, however, the only account compatible with the village's own statements about the rite, which are uniformly that there is no story.
The number seven, in any case, has settled. The lamps are tin; the wicks kerosene; the spare lamp is bought every year and never used. The rite continues. The origin, by any account, is now the rite itself.