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On the Kalendar: Vitus (Guy), Martyr, Holy Helper

June from Les Petites Heures d'Anne de Bretagne

“June”, kalendar page from Les Petites Heures d’Anne de Bretagne (The Little Hours of Queen Anne of Bretagne), by the Maître des Triomphes de Pétrarque. From Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (France).

According to his Legend, Vitus was martyred with Modestus and Crescentia under the Emperor Diocletian. Public veneration of the trio during the fifth century indicates that they were historical martyrs, but in the absence of contemporary accounts, the Legend accrued some legendary (in many senses of the word) details of their martyrdom.

The Legend says that Vitus was the 7-year-old son of a Lucanian senator. (Lucania is a province in southern Italy between the Tuscan Sea and the Gulf of Taranto.) Or maybe he was 10 years old. And maybe his father was a Sicilian senator named Hylas. At any rate, Vitus became a Christian at a precocious age, and to avoid being tortured by his father (who wanted him to remain a good pagan), he ran away with his tutor Modestus and Modestus’s wife Crescentia (who was also Vitus’s nanny). They wound up in Rome, where Vitus drove out a demon which had taken possession of one of Diocletian’s sons. This, however, didn’t endear Vitus and his companions to Diocletian, who still had them tortured for being Christians. They were thrown to the lions, but the lions merely licked them. The were then thrown into a cauldron of boiling oil (along with a rooster—this is important later), but just as they were about to die, an immense storm destroyed several pagan temples, and under cover of this mayhem, an angel whisked the trio back to Lucania, where they died of their wounds, possibly from having been tortured on the rack. (Or maybe they survived and were martyred later; the records are inconsistent.)

The association of Vitus with the eponymous disease, St Vitus’ Dance, is somewhat convoluted. One explanation is that some 16th-century Germans and Latvians thought they could ensure a year’s worth of health by dancing before a status of Saint Vitus on his feast day. Their manic dancing apparently resembled chorea (Sydenham’s chorea, or chorea minor), which is characterized by by rapid, uncoordinated jerking movements primarily affecting the face, hands and feet. Thus, Vitus lent his name to the disease long before it was documented by Thomas Sydenham, a British physician who lived in the mid-17th century. Because medieval medical understanding was rather vague and didn’t necessarily distinguish between various diseases, Vitus also became the patron saint of epileptics. And because of some strange transference understandable only by the medieval mind, Vitus was also the patron saint of dancers, and by extension, actors. And because the angel saved him in the middle of a storm, he became a protector from storms. And remember the rooster? Because the rooster became an identifying symbol of Vitus, the saint became a protector against oversleeping.

On the other hand, it’s possible that Vitus’s connection to chorea and epilepsy predates the German/Latvian devotions, because Vitus was already well established as one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, whose cultus began in Rhineland in the 14th century during the Black Death.

Every reference states that Vitus is also known as Guy, but they never explain why. Vitus’s feast day is June 15.

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