Note 236 — Chapter III · HOLY DAYS
Reading edition
E. E. Sikes, “Folk-lore in the ‘Works and Days’ of Hesiod,” Classical Review, 1893, vii, 390. The Hesiodic injunction (Opera et dies, 742-743):
μηδ’ ἀπὸ πεντόζοιο θεῶν ἐν δαιτὶ θαλείῃ αὖον ἀπὸ χλωροῦ τάμνειν αἴθωνι σιδήρῳ
stripped of its metaphorical setting, means simply, “Do not cut your nails with iron on a joyous festival of the gods.” This taboo may be compared with the rule observed by the Flaminica Dialis at Rome, who, during the celebration of the festival called the Vestalia, might not cut her hair or nails (Ovid, Fasti, vi, 225-226). The Roman antiquarian, Pliny the Elder, refers to the belief that it is ominous to pare the nails on market days (nundinæ), but to cut the hair on the 17th and 29th days of the month is a preventive of baldness and headache (Historia naturalis, xxviii, 5). These pagan superstitions have passed into modern European folklore, being widely current, for example, in England (W. Henderson, Notes on the Folk-lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders, London, 1879, pp. 17 sq.), as in the familiar lines:
“Better a child had ne’er been born Then cut his nails on a Sunday morn!”
Or, as another old English rhyme runs:
“Sunday shaven, Sunday shorn, Better hadst thou ne’er been born!”
In certain parts of Ireland people will not shave on Sunday (G. H. Kinahan, in Folk-lore Record, 1881, iv, 105). Besides Sunday, Friday is often considered an unlucky day for cutting hair or nails, and sometimes a distinction is made between the two days, as in Northumberland, where it is unlucky to cut hair on a Friday or to pare nails on a Sunday (Denham Tracts, ed. J. Hardy, ii, 343). In Macedonia Wednesday and Friday are the two days when the nails should not be cut, while Sunday is unpropitious for bathing (G. F. Abbott, Macedonian Folk-lore, Cambridge, 1903, p. 190). Similar taboos are found outside of Europe. The Egyptians hold Saturday to be particularly unfavourable for shaving and cutting the nails (E. W. Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians,⁵ London, 1871, i, 331), while the Jews in Jerusalem think that the nails should be cut early in the week, so that they may not start growing on the Sabbath (Miss A. Goodrich-Freer, in Folklore, 1904, xv, 187). These superstitions may rest ultimately on the notion that such acts as hair-cutting, shaving, and nail-paring are ritually unclean, and hence that their performance on a sacred day would defile the festival. See in general on this subject, E. E. Sikes, “Hair and Nails,” Hastings’s Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, vi, 474-476.