'These days presumably the only dangers to English Catholics on bonfire night are the kind they warn you about on Blue Peter. '

Steve Tomkins wonders why we’re still burning effigies of Guy Fawkes, 400 years after the failed attempt to blow up Parliament

Compared to the Christian tradition of burning people alive, burning their effigies is clearly a step in the right direction, but it’s still not a particularly nice way to behave.

So what does it say about British society that we’re still burning Guy Fawkes in effigy 400 years after his execution as a Catholic terrorist?

For one thing, it suggests how easy we find it to re-enact gruesome ritual without thinking about it. Effigy burning had clear meaning to our ancestors. It was a punishment enacted by the state against those who were not available to take their punishment in the usual way.

When Michael Servetus was convicted of denying the Trinity in counter-reformation France, he was burned in effigy because he had fled the country to Calvin’s Geneva, where he was burned in person. When governments stopped burning heretics and witches, effigy burning remained as a threatening gesture of the mob.

Gesture

Even today, of course, it is a gesture of violent protest, whether from Turkish Muslims against George Bush, or Sussex conservationists against John Prescott.

So it should not be too hard for us to decode the symbolism of Guy Fawkes night. From the 17th century well into the 20th, Roman Catholicism was a focus of fear and hatred for English people.

Fox’s Book of Martyrs, the most widely read book after the Bible throughout much of that time, kept alive the stories how Bloody Mary had burned the Protestants. Catholics were thought to owe allegiance to the Pope instead of the King or Queen of England, in league with invaders from Scotland and France. Even people as amicable as Dickens disliked Catholicism as a barbaric superstition.

So what better vent for anti-Catholic paranoia than an annual burning of Guy Fawkes, the fundamentalist whose failed November 5 th attack made him an icon of the popish urge to destroy the Parliament and Church of England, and of course overturn English freedoms?

Give the papists a taste of their own fiery medicine. In an age when rioters could wreck the homes of English Catholics, there was no mistaking the mock-executions for harmless fun. John Wesley’s description of the traditional Guy Fawkes celebrations was: 'The town full of bonfires, and people shouting, firing of guns, cursing and swearing.'

Dangers

These days presumably the only dangers to English Catholics on bonfire night are the kind they warn you about on Blue Peter. The fear and hatred have drained out of the ritual, turning it into family entertainment, all potatoes in foil and sparklers. Time, to quote Philip Larkin, has transfigured it to untruth.

There is, perhaps, something quite heart-warming about this. If it is a shock to notice that our bonfire night festivities are an expression of ancient hatreds, it is also comforting to think that the ritual can outlive the hatred and transfigure it into something quite harmless. If only new religious fears and hatreds had not come up to take its place.

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