The Life of Saint Martin · Chapter XII
The pagan funeral frozen in the middle of the fields
Some time later, on one of his journeys through the countryside, Martin came across, in the distance, the funeral of a pagan, on its way to the burial surrounded by superstitious rituals. As they were still more than seven hundred metres away, Martin stopped to try to work out what that gathering was, unable to make out clearly from afar what was going on.
He saw, however, that it was a large group of peasants, and noticed some white linen sheets fluttering in the wind above what they were carrying on their shoulders. He was at once convinced that they were holding a pagan procession, because the country people of Gaul had the old habit of parading the statues of their gods through the fields, covered with white cloths.
Martin then raised his hand, made the sign of the cross in their direction and ordered them to stop where they were and set down what they were carrying. What followed was extraordinary: first, those men all stopped dead, motionless as stone statues; then, however hard they strained to move on, they could not take a single step forward and began turning round and round on the spot in a perfectly ridiculous manner, until, exhausted, they had no choice but to lay the body on the ground. Bewildered, they looked at one another in silence, not understanding what was happening to them.
Meanwhile, seeing the scene from closer up, Martin realised that this was only a funeral procession and not a procession of idols. He raised his hand again and left them free to pick up the dead man and go on their way. And so, when he wished, he made them stop; and when he saw fit, he let them go in peace.
This episode — almost comic in its image of the men going round in circles, unable to get away from the same spot — helps to explain the origin of the very word pagan!
In Latin, a village or rural district was called a pagus, and whoever lived there was a paganus — the country dweller, the villager (whom Sulpicius also calls rusticus). While Christianity spread quickly through the Roman cities (civitates), in the rural areas of Gaul the farmers long kept up the old Celto-Roman rituals. One of the most popular took place in spring (similar to the Roman festival of the Ambarvalia and the cult of Cybele or of the ancient Celtic mother goddesses): they carried images of deities, covered with white linen cloths, in procession around the cornfields to ask for good harvests. At a distance of 500 Roman paces (about 740 metres), Martin mistook the shroud for the veils of one of those farming processions — but as soon as he saw that it was only village people going to bury a dead man, he let them get on with their lives.