Having had the month of November to rest ourselves from the travails of crossing the veil on Samhain, and the equally mortifying stress of upcoming Black Friday sales, the occult community frequently comes together at this time of year to inform every Christian within earshot that they are about to celebrate an old pagan fire festival that they stole from our ancestors.
And of course this inevitably brings up all the other old pagan fire festivals that they also stole from our ancestors, and the rituals they “borrowed” and the symbols they are misusing etc., etc. It’s a wonder we ever get the Black Friday Eve Feast dishes done in time to line up at the mall for the Coming of the Big Screens.
The image, created by illustrator Norman Rockwell during the early days of American involvement in World War II, is certainly a propaganda piece.
It depicts an harmonious multigenerational feasting orgy that occurs on the third Thursday in November, right before the mad capitalist cash grab retailers hope will keep their doors open, remove excess inventory before tax time, and get them through the post holiday slump while everyone struggles to pay for the “gifts” that count more than the thoughts.
I love this painting for what it aspires to be, but I hate that it has become a fantasy that many of us are searching for every year at this time.
It’s a myth, and should be regarded as such. Place it next to the Birth of Venus and Saturn Devouring His Sons, as allegorical at most, and let’s all stop trying to live up to it. It’s not healthy on a number of levels.
I am not a Christian, and I don’t think I ever actually was. I attended Sunday School and Vacation Bible School as a child, and I have a very good understanding of the Bible, but I was not baptized or christened into the community of the church. In fact the church that provided these services was not part of a structured hierarchy or established sect. I think what was being preached was probably what the evangelical churches teach now, but as I tend to avoid them, the comparison is with their public persona only.
At any rate, I never saw Christmas as a religious rite of the Christian faith, or a part of the Miracle of the Resurrection, though I find researching the ideas around this festival quite fascinating.
Yet I still celebrate Christmas because I have friends and family less weird than myself that enjoy that holiday. I don’t personally need to spoil it for them by telling them how it originates as Saturnalia in Rome, or is really the Viking Yule that calls the Sun back to us from the Outer Dark. It is a time for family and food and fellowship, and a celebration of life continuing to move forward another year.
My wife’s mother had her last Christmas in 2021. She sat beneath a plaque of the Wheel of the Year (which I am sure she purchased with a wink-wink as a “Celtic calendar”) and watched us all open our gifts. She had always set great store by having the family together for Christmas day. Which was December 27 this time, because that was when we could all be off work, and make the several hour journey to where they lived. A bit over a month later she was gone. Our Christmas will never be quite the same again.
That Wheel of the Year is the exact one we call the Witches Calendar and most likely derives from Wiccan Sabbats plotted by Gerald Gardner and others who created the Wiccan faith in the first half of the 20th Century. At its corners you will find the Solstices and the Equinoxes under suitably archaic Gallo-Nordic names, and betwixt and between those you will find the cross quarter days, which are the big festivals for Wiccan and witch alike.
These ancient and noble traditions are a matter of speculation. Some bits come from tradition, oral history, and folklore. Some come from things like Robert Graves’s White Goddess and other interpretive works that in analysis can’t be considered a valid historical source.
So hurling the gravy boat at Cousin Cecil, the “Christian weirdo” at Black Friday Eve dinner over it seems, to my way of thinking, a bit of an overreaction. It cries out for a need to “defend our turf” by vilifying the other guy. And that’s precisely what many have accused the Christian community of doing to the occult community for centuries (and not without good and sufficient reason).
Do we really want to be the ones to carry that onward?
Now if Cecil lobbed a roll at me first, that’s a different matter. I love a good debate. I delight in finding historical precedent that many of Cecil’s most cherished and revered truths have their origin in something or someplace other than what he thinks they do.
Ah, for those glorious days in the early Church when you could argue for months about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. I think sometimes the reason the Church today has so many defectors to other beliefs, or no belief at all, is because they’ve taken away that wonderment with the spiritual world.
Let’s be fair. Spirit is a big thing. Way bigger than we are. Regardless of how you come at it, the idea that we are ghosts pushing around a meat suit on a tiny fragile rock spinning around a big ball of fire in an infinite and possibly timeless emptiness without any other ghosts out there is somewhat terrifying. Only moderately more terrifying is that there are other much bigger ghosts out there who are making it all go, to which we appear as meager as bacteria. But what I think is most terrifying is that those really big ghosts are out there wondering if there are even bigger ghosts that they can’t see.
And all of them can dance on the head of a pin.
So when you establish a narrowly defined “sure and true” procedure for how all that comes together and operates for your club, you’ve taken some of the magic out of it. I mean, if I told you about how the TVs actually arrive at the Coming of the Big Screens, it just wouldn’t feel as special, now would it?
And perhaps that’s why people are drawn to non-traditional observances of traditional holidays. Or traditional observances of non-traditional holidays, depending on how you see it. Yule for Christmas. Ostara for Easter. Just leave me my Halloween, please. I’m always nervous that I’ll mispronounce Samhain in front of the family.
We don’t live in Ancient Rome or Medieval England or First Century Judea. So our choice of how we celebrate important dates, in fact our choice of important dates, is completely arbitrary. The Romans were a fairly tolerant and eclectic bunch. They loved a good party, so you can probably find a Roman festival to match up with about any day in the calendar 1The Romans even added days to the calendar to match up. , and if you can’t, you’ll find one they celebrated that was “stolen” from the Greeks, or the Celts, or the Phoenicians, or the Egyptians.
It’s fair to say that most ancient civilizations amalgamated the ideas and beliefs of their neighbors as they grew outward. Egypt presents a very easy way to observe this. The Egyptians have more gods than most other Mediterranean cultures. Every city and village had a god. There were gods for rivers and rocks and trees. There were gods for the hours, the stars, the winds, the directions, and several more abstract concepts. As the culture expanded, the local gods were allowed to climb aboard the Boat of Ra as it sailed through the Celestial Nile. They helped to row, they fought off demons, and they ensured a friendly greeting for the sky-bound counterpart of the village they protected on the earth.
Ra the Sun god is an old god of the Delta, or lower Egypt. Further up the Nile, the fertility god Osiris (Ausur in Khemit) was more important. His worship may have begun in ancient times when a fetish made of wheat or corn was ritually buried. When the corn man sprouted, life had returned. The metaphor for the dead being reborn ensured Osiris his place as the Lord of the Blessed Dead. When Narmer unified Upper and Lower Egypt, Amen, his personal god, was merged with Ra, and celebrated with the great Temple of Karnak, one of the world’s oldest perpetually used sacred sites. The Temple remains more or less active through to the Romans, when a portion was rededicated as Christian church for the new Christian Empire. There is now a mosque in it’s place, while the ancient giant temple complex bears mute testimony to the survival of the old gods.
So “stole” may be a harsh word. Borrowed is less harsh, but not perhaps as accurate.
If you go to a village and they have always worshipped Odin, getting them to forsake Odin and embrace your new Shepherd god is going to be a tough sell. Maybe that first year you get two or three converts. But they still want to hang out with their friends and family and drink mead at Yuletide. And well, so long as they aren’t actively praying to Odin, then Jesus isn’t offended. The missionary work of conversion was, at least in the early church, a little more flexible than it would become.
And we have to remember that joining the church in the Roman times meant hobnobbing with all the other people who had embraced the new faith, and being able to sell them used chariots. We have all known someone whose practice of Christianity was as much political and mercenary as spiritual, if not moreso. So it should not surprise us that this was an ancient practice too. If the Emperor converts, so do the subjects. If the Romans convert, then maybe there’s a trade agreement to be made if the Picts convert also. Meanwhile, no one said anything about not drinking mead at Yuletide.
And gradually over the next couple of millennia, what had been purely pagan and what had been purely Christian became a bit confused. People had their mead and they went to mass. They burned a Yule log and put up a creche. And nobody stole anything, they just decided that they were going to do the things that everyone enjoyed doing together and not make such a big deal about where it came from. If your family put up a tree for six generations, it didn’t matter if it was an ancient pagan winter symbol or a Christmas tree.
This desire to tease out an authenticity that is probably not there I think stems from being born as orphan children into a predominantly monotheistic Western world. Because so much of the history of witchcraft is tied to it’s Christian persecution, those on the path desire validation that somehow they are rejecting every taint of the faith that burned their figurative ancestors.
It’s an odd quirk of the human psyche that we feel the need to identify with persecutions that we have never ourselves experienced. The Burning Times were a horrible blot on human history. So is the Holocaust, Slavery, the Trail of Tears, the Holy Inquisition, the Crusades and many other persecutions (including those against the Christians) carried out by one group of people who have singled out another to blame for all the evils of the world.
The scenario of the oppressed becoming an oppressor is the cultural equivalent of the abused child growing up to become an abuser.
It needs to stop. Here. Now.
Before there are no more TVs left at Best Buy.
Now give Cousin Cecil back his dessert spoon and have another slab of that pie that is a completely inauthentic holiday tradition before I come over there and make you.
I will see you next week, and to all a good night.
Featured image: A painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris depicting the first Thanksgiving.Credit…Bettmann Archive/Getty Images.
This depicts the other great myth of Thanksgiving, that the Puritan pilgrims shared a feast with the local Indigenous Peoples, in the spirit of harmony and fellowship.
Which, of course, is why the Indigenous Peoples are shown in the subordinate position gladly receiving food from the oh so much better Puritans.
These same Puritans would not much later be responsible for the Salem Witch Trials, which sadly was not the worst of their atrocities. But hey, have some more mashed potatoes and corn (gifts from those primitive Indigenous Peoples).