This Winter Solstice mandala incorporates traditional pagan symbols--the Druidic Oak as the Tree of Life festooned with ever green holly. |
“Everybody
celebrates Solstice,” the smug pagan said, “They just don’t know it.”
Don’t
you hate a smug pagan about as much as an outraged Bible thumper or a self
righteous atheist? O.K. maybe not. Especially since the pagan has a point.
Buried
in traditional folklore, swathed in symbolism, and steeped in metaphor, Christmas and Chanukah share
the same impulses as Yule and its Celtic
and ancient British cousins, Meán Geimhridh and Meán Geimhridhh beloved by contemporary neo-pagans of
one stripe or another. At their core
there was in each of them a physical or metaphorical re-kindling of the light
at the darkest hour of the year offering a glimmering of hope at a time of cold
and starvation.
Archeological evidence shows
that the event—the shortest day and longest night of the year, when the sun’s
daily maximum elevation in the sky is the lowest—was marked, often using
physical constructions to capture the rising sun, in Neolithic times
across widely separated cultures in Europe, the Near East, Asia, and North America. Stonehenge
is just the most famous example.
While
the trapping of Christmas—the Yule log,
the holly and the ivy, the Christmas tree, mistletoe, wassailing
and other customs are commonly known to be borrowed from pagan celebrations,
the metaphor of the birth of the Son,
bringing light and salvation to the world is often overlooked. Among still nervous orthodox Christians, drawing
parallels to pagan belief is still actively discouraged.
The
early Church actively squelched efforts to confabulate the Feast of the Nativity with the Festival
of Sol Invictus, introduced to the Roman
Empire in the Third Century under
the Emperor Elagabalus. It
was a religious revolution that briefly upended Jupiter as the primary
Roman God and put in his place the Invincible Sun, which combined the
characteristics and cult practices of several sun gods including Syrian Elah-Gabal, the Greek Apollo, and Mithras,
a soldiers’s god of Persian
origin.
The
feast was set on December 25, during
the Roman holiday of period following Saturnalia. Later, under the Emperor Aurelian as Christianity grew in influence and
importance, attempts were made to incorporate worship of the Christ child into
the cult as an incarnation of Sol.
When the Church became ascendant in the Empire, it
did all it could to squelch the festival, but like many popular pagan customs,
it was so integrated into many daily lives that it inevitably influenced how
Christmas, by then assigned to the same calendar day, was observed.
Well more than a millennium later the English poet
Christina Rossetti, a member of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, drew
the clear connection between Christmas and solstice in her poem In the Bleak Midwinter. Popularized after her death and set to music
to become what is considered by many critics as one of the most beautiful of
carols.
In the Bleak Midwinter
In the bleak
midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard
as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen,
snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak
midwinter, long ago.
Our God, Heaven
cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth
shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak
midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God
Almighty, Jesus Christ.
Enough for Him,
whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of
milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him,
whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass
and camel which adore.
Angels and
archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and
seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother
only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the
beloved with a kiss.
What can I give
Him, poor as I am?
If I were a
shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise
Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I
give Him: give my heart.
Tonight, I think I will dispose of the obtuse
metaphors and with those old pagans—and the smug new ones—kindle some small
fire of hope and prayer amid the dark and cold.
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