What You Know about Christmas Might Be Wrong

The idea that Christmas celebrations are largely lifted from earlier Paganisms is pretty well embedded in the culture, even among people who don’t have a dog in that fight.

So let Biblical Archaeology Review stir things up a little with the idea that the Dec. 25 (or Jan. 6 for the Orthodox) date was not necessarily chosen to ride piggyback on Sol Invictus or Mithras but is based on Jewish tradition instead, one carried on by early Christians:

Around 200 C.E. Tertullian of Carthage reported the calculation that the 14th of Nisan (the day of the crucifixion according to the Gospel of John) in the year Jesus died was equivalent to March 25 in the Roman (solar) calendar. March 25 is, of course, nine months before December 25; it was later recognized as the Feast of the Annunciation—the commemoration of Jesus’ conception. Thus, Jesus was believed to have been conceived and crucified on the same day of the year. Exactly nine months later, Jesus was born, on December 25.

Read the whole thing.

Finally, Hank Stuever is the author of Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present. You can read an excerpt here in the Washington Post “Style” section.

I know that I am in the same country as those “gated-community supermoms who [have]  volleyball schedules, tutor times and carpool arrangements abuzz in the BlackBerry that is [their] brain,” because I have sat in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport and watched them clatter by.

This fact struck me though: Amid all the crafts-making and bazaar-holding and home-decorating, they don’t know how to sew?

“It’s the sparkle, spirit, and style of American Girls, yesterday and today!” intones a recorded narration as the lights go down. A Junior League member and a teenage beauty pageant winner emcee. While each young model, carrying a doll, takes her little turn on the catwalk, we learn her American Girl back story. Here’s Josefina, who lived on a ranch in northern New Mexico in the 1820s. She had to sew her own clothes.

“Who here knows how to sew their own clothes?” the emcee asks. “Raise your hands.”

In a room of several hundred families, nobody raises a hand.

“Moms? Anyone here ever sew? Anyone have a sewing machine?”

No hands.

“Well then, you can just imagine how hard life was.”

Weird, eh? Even I have an old sewing machine for repair jobs. It makes life easier, just as my chainsaw and power screwdriver do.

UPDATE: If you have read this far and are not still muttering about Druids, take Stuever’s Christmas-shopping survey.

Cattle Mutilations and Occult Weirdness

A recent “cattle mutilation” report had the gang at Querencia turning to me, because evidently I am their go-to guy on weirdness.

After a couple of weeks had passed, I cranked out a four-part blog post series at my other blog:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

But I left something out: what I called my “Berlitz full-immersion summer course in occult weirdness.”

I did write about that aspect of the experience for Fate magazine back in 1988. But I seem to have outsmarted myself and “filed” that issue in some very special place. It is not in the Box of Magazines in Which I Published Articles.

Naturally it is not available online, being from 1988. Too bad, because I had thought of scanning the pages and putting them on the web site.

Perhaps I could find a copy somewhere if there was sufficient demand.

DUTS: Everyone Is Doing It

A blog of a nearby nature center just reported on how they drummed down (!) the Sun this year.

Nothing Pagan there, no, sir. (No snickering, please.) Their timing was a little strange, but their hearts were in the right place.

Here is last year’s Denver-area drumming (YouTube video.)

As mentioned, the dogs and I did our own.

IO SATVRNALIA

Return of the Sun, miraculous menorahs (officially over, yes), Baby Jesus—it’s all good.

Did you make your reservation at Kentucky Fried Chicken yet?

And Io, Saturnalia!

(graphic lifted from another Pagan blogger)

One Night during the Cold War

I was walking around today in Manitou Springs, once a spa-resort town, located in the foothills west of Colorado Springs.

You should know that there are no springs in Colorado Springs–real-estate developers lied in the 1870s too. The springs are in Manitou.

But Colorado Springs has several important military installations: Fort Carson, NORAD, and so on.

Manitou is in a tight valley, and Ruxton Avenue, one of the main streets, goes up a side canyon, where the sun rarely clears the snow and ice, so you step carefully past the little storefronts where various hopeful artsy types open galleries and craft shops and then are gone six months later.

I looked down at one of the Victorian houses across the creek, and a memory of the Cold War years came back.

It was winter then too. M. and I, not long married, lived elsewhere in Manitou.

One night in the early 1980s, I was visiting friends who rented that particular house then, and I came out around 10 p.m to see a narrow view of the sky to the north.

The sky was glowing blood red.

Faster than you can read these words, I thought, “That’s it. Soviet missiles have hit Denver. We’re next. We’ll all be dead before I can get home to say goodbye to her.”

Then my rational mind belatedly suggested, “Maybe it’s the Northern Lights.”

At 38 degrees-something north, we do not see the aurora borealis often—in fact, almost never.

Had it not been for the planetarium shows I had watched as a kid at the natural history museum in Denver, I might not have known what I was seeing.

I went home then to find M. also a little shaken by the sight. After we reassured ourselves that we were still alive, we watched the aurora until it faded. It was front-page news in the next day’s local papers.

It all came back to me as I walked back down to the main thoroughfare to look for her Christmas present. We’re still alive.

Creeping Pantheism

Highbrow journalist Ross Douthat is bothered by creeping pantheism.

In a recent New York Times piece, he calls pantheism “Hollywood’s religion of choice.”

The “news hook” for his column is the new movie Avatar, which repeats the Pocahantas story once again. Some critic called it “Dancing with Smurfs.”

To Douthat, “Avatar is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.”

And that bothers him. He likes the certainty of the monotheistic religions (he is Roman Catholic), even when you sense that he does not subscribe to all of even the Catholic church’s dogma:

[P]antheism opens a path to numinous experience for people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic religions — with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps “bring God closer to human experience,” while “depriving him of recognizable personal traits.” For anyone who pines for transcendence but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human affairs, this is an ideal combination.

I do not mean to dismiss his anguish:

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality.

I am not sure that all Pagans have reconciled themselves to that truth either.

Do you ever sing,

We all come from the Goddess,
and to her we shall return,
like a drop of rain
flowing to the ocean

and wonder if there is too much loss of individuality there? I think that that is something like what Douthat is trying to articulate.


UPDATE: Another blogger watches Avatar and says that minus the sci-fi elements, it is a movie that Wendel Berry or even J.R.R. Tolkien might have approved of, for it presents a fully integrated culture in contrast to “our world of Facebook friends and warehouse shopping clubs.”

Our ‘Open-Source’ Religion

Paganism as an open-source religion. (That approach works for some Jews too.)

Douglas Cowen, in his book Cyberhenge, goes even further, making an explicit analogy to computer coding: “Pagans are ‘hacking’ their own religious traditions out of the ‘source codes’ provided by pantheons, faith practices, liturgies, rituals, and divinatory practices drawn from a variety of cultures worldwide.” Given all that “hacking,” it’s no wonder that, as Webster says, “There are a huge number of pagan people in the high-tech space.”

Hat tip: Gus diZerega.

‘Great Nights Returning’

A fine poem for the winter solstice.

Up the Hill to Yule

One advantage to living in the hills is that by taking different routes, you can pick the moment of observed solstice sunrise. I could sleep in until nine o’clock and still “drum up the sun” if I took the trail we call “the loop.”

But the dogs want, need, and demand their morning run, so we go “up the hill” on the Forest Service road, into a sunrise that is already happening.

At the top I take a little side trail to a suitable boulder, unzip the case, and take out the frame drum. It booms out over the valley, past the black trunks of ponderosa pines killed four years ago in the Mason Gulch fire, past resurgent Gambel oak, past living pines that the fire missed.

In the south, that is where the fire started when lightning struck. In the west, that is Holt Mountain guarding its maze of overgrown skid roads. In the north, a steep brushy slope surmounted by rimrock. In the east, a glare of light.

Uh-oh, what does Fisher have in his mouth? It’s the spare drumstick, and he is settling down to chew it. No! Come here! No serious damage, just dog slobber.

So much for drumming. The calendrical ritual is done. It is perhaps that calendar that unites us Pagans more than theology–to be doing something at these times.

Happy solstice to all!

Black Metal Music: ‘Abiding and Transcendent’

The wide world of academia  includes Buffy Studies and edited collections published by serious presses on the legal aspects of Harry Potter’s world.

So why not a quasi-academic symposium on black-metal music?

He quoted lyrics from the face-painted, early-1990s Norwegian black-metal bands Gorgoroth and Immortal; he framed black metal as respecting some of rock’s orthodoxies, as opposed to the heresies of disco and punk; and he spoke of black metal’s preoccupation with “the abiding and transcendent: stone, mountain, moon.”.

(Tip of the steel helmet to Margaret Soltan.)