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(422) The Pagan Roots of Christmas - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E_oexG2LEE

Transcript:

(00:00) our topic tonight it should be a fun one the pagan roots of Christmas we like paganism here they have a bunch of different pagan topics and we always fill the place up when we do so welcome everybody we mentioned to everybody who's joining us all of our ability to stream content our archives our capacity to expand our program like we're doing next year is because of your generous donations we really appreciate those we're to the end of the year kind of fundraising and if you have been enjoying all of these services you could

(00:37) always go to our website Center place dot CA there are PayPal buttons and if you live in either the United States or Canada all of your donations are tax-deductible so we would love to have you make a contribution it's going to help us with a bunch of different things like for example we'd like that buy a bunch of more cameras for example so that one we can have them facing this way and other kinds of things and and and do more things and there's other things too so anyway we'll talk about that thanks okay so Christmas traditions I'll

(01:11) just say in the family where I grew up I grew up in the in the 70s and this was one of our big family traditions was back in those days you had four networks of television maybe that you could watch and so you watched whatever they put on and one of the things that we looked forward to as one of our Christmas traditions where these rankin/bass stop-motion classics which were actually not that old at the time you know now they've been with us forever and so they seem like a long-standing tradition and custom so Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer

(01:47) came out in 64 Santa Claus is coming to town in 1970 of the year without a Santa Claus 1974 my dad's favorite was Rudolph he loved that you know when you've gone back to it you probably have the story is a little bit dated at this point to span Santa is a pretty bigoted Santa in terms of he's not it's not just the the pure pressure of the other reindeer that are not letting a red-nosed reindeer play the reindeer games Santa's pretty against red-nosed reindeer stew and it's only when there's like a bunch of utility at the end you

(02:26) know that he needs the red-nosed reindeer to get his sleigh through the storm that he's like okay I'm I'm okay with it now after all anyway the interesting message for the kids our favorite was the year without a Santa Clause because of these miser brothers I don't know if you guys remember this but essentially the heat miser and snow miser control the the hot and the cold they bizarrely because again it's North American centric you know that snow miser lives you know in the North Pole but the heat miser just lives in the

(02:58) south you know and so you get this impression if you're a little kid that it's just so hot in the south you know and so that's completely Leandra who's from Argentina anyway it's a different idea so anyway we loved that when I was a kid then in between them the special that they put out in between is called Santa Claus is coming to town and it really wasn't anybody's favorite but you know you had to watch whatever they put on TV you know I think at that time maybe one of you liked it so anyway our family wasn't as as popular with

(03:26) anybody but it's essentially a story of Santa Clauses frequently asked questions and it starts with a mailman from the US Postal Service that apparently has a little tractor that he drives across Canada presumably in order to get to the North Pole and he's answering all of the letters that all of the children have written asking all of these questions about all of these things that we don't understand why Santa is doing these different things and so the story isn't entirely coherent it's mostly trying to answer every little detail about Santa

(04:04) and give an explanation for why Santa Claus and all the Christmas traditions are the way they are and so for example why is Santa called Claus well because Santa began life according to this movie as a foundling baby and one of the only thing the only clue that he's found with is a tag a kind of a dog tag that says Claus we go why does he live with elves and why is he also called Chris gringo well it turns out that the baby gets found by elves whose last name is Kringle and those elves decide to name him Chris and

(04:41) incidentally this is also where he gets his red suit apparently because those elves all wear those red suits at this point in the story why do those elves make toys well it's their Elf family tradition so the Kringle family it turns out were the first toy makers to the King so they have this family patent and tradition that they have always been time occurs and so that's simply what the elves do preexisting Lee before Santa even got there before Kris got there why does he give toys to children well it turns out that the burgermeister

(05:16) meisterburger had outlawed toys and so the children of sombertown had nuttin and you can tell this is coming from 1970 a time when all villains were either German or vaguely German right after coming off of World War two so why does Santa you know have to come up through down the chimney enter the house through the chimney like an outlaw essentially and have to hide all the toys in the stockings it's because again he doesn't want to get caught with the illegal toys and also the children are hiding them in their stockings so that

(05:50) they don't get caught and get punished by the burgermeister meisterburger why does he say ho ho ho when he laughs turns out that he learned to laugh from seals all the explanations are hearing folks we never knew these you know where these things came from but that's how where did you get the flying reindeer for his sleigh and that's the future mrs.

(06:19) Claus Jessica who's approaching reindeer it turns out that after Santa Clauses friend the winter warlock reformed and became from evil to good he lost most of his magic but some of the leftover pieces of magic that he had were acorns that make reindeer fly and that very essential to because the flying reindeer somehow had a jailbreak it's not really even clear how they got out of the prison by flying reindeer because it's theirs in prison but anyway they just fly away so that's why he has flying reindeer it all makes sense now

(06:54) okay so we're talking a little bit about in this case ideological explanations so people have a bunch of stuff like there's Santa says hohoho he has reindeer that fly he puts toys in stockings he comes down chimneys why does he do all these things so in a lot of cases when people are confronted with odd things the way that they explain it is they create a story about it or a storied explanation so for example this is an Egyptian papyrus which has a snake that had legs so why don't snakes have legs that's a question maybe people ask

(07:35) and so when you have ideological narrative that is easily answered it's because God cursed the serpent in the Garden of Eden in Genesis chapter 3 verse 14 God says cursed are you I'm just to say to the serpent above all livestock and all wild animals you will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life and so that's the ideological explanation about why snakes don't have legs and there's all sorts of snakes are make their way through a lot of mythology so for example as people are scared of snakes

(08:11) so anyway so another example is why do you sneak you know shed their skin and then renew themselves that way so in other words they cast off they're old and are suddenly become a young snake again because they cast that off well it turns out and if you go back up much earlier than the Bible if you go back to the epic epic epic of gilgamesh when Gilgamesh has sailed away and found wouldn't have pitched him essentially the Sumerian Noah and a pushed him is explaining to Gilgamesh you know that he can't really have eternal life but he

(08:40) gives him a plant that he can eat and that will give him a semblance of youth eternal youth and the snake on the way back on the boat right back a snake eats it and so therefore the snake has that capacity to renew itself and so again this is an ideological explanation and anyway there's a bazillion of these it's not just for snakes but anyway this same kind of thing right so if we weren't actually though to have though the order of how these come about if the story doesn't come first the problem comes first right so people observe that

(09:15) snakes have no legs people ask why they don't and then a storyteller or in the case of Genesis a prophet and specifically in this case J the yahwah source one of the source authors of the Pentateuch the first five books of the Bible the Torah creates this Genesis story in order to explain why snakes don't have legs right okay this is also could be this is also a way that we do this is through a process called folk etymology people people love folk etymology so we we know what real etymology is is where you are tracing

(09:54) down the history of words their route meeting if it's going back let's say to an old anglo-saxon word and then from there back to proto-germanic words all the way back into indo-european or it could just as easily in English go back through Norman French to Old French to Latin and from Latin to proto italic and back again to indo-european so we try and trace those roots down in order understand etymology folk etymology is the non scholarly version of this when people hear something and it sounds like something and they create an etymology

(10:29) or create a meaning of that so we might ask the question why where does our history is one of our focuses why is so much of history devoted to the study of old rich powerful white men and so one of the answers that we could have into folk etymology is we say well that's because history is really just his story and then what we really need to be doing is recovering her stories so that we can actually also have the narratives that are not as well told throughout time and so that that goal is true enough but in

(11:03) terms of actual at Amala gee this is not this is a folk etymology history has no relationship to the words his and story that is not a that has nothing to do with anything so her story is a as a neologism a new word that is based on a false etymology or folk etymology of history in both in both cases when we have the English word story and the English word history they do have the same basic etymological trail so in both cases they're sort of coming from that that like I say that Norman French old French path that's

(11:42) going to take us back to Latin and so you know s toir the old French from the Latin historia which is from the ancient Greek historian so it's a lone word that they let the Romans pull directly in from Greek so anyway in this case historia means inquiry or knowledge gained by investigation and so we took that directly in our more scientific word in English history which is kind of coming more straight from Latin whereas the other one which is narrative telling a story is another path that brought us to the present worked and so the words

(12:16) are have the same origin this one just simply lopped the that part off the beginning and because French people don't always say all those letters at the beginning and end it okay so sometimes we have all of the explanations from the year without a Santa Claus and there's plenty more than the ones I gave you about ho ho ho and the flying reindeer and stuff like that it's a truism that we have that truth is stranger than fiction and it often turns out that history is more interesting than folk etymology and even mythical

(12:53) ideological ideology and so actually there's the Garden of Eden story is a great story and that has inspired lots of literature so I'm not going to say that folk mythology and those kind of things aren't all so rich but history often contains stuff that you'd never make up because you just can't believe it you know nobody would one of the things about when you are creating literature is generally speaking it has to be plausible whereas history doesn't have to people you know people do these things okay so we knew that why is called Chris crinkle

(13:25) right because the elves are named Kringle and they named him Chris right so why also why is but what that's the folk etymology why is to use anybody know why Santa Claus is called Kris Kringle is I didn't either this is crazy history is neat okay so we know this part right so everybody knows that like Santa Claus that that is somehow a derivative from Saint Nicholas which is to say white we also call Santa Claus Saint Nicholas or old Saint Nick and so the Santa Claus is a rendering in English of the Dutch Sinterklaas right

(14:02) and Sinterklaas is itself derived it's a nickname that's derived from since Nicholas so both of them therefore our following Dutch Dutch loanwords into English from Saint Nicholas who was a 4th century Christian Bishop from Anatolia what's now Turkey and his feast day in the West in the Latin Church is celebrated on December the 6th so it's close to Christmas and not Christmas right so this st.

(14:33) also gives us Santa's nickname Saint Nick and all those things so we're probably that one you guys probably heard of right you probably know but what what often happens is that things got all changed up and messed up in the in the Reformation the Protestant Reformation Protestants were like there's just way too much fun going on you know all of these holidays all of these things that we were doing so Protestant reformers really wanted to eliminate things from Christianity like things like the veneration of saints instead of being able to let's say pray

(15:05) to who's the same who helps you with the law stuff anyway so which Saint Anthony you know - because he I lost a lot of things already even today it's a 95 if I were Catholic or Orthodox I would have gotten those back as somebody whose tradition comes through the Protestants I just I'm that's too bad you know for me right so I don't have any any mediation from any the of the Blessed holy Saints right and so it's because what instead Martin Luther and the Protestant reformers want is unmediated connections so people are

(15:40) having a personal connection to Christianity's triune God so a personal relationship with Jesus with God the creator or and and not worry and the Holy Spirit right as opposed to through any Saints and also Protestant reformers really wanted to purge Christianity of anything that they thought smelled like paganism and so whether or not it was pagan or not you know if they if it looked like a pagan it was like talk to act like a pagan it was the duck and everything like that they wanted to roast that duck and so they often did

(16:17) and so Martin Luther who is one of them those important Protestant reformers proposed that the traditional gift giver so st. Nicholas has a saint had been known as a giver of gifts in his Saints lives and his in his in his feast day and so people traditionally gave gifts on that December 6th day instead Martin Luther's proposed that we replace st.

(16:43) Nicholas we shouldn't have Saints we're getting rid of the Saints and so he has a new idea and his idea is that it will be the baby Jesus essentially so now instead of having a saint coming around and giving the gifts the Child Jesus essentially and you can see child Jesus here showing up still got a reindeer anyway with a package full of gifts get can't get rid of the reindeer apparently you know if it anyway and so and so then Martin Luther also then proposed that the gift-giving day move from the Saints holiday into the

(17:22) Christmas Day right so again move from st. to Christ and so German for child Jesus is Chris Kent mr. Kent and that made its way into English slang whatever as Kris Kringle and so if you can imagine that's where we get Kris kringles name from and how much more interesting is that then those ain't those elves were named cram and Kringle I'm Chris so anyway history is very interesting okay in fact there's all kinds of other traditional gift givers although we're pretty familiar in North America with now Santa Claus and that's sort of our

(18:02) thing all across Europe apparently there are different traditional I mean Santa Claus is now made his way globally right but a lot of the different places have a guy who like father Christmas in their own language like it's a pair pair no well you know and that kind of a thing or they have a guy who is like named like Christmas man but is essentially the same as father Christmas like I say that Christ child that baby Jesus is wandering around kind of Austria and the surrounding area delivering presents grandfather Christmas old man Christmas

(18:38) Saint Nicholas Saint Nicholas is from Turkey so I'm sure that the Greeks simply cannot have him visit right now so they've got their own saint for that basil grandfather frost and then I hear up in Scandinavia goat Christmas coat is coming the Christmas gnomes and the Christmas lads right so bunch of Christmas lads come to Iceland to do this right so here are the Christmas lads there are 13 Yule Lads apparently in Iceland there Claude gulley guck stubby spoon licker pot likker Bowl liqueur door slammer skewer gobbler

(19:14) sausage Swiper my favorite window peeper doorway sniffer meat hook and candle stealer apparently and it amazingly apparently they the Yule Lads not just they don't just all show up on Christmas Eve or anything boring like that they show up on the last 13 nights one by one by one before Christmas and then once Christmas arrives they leave one by one by one by one so you have like a long period of time where you have at least one Christmas lads kind of running around and so what they do is they place small gifts into the shoes of children

(19:53) who have left their shoes on the windowsill for this purpose and apparently if the children have been they will put a potato in there as opposed to a sack of coal like I guess Santa Claus used to do for bad children in North America the children in Iceland have a lot to worry about because there's also a giantest named gorilla who takes misbehaving children away in her sack and in addition to that she has a monstrous you'll cat who simply eats people bad it's it's not so much the bad kids apparently I mean I guess those

(20:28) people who haven't got a present of a new set of clothes which i think is not really very fair to because how do can you how can you help that right so anyway that's one of the alternate gift givers another alternate gift giver we mentioned is the Yule goat so here is in Sweden they routinely build in one of these towns that came over the town of this in Sweden anyway a giant you will goat made out of hay this proves absolutely irresistible to everybody in Sweden to want to burn it down because it's a giant goat okay so it almost

(21:03) every year it gets burned up anyway it's illegal you're not allowed to but there's like a tracking like they track it like it's pretty well 2/3 of the years it gets burned down even though you know you're it's like you're not allowed to it but anyway so you can imagine anyway a giant effigy Idol you know like of a goat this sounds pretty pagan right but you burned down so it may go back we don't know it's very hard to trace unfortunately we're gonna have this all the way through it's very hard to trace popular or lived culture especially

(21:34) peasant culture back through history because as we mentioned in our you know his story her story slide history tends to be it's not all so much written by the winners as so much as written by people with money who can pay people to write stuff down and then preserve those books and people who are illiterate which is in the historic times a much smaller minority so it's a story of elite culture I mean a lot of cases going through the Christian Middle Ages and the European West it's the monks who are writing things

(22:09) down and they often are not interested in recording let's say what locals are doing in terms of any kind of pagan holdovers they'd much prefer to talk about the triumph of Christianity although sometimes they do mention it from time to time to complain about it and so we do get to hear about it that for that reason so anyway it may go back so we do know that Thor who is obviously one of the main gods in the Scandinavian Pantheon Norse pantheon had a chariot who is pulled by two goats and so the goat is a associated with the god

(22:46) Thor there is also this thing is called the Yule Balkin so the Yule goat there's a custom also of you will bucking which is like I think in the carol we go here we go a-wassailing you know where you're going around and you're caroling on the one hand but it's not simply caroling it's more like again in the same way that Halloween is sort of more more pagan II holiday that we have you young people they're all dressed up in costumes and masks they're going around they're singing Christmas carols and probably drinking and then they and then

(23:23) the after they're done singing there Carol at each one of the houses they're supposed to get a treat and they're also doing pranks and stuff like that so mischief so it's kind of like trick-or-treating right and so in that case anyway it might go back to that kind of a practice that's related therefore to something coming out of the worship of Thor anyway but it's continued so here there's a picture here modern picture of the old goat bringing a whole bag of gifts to Swedish kids and he's also got an elf okay so our Santa

(24:00) Claus that we have in North America is fairly recent comparatively obviously those christmas specials now are going back to the middle of the 20th century it goes that itself has developed from a kind of a character that really evolved especially in New York in the 19th century took form by the late 19th century that then is partially Santa Claus that is then partially derived from Sinterklaas as we mentioned and that's in part because of how many Dutch people and dust customs there are back then especially in New York rights in New

(24:39) York the colony had been founded as the New Netherlands New York City was New Amsterdam and there were still lots and lots of I mean up in the early 19th century Dutch speakers in in New York State and even one of the early US presidents Martin Van Buren as you know is again one of these old Yankee Dutch guys you know from that tradition so Sinterklaas is one of the reasons why that we have these some of these Dutch long words and this thing in particular affected North American culture so what are some of the differences between

(25:12) Santa Claus and Sinterklaas well so Santa Claus wears a Santa suit Sinterklaas dresses as a bishop so he's definitely a bishop Santa Claus arrives with gifts on Christmas Eve which is to say the 24th of December Sinterklaas actually arrives on st. Nicholas's Eve which is the 5th of December Santa Claus lives at the North Pole as we know since your class that's too cold for him Central Claus winters and spends his time in Spain like so many people in the EU he's got a nice coastal village and you know he's not hanging out at the North

(25:48) Pole Santa Claus is running around on a sleigh that is pulled by eight tiny flying reindeer such a class arrives by boat from Spain and then once he gets off the boat he's got a white grey horse that he rides around on since Santa Claus has elf laborers who make his toys for him Sinterklaas has black servants that are called Sparta Piet which is a very interesting thing so there is Sinterklaas and there are the Sparta beat who are arriving with him in the celebration so Dutch guys in in blackface so apparently as of 2018 in surveys 88

(26:33) percent of Dutch people do not perceive Zarda pede to be racist so it's different obviously than I guess Trudeau and the Atlantean costume or whatever and we have a different perception in North America than maybe I don't know how long this custom is gonna go on but anyway they're committed to it right now okay so if we want to think of though this idea of st.

(26:54) Nicholas the bishop so who is that guy so Saint Nicholas of Myra Myra is a town was a city back in the Roman Empire and the greek-speaking eastern half in the area of Lysia which is one of those portions of Anatolia or Asia Minor which we now think of as Turkey right but the Turks hadn't moved there yet so he's an early Christian Bishop historically we know almost nothing about this guy so he just was a popular you know big-name early Bishop but we don't have writings from him and so therefore he's way less known than let's say other early

(27:29) contemporary or you know early Christian bishops like clement of alexandria or somebody like that he may have attended the council of nicaea he's on some of the attendee lists but it's possible that he's just at that point so popular that they stuck him on later lists so we're not really sure if he actually did however he becomes very popular because lots and lots of Legends kind of grow up around him so he turns out that he's becomes a secret gift giver a miracle worker and he's a hero who goes around and rescues people from various kinds of

(28:07) persecution so in terms of being a secret gift giver there's poor girls in the town who because of all of these different reasons they are not gonna have dowries you have to have a dowry in order to have a good marriage in order to have a good life and all these kind of things they're gonna end up being servants or something like that without these and so he's secretly at nighttime through the window you know puts three bags of gold through there so they can each have a dowry and so I don't know who told anybody about that because it

(28:37) seems like now that he's got public you know the publicist when that was revealed it turns out anyways not a secret as all that after they up because we all know but any event that that's one of the things that he gets known for that kind of thing right he grew very much in valera t in the Middle Ages and so there is a tradition really before the invention of the biography as a form there is this long tradition throughout the Christian Middle Ages of writing lives of saints she call hagiography which is not saying anything bad but

(29:13) it's actually for edification so that people can kind of see you know this miraculous person and and and want to live a good life right and so that was a very popular reading in the Late Antiquity all throughout the Middle Ages and so there's lots of super popular saints lives for st. Nicholas whose stories only get better and better and better and so one of the things that he was known for in terms of miracle-working for example is he could like he's sailing along the Mediterranean it's stormy he could calm

(29:43) the calm the storms right and so as a result of that sailors you know pray to Saint Nicholas because that's a thing that that they need right so over time then he becomes seen as a patron saint for sailors merchants archers repentant thieves prostitutes children Brewers pawn brokers and students so some wide variety people like this guy this is an interesting story here that's illustrated here at a late medieval painting so there's a evil butcher who's taken three young boys and pickled them and he's going to sell them essentially

(30:24) as ham and so Saint Nicholas gets wind of this he finds them he opens the barrel up and on the spot he resurrects the pickled kids and so there you go that is divine power so not pickled anymore all right so relics were also a really big deal in the Middle Ages and so the ability to have some components physical remains or object that had been wholly to the Saint during their life in this idea of medieval Christianity that continues on in in in Catholicism and orthodoxy of having an intercessor where you can pray to

(31:10) that sainted person and have them intercede on your behalf with God who seems to be too far removed for us to even on comprehend in that sense then also having that that relic there and to venerate to be there to be physically present was very inspiring to people in the Middle Ages so much so that they would steal them and so in a way it seems like wait a second you mean that almost seems like how is that gonna work you know you're trying to hear if you're trying to have this you know really Pro you know kind of religious mojo thing

(31:46) and you're gonna have it happen because you're gonna begin it by stealing so anyway and nevertheless they do and so quite famously st. mark for example who's one of the four evangelists the traditionally one of the people who write one of the four canonical Gospels of the Christian New Testament so the Gospel according to st. mark st.

(32:06) Mark's remains traditionally were in Alexandria Egypt where Saint Mark has thought of traditionally as the very first bishop of Alexandria and therefore all of the succeeding bishops of Alexandria are his heirs and to this day the Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt is the patriarch of Alexandria is the successor to st.

(32:31) mark in the same way that the Pope of Rome is the successor to Saint Peter right and so anyway however Egypt did fall into Muslim hands and so at a certain point crafty Venetians went there stole all of the relics in the year 8:28 apparently of Saint Mark there they have all kinds of folk stories about how they did it they covered it in in pork and sausages in order to because then the Muslims custom agents wouldn't look there because they were so up hoard you know they hate pink stuff right and so you'd think that they would know that trick after not too long so you'd always

(33:08) look in the pork you know to serve but any event that's how the story goes anyway so they take it and they make st. Mark's in Venice which is why Venetian Republic is even sometimes called the Republic of st. mark and so even if you've seen the flag of Venice the flag has a winged lion that's the symbol of st.

(33:29) mark and so that becomes the symbol of Venice itself again because of theft right so anyway in that same way Saint Nicholas of Myra his remains are in this city that had been in the eastern Roman Empire the Byzantine Empire but at a certain point the Turks do arrive in what we now call Turkey and they won an amazing battle in the 11th century against the Byzantines man's occurs just absolutely over on all of what we now think of as Turkey and so when that happened some enterprising Bari 'its in 1087 went and stole the relics and brought it back to their city

(34:13) in southern Italy Bari which is where anyway they are today and this church of Saint Nicholas of Bari and so just from this kind of time period we can just show again the Venetians run down here to the Farid caliphates the take from the Coptic Orthodox Church the relics of Saint Mark and bring it back and the same thing am i right here and what's now turkey brought back to Bari okay so I'm supposed to be talking a little bit about paganism so and Pagan holdovers and so there is a little bit of something to what the Protestants are

(34:56) talking about in the modern era when they are talking about kind of Saints as holdovers to some of the pagan past and so definitely in the old religions and we don't have a whole slide here on paganism we do a bunch of things but generally speaking what we call paganism now is not what anybody called it in the past it's a Christian term for the religions that preceded Christianity and we sometimes call these Pali theistic but again they wouldn't call themselves that because they wouldn't have had any idea that it wouldn't be

(35:34) natural just to have thousands or millions of gods or whatever and so it's only in contrast to the monotheistic religions Judeo Christianity Islam and so forth that we now think of these as polytheistic religions but essentially in the greco-roman world on the Greek side it's Zeus Athena these sort of gods and goddesses they have their equivalents in the ramen side in the case of that is Jupiter and Minerva and so forth the gods ultimately and especially the romanette conception of their kind of paganism their religion is

(36:11) called in Latin dough which days which is I give you God's I get to you gods what's in order that dace you give to me so in other words I'm gonna give the sacrifice we're gonna on a special day if you're rich Roman or whatever your sacrifice cattle to to Apollo or something like that and then Apollo is gonna you know pay that back with victory in battle or any other kinds of things like that and in on the small scale you might do any number of things different rituals every single time you go out your door the god Janus the

(36:52) two-faced God that is in charge of thresholds you may well do something like like we do have still in their Abrahamic religion soso Jews have a thing that they pray on the you know on the threshold sometimes people you know people cross their fingers people do different special things when you know step on a crack anyway paganism is all about doing little rituals at all times and so you might do some kind of little ritual behavior in order to make that transition you have from being an inside space to being cross the threshold that

(37:28) Genesis has allowed that to happen without you tripping or without something horrible happening and so paganism is really all about all of those kind of things where you living in constant fear that all of the chaotic forces of life are going to in John you and you have to have all these kind of right behaviors in order to prevent those things from happening right so in some cases in those things like bringing you luck protecting your journey curing diseases in some cases Saints which is to say deceased holy men

(37:59) and women who are martyred for the Christian cause they took on some of those functions as patrons so we talked about for example fighting things any other number of things be safe at sea for the merchants any number of things like that and as a deliberate policy early Christians built their shrines on top of pagan shrines and so one of the things that what happened is that kind of warrior monks would come out they'd come to the pagan shrine there'd be some great old let's say tree or statue to two Magnum arch at mater the Great

(38:37) Mother or something like that they'd say well is she so powerful then what would stay yeah and then she'd stop me from taking my axe and chopping this into little pieces and if she is a great goddess for real then that wouldn't happen because I'd get struck down and so then they smashed the thing up and everyone realizes well nothing happened and so then once that happens then they build a Christian little shrine there and so then if you were the dear old lady that would go there to have a healing performed or something like that

(39:04) when it was the shrine to magna mater now you come back and instead you're gonna pray to Mary right or you'll pray to me the same way you always prayed but now there's a statue of Mary there heracross or something like that and so that was kind of a deliberate policy and indeed we have for example Pope Gregory the Great he's had it he's conducted a mission to the anglo-saxons he sent his own number one guy than the abbot of his personal monastery from Rome Agustin of Canterbury to Kent the English Kingdom of Canterbury has founded the Church of

(39:41) Canterbury there the guy writing him back he says boy he's this is tough Gregory these guys are really pagan you know they're they're not converting easy this is a mess you know you don't know where you sent me anything accents you know and and and they keep on you know they won't stop you know going to their shrines and worshiping and everything like that and Gregory's like that's fine let them go to the shrine you have to you know cut the statue down and put across there or something like that but if they if they want to bring you

(40:09) know and cap sacrifice twenty cattle to Woden that's okay they can bring the cattle you know as tithes and that kind of thing but they you know just just go ahead and deliberately replace it right so they definitely did that and specifically when they couldn't get pagan holidays people to stop practicing them and there are pagan holidays in Rome itself that go on into the fifth of six centuries and they still are trying to kind of stamp those things out like the Lupercalia and things like that which essentially they plant st. Valentine's

(40:43) Day on top of and so as you are trying to do those kind of things you replace as a deliberate policy both the shrines and that kind of thing with Saints right Saint solid Saints days so again if you can't beat them saints days so you know st. Patrick you know we have st. Patrick's Day st. Valentine again we start adding kind of these guys yeah st.

(41:16) Valentine didn't actually write love letters in fact nobody is interested in romantic love in that time period of late antiquity romantic love really takes off in the central Middle Ages it becomes a big theme of courtly love of the kind of the Knightly era and that's when people start wanting to write love letters and things like that people are more literate anyway so that's where Valentine's traditions change a little okay there is speaking of paganism another potential ancestor besides Saint Nicholas of Myra and that is via this character father Christmas

(41:53) so if we go back we've talked a little bit about the different calendars that people have we've inherited in the West the Roman calendar so we have just with a little mod vacation our calendar parent calendars the Gregorian calendar in the modern times that's because the Pope fixed a couple things that were problematic with it but generally speaking it's almost the same as the Julian calendar that Julius Caesar fixed based on the original Roman Republican calendar anyway so there everybody had different calendars and so the ancient Germanic

(42:28) peoples had a calendar that was divided into six tides they were called as opposed to twelve months and so tide is like a double month it's twice long of which you'll then correspond to the winter time so December January and therefore it's called Yuletide which is still a word we have anyway as we begin to have evidence for popular celebrations so as I mentioned getting at that kind of what are popular people doing what are common people doing what are the peasants doing is really tough and it's especially tough in late

(43:06) antiquity and the Dark Ages in the early Middle Ages because we have so little writing in general that survived but over time then that starts to take off and we have more and more and more so as we have more evidence in the later Middle Ages and especially that in the early modern period in Britain Christmas is very much associated with a figure that presides over Yule celebrations as opposed to modern Santa Claus which is really focused on kids stuff and presents for kids and things like that this character which is King Christmas

(43:37) or sir Christmas or all eventually father Christmas father you know King Yule is focused on merrymaking singing and especially drinking so it's a big drinking holiday in the later Middle Ages and so we have a popular in our own recollection maybe so if you've seen we always there's like a 10,000 different versions of a Christmas carol and so if you ever are seeing a Christmas carol and you're watching the ghost of Christmas present and it's this kind of big guy with a wreath and you know he's got a green Santa Claus robe but it's

(44:13) loosely fitting and this kind of thing and he's drinking there's a big feast and all this kind of thing so Dickens who's writing his novel you know is before the modern ideas of Santa Clauses have started coalesced and things like that in North America and so certainly haven't become popular where he is and so this imagery is this father Christmas imagery of again an adult merrymaking festival feasting especially drinking merrymaking is a euphemism here too so lots of you know fun stuff right so okay so is there

(44:51) an antecedent so it's possible so we had that question why do you reindeer fly so it's possibly because Jessica the future mrs. Claus had those magic acorns that for some reason she fed to the reindeer just as possible I think we can't we can't make this for sure there may be a memory from Germanic mythology so in that tide that Yuletide Woden we have that named Woden votans day in our wednesday so that's one of the leading gods of the pantheon the equivalent in Norse mythology were more more more familiar with right so there would an

(45:28) Odin right so but in Germanic anglo-saxon whoa damn so he was said to lead what's called a wild hunt through the skies he's got a flying horse and that's happening in the night skies in the wintery Germany and Anglo Saxon lands and so it's possible that this father Christmas character has inherited that some of one's features and roll roll so if so we have a kind of a double evolution that's getting us to our present-day Santa Claus so we have this popular st.

(46:09) Nicholas a secret gift giver who also can resurrect pickled children he is the origin of sinter Klaas with his Sparta Pete slave helpers that that's not racist or anything according to the Dutch who brings oranges from Spain to the good children of Holland that through by via New Amsterdam makes its way to New York but also via the English heritage it's a medieval picture here of Woden maybe a Yule Yule near the you'll figure becomes this kind of father Christmas Mary maker of the adult Christmas holiday that the late medieval and early

(46:48) modern English people celebrate again coming to Santa Claus so it's like the robe but buttoned up and read so so we mentioned this tied to this two-month period in the Germanic calendar of Yule which is to say that midwinter so there is also a multi-day festival Yule that's associated with it that was celebrated by Germanic peach peoples and some of those traditions have continued on at Christmas so one of these being the Yule Log so having a big log that gets burned you'll singing of course has gone back and very deliberately we have actually

(47:33) in the historic period the norse christian king haakon the first so as he has converted from being a pagan viking to being a christian one of the things that he decrees is that now all of you warriors of him norse warriors all of you vikings and everything like that you've been celebrating you'll on whatever day you did it you know and it's midwinter we're gonna now celebrate that when the christians celebrate christmas and so it's it's specifically spelled out that it's deliberately you know brought together so not always do

(48:10) we have like i say we had Pope Gregory the Great corresponding with Augustine of Canterbury telling them and very specifically just chop the statue down and put across there and now it's now it's no longer a pagan temple it's now a Christian shrine likewise this is no longer a pagan holiday it is now specifically the Christian holiday we have kind of decree of the first Christian King North King to do Sasa in addition then there's more than one kind of paganism so although we maybe we lump it together now in

(48:43) retrospect in an our perspective in that one word in fact paganism has always been an intensely localized phenomenon so it's broadly similar across all of its expressions in the sense that you are essentially aware that the world is full of all these different chaotic forces you name some of them if you have stories or myths about some of them you have though more more importantly rituals or maybe sacrifices ways that you were appeasing some of these forces which in a lot of the cases you view as embodied or anthropomorphize and you

(49:20) think of them as being like a human form or an animal form or something like that and so for example death is something we all believe in but death is also therefore a god and and so on and so forth the Sun something we can all see but the Sun also is Apollo the Sun also is Helios okay so in addition then to the Norse holiday that we talked about in Germanic and Germanic mythology you'll the Romans then in their pre-christian days and pagan Rome had a festival that is also taking place multi-day festival in midwinter called

(50:03) Saturnalia and the point of the Saturnalia holiday it's one of these holidays where roles are reversed and so one of the things that happen is when you have a very hierarchical Society a very rigid paternal society so Roman Roman households are run where essentially the father it's called the paterfamilias the father of the family has this very specialized role like the Godfather in The Godfather style movies where you get that guys in charge and he traditionally has the power of life and death over everybody in the household

(50:40) and that's stratified all the way down to household employees and clients too the slaves that are part of the society and so normally that's rigidly held throughout the year but during Saturnalia it's reversed maybe right so maybe the master has to act as a slave and the slaves one of the slaves is may be given a special role for just that that period of time and in some ways that safety valve where you let some of the air out of the system allows the authoritarian system to function more healthily throughout the rest of

(51:18) the year and makes it less likely to have for example a slave rebellion or something like that because that kind of thing has happened and so that same through the Middle Ages into modern times one of the places where that same kind of Saturnalia reversal continued was in the very hierarchical Church for example in medieval England where you again you have bishops who have kind of absolute authority over their diocese and that's going down to whatever altar boys and even the slaves and things like that and so what they would do is they

(51:50) would pick some boy to be Bishop for the day right and so now suddenly there's a boy Bishop and so and so he's doing whatever crazy things that a boy does when he gets to be a bishop right other things that were happened in the Saturnalia time gift exchange so that's one of the things that continues of course feasting and drinking was a big thing one of the things that has happened is you've made it all the way here to midwinter and now you're gonna have to we're gonna come up on a period when everybody is gonna you know is

(52:22) normally gonna have to be fasting whether you're into Christian times when you have a devoted holiday period for it Lent you nevertheless are gonna have to do it whether you because we don't have the kind of refrigeration and storage and things like that canning and everything that we have now and so it eventually it'll run out but this is your big feast before the end of that it's also associated with all kinds of vices gambling things like that merrymaking as we say that isn't otherwise allowed and so that lets

(52:52) itself out on those kind of days so the festival of Saturn these saturd being Jupiter or Zeus the Roman version of Zeus Jupiter's old dad unlike in Greek mythology and Greek religion where Zeus overthrew his father Cronus who was viewed as this villain and this the leader of the Titans these bad evil Giants otto chthonic monsters the Romans didn't look at it that way they're - they're too pious and in the sense of being devoted to their fathers so this whole father father father thing is really important for the Romans and

(53:35) so for for Jupiter Saturn is kind of like you know what he's looking revered old guy who just had to retire because he's into his dotage and so when we look back at at Saturn we're looking back at this kind of golden age when everything was looser and nicer and you're living in kind of the Arcadian wilderness and everybody's have harps and that kind of thing so Saturn is not reviled like Chronos is in the Greek religion so Saturn Eilat yeah that's the festival okay so having gone through all of this I want to even just as well how

(54:11) Christian is Christmas I mean obviously we have the the name Christmas which means mass where you are worshipping Christ and so that the name of course is quite Christian how how Christian is it otherwise let's just go back to the biblical canon in order to try to establish where this thing comes from so the Christian Bible the New Testament contains two different nativity stories there are four canonical Gospels mark Matthew Luke and John mark and John don't have nativity stories but Luke and Matthew do in Matthew's Gospel Jesus's parents Mary

(54:59) and Joseph live in Bethlehem and they give birth to the baby Jesus when that is happening there is a star that appears in the sky this guides wise men we're gonna have a lecture on this in three weeks it turns out the Wiseman here alright sometimes call the Magi are in fact the word Magus it means a priest or a in this case the in the Westerners are associating with astrologers but essentially a like a sorcerer but it's essentially a priest in the Zoroastrian religion is what the Westerners were seeing and so those Magi are coming to

(55:44) find this new ruler who they understand to be a savior and so are a stream is 'm is in fact a religion that has an idea of saviors and in fact it may well be one of the places where Judaism even got the idea of a savior and so they are seeking then this Messiah as he's called in English version of Hebrew Anointed One and so they go to the king of Judea at the time King Herod and they hope that they're gonna and Herod though when he hears about that Messiah has been born he feels very uncertain on the throne he is not in fact from the

(56:22) Davidic line he is a Edomite he's an item man and so therefore he is only half Jewish anyway and so as a result of that he has power but he is king and very powerful King but by the grace of Rome so because he has powerful allies in Rome that keep him in power so anyway he doesn't want a legitimate rival to come up and become a pretender to his throne and so according to the story he massacres all of the infant boys in the region to make sure that none of them grow up to be the Messiah and but in the meantime Jesus's family have been warned

(56:58) in a vision to flee and they flee to Egypt and then after they spend a bunch of time in Egypt after Herod dies then they move back up to Nazareth and so that's explains in Matthew's story how it comes to be that they're from Bethlehem and Jesus is born in Bethlehem but Jesus is called Jesus of Nazareth and why is there three that's not in the Gospel because they have three different gifts so they give gold frankincense and myrrh and so people just make three wise men because you know because it's not there's a bunch of wise men we have no

(57:33) idea how many wise men in the story but they have three gifts and so as a result then they have traditional names they're Caspar Melchior and Balthazar which is where is even where the named Balthazar even comes from and so it's a it's a anyway it's a lots of different traditional things I've gotten pulled into that okay oh and one of them is black hope not in that picture maybe this is a bad picture of it but anyway so I can't remember if it's Balthazar's black okay okay okay but there's another Nativity story in

(58:08) the Christian New Testament so Luke's Gospel in this case Joseph and Mary are actually from Nazareth but they have to go to Bethlehem because of a census when they get there there's no room at the end so they use a manger say a food trough animal food trough has a crib for the baby so in this case instead of a star and kings or wise men the birth is attended by shepherds who've been told of the news by angels and so in point of fact these these stories actually contradict Christians don't usually worry about that because we tend to

(58:44) synthesize them so we just don't make a big deal about Matthew as far as we can tell the people just live in Bethlehem but now we we just say well no they're from Nazareth they come there you know so it's all integrated together the Shepherd's show up first then the wise men come a few days later so it's all put together into one coherent story but in fact it's two totally separate stories neither of these stories though gives December twenty-fifth as the date for this to happen nor indeed any date so that's not part of it in fact the early

(59:18) Christians not only didn't observe Christian Christmas but they're actually not even aware of let's say when Jesus might have been born which is not unusual it would be actually very unusual to have recorded anybody's birthday in antiquity we don't have many of those it wasn't any but so we just didn't know so Clement of Alexandria who's a very important Bishop one of the traditional successors of st.

(59:45) mark as we mentioned so he's in this important Christian city in Egypt or where there's a huge Christian population anyway at the end of the second early 3rd centuries he writes there are those who have determined not only the year of our Lord's birth but also the day and they say that it took place in the twentieth twenty eighth year of Augustus so they didn't use ad and BC obviously back them and they didn't usually use any other numbering system as we know that in the past people tended to cite regnal years right so this is the 20th 28th year

(1:00:18) that's Augustus is Caesar over the Roman Empire which is to say 1 AD in the twenty-fifth day of the Egyptian month of Patchen which is to say May 20th so May 20th is one of the one of the calculations that he's heard people have made further others say that he was born on the 24th or 25th of our muthi which is to say April 20th or 21st so as far as anybody knows and Clements the most in the know kind of guy that you'd have around the Year 200 sometime in the spring maybe however December 25th did in the Roman

(1:00:56) Empire correspond with a very important birthday and indeed it's the birthday not of the Son of God but the birthday of the Sun God and so we have here at the center of a zodiac the sol invictus Helius the under bowl the Unconquered bull sun which is one of the main pagan gods so the pagan gods the sun is a pretty important thing as you'd imagine the sun is bringing us light and heat and we wouldn't be able to have crops or anything else if we didn't have a Sun and so for many pagans Sun is really the God that you should be worshipping and

(1:01:38) so December 25th in the Roman calendar corresponds to the winter solstice which is to say the shortest day of the year to say the day that you see the Sun the least and so now we're gonna start to have the Sun be make longer and longer and longer days until we get to the summer solstice and so in that sense you can imagine why pagans thought well this is the sun's rebirth day so the Sun goes smaller and smaller in terms of it and then now it's reborn and this happening and indeed the Emperor Aurelian who is a

(1:02:09) pagan designated in the year 27 274 ad that the 25th will become thereafter and not to solely and victi which is to say the birthday of the in Conqueror bull Sun and so a century not even half a century after that the Roman Church fixed the day for Christmas on that same day the birthday of the Sun you would not Oh n-now is the birthday of the Sun oh wait and Augustine who is a ventilator important early church thinker says and this is this makes all the sense in the world we have we have Old Testament prophets which is to say

(1:02:53) Hebrew prophets who were talking about the Messiah who are essentially equating him with the son so he'll be like a son to his people in terms of the S UN and so as far as Augustus is concerned well that just makes sense that we're gonna combine it and also in the same sense that Christ is a god of new life you know that God who has conquered death having he guessed anew essentially says having his birthday on the 25th as the world is being reborn and the Sun is coming back and and we're going to you know have longer days again and

(1:03:28) everything like that also makes all the sense in the world that he would have been born on that day so by that time the equation is making sense for early Christians which is to say a couple hundred years after a century and a half after climate wasn't sure so nevertheless Christmas is not particularly important in this first centuries as a holiday certainly compared with Easter which was by far in a way the primary holiday of the Christian calendar Easter as a movable holiday kept alive Christian Christianity and

(1:04:04) the entire you know Western civilization's interest in astronomy so that they could figure out what day Easter was going to be on and so it's quite a complicated calculation to figure it out because once you pick what they Easter is then that affects all the 40 days before that till you get to Lent and and Mardi Gras and all the fifty days after it until you get to Pentecost so the entire Christian calendar moves around based on how you calculate Easter the only other thing that people cared about astronomy for was astrology which

(1:04:33) they never got over and throughout the whole Middle Ages either even though it's technically not really very Christian but anyway they Christians were still excited about it included including bishops and Pope's so anyway Easter was much more important and Christmas had very little importance in late antiquity there's a certain time period when the Nicene or Catholic Orthodox Christians are having technical arguments with the Aryans and so they want to have a Christmas as a holiday in order to they're making points against

(1:05:07) each other for Christological controversy but it's not a very big deal comparatively nevertheless it grows in popularity we've had a lecture recently on Charlemagne and we know that in the year 800 on Christmas Day in Rome Charlemagne is crowned Roman Emperor we now think of as Holy Roman Emperor but essentially the revival of the Roman Empire in the West after this period when there is essentially no authority in the Western or Latin world secularly and so that happened on Christmas Day and because of that that became a time

(1:05:42) especially to emulating Charlemagne Charlemagne was so important to later monarchs that that would be a time when they would hold courts especially and so Christmas courts were Yule courts became a big tradition after Charlemagne nevertheless it's a courtly holiday so as you're bringing a royal court together to hold a court or as peasants Organa gathering for the same kind of merrymaking and especially drinking than it is a thing it's a big religious festival like Easter right so for example a couple cent you know four centuries later when

(1:06:21) we get to Good King John the worst King of England the reason why there has never been another King John there's a new king John the first sure to be known as John the worst is how the song goes right so anyway so John had the yule court at Windsor in the year 1213 and in orgy we have the records of all of his procurements so he had to get 20 tons of good new and ordinary wine from Gascony and France he got four tons though of the best stuff to red to white for his own table food they got 200 pigs heads with all the pickled pork 10,000 hens 50

(1:06:59) pounds of pepper 2 pounds of Safra and a hundred pounds of good fresh almonds 15,000 herrings spices for making sauces two dozen towels the hotel's of linen for making tablecloths needed all those towels they didn't have silver yet so anyway it turned out that was enough they had to order in some umpteen thousand more Piggy's heads afterwards so anyway there's a big amount of feasting that's going on in this cruel court according then to church people who again are our sources they're often writing things down they weren't too

(1:07:35) happy with who all is attending these courts and what London is like during these kind of Yule celebrations so Richard of Divi say the Kings according to him he said went and saw the Kings celebration it's not religious he said I was shocked to see actors gestures smooth-skinned youths mores flatterers pretty boys effeminate s-- Petrus singing girls quack doctors belly dancers sorceress extortioners night Wanderers magicians mimes no one wants a mime beggar's buffoons all this tried fill all the houses in London so anyway

(1:08:14) it's a it's you can imagine that people are complaining churchmen are complaining about Christmas going all the way back here to twelve thirteen so you know these things is a Christian tradition which is to say complaining about Christmas or complaining about people not having the true spirit of Christmas that has definitely been going on all the way back to King John's day and before but in fact actually Christian Christmas is continually evolving at all times our traditions are evolving and even deciding necessarily what the true

(1:08:50) spirit of Christmas or Saturnalia or Yuletide it is is a little bit complicated right so the actual war on Christmas that happened was actually a war that the Christians fought against Christmas so for example when Puritans went to New England and settled Massachusetts they were very very pleased when they got there that they were able to ban Christmas and so Christmas was not allowed to be celebrated in Massachusetts because it's this horrible merrymaking this horrible drinking celebration so thank you Lord for this

(1:09:31) new world where we can ban Christmas this is the idea that the Puritans had when they got here there was a very serious war on Christmas the Puritans said Yuletide ideas fool side they believed that it's based on a pagan holiday they believed that it's not in Scripture where they're quite correct they see that December 25th has no historical basis for Christ's birth and they were very aware that everybody in England got really drunk okay and so this is a woodcut here from a text the examination and trial of father

(1:10:05) Christmas from 1686 and he is found guilty guilty charged so real war on Christmas and they banned it for as long as they could the reality is there's nothing particularly Christian about bunnies you know with eggs went wandering around these are definitely symbols of resurrection and renewal and they're taking place in this time period of spring this time period and so many calendars it's the new year this time that life is all coming back because eggs are signs of new life bunnies are you know fertility symbols

(1:10:47) because bunnies you know of our merrymakers well you know making lots of new bunnies right so this isn't particularly Christian this one you know a lot of our holidays Thanksgivings no really this other than the name in some ways right so in some ways you know this is a guy with a red suit stockings presents trees ornaments okay nevertheless where are we now so the courts you know often have separated this which is to say the nativities part from the tree that we can put out in fronts of City Hall here in Toronto

(1:11:32) nevertheless in practice there's a big overlap between let's say our Christian celebration that we've inherited and let's say our present secular practices that are here going on and a bunch of these things are things that are in both a little mistletoe again that's one of these pagan fertility symbols right some mistletoe and evergreens trees and things like that the idea is that they don't die in winter right so they're staying alive and so that's why they've made their way through why we have eggnog I don't know we have to look that

(1:12:06) up alright the trees although they actually they seem like that might be a pagan holdover but actually you know it is certainly a fertility symbol as I just mentioned nevertheless the trees actually weren't known in England until the 1830s and so again it's one of these things that the Protestants created as part of their break in the customs of the Roman Church so in some cases we have a tradition that seems very venerable and goes all the way back Easter eggs go all the way back way before Easter way before

(1:12:39) Christianity there's thousands of years BC Easter or decorated eggs and the Ukraine the Scythian sir are doing that for some reason well for fertility reasons man what can we say so in the course of history history is a thing where we have both continuity so things continue on but there's also innovation so there's new things it's rarely so much a really jarring break oftentimes even a thing that seems just completely completely unpredictable you'd never imagine that Donald Trump would be President or something like that right nevertheless

(1:13:19) there was like a bunch of things that were precursors that that said that you know that led up to that I mean there was predicted there's a whole Simpsons episode where he was president and things like that like from 20 years ago or something so anyway it's a there are ways that you know like where these things are actually everything that comes in the present has has its precursors that they're it's built upon if you're aware of it so innovations are always born from their immediate context as opposed to just from nothing right so

(1:13:50) seeming actions are often originally reactions so a lot of times we might think somebody started something that's totally new but if you just look at the immediate context you'll find out that there was something that was the opposite they're reacting to it and they're doing something that's different in reaction to what just happened right and often to periodization so when we might say this happened this is the the worst of the time that we have this is I'm a bit evil so this why am I upset about this video wait so we have periods

(1:14:18) we call like ancient times antiquities early Middle Ages Dark Ages those kind of things late Middle Ages early modern times modern times postmodern times and all these there's all kinds of people in who are Renaissance scholars who will make the claim this is the first time this happened in the modern era and that's only because they just started calling their era modern since that's the first time it happens in their period it's no big deal something happened like that in late Middle Ages so anyway is that that kind of thing so

(1:14:44) periodization you know is something that we always have to be kind of aware of because it's often quite arbitrary where we decide to kind of draw those those lines so funny so back if you've ever seen if you'd respond to deep that ended now but when Selina Meyer was running for president on this HBO show I'm hurt she is just always you know vapid or whatever she just refuses to make any waves and everything like that everything is poll-tested and so her slogan is continuity with change you know and so it's essentially so people like change

(1:15:18) but they also like continuity so she's offering continuity with change but that in that slogan which is so wonderful is really how I see you know the flow of history so the flow of history is continuity with change so it's really no secret that many of our secular holidays derive from those Christian holidays in the West itself we say we have that our Western hottest the word west is our secular replacement word that we used to use for christened em that's what pretty much they mean we got rid of that word Latin Western Christendom and so when

(1:15:51) does something cease to be Christian when did it start to be Christian when did Saturnalia or Lupercalia become st. Valentine's Day the Christian holiday did it come when did when it became a courtly romantic holiday and it's something that people are doing in the in the medieval courts and they're celebrating secret adulterous Affairs is that a Christian no Christian is that holiday right it's taking place in that Christian context you know and so in up tune including now the highly commercialized holidays that we have

(1:16:23) we're pretty much Valentine's Day is about you know presents and you know again get roses flowers and little cards that's one of the main hallmark holidays Halloween is about every bit of candy that you could ever buy in the course of a year and Christmas you know is you know is celebrated in our society by as the day when the retailers are actually able to have you know made made up for the fact that everybody the rest of the year is buying everything on Amazon right so continuity would change so I'm just gonna say our own experience with

(1:16:58) the secularization of what had been Christian holidays so now as we have various secular holidays like Christmas I think gives us a glimpse into that earlier Christianization of the earlier pagan holidays so they're both at all and that is the pagan roots of Christmas [Applause] questions and we have to get people the microphone if we I don't know where the microphone Oh Mike you're full did you find did you find anything about the roots of the chimney oh my Santa comes down there I just ran to come down the chimney I didn't go

(1:17:46) through and answer every one of those questions so I think that so in a lot of cases our modern traditions about Santa are this this thing that a couple people like Thomas Nast is cartoonists and a couple of poets and things like that in New York in the 19th century are creating these things and so the twas the night before Christmas is a pretty early poem I think and so in some cases some of these things might be just based on coming out of the poem as the poet has has even put in a tiny reindeer we only get their names why don't we get

(1:18:22) the Rudolph's song but you know so I would speculate it that it's that but I didn't look it up so I don't know was there also debate about the dates for Easter and some other major holidays say yes yes so so so Christmas hadn't been holiday and they just didn't know when Jesus was born and so like I say the early Christians are debating about it and they just ultimately arbitrarily I think picked the day the birthday of the son of the actual son you know for the for that birthday Easter initially there's a huge rift among early

(1:19:05) Christians about when to celebrate Easter it's initially associated with the Jewish holiday Passover and so essentially in the Gospel accounts the idea of it is is that Jesus traditionally in the Last Supper is actually celebrating the Jewish holiday of Passover which he's giving a different a different meaning to so now he is introducing the Christian sacrament of communion on that on that day which is the bread and the wine and stuff and so and so that's when the and then right after that he's crucified right and resurrected according to the

(1:19:38) traditional accounts and so and so then it's associated therefore with Passover well Passover is calculated according to the Hebrew calendar which is based on the Babylonian calendar which is a lunar solar calendar as opposed to the as opposed to the the Roman calendar which is purely solar and so so the Roman months our months you cannot tell based on what day it is in the month if it's a full moon or not whereas with the Jewish calendar you can so the Jewish calendar the months track the phases of the Moon

(1:20:12) and then the years track the year that this takes of the Sunday the earth to go around the Sun and so and so that's a lunar solar the Roman calendar said screw it we can't worry about it so anyway because of that it's complicated and that's why Jewish holidays move around and so that is why I also then Passover moves around and so then the early Christians had a big debate over it they ultimately because of the sysm they early Christians and early Jews didn't get along and that has been unfortunately troubled history you

(1:20:43) know that has continued and so as a result of that the early Christians made a calculation that Sepp created separated their calculation from Passover and so now and so they picked a date for Easter that is based on a on again a lunar solar calculation that's not based on Passover but is like Passover and is complicated and so it took a lot of math it was pretty much all the math that anybody could do in the late Middle Ages in order to figure out when Easter was supposed to be and sometimes it would be celebrated by the

(1:21:14) wrong times to people and then so if sometimes if you know for example that the Orthodox Christians and the and the Western Christians celebrate Christmas on two different days because we have two different calendars so that would happen in the Middle Ages if you had a king who's an Arian and you had as wife who is a Catholic and so then they would celebrate Easter on two different days but it's not just Easter it's forty days in front of Easter and fifty days after so so it's a mess you know so getting that date exactly right but yes some of

(1:21:49) the other holidays are just plopped down right on top of pagan holidays like st. Valentine's Day plopped on top of Lupercalia so yes absolutely how do you account for the rise of paganism or the interest in paganism currently and there's also some vestiges of this condemnation of Christmas as being pagan and also definitely condemnation of paganism and these very puritanical religions that are currently exist yes yeah so there's a couple things yeah so Protestantism made a major reaction against inherited custom and so

(1:22:44) Protestants decided so in Christianity in the West in what's now Catholicism Latin Christianity there have been four sources of authority and those are Scripture the early church fathers tradition and apostolic continuity so the idea that the st. Peter appointed a bishop who appointed a bishop we pointed Bishop Roberta Bishop all the way down to Pope Francis right and so that's the apostolic succession and then tradition was also another source of authority a completely valid source of authority the Protestants said nope they're that

(1:23:19) traditional thing st. Peter probably never maybe never even went to Rome we have no there's no history that's supporting that that the Pope's claim to that or the Coptic Pope's claim to being going back to st. mark there's very little chance frankly that st. mark remains were in that grave for the people and barri to steal it has almost no historical basis so no the Protestants say to tradition tradition is just preserving paganism that's what that is what the products are saying and they and the Church Fathers tended to argue things and

(1:23:49) interpretations that are kind of more Pro Orthodox or Catholic then then what Protestants like so they threw them out too and so that gave Protestants one source of authority and tight which they said they're for Authority rest Sola scriptura on Scripture alone and so as a result of that Protestants went really nutso over the Bible and it was at a time to when the printing press happened so suddenly now everybody had was able to have a Bible and everybody was gonna be literate and so now what we may even think of Christianity as being this very

(1:24:17) Bible based thing where everybody is constantly reading the Bible in a very literal istic way and all this kind of thing this is a very modern thing Christianity wasn't about that until modern times and it's actually a weird distortion of Christianity that has happened that's problematic for a bunch of different reasons but that that Protestants even you know I often say that our that our modern secular society agnosticism and atheism are in fact just further sects of Protestantism because what atheists and agnostics have done on

(1:24:52) wittingly and aren't really aware of it's just that same thing with Protestants we're already doing which is purging certain things we purged out the Saints we purged out this we purged out that and instead they've moved in those same exact directions that the Protestants were moving and they just purge more things so we purge the name Christian we purged the idea of God the way we have it and we're still continuing to purge and move into those diff waise and so one of the things that's happened is that that that path is kind

(1:25:16) of continued from the Protestant launching pad and then in terms of the other question you had in terms of the rise now of kind of a neo-paganism pagan revivals so as as Protestants have gotten to this point where we look back in modern times and we think of Christianity and very negative terms because of a bias of quite a correct bias of anti-clericalism the kind of very strong control that churches had over universities and thoughts and writing and things like that that was often negative and there's often been a

(1:25:54) negative force in terms of social mores you know which is to say enforcing bigotry and other kinds of things like that so by overturning those things there's quite a negative bias for what immediately has gone before so people are now in the secular society which is frankly a sect of and just a derivative of Protestantism but they look back at what went before you hate what you're closest to so that's viewed as very negative since the Christians were since the Christians were enemies of the pagans then from this perspective paganism looks really

(1:26:30) fun the pagans like to drink the pagans liked a lot of sex that's as much as people normally think of it and so I think that normally that has created a big revival in paganism into as an interest you know in general and so we make a topic like pagan roots of Christmas we fill the place so it's really wonderful I like that so we like to talk about paganism but one of the things is that's not what people don't really get is paganism was was way worse then than Christianity in terms of being all kinds of controlling and things like

(1:26:59) that so they had different hang-ups it wasn't about drinking insects but there were about all kinds of other horrible oppressive things you would not like to have to do all of the ritualistic stuff that you constantly have to do as you're a slave to every last little iota thing that you have to do to make sure that the gods aren't going to smite you in all kinds of weird ways or the kinds of penalties that you have the kinds of arbitrary rules and weird things that are anyway that you're subject to antagonize them and so you

(1:27:31) know you're so far distant from it when you're doing a revival you can share you pick and just pick the things out of it you like and so people have revived in the last century a kind of neo-paganism Wicca other kinds of modern sects of Protestantism I would say again did anyway largely from its Protestant foundation they have cherry picked some of the old things brought that on and created quite nice things often so it can be very egalitarian it can be very it rejects a lot of the Protestants rejection of ritual and so now it

(1:28:04) emphasizes ritual so there's all kinds of things that you're rejecting what you just came from in and embracing something that's actually quite new but cherry picked out of ancient things referring Richard very good point yes yeah so so one of the problems the point here is returning to the feminine bringing back the Divine Feminine and so actually this is a major problem for Christianity because of being founded essentially refounded on this Roman male thing right so like I was saying with them the father line or whatever in in

(1:28:45) in Rome is all about men and so Christianity has three gods who will all seem like they're male although only one of them is so anyway but in any event returning the Divine Feminine to a central place in some cases the most central places if if the main worship is of the of the Great Mother has been a wonderful revival within modern paganism I remember a an episode of a Star Trek where they landed on an alien world and they discovered that the residents there were worshipped of the Sun I guess they somehow managed to speak to them in

(1:29:35) English and it was only to later in the show that they discovered that they were talking about the Son of God yeah yeah you're right it's a terrible episode of old Star Trek called bread and circuses they go to a planet which is 1960 the Roman Empire survived it's the 1960s and there's this rebel group that isn't in the hiding out in the woods and they and they all like you say there's Sun worshipers there's Sun worshipers and then at the end of the episode of her is listening and she says don't you understand sir they're not worshiping

(1:30:08) the Sun it's the Son of God and so this Roman world is about to experience the Enlightenment of becoming Christian I guess I don't know what the idea of it is in the old star chick that anyway that seems like with yes funny just wondering if you could talk about maybe you mentioned like the Christmas being kind of transplanted onto the Sol Invictus and I was like honoring that birthday yeah but were there other Christians at the time who sort of opposed that as maybe to pro Rome or something well so when it happens yeah good point

(1:30:49) so so this is a time period of immediate transition and so Christianity in a has a as a weird bifurcated incubation period so Jesus and his followers I mean Jesus is crucified by the Roman authorities and crucifixion is a form of execution that the Romans reserved for essentially rebels for people who are committing insurrection and so he's essentially viewed presumably maybe he is claiming to be King of the Jews or something like that and so therefore they anyway at least see him as a troublemaker enough thinkers of I lots

(1:31:29) of people so it's not like it they've singled him out for anything in particular but anyway he's like on their on their list of maybe the thousand people they were going to crucify that year and so and so that's a troubled time and then the early Christian times that follow the next two centuries the Christians largely remember their history as one where they are a minority that is not always tolerated within the Roman Empire and so generally speaking the state religion of the Roman Empire is this kind of paganism and one of the

(1:32:00) things that you have to do largely is in the same way that you might let's say pledge of allegiance to the flag or something like that the Americans do is where you are saluting or these kind of things one of the things that you're showing your patriotism patriotism in the Roman Empire is that you will worship the genius of the Emperor so that the Emperor's are there genius is divine and they'll have shrines in the city and all that worshiping the genius of the Emperor means is you pick up a little thing incense to go like this and

(1:32:30) go so there's a very low bar and so we do have these wonderful documents from Late Antiquity for example there's a text called the martyrdom of saints Perpetua and philetus and they take these these Christian noble women in what's now Tunisia was then the Roman province of Africa Carthage and they essentially have these it's part during one of the persecutions so there's occasional local persecutions wherever the Christians are cracked down on and so these noble Christian women are going to be thrown to the the Lions in the in

(1:33:06) the Roman Coliseum that isn't our Carthage or something or lights down there but the governor does not want to do it these are noble women they're they're they're pretty they're smart everyone likes them they're very popular they don't want to throw Perpetua and flaky tests to the Lions at all so he was like look all you got to do just pick it up just do this I don't know I don't have to do anything not know you know that would be I would be denying God if I would do it would be preferable blasphemy so so they're too pure right

(1:33:32) to do it and so then they bring out their dad their poor old daddy was a provincial senator or whatever and so they whip him the whip the dad say look I I don't want to have to do this but I'm gonna keep whipping your dad and delay she just picked this thing up anyway so they martyr them right so they do martyr them so anyway that's a case where the Christians are and a lot of them you know Christians picked it up right but a bunch of them did get thrown to the Lions is not as many as Christians would have you have believed

(1:34:00) later I mean the Saints lives become so popular that everybody gets martyred but but there were martyrs and that's part of it so so this hostile hostility as you're talking about between early Christians and the Roman authorities but that changes just a hundred percent it's a total complete turnaround when the Roman Emperor himself converts so when the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century becomes a Christian and he issues the Edict of Milan the Edict of toleration allowing Christianity to be worshiped on persecuting and later when

(1:34:33) his successor Theodosius essentially outlaws paganism then things are quite reversed and so that's when now the bishops are now Imperial officials so they are actually being patronized by the imperial government they are working side by side each one of the we have the word diocese maybe you think of it like a diocese as a Catholic word which is a bishop as a head of a diocese diocese is a Roman word for late Roman province and so essentially what would happen is that the emperors would send out an official

(1:35:05) account to to rule a diocese and they would send a bishop and now there's just the bishops left you know but anyway that's the diocese and so they become the Imperial administration and so when that happens there are a bunch of Christians who are like thinking we've sold our souls they don't like it but a lot of the other ones pretty quickly the leaders the people that have the paper you know they're the ones with the money they're the ones that are that are patronized by the imperial government they become Imperial officials those are

(1:35:37) the bishops and that's essentially the Christianity that wins right and so as a result of that all modern institutional Christianity in the Greek East and the Latin West anyway there's oriental churches that are further east but anyway are all descended from that Roman institutional church so in that case people get over it and now we just start working on the the business of stamping out paganism and replacing it with Christian stuff all right a lot of action in the kitchen so probably yeah we should do steak is

(1:36:16) there's a lot of yeah thank you guys so much this was so much fun I'm gonna say goodbye to those of you who were joining us online and have a Merry Christmas we'll see you I think it's the first Tuesday of the seventh with the story of the Magi