A Winter’s Tale:
In the family home at Christmas I used to muse over the
plastic fairy on top of the artificial conifer tree: who is that supposed to be - & she
holds a star (wand), what's this star? Many years on and I realise that it
represents the day star, dying and being reborn at the winter solstice - so
what exactly is this tree – introduced by Victorian nobility in the 19th
century? I think it's the solar tree, it wears the sun in its crown. The star
is equally the Pole Star around which the great, antlered female elk circles,
today known as the constellation Ursa Major - at the midwinter rite it
symbolised the frail midwinter sun, a tiny star (prehistorically Thubron) at
the apex of the soaring solar tree or world axis if you prefer. I have
patiently restored this narrative from stories and tales, including the
Kalevala where the elk has been predictably demonised by subsequent cultures
and systems of belief.
Googling Father Christmas invariably gets you a jolly old
Norse Odin (Old English Woden) showering his admirers with gifts. That looks a
bit suspect to me. I can't find an Odin gift tradition; perhaps there is one,
the ‘ring giver’? But gift-giving is a fairly universal and ancient activity
with an important social function; & is Odin jolly like Santa? Not really,
this hooded figure is called 'Grimr' meaning masked and in the context of the
violent, furious god it can only be the grim, set mask of death - this being a
god of the dead. The name Woden
corresponds to Old English ‘wod’ meaning mad: possibly recalling the
pejorative ‘wooden head’ in English. Secondly, what we have for Odin doesn't
appear to be that old in terms of prehistory, he is frequently associated with
riding (Wild Hunt) & riding is a comparatively recent activity (Eurasia)
c.4 to 3500bce and later still in Western Europe. Odin is called 'Jolnir' after
the festival of Jol or Yule but gods tend to attract attributes to them, just
like saints absorbed qualities of older pagan divinities, so I don't read too
much into the name: Odin had many names, such as 'Yggr' meaning the terrible,
not particularly jolly that one. What does Odin bring as a gift? He is credited
with bringing poetry to humans but he is also reputed to have stolen this
poetry in the first instance, so it's a bit of a wayward gift it seems to me
I leave Odin here
& am unconvinced that Odin is Father
Christmas; also worth noting that historically the pagan English called Yule
'Mothers' Night' according to the venerable Bede, there's no apparent reference
to Odin or Woden in that naming. What we do have however is Wednesday, the day
of Woden. But I don't think anyone for sure knows why Yule in England (then
eastern Britain) was referred to as Mothers' Night by Bede. There have been
attempts by some to weave these mothers into Teutonic tradition but it's
unconvincing & if it were so, why don't we see a winter's Mothers' Night in
Teutonic and Scandinavian mythology? Mythological mothers – female groups - are
certainly attested to in Romano-Celtic cultures though. According to the Odin ‘Jolnir’
model, Yule should be recorded as being presided over by this deity in England,
and it isn't. Not that Bede is particularly reliable, but it's what he leaves
out that is questionable, not so much the information he supplies, which
appears to me muddled & perhaps not even thoroughly understood by England's
first historian. Bede was a cloistered soul, he had no practical understanding
of what pagans did or believed in. When in doubt he invoked classical sources -
which is what everybody did - and still do to a degree. This was also pleasing
to Rome, Bede was painting a picture agreeable to Rome, a picture of a people
ripe for conversion. So he wasn't perhaps that bothered about the detail of his
description only the overall impression it would create.
Bede notwithstanding
– the name means prayer - in our hunt for the real Father Christmas, we shall
proceed on to the next venerable & festive gentleman: Saint Nicholas. The
saint gives us Santa Claus, 'santa'=saint, 'claus'=Nicolaus. And what is so
Christmasy about St Nick? His 'feast day' falls on the 6th of December which is
tolerably close - but not that near - to the winter solstice, that's about it.
The folklore (hagiography) surrounding the saint is for me awkward in its
attempts to absorb the prehistoric & astronomical midwinter event, when the
sun 'stands still' on the horizon for three days. He resurrects three murdered
children; he gives dowries to three young women, thrice, but most tellingly the
triple dowries turn into 'three gold balls' in some versions & there can't
be much more of a graphic reference to the three standstill solstice sun days
than this. St Nicholas & the Church purloined the solstice event as far as
I am concerned. But there's more -
The Austrian/Italian St Nicholas tradition has split the
saint into two distinct personages, a medieval demonic goat & a saintly gift bringer, so what's
going on? You'll notice that the Krampus figures are not necessarily goats,
they're composites: furry hides & horned or even antlered. That's the key
to the puzzle I think.
Nicholas aka Santa
aka Father Christmas brings gifts - three golden orbs in one instance - but
there is a much older & more important winter solstice gift-bringer whom
Santa has displaced. Combing through the myths of Eurasian peoples who have
retained remnants of their hunter-gatherer culture it is possible to tentatively
reconstruct the picture. At the winter solstice a giant, antlered female elk
gathers up the sun with her horns & dashes with it into the deep forest of
the night, taking with her the light of humanity, potentially never to return.
The world is plunged into the longest, darkest night. There appears a 'culture
hero', in this instance a bear. However, the female elk (obviously inspired by
antlered doe reindeer) is the sun herself. The bear-god either captures or
marries the doe, and that is probably the significance of the furry Krampus's
wearing horns, they represent a sacred marriage, a 'hieros gamos' - elk and
bear as one. Who the bear-god actually was is lost in the remote past - I think
he is the northern constellation Bootes pursuing the Great Elk [just like in
the Kalevala] we know as the Plough. But what was his original name? In Siberia he is known as Mangi.
http://youtu.be/JmXmfx7uFR0
Otherwise, an obvious candidate is going to be Arthur whose name, some say, not only means the bear, but additionally his personage also answers to a 'culture hero', just like the lost bear-god, but surviving down to the modern period. Moreover, the Arthurian hunt for the Grail is I believe the hunt for the sun goddess herself - a retelling of the same age-old story. In Arthurian lore there is the Grail Maiden, Elaine, and 'elain' means deer in Middle Welsh.
http://youtu.be/JmXmfx7uFR0
Otherwise, an obvious candidate is going to be Arthur whose name, some say, not only means the bear, but additionally his personage also answers to a 'culture hero', just like the lost bear-god, but surviving down to the modern period. Moreover, the Arthurian hunt for the Grail is I believe the hunt for the sun goddess herself - a retelling of the same age-old story. In Arthurian lore there is the Grail Maiden, Elaine, and 'elain' means deer in Middle Welsh.
It follows that the gift-bringer at Christmas brings us that
most precious jewel, the light, the sun reborn into a new solar year.
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