Christmas Carols In Old America. Patrizia Barrera

      

Patrizia Barrera

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      Copyright

      Copyright Patrizia Barrera, 2021

      All Right Reserved

       Rha Production

       Traduzione Inglese

      di DANILO PERSICO

      CHRISTMAS ORIGINS

      It may be hard to believe but Christmas is actually a pagan feast. It was actually rather a feast reserved to wizards and witches that used to dance around a tree or, much more likely, around stone circles on the winter solstice day, that is on 22 ^nd December. It was an orgiastic celebration, with dances, grass and sex, to propitiate the favor of the gods in the winter period, that in ancient times was really frightening.

      Its origin? Some say it came from Druids culture and it had Celtic roots. If any of you has ever read Asterix and Obelix comics can, in a funny way, get a gist of it, even though these people’s esoteric tradition was much more complex. The period is from IV to III century B.C. and the place is the British islands but with expansions to as far as Italy , Iberian peninsula and Sweden. We know them as BRITONS and the Stonehenge mystery is what probably tickles us more of their past, rather than their religious traditions. Yet all the Christmas magic and enchantment we still feel today derives from these extinguished people.

      Romans, that defeated Celtics and colonized their territories several times, absorbed their customs and traditions and that was how the winter solstice feast became a tradition of the Empire. The celebration of Winter solstice was actually present in several cultures: in ancient times natural cycles were well observed and the fact that the shortest day, and therefore the seeming abandonment of the sun, occurred around 21 ^st of December was a well known phenomenon, but not considered “automatic”. The sun was a life giver god; and as all gods he was prone to excesses, grudge and acts of violence. Therefore men needed to get in good with it, so that it continued to donate its warmth. The days immediately following 21st of December were therefore lived with terror and fear by ancient people, especially when light got inevitably weaker and nights longer. Man could be confident that the sun was back and that a new year was beginning for humanity only on 25 ^th of December, a day when, for a series of astronomical laws that I’m not going to explain here, the sun seems to be born again, powerful and victorious.

      In a few words there’s a new birth. This simple interpretation can maybe explain the success of the festivities linked to winter solstice that we find in several cultures throughout the world.

      When Romans “recycled” pagan dances they were reinventing the wheel. And after them the Christians did the same. Joining fetishes representing Christ and the virginity of Mary to the pagan dances, they were actually connecting to much more ancient myths and customs. The Madonna with Child is indeed not a Christian heritage.

      In Egypt, for instance, 2000 years before Jesus birth the god Horus (the Sun) was portrayed as a child in the arms of the goddess Isis (the Moon) who was a mother and sister. Even before that in Persi the myth of the god Mitra should make us think: it seems that he had been given birth by a virgin, he had twelve disciples and above all he was called “The Savior”! The Babylonian sun god TAMMUZ is not less surprising: he was also portrayed in the arms of the mother goddess ISHTAR, he had a halo made of twelve stars, representing the twelve zodiac signs. (12 like Christ’s disciples, don’t you think?) It seems that he also died and resuscitated after 3 days… and this in 3000 B.C.

      I won’t talk about the horrid Dionysian rites, where a child god was literally cut into pieces by women who had gone insane, to be born again more beautiful and strong than before; and I just touch on a sun god in the Yucatan, he too was given birth by the virgin CHRIBIRIAS . But I would like to highlight that the rites that took place in the winter solstice were not present only in this hemisphere, but in the other one too, as even Incas celebrated the sun god WIRACOCHA on their winter solstice, that is on June 24th!

      PICTURE 1) Here is the extraordinary correspondence between the goddess Isis and the Christian Virgin. There are several similarities: we’re struck by the central role of the two figures in both the pagan and then Christian religion. They were both considered mortal, virgin and linked to the figure of the “Savior”, Horus for Isis and Christ for Mary, who were portrayed by classic iconography as the child held in the arms and breastfed by the woman.

      So it’s the same the whole world over. And the whole world cheerfully celebrated a Christmas rich in dances and songs between a sexual intercourse and a drink, until Christianity came to upset the apple cart . It started of course to forbid the sex and the amenity of the festivity, that didn’t match Mary’s image of purity ; it was then the turn of the dance, considered a “Devil’s gift” . Finally pagan songs were substituted, as they still praised strange divinities of the past, mixing them with the Christian ones.

      The first to provide an original text was, in 129 A.D., the Roman Bishop, who forced the believers to sing a HYMN OF THE ANGELS at Christmas; not to be outdone, the Orthodox Church, through a certain Comas from Jerusalem, created a HYMN TO THE DIVINITY in 720 A.D. Thereafter writing religious texts to sing at Christmas became a real profession reserved to the monks. The date of Jesus birth was fixed on December 25th in the 4th century to oppose the several winter solstice celebrations that still existed . Actually no Gospel refers to an exact date when it talks about the Nativity. Jesus was born and that’s all. Theologians got the idea from the census, letting pass that Romans had a real passion for the count of their subjects, often for planning and control reasons. Replacing the pagan festivities with the birth of Our Lord was therefore a brilliant master stroke.

      Yet the people did not appreciate immediately this change: life was too short and hard to let one of the few moments of debauchery of the year be taken away. Condemned to the fast and to a sober lifestyle, the new Christians had found comfort in folk songs, that had the merit to be sung in the mother tongue, easy to understand and learn for everybody. The Church indeed forced the mob to learn Hymns in Latin by heart, and celebrations were led among sad and measured people that struggled to mumble words they did not understand.

      Many early Christian bishops opposed this state of things, like St. Ambrose for instance, who even adapted the text VENI, REDEMPTOR GENTIUM to folk songs of pagan origins so that people, even though they didn’t know the text, could at least croon the song their own way. But these were isolated cases. With anathemas and threats of excommunication the Catholic Church managed to create a real musical anthology that was imposed on people and lasted until the Middle Ages. And for sure not for everybody’s joy. At the beginnings of 1200 people had lost the will to celebrate Christmas and the birth of our Lord passed by among apathetic families, whose only transgression was finally eating a piece of meat, after the long fasting of the Advent . One of the most attentive Saints and a reformer of the Catholicism, St. Francis of Assisi, realized it, and he thought of restoring the ancient cheerfulness to get the people closer to the Heaven.

      Well understanding the difficulties of the poor people, he created a sort of living celebration of Christ’s birth, with a shed and characters that, differently from what is usually believed, did not stay there motionless, just to be admired, but used to sing traditional songs, that had never died, with flutes and bagpipes, telling shortly the story of the Nativity. It was a whole week of preparation for Christmas with games and competitions,