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Christmas Is Pagan!
See Proof here in:
“The X-mas Files”, Part 2
Borrowed from: TRUTH ON THE WEB MINISTRIES PRESENTS:
Where did Christianity get “Christmas”? Is it really “Christ’s Mass”? The evidence contradicting the popularly held notion that Jesus ever had anything to do with Christmas is historically overwhelming! Could “committing” Christmas be a sin?
The reason why Christmas came to be celebrated on December 25 remains uncertain, but most probably the reason is that early Christians wished the date to coincide with the pagan Roman festival marking the “birthday of the unconquered sun” (natalis solis invicti); this festival celebrated the winter solstice, when the days again begin to Lengthen and the sun begins to climb higher in the sky. The traditional customs connected with Christmas have accordingly developed from several sources as a result of the coincidence of the celebration of the birth of Christ with the pagan agricultural and solar observances at midwinter. In the Roman world the Saturnalia (December 17) was a time of merrymaking and exchange of gifts. December 25 was also regarded as the birth date of the Iranian mystery god Mithras, the Sun of Righteousness. On the Roman New Year (January 1), houses were decorated with greenery and lights, and gifts were given to children and the poor. To these observances were added the German and Celtic Yule rites when the Teutonic tribes penetrated into Gaul, Britain, and central Europe. Food and good fellowship, the Yule log and Yule cakes, greenery and fir trees, and gifts and greetings all commemorated different aspects of this festive season. Fires and lights, symbols of warmth and lasting life, have always been associated with the winter festival, both pagan and Christian. Since the European Middle Ages, evergreens, as symbols of survival, have been associated with Christmas. Christmas is traditionally regarded as the festival of the family and of children, under the name of whose patron, Saint Nicholas, or Santa Claus, presents are exchanged in many countries.
CHRISTMAS:
Encyclopedia Britannica: lengthy quote from www.Britannica.com
The reason why Christmas came to be celebrated on December 25 remains uncertain, but most probably the reason is that early Christians wished the date to coincide with the pagan Roman festival marking the “birthday of the unconquered sun” (natalis solis invicti); this festival celebrated the winter solstice, when the days again begin to Lengthen and the sun begins to climb higher in the sky. The traditional customs connected with Christmas have accordingly developed from several sources as a result of the coincidence of the celebration of the birth of Christ with the pagan agricultural and solar observances at midwinter. In the Roman world the Saturnalia (December 17) was a time of merrymaking and exchange of gifts. December 25 was also regarded as the birth date of the Iranian mystery god Mithras, the Sun of Righteousness. On the Roman New Year (January 1), houses were decorated with greenery and lights, and gifts were given to children and the poor. To these observances were added the German and Celtic Yule rites when the Teutonic tribes penetrated into Gaul, Britain, and central Europe. Food and good fellowship, the Yule log and Yule cakes, greenery and fir trees, and gifts and greetings all commemorated different aspects of this festive season. Fires and lights, symbols of warmth and lasting life, have always been associated with the winter festival, both pagan and Christian. Since the European Middle Ages, evergreens, as symbols of survival, have been associated with Christmas. Christmas is traditionally regarded as the festival of the family and of children, under the name of whose patron, Saint Nicholas, or Santa Claus, presents are exchanged in many countries.
SATURNALIA:
One of the best-known festivals of ancient Rome was the Saturnalia, a winter festival celebrated on December 17-24. Because it was a time of wild merrymaking and domestic celebrations, businesses, schools, and law courts were closed so that the public could feast, dance, gamble, and generally enjoy itself to the fullest. December 25—the birthday of Mithra, the Iranian god of light, and a day devoted to the invincible sun, as well as the day after the Saturnalia—was adopted by the church as Christmas, the nativity of Christ, to counteract the effects of these festivals.
CHRISTMAS TREE
An evergreen, usually a balsam or douglas fir, decorated with lights and ornaments as a part of Christmas festivities. The use of evergreen trees, wreaths, and garlands as a symbol of eternal life was an ancient custom of the Egyptians, Chinese, and Hebrews. Tree worship, common among the pagan Europeans, survived after their conversion to Christianity in the Scandinavian customs of decorating the house and barn with evergreens at the New Year to scare away the devil and of setting up a tree for the birds during Christmastime; it survived further in the custom, also observed in Germany, of placing a Yule tree at an entrance or inside the house in the midwinter holidays.
The modern Christmas tree, though, originated in western Germany. The main prop of a popular medieval play about Adam and Eve was a fir tree hung with apples (paradise tree) representing the Garden of Eden. The Germans set up a paradise tree in their homes on December 24, the religious feast day of Adam and Eve. They hung wafers on it (symbolizing the host, the Christian sign of redemption); in a later tradition, the wafers were replaced by cookies of various shapes. Candles, too, were often added as the symbol of Christ. In the same room, during the Christmas season, was the Christmas pyramid, a triangular construction of wood, with shelves to hold Christmas figurines, decorated with evergreens, candles, and a star. By the 16th century, the Christmas pyramid and paradise tree had merged, becoming the Christmas tree.
The custom was widespread among the German Lutherans by the 18th century, but it was not until the following century that the Christmas tree became a deep-rooted German tradition. Introduced into England in the early 19th century, the Christmas tree was popularized in the mid-19th century by the German Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria. The Victorian tree was decorated with candles, candies, and fancy cakes hung from the branches by ribbon and by paper chains. Brought to North America by German settlers as early as the 17th century, Christmas trees were the height of fashion by the 19th century. They were also popular in Austria, Switzerland, Poland, and The Netherlands. In China and Japan, Christmas trees, introduced by western missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries, were decorated with intricate paper designs.
MISTLETOE
In some parts of Europe the midsummer gathering of mistletoe is still associated with the burning of bonfires, a remnant of sacrificial ceremonies performed by ancient priests, or druids. Mistletoe was once believed to have magic powers as well as medicinal properties. Later, the custom developed in England (and, still later, the United States) of kissing under the mistletoe, an action that once was believed to lead inevitably to marriage.
Mistletoes are slow-growing but persistent; their natural death is determined by the death of the hosts. They are pests of many ornamental, timber, and crop trees and are the cause of abnormal growths called “witches’ brooms” that deform the branches and decrease the reproductive ability of the host. The only effective control measure is complete removal of the parasite from the host.
ROMAN RELIGION - The survival of Roman religion
For a time, coins and other monuments continued to link Christian doctrines with the worship of the Sun, to which Constantine had been addicted previously. But even when this phase came to an end, Roman paganism continued to exert other, permanent influences, great and small. The emperors passed on to the popes the title of chief priest, pontifex maximus. The saints, with their distribution of functions, often seemed to perpetuate the many numina of ancient tradition. The ecclesiastical calendar retains numerous remnants of pre-Christian festivals—notably Christmas, which blends elements including both the feast of the Saturnalia and the birthday of Mithra. But, most of all, the mainstream of Western Christianity owed ancient Rome the firm discipline that gave it stability and shape, combining insistence on established forms with the possibility of recognizing that novelties need not be excluded, since they were implicit from the start.
Above quoted from www.Britannica.com
MORE QUOTES
Holidays Preferred Over Holydays by World
“The PRELATE, by his doctrine, practice, example, and neglect of discipline, declareth that he hath no such reverend estimation of the Sabbath. He doteth so upon the observation of Pasche [Easter], and Yule [Christ-mass], and festival days appointed by men, that he preferreth them to the Sabath, and hath turned to nothing our solemn fasts and blessed humiliations.” —David Calderwood, The Pastor and the Prelate, (1628)
Thus we see that the Providence of God has kept the day secret from the knowledge of men; and it is in vain for any to determine the particular day. Nevertheless, as to the month, a probable Judgement may be made. The Great [De Emendat. Temp. l. 5] Scaliger, [In Chronol. Isag. c. 47.] Calvisius, and L’Empereur [In Scholiis ad Iarchiadenia Dan. 9.] conclude that it was in the latter end of September, or the beginning of October. And before them, Beroaldus, Wolfius and Hospinian were of that Judgment. And this suits well with what is recorded of the shepherds, Luke 2:8. It is not probable that the Shepherds would be abroad watching their Flocks in the Depth of Winter. The month of December is by Hesiod called Meis kalepos probatois, And though in Judaea the summer be hot, yet the winter is cold. Matth. 24:20. Ps. 147:17. But in September or October this might well be. [Wolphius de Tempore p. 81, 82.] Nor is it likely that Augustus should enjoin all his Subjects throughout the whole Roman World to travel into their own cities in the midst of Winter, as he did at the Time when Christ was born (Luke 2:1). Moreover, the Feast of Tabernacles, which signified the Incarnation of Christ, was in the seventh month. Inasmuch as the Passover typified Christ’s Death, he was crucified in that month. Why then may we not think that since the Feast of Tabernacles typified his Nativity, he was in that month born? —A TESTIMONY Against several Prophane and Superstitious CUSTOMS, Now Practised by some in New-England, The Evil whereof is evinced from the Holy Scriptures, and from the Writings both of Ancient and Modern Divines; —Increase Mather, 1687
Christmas Holidays were at first invented and institute in compliance with the Pagan Festivals, of old observed at that very time of the Year. —De Antiq. Conviv. p. 133
And [De Origine Festorum Christ.] Hospinian speaketh judiciously, when he saith, that he doth not believe that they who first of all observed the Feast of Christ’s Nativity in the latter end of December, did it as thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian. Hence December was called Mensis Genialis, the Voluptuous Month. Whilst the Saturnalian Days lasted, the observers of them were won’t to send Gifts one to another, which therefore Tertullian calls Saturnalitia, and Jerom giveth them the Name of Saturnalium Sportulae. The like is done by many in Christmas time. —“A TESTIMONY Against several Prophane and Superstitious CUSTOMS, Now Practised by some in New-England, The Evil whereof is evinced from the Holy Scriptures, and from the Writings both of Ancient and Modern Divines.” — Increase Mather, 1687.
We object to the observance of Christmas by the church, because we believe that its original appointment as a Christian festival was not only unauthorized but wicked. It was foisted in among the observances of religion, along with many other things, for which there can be imagined no reason but a willingness to make a compromise with heathenism. The facts were simply these. The sagacity of the Romish church was not long in making the discovery that the chief obstacle in the way of an easy and universal embrace of Christianity, was the world’s natural dislike of the simplicity and purity of its doctrines and practices. The old heathens of the Empire were very loath to abandon their voluptuous and flesh-pleasing system for one which offered so little in return to gratify their appetite for display and self-indulgence. To the ecclesiastical Solomons of that time the idea occurred, that the work of conversion might be facilitated by rendering Christianity more attractive in its form, and more agreeable to the popular tastes. In a word, by compromising the matter, and carrying the gospel at least half-way in the work of conformation, to meet the reluctant idolaters —Excerpt of article titled “CHRISTMAS” from THE REFORMED PRESBYTERIAN MAGAZINE, January, 1851
“ ... within the Christian Church no such festival as Christmas was ever heard of till the third century, and ... not till the fourth century was far advanced did it gain much observance. How, then, did the Romish Church fix on December 25th as Christmas-day? Why, thus: Long before the fourth century, and long before the Christian era itself, a festival was celebrated among the heathen, at that precise time of the year, in honour of the birth of the son of the Babylonian queen of heaven; and it may fairly be presumed that, in order to conciliate the heathen, and to swell the number of nominal adherents of Christianity, the same festival was adopted by the Roman Church, giving it the name of Christ.” —Alexander Hislop, in The Two Babylons p. 93
“The interchange of presents between friends is alike characteristic of Christmas and the Saturnalia, and MUST HAVE BEEN ADOPTED BY CHRISTIANS FROM THE PAGANS, as the admonition of Tertullian plainly shows.” (Emphasis added). —Bibliotheca Sacra (Vol. 12 pp. 153-155)
“This festival has been commonly believed to have had only an astronomical character, referring simply to the completion of the sun’s yearly course, and the commencement of a new cycle. But there is indubitable evidence that the festival in question had a much higher influence than this—that it commemorated not merely the figurative birthday of the sun in the renewal of its course, but the birth-day of the grand Deliverer ... the Sun-God and great mediatorial divinity.” Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons pp. 94,97
[The Two Babylons, quoted frequently in this article, can be found in it’s entirety by visiting this link]
“The wassailing-bowl of Christmas had its precise counterpart in the ‘Drunken Festival’ of Babylon; The candles, in some parts of England, lighted at Christmas eve and used so long as the festive season lasts, were equally lighted by the pagans on the eve of the festival of the Babylonian god, to do honor to him, for it was one of the distinguishing peculiarities of his worship to have lighted candles on his alters. The Christmas tree, now so common among us, was equally common in pagan Rome and pagan Egypt. In Egypt that tree was the palm tree; in Rome it was the fir; the palm tree denoted the pagan Messiah, as Baal-Tamar; the fir referring to him as Baal-Berith .... On Christmas day the continental Saxons offered a boar in sacrifice to the sun, to propitiate her. In Rome a similar observance had evidently existed; for a boar formed a great article of Saturn, as appears form the words form Martial, ‘That boar will make you a good Saturnalia.’ Hence the boar’s head is still a standing dish in England at the Christmas dinner, when the reason of it is long since forgotten. Yea, the ‘Christmas goose’ and ‘yule cake’ were essential articles in the worship of the Babylonian Messiah, as that worship was practiced both in Egypt and at Rome.” —Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons, pp. 97,100,101
“The Christmas tree, now so common among us, was equally common in Pagan Rome and Pagan Egypt. In Egypt it was the palm tree; in Rome it was the fir; the palm-tree denoting the Pagan Messiah, as Baal-Tamar, the fir referring to him as Baal-Berith. The mother of Adonis, the Sun-God and great mediatorial divinity, was mystically said to have been changed into a tree, and when in that state to have brought forth her divine son. If the mother was a tree, the son must have been recognized as ‘Man the Branch.’ And this entirely accounts for putting the Yule Log into the fire on Christmas Eve and the appearance of the Christmas tree the next morning. As Zero-Ashta, ‘The seed of the woman,’ ... he has to enter the fire on ‘Mother night,’ that he may be born the next day out of it, as the ‘Branch of God,’ or the Tree that brings divine gifts to men.” —The Two Babylons, p. 97
“ ... the divine child born at the winter solstice was born as a new incarnation of the great god (after that god had been cut in pieces ... on purpose to revenge his death upon his murderers.) Now the great god, cut off in the midst of his power and glory, was symbolized as a huge tree, stripped of all his branches, and cut down almost to the ground. But the great Serpent, the symbol of the life restoring Aesculapius, twists itself around the dead stock ... and lo, at its side sprouts a young tree - a tree of an entirely different kind, that is never to be cut down by a hostile power ... and thus shadowed forth the perpetuity and everlasting nature of his power, how that after having fallen before his enemies, he has risen triumphant over them all. Therefore, the 25th of December, the day that was observed in Rome as the day when the victorious god reappeared on earth was held at the Natalis invicti solis, The birthday of the unconquered Sun —The Two Babylons, p. 98
“Lighted candles are foreign to the worship of God in the church of the New Testament scriptures. Yet, they too had their place in the worship of the sun god of paganism and in Christmas today.” —Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons, Loizeaux Bros., Neptune, N.J., 1959, pp. 94,97
“The third one of the great feasts of the church, Christmas, doesn’t seem to be kept during the first three centuries. In contrast to it a memorial of Christ’s baptism was celebrated in the Orient as a revelation of his Messiahship and glory of his divinity called Epiphania, the sixth of January. This festival was, in Egypt, also given the meaning as a memorial of Christ’s birth, and in that way they had in a certain sense a substitute for Christmas, which had not yet begun.” —C.A. Cornelius, Ecclesiastical History, part 1, p. 139
“During the first three centuries we find no trace of any feast for the birth of Christ.” —Frederick Neilsen, Ecclesiastical History, p. 224
“Father Christmas once dropped some gold coins while coming down the chimney. The coins would have fallen through the ash grate and been lost if they hadn’t landed in a stocking that had been hung out to dry. Since that time children have continued to hang out stockings in hopes of finding them filled with gifts.” —The History of Christmas
“ ... the golden calf was built and the celebration declared a ‘feast to the Lord.’ ... The people had declared a celebration to honor God that he did not recognize as being in his honor.” Richard Rives, Too Long in the Sun, Partakers Pub., 1996, pp. 129-130.)
“Hathor and Aphis, the cow and bull gods of Egypt, were representatives of sun worship. Their worship was just one stage in the long Egyptian history of solar veneration. The golden calf at Mount Sinai is more than sufficient evidence to prove that the feast proclaimed was related to sun worship. The event at Mount Sinai was just one episode in the Satanic apostasy which began at the tower of Babel. The celebration of December 25th, originally proclaimed in honor of the birth of the sun god Mithra, can only be one of the final events in the long continuing saga of Satanic sun worship.” —Richard Rives, Too Long in the Sun, pp. 130-131
“The reasons for celebrating our major feasts when we do are many and varied. In general, however, it is true that many of them have at least an indirect connection with the pre-Christian feasts celebrated about the same time of year— feasts centering around the harvest, the rebirth of the sun at the winter solstice (now Dec. 21, but Dec. 25 in the old Julian calendar), the renewal of nature in spring, and so on.” —The New Question Box; Catholic Life for the Nineties, copyright 1988 by John J. Dietzen, M.A., S.T.L., ISBN 0-940518-01-5 (paperback), published by Guildhall Publishers, Peoria Illinois, 61651., p. 554
“The Calvinists declared that observing Christ’s birthday was a human invention .... They asserted that Christ would not have approved of it, for it merely furnished excuse for wrong doing ... Town criers went around and cried out so loudly so that all might hear, ‘No Christmas! no Christmas!’” —Mayme R. Krythe, All About Christmas
“The day [of Christmas] was not one of the early feasts of the Christian church. In fact the observance of birthdays was condemned as a heathen custom repugnant to Christians.” —George W. Douglas, The American Book of Days, p. 658
“The celebration of the Nativity of Christ on 25 December, just after Saturnalia, is first attributed in the calendar of Philocalus in AD 336, and the day may have been chosen in opposition to the festival held that day in honour of Sol Invictus, whose temple was dedicated in AD 274 by Aurelian.” —H.H. Scullard, Festivals and Ceremonies of the Ancient Roman Republic, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981, p.207
“From the Romans also came another Christmas fundamental: the date, December 25. When the Julian calendar was proclaimed in 46 C.E. [A.D.], it set into law a practice that was already common: dating the winter solstice as December 25. Later reforms of the calendar would cause the astronomical solstice to migrate to December 21, but the older date’s irresistible resonance would remain” —Tom Flynn, The Trouble With Christmas, 1993, p.42
“The time of the winter solstice has always been an important season in the mythology of all peoples. The sun, the giver of life, is at its lowest ebb. It is [the] shortest daylight of the year; the promise of spring is buried in cold and snow. It is the time when the forces of chaos that stand against the return of light and life must once again be defeated by the gods. At the low point of the solstice, the people must help the gods through imitative magic and religious ceremonies. The sun begins to return in triumph. The days lengthen and, though winter remains, spring is once again conceivable. For all people, it is a time of great festivity” —Gerard and Patricia Del Re, The Christmas Almanac, 1979, p.15
“We do not know its beginning ... we do not really know when the Christ Child it venerates was born; or the time and place when Christmas was first celebrated: or exactly how it was that, over the centuries, a bishop-saint of Asia Minor and a pagan god of the Germans merged to become Santa Claus. “Although the Christmas story centers in the Christ child of Bethlehem, it begins so long before his coming that we find its hero arriving on the scene after more than half of the time of the story has gone by .... Christmas began there [Mesopotamia], over four thousand years ago, as the festival which renewed the world for another year. The ‘twelve days’ of Christmas, the bright fires and probably the Yule log; the giving of presents; the carnivals with their floats; their merry makings and clowning; the mummers who sing and play from house to house, the feastings; the church processions with their lights and song all these and more began three centuries before Christ was born. And they celebrated the arrival of a new year.” —Earl W. Count, 4000 Years of Christmas, pp. 11,18
“Saturnalia and the kalends were the celebrations most familiar to early Christians, December 17-24 and January 1-3, but the tradition of celebrating December 25 as Christ’s birthday came to the Romans from Persia. Mithra, the Persian god of light and sacred contracts, was born out of a rock on December 25. Rome was famous for its flirtations with strange gods and cults, and in the third century [274] the unchristian emperor Aurelian established the festival of Dies Invicti Solis, the Day of the Invincible Sun, on December 25. —Gerard and Patricia Del Re, The Christmas Almanac, 1979, p. 17
Mithra was an embodiment of the sun, so this period of its rebirth was a major day in Mithraism, which had become Rome’s latest official religion with the patronage of Aurelian. It is believed that the emperor Constantine adhered to Mithraism up to the time of his conversion to Christianity. He was probably instrumental in seeing that the major feast of his old religion was carried over to his new faith” —Gerard and Patricia Del Re, The Christmas Almanac, 1979, p. 17
“For that day [25th of December] was sacred, not only to the pagan Romans but to a religion from Persia which, in those days, was one of Christianity’s strongest rivals. This Persian religion was Mithraism, whose followers worshiped the sun, and celebrated its return to strength on that day. The church finally succeeded in taking the merriment, the greenery, the lights, and gifts from Saturn and giving them to the Babe of Bethlehem” —Earl W. Count, 4000 Years of Christmas, p. 27
“Christmas is a very old holiday. It clearly started as a celebration of the passing of the winter solstice, and the start of the sun’s return journey from the north to the south .... The ancient Romans observed this time with a festival dedicated to Saturn, the god of agriculture, and it was called Saturnalia .... When Emperor Constantine decreed Christianity as the new faith of the Roman Empire, early in the fourth century, the Christians gave the holiday an entirely new name and an entirely new meaning.” —Joseph Gaer, Holidays Around the World. Boston: Little Brown, 1953. p133.
“Christmas, as we have seen, is of the Mediterranean ... for the Mediterranean world already had not merely centuries, but millennia behind it, when Christ was born; and even the religion which he founded had traveled several centuries before it discovered its need of Christmas” —Earl W. Count, 4000 Years of Christmas, p. 86
“25 December was a particularly good date for a Christian festival celebrating new life, because there were several pagan festivals all doing much the same thing. The Romans honoured their god Saturn between 17 and 23 December. Saturnalia was a festival in celebration of Rome’s Golden Age, which all hoped one day would return. Many of its festivities became part of the traditional Christmas .... When Christianity became the official religion of the Emperor Constantine, in the early part of the fourth century AD, the pagan celebrations of the 25th stayed to become part of Christmas.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas. Glasgow: William Collins, 1981. p. 14
“Christmas was generally celebrated in the West only after the triumph of Constantine when the time of Christ’s birth was reckoned with the Day of the Unconquered Sun on 25 December” —Smith, From Christ to Constantine, pp. 150-151
“The assimilation of Christ to the sun god, as sun of righteousness, was widespread in the fourth century and was furthered by Constantine’s legislation on Sunday, which is not unrelated to the fact that the sun god was the titular divinity of his family” —Walker, A History of the Christian Church: Revised, Section 13
“During Saturnalia, everyone feasted and rejoiced, work and business were for a season entirely suspended, the houses were decked with laurel and evergreen, visits and presents were exchanged between friends, and clients gave gifts to their patrons. The whole season was one of rejoicing and goodwill, and all kinds of amusements were indulged in by the people.” —J.M. Wheeler, Paganism in Christian Festivals.
“Although it now celebrates the birth of Jesus, Christmas has its roots in holidays far more ancient and retains strong traces of pagan festivals incorporated as Christianity spread across Europe and the world.” —The Mystical Year, Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, no date, p. 120
The “12 Days of Christmas” are a Roman Catholic invention: “By 529 AD, it was a civic holiday, and all work or public business (except that of cooks, bakers, or any that contributed to the delight of the holiday) was prohibited by the Emperor Justinian. In 563, the Council of Braga forbade fasting on Christmas Day, and four years later the Council of Tours proclaimed the twelve days from December 25 to Epiphany as a sacred, festive season.” —Mike Nicholas, “Midwinter Night’s Eve: Yule”
[A writer in 1633 said,] “If we compare our Bacchanalian Christmases and New Year’s Tides with these Saturnalia and Feasts of Janus, we shall find such near affinity between them both in regard of time (they both being in the end of December and on the first of January), and in their manner of solemnizing (both of them being spent in revelling, epicurism, wantonness, idleness, dancing, drinking, stage plays and such other Christmas disorders now in use with Christians, were derived from these Roman Saturnalia and Bacchanalian Festivals; which should cause all pious Christians eternally to abominate them.” —Ashton, A Right Merrie Christmas, p. 6
“The largest pagan religious cult which fostered the celebration of December 25 as a holiday throughout the Roman and Greek worlds was the pagan sun worship —Mithraism .... This winter festival was called ‘the Nativity’ —The Nativity of the Sun,” —Frazer, Golden Bough, p. 471
The New Book of Knowledge, New York: Grolier, 1979, p289
“Practically every country in the world, from China to India, from South America to the Middle East, held celebrations at this time of year ... it was not until the fourth century that Pope Julius I declared that December 25 should be celebrated as the birthday of Jesus Christ, and Christmas as we know it began. We now celebrate Christmas every year, with a little bit of pagan superstition, a Norse Yule log, Druid candles, a drop of wine from Saturnalia, and a feast from the winter solstice.” —Gyles Brandreth, The Christmas Book. London: Robert Hale, 1984, p9
“Many of our Christmas customs have their roots in pagan ceremonies that were already hoary with age in the fourth century AD.” —Christina Hole, Christmas and its Customs. London: Richard Bell, 1942, p. 9
“The Saturnalia, extending from December 17 to December 24, was an age-old observance of tribute to the god Saturn, whose name means plenty or bounty. It was a time of rejoicing, hilarity and merrymaking .... Of prime significance is the spirit of brotherhood that prevailed at that season of the pagan year. And this humanitarian touch was carried over into the Christmas observances of Christians.” —Daniel J. Foyle, The Christmas Tree. New York: Chilton, 1960. p. 17
“The period was characterized by ‘processions, singing, lighting candles, adorning the house with Laurel and green trees, giving presents’ . . . it is to the merriment and bestowing of favours at the Saturnalia time that we owe our common Christmas practice.” —Alfred Carl Hottes, 1,001 Christmas Facts and Fancies. New York: A.T. De La Mare, 1954, p. 14
“During the Saturnalia, normal life turned upside down. Gambling was declared legal, courts were closed, and no one could be convicted of a crime .... Christians began absorbing these old customs and infusing them with Christian meaning in order to spread their faith.” —The Glory and Pageantry of Christmas. Maplewood, NJ: Time-Life Books, 1963. p. 114
Yule
“For modern Witches, Yule (from the Anglo-Saxon ‘Yula’, meaning ‘wheel’ of the year) is usually celebrated on the actual Winter Solstice, which may vary by a few days, though it usually occurs on or around December 21st. It is a Lesser Sabbat or Lower Holiday in the modern Pagan calendar, one of the four quarter-days of the year, but a very important one.
“Remembering that most Christmas customs are ultimately based upon older Pagan customs, it only remains for modern Pagans to reclaim their lost traditions. In doing so, we can share many common customs with our Christian friends, albeit with a slightly different interpretation. And thus we all share in the beauty of this most magical of seasons, when the Mother Goddess once again gives birth to the baby Sun-God and sets the wheel in motion again.” —Mike Nicholas, “Midwinter Night’s Eve: Yule
“Witches celebrate eight major festivals or sabbats each year .... The first is Yule, 20 or 21 December.” —Jeffrey B. Russell, A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics, and Pagans. —London: Thames and Hudson, 1980, p. 168
Yule Logs
“The ceremony of the Yule log, like so many of the oldest Christmas traditions, was thoroughly pagan in origin.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas. Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p. 59
“The Yule Log tradition comes to us from Scandinavia, where the pagan sex and fertility god Jul, or Jule (pronounced “yule"), was honored in a twelve-day celebration in December. A large, single log (generally considered to have been a phallic idol) was kept with a fire against it for twelve days, a different sacrifice to Jul being offered in the fire on each of the twelve days.” —Holidays and Holy Days, by Tom C. McKenney
“The Yule log was originally an entire tree, carefully chosen, and brought into the house with great ceremony. The butt end would be placed into the hearth while the rest of the tree stuck out into the room. The tree would be slowly fed into the fire and the entire process was carefully timed to last the entire Yule season.” —The History of Christmas
Christmas Trees / Evergreens / Ivy / Holly
“The tradition of bringing holly and ivy, or any evergreen, into the house is another Christmas practice which goes back to the Romans.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas. Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p. 62
“Christmas incorporated many other pagan customs. Holly and ivy, for instance, sacred to the ancient gods Saturn and Dionysus, were believed to have magic power against evil.” —The Mystical Year. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, no date, p121
“Many other Christmas decorations used today were once pagan symbols. The Romans used flowers and leafy boughs in their rites. Records show that the Saxons used holly, ivy, and bay in their religious observances.” — The New Book of Knowledge, New York: Grolier, 1979, p. 291
“Some authorities maintain that its [the Christmas tree’s] origins lay in the pagan worship of vegetation.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas. Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p. 64
“The Christmas tree, now so common among us, was equally common in pagan Rome and pagan Egypt. In Egypt that tree was the palm tree. In Rome it was the fir. The palm tree denoting the pagan messiah as Baal-Tamar (Judges 20:33) [Baal-Tamar = lord of the tree (palm)~kh], the fir referring to him as Baal-Berith [Baal-Berith, meaning “lord of the covenant”—another false title that resembles the true~kh]. The mother of Adonis, the sun god and great mediatorial divinity, was mystically said to have been changed into a tree and when in that state to have brought forth her divine son. If the mother was a tree, the son must have been recognized as “the man of the branch” and this accounts for the putting of the yule log into the fire on Christmas Eve, and the appearance of the Christmas tree the next morning” —Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons, p. 97
“Even the Christmas tree, which came into common use only in nineteenth-century Germany, is perhaps a throwback to a great tree from Norse mythology that was named Yggdrasil.” —The Mystical Year. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, no date, p. 121
“The Christmas tree is the symbol of the spirit of the Yuletide in many homes. The custom came from Germany and dates to long ago when primitive people revered trees-particularly evergreens.” —The New Book of Knowledge. New York: Grolier, 1979, p. 291
“The use of evergreens was so closely associated with the garlands of pagan days that in many of the early Church celebrations they were forbidden.” —Alfred Carl Hottes, 1,001 Christmas Facts and Fancies. New York: A. T .De LaMare, 1954, p15
“The use of Christmas wreaths is believed by authorities to be traceable to the pagan customs of decorating buildings and places of worship at the feast which took place at the same time as Christmas. The Christmas tree is from Egypt and its origin dates from a period long anterior to the Christmas era.” —Frederick J. Haskins, Answers to Questions
Mistletoe
“Mistletoe was always known to have played an important part in the rituals of the Druids, and consequently, was never really accepted by the Church.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas. Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p63
“The Druids gave the world the tradition of hanging mistletoe in the house.” —The New Book of Knowledge, New York: Grolier, 1979, p291
Gift Giving
“The idea of giving presents goes back to the Romans.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas, Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p. 84
“The custom of presenting friends with gifts at Christmas dates back to the time of the ancient Romans.” —Everymans Encyclopedia, Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1967, p1,672
The wise men gave their gifts to Christ, but did not exchange gifts with each other. The gifts presented to Christ were to a king, because of his royalty, and not because of his birthday: “He was a king, and the people of the East never approached the presence of a king without a present in their hands” —Adam Clarke Commentary, Volume 5, Matthew 2:11, p. 34
“The interchange of presents between friends is alike characteristic of Christmas and the Saturnalia, and must have been adopted by Christians from the Pagans, as the admonition of Tertullian plainly shows.” —Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol. 12, pp. 153-155
“The early church ... cleverly transferred its significance [pagan gift-giving at Saturnalia] to a ritual commemoration of the gifts of the Magi.” —Discovering Christmas Customs and Folklore.
“The giving of presents at this time of year has been a custom that has quite naturally lingered through the ages from the Saturnalia and Kalends celebrations when garlands of flowers, candles and dolls were presented as symbolic gifts to bring good luck and prosperity for the future. Although the early Christian Church turned its nose up at pagan rituals, its members saw that they were missing out on the present-giving and cleverly decided to adopt the practice in remembrance of the gifts brought to the infant Jesus by the kings and the shepherds.” —Gyles Brandreth, The Christmas Book, London: Robert Hale, 1984, p. 100
“Because gift-giving was so essential a part of the pagan celebrations [of Saturnalia], the early Church frowned upon it as sternly as upon other and more questionable New Year celebrations.” —Christina Hole, Christmas and its Customs, London: Richard Bell, 1942, p. 25
Santa / St Nick
“He is the patron of storm-beset sailors (for miraculously saving doomed mariners off the coast of Lycia), of prisoners, of children ... which led to the practice of children giving presents at Christmas in his name and the metamorphosis of his name, St. Nicholas, into Sint Klaes, or Santa Claus, by the Dutch. It should be noted though that the figure of Santa Claus is really non-Christian and is based on the Germanic god Thor, who was associated with winter and the Yule log and rode on a chariot drawn by goats named Cracker and Gnasher.” —The Catholic Pocket Dictionary of Saints.
Old “St.” Nick: devil—(usu. the Devil) (in Christian and Jewish belief) the supreme spirit of evil; Satan, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Beelebub, Abaddon, Belial, Prince of Darkness, Tempter, deuce, archenemy, evil one, colloq. Old Nick [boldface emphasis here mine] ...” —Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, p. 388, article: devil
“This festival has been commonly believed to have had only an astronomical character, referring simply to the completion of the sun’s yearly course, and the commencement of a new cycle. But there is indubitable evidence that the festival in question had a much higher influence than this—that it commemorated not merely the figurative birthday of the sun in the renewal of its course, but the birth-day of the grand Deliverer ... the Sun-God and great mediatorial divinity.” —Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons, Loizeaux Brothers, 1916, pp. 94,97
“ ... within the Christian Church no such festival as Christmas was ever heard of till the third century, and ... not till the fourth century was far advanced did it gain much observance. How, then, did the Romish Church fix on December 25th as Christmas-day? Why, thus: Long before the fourth century, and long before the Christian era itself, a festival was celebrated among the heathen, at that precise time of the year, in honour of the birth of the son of the Babylonian queen of heaven; and it may fairly be presumed that, in order to conciliate the heathen, and to swell the number of nominal adherents of Christianity, the same festival was adopted by the Roman Church, giving it the name of Christ.” —Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons, p. 93
“Horus (Eg.). The last in the line of divine Sovereigns in Egypt, said to be the son of Osiris and Isis. He is the great god ‘loved of Heaven,’ the ‘beloved of the Sun, the offspring of the gods, the subjugator of the world.’ At the time of the Winter Solstice (our Christmas), his image in the form of a small newly-born infant, was brought out from the sanctuary for the adoration of the worshiping crowds ...” —H.P. Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary, London: 1892, p. 145
“As Christianity spread to northern Europe, it met with the observance of another pagan festival held in December in honour of the sun. This time it was the Yule-feast of the Norsemen, which lasted for twelve days. During this time log-fires were burnt to assist the revival of the sun. Shrines and other sacred places were decorated with such greenery as holly, ivy, and bay, and it was an occasion for feasting and drinking.
“Equally old was the practice of the Druids, the caste of priests among the Celts of ancient France, Britain and Ireland, to decorate their temples with mistletoe, the fruit of the oak-tree which they considered sacred. Among the German tribes the oak-tree was sacred to Odin, their god of war, and they sacrificed to it until St Boniface, in the eighth century, persuaded them to exchange it for the Christmas tree, a young fir-tree adorned in honour of the Christ child . . . It was the German immigrants who took the custom to America” —L.W. Cowie and John Selwyn Gummer, The Christian Calendar, 1974, p. 22
“Christmas gifts themselves remind us of the presents that were exchanged in Rome during the Saturnalia. In Rome, it might be added, the presents usually took the form of wax tapers and dolls, the latter being in their turn a survival of the human sacrifices once offered to Saturn. It is a queer thought that in our Christmas presents we are preserving under another form one of the most savage customs of our barbarian ancestors!” —William Walsh, The Story of Santa Klaus, p. 67
“This was no mere accident. It was a necessary measure at a time when the new religion [Christianity] was forcing itself upon a deeply superstitious people. In order to reconcile fresh converts to the new faith, and to make the breaking of old ties as painless as possible, these relics of paganism were retained under modified forms ....
Thus we find that when Pope Gregory [540-604] sent Saint Augustine as a missionary to convert Anglo-Saxon England he directed that so far as possible the saint should accommodate the new and strange Christian rites to the heathen ones with which the natives had been familiar from their birth.
For example, he advised Saint Augustine to allow his converts on certain festivals to eat and kill a great number of oxen to the glory of God the Father, as formerly they had done this in honor of [their gods] .... On the very Christmas after his arrival in England Saint Augustine baptized many thousands of converts and permitted their usual December celebration under the new name and with the new meaning” —William Walsh, The Story of Santa Klaus, p. 61
“The worshipers (of Mithra) held Sunday sacred and celebrated the birth of the Sun on the 25th of December.” —Franz Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra, trans. by Thomas J. McCormack, p. 191
Cardinal Newman admits in his book that; the “temples, incense, oil lamps, votive offerings, holy water, holidays, and seasons of devotion, processions, blessings of the fields, sacerdotal vestments, the tonsure (of priests, monks and nuns), images, and statues ... are all of pagan origin.” -The Development of the Christian Religion, Cardinal Newman p.359
The valuable testimony of J. Murdock, D. D., is in harmony with the above: “It was Julius I (Bishop of Rome, A.D. 337-352) who first ascertained this to be the right day; and though his authority is not the best, yet it is generally admitted that the designation of the twenty-fifth of December for the festival was first made about the middle of the fourth century.” —Ecclesiastical History, by Mosheim, Vol. I, p. 279
“A broad element of English Christianity still considered Christmas celebration a pagan blasphemy. The Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Calvinists and other denominations brought this opposition to early New England and strong opposition to the holiday lasted in America until the middle of the 18th century.” —The Origins of Christmas”, Rick Meisel, Dec. 19, 1993, p. 4
For more about pagan Christmas, see Part 3
Assembled by Ken Hoeck
12/99
Lonnie Martin’s work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License .
To locate any word on this site, if just typing onto the page doesn’t highlite it, then holding the shift key and the letter F down for a moment will enable whatever you enter to show up immediately, starting with your first letter.
“During the first three centuries we find no trace of any feast for the birth of Christ.” —Frederick Neilsen, Ecclesiastical History, p. 224
“Father Christmas once dropped some gold coins while coming down the chimney. The coins would have fallen through the ash grate and been lost if they hadn’t landed in a stocking that had been hung out to dry. Since that time children have continued to hang out stockings in hopes of finding them filled with gifts.” —The History of Christmas
“ ... the golden calf was built and the celebration declared a ‘feast to the Lord.’ ... The people had declared a celebration to honor God that he did not recognize as being in his honor.” Richard Rives, Too Long in the Sun, Partakers Pub., 1996, pp. 129-130.)
“Hathor and Aphis, the cow and bull gods of Egypt, were representatives of sun worship. Their worship was just one stage in the long Egyptian history of solar veneration. The golden calf at Mount Sinai is more than sufficient evidence to prove that the feast proclaimed was related to sun worship. The event at Mount Sinai was just one episode in the Satanic apostasy which began at the tower of Babel. The celebration of December 25th, originally proclaimed in honor of the birth of the sun god Mithra, can only be one of the final events in the long continuing saga of Satanic sun worship.” —Richard Rives, Too Long in the Sun, pp. 130-131
“The reasons for celebrating our major feasts when we do are many and varied. In general, however, it is true that many of them have at least an indirect connection with the pre-Christian feasts celebrated about the same time of year— feasts centering around the harvest, the rebirth of the sun at the winter solstice (now Dec. 21, but Dec. 25 in the old Julian calendar), the renewal of nature in spring, and so on.” —The New Question Box; Catholic Life for the Nineties, copyright 1988 by John J. Dietzen, M.A., S.T.L., ISBN 0-940518-01-5 (paperback), published by Guildhall Publishers, Peoria Illinois, 61651., p. 554
“The Calvinists declared that observing Christ’s birthday was a human invention .... They asserted that Christ would not have approved of it, for it merely furnished excuse for wrong doing ... Town criers went around and cried out so loudly so that all might hear, ‘No Christmas! no Christmas!’” —Mayme R. Krythe, All About Christmas
“The day [of Christmas] was not one of the early feasts of the Christian church. In fact the observance of birthdays was condemned as a heathen custom repugnant to Christians.” —George W. Douglas, The American Book of Days, p. 658
“The celebration of the Nativity of Christ on 25 December, just after Saturnalia, is first attributed in the calendar of Philocalus in AD 336, and the day may have been chosen in opposition to the festival held that day in honour of Sol Invictus, whose temple was dedicated in AD 274 by Aurelian.” —H.H. Scullard, Festivals and Ceremonies of the Ancient Roman Republic, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981, p.207
“From the Romans also came another Christmas fundamental: the date, December 25. When the Julian calendar was proclaimed in 46 C.E. [A.D.], it set into law a practice that was already common: dating the winter solstice as December 25. Later reforms of the calendar would cause the astronomical solstice to migrate to December 21, but the older date’s irresistible resonance would remain” —Tom Flynn, The Trouble With Christmas, 1993, p.42
“The time of the winter solstice has always been an important season in the mythology of all peoples. The sun, the giver of life, is at its lowest ebb. It is [the] shortest daylight of the year; the promise of spring is buried in cold and snow. It is the time when the forces of chaos that stand against the return of light and life must once again be defeated by the gods. At the low point of the solstice, the people must help the gods through imitative magic and religious ceremonies. The sun begins to return in triumph. The days lengthen and, though winter remains, spring is once again conceivable. For all people, it is a time of great festivity” —Gerard and Patricia Del Re, The Christmas Almanac, 1979, p.15
“We do not know its beginning ... we do not really know when the Christ Child it venerates was born; or the time and place when Christmas was first celebrated: or exactly how it was that, over the centuries, a bishop-saint of Asia Minor and a pagan god of the Germans merged to become Santa Claus. “Although the Christmas story centers in the Christ child of Bethlehem, it begins so long before his coming that we find its hero arriving on the scene after more than half of the time of the story has gone by .... Christmas began there [Mesopotamia], over four thousand years ago, as the festival which renewed the world for another year. The ‘twelve days’ of Christmas, the bright fires and probably the Yule log; the giving of presents; the carnivals with their floats; their merry makings and clowning; the mummers who sing and play from house to house, the feastings; the church processions with their lights and song all these and more began three centuries before Christ was born. And they celebrated the arrival of a new year.” —Earl W. Count, 4000 Years of Christmas, pp. 11,18
“Saturnalia and the kalends were the celebrations most familiar to early Christians, December 17-24 and January 1-3, but the tradition of celebrating December 25 as Christ’s birthday came to the Romans from Persia. Mithra, the Persian god of light and sacred contracts, was born out of a rock on December 25. Rome was famous for its flirtations with strange gods and cults, and in the third century [274] the unchristian emperor Aurelian established the festival of Dies Invicti Solis, the Day of the Invincible Sun, on December 25. —Gerard and Patricia Del Re, The Christmas Almanac, 1979, p. 17
Mithra was an embodiment of the sun, so this period of its rebirth was a major day in Mithraism, which had become Rome’s latest official religion with the patronage of Aurelian. It is believed that the emperor Constantine adhered to Mithraism up to the time of his conversion to Christianity. He was probably instrumental in seeing that the major feast of his old religion was carried over to his new faith” —Gerard and Patricia Del Re, The Christmas Almanac, 1979, p. 17
“For that day [25th of December] was sacred, not only to the pagan Romans but to a religion from Persia which, in those days, was one of Christianity’s strongest rivals. This Persian religion was Mithraism, whose followers worshiped the sun, and celebrated its return to strength on that day. The church finally succeeded in taking the merriment, the greenery, the lights, and gifts from Saturn and giving them to the Babe of Bethlehem” —Earl W. Count, 4000 Years of Christmas, p. 27
“Christmas is a very old holiday. It clearly started as a celebration of the passing of the winter solstice, and the start of the sun’s return journey from the north to the south .... The ancient Romans observed this time with a festival dedicated to Saturn, the god of agriculture, and it was called Saturnalia .... When Emperor Constantine decreed Christianity as the new faith of the Roman Empire, early in the fourth century, the Christians gave the holiday an entirely new name and an entirely new meaning.” —Joseph Gaer, Holidays Around the World. Boston: Little Brown, 1953. p133.
“Christmas, as we have seen, is of the Mediterranean ... for the Mediterranean world already had not merely centuries, but millennia behind it, when Christ was born; and even the religion which he founded had traveled several centuries before it discovered its need of Christmas” —Earl W. Count, 4000 Years of Christmas, p. 86
“25 December was a particularly good date for a Christian festival celebrating new life, because there were several pagan festivals all doing much the same thing. The Romans honoured their god Saturn between 17 and 23 December. Saturnalia was a festival in celebration of Rome’s Golden Age, which all hoped one day would return. Many of its festivities became part of the traditional Christmas .... When Christianity became the official religion of the Emperor Constantine, in the early part of the fourth century AD, the pagan celebrations of the 25th stayed to become part of Christmas.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas. Glasgow: William Collins, 1981. p. 14
“Christmas was generally celebrated in the West only after the triumph of Constantine when the time of Christ’s birth was reckoned with the Day of the Unconquered Sun on 25 December” —Smith, From Christ to Constantine, pp. 150-151
“The assimilation of Christ to the sun god, as sun of righteousness, was widespread in the fourth century and was furthered by Constantine’s legislation on Sunday, which is not unrelated to the fact that the sun god was the titular divinity of his family” —Walker, A History of the Christian Church: Revised, Section 13
“During Saturnalia, everyone feasted and rejoiced, work and business were for a season entirely suspended, the houses were decked with laurel and evergreen, visits and presents were exchanged between friends, and clients gave gifts to their patrons. The whole season was one of rejoicing and goodwill, and all kinds of amusements were indulged in by the people.” —J.M. Wheeler, Paganism in Christian Festivals.
“Although it now celebrates the birth of Jesus, Christmas has its roots in holidays far more ancient and retains strong traces of pagan festivals incorporated as Christianity spread across Europe and the world.” —The Mystical Year, Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, no date, p. 120
The “12 Days of Christmas” are a Roman Catholic invention: “By 529 AD, it was a civic holiday, and all work or public business (except that of cooks, bakers, or any that contributed to the delight of the holiday) was prohibited by the Emperor Justinian. In 563, the Council of Braga forbade fasting on Christmas Day, and four years later the Council of Tours proclaimed the twelve days from December 25 to Epiphany as a sacred, festive season.” —Mike Nicholas, “Midwinter Night’s Eve: Yule”
[A writer in 1633 said,] “If we compare our Bacchanalian Christmases and New Year’s Tides with these Saturnalia and Feasts of Janus, we shall find such near affinity between them both in regard of time (they both being in the end of December and on the first of January), and in their manner of solemnizing (both of them being spent in revelling, epicurism, wantonness, idleness, dancing, drinking, stage plays and such other Christmas disorders now in use with Christians, were derived from these Roman Saturnalia and Bacchanalian Festivals; which should cause all pious Christians eternally to abominate them.” —Ashton, A Right Merrie Christmas, p. 6
“The largest pagan religious cult which fostered the celebration of December 25 as a holiday throughout the Roman and Greek worlds was the pagan sun worship —Mithraism .... This winter festival was called ‘the Nativity’ —The Nativity of the Sun,” —Frazer, Golden Bough, p. 471
The New Book of Knowledge, New York: Grolier, 1979, p289
“Practically every country in the world, from China to India, from South America to the Middle East, held celebrations at this time of year ... it was not until the fourth century that Pope Julius I declared that December 25 should be celebrated as the birthday of Jesus Christ, and Christmas as we know it began. We now celebrate Christmas every year, with a little bit of pagan superstition, a Norse Yule log, Druid candles, a drop of wine from Saturnalia, and a feast from the winter solstice.” —Gyles Brandreth, The Christmas Book. London: Robert Hale, 1984, p9
“Many of our Christmas customs have their roots in pagan ceremonies that were already hoary with age in the fourth century AD.” —Christina Hole, Christmas and its Customs. London: Richard Bell, 1942, p. 9
“The Saturnalia, extending from December 17 to December 24, was an age-old observance of tribute to the god Saturn, whose name means plenty or bounty. It was a time of rejoicing, hilarity and merrymaking .... Of prime significance is the spirit of brotherhood that prevailed at that season of the pagan year. And this humanitarian touch was carried over into the Christmas observances of Christians.” —Daniel J. Foyle, The Christmas Tree. New York: Chilton, 1960. p. 17
“The period was characterized by ‘processions, singing, lighting candles, adorning the house with Laurel and green trees, giving presents’ . . . it is to the merriment and bestowing of favours at the Saturnalia time that we owe our common Christmas practice.” —Alfred Carl Hottes, 1,001 Christmas Facts and Fancies. New York: A.T. De La Mare, 1954, p. 14
“During the Saturnalia, normal life turned upside down. Gambling was declared legal, courts were closed, and no one could be convicted of a crime .... Christians began absorbing these old customs and infusing them with Christian meaning in order to spread their faith.” —The Glory and Pageantry of Christmas. Maplewood, NJ: Time-Life Books, 1963. p. 114
Yule
“For modern Witches, Yule (from the Anglo-Saxon ‘Yula’, meaning ‘wheel’ of the year) is usually celebrated on the actual Winter Solstice, which may vary by a few days, though it usually occurs on or around December 21st. It is a Lesser Sabbat or Lower Holiday in the modern Pagan calendar, one of the four quarter-days of the year, but a very important one.
“Remembering that most Christmas customs are ultimately based upon older Pagan customs, it only remains for modern Pagans to reclaim their lost traditions. In doing so, we can share many common customs with our Christian friends, albeit with a slightly different interpretation. And thus we all share in the beauty of this most magical of seasons, when the Mother Goddess once again gives birth to the baby Sun-God and sets the wheel in motion again.” —Mike Nicholas, “Midwinter Night’s Eve: Yule
“Witches celebrate eight major festivals or sabbats each year .... The first is Yule, 20 or 21 December.” —Jeffrey B. Russell, A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics, and Pagans. —London: Thames and Hudson, 1980, p. 168
Yule Logs
“The ceremony of the Yule log, like so many of the oldest Christmas traditions, was thoroughly pagan in origin.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas. Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p. 59
“The Yule Log tradition comes to us from Scandinavia, where the pagan sex and fertility god Jul, or Jule (pronounced “yule"), was honored in a twelve-day celebration in December. A large, single log (generally considered to have been a phallic idol) was kept with a fire against it for twelve days, a different sacrifice to Jul being offered in the fire on each of the twelve days.” —Holidays and Holy Days, by Tom C. McKenney
“The Yule log was originally an entire tree, carefully chosen, and brought into the house with great ceremony. The butt end would be placed into the hearth while the rest of the tree stuck out into the room. The tree would be slowly fed into the fire and the entire process was carefully timed to last the entire Yule season.” —The History of Christmas
Christmas Trees / Evergreens / Ivy / Holly
“The tradition of bringing holly and ivy, or any evergreen, into the house is another Christmas practice which goes back to the Romans.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas. Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p. 62
“Christmas incorporated many other pagan customs. Holly and ivy, for instance, sacred to the ancient gods Saturn and Dionysus, were believed to have magic power against evil.” —The Mystical Year. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, no date, p121
“Many other Christmas decorations used today were once pagan symbols. The Romans used flowers and leafy boughs in their rites. Records show that the Saxons used holly, ivy, and bay in their religious observances.” — The New Book of Knowledge, New York: Grolier, 1979, p. 291
“Some authorities maintain that its [the Christmas tree’s] origins lay in the pagan worship of vegetation.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas. Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p. 64
“The Christmas tree, now so common among us, was equally common in pagan Rome and pagan Egypt. In Egypt that tree was the palm tree. In Rome it was the fir. The palm tree denoting the pagan messiah as Baal-Tamar (Judges 20:33) [Baal-Tamar = lord of the tree (palm)~kh], the fir referring to him as Baal-Berith [Baal-Berith, meaning “lord of the covenant”—another false title that resembles the true~kh]. The mother of Adonis, the sun god and great mediatorial divinity, was mystically said to have been changed into a tree and when in that state to have brought forth her divine son. If the mother was a tree, the son must have been recognized as “the man of the branch” and this accounts for the putting of the yule log into the fire on Christmas Eve, and the appearance of the Christmas tree the next morning” —Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons, p. 97
“Even the Christmas tree, which came into common use only in nineteenth-century Germany, is perhaps a throwback to a great tree from Norse mythology that was named Yggdrasil.” —The Mystical Year. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, no date, p. 121
“The Christmas tree is the symbol of the spirit of the Yuletide in many homes. The custom came from Germany and dates to long ago when primitive people revered trees-particularly evergreens.” —The New Book of Knowledge. New York: Grolier, 1979, p. 291
“The use of evergreens was so closely associated with the garlands of pagan days that in many of the early Church celebrations they were forbidden.” —Alfred Carl Hottes, 1,001 Christmas Facts and Fancies. New York: A. T .De LaMare, 1954, p15
“The use of Christmas wreaths is believed by authorities to be traceable to the pagan customs of decorating buildings and places of worship at the feast which took place at the same time as Christmas. The Christmas tree is from Egypt and its origin dates from a period long anterior to the Christmas era.” —Frederick J. Haskins, Answers to Questions
Mistletoe
“Mistletoe was always known to have played an important part in the rituals of the Druids, and consequently, was never really accepted by the Church.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas. Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p63
“The Druids gave the world the tradition of hanging mistletoe in the house.” —The New Book of Knowledge, New York: Grolier, 1979, p291
Gift Giving
“The idea of giving presents goes back to the Romans.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas, Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p. 84
“The custom of presenting friends with gifts at Christmas dates back to the time of the ancient Romans.” —Everymans Encyclopedia, Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1967, p1,672
The wise men gave their gifts to Christ, but did not exchange gifts with each other. The gifts presented to Christ were to a king, because of his royalty, and not because of his birthday: “He was a king, and the people of the East never approached the presence of a king without a present in their hands” —Adam Clarke Commentary, Volume 5, Matthew 2:11, p. 34
“The interchange of presents between friends is alike characteristic of Christmas and the Saturnalia, and must have been adopted by Christians from the Pagans, as the admonition of Tertullian plainly shows.” —Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol. 12, pp. 153-155
“The early church ... cleverly transferred its significance [pagan gift-giving at Saturnalia] to a ritual commemoration of the gifts of the Magi.” —Discovering Christmas Customs and Folklore.
“The giving of presents at this time of year has been a custom that has quite naturally lingered through the ages from the Saturnalia and Kalends celebrations when garlands of flowers, candles and dolls were presented as symbolic gifts to bring good luck and prosperity for the future. Although the early Christian Church turned its nose up at pagan rituals, its members saw that they were missing out on the present-giving and cleverly decided to adopt the practice in remembrance of the gifts brought to the infant Jesus by the kings and the shepherds.” —Gyles Brandreth, The Christmas Book, London: Robert Hale, 1984, p. 100
“Because gift-giving was so essential a part of the pagan celebrations [of Saturnalia], the early Church frowned upon it as sternly as upon other and more questionable New Year celebrations.” —Christina Hole, Christmas and its Customs, London: Richard Bell, 1942, p. 25
Santa / St Nick
“He is the patron of storm-beset sailors (for miraculously saving doomed mariners off the coast of Lycia), of prisoners, of children ... which led to the practice of children giving presents at Christmas in his name and the metamorphosis of his name, St. Nicholas, into Sint Klaes, or Santa Claus, by the Dutch. It should be noted though that the figure of Santa Claus is really non-Christian and is based on the Germanic god Thor, who was associated with winter and the Yule log and rode on a chariot drawn by goats named Cracker and Gnasher.” —The Catholic Pocket Dictionary of Saints.
Old “St.” Nick: devil—(usu. the Devil) (in Christian and Jewish belief) the supreme spirit of evil; Satan, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Beelebub, Abaddon, Belial, Prince of Darkness, Tempter, deuce, archenemy, evil one, colloq. Old Nick [boldface emphasis here mine] ...” —Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, p. 388, article: devil
“This festival has been commonly believed to have had only an astronomical character, referring simply to the completion of the sun’s yearly course, and the commencement of a new cycle. But there is indubitable evidence that the festival in question had a much higher influence than this—that it commemorated not merely the figurative birthday of the sun in the renewal of its course, but the birth-day of the grand Deliverer ... the Sun-God and great mediatorial divinity.” —Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons, Loizeaux Brothers, 1916, pp. 94,97
“ ... within the Christian Church no such festival as Christmas was ever heard of till the third century, and ... not till the fourth century was far advanced did it gain much observance. How, then, did the Romish Church fix on December 25th as Christmas-day? Why, thus: Long before the fourth century, and long before the Christian era itself, a festival was celebrated among the heathen, at that precise time of the year, in honour of the birth of the son of the Babylonian queen of heaven; and it may fairly be presumed that, in order to conciliate the heathen, and to swell the number of nominal adherents of Christianity, the same festival was adopted by the Roman Church, giving it the name of Christ.” —Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons, p. 93
“Horus (Eg.). The last in the line of divine Sovereigns in Egypt, said to be the son of Osiris and Isis. He is the great god ‘loved of Heaven,’ the ‘beloved of the Sun, the offspring of the gods, the subjugator of the world.’ At the time of the Winter Solstice (our Christmas), his image in the form of a small newly-born infant, was brought out from the sanctuary for the adoration of the worshiping crowds ...” —H.P. Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary, London: 1892, p. 145
“As Christianity spread to northern Europe, it met with the observance of another pagan festival held in December in honour of the sun. This time it was the Yule-feast of the Norsemen, which lasted for twelve days. During this time log-fires were burnt to assist the revival of the sun. Shrines and other sacred places were decorated with such greenery as holly, ivy, and bay, and it was an occasion for feasting and drinking.
“Equally old was the practice of the Druids, the caste of priests among the Celts of ancient France, Britain and Ireland, to decorate their temples with mistletoe, the fruit of the oak-tree which they considered sacred. Among the German tribes the oak-tree was sacred to Odin, their god of war, and they sacrificed to it until St Boniface, in the eighth century, persuaded them to exchange it for the Christmas tree, a young fir-tree adorned in honour of the Christ child . . . It was the German immigrants who took the custom to America” —L.W. Cowie and John Selwyn Gummer, The Christian Calendar, 1974, p. 22
“Christmas gifts themselves remind us of the presents that were exchanged in Rome during the Saturnalia. In Rome, it might be added, the presents usually took the form of wax tapers and dolls, the latter being in their turn a survival of the human sacrifices once offered to Saturn. It is a queer thought that in our Christmas presents we are preserving under another form one of the most savage customs of our barbarian ancestors!” —William Walsh, The Story of Santa Klaus, p. 67
“This was no mere accident. It was a necessary measure at a time when the new religion [Christianity] was forcing itself upon a deeply superstitious people. In order to reconcile fresh converts to the new faith, and to make the breaking of old ties as painless as possible, these relics of paganism were retained under modified forms ....
Thus we find that when Pope Gregory [540-604] sent Saint Augustine as a missionary to convert Anglo-Saxon England he directed that so far as possible the saint should accommodate the new and strange Christian rites to the heathen ones with which the natives had been familiar from their birth.
For example, he advised Saint Augustine to allow his converts on certain festivals to eat and kill a great number of oxen to the glory of God the Father, as formerly they had done this in honor of [their gods] .... On the very Christmas after his arrival in England Saint Augustine baptized many thousands of converts and permitted their usual December celebration under the new name and with the new meaning” —William Walsh, The Story of Santa Klaus, p. 61
“The worshipers (of Mithra) held Sunday sacred and celebrated the birth of the Sun on the 25th of December.” —Franz Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra, trans. by Thomas J. McCormack, p. 191
Cardinal Newman admits in his book that; the “temples, incense, oil lamps, votive offerings, holy water, holidays, and seasons of devotion, processions, blessings of the fields, sacerdotal vestments, the tonsure (of priests, monks and nuns), images, and statues ... are all of pagan origin.” -The Development of the Christian Religion, Cardinal Newman p.359
The valuable testimony of J. Murdock, D. D., is in harmony with the above: “It was Julius I (Bishop of Rome, A.D. 337-352) who first ascertained this to be the right day; and though his authority is not the best, yet it is generally admitted that the designation of the twenty-fifth of December for the festival was first made about the middle of the fourth century.” —Ecclesiastical History, by Mosheim, Vol. I, p. 279
“A broad element of English Christianity still considered Christmas celebration a pagan blasphemy. The Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Calvinists and other denominations brought this opposition to early New England and strong opposition to the holiday lasted in America until the middle of the 18th century.” —The Origins of Christmas”, Rick Meisel, Dec. 19, 1993, p. 4
For more about pagan Christmas, see Part 3
Assembled by Ken Hoeck
12/99
Lonnie Martin’s work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License .
To locate any word on this site, if just typing onto the page doesn’t highlite it, then holding the shift key and the letter F down for a moment will enable whatever you enter to show up immediately, starting with your first letter.
The New Book of Knowledge, New York: Grolier, 1979, p289
“Practically every country in the world, from China to India, from South America to the Middle East, held celebrations at this time of year ... it was not until the fourth century that Pope Julius I declared that December 25 should be celebrated as the birthday of Jesus Christ, and Christmas as we know it began. We now celebrate Christmas every year, with a little bit of pagan superstition, a Norse Yule log, Druid candles, a drop of wine from Saturnalia, and a feast from the winter solstice.” —Gyles Brandreth, The Christmas Book. London: Robert Hale, 1984, p9
“Many of our Christmas customs have their roots in pagan ceremonies that were already hoary with age in the fourth century AD.” —Christina Hole, Christmas and its Customs. London: Richard Bell, 1942, p. 9
“The Saturnalia, extending from December 17 to December 24, was an age-old observance of tribute to the god Saturn, whose name means plenty or bounty. It was a time of rejoicing, hilarity and merrymaking .... Of prime significance is the spirit of brotherhood that prevailed at that season of the pagan year. And this humanitarian touch was carried over into the Christmas observances of Christians.” —Daniel J. Foyle, The Christmas Tree. New York: Chilton, 1960. p. 17
“The period was characterized by ‘processions, singing, lighting candles, adorning the house with Laurel and green trees, giving presents’ . . . it is to the merriment and bestowing of favours at the Saturnalia time that we owe our common Christmas practice.” —Alfred Carl Hottes, 1,001 Christmas Facts and Fancies. New York: A.T. De La Mare, 1954, p. 14
“During the Saturnalia, normal life turned upside down. Gambling was declared legal, courts were closed, and no one could be convicted of a crime .... Christians began absorbing these old customs and infusing them with Christian meaning in order to spread their faith.” —The Glory and Pageantry of Christmas. Maplewood, NJ: Time-Life Books, 1963. p. 114
Yule
“For modern Witches, Yule (from the Anglo-Saxon ‘Yula’, meaning ‘wheel’ of the year) is usually celebrated on the actual Winter Solstice, which may vary by a few days, though it usually occurs on or around December 21st. It is a Lesser Sabbat or Lower Holiday in the modern Pagan calendar, one of the four quarter-days of the year, but a very important one.
“Remembering that most Christmas customs are ultimately based upon older Pagan customs, it only remains for modern Pagans to reclaim their lost traditions. In doing so, we can share many common customs with our Christian friends, albeit with a slightly different interpretation. And thus we all share in the beauty of this most magical of seasons, when the Mother Goddess once again gives birth to the baby Sun-God and sets the wheel in motion again.” —Mike Nicholas, “Midwinter Night’s Eve: Yule
“Witches celebrate eight major festivals or sabbats each year .... The first is Yule, 20 or 21 December.” —Jeffrey B. Russell, A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics, and Pagans. —London: Thames and Hudson, 1980, p. 168
Yule Logs
“The ceremony of the Yule log, like so many of the oldest Christmas traditions, was thoroughly pagan in origin.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas. Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p. 59
“The Yule Log tradition comes to us from Scandinavia, where the pagan sex and fertility god Jul, or Jule (pronounced “yule"), was honored in a twelve-day celebration in December. A large, single log (generally considered to have been a phallic idol) was kept with a fire against it for twelve days, a different sacrifice to Jul being offered in the fire on each of the twelve days.” —Holidays and Holy Days, by Tom C. McKenney
“The Yule log was originally an entire tree, carefully chosen, and brought into the house with great ceremony. The butt end would be placed into the hearth while the rest of the tree stuck out into the room. The tree would be slowly fed into the fire and the entire process was carefully timed to last the entire Yule season.” —The History of Christmas
Christmas Trees / Evergreens / Ivy / Holly
“The tradition of bringing holly and ivy, or any evergreen, into the house is another Christmas practice which goes back to the Romans.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas. Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p. 62
“Christmas incorporated many other pagan customs. Holly and ivy, for instance, sacred to the ancient gods Saturn and Dionysus, were believed to have magic power against evil.” —The Mystical Year. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, no date, p121
“Many other Christmas decorations used today were once pagan symbols. The Romans used flowers and leafy boughs in their rites. Records show that the Saxons used holly, ivy, and bay in their religious observances.” — The New Book of Knowledge, New York: Grolier, 1979, p. 291
“Some authorities maintain that its [the Christmas tree’s] origins lay in the pagan worship of vegetation.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas. Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p. 64
“The Christmas tree, now so common among us, was equally common in pagan Rome and pagan Egypt. In Egypt that tree was the palm tree. In Rome it was the fir. The palm tree denoting the pagan messiah as Baal-Tamar (Judges 20:33) [Baal-Tamar = lord of the tree (palm)~kh], the fir referring to him as Baal-Berith [Baal-Berith, meaning “lord of the covenant”—another false title that resembles the true~kh]. The mother of Adonis, the sun god and great mediatorial divinity, was mystically said to have been changed into a tree and when in that state to have brought forth her divine son. If the mother was a tree, the son must have been recognized as “the man of the branch” and this accounts for the putting of the yule log into the fire on Christmas Eve, and the appearance of the Christmas tree the next morning” —Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons, p. 97
“Even the Christmas tree, which came into common use only in nineteenth-century Germany, is perhaps a throwback to a great tree from Norse mythology that was named Yggdrasil.” —The Mystical Year. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, no date, p. 121
“The Christmas tree is the symbol of the spirit of the Yuletide in many homes. The custom came from Germany and dates to long ago when primitive people revered trees-particularly evergreens.” —The New Book of Knowledge. New York: Grolier, 1979, p. 291
“The use of evergreens was so closely associated with the garlands of pagan days that in many of the early Church celebrations they were forbidden.” —Alfred Carl Hottes, 1,001 Christmas Facts and Fancies. New York: A. T .De LaMare, 1954, p15
“The use of Christmas wreaths is believed by authorities to be traceable to the pagan customs of decorating buildings and places of worship at the feast which took place at the same time as Christmas. The Christmas tree is from Egypt and its origin dates from a period long anterior to the Christmas era.” —Frederick J. Haskins, Answers to Questions
Mistletoe
“Mistletoe was always known to have played an important part in the rituals of the Druids, and consequently, was never really accepted by the Church.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas. Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p63
“The Druids gave the world the tradition of hanging mistletoe in the house.” —The New Book of Knowledge, New York: Grolier, 1979, p291
Gift Giving
“The idea of giving presents goes back to the Romans.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas, Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p. 84
“The custom of presenting friends with gifts at Christmas dates back to the time of the ancient Romans.” —Everymans Encyclopedia, Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1967, p1,672
The wise men gave their gifts to Christ, but did not exchange gifts with each other. The gifts presented to Christ were to a king, because of his royalty, and not because of his birthday: “He was a king, and the people of the East never approached the presence of a king without a present in their hands” —Adam Clarke Commentary, Volume 5, Matthew 2:11, p. 34
“The interchange of presents between friends is alike characteristic of Christmas and the Saturnalia, and must have been adopted by Christians from the Pagans, as the admonition of Tertullian plainly shows.” —Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol. 12, pp. 153-155
“The early church ... cleverly transferred its significance [pagan gift-giving at Saturnalia] to a ritual commemoration of the gifts of the Magi.” —Discovering Christmas Customs and Folklore.
“The giving of presents at this time of year has been a custom that has quite naturally lingered through the ages from the Saturnalia and Kalends celebrations when garlands of flowers, candles and dolls were presented as symbolic gifts to bring good luck and prosperity for the future. Although the early Christian Church turned its nose up at pagan rituals, its members saw that they were missing out on the present-giving and cleverly decided to adopt the practice in remembrance of the gifts brought to the infant Jesus by the kings and the shepherds.” —Gyles Brandreth, The Christmas Book, London: Robert Hale, 1984, p. 100
“Because gift-giving was so essential a part of the pagan celebrations [of Saturnalia], the early Church frowned upon it as sternly as upon other and more questionable New Year celebrations.” —Christina Hole, Christmas and its Customs, London: Richard Bell, 1942, p. 25
Santa / St Nick
“He is the patron of storm-beset sailors (for miraculously saving doomed mariners off the coast of Lycia), of prisoners, of children ... which led to the practice of children giving presents at Christmas in his name and the metamorphosis of his name, St. Nicholas, into Sint Klaes, or Santa Claus, by the Dutch. It should be noted though that the figure of Santa Claus is really non-Christian and is based on the Germanic god Thor, who was associated with winter and the Yule log and rode on a chariot drawn by goats named Cracker and Gnasher.” —The Catholic Pocket Dictionary of Saints.
Old “St.” Nick: devil—(usu. the Devil) (in Christian and Jewish belief) the supreme spirit of evil; Satan, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Beelebub, Abaddon, Belial, Prince of Darkness, Tempter, deuce, archenemy, evil one, colloq. Old Nick [boldface emphasis here mine] ...” —Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, p. 388, article: devil
“This festival has been commonly believed to have had only an astronomical character, referring simply to the completion of the sun’s yearly course, and the commencement of a new cycle. But there is indubitable evidence that the festival in question had a much higher influence than this—that it commemorated not merely the figurative birthday of the sun in the renewal of its course, but the birth-day of the grand Deliverer ... the Sun-God and great mediatorial divinity.” —Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons, Loizeaux Brothers, 1916, pp. 94,97
“ ... within the Christian Church no such festival as Christmas was ever heard of till the third century, and ... not till the fourth century was far advanced did it gain much observance. How, then, did the Romish Church fix on December 25th as Christmas-day? Why, thus: Long before the fourth century, and long before the Christian era itself, a festival was celebrated among the heathen, at that precise time of the year, in honour of the birth of the son of the Babylonian queen of heaven; and it may fairly be presumed that, in order to conciliate the heathen, and to swell the number of nominal adherents of Christianity, the same festival was adopted by the Roman Church, giving it the name of Christ.” —Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons, p. 93
“Horus (Eg.). The last in the line of divine Sovereigns in Egypt, said to be the son of Osiris and Isis. He is the great god ‘loved of Heaven,’ the ‘beloved of the Sun, the offspring of the gods, the subjugator of the world.’ At the time of the Winter Solstice (our Christmas), his image in the form of a small newly-born infant, was brought out from the sanctuary for the adoration of the worshiping crowds ...” —H.P. Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary, London: 1892, p. 145
“As Christianity spread to northern Europe, it met with the observance of another pagan festival held in December in honour of the sun. This time it was the Yule-feast of the Norsemen, which lasted for twelve days. During this time log-fires were burnt to assist the revival of the sun. Shrines and other sacred places were decorated with such greenery as holly, ivy, and bay, and it was an occasion for feasting and drinking.
“Equally old was the practice of the Druids, the caste of priests among the Celts of ancient France, Britain and Ireland, to decorate their temples with mistletoe, the fruit of the oak-tree which they considered sacred. Among the German tribes the oak-tree was sacred to Odin, their god of war, and they sacrificed to it until St Boniface, in the eighth century, persuaded them to exchange it for the Christmas tree, a young fir-tree adorned in honour of the Christ child . . . It was the German immigrants who took the custom to America” —L.W. Cowie and John Selwyn Gummer, The Christian Calendar, 1974, p. 22
“Christmas gifts themselves remind us of the presents that were exchanged in Rome during the Saturnalia. In Rome, it might be added, the presents usually took the form of wax tapers and dolls, the latter being in their turn a survival of the human sacrifices once offered to Saturn. It is a queer thought that in our Christmas presents we are preserving under another form one of the most savage customs of our barbarian ancestors!” —William Walsh, The Story of Santa Klaus, p. 67
“This was no mere accident. It was a necessary measure at a time when the new religion [Christianity] was forcing itself upon a deeply superstitious people. In order to reconcile fresh converts to the new faith, and to make the breaking of old ties as painless as possible, these relics of paganism were retained under modified forms ....
Thus we find that when Pope Gregory [540-604] sent Saint Augustine as a missionary to convert Anglo-Saxon England he directed that so far as possible the saint should accommodate the new and strange Christian rites to the heathen ones with which the natives had been familiar from their birth.
For example, he advised Saint Augustine to allow his converts on certain festivals to eat and kill a great number of oxen to the glory of God the Father, as formerly they had done this in honor of [their gods] .... On the very Christmas after his arrival in England Saint Augustine baptized many thousands of converts and permitted their usual December celebration under the new name and with the new meaning” —William Walsh, The Story of Santa Klaus, p. 61
“The worshipers (of Mithra) held Sunday sacred and celebrated the birth of the Sun on the 25th of December.” —Franz Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra, trans. by Thomas J. McCormack, p. 191
Cardinal Newman admits in his book that; the “temples, incense, oil lamps, votive offerings, holy water, holidays, and seasons of devotion, processions, blessings of the fields, sacerdotal vestments, the tonsure (of priests, monks and nuns), images, and statues ... are all of pagan origin.” -The Development of the Christian Religion, Cardinal Newman p.359
The valuable testimony of J. Murdock, D. D., is in harmony with the above: “It was Julius I (Bishop of Rome, A.D. 337-352) who first ascertained this to be the right day; and though his authority is not the best, yet it is generally admitted that the designation of the twenty-fifth of December for the festival was first made about the middle of the fourth century.” —Ecclesiastical History, by Mosheim, Vol. I, p. 279
“A broad element of English Christianity still considered Christmas celebration a pagan blasphemy. The Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Calvinists and other denominations brought this opposition to early New England and strong opposition to the holiday lasted in America until the middle of the 18th century.” —The Origins of Christmas”, Rick Meisel, Dec. 19, 1993, p. 4
For more about pagan Christmas, see Part 3
Assembled by Ken Hoeck
12/99
Lonnie Martin’s work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License .
To locate any word on this site, if just typing onto the page doesn’t highlite it, then holding the shift key and the letter F down for a moment will enable whatever you enter to show up immediately, starting with your first letter.
“Practically every country in the world, from China to India, from South America to the Middle East, held celebrations at this time of year ... it was not until the fourth century that Pope Julius I declared that December 25 should be celebrated as the birthday of Jesus Christ, and Christmas as we know it began. We now celebrate Christmas every year, with a little bit of pagan superstition, a Norse Yule log, Druid candles, a drop of wine from Saturnalia, and a feast from the winter solstice.” —Gyles Brandreth, The Christmas Book. London: Robert Hale, 1984, p9
“Many of our Christmas customs have their roots in pagan ceremonies that were already hoary with age in the fourth century AD.” —Christina Hole, Christmas and its Customs. London: Richard Bell, 1942, p. 9
“The Saturnalia, extending from December 17 to December 24, was an age-old observance of tribute to the god Saturn, whose name means plenty or bounty. It was a time of rejoicing, hilarity and merrymaking .... Of prime significance is the spirit of brotherhood that prevailed at that season of the pagan year. And this humanitarian touch was carried over into the Christmas observances of Christians.” —Daniel J. Foyle, The Christmas Tree. New York: Chilton, 1960. p. 17
“The period was characterized by ‘processions, singing, lighting candles, adorning the house with Laurel and green trees, giving presents’ . . . it is to the merriment and bestowing of favours at the Saturnalia time that we owe our common Christmas practice.” —Alfred Carl Hottes, 1,001 Christmas Facts and Fancies. New York: A.T. De La Mare, 1954, p. 14
“During the Saturnalia, normal life turned upside down. Gambling was declared legal, courts were closed, and no one could be convicted of a crime .... Christians began absorbing these old customs and infusing them with Christian meaning in order to spread their faith.” —The Glory and Pageantry of Christmas. Maplewood, NJ: Time-Life Books, 1963. p. 114
Yule
“For modern Witches, Yule (from the Anglo-Saxon ‘Yula’, meaning ‘wheel’ of the year) is usually celebrated on the actual Winter Solstice, which may vary by a few days, though it usually occurs on or around December 21st. It is a Lesser Sabbat or Lower Holiday in the modern Pagan calendar, one of the four quarter-days of the year, but a very important one.
“Remembering that most Christmas customs are ultimately based upon older Pagan customs, it only remains for modern Pagans to reclaim their lost traditions. In doing so, we can share many common customs with our Christian friends, albeit with a slightly different interpretation. And thus we all share in the beauty of this most magical of seasons, when the Mother Goddess once again gives birth to the baby Sun-God and sets the wheel in motion again.” —Mike Nicholas, “Midwinter Night’s Eve: Yule
“Witches celebrate eight major festivals or sabbats each year .... The first is Yule, 20 or 21 December.” —Jeffrey B. Russell, A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics, and Pagans. —London: Thames and Hudson, 1980, p. 168
Yule Logs
“The ceremony of the Yule log, like so many of the oldest Christmas traditions, was thoroughly pagan in origin.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas. Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p. 59
“The Yule Log tradition comes to us from Scandinavia, where the pagan sex and fertility god Jul, or Jule (pronounced “yule"), was honored in a twelve-day celebration in December. A large, single log (generally considered to have been a phallic idol) was kept with a fire against it for twelve days, a different sacrifice to Jul being offered in the fire on each of the twelve days.” —Holidays and Holy Days, by Tom C. McKenney
“The Yule log was originally an entire tree, carefully chosen, and brought into the house with great ceremony. The butt end would be placed into the hearth while the rest of the tree stuck out into the room. The tree would be slowly fed into the fire and the entire process was carefully timed to last the entire Yule season.” —The History of Christmas
Christmas Trees / Evergreens / Ivy / Holly
“The tradition of bringing holly and ivy, or any evergreen, into the house is another Christmas practice which goes back to the Romans.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas. Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p. 62
“Christmas incorporated many other pagan customs. Holly and ivy, for instance, sacred to the ancient gods Saturn and Dionysus, were believed to have magic power against evil.” —The Mystical Year. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, no date, p121
“Many other Christmas decorations used today were once pagan symbols. The Romans used flowers and leafy boughs in their rites. Records show that the Saxons used holly, ivy, and bay in their religious observances.” — The New Book of Knowledge, New York: Grolier, 1979, p. 291
“Some authorities maintain that its [the Christmas tree’s] origins lay in the pagan worship of vegetation.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas. Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p. 64
“The Christmas tree, now so common among us, was equally common in pagan Rome and pagan Egypt. In Egypt that tree was the palm tree. In Rome it was the fir. The palm tree denoting the pagan messiah as Baal-Tamar (Judges 20:33) [Baal-Tamar = lord of the tree (palm)~kh], the fir referring to him as Baal-Berith [Baal-Berith, meaning “lord of the covenant”—another false title that resembles the true~kh]. The mother of Adonis, the sun god and great mediatorial divinity, was mystically said to have been changed into a tree and when in that state to have brought forth her divine son. If the mother was a tree, the son must have been recognized as “the man of the branch” and this accounts for the putting of the yule log into the fire on Christmas Eve, and the appearance of the Christmas tree the next morning” —Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons, p. 97
“Even the Christmas tree, which came into common use only in nineteenth-century Germany, is perhaps a throwback to a great tree from Norse mythology that was named Yggdrasil.” —The Mystical Year. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, no date, p. 121
“The Christmas tree is the symbol of the spirit of the Yuletide in many homes. The custom came from Germany and dates to long ago when primitive people revered trees-particularly evergreens.” —The New Book of Knowledge. New York: Grolier, 1979, p. 291
“The use of evergreens was so closely associated with the garlands of pagan days that in many of the early Church celebrations they were forbidden.” —Alfred Carl Hottes, 1,001 Christmas Facts and Fancies. New York: A. T .De LaMare, 1954, p15
“The use of Christmas wreaths is believed by authorities to be traceable to the pagan customs of decorating buildings and places of worship at the feast which took place at the same time as Christmas. The Christmas tree is from Egypt and its origin dates from a period long anterior to the Christmas era.” —Frederick J. Haskins, Answers to Questions
Mistletoe
“Mistletoe was always known to have played an important part in the rituals of the Druids, and consequently, was never really accepted by the Church.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas. Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p63
“The Druids gave the world the tradition of hanging mistletoe in the house.” —The New Book of Knowledge, New York: Grolier, 1979, p291
Gift Giving
“The idea of giving presents goes back to the Romans.” —Frank and Jamie Muir, A Treasury of Christmas, Glasgow: William Collins, 1981, p. 84
“The custom of presenting friends with gifts at Christmas dates back to the time of the ancient Romans.” —Everymans Encyclopedia, Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1967, p1,672
The wise men gave their gifts to Christ, but did not exchange gifts with each other. The gifts presented to Christ were to a king, because of his royalty, and not because of his birthday: “He was a king, and the people of the East never approached the presence of a king without a present in their hands” —Adam Clarke Commentary, Volume 5, Matthew 2:11, p. 34
“The interchange of presents between friends is alike characteristic of Christmas and the Saturnalia, and must have been adopted by Christians from the Pagans, as the admonition of Tertullian plainly shows.” —Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol. 12, pp. 153-155
“The early church ... cleverly transferred its significance [pagan gift-giving at Saturnalia] to a ritual commemoration of the gifts of the Magi.” —Discovering Christmas Customs and Folklore.
“The giving of presents at this time of year has been a custom that has quite naturally lingered through the ages from the Saturnalia and Kalends celebrations when garlands of flowers, candles and dolls were presented as symbolic gifts to bring good luck and prosperity for the future. Although the early Christian Church turned its nose up at pagan rituals, its members saw that they were missing out on the present-giving and cleverly decided to adopt the practice in remembrance of the gifts brought to the infant Jesus by the kings and the shepherds.” —Gyles Brandreth, The Christmas Book, London: Robert Hale, 1984, p. 100
“Because gift-giving was so essential a part of the pagan celebrations [of Saturnalia], the early Church frowned upon it as sternly as upon other and more questionable New Year celebrations.” —Christina Hole, Christmas and its Customs, London: Richard Bell, 1942, p. 25
Santa / St Nick
“He is the patron of storm-beset sailors (for miraculously saving doomed mariners off the coast of Lycia), of prisoners, of children ... which led to the practice of children giving presents at Christmas in his name and the metamorphosis of his name, St. Nicholas, into Sint Klaes, or Santa Claus, by the Dutch. It should be noted though that the figure of Santa Claus is really non-Christian and is based on the Germanic god Thor, who was associated with winter and the Yule log and rode on a chariot drawn by goats named Cracker and Gnasher.” —The Catholic Pocket Dictionary of Saints.
Old “St.” Nick: devil—(usu. the Devil) (in Christian and Jewish belief) the supreme spirit of evil; Satan, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Beelebub, Abaddon, Belial, Prince of Darkness, Tempter, deuce, archenemy, evil one, colloq. Old Nick [boldface emphasis here mine] ...” —Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, p. 388, article: devil
“This festival has been commonly believed to have had only an astronomical character, referring simply to the completion of the sun’s yearly course, and the commencement of a new cycle. But there is indubitable evidence that the festival in question had a much higher influence than this—that it commemorated not merely the figurative birthday of the sun in the renewal of its course, but the birth-day of the grand Deliverer ... the Sun-God and great mediatorial divinity.” —Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons, Loizeaux Brothers, 1916, pp. 94,97
“ ... within the Christian Church no such festival as Christmas was ever heard of till the third century, and ... not till the fourth century was far advanced did it gain much observance. How, then, did the Romish Church fix on December 25th as Christmas-day? Why, thus: Long before the fourth century, and long before the Christian era itself, a festival was celebrated among the heathen, at that precise time of the year, in honour of the birth of the son of the Babylonian queen of heaven; and it may fairly be presumed that, in order to conciliate the heathen, and to swell the number of nominal adherents of Christianity, the same festival was adopted by the Roman Church, giving it the name of Christ.” —Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons, p. 93
“Horus (Eg.). The last in the line of divine Sovereigns in Egypt, said to be the son of Osiris and Isis. He is the great god ‘loved of Heaven,’ the ‘beloved of the Sun, the offspring of the gods, the subjugator of the world.’ At the time of the Winter Solstice (our Christmas), his image in the form of a small newly-born infant, was brought out from the sanctuary for the adoration of the worshiping crowds ...” —H.P. Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary, London: 1892, p. 145
“As Christianity spread to northern Europe, it met with the observance of another pagan festival held in December in honour of the sun. This time it was the Yule-feast of the Norsemen, which lasted for twelve days. During this time log-fires were burnt to assist the revival of the sun. Shrines and other sacred places were decorated with such greenery as holly, ivy, and bay, and it was an occasion for feasting and drinking.
“Equally old was the practice of the Druids, the caste of priests among the Celts of ancient France, Britain and Ireland, to decorate their temples with mistletoe, the fruit of the oak-tree which they considered sacred. Among the German tribes the oak-tree was sacred to Odin, their god of war, and they sacrificed to it until St Boniface, in the eighth century, persuaded them to exchange it for the Christmas tree, a young fir-tree adorned in honour of the Christ child . . . It was the German immigrants who took the custom to America” —L.W. Cowie and John Selwyn Gummer, The Christian Calendar, 1974, p. 22
“Christmas gifts themselves remind us of the presents that were exchanged in Rome during the Saturnalia. In Rome, it might be added, the presents usually took the form of wax tapers and dolls, the latter being in their turn a survival of the human sacrifices once offered to Saturn. It is a queer thought that in our Christmas presents we are preserving under another form one of the most savage customs of our barbarian ancestors!” —William Walsh, The Story of Santa Klaus, p. 67
“This was no mere accident. It was a necessary measure at a time when the new religion [Christianity] was forcing itself upon a deeply superstitious people. In order to reconcile fresh converts to the new faith, and to make the breaking of old ties as painless as possible, these relics of paganism were retained under modified forms ....
Thus we find that when Pope Gregory [540-604] sent Saint Augustine as a missionary to convert Anglo-Saxon England he directed that so far as possible the saint should accommodate the new and strange Christian rites to the heathen ones with which the natives had been familiar from their birth.
For example, he advised Saint Augustine to allow his converts on certain festivals to eat and kill a great number of oxen to the glory of God the Father, as formerly they had done this in honor of [their gods] .... On the very Christmas after his arrival in England Saint Augustine baptized many thousands of converts and permitted their usual December celebration under the new name and with the new meaning” —William Walsh, The Story of Santa Klaus, p. 61
“The worshipers (of Mithra) held Sunday sacred and celebrated the birth of the Sun on the 25th of December.” —Franz Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra, trans. by Thomas J. McCormack, p. 191
Cardinal Newman admits in his book that; the “temples, incense, oil lamps, votive offerings, holy water, holidays, and seasons of devotion, processions, blessings of the fields, sacerdotal vestments, the tonsure (of priests, monks and nuns), images, and statues ... are all of pagan origin.” -The Development of the Christian Religion, Cardinal Newman p.359
The valuable testimony of J. Murdock, D. D., is in harmony with the above: “It was Julius I (Bishop of Rome, A.D. 337-352) who first ascertained this to be the right day; and though his authority is not the best, yet it is generally admitted that the designation of the twenty-fifth of December for the festival was first made about the middle of the fourth century.” —Ecclesiastical History, by Mosheim, Vol. I, p. 279
“A broad element of English Christianity still considered Christmas celebration a pagan blasphemy. The Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Calvinists and other denominations brought this opposition to early New England and strong opposition to the holiday lasted in America until the middle of the 18th century.” —The Origins of Christmas”, Rick Meisel, Dec. 19, 1993, p. 4
For more about pagan Christmas, see Part 3
Assembled by Ken Hoeck
12/99
Lonnie Martin’s work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License .
To locate any word on this site, if just typing onto the page doesn’t highlite it, then holding the shift key and the letter F down for a moment will enable whatever you enter to show up immediately, starting with your first letter.
“Christmas gifts themselves remind us of the presents that were exchanged in Rome during the Saturnalia. In Rome, it might be added, the presents usually took the form of wax tapers and dolls, the latter being in their turn a survival of the human sacrifices once offered to Saturn. It is a queer thought that in our Christmas presents we are preserving under another form one of the most savage customs of our barbarian ancestors!” —William Walsh, The Story of Santa Klaus, p. 67
“This was no mere accident. It was a necessary measure at a time when the new religion [Christianity] was forcing itself upon a deeply superstitious people. In order to reconcile fresh converts to the new faith, and to make the breaking of old ties as painless as possible, these relics of paganism were retained under modified forms ....
Thus we find that when Pope Gregory [540-604] sent Saint Augustine as a missionary to convert Anglo-Saxon England he directed that so far as possible the saint should accommodate the new and strange Christian rites to the heathen ones with which the natives had been familiar from their birth.
For example, he advised Saint Augustine to allow his converts on certain festivals to eat and kill a great number of oxen to the glory of God the Father, as formerly they had done this in honor of [their gods] .... On the very Christmas after his arrival in England Saint Augustine baptized many thousands of converts and permitted their usual December celebration under the new name and with the new meaning” —William Walsh, The Story of Santa Klaus, p. 61
“The worshipers (of Mithra) held Sunday sacred and celebrated the birth of the Sun on the 25th of December.” —Franz Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra, trans. by Thomas J. McCormack, p. 191
Cardinal Newman admits in his book that; the “temples, incense, oil lamps, votive offerings, holy water, holidays, and seasons of devotion, processions, blessings of the fields, sacerdotal vestments, the tonsure (of priests, monks and nuns), images, and statues ... are all of pagan origin.” -The Development of the Christian Religion, Cardinal Newman p.359
The valuable testimony of J. Murdock, D. D., is in harmony with the above: “It was Julius I (Bishop of Rome, A.D. 337-352) who first ascertained this to be the right day; and though his authority is not the best, yet it is generally admitted that the designation of the twenty-fifth of December for the festival was first made about the middle of the fourth century.” —Ecclesiastical History, by Mosheim, Vol. I, p. 279
“A broad element of English Christianity still considered Christmas celebration a pagan blasphemy. The Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Calvinists and other denominations brought this opposition to early New England and strong opposition to the holiday lasted in America until the middle of the 18th century.” —The Origins of Christmas”, Rick Meisel, Dec. 19, 1993, p. 4
For more about pagan Christmas, see Part 3
Assembled by Ken Hoeck
12/99
Lonnie Martin’s work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License .
To locate any word on this site, if just typing onto the page doesn’t highlite it, then holding the shift key and the letter F down for a moment will enable whatever you enter to show up immediately, starting with your first letter.
Cardinal Newman admits in his book that; the “temples, incense, oil lamps, votive offerings, holy water, holidays, and seasons of devotion, processions, blessings of the fields, sacerdotal vestments, the tonsure (of priests, monks and nuns), images, and statues ... are all of pagan origin.” -The Development of the Christian Religion, Cardinal Newman p.359
The valuable testimony of J. Murdock, D. D., is in harmony with the above: “It was Julius I (Bishop of Rome, A.D. 337-352) who first ascertained this to be the right day; and though his authority is not the best, yet it is generally admitted that the designation of the twenty-fifth of December for the festival was first made about the middle of the fourth century.” —Ecclesiastical History, by Mosheim, Vol. I, p. 279
“A broad element of English Christianity still considered Christmas celebration a pagan blasphemy. The Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Calvinists and other denominations brought this opposition to early New England and strong opposition to the holiday lasted in America until the middle of the 18th century.” —The Origins of Christmas”, Rick Meisel, Dec. 19, 1993, p. 4
For more about pagan Christmas, see Part 3