I read Christmas: A Candid History walking home last night. It's a small compact book so walking and reading works well. In any case, there was some surprising information here. The basic outline that Christmas, as we understand it, is in large part a co-opted pagan complex of festivals is there. No surprise. But the author claims that the suppression of St. Nicholas and his festival during the Reformation in northern Europe had the side effect of enabling the resurgence of pagan supernatural folk-heroes! In other words, without St. Nicholas the rural peasantry of German and Scandinavia simply drafted a replacement from their own folk history for their mid-winter celebrations, and that replacement naturally manifested many more pagan elements than St. Nicholas the Christian bishop because it was outside of church control.
But St. Nicholas as Santa Claus remains robust in the United States. Why? Turns out that this figure was a creation of the circle around Washingtin Irving in New York during the early 19th century. New York was of course once a Dutch colony, and many of the elite families still proudly declared such antecedents. Iriving's circle simply asserted that the festival of Sinter Klaas had once been very prominent in New Amsterdam despite no evidence to support this, and the rest is history....
- Log in to post comments
Stephen Nissenbaum's book, The Battle for Christmas, goes into some detail on American origins of Santa Claus, including what Irving and C.L. Moore had to do with it all. It's pretty interesting.
I used to walk while reading when I was a kid, but I haven't tried it recently. I don't think I'm coordinated enough.
Have you read the work of Ronald Hutton? I rate him as one of the most interesting of current British intellectuals.
He is a professor of history at Bristol University, England and has produced many deeply-researched books on topics related to paganism and its revival.
Hutton pretty conclusively shows that there is zero evidence for paganism surviving to modern times in an 'underground' form.
Modern paganism was a part of the romantic movement, and a product of intellectuals - writers, artists and nationalist politicians. For instance, modern 'Wiccan' witches derive from a religion devised in mid-twentieth century England.
Hutton pretty conclusively shows that there is zero evidence for paganism surviving to modern times in an 'underground' form.
this isn't paganism as an organized religion, but pagan as in folkways. e.g., local practices such as tending gardens where snakes were resident persisted in places like lithuania 'till the 18th century.
i am aware of the work on wicca, and it is convincing, though i never held to the opinion that institutionalized paganism persisted anyhow.
Without disagreeing with BGC's contention that organised paganism did not survive intact through to the modern era, there is evidence that some folk practices and customs persisted long into the Christian era. Paganism is keen on water,and at some sites in Britain (such as bends in rivers, for example Brimfield near Ludlow) valuable medieval metalwork (swords, etc.) has been found in places or ways that are not consistent with the owner dropping or hiding the objects. And, of course, we still have the concept of a wishing well now!
The existence of medieval "green men" in the reliefs on wooden panels in churches in England (and probably elsewhere) hints at some similar folk beliefs, although they could simply be the woodcarvers' little in-joke. Perhaps sheila-na-gigs too (I'm less comfortable with those).
there is evidence that some folk practices and customs persisted long into the Christian era.
there is evidence that A LOT of folk practices persisted.
i will give a concrete example. in the late 18th century by chance a lutheran locality was bereft for a pastor for about 10 years. the farmers of this locality eventually ended up killing and burying a cow to ensure a good harvest. we know the details of this because the lutheran church sent a minister to do a thorough investigation and confirm as to whether seemingly pagan practice indicated. the records of the interviews doesn't give much of a clue as to how or why the farmers did what they did, people disavowed specific knowledge of the provenance of the practice and referred to a generalized folk wisdom. as it happens, i have read a fair amount about the cultural history of the baltic region, and bull burials was a common practice within the pre-christian religious tradition. the lutheran locality i refer to above was in prussia, so i think it is safe to say that these villagers heard stories about these practices from their grandparents in the form of legend or myth, and the memories were determinative in their actions once they started to reconstruct a religious life embedded within their lives after the christian church had operationally abandoned them (the villagers all avowed that they were confessing protestants and they attempted to justify the practice as a christian one).
more specifically stated: did supernatural beliefs exogenous to the christian cosmos persist in europe? yes. in two forms. first, in a christianized form where local gods became identified with saints. but secondly, as superstition, or as demons if perceived malevolently. this is why belief in elves remains a persistent part of icelandic culture.
One of the ways these pagan-originated folk practices stayed around so long is that often cultures continued to believe that the old gods existed and old practices "worked" but re-contextualized those gods and practices as demonic or ambivalent supernatural powers.
So while Christianity brought a strongly negative moral view of the old practices, it didn't necessarily result in people believing that they didn't work.
In an English folk context, Katherine M. Briggs is a folklorist who has several nonfiction books and a few novels dealing with English folk beliefs in the 1500s-1700s centering around witches, sprights, goblins and magic.
Well, it is seldom possible to prove a negative - but Ronald Hutton's work persuaded me that many of the above specific examples of persisting paganism can be explained by being traced to the creativity of the intellectuals of the romantic movement, or to a rather loose symbolic and analogical style of thinking (in which a superficial similarity is taken for a homology) - rather than the persistence of pagan beliefs and practices.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Hutton
Hutton is not a spiteful nay-sayer - indeed he is himself a neo-pagan (Druid) and very friendly with many of the leading neo-pagans. I myself find the neo-pagan traditions extremely evocative.
I think the modern interest in paganism probably has fairly recent 'poetic' origins (the last few hundred years, at most) and is none the worse for that if recognized as such.
bruce, i see no reason why hutton's thesis invalidates the persistence of pagan folkways. these pagan folkways were ofte christianized, or given a christian patina, but that does not negate that they are exogenous to the christian religious tradition (just as nowruz is exogenous to the muslim one though there are attempts to islamicize it). a more broad terminology would be to say that it is 'superstition,' but that has a strong normative connotation. there doesn't need to be any organized underground paganism for this to persist. many higher religious 'reform' movements are motivated in large part by a recognition of the exogenous orgin of folk religious customs and their attempt to purge them from orthopraxy or doxy.
p.s. worship of thor among the sami persisted until the 1700s when they were finally fully lutheranized. this was not really underground; the sami were just mostly outside the bounds of european civilization.
p.p.s. a lot of the extant literary documentation of pagan practices among the european peasantry dates back to the reformation, when both protestants and catholics finally took a deeper interest in rural religiosity for the purposes of conformity. e.g., the counter-reformation records are how we know that lithuanian peasants kept up a lot of their old traditions hundreds of years after lithuania's official conversion (which was 1386, so rather late). again, this was not underground paganism, it was just that the bar for who was considered a christian during the medieval period was less loosely determined by personal confession or practice than later on so long as one attended mass, had children baptized, etc.