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Date:         Thu, 17 Dec 1992 20:00:09 -0800
From:         Marianne Dugan <MDUGAN@OREGON.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year

>   Whether you believe in Him or not, you cannot escape the fact that Christmas
>is a religious holiday.   Just the word CHRISTmas implies He, who gave Himself
>for us.

Well, yes but no.  This message had some nice sentiments in it,
but "whether you believe in Him or not," you actually cannot
escape the _fact_ that Christmas did not originate with
Christianity.  As a matter of fact, Christianity _adopted_ the
winter solstice holiday (holy-day) from the "pagans."  I quote from
_The Golden Bough_, the epic work by Sir James George Frazer
called by Time magazine "One of the 20th Century's most
influential books."  :

"An instructive relic of the long struggle [between Christianity
and "paganism"] is preserved in our festival of Christmas, which
the Church seems to have borrowed directly from its heathen
rival.  In the Julian calendar the twenty-fifth of December was
reckoned the winter solstice, and it was regarded as the Nativity
of the Sun . . . The celebrants retired into certain inner
shrines, from which at midnight they issued with a loud cry, 'The
Virgin has brought forth!  The light is waxing!'  The Egyptians
even represented the new-born sun by the image of an infant which
on his birthday, the winter solstice, they brought forth and
exhibited to his worshippers.  No doubt the Virgin who thus
conceived and bore a son on the twenty-fifth of December was the
great Oriental goddess whom the Semites called the Heavenly
Virgin or simply the Heavenly Goddess; in Semitic lands she was a
form of Astarte. . . .

"The Gospels say nothing as to the day of
Christ's birth, and accordingly the early Church did not
celebrate it. . . . But at the end of the third or the beginning
of the fourth century the Western Church . . . adopted the
twenty-fifth of December as the true date, and in time its
decision was accepted also by the Eastern Church. . . .

"What considerations led the ecclesiastical authorities to
institute the festival of Christmas?  The motives for the
innovation are stated with great frankness by a Syrian writer,
himself a Christian.  'It was a custom of the heathen to
celebrate on the same twenty-fifth of December the birthday of
the Sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity.  In
these solemnities and festivities the Christians also took part.
Accordingly when the doctors of the Church perceived that the
Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and
resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnised on that day
and the festival of the Epiphany on the sixth of January. . . .'
The heathen origin of Christmas is plainly hinted at, if not
tacitly admitted, by Augustine when he exhorts his Christian
brethren not to celebrate that solemn day like the heathen on
account of the sun, but on account of him who made the sun.
Thus it appears that the Christian Church chose to celebrate the
birthday of its Founder on the twenty-fifth of December in order
to transfer the devotion of the heathen from the Sun to him who
was called the Sun of Righteousness.

[And now, as to Easter, since it was mentioned in this post as well:]
"If that was so,
there can be no intrinsic improbability in the conjecture that
motives of the same sort may have led the ecclesiastical
authorities to assimilate the Easter festival of the death and
resurrection of their Lord to the festival of the death and
resurrection of another Asiatic god which fell at the same
season. . . . Thus the tradition which placed the death of Christ
on the twenty-fifth of March was ancient and deeply rooted.  It
is all the more remarkable because astronomical considerations
prove that it can have had no historical foundation.  The
inference appears to be inevitable that the passion of Christ
must have been arbitrarily referred to that date in order to
harmonise with an older festival of the spring equinox.  This is
the view of the learned ecclesiastical historian Mgr. Duchesne,
who points out that the death of the Saviour was thus made to
fall upon the very day on which, according to a widespread
belief, the world had been created. . . . When we remember that
the festival of St. George in April has replaced the ancient
pagan festival of the Parilia; that the festival of St. John the
Baptist in June has succeeded to a heathen midsummer festival of
water; that the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin in
August has ousted the festival of Diana; that the feast of All
Souls in November is a continuation of an old heathen feast of
the dead; and that the Nativity of Christ himself was assigned to
the winter solstice in December because that day was deemed the
Nativity of the Sun; we can hardly be thought rash or
unreasonable in conjecturing that the other cardinal festival of
the Christian Church -- the solemnisation of Easter -- may have
been in like manner, and from like motives of edification,
adapted to a similar celebration of the Phrygian god Attis at the
vernal equinox. . . .

"Taken altogether, the coincidences of the Christian with the
heathen festivals are too close and too numerous to be
accidental.  They mark the compromise which the Churh in the hour
of its triumph was compelled to make with its vanquished yet
still dangerous rivals."

I will add only the obvious pagan roots of Christmas tree worship
("Oh, Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree!")

To some of us the old meaning of Christmas and Easter have a
strong pull; the revolution of the Earth about the Sun and the
changes that brings are what keeps us alive, and the return of
the Sun is truly an occasion for celebration!

----------------------------------------------------------------
Marianne Dugan  mdugan@oregon.uoregon.edu
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU