Among these original national gods Jupiter or Jove was the favorite … In the early centuries of Rome he was still a half-impersonal force–the bright expanse of the sky, the light of the sun and moon, a bolt of thunder, or (as Jupiter Pluvius) a shower of fertilizing rain; even Virgil and Horace occasionally use “Jove” as a synonym for rain or sky. In time of drought the richest ladies of Rome walked in barefoot procession up the Capitoline hill to the Temple of Jupiter Tonans–Jove the Thunderer–to pray for rain. Probably his name was a corruption of Diuspater, or Diespiter, Father of the Sky.
–Caesar and Christ, by Will Durant, p. 61
… and when the Romans encountered Zeus, they said, “Hmm, seems to be Jupiter.”
You can read the incident that this is a reference to, in I Samuel chapters 4 – 6.
The Philistines were a culturally Aegean/Mycenaean people who had settled along the coast of Canaan. Though culturally Greek, they spoke a Semitic language. Their god, Dagon, was a man/fish god who had antecedents going all the way back to Sumeria.
The genre of these particular chapters of Scripture might be described as dark comedy. It’s a unique story, because it presents the reaction of an Aegean people when confronted with the God of Israel. The story is told in a Hebrew historical record, but the amount of detail means that the Hebrew chronicler must have had spies or eyewitness accounts.
The Philistines, though, or perhaps because, they are pagans, are pretty canny. They start out thinking they have won a victory over the Israelites by capturing their god, but it doesn’t take them too long to figure out that this God is trouble, and to ascertain, by process of elimination, what He wants.
Or you could say that God is very adept at communicating with the Philistines.
Did this religion help Roman morals? In some ways it was immoral; its stress on ritual suggested that the gods rewarded not goodness but gifts and formulas; and its prayers were nearly always for material goods or martial victory. The gods were, with some exceptions, awesome spirits without moral aspect or nobility.
Nevertheless, the old religion made for morality, for order and strength in the individual, the family, and the state. Before the child could learn to doubt, faith molded its character into discipline, duty and decency. Religion gave divine sanctions and support to the family; it instilled in parents and children a mutual respect and piety never surpassed, it gave sacramental significance and dignity to birth and death, encouraged fidelity to the marriage vow, and promoted fertility by making parentage indispensable to the peace of the dead soul. By ceremonies sedulously performed before each campaign and battle it raised the soldier’s morale, and led him to believe that supernatural powers were fighting on his side. It invested every phase of public life with religious solemnity, prefaced every act of government with ritual and prayer, and fused the state into such intimate union with the gods that piety and patriotism became one, and love of country rose to a passion stronger than in any other society known to history. Religion shared with the family the honor and responsibility of forming that iron character which was the secret of Rome’s mastery of the world.
–Caesar and Christ, by Will Durant, p. 67
… In other words, it wasn’t enough to hold back the tide of human wickedness, but it was a good preparation for the Gospel.
This review was originally posted, in a slightly different form, on Goodreads in June 2025.
This book is a capable history of New Thought in the Christian church, particularly in America. The author first sketches how she grew up around a lot of New Thought and mistook it for Christianity. Then, she sketches how after she realized many of these beliefs were wrong, for some years she was calling them New Age because that’s what everyone else called them. She discusses how she learned of the term New Thought and how it differs from the New Age.
Both belief systems partake of Gnostic/Hermetic cosmology and theory of human nature. However, New Age embraces neopaganism and the occult, whereas New Thought instead tries to cast these Hermetic ideas in “Christianese” and read them back into the New Testament. This is made easier because many New Testament writers were talking directly back to Gnostics, and even re-purposing their terms.
Melissa unpacks the Gnostic/Hermetic assumptions behind such common “Christian” practices as the Prosperity Gospel, visualization, affirmations, “I am” statements, and the like. But instead of just dismissing these practices as “ppf, that’s pagan,” she actually shows where they originated and how they differ from orthodox Christianity.
This book does not dive deeply into the pagan side of Gnosticism and Hermeticism. It doesn’t discuss these philosophies’ relationship to Western mysticism, Eastern mysticism, Kabbalism, or German philosophers like Hegel. It doesn’t discuss the attempts in the early centuries after Christianity to integrate Gnosticism with Christianity. The history of these philosophies is a huge topic that could take up a lifetime of study.
Melissa’s book is not meant to be an intimidating doorstop of a book that covers all of this. She’s zooming in on one little twig on this big, ugly tree: New Thought and its influence on American Christianity. Her book gives well-meaning Christians the tools and vocabulary to recognize this kind of thought and to talk about it. I have bought copies to give to all the women in my family. New Thought can be difficult to talk about because it portrays itself as “what Jesus actually taught.” If you know someone who is into New Thought, you cannot just dismiss it as “No, that’s Gnostic.” Even though you are right, to them it will sound like you’re just brushing them off. This book might be useful in such a situation.
If you want to find out how Hermeticism gave birth to Marxism through Hegel and Marx, there is a fantastic series of lectures about it on YouTube by James Lindsay. I also recommend Melissa’s YouTube channel and the YouTube channel Cultish.
I might be in the process of drafting a book that takes place before the Flood. So that is forcing me to tackle this issue. Besides needing to get it settled in my own mind, this post is meant to test the waters and see how you, my readers, react to this concept. If I even bring it up, will I be kicked out of polite society?
So, this post is a historical survey of sister-marrying. And it starts in Egypt.
Royals did it
Marrying one’s sister, or half-sister, was not unheard of in the royal families of Ancient Near Eastern cultures. See the following two links for some hair-raising proof that it happened in ancient Egypt:
The practice of royal inbreeding continued so long in Egypt that, by the time we get to Tut-ankh-amen, he has a myriad of health problems and is rather strange-looking.
This was such an established part of married love, at least among royals, in the Ancient Near East that calling someone “my sister” became a conventional endearment. Here, for example, is Solomon:
You have stolen my heart, my sister, my bride,
you have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes,
with one jewel of your necklace.
Song of Solomon 4:9
And why did they do it? The obvious answer is to keep the royal bloodline pure. Most ANE cultures tended to believe that their royal family was descended from the gods (see my post Genetic Engineering in the Ancient World), and to add another layer to this, their myths about the gods also often featured sibling-marriage. Typically, you’d have gods and goddesses all being descended from the same being (Father Sky and Mother Earth, say), and then reproducing with each other to produce all the typically observed features of the cosmos. (Please, for the love of God, take my word for this and don’t read the Sumerian creation myths. I’m begging you–don’t!)
Speaking of Sumerians, here is an article that argues that Abram married his half-sister Sarai (whose name means princess) for the same reason: because their family was some kind of royalty in Mesopotamia before he left on his journey.
My question, however, is this. Did this practice of royals marrying their sisters represent breaking an established taboo for a “good” reason, or was it a case of carrying on a common practice a little longer than most people? My contention is that it’s the latter.
Let’s Go to Genesis
Genesis is, as I have often said, my favorite ancient history book. The more I study all of this, the more I realize that it is by far the most accurate written record we have of really ancient history, and of course it’s the only written record we have for some events that are, nevertheless, corroborated indirectly by archaeology, genetics, and historical traditions from around the world.
So, in Genesis, we have humanity starting out with one single couple. If we take this seriously, we have to conclude that the first generation would have had to marry their brothers and sisters, because there was nobody else around.
Nowadays, this would be an impossible genetic problem, besides being taboo. However, clearly it wasn’t taboo at the time. By producing families, people were obeying God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.” (Gen. 1:28) Based on the extremely long lifespans recorded in Genesis, we can infer that the newly created people were much healthier than we are, with a much more varied and robust genetic code. They would have had few diseases as yet, and almost no harmful mutations to inherit. Adam and Eve, who didn’t die until they were into their 900s, could have had literally a hundred or more children in that first generation. Furthermore, these children need not all have looked alike, except in the sense of being human. We have to remember that Adam and Eve had within them the potential to produce every genetic variation we see today (and actually more, since most of the variety was lost during the Flood).
By the time Cain kills Abel, there are enough people in the earth that Cain can complain, “I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” These other people that he is worried about would have been his siblings, nephews and nieces, grandnephews and -nieces, and so forth. If we figure that Seth was born not long after the murder of Abel, then the murder of Abel took place just under 130 years after the Fall. (Genesis 4:25 – 5:3) Apparently, that was enough time for the world to be populated.
In this video, starting at about 20:00, geneticist Nathaniel T. Jeansen discusses how our ancestors had to have been more closely related “than we are usually comfortable with.”
A Detour into Evolutionary Theory
“But wait!” you may say. “All this is nonsense. People didn’t all come from one founding couple, we evolved from several different but related species of hominids.”
Actually, if you think that way, you probably stopped reading this article before you got to this section. But let’s dip a toe into natural selection, just in case there is anyone hate-reading or any readers who are intrigued by what I’m saying about history, but are bothered by the science side of things.
Natural selection, in order to work as a mechanism, has to have a population of creatures already in place, with some genetic variation already in their genome. And–this is critical–they have to be already reproducing. That way, natural selection can operate on the subsequent generations of the population, encouraging variety here, stamping it out there, etc.
This creates a big problem if you want to argue that people evolved from (ultimately) one-celled animals. Now, how one-celled animals reproduce is itself a beautiful, complex mystery, but it’s basically by subdividing, producing clones of themselves. In other words, it’s not sexual reproduction.
How did sexual reproduction come about through natural selection? It would call for a wildly improbable series of (already vanishingly rare) beneficial mutations to the genetic code of two different creatures of the same species, such that one ended up male and one ended up female, with their systems perfectly corresponding to each other for reproduction. And it would have to work perfectly the first time.
If you want several different populations of human species, then you need this miracle to happen not once but several times, in different places. If it only happens once, then you’re back to what Genesis describes, which is just one founding couple.
What I’m saying is that introducing evolutionary theory doesn’t make the believability problem smaller, it makes it bigger.
Stephen Meyer explains why beneficial mutations are mathematically impossible.
Back to Genesis Again
We’ve established that in the pre-Flood world, there was no taboo on marrying one’s sibling (or probably, cousin or niece either), and also no health cost to doing so. Also (probably) it would not necessarily mean marrying someone you had grown up in close proximity with, given the size of the families we are talking about.
Then we get the Flood, in Genesis 6 – 9 and also attested in numerous local histories worldwide. At the Flood, the human population of the earth, previously vast in genetic diversity, gets culled down to just four couples, and the men of these couples are all related to each other. It’s from these four couples (perhaps just three of them?) that all of us today are descended. (We are literally just one big family!)
Think about the implications of this. The most distant relationship that any of Noah’s grandchildren would have had to each other would have been cousin during that first generation. Perhaps they married their cousins, and then their second cousins and so forth, but there is nothing to indicate that the possibility of marrying siblings had been closed to them. In Gen. 9:1 -17, God makes a new covenant with Noah and his sons. He reiterates the command to increase in number and fill the earth. He gives them the animals to eat, institutes the death penalty for murder of humans, and promises never to send another worldwide flood. He does not mention any new rules about not marrying your sister.
Next, in Genesis 11 and 10 respectively, we get the Tower of Babel and the Table of Nations. Though the Table of Nations comes before the account of Babel, the fact that we are told which geographical areas these nations settled in hints that the Table of Nations is at least a partial elaboration of where people went when “the LORD scattered them over the face of the earth.”
In the Table of Nations, the peoples are sorted by father. We see the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japeth listed by a paternal line, and we see them scattering to found cities, kingdoms, and peoples. This implies, though it does not directly say, that they were having a lot of children per family, and that they were practicing in-group marriage.
Now we get to Abram, who was a Sumerian basically, or was living in that region of the world and in that culture area. As has been covered, he married his half-sister Sarai, whether because theirs was an aristocratic family or because it was still common practice in Mesopotamia at the time. Later, on two separate occasions (Gen. 12:10 – 20 and 20:1 – 18), he “lies” by telling a local ruler that Sarai is his sister. On both occasions, the local king understands this to mean that Sarai is not Abram’s wife and is fair game for his harem. This shows that, probably, most wives were not sisters at the time, at least in Egypt (Gen. 12) and southern Palestine (Gen. 20).
This would be about 2,000 B.C.
In Genesis 24, Abraham asks his servant to get a wife for Isaac from among “my own relatives.” The servant, guided by the LORD (!), finds Rebekah, the daughter of Abraham’s niece (Gen. 24:15). One generation later, Rebekah herself encourages Jacob to marry one of his cousins, daughters of her brother Laban. So by this time, we are practicing in-group marriage, but with cousins, not siblings.
Finally, in Leviticus 18, we get an explicit prohibition on marrying your sister.
Leviticus comprises the details of the giving of the Law, right after the exodus from Egypt, so about 1400 B.C. If you plop your finger onto Leviticus, it looks really early in the Bible. However, it’s 600 years after Abraham and a couple of thousand years after the Flood, so it is coming rather late from this blog’s perspective on ancient history.
The intended recipients of Leviticus are a large population of tribes who have just spent 400 years becoming culturally Egyptian. Since Moses’ parents were both from the tribe of Levi (Exodus 2:1), we can infer that they are still practicing in-group marriage.
Leviticus chapter 18 begins this way:
The LORD said to Moses: “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘I am the LORD your God. You must not do as they do in Egypt, where you used to live, and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you. Do not follow their practices. You must obey my laws and be careful to follow my decrees. I am the LORD your God. Keep my decrees and laws, for the man who obeys them will live [i.e. find life] by them. I am the LORD.
“No one is to approach any close relative to have sexual relations. I am the LORD.”
Lev. 18:1 – 6
There follows a very comprehensive list of close relatives who are off-limits. This list includes everything you can think of, and some things that you perhaps haven’t. It ranges from very sick perversions, to this:
“‘Do not have sexual relations with your sister, either your father’s daughter or your mother’s daughter, whether she was born in the same home or elsewhere. (v. 9)
“‘Do not take your wife’s sister as a rival wife and have sexual relations with her while your wife is living.'” (v. 17)
Verse 9 gives us a clue of what types of family arrangements were possible among the Israelites of 1400 B.C. You might have a half-sister who was raised in a separate household. Verse 17 describes a behavior that Jacob famously engaged in with Rachael and Leah (additionally, both women were his cousins). In fact, the two women’s rivalry was how we got the twelve tribes of Israel. Marrying two sisters at the same time (not to mention their respective maidservants) was apparently something that was normal in the age of the patriarchs, but now, giving the Law 600 years later, God forbids it.
Leviticus 18:24 – 29 makes it clear that “all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you,” but God considers them to be things that defile a land. I gather that this means the wide variety of disordered sexual relationships described in Leviticus 18 were not unheard-of, probably not just among the Egyptians and Canaanites, but among many or all of the many tribes in the surrounding areas.
We have God to thank for this taboo
So, now we know approximately when marrying your sister became taboo. 1400 B.C. And people didn’t come up with this on their own; God had to enforce it.
The overall picture is one where we start off with is marriages taking place among close family, in sort of a wholesome way, before and immediately after the Flood. Then, instead of branching out and marrying more and more distantly related people as the earth’s population increases, we see cultures in the Ancient Near East curving back in on themselves and coming up with more and more perverse ways to approach this. I gather from Lev. 18 that, once an ANE man had bagged a wife, he seemed to feel entitled, or at least have an eye out for the opportunity, for sexual rights to everyone related to her.
The time of the Israelite patriarchs, enslavement in Egypt, and Exodus also overlaps with the Minoan civilization on Crete, which gave us the legend (?) of the Minotaur, the offspring (allegedly) of Queen Pasiphae and a white bull. That gives us a clue that such horrifying practices were not confined to the Levant. “Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how that nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled.”
Disclaimer: None of these pictures are mine. I found them on the Internet. If any of them are yours, and you don’t like them being used in this post, contact me and I’ll be happy to take them down.
This is the Lady of Elche, Spain.
As you can see, her shoulders are hunched up. Some people describe her as having an “elongated head,” but it could just be the hat. Or it could be a hat meant to imitate elongated heads, as we see in many other cultures, but especially Egypt and MesoAmerica, where there was also head binding.
The following two links are my bibliography. You can follow them to check what I’m about to tell you about the Lady.
When I first heard that this Lady had been found buried in Iberia, it freaked me out. That’s because my understanding of pre-Roman Iberia was that it was basically Celtic. I was prepared to find Celtic- or Scythian-style artifacts there, such as images of people with narrow chins, large eyes, and moustaches; men with deer antlers; horses, and spirals, perhaps worked in silver, wood, stone, or even gold.
Celtic portrait, with torque necklace
Kurgan stelae in Kyrgyzstan, closer to the probable homeland of the Celts/Indo-Europeans
That’s what I expected to find in Spain. Or maybe something that looked like Etrusacan art, or like statues from the Archaic period of Greece.
I was not prepared for a massive, highly realistic stone statue that looked more classical Greo-Roman in style and featured attire more reminiscent of … I don’t know. Ancient Mesopotamia? Peru? The Lady of Elche freaked me out because it seemed to suggest a whole different style of civilization in Iberia, previously unknown. I was thinking Stone Age or pre-Flood.
Then, I heard that the Lady was believed to be Carthaginian. She instantly became less mysterious, but no less horrifying.
Carthage was a colony of Phoenicians. Phoenicia was an advanced civilization from the Levant. They inhabited the port cities of Tyre and Sidon, near ancient Israel. This explains why the Lady seems to be dressed like someone from the Ancient Near East. The Phoenicians had a shipping empire, so not surprisingly, they started a colony in North Africa. Carthage was here:
As you can see, they are very close to Europe, including territories in Spain. That explains how the Lady of Elche could have Western European facial features and Carthaginian dress.
Like most advanced civilizations of the Ancient Near East, the Phoenicians practiced atrocities in their pagan worship. This was the group that had the god Molech, to whom babies were sacrificed in the fire.
They were dropped down into, or placed in niches in, the red-hot statue. Drums and horns covered the sound of the infants’ screams. Incredibly, Israelites kept taking part in this practice and God had to keep telling them to stop. There was even an Israelite king who “made his son pass through the fire.”
Given that Carthage was part of an advanced, baby-killing empire, the Lady of Elche at once becomes more horrifying. The blank look on the woman’s face becomes more sinister. Is this just a death mask? Or is it because she is cruel? Or mindwiped by all that she had seen and done?
I don’t have any historical reference for this, but an anonymous commenter on the Internet has asserted that the “ear covers” were worn by priests and priestesses to block out the screams of the victims of more gruesome rituals. The bigger the ear muffs, the worse the ritual. I’d like to pooh-pooh that, but it fits with everything else we know about the ancient world. Christ conquering the nations suddenly sounds much less like a step in oppression and more like a relief. If you know more about the earmuff question, I’d love to hear it I wouldn’t exactly love to hear about it, but I’m curious and please send me your information.
If you know how to indicate your interest in the Lady to the algorithm, you may find people dressed in historical re-constructions of the Lady of Elche’s garb, like these:
These ladies all look significantly happier than the original Lady.
This post is about how we got our Christmas trees. For the record, I would probably still have a Christmas tree in the house even if it they were pagan in origin. (I’ll explain why in a different post, drawing on G.K. Chesterton.) But Christmas trees aren’t pagan. At least, not entirely.
My Barbarian Ancestors
Yes, I had barbarian ancestors, in Ireland, England, Friesland, and probably among the other Germanic tribes as well. Some of them were headhunters, if you go back far enough. (For example, pre-Roman Celts were.) All of us had barbarian ancestors, right? And we love them.
St. Boniface was a missionary during the 700s to pagan Germanic tribes such as the Hessians. At that time, oak trees were an important part of pagan worship all across Europe. You can trace this among the Greeks, for example, and, on the other side of the continent, among the Druids. These trees were felt to be mystical, were sacred to the more important local gods, whichever those were, and were the site of animal and in some cases human sacrifice.
God versus the false gods
St. Boniface famously cut down a huge oak tree on Mt. Gudenberg, which the Hessians held as sacred to Thor.
Now, I would like to note that marching in and destroying a culture’s most sacred symbol is not commonly accepted as good missionary practice. It is not generally the way to win hearts and minds, you might say.
The more preferred method is the one Paul took in the Areopagus, where he noticed that the Athenians had an altar “to an unknown god,” and began to talk to them about this unknown god as someone he could make known, even quoting their own poets to them (Acts 17:16 – 34). In other words, he understood the culture, knew how to speak to people in their own terms, and in these terms was able to explain the Gospel. In fact, a city clerk was able to testify, “These men have neither robbed temples nor blasphemed our goddess” (Acts 19:37). Later (for example, in Ephesus) we see pagan Greeks voluntarily burning their own spellbooks and magic charms when they convert to Christ (Acts 19:17 – 20). This is, in general, a much better way. (Although note that later in the chapter, it causes pushback from those who were losing money in the charm-and-idol trade.)
However, occasionally it is appropriate for a representative of the living God to challenge a local god directly. This is called a power encounter. Elijah, a prophet of ancient Israel, staged a power encounter when he challenged 450 priests of the pagan god Baal to get Baal to bring down fire on an animal sacrifice that had been prepared for him. When no fire came after they had chanted, prayed, and cut themselves all day, Elijah prayed to the God of Israel, who immediately sent fire that burned up not only the sacrifice that had been prepared for Him, but also the stones of the altar (I Kings chapter 18). So, there are times when a power encounter is called for.
A wise missionary who had traveled and talked to Christians all over the world once told me, during a class on the subject, that power encounters tend to be successful in the sense of winning people’s hearts only when they arise naturally. If an outsider comes in and tries to force a power encounter, “It usually just damages relationships.” But people are ready when, say, there had been disagreement in the village or nation about which god to follow, and someone in authority says, “O.K. We are going to settle this once and for all.”
That appears to be the kind of power encounter that Elijah had. Israel was ostensibly supposed to be serving their God, but the king, Ahab, had married a pagan princess and was serving her gods as well. In fact, Ahab had been waffling for years. There had been a drought (which Ahab knew that Elijah — read God — was causing). Everyone was sick of the starvation and the uncertainty. Before calling down the fire, Elijah prays, “Answer me, O LORD, answer me, so these people will know that you, O LORD, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again.” (I Kings 18:37)
Similar circumstances appear to have been behind Boniface’s decision to cut down the great oak tree. In one of the sources I cite below, Boniface is surrounded by a crowd of bearded, long-haired Hessian chiefs and warriors, who are watching him cut down the oak and waiting for Thor to strike him down. When he is able successfully to cut down the oak, they are shaken. “If our gods are powerless to protect their own holy places, then they are nothing” (Hannula p. 62). Clearly, Boniface had been among them for some time, and the Hessians were already beginning to have doubts and questions, before the oak was felled.
Also note that, just as with Elijah, Boniface was not a colonizer coming in with superior technological power to bulldoze the Hessians’ culture. They could have killed him, just as Ahab could have had Elijah killed. A colonizer coming in with gunboats to destroy a sacred site is not a good look, and it’s not really a power encounter either, because what is being brought to bear in such a case is man’s power and not God’s.
And, Voila! a Christmas Tree
In some versions of this story, Boniface “gives” the Hessians a fir tree to replace the oak he cut down. (In some versions, it miraculously sprouts from the spot.) Instead of celebrating Winter Solstice at the oak tree, they would now celebrate Christ-mass (during Winter Solstice, because everyone needs a holiday around that time) at the fir tree. So, yes, it’s a Christian symbol.
Now, every holiday tradition, laden with symbols and accretions, draws from all kinds of streams. So let me hasten to say that St. Boniface was not the only contributor to the Christmas tree. People have been using trees as objects of decoration, celebration, and well-placed or mis-placed worship, all through history. Some of our Christmas traditions, such as decorating our houses with evergreen and holly boughs, giving gifts, and even pointed red caps, come from the Roman festival of Saturnalia. This is what holidays are like. This is what symbols are like. This is what it is like to be human.
Still, I’d like to say thanks to St. Boniface for getting some of my ancestors started on the tradition of the Christmas tree.
Bonus rant, adapted from a discussion I had …
... in a YouTube comments section with a Hebraic-roots Christian who was insisting that Christmas is a “pagan” holiday:
So, as we can see, the evergreen tree is a Christian symbol, not a pagan one, and has been from the very beginning of its usage. St. Boniface cut down the tree that was sacred to Thor, and that was an oak tree, not a Christmas tree. Sacred oaks are pagan. Christmas trees, which incidentally are not actually considered sacred, are Christian.
Yes, I am aware, as are most Christians, that Jesus was probably not actually born on Dec. 25th. Yes, I am aware that Yule was originally a pagan feast time.
But let’s look at the symbolism, shall we?
For those of us who live in northern climes, and especially before the industrial revolution, the winter solstice is the scariest time of the year. The light is getting less and less, and the weather is getting worse and worse, and all in all, this is the time of year when winter officially declares war on humanity. Winter comes around every year. It kills the sick and weak. It makes important activities like travel and agriculture impossible. It makes even basic activities, like getting water, washing things, bathing, and going to the bathroom anywhere from inconvenient to actually dangerous to do without freezing to death. If winter never went away, then we would all surely die. That is a grim but undeniable fact. Read To Build A Fire by Jack London, and tremble.
Thus, people’s vulnerability before winter is both an instance and a symbol of our vulnerable position before all the hardships and dangers in this fallen world, including the biggie, death. And including, because of death, grief and sorrow.
Yule is a time of dealing with these realities and of waiting for them to back off for another year. After the solstice, the days slowly start getting longer again. The light is coming back. Eventually, it will bring warmth with it. Eventually, life.
Thus, it is entirely appropriate that when the Germanic tribes became Christians, they picked the winter solstice as the time to celebrate Jesus’ birth. He is, after all, the light of the world. A little, tiny light – a small beginning – had come into the bitter winter of the sad, dark world, and it was the promise of life to come. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. All this biblical, very Hebrew symbolism answers beautifully the question raised by the European pagans’ concern with the sun coming back.
Our ancestors were not “worshipping pagan gods” at Christmas. They were welcoming Christ (who is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) into the heart of their culture. They were recognizing that He was the light, using terms they knew, which were Germanic terms, and this is not surprising because they were Germans.
So, if you want to make the case that no holidays are lawful for Christians except those prescribed in the Old Testament for Israel, be my guest. Try to find some Scriptures to back that up. And maybe you can. But you cannot make that case by accusing people who put up a Christmas tree of worshipping pagan gods. All you’ll do then is reveal yourself to be historically ignorant.
And now to Rome, as always in December, came the Saturnalia.
“Io! Saturnalia!” That was the call that ushered in the merriest holiday of the Roman year — that hilarious, glorious, mid-December festival, the Saturnalia.
“Io! Saturnalia! Io! Io! Io!” That was the greeting that echoed through the holiday season. For it was in honor of Saturn — good, old, generous Saturn, kindest and most provident of the gods.
During those mid-December days (first three, later seven) no war was ever declared, nor battles fought, no criminals tried or punished. Courts were closed; schools dismissed; even the slave markets were shut down. During those days, all slaves were free [just] as in those golden days of old, all people had been equal. Everyone, rich, poor, young and old joined in a glorious holiday.
The day began with a sacrifice of thanksgiving in the early morning, followed by a public feast at midday, which turned into a wild, hilarious carnival before evening. In red pointed caps and colored costumes, merrymakers went singing and laughing through the streets, showering wheat and barley like confetti, and granting every wish, no matter how wild, ridiculous, or disgusting, made by the lucky one who had been chosen “King of the Saturnalia.”
The weeks ahead were always filled with preparation. Candlemakers and makers of dolls were busy pouring wax, turning out little earthenware images, and setting up booths for the doll fair. Every child would want a doll, and every household would need many candles for the Saturnalia.
Holly branches, with their bright berries, had to be cut and carted into the city, and houses trimmed with evergreen. Gifts for the family and friends must be selected and wrapped. For on the second day, after a family dinner of roast young pig, with all the trimmings, came an exchange of presents!
Augustus Caesar’s World: 44 BC to AD 14 by Genevieve Foster, Beautiful Feet Books, 1947, 1975, pp. 56 – 58
The following account has been brought to my attention three times in the last forty-eight hours, so I guess I’d better pay attention.
The Gadarene region was Greek, not Jewish, in culture. There were a lot of pigs. There was a lot of paganism. People understood power. They knew there were things out there beyond their control or ken.
Jesus and his disciples landed on these shores in their fishing boat. I am not sure why they made this decision. It’s possible that they were blown there by the recent storm and needed to touch land and regroup.
Almost as soon as they disembarked (“immediately,” Peter says, telling the tale to John Mark), they encounter the scariest sight any of them have ever seen: the town demoniac.
Peter gives us some background, which apparently was well-known to the people in area. This man “had an unclean spirit.” The local people had tried to “tame him,” but they couldn’t do it. With paranormal strength, he would break through any chains put on him. (Demons are quite reckless with the bodies of their human hosts.) He had it so bad that he couldn’t live around people. But he didn’t go far. Night and day, they could hear him screaming in the hills that surrounded the town and in the graveyard, his home base. He was apparently naked (because later, he is “clothed”), and he would cut himself with stones.
It breaks the imagination, what this man must have suffered.
The demons for some reason were attracted to the sight of Jesus stepping on their shores. The man runs up to Jesus, falls on his knees, and screams, “Why can’t you leave me alone, son of the most high God? Swear to God that you won’t torture me!”
Jesus, the only sane person in this story, asks a simple, human question. “What’s your name?”
He was asking the man, but the demons answer: “Legion, for we are many.” (This would later prove to be really really true.)
Jesus, unfazed, tells the demons to come out of the man. And they begin to bargain. I’m not sure why they thought this was possible. Was it because they were gods in their own country? Was it because there were so many of them? At any rate, rather than be banished from that region, the demons get Jesus to agree that they can go into a nearby herd of two thousand pigs.
There were enough of them to possess the entire herd.
The pigs, unable to handle what this poor man had been going through, panicked and “ran violently down a steep place into the sea” and drowned.
The swineherds, understandably horrified, went for help. By the time the people of the region had been summoned from their homes and fields and made their way to the beach, the formerly demon-possessed man was “sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind.” Jesus, still bringing the sanity and relief, had apparently rustled up clothing for him from somewhere. (One of His or His disciplines’ spare cloaks, perhaps, from the boat?) This man’s body no doubt still bore the scars of the harrowing life he had been leading. He was probably still fragile. Did he even remember the months or years he had lost to demon possession? We don’t know. But he was near Jesus.
The Gadarene people were freaked out. There were a bunch of dead pigs washing up on the beach. They were confronted with the disorienting sight of the madman’s face now looking sane. And, though they might not have known exactly what Jesus was, He clearly represented a dangerous power. They pleaded with Him to leave their region.
The delivered man, for obvious reasons, wanted to go with Jesus. But Jesus told him to go back and “tell your friends the great things the Lord has done for you.” Perhaps, during the time it took the swineherds to bring the townspeople, Jesus had been interviewing the man, finding out about relationships he had before disaster befell him fully. And this man was not a Jew, and would find it difficult to live on the west side of the sea. Going back to his old life might be hard, but going anywhere else would be a lot harder. He followed Jesus’ instructions.
This story would have been a very different horror story had Jesus not been present.
Out of Babel Books 