Yule and Noel - The Saga of Christmas
Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Ph.D.
Part 1
The Birthday of Humanity
Could any statement fall on the mind of the general reader with greater astonishment and incredulity than the assertion here and now to be made that while everybody has celebrated the great festival of Christmas year after year for some seventeen centuries, nobody truly and profoundly knows what it means? It is questionable whether a single person could be found today who would be able to give a sound and supportable elucidation of the significance of the traditional rites and celebratory customs connected with the annual observance of the solstitial holiday. In millions of homes the head of the household, with suppressed anticipation of delight, drags into the house a green pine tree and in happy mood labors late into the night of December twenty-fourth to decorate it with shining baubles and gifts. Yet it is safe to say that not in centuries has a single one of these celebrants entertained the remotest idea of the origin and inner meaning of his customary procedure. It is done because it has become fixed in the communal mind as traditional routine. Few even pause to wonder how or why the several usages have come to prevail, and would be surprised if some one raised the question. Now and again a newspaper article will venture to relate the origin of one or another customary feature, but cloaks the account in uncertainty and conjecture. The symbolism of the pine tree, the mistletoe and the Yule log traces back, it will say, to Celtic or Nordic provenance, but as to vouchsafing any authentic intelligence as to the inner significance of the rites mentioned, it makes little pretence at knowledge. It is necessary to add that in such attempts to throw some light on ancient customs connected with the festival most of the explanation advanced falls wide of the mark of truth.
If question was asked why the Christmas pine tree is trimmed with bright objects, or why a gold star is usually hung atop the highest branch, there would be complete innocence and a blank stare. If it was inquired why the two strongly contrasted colors of red and green were universally accepted as traditionally appropriate to the festival, similar default of knowledge would be encountered. Even the practice of presenting the Yuletide gifts to family members and friends is not too clear to the average person, although there is a hazy impression that it somehow is connected with the sentiment of God's great gift of his Son to redeem mankind. It would be asking far too much explicit question why the Norse and the Anglo-Saxons at an earlier time used to drag in and burn the Yule log on the old-time hearth, and why they scattered parched wheat upon the doorstep or the hearth-stone of the house. Equally vain would it be to ask why they suspended a twig of mistletoe under which lovers might steal a kiss. And what the significance of the candle set in the window to send its tiny gleam abroad in the dark night of December? Perhaps some one might venture the explanation that it symbolized the light brought to the world by the birth of the Christ, to shed his benignant rays upon a benighted humanity.
IS CHRISTMAS A CHRISTIAN FESTIVAL?
For centuries in Western countries Christmas has been proclaimed to be a purely Christian celebration, commemorating the birth of the Christ, the Savior of mankind, in ancient Judea. Yet so stolid and unthinking are the masses that it has hardly ever entered the brain of one in millions that practically nothing connected with the observance is in any way distinctly Christian except the one item of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. The Christian religion has over these many centuries berated and flouted the Pagan world and its religions. Yet the odd truth is that here in its most colorful festival of the year the Christian world is found perpetuating the celebratory rites and traditional practices of that same Pagan system that it traduces. Encyclopedias and apologetic writing in the Christian world have to be content to say that this is due to the fact that as Christianity spread over the northern Teutonic and Nordic lands of Europe, it insensibly commingled its own ideas with the ineradicable customs of the new converts in those countries. Instead of ousting completely the religious routine and addictions of the peoples it had newly won over, it had to be satisfied to make a blending of its basic Christology with the ritual usages of the nations it overspread without uprooting these from their native hold on these people. In short it graciously condescended to allow its Pagan converts to continue undisturbed in the grooves of hereditary custom, aiming the while to read a Christian meaning into those survivals of the olden time and such early religions as the Druidic.
This is the common belief, the general understanding. How far it falls short of the truth will constitute the astounding revelation of this brochure. So far from its being true that Christianity captured Paganism in its Christmas institution, the fact of history is that as regards the mode of the Christmas celebration, it was Paganism that captured Christianity. For the astounding truth about the matter is that the entire body of meaning foisted upon the festival by Christianity has missed the mark of true significance by many a mile, while for a comprehension of the primordial motives expressed in and by the ritual and symbolical customs and rites, we have to go back to the mysteries of occult Pagan formulations. To the substantiation of this epochal pronouncement the present essay will be dedicated.
This declaration virtually asserts that Christmas finds its true and more potent spiritual significance for us when treated as a Pagan rather than as a Christian ordination. The inferences from this deduction are not dodged. They will be openly accepted and confirmed in their general correctness. The claim is here advanced that not through Christian but through Pagan forms of celebration and channels of understanding does this great solstitial ceremony derive its highest moving and uplifting moral and spiritual power. Christianity has diverted the true original meaning off into dead-end by-paths. This has happened because it has lost the underlying sense of the Pagan formulations. The sad result is that nobody in Christian lands has the dimmest conception of the true significance of the striking rituals and symbols that still prevail to mark this as the most cherished festival of the Christian year. This is a strange and anomalous phenomenon indeed.
CHRISTMAS ON MARCH 25.
In the first place there is the matter of the date, the year, month and day of the anniversary and the celebration. In all Christian understanding the assumption is that Christmas commemorates the birth of the infant Jesus at a given place and hour. It is perhaps well enough known that the exact time of this event is not a matter of historical record, and therefore the anniversary character of the celebration is hardly any longer considered. It is kept in the dark background of silence because to agitate it opens the door to scores of pertinent questions for which religionists have no authentic answers. The twenty-fifth day of December is accepted now as a token date of the birth, though few even pause to wonder any more what led to the selection of this date, if it is not to be held to be the actual birthday of the Galilean Messiah.
In the case of a festival of such importance and prominence as Christmas, it is a thing of no light insignificance that the Christian Church keeps from its people the simple and singular fact that the early Christians celebrated the birth of their Savior for over the first three and a half centuries on March 25. It is to be questioned whether its clergy are generally aware of this fact definitely and succinctly. It would involve the revelation of their faith's early kinship with Paganism. It is therefore kept from publicity. But the words of the decree issued by the Pope of Christendom, Julian II, in the year 345 A.D., are still to be read, and they inform us that in that year he decreed that henceforth it was fitting that the followers of the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, should unite with the followers of Mithra and of Bacchus in celebrating the rebirth of the deity under solar symbolism at the winter solstice! Here again it is historically established that even the day and date of the Christmas event was not an original Christian institution, but was an accommodation of Christian practice to Pagan observance. In this same decree it is logically established that the date is not set as an anniversary commemoration, since the only consideration governing its selection is astrological symbolism! No pretence is made that it is to be regarded as the natal day of the Son of God in human body.
Surely it is of first importance to inquire why, before Pope Julian's decree, Christian practice had set the celebration of the Savior's birth on March 25. Here, too, the dominant motives are found to be primarily astrological. March brings the vernal equinox, and the most moving dramatic rituals of the ancient Pagan religion were consummated on or about March 21, the date of the sun's crossing northward over the equatorial meridian. Annually at this epoch every allegorical representation of the aeonial cycle of soul's involvement in matter and body came to final stage and to victory with the sun's ascent out of the darkness of winter, typifying the soul's resurrection out from under the thraldom of "death" in mortal bodies. This was in fact the final and climactic act in the drama of the birth of the Son of God from out its material womb of flesh. Hence it came to be regarded in Pagan modes of pictorializing spiritual processes as the true birth of spirit, the conception having taken place back on September 21 and the "quickening" from "death" having occurred on December 21,--all in zodiacal symbolism.
As the advent of the human child from the mother's womb is as virtually a resurrection as any readily conceivable, so the resurrection symboled by the passing over the line of division between heaven (spirit) and earth (matter) by the sun on March 21 could just as permissibly be classified as a birth. Every birth is a resurrection, every resurrection a new birth. It requires no special genius to poetize the vernal equinox as the birthday of the sun of spring, and, following solar symbolism, the birthday of the spiritual or deific "sun" in the constitution of man. Hence on the pattern of nature symbolism March 21 was held to be the birthday of the Messiah. From the first the Christians had joined with the Pagans in commemorating at the equinox of spring a festival called Lady's Day, outwardly in honor of nature's rebirth from the universal Mother Earth, esoterically in token of the rebirth of "dead" spiritual consciousness according to the inner teachings of the Mysteries. The Christians thus celebrated it for almost three and a half centuries, an exceptional item of no slight historical significance. The statement to this effect is made by Clement of Alexandria and others of the early Christian writers. It is confirmed by the Julian decree. It can be affirmed, then, that the Christian celebration of the festival on December 25 dates from the year 345 A.D.
But why the twenty-fifth days of March and December, and not the twenty-first (or twenty-second)? Here is a question which, as far as general knowledge goes, has found no authoritative answer.
The reason is to be found, no doubt, in the peculiarity of ancient celebratory custom. It is in fact the same reason which prescribed the mythical "three days" in which the Son of God lay in the tomb between death and resurrection. "As Jonas was three days and nights in the belly of the whale, so must the Son of Man be three days in the bowels of the earth." These three "days" of the incarnational immersion of spirit in the three kingdoms of matter, mineral, vegetable and animal, were held to be of such major significance in the ritualism of archaic religion that many of the more important festivals commemorating the soul's crucial experiences in the flesh were instituted as three-day ceremonies, the first day marking the entry of soul into matter's domain, and the third day consummating its rising out of that realm of "death." In Old Testament prophecies, it was again and again stated that we would rise out of the tomb of "death" in these physical bodies "on the third day." As Hosea (6:2) has it: "Come let us return unto the Lord: for he will bind us up. After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight." After spending three "days and nights," or periods of incubation and release, in the three lower kingdoms of nature, spirit-soul would awaken from its aeonial submergence in the dark unconsciousness of matter and come to its birth into more expanded being in the mind and heart of mankind. So the Gospel allegory represented the Christ as emerging from the boat and walking forth on the water (the body is seven-eighths water!) to save his disciples from sinking in the sea "in the fourth watch of the night." Incarnation has always been symboled as the night-time and the winter-time of the soul, its light and life, like the sun's, going "dead" in the coldness and darkness of matter.
Hence at all the four cardinal points of the zodiac, June, September, December and March, the great ceremonial festivals were set at three days length, beginning on the twenty-first or twenty-second of the month, and culminating three days later on the twenty-fifth, or "after three days."
It has been indicated that the early Christians who commemorated the Savior's birth on March twenty-fifth were not in reality totally misconceiving the significance of the festival appropriate to that date. Even more cogently than Christmas, Easter is the birthday of the Christ grade of sentient being. The distinction between the commemorative values of the two dates is to be found in the allegorical picturing of the Christ's development at the two emblematic seasons. On December twenty-fifth the Christ is born as an infant. Not having been here before, he then makes his first appearance in the life of animal humanity, or has his first awakening in the womb of body. As a new-born power he is yet the undeveloped potential of Christliness, the babe in swaddling clothes, the princeling, the king-to-be. He is germinally, seminally, the King of Glory.
But in March he has become a full-grown deity, the king on his throne wielding all the fulness of his divine prerogative in the life of man. The Christ-child has matured into fulness of the stature of the nature of God, the infant deity has deployed into expression the total possibility of his deific genius. To summarize it tersely, he is in December the Christ awakened in the womb of matter; in March he is the Christ awakened out of the womb of matter. In one he is the babe; in the other the man-Christ, exercising complete lordship over the physical life of his body.
Indeed, in the true sense of a birth, Christmas is less the birth-time than it is the time of what was called the "quickening." St. Paul in particular uses this word to intimate the rise in consciousness of the dynamic potencies of the Christ nature. This was a natural form of typism drawn from the structure of zodiacal symbology that was universally used in the esoteric science of the ancient day. Likening the descent of the soul into matter to the falling direction and decreasing power of the sun from June to December, the symbologists of old figured the birth of the divine sun-of-soul at the December solstice, following upon its conception in the cosmic mind at the June solstice. Descending from the June point of generation in God-mind, it entered into matter at the September equinox, which would signalize its physical conception in Mother Nature's womb. From September 21 on to March it endured its embodiment in matter, its period of incubation or gestation preparatory to its ultimate birth at Easter. But from September on down to December it plunged deeper and deeper into the darkness of bodily "imprisonment." It lost daily to the powers of matter, growing more inert, the spiritual awareness sinking into a sleep or coma as it was progressively submerged under the dominance of the flesh. In this its deepest immersion in matter all ancient allegorism depicted the Christos as lying inert in "death." From this aeonial "death" its resurrection would come at Easter, its preliminary quickening at Christmas.
The significant item of this dramatism is that at the December solstice the sun-of-soul halts its descent and stands for a time balanced and equilibrated with the powers of matter. The inertia of matter, offering resistance to the energies of spirit, brings the downward movement of soul into matter to a full stop, and for the period of the solstice holds it immovable in its embrace. It is at this point and in this stabilized condition that the soul of the spiritual energy which has gone "dead" in matter is suddenly "quickened" out of its torpid state and feels the first touch of its awakening to birth for a new cycle of growth. Having "descended into hell," (as the creed has it) he now awakes to an incipient awareness of his position and the consciousness of his new-born strength. That which lay buried in the tomb of "death" is now quickened in its womb of new birth. And as a mother-to-be suddenly feels the stirring of the embryonic babe within her, so Mother Matter feels the same stirring of new-born mind and the Christly impulse within her domain. As St. Paul so strikingly puts it, "All the creation groans and travails in pain until now, waiting for the manifestation of the Sons of God."
Christmas at the winter solstice then memorializes this quickening of the foetal Christ within the heart, mind and soul of humanity. It stages a festival of rejoicing at the knowledge that in the circuit of alternate involution and evolution, the deific solar power of Christliness, making its round of descent into the body and return, has ended the long period of its lifeless insensibility as mere seed of divinity in the soil of mortal body, is now quickened out of its spell of "death" and awakened to the glorious conquest of life in a new cycle of growth. The season thus commemorates the birth to activity of the Christ-mind in the nature and body of mankind. It is to be remembered always that it is only the birth of that Christ-mind, the deific power in its infancy, in its first unsure reachings and gropings amidst the strong elemental surges of the irrational and passional nature of the flesh. But it is no longer lifeless, inert, speechless, dumb and blind, as ancient symbolism pictured it in this condition. It is awakened to catch the sense of events and the significance of experience. It is ready to respond in ever increasing intelligence to the impacts of environment and sensuous life, and drain out of them their moral value for its perfection.
This delineation is of crucial importance for general comprehension and for its psychological beneficence, because a very faulty conception of the "birth of Christ" and the "coming of Messiah" has widely ingrained the bland assumption that by the alleged historical event of Bethlehem birth the Christ influence has indeed been injected into the body and soul of human life. All ancient presupposition that centered upon the Messianic fulfilment contemplated the immediate spiritualization and transfiguration of the world's elan and morale upon this postulated advent of the only-born Son of God. This opinion has altered but little in the succeeding time to the present. Vague Christian belief credits this "birth of Christ" with bringing the first true light to shine in heathen darkness, and credulously propagates the legend that the world has been elevated to higher level of righteousness and spirituality as a result of this event of two thousand years ago.
THE ADVENT AT THE SOLSTICE
A more competent envisagement of the symbolic intimations, however, accentuates the thesis that what is celebrated at Christmas is but the first awakening of that Christ power that slept within the confines of the mortal nature until the turn of the cycle at the solstitial point of evolution. In the first chapter of I Samuel it is said of Hannah, who, like Sarah and Elizabeth, was to bear the Christ-child in her old age, that "at the turn of the year she bore her son." Mother Nature gives birth to the Messianic consciousness at the turn of the cycle of the aeonial "year," where involution comes to a halt and after the period of solstitial motionlessness swings around as on a pivot and takes initial new direction upward toward evolution. But human fancy has not been sharp enough to preserve the subtle distinction between the occult sense of the soul's "quickening" out of its antecedent "death" and its "birth" as an active power in the world. What might be called a confusion of tropes has come in to befuddle common understanding. There are several senses in which the "quickening" may be conceived as the Christ's "birth." It is by no means inappropriate to think of the cosmic event signalized by the Christmas allegorism as the birth of the Christ, if one is schooled to moderate the conception with the knowledge that the Christ motivation is under Yuletide symbolism conceived as only at the inception of its objective kingship in history, and that only the lives of humans individually and collectively will set the Prince of Peace on the throne of human life in the world.
As said, all expectation of Messiah's coming in the ancient world envisaged the immediate transfiguration of humanity by divine grace and the near beatification of world history by the cosmic event. How egregiously fallacious and irrational this high anticipation has been can now be seen in historical retrospect from the present. Not only did the proclaimed birth of Christ by the Christian movement not make the slightest appreciable change in the tone and character of mundane history at the time (indeed it seems not even to have been heard of for close to two hundred years after its declared incidence), but the record of history for the two thousand years since the great divine oblation, and more particularly as manifested in and among the nations blessed with the message of that Redeemer, is one whose blackness and shocking inhumanity exceeds anything of the kind in all world annals of the past. History in effect enforces the conclusion that the coming of Messiah in the form of a historical birth, so far from inaugurating in the world an epoch of light, peace and charity among nations, has been followed by the long night of what the historians have seen fit to designate the "Dark Ages." If Messiah had truly come in the Bethlehem event and come in the commonly accepted sense, as having brought by his personal presence the benison of divine grace, light and truth to the world, his long-heralded, breathlessly-awaited and celestially-proclaimed advent has culminated as the world's supreme disappointment.
The Christian thesis of the Savior's historical birth in Judea assumedly in the year 1 A.D. is challenged and jeopardized by several considerations that are glaring enough to be crucial for the whole future of the faith of the West. When the Church Fathers settled upon the date of the Bethlehem birth as the year 1 of a new dispensation, and inaugurated a new calendar reckoning with that year, they were without benefit of certain historical data that have come to light from authentic historical record since that time.
Two facts stand out as proving the fixed date to be erroneous,--assuming that there was the birth of a divine personage about whose life the Gospels were elaborated. One is the discovered date of the death of Herod, Tetrarch of Galilee, in the year 4 B.C. The other is the recorded time of the rulership of "Cyrenius," governor in Syria when the Roman tax was levied which took Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, so that the divine birth, heralded in Scripture, might occur at that village to fulfil ancient prophecy. This time is found, on certified governmental record of Syrian history, to have been between the years 13 and 11 B.C. Herod and Cyrenius (found to be written Quirinus in the Roman records) were both mentioned (by Matthew) as reigning when Jesus was born. The date set for the birth is therefore found to be at least four years too late to have included Herod's effort to destroy the infant Christ by the (now generally admitted unhistorical) "Slaughter of the Innocents," and some twelve or thirteen years too late to have transpired "when Cyrenius was governor in Syria." It is notable that even a Catholic publicist, in an article in the Sunday American Weekly magazine early in 1947, conceded that the Bethlehem birth must be placed at least as early as 7 or 8 B.C.
With these two enforced corrections a host of other minor, though still important, conclusions and speculations that have become officially accepted as Christian history must perforce be thrown out, being confused by the two known dates. Indeed some of the disclaimers reach beyond minor items and put in jeopardy some of the basic claims on which the entire fabric of Christian historization rests. The frankness of Church leadership in facing the implications of these emendations has not been open and sincere. It is deemed best to let the disclosures pass with as little publicity as possible.
Having engrafted so much Pagan usage upon its own tree, it is little wonder that Christianity has evolved and preserved so little of the meaning of these extraneous and exotic customs which most of the northern countries of Europe, and their descendant populations in the Americas, have persisted in featuring in the celebration of Christmas. It has felt that it can condescendingly tolerate the admixture of Pagan "foibles" that cling like barnacles to its Nativity commemoration, without imperiling the fundamental strength and hold of the festival on its own communicants. It can afford to remain unconcerned about expounding the recondite significance underrunning the Pagan accoutrements that have been superimposed on the occasion, as to do so in any notable manner would be to lend gratuitous importance and enhancement to Pagan formulations.
And this covert apprehension and subterfuge is by no means groundless. Indeed the revelation of the true esoteric magnificence of the spiritual and theological conceptions adumbrated and allegorized by the Nordic-Teutonic-Celtic-Saxon festival usages will be seen to present a definite challenge to the whole authenticity of the Christian system, not so much as presenting the light and beauty of a rival or opponent religion, as in lending to the Christian revelation the representations of the meanings of its own celebratory elements, which it has lost or never known and published. In fact the startling asseveration can be made that the medley of Pagan ritual forms connected with Christmas carries a truer and more illuminating message of the inner significance of the gala day than do the distinctly Christian elucidations. This line of pursuit indeed runs so deep into the context of Christmas dramatism and symbolism as to come close to demonstrating that there is nothing in the celebration that is exclusively Christian at all, every single item being traceable to Pagan origins. Such a flat and drastic statement will be severely challenged. The present essay will stand as an answer to that challenge.
THE ANCIENT LINEAGE OF CHRISTMAS
The fundamental theses underlying the solstitial festival of deific rebirth trace back primarily to ancient Judaism, and back of that to the archaic Egyptian theurgical science. Ubiquitous in Egypt's religious systematism was the theme of the coming of Messiah. Horus, the central Christ figure in the texts, was described as "he who ever comes," "he who comes regularly and continuously," or who comes periodically. In some of the hymns he is hailed as "The Comer! The Comer!" Isis, the goddess mother and queen of heaven, entreats him to come and lift her out of her desolation.
What becomes indubitably clear from searching study of these old texts is that the Messianic "coming" they refer to is the advent into the evolving life of humanity on this earth plane of a form, grade or degree of consciousness which was not generable in the order of nature itself, but was the flowering to maturity of the conscious potential inherent in a seed of divine mind implanted in the natural order from above. As any mother has to receive the seminal essence of a new birth and mature it to its generation, so the maternal order of nature, the material world, had to be impregnated at a point of readiness in its evolution with the seed of a divine grade of mind, give it birth and rear it to its maturity. Its reception in utero would be signalized zodiacally at the September date, its birth at the December period and its rearing and growth completed at the March consummation. But in the salient features of the symbolism its birth would be allocated to the December solstice. Christmas would celebrate the emergence of the divine order of conscious mind in the human race, the inception of the human grade of being to crown the former pure animal level of subconscious and instinctive existence. It marked the entry of mind, reason, and the whole vast potential of the activity of thought into human motivation, installing the intellect as king over human action. The interior meaning of Christmas can never be realistically grasped until it is understood that it celebrates the coming of mind as King over the lower instincts, appetencies and passions of the primitive animal stage of biological evolution. The Christmas advent of the Prince of Peace would eventuate finally in the Easter crowning of the King of Love, for mind was to be glorified in the end by the sweet aura and radiant light of divine Love.
Of infinite significance it is to know that in all the antecedent and "prophetic" literature and religious ritual stemming into Judaism and Christianity from the venerable lore of old Egypt, the constructions dealing with the Messianic coming indubitably refer to this advent of the new higher dispensation that would supervene on earth from the birth of the thinking principle in human action, and just as indubitably can not be taken to refer to the physical birth of any personalized Christ or Messiah. Study of the ancient field of religious literature reveals no prevalence of the notion that Messiah would come on earth in the form of a human babe and man-Christ until about the second and third centuries of the Christian era, and then predominantly only in the region around the Eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. Tersely, it can be stated as verifiable truth that the conception of the Christ-Messiah as a human being of flesh and blood had not been extant in the ancient world until it took form in the degenerate philosophical period of the early Christian centuries. From the heyday of Greek philosophical brilliance in Plato's age some five hundred years before this there had ensued a tragic decline and decay in spiritual wisdom, which Sir Gilbert Murray has famously characterized by his phrase "the failure of nerve" on the part of the Greek mind. And it was at the very lowest ebb of the philosophical spirit that a phenomenon occurred which cast the shadow of ignorance that deepened into the "Dark Ages" of Medieval Europe. It was at this epoch that the conception of Christos-Messiah as a principle of higher consciousness was transmogrified into the form of a man-God Savior, the Christ as principle turned into the Christ as a man. This was the supreme tragedy of human cultural history. It generated and released the frenzy that was to burn the Alexandrian library, murder Hypatia and Bruno, close up the Platonic Academies and end the benignant light of an archaic spiritual wisdom older than ancient Egypt.
Fully five thousand years before a Hebrew maid Mary nursed an infant of Nazareth the haloed Madonna and the Child were extant in Egypt as Isis holding her infant Horus. On the walls of the temple of Luxor, at a date as early as 1700 B.C. there were carved four scenes which have been reproduced in the Gospels as first-century Christian history. The first scene depicts a group of angels on a cloud making the annunciation of the coming of the Messiah King to a band of shepherds in the fields. The second represents a single angel announcing to a young maiden that she is to be the mother of this coming King. A third pictures the Nativity scene, with the two animals, the ox and the ass, present. And the fourth shows three noblemen kneeling before a babe and offering gifts. How we are expected to accept the thesis that ancient Egyptian dramatic and symbolic representation of man's evolutionary history turned into factual history in the year 1 A.D. has not been made clear to any reasoning mind. One must go deeply into the study of this remote background of the Judaeo-Christian Scriptural literature to be impressed with the pivotal significance of findings such as these, for they are multitudinous and staggering in their implications.
The setting of the sun or a star in the west had been for long centuries the symbol of the descent of soul into incarnation as similarly the alternate rising of sun or star in the east at morning had allegorized the resurrection or rebirth of soul out of its burial in the dark cave of fleshly body. The three stars in the hunter's belt in the constellation of Orion had been from remote times denominated the "Three Kings" who attended the birth of the coming Lord. The figure of the Christ born among animals, or exposed to be saved by animals in a stable or a cave, was common at a very early period. The symbolism of midnight, winter and the solstice was universally prevalent as depicting the period of the Christ-birth in the depth of the "dead" condition of soul buried down under bodily inertia. One is safe in saying that not a feature of the traditional forms of celebration of Christmas is missing in the ancient background of our religion. And as one canvasses these identities and correspondences between Gospel narrative and antecedent allegorism, there grows the conviction of the non-historicity and from that the ridiculousness of the Gospel accounts of the birth of the Christ when taken as assumed occurrence in objective history. The supremely beautiful scenario of the angelic heralding of the birth of Christ in Luke's Gospel becomes traduced into unacceptable reality if taken as history. The singular fact of ostensible "history" that Jesus was born just six months after his forerunner John the Baptist can be given rational--and most sensationally enlightening significance only in reference to the symbolism of the zodiacal chart. That Elizabeth, the mother of John, gave birth to her son in her old age, as did both Sarah and Hannah bear their sons Isaac and Samuel, carries a significance that has not been properly envisaged. The reference to the zodiacal sign of Aries, the Ram, in the items of the Christ featured as the "Lamb of God" and the shepherds with their flocks in Christmas pageantry, has been entirely overlooked, as have also the obvious Piscean implications of the Christ's twelve disciples chosen as "fishermen," and the Greek characterization of the early Christians as "little fishes" and the Christ figure himself as Ichthys, the Fish Avatar of deity. In the precession of the equinoxes the sun was entering the sign of Pisces, the Fishes, about the time of the founding of Christianity, and we are quite ignorant today as to the concern of ancient religious interest with both astrological and natural symbolic representation. To interpret ancient Scriptures solely from the historical point of reference and ignore the poetic, figurative and emblematic, will contort their cryptic esoteric significance into gross caricature of real meaning.
Then there is the item of the name of the location of the Gospel birth. One is now in position to say that if the divine babe's birthplace had been localized in Patagonia, Lapland, Alaska or Siberia, or London or New York, he would still have been truly born in "Bethlehem." Because it is as clear as anything well can be that the name, Bethlehem, carries no possible reference to the village of that name in Palestine. What then does Bethlehem mean? The Hebrew dictionary tells us that the word is made up of beth, meaning "house," and lehem meaning "bread." It therefore means "house of bread," and is a cryptic designation of the human body. Where else can the Christ consciousness be born but in the human body and its brain? As the "Red Sea" in both Old and New Testament symbolism is a glyph for the human body blood (since it is actually sea water and is red!), so the "Bethlehem" house of bread is a semantic veil for the human body. In the archaic zodiacal symbolism the sign of Virgo, the Virgin Mother, was poetized as the house of bread--from the fact that in it was the great star, Spica, the head of wheat, symbol of the divine bread coming down from heaven--while just six months across from it was the sign of Pisces, the Fishes. The Sages of antiquity portrayed Virgo as the mother of the first or natural man and Pisces as the Mother of the second Adam or the Christ. How astonishingly significant it must be, then, to note that in the "miracle" of the feeding of the five thousand the two foods given were the emblems of these two houses of the zodiac, Virgo and Pisces, the one the Mother of John, the forerunner, the other the mother of Jesus, just six months later! At least two of the ancient goddesses in religious dramatism were styled "Fish-mothers" of divinity, Atergatis and Semiramis. The semantic relevance of the mermaid in ancient mythology is connected with this area of reference.
THE RED AND THE GREEN
Having woven again the threads of connection of the great festival with its primal sources in ancient symbolic science, the way is clear to delineate as lucidly as possible the basic significations of the various rites, modes and symbols of the customary celebration. The explanation of the meaning of the two vividly contrasting colors which stand as the "theme colors" of Christmas, red and green, seems the most proper item with which to begin the exegesis. And the basic rationale underneath these colors will itself formulate the essential ground-scheme for the interpretation of most of the other symbolic features.
No treatise can dissertate upon such a matter as the birth of the Christ without blue-printing a chart of the interrelation of the several diverse but interlocked natures which enter into the constitution of man, the human-divine composite. The true--but long lost--bases of sound religious philosophy are to be located in the realm of anthropology. Religious experience is a phenomenon transpiring within the elements of human nature. It is, so to say, a psychosomatic ferment amongst the sensual, emotional, intellectual and spiritual components of man's compound existence.
Most graphically described, man is, in Plato's analysis, half god and half animal; a god by virtue of his mind, an animal by virtue of his body. He is a god inhabiting the body of an animal. He is thus fabricated out of four separate natures, which are interfused and interrelated in one organism. He is in toto a combination in one physical form of four organic entifications of being or consciousness, the physical, the emotional, the mental and the spiritual, each functioning in and through its own distinct body, which in each case is composed of matter in a state of atomic texture and organization consonant with its degree of fineness or coarseness in the evolutionary scale. These four bodies are maintained in communal relation to each other within the confines of the outer physical frame by the play of affinities and atomic energizations that life and nature readily, if mysteriously, succeed in regulating, the finer bodies interpenetrating and animating the coarser. Their diversity of structure is seen as a matter of the differences in frequency, wave-length and other modes of vibration of the four grades of matter composing them.
The two coarser and, in the evolutionary sense, lower bodies and their activated types of consciousness constitute what ancient arcane science denominated the lower, or natural man, called in Pauline Christianity the first Adam, or the "man of the earth, earthy," while the two finer and higher ones composed the "spiritual man," the second Adam, Paul's "Lord from heaven." The first two, symboled respectively by earth and water, united to form man physical; the second two, emblemed by air and fire, constituted man spiritual. The four united man earthly with heavenly man. When the Bible poetically says that heaven and earth have kissed each other, it refers to the union of the two natures in the body and life of mankind.
Man's complete constitution, then, consisted of four natures so conjoined as to make him a dual creature, with a material body composed of earth and water, and a spiritual body composed of air (Latin spiritus means "air") and fire, with the former housing the latter, but being animated and ensouled by it. As religion is the relation between man's physical-animal nature and that of this indwelling god within him, the gist of all meanings presented in the Scriptures and theology relates to the interplay between these two co-tenants of the physical body, the psyche and the soul.
This analysis prepares the ground for the explication of the red and green colors so vividly flaunted in the Yule display. The strongly contrasting yet complementary green leaves and red berries of the holly branch are not only beautiful to the sense, but stand as mentally cogent types of the two natures in man. Green is the universal color of nature on this planet, at least in the vegetable realm. It therefore symbolizes the first or natural man, the man whose life, like that of green leafage, is drawn up out of the earth. On the other side red typifies the second Adam, or man spiritual, because the age-old and invariable symbol of spirit universal throughout the world was fire; and red is the common color of fire. The red stands for the fiery essence of divine spirit, the soul of man.
The Christmas message that is mutely but eloquently spoken by the holly sprig is indeed a moving sermon. It bespeaks the life, history and composition of the human soul, for it presents in dumb pantomime the growth of man natural as the green stem and its leaves, and then the generation out of these raw natural elements of man spiritual, as the fiery red product flowing at the summit. The colorful holly branch thus depicts man's potential divine spirit as the beautiful flower and fruit of a physical growth in the natural order.
Man can gaze upon the holly tree and see his own life-drama mirrored in outline and in miniature, or as the analogue of all natural process. His body is the growth and evolution of a rudimentary nucleus of life over a long period. It is his natural self, grown under the order of the world of nature and the operation of natural law. But in the fulness of time, it, too, bears its glorious fruit at the topmost reach of its "green" body, which in the case of man is the head. And this fruit of the tree of life when fully ripened, were it visible to all human eyes, would be seen flashing out in the form of a radiant crown of ineffable spiritual beauty efflorescent in the purest of colors.
In both nature and in man the first or natural order of creation gives birth at its apex to the second or spiritual man. The physical creation, the "mother," labors to generate her son, the conscious creation, the Logos. As the spiritual body or bodies in which this spiritual consciousness is instrumentalized are constituted of the glowing radiance of solar light, the color of fire is the most apt earthly symbolic representation of their nature. The world of green nature bears on its top branch the bright red of the spirit. If one can imaginatively see all this in the holly, or the poinsettia, or the barberry, one will find these emblematic objects the mental goad to realizations of the most potent cathartic virtue. They unite the mental and the emotional through the subtle power of an aesthetic dynamism. They portray vividly the birth of the Christ in man as the burgeoning of red fire of spirit at the top of the green stem of the natural bodily life.
Here we have the basis of the old English legend of the blossoming of the thorntree at Glastonberry at Christmas. It is symbolism. The tree of nature, here the thornbush, is proclaimed to put forth its bloom at the winter solstice, as precisely at this point in the cycle where involution (the soul's descent) turns into evolution (the soul's reascent), the Christ-child of noetic consciousness is born. The thornbush was in all likelihood chosen as carrying on the Old Testament allegory of the thornbush of Exodus aflame with divine fire.
With the tree introduced as typograph of man's natural self, the elucidation comes to the Christmas pine tree. And well may the German folksong carol its adoration of the firtree's perennial greenness!
O Tannenbaum! O Tannenbaum! (O fir-tree! O fir-tree!
Wie green sind deine Blaetter! How green are thy leaves!)
For here nature is green, not only for the seasonal cycle of summer, but all the year round. The life of nature, preparatory as it always is to the birth of consciousness, is in its essence everlasting. Matter is indestructible, though its forms of manifestation may continually change. The root essence of material substance is imperishable. It is always a potency, latent during the alternate periods of non-manifestation, active during the opposite cycles of spirit's waking existence.
Perhaps fancy will not stray too far afield into whimsicality when it likens the darker shades of the pine's winter green or former years' growth to the dullness of matter in the inactive or latent state, while seeing in the brighter shades of the green of the summer's new growth an emblem of the more radiant energization of matter when ensouled by bright spirit in the cycles of manifestation. In the temperate and frigid zones nature has provided a type of the eternality of life and matter in never-fading greenness of the northern pine. Symbol of the immortality of life, it brings into the Christmas ritual much the same significance as the green of the holly. It represents outdoor or wild nature, thus again typifying the first or natural man in the human constitution.
THE GOD DOMESTICATES THE ANIMAL
But for Yuletide ceremonialism the pine is cut down and brought in and set up in human habitations. What can this betoken other than the bringing of the natural man within the pale and the aura of the influence of the god-nature in the human being? In the life of the human when body is ensouled by the more potent dynamic of spiritual consciousness, the external bodily nature is in the full sense of the word being domesticated by the divine Self that is from above. The implanted heavenly grade of mind, as it develops, takes the natural under its care and tutelage and labors patiently to transmute its norm of consciousness from crude animal instinct to intelligence and reason. The wild animal nature is being tamed and transformed by the impacts upon it of the influences of "the Lord from heaven," whose ruling motivations are those of benevolence and love-wisdom. In the Old Testament it was Esau, and in the New it was John the Baptist, both of whom stood as the type figure of the first or natural man, who lived in the wilds of external nature. Untamed wild brutish nature is to be tamed and gradually changed into the likeness of its spiritual tutor. In the transfer of a product of outdoor nature into the human dwelling there is signalized the bringing of the "wild beast" segment of man's dual composition under the influence of the divine-human grade of mind and subjecting it to the impact of the forces that will in time convert it from brute to human. Eventually superhuman glory awaits it.
But the semantic dramatism does not stop with the bringing of the green pine into the home. When the outer man is brought within the radiation of the soul's more uplifting powers, it does not long remain bleak and bare in its greenness. It becomes in the transforming process lighted up with divine glories. The crowning of the human-animal with supernal grandeur of bright spirit is dramatized by the decoration of the green branches of the tree with glittering objects. Not only is the product of raw nature introduced into the human domicile; it is bedizened with every sort of tinsel and gaudy brilliance. And atop its central bough is hung the great gold star!
If the mind of the ordinary householder who trims the Yule tree could have any full measure of the deeper significance of this bright decking of the Christmas pine as an evolutionary transaction within the range of his own nature, no ritual in all the year's round of festivals could possibly engender a more dynamic exaltation of his spirit than this task of the late hours of Christmas eve. For it poetizes with aesthetic beauty the drama of the inner life of man himself. It enacts in reality the living processes by which man's own bodily organism, itself a tree of natural growth, lights up within its own organic structure a series of glowing centers of glinting radiance, which the Hindus have called chakras, or "wheels." They are described as saucer-like in shape and of a coruscating brilliance, as they shine within the watery confines of the body. When the ancient Sages speak of the soul's coming to earth to "kindle a flame within the tomb of the body;" and the Egyptian books announce its coming to generate "a burning within the sea," they are not indulging in extravagant flings of fancy, but are pictorializing actual processes that ensue upon the spirit's transfiguring operation within the physical body.
In fact it is to be understood that deity enters the stable of the animal-human body at its birth, and as its latent powers of divinity unfold their capabilities into activity and work their magical effect upon the physical organism, it succeeds finally in lighting up twelve lamps of a radiance never seen on land or sea, which shine within the orbit of the branches of the tree of man's life. In a word, one may say that the physical tree of man's body is lighted up with the fires of divinity at the extremity of the twelve branches of his development.
In the Kabalistic literature of the Hebrews there is the great Sephirothal Tree, with the three higher and the seven lower lights enkindled upon its ten distinct branches of radiation. And this cosmical tree is but the macrocosmic replica of what is repeated in miniature in the human microcosm. The mighty work of great Deity is to cause light to shine out of the abysmal darkness. If that Power can generate in fish living in deep-sea darkness a light that makes their world clear to vision, so it can cause the lights of spiritual intelligence to glow within the divinized body of man. Humanity is to generate twelve divine lights upon the branches of its tree of life. This is set forth with explicit exactness in the last chapter in the Christian Bible, Revelation 22, where it is said that the tree of life shall bear twelve manner of fruits upon its branches, and its leaves shall be for the healing of the nations.
Again a striking passage from the Bible, in the language of St. Paul, says that "God who hath caused the light to shine out of darkness hath shined in our hearts; but we have this treasure in earthen vessels." We hold it in these physical bodies of ours. The bright ornaments on the Christmas fir-tree do indeed symbolize our possession of the twelve "treasures of light," which are deity's immortal gift to animal man within the scope of the Christmas ritualism.
And the power that will cause these twelve lights to glow upon the branches of the organic human tree is just that spirit of good-will, love and fellowship that is denominated the "Christmas spirit." As the transfiguring grace of the lower power lights up the human countenance, so in positive physical reality will the rule of brotherhood and charity in the conscious life of mankind generate these twelve beacons of the divine love-light in evolving human nature. The birth of the Christos in the consciousness of humanity will cause the collective tree of human nature to be miraculously trimmed with lights that will illumine the pathway of world history ever more brilliantly unto the day of man's deification. "I will clothe thee with light as with a garment," says the God of the Old Testament. He might have paraphrased it: "I will trim the twelve branches of your nature tree with the lights of the Christ-born radiance of love. "For 'Christmas' means 'Christ-birth.'" The mas is from the Egyptian mes "to be born." Mess-iah means the "(new) born Iah" (Jah), or Jehovah,--God.
And God might have added: "I will crown your tree of brilliance with the super-bright Star atop the central branch." Yes; for the twelve branch lights are the lesser lights, and the great light of the Christ consciousness glows in supreme glory in the center of all. On the Mount of Transfiguration, as recounted in the early Gnostic-Christian work, the Pistis Sophia, Jesus, seated in the midst of the twelve disciples, is transfigured with supernal brightness in their center. St. Paul says that we are all members of one spiritual body, of which Christ is the head. The divine splendor shines out in full power in the head, where the spark and fire of godlike intelligence glows like a living flame. The end and consummation of man's growth comes with this deific glorification in his head. A living flame bursts forth in form like the petals of a fiery lotus, so that the ancients called it "the thousand-petaled lotus in the head" of divinized man. This is the pure beauteous flame of divine love and compassion which has its glorious birth in the head of man the human, and is the bright Bethlehem star whose rise in the east heralds indeed the birth of the savior of the world. If this bright star of the morning is not brought to shining in human hearts the Christ is not born in the world. Where can the Christ-mind be given birth if not in the human minds and hearts? Could ten thousand Christs of Nazareth implement Christliness in the world if its gracious spirit did not govern the lives of mortals? Not until all Christendom makes that which the Bethlehem birth beautifully symbolizes a living reality in the daily run of its world-life will the Christmas tree of humanity be decked with its twelve lights and its topmost Star in anything but empty form.
Instead of the gold star on the topmost limb, ancient ingenuity also devised the figure of the one branch of the tree that put forth golden leaves--the Golden Bough. This was used to symbolize the Christos nature, whose golden light of spiritual splendor become the glorious end product of the whole natural creation, which, St. Paul says, groans and travails in the pains of parturition until it manifests the Sons of God, or the Christ. It is a most significant fact that in many tongues the word for "gold" is the same as the word for "light." In the Hebrew "light" is aor, in French "gold" is or, in Latin aurum, giving us the English ore. The Egyptian Hor-us is the golden light of the divine Christ grade of brilliance. That his name for centuries was Iusa before it was Horus, bespeaks again the direct source of the later name, Jesus. Greek and Roman mythologies made the golden bough the passport in the hands of the heroes who would adventure into the dark depths of the Stygian "underworld," whose mislocation by the scholars for centuries has thrown all exegetical effort sadly awry of true comprehension and interpretation. Not only was it the hero's passport of entry into the nether world of Sheol, Amenta, Hades and hell, but it was his necessary exit-permit from those same umbrageous grots and caverns where the shades of the "dead" flitted about in the darksome recesses of semi-night. His possession of the powers symbolized by the bough of spiritual gold alone guaranteed his emergence in safety from this underrealm of fleshly dusk.
Continue to Yule and Noel - The Saga of Christmas, Part 2