Christmas Special: Christian and pagan origins

     Christmas is a holiday now celebrated through many different cultures around the world. Some Muslim nations even hold Christmas as a special time of year. The holiday has grown to encompass more than the Christian reverence of Christ's birth, and  it now stands for the love of mankind for his fellows, an appreciative acknowledgement toward the friends and family that make life meaningful.
     The origins of this "Christian" day are far from their modern recognition of Jesus of Nazareth's birth.
Ancient Egyptians and ancient Greeks worshiped gods of the resurrection (Osiris and Dionysus respectably) at the end of the year, but European paganism had the strongest impacts on modern traditions.
     The sum total of Christian impact on the holiday is a recognition of Jesus's birth. All similarities end there since Jesus was born anywhere from August to September, not December. Early church fathers make no recognition of Christmas as a revered time of year since adoption of the holiday began later. After centuries of church leaders discouraging celebrations on 25 December because of non-Christian traditions, Pope Gregory I instructed his priests not to ban winter celebrations but adapt them for Christians. This did not definitively end Christian opposition to Christmas's celebration. Though Christmas was eventually an intimate part of Christian religion, Oliver Cromwell's government banned the festivities in England during his reign because of the pagan origins. In the British colonies of the New World, Puritan groups such as the Massachusetts Bay Colony continued the ban for several years while other areas embraced  the tradition.
     The Romans held an annual week-long festival, Saturnalia, 17-25 December, to honor Saturn, the god of agriculture. A Christianized Roman populace later replaced their heathen celebration habits with a recognition of  Christ's birth, but the traditions used to celebrate this holiday did not noticeably change for centuries. An example of unchanging practices despite a religious shift is easily exemplified with the human-shaped biscuits, the origin of the gingerbread man, that were eaten during Saturnalia to symbolize the human sacrifice of the Lord of the Misrule at the end of the festive week. While the human sacrifice is no longer a part of tradition, the gingerbread man is.
     The dominant origin for most Christmas traditions actually spring from European pagans. Rituals celebrated the winter solstice and recognized the return of daylight with spring on the way. Pagans decorated their trees in worship of natural spirits, the predecessor to Christmas trees, used mistletoe to poison the victims for their human sacrifices, and sang carols to ward off evil spirits.

     Santa Claus is an excellent example of merged traditions. Bishop Nicolas of Myra in Turkey attended the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. In 1087 his body was moved from Turkey to Italy where it absorbed the gift-giving tradition of Pasqua Epiphania, a local saint, especially placing toys in children's stockings. Gifts were exchanged on 6 December, the anniversary of Nicolas's death. As this tradition spread north into pagan tribes, representation of Nicolas merged with Woden: a man with long white beard riding a horse through the sky in late autumn in heavy winter clothing. The celebration date shifted to 25 December as Christians attempted to convert the pagan rituals as was done with Saturnalia centuries before.
     The modern depiction of Santa Claus, however, comes largely from the nineteenth century. In his Knickerbocker History, Washington Irving, an American writer, used the translated Dutch name of Nicolas (Sinterklaas), "Santa Claus," to describe a bearded, horse-riding man. The poem "T'was the night before Christmas" changed the steed from a horse to reindeer and added the descent by chimney. Harper's Weekly, a newspaper, popularized the visual aspects of Santa Claus from the 1860-1880s. As the final touch, Coca-Cola commissioned a Santa advertising campaign in the 1930s with the only stipulation being a Coca-Cola red suit. Thus, Santa Claus contains elements of Christian, pagan, and commercial origins that effectively represents the amalgamation of Christmas today.
     By the 1880s the modern conception of "Christmas" was secured with egg nog, Christmas cards, Santa Claus, and the Christmas poems and stories by Clement Clark Moore and Charles Dickens. By the mid 1940s Christmas became a commercial focus for many American-based companies with FDR's extension of the Christmas shopping season to Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, as well as Coca-Cola's successful development of Christmas advertising begun in the 1930s.
     Christmas has long been a winter holiday celebrated by people of different religions around the world. Despite the modern Christian emphasis, it is fitting that a holiday begun to celebrate life and human relationships continues to spread joy around the world in all different cultures, religions, and peoples.


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Agatha Tyche

Years that Question

     The history of man normally has various centers of power. Rarely are those centers tangled into one place. America, the superpower, is projected to be replaced by China at the economic pinnacle by 2016. The Christian missionary title of the world already belongs to South Korea so the United States has lost that too. As a military might, the young nation still holds up the mark for now.
     With the widespread protests, civil wars, and increasing wealth of the Middle East, the population explosion in Africa, and the increasing economic might of SE Asian nations like the Philippines, India and Indonesia, the focal point of global power is already changing, but will the landscape change as a whole or only within the upper classes? European imperialism shredded the last African-based empires a century and a half ago, and the Ottoman Empire's fall after World War I ended the last prominent Middle Eastern empire.
     Will economic development in previously termed "third world" countries finally sling-shot forward? If a non-Western country becomes a superpower, will the change in power be beneficial to their economic development and social stability or will the effort of rising up empty the coffers? Alternatively, will the newly found power refocus attention on the new pole and cause further development?
     Much of the twentieth century focused on the mutual destruction of Europe's powers. With this new century other nations are stepping on the springboards of global domination, but will they learn the lessons of their predecessors or only seek accumulation and domination?

     As with all new things, elements of excitement and fear merge indistinguishably. Population dynamics of a growing world are prying power from the elderly Western nations. What will become of the old powers - looted, restored, or stabilized? Will a multi-polar world destroy or encourage trade?
     Let's find out.

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Agatha Tyche

House of Cards

     Always destruction is faster than building. A big family dinner can take a full day to cook but eating rarely takes more than an hour. Clean up is faster than adding ingredients and cooking as well, and the time to make a fancy dinner is easily two-thirds of the total time. The Twin Towers of New York City imploded in an hour and a half but took five years to construct.
     The universe's touted law of entropy never sleeps. Disassembly is quicker than manufacturing. One of the starkest revelers of this fact is fire.

     House fires, ships burning at sea, fires that consume entire cities from Rome in 64 AD to London  in 1666 to Chicago in 1873. The accumulated work of thousands of hands is destroyed in hours. The Sack of Rome by Alaric's Visigoths in 410 robbed the city of nearly 800 years of art and wealth.
     While man is a master craftsman capable of making beauty inexpressible in words, he is also the master of ruins. Life is a tentative thing with many ingredients needed to usher in a new generation that can be undone with few decisive actions. Genocide removes a unique perspective of life from the world just as war obliterates the creations of an entire civilization. Is man not to fight the entropy around him by assisting, fabricating, and envisioning what the works of his hands could be? Let us not allow the continual story of man's answer to entropy be bureaucracy and mass production but the beauty of our lives, stories, and the love we share with our fellow man.


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Agatha Tyche

What Man Has to Say

     The most rudimentary forms of civilization involve man's organized interactions with others of his cultural group under rules of social interchanges. An authority higher than the individual unites people together whether from a small group of local extended families, an expanded tribal system, or a government with positions beyond the individual leaders which pass power on to consecutive generations. As governments developed and attempted to force their wills upon the people they governed, an obvious problem developed. Since the government derives it power from those it governs, a populous cannot be governed unless it submits to that government.
     The philosophy of this social contract has undergone intensive analysis since its popularized conception in the seventeenth century with notable advocates John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. The social contract states that the power of the government, specifically that of a monarch, is derived from the subjects that empower it. Thomas Hobbes famously describes the processes of governing man whose natural state is anarchy and is subdued with promises of protection and threats of violent death usually carried out via execution.

     In the nearly five centuries since the birth of this political philosophy, the world has change. Monarchs no longer dominate the spectrum of governments in power around the world. Mercantilism is no longer the prevailing economic theory of Europe. Life imprisonment has replaced the death penalty in most Western nations since the 1970s. Instead of having a government ruling over illiterate masses with the threat of exploitative military enforcement, the people now decide who oversees their nation's domestic and international affairs.
     Neither Hobbes and Locke's world nor our own have succeeded in uncovering the perfect government,  but in the centuries since the European Enlightenment, the common man has gained a voice of authority after a long struggle. Still the task of governments has not changed. Strength is in the appeasement and distraction of the masses to rising against the body of government as the French did in their bloody revolution at the end of the eighteenth century.
     Ancient Rome's deteriorating economy encouraged emperors to give large food handouts to prevent the one million people in the city from rioting over grain prices which gave origin to the phrase "bread and circuses (panem et circenses)" to describe the collapse of civil duty and only give sustenance to public approval.
     A thousand years later the people's voice still thundered. The 1381 Peasant's Revolt in England came about because of government incompetence and high taxes. The American and French revolutions occurred largely because of high taxes and the political oppression of the common man. The 1790s stirred Europe into a revolution frenzy with several smaller revolutions occurring through the early 1800s, especially the Europe-wide 1848 revolution. Under the Soviet regime in Eastern Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, Hungary rose up in 1956, and Alexander Dubček's initiated the Prague Spring in 1968. Both sought anti-centralization. The recent and widely televised 2011 London riots were also credited, in a large part, to a common and growing frustration of the government's mismanagement of economic policy's.
     After two millenia of documented uprisings caused largely by economic stimuli, does this still impact modern governments? Yes. As Thomas Hobbes explains in The Leviathan, governments are created to protect and control people, but if the government fails in its purposes, the people should and shall rise up as the American Founding Fathers explained in several Lockean documents. People outnumber government enforcers since the regime's protectors come from the population it governs. Thus, if a significant portion of the populace is dissatisfied enough to riot, a new government can be created.
     George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four touches on a similar topic. As the main character, Winston Smith observes,

"If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflection of the voice; at the most an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They need only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely, sooner or later it must occur to them to do it. And yet --!
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they will never become conscious."    George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 60-61.

     Considering the absolute power many monarchs held centuries ago, modern man is the most privileged class ever. The goals of cultures differ from each other and from themselves through time. Food and wealth accumulate with those in power, and since man needs to eat, he will always rise up when the life of those he loves is threatened.
     When evaluating the policies of your country, make sure to consider them based off historic perspective and the goals of the current regime then consider how that impacts the population as a whole: beneficially or detrimentally. No man or government is perfect, but since we have to share the world, let us do so with the satisfaction of making it as good a place for as many as possible.

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Agatha Tyche

Thank you

     After 18 months, I would like to thank my regular readers, especially from the United States, Russia, China, and Germany. We've covered topics from the aspects of the soul, the purposes of wars and revolutions, and reflections on virtues. Thanks for hanging in there!

     The bi-monthly posts will keep coming. Working outlines for posts through July 2014 are already being researched and written. Thank you for following my disparate thoughts, and if you have ideas, interests, and topics you would like presented, leave a comment.
     The list of nations is organized by the number of views from that nation. If there is an equal number for multiple nations, the country first to view comes earlier on the list. Thank you, readers around the world!

United States
Russia
China
Germany
Ukraine
France
United Kingdom
Netherlands
India
Poland
Kazakhstan
Malaysia
Chile
Lithuania
Brazil
Columbia
Indonesia
Mexico
Peru
Latvia
Venezuela
Israel


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Agatha Tyche

Commitment

A pledge to support a policy then reinforced by any actions necessary to maintain that policy requires sacrifice, determination, and endurance. That is commitment.
     From the last decades of the eighteenth century to the civil wars marring the land today, subjects and citizens of nations have risen up to claim their own political and economic freedoms.
     The American Founding Fathers began the experiment of modern democracy through a three-branched republic. While some of the men paid gravely for their treasonous decisions, the desire for liberty and political self-determination encouraged the revolution to press on. Similarly, men seeking to gain political power outside of the three estates began a revolution in France a decade after the Americans. Trying to override the centuries of systematic tradition left the European terrain bloody from executions of nobles and peasants, soldiers and saints, instigators and innocents. No group surrendered peaceably because all saw themselves as right. Another example of men seeking independence is the Indian colonization by Britain in 1757 which ended in 1947 after forty-two years of constant opposition from the Indian peoples. The nation fought for independence while simultaneously supporting Britain through two world wars.
     These examples only exhibit large movements of a deterministic, steadfast commitment to the ideal of independence and freedom. Individuals have committed their lives to various independence movements through history with particular emphasis in the last few centuries from Simon Bolivar's revolution in South America to Martin Luther's clerical reform that sparked the Reformation to the industrial revolution that introduced a new materialistic mindset on world wealth.

     Commitments do not always result in the fall of government, rebellion, revolution, or war. Justinian I of Constantinople chose not to flee during the Nika riots. Instead, the emperor suppressed the public outburst, cemented his role, and took opportunity from the destructive riots to create architectural masterpieces that awe the world today. Commitment results in change, but the change can be catastrophic like the French Revolution or beautiful like the Hagia Sophia.
     Hanging on through the rough patches to achieve what is desired and see the greatness of accomplishment is why endurance is highly prized. Humanity is unique in its robust ability to subdue its surrounding environment, but while changes are occurring out of your control, a true test of your determination is your willingness to hold steady and finish the task at hand.
     If you believe strongly enough, it is worth it.


Happy anniversary, Jessica!
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Agatha Tyche

A Lesson in Empathy

    Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

     Here is a mental exercise. Take what you are most devoted to and passionate about and convert that into a feeling of patriotism for your country. Imagine four years of rain, mud, bullets, and dead friends culminating in losing the war against your most hated enemy. The enemy then forces your nation, that you love most dearly, to pay for the entire cost of the war, never form a military again, and surrender valuable tracks of land.
     After your participation in the largest battles of the war and seeing the courage and strength of your nation only to have it surrender, you feel betrayed. Not by your enemy or the soldiers you fought alongside. Instead, the political backbone of the nation surrendered, destroying the triumph of the military efforts.
     Now imagine, after four years of devoted, unfailing service, after betrayal by the thing you most loved, you raise up opposition to end this political monstrosity that has taken the place of  your beloved country. You are arrested for acting out your beliefs, but, eventually, you are released. Sharing your thoughts with your friends, they pass on your inspiring ideas to give hope to the people. Your people. Who lost all dignity, wealth, and hope after the war. With a surge of emotion, you announce a plan to achieve just revenge against the enemies that destroyed your country and your people. The adversaries responsible for the imploded economy and the death of millions of brave men.
     After years of planning, you succeed in getting large-scale attention and support for your revenge plan. In fact, you go a step further and say that victory will be a new world. A better world where success will out last the lives of your supporters - and the lives of their children and grandchildren  - in a version of stabilized, near-eternal glory.
     But you fail to achieve this dream for millions of your countrymen. The antagonistic countries oppose your dream, and they fear and hate you just as you fear and hate them. How can inspirations of greatness and righteous revenge be objected to? Because they were accompanied by mass racial genocides.
Can you empathize with Adolf Hitler?

     Part of what historians must do to succeed in understanding history is to stand in the shoes of the people that experienced it. For another example, to understand the impact of Martin Luther's Reformation, historians place themselves in Luther's life to flush out motivations. After this the lives of church officials, royalty, nobles, and the common people of all nationalities are similarly related to to explain history's reactions as they progress. Whether or not these individual perspectives are accurate is unimportant since to understand actions, the initial biases must be empathized with. A true test of a historian is to relate to the most disagreeable characters while sharing bias, prejudice, and conviction in order to portray history as the past actually happened.

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Agatha Tyche