Is Santa Mythology based on Odin?

lismore said:

Hello! Thank you for your detailed reply. I hope you're well. The British head of State Oliver Cromwell banned 'Christmas' celebrations in 1658. So it's clearly of Ancient enough vintage and objectionable enough to be causing offence to believers in the 17th Century.

As to Paganism in Europe being extinct at that point, I would suggest an alternative view. Living in an old European country myself I think it's more a case of Christianity formed a superficial veneer on a still Pagan country and began to adapt Pagan customs to make lip service to Christianity more bearable. For example Tigh Nam Bodach:

The ancient pagan shrine of Tigh nam Bodach is located in Glen Cailliche (the Crooked Glen of the Stones), north of Loch Lyon. The shrine is made up of a modest stone structure that houses a family of three bell shaped water stones from the river bed of the Lyon. The largest represents the Cailleach (old woman), accompanied by the Bodach (old man) and their daughter, Nighean. In what is believed to be the oldest uninterrupted pre-Christian ritual in Britain, the water-worn figures from the River Lyon are taken out of their house every May and faced down the glen, and returned every November.

The ritual marked the two great Celtic fire festivals of Beltane(Summer) and Samhain (Winter)and the annual migration of Highland cattle on and off the hills. Legend states that The Cailleach, in the tradition of the Celtic mother-goddesses, blessed the stock and the pasturage and ensured good weather and "strange and terrible" things could happen to those who dared disturb her wintering grounds in Glen Cailliche.

The Cailleach, or divine goddess, is a potent force in Celtic mythology, commonly associated with wild nature and landscape. A local myth says that Loch Tay was formed when she forgot to leave a flagstone lid on a magical spring well.

Tigh Nam Bodach

Visitor and tourism information for Highland Perthshire, Scotland, including Pitlochry, Aberfeldy, Dunkeld, Kinloch Rannoch and Blair Atholl.

www.highlandperthshire.org

There are many still Pagan sites and customs throughout Britain and Ireland similar to this, some are rather scary.

A local Presbyterian Minister and evidently a practising Pagan, Robert Kirk, wrote a book on the Ancient Celtic gods that I believe can still be obtained:

Robert Kirk (9 December 1644 – 14 May 1692) was a minister, Gaelic scholar and folklorist, best known for The Secret Commonwealth, a treatise on fairy folklore, witchcraft, ghosts, and second sight, a type of extrasensory perception described as a phenomenon by the people of the Scottish Highlands. Folklorist Stewart Sanderson and mythologist Marina Warner called Kirk's collection of supernatural tales one of the most important and significant works on the subject of fairies and second sight.[2] Christian philosopher and religious studies scholar David Bentley Hart has praised Kirk for writing The Secret Commonwealth to defend "harmless Scottish country folk who innocently dabbled in the lore of their culture" and "found themselves arraigned by Presbyterian courts for practicing the black arts."[3] Robert Kirk (folklorist) - Wikipedia

Robert Kirk (folklorist) - Wikipedia​ Robert Kirk (9 December 1644 – 14 May 1692) was a minister, Gaelic scholar and folklorist, best known for The Se...

In that part of the Scottish Highlands practising Pagans were dragged in and out church courts for centuries for practising Pagan customs and observing pagan festivals, practices like the oracle of the hide. The New Testament was not translated into Scots Gaelic until 1755 and many of the people there only spoke Gaelic. So the services of the Roman Catholic then the Presbyterian Church would be incomprehensible mumbo jumbo to them, their de facto religious system would be Paganism, the rituals of earth and sky. I would suggest that it would be much the same throughout Europe, Ireland also in particular remained stubbornly Pagan in practice, where much of Halloween had it's origin. Scotland would be especially interesting though as Germanic Paganism clung on in the East Part of the country and Celtic Paganism in the West.

In Britain as a whole the number of Christians peaked in the Victorian era in 1851 at 50%, so at the very peak for every Christian there was a non Christian.

So I would suggest that given society remained Pagan at it's core, emerging popular culture should be seen through a different lens than all based on Christian values. The custom of Christmas trees emerged in countries clinging stubbornly to their Pagan roots, the veneration and decoration of trees is a recorded pagan custom, the veneration of trees in winter time is not recorded in the New Testament as I understand. Nor is there a omniscient bearded dwarf with flying reindeer in the New Testament, but there is something closer in the pagan tradition. Leaving cookies for Santa is perhaps closer to a Pagan tradition than anything you would find in the gospels.
God Bless

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Something else that Cromwell did was,

Febuary 4th 1657 Oliver Cromwell, Lord protector of England, issued the first residence permit to a Jew.

Luis Carvajal, since the expulsion of all Jews from England by King Edward 1 in the year 1290.

Partially due to the efforts of the great scholar Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel.

From Jewish history.

lismore said:

Hello! Thank you for your detailed reply. I hope you're well. The British head of State Oliver Cromwell banned 'Christmas' celebrations in 1658. So it's clearly of Ancient enough vintage and objectionable enough to be causing offence to believers in the 17th Century.

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Here is what you quoted from me. Read it more carefully:

What a lot of people don't realize is that a lot, perhaps even the majority, of Christmas customs we have are actually recent developments of the last few centuries. By that point, paganism had gone extinct in Europe and had been so for centuries upon centuries.

First, I said "last few centuries." The 17th century is still within "the last few centuries". I had chiefly in mind the 16th century onward, though with special emphasis on the last two centuries.

Second, I said customs. Pointing to Oliver Cromwell banning Christmas celebrations in the 17th century doesn't mean that all of the modern customs of Christmas had developed (they hadn't, and even some of the ones that had hadn't gotten popular yet). The only thing it shows is that there were Christmas celebrations, which is obviously the case (it had been celebrated for well over a millennium at that point).

So this does nothing to negate my point.

lismore said:

As to Paganism in Europe being extinct at that point, I would suggest an alternative view. Living in an old European country myself I think it's more a case of Christianity formed a superficial veneer on a still Pagan country and began to adapt Pagan customs to make lip service to Christianity more bearable.

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Even if we accept a lot of paganism got incorporated into Christianity, we still run into the big problem. If Christianity in a country took things from paganism in that country, it had to have done so at a time when the paganism was still extant. It can't have done so after paganism stopped. You don't absorb practices that are no longer being practiced and haven't been for centuries (if they ever were actually practiced to begin with).

So if someone can point to a Christmas tradition that goes back to when paganism was around, then that could have possibly been taken from pagans. A Christmas tradition that only developed long after paganism went away obviously cannot be taken from paganism, because the time for any possible taking from paganism had elapsed.

lismore said:

For example Tigh Nam Bodach:

The ancient pagan shrine of Tigh nam Bodach is located in Glen Cailliche (the Crooked Glen of the Stones), north of Loch Lyon. The shrine is made up of a modest stone structure that houses a family of three bell shaped water stones from the river bed of the Lyon. The largest represents the Cailleach (old woman), accompanied by the Bodach (old man) and their daughter, Nighean. In what is believed to be the oldest uninterrupted pre-Christian ritual in Britain, the water-worn figures from the River Lyon are taken out of their house every May and faced down the glen, and returned every November.

The ritual marked the two great Celtic fire festivals of Beltane(Summer) and Samhain (Winter)and the annual migration of Highland cattle on and off the hills. Legend states that The Cailleach, in the tradition of the Celtic mother-goddesses, blessed the stock and the pasturage and ensured good weather and "strange and terrible" things could happen to those who dared disturb her wintering grounds in Glen Cailliche.

The Cailleach, or divine goddess, is a potent force in Celtic mythology, commonly associated with wild nature and landscape. A local myth says that Loch Tay was formed when she forgot to leave a flagstone lid on a magical spring well.

Tigh Nam Bodach

Visitor and tourism information for Highland Perthshire, Scotland, including Pitlochry, Aberfeldy, Dunkeld, Kinloch Rannoch and Blair Atholl.

www.highlandperthshire.org

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Looking a little into this, it does not appear to be sure that this is in fact an ancient pagan custom. For example:

“There’s no evidence that they date back to pre-Christian times, but the stones have clearly remained in memory and probably in active, if perhaps intermittent, tradition for hundreds of years.”

...

The first published reference to the site is in a Perthshire history book from 1888, which suggests it was associated with a nearby monastic community, St Meuran. Some believe the writer avoided acknowledging their possible earlier origins for fear of upsetting the kirk. Others suggest 18th-century shepherds created a dolls’ house or seasonal shrine out of stones from the nearby stream, while there are those who dismiss it as a 20th-century folly constructed by estate workers.

So it looks to me like despite the popular claim being that it's an ancient pagan ritual continuing to the present, the actual evidence for this claim seems to be rather equivocal. This could very well be a much more recent innovation that was "retconned" into being an old pagan one. This process--in which a relatively modern practice gets claimed to go back way farther into some kind of ancient custom--is something that happens sometimes.

However, let's suppose that this is in fact an ancient pagan custom that persisted even through the Christian period into the present day. But that wouldn't counter my point, because this would be something that pagans were doing back then, then kept doing even after Christianization. If this ritual only started in the last few centuries, which may actually have been the case based on the article, then obviously it didn't come from any ancient pagan ritual because... well, any such ritual would have been completely forgotten.

lismore said:

There are many still Pagan sites and customs throughout Britain and Ireland similar to this, some are rather scary.

A local Presbyterian Minister and evidently a practising Pagan, Robert Kirk, wrote a book on the Ancient Celtic gods that I believe can still be obtained:

Robert Kirk (9 December 1644 – 14 May 1692) was a minister, Gaelic scholar and folklorist, best known for The Secret Commonwealth, a treatise on fairy folklore, witchcraft, ghosts, and second sight, a type of extrasensory perception described as a phenomenon by the people of the Scottish Highlands. Folklorist Stewart Sanderson and mythologist Marina Warner called Kirk's collection of supernatural tales one of the most important and significant works on the subject of fairies and second sight.[2] Christian philosopher and religious studies scholar David Bentley Hart has praised Kirk for writing The Secret Commonwealth to defend "harmless Scottish country folk who innocently dabbled in the lore of their culture" and "found themselves arraigned by Presbyterian courts for practicing the black arts."[3] Robert Kirk (folklorist) - Wikipedia

Robert Kirk (folklorist) - Wikipedia​ Robert Kirk (9 December 1644 – 14 May 1692) was a minister, Gaelic scholar and folklorist, best known for The Se...

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I see nothing here about him being "evidently a practising Pagan". All it does is say he published a book on local folklore--though he appears to have thought the folklore was true. The article says:

According to George MacDonald Ross, professor of philosophy at the University of Leeds, Kirk documented fairy folklore from traditional accounts in the Scottish Highlands to promote Christianity and its biblical account of "non-human spirits".

So he apparently interpreted stories of fairies and such as being examples of the spirits described in the Bible itself and went into detail about beliefs about them, apparently finding them credible. Having now read a bit about the book, and read (well, skimmed) some parts of it, it appears that Kirk does indeed interpret all of this from a Christian context. His asseriton, after all, is that this sort of thing is what the Bible was talking about. There is not veneration or worship of these beings discussed in his work. This doesn't make him a "practising Pagan".

But perhaps the claim is really just to say that such things were believed upon in this time and go back to pagan beliefs. It is not clear to me whether this is the case--one would need to demonstrate greater antiquity--but accepting it as such, this does not relate to the things currently under examination.

lismore said:

In that part of the Scottish Highlands practising Pagans were dragged in and out church courts for centuries for practising Pagan customs and observing pagan festivals, practices like the oracle of the hide. The New Testament was not translated into Scots Gaelic until 1755 and many of the people there only spoke Gaelic. So the services of the Roman Catholic then the Presbyterian Church would be incomprehensible mumbo jumbo to them, their de facto religious system would be Paganism, the rituals of earth and sky. I would suggest that it would be much the same throughout Europe, Ireland also in particular remained stubbornly Pagan in practice, where much of Halloween had it's origin. Scotland would be especially interesting though as Germanic Paganism clung on in the East Part of the country and Celtic Paganism in the West.

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Again, even if we accept this as true, it does not change the fact that customs (if ever practiced to begin with) that were gone and forgotten for centuries upon centuries clearly do not have any relation to more recent ones.

Much of your post here is rather too vague to comment on much, and once again irrelevant for our purposes, but on the idea of "much of Halloween had its origin" in Ireland, that does not appear to be true, even if it is popularly claimed. You do not go into any detail, but I would assume this relates to the whole idea of Halloween coming from Samhaim. There are considerable problems with this assertion, as detailed here:
(See also, from the same source, Samhain Was Not On October 31)

One final thing to note. What was being discussed here was Christmas, both in regards to Santa Claus and Christmas Trees. But these things did not originate from the Scottish Highlands. Christmas trees started in Germany. The modern Santa Claus has a complicated origin, being more of a fusion of several different ideas (the main ones being St. Nicholas and Father Christmas), which also can't quite be ascribed to Scotland, though Father Christmas at least had an English origin. But Father Christmas also emerges too late to be some kind of lingering pagan idea as well, being a creation of the 16th century (as explained at Christmas Eras Tour - Part III)

lismore said:

In Britain as a whole the number of Christians peaked in the Victorian era in 1851 at 50%, so at the very peak for every Christian there was a non Christian.

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You cite no evidence or source for this claim of yours. One should not make a claim like this without offering evidence. As it turns out, this claim of yours is false; the percentage you offer is wrong, what you say it was measuring was wrong, and I find no indication it was the "peak" either.

First, this was not measuring the number of Christians. It was measuring how many people went to church. Plenty of people who consider themselves Christian for any number of reasons do not attend church. So what you say was being measured was not what was being measured.

Also incorrect is the percentage offered. As explained in the Wikipedia entry for it:

As the Wikipedia article on it asserts:

The Government also conducted a census in England and Wales of churches and chapels, endowments, sittings, attendance at religious services on Sunday 30 March 1851 and average numbers during the preceding twelve months. Reports were collected from local ministers. The attendance count was 10,896,066 (60.8%) out of a population of 17,927,609.

As its source it cites the census itself and also Owen Chadwick's work The Victorian Church, which usefully condenses the hundreds of pages into something brief on page 365 (see here). After calculating the number of people who went to church divided by the number who they thought would be expected to go to church (so for example older people would be excluded), they ended up with about 58% of people should in his estimation should be attending church of those who were not. This is higher than the 50% number you offered. One could, of course, quibble with various parts of his estimation and arrive at a 50%, but if that is what you did you did not indicate it.

In any event, even if the 50% number is correct, what it was actually measuring was something quite different than what you claimed.

Lastly, I am not sure where the claim that this was the "peak" of Christians came from. Granted, we already have noted it was not talking about the percentage of Christians, but whether it was percentage of Christians or churchgoers, I do not think the census claims it was the peak, so I do not know where you got this claim from.

lismore said:

So I would suggest that given society remained Pagan at it's core, emerging popular culture should be seen through a different lens than all based on Christian values.

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The problem is that the things you have pointed out so far have offered evidence of this. You pointed to one ritual that is not affiliated with Christmas and may have actually been a new innovation that people tried to backdate for posterity, a man who may have bought into the reality of things like faeries but defended it on Christian principles, and a misrepresentation of a census.

lismore said:

The custom of Christmas trees emerged in countries clinging stubbornly to their Pagan roots, the veneration and decoration of trees is a recorded pagan custom, the veneration of trees in winter time is not recorded in the New Testament as I understand.

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You say it was a recorded pagan custom. Please be sure to give actual evidence (such as primary sources), which people so frequently do not. Also note that your examples should be from the place where Christmas trees actually originated, namely Germany.

However, even if one could point to such a thing, we run again into the same problem discussed earlier. Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that one can find "veneration and decoration of trees" (and in an area that is actually where Christmas trees emerged). Even if this was true--and again, evidence has not yet been shown--this could not plausibly be the origin of the Christmas tree. That is because even if the pagans were doing this, this practice would have ended long, long before the Christmas tree, meaning there is not a possible connection. People do not suddenly start to engage in old pagan practices they do not even know about--and if they do, it would be completely coincidental.

lismore said:

Nor is there a omniscient bearded dwarf with flying reindeer in the New Testament, but there is something closer in the pagan tradition.

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Not really, no. Also, you mention reindeer. The first mention anyone has been able to find of Santa Claus having flying reindeer comes from the 1821 work Old Santeclaus with Much Delight. How does an innovation of a 19th century work trace back to paganism?

lismore said:

Leaving cookies for Santa is perhaps closer to a Pagan tradition than anything you would find in the gospels.
God Bless

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And what pagan tradition would that be? Remember: Offer evidence. There's a whole lot of people who will claim that something that appears eerily similar to Christmas was done by pagans... but without, you know, offering any actual primary sources the pagans ever did any such thing, let alone in a time and place where it could have influenced Christmas customs.

It appears the tradition of offering cookies to Santa Claus is something that started in the 20th century. What pagan tradition were people curbing from then?

lismore said:

Hello! Thank you for your detailed reply. I hope you're well. The British head of State Oliver Cromwell banned 'Christmas' celebrations in 1658. So it's clearly of Ancient enough vintage and objectionable enough to be causing offence to believers in the 17th Century.

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This brings up an interestiong point. The Puritans were deeply serious about obedience. Their concern was that Christmas had no explicit biblical command and had absorbed pagan customs and moral excess. In their minds, removing it was an act of faithfulness.

And yet, this moment in history shows how easily sincerity can drift into legalism.

The Puritans moved from a reasonable position—“Christmas is not commanded in Scripture, therefore it should not be required”—to a dangerous one—“Christmas is not commanded in Scripture, therefore it must be forbidden.” That step is small, but the consequences are large.

Legalism often begins not with false doctrine, but with fear: fear of compromise, fear of corruption, fear that if lines are not strictly enforced, holiness will be lost. So rules are extended into areas where Scripture has left freedom. What begins as guarding truth ends up constraining conscience.

The irony is that in trying to preserve obedience, they lost the very rest obedience was meant to produce. Jesus does not deny the importance of holiness, but He places its weight on Himself. His yoke is easy and His burden light—not because righteousness is optional, but because it flows from union with Him rather than enforced conformity.

Paul addresses this directly in Romans 14: “One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind.” The New Testament does not erase conscience, but it refuses to police it where Christ has granted freedom. Christmas is never commanded—but neither is it forbidden.

That middle ground—freedom governed by love—is exactly where legalism struggles to live.

By banning Christmas, the Puritans unintentionally taught that holiness is preserved through restriction, that joy is spiritually dangerous, and that God is honored more by what we suppress than by whom we trust. The gospel points in the opposite direction: holiness grows from abiding in Christ, joy is a fruit of the Spirit, and obedience is the response of a heart at rest, not a behavior under surveillance.

This connects to a broader issue within Christianity: when righteousness becomes enforced rather than received, the center quietly shifts from Christ to control. Uniformity replaces transformation. Compliance replaces faith.

Cromwell’s England stands as a sober reminder that it is possible to be right about doctrine and still miss the spirit of Christ. Truth matters. Holiness matters. But when obedience is severed from rest, it becomes a burden Jesus never asked His people to carry.

And that—far more than Christmas trees or feast days—is the real warning worth remembering.