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Christmas and the myth of pagan origins
As Christmas approaches I have started to see more and more posts repeating that persistant myth that Christmas either started as a pagan festival or incorporated pagan elements. Every year this myth gets refuted, but it never dies. So here it is again, another year, another refutation. I expect most people will angrily downvote this without reading it. But for those who are interested in learning, here's the facts.
TLDR: There is no reputable historical evidence that December 25th was ever the date of any pagan festival. Nor is there any reputable evidence that any traditional Christmas customs were taken from pagan practices.
There is little historical evidence that can trace the origins of Christmas back to any Pagan festival or particular celebratory customs. Saturnalia has no link at all, being a festival that preceded the midwinter solstice. It was held on 17th December, and the celebrations continued for an irregular span, from two days to a maximum of seven days in total, so would have never lasted longer than the 23rd December.
Julius Caesar did fix the Solstice at the 25th but there appears to have been no festivities set for the date. The Romans did not celebrate the Solstice, but rather had two flanking festivals, the Saturnalia, which had to finish by the 23rd, and the Kalendae, from 1st to 3rd January. The period between the two festivals was not marked by any festivals, and the Solstice itself was not celebrated. It appears to have been considered an unpropitious time for the Romans, who avoided the period between the two festivals.
The evidence suggests that the calculation of the date of Christmas was not based on the Solstice. As the Church had no historical date for Christ’s Nativity they had to invent a date for this and they did so by using an old tradition that associated the day of a holy man's death as being the same day as his conception.
Thus they believed that Jesus' conception was the same day as Paschal, and calculating exactly nine months from there gave them his birth date. Therefore in the east where Paschal was celebrated several days later than the West, Jesus' nativity was calculated as 6th January. In the West it was calculated as 25th December.
If the Christians had been interested in appropriating Saturnalia, then they would have certainly used the correct date. And while Yule was the Norse/Germanic name for the month in which midwinter fell, there is no contemporary evidence that it was the name of a particular religious festival.
The closest link that can be argued is the supposed link between the date of December 25th and the birthday of the Unconquered Sun. In the late fourth century the anonymous "Scriptor Syrus" wrote a note in the margins of a calendar that: “It was a custom of the pagans to celebrate on the same 25 December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity. In these solemnities and revelries the Christians also took part. Accordingly when the doctors of the Church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnized on that day.”
However, despite this late account, our records tell us that the Festival of the Unconquered Son did not actually take place on December 25th. The Cult itself was not ancient, but had been invented by Emperor Aurelian in 274 as a syncretic state cult, in order to unify the Empire under a single religion. It was based on an older Syrian cult, which had celebrated its annual festival in late-October.
Aurelian’s new Festival was supposed to be held every four years and was actually celebrated with games in mid-October. (And Aurelian’s Sol Invictus Cult didn’t even last 50 years, being abolished by Constantine in 324.)
We do not know then why this anonymous writer, over fifty years after the abolition of the festival, made his claim that a Nativity of Sol Invictus was held on the December 25th. Perhaps there was another informal celebration held in midwinter as well or he was merely mistaken. Historians can only guess.
Why indeed the early Church would have been interested in appropriating a Pagan festival is a mystery also. The early Church, to the contrary, made great efforts to distinguish their sect from any pagan associations. Even the fact that December 25th was so close to midwinter was problematic for the early Church, and several Fathers wrote often to remind believers not to confuse the Feast of Christ’s Nativity with sun worship.
Although commentators will sometimes acknowledge that the Christian Feast of the Nativity did not appropriate the date from any known pagan festival, there remains the claims that the Church appropriated their celebratory traditions and rites. However, this again has little historical support. Saturnalia was a time of raucous partying, and the overturning of social propriety. Slaves would be waited on by their masters, and peers would choose a “king” to order party pranks, such as dancing naked or speaking disgracefully (Lucian, Saturnalia, 4).
This was a far cry from the piety of early Christian celebrations, which would not countenance such behaviour. The Christian Festival was originally a solemn affair, celebrated with the attendance of religious services . While the strict fast of the preceding days was broken with a banquet, there was no tradition of impious behaviour, on the contrary Christians often denounced anything that appeared too pagan.
What then of Anglo-Saxon festivities? The cycles from Ireland and Wales are unhelpful, written too long after Christianisation. Bede, provides his own helpful speculation on the pagan past he had scanty historical knowledge of. He wrote in 730, after Christinisation, and stated that the most important annual festival of the English had formerly been what they called the Modranicht, or ‘Mother Night’, on 24 December. This was the night of their new year, and they observed it with (unspecified) religious rites.
However, this was thoroughly critiqued as early as Alexander Tille in 1889 who pointed out that Bede’s knowledge of his people’s pagan past was scanty at best, which Bede himself admitted. Tille suggested that Bede simply mistook Mother Night for a celebration of the Virgin Mary. This “Modranicht” indeed is entirely absent from any other historical source, either from England or the Continent.
It is hard to find any primary sources about Yule. What we know is that the earliest Scandanavian literature does not mention it, but rather to a pagan festival called the “Winter Nights”, which was an October festival. However, several centuries after Scandanavia had been Christianised; in the 13th century Snorri Sturlson wrote that Yule was the name of a pagan midwinter festival. Snorri of course has the same problem as Bede, in that his knowledge of ancient pagan practices was extremely limited.
Snorri wrote that the pagan custom was to sacrifice during the Winter Nights for a good crop at Yule. He said that the Festival of Yule lasted three nights, from Midwinter to New Year, and that a Christian ruler of Norway, Hakon the Good, had made this synchronize with the Nativity. His understanding of Yule was that it was a time of peace, during which no violence or combat could take place. We should be wary of trusting Snorri’s claims completely however.
Furthermore, as I said above, rather than appropriating pagan customs, Christian leaders were vociferous in their denunciations of them. From the fourth century to the eleventh century we know of forty separate denunciations of continuing pagan practices, condemning popular pagan midwinter and new year customs such as divination, sorcery and magic.
The Pagan customs that continued however were most commonly associated with New Year celebrations, being carried out largely on 31st December and 1st January. We can see that far from appropriating pagan customs, the Church was far more interested in condemning them. And although the Church was unsuccessful and these New Year’s customs continued, they were never appropriated or approved of by the Church.
The best that can be said for the appropriation of customs is that the Romans gave out gifts of candles, and decorated their temples with foliage. Indeed decorating one’s home with the flowers and foliage of the season is extremely common all over the world, and this was no different in Europe. Europeans filled their homes with holly, ivy, bay, laurel, rosemary, and broom at Christmas just as they filled their homes with other plant-life at other times. This was given no Christian significance, and was sometimes denounced by the Church as antithetical to proper religious observance, though most local clerics and churchwardens had no problem with it. Even the Protestants found little to condemn about it.
However, it is hard to find any evidence that this use of foliage had any pagan religious or superstitious significance. It appears to have been considered merely generic decoration, suitable for any celebration. And while candles and gift-giving do have an association with Christmas, the concept of candles and giving gifts is also so generic it is hard to say with certainty that they are definitely a pagan appropriation. After all, lighting candles is normal human behaviour during times of darkness, and gift-giving is quite standard during times of celebration.
Mistletoe is seemingly the only tradition with pagan origins, in that the druids were indeed recorded as having considered the plant sacred, though they did not decorate their homes with it but drank it in a potion. And the druids were wiped out completely by the Romans in 60 CE and the next historical mention of Christians using the plant is in the 17th century.
The seemingly pagan “fertility rite” of the kissing bough actually has no evidence of pagan origin. Mistletoe was a late addition to Christmas foliage, being only first recorded in England in the 1620’s when England was firmly Christian. And at first this was merely hung up, and was not used for kissing under. The origin of the “kissing bough” can only be traced back to the late 18th century. It was Washington Irving, writing in 1819, who first suggested that it was derived from pagan origins. In reality, the choice of mistletoe for the kissing bough never originally had any deeper significance except that it was rare, and so would have made the bough more impressive, compared to boughs made of other plants.
And again, with the seemingly pagan “Yule Log”, historians struggle to find any evidence for pagan origin. The suggestion that it had these associations was first made in 1725 by Henry Bourne, who had no evidence for this speculation, and romantic folklorists of the nineteenth century such as James Frazer eagerly repeated this as fact. The tradition of the Yule Log may have merely been that a large source of fuel was needed so as to be sufficient to burn throughout the day, without requiring anyone to work to tend or refuel the fire when they’d rather be celebrating.
There is no mention of a special Yule Log in England before 1600 and the earliest reference that can be found for it anywhere is in Germany in 1184, long after Christianisation. The multiplicity of folk superstitions that surround the Yule Log are different in different localities, suggesting that these have each been grafted onto it later, rather than coming from a shared ancient source.
Christmas trees are often mentioned as a pagan practice, due to the vague idea that pagans liked trees. However, they worshipped living trees, and it would have been completely abhorrent to them to chop a tree down to bring it inside their home. To understand the origins of the Christmas tree we need to actually study the history. The tradition has obviously changed over the centuries, as all traditions do. Baubles and tinsel are new, and our fairy lights were once lighted tapers. In the 19th century presents used to hang from the branches rather than be put underneath. But tracing them back even further, the very first Christmas trees in the middle ages had no presents hung from the branches, only apples.
This was because in medieval Christianity Christmas Eve was known by another name: The Feast Day of Adam and Eve. And as part of their celebrations, morality plays were performed, with the central prop being a tree, hung with apples and communion wafers, representing the Tree of Life. The play contained two trees as part of the set; the Tree of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life was then paraded round the village and placed in the town square.
Morality plays were banned by the Church during the 15th century but in many parts of Germany the tradition survived, and German settlers in other countries took it with them, until the tradition became popular in the 19th century and quickly spread to non-Germans. In the 19th century some regions of Germany still placed little figurines of Adam and Eve and the serpent underneath their Christmas trees, and still in parts of Bavaria today, the Christmas tree is hung with apples and known as the Paradise Tree.
Santa Claus is often linked to Odin, simply because of the beard and elves, and the flying reindeer appear (to modern eyes) to be vaguely similar to Odin’s eight (or six) legged horse Sleipnir. But there is no historical link whatsoever. Santa is a mixture of a folk personification of the Spirit of Christmas that became popular in seventeenth century England, that was originally called Sir Christmas, and the Bishop Nicholas, who was a common figure who townsmen would dress up as in Germany.
These traditions intermingled in the 19th century, and the flying reindeer and elves and plump belly etc. were all added in a famous children's poem that was written in America in 1822 by Clement Clarke Moore. This late American addition of all the common elements of Santa Claus shows that there is no link to older pagan traditions..
Source: Ronald Hutton: The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford University Press, 1996
How December 25 Became Christmas
As Christmas approaches I have started to see more and more posts repeating that persistant myth that Christmas either started as a pagan festival or incorporated pagan elements. Every year this myth gets refuted, but it never dies. So here it is again, another year, another refutation. I expect most people will angrily downvote this without reading it. But for those who are interested in learning, here's the facts.
TLDR: There is no reputable historical evidence that December 25th was ever the date of any pagan festival. Nor is there any reputable evidence that any traditional Christmas customs were taken from pagan practices.
There is little historical evidence that can trace the origins of Christmas back to any Pagan festival or particular celebratory customs. Saturnalia has no link at all, being a festival that preceded the midwinter solstice. It was held on 17th December, and the celebrations continued for an irregular span, from two days to a maximum of seven days in total, so would have never lasted longer than the 23rd December.
Julius Caesar did fix the Solstice at the 25th but there appears to have been no festivities set for the date. The Romans did not celebrate the Solstice, but rather had two flanking festivals, the Saturnalia, which had to finish by the 23rd, and the Kalendae, from 1st to 3rd January. The period between the two festivals was not marked by any festivals, and the Solstice itself was not celebrated. It appears to have been considered an unpropitious time for the Romans, who avoided the period between the two festivals.
The evidence suggests that the calculation of the date of Christmas was not based on the Solstice. As the Church had no historical date for Christ’s Nativity they had to invent a date for this and they did so by using an old tradition that associated the day of a holy man's death as being the same day as his conception.
Thus they believed that Jesus' conception was the same day as Paschal, and calculating exactly nine months from there gave them his birth date. Therefore in the east where Paschal was celebrated several days later than the West, Jesus' nativity was calculated as 6th January. In the West it was calculated as 25th December.
If the Christians had been interested in appropriating Saturnalia, then they would have certainly used the correct date. And while Yule was the Norse/Germanic name for the month in which midwinter fell, there is no contemporary evidence that it was the name of a particular religious festival.
The closest link that can be argued is the supposed link between the date of December 25th and the birthday of the Unconquered Sun. In the late fourth century the anonymous "Scriptor Syrus" wrote a note in the margins of a calendar that: “It was a custom of the pagans to celebrate on the same 25 December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity. In these solemnities and revelries the Christians also took part. Accordingly when the doctors of the Church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnized on that day.”
However, despite this late account, our records tell us that the Festival of the Unconquered Son did not actually take place on December 25th. The Cult itself was not ancient, but had been invented by Emperor Aurelian in 274 as a syncretic state cult, in order to unify the Empire under a single religion. It was based on an older Syrian cult, which had celebrated its annual festival in late-October.
Aurelian’s new Festival was supposed to be held every four years and was actually celebrated with games in mid-October. (And Aurelian’s Sol Invictus Cult didn’t even last 50 years, being abolished by Constantine in 324.)
We do not know then why this anonymous writer, over fifty years after the abolition of the festival, made his claim that a Nativity of Sol Invictus was held on the December 25th. Perhaps there was another informal celebration held in midwinter as well or he was merely mistaken. Historians can only guess.
Why indeed the early Church would have been interested in appropriating a Pagan festival is a mystery also. The early Church, to the contrary, made great efforts to distinguish their sect from any pagan associations. Even the fact that December 25th was so close to midwinter was problematic for the early Church, and several Fathers wrote often to remind believers not to confuse the Feast of Christ’s Nativity with sun worship.
Although commentators will sometimes acknowledge that the Christian Feast of the Nativity did not appropriate the date from any known pagan festival, there remains the claims that the Church appropriated their celebratory traditions and rites. However, this again has little historical support. Saturnalia was a time of raucous partying, and the overturning of social propriety. Slaves would be waited on by their masters, and peers would choose a “king” to order party pranks, such as dancing naked or speaking disgracefully (Lucian, Saturnalia, 4).
This was a far cry from the piety of early Christian celebrations, which would not countenance such behaviour. The Christian Festival was originally a solemn affair, celebrated with the attendance of religious services . While the strict fast of the preceding days was broken with a banquet, there was no tradition of impious behaviour, on the contrary Christians often denounced anything that appeared too pagan.
What then of Anglo-Saxon festivities? The cycles from Ireland and Wales are unhelpful, written too long after Christianisation. Bede, provides his own helpful speculation on the pagan past he had scanty historical knowledge of. He wrote in 730, after Christinisation, and stated that the most important annual festival of the English had formerly been what they called the Modranicht, or ‘Mother Night’, on 24 December. This was the night of their new year, and they observed it with (unspecified) religious rites.
However, this was thoroughly critiqued as early as Alexander Tille in 1889 who pointed out that Bede’s knowledge of his people’s pagan past was scanty at best, which Bede himself admitted. Tille suggested that Bede simply mistook Mother Night for a celebration of the Virgin Mary. This “Modranicht” indeed is entirely absent from any other historical source, either from England or the Continent.
It is hard to find any primary sources about Yule. What we know is that the earliest Scandanavian literature does not mention it, but rather to a pagan festival called the “Winter Nights”, which was an October festival. However, several centuries after Scandanavia had been Christianised; in the 13th century Snorri Sturlson wrote that Yule was the name of a pagan midwinter festival. Snorri of course has the same problem as Bede, in that his knowledge of ancient pagan practices was extremely limited.
Snorri wrote that the pagan custom was to sacrifice during the Winter Nights for a good crop at Yule. He said that the Festival of Yule lasted three nights, from Midwinter to New Year, and that a Christian ruler of Norway, Hakon the Good, had made this synchronize with the Nativity. His understanding of Yule was that it was a time of peace, during which no violence or combat could take place. We should be wary of trusting Snorri’s claims completely however.
Furthermore, as I said above, rather than appropriating pagan customs, Christian leaders were vociferous in their denunciations of them. From the fourth century to the eleventh century we know of forty separate denunciations of continuing pagan practices, condemning popular pagan midwinter and new year customs such as divination, sorcery and magic.
The Pagan customs that continued however were most commonly associated with New Year celebrations, being carried out largely on 31st December and 1st January. We can see that far from appropriating pagan customs, the Church was far more interested in condemning them. And although the Church was unsuccessful and these New Year’s customs continued, they were never appropriated or approved of by the Church.
The best that can be said for the appropriation of customs is that the Romans gave out gifts of candles, and decorated their temples with foliage. Indeed decorating one’s home with the flowers and foliage of the season is extremely common all over the world, and this was no different in Europe. Europeans filled their homes with holly, ivy, bay, laurel, rosemary, and broom at Christmas just as they filled their homes with other plant-life at other times. This was given no Christian significance, and was sometimes denounced by the Church as antithetical to proper religious observance, though most local clerics and churchwardens had no problem with it. Even the Protestants found little to condemn about it.
However, it is hard to find any evidence that this use of foliage had any pagan religious or superstitious significance. It appears to have been considered merely generic decoration, suitable for any celebration. And while candles and gift-giving do have an association with Christmas, the concept of candles and giving gifts is also so generic it is hard to say with certainty that they are definitely a pagan appropriation. After all, lighting candles is normal human behaviour during times of darkness, and gift-giving is quite standard during times of celebration.
Mistletoe is seemingly the only tradition with pagan origins, in that the druids were indeed recorded as having considered the plant sacred, though they did not decorate their homes with it but drank it in a potion. And the druids were wiped out completely by the Romans in 60 CE and the next historical mention of Christians using the plant is in the 17th century.
The seemingly pagan “fertility rite” of the kissing bough actually has no evidence of pagan origin. Mistletoe was a late addition to Christmas foliage, being only first recorded in England in the 1620’s when England was firmly Christian. And at first this was merely hung up, and was not used for kissing under. The origin of the “kissing bough” can only be traced back to the late 18th century. It was Washington Irving, writing in 1819, who first suggested that it was derived from pagan origins. In reality, the choice of mistletoe for the kissing bough never originally had any deeper significance except that it was rare, and so would have made the bough more impressive, compared to boughs made of other plants.
And again, with the seemingly pagan “Yule Log”, historians struggle to find any evidence for pagan origin. The suggestion that it had these associations was first made in 1725 by Henry Bourne, who had no evidence for this speculation, and romantic folklorists of the nineteenth century such as James Frazer eagerly repeated this as fact. The tradition of the Yule Log may have merely been that a large source of fuel was needed so as to be sufficient to burn throughout the day, without requiring anyone to work to tend or refuel the fire when they’d rather be celebrating.
There is no mention of a special Yule Log in England before 1600 and the earliest reference that can be found for it anywhere is in Germany in 1184, long after Christianisation. The multiplicity of folk superstitions that surround the Yule Log are different in different localities, suggesting that these have each been grafted onto it later, rather than coming from a shared ancient source.
Christmas trees are often mentioned as a pagan practice, due to the vague idea that pagans liked trees. However, they worshipped living trees, and it would have been completely abhorrent to them to chop a tree down to bring it inside their home. To understand the origins of the Christmas tree we need to actually study the history. The tradition has obviously changed over the centuries, as all traditions do. Baubles and tinsel are new, and our fairy lights were once lighted tapers. In the 19th century presents used to hang from the branches rather than be put underneath. But tracing them back even further, the very first Christmas trees in the middle ages had no presents hung from the branches, only apples.
This was because in medieval Christianity Christmas Eve was known by another name: The Feast Day of Adam and Eve. And as part of their celebrations, morality plays were performed, with the central prop being a tree, hung with apples and communion wafers, representing the Tree of Life. The play contained two trees as part of the set; the Tree of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life was then paraded round the village and placed in the town square.
Morality plays were banned by the Church during the 15th century but in many parts of Germany the tradition survived, and German settlers in other countries took it with them, until the tradition became popular in the 19th century and quickly spread to non-Germans. In the 19th century some regions of Germany still placed little figurines of Adam and Eve and the serpent underneath their Christmas trees, and still in parts of Bavaria today, the Christmas tree is hung with apples and known as the Paradise Tree.
Santa Claus is often linked to Odin, simply because of the beard and elves, and the flying reindeer appear (to modern eyes) to be vaguely similar to Odin’s eight (or six) legged horse Sleipnir. But there is no historical link whatsoever. Santa is a mixture of a folk personification of the Spirit of Christmas that became popular in seventeenth century England, that was originally called Sir Christmas, and the Bishop Nicholas, who was a common figure who townsmen would dress up as in Germany.
These traditions intermingled in the 19th century, and the flying reindeer and elves and plump belly etc. were all added in a famous children's poem that was written in America in 1822 by Clement Clarke Moore. This late American addition of all the common elements of Santa Claus shows that there is no link to older pagan traditions..
Source: Ronald Hutton: The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford University Press, 1996
How December 25 Became Christmas
