Christmas Myth – Between Sword and Cross (Part 2)

About the Christmas tree

„I know of an ash tree called the World Tree,
A whitish mist moistens its crown,
Outside, the dew that fertilizes the depths falls,
It stands ever green by Urd’s well.“

• Edda, Gylfaginning –

The ash tree (Yggdrasil) was considered by the Norse peoples to be the tre the ash tree heralded the meaning of the changing of the seasons, of death and rebirth. However, not all trees lost their leaves in the course of the year – such as the widespread, evergreen fir tree. Branches from this tree decorated living rooms and animal stables during the Twelve Days of Christmas, and were thus a fundamental symbol representing the desire and longing for the land to blossom into springtime life again after the harsh winter. To give this wish even more expressiveness, the branches were decorated with candles, which, in combination with the green of the branches, were a silent yet bright and flickering call for the sun to rise again.
The church fought the custom of putting up a fir tree in the house for centuries before declaring the pagans‘ Christmas tree to be a Christian tree. —

The Rauhnächte – “Die and Be Reborn”

The Rauhnächte, from December 24 to Epiphany (January 6), were called the “Twelfth Night.” The North German and Danish name for this period is “Jul,” which symbolizes the wheel taken from the runic calendar that represented the cycle of the seasons. In addition to this interpretation, there is a simpler one: the term “Jul” is related to the verbs “to cheer,” “to shout,” “to rejoice,” etc., so that the Jul period can also be defined as a celebration of joy, “because from the winter solstice onwards, people were looking forward to spring, the beautiful season.”

The Twelve Days of Christmas were a special time: mystical when snow covered the land, making it look as if it were covered with a shroud; eerie and spooky when opaque fog swirled over the snow and the mirage of a shadowy creature—perhaps that of a deceased ancestor? And so it is no wonder that the ancients saw the god Odin, accompanied by his ravens Hugin and Munin, as well as his shadowy companions, traveling through the snow- and fog-covered landscape to check that all was well. All this may be the reason why Yule was originally a festival commemorating the clans‘ deceased ancestors; the Church also corrupted this pagan commemoration into All Saints‘ Day: in 913 CE, Pope Sylvester designated November 2 as a “day of prayer for the souls of the dead.” Nevertheless, the pagan custom of commemorating the dead persisted into the early 1950s and early 1960s, because at Christmas time, families did not forget to decorate the graves of the deceased and light candles on them. —

The pagan commemoration of the dead seems to contradict the joyful Christmas festivities—but only seemingly, because the Rauhnächte represented passing and becoming, as people knew that after January 6, the days would get longer again and spring would soon be welcomed. The Christmas celebrations, which were a longing for the coming change of seasons, also included domestic and farm animals, as well as trees in many northern regions, which were embraced during the “rough nights” and spoken to kindly in the confidence that they would bear abundant fruit in the coming year …

The spiritual aspect of the Christmas season

Today, Christmas celebrations have become thoroughly commercialized, individualized, clichéd, and full of empty phrases, leaving little room for traditional, ritualistic, spiritual feelings, thoughts, and actions. This is because in today’s way of life and behavior, any reference to non-church-based religion is almost considered a reprehensible flaw (in the sense of both church and secular dogmatism). The exception to the rule is when one or another anti-religious pagan aspect is accompanied by economic benefit – “so that money can be made.”
Traditional religion and ritual, in the classical sense and in relation to the present day, have been degraded to an ideologized fringe phenomenon subject to open defamation, so that natural access to the spiritual primordial paths of a transcendent reconnection or reflection—the meaning of religion—has been made almost impossible.

This also means that questions such as “Where do I come from? Where am I going? What does life on earth mean to me?” as well as the general question of the meaning of existence between birth, life, and death remain unanswered because they have been decoupled from primal spirituality by secular-technocratic or generalized religious concepts.
The officially recognized religions, as defined by secular and Christian worldviews, but also those that have spilled over from the Eastern hemisphere to the Western, all of which have been robbed of their religious primal substance, serve the modernist and highly commercialized clichés of a religious process of self-discovery and insight that can be acquired in a weekend seminar. Therefore, spiritually oriented people of Nordic origin will certainly not come into contact with their primal ancestors, their primal needs, and their primal spirituality in this oversupply of religious concepts on offer, nor will they see a viable path to spiritual transcendence, which the experiential magic of the Rauhnächte offers them.

Final thoughts

Having reached the provisional end of the Christian Christmas myth, we have established, as far as the reasonable length of a blog allows, that in today’s sense, before the widely circulated Christian Christmas story, there was a ritualized nature mysticism in the northern countries based on death and rebirth in the changing seasons. The rituals performed during the Rauhnächte to bring about the transformation of the winter season involved the ancestral, animal, and natural worlds. During these days, a solemn peace reigned between the human, animal, and natural worlds.
The primal human longing and search for harmony and peace in interpersonal relationships, which specifically seeks expression and a feasible path during the Christmas season, is currently fueling people’s interest in ancient, non-Christian rituals and perspectives, as evidenced by the interest in the magic of the Rauhnächte – the book tables in bookstores bear witness to this.

Even though the topic of the Rauhnächte has been commercialized, it is still positive that some people are trying to reconnect with their primal origins in the cycle of seasonal change and personal (psychological) death and rebirth.

With this in mind, the SoW team wishes the readers of our blog a contemplative and peaceful Rauhnacht season.

Ende of Part 2 – Part 1