Part 16 (1/2)

[Ill.u.s.tration:

NEW YEAR MUMMERS IN MANCHURIA.

An Asiatic example of animal masks.]

We have now to leave the commemoration of the Nativity of Christ, and to turn to the other side of Christmas--its many traditional observances which, though sometimes coloured by Christianity, have nothing to do with the Birth of the Redeemer. This cla.s.s of customs has often, especially in the first millennium of our era, been the object of condemnations by ecclesiastics, and represents the old paganism which Christianity failed to extinguish. The Church has played a double part, a part of sheer antagonism, forcing heathen customs into the shade, into a more or less surrept.i.tious and unprogressive life, and a part of adaptation, baptizing them into Christ, giving them a Christian name and interpretation, and often modifying their form. The general effect of Christianity upon pagan usages is well suggested by Dr. Karl Pearson:--

”What the missionary could he repressed, the more as his church grew in strength; what he could not repress he adopted or simply left unregarded.... What the missionary tried to repress became mediaeval witchcraft; what he judiciously disregarded survives to this

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day in peasant weddings and in the folk-festivals at the great changes of season.”{1}

We find then many pagan practices concealed beneath a superficial Christianity--often under the mantle of some saint--but side by side with these are many usages never Christianized even in appearance, and obviously identical with heathen customs against which the Church thundered in the days of her youth. Grown old and tolerant--except of novelties--she has long since ceased to attack them, and they have themselves mostly lost all definite religious meaning. As the old pagan faith decayed, they tended to become in a literal sense ”superst.i.tion,”

something standing over, like sh.e.l.ls from which the living occupant has gone. They are now often mere ”survivals” in the technical folk-lore sense, pieces of custom separated from the beliefs that once gave them meaning, performed only because in a vague sort of way they are supposed to bring good luck. In many cases those who practise them would be quite unable to explain how or why they work for good.

Mental inertia, the instinct to do and believe what has always been done and believed, has sometimes preserved the animating faith as well as the external form of these practices, but often all serious significance has departed. What was once religious or magical ritual, upon the due observance of which the welfare of the community was believed to depend, has become mere pageantry and amus.e.m.e.nt, often a mere children's game.{2}

Sometimes the spirit of a later age has worked upon these pagan customs, revivifying and transforming them, giving them charm. Often, however, one does not find in them the poetry, the warm humanity, the humour, which mark the creations of popular Catholicism. They are fossils and their interest is that of the fossil: they are records of a vanished world and help us to an imaginative reconstruction of it. But further, just as on a stratum of rock rich in fossils there may be fair meadows and gardens and groves, depending for their life on the denudation of the rock beneath, so have these ancient religious products largely supplied the soil in which more spiritual and more

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beautiful things have flourished.

Amid these, as has been well said, ”they still emerge, unchanged and unchanging, like the quaint outcrops of some ancient rock formation amid rich vegetation and fragrant flowers.”{3}

The survivals of pagan religion at Christian festivals relate not so much to the wors.h.i.+p of definite divinities--against this the missionaries made their most determined efforts, and the names of the old G.o.ds have practically disappeared--as to cults which preceded the development of anthropomorphic G.o.ds with names and attributes. These cults, paid to less personally conceived spirits, were of older standing and no doubt had deeper roots in the popular mind. Fundamentally a.s.sociated with agricultural and pastoral life, they have in many cases been preserved by the most conservative element in the population, the peasantry.

Many of the customs we shall meet with are magical, rather than religious in the proper sense; they are not directed to the conciliation of spiritual beings, but spring from primitive man's belief ”that in order to produce the great phenomena of nature on which his life depended he had only to imitate them.”{4} Even when they have a definitely religious character, and are connected with some spirit, magical elements are often found in them.

Before we consider these customs in detail it will be necessary to survey the pagan festivals briefly alluded to in Chapter I., to note the various ideas and practices that characterized them, and to study the att.i.tude of the Church towards survivals of such practices while the conversion of Europe was in progress, and also during the Middle Ages.

The development of religious custom and belief in Europe is a matter of such vast complexity that I cannot in a book of this kind attempt more than the roughest outline of the probable origins of the observances, purely pagan or half-Christianized, cl.u.s.tering round Christmas. It is difficult, in the present state of knowledge, to discern clearly the contributions of different peoples to the traditional customs of Europe, and even, in many cases, to say whether a given custom is ”Aryan” or pre-Aryan. The proportion of the Aryan military aristocracy to the peoples whom they conquered was not uniform in all countries, and

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probably was often small. While the families of the conquerors succeeded in imposing their languages, it by no means necessarily follows that the folk-practices of countries now Aryan in speech came entirely or even chiefly from Aryan sources. Religious tradition has a marvellous power of persistence, and it must be remembered that the lands conquered by men of Aryan speech had been previously occupied for immense periods.{5} Similarly, in countries like our own, which have been successively invaded by Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and Normans, it is often extraordinarily hard to say even to what _national_ source a given custom should be a.s.signed.

It is but tentatively and with uncertain hands that scholars are trying to separate the racial strains in the folk-traditions of Europe, and here I can hardly do more than point out three formative elements in Christian customs: the ecclesiastical, the cla.s.sical (Greek and Roman), and the barbarian, taking the last broadly and without a minute racial a.n.a.lysis.

So far, indeed, as ritual, apart from mythology, is concerned, there seems to be a broad common ground of tradition among the Aryan-speaking peoples. How far this is due to a common derivation we need not here attempt to decide. The folk-lore of the whole world, it is to be noted, ”reveals for the same stages of civilization a wonderful uniformity and h.o.m.ogeneity.... This uniformity is not, however, due to necessary uniformity of origin, but to a great extent to the fact that it represents the state of equilibrium arrived at between minds at a certain level and their environment.”{6}

The scientific study of primitive religion is still almost in its infancy, and a large amount of conjecture must necessarily enter into any explanations of popular ritual that can be offered. In attempting to account for Christmas customs we must be mindful, therefore, of the tentative nature of the theories put forward. Again, it is important to remember that ritual practices are far more enduring than the explanations given to them. ”The antique religions,” to quote the words of Robertson Smith, ”had for the most part no creed; they consisted entirely of inst.i.tutions and practices ... as a rule we find that while the practice was

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rigorously fixed, the meaning attached to it was extremely vague, and the same rite was explained by different people in different ways.”{7}

Thus if we can arrive at the significance of a rite at a given period, it by no means follows that those who began it meant the same thing. At the time of the conflict of the heathen religions with Christianity elaborate structures of mythology had grown up around their traditional ceremonial, a.s.signing to it meanings that had often little to do with its original purpose. Often, too, when the purpose was changed, new ceremonies were added, so that a rite may look very unlike what it was at first.

With these cautions and reservations we must now try to trace the connection between present-day or recent goings-on about Christmas-time and the festival practices of pre-Christian Europe.

Christmas, as we saw in Chapter I., has taken the date of the _Natalis Invicti_. We need not linger over this feast, for it was not attended by folk-customs, and there is nothing to connect it with modern survivals.

The Roman festivals that really count for our present purpose are the Kalends of January and, probably, the _Saturnalia_. The influence of the Kalends is strongest naturally in the Latin countries, but is found also all over Europe. The influence of the _Saturnalia_ is less certain; the festival is not mentioned in ecclesiastical condemnations after the inst.i.tution of Christmas, and possibly its popularity was not so widespread as that of the Kalends. There are, however, some curiously interesting Christmas parallels to its usages.

The strictly religious feast of the _Saturnalia_{8} was held on December 17, but the festal customs were kept up for seven days, thus lasting until the day before our Christmas Eve. Among them was a fair called the _sigillariorum celebritas_, for the sale of little images of clay or paste which were given away as presents.[81] Candles seem also to have been given away, perhaps

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as symbols of, or even charms to ensure, the return of the sun's power after the solstice. The most remarkable and typical feature, however, of the _Saturnalia_ was the mingling of all cla.s.ses in a common jollity. Something of the character of the celebration (in a h.e.l.lenized form) may be gathered from the ”Cronia” or ”Saturnalia” of Lucian, a dialogue between Cronus or Saturn and his priest. We learn from it that the festivities were marked by ”drinking and being drunk, noise and games and dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping of tremulous hands, an occasional ducking of corked faces in icy water,” and that slaves had licence to revile their lords.{9}

The spirit of the season may be judged from the legislation which Lucian attributes to Cronosolon, priest and prophet of Cronus, much as a modern writer might make Father Christmas or Santa Klaus lay down rules for the due observance of Yule. Here are some of the laws:--

”_All business, be it public or private, is forbidden during the feast days, save such as tends to sport and solace and delight. Let none follow their avocations saving cooks and bakers._

_All men shall be equal, slave and free, rich and poor, one with another._

_Anger, resentment, threats, are contrary to law._

_No discourse shall be either composed or delivered, except it be witty and l.u.s.ty, conducing to mirth and jollity._”