It’s Christmas, and thus comes the inevitable barrage of internet posts claiming that Christmas was “stolen” from pagans in one way or another.
The notion that Christians, collectively, “stole” anything from pagans is based in an ahistorical and frankly conspiratorial approach towards history. Christians are not a monolithic entity (even when they’re pretending that they are), and they did not construct a malicious plot to convert pagans by “stealing” anything from them. Pagan traditions ended up getting intermixed with Christian ones through a normal process called syncretism. Syncretism is what happens when multiple religions exist in the same communities. The traditions, rituals, and myths of those communities naturally intermingle over time. Syncretism already happened between pagan religions all the time, so when Christianity showed up, there wasn’t anything unusual about syncretising pagan and Christian practices. Ordinary people simply adapted their existing traditions to a Christian context without much fuss. A few generations go by, and paganism gradually disappears. I think it’s more accurate to say that Christianity assimilated pagan traditions rather than “stole.” Nothing was stolen. The people who still practice those old pagan traditions are the descendents of the same people who practiced them originally. You can’t steal something that’s already yours.
Now, Christian missionaries were certainly aware of this process and furthered it on purpose:
Tell Augustine that he should be no means destroy the temples of the gods but rather the idols within those temples. Let him, after he has purified them with holy water, place altars and relics of the saints in them. For, if those temples are well built, they should be converted from the worship of demons to the service of the true God. Thus, seeing that their places of worship are not destroyed, the people will banish error from their hearts and come to places familiar and dear to them in acknowledgement and worship of the true God. Further, since it has been their custom to slaughter oxen in sacrifice, they should receive some solemnity in exchange. Let them therefore, on the day of the dedication of their churches, or on the feast of the martyrs whose relics are preserved in them, build themselves huts around their one-time temples and celebrate the occasion with religious feasting. They will sacrifice and eat the animals not any more as an offering to the devil, but for the glory of God to whom, as the giver of all things, they will give thanks for having been satiated. Thus, if they are not deprived of all exterior joys, they will more easily taste the interior ones. — Gregory the Great’s letter to Abbot Melitus
Of all the sources I’ve looked at, this one definitely comes the closest to fitting the “Christians stole our holidays” narrative. But once again, nothing’s being stolen. Consider what’s actually going on here: Pope Gregory is explicitly stating that Christian missionaries should encourage, rather than suppress, the aformentioned syncretism. Sacred ground is still sacred ground, festivals are still festivals, nothing changes except the deity it’s dedicated to. That is how pagan traditions survive. In the places where this didn’t happen, pagan survivals are even fewer and far between. Christian tolerance of syncretism is what enabled pagan traditions to be preserved by the people whose traditions those were in the first place.
Conversion is a long, complicated, messy process and I’m not going to summarize all of it in this post, but it wasn’t always violent. In fact, violent conversion was rarer than you probably think. This sort of gradual assimilation was more typical.
Regarding Yule specifically, Yule was a Germanic and Norse pagan festival that is relatively well-attested throughout the surviving literature. Unfortunately, almost all of that literature is medieval, post-Christianization, and doesn’t come from pagans themselves. The best primary source we have that describes Yule is the Saga of Hakon the Good, which is part of the Heimskringla, one of Snorri Sturluson’s books. This saga tells the history of King Hakon and his attempts to Christianize Norway. One of the ways he does this is by taking the same approach as Pope Gregory, and permitting pagans to carry on with their Yule celebrations. In fact, he actually mandates that Yule be celebrated, but moves it to a more Christian date:
King Hakon was a good Christian when he came to Norway; but as the whole country was heathen, with much heathenish sacrifice, and as many great people, as well as the favour of the common people, were to be conciliated, he resolved to practice his Christianity in private. But he kept Sundays, and the Friday fasts, and some token of the greatest holy-days. He made a law that the festival of Yule should begin at the same time as Christian people held it, and that every man, under penalty, should brew a meal of malt into ale, and therewith keep the Yule holy as long as it lasted. Before him, the beginning of Yule, or the slaughter night, was the night of mid-winter (Dec. 14), and Yule was kept for three days thereafter.
The next chapter provides this incredibly detailed description of Yule festivities:
To this festival all the men brought ale with them; and all kinds of cattle, as well as horses, were slaughtered, and all the blood that came from them was called “hlaut”, and the vessels in which it was collected were called hlaut-vessels. Hlaut-staves were made, like sprinkling brushes, with which the whole of the altars and the temple walls, both outside and inside, were sprinkled over, and also the people were sprinkled with the blood; but the flesh was boiled into savoury meat for those present. The fire was in the middle of the floor of the temple, and over it hung the kettles, and the full goblets were handed across the fire; and he who made the feast, and was a chief, blessed the full goblets, and all the meat of the sacrifice. And first Odin’s goblet was emptied for victory and power to his king; thereafter, Niord’s and Freyja’s goblets for peace and a good season. Then it was the custom of many to empty the brage-goblet; and then the guests emptied a goblet to the memory of departed friends, called the remembrance goblet. Sigurd the earl was an open-handed man, who did what was very much celebrated; namely, he made a great sacrifice festival at Hlader of which he paid all the expenses. Kormak Ogmundson sings of it in his ballad of Sigurd: —
“Of cup or platter need has none The guest who seeks the generous one, — Sigurd the Generous, who can trace His lineage from the giant race; For Sigurd’s hand is bounteous, free, — The guardian of the temples he. He loves the gods, his liberal hand Scatters his sword’s gains o’er the land-”
Although this description comes from a Christian text about a Christian king spreading Christianity, it’s a description of how pagans celebrated Yule, providing us with an extremely rare glimpse into what pagan practices looked like. Snorri is a few centuries removed from actual paganism, so the description may or may not be accurate, but it’s definitely the best we’ve got.
What it tells us is that pagans celebrated Yule by hosting a big drinking party at which many animals were sacrificed to the gods. The blood of the animals was collected and sprinkled on the temple and the assembled people to consecrate them. Then the meat of the animals would be boiled over a fire in the center of the temple, and the guests would eat it. They drank toasts to specific gods, first to Odin, then to Njord and Freya. Odin in this context is associated with kingly power and victory, and Njord and Freya are associated with peace and abundance. One toast is also dedicated to the beloved dead. Sigurd hosted the festival and was called “the Generous” for sparing no expense. He’s Hakon’s son and proxy. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but that poem Snorri quotes implies that Sigurd was also pagan, not Christian like Hakon: His lineage was said to be from the jotnar, and “he loves the gods.” Maybe Christian jarls still claimed to be descended from jotnar, I dunno, but they wouldn’t be said to love the gods, plural.
By Angus McBride
I’m inclined to believe that the description is accurate or at least somewhat accurate, because it describes a fairly typical pagan festival. The specifics of the rituals differ from religion to religion, and sometimes from place to place, but most pagan festivals involve an animal sacrifice, which is basically a ritualistic barbecue. The animal’s meat is cooked and shared amongst the people present, and there’s a lot of drinking, as well as further toasts or libations to the gods and the dead. Descriptions of Ancient Greek and Roman festivals, most of which come directly from pagans themselves, tend to be similar.
However, you may have noticed that this description of pagan Yule bears no resemblance to modern Christmas whatsoever.
That’s a running theme. A lot of modern traditions that people assume must be pagan survivals aren’t actually old enough to have come from paganism. Most Christmas traditions that we hold dear are only a couple centuries old at most. The actual pagan survivals that got intermixed with Christmas (like the “Lord of Misrule”) have largely died out. Christmas trees are a great example of a tradition that everyone assumes is older than it actually is. The earliest mention of a Christmas tree, or anything like one, is from the fifteenth century — way after the Christianization of Germany and Scandinavia. Christmas trees didn’t reach the Anglophone world until even later, in the nineteenth century. (If you want to know the full history, I highly recommend Religion for Breakfast’s video, “The Very Recent Origins of the Christmas Tree.”) So, Christmas trees are not pagan. But they are one of the more secular aspects of the holiday, making it easy for modern people to “paganize” them.
Happy Solstice!
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