CHAPTER VI

PRE-CHRISTIAN WINTER FESTIVALS

The Church and Superstition--Nature of Pagan Survivals--Racial Origins--Roman Festivals of the _Saturnalia_ and Kalends--Was there a Teutonic Midwinter Festival?--The Teutonic, Celtic, and Slav New Year--Customs attracted to Christmas or January 1--The Winter Cycle of Festivals--_Rationale_ of Festival Ritual: (_a_) Sacrifice and Sacrament, (_b_) the Cult of the Dead, (_c_) Omens and Charms for the New Year--Compromise in the Later Middle Ages--The Puritans and Christmas--Decay of Old Traditions.

[Illustration:

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 class 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 surreptitious 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 |162| 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 "superstition," something standing over, like shells 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 amusement, 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 |163| 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 worship of definite divinities--against this the missionaries made their most determined efforts, and the names of the old gods have practically disappeared--as to cults which preceded the development of anthropomorphic gods 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 associated 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