This is the third article on the Nativity of St. John. This article will
deal with the Neo-Pagan practice of claiming Celtic origins, “Blame it
on the Celts,” or “Claim it's from the Celts.” We'll also look at
documented German and wider European practices.
Keep this question in mind as we conclude this series:
Is it realistic to think that the Church Fathers of the 1st and 2nd
centuries went to the extreme of sending out scouts to the British
Isles, to western and northern Europe in order to find out when ancients
pagans held their festivals so that the Church Fathers could schedule
the liturgical year accordingly?
What We Have Covered
To bring readers up to speed, we have been evaluating the claims
that this Christian holy day was instituted as a way to displace,
absorb, or suppress an ancient pagan holiday.
Some of the assertions behind these claims are:
- The assertion that Paganism is older than Christianity. This
is a rejection of the Bible. Particularly the nature of God, His six
day creation, the fall into sin by our first parents, and the
promise of the Messiah in the curse on Satan (Genesis 3:15).
Christianity is older than all the paganisms known today and through
history.
- The assertion that Christianity is unoriginal and needs to
steal, suppress, displace, or act in other illegitimate ways to
establish itself as a religion. While these wrongs are implied by
the claims against Christianity, the irony is that pagan religions
have never had a problem doing exactly these things. For the most
part, pagan religions never met a different faith that they haven't
tried to claim as originally their own. This can be seen even in the
pagan reactions to the early Christian Apologists.
- The assertion that most community rituals seen in modern
times must have had their origin in Paganism. According to the
assertion that Paganism is Older, anything that could be viewed as a
relic of pagan ritual demonstrates the fact that Christianity is the
new kid on the block and hasn't been as successful in its repression
of paganism as it had hoped.
So far we have looked at ancient texts relating specifically to
the Nativity of St. John the Baptist and the summer
solstice/Midsummer which demonstrate that:
- The celebration of Christmas was established December 25 by
the late 2nd century or early 3rd century A.D. in northern Africa
from Algeria to Egypt, as far north as the shore of the Black Sea,
from Israel in the east, and over to Rome in the west. According to
the Church Fathers of that era the date was chosen based on what
they believed about the significance of the date of the Passover in
Exodus.
- St. John’s Nativity coordinated with Christmas based on
Luke 1.
- Widespread celebrations of St. John’s Nativity by the
mid-4th century.
With regard to the assertions that summer solstice celebrations
are very ancient, common, widespread, and pagan we looked at the
records from Mesopotamian cultures, ancient Greece, and ancient Rome.
- There are no ancient Near Eastern records from the 3rd
millenium B.C. down to the fall of Babylon of any widespread ritual
tied directly to the summer solstice. One ritual in the late
Babylonian period, the transposing of priestesses from Esagil to
Ezida and vice versa shortly after the summer solstice and after the
winter solstice, is all we have.
- While ancient Greek sources refer often to the summer
solstice, these references do not show any evidence of a ritual
associated with solar worship or any widespread ritual relating to
the summer solstice.
- The ancient Roman sources show that there were solar cults
and temples through Rome's history, but there are no records that
indicate any widespread solar ritual on the event of the summer
solstice. Aurelian's attempt at establishing the worship of Sol
Invictus is not related to either the winter or the summer solstice.
Besides this, his attempt took place after Christians had settled on
December 25th as the liturgical date for Christ's birth.
The First Problem With Asserting Celtic Origins
The liturgical days for Christmas and the Nativity of
St. John the Baptist didn't originate in Celtic lands. The festivals
originated before the Church had widespread contact with peoples who
became popularly refered to as Celtic. While some modern St. John's
traditions might come from European practices or rituals in the early
parts of the first millennium A.D. evidence from actual documentation
to demostrate that the practices were particularly Celtic or even
pagan is thin. In fact, many of the modern traditions have already
been shown to be derived from or been drastically modified during the
period of the radical Reformation—particularly the English
Reformation. (Ronald Hutton The Stations of the Sun 1991)
Second Problem: Ancient Celtic Monuments—which are not really
“Celtic”
In the popular understanding today it seems quite apparent from
tombs,
henge monuments, the
cursus monuments and other
archaeological finds that ancient Celts were capable of calculating
the actual Summer and Winter solstices without reference to what ever
political calendars were in use.
There is a prehistoric tomb in County Meath, Ireland, called
Newgrange
[Irish: Sí an Bhrú]. The only sunlight to enter the tomb comes on
the morning of the Winter solstice.
Much
more
famous is the Midsummer sunrise celebrated at Stonehenge. The
"precision" of the alignment between the Heel Stone and the
center trilithon of the central ring to mark the solstice is still
hotly contested by astronomers. But today Neopagans assert that this
is proof of the advanced understanding that ancient Celtic pagans
possessed in predicting the solstices.
If
ancient pagans from a thousand years B.C. up through 1500 A.D. were
so good at knowing when the solstices would take place regardless of
which political calendar was in use, why would today's Neo-Pagans and
Wiccans feel they have to assert that June 24th
had to be the Summer solstice?
By
200 AD the Julian Calendar was off so that June 22 was the solstice.,
in the mid-300s it was the 21st,
by 1580 it was June 11th
or 12th.
The Gregorian Calendar reforms of 1582 didn't set the solstice back
to the 24th
as in Julius Caesar's time. Instead the summer solstice was
synchronized with June 21/22. In 1752, the year England finally
adopted the Gregorian Calendar, the summer solstice in England took
place on June 10th.
(http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/seasons.html?year=1750&n=136)
Actually, those ancients may or may not have been very good at
calculating the solstice. But the solstice might not have mattered as
much to them as the moderns wish. Ronald Hutton raises an important
consideration with regard to using this kind of archaeological
evidence. After listing Newgrange, Knowth, Loughcrew and Maes Howe,
and some of the 'cursus' monuments of southern England as well as the
'henge' monuments, Hutton wrote:
All this is impressive, and must be significant, but
needs to be put in a wider perspective. These are almost all
unusually sophisticated and elaborate structures of their kind, and
as such highly atypical. None of the other fifty-odd cursuses known
in Britain has obvious solar alignments, nor do any of the other
passage graves, which number over a hundred. ... To sum up, it is
clear that at particular times and places in British and Irish
prehistory the cardinal points of the sun, and particularly the
winter solstice, had considerable ritual importance. None the less,
the vast majority of prehistoric monuments in these islands do not
relate to any of them, so that no overall or enduring pattern of cult
can be detected. Furthermore, a considerable gulf separates
all these monuments from the pre-Roman British Iron Age, not one of
the temples of which has yet been found to have possessed a
significant solar alignment. (Stations of the Sun, p. 4-5)
Thus, these prehistoric “Celtic” sites do not demonstrate any
consistent preoccupation with the solstices. Furthermore, these
prehistoric monumental sites cannot be considered relics originally
representative of Celtic religiosity. Modern people have projected a
sense of Celticness on these monuments because they exist in what are
considered Celtic lands. The problem is that these monumental
structures predate any people group that could be called Celtic by at
least 1,000 years.
So, when considered together as a body of evidence these “ancient
Celtic monuments” demonstrate three things relevant to St. John's
Nativity and Midsummer.
- There is no overall consistency in design that would
demonstrate that the summer or winter solstice was of special
significance to the builders of these monuments, whatever culture(s)
they might represent.
- There is no demonstrable direct heritage from these
monumental structures to the people groups that became labeled by
the term Celtic in the 1700s and later.
- And if the ancients were so good at predicting the solstice,
why would those ancients want to claim that some proximate date on a
comparatively much more inaccurate calendar from a very remote
region like Rome must be the day of their solstice celebration? This
is a basic presupposition of the claim, and it makes no sense.
Third Problem: Real Celts
Anything known about the Celts before the middle ages is
reconstructed from archaeological finds and the few Greek and Roman
authors that mention them. Despite so much being published about
ancient Celts in novels, movies, and even popularizing educational
documentaries (BBC's “The Celts” from the late 1980s) there is
very little that is actually known about their societal structures or
their various religious views.
But there is a reason for all this mis-information. It comes not
just from the popularizers, but even from the scholars themselves.
Tristan Barako of Brown University explains:
There's a running joke in archaeology
that if you don't know what the function of an artifact is, then it
must be cultic (i.e., religious). It's a big problem because
artifacts are essentially mute -- that is, they don't tell you what
they were used for. It's up to the archaeologist to interpret them
and give them meaning. Obviously this can be very subjective, which
explains why there are always so many contrasting theories in
archaeology -- this is especially true when it comes to religious
objects.
(Tristan Barako, interview
http://www.providencepictures.com/news/2009/02/qa-with-dr-tristan-barako-for-cogitoorg.html
)
The truth is that up to 500 BC there are no written accounts of a
people called the Celts. References to Celts and Gauls can be found
in the Classical sources from that time on (see list here
http://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/index_classical.html ) What can be
seen from these early classical sources is that the use of the terms
Celt or Gaul did not signify a specifically self-identified ethnic or
religious group. An issue discussed at length by many archaeologists
since the 1980s. The complexities in determining any origins or
rituals of what has become called the Celtic peoples are still
grossly simplified for the convenience of maintaining a modern Celtic
identity. “Celtic” identity was actually the creation of the 18
th
century.
From the 18
th century and later this Celtic identity
was based on a variety of assumptions that formed the basis for
reading texts from what became identified the 7
th century
AD and later: not the least of which was a notion that there were in
much more ancient times a group that was a monolithic culture in
Celtic language, Celtic ritual and religious ideas, Celtic political
and economic outlook, and Celtic self-identification.
No such monolithic Celtic society ever existed. Several
archaeologists, linguists, and historians have demonstrated the
falseness of such notions. See, for example:
- Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of
Indo-European Origins 1987.
- Simon James, The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern
Invention?.1999.
- Ronald Hutton The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles:
Their Nature and Legacy, 1991.
But a romantic version of the past glory and culture of the Celts
remains in popular thought to this day. And with it, the fictional
reconstructions of supposedly “Celtic” religious and ritual
teachings. One example of the ironies is that can be shown in the way
people romanticize Celtic identity is the contrast between doubt
about the historical nature of King Arthur (supposedly 5
th
century AD) which comes to us from texts dating to the 12
th
century AD, and the certainty about Celtic identity and Celtic solar
ritual ascribed to far more ancient times from far more vague
references in manuscripts that come from the 9
th century
AD and later.
But we do have some texts given us by archaeology that describe,
at least in part for some of those people who today we would term
Celtic.
Ancient Celtic Calendars
It seems fair to ancient Celts to assume that they shared some
cultural and ethnically unique features, such as a grouping of
languages that share common
features. Such linguistic commonality
does not at all imply identity of ritual or calendar shared by all
ancient Celts. The Greeks and the ancient Semitic peoples have
already been given as examples that demonstrate the weakness of such
assumptions.
When we look at ancient Celtic calendars what we find is a lack of
calendars until the middle ages. But there is one calendar that we
have found in good enough shape to attempt to decipher it. It dates
probably to the 2
nd century AD. This is the Coligny
Calendar, written in Gallic and found in 1897 at Coligny, France.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coligny_calendar)
The problem with the calendar is that interpreting what might seem
to be a simple thing is not. Scholars well acquainted with the
language and the object cannot agree on when the first month took
place with respect to our modern calendar. The names of the months
are no guarantee. What they can say with reasonable confidence is
that the calendar was basically a lunisolar calendar: that is, a
calendar based on the moon which was adjusted to make up for the
solar year. As such there is not consistent solar date that can be
identified to settle the disagreements about which month was first.
(
http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~marc-carlson/calendar/coligni.html )
So, in the 2
nd century AD in the province of Ain,
France, the actual date which we could call Celtic does not indicate
any universal or even widespread celebration of the summer solstice.
Midsummer Traditions That Might Be Pagan in Origin.
Those who claim widespread ancient
pagan traditions are behind the date and rituals on St. John's
Nativity are left with a significant problem. The major ancient
cultural influences on the region where they claim origins does not
have any actual historical data to back up that claim. So, perhaps
there was just a general use of pagan traditions or ritual that took
place just generally at what was about Midsummer Day.
Two main categories of traditions can be seen in those listed by
Guiley (
The Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft) and
others: fire traditions, and non-fire rituals. We will look at the
fire traditions first.
Burning Wheels and Bonfires:
The earliest references to burning wheels comes from the
Acts
of St. Vincent of Saragossa. The description is of pagans in
Aquataine, France. But this reference does not mention a particular
date or time of year. (Hutton, p. 311) St. Vincent was killed in 304
A.D. But his Acts were compiled from tradition and assembled in the
8th or 9th century. (
Catholic
Encyclopedia)
So while the reference to pagans using burning wheels dates for
certainty as early as the 8th or 9th century A.D. the burning wheel
might date back to late 3rd or early 4th century A.D. But this
document does not tie this tradition to a day of the year.
A 13th-century monk from Winchcomb, Gloucestershire edited a
collection of sermons. Regarding St. John's eve' he wrote that the
pagans rolled a wheel. However, it is not noted whether the wheel was
set ablaze.
Historically, the listing of actual
Burning Wheels on
Midsummer's Eve' or Day start with Thomas Naogeorgus (1508-1563) a
Protestant of the radical reformation in Germany who wrote chiefly
from 1538-1555. An English translation of his 1555
Regnum
papisticum from 1880 of his account of St. John's Eve':
Then doth the ioyfull feast of John the
Baptist take his turne,
When bonfiers great with loftie flame, in
euery towne doe burne:
And yong men round about with maides, doe
daunce in euery streete,
With garlands wrought of Motherwort, or else
with Veruain sweete,
And many other flowres faire, with Violets
in their handes,
Whereas they all do fondly thinke, that
whosoeuer standes,
And thorow the flowres beholds the flame,
his eyes shall feele no paine.
When thus till night they daunced haue, they
through the fire amaine
With striuing mindes doe runne, and all
their hearbes they craft therein,
And then with wordes deuout and prayeres,
they solemnely begin,
Desiring God that all their illes may there
consumed bee,
Whereby they thinke through all that yeare,
from Agues to be free.
Some others get a rotten wheele, all worne
and rast aude,
Which coured round about with strawe, and
tow, they closely hide:
And caryed to some mountaines top, being all
with fire light,
They hurle it downe with violence, when
darke appears the night:
Resembling much the Sunne, that from the
heauens down should fal,
A straunge and monstrous sight it seemes,
and fearful to them all:
But they suppose their mischiefes are all
likewise throwne to hell,
And that from harmes and daungers now, in
safetie here they dwell.
(Reprint of The
popish kingdome, by T. Naogeorgus, Engl. by
B. Googe, ed. by R.C. Hope, 1880, page
55)
Notice that Naogeorgus does not claim the people were pagan, nor
does he claim that the people thought the
Burning Wheel
represented the sun. Rather he conjectures about the
Burning
Wheel as "resembling much the sun which should fall
down from the heavens."
So in the 1500s in Germany we have documentation that there were
Christians burning fires on St. Johns, using burning wheels, dancing,
making garlands, praying for safety and health in the coming year.
Engaging in what could be called non-Christian ritual traditions and
holding superstitious beliefs about those rituals.
Could these come from pagansim? Yes. But such superstitions need
not be assumed to be of great antiquity. Nor can we assume that there
was some huge monolithic pagan culture underlying all the different
rituals.
In fact, the oldest records of bonfires or dances tied to
Midsummer or to the Nativity of St. John start in 12th century
France. Such traditions are not documented in England until the 13th
century. The earliest in Ireland is 1305. (Hutton's
The Stations
of the Sun, pp. 311-313, Jacob Grimm,
Teutonic Mythology
II:601-630; IV:1461-1468)
Where the traditions can be documented throughout the British
Isles, it is noteworthy that records in the typically "Celtic"
areas give evidence that the traditions of Midsummer fires/St. John's
eve fires emerged more as a Roman Catholic defiance against the legal
imposition of Protestantism and Protestant hostility toward all
historically catholic practices. (Hutton, pp. 315-319)
In an ironic twist it seems that the radical Reformation's
anti-catholic hostility nurtured or created the ostensible pagan
ritual forms it sought to stamp out by destroying 'papistic'
practices.
Non-fire Rituals:
As for dancing and making floral arrangements, these are
documented not only of Midsummer from the 1200s on, but of every
other holiday in England and Europe in general. There is more than
ample evidence that the greenery chosen and the dance styles depended
mostly on local availability and social fads set by royalty. Even
with abundant evidence of the variety and changeable nature of these
features of holidays many claims are projected back on the past that
these things necessarily reflect a uniform monolithic pagan ritual
presence that predates Christianity--usually claimed to be Celtic in
origin.
Claims of Celtic origins are handy because the Celts left no
written records to contradict the Neopagans and Wiccans.
The first document to note that the night is good for contacting
fairies appears to be Lady Francesca Speranza (Jane) Wilde's 1887
book
Ancient
Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland. p.
195f.
Her research otherwise seems to be based on Hislop's equating of
pagan England with Ba'al worship of ancient Babylon.
St. Elsewhere
At this point we need to consider St. Eligius (588-660) because he
is often cited as proof of the antiquity of such rituals on St.
John's Eve'. The one sentence quotation is often cited without
context from St. Ouen's (609-86) biography of Eligius. The section
says:
Before all else, I denounce and contest,
that you shall observe no sacrilegious pagan customs. For no cause or
infirmity should you consult magicians, diviners, sorcerers or
incantators, or presume to question them because any man who commits
such evil will immediately lose the sacrament of baptism. Do not
observe auguries or violent sneezing or pay attention to any little
birds singing along the road. If you are distracted on the road or at
any other work, make the sign of the cross and say your Sunday
prayers with faith and devotion and nothing inimical can hurt you. No
Christian should be concerned about which day he leaves home or which
day he returns because God has made all days. No influence attaches
to the first work of the day or the [phase of the] moon; nothing is
ominous or ridiculous about the Calends of January. [Do not] make
[figures of?] vetulas, little deer or iotticos or set tables at night
or exchange New Years' gifts or supply superfluous drinks. No
Christian believes impurity or sits in incantation, because the work
is diabolic. No Christian on the feast of
Saint John or the solemnity of any other saint performs solestitia
[solstice rites?] or dancing or leaping or diabolical chants. No
Christian should presume to invoke the name of a demon, not Neptune
or Orcus or Diana or Minerva or Geniscus or believe in these inept
beings in any way. No one should observe Jove's day in idleness
without holy festivities not in May or any other time, not days of
larvae or mice or any day but Sunday. [emphasis added]
(Saint
Ouen of Rouen: The Life of Saint Eligius,
Book 2,
sec. 16)
The bolded sentence above is the one sentence that modern pagans
and others quote. Two things are important to note:
First, St. John's day, while named, is placed among the rest of
the saints' days in the year in this reference.
The second is that the word "solestitia" is fairly
unique. It could be a variant of "solstitia" which
translates as "solstices" or even "summer"
[compare Herman Hagen's
note
on this term in a late manuscript of Vergil]. Or, since it is in
context with dancing and leaping, it could mean "standing in
isolation" derived from "sole" and "statio."
However, many websites repeat the quotation isolated from context
in these words:
No Christian on the feast of Saint John or
the solemnity of any other saint performs solestitia
[summer solstice rites] or dancing or leaping or diabolical
chants.
[wikipedia,
witchesofthecraft,
pagan-place,
timessquare,
etc...]
Notice the interpretation of
solestitia as "summer
solstice rites". This has become the fixed interpretation of the
word only in modern times from Neopagan and Wiccan sources.
When read in context St. Eligius's words show a wide breadth of
concern in many different areas. Even the sentence in question is
much broader than just St. John's day.
Summary
While there were several areas documented throughout Europe that
had fire burning on this night and games associated with this night,
the evidence comes from long after the Christianization of these
areas. Such evidence might indicate old pagan practices, or it just
might represent common cross- cultural practices. Jacob Grimm (listed
above) notes that fires were common on Shrove Tuesday, the first
Sunday in Lent, Easter, May Eve and the days around and after May
Eve, St. John's Nativity, St. Peter and Paul's, and on several other
spring to late summer days as well as other church festivals, such as
Christmas.
Certainly many of the rituals recorded were superstitions outside
the Christian faith. But superstition does not necessarily come from
long ancient uniform practice. But since all the testimony comes from
the 11
th century AD and later one cannot help but think
that these claimed “ancient pagan” practices were not so ancient,
and not so uniform and monolithic.
During the Reformation, especially in England many of fire
traditions were either invented or re-invented for the purpose of
making a ritual distinction between Roman Catholic and Reformed
Protestant. These rituals actually would come to be more
intrinsically identified with the celebration of the historic
liturgical festivals, like St. John's Nativity than with any possible
pagan roots.
This is not to say that some of these traditions today are not
pagan. Many have been re-purposed for that very reason, to assert
what is hoped to be an ancient pagan past that could give life
meaning to the modern pagan.
Just because the modern pagans claim something is theirs doesn't
mean it is.
Pr. Joseph Abrahamson of Clearwater Lutheran Parish-Northwestern MN
