The songs
Come and Be Welcome - 3:25 - Heather Dale
The Beggar - 4:06 - Paddy Hernon
Come and Be Welcome is a fairly new song, recorded in 2009 by Heather Dale and her husband Ben Deschamps from Toronto. This recording is from the above album, The Green Knight. The song was written by Emily Holbert, a fellow member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. They are a group that tries to learn about medieval times by living it in a fantasy world of medieval ladies and wenches, bold knights and noble lords.
Heather and Ben live the lifestyle in more ways than one. Even when they are not dressed in medieval garb with their fellow SCA members, Heather is a modern professional wandering minstrel. I first encountered her about 15 years ago at a house concert here in Victoria. She has a very charismatic personality and I felt privileged to listen and watch here in the intimate confines of a living room, and she transported me musically to a fantasy version of the middle ages.
This isn’t like listening to early music where performers great pains to research their target time period and then try to emulate, as much as they can, what music sounded like hundreds of years ago. As you can hear from this song, this music takes you to a fantasy world of medieval times, or the court of King Arthur. it is performed for modern ears and musical sensibilities.
Heather isn’t just a one-trick-pony musically. She also records calming meditative songs and other non-medieval/fantasy songs. Stepping out of the pagan mode that is my theme for this series I’d like to share with you a video of her multi-lingual version of Canada’s only international big hit Christmas Carols, Iesous Ahatonnia (The Huron Carol) click on the following image:
But now back to Come and Be Welcome. In the song, she is musically playing the role of the lord or lady in a castle, and I think accurately conveys the fact that in the days before modern communication, wandering minstrels, storytellers, persons on pilgrimage, or even travelers from a nearby manor would be welcome for the news of the outside world and entertainment that they have to share.
In The Beggar Paddy Hernon conveys the same message, but in the context of a much lower stratum in society. Being likeable and a good storyteller assures anyone a warm welcome. This is the title song from his below 1973 vinyl album. Most of the other songs on it are traditional English or Irish folk songs, two are more recent songs that he picked up in his travels, and only this one is a song that he himself composed.
Paddy was a modern traveling minstrel himself for 12 years but he now lives here in Victoria. I know him from being a fellow folksinger with a penchant for nautical ballads, forebitters and shanties. In my case, I need to carry my songbook handy for the lyrics. (I have a pretty good memory for melodies, but my memory seems to refuse to hold on to song lyrics.) Paddy, on the other hand, has a vast repertoire of folk songs in his head. And while my sole nautical qualification for singing songs of the sea is that I occasionally ride a ferry to the mainland or a smaller island, Paddy is a qualified Master Mariner.
Paddy told me about this early recording when I described this project to him when it was still in an embryonic stage. I asked him if he had anything that would fit my theme and he told me about The Beggar. I told him it sounded perfect. He no longer has a master copy of the recording so he recorded this one from his copy of the vinyl.
Paddy doesn’t need to join SCA to live the fantasy dream. He captains and lives aboard his 65’, tops'l schooner, Blarney Pilgrim.
Essay: Ancient Origins Part 6: Introduction to folkloric study, general of Yuletide customs, and midwinter greenery [word count 3802]
This essay will be quite different from the previous essays in this Ancient Origins series (and not just because it is even longer than the others.) They have each focused on the state of humanity during a particular time period, and peoples’ prevailing spiritual world-views related to midwinter and the winter solstice during that time period.
This one also has a particular time-period in mind – the late medieval, or middle ages from about 1000 to 1500 -- but the reason for using a time period is quite different. I chose the middle ages because we have a fair amount of written documentation about it and because is recent enough that we can supplement the written record with what we can glean from folklore. The written record is quite incomplete and it has a class bias. It records the life and times of the high-born, but very little about the common people.
It is a time when the Roman Catholic church was unified and powerful in Western Europe, and was absolutely dominant in western society. It was not safe to have any other religion in most countries. For that reason we have little or no knowledge about the actual religious beliefs and practices of Pagans (if any) in northern Europe at that time.
There is a general perception that people who were animists or who practiced folk medicine were frequently burnt as witches. Actually, that is quite an exaggeration. Yes people were accused of witches witches and executed as recently as 1684 in England, but it was usually because someone with influence made a false accusation against a person that they didn’t like for some totally unrelated reason. If practice, the number of people who executed as witches pales in comparison to the number of people who were accused and killed for alleged heresy. The real animists could easily survive by dutifully attending mass every Sunday and keeping their mouths shut about Catholic theology.
We have quite a bit of information about social and cultural ritual-like midwinter and solstice customs that do not appear to be linked to the beliefs of Catholicism. For the geographic area of my ancestors, this includes remnants from earlier explicitly-Pagan Celtic, Germanic, Norse or Roman cultures and religion.
My premise is that if we find cultural/social remnants of pre-Christian ritual activities during medieval times related to midwinter celebration that are not related to Catholic beliefs, and the same or similar practices are still with us today, we can take that as being indicative of possible survival of ancient pagan practices and beliefs. This applies whether the practices reflect pagan polytheism or animism. (Note that this is not the same as saying that the practice of Paganism as a religion continued during that time; that is beyond the scope of my research or this analysis.)
For this to work I need to show that the ritual-like customs were active both now or recently, and in medieval times, and that they have at least a plausible case for having originated as elements of pagan practice. They cannot be functional requirements of the midwinter season for medieval times, and they cannot have a basis in Catholic theological belief as it was that time.
If that sounds confusing to you, I understand. It sounds confusing to me too. But I think it will make more sense once I get started, which will be pretty soon now.
I’ll jump to the end here and tell you my conclusion. I think that there is ample evidence to show that pagan elements survived as important cultural elements during medieval times, and still survive today. This is despite attitudes towards pagan practices and beliefs that ranged from antipathy to downright hostility from the all-powerful Catholic church leadership in the intervening period.
If that sounds self-evident to you then this essay will just reinforce your current beliefs. We can all use validation of our beliefs, so read on. I will go into excruciating detail validating you.
Instead of organizing this essay somewhat chronologically, as with the previous Ancient Origins essays, this one will begin a series of sub-essays discussing ancient, medieval and current activities and practices rooted in paganism.
Winter solstice as the beginning of the annual cycle
There is no religious reason for the Catholic Church to have wanted the midwinter season (or more accurately, when the solstice could be confirmed by observation) to be celebrated as the beginning of the new year. And there is even less reason that they would want the new year to be celebrated as a secular holiday rather than as a religious holy day.
If the Church had wanted some religious basis for the date of the new year a much better choice would have been in the Spring. That would conform to the Jewish calendar which, since about 600 years BCE, places Rosh Hashanah in the Springtime. more importantly, it would also relate more closely to the probable time of year described for Christ’s birth in the New Testament.
As any shepherd could have told the Church officials (if they had bothered to ask such a humble person) the most likely time that shepherds would be tending their sheep out in the fields at night would be during the Springtime lambing season. That is when sheep can gorge on the freshly flourishing grass. The flock would never be out in midwinter when grass hardly grows at all in the lands around Judea. They would be securely kept sheltered below the shepherds homes where their winter fodder was kept, and their collective warmth would help keep the peoples home above them warmer.
Instead, in the middle ages the Church officials in Rome continued to time the new year according to the Roman Julian calendar that had been established in 46 BCE. That calendar began the new year just after the winter solstice, and the New Year festival of Kalends was celebrated with licentious behavior. The 4th century Greek scholar Libanius recorded that almost everyone stayed up on Kalends Eve to usher in the new year with drinking and revelry.
Lavish parties were held in the homes of the wealthy and drunken crowds roamed through the streets partying. The celebration culminated at the stroke of midnight (as marked by the water-clock) with singing, noisemaking, and people kissing each other. (Sound familiar?) The people returned to their homes near daybreak to install seasonal greenery for the next day's festivities, then they slept off their night's over-indulgence and got ready for the final and most-beloved days of the midwinter season.
The five-day Kalends festival was filled with the biggest and most important gladiatorial games and chariot races of the whole year. That kind of secular celebration for the new year has continued has continued to this day, except we have replaced gladiatorial contests with football on television.
From a religious perspective the New Year festivities had no religious meaning, for the pagan Romans or for the Christians. Even for the Roman emperors, the midwinter season that began with the start of Saternalia on Dec 17 had too much partying. Both the Emperor Augustus and the Emperor Caligula tried to get people to tone it down, but they were unsuccessful. And those were rulers who were not taking no for an answer.
The Church could have fixed this any time after they became the de facto political leaders of Europe in the early middle ages. That happened to coincide with when the celebration of Christmas was beginning to become very popular because of the rapid grown of a Christian cult among the newly-converted northern European pagans. They saw Jesus’ mother Mary as a surrogate for the very popular chief goddesses that conversion was forcing them to abandon. (It is hard to suddenly become a patriarchal monotheist when your world-view has always expected male-female duality.)
They had another perfect opportunity when they adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, when they were just past the height of their power. That was also a time when such a move would have been helpful in fending off the emerging Protestant Reformation’s accusations that the Church wasn’t religious enough. They could have moved the beginning of the new year to the religiously very-meaningful day of the crucifixion, or on Easter, the day they celebrated Christ’s resurrection. But they didn’t. Perhaps the pagan meaningfulness of the winter solstice was still too great even then.
General ways of celebrating the midwinter season
The Roman Catholic Church had first identified Dec 25 as being the day of Jesus’ birth in 336, although as mentioned above popular celebration of Christmas didn’t begin until the early middle ages. Before medieval times even Christians continued to celebrate the midwinter in the old secular manner. For a very interesting 4:00 video about the selection of Dec 25 as Christmas click on the following image:
During early medieval times the population became Christian in almost all Western countries (often by order of their kings.) Over time the Church was quite successful at getting people to change the name of the midwinter seasons’ holidays to local-language equivalents of Christmas, St. Stephen’s Day, Saint Lucy’s Day, Epiphany, etc. However, the manner in which the midwinter season was celebrated changed very little during that time. As far as I know, then as now, Catholics attended mass on Christmas Day itself, but other than the usual daily or weekly masses no other named days required special religious observance.
While the names of the midwinter days changed, the records of the royal court, and those for manor houses of those not noble enough to attend court at Christmastime, show that the same types of activities continues as before. In the great halls and at court, Christmastide was an occasion for carnival-like processions by the nobility and their entourages, hunts, jousting tournaments and other sporting contests between the knights, as well as lavish feasts and entertainment which included masquing and mumming. The medieval tradition of serving boar at the Christmas Eve feast probably descended from the old Anglo-Saxon custom of sacrificing a boar to Freyja, the goddess of fertility, at that time of year.
Even today, almost all of what we think of as Christmas customs all have antecedents in pagan times (except for nativity crèche scenes, which were first introduced in about 1200.)
On the other hand, whatever the culture, midwinter was a natural time for feasting, especially on meat. Herd animals have a tendency to multiply in the summertime. It is what they do naturally, and what the farmers want them to do. But the ability to feed them in the fields diminishes in the fall and drops to near-zero during the winter. The herd has to be culled to whatever level of winter fodder there is in storage.
Any slaughtered meat that was not eaten or used for animal sacrifice would otherwise go to waste. November had always been the primary time of the year when animal sacrifices were made. Christianity was not into animal sacrifice but the herd had to be culled according to the same tough economic logic. So the midwinter feasts got just bigger. So in that regard, I suppose that you could say that becoming Christian did have an effect on people’s midwinter celebrations.
Midwinter greenery
As far as I know, Christianity has no ritual or symbolic meaning attributed to coniferous trees or to other evergreen plants. In fact, except for in few rare instances (like palm leaves and branches at Easter, and harvest bounty in the fall) greenery and plants are not a part of Catholic religious theology or practice. As with many other types of objects, different flowers and plants have long had symbolic meaning in religious art. But this artistic symbolism is part of a broad movement by artists and much/most of the symbolism itself derives from pagan roots.
In medieval times, and continuing today, churches were decorated with swags and garlands of greenery for Christmas, but this appears to have been for esthetic rather than religious purposes, to make the space seem more festive than during the rest of the year. In choosing greenery to do so, the churches were just following the common secular aesthetic for seasonal decoration for their times. But inadvertently or not, they were continuing a longstanding deep-rooted pagan custom of decorating with these materials.
All trees had strong symbolic meaning for pagans. Oaks and other hardwood deciduous trees were on the side summer and Life. Conifers were part of the realm of the winter spirits, who were on the side of Death in the conflicting duality that goes back to the very earliest days of pagan animism. The forces of winter, led by Death itself, represented a threat to humanity as well as to the spirits of Life. Walking through the forest in midwinter, conifers and other evergreen plants stand out behind the bare seemingly-lifeless branches of deciduous trees and bushes, and the withered remnants of summer plants.
I suspect that the origins of bringing evergreen boughs indoors is very ancient indeed; from long before the Christians, and possibly back to our hunter/gatherer or early agricultural ancestors who were near the coniferous forests in northern Europe. It was the only material available for fresh bedding in the wintertime, for animals or humans. Although they probably didn’t know about it, evergreen boughs also have strong anti-bacterial properties, and it makes a poor host material for vermin. It may be that Darwinian natural selection favoured people who regularly brought evergreen branches indoors.
The softness and smell of fresh evergreen branches also probably appealed to them. Their stickiness was probably a nuisance that they got used to, and it could a blessing for making pitch.) Tossing old or fresh evergreen branches into the fire was useless as far as cooking was concerned, but it made a lively display that I suspect elicited an entertaining tale from many storytellers.
One powerful animist winter spirit was the yew tree, which in medieval times was frequently planted in grave yards. But the most important terrestrial winter spirits were “King” Holly and “Queen” Ivy (who also represented the gender duality.) Both of these European plants are frequent and aggressive invasive plants here in Victoria where I live. Their prominent appearance in the forests during the winter indicated that they had dominance at that time of year. The summer spirits, led by the Sun in the sky, and King Oak on land, were obviously both in a feeble state during the wintertime.
[Long digression: At least some of the lyrics for the song The Holly and the Ivy are clearly from the Victorian era instead of medieval time, including the pseudo-medieval first part of the refrain Oh, the rising of the sun, and the running of the deer and the totally anachronistic last part of the refrain the playing of the merry organ, sweet singing in the choir. They didn’t have organs or choirs in medieval times. And despite the name, the characteristic of the ivy aren’t even mentioned in the song.
The Church did attribute symbolic meaning to colour, but then so did the pagans. The melody of the verse does sound somewhat archaic, and with the dark foreboding of future sacrifice, I think that the verses of the song have more of a pagan feel to them except for the heavy Catholic theology in the lyrics. The melody, attribution to colours in the seasonal changes to the flowers and berries, and the foreboding suggest that it is possible that the song might be derived from an ancient pagan song. But in that case, there must have been equal treatment for the genders to conform to the principles of duality.
Perhaps it is just the animist in me speaking, but I like to think that a good melody is indeed immortal, able to survive changing musical fashions. Perhaps the timing occasionally changes to match current dance fashions, or the song is given new lyrics when someone comes up with appealing new poetry, but the spirit (or soul) of the song lives on. Perhaps some of our current folk music, and pop music that is set to melodies from the public domain, is actually music that goes back to our very ancient ancestors. End of digression]
Humans were not neutral parties in the conflicting interests of the Summer and Winter spirits. They needed the revival of the mighty Sun and his fellow forest spirits of the large and useful deciduous trees and the other summer plants, to return life to the soil and the Earth. We know from archaeological evidence that early warriors would often bring back body-parts, especially heads, as gruesome souvenirs from their victims and erect them as trophies and/or as deterrents to attackers. I wonder if the hanging of evergreen swags and garlands may have been based on a similar ancient customs, indicating affiliation with the forces of Life and to express support for the friendly summer spirits.
In medieval times, Holly, Ivy, Bay and Rosemary were common greenery for decorating, whether in the royal palaces or in the homes of peasants. Branches from evergreen trees were less common, and mistletoe was not used at all. In the time of the Celts and their Nordic and Germanic counterparts, mistletoe had been a powerful but also a rare spirit that was on the side of the winter spirits. Yet for all Northern peoples the mistletoe was very sacred, and too useful as a medicine to be used as decoration.
Mistletoe is a semi-parasitic plant that keeps its leathery green leaves year-round. In the winter it bears white berries filed with juice that is the colour and texture of semen. It grows high in deciduous trees, whose leaves hide the mistletoe bunches during the summer and its bunches only become visible in autumn after the leaves have fallen. All Northern cultures associated mistletoewith the struggle between life and death. Harvesting it was like taking a trophy from Death itself.
For the Nordic and Germanic people mistletoe was very exotic (since it does not grow in Scandinavia or many Germanic forests.) For all of the northern tribes, the plant’s berries, or medicine made from it, was a very valuable trade good or plunder. In nordic and germanic polytheistic mythology it was known as the instrument by which Loki enabled the blind god Haldur to slay the otherwise invulnerable god Baldr. For them, mistletoe opened the door to the underworld and provided protection in the face of magic and illness.
The Celtic pagans are said to have believed mistletoe's slimy, sticky white winter berries were drops of semen from the cosmic bull that impregnated the fecund goddess Earth. The first century Roman historian Pliny the Elder documents how mistletoe was harvested with a golden sickle by white-robed, red-cloaked Druids from oak trees (where it rarely occurs) for use in midwinter sacrifices of white bulls and in the making of powerful fertility elixirs and as an aphrodisiac.
[Note: Here is what mistletoe “rarely occurs” means, according to the well-researched article from which I got the above photo: “Oaks are one of the most populous trees in France but a study in the last century found just fifteen mistletoe bearing trees across the whole nation; a ratio of roughly one mistletoe oak per 10,000km² of forest.”]
I can think of no reason why Christians would ever have been able to imbue mistletoe with Christian meaning in medieval times when its pagan meaning was still in people’s consciousness, and it was still in wise women’s medicine kits. The “ancient” custom of kissing under mistletoe is actually quite recent, first documented in 18th century England when Christmas out of favour for religious people and only louts celebrated the holiday. Although it has nothing to do with Christianity, the revivers did accurately hearken back to the plant’s ancient association with sexuality and fertility.
I can’t not mention the beautiful smell of evergreens indoors at wintertime! Our family always had live Christmas trees when I was a child, and I still associate the smell of those trees with the midwinter holiday. But I don’t associate the smell with Christianity. As far as I know, the only odors that Christianity has ever considered to be symbolic are frankincense incense, and blessed unguents for the sacrament that is administered by priests to people who are about to die (called Extreme Unction) which may itself have roots in pagan ritual. Although I have heard some fanciful stories about the origins of the Christmas tree being related to Christianity, but I think of the decorated trees as being entirely a secular symbol.
Christmas wreaths have now become one of the most common Christmas evergreen decorations, and they are still frequently made from natural materials. According to this Time Magazine article such wreaths have clear pagan roots:
Before the wreath became associated with Christmas, it was a prominent emblem of victory and power in ancient Greece and Rome. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, after the nymph Daphne rejected the god Apollo and escaped from him by turning into a laurel tree, Apollo says, “Since you cannot be my wife, you shall surely be my tree. O laurel, I shall for ever have you in my hair, on my lyre and quiver.” The passage inspired art such as the marble statue “Apollo Crowning Himself,” reinforcing the imagery of Roman and Grecian gods donning the green crown.
The wreath had a similar symbolism among non-deities. Mireille M. Lee, in Body, Dress, and Identity in Ancient Greece, writes, “Athletes who were victorious at the Panhellenic games were crowned with wreaths of olives (Olympia), laurel (Delphi), wild celery (Nemea), and pine (Isthmia).” Outside of competitions, a crown of leaves or flowers also represented honor and joy. The wreath was described as “the ornament of the priest in the performance of sacrifice, of the hero on his return from victory, of the bride at her nuptials, and of the guests at a feast.”
The circle itself is not generally used as a Christian religious symbol, nor as a Christmas symbol. But circles and spirals are definitely ancient pagan symbols. The very word Yule represents the midwinter holidays and may come from the Germanic and Nordic words for wheel. Since the introduction of that invention in bronze-age times the wheel has been used by northern European pagans as a metaphor for the changing turning of the seasons.
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