YULETIDE/CHRISTMAS: A GERMANIC CELEBRATION
Our perceptions of Nature
Even if it were lost to us, surely we must create it again: Holynights, this most joyous festival of the year. At the very least, since our folk immerse themselves more and more in the International Capitalist monoculture, we must rediscover it.
For the last few weeks of autumn, it burns in all its magnificence. All of its splendor has wound down into golden or red fruit, the last of the light-filled bouquet and the beautiful golden-brown groves. “All shedding takes us with a festive spirit.” Says nature and the beloved poet Hoelderin. Then came the wetness, the fog and the cool moisture. During the night came the chill hoar frost, the first frost that ends all the flowers and blackens all colors. All life retreats as it were into itself, back into the earth. It folds itself up as if into a great overcoat; veiling itself in a death-still shroud of mist and peacefulness. And so man sees the the death in nature and retreats into his home to contemplate his own death.
It has now become white in the countryside. On many mornings the cracking of the frost is heard, and it becomes colder and darker. The days always become shorter, the nights ever longer, always deader fading further into death, growing stiff and more frozen outside. One is always tied to the house, always more in one’s own room. One is always more dependent and more atrocious appear one’s thoughts. What if one is without a home? a roof? a house? without fire? or so the mind wanders otherwise down gloomy avenues should the wintertime persist.
And the sun has almost left us. We do not see it all day. And if it indeed finally comes late in the morning, it raises itself with difficulty barely over the horizon. So that man must worry about whether it will make it over the horizon or perhaps it will fail to rise one day.
But then again it is still nice in the house. The parents are close and near the children, so homely and cozy with one another. Something of a premonition is also in us, that it thus will not remain as it is outside the house. A belief is in us that the sun is indeed able to manage without any trouble. And the father or mother explains that it was always so. A secret joy overcomes the children not loud or noisy at all, a real quiet that we know about, it will be warm, green and blooming again! How enchanted everything from our ancestors is in the middle of the icy cold, that it will be entirely different again. Also, amongst us and before one another do we secretly remain full of mysteries and also keep fuller of surprises. We sing well too, not wild and loud, especially with full reverence and we prepare ourselves festively for a large moment.
When the children are aware of it and have experienced often enough or the parents explain from their experience that exactly on a certain day, when hope is smallest, the sun will rise again. We explain this through allegory, through symbolism, through a custom that on the night of change, the evening of the shortest day and longest night we kindle a light to honor the sun. We may light a great fire on a mountain, gather around it to let our gratitude rise and sing a song of faith to the eternal victory of light. Then we have managed to express our perception anew through Yuletide. In the most important ways we have done exactly as was done by our ancestors without thinking. It has been handed down to us and we actually still celebrate it today for the same reason.
The natural basis of the Celebration
Yuletide/Christmas as a celebration is as old as the Germanic essence is in the world. This is managed by remaining unclouded and undisconcerted in our feelings. Our ancestors did thus to remain true to the older and more holy celebrations coming from a greater depth and such customs are more solidly bound within our essence. The holiday is then strengthened until on this day an unshakeable custom is set with a number of special practices that have grown around it.
The Germanic Yuletide celebration thus forms an entire basis of a particular nature. In the initial stages of their life our ancestors searched. There they were still a folk in child-hood: young, searching and inquiring not simply for their basic needs, consumption, spoils, or accumulation of riches. What was much more important to them in the mystery of nature was to penetrate into the essence of life. And they found order there: the most valuable and loftiest in their eyes. It can also be said that they found natural laws pertaining to all life. Human desires and self-serving hopes stood far under these laws. The order appears to them as worthy of admiration. They worship it as divine.
To them the order of the world was through the course of the year: summer and winter in their eternal alternation. It is immutable. And it depends on the sun itself. Their light and their warmth was in the north of Europe, in our ancestors’ homeland, in distinction and contrast to the southern areas not at all too amply allocated. They judged and admired it more highly, also. They yearned for her more in the winter too. The year was, as it were, expired in the winter. Then the course of the year began anew. And thusly the celebration was placed at this time of the turning. No, not just a celebration was it that they assigned to this date! This was the holy, divine, reverent order in the course of the year that is the most sacred and joyful. Its occasion was a somewhat mysterious and set apart for their ancestors. It was one of their most intimate festivals.
But this order, stemming from the inter-relation of the sun and earth, and assigned already quite early as an exact calendar, as it were, also as an unwritten calendar that was not the only one seems remarkable to them. Just as important to them was the other order, after which human life itself, alone, preserves through the alternation and permanent redemption of the lineage that they die and become born anew to eternity. In the full and especially early winter many people always die. In the winter and in spring many children are also born. In thoughts they live much more closely bound with they dead as we do today. The love for their large, numerous, strong families was greater also. So the time of the turn-around was the renewal of the course of the year quite especially for the memory of the dead but also suited for the joy of the children. Our ancestors also have these memories and this pleasure on the subject of the celebration.
These three great life-affirming pillars were the foundations on which our ancestors based their Holy Night’s Festival. On these three pillars rested their deepest beliefs which were celebrated in their festival. These three things were celebrated in deepest winter- yet still bound to the house as we are today- as the truly god-given foundation of life.
Something of tradition
Children must always outwardly express what they inwardly experience. They cannot simply think about something in silence as with older people. They must cheer or sing, or dance or become reverently quite still or else the experienced image will leave. The grown-ups handle it in a similar manner also so long as Folk were in the condition of earlier youth and more complete natural conditions. They arranged things in accordance with what they thought. In art forms, in poetic images and tales, through their own plot or game and the great immortal things which they recognize through a repeat of their childhood. One generation borrows it from the others. Later generations extend everything well also. But in essence they remain century by century loyal to the tradition. We describe these games, tales, practices and actions (folkways) that have been continually passed on as tradition.
There has never been a Germanic festival of the year that is so rich and diverse that it moves us as if we were under the spell of the Yuletide tradition. It has actually come down to us with so many foreign Christian elements that have nothing to do with its primeval Germanic origins that the need has arisen to re-acquaint ourselves with this tradition and its symbols. Then as deeply engrained in our hearts as this tradition is, we will fully comprehend it as it grips our souls once again.
In the Middle Ages, the holiday was known as “Ze wihen Nachten” (Middle High German). It was called as such because it took place in the solemn and sacred Nights, hence Holy Nights, these twelve nights remaining so to speak with the balance of the month. Our forefathers mentioned at this time the calendar as it were named “between the years”. So at the temporal standstill of the year lies the quietest time of nature, in the middle of its greatest, quietest sleep. Nobody is allowed to interfere with this quietness, neither weapons nor noise. Life and death extend its head in this stillness. It merges imperceptibly into one another. The dead were around it and their thoughts were consecrated but also the great gods of the world: Odin/Wotan rider of the white horse; and lady Berchta the radiant, shining; Mother Holle the good lady in whose lap rests the future of life; not in the end but even the sun, the light itself that in all stillness now becomes born again. As the Edda says: “A daughter births the bright goddess, before she chokes the wolf—“ a new sun is borne from the old sun, the old year, before the wolfsmoon, the Yule month, month of the dead, the “December”, to swallow the old sun. That the birth of a child as a symbolic rebirth of the sun is deep-lying symbolism that is many thousands of years old.
The traditions around the Holy Nights are innumerable. The Pelzmaerte, Ruprecht, Nicholas, all are transformations of the One, the All-Ruler, of the lord of life and death, of the sunriders to lead it on. His horse is fed on the holy evening only by fodder left before the door. In reality he never brushes us with his tail, but we are blessed by him on his ride among the living. He is also the rider of the White Horse, who can still be seen going about many places. In Sweden, the white-Adorned Luzia, Kindred of lady Berchta, trots proudly with a halo of splendid brilliance. In neighboring lands of the Germanic world and old Nordic India He kindles the celebration of the rebirth of the sun with a new flame. Through the whirlwind of friction between one piece of wood and another he creates a spark. This spark was the child of light. Also, as the son of the god, the light, he is the “son of god”. All of the festive spirit of the Holy Nights revolves around this. All joy, all feelings of gratitude, happiness, all of the suspense and eager anticipation does as well. Also the joy of giving which suffuses our life, that returning light, is beheld in the reborn and ascendant sun. To that end all the symbols of life and its overcoming of death are tied to the “Mother” (The Anglo-Saxons know the largest night of the year as “mothernight”.) and “child”.
From there the German soul takes a bold turn: from the focus of life on earth to the greater order of the universe. It grips us and holds us with an especially deep symbolic picture within our tradition: The images of the Yule tree.
In our homeland there are few plants that remain green in winter. The pine is the most impressive and mightiest amongst them. So the evergreen tree becomes the picture of the symbol of eternal progress, the uninterrupted cycle of life. It was brought in from the wintry forest, but not for the entire winter. No, it was only brought in for the celebration of reborn and ascendant life.
The worldview of our ancestors was not a primitive, dull legend of the creation of the world. It was also not an astronomic- mathematical system as if inquiring into the lawfulness of the universe. It was a view of life, a poetic view of all life in a great simile that clarified and made it all understandable. It compares the universe poetically and pictorially as a tree. It was a world yew. Their tribe was, as it were the ash of the Universe. The tribe bore a mighty crown and on an equally mighty rootstock. In the living space of this tree were brought among it energies friendly and hostile to life in the world. Something of order and something of chaos was in it. All low and high qualities of humanity and also the revealed destiny of life and and the universe were therein. When our ancestors brought in and beheld the Yule tree, the fir, as a traditional part of the Holy Nights they beheld not only an evergreen symbol, but a smaller image of the greater allegory represented by the evergreen world-yew.
Then you feel the fir associated with both the symbolic embellishment of the Holy Nights tradition and the persistent image of life represented by the world tree. It is ornamented with fertility symbols. It shows its apples and golden nuts. It is the ancient alder that was Odin’s original steed. It bears its representations of the sacred pair and the babe all baked in holiday pastries. Into this living space of the world tree come the eagle and the deer, the swan and the hen, and many more besides. As important and indispensable ornaments on every tree are the lights that represent the returning sun. In the different regions of Germany there are also other symbols. So in place of the fir as the evergreen plant of the box tree or also the holly tree and the place of the fir as a reflection of the world tree of the pyramid of Holy Nights and others. But the fir is the most beautiful symbol. It is the deepest symbol as in the soul in the soul of the Germans as they had the furthest space to conquer. As a thousand years ago the German wanderers everywhere moved in the world, they also took their Yule traditions, as today they took the custom of the Yule tree throughout the world with themselves in the hottest and most southerly regions.
In Relation to History
It must still be said that in spite of centuries passing and countless attempts to replace or subvert the festival of the Holy Nights we have always remained loyal and receive the spirit anew in our hearts. It is not the scholars with their books about the tradition. It is not the church with their Christian celebration of Christmas. It is also not the calendar with its division of time and not the businesses with their offers of countless gifts. It is alone the German mother and everything that goes with her. Each and every tradition she holds and with her the German children are the tale. For she holds and molds the life of the children. She builds the home-life and forges the character of their kind. Through all times and seasons they should always stay deeply loyal to those of their own Germanic race.
It is a widely circulated view that the Yule/Christmas festival, Holy Nights is an ecclesiastical celebration that had found its entrance in Europe with Christianity. The church itself describes the festival as a celebration of Christ and of his teachings; that on this day Jesus of Nazareth was born. This view and teaching is false. The day and year of the birth of the Nazarene are completely uncertain today. The day itself in the first century of our calendar was unknown. In the oldest documents he once received the twenty-fifth of March, twentieth of April, twentieth of May and from the church father Clemens even the eighteenth of November was given. Beginning in the year 325, the year of the Council of Nicea, Yule/Christmas was mentioned as an ecclesiastical celebration in church records. But also at this time it was still not standard practice for all parishes to celebrate the festival. We know from documents that in Rome the pope Julius, who resided from 337 to 352, interpreted the resolution that it would normally be celebrated in Rome during the winter solstice, the celebration of the birth of the sun god Mithras; which would be replaced by the Christian festival. He explained the day of the solstice as the day of the birth of Christ.
This timely starting point of Christianity was arranged through the cult of Mithra. Since the third century the Winter Solstice was celebrated as the day of the invincible “Sol” who was looked upon as the opponent of the bull-sacrificing Mithras. From the earliest occasions the Christian celebration had features in common with the cult of Mithra such as the birth, worship through a shepherd and teacher of the resurrection of flesh. So it was thus difficult to put up a barrier against this competitor. A few years later the church father had to explain: “ We celebrate on the twenty-fifth of December, not because of the birth of the sun, as the unbelievers do, but because of the birth of him who created the sun.”
Even as late as December of the year 1935, the “Osservatore Romano”, journal of the Vatican, described the official time of the pope, the practice of putting up a tree of light in celebration of Holy Nights as a “remnant of the pagan custom of nature”. He called it “exotic” and a “Protestant fashion” and this same circle speaks of a “Christmas tree” today.
The comparison of the Winter Solstice and New Year’s tradition of the Indo-Germanic folk amounts to the most important ritual act which was at this time. Each fire and spark to light of the sacral fire needs fire to regenerate it as in regard to a symbolic sun and fire of heaven. No fire was allowed to burn before the new fire of the village community was lit. This winter solstice ritual act of these times was to extinguish each and every fire and light and make a new fire generated between two pieces of wood, symbolizing the sun and the heavenly fire. This Winter Solstice ritual act can be indicated by the old Indo-Germanic heathendom. They ordered themselves, the people of world events and followed the eternal law of nature. Because they believed the sun, that central fire of the world, expired at the Winter Solstice, it must also then be born anew.
Very early on church councils and commissions decreed that tree-worship was forbidden. At this time there were several particular prohibitions made against setting up lights near trees, springs or wells. These things played a role in the heathen honoring of the Holy Nights tree.
The experience that forms the basis for the myths of the Winter Solstice and that the cult seeks to swear is the beholding enrapturement. It is no doubt that Christianity ordered this experience of the soul. After the Christian teachings there is not a “display of deity” on earth but only in the afterworld. The heathen religion, however, knows appearances of gods through the “aura”, the cloud of gleaming, flowing radiance is excellent.
We ask thus according to the origin of the worship of trees and the myth of the apple tree as we will grant to Germanic antiquity. In the worship, in accordance to the world tree, the tree of light of Yule is the most perfect arrangement of the Germanic tree worship.
Published in ‘Die Nordische Zeitung’ (Nordic Journal). Used with permission.
Written by Hertha Simmel.
Translation by Berkley Harbin and Michael Boyd.