Pagan Christmas Quotes

Santa Claus has nothing to do with it," the latke said. "Christmas and Hanukah are completely different things." "But different things can often blend together," said the pine tree. "Let me tell you a funny story about pagan rituals.

Actually Grandad Christmas is a pagan holiday and Jesus probably hates you for celebrating it.

You have a famous relative. Family tradition has it we descend from St. Nicholas.” “Santa Claus? I thought he was make-believe.” “He is, but the person Santa Claus is based on is real. St. Nicholas of Myra was a fourth-century bishop—and a fine human being. He served in Turkey.

Pope Gregory I (in 601) laid the church’s strategy out quite plainly. As he wrote to Mellitus, his missionary in England, “[Do] not…stop such ancient pagan festivities…adapt them to the rites of the Church, only changing the reason of them from a heathen to a Christian impulse.

It has been said that Christmas is for children; but as the years of childhood fancy pass away and an understanding maturity takes their place, the simple teaching of the Savior that ‘it is more blessed to give than to receive’ (Acts 20:35) becomes a reality. The evolution from a pagan holiday transformed into a Christian festival to the birth of Christ in men’s lives is another form of maturity that comes to one who has been touched by the gospel of Jesus Christ.

To those Romans December twenty-fifth was the birthday of the sun. They wrote that in gold letters in their calendar. Every year about that time, the middle of winter, the sun was born once more and it was going to put an end to the darkness and misery of winter. So they had a great feast, with presents and dolls for everybody, and the best day of all was December twenty-fifth. That feast, they would tell you, was thousands of years old- before Christ was ever heard of.

Most Christian holidays were Pagan holidays first. Christmas trees and Easter eggs have absolutely nothing to do with Jesus. They are Pagan symbols. Christianity is thinly disguised Paganism.

If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family.

On Christmas. "Santa Claus represents God on assistance," said Clyde. "Santa Claus is a negative-idealed god, the pagan god of material worship," Leon stated. "Christmas means the rebirth, regeneration. Some people have Christmas every day. The Christmas tree stands up and either the wife trims it or they trim it together with righteous-idealed sexual intercourse. Or the husband prays to God through his Christmas tree and trims his bodily Christmas tree. Christ-mast; the mast of Christ, the upstanding penis—that's what it means to me." "Santa Claus is a good symbolization for Christmas," said Joseph. "Department stores, shopping, the coming of the New Year. Christmas means better business in the stores.

She isn’t simply unafraid of a good fight, she lives for it, and will often actively go looking for a fight. This is what differentiates your run-of-the-mill fighter from a crusader. The Warrior Princess Submissive is no shrinking violet. She is that dyed-in-the-wool Republican who attends the Democratic National Convention wearing a Rand Paul t-shirt. She is the African-American woman who invites herself to a Ku Klux Klan rally without a hood... and hands out business cards to everyone there. She is the woman who invites the Jehovah's Witnesses into her home and feeds them dinner, just for the opportunity to defend Christmas - even though she may be a Pagan. When the other girls in high school or college were trying out for the pep squad or cheerleading, she set her sights on the debate team. While her friends agonize over how to “fit in” socially, she is war gaming ideas on how to change society to fit her ideals and principles. Are you someone she considers to be immoral or evil? Run. She will eviscerate you.

My darling atheist,” she recalled telling him, “why do you help me decorate a Christmas tree to celebrate the birth of Christ?” He laughed. “This isn’t for Christians or for Christ, liebes Kind,” he said, “only for pagans like you and me. Anyway, it is very beautiful.

At the beginning of a new year, many people have nothing better to do than to make a list of bad deeds and resolve from now on—how many such “from-now-ons” have there already been!—to begin with better intentions, but they are still stuck in the middle of their paganism.

Ugh. Would that Christmas could just be, without presents. It is just so stupid, everyone exhausting themselves, miserably haemorrhaging money on pointless items nobody wants: no longer tokens of love but angst-ridden solutions to problems. [...] What is the point of entire nation rushing round for six weeks in a bad mood preparing for utterly pointless Taste-of-Others exam which entire nation then fails and gets stuck with hideous unwanted merchandise as fallout? If gifts and cards were completely eradicated, then Christmas as pagan-style twinkly festival to distract from lengthy winter gloom would be lovely. But if government, religious bodies, parents, tradition, etc. insist on Christmas Gift Tax to ruin everything why not make it that everyone must go out and spend £500 on themselves then distribute the items among their relatives and friends to wrap up and give to them instead of this psychic-failure torment?

For what, in actual practice, should the critical, mature modernist Christian do when, for instance, he gathers his children around him to celebrate Christmas? Should he read Luke's Christmas Gospel and sing the Christmas carols as if they were true, even though he believes them to be crude and primitive theology? After all, the rest of his society has no scruples about doing this, the pagans and the department stores. Or if this seems too cynical, too dishonest, ought he rather, in the manner of early socialist Sunday schools, to devise a passionately rationalist catechesis, swap German for German, chant a passage from Bultmann instead of 'Joy to the World!'; ought he rather to gather his little ones about the Crib, light the candles, and read Raymond Brown instead of St. Luke on the virginal conception of Jesus: 'My judgment in conclusion is that the totality of the scientifically controllable evidence leaves an unresolved problem.' How their eyes will shine, how their little hearts will burn within them as they hear these holy words! How touched they will all be as the littlest child reverently places a shining question mark in the empty manger. And how they will rejoice when they find their stockings, which they have hung up to a Protestant parody of a Catholic bishop, stuffed with subscriptions to 'Concilium,' 'Catholic Update,' 'National Catholic Reporter,' and 'The Tablet.

Like most people, when I look back, the family house is held in time, or rather it is now outside of time, because it exists so clearly and it does not change, and it can only be entered through a door in the mind. I like it that pre-industrial societies, and religious cultures still, now, distinguish between two kinds of time – linear time, that is also cyclical because history repeats itself, even as it seems to progress, and real time, which is not subject to the clock or the calendar, and is where the soul used to live. This real time is reversible and redeemable. It is why, in religious rites of all kinds, something that happened once is re-enacted – Passover, Christmas, Easter, or, in the pagan record, Midsummer and the dying of the god. As we participate in the ritual, we step outside of linear time and enter real time. Time is only truly locked when we live in a mechanised world. Then we turn into clock-watchers and time-servers. Like the rest of life, time becomes uniform and standardised. When I left home at sixteen I bought a small rug. It was my roll-up world. Whatever room, whatever temporary place I had, I unrolled the rug. It was a map of myself. Invisible to others, but held in the rug, were all the places I had stayed – for a few weeks, for a few months. On the first night anywhere new I liked to lie in bed and look at the rug to remind myself that I had what I needed even though what I had was so little. Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you. Why did I leave home when I was sixteen? It was one of those important choices that will change the rest of your life. When I look back it feels like I was at the borders of common sense, and the sensible thing to do would have been to keep quiet, keep going, learn to lie better and leave later. I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it. And here is the shock – when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, then you do not experience great joy and huge energy. You are unhappy. Things get worse. It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded. And then all the cowards come out and say, ‘See, I told you so.’ In fact, they told you nothing.

It was no mere astronomic festival, then, that the Pagans celebrated at the winter solstice. That festival at Rome was called the feast of Saturn, and the mode in which it was celebrated there, showed whence it had been derived. The feast, as regulated by Caligula, lasted five days; loose reins were given to drunkenness and revelry, slaves had a temporary emancipation, and used all manner of freedoms with their masters. This was precisely the way in which, according to Berosus, the drunken festival of the month Thebeth, answering to our December, in other words. the festival of Bacchus, was celebrated in Babylon. "It was the custom," says he, "during the five days it lasted, for masters to be in subjection to their servants, and one of them ruled the house, clothed in a purple garment like a king." This "purple-robed" servant was called "Zoganes," the "Man of sport and wantonness," and answered exactly to the "Lord of Misrule," that in the dark ages, was chosen in all Popish countries to head the revels of Christmas.

An Atheopagan Prayer by Mark Green Praise to the wide spinning world Unfolding each of all the destined tales compressed In the moment of your catastrophic birth Wide to the fluid expanse, blowing outward Kindling in stars and galaxies, in bright pools Of Christmas-colored gas; cohering in marbles hot And cold, ringed, round, gray and red and gold and dun And blue Pure blue, the eye of a child, spinning in a veil of air, Warm island, home to us, kind beyond measure: the stones And trees, the round river flowing sky to deepest chasm, salt And sweet. Praise to Time, enormous and precious, And we with so little, seeing our world go as it will Ruing, cheering, the treasured fading, precious arriving, Fear and wonder, Fear and wonder always. Praise O black expanse of mostly nothing Though you do not hear, you have no ear nor mind to hear Praise O inevitable, O mysterious, praise Praise and thanks be a wave Expanding from this tiny temporary mouth this tiny dot Of world a bubble Going out forever meeting everything as it goes All the great and infinitesimal Gracious and terrible All the works of blessed Being. May it be so. May it be so. May our hearts sing to say it is so.

If one could nominate an absolutely tragic day in human history, it would be the occasion that is now commemorated by the vapid and annoying holiday known as “Hannukah.” For once, instead of Christianity plagiarizing from Judaism, the Jews borrow shamelessly from Christians in the pathetic hope of a celebration that coincides with “Christmas,” which is itself a quasi-Christian annexation, complete with burning logs and holly and mistletoe, of a pagan Northland solstice originally illuminated by the Aurora Borealis. Here is the terminus to which banal “multiculturalism” has brought us. But it was nothing remotely multicultural that induced Judah Maccabeus to reconsecrate the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC, and to establish the date which the soft celebrants of Hannukah now so emptily commemorate. The Maccabees, who founded the Hasmonean dynasty, were forcibly restoring Mosaic fundamentalism against the many Jews of Palestine and elsewhere who had become attracted by Hellenism. These true early multiculturalists had become bored by “the law,” offended by circumcision, interested by Greek literature, drawn by the physical and intellectual exercises of the gymnasium, and rather adept at philosophy. They could feel the pull exerted by Athens, even if only by way of Rome and by the memory of Alexander’s time, and were impatient with the stark fear and superstition mandated by the Pentateuch. They obviously seemed too cosmopolitan to the votaries of the old Temple—and it must have been easy to accuse them of “dual loyalty” when they agreed to have a temple of Zeus on the site where smoky and bloody altars used to propitiate the unsmiling deity of yore. At any rate, when the father of Judah Maccabeus saw a Jew about to make a Hellenic offering on the old altar, he lost no time in murdering him. Over the next few years of the Maccabean “revolt,” many more assimilated Jews were slain, or forcibly circumcised, or both, and the women who had flirted with the new Hellenic dispensation suffered even worse. Since the Romans eventually preferred the violent and dogmatic Maccabees to the less militarized and fanatical Jews who had shone in their togas in the Mediterranean light, the scene was set for the uneasy collusion between the old-garb ultra-Orthodox Sanhedrin and the imperial governorate. This lugubrious relationship was eventually to lead to Christianity (yet another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the birth of Islam. We could have been spared the whole thing.

The tree with pagan roots continues to accept grafts.

In the round of our rational and mournful year one festival remains out of all those ancient gaieties that once covered the whole earth. Christmas remains to remind us of those ages, whether Pagan or Christian, when the many acted poetry instead of the few writing it. In all the winter in our woods there is no tree in glow but the holly.

If we can put our minds and hearts, all our differences can bond for greater joy. Pagan holiday, Jewish baby and Roman empire - the union of ideas, emotions and a reason to celebrate is the real story of Christmas day.

Pagan holiday, Jewish baby and Roman empire - the union of ideas, emotions and a reason to celebrate is the real story of Christmas day.

The birth of the Lord began to be commemorated (on an annual basis) somewhere in the third or fourth centuries a.d. It is commonly argued that this was a “takeover” of a pagan holiday, celebrating the winter solstice. But it just as likely, in my view, that this was actually the other way around. Sol Invictus was established as a holiday by Aurelian in a.d. 274, when the Christians were already a major force. So who was copying whom? And Saturnalia, another popular candidate suggested as being an “ancestor” of Christmas, actually occurred on December 17.

I mean, we couldn’t even keep Christmas anymore. Every Christmas my daddy would drag a Christmas tree inside and say, “Decorate the tree, kids.” We’d start decorating it and my mother would come running into the room screaming, “THIS TREE IS A SYMBOL OF NIMROD. NIMROD FUCKED HIS MOTHER”—no, she didn’t say “fucked,” she said, “NIMROD MARRIED HIS MOTHER TO KEEP THE BABYLONIAN BLOODLINE PURE, AND THE CHRISTMAS TREE IS THE EVERYTHING TREE! IT’S A SYMBOL OF THE BABYLONIAN BLOODLINE! IT’S PAGAN! IT’S AN ABOMINATION!” And we’d scream and she’d drag it out and my daddy would drag it back in and say, “DECORATE THE TREE!” And we’d say, “Please, we don’t wanna decorate the Babylonian symbol of evil.

the Christmas tree. Do you know where that comes from?” “No idea.” “Saint Boniface decided to ‘christianize’ a ritual intended to honor the god Odin when he was a child. Once a year, the Germanic tribes would place presents around an oak tree for the children to find. They thought this would bring joy to the pagan deity.

You may say we made a mistake placing the birth of Jesus on December 25th. Consider this: in 3 B.C., December 25th was the eighth day of Hanukkah, the day when the greatest gift is given.... Early Christians would not have made up the date, or used a pagan festival date...the date was chosen by people who remembered.

The Church, at an early date, selected the heathen festivals of Sun worship for its own, ordering the birth at Christmas, a fixed time, and the resurrection at Easter, a varying time, as in all Pagan religions; since, though the Sun rose directly after the vernal equinox, the festival, to be correct in a heathen point of view, had to be associated with the new moon." [496:5]

What the defenders of Christmas were doing was not keeping harmless old customs but rather perpetuating paganism and idolatry.

Dr. John G. Jackson quotes Kenneth R.H. Mackenzie as follows: “From the woolly texture of the hair, I am inclined to assign to the Budda of India, the Fuhi of China, the Sommanoacom of the Siamese, the Xaha of the Japanese, and the Quetzalcoatl of the Mexicans, and the same, and indeed an African, or rather ‘Nubian’ origin.” Most of these black gods were regarded as crucified saviours who died to save mankind by being nailed to a cross, or tied to a tree with arms outstretched as if on a cross, or slain violently in some other manner. Of these crucified saviors, the most prominent were Osiris and Horus of Egypt, Krishna of India, Mithra of Persia, Quetzalcoatl of Mexico, Adonis of Babylonia and Attis of Phrygia. Nearly all of these slain savior-gods have the following stories related about them: They are born of a virgin, on or near December 25th (Christmas); their births are heralded by a star; they are born either in a cave or stable; they are slain, commonly by crucifixion; they descend into hell, and rise from the dead at the beginning of Spring (Easter), and finally ascend into heaven. The parallels between the legendary lives of these pagan messiahs and the life of Jesus Christ as recorded in the BIBLE are so similar that progressive Bible scholars now admit that stories of these heathen have been woven into the life-story of Jesus.

For one great example, according to the story, the Christmas wreath custom did not come from paganism, but from a remarkable defeat of paganism. Boniface (A.D. 680–754), missionary to the Germans, had chopped down a great oak, sacred to Thor. Three days later, on the first Sunday of Advent, he prevented a human sacrifice and used the sacrificial knife of the Druid priest to cut fir boughs for the people to take home as a reminder of Calvary. And for a second example, the inventor of Christmas tree lights (non-electric) was Martin Luther. This is because Jesus is the light of the world.

According to our minister, Mr. Cornelius Barker, presents were a pointless, expensive, pagan diversion. Yes, well, good luck explaining that to seven children.

And please don’t give me some crap about it being Celtic in origin. I’ve researched the subject far more than you and your crackpot crowd and I can assure you that the pagan thing is total bollocks. To start with, the festival of Christmas is not derived from Yule. Yule dates back to 400 AD at the earliest, whereas Christmas is referred to in Roman records some two centuries before that. Also, the birth of Jesus is not a Christianised version of the birth of Mithras … Mithras was not born of a human mother, and his cult came much later during the Empire. There is no provable connection between Christmas and the solstice celebrated by the druids. We don’t even know if the druids celebrated the solstice because they didn’t write anything down, whereas the Romans wrote an awful lot down about Christmas. Sorry to disappoint you, Soph, but Christmas is solidly Christian with a few pagan trappings that the Victorians added because they were midwinter emblems.

But the way I have construed this, the weaker brother is the one who does not observe Christmas. How do we answer the charge that it is actually the other way around, and that the “observer” is one who is guilty of syncretism? This charge of syncretism is often made—the Christian year is thought to be the residue of long-forgotten compromises with paganism. And in its overgrown and encrusted forms this was frequently the case. But in certain notable instances, the reverse was true. For one great example, according to the story, the Christmas wreath custom did not come from paganism, but from a remarkable defeat of paganism. Boniface (a.d. 680–754), missionary to the Germans, had chopped down a great oak, sacred to Thor. Three days later, on the first Sunday of Advent, he prevented a human sacrifice and used the sacrificial knife of the Druid priest to cut fir boughs for the people to take home as a reminder of Calvary. And for a second example, the inventor of Christmas tree lights (non-electric) was Martin Luther. This is because Jesus is the light of the world.

The spring celebration of the Germanic goddess Eostre merged over time with the celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection to become the Christian festival Easter. Christians adopted the Celtic festival of Samhain at the end of October, sometimes known as the Feast of the Dead, by moving All Saints’ (Hallows’) Day from May to November, making All Hallows’ Eve a time to remember the dead. The midwinter pagan festival of Yuletide became Christmas.

Brilliant. And how do you know he’s a saint?” “He’s got a halo?” “Excellent, and does that golden halo remind you of anything?” Hitzrot broke into a smile. “Yeah! Those Egyptian things we studied last term. Those . . . um . . . sun disks!” “Thank you, Hitzrot. Go back to sleep.” Langdon turned back to the class. “Halos, like much of Christian symbology, were borrowed from the ancient Egyptian religion of sun worship. Christianity is filled with examples of sun worship.” “Excuse me?” the girl in front said. “I go to church all the time, and I don’t see much sun worshiping going on!” “Really? What do you celebrate on December twenty-fifth?” “Christmas. The birth of Jesus Christ.” “And yet according to the Bible, Christ was born in March, so what are we doing celebrating in late December?” Silence. Langdon smiled. “December twenty-fifth, my friends, is the ancient pagan holiday of sol invictus—Unconquered Sun—coinciding with the winter solstice. It’s that wonderful time of year when the sun returns, and the days start getting longer.” Langdon took another bite of apple. “Conquering religions,” he continued, “often adopt existing holidays to make conversion less shocking. It’s called transmutation. It helps people acclimatize to the new faith. Worshipers keep the same holy dates, pray in the same sacred locations, use a similar symbology . . . and they simply substitute a different god.” Now the girl in front looked furious. “You’re implying Christianity is just some kind of . . . repackaged sun worship!” “Not at all. Christianity did not borrow only from sun worship. The ritual of Christian canonization is taken from the ancient ‘god-making’ rite of Euhemerus. The practice of ‘god-eating’—that is, Holy Communion—was borrowed from the Aztecs. Even the concept of Christ dying for our sins is arguably not exclusively Christian; the self-sacrifice of a young man to absolve the sins of his people appears in the earliest tradition of the Quetzalcoatl.” The girl glared. “So, is anything in Christianity original?” “Very little in any organized faith is truly original. Religions are not born from scratch. They grow from one another. Modern religion is a collage . . . an assimilated historical record of man’s quest to understand the divine.

The sabbats mark the Wheel of the Year, the turning of the seasons. For Wiccans and Pagans of some other traditions, these are the spine of the Craft, and some fall on dates that are closely aligned with those of major Christian holidays: Yule, the winter festival from which we get the Twelve Days of Christmas; Ostara, the spring equinox and the source of Easter’s fertility symbols (the rabbit, the egg); Samhain,3 the time of communion with the dead, dressed up in mainstream culture as Halloween.

All that genuinely remains of the ancient hymns or the ancient dances of Europe, all that has honestly come to us from the festivals of Phoebus or Pan, is to be found in the festivals of the Christian Church. If any one wants to hold the end of a chain which really goes back to the heathen mysteries, he had better take hold of a festoon of flowers at Easter or a string of sausages at Christmas. Everything else in the modern world is of Christian origin, even everything that seems most anti-Christian. The French Revolution is of Christian origin. The newspaper is of Christian origin. The anarchists are of Christian origin. Physical science is of Christian origin. The attack on Christianity is of Christian origin. There is one thing, and one thing only, in existence at the present day which can in any sense accurately be said to be of pagan origin, and that is Christianity.

Himmler was an ambitious, sinister, idealistic creature of devious ways. His ideas on human behaviour had been gleaned from animal breeding lectures at agricultural college years before. The SS had certain affinities to the Jesuit monastic orders, an enforced mysticism which even Hitler found slightly ludicrous: in 1940, witnessing the pagan Yule celebration of the SS Leibstandarte at Christmas, he quietly commented to an adjutant that this would never take the place of ‘Silent Night.

Many people think that the church simply took over a pagan holiday, but that is not so. As Sextus Julius Africanus had shown, there were good reasons for celebrating the feast of Christ’s birth on December 25, and sun and light symbolism played a very great role in Christian worship.

That festival, called Lady-day, is celebrated at Rome on the 25th of March, in alleged commemoration of the miraculous conception of our Lord in the womb of the Virgin, on the day when the angel was sent to announce to her the distinguished honour that was to be bestowed upon her as the mother of the Messiah. But who could tell when this annunciation was made? The Scripture gives no clue at all in regard to the time. But it mattered not. But our Lord was either conceived or born, that very day now set down in the Popish calendar for the "Annunciation of the Virgin" was observed in Pagan Rome in honour of Cybele, the Mother of the Babylonian Messiah. Now, it is manifest that Lady-day and Christmas-day stand in intimate relation to one another. Between the 25th of March and the 25th of December there are exactly nine months.

Not again,” Daphne muttered angrily when she came in for dinner one night. “How can Muggles listen to such dribble?” “It’s ‘Joy to the World,’” Justin responded importantly. “How can that possibly be dribble?” She scoffed at him. “Evidence shows that your Harry Potter figure—“ Harry gagged at her phrasing and nearly choked on the pumpkin juice he was drinking. “As I was saying,” Daphne began again, “your Harry Potter figure was most likely born in March. Your scholars say so.” Justin rolled his eyes. “The only reason that your Christmas was placed at the end of December was because of pre-existing pagan holidays celebrating the darkest time of the year, when the pagan god is reborn having died at Samhain. Your god’s death and resurrection had been told hundreds of times before that in all notable pagan religions. And you stole our date and our customs—including evergreen trees and mistletoe.” “I don’t think I like Jesus being called a Harry Potter figure,” Harry murmured to himself, finding the entire conversation suddenly frightening. “I can’t believe you just said that,” Justin said to Daphne, who pointedly ignored him. “Why not?” she questioned Harry. “He somehow survived death to rise again when he shouldn’t have and was born to save the world. He clearly is a prefiguration of the entire prophecy situation we currently have. Who knows? In two thousand years there might be a religion surrounding you.” Harry paled just at that horrifying thought, and was glad that Octavian celebrated Yule. After this Christmas, he would try never to think about those parallels ever again. “What about angels visiting the shepherds?” Justin asked Daphne defensively. “Or the three kings? I bet you don’t have those!” “You really think you came up with the kings?” Daphne laughed. “Don’t get me started on the three magical kings. They’re not even human!

Whether the oddments of superstition my mother told us when we were young were believed by her or were meant as a kind of amusement for us, like the Easter Bunny, Moss Babies and the Tooth Fairy, I am undecided; possibly something of both. She wouldn’t wear green (but that was due to family history: Great-Aunt Emma had an emerald green dress and her fiancé had perished at sea); Christmas decorations had to be totally removed by Twelfth Night as witches could get into the least scrap of tinsel or coloured paper. The snippets of lore were varied: never bring into the house bones, peacock feathers or may blossom; never mix red and white flowers in a vase (death ensued if you did); don’t look at the moon through glass; don’t put shoes on a table (surely just hygienic advice); sing before morning and you’ll cry before night; if you meet a piebald horse, make a cross in the dust on your shoe.

Have you believed or participated in this infidelity, that some wicked women, turned back after Satan, seduced by illusions and phantoms of demons believe and affirm: that with Diana, the goddess of the pagans, and an unnumbered multitude of women, they ride on certain beasts and traverse many areas of the earth in the stillness of the quiet night.1 This isn’t the only mention Burchard made of women riding out at night in a host led by a goddess – of his two hundred or so rules, it’s the subject of four. And numerous other medieval churchmen complained about this idea as well as Burchard, a collection of angry fragments that suggests it was a commonly held belief, no matter how much the church might have tried to stamp it out. Sometimes the goddess leading the women is called Holda or Herodias, not Diana. Sometimes the women are able to pass through closed doors to sneak away in spirit, leaving their bodies lying in bed with their husbands while their souls cavort through the night.

Like the folklorists spinning beguiling fantasies of ancient pagan rituals, Jerome, Borlase, Dickens and the Jameses (M.R. and Henry) were tapping into the old need for darkness within the new, Victorian, family Christmas, when people were meant to be getting cosy round the tree or roasting chestnuts by the fire with their nearest and dearest, and not rampaging drunkenly through the streets in a horrible mask. The traditions might have shifted, and the tales may have been rendered in a form that could be enjoyed quietly, at home, with your family, but everyone still wanted midwinter to be full of ghosts and monsters.

Sixty years after Frazer’s Golden Bough, the poet Robert Graves wrote The White Goddess, a book entirely made up of delightful nonsense about pagan rituals and asserting that the death-and-resurrection mummers plays were ‘the clearest survivals of the pre-Christian religion’. This in turn inspired Sylvia Plath, who found herself identifying with Grave’s goddess – a sister of Holda – who he put at the centre of it all. It inspired books like Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, the children’s story from 1973 about the dark, pagan magic that bleeds through into Christmas and midwinter. Plenty of our most beloved horror stories are based on these ideas too, from The Wicker Man to Midsommar and, arguably, the entire genre of folk horror.

The truth is that there is an alliance between religion and real fun, of which the modern thinkers have never got the key, and which they are quite unable to criticize or to destroy. All Socialist Utopias, all new pagan Paradises, promised in this age to mankind have all one horrible fault. They are all dignified…. But being undignified is the essence of all real happiness, whether before God or man. Hilarity involves humility; nay, it involves humiliation…. Religion is much nearer to riotous happiness than it is to the detached and temperate types of happiness in which gentlemen and philosophers find their peace. Religion and riot are very near, as the history of all religions proves. Riot means being a rotter; and religion means knowing you are a rotter.