A Christmas Story

When we celebrate Christmas we continue the practice of hundreds of generations of our remote ancestors, who held festivals at that season every year for many centuries before Christianity had ever been heard of.


That day was the birthday of Apollo, the great sun god, and it was also the day upon which were celebrated, by their respective worshippers, the births of Adonis, of Dionysos, and of Mithras. The 25th of December was so highly regarded as a day suitable for the birthday of a god that it was selected for the apotheosis of Alexander the Great when he was first acclaimed as God in the temple of Amon (Jupiter) in 322 BC.

The 25th of December was adopted by Aurelian in 274 AD as the day to celebrate the birthday of Sol Invictus. In 336 or 354 AD, the Christians took the same date as the birthday of Jesus. Almost all religions have some root in primitive sun worship, and the Christians merely continued a custom which the adherents of most of the contemporary religions had carried on for many centuries before that time. Astronomically, the sun begins a new year of life at the winter solstice, and so the 25th of December, or some day proximate to that date, was selected in remote antiquity for the celebration of God's birthday, when sun gods were worshipped.

Christmas Before Christ

At the first moment after midnight of 24 December the nations of the East would rise at midnight to celebrate the arrival of 25 December, the birthday of their gods. At midnight on the twenty-fifth of the month Savarana, which is our December, millions of Krishna's disciples celebrated his birthday by decorating their houses with garlands and gilt paper, and giving presents to friends.

The people of China also traditionally celebrated this day, closing their shops. Buddha is said to have been born on this day after the Holy Ghost had descended on his virgin mother Maya. The god of the Persians, Mithras, was born on the 25th of December long before the coming of Jesus.

The Egyptians celebrated this day as the birth day of their great saviour Horus, the Egyptian god of light and son of a virgin mother, the queen of the heaven, Isis. Osiris, god of the dead and the underworld in Egypt, another son of a holy virgin, was born on the 25th of December. Adonis, revered as a dying and rising god among the Phrygians then the Greeks, was born on the 25th of December. His worshipers held him a yearly festival representing his death and resurrection, in midsummer. Even the temple at Jerusalem was used to celebrate the birthday of the god Adonis in the years when Jesus might have been born, Herod being no Jew by conviction. The cave in Bethlehem which is said to have been the birth place of Jesus was also previously a place in which the birthday of Adonis was celebrated.

The Greeks celebrated the 25th of December as the birthday of Hercules, the son of their supreme god, Zeus, through the mortal woman Alcmene. Bacchus, the god of wine and revelry among the Romans, known among the Greeks as Dionysos, was born on this day.

The nations of the north also had their greatest festival of the year in midwinter. To these northern barbarians, shuddering in the snow laden forests beyond the Danube, the return of the sun was the most desired event of the year, and they soon learned the time—the winter solstice—when the "wheel" turned. The sun was figured as a fiery wheel, and as late as the nineteenth century there were parts of France where a straw wheel was set on fire and rolled down a hill, to give an augury of the next harvest.
Hence "Yule" (from the Teutonic word "hoel" or "wheel") was the outstanding festival of the ancestors of the French and Germans, the English and Scandinavians. The sun was born, and fires ("Yule logs," still traditionally symbols of Christmas, though usually in the form of a chocolate cake) flamed in the forest villages, the huts were decorated with holly and evergreens, Yule trees were laden with presents, and stores of solid food and strong drink were lavishly opened. This lasted until Twelfth Day, now Epiphany. The Scandinavians celebrated the 25th of December as the birth day of their god Freyr, the son of their supreme god of the heavens, Odin.

Long before Christianity, as mid-winter approached, Rome was lit up with joy. It was the festival of the old vegetation-god Saturn who, as a god, died or was displaced by Jupiter, the sky-god, but had a fine temple on the Capitol. His festival lasted seven days, from December 17th to 24th, and was the most joyous time of the joyous Roman year. For the whole week, no work was done, the one law being good cheer and good nature, but the 25th was the culmination of it all, the greatest festival in the Roman calendar—the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun…

There was great rejoicing, illuminations and public games, and all shops were closed. Presents were exchanged, and the slaves were indulged in special liberties—on this one day they were free. They donned the conical cap of the freedman—as frolickers continue at Christmas, and on other festive occasions today, to don caps of paper—and sit at table while masters wait on them.

On 25 December, crowds filled the streets and raised festive cries, and the women of Rome paraded, singing in a loud voice, Unto us a child is born this day. Stalls laden with presents lined the streets near the Forum, but the great present of the season was a doll, of wax or terracotta. Hundreds of thousands of these dolls were on sale on the stalls and held in the arms of passers by. Once human beings were sacrificed to Saturn, and, as human life grew more important than religion, the god or his priests had to be content with effigies of men or maids—dolls! It was a time of peace on earth, for by Roman law no war could begin during the Saturnalia, and of good-will toward all men.

The festival went back far into the mists of prehistoric times. It had been earlier a one-day festival, the feast of Saturn, an important magico-religious festival for insuring the harvest of the next year, rejoicing that the year's work was over, and helping and propitiating the god of fecundity by generous indulgence in wine and love. The mysterious winter dying of the sun was also arrested.

The entire known world of two thousand years ago had its "Christmas without Christ." The figure of Christ was drawn in all its chief features before a line of the gospels was written, unarguably in the details relevant to Christmas. The first symbol of the Christian religion, the manger or basket cradle of the divine child, the supposed unique exhortation to humility, was one of the most familiar religious emblems of the Pagan world. Had it been exhibited to a crowd in one of the cosmopolitan cities of the Empire, it would have been strange or new to few. One might pronounce it Horus, another Mithras, another Hermes, another Dionysos, but all would have shrugged their shoulders nonchalantly at the news that it was just another divine sun child in the great family of gods. The world flowed on. The names only were changed.

Christians never think it strange that the birth date of Jesus is also the birth date of many of the incarnated gods of antiquity. They never think it curious that it was for ancient astronomers when the old sun died and was re-born and a new sun began to climb again in the heavens. At the solstice, it seemed to hover at the same altitude in the sky for three days, the critical time in the slow decline and possible death of the sun. Then it began to rise on the 25th, the great day of the sun's rebirth. That Pagans venerated the birthday of Christ as the birthday of their gods is beyond coincidence.

The solar celebration was so widespread and popular that the church could neither stop it, nor stop it being identified in the popular mind with Jesus's birth anyway. The importance of 25 December to Pagans made Christian converts think it must also be important to their newly adopted religion. They easily supposed it must have been the birthday of their messiah.

Every Roman was familiar from childhood with the great midwinter festival, and in the earliest days of the Christian era the religions of Persia and Egypt, with similar festivals, had spread over the Empire. The Romans later presided over the council of Nicea (325 AD) which lead to the official Christian recognition of the Trinity as the true nature of God. Since his birth date had been forgotten, when Jesus was made a god by Constantine, 25 December was selected as his birthday, because it was the birthday of other gods, and particularly that of the chief rivals to Christianity in the Roman Empire, Sol Invictus and Mithras. The Pagan emperor Constantine, who presided over the council of Nicea, was popularly considered the embodiment or incarnation of the this supreme Roman sun god. The bishops were typically opportunistic. By celebrating at the same time as Pagan religions they hoped to offer the same benefits and pull in some Pagan punters. Christmas remained the start of a new year up to the tenth century.

The Emperor Honorius (395 to 423) speaks of 25 December as being a "new" festival, and a text of about the same time says it is one of the three great Christian festivals so holy that theatres had to close by law. The churches of the Eastern Empire accused the Western Church of idolatry and sun worship. Jesus was identified with the sun by both Cyprian and Ambrose. Jesus and Mithras had become almost identical in the minds of the western populace. Saint Augustine was one who did not approve of this particular concession to Paganism.
Christmas festivals today incorporate many other Pagan customs, such as the use of holly, mistletoe, Yule logs, and wassail bowls.

The Christmas tree itself is the most obvious aspect of ancient Pagan celebrations which were later incorporated into church rites. Scholars believe that the Christian celebration was originally derived in part from rites held by pre-Christian Germanic and Celtic peoples to celebrate the winter solstice. The Christmas tree, an evergreen trimmed with lights and other decorations, because it keeps its green needles throughout the winter months, was believed by pre-Christian Pagans to have special powers of protection against the forces of nature and evil spirits. The Christmas tree is derived from the so-called paradise tree, symbolizing Eden, of German mystery plays. The use of a Christmas tree began early in the 17th century, in Strasbourg, France, spreading from there through Germany, into northern Europe and Great Britain, and then on to the United States.

Christmas is not the only Christian festival which was stolen from ancient Paganism and adapted to the Essenism of Jesus. There is also Easter, the Feast of St John, the Holy communion, the Annunciation of the virgin, the assumption of the virgin, and many others have their roots in ancient Pagan worship. Midsummer Day is the Feast of St John the Baptist and is dedicated also to Saints Philip and James. Saints Peter, James, Andrew and Paul were given unimportant days even though we are told they were Christ's Apostles.
Christians were never too keen on following the instructions of their holy texts though they usually made a great show of studying them. Had they taken notice they could not have taken these Pagan practices into the divine religion of Essenism. The scriptures warned against it quite explicitly:

Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them, after that they be destroyed from before thee; and that thou inquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise. (Deut 12:30).

It was hard for the gentile Christian converts though. They had lately been celebrating these festivals and all their friends still were. So they thought: "What does it matter?" That has often been the enduring strength of Christianity. Its ministers have been so flexible in the face of serious rivalry as to be unprincipled. Yet in the face of weak or isolated rivals, it has applied the devil's own punishments as if they were the guardians of hell not heaven.

For Christians, Christ was the real sun that had risen upon the world. Why not boldly pinch the birthday of the unconquered sun? The masses could then be told they were celebrating Jesus—but the ribaldry, license and fooling were contrary to Essenic, now Christian, prudery, and despite attempts to stop it all, it persists until today.

Sun Gods

A prosperous Asiatic sun religion was housed on the Vatican hill before the Popes commandeered it for Christianity. Mithraism spread rapidly, was respected, and was strikingly like Christianity. Mithras was an Aryan sun god. The reform of the Persian religion by Zoroaster (Zarathustra) had put the ethical deity Ahuramazda so high above the old nature gods that he was practically the one god. But Mithras stole upward, as gods do, and Persian kings of the fifth century BC put him on a level with Ahuramazda.

The Persians conquered and blended with Babylon, and Mithras rose to the supreme position and became an intensely ethical deity. He was, like Aten and Christ, the sun of the world. He sacrificed the pleasures of life, like Christ but unlike Zeus. Drastic asceticism and purity were demanded of his worshippers. They were baptized in blood. They practiced the most severe austerities and fasts. They had a communion supper of bread and wine. They worshiped Mithras in underground temples, artificial caves called grottos, which blazed with the light of candles and reeked with incense.

Every year they celebrated the birthday of this god, who had come to take away the sins of the world, and the day was December 25th. As that day approached, near midnight of the 24th, Christians might see the stern devotees of Mithras going to their temple on the Vatican, and at midnight it would shine with joy and light. The Saviour of the world was born. He had been born in a cave, like so many other sun-gods, and some of the apocryphal gospels put the birth of Christ in a cave. He had had no earthly father. He was born to free men from sin, to redeem them.

F Cumont, the great authority on Mithras, who it is now fashionable to disparage, has laboriously collected for us all these details about the Persian religion, and more than one of the Christian Fathers refers nervously to the close parallel of the two religions. The Saviour Mithras was in possession, had been in possession for ages, of December 25th as his birthday. He was the real "unconquered sun", a sun god transformed into a spiritual god, with light as his emblem and purity his supreme command. What could the Christians do? Nothing, until they had the ear of the emperors. Then they appropriated December 25th, and even bits of the Mithraic ritual, and they so zealously destroyed the traces of the Mithraic religion that one has to be a scholar to know anything about it.

There is more. A Roman writer of the fourth century, Macrobius, in a work called "Saturnalia" (1:10 discusses the practice of representing the gods in the temples as of different ages. He says: These differences of age refer to the sun, which seems to be a babe at the winter solstice, as the Egyptians represent him in their temples on a certain day, that being the shortest day, he is then supposed to be small and an infant.

This is confirmed and elaborated by a Christian writer, the author of the "Paschal Chronicle," who says: Jeremiah gave a sign to the Egyptian priests, saying that their idols would be destroyed by a child-Saviour, born of a virgin and lying in a manger. That is why they still worship as a goddess a virgin-mother, and adore an infant in a manger.
He wants to explain age old customs to which their god is indebted as imitations of their own much later god. Horus, the god in question, was an old sun god of the Egyptians. In the adjustment of the rival Egyptian gods, when the tribes were amalgamated in one kingdom, about 3000 years before Jesus was born, Horus was made the son of Osiris and Isis. The latter goddess was the sister and the spouse or lover of Osiris, but whether we should speak of her as "a virgin mother" is a matter of words. In one Egyptian myth she was fecundated by Osiris in their mother's womb, in another and more popular, she was miraculously impregnated by contact with the false phallus of the dead Osiris. Virginity in goddesses is a relative matter.

Whatever we make of the myths, Isis seems to have been originally a virgin goddess, and in the later period of Egyptian religion she was again considered a virgin goddess, demanding strict abstinence from her devotees. At this period, apparently the birthday of Horus was annually celebrated, about December 25th, in the temples. As both Macrobius and the Christian writer say, a figure of Horus as a baby was laid in a manger, in a scenic reconstruction of a stable, and a statue of Isis was placed beside it. Horus was, in a sense, the Saviour of mankind. He was their avenger against the powers of darkness, he was the light of the world. His birth festival was Christmas without Christ.

This spectacle is presented in every church in the world on December 25th. Catholic priests have taught their flocks to believe St Francis of Assisi invented this touching scene of the humble birth of the redeemer. Francis of Assisi will never have read the obscure "Paschal Chronicle," but some other Christian writer had seen and reproduced it, and it had come to the knowledge of Francis. Christ's crib is an exact reproduction of the scene exhibited in Egyptian temples centuries before Christ, and the Egyptian legend itself is thousands of years older than Jeremiah. On the analogy of the Christian practice, the Egyptian legend must have described Isis as having given birth to her divine son in a stable. In Alexandria, there was a similar Greek celebration on December 25th of the birth of a divine son to Kore (the "virgin").

And this is not the end. The Greeks had a similar celebration. The idea of a divine son being born in a cave was common, or there were actually several scenic representations of the birth of these gods in their festivals. J M Robertson gives three in Christianity and Mythology. Hermes, the Logos (like Jesus in John), the messenger of the gods, son of Zeus and the virgin Maia, was born in a cave, and he performed extraordinary prodigies a few hours after birth. He was represented as a "child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger." Dionysos (or Bacchus) was similarly represented. The image of him as a babe was laid in a basket cradle in the cave in which he was born. There is good reason to think that Mithras was figured in the same way.

From end to end of the Roman Empire December 25th was the birthday of the unconquered sun, of the Saviour Mithras, and of the divine Horus and they and the others, whose festivals were in other seasons, were represented almost exactly as the birth of Christ was described in the gospels and is depicted in Catholic churches today.