Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan Part 15

"Holy angels and blest, Through these palms as ye sweep, Hold their branches at rest, For my babe is asleep.

And ye Bethlehem palm-trees, As stormy winds rush 150 In tempest and fury, Your angry noise hush; Move gently, move gently, Restrain your wild sweep; Hold your branches at rest, My babe is asleep.

My babe all divine, With earth's sorrows oppressed, Seeks in slumber an instant His grievings to rest; He slumbers, he slumbers, O, hush, then, and keep Your branches all still, My babe is asleep!"{43}

Apart from such modern revivals of the Christmas drama as Mr. Laurence Housman's "Bethlehem," Miss Buckton's "Eager Heart," Mrs. Percy Dearmer's "The Soul of the World," and similar experiments in Germany and France, a genuine tradition has lingered on in some parts of Europe into modern times. We have already noticed some French and German instances; to these may be added a few from other countries.

In Naples there is no Christmas without the "Cantata dei pastori"; it is looked forward to no less than the Midnight Ma.s.s. Two or three theatres compete for the public favour in the performance of this play in rude verse. It begins with Adam and Eve and ends with the birth of Jesus and the adoration of the shepherds. Many devils are brought on the stage, their arms and legs laden with bra.s.s chains that rattle horribly. Awful are their names, Lucifero, Satana.s.so, Belfegor, Belzebu, &c. They not only tempt Adam and Eve, but annoy the Virgin and St. Joseph, until an angel comes and frightens them away. Two non-Biblical figures are introduced, Razzullo and Sarchiapone, who are tempted by devils and aided by angels.{44} In Sicily too the Christmas play still lingers under the name of _Pastorale_.{45}

151 A nineteenth-century Spanish survival of the "Stella" is described in Fernan Caballero's sketch, "La Noche de Navidad."{46} At the foot of the altar of the village church, according to this account, images of the Virgin and St. Joseph were placed, with the Holy Child between them, lying on straw. On either side knelt a small boy dressed as an angel. Solemnly there entered the church a number of men attired as shepherds, bearing their offerings to the Child; afterwards they danced with slow and dignified movements before the altar. The shepherds were followed by the richest men of the village dressed as the Magi Kings, mounted on horseback, and followed by their train. Before them went a shining star. On reaching the church they dismounted; the first, representing a majestic old man with white hair, offered incense to the Babe; the others, Caspar and Melchior, myrrh and gold respectively. This was done on the feast of the Epiphany.

A remnant possibly of the "Stella" is to be found in a Christmas custom extremely widespread in Europe and surviving even in some Protestant lands--the carrying about of a star in memory of the Star of Bethlehem.

It is generally borne by a company of boys, who sing some sort of carol, and expect a gift in return.

The practice is--or was--found as far north as Sweden. All through the Christmas season the "star youths" go about from house to house. Three are dressed up as the Magi Kings, a fourth carries on a stick a paper lantern in the form of a six-pointed star, made to revolve and lighted by candles. There are also a Judas, who bears the purse for the collection, and, occasionally, a King Herod. A doggerel rhyme is sung, telling the story of the Nativity and offering good wishes.{47} In Norway and Denmark processions of a like character were formerly known.{48}

In Normandy at Christmas children used to go singing through the village streets, carrying a lantern of coloured paper on a long osier rod.{49} At Pleudihen in Brittany three young men representing the Magi sang carols in the cottages, dressed in their holiday clothes covered with ribbons.{50}

152 In England there appears to be no trace of the custom, which is however found in Germany, Austria, Holland, Italy, Bohemia, Roumania, Poland, and Russia.{51}

In Thuringia a curious carol used to be sung, telling how Herod tried to tempt the Wise Men--

"'Oh, good Wise Men, come in and dine; I will give you both beer and wine, And hay and straw to make your bed, And nought of payment shall be said.'"

But they answer:--

"'Oh, no! oh, no! we must away, We seek a little Child to-day, A little Child, a mighty King, Him who created everything.'"{52}

In Tyrol the "star-singing" is very much alive at the present day. In the Upper Innthal three boys in white robes, with blackened faces and gold paper crowns, go to every house on Epiphany Eve, one of them carrying a golden star on a pole. They sing a carol, half religious, half comic--almost a little drama--and are given money, cake, and drink. In the Ilsethal the boys come on Christmas Eve, and presents are given them by well-to-do people. In some parts there is but one singer, an old man with a white beard and a turban, who twirls a revolving star. A remarkable point about the Tyrolese star-singers is that before anything is given them they are told to stamp on the snowy fields outside the houses, in order to promote the growth of the crops in summer.{53}

In Little Russia the "star" is made of pasteboard and has a transparent centre with a picture of Christ through which the light of a candle shines. One boy carries the star and another twirls the points.{54} In Roumania it is made of wood and adorned with frills and little bells. A representation of the "manger," illuminated from behind, forms the centre, and the star also shows pictures of Adam and Eve and angels.{55}

153 A curious traditional drama, in which pagan elements seem to have mingled with the Herod story, is still performed by the Roumanians during the Christmas festival. It is called in Wallachia "Vicleim" (from Bethlehem), in Moldavia and Transylvania "Irozi" (plural from _Irod_ = Herod). At least ten persons figure in it: "Emperor" Herod, an old grumbling monarch who speaks in harsh tones to his followers; an officer and two soldiers in Roman attire; the three Magi, in Oriental garb, a child, and "two comical figures--the _paiata_ (the clown) and the _mosul_, or old man, the former in harlequin accoutrement, the latter with a mask on his face, a long beard, a hunch on his back, and dressed in a sheepskin with the wool on the outside. The plot of the play is quite simple. The officer brings the news that three strange men have been caught, going to Bethlehem to adore the new-born Messiah; Herod orders them to be shown in: they enter singing in a choir. Long dialogues ensue between them and Herod, who at last orders them to be taken to prison. But then they address the Heavenly Father, and shout imprecations on Herod, invoking celestial punishment on him, at which unaccountable noises are heard, seeming to announce the fulfilment of the curse. Herod falters, begs the Wise Men's forgiveness, putting off his anger till more opportune times. The Wise Men retire.... Then a child is introduced, who goes on his knees before Herod, with his hands on his breast, asking pity. He gives clever answers to various questions and foretells the Christ's future career, at which Herod stabs him. The whole troupe now strikes up a tune of reproach to Herod, who falls on his knees in deep repentance." The play is sometimes performed by puppets instead of living actors.{56}

Christmas plays performed by puppets are found in other countries too. In Poland "during the week between Christmas and New Year is shown the _Jaselki_ or manger, a travelling series of scenes from the life of Christ or even of modern peasants, a small travelling puppet-theatre, gorgeous with tinsel and candles, and something like our 'Punch and Judy'

show. The market-place of Cracow, especially at night, is a very pretty spectacle, its sidewalks all lined with these glittering Jaselki."{57} In Madrid 154 at the Epiphany a puppet-play was common, in which the events of the Nativity and the Infancy were mimed by wooden figures,{58} and in Provence, in the mid-nineteenth century, the Christmas scenes were represented in the same way.{59}

Last may be mentioned a curious Mexican mixture of religion and amus.e.m.e.nt, a sort of drama called the "Posadas," described by Madame Calderon de la Barca in her "Life in Mexico" (1843).{60} The custom was based upon the wanderings of the Virgin and St. Joseph in Bethlehem in search of repose. For eight days these wanderings of the holy pair to the different _posadas_ were represented. On Christmas Eve, says the narrator, "a lighted candle was put into the hand of each lady [this was at a sort of party], and a procession was formed, two by two, which marched all through the house ... the whole party singing the Litanies.... A group of little children, dressed as angels, joined the procession.... At last the procession drew up before a door, and a shower of fireworks was sent flying over our heads, I suppose to represent the descent of the angels; for a group of ladies appeared, dressed to represent the shepherds.... Then voices, supposed to be those of Mary and Joseph, struck up a hymn, in which they begged for admittance, saying that the night was cold and dark, that the wind blew hard, and that they prayed for a night's shelter. A chorus of voices from within refused admittance. Again those without entreated shelter, and at length declared that she at the door, who thus wandered in the night, and had not where to lay her head, was the Queen of Heaven! At this name the doors were thrown wide open, and the Holy Family entered singing. The scene within was very pretty: a _nacimiento_.... One of the angels held a waxen baby in her arms.... A padre took the baby from the angel and placed it in the cradle, and the _posada_ was completed. We then returned to the drawing-room--angels, shepherds, and all, and danced till supper-time."{60} Here the religious drama has sunk to little more than a "Society" game.

[Ill.u.s.tration:

THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI. MASACCIO

(_Berlin: Kaiser Friedrich Museum_)]

155

POSTSCRIPT

Before we pa.s.s on to the pagan aspects of Christmas, let us gather up our thoughts in an attempt to realize the peculiar appeal of the Feast of the Nativity, as it has been felt in the past, as it is felt to-day even by moderns who have no belief in the historical truth of the story it commemorates.

This appeal of Christmas seems to lie in the union of two modes of feeling which may be called the _carol spirit_ and the _mystical spirit_.

The _carol spirit_--by this we may understand the simple, human joyousness, the tender and graceful imagination, the kindly, intimate affection, which have gathered round the cradle of the Christ Child. The folk-tune, the secular song adapted to a sacred theme--such is the carol.

What a sense of kindliness, not of sentimentality, but of genuine human feeling, these old songs give us, as though the folk who first sang them were more truly comrades, more closely knit together than we under modern industrialism.

One element in the carol spirit is the rustic note that finds its sanction as regards Christmas in St. Luke's story of the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night. One thinks of the stillness over the fields, of the hinds with their rough talk, "simply chatting in a rustic row," of the keen air, and the great burst of light and song that dazes their simple wits, of their journey to Bethlehem where "the heaven-born Child all meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies," of the ox and a.s.s linking the beasts of the field to the Christmas adoration of mankind.[80]

For many people, indeed, the charm of Christmas is inseparably a.s.sociated with the country; it is lost in London--the city is too vast, too modern, too sophisticated. It is bound up with the thought of frosty fields, of bells heard far away, of bare trees 156 against the starlit sky, of carols sung not by trained choirs but by rustic folk with rough accent, irregular time, and tunes learnt by ear and not by book.

Again, without the idea of winter half the charm of Christmas would be gone. Transplanted in the imagination of western Christendom from an undefined season in the hot East to Europe at midwinter, the Nativity scenes have taken on a new pathos with the thought of the bitter cold to which the great Little One lay exposed in the rough stable, with the contrast between the cold and darkness of the night and the fire of love veiled beneath that infant form. _Lux in tenebris_ is one of the strongest notes of Christmas: in the bleak midwinter a light shines through the darkness; when all is cold and gloom, the sky bursts into splendour, and in the dark cave is born the Light of the World.

There is the idea of royalty too, with all it stands for of colour and magnificence, though not so much in literature as in painting is this side of the Christmas story represented. The Epiphany is the great opportunity for imaginative development of the regal idea. Then is seen the union of utter poverty with highest kingship; the monarchs of the East come to bow before the humble Infant for whom the world has found no room in the inn. How suggestive by their long, slow syllables are the Italian names of the Magi. Gasparre, Balda.s.sarre, Melchiorre--we picture Oriental monarchs in robes mysteriously gorgeous, wrought with strange patterns, heavy with gold and precious stones. With slow processional motion they advance, bearing to the King of Kings their symbolic gifts, gold for His crowning, incense for His worship, myrrh for His mortality, and with them come the mystery, colour, and perfume of the East, the occult wisdom which bows itself before the revelation in the Child.

Above all, as the foregoing pages have shown, it is the _childhood_ of the Redeemer that has won the heart of Europe for Christmas; it is the appeal to the parental instinct, the love for the tender, weak, helpless, yet all-potential babe, that has given the Church's festival its strongest hold. And this side of Christmas is penetrated often by the _mystical spirit_--that sense of the Infinite in the finite without which the highest human life is impossible.

157 The feeling for Christmas varies from mere delight in the Christ Child as a representative symbol on which to lavish affection, as a child delights in a doll, to the mystical philosophy of Eckhart, in whose Christmas sermons the Nativity is viewed as a type of the Birth of G.o.d in the depths of man's being. Yet even the least spiritual forms of the cult of the Child are seldom without some hint of the supersensual, the Infinite, and even in Eckhart there is a love of concrete symbolism.

Christmas stands peculiarly for the sacramental principle that the outward and visible is a sign and shadow of the inward and spiritual. It means the seeing of common, earthly things shot through by the glory of the Infinite. "Its note," as has been said of a stage of the mystic consciousness, the Illuminative Way, "is sacramental not ascetic. It entails ... the discovery of the Perfect One ablaze in the Many, not the forsaking of the Many in order to find the One ... an ineffable radiance, a beauty and a reality never before suspected, are perceived by a sort of clairvoyance shining in the meanest things."{1} Christmas is the festival of the Divine Immanence, and it is natural that it should have been beloved by the saint and mystic whose life was the supreme manifestation of the _Via Illuminativa_, Francis of a.s.sisi.

Christmas is the most human and lovable of the Church's feasts. Easter and Ascensiontide speak of the rising and exaltation of a glorious being, clothed in a spiritual body refined beyond all comparison with our natural flesh; Whitsuntide tells of the coming of a mysterious, intangible Power--like the wind, we cannot tell whence It cometh and whither It goeth; Trinity offers for contemplation an ineffable paradox of Pure Being. But the G.o.d of Christmas is no ethereal form, no mere spiritual essence, but a very human child, feeling the cold and the roughness of the straw, needing to be warmed and fed and cherished.

Christmas is the festival of the natural body, of this world; it means the consecration of the ordinary things of life, affection and comradeship, eating and drinking and merrymaking; and in some degree the memory of the Incarnation has been able to blend with the pagan joyance of the New Year.

158 159

Part II--Pagan Survivals

160 161

CHAPTER VI

PRE-CHRISTIAN WINTER FESTIVALS

The Church and Superst.i.tion--Nature of Pagan Survivals--Racial Origins--Roman Festivals of the _Saturnalia_ and Kalends--Was there a Teutonic Midwinter Festival?--The Teutonic, Celtic, and Slav New Year--Customs attracted to Christmas or January 1--The Winter Cycle of Festivals--_Rationale_ of Festival Ritual: (_a_) Sacrifice and Sacrament, (_b_) the Cult of the Dead, (_c_) Omens and Charms for the New Year--Compromise in the Later Middle Ages--The Puritans and Christmas--Decay of Old Traditions.