"...it's very hard to change people's minds."

Tim Minchin on confirmation bias, the science behind why we are becoming more divided, why progressives need to learn that it is improbable that the path to more empathy will be paved with less empathy, and why it's so fucking hard to change people's minds.

Happy fucking Christmas.

[Hat tip Gerry Coyne]

Summer reading

Last week a friend was metaphorically assaulting me for not posting my regular pic of my pile of summer reading. "Fear not!" I played for time, explaining that everything this year takes much longer...

So what are you planning to read over these long summer days of holiday hell?

Christmas: It's thanks to capitalism

"Thanks to capitalism, there was enough wealth to make gifts possible, a great productive apparatus to advertise them and make them available cheaply, and a country so content that men wanted to reach out to their friends and express their enjoyment of life."

~ philosopher Leonard Peikoff, from his op-ed 'Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial'

"One says: ‘Merry Christmas’ — not ‘Weep and Repent'."

“The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion: it is good will toward men — a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property (though it is supposed to be part, but is a largely unobserved part) of the Christian religion.
    “The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: ‘Merry Christmas’ — not ‘Weep and Repent.’ And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form — by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token remembrance. . . .
    “The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialised. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions — the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors —provide the city with a spectacular display, which only ‘commercial greed’ could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.” 

          ~ Ayn Rand, The Objectivist Calendar, December 1976

"The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: 'Merry Christmas'—not 'Weep and Repent.'" #QotD

"The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion: it is good will toward men—a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property (though it is supposed to be part, but is a largely unobserved part) of the Christian religion.
    "The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: 'Merry Christmas'—not 'Weep and Repent.' And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form—by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance . . . .
    "The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialised. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colours—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only 'commercial greed' could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle."
        ~ Ayn Rand, in answering the question of whether it is appropriate for an atheist to celebrate Christmas.

Christmas reading

It's that time of year again: that regular annual ritual of weeding out my book stack to fit into my holiday book sack.

What books are you struggling to fit into your book sack this summer?

Or do you just take a bigger sack?
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Happy Christmas -- from Frank Lloyd Wright and us!

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright used to send out his poetic Christmas message every year. So I do too. 
He called it “Man the Enlightened Being.”  “The herd disappears and reappears," says Wright's message, "but the sovereignty of the individual persists." What better time of year to take time out to reflect on that.* 

 Literature tells about man. Architecture presents him. The Architecture that our man of Democracy needs and prophecies is bound to be different from that of the common or conditioned man of any other socialized system of belief. As never before, this new Free-Man’s Architecture will present him by being true to his own nature in all such expressions. . .
    With renewed vision, the modern man will use the new tools Science lavishes upon him (even before he is ready for them) to enlarge his field of action by reducing his fetters to exterior controls, especially those of organized Authority, publicity, or political expediency. He will use his new tools to develop his own Art and Religion as the means to keep him free, as himself. Therefore this democratic man’s environment, like his mind, will never be style-ized. When and wherever he builds he will not consent to be boxed. He will himself have his style.
    The Democratic man demands conscientious liberty for himself no more nor less than he demands liberty for his neighbor. . .
    Whenever organic justice is denied him he will not believe he can get it by murder but must obtain it by continuing fair dealing and enlightenment at whatever cost. He will never force upon others his own beliefs nor his own ways. He will display his social methods to others as best advantage as critic or missionary only when sought by them.
    His neighbor will be to him (as he is to himself) free to choose his own way according to his own light, their common cause being the vision of the uncommon-man wherein every man is free to grow to the stature his freedom in America under the Constitution of these United States grants him.
    Exterior compulsion absent in him, no man need be inimical to him. Conscience, thus indispensable to his own freedom, becomes normal to every man. . .
    Remember the men who gave us our [American] Nation. We have ‘the Declaration’ and our Constitution because they were individualist. Great Art is still living for us only because of Individualists like Beethoven. We have creative men on earth today only as they are free to continually arise as individuals from obscurity to demonstrate their dignity and worth above the confusion raised by the herding of the common-man by aid of the scribes and Pharisees of his time—quantity ignoring or overwhelming quality. The herd disappears and reappears but the sovereignty of the individual persists. . .

Read on here for Frank Lloyd Wright's full message: “Man, the Enlightened Being,” and have a great individualistic holiday season.

And remember this useful advice about responsible holiday drinking: Don’t underestimate when you’re at the bottle store. When there’s serious celebrating to be done, it would be irresponsible to run out.

See you next year!!

__________________________________________________________________________________

* [Note that by the word ‘Democracy’ Wright did not mean “a counting of heads regardless of content”; what he meant by the word was simply: Freedom.]

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#ChristmasMyths, #7: So why December 25?

 

A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS to all of you, and a Salacious Saturnalis!

Why are we celebrating morning drinking today? There’s a very good reason, and it’s not quite what you think …

---

As every child knows, Christmas falls on December 25th every year. Every year.

But is it because it says so in the Bible? Hell no! You won’t fnid any concept of that there.

The very few early Christian churches who did observe the Nativity² celebrated it sometimes in May, sometimes in April, and even occasionally in January. So clearly they had no clue when their legends had it their Saviour was born.

Nor did they know even which year he was supposed to have been born, the celebrated census causing the one-off visit to Bethlehem being a fabrication found nowhere in the historical literature other than the gospel fictions. So not a great datum bu whic to start a calendar then.

And of you think that today you’re ceberating a birthday, it gets even more complicated the further you drill down.

The authors of both Matthew and Luke suggest the Nativity events happened in the days of Herod, the King of Judea.³  But this particular Herod died in 4BC. The authors of Luke talk too about a census “made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria” (one unknown both to historians like Tacitus and Josephus, and also apparently to the authors of Matthew), just to have their boy born in the City of David. But while this placement gets their boy to Bethlehem in order to please their Jewish readers, they face the problem however that according to Josephus, the only historian to mention anything like this, Cyrenius didn’t become governor until either 6 or 10AD.

Quite a problem.⁴

Put beside that larger stumbling block, the problem of the day, or even month, seems almost minor. (But you do have to wonder what sheep and shepherds were doing out in the fields at night in midwinter where snow very occasionally “blankets the region.” Shouldn't tit have ben them who were away in a warmish manger?)

Now, despite the fact that not one of these authors of festive fiction had any clue about any of the alleged history they referred to, there is in fact a very good reason that fifth-century church fathers eventually did settle on a date of December 25 to celebrate when their divine boy was born. And it wasn’t because of anything they’d put in their book.⁵ It was because folk had been out in the streets for thousands of years already on December 25 celebrating the birth of many other divine boys all born the same day. Boys like these, whom everyone at the time would have known:

And so, rather than fighting the ages-old tradition, the church fathers of what was now a state religion enforced by military arms figured thatr with the full might of the Roman Empire now behind them (red James Valliant’s and Warren Fahey’s Creating the Christ for some of the details)they could simply usurp the heathens⁶ by main force. Usurp them by adopting their rituals, banning their heresies, burning their books--and trying to bury the memory that they had ever existed.

Which is a nasty enough story for this benevolent time of year, but it still doesn’t explain why December 25 was such a crowded calendar for divine birthdays. 

To a modern ear it might sound strange, but the simple explanation is that this day in December was the best day to celebrate one of the most important moments of every year: the winter solstice.

That’s why virtually every early northern-hemisphere culture in and out of Christendom celebrated it, from China to India, from Buddhist temples to Celtic dolmens, sometimes adding the legends of divine birth to allow their divinity to absorb the power of the moment.

It’s easy to forget this, living as we do in the two-hundred years out of all human history in which the industrial revolution has made it possible for billions to complain about #FirstWorldProblems, but in a superstitous time and place ignorant of causality, , it was only at the solstice you discovered whether the gods had decided to give this earth and everyting on it the gift of life for another roiund of harvests; pre-industrial society the annual harvest was everything—it was literally life or death.

And in pre-scientific stone-age societies, where all these myths and their rituals were born, it’s easy to forget the cause of the returning harvest was utterly unknown. 

So perhaps it was divine?

It was the result, surmised most cultures, of battles between competing gods; between gods of light (“I am the light of the world,” said Attis, Mithra, Uncle Tom Krishna and all) who every year beat back the darkness, to start the cycle of birth and rebirth again.

Since even the cause of the returning seasons was wholly unknown, making of every new solstice a divine miracle brought by Saturn, Sol Invictus or whichever Saviour figure your worshipped, little wonder then that the turning of the winter solstice was a time to get happy and praise your gods – to celebrate that  your gods were beating back the darkness for another year (and remember, most people in these early times wouldn’t see but very few years in their lives, life expectancy being what it wasn’t).

This is not unimportant. Author Joseph Campbell (author of Hero with a Thousand Faces and the Power of Myth) describes it brilliantly when he writes that through rituals like these we are seeking to “feel the rapture of being alive. Rituals and ceremonies help us find the clues to this within ourselves.” Through rituals like this, he says, we celebrate our passage out of the darkness.  This solstice celebration is perhaps the ultimate and most literal example.

So while December 25 isn’t the winter solstice, it was the first day in the Northern Hemisphere that the day begins getting noticeably longer, and this victory begins being noticeably evident. Just the right time then to celebrate the victory against the forces of darkness with all the rituals at your disposal, in the hope (but not expectation, mind) that they will bring victory again next year.

That we still celebrate this victory today, along with all the trees and the stockings, the Santas and sleighs and mistletoe, and all the hugs and smiles and eating and drinking, and all the revelry and other Pagan trappings of being whole and being alive to celebrate another year with loved ones confirms strongly enough that the whole mythic celebration still has resonance today, even down here in the Southern Hemisphere summer, and even though it’s changed its form a little since the days of ancient Horus.

Just like all good myths should. That’s how they stay alive, even when buried.

So this Christmas, and every Christmas, there's nothing in it either an atheist or pagan can't get behind and celebrate themselves: if it's a celebration of anything at all, it's of "the rapture of being alive"!
Could there be anything better to which to raise a glass or six?

So I wish all of you, even the trolls, a very Merry Christmas.

A Cool Yule-Feast.

A delightful Noel.

A wonderful Nolagh.

A corking Capacrayme.

A Great Triple Night.

A very happy Natalus Solis Invicti.

And a sweaty and Salacious Saturnalia.

Enjoy!

And I’ll see you all in the New Year.

READ THE WHOLE #CHRISTMAS MYTHS SERIES HERE:

• #1: Introduction, and The Miraculous Birth
• #2: The Star of Bethlehem
• #3:  The Song of the Heavenly Host
• #4: The Birthplace and Surroundings of the Little Baby Jesus
• #5: So, What’s With All That Frankincense?
• #6: The Slaughter of the Innocents

NOTES:

1. This and later posts in the series rely heavily on Thomas William Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions, and Joseph Campbell’s Occidental Mythology and  Thou Art That. 2. Until the Romans made Christianity compulsory in 391AD, at which time they decided on a collection of books for their Bible and banned and burned all the rest, early Christian church rituals would often be based around the regular reading and re-reading of one particular Gospel. So the Nativity would only have been celebrated by those who read either Matthew or Luke (since the unknown authors of neither Mark nor John had added this allegedly all-important stgory to theirs--which is curious, don't you think?).
3. Yet again, the authors of both the earlier Mark, on which these two are based, and the later John show precisely zerointerest in the subject.
4. Just to further confound things, Josephus expressly states that as long as Herod the Great lived, the province of Judea was exempt from Roman taxation. Ergo Luke's taxation census must have occurred after Herod's death while Matthew requires it to have happened before.
So why add a census to the story?
One reason was to have their hero born in in Bethlehem, and so fulfil scriptural predictions about a Messiah coming from Bethlehem. But they might have plotted it better.
Another might have been that the taxing, for which the census was supposed to be the purpose, inspired the formation of the Zealots, or Nazarenes—with whom some authors speculate Jesus and his brother James were heavily involved. So by associating their boy with the privations involved this was a dog whistle to their colleagues.
5. “…they put into their book.” The Gospels themselves were being subtracted from and added to by copyists virtually all the way up to the fourth century, when Emperor Consantine ordered Christians to stop squabbling and ordered the production of fifty copies of what has become the canonical Bibles, based on the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus.
6. It started gently. Writing in about 390AD, John Chrysostom refers to the massive public Roman celebrations for Sol Invictus, and says, “On this day, also, the Birth of Christ was lately fixed at Rome, in order that whilst the heathen were busy with their profane ceremonies, the Christians might perform their holy rites undisturbed.” Within a century, the public and even private celebrations for Sol Invictus were banned, barred and buried from sight, with the new state religion taking over.

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The #ChristmasMyths. #2: The Star of Bethlehem

Part of a continuing series looking at the pagan origins of the Christmas Myths, one day at a time. (Introduction is here.) Today, the story of three mendicants and a star.

We Three Kings of Orient are
One on a tractor, Two in a Car
One on a scooter Tooting his hooter
Following yonder star …
~ Fred Dagg, ‘The Authorised Version’

LONG BEFORE THE GREAT Fred Dagg first sang or the Bethlehem Star burst into print, Jesus was born under a star that guided three wise men to his stable door, stopping at Herod’s palace to ask the way. Actually, only the first of these things really happened.

The real story about the last thing however is marginally more interesting than what you’ve heard —especially its real origins; which is infinitely more compelling for being true.So settle back and pull up your star charts.

THE STORY OF STARS and wise men and Jesus is only barely told. For all the amount it fills up space on so many Christmas cards, the story itself only appears in one of the gospels, the one written well after Jesus would have died that erroneously bears the title of ‘Matthew.’ You may consider its inclusion passing strange for a few reasons:

• why this one author chose to add the tale, when the Bible itself was so equivocal on what amounts to astrology; 
• why the authors of the other Gospels choose to ignore the embroidery altogether; 
• why the author(s) of Mark, the earliest Gospel from whom the author(s) of Matthew borrowed most of his, didn’t bother to include any of it; 
• why the three men who we’re told are so wise, and despite being led by this star, lost their way so badly they ended up in Jerusalem instead of Bethlehem; where they very unwisely dobbed in the new baby to King Herod, causing the King to “slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof,from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.”
     I mean, they don’t actually seem to be very wise, do they.

So if any of this sounds in any way wise, or even literarily or historically correct, then I have some gold, and frankincense and myrrh to sell you.


OF COURSE, IT’S NOT INTENDED to be taken as either literarily or historically correct. What idiot would? It was written as myth, based on other myths, to appeal  to a credulous audience who was rather partial to the occasional celestial message from the skies.

The Roman historian Tacitus tells us, for example, that at a crucial moment in the reign of the Emperor Nero,

A comet having appeared at this juncture, the phenomenon, according to the popular opinion, announced that governments were to be changed, and kings dethroned.  In the imaginations of men, Nero was already dethroned, and who should be his successor was the question.

Indeed, popular opinion also had it that brilliant stars were also seen at the birth of every Caesar, Canon Farrar declaring in his own Life of Christ:

the Greeks and Romans had always considered that the births and deaths of great men were symbolised by the appearance and disappearance of heavenly bodies…

Frankly, the credulous Roman people were prepared to accept that a sign from the sky would indicate either a coming coup, or the coming of a great man.

This then was the audience to whom the authors of Matthew were talking when they wove their tale—one to whom it would have been passing strange if his story of this new Messiah did not contain some sort of clear cosmic sign.

SO WHY DID THOSE authors need to add the Three Magi from the East who were following what they told Herod was “His star”? Perhaps because it was from “The East” that this tradition of the “cosmic herald” derived.

Consider the birth of the Buddha, which was supposed have been announced in the heavens by what was called a “Messianic star” rising on the horizon. “Wise men,” known as “Holy Rishis,” were informed by this that their Messiah was born.

Famous births in India also enjoyed their own celestial shining light. The Indian Nakshatias divided the astrological field into 27 constellations, any one of which could direct your life—any unfavourable signs needing to be assuaged by a ceremonial S’Anti. When Crishna was born, “his stars” were said to be seen in the heavens.

In China too, the same astrological influences predominated, and the birth of Yu the legendary founder of China’s first dynasty, was said to have been accompanied by a star, as was the birth of the Taoist sage Laotse.

In the Muslim world, a star and several other celestial signs were supposed to have appeared at the birth of Ali, Muhammad's great disciple.

According to Hebrew legends, a “brilliant star” was also supposed to have shone at the birth of Abraham, and the star at Moses’s birth was so bright it was supposed to have been seen and reported by Egyptian Magi to their king.

In Egypt too, tables were kept with tables of the constellations and their movements for every hour of every month of the year—all of which were supposed to have influence on human beings, and to herald forthcoming events—not least the birth of a Pharaoh.

That’s a lot of stars to have appearing and disappearing in the cosmos. All these appearances on cue would have demanded many more “special stars” and astrological events than even the ancient heavens could have provided. But as we said, they were al a fairly credulous lot.

For his story, Matthew chose to hook directly into the Persian tradition of strangeness in the heavens, where from ancient times they looked to the heavens for guidance, and to the stars for divination. Astrologers were said to have “swarmed throughout the country.” And according to Matthew’s addition to the Gospels it fell to what seems to be three Persian Magi, the Zoriastrian priesthood who followed the god Ormuzd, to distinguish “his star” and announce to the world—or at least to Herod—that the newborn had been granted divine sanction thereby.

A strange tale indeed. (Or an interesting one, if you consider all the sources.)

But if you want to sell your man as a Messiah to an uncritical world ready to believe that the great men of myth and history already had stars to their name, and misguided astrologers to guide them, then evidently that’s a tale a budding Gospel writer decides he has to write.

Well, one of them at least.

READ THE WHOLE #CHRISTMAS MYTHS SERIES HERE:

• #1: Introduction, and The Miraculous Birth

This afternoon: “The Song of the Heavenly Host.”

* * * *

* This and later posts in the series rely heavily on Thomas William Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions. Unless otherwise attributed, all quotes are sourced from there.

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The #ChristmasMyths, #1: The Myth of the Miraculous Birth

 

TIME FOR A SHORT STORY.

A story about the Christian Christmas stories,

A story about where that some of that stuff of legend and mythology came from – what the myths really mean, why early Christian authors wanted to borrow them, and why in some form or other they are told and retold. So …

Q: What’s mythology?
A: Someone else’s religion

Q: What’s the Christian Christmas story based on?
A: Someone else’s stories.

The Christian Christmas story is based on Mythology borrowed from elsewhere. I’m going to look at the pagan origin of each of these myths and legends one day at a time: the miraculous birth; in a humble place; of a youngster of impressive genealogy; accompanied by a tremendous star; and (in Luke) a heavenly choir; recognition of the divine child by passing vagrants wise men; their presentation of gifts; and the slaughter of innocents by a king fearing the child might displace his crown.

The early Christian writers did well in writing their story but, rather than being made up out of whole cloth, it was woven together from earlier myths and legends and the stories of other religions, with most of which they and their readers would have been familiar, to tell the bigger tale those writers wanted their readers to embrace.

Stay with me as I tell the stories.

Today, the Myth of the Miraculous Birth . . .

Far from being unique to the Christian Christmas story, the Virgin Birth Myth is so common in world mythology as to have been the leitmotif of any god anywhere--it's almost like it's a prerequisite for any god that the story appear in his biography if he (or she) is to be taken in any way seriously. So no wonder those early Christian authors wanted it for their own.

The tale appears in American Indian mythologies; in Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology; in Asian and Indian mythologies of every kind -- and even in Maori mythology here in New Zealand. It’s ubiquitous—and not just because everyone copied, but because, like all mythology, it reveals some fundamental truth.

LOOK AT SOME OF the places and times that share the tale.

It appears in ancient Indian myth in the figure of Heri Chrishna, or Crishna the Saviour, who is born of the chaste virgin Devaki, selected on account of her purity, begotten by the deity Vishnu, and said to be “the very person of Vishnu himself in human form.”

Thai mythology has a virgin-born god and saviour called Codon, his mother, a beautiful young virgin, was “impregnated with sunbeams” while out praying one day.

In Buddhist mythology, The Buddha was born of the Virgin Maya, or Mary, after the divine power called “The Holy Ghost” was said to have descended on her in the form of a white elephant! (A little like the session with a white bull enjoyed by Pasiphae, the mother of the Minotaur, but with seemingly more pleasant results.)

Like someone else we could mention, it was said of the Buddha, “He in mercy left paradise, and came down to earth because he was filled with compassion for the sins and miseries of mankind.”  From the time of his birth however, Maya’s womb was sealed up “like a casket in which a relic is placed” and she lived thereafter as a perpetual virgin. So it didn’t all end well for her.

The Hindus have a Lord and Saviour call Salivahana, a “divine child born of a Virgin, in face an incarnation of the Supreme Vishnu.”
China too has the demi-god Fo-hi, conceived when a virgin tasted the divine lotus, and at whose birth a rainbow appeared.

Laotse too, the founder of Taoism, was said to have been “a divine emanation incarnate in human form,” born of a virgin out of his mother’s side. The sages Yu, Hau-ki, Xaca, Confucius were also said to all be god-begotten and virgin-born.

Stop me if any of this is sounding at all familiar.

NOW IT MIGHT BE argued that all this was a bit distant to early Middle Eastern authors. Maybe. But the Middle East of the time was one vast trade route. In any case, there was plenty of virgin-born action closer to home.

In Egypt there was the Saviour Horus, god of vengeance, sky and protection and the second emanation of Ammon, conceived in bizarre fashion out of the virgin Isis and said to be born on December 25; the god Ra, “born from the side of his mother, but was not engendered,” and the sons he himself divinely “engendered”; the god-king Menes likewise.

By the rivers of Babylon (where they sat down) they told stories of how their god-king Nebuchadnezzar was created by the god Bel, engendered by the god Marduk, “and deposited himself the germ of [his] life in the womb of [his] mother.”

Zoroaster in Persia too—who Plato says the Persians considered to be the son of the Supreme God Orasmasdes--was “born in innocence, of an immaculate conception, of a ray of the Divine Reason.”

As was the Indian/Persian angelic divinity Mithras, said to have enjoyed a virgin birth, 12 companions and an ascension into heaven, and around whom the Romans built a religion that at the time of the Gospels’ creation was among the most popular going around—the Pagan Christ—the sun-god ‘Sol Invictus Mithras’ said to be the “favourite deity” of Asia Minor whose “mysteries” had “permeated the Roman Empire and extended from India to Scotland”—and whose birthday just happened to be on December 25.

If they were to be successful, this last was the main religion the early Christians either had to knock off or usurp—or absorb.

Justin Martyr to Emperor Adrian: “The story of Jesus’ divine birth ‘says no more that what you
Pagans say of those whom you style the sons of Jove.’” Picture shows birth of Dionysus-Zagreus,
first son of Jove to a mortal woman, who was was torn apart by the Titans 
before being resurrected and ascending to heaven. Nice story. But who would ever believe it?

THE EARLY CHRISTIAN WRITER who revelled in the unlikely name of Justin Martyr relied on all this and more when he wrote to Emperor Adrian arguing that the just-written story of Jesus’ divine birth “says no more that what you Pagans say of those whom you style the sons of Jove.” True enough. Jove aka Jupiter aka Zeus was, if you recall your cursing properly (“By Jove!) not only “omnipotent” but also the first and the last; the head and the midst; the giver of all things; the foundation of the earth, and the starry heavens.”

So he was a divine and all-powerful fellow. And so were Jove’s sons, by Jove!

Among the divine sons of Jove aka Zeus we can find Hercules, the son of Jupiter by a mortal mother Alcmene;Bacchus (aka Dionysus), delivered by the mortal mother Semele “by a lightning-bearing flame” (which must have hurt the poor woman); Amphion, by the mortal mother Antoiope; Prometheus, the deliverer of fire to humans, and a deity uniting divine and human nature; Perseus, by the mortal virgin Danae; Mercury, by the mortal mother Maia; Aeolus, by the mortal mother Acasta; Apollo, delivered under a tree to the mortal mother Latona; Aethlius, by the mortal mother Protogenia; Arcas, by a mortal mother; Aroclus, by another mortal mother.

The legendary founder of Rome Romulus was said to have been the son of God by the “pure virgin” Rhea-Sylvia

That’s a lot of begatting going on. So it seems that if any bogus Messiah were to be taken at all seriously around these parts, he needed as a minimum some kind of supreme being in his bloodlines and maybe a bit of virgin-birthing to kick his story off.

Roman and Greek rulers themselves were not immune to having their stories so embroidered. The legendary founder of Rome Romulus was said to have been the son of God by the pure virgin Rhea-Sylvia. Julius Caesar was supposed to have a God for a father, as was Augustus. Alexander the Great was said to have been the son of either Jupiter/Zeus or Ammon (depending on who was telling the story) by the mortal mother Olympias, who was impregnated by a divine snake, all of which no doubt amused his warrior father Philip. His general and partial successor Ptolemy Soter (Ptolemy Saviour) was also said to carry the divine afflatus, as was Cyrus, King of Persia.

Alexander the Great was said to have been the son of the mortal mother Olympias, who was impregnated by a divine snake

Plato too was believed by many to have been the son of God by the pure virgin Perictione, and his father Aris was said to have been admonished in a dream to leave her bits alone because she was pregnant to a god. Plato’s story, and Aris’s, is shared by the mother of Apollonius, and the father ofPythagoras. Aesculapius, “the great performer of miracles, was supposed to be the son of a god and the worldly mother Coronis.” She supposedly -gave birth on a mountain (it’s a long story), with the help of a passing goat-herd, to a child whose head was “encircled with fiery rays.”

Even closer to the Middle Eastern home was Simon Magus, a Hebrew hero contemporary with Jesus who performed miracles and was believed to be the son of a god.

And that’s not to mention the various offspring of Odin (who, because of his predilection for wandering the skies delivering gifts, was said to be one of the forebears of the Santa story), including Baldur and Thor; or the various virgin-born gods in the ancient South America that helped the Spanish so much in selling their own version of the virgin-born story to a fearful population—god-king-saviours like the MexicanQuetzalcoatl, the Mayan Zama, Bochica of Colombia, Manco Capac (offspring of of the god Peru), Votan of Guatemala, and Zome of Brazil. Meanwhile, North American Indians celebrated the divine birth of Wasi, if you were Cherokee; of Qaagagp if you were an Edue of California; of Tarengawagan if you were Iroquois; and Michabou if you were Algonquin.

Not to forget the miraculous birth of the trickster      

and miracle-worker Maui, conceived                

here in New Zealand to the divine                 

Tama-nui-te-ra and the mortal mother Taranga          

Not to forget the miraculous birth of the trickster and miracle-worker Maui, conceived here in New Zealand to the divine Tama-nui-te-ra and the mortal mother Taranga, and the hero of many delightfully tall tales.

NOW, IT’S FAIRLY OBVIOUS that not one  of these stories relate actual historical events. In each of them, the story is intended either to be taken as the sort of exaggerated boasting Arabs still enjoy today, or to be taken as a metaphor—a symbol in the most basic sense. According to mythologist Joseph Campbell, the symbol embodied here is that of “the birth of spiritual man out of animal man.” A symbol, in other words, of an important transformation in human affairs --- the coming into maturity of mankind.

This relates strongly to what Campbell calls "the Hero Myth," universal in so many cultures, in which the son is born to a father who is, let’s say, a hero warrior gone off to the wars after conception never to return.  The son’s first quest as a man—his first spiritual journey—is the quest to find his father. In other words, to find himself.

There is then [says Campbell] a whole tradition of mythologies involving the spiritual begetter and the son who must go in quest of his father.
    This is not always a Virgin Birth in the physical sense…

But important to the tale that his thought-to-be father is often revealed not to be his real birth-father – his origins, like mankind’s, being lost in the mists of time.

No surprise then in the Jesus story that his parents fail to understand him when, in the story, the twelve-tear-old Jesus tells his parents “he must be about his Father’s business.”

And note that even in the Synoptic Gospels themselves, when the Jesus stories first appear, we never find Jesus from his own mouth (as told by his take-tellers) declaring himself to be either a god or God, or to be worshipped as one.²

So if you do take these as Gospel, then you’d surely have to believe him.

Understanding the myths is far more interesting than arguing for them being literal or historical fact. Isn’t it odd that instead of enjoying the metaphorical meaning of these myths and stories, so many folk get hung up instead on the literal fiction.

Happy Horusmas!

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NOTES

1. This and later posts in the series rely heavily on Thomas William Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions. Unless otherwise attributed, all quotes are sourced from there.

2.  “If we seek in the first three Gospels to know what his [later] biographers thought of Jesus, we find his true humanity plainly stated, and if we possessed only the Gospel of Mark, and the discourses of the Apostles in Acts, the whole Christology of the New Testament  would be reduced to this: that Jesus of Nazareth of was ‘a prophet mighty in deeds and in words, made by God Christ and Lord.’ ” – Albert Réville
And check out the Question ‘Is Jesus God?’ at the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible site.

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If you’re going to drink up this Christmas, do it properly

 

My Christmas present to myself this year (thank you, readers) is  these IPA glasses.

While a stubby holder, a pilfered pub tumbler and the occasional stemmed pilsner glass have been my main beer holders over the years, it's now time to up my game. 

So if you have beer and nothing to put it in, you can look at The Spiegelau Store. Fine people. Quick delivery. And they have wine glasses for those unfortunate enough not to drink beer – and cocktail glasses for those astute enough to need them.

Fill your boots up.

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The best & worst gifts measured

 

If you’re buying an economist a gift this Christmas … don’t.

Or at least don’t before examining why you maybe shouldn’t – because economists reckons what you spend on gifts is generally valued much less that what you paid for them.

A 1993 paper, “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas,” gave the notion its first real academic ballast. The author, Joel Waldfogel, then at Yale University, calculated yuletide waste by asking 86 students to estimate the cost of presents they received. Average answer: $438.
    He asked how much they would have been willing to pay for the same gifts. Average answer: $313. Recipients valued gifts at 71.5 cents on the dollar, a significant economic inefficiency.
    Gifts, Mr. Waldfogel wrote, “leave the recipient worse off than if she had made her own consumption choice with an equal amount of cash.” …
   “The efficiency loss of Christmas presents,” they concluded, “is highest for gifts from grandparents.”

Take that, grandparents! (Although some researchers reckon girlfriends rate as fair;ly useless too.)

[And] a 2009 ‘Journal of Socio-Economics’ paper measured gifts across the holiday catalogue, from books (which recipients valued at 74% of the amount spent) to footwear (92%) and kitchen gadgets (77%).
    “We find no evidence of significant welfare gains in any gift category,” the paper concluded, calling gifts a “considerable market failure.”

Don’t worry. There is hope.

Anyone who has studied microeconomics knows... that an income transfer, as opposed to a gift in-kind, gets you to a higher level of utility," but as WSJ reports, putting theory under the tree is another matter. After years of studying the economics of gift-giving, economists have found that some gifts are valued more highly than others, and that some gift-givers seem to be better than others...

Turns out that pets suck, but jewellery rocks. So, this Christmas, buy your favourite economist some bling. Or send them on a long trip …

[Hat tip Zero Hedge]

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The *real* reason for the season

 

Yes folks, it’s time for that post again because …

It’s the Christmas season. Yuletide. The festive season. And we need to know the real reason for the season, which is …. probably not what you think it is.

We’ve had the cartoon, so like all good Christmas dinners, let’s have a Christmas joke:

Q: "What's the difference between God and Santa Claus?"
A: "There is no God."

Ha ha ha.  The fact is, dear readers, at least Santa—well, Saint Nicholas at least—was a real figure, if not a real bloke, even if the many other inspirations for the Santa Claus character were not.

But God, or Christ, is suspiciously hard to find. (Which makes you sort of wonder what kind of message he’s allegedly trying to send by being so, well, non-omnipresent and all, and by only sending notes via obscure Bronze- and Roman-era texts.) And the harsh fact about him and Christmas, whatever else you may have heard, is that Christ himself was never even in Christmas --except in fiction and by order of the first few Popes.

Not even in the Roman-era texts:

[The New Testament itself gives two different and incompatible stories of the birth of Jesus, explains Christopher Hitchens.] None of the four gospels gives any notion of what time of year (let alone in what year) the supposed Nativity occurred. Only two gospels mention the virginity of Mary and only one has any mention of a "manger" [which is nothing more than a fancy name for trough – but try singing “Away in a trough” and see where that gets you!].
    Nowhere is there any record of a "stable." Wise men and shepherds are likewise very unevenly distributed throughout the discrepant accounts. So that the placement of a crèche surrounded by a motley crew of humans and animals has no more Scriptural warrant than does The Life of Brian [and many fewer laughs].
    Moreover, the erection of this exhibit near the turn of the year is actually a placation of the old Norse gods of the winter solstice - or "Yule" as the pre-Christians sometimes called it.
    I myself [says Hitchens] repose no faith in any man-made text or made-man redeemer, so when it's Christmas I say "Merry Christmas" with a clear conscience, as I respect Ramadan and Passover, and also because "Happy Holidays" is so thin and insipid.
    I don't mind if Christians honour the moment by displaying, and singing about, reindeer (a hard species to find in the greater Jerusalem/Bethlehem area). Same for the pine and fir trees that also don't grow in Palestine. I wish everybody joy of it.

And so do I. I just wish the Christians would leave off bashing us over the head with their myth—and their values.

So many facts that appear in your nativities don’t even come from those texts. We celebrate Christmas in December, yet the best we can tell from those Christmas stories is that the character of Jesus wasn't even born in December, let alone at Christmas time: he was born in July.¹ Which makes him a cancer.²  Just like religion itself.

And God doesn’t even like Christmas trees, for Chrissake!

So the reason for the season, and how the season is celebrated, have very little originally to do with what you might have thought it did.

Historians themselves however do know the "reason for the season," and it's not because of anything that happened away in a stable at a time of a non-existent census.  Even the Archbishop of Canterbury knows the truth, conceding a few Christmasses ago that the Christmas story and the Three Wise Men -- the whole Nativity thing itself --  is all just "a legend." Legends in fact that borrowed in whole cloth from other times and other places, and thereafter usurpedand occupied  by the Christian church.

Speaking for myself,  I really like myths and legends.

I’m even happier when we remember they’re stories, not historical accounts. (Q: What’s the definition of mythology? A: Somebody else’s religion.)

So the simple fact to remember at this seasons is that 'Christmas' itself was originally not even a Christian festival at all.  The origins of what we now all enjoy was most likely the lusty pagan festival to celebrate the winter solstice, the festival that eventually became the Roman Saturnalia (right).

In the pre-modern northern hemisphere, (from whence these traditions started) this time of year was especially important; the time of year when days stopped getting darker and darker, and started once again to lengthen.

A halfway point in winter, that bleak season of hibernation before planting could begin again and you knew by now that the crops being stored to keep the wolves at bay would see you through. Or not. And if they would, you had something to celebrate: that another year on earth was maybe possible!

So this was a time of the year for great optimism.  The end of the hardest part of the year was in sight (particularly important up in Lapland, the pagan home of the Norsemen where all-day darkness was the winter rule), and those all-important food stocks would soon be replenished.

All this was something worth celebrating with enthusiasm, with gusto and with plenty of food and drink and pleasures of the flesh -- and if those Norse sagas tell us anything, they tell us those pagans knew a thing or two about that sort of celebration!  They celebrated a truly Salacious Saturnalia.

Thus was born the now-celebrated tradition of being blathered for most of what has become the Christmas month.

One other popular celebration (and stop me if you’ve heard this before) involved having a chap put on the horns and skin of the dead animal being roasted in the fire (worn with the fur side inside and the blood-red side outside ), and giving out gifts of food to revellers.  This guy represented Satan, or at least some species of evil-doer, and the revellers celebrated beating him back for another year by making him a figure of fun (I swear, I'm not making this up). 

Observant readers will spot that the gift-giving and the red outfit lined with red fur (and even the name itself, almost) are still with us in the form of Santa.  So Happy Satanmas, Santa!

 

SUCH WERE THE celebrations of the past.  But the Dark Age Christian do-gooders didn’t like the pagan revels. Too little sackcloth and ashes for their liking. Instead of bacchanalia, these ghouls of the graveyard wanted instead to talk about suffering and their sores, and to spread the misery of their religion worldwide; instead of throwing themselves into such lewd and lusty revels, they thought everyone should be sitting at home mortifying their flesh  – and  very soon they hit upon a solution: first they stole the festivals, and then they sanitised them. 

And instead of lusty revels with Satan and mistletoe, they gave us insipid nonsense around a trough along with Magi, stars, and shepherds – with only an angel or two to excite a bit of lust.  (Just think, the first 'Grinch' who stole Christmas was really a Pope!)

So given this actual history, it's somewhat churlish of today's sanitised saints of sobriety to be complaining now about history reasserting itself and folk claiming Christmas back for their revels.

BECAUSE THE VERY BEST OF Christmas is still very much pagan, for which you should really thank Odin, not the baby bloody Jesus.

The mistletoe, the trees, and the presents; the drinking and eating and all the red-blooded celebrations; the gift-giving, the trees and the decorations; the eating and the singing; the whole full-blooded, rip-roaring, free-wheeling, overwhelming, benevolent materialism of the holiday -- all of it all fun, and all of it fully, one-hundred percent pagan.

And commercial! (Spoiler alert, the modern Christmas was born that way: it was invented by capitalism.) Says Leonard Peikoff in 'Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial' (s), the festival is "an exuberant display of human ingenuity, capitalist productivity, and the enjoyment of life." I'll drink to all that, and then I'll come back right back up again for seconds.

Ayn Rand sums it up for mine, rather more benevolently than my brief introduction might have led you to expect:

“The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion: it is good will toward men—a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property (though it is supposed to be part, but is a largely unobserved part) of the Christian religion.
The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: ‘Merry Christmas’—not ‘Weep and Repent.’ And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form—by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance....
    “The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying is good for business and good for the country’s economy; but, more importantly in this context, it stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decoration put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only ‘commercial greed’ could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.

And so say all of us.  I wish you all, wherever you are a  Cool Yule, a Salacious Saturnalia, and a very Happy Christmas.

PS: Here’s some related Hot Facts from the Hot Facts Girl. Concentrate as well as you can…

 

 

 

1. Yes, this is simply a rhetorical flourish. Jesus' birth may have happened in March. Or in September -- or not at all -- but it certainly did not happen in December. More on that here.

2. "A cancer. Like religion." Think that's harsh? You should try Landover Baptist's Bible Quizzes. Or Sam Harris's 'Atheist Manifesto.' Ouch! [Hat tip for both, good old Stephen Hicks] And, I confess, I pinched the quip from Australian comedy team The Doug Anthony All Stars.

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It’s Christmas in Venezuela

 

Its socialist rulers having taken the means of production into the toilet, and with its currency now worth less than the toilet paper you won’t find there, Venezuela’s socialist apparatchiks have now done a reverse Scrooge – confiscating toys from toy makers so they can be seen to be Santa.  But quite apart from the moral outrage of blatant theft, Dan Mitchell points out in this guest post that the practical problem with raiding toy makers to redistribute toys is that next year, there won't be any toy makers to raid.
This is what socialism looks like, children …

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Socialist Venezuela Raids Santa's Workshop

Earlier this year, I borrowed from Dante’s Inferno and created the Five Circles of Statist Hell. At the time, I suggested that Venezuela was on the cusp of moving from the third circle (“widespread poverty and economic misery”) to the fourth circle (“systematic and grinding poverty and deprivation”).

Since we now know that children in the country are suffering from hunger and malnutrition, I think we can safely confirm that Venezuela has made that crossing, joining the dystopian hell of North Korea (though you can make a good argument that the savage regime based in Pyongyang actually belongs in the fifth circle).

And just in case you need another piece of evidence about Venezuela, consider these excerpts from a surreal BBC report.

Venezuelan authorities have arrested two toy company executives and seized almost four million toys, which they say they will distribute to the poor. Officials accused the company of hoarding toys and hiking prices in the run-up to Christmas. Last week, the government issued an order to retailers to reduce prices on a range of goods by 30%. …Our children are sacred, we will not let them rob you of Christmas,” it said in a tweet, along with photos and video of thousands of boxes of toys. …The agency also posted photos of the two executives being marched from the premises by a squad of heavily armed soldiers.

Here’s some additional background on the economic situation in the country.

This is not the first time Venezuela has ordered price cuts on retailers, or mobilised armed units to enforce it. In late 2013, the country introduced laws allowing the government to fix prices and dictate profit margins. …The same measures have been used to fix the prices of basic products such as flour, meat and bread – but supply is limited in a country where many people go hungry.

Before continuing, I can’t help commenting that BBC journalists apparently can’t put 2 and 2 together. The reason supply is limited and people are suffering is because of the price controls and intervention.

Sigh.

Anyhow, here are some final passages from the article.

The Venezuelan government is becoming increasingly unpopular as the country’s economic crisis grows. …The International Monetary Fund estimates that inflation – the rate at which prices go up – will hit 2,000% next year.

Yup, Venezuela is a regular Shangri La. No wonder Bernie Sanders is so infatuated with the place.

But let’s focus today on the Venezuelan government’s attempt to play Santa Claus by seizing toys and selling them at below-market rates.

I don’t know if this move will be politically popular since that depends on whether ordinary people have some degree of economic sophistication.

But we can say with great confidence that it represents terrible economic policy. That’s because, as Thomas Sowell has wisely noted, it’s very difficult for a government to steal wealth more than one time.

The victims (both the ones who already have been looted and the ones who might be targeted in the future) quickly learn that it’s not a smart idea to accumulate assets that can be stolen by the state.

In effect, the productive people of the country learn to behave like the Little Red Hen.

In the short run, though, the Venezuelan government gets to play Santa Claus. At least for 2016.

But it won’t have that option in 2017. And because the nation’s kleptocratic government is running out of victims, it’s just a matter of time before the system collapses, at which point the government either gives up power or launches a brutal crackdown.

Hopefully the former.

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Daniel J. Mitchell is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending. He also serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review.
This post previously appeared at his blog International Liberty, and at FEE.

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Q: The modern reason for the season? A: Capitalism.

 

Christmas as we know it? It’s mostly a modern invention – and that’s mostly good.
In this guest post, B.K. Marcus tells a little bit of of the little-known tale of how American capitalism created both the modern Christmas and the market innovation of Peace on Earth.

Rowdy men in colourful rags gather outside the city’s nicer homes, demanding to be let in. Some have disguised themselves with mock-fancy outfits that ridicule their less-than-willing hosts, while others have blackened their faces or dressed up as animals. If you try to keep them out, they will shatter your windows, break down your door, and help themselves to food and drink. If instead you grant the rabble access, your costumed guests will drink your best booze and demand a cash “tip” for slurring a noisy song at your family.
Welcome to a traditional Christmas, as it was celebrated for over a thousand years: from the last days of Rome, through late-medieval London, to 18th-century New York.
No Santa, no Christmas tree, no wreath or holly or mistletoe. And no more sign of the Holy Family than you would have seen at any other season.

“It was all a little like Halloween today,” writes historian Stephen Nissenbaum in The Battle for Christmas, “when, for a single evening, children assume the right to enter the houses of neighbours and even strangers, to demand of their elders a gift (or ‘treat’) and to threaten them, should they fail to provide one, with a punishment.”
    But unlike modern Halloween, the traditional Christmas involved real intimidation: the costumed petitioners were not small children but lower-class young men; they were already drunk and demanding yet more to drink.
    How did this annual ritual of clamour and extortion turn into silent night, holy night?
    Despite centuries of effort by Church authorities, that transformation was not at all a religious conversion from pagan bacchanal to pious observance. The modern, domestic Christmas is younger than the Industrial Revolution, and like that revolution, it was part cause and part consequence of commercial capitalism.

The Clash of Christmas Cultures
Whether it’s Starbucks cups or the ever-popular “Happy Holidays” greeting, every year it seems there is a controversy over Christmas and how it’s celebrated. The most amusing so far this year is the story about Minneapolis’s Mall of America hiring its first black Santa's helper that outraged so many readers of the Minneapolis Star Tribune they had to shut down online comments. As one journalist responded to the controversy, “Nothing says ‘Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men,’ like a tsunami of hatred over a black man honouring the legend of a Turkish bishop, in celebration of the birth of a Palestinian Jew.”
    “The blowback,” she continues, “is yet another chapter of on ongoing saga that a ‘war’ is being waged against Christmas.”
  Whatever official tradition is allegedly being dropped, it has become an unofficial tradition in Europe and North America at least that as the nights grow longer and the temperature drops, there must be a public skirmish in an on-going culture war over the season and its sundry greetings.
    The central winter holiday (claim the protectors of tradition) has grown either too secular or too exclusionary, either too politically correct or too incorrect, and always—always!—they bleat that it’s far too materialistic.
    Implicit in the charges is the idea that unsympathetic forces have corrupted our holiday and degraded our longstanding traditions. We have, it is ever contended, lost track of the true meaning of Christmas.
    But older than most of our modern Christmas traditions is the tradition of fighting over how to celebrate in late December — or whether to celebrate at all. The traditionalists and their many followers seem to believe that a failure to explicitly observe Christmas is an attack on Christianity. But once upon a time, some of the most zealous Christians, especially in America, took precisely the opposite position…

The Traditional Enemies of Christmas
For the first two centuries of European settlement in New England, writes Nissenbaum, there was no official celebration of Christmas at all.

In fact, the holiday was systematically suppressed by Puritans during the colonial period.… It was actually illegal to celebrate Christmas in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681.

Why such hostility toward Christmas from pious Christians? According to the Puritans, Christmas was not really a Christian holiday at all.

It was only in the fourth century that the Church officially decided to observe Christmas on December 25. And this date was chosen not for religious reasons but simply because it happened to mark the approximate arrival of the winter solstice [and the birth of a  legendary number of pagan gods], an event that was celebrated long before the advent of Christianity. The Puritans were correct when they pointed out — and they pointed it out often — that Christmas was nothing but a pagan festival covered with a Christian veneer.

When you consider how Christmas had been celebrated for over a millennium — with drunken misrule, menace, and open invasion of property — it’s easier to understand the Puritan antipathy to the holiday.
    But over time, the opponents of this carnival Christmas found that they couldn’t suppress the celebration.
    Today, “diversity” is a buzzword for the sort of political correctness that traditionalists contend is the enemy of Christmas. But the only era in which Christmas was even partially suppressed was when a homogeneous population of the pious dominated the culture and the government.
    As both Europe and America grew more diverse in backgrounds and beliefs, Christmas reasserted itself.
    The Puritan attempt to ban Christmas was part of a larger campaign to impose a particular understanding of biblical religion on England and America, but it also had a more practical, secular goal: dispersing the crowds that gathered in public to pursue their disorderly version of holiday cheer.
    In the early 19th century, a different group of rich and powerful men tried to re-engineer the holiday for their own social agenda. That their efforts were ultimately so successful has less to do with their specific goals than with how well their invented traditions served the emerging commercial culture of industrial capitalism.


Inventing Tradition
In 1975, a small group of Boston artists were seeking an alternative way to celebrate New Year’s Eve, one that avoided the usual emphasis on drunken revelry. Their solution was called First Night, a gathering of performers and public audiences seeking to welcome the New Year without alcohol. The event was a success, and nearby communities soon adopted it. By the end of the 20th century, it had spread to more than 250 North American cities. By 2006, First Night attracted more than a million visitors.
    A century and a half earlier, wealthy New Yorkers pursued a similar mission: to offer an alternative to the sort of Christmas that historian Susan G. Davis called “riotous disorder, racial violence, and jolly foolery for neighbours and audiences.”
    The combination of “customary Christmas license” and the seasonal unemployment that still occurred in an economy based largely on agriculture, Davis writes in Parades and Power, “made the winter holiday a noisy, drunken, threatening period in the eyes of the respectable.”
    Some of the respectable took it upon themselves to fashion an alternative to the traditional Christmas. The Knickerbockers (the name comes from a pseudonym used by the group’s best-known member, Washington Irving) were “a small group of antiquarian-minded New York gentlemen,” who, according to Nissenbaum, “felt that they belonged to a patrician class whose authority was under siege,” especially during the annual winter riots.
    Like the First Night artists, the Knickerbockers decided that the solution was not to ban the unwanted activity but to offer it some competition. Unlike First Night, the Knickerbockers’ alternative was to celebrate not in public but at home, not among crowds of strangers but rather with immediate family.
    This attempt to invent a newly domestic Christmas took several forms, but the one that captured the public imagination was the family Christmas that centred around small children, Christmas presents, and a new patron saint of gift giving: Saint Nicholas.
    The established wisdom may be that the American Santa Claus, now a global figure, was “a creature of ancient Dutch folklore,” as Nissenbaum puts it, “who made his way to the New World in the company of immigrants from Holland.” But Santa was, in fact, an invention of Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and in particular of Clement Clarke Moore, the author of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas.” Better known as “‘Twas the Night before Christmas,” the poem was first published on December 23, 1823, and has become, according to one New York historian, “arguably the best-known verses ever written by an American.”

Reinventing Children
Santa had predecessors, for sure, most notably the historical Saint Nicholas (known in Dutch as Sinterklaas), but before the 19th century there was no widespread tradition in America of Christmas gifts for children — in part because our current idea of childhood is itself a recent invention.

In pre-modern times, most children were treated as proto- or mini-adults — not yet fully formed but otherwise not essentially different from anyone else. There is some disagreement among historians about parents’ affection and attitudes toward their offspring in the eras of high infant mortality, but if we put aside the historically thorny issue of familial tenderness, we can see that the parental duty, commonly understood, was to prepare children for adulthood as directly as possible.
    Only in the early period of capitalism, with the rise of a large, commercial middle class, did the notion arise that children should be segregated from the grown-up world of work — and of bacchanalian carousing. Where Western attitudes toward childrearing had previously focused on a conception of the young as little savages who needed to be civilized, the modern bourgeoisie, influenced by the writings of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, came to perceive children as fundamentally innocent — a state that needed to be preserved, protected, and celebrated.
    With the more widespread wealth and increasing privacy brought about by a growing commercial economy, a new divide emerged in the minds of the middle class: a separation between the corrupting public sphere and the protective shelter of the home. The new icon of Santa Claus offered New Yorkers, Americans, and eventually the whole world a figure around whom to ritualise this newfound domesticity and to raise new generations of parents who would come to believe that their childhood memories of Christmas were part of a timeless tradition.

Removing the Price Tag
What was not perceived as timeless was the commercial revolution that made it all possible. Memories of a simpler time were fresh, if not entirely accurate. As industry, urbanisation, and immigration increased, so too did a desire for at least one time of year when we could retreat to a world of preindustrial craftsmanship, nonmonetary exchange, and quiet familial ties. Nissenbaum writes of the tension between the new economy and the new Christmas:

Perhaps the very speed and intensity with which those essentially new rituals were claimed as timeless traditions shows how powerful was the need to keep the relationship between family life and a commercial economy hidden from view — to protect children (and adults, too) from understanding something troublesome about the world they were making.

As merchants recruited ‘Saint Nick’ to promote their shops and mass-produced products, an antithetical image of Santa’s workshop became well established: one with no sign of machinery or modern production, only hand tools and individual craftsmanship. The presents exchanged on December 25 were overwhelmingly store-bought items; but with price tags removed and wrapping paper applied, they were presented as existing outside the commercial nexus.
    Even the Christmas tree, another seemingly ancient folk tradition that was in fact invented in the 19th century, “first entered American culture as a ritual strategy,” writes Nissenbaum, “designed to cope with what was already being seen … as a holiday laden with crass materialism — a holiday that had produced a rising generation of greedy, spoiled children.” The Christmas tree made gift giving less one-sided. The family tree became the locus of not only surprise and gratitude but also of mutual generosity, the hub of a material exchange “forged outside the fevered crucible of market relations.”
    The meaning of Christmas, according to the tree-centred ritual, lies not in material gain but in gratitude and generosity.

The Season of Light
Our current holiday rituals can be seen, then, as a dance between capitalism and an on-going cultural ambivalence to commerce. The world of economic production and exchange produces a need to escape our awareness of the marketplace — and the market itself meets that demand.
    If we need that annual hiatus to be more spiritual, less materialistic, more familial, and less anonymous, the commercial culture will adapt, even with seemingly non-commercial solutions.

Those who want to celebrate the winter solstice as the birth of their saviour[s] have centuries of tradition behind them. But that has never been the way most people celebrated the season, no matter what our selective memory may suggest. Drunken revelry in the streets is now confined to New Year’s Eve [sadly – Ed.], and is a much older tradition, one the Church sought to counter with its celebration of the Nativity. A religious Christmas may be more peaceful, more admirable, and certainly more high-minded, but in the appeal to tradition, it loses out to older and more popular forms of low-minded merrymaking.
     Where religious authorities tried and failed to rein in the noise and menace of the solstice season, modern capitalism succeeded, displacing the winter carnival with its own invented tradition: the domestic Christmas, a 19th-century creation merging Christian and pagan symbols in a celebration centred around two other historical innovations: the modern family and modern childhood.
    For millennia, people have wanted to spend the darkest part of the year celebrating in a way that diverges from the normal rules and routine. In an agricultural age, that meant overindulging in meat and drink. In a rigid social hierarchy, it meant reversing the ranks, making the wealthy serve the poor. In a commercial age, where mom and dad head off to separate jobs while the kids are sent to school, it means spending the holiday together in leisure, practicing a form of mutual generosity that is ritualized to obscure its capitalist origins.
    As long as the demand continues for an annual hiatus from the normal rules, the market will supply whatever is necessary to mark the season, even when what is required is the impression that we have somehow transcended the commercial world that makes our modern Christmas possible.

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B.K. Marcus is editor of the Freeman,
where this post previously appeared.
Santa pic by Prodos

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