Just as Christians celebrate Advent and the birth of the Divine Light in human form at Christmas, so Jews celebrate Hanukkah during this season. As I write this post, we're in the second day of the eight-day Hanukkah festival, which children particularly enjoy because they get to eat doughnuts, chocolate coins and pancakes, and receive gifts each evening at the lighting of candles.
Hanukkah is the celebration of the rededication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem in 164 BC. The temple had been defiled by the Greeks, reflecting the way Greek philosophical ideas were also starting to undermine the religious faith of many Jews. The Greeks believed in the power of logical thinking above all else, and used this belief system to try to weaken the spiritual faith of the Jews.
The Maccabeans defied the authorities and cleansed the Temple. Their redemption of this holiest of holy places necessitated lighting the precious space with an oil lamp, or Menorah, but when they had retaken the Temple they found that there was enough oil for only one day. The ritual had to continue for eight days, but although there seemed little hope of that happening, the Rabbis went ahead and lit the first lamp, showing their faith in God.
And then, the story goes, God performed a great miracle. The oil, which had been kept pure and undefiled during the times of spiritual darkness, miraculously burned for eight days. The entire Temple was cleansed and dedicated once again to the worship of God, Yahweh, the great Spirit beyond all human comprehension and logic.
Without Hanukkah, we would have no Christmas. If the Jewish religion had died out, there would have been no Jewish Messiah, no Jesus Christ. It would have been as C.S. Lewis describes the fallen land of Narnia, "Always winter but never Christmas".
Today, the festival of Hanukkah is celebrated in Jewish homes around the world with the lighting of candles, increasing by one every night, until finally all eight candles in the special Hannukiah, or Hanukkah menorah, are burning brightly.
The ceremony is accompanied by prayers and songs, and special foods are eaten - specifically, doughnuts and potato pancakes, or latkes. These foods are round and golden, and remind us of the round foods eaten at Christmas, to encourage the Sun to return. Gifts of gold foil-wrapped coins are exchanged, small symbolic Suns.
These facts, together with the emphasis on the importance of light in the Hanukkah story, hint that although there is a religious story, as well as a piece of verifiable Jewish history, attached to the festival, its origins must lie much further back in time, reflecting the universality of solar worship and the importance of the Sun in the Northern Hemisphere.
If the Sun dies, then life is extinguished. If there is no inner light, spiritual life perishes. The festival of Hanukkah reminds us of the supreme importance of the external and internal Sun in our lives. And this links us once more to Advent and Christmas, and to our primal need for light in both forms.
We also celebrate Advent with carols and candle lighting. In this celebration that anticipates the coming of the great Light of Christ, however, we also find echoes of the very ancient solar religious cults that our own ancestors followed.
Many Christians are horrified at this suggestion - that various elements combine in our modern religious celebrations - but to me, this only underlines the deep, archetypal forces of spirituality linked to the cosmos which play a paramount part in the world's great religions.
When you reflect on the importance of the harvest and of the crucial need of the Sun to bring about new growth, then the threat of the "death" of the Sun, which happens every year at the time of the Winter Solstice, must have terrified our ancestors.
They would therefore come together for huge seasonal festivals at sacred sites, would feast and sing and offer prayers to the gods, and generally - and horrifyingly, to us - accompany their rites with sacrifice. If there had been a good harvest and if the weather had been fine, the gods might be appeased by an animal sacrifice, but if the harvest had failed, especially if the weather had been particularly bad, then the elders of the tribe might conclude that a human sacrifice was necessary.
It would have been considered a great honour to be sacrificed for the good of the tribe. Such sacrifices took place throughout Europe, including the British Isles, and we may trace their rituals through the perfectly preserved "bog people" that have been discovered at archaeological sites. That they were ritual sacrifices may be seen from the fact that three types of killing were used: usually stabbing, poisoning and garotting. The power of the number three was considered very great in many ancestral religions, so a sacrifice had to be carried out in triplicate.
Perhaps the king or chief of the tribe, if his powers were waning along with that of the Sun, would accept the need to be sacrificed. Sometimes an important man or woman would volunteer to become the sacrifice. But there was a universal belief that human sacrifice was the only way of appeasing the gods when their wrath was evident, or when the powers of the Sun God himself seemed to be diminishing. The heavenly gods must be fed by animal or human blood.
Only with the coming of Christianity did these dreadful practices cease.
In some of our current Christmas carols, we may trace the outlines of a ritual long abandoned, but still half alive in the memory of the tribes.
The most obvious example is one of my own favourite carols, "The Holly and the Ivy".
First, a bit of background: Druids, the priests and priestesses of the Celtic religion, held many beliefs about trees. Each tree had an important role to play in the spiritual world as well in the physical realm, and a whole language was based on the meaning of each tree. The name "Druid" can be derived from the Celtic word for a wise person, "wid" or "wit", and the word for oak, "der" or"derry". So the Druids were the wise ones who gathered by the oaks, and performed rituals for the benefit of the people.
"The Holly and the Ivy" clearly reflects this practice, together with the shamanistic beliefs of the worshippers of Cernunnos, or Herne, the mighty hunter. Animal foods were vital in the winter, and the god of hunting must be invoked to help continue the tribal food supply. The deer must be made to run into the tribal hunting grounds, and you can hear this in the words of the hymn.
I'm going to italicize the "ancient" words, which I believe represent the ancestral rituals that preceded the coming of Christianity, and you can see what I mean here:-
The holly and the ivy,
When they are both full grown,
Of all the trees that are in the wood,
The holly bears the crown.
The holly bears a berry
As red as any blood,
As Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
To do poor sinners good.
O the rising of the Sun
And the running of the deer -
The playing of the merry organ,
Sweet singing in the choir.
As a child, I wondered what on earth the deer had to do with Christmas! And the answer, of course, is nothing! But the deer had everything to do with the old religion, and the seeking of the tree spirits and the god of hunting to sustain the tribe. Shamans would even don antlers and act out the ritual of hunting, as is still carried on today in the Horn Dance of Abbots Bromley, in England.
The first verse is clearly the start of a very old song about the tree spirits, and then comes the mention of blood, symbolizing sacrifice. Very shrewdly, the early Christians replaced the second half of the second verse, and of all subsequent verses, with the Christian doctrine, as in, "As Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ ...". There is no room to quote the entire carol here, but if you can get hold of the words, you'll see what has happened.
They also replaced the second half of the chorus, which is repeated throughout the song, with "The playing of the merry organ ..."; again, this banished the old religion and brought the song firmly into line with Christian practice.
Nevertheless, the sudden irruption of the "running of the deer" into a Christmas carol is in its way as shocking as the quick switch in Monty Python's famous Lumberjack Song! You know, the song which starts out with the very butch, macho lumberjack chopping down trees, and soon brings in his enjoyment of putting on women's clothing, etc., etc. Both songs are a kind of subversion of the original meaning.
If you're lighting Hanukkah candles during this week, or lighting candles on an Advent wreath each Sunday, please spare a thought for our poor ancestors, ignorant of the true nature of God and of spirituality, but aware that above all we humans need Light.
Our bodies and souls depend on it. And we must prepared to make great sacrifices in order to increase the Light in the world.
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