In Saxony and Thuringia, at Whitsuntide, the Wild Man, a person disguised in branches and moss, was chased through the woods. On being overtaken he was shot at with blank cartridge and pretended to fall down dead. A mock doctor then bled him and he soon came to life again. The rejoicing people placed him in a waggon, and led him about in procession, to receive gifts at the houses of the village.[361]
The common feature in all these apparently senseless observances is the symbolical sacrifice of the human representative of the spirit of vegetation, and they drive us to the conclusion that there was a time when the victim was sacrificed in reality. In the same way the custom still current in Belgium and French Flanders at the summer festival of drawing in procession large wicker figures enclosing living men, recalls the gigantic images of ozier-work, covered with leaves, in which the Druids confined the victims destined for their fiery sacrifices.[362]
CHAPTER IX
CHRISTMAS OBSERVANCES
In modern times, as the once joyful celebrations of May-day have waned the festivities of Christmas-tide have undergone increase and development. The grosser features of the festival have, no doubt, been eliminated; the mummers and the lord of misrule have for the most part gone the way of the May-king, but all the more graceful and orderly observances of the time have strengthened their hold on the popular favour. The decoration of the house is as usual to-day at Christmas as it once was at May-day, and the Christmas-tree has stepped into the place which the May-tree once held in the affections of the young. Yet if we trace these Christmas observances back to their origin, we find them as distinctively pagan in their ancestry as the festivities of May-day.
We owe the survival of many pagan customs largely to the Roman Church, whose settled policy it was to adapt the old festal rites to the purposes of the new faith, and to divert its rude converts from the riotous festivities of their unconverted friends by offering them the more orderly rejoicings of a Christian holy day. Gregory the Great, when he sent his missionaries to Britain, instructed them to Christianise the festivals and temples of the heathen, “raising their stubborn minds upwards not by leaps, but step by step.” And Dr. Tille, in his learned work on the German Christmas,[363] has shown what pains were taken by the priesthood to transfer to their own feast the rude rejoicings with which the unconverted Germans celebrated their great festival at the beginning of winter. The same transference of pre-Christian usages occurred in Italy, where the Christmas festival, first definitely fixed at the time of the winter solstice by Bishop Liberius, A.D. 354,[364] inherited, as expressly stated by Polydore Virgil, several of the features of the great Roman festival of the Saturnalia, held about the same time. This festival was an occasion for universal mirth and festivity. Friends visited and feasted each other, and there was a general interchange of presents, the objects presented consisting usually of branches, wax tapers, and clay dolls. The stalls were laden with gifts, like the Christmas shops of to-day. One of the days of the festival, the dies juvenalis, was devoted to children. The solstitial character of the festival is shown by the fact that another of its days was dedicated by the Emperor Aurelian to the Persian sun-god, Mithra; and Varro states that the clay dolls, which were an important feature of the celebration, represented the infant sacrifices once made to a Phoenician Baal who had been introduced to Rome under the name of Saturn or Cronos.[365]
However this may be, it is clear that some observances familiar to us at Christmas—the feasting, the present giving, and the now obsolete mumming—have an origin which is lost in antiquity. Other customs, too, though with a different provenance, have an equally venerable ancestry. The use of mistletoe, for instance, is without doubt a direct legacy from the Druids, who were wont at the time of the solstices solemnly to place upon their altars the mysterious branch, into which it was thought that the spirit of the tree retreated when the rest of the leaves had fallen. This practice, strangely enough, survived until within comparatively recent years in a ceremonial practised at York Minster and some other northern churches,[366] though as a rule the introduction of the mistletoe into Christian edifices was strongly reprobated, on the score that it was a heathen emblem.
The practice of decorating the house at the New Year with holly and other evergreens was also a pagan observance. Dr. Chandler refers to it as a Druidic custom, the intention being to provide the sylvan spirits with a shelter to which they might repair, “and remain unnipped with frost and cold winds, until a milder season had renewed the foliage of their darling abodes.”[367] In early times the Church made a stand against this use of evergreens as being a pagan custom, but the interdict was not persevered in, and later on we find the decoration of the churches a recognised practice, the note for Christmas eve in the old Calendar being, Templa exornantur.[368]
The observance, however, which most concerns us here is that of the Christmas-tree, the evolution of which furnishes us with one of the most interesting chapters in the history of religious development. To the present generation the Christmas-tree appears such an essential feature of the festival, as celebrated in this country, that many will be surprised to hear how recent an importation it is. But as a matter of fact, the Christmas-tree was practically unknown in England until it was introduced by the late Prince Consort.[369] Even in Germany, the land of its origin, it was not universally established as an integral part of the festival until the beginning of the present century,[370] and it was only at that date that it came to be known as the “Weihnachtsbaum” and “Christbaum.”[371] Goethe in 1774 describes it as adorned with wax tapers, sweetmeats, and apples, but calls it simply the “decorated tree.”[372] Schiller in 1789 finds no more distinctive name for it than the “green tree.”[373] Since that time, or rather since 1830, its diffusion throughout the world has been so marvellously rapid that there is nothing to compare with it in the whole history of popular customs.
In Germany the Christmas-tree can be traced back more or less in its present form to the beginning of the seventeenth century, when an unnamed writer, in some extremely fragmentary notes, tells us that it was the custom at Strasburg to set up fir-trees in the houses at Christmas, and to deck them with roses of coloured paper, apples, etc.[374] The next mention of it occurs half a century later in the writings of Professor Dannhauer, a celebrated theologian, also living in Strasburg.[375] “Amongst the other absurdities,” he writes, “with which men are often more busied at Christmas than with the Word of God, there is also the Christmas or fir-tree, which they erect in their houses, hang it with dolls and sweetmeats, and then shake it and cause it to shed its flowers. I know not the origin of the custom, it is a child’s game.... Far better were it to lead the children to the spiritual cedar, Christ Jesus.” The reprobation of the Strasburg preacher was echoed by other divines, and to this cause probably the Christmas-tree owed its slow diffusion throughout Germany. The theological dislike of it, however, as it turned out, was ill-advised, for eventually the Christmas-tree displaced other popular observances of a far less innocent nature.
So far we have been treading historical ground, but in tracing the Christmas-tree still farther back we have only inference to go upon. The subject, however, has been carefully worked out by Dr. Tille,[376] and the pedigree which he traces for the tree is a most interesting one. His argument must here be condensed as closely as possible. The Christmas-tree, with its lights, its artificial flowers, and its apples and other fruit, is presumably connected with the legend of Christmas flowering trees, which was very familiar to the Middle Ages, and of which the English myth of the Glastonbury thorn is an example. The origin of the legend in Germany is thus explained by Dr. Tille:—It is not unusual when the season is mild to find trees blossoming in November, especially the cherry and the crab-tree. For the old German peasant the New Year began with the great slaughtering feast early in November, when the cattle were brought in from the pastures, and all the superfluous ones were butchered and feasted on; the winter was thus counted to the New Year, like the eve to a holy day. Hence when trees blossomed late, a casual connection was inevitably traced between the strange phenomenon and the New Year feast at which it took place. On the introduction of Christianity the feasts of St. Martin, St. Andrew, and St. Nicholas were substituted for the ancient festivals. The strange blossoming power of nature was connected with St. Andrew’s Day, and fruit-boughs severed on that day were believed by the people to possess particular virtue.[377] The Mediaeval Church, always eager to enlist popular superstitions in its own support, set itself to transfer to Christmas the blossoming tree of the November festival, and the legends which related how celebrated magicians like Albertus Magnus, Paracelsus, and Faustus had made for themselves a summer in the heart of winter were incorporated by the monks into the lives of certain saints.[378] The belief in trees that blossomed and bore fruit at Christmas was widely distributed and firmly held amongst the people in the later Middle Ages. In the German literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries many instances of the miraculous fact are circumstantially recorded.[379] A writer in 1430 relates that “not far from Nuremburg there stood a wonderful tree. Every year, in the coldest season, on the night of Christ’s birth this tree put forth blossoms and apples as thick as a man’s thumb. This in the midst of deep snow and in the teeth of cold winds.” In a MS. letter of the Bishop of Bamberg, dated 1426, and preserved in the Hofbibliothek at Vienna, the actual blossoming of two apple-trees at Christmas is mentioned as an acknowledged fact, and we find a Protestant preacher giving full credence to the belief nearly a couple of centuries later.