No one
who is seriously interested in Christmas can afford to overlook this
cornerstone book by Clement A. Miles,
first published in 1913. Christmas in Ritual and Tradition,
Christian and Pagan is a remarkable read for the folklorist, the casual
Christmas buff, or the historian.
Miles
traces mid-winter festivals that date back to our most ancient times, and shows
how ascendant Christianity took the traditions, motifs and sentiments of these
celebrations and melded them into the splendid Christian holiday that resonates
today. I quickly point out here that
Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan is not a revisionist,
anti-Christian work; rather, this is the deeply detailed and researched work of
a folklorist who looks at the many parts of our contemporary Christmas and
traces them back to their earliest roots.
It is fascinating.
Miles
spends some time in his explication of the three traditions of Christmas –
Christmas, Noel and Yule – and then reveals the origins of many beloved
Christmas traditions, including the Christmas tree, carols, the Yule log,
feasting and various games still played around the holiday hearth.
Sadly,
your correspondent has not been able to learn much about Miles. He died on February 2nd, 1918 at
only 37 years of age. He was a member of
the Folk-Lore Society, and had for
many years been on T. Fisher Unwin’s
literary staff. Miles also worked for
the Friends’ War Victims’ Relief
Committee, and possessed a wide knowledge of European languages, translated
Sabatier’s Modernism and other works
from the French, and was co-translator from the Italian of Gayda’s Modern Austria: Her Racial and Social Problems. His early
death was clearly a great loss to anyone interested in history or folklore.
Here is
a quote from Christmas in Ritual and
Tradition, Christian and Pagan that best provides a bit of the flavor of
the book:
Before we pass 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 ass linking the
beasts of the field to the Christmas adoration of mankind.
For many people, indeed, the charm of
Christmas is inseparably associated 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 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, Baldassarre, 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.
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 God 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.” 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 Assisi.
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 God 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.
Christmas in Ritual and Tradition,
Christian and Pagan is
available at Project Gutenberg, and the invaluable www.ManyBooks.net. It is essential reading for Christmas.
