Giant Radioactive Rubber Pants: If I see one more Pagan complaining that Christians 'stole' our holiday...
…I’m going to tear my hair out.
Seriously, guys. CHRISTMAS is a CHRISTIAN holy day. Personally, I think they have every right to complain that people are taking the ‘Christ’ out of what they celebrate. It’s supposed to be about Jesus after all!
Yes, a lot of Christmas traditions are based on original Pagan practices, like decorating a tree and making a Yule log and so on…but it’s still a Christian holiday. About Christ. It’s not Yule! It’s not celebrating the Winter Solstice!
They haven’t stolen anything!
They can have their holy day. We can have ours. We can all get fat and be merry together.
Why do you think so many of the traditions of Yule are found as Christmas? The Catholic church literally did steal it. They used turning Yule into Christmas as a way of converting the Pagan masses in Englad and Ireland. They also turn Cernunnos into Satan, thus worshipping him made you a Satanist and a witch.
Actually, I agree with naturewitch. They didn’t actually ‘steal’ our celebration perse, they just placed their own very near to the time of ours, in the hopes that it would overshadow Yule and people would eventually forget Yule.If it had worked, we wouldn’t still be celebrating the Winter Solstice now, would we?
Also, it wasn’t Cernunnos they turned into Satan, it was Pan. Cernunnos was relatively undiscovered, and there are actually very few carvings and inscriptions relating to him.
I really don’t get the Cernunnos thing. While he is sometimes shown with horns, it’s more frequent to see him with antlers. It’s Pan: consistently half man, half goat, and right there in the territory of the early Church to vilify. That is the “Devil” image we grew up with, people. Wales was far and too late in the game to make a popular scapegoat of their gods. The Romans did that to the practices of the people instead. It really is a matter of “Never again that stupid historical myth that never happened they way your local New Age section says it did.”
And it really wasn’t theft. It was a natural, and reluctant, adaptation of Germanic traditions. Yes, the early Catholic Church, with in the context of Roman conquest, really wanted everyone to adapt Christianity. But the early Church also would have rather eradicated all foreign pagan influences than adapt them. However, the Germanic Tribes of antiquity actually, by all intents and purposes, kicked the Romans out. And still we whine and moan that the Roman Christians oppressed the Germanic pagans and took their holiday? You can’t oppress without power, and the Romans had none against Germania. Germanic people ended up being the hired stabilizers of the Roman Empire in they days of its collapse. These people ended up adapting Christianity themselves, while refusing to drop certain traditions like Yule. The Church simply moved the date so that the celebrations would take on a Christian meaning.
Man, if there were a Pagan Pope, I would hope that one of the dogmas is to observe actual ancient and medieval history outside of modern metaphysical texts before initiations and dedications. It’s increasingly painful every time I read these things, and I feel excessively embarrassed for my teenage-self and how well I also bought into it.
