The Holly King

Exploring the Animistic Roots of Christmas

Seasons greetings one and all. A quick announcement: for the next 24 hours (Christmas day) I am offering my course, Psychedelics and the Soul: Level - Mythopoetic Integration for nearly 50% off.

If you want to give yourself the gift of exploring mythic themes and symbolism in psychedelic integration, now’s the time.

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Sending love and blessings to you all as this year comes to a close. Now, onwards…

“Christmas was the only Christian festival I could celebrate with fervor. All others left me cold. New Year’s Eve alone had something of the attractiveness of Christmas, but definitely took second place; Advent had a quality about it that somehow did not fit in with the coming Christmas. It had to do with night, storms, and wind, and also with the darkness of the house. There was something whispering, something queer going on.”

-Carl Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 19).

All my life I’ve felt like an outsider looking in on Christian culture. I grew up outside of Christianity, and was served the watered-down grape juice of reform Judaism instead.

Though one could easily argue that anyone who lives in the Western world is still very much living in the Christian world. Still, I’ve always felt that never receiving a formal indoctrination into mainstream Christianity afforded me a unique perspective into the popular rituals and seasonal pulse of the Christian year, untainted by church, dogma, shame, or the threat of hell.

Yet with an Irish Catholic mother of strong Nordic-Germanic stock, something of the old ways still managed to seep into my psyche.

Something about Christmas always felt slightly feral, almost sinister to me, and the more I’ve learned about this holiday’s Germanic pagan roots, the more I’ve felt validated in this childhood intuition.

The revitalized tradition of Kraumpus Nacht, for instance, is a full-fledged demon festival, where a horrifying monster called Krampus comes and terrorizes children in snowy mountain villages. The Germans know a thing or two about the value of fear. I’m glad this clearly animistic tradition of placating fearsome mountain spirits has been kept alive, against all odds.

And while Krampus was unfortunately not a staple of my childhood, I did grow up with was the blessedly totemic rituals of the Christmas tree, crackling fire, and family feast. The divine scent of Noble fir pine imbues my earliest memories of Yuletide, along with untamed Pacific Northwest storms that rolled in off the Ocean like a wild god, rampaging through the conifers that surrounded my childhood home.

The likely shamanic, and ontologically curious belief in Santa Claus took root in my childhood psyche and opened up the possibility that there were indeed invisible, magical forces at play that could be only encountered in the dark of night. Children especially need beliefs like these to open them up to the possibility that another world exists behind this one, and that these otherworldly forces are indeed watching you.

I received all of the barely-cloaked pagan ritual that forms the foundations of this holiday without any of the religious overlay. I got Christmas without Christ.

Some would say that I’m missing the point. But I disagree entirely.

The more I’ve delved into the symbolism and mythology of Christmas, the more I’ve come face to face with its pre-Christian roots, which are decidedly rooted in the dark, in the decay of once-vibrant summer growth, and in the ripening of the soon-to-be-reborn sun. Against all odds, there is an animistic aliveness still present in this holiday, precisely because of its connection to a specific place and at a specific time: namely, northwestern Europe at the peak of winter.

The celebration of ice and snow marks a rare moment when slowness and inward contraction is actually honored in an overly extroverted culture. If you can look past the manic machinery of consumption and waste that marks the modern form of this holiday, especially in the US, there is actually a profound reverence for the natural world that remains strongly connected to Christmas.

First, there is the utterly pagan ritual of bringing an evergreen tree into one’s home, a symbol of enduring life, and perhaps a nod to the Siberian tundra where reindeer and psychotropic amanita muscaria mushrooms thrived during winter months, which many claim to be the shamanic mythos of Santa Claus. Others have written prolifically on this over the years, so I won’t belabor the point.

Regardless, the largely unquestioned tradition of bringing a tree into one’s house and ritualistically adorning it with totemic objects of personal and familial significance, is probably the most animistically rich practice still alive in mainstream Western culture. If only we could follow the ritual through to its natural conclusion by properly returning it to the earth, rather than dumping it on the side of the road, then we’d have a truly earth-honoring tradition that actually serves life and the holy in nature, rather than merely takes from it.

Then there is the refreshing tradition of adorning otherwise sterile homes and buildings with wreaths, garlands, and other handcrafted objects made out of local plant life. Most notable is holly, or “holy” tree, with its unmistakable red berry during the winter, and white flower during the spring and summer. Taken together, the holly tree contains every color we associate with Christmas: green, white, and red.

The symbolic roots of the holly tree go deep into the earthen memory of ancient Europe. The eternal battle between the mythical Holly King against the Oak King cycles endlessly between the winter and summer solstice, which the English poet Robert Graves links to stories throughout Celtic and Christian myth.

In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, perhaps the most enigmatic of the Celtic-Arthurian stories, the undying Green Knight is the holly tree personified, who comes to call at Arthur’s court on Christmas, trotting through the castle atop a green horse, bearing an axe in one hand and a holly bough, or club, in the other.

Challenging the court to a “Christmas game,” the Green Knight proposes that any blow dealt to him must be repaid in one year’s time. The old and gnarly knights of Camelot don’t say a word. Arthur’s young nephew, Gawain, is the only knight who accepts the challenge, eager to earn his name. Taking the Green Knight's axe, not quite sure how to handle his challenger’s bowed head, Gawain separates it cleanly from its shoulders in a show of newly found adolescent power.

Yet the Green Knight doesn’t fall. Instead he picks up his bleeding head off the cold stone floor. Red blood flows down his ivy-covered arm as he raises his head high. The Green Knight shows his head to lady Guinivere, Arthur’s wife and the lady of the court. It's an unexplained moment in the story, one that Arthur and his knights try to dismiss. Yet behind Guinivere stands a much more ancient Goddess known by many names, across countries and cultures, the one who ruled the cycles of the earth and the seasons of the northern world, who Graves called “The White Goddess.”

Despite what it may seem, the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, along with most Arthurian romances, can actually be seen as a hidden testament to the unyielding power of the archetypal feminine. The Christmas “game” the Green Knight proposes might all be in honor of Guinivere and the goddess that stands behind her. After all, it is she who he presents his head to.

In a year and a day, after Gawain travels throughout the land and arrives at a strange castle, where he is welcomed warmly and hosted by its mysterious lord, named Bertilak. While staying there, his character is further tested through three temptations by the wife of his host, who eventually gives him her green sash, a motif which has ancient Celtic and medieval chivalric layers of meaning.

Finally, Gawain arrives at the “Green Chapel” of the Green Knight to face his retribution. Walking through the earth-hewn, mossy ruins of the chapel, Gawain finally confronts the Green Knight who is patiently waiting, sharpening his axe. But now it's Gawain’s turn, no longer the adolescent youth eager to show his power. It's time for his youthful energy to pay up, and finally surrender to the great Holly King.

Trembling in his boots, Gawain bows his head low, waiting for the cold axe to fall.

One. Two. Three.

He flinches. The Green Knight belittles him for his cowardice. The second time the axe is raised, expecting its swift fall, Gawain only feels it placed gently on his neck. Impatient by now after a year of waiting for this moment, Gawain is ready for it to be done. The third time, the Green Knight raises his axe high into the crisp silver air, ready to strike.

A year turns. The moment arrives. The white winter sun stands still.

But all he gets is a nick on the neck, drawing a small bead of berry-red blood.

“Off with your head,” croaks the Knight, chuckling like stones beneath a churning river.

Mysteries within mysteries reside within this tale. The imagery of the myth emerges straight out of the pre-Christian imagination of Celtic Europe. To this day, it remains one of the weirdest, symbolically rich stories I’ve ever encountered. And like many myths, it can only be made sense of when seen as the unique expression of a specific place and a specific time on the planet.

I don’t pretend to know what this story is about. But I can smell the pungent terpenes of pine emanating through its words. Something in my bones understands that this story just makes sense, even though my rational mind doesn’t understand it.

Maybe it's my ancestors, whose own traditions might have mirrored those encoded within this tale. Maybe it's my love of this season, and the mystery and darkness that is so utterly a part of it.

Maybe it's the true spirit of the “holiday season” breathing its cold truth into the frostbitten air, a truth that the manic consumption of this holiday now much flies in the face of. It's something we are now all dearly paying for on a planetary level, but something our ancestors knew on every level of their being:

That everything given must be paid for. That the branch that blooms must also fall.

And that for the Holly King, death is just the middle of a long life.

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