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.
Click here to learn more.
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.