Being
part of an
occasional series on the blessings of the human condition
So What Is This Christmas
Thing?
The story of Christmas is an unholy smörgåsbord of competing myths,
with more than enough variations for any
unimaginative adolescent to
create their own customized fairy tale pick-and-mix version of
history.
For the Christmas story has all the right ingredients: Objective history, with lashings of legend. Astronomy, with a splash of astrology. Real flesh and blood people with a soupçon of supernatural. As ingredients for fairy stories go, it doesn't get much better than this.
The main problem with bursting only a few of the muliplicity of myth bubbles is that there are still so many fairy stories left over. No, that myth is not true, but, no, your reactionary neo-pagan Christian myth is not true, either, along with its many derivations.
Let's start with a clean slate: everything you've ever heard about Christmas is untrue, or at least distorted to the point where it has long since ceased to be meaningful. And that includes whatever pagan origin urban myths you've collected over the years. Christmas is a crock, let's start over.
The Origin of Christmas
This is such a huge subject, ripe with obfuscation, so you will excuse me for skimping on the details en route to the nitty-gritty. Here then, in as few words as possible, is how it really happened:
The
Sun is big. Really, really very big. Think of seriously big
and
then multiply by a grillion. And not only big, but also hot,
with substantial implications for our agrarian forefathers. If you live
off the land, the Sun absolutely rules your life. Even today, as
isolated as we
are from nature, the Sun determines our days, our weeks, our months,
our seasons, our years and our ages. Think how much more important the
Sun must
have been before pizza and TV were invented. Naturally, the Sun became
a god.
That is all very well except that, at one particular time of year, the Sun practically disappears. Which could be very disconcerting if you were new to agribiz. Plus, it gets bloody cold. The Sun sinks lower and lower every day until it appears to stop moving altogether. Think about it - you plant your seeds and the Sun God goes on a coffee break. Three days later it starts to climb higher and higher in the sky and, then, before you know it, it's Christmas. Today, we call that lowest position The Winter Solstice. The relative movement is caused by the angle of the planet's rotational axis to the solar plane and the apparent lack of movement is because the Sun is at the very nearly flat bottom of a sine wave. All of which is terminally boring but let's just say that without it Vivaldi would never have created the old Quatro Stagioni.
The Winter Solstice (December 21st) and the Western Christmas (December
25th) are the same thing, the difference being exactly that difference
between the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Here's a seasonal picture
of a Christmas tree over a pretty statue at The Rockefella Center.
Now isn't that special.
In time, the Sun became anthropomorphized, which is to say that the Sun acquired a human name as well as human and superhuman attributes. Early Sun myths such as Horus and Tammuz are worth exploring as even today their stories permeate our culture. Among other things, they were each an only son, born of a virgin, died for three days and were resurrected. If you'd like to learn more, do a search for Zeitgeist, The Movie.
Nothing else of any importance ever happened at Christmas.
Well, except for a couple of things you should probably know:
Some Elementary Daytime Astronomy
This is where it gets even messier, but hope is at hand. I'm assuming
here that your Christmas slate is still clean, with
the possible exception of a teensy bit on the Sun and the Winter
Solstice. Now we get
to add another character on our Christmas cast list and even, who
knows, our Christmas card list.
A long time ago, in a mythology far, far away lived Azazel, who you may know as Anu (pic), Ishamash, Molech or Khem, probably more familiar to you as the biblical Ham. (If you pronounce Ham with a very froom Hassidic New York accent it sounds just like Khem.) He has as many names as there have been subcultures. In Greece they called him Kronos and by the time he got to Rome his name was Saturn.
Now, this may never have occurred to you, but all the days of the week are named after heavenly bodies. This will be more apparent if you speak a foreign language or have a passing interest in etymology. Bear with me if you're familiar with this:
The story of Christmas is an unholy smörgåsbord of competing myths,
with more than enough variations for any
unimaginative adolescent to
create their own customized fairy tale pick-and-mix version of
history.For the Christmas story has all the right ingredients: Objective history, with lashings of legend. Astronomy, with a splash of astrology. Real flesh and blood people with a soupçon of supernatural. As ingredients for fairy stories go, it doesn't get much better than this.
The main problem with bursting only a few of the muliplicity of myth bubbles is that there are still so many fairy stories left over. No, that myth is not true, but, no, your reactionary neo-pagan Christian myth is not true, either, along with its many derivations.
Let's start with a clean slate: everything you've ever heard about Christmas is untrue, or at least distorted to the point where it has long since ceased to be meaningful. And that includes whatever pagan origin urban myths you've collected over the years. Christmas is a crock, let's start over.
The Origin of Christmas
This is such a huge subject, ripe with obfuscation, so you will excuse me for skimping on the details en route to the nitty-gritty. Here then, in as few words as possible, is how it really happened:
The
Sun is big. Really, really very big. Think of seriously big
and
then multiply by a grillion. And not only big, but also hot,
with substantial implications for our agrarian forefathers. If you live
off the land, the Sun absolutely rules your life. Even today, as
isolated as we
are from nature, the Sun determines our days, our weeks, our months,
our seasons, our years and our ages. Think how much more important the
Sun must
have been before pizza and TV were invented. Naturally, the Sun became
a god.That is all very well except that, at one particular time of year, the Sun practically disappears. Which could be very disconcerting if you were new to agribiz. Plus, it gets bloody cold. The Sun sinks lower and lower every day until it appears to stop moving altogether. Think about it - you plant your seeds and the Sun God goes on a coffee break. Three days later it starts to climb higher and higher in the sky and, then, before you know it, it's Christmas. Today, we call that lowest position The Winter Solstice. The relative movement is caused by the angle of the planet's rotational axis to the solar plane and the apparent lack of movement is because the Sun is at the very nearly flat bottom of a sine wave. All of which is terminally boring but let's just say that without it Vivaldi would never have created the old Quatro Stagioni.
The Winter Solstice (December 21st) and the Western Christmas (December
25th) are the same thing, the difference being exactly that difference
between the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Here's a seasonal picture
of a Christmas tree over a pretty statue at The Rockefella Center.
Now isn't that special. In time, the Sun became anthropomorphized, which is to say that the Sun acquired a human name as well as human and superhuman attributes. Early Sun myths such as Horus and Tammuz are worth exploring as even today their stories permeate our culture. Among other things, they were each an only son, born of a virgin, died for three days and were resurrected. If you'd like to learn more, do a search for Zeitgeist, The Movie.
Nothing else of any importance ever happened at Christmas.
Well, except for a couple of things you should probably know:
Some Elementary Daytime Astronomy
This is where it gets even messier, but hope is at hand. I'm assuming
here that your Christmas slate is still clean, with
the possible exception of a teensy bit on the Sun and the Winter
Solstice. Now we get
to add another character on our Christmas cast list and even, who
knows, our Christmas card list.A long time ago, in a mythology far, far away lived Azazel, who you may know as Anu (pic), Ishamash, Molech or Khem, probably more familiar to you as the biblical Ham. (If you pronounce Ham with a very froom Hassidic New York accent it sounds just like Khem.) He has as many names as there have been subcultures. In Greece they called him Kronos and by the time he got to Rome his name was Saturn.
Now, this may never have occurred to you, but all the days of the week are named after heavenly bodies. This will be more apparent if you speak a foreign language or have a passing interest in etymology. Bear with me if you're familiar with this:
| Day | Planet (English) |
Greek Diety |
Norse Diety |
Anglo-Saxon Day |
German Day (Old) |
French
Day (Old) |
Spanish Day |
| Monday | Moon | Selene | Mano | Monandaeg | Montag | Lundi | Lunes |
| Tuesday | Mars | Ares | Tiw | Tiwesdaeg | Dienstag | Mardi | Martes |
| Wednesday | Mercury | Hermes | Woden | Wodnesdaeg | Mittwoch | Mercredi | Miércoles |
| Thursday | Jupiter | Zeus | Thor | Thorsdaeg | Donnerstag | Jeudi | Jeuves |
| Friday | Venus | Aphrodite | Freia | Frigedaeg | Freitag | Vendredi | Viernes |
| Saturday | Saturn | Kronos | Sataere | Saterndaeg | (Sataere-tag) | (Saturni-dies) | Sabado |
| Sunday | Sun | Helios | Sunna | Sunnandaeg | Sonntag | Dimanche | Domingo |
Yes, in most languages
the days of the week are named after some or other celestial lump. In
many cases the original sense is lost in time. For instance, the modern German
Samstag comes from Sataere-tag. In English we use Latin names
for the planets, but Germanic for the Sun and Moon. Spanish
is interesting,
their
weekend names meaning Sabbath and Lord's Day. Not bad for the
people that gave us Feliz Navidad.
Now let's try and look at this objectively: The weekend, arguably the two most important days of the entire week, are named after the Sun and Saturn. This is a biggie and, stay tuned, it's about to get even bigger.
If
one were to ask which day of the week was the most significant, in
America most people would suggest Sunday. But that's only because
Western civilization is run by people that worship the Sun. In many
other cultures, Saturday is the most important day of the week. And, of
course, Saturday was the original Christian sabbath and day of worship until AD
325, when
Constantine, Sun Emperor, and sole earthly representative
of Sol Invicta (the Sun God), rather unsurprisingly moved it to Sunday.
The Jewish Sabbath, as an example, starts at sundown on Friday and ends at sundown on Saturday, following the older convention of having real days before midnight was invented.
Let's have an action replay here in case you missed it: The original Christian day of worship, the Sabbath and the most important day in many cultures is the day given to the planet Saturn. The Moon is closest, Jupiter is biggest, Venus is nicest, but Saturn? Now, that's just plain curious.
The Other Side of Christmas
Curious, unless you have a working knowledge of the Law of Octaves. Our two days of the weekend are really a Gnostic microcosm of cosmic duality: light and dark. Those two fish really do swim in different directions. For instance, Horus (you know - only son, born at Christmas, virgin mother, died for three days and resurrected) represents the Sun and obviously Sunday. His opposite number represents the dark, meaning the night, but also absence of the Sun. Remember those three days when the Sun "dies"?
The
winter solstice, the apparent death of the Sun deity, happens just as
the Sun moves into the part of the sky we call Capricorn. And
Capricorn the Goat is ruled by, guess
who, Saturn, which name has also entered our language from another
direction as the word Satan (obviously related to the
sabbatical goat, the latter-day symbol of wannabe witchcraft, but that
is
another story entirely.) Well, no surprises here, then, to learn that
the mortal enemy of
Horus is Set, ever-present complementary deity of the dark side and
generally of all things
less-than-sparkling including, of course,
Seturday. (Still courtesy of Zeitgeist.)
And so it is, that the great primordial pissing-match of light versus dark manifests in our weekend as Saturday and Sunday, and is also back by popular demand every single Christmas, for the death of the Sun God at the winter solstice is also the birth of Saturn. In case you're still asleep, the new year starts in the sign of Capricorn with jANUary, named after jANUs.
That alone explains most religions and, if you do your homework, much else besides.
Astrology? I don't even believe in Astronomy
Mars
is known to astrologers as The Lesser Malefic -
hardly complimentary - but poor old Saturn is called The Great Malefic or The Bringer of Sorrow.
Let's get it over with: Saturn has been associated with some serious
heavy shit. You can do your own research but don't get bogged down in the ugly stuff.
Although his name starts with an X in Greek, the original symbol of Kronos gave us the modern letter K. Today we use the symbol shown here, like an uncial letter h with a cross. This symbol is also the alchemical symbol for lead, the base metal to be transmuted into gold, so if lead vs gold isn't on your duality list now would be a good time. Now. This page will still be here when you get back.
In this diagram the zodiac has been turned so that the
winter solstice is at the
bottom. In December the Sun is at 6 o'clock moving counter-clockwise
and moves from Sagittarius to Capricorn on its way back up to the
Summer Solstice. Of
course, the Sun doesn't really travel through the constellations - we
swing
around the Sun and see the stars behind it. Being the outermost of
the visible (to the naked eye) planets, Saturn is by far the
slowest. Check out the "Saturn Return".
Saturn is the secondary planet for Aquarius and Libra but it's his role as the ruler of Capricorn in which we are interested here. Capricorn is also a Cardinal sign which probably means all kinds of mega-exciting astrological thingies available in this month's Cosmopolitan.
More importantly, Cardinal means the sign starts on one of the cardinal points. On a compass that would be North, South, East, West. Look at the cross on the Saturn symbol and as on the Zodiac let's call the right (East) arm the Spring Equinox (Aries), the top (North) arm is the Summer Solstice (Cancer), left (West) is the Autumnal Equinox (Libra), and that leaves the longer bottom arm of the Southern Cross which is the Winter Solstice (Capricorn). Funny how it all fits. Extra points for spotting the scythe.
The Esoteric Significance of Christmas
Poor Mr Kronos Saturn, the Satan connection notwithstanding, is desperately in need of a public relations image makeover. In many cultures he is pictured as an old man with a large white beard and a hood or a pointy hat, rather like Gandalf. (Oh yeah - Anu's title was: Lord of The Rings.) Sometimes Saturn carries a lantern and a crook or shepherd's staff. Did I say shepherd? Uh-oh. Or a wand. In these enlightened times, of course, he combines the lantern and the staff and is armed with a light saber. Huh?
Anu Khem KronoSat in some incarnations would carry a scythe, for he is also known as Old Father Time. Not really strange, therefore, to discover that we use his Greek name (XPOVOS, Kronos, or Chronos in English) as a prefix meaning time (chronic, chronology, chronograph, chronometer, cron).
(NB: The name Kronos starts with the divine chi-rho prefix XP, same as Jesus, hierophant and Windows.)
And it's not just the Solar system and Christmas, Saturn also puts in a special guest appearance in The Tarot. As card number nine (there's that octave thing again) he is more commonly known these days as The Hermit. In medieval Italian tarot he was called Il Tempo (The Time). He appears on other cards as well.
For his role as the Hermit (or Searcher) he should wear the brown robe of humility, more like Obi Wan Gandalfi and not white as pictured on the tarot card here. In England he was known as Robin Goodfellow, and more recently as Robin Hood (tights are optional, but wearing green is not).
Sometimes,
as Old Father Time, he is dressed in white, although his
alter ego The Grim Reaper would normally wear black and rather more of
a saturnine complexion. In Scandinavian
countries he wears green, the traditional colour of Saturn, but in the
West he wears red and we call him Santa. Red is an appropriate color
considering the amount of bloodletting and sacrifice that has been done
in his name.
Bet you even think the candy cane and the barber's pole are traditional, accidental and you can probably quote some spurious folk tale about their origin. Saturn was so slow going around the solar system that he became associated with the snail. The Greek word for snail is helix. A crook with a red helix. Still believe in the Tooth Fairy?
Whatever you want to call him, and there is certainly plenty of
choice, from Assyria to Atlanta the Kronos–Saturn character in his
many
guises gets to play the lead role in the Christmas Fairy Story
of many cultures. The good news is that Saturn's bloody crook can only hook
you if you are one of the sheep.
Like most big-time deities, Saturn has animals and plants dedicated to him. In his case, this was a tough choice, because in the Northern hemisphere it's so staggeringly cold that pretty much everything in the botany department is dead around Christmas, leaving just a handful of evergreen. Like the holly and the ivy. Oh, and the pine tree. Especially the pine tree. Sacrificed your Douglas Fir yet?
If you imagine, after this brief introduction, that you know what Christmas, Saturnalia, Apollo, Natali
invicta, Anu, Nanna, Capricorn, Mithra, Mistletoe, The Gingerbread Man and
the Winter Solstice is all about, yule better think again. Your
Titanic Christmas adventure has
only just begun:
On your marks - ready, set, go: Obelisk Broken, Isis?
In keeping with the Christmas Spirit, you probably know that Albus Dumbledore has a
wand made of sacred wood from the evergreen holly tree, the tree given to Saturn. Or Hollywood,
as it's also called. Note that in this picture his owl lectern pays
homage to Molech, Malak, Melek, or as he's sometimes known,
Saturn. Did I say permeate?
The Spiritual Significance of Christmas
By now you probably think that we've taken a meandering detour of some pretty obscure pantheons, not to mention Universal Studios, just for the hell of it. Truth is, we took the shortcut as this stuff leads everywhere in history and still leaves its tell-tale mark on our culture today. We cut a few corners to get here because it doesn't matter what label the Winter Solstice story is known by: Anu, Khem, Janus, Shani, Pan, Kronos, Molech, Saturn, Satan, nanna, Santa, Set - the names and stories are merely a temporary cultural expression of something very real that happens in the electrical worlds at Christmas.
There is a big lesson in all of this: Just because something is hidden or esoteric does not necessarily mean it is spiritual. In this case (and many others) the real meaning has been deliberately buried under many layers of allegory, myth and tradition. Yes, you have been scammed. We all have. But there is good news.
Saturn is called Old Father Time and Chronos the Timekeeper for a very
good reason: think of Saturn as the solar escapement, or
metronome if you don't know what an escapement is. The scythe of Saturn
cuts away the old year and heralds the new. In alchemy the lead has to
first die before it can become gold. Every year we are given the
opportunity to make a fresh start, which is why we think up New Year's
resolutions.
This is not just a metaphor or some meaningless tradition, but an actual influx of energy into the planet. If you are at all sensitive you may feel lonely which is why we surround ourselves with friends and family in an attempt to bury these unwelcome feelings. Many people are depressed by this energy and, as a result, Christmas has more suicides and more divorces than any other time of year. It's also supposed to produce more conversions. (After this I hope you "get" religion.)
We pretend that none of this happens as we give a brand new gift to celebrate the brand new you. If you are young we pretend that Santa gives you presents. if you are poor, Robin Hood might steal from the rich and give to you. We pretend to ourselves that we are not driven by these strange feelings as we fly across the country just to be with relatives that we don't particularly like the rest of the year. We eat too much, spend too much, smoke too much, drink too much and party too much in an attempt to avoid this strange hollow feeling that comes every Christmas. And then, glad that it's all over, we promise ourselves that next year things will be different, we are going to be a new person.
Most of us appreciate that it really doesn't work like that. We fight the changes because we never allow Saturn to cut the links to our old self, leaving powerful threads that prevent us moving on. The answer is to do exactly that: When those feelings arrive, jump in with both feet and embrace them. Allow time for introspection and contemplation, time enough for the magic of Saturn to flow through you, flash its scythe and cut off the ties to last year's you and last year's baggage.
You will feel grief as you say goodbye to the old you, and remorse for all those things that you didn't do and on top of it all, lonely, because it's your journey, and no one else's.
Then, when it's all over for another year, and only then, will you have something worth celebrating.
Christmas – it's not about religion any more.
Anyway, that's my two cents, you have a great Kronia and Happy New Year.
Ken
PS: Never take candy cane from strange planets.
Now let's try and look at this objectively: The weekend, arguably the two most important days of the entire week, are named after the Sun and Saturn. This is a biggie and, stay tuned, it's about to get even bigger.
If
one were to ask which day of the week was the most significant, in
America most people would suggest Sunday. But that's only because
Western civilization is run by people that worship the Sun. In many
other cultures, Saturday is the most important day of the week. And, of
course, Saturday was the original Christian sabbath and day of worship until AD
325, when
Constantine, Sun Emperor, and sole earthly representative
of Sol Invicta (the Sun God), rather unsurprisingly moved it to Sunday.
The Jewish Sabbath, as an example, starts at sundown on Friday and ends at sundown on Saturday, following the older convention of having real days before midnight was invented.
Let's have an action replay here in case you missed it: The original Christian day of worship, the Sabbath and the most important day in many cultures is the day given to the planet Saturn. The Moon is closest, Jupiter is biggest, Venus is nicest, but Saturn? Now, that's just plain curious.
The Other Side of Christmas
Curious, unless you have a working knowledge of the Law of Octaves. Our two days of the weekend are really a Gnostic microcosm of cosmic duality: light and dark. Those two fish really do swim in different directions. For instance, Horus (you know - only son, born at Christmas, virgin mother, died for three days and resurrected) represents the Sun and obviously Sunday. His opposite number represents the dark, meaning the night, but also absence of the Sun. Remember those three days when the Sun "dies"?
The
winter solstice, the apparent death of the Sun deity, happens just as
the Sun moves into the part of the sky we call Capricorn. And
Capricorn the Goat is ruled by, guess
who, Saturn, which name has also entered our language from another
direction as the word Satan (obviously related to the
sabbatical goat, the latter-day symbol of wannabe witchcraft, but that
is
another story entirely.) Well, no surprises here, then, to learn that
the mortal enemy of
Horus is Set, ever-present complementary deity of the dark side and
generally of all things
less-than-sparkling including, of course,
Seturday. (Still courtesy of Zeitgeist.)And so it is, that the great primordial pissing-match of light versus dark manifests in our weekend as Saturday and Sunday, and is also back by popular demand every single Christmas, for the death of the Sun God at the winter solstice is also the birth of Saturn. In case you're still asleep, the new year starts in the sign of Capricorn with jANUary, named after jANUs.
That alone explains most religions and, if you do your homework, much else besides.
Astrology? I don't even believe in Astronomy
Mars
is known to astrologers as The Lesser Malefic -
hardly complimentary - but poor old Saturn is called The Great Malefic or The Bringer of Sorrow.
Let's get it over with: Saturn has been associated with some serious
heavy shit. You can do your own research but don't get bogged down in the ugly stuff.
Although his name starts with an X in Greek, the original symbol of Kronos gave us the modern letter K. Today we use the symbol shown here, like an uncial letter h with a cross. This symbol is also the alchemical symbol for lead, the base metal to be transmuted into gold, so if lead vs gold isn't on your duality list now would be a good time. Now. This page will still be here when you get back.
In this diagram the zodiac has been turned so that the
winter solstice is at the
bottom. In December the Sun is at 6 o'clock moving counter-clockwise
and moves from Sagittarius to Capricorn on its way back up to the
Summer Solstice. Of
course, the Sun doesn't really travel through the constellations - we
swing
around the Sun and see the stars behind it. Being the outermost of
the visible (to the naked eye) planets, Saturn is by far the
slowest. Check out the "Saturn Return".Saturn is the secondary planet for Aquarius and Libra but it's his role as the ruler of Capricorn in which we are interested here. Capricorn is also a Cardinal sign which probably means all kinds of mega-exciting astrological thingies available in this month's Cosmopolitan.
More importantly, Cardinal means the sign starts on one of the cardinal points. On a compass that would be North, South, East, West. Look at the cross on the Saturn symbol and as on the Zodiac let's call the right (East) arm the Spring Equinox (Aries), the top (North) arm is the Summer Solstice (Cancer), left (West) is the Autumnal Equinox (Libra), and that leaves the longer bottom arm of the Southern Cross which is the Winter Solstice (Capricorn). Funny how it all fits. Extra points for spotting the scythe.
The Esoteric Significance of Christmas
Poor Mr Kronos Saturn, the Satan connection notwithstanding, is desperately in need of a public relations image makeover. In many cultures he is pictured as an old man with a large white beard and a hood or a pointy hat, rather like Gandalf. (Oh yeah - Anu's title was: Lord of The Rings.) Sometimes Saturn carries a lantern and a crook or shepherd's staff. Did I say shepherd? Uh-oh. Or a wand. In these enlightened times, of course, he combines the lantern and the staff and is armed with a light saber. Huh?
Anu Khem KronoSat in some incarnations would carry a scythe, for he is also known as Old Father Time. Not really strange, therefore, to discover that we use his Greek name (XPOVOS, Kronos, or Chronos in English) as a prefix meaning time (chronic, chronology, chronograph, chronometer, cron).
(NB: The name Kronos starts with the divine chi-rho prefix XP, same as Jesus, hierophant and Windows.)
And it's not just the Solar system and Christmas, Saturn also puts in a special guest appearance in The Tarot. As card number nine (there's that octave thing again) he is more commonly known these days as The Hermit. In medieval Italian tarot he was called Il Tempo (The Time). He appears on other cards as well.
For his role as the Hermit (or Searcher) he should wear the brown robe of humility, more like Obi Wan Gandalfi and not white as pictured on the tarot card here. In England he was known as Robin Goodfellow, and more recently as Robin Hood (tights are optional, but wearing green is not).
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Tarot | Jesus | Obi Wan Kenobi | Gandalf | Santa |
Sometimes,
as Old Father Time, he is dressed in white, although his
alter ego The Grim Reaper would normally wear black and rather more of
a saturnine complexion. In Scandinavian
countries he wears green, the traditional colour of Saturn, but in the
West he wears red and we call him Santa. Red is an appropriate color
considering the amount of bloodletting and sacrifice that has been done
in his name.Bet you even think the candy cane and the barber's pole are traditional, accidental and you can probably quote some spurious folk tale about their origin. Saturn was so slow going around the solar system that he became associated with the snail. The Greek word for snail is helix. A crook with a red helix. Still believe in the Tooth Fairy?
Whatever you want to call him, and there is certainly plenty of
choice, from Assyria to Atlanta the Kronos–Saturn character in his
many
guises gets to play the lead role in the Christmas Fairy Story
of many cultures. The good news is that Saturn's bloody crook can only hook
you if you are one of the sheep. Like most big-time deities, Saturn has animals and plants dedicated to him. In his case, this was a tough choice, because in the Northern hemisphere it's so staggeringly cold that pretty much everything in the botany department is dead around Christmas, leaving just a handful of evergreen. Like the holly and the ivy. Oh, and the pine tree. Especially the pine tree. Sacrificed your Douglas Fir yet?
If you imagine, after this brief introduction, that you know what Christmas, Saturnalia, Apollo, Natali
invicta, Anu, Nanna, Capricorn, Mithra, Mistletoe, The Gingerbread Man and
the Winter Solstice is all about, yule better think again. Your
Titanic Christmas adventure has
only just begun: On your marks - ready, set, go: Obelisk Broken, Isis?
The Spiritual Significance of Christmas
By now you probably think that we've taken a meandering detour of some pretty obscure pantheons, not to mention Universal Studios, just for the hell of it. Truth is, we took the shortcut as this stuff leads everywhere in history and still leaves its tell-tale mark on our culture today. We cut a few corners to get here because it doesn't matter what label the Winter Solstice story is known by: Anu, Khem, Janus, Shani, Pan, Kronos, Molech, Saturn, Satan, nanna, Santa, Set - the names and stories are merely a temporary cultural expression of something very real that happens in the electrical worlds at Christmas.
There is a big lesson in all of this: Just because something is hidden or esoteric does not necessarily mean it is spiritual. In this case (and many others) the real meaning has been deliberately buried under many layers of allegory, myth and tradition. Yes, you have been scammed. We all have. But there is good news.
Saturn is called Old Father Time and Chronos the Timekeeper for a very
good reason: think of Saturn as the solar escapement, or
metronome if you don't know what an escapement is. The scythe of Saturn
cuts away the old year and heralds the new. In alchemy the lead has to
first die before it can become gold. Every year we are given the
opportunity to make a fresh start, which is why we think up New Year's
resolutions.This is not just a metaphor or some meaningless tradition, but an actual influx of energy into the planet. If you are at all sensitive you may feel lonely which is why we surround ourselves with friends and family in an attempt to bury these unwelcome feelings. Many people are depressed by this energy and, as a result, Christmas has more suicides and more divorces than any other time of year. It's also supposed to produce more conversions. (After this I hope you "get" religion.)
We pretend that none of this happens as we give a brand new gift to celebrate the brand new you. If you are young we pretend that Santa gives you presents. if you are poor, Robin Hood might steal from the rich and give to you. We pretend to ourselves that we are not driven by these strange feelings as we fly across the country just to be with relatives that we don't particularly like the rest of the year. We eat too much, spend too much, smoke too much, drink too much and party too much in an attempt to avoid this strange hollow feeling that comes every Christmas. And then, glad that it's all over, we promise ourselves that next year things will be different, we are going to be a new person.
Most of us appreciate that it really doesn't work like that. We fight the changes because we never allow Saturn to cut the links to our old self, leaving powerful threads that prevent us moving on. The answer is to do exactly that: When those feelings arrive, jump in with both feet and embrace them. Allow time for introspection and contemplation, time enough for the magic of Saturn to flow through you, flash its scythe and cut off the ties to last year's you and last year's baggage.
You will feel grief as you say goodbye to the old you, and remorse for all those things that you didn't do and on top of it all, lonely, because it's your journey, and no one else's.
Then, when it's all over for another year, and only then, will you have something worth celebrating.
Christmas – it's not about religion any more.
Anyway, that's my two cents, you have a great Kronia and Happy New Year.
Ken
PS: Never take candy cane from strange planets.