The early Christian missionaries among the all conquering Teuton Varbarians, who swarmed over every country -in Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire, were quick to recognize this truth and tactful in acting upon it." They did not attempt to persuade their terrible converts from making the sign of Thor's hammer (an inverted swastika) over their food and drink and at the inception of every undertaking. They simply let them persist in the practice and slowly got them into the habit of calling it the sign of the cross.
they converted a tribe that had a sacred oak, it was futile to attempt to keep the people from performing certain rites at the tree, so they invariably coax-jed them to cut the tree down, build a Yehurch of the timbers from it and enjoy ithe manifest advantage of having the holy wood all around them. The heathen rites were of course carried on in the church until the memory of the tree was lost, when they were gradually eliminated, All the earliest churches in England, as every other European country, vere built over or around the heathen alars in sacrificial groves, 30 that those who would not come to the church to lear Christiangty preached, had to come fo conduct their private, and generally ret heathen services, while no one, for many generations after @ tribe's conversion, would have dared to touch the red trees of the surrounding grove unless they could be built into the church self.
The only way to deal with a holy spring was to associate with it a Christian patron saint and then give the heathen incantations to the spring's dragon or presiding. spirit a Christian meaning. Over great parts of Europe it remained for centuries, after heathenism was_sup-jessedly forgotten, more difficult to get man to work on Thursday (Thor's day)
on Sunday; although the idler would imply have protested that it was unlucky jind would hava repudiated all suggestions denied all knowledge of Thor. The weird midnight ceremonies in forest ea conducted in both England and rica down to the end of the 18thtury by those who professed a devotion to witchcraft were simply primitive Teutonic' heathen rites surviving the conversion to Christianity by. niobe than a thousand years, though Satan Was jeubstituted for Thor, Odin and Freyr, Xind all memory of these latter persons 3 dead. Those who have read fawthorne's "Scarlet Letter" will re-hemper his description of such an orgy the Now England fonest on the very. fetekirte of Puritan Boston, the most One of the author's hobbies has been the study carly European folk lore. In this article he trace the origins of our priticipal festivals until they loge themscres in the mists of the past.
Few of us who observe Christmas and New Year in traditional fashion know of their relation to sun worship and their probable connection with the prominence of the Kitchen God at the celebration of the New Year by the Chinese, S Se intensely, though—_narrow-mindedly, religious community that has ever exist-
At all events it was missionary practice to adopt into the church all that could be absorbed, and to persuade a new flock that the rest were the creatures or the works of the devil. The bigger gods were simply amalgamated with Satan because their characters made it impossible for them to be identified with the Divine Persons of the Trinity. Odin did continue to have a separate existence as the Wild Huntsman, whose chase can be heard in the sky to this day by the seventh son of a seventh son, but as such he is so harmless that the Church can afford to ignore him. Lesser gods melded with Christian saints; the elves, the bright spirits of the air, were either allowed to flourish as harmless, or, in some quarters, became angels, The subterranean of dwarfs, gnomes, brownies and the like, were either included in Satan's entourage or just left out in the cold like the elves.
The Antiquity of Holidays When it came to the holidays, however, it was soon realized that there was no chance in the world of doing away with them or of greatly altering the form of their observance. The only possible thing to do was to give them a Christian pedigree, shift them about a little so as to coincide with Christian chronology and, having given them sufficient Christian character, encourage their observance in the hope that the old heathen elements could eventually be eliminated. Just as there was once such a thing as an Indo-European language from which Sanskrit; Persian and all but a few of the minor dialects of Europe are descended, 80 it becomes apparent to the comparative student of the religions of Europe and a good part of Asia, that there was once, before all these peoples separated, a primitive Indo-European reigion with gods, rites and holidays, which have been kept more or less sacred. down to the present day under one disguise or another.
'The great festivals were four in number, one for each of the four seasons, coinciding' with jes' in the sun's apparent annual round, and the greatest and most sacred of all was the Midwinter festival, the sun's annual twelve-day vacation, the season when the god of the hearth—the fire god—took his place, the Yuletide of our immediate ancestors and the present Christmas of all Christendom. To-have done away with it' would have been impossible, to have made it a lesser: festival, subordinate to any other church holiday' would have been almost @ifficult, sorthe church with great wisdets; but little concern for its own records, Pronouneed it the Saviour's birthday and made it the greatest holiday on the calendar.
The Indo-European folk had also their "Spring, Autumn and Summer Acativais, - Zhe Spring festival, falling sith on the vernaequinox or the nearest new moon, or the nearest full moon, according to slightly varying tradition was the holy day of a goddess of fecundity, who survives in the Christian calendar as Easter and whose emblems continue to be with us the egg and the rabbit, symbols of reproduction. Long after the changing of the date of this festival, which was undoubtedly celebrated with forms of gaiety that would no longer be respectable, England continued to compensate herself for the loss of a heathen rite by celebrating the Church's adaptation of the old feast at Easter time and by having somewhat discreet but still frankly heathen festival on May Day. The Midsummer Festival—the Summer solstice—was a celebration of the sun's ascendency and wag once observed by bonfires on hilltops and by the rolling of hoops or wheels of fire, sun symbols. The Church'adopted it and made it the day of St. John the Baptist, but it continued to be observed with heathen rites almost down to the immediate prerent, while St. John, despite the Church's best efforts, was never really given a leading part in the ceremonies. The fourth great feast of the heathen year came about the time of the autumnal equinox and was variously a Moon festival or a harvest festival. The Christian substitute was a holy day on what is now known in America and Scotland as Hallow E'en, where it has no religious significance, but is observed by children with mummery and hocus-poons of undoubted pagan origin. The American Thanksgiving Day is also obviously a survival of another Phase of the old Autumn festival under a new guise.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.