To come back to Christmas, the origin of our non-Christian customs at Yuletide is much: clearer than those of "any other holiday, because of their importance in the sight of our wild forebears and the tenacity with which they have been retained. The retention of the Very old and still. rather obscure old Teutonic name, Yule, is a case in point. There is now good reason to believe thet it is an ancient form of some lost ancestral word which also begot the Gothic word hull and the moder: English wheel. That yule also meant log, since the primitive wheel was only a section of a log, seems ely. That It til-does mean wheel in rissian is beyond doubt. The Chinese have a borrowed word, ku-lu, meaning wheel or log, which occurs in most of the languages of Central: Asia in one form or another, and which is probably from the same ancient ancestral word that fathered both wheat and yule. Yule then the wheel of the sun, the nine-spoked wheel which is wel)" enough known in most quarters of Asia, and which played part throughout' medieval Europe in many holiday rites and forbidden incantations.
When the Indo-Germanic peoples first started shaping'a calender in a crude sort of way, they-were in doubt, as the Rigveda proves, aa to whether to add twelve days every year to the lunar year and have a full-fledged solar year, or to adhere to the lunar year with an occasional extra moon to bring the two years into line. The Yuletide festival grew out of the system of having an extra twelve days, days dedicated to the sun and the fire god, but allotted to the great luminary as a vacation, during which time the Yule fire was man's guide in his stead. The Twelfth Night, the eve of the sun's resumption of serious business, was the occasion for great rejoicing and feasting, accompanied probably by fire worship and the burning of the wheel or section of lox. This final feast was therefore in reality new year's eve celebration, so that the Scotch Covenanters when' they di couraged the celebration of Christmas b cause it was of heathen origin, and encouraged in its stead the Naw Year celebration, which is still such a joyful season in Scotland, were really discarding 2 Christian festival, the heathen features of which had lost their significance, anc were reviving a purely heathen feast, In the old Germanic communities the twelve days were looked upon as a season of preparation and purification, a kind of Tent, during which there was some fasting and a particular effort was made on everyone's part to finish all work so th rething might be left undone at the year's end, and everyone' might undertake a fresh career with now work like the ro-turning sun, A slovenly and disordered household was at this season severely punished by the household gods and there usually benevolent beings, the agents of high heaven on the hearth, were feared at this season much as the Chinere kitchen god is feared at New Year when he checks up the merits and demerits of the family and goes off to report to the higher authorities.
The Boar's Head—Omen of Death Most of the attributes of the primitive Aryan ann god were at a later date distributed among other deities as the old Teutonic pantheon grew. In the Scandinavian mythology Freyr retained more of the deified sun's distinguishing traits and symbols than any other deity, among which were the wheel and the golden boar. In Norse legend Frey usually rides in a wagon drawn by thi marvelous and terrible animal, but at a later date when men rode more and used wagons less, the god also rode his boa The animal was at once the symbol the sun and the most suitable sacrifice that could be offered to him. The boar's head therefore played an important part in Yuletide ceremonies long after there was any thought of sun worship among the Christian peoples of Europe. The Oxford college ceremony of carrying the head around the hall during the aus festivities is a survival of it. In heathen days, during the Yuletide sacrifice that preceded the feast there was also some barbarous rite of selecting victims for human sacrifice with the boar's head so that the sight of it brought up in the Teutonic ming fearful associations. Long after the conversion to Christianity, the warriors of all Teutonic nations had boar's heads engraved of their helmets to unnerve their adversaries and in Scotland the boar's head is still considered an omen of death.
Since Teutons, Celts and Slavs al ways ate their sacrifices, after offering them to the gods, the Yuletide boar, after serving his ritualistic purpose, became the piece de resistance at the grand Twelfth Night feast; so we should adorn our posters and magazine covers with pigs and not with turkeys. If audite persons ever contrive to trace in the Chinese
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.