Pagan Christmas (9 page)

Fly agaric spirits and Christmas goblins under the fir tree.

Mythology recorded in modern times contains some stories in which Wotan (Wodan or Odin), the shamanic god of ecstasy and knowledge, was associated with the fly agaric mushroom. According to legend, the fly agaric mushroom grows where Wotan rides on his horse through the clouds with his followers, the members of the wild hunt, in the dark nights around the time of the winter solstice. Wherever the froth of Wotan’s horse fell to the ground, the ground would become “pregnant” nine months later with sprouting fly agaric mushrooms, at the time of the autumn equinox. The story sometimes says that the fly agaric mushrooms grow from of a mixture of the blood (red) and froth (white) of Wotan’s white horse. The wild hunt is drawn to the mushroom, calmed and put in a good mood with incense. In the smoke columns of the incense, and wherever it finds nourishment, the wild hunt army becomes guardian of house and farm.

In the folk vernacular, fly agaric mushrooms are called “raven’s bread.” Ravens are not only age-old shamanic power animals, they are also messengers of Odin, also known as Hrafnöss, “raven god.” In Skaldic poetry, fly agaric is called munins tugga “food of the raven (munin)” (Gísli 31, 4). Could it be that the fly agaric mushroom has a direct connection with Odin’s ravens, Hugin and Munin? Are the mushrooms food for the two ravens, who carry his thoughts and memories during their flights?13

In Kamchatka (a peninsula in the far northeast of Siberia) the raven (kutch) is still a sacred animal for the shamans who live there. In the mythology of the Korjaken, the fly agaric mushroom, or muchomor, grew from the saliva of the Creator where he spat on the Earth. Great Raven, the cultural hero and animal helper of the Korjaken, first spied the strange sprout and ate it at once. Suddenly he began to feel funny, started dancing, and became clairvoyant. Great Raven said: “Let the fly agaric mushroom live forever on the Earth; and let my children see what it has to show them.”

These liberty caps, also commonly called dwarf hat or goblin hat, are Psilocybe semilanceata—mushrooms that grow in middle Europe. Ingested, they create colorful hallucinations and open the doors to the goblin world. (Postcard, Psychedelic Shop)

Thunder god Thor or Donar flies with his goat cart through the air, creating thunder and lightning. (Illustration by Lucian Zabel for a brochure for the company Minimax, Berlin)

The ethnic cultures that live in the north of Kamchatka, especially the Tschuktschen and Korjaken, live as reindeer nomads and wander with their flocks in the vast plains of that country. They and other north Siberian shamans ritually ingest the fly agaric mushroom, especially when they want to communicate with the souls of their ancestors14 or make contact with the spirits for divination and to heal the sick.

Liberty Caps and Fly Agaric Mushrooms

Hallucinogenic mushrooms are as spread out all over the world as the image of Father Christmas.

SIEGEL 1995, 72F

Like dwarfs, brownies, and goblins, the famous Father Christmas wears a pointed red hat. It resembles the helmets we see worn by Viking warriors and by Wotan in the few pictures of him that may be seen in Scandinavian museums. Their typical outline resembles mushrooms; they are often called liberty caps.

Mushrooms are neither plants nor animals; they are in a category of their own called fungi. In the Alpine region they are known as “little sponges.” Some knowledge is needed to distinguish the poisonous from the edible; even biologists are wary of mushrooms, as are the majority of collectors. Whoever loses this fear and gains knowledge of mushrooms can find treasure in the kingdom of fungi, including delicious meals, healing remedies, and kindling to light fires, as well as coloring and fermenting agents. For example, without yeast, a kind of fungus, there would be no alcohol to drink.

Emphasizing the similarity between the hat of Father Christmas and the hat of the mushroom is not as far-fetched as it might seem. Even Homer considered mushrooms “a connection between heaven and Earth.” Porphyrius called mushrooms “children of the gods,” and poets of ancient times called them “children of the Earth” (Lonicerus 1679, 160). Their Greek godfather, Zeus, the lightning-thrower, was considered father of the mushrooms. His most important symbol was the thunderbolt, which fertilized the Earth and made the mushrooms grow (Wasson 1986). The same image can be found in Germanic mythology, as described earlier.

The Origin of the Fly Agaric Mushroom

“God Wotan was riding his horse at Christmastime, and suddenly he was followed by devils. The horse started galloping, and red-dotted foam was running down from its mouth. Wherever the foam fell, the next year the well-known white-dotted red hats of the fly agaric mushroom started to come up” (Pursey 1977, 80).

The relationship between the horse and the mushrooms that grow in the forest can be seen in this Art Deco illustration by B. Löffler, from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1902).

This universal relationship between mushrooms and gods, attributed in shamanic cultures to natural forces, has also been linked with Christian saints. On the island of Rügen on the Baltic Sea, the former Slavic war god St. Veit15 was worshipped as the patron saint of mushrooms. “The Slav said that he was accompanied by good goblins that let mushrooms grow” (Frond and Lee 1979). St. Veit is considered the protector of the fields. He carries a cornucopia and, like Wotan, rides on a white horse: “From his horse’s foam all the mushrooms grow” (Müller-Ebeling
et al.
1998, 20).16

In Europe, fly agaric mushrooms are considered a symbol of good luck. This is why they are so popular for New Year’s and other holiday greeting cards. Fly agaric mushroom spirits appear in glossy pictures and on Christmas decorations during the Christmas season. One can find all kinds of items decorated in a fly agaric motif, from plastic figurines of “smurfs” holding fly agaric mushrooms to “lucky mushroom” fireworks for New Year’s Eve parties. The mushrooms also appear on Easter cakes, chocolates, and marzipan.

Reindeer, Sleighs, and Shamans

The feeling of flying that occurs after consumption [of fly agaric mushrooms] is an effect that could be the origin of the Scandinavian and English version of Father Christmas, who flies through the air on his reindeer sleigh.

BREMNESS 1994, 286

The idea of a great variety of reindeer sleighs flying through the air at Christmastime seems to be pervasive in cultures that celebrate Christmas. A laughing, red-and-white Father Christmas sits in his sleigh with his sack, his rod, and the presents. Every year this ancient shaman comes down to Earth in his reindeer sleigh and lands on numerous roofs—the very image of a great, twinkling, lit-up, Christmas decoration. “Father Christmas is a pagan shaman from the gray mist of a distant European past. This might seem strange to a lot of people in our day; they may even think that this is an extremely far-fetched claim. Can you prove something like that?” (Appleton 2002, 53).

Father Christmas on a fly agaric trip. (Illustration by Pablo Bruera, Érase una vez Papa Noel. © 2001 from Cáñamo, Especial 2001)

Father Christmas and a shaman meet in a Finnish children’s book entitled Father Christmas in Search of His Own Origin. (Illustration from Kunnas, Mauri. Zauberspuk beim Weinachtsmann, 1996. (Hamburg: Verlag Friedrich Oetinger)

Siberian mythology describes a “heavenly hunt” similar to the Germanic wild hunt. The Siberian shamans ride on reindeer sleighs through the air, up to the clouds. The world tree is their goal; this is where the magic reindeers live. The Siberian Tschutschuken say that the moon is a man on a sleigh that is pulled by two reindeer to Earth and can fly back up to heaven—just like Father Christmas (Guter 1978, 57ff).

Fly agaric spirits appear to those in the visionary state of mind, looking blue-skinned like smurfs (relatives of goblins). The fly agaric mushroom is the scepter of a king, maybe even a symbol of the three magi from the orient. (“Smurf” figure under a Mexican papier-mâché fly agaric umbrella, twentieth century)

The association of reindeer and shamanism is ancient. In the caves of the Ardèche are wall paintings of reindeer that are around thirty thousand years old. As early as the Old Stone Age, reindeer were sunk in moors as sacrificial offerings—for example, in the Hamburg steppe of Meiendorf and Stellmoor (Pohlhausen 1953). This is the ritual context of cultic poles or stakes crowned with anthropomorphic mushrooms with dwarf caps. Sometimes, reindeer skulls were even placed on top of such sacrificial stakes. These often-neglected details may be early associations of the reindeer with the godly mushrooms, just as the mushroom-topped ritual poles may be early ancestors of the Christmas tree. So the red and white Father Christmas, riding on his reindeer sleigh through the air, is nothing less than an anthropomorphic fly agaric mushroom, a modern version of a fly agaric mushroom shaman.

It has often been observed that reindeer get “high” on fly agaric mushrooms and even search for them in the snow. Many travelers have observed that reindeer are even keen on the urine of people who have taken fly agarics.

It is well-known that the urine of human beings who eat fly agaric mushrooms is also hallucinogenic. Among the Siberian peoples, it was a common custom to collect the urine of those who got high on fly agarics and drink it in order to achieve yet another state of mind—one said to be even more intense than the one that was caused by the fly agaric itself (Samorini 2002, 54).

A flying fly agaric mushroom hanging from a fly agaric “umbrella”—what a perfectly shamanic Christmas decoration! (Wood figure from Käthe-Wohlfahrt-Vertrieb, Germany, 2001)

Christmas Tree Decorations

How beautiful is the Christmas tree right there before us, its top crowned by an angel! It represents Christ’s family tree, of which the Lord himself is the crown. How brightly shine its many lights! They express the enlightenment that came to people through Christ’s birth. How tempting the red apples are! They seem to be laughing! They remind us of the expulsion from Paradise …

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, AUTOBIOGRAPHY FROM THE YEARS 1856 TO 1869, SCHLECHTA INDEX III, 33

Modern people adorn the Christmas tree with a purely decorative point of view. As with many longstanding traditions, we do not know much about the origin of the activity in which we are engaging when we decorate the tree—and, in fact, we don’t really care much about it. All that matters is that the tree looks good and that the colors match the decor of the house. But the decoration of trees is actually an age-old custom practiced throughout the world. Everywhere—in the shamanic world, in pagan cultures, and in religious customs—holy trees are decorated with pieces of cloth, pictures of saints, and offerings.

The tree decoration of the Christian religion has roots in old celebrations of the Christmas feast: “On Christmas Eve there was a desire to stimulate the fertility of the trees by making a ritual offering of Christmas Eve supper leftovers and even putting cake on the leaves” (Spamer 1937, 16). Shamans decorate juniper bushes with red and white pieces of cloth in the Himalaya region. Pliny (23–79 CE) wrote sensitively on pagan tree worship: “Forests were the temples of higher powers; and even today, a very beautiful tree is still dedicated to the god, in an age old custom on the countryside” (Pliny the Elder XII, 3).

During the same period, the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus (circa 55–120 CE) became acquainted with the customs of Germanic tribes living in the deep forests that covered wide areas of the land.17 Like Pliny, he noticed the nature worship practiced by the “barbarian peoples” in the “sacred groves”:

They think it incompatible with the sublimity of the heavenly, to lock up the gods behind walls and to somehow imitate them with human faces. They dedicated clearings and groves to them; and invoked them with the godly name of their secretive being that only they can see—from within their state of awe (Tacitus, Germania IX).

Like the North American Indians, our Germanic ancestors knew the Great Spirit in the beings of nature, and they treasured this elemental basis of life. The great forests were plundered in the Greco-Roman Age for the building of warships. “In their ambition to build their civilization, the Greeks and Romans thoughtlessly deforested the Mediterranean region. By the fourth century BCE, Plato already sentimentally recollected a time when wide areas of Attica were still covered with forests” (Pogue 1992, 75).

The forest was the temple; the trees were the gods and goddesses. The incense offering was the contact between the pagans and the numinosum—the religious experience. (Arnold Böcklin [1827–1901], Holy Grove, 1886. Oil on mahogany wood, Hamburg Kunsthalle)

In the fourth century CE, the Roman Emperor Theodosius the Great (347–395) forbade pagan rituals, and, most important of all, the custom of decorating holy trees:

If someone burns incense in front of images of man-made idols, they are damned; or if such a person worships idolatrous images by decorating a tree with ribbons, or if he sets up an altar outside—he is guilty of blasphemy and of a sacrilege—even if he is making religious observance (quoted in Fillipetti 1979, 30).

Nevertheless, the custom has survived to the present day—even if the symbolic meaning of decoration as a ritual invocation having to do with fertility has been forgotten. Yet this is what the decoration of the Christmas tree is really all about.

On a branch she hung little reticules cut from colored paper, and each reticule was filled with sweets. Golden apples and walnuts hung down as if they had grown from the tree. Hundreds of red, blue and white small lights were put firmly on the branches. Little dolls that looked like human beings … were hovering in the green; and, high above in the treetop, a star made of gold foil was attached. This was splendid, extraordinary and splendid! (Hans Christian Andersen, 1845).

A rolling fly agaric mushroom man. (Toy, Germany, 1999)

Selecting festive decorations for the Christmas tree is a popular hobby these days. In the nineteenth century, the glass balls and wood figures manufactured in a cottage industry in poor areas of Germany, such as the Erzgebirge and the Thuringian forest in Eastern Germany, as well as the lower Bavarian forest, ensured the survival of whole regions. Today, Christmas romanticism ensures the survival of whole marketing chains (such as Käthe-Wohlfahrt-Vertrieb in Rothenburg), as well as industrial subsidiaries that locate their production in Asian countries where labor is cheap. But the flood of Christmas products—from the artsy to the kitschy, from the folkloric to the commercial—is not our subject. Let us concentrate instead on natural tree ornaments that come from the plant kingdom, made from materials that are “refined” in the oven. The human imagination knew no boundaries when it came to decorating the Christmas tree, Advent wreaths, doors, and the table with the bounty of mother nature, brought to the home from near and far. There were straw stars, red berries, and dried ground cherry capsules from local sources as well as exotic cinnamon canes, lotus fruit capsules, eucalyptus branches, and more from faraway places.