Bill White: A Merry Pagan Christmas And The Search For The True Meaning Of Christ

“Today I heard someone on the radio say ‘Happy Yule.’ Happy Yule. Now somebody tell me what is that?”

So the Southern Baptist preacher spoke to us on Christmas Eve. Yes, I found myself in a Baptist Church that night, at the accompaniment of a friend – and yes, I did enjoy the emphasis the preacher put on the fact that “one worshipper” (Yasir Arafat) “was turned away from Bethlehem today just as Joseph and Mary were turned away two millennia ago.”

But his sermon aside, the preacher’s question about the holidays is a valid one: what exactly is Yule? What does it have to do with Christmas? As much as preachers tell us that Christmas is about the birth of baby Jesus, a lamb saviour designed to equalize and reduce us all in a morass of universal nothingness, there is no question that what is worshipped in the minds of Western men is in fact the opposite – the birth of a divine king, a “Prince of Peace” in the ascetic warrior vein, that is here to restore our race and our culture. But it seems so few of understand explicitly the nature of this Christ to us is not what is written in the Semitic Bible.

Christianity has always been divided into two battling spirits. On the one hand, there is the creative spirit of Eurasian man, the spirit that led to the founding of the great cultures of old – Maya, Greece/Rome, Germania, Babylon, Egypt, India, and China. On the other hand there is the spirit of destruction, the alien-ness, empty intellectuality, sickness, and neuroticism that permeates the Semitic faiths that gave the post-Roman-Imperial Christian faith its founding literature but not its rituals, mentality, or form. The higher tradition is the province of the “pagan” churches, with Catholicism, its living emperor the Pope and its hierarchal remembrance of the spiritual culture which preceded it, its highest form. At the lower end are the so-called “evangelical” churches, bastions of “Judaeo-Christianity”, whose doctrines spring forth to purify the faith of any notion of the life that infuses it, and to reduce it to an essential Judaic heresy, complete with the nihilistic death motive in the pure. In between lie most men, half-absorbing half-known doctrines, a mishmash of the spiritual extremes, whose soul accepts the faith because its higher elements ring true, and who in accepting it uncritically absorb its death motif as well.

But some have begun to reject our modern perversion of Tradition, and begun to restore the old ways of the Old Times, before the destruction of Rome and the Christianization of the barbarians, before the same sickness that let Bolshevism and liberalism take hold of Europe and its colonies in the 20th century destroyed the Imperium of our people in the Third, and have gone back to a time when the decay was just starting, and we still preserved in our faith the memories and wisdom of our eternal ancestors. In these times we can find the true meaning of the pre-Christian Christmas, and the Prince of Peace of our Yuletide season.

The Christmas Tree and Mistletoe

The Christmas tree is the foundation of the pre-Christian winter holidays and central to the European pagan tradition. In ancient times, the venerated tree was the oak, though ashes and yews were substituted in later ancient days, and the representation of the tree as life among the desolation of winter shifted to the evergreen needles of the pine sometime during the centuries of darkness following the fall of Rome. According to Lewis Spence, in his History and Origins of Druidism (1949):

“Zeus, as oak-god, wielded the powers of rain, thunder and lightning. Frazer was of opinion that this view of oak-gods generally as rain-bringers and lightning wielder arose from the notion that as fire on earth was generated by the rubbing together of oaken sticks, so it was in heaven … In Italy the oak was sacred to Jupiter and on the Capitalonian Hill at Rome he was worshipped as the god of the oak and the rain and the thunder. The probability is that the sacred tree of Nemi, famous by Frazer in the Golden Bough, was an oak … The Germans certainly worshipped the oak, which was dedicated to Donar or Thunar, the Lord of the Thunder, the great fertilizing power. Among the Slavonic peoples the oak was the sacred tree of the thunder-god Perun …”

Even in modern times, Aryan-oriented organizations such as the West Virginia-based National Alliance or the Portland, Oregon-based Volksfront use the Norse “life rune,” a graphical representation of a tree, as the symbol of their organization.

Some, such as Godfrey Higgins in his Celtic Druids (1829), attempted to demonstrate that the original Druids were immigrants from India, and that their tree-worship represented a transplantation of the pagan Hindu faith. In actuality, the druids came to the British Isles through Europe from the East during the Celtic migration in the mid-first millennia before Christ, where they met with an “aboriginal” people of the British Isles, who had immigrated there around the turn of the third millennia before Christ from locations in Italy, Greece, and Southern Europe. It is likely that resemblances between the form of Druidic worship and that of India lies in the common Indo-Aryan ancestor of the two cultures, and not the direct migration of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent.

Latter day Jewish heretics such as Freud have attempted to pervert the meaning of the tree by attaching to it a phallic significance which they have integrated into their pseudo-psychological babbling which represents bodily functions as phases in life development. This is simple rubbish from half-rate thinkers who, in the words of Dennis Klein, in his Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1981), were attempting to establish “Jewish moral superiority to the injustices of … anti-Semitic society” with erroneous and hare-brained ideologies. In the words of Freud, in his Interpretation of Dreams (1913), it was a case of “Hannibal … the figure of the Semitic general … Hannibal and Rome”, with Rome being Western Man, that motivated this urge to destroy. Though now Freud has passed, one still occasionally encounters his ideas in modern representations of pre-Christian Britain such as the otherwise intriguing cult film The Wicker Man (1973).

In the real world, the association of the tree with life is believed to be an earlier and more fundamental relationship, founded in the relationship between Western men and his environment. In the time before agriculture, trees and their fruit formed the basis of the staple diet of the Europeans. Oak trees in particular had acorns which were ground into grain and baked in to bread in pre-agricultural times, and which were still eaten in parts of the British Isles and Brittany at least as late as the early 20th Century, provided the basic meal for the early European. Spence tells us:

“There is good evidence that trees are worshipped not only because they enshrine spirits, but … because they are ‘food-givers,’ that is because they or the spirit which animates them furnish [men] with nuts, or fruit … In primeval ages the continent of Europe was covered by dense forests, and particularly with those in which the oak tree featured. Indeed, it was not until the late medieval period when most of these disappeared … That acorns were an article of diet for human consumption in primitive times can be proved from many a passage in classical literature[:] … Hesiod … Pausanias and Galen … Pliny … Strabo … Homer … Juvenal … Ovid … the Irish Book of Leinster … . It is scarcely surprising, then, that the oak tree loomed so largely in the religious ideas of early European man.”

Frazer in his Golden Bough (1922) also affirmed the universality of tree worship among Indo-European peoples, stating:

“The worship of the oak-tree, or of the oak-god, appears to have been shared by all the branches of the Aryan stock in Europe.”

The veneration of the tree lasted longest in the British Isles and in Gaul, where the Romans encountered it during the conquest, and where memories of it still provide the foundation for local fables of fairy spirits and mystical woodlands. The word druid, meaning “wise man of the oak”, is derived from the same root, “dru”, that gives the word drus “oak” and dendron “tree” in Greek, drus “wood” in Sanskrit, “doire” “grove” and darach “oak” in Gaelic, deruo in Gaulish, dir in Irish, derw in Welsh, or drouiz in Breton, combined with the root “ydd” or “uid”, meaning “wise man” or “wisdom” in the various Celtic languages. Another variant of “druid” is the Welsh derw-ydd (derwydd), which gives the name of your correspondent’s home town, Derwood, here in Maryland, USA.

Contrary to the ahistorical and culturally decadent interpretations of writers like Marion Zimmer (aka Marion Bradley), who’s “science fiction/fantasy” writings and recent film the Mists of Avalon attempted to portray “pre-Christian Britain from a feminist perspective”, the Druidic faith from which we draw the Christmas tree was not based on worship of a Goddess. The tree, in particular the oak, is associated with God worship in all European and Eurasian traditions. In the words of Spence:

“The original god of Druidism was a spiritual conception of the oak tree, like the Greek Zeus and the Roman Jupiter.”

Numerous references follow, suggesting that the worship of Zeus, Math Vab Mathonwy, Geydion, Nuada, Lug, Picus, Jupiter, Cennunos, Dis, Taranis, Teutates, Beleno, Mercury, Mars, Bel, Bile, and Belenos (of the Beltane festival), all male, were associated with the various branches of Druidism in the British Isles, Gaul, and Asia Minor. Further, the function of the Druids in pre-Roman society was that of the maintenance of a patriarchal order, including a religious caste system similar to that of the Hindus, and a divine male King. While there is evidence of female druids, whose existence may be responsible for the legend of the forest nymph, the “dryad”, and there are references to occasional female priestesses, and of course, the famed Queen Boadicea of the Iceni who led the revolt against Rome in the first century anno domini, there is little evidence that female leadership was the norm, or that pre-Roman Britain was a matriarchal society, as the 1960s-influenced “earth-goddess” “Age of Aquarius” hippy-occultists who populate the “New Age” section of bookstores claim.

It was from this worship of the oak tree that the mistletoe, another Christmas favorite, gained its significance. In the words of the Roman historian Pliny:

“The Druids held nothing more sacred than the mistletoe and the tree that bears it, always supposing that tree to be the oak. … [Everything which grew on the oak] has been sent from heaven.”

In the Celtic language, Spence tells us, the mistletoe was called by a name that meant “all healing”. Spence compares the ritual cutting of the mistletoe to similar rites in Egypt, cites a comparison by Frazer to a rite in Rome, and goes on to quote MacCulloch as saying:

“The mistletoe or branch was the soul of the true, and also contained the life of the divine representative.”

In Spence’s own words, the mistletoe:

“was … regarded as the semen of life-essence of the oak, the glutinous matter contained in its berries was thought of as the spermatozoa, or impregnatory fluid of the god … the amatory practice of ‘kissing under the mistletoe’ seems to have some tincture of recollection of a rite which might make a union fertile by sympathetic magic. … That the mistletoe was not so much the soul of the oak but rather its life-essence, is … demonstrable.”

Not surprisingly, the worship of the tree at Christmas was generally a persecuted practice that was destroyed by the Christian invaders and the Christianization of dying Rome. It survived only in German and Scandanavian areas, where it was introduced as a formal part of the Christmas ritual in the early 16th Century, according to a recent article in the Washington Times (“Christmas tree hasn’t always been welcome in US”), “as an extension of the existing tradition of decorating trees on special days such as Easter.”

The tradition was brought from Germany to the colonies of Christian Britain by immigrants in the 19th Century. As the Times article continues:

“Charles Dickens had no Christmas tree in his holiday novel ‘A Christmas Carol’ (1843) …German immigrants to the United States in the 1800s[, however, ] took their tree tradition with them.”

The Times, of course, ignored the larger question of why Germanic people were decorating trees as a tradition prior to its integration into the Christmas ceremonies. Many fundamentalist Christians in the United States still reject the Christmas tree as smacking of Satan – a fact which gives non-Semitized Western men a clue that something is quite right with the practice.

But regardless of the different modern, often half-educated or half-self-aware views on the issue, it is clear that the worship of the tree as the central aspect of the Christmas celebration is a form of worship that predates the birth of Christ. In addition and perhaps more importantly, the integration of these pre-Christian traditions into the worship of Christ changed the nature of Christ to make him unrecognizable, and loathsome, to the Jewish faith from which he arose as Messiah.

The Hatred Of Kings

Thomas Paine, in defending democracy in his pamphlet Common Sense (1791), quoted extensively from the Bible on the essential opposition of the idea of Monarchy and the Divine Kingship to Old Testament Judaism. He first tells the story of Gideon, who, after defeating the Midianites, was told by the Jews to:

“Rule … over us, thou and thy son, and thy son’s son.”

To which Gideon, being pious, replies:

“I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you, THE LORD SHALL RULE OVER YOU.”

And thus we see the beginning of the essentially nihilistic nature of Judaism, which will have no man be superior to any other, but every man reduced to nothing in the eyes of their God. Even the followers and originators of modern Jewish heresy can draw comparisons between their movement and heresies which proceeded them: witness for instance the comparison made by Marx and Engels between their nihilistic pre-Bolshevism and the early Christians in the Communist Manifesto (1843) and in later works.

Continuing with Paine’s description, 130 years later the Jews again, envying the Indo-European “barbarians” and “heathens” which surrounded them, asked Samuel for a king, telling him:

“Behold thou art old, and thy sons walk not in they ways, now make us a king to judge us like all the other nations.”

To which the Old Testament gives his reaction:

“But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, Give us a king to judge us; and Samuel prayed unto the Lord, and the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that say unto thee, for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, THAT I SHOULD NOT REIGN OVER THEM”

And when the Jews insisted to be normal, like all the other nations, Samuel says:

“I will call unto the Lord, and he shall send thunder and rain that ye may perceive that your wickedness was great which ye have done in the sight of the Lord, IN ASKING YOU A KING.”

And so the Lord eventually breaks with the Jews and gives the world the Christians, who immediately set out to destroy the Divine Pax Imperia of Rome. To see how the early Christians dealt with an authentic European culture, we turn to Guglielmo Ferrero’s The Ruin of The Ancient Civilization and The Triumph Of Christianity(1921), where he tells us:

“From the point of view of the Empire … it cannot be doubted that Christianity was a disintegrating element. … The new religion [upheld with fervor] that the Christian must not seek public employment … [because] the world in which other men lived and which they enjoyed was tainted by a religion and a civilization which had been cursed by Christ. … Logically therefore it would be the duty of the Christian to destroy the Empire … [and its method] was abstention. It deprived the central and municipal administrations of the aid of numerous cultivated and intelligent men of the civilized classes … The army suffered from this systematic abstention still more severely than the civil employments. … Nothing remained … for the Christian soldier but to abandon the army immediately and to resolve to suffer the fate of all Christians for Christ’s sake.”

Christianity as Jewish heresy inflicted on Rome the same disastrous and destructive effect as the Jewish heresies of Marxism and his companions in the social sciences: Freud, Boas, and the Frankfurt school, inflicted on US and Western cultures in the 20th Century. But yet the Christ that most Christians worship at Christmas is not the diseased Christ-figure whose teachings caused Rome’s death, but the different, non-Judaic Christ from whom many of the greatest works of the West, from Dante to Bach, drew their creative spirit. Having seen the undiluted destructive Christ-figure at work, one is forced to ask, if this is not our Christ, who is the Christ our ancestors worshipped?

The Prince of Peace

Jesus Christ is said to be the Prince of Peace. Many believe this title was original to him – but it was not. The idea of a Prince of Peace – an Imperator Pacificus, an enforcer of the Pax Romanum, the founder of the Imperium, the one who has achieved peace by oneness with the divine, and then radiates this peace outwards to his people through the restoration of the divine order of the Golden Age, is a notion that pre-dates Christ by millennia. Julius Evola, in his Revolt Against the Modern World (1934), starts his exploration of the idea of Prince of Peace with the Aryan-Hindu branch of Indo-European tradition, stating:

“As a starting point, we may consider the Hindu notion of the cakravartin, or ‘universal king’…. The cakravatin, besides being the ‘Lord of Peace,’ is ‘Lord of the Law’([rta]) and ‘Lord of Justice’ (dharmaraja). … Cakravatin literally means … ‘spinner of the wheel’.”

And thus we see the idea of the Prince of Peace as the man at the center of the spinning wheel of the universe. While the rest of the universe moves around him, he is unmoved, the principle by which the rest of the universe measures its rotation. The Greeks called this the kuklos ths genesews or kuklos anagkhs, the “wheel of generation” or “wheel of Fate”. In the words of Confucius:

“The practice of government by means of virtue may be compared to the polestar, which the multitudinous stars pay homage to while it stays in its place.”

It is in this context of the “Prince of Peace” that pagan Europeans, who did not have the Bible in the vulgate, and were not familiar with the fairy tales of Judaism, understood the nature of Christ. To them, Christ’s disciples were the adherents of a new king, similar to the kings of men that reigned then on earth. As Evola points out:

“Dante talked about [in the context of Christ] the Imperator Pacificus, a title previously bestowed on Charlemagne.”

So it was clear that European peoples saw their divine Heroic kings, men who made war, and who were known for conquest, as having the same title, “Prince of Peace”, which they bestowed upon their new spiritual leader Christ. Such an equation of peace with war is not limited to European cultures. Lo Kuan-Chung’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms from the (Mongolian) Yuan Dynasty of 14th Century China refers to the reign of theEmperorof civil-war-torn third century China as being one of “Established tranquility”.

Evola explains this to us, telling us that the nature of the “peace” that the leader is prince of, in European tradition:

“Is not the profane and social peace pursued by a political government … but rather an inner and positive peace, which should be divorced from the triumphal element. This peace does not convey the notion of cessation, but rather that of the highest degree of perfection of a pure, inner, and withdrawn activity. It is a calm that reveals the supernatural.”

Such a notion of inner peace through war is not wholly unknown to later Semitic religions. In exploring the pagan aspects of Islam, one finds the tradition of the greater and lesser Holy Wars (el-jihadul-akbar and el-jihadul-ashgar). The lesser Holy War is the war against unholy men and their infidelic practices. The greater Holy War is the sense of warrior asceticism – the liberation from the boundaries of the flesh and of material goods – that comes from destroying and risking self-destruction in the pursuit of jihad. As Evola puts it:

“The ‘greater holy war’ is man’s struggle against the enemies he carries within. More exactly, it is the struggle of man’s higher principle against everything that is merely human in him, against his inferior nature and against chaotic impulses and all sorts of material attachments. … The ‘enemy’ who resists us and the ‘infidel’ within ourselves must be subdued and put in chains. … The ‘lesser holy war’ … is indicated and even prescribed as the means to wage this ‘greater holy war’; thus in Islam the expressions ‘holy war’ (jihad) and ‘Allah’s Way’ are often used interchangeably. … The external vicissitudes experienced during a military campaign cause the inner ‘enemy’ to emerge and put up a fierce resistance and a good fight in the form of the animalistic instincts of self-preservation, fear, inertia, [and] compassion.”

We can see that the Prince who is of this Peace is not the “Prince of Peace” that demanded that the Christian abstain from the military service of Rome, or who demands that US stop all wars, on principle, unless they are conducted in the interest of Israel, or who exhorted his followers to always turn the other cheek and to give no resistance to evil. This “Prince of Peace”, this Imperator Pacificus who is the Western, not the Jewish, conception of Christ, is a warrior king of the divine type which Western society has lost, and who’s loss began the cycle of destruction that culminates in Ragna Rokkr, or the Jewish Armageddon. It was the recognition in the soul of Western man that we had lost kings of this type in this world that caused to embrace the idea of such a king in the next world, and it is the recognition that the king we got is not of our type – a recognition that has come through the widespread dissemination of the written Bible – that caused us to be forced into a choice – to accept a movement that is essentially spiritually Messianic Judaism, or to reject that movement and that faith for a return to those older ways more suited to our soul. It is the symbols of these older ways – the ancient symbols of the European and Asian – and the worship of those symbols with Christ at the Christmas season – that prove the essential transformation that Christ has undergone in the hearts and minds of the common man.

The Reverend Joseph Wild, in his at times prophetic The Lost Ten Tribes and 1882 (1879), exposes this essentially duality within the context of British Israelism, the belief that the Anglo-Saxons were the lost ten tribes of Israel:

“Jesus came to His own and they did not receive him. Who were his own? We answer, the Jews, for he was of Judah. But if his own did not receive him, we ask who did? The answer is that the [Anglo-Saxons] received him.”

And he spoke truly, if somewhat unintentionally, for the Jews, who despite element of the religious tradition and ethnic background that gives kinship with the civilizations of the Indo-Europeans, lost the tradition of the divine kingship in prehistory (among the Sephardim), and late in the first millennia anno domini (for the Ashkenazi), and can only understand a figure like Christ as a heretical trend within the context of Semitic nihilism, and cannot understand him within the context of the mystery of creativity that empowers Indo-European culture. To the Jewish faith, the worship of a man as a Messiah within the framework of living time is non-sensical, because God himself has commanded that no man will rise above any other to lead, except He who is coming bring the end of time. No end of time, no Messiah. But to a Western man of the Aryan culture-soul, the idea of the Divine King returning and re-establishing the Golden Age is nothing but natural, and there is no way for such men to understand to have understood Christ without creating in them and their societies serious pathological behavior. With the beginning of the death cycle in the period just before recorded history, the material non-existence of the divine order and kingship despite its persevering spirit naturally leads to the belief in the existence of that kingship in some other world that is invisible to man – in the heavens, for instance -- and as the heavens are explored, in another universe, in another dimension, in outer space, in our minds, or in the distant past.

CONCLUSIONS

What we learn is that the Jesus that men worship at Christmas is not the nihilistic Jesus of the early Christians that the latter day prophets of “Judaeo-Christianism” have attempted to restore to us; it is not the Jesus who’s followers destroyed the peace of the Roman Empire, and who’s latter day heretical imitators have attempted to destroy Europe and its colonies. The Jesus of Christmas is a Jesus of the life-tradition, and not of death. When wee hear the Little Drummer Boy sing:

“Come, they told me / A newborn King to see / Our finest gifts we bring / To lay before the King / So to honor Him / When we come.”

It is a Divine King that will bring life to the people of Europe as the Kings of Europe did of old that we see him honor, and not a King of Death who has come to undermine and destroy our families and our civilization. It is a Prince of Peace, in the manner of King Charlemagne, and in the manner of the sun-kings from Mithras to Louis the XIVth, that he is paying homage to. It is not a meek lamb seeking to lead mankind into Semitic nihilism, but a Hero to restore the Traditional way of life that the greater race of men once had, and who are prophesied, after the completion of the cycle of destruction, under his leadership to have again.

On the day of Christmas Western men worship both what once was – the religion of the divine kings of the Celts, the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, and the Norse who gave them life through the tree and who passed their power on to men through the mistletoe – and what will be – the resurrection of those lost kings and the Golden Dawn of a new age. To do this requires an essential rejection of the majority of the literal text of the Bible as heretical, and its reinterpretation in the context of the hidden nature of the race of men who adopted Christ, who thought directly about the nature of God, rejecting much of the literal text of the Semitic Bible for higher revelations in the context of their own pantheon.

The future of Western man lies in a new understanding of these ancient concepts – of a re-conceptualization of religion and its true, hidden and occult meaning, and of the purification of this meaning from the taint of lower faiths and their pseudo-religious mumblings. Given the heavy integration of Semitic mythos into Western culture, it may impossible to extract the one fully from the other. But it is possible to clarify and reinterpret the two so as to remove from them the poisonous elements of the lower class. If the Semitic God denies his people a Divine King, and demands that they all live according to some ridiculous and intricate set of neurotic and nihilistic commandments, interpreted in an equally neurotic manner by a Rabbinical or Priestly class, let them live that way. But we cannot allow these people to inflict their mistaken notions as to what is right and true upon the rest of us, or to allow the notions of governance or political or social order that they derive from their faith to keep us from pursuing those forms of governance which are natural to our people.

To quote Evola:

“The third and last type of civilization … is the civilization of the heroes[:] … the race of heroes to whom it is given the possibility of attaining immortality … the heroes … whose adventure succeeds. … The other heroes, those not capable of realizing such a possibility … [ref. Matthew 11:12] … descend to the same level as the race of Titans … who were cursed … as a result of their … corruption.”

The question each of us faces, with death surrounding us and the few living slowly succumbing to a subtle poison and a horrid rotting, is whether we will stand up and rally the living to the memories of our Golden Age before time, or whether we will allow the rot to consume the little we have left. Christmas is one of our memories. Ancient forests and ancient ways echo in it. As it preserves our pure traditions and our relationship with nature and our early environment it is a potential rallying point for the rescue of civilization. What remains to be seen is whether we can find those leaders willing to take up the swords and shields of memory and join battle against the disease.

It is a question of our spiritual life and death. Our answer is not yet given