The Christmas mood has been creeping in since November 🎄 Children write letters to Santa Claus, who will secretly crawl through the chimney on Christmas night and leave gifts under the tree or in stockings hung on his shoulder. In childhood, we also believed in the fairy tale of this gentleman dressed in red and white and flying gifts in a sleigh drawn by deer 🦌🦌 Later that belief turned into just a game, when we secretly left gifts under the Christmas tree for the housemates, and in the morning we were happily surprised "ooo, just look at what grandfather left!" . We're not saying we don't need a bit of fairy tales and magic in our pragmatic lives. But it is interesting to look at a slightly different Christmas story.
Every year, Harvard professor Donald Pfister tells his students a slightly different story about Santa Claus. This is not the story of how Santa Claus came from the once-living St. Nicholas, who distributed gifts to the poor, and not about the fact that the modernized character of Santa Claus was introduced back in 1822. by CC Moore in his poem "The Night Before Christmas" and certainly not about another version of the appearance of this character from a Coca-cola advertising campaign. The main character of the mischievously smiling professor's Christmas tale - we are very familiar with Amanita muscaria! 🍄 And the cheerful Santa Claus in this tale is the equivalent of the shamans who worked in the peoples living in the North several centuries ago. Crazy? Really so! 🤓Well, but here is not just one crazy professor's version of the Christmas story - the same stories are told by a bunch of scientists, historians and anthropologists (such as ecologist Dr. Andy Taylor, ethnomycologist Robert Gordon Wassonsen, anthropologist John A. Rush), whose research has discovered a number of connections between flycatchers, shamans and Santa Claus.
Let's start with the fact that in different cultures, long before Christianity introduced its own version of Christmas, people around December 21st. used to celebrate holidays related to the winter solstice ☀️This is the longest night of the year, after which the days start to get longer. For example, the Germanic peoples had a midwinter festival (Yule), the Romans had a festival called Saturnalia, dedicated to the god Saturn. In Finland, the time before the solstice was called Jako-aika, and it was the darkest and most dangerous time, when the sun rarely appeared, and all kinds of spirits, the dead and other not-so-cute creatures roamed freely among the living. People mostly stayed at home at that time, burning a lot of candles and torches.
The Sami, a tribe living in the northernmost territories of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, believe that during the dark period, a lot of darkness accumulates in the human soul, which can be destroyed when the sun appears. Therefore, during the winter solstice, people brought their shaman - or more likely the shaman, expensive gifts as an offering (by the way, gifts were a fairly common motif of solstice celebrations) and a request to help purify their souls and prepare them for the return of light. So the shaman used to go to the world of Darkness, carrying people's souls in the darkness. And such a journey required special plants or mushrooms that opened the gates of consciousness. It was often considered sacred toadstool 🍄 As you know, this mushroom contains hallucinogenic substances, but it is poisonous, although not fatal - if you look at it, you get a rather nasty effect of the toxins (vomiting, convulsions, sweating...). But there was a way to avoid it, and here the good deer helped! Many northern peoples raised and grazed deer. Deer seem to love flycatchers! When fed, their urine becomes an extremely powerful concentrate of fly agarics, as they filter the toxic substances through their digestive system, creating a hallucinogenic elixir. By the way, it is mentioned somewhere that shamans used to dress in red clothes for such rituals. Here you have a shaman, carried by deer, embarking on a journey of darkness, from which she will return with gifts! Spotting the similarities yet? :))
In the last part of the story, we ended with the journey of the shaman to the world of darkness, where all the darkness of the soul inhabited by people was transported to return with already cleansed souls and a blessing.
In this difficult journey, the North Star was the signpost 🌟Besides, the holy tree is also mentioned in some places, which was placed either in the shaman's yurt or where this ritual took place. It is believed that the magical tree may have been a spruce! 🌲Because magical flies often grow under fir trees. Don't remember anything? A fir tree, under which flycatchers flutter like colorfully wrapped gifts. And if we put the north star on the Christmas tree! And another interesting point is that if the shaman wanted to visit people in their yurts in this bad environment, she often had to crawl through the "chimney" - the opening left for smoke at the top of the yurt, because the usual entrance was covered with snow.
So here's a shamanic Christmas tale covered in magical flies, which certainly has a lot of recurring symbols and ideas in today's Christmas stories. I like the ability of the ancient peoples to listen to nature, its help and humility, the symbolic preparation to be reborn and welcome the light and the sun with a soul cleansed of darkness. And gifts as help to prepare for this transformation, the idea of companionship and blessing brought by a female shaman. Of course, we are talking about stories (often not written anywhere), legends that are difficult to prove scientifically. So there are all sorts of discussions about it among scientific people. But reading about the Sami, ancient Finnish deities and shamanic rituals and celebrating the winter solstice, this story doesn't seem unrealistic to me, and I really like it a lot more than the red-cheeked uncle - Santa Claus character, who covers everyone with piles of stuff.
So everyone is waiting for the calm light and rebirth. And until the light returns to our days, we can each create that light for ourselves and for others. 🙏
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