The Mythology of America's Seasonal Holidays

The Dance of the Horae

Arthur George

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030469153
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030469160
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Every year we celebrate a cycle of seasonal holidays. The ancient Greeks called this cycle "The Dance of the Horae," after the mythical divinities who represented the seasons. What myths sit at the foundation of our own holiday celebrations? This interdisciplinary book explores the myths and symbols that underlie our major seasonal holidays and give them their meaning. Arthur George also shows how America's own mythmaking has shaped some holidays. This mythological approach reveals how and why holidays arose in the first place, how and why they have changed over the centuries, why they have remained important, and finally how we can celebrate them today in a more meaningful manner that can enrich our lives and better our society. George devotes particular attention to the depth psychological aspects of holidays and their corresponding myths, as well as to the insights of modern biblical scholarship for key holidays such as Easter and Christmas.

© The Author(s) 2020

A. GeorgeThe Mythology of America's Seasonal Holidayshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46916-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Why We Have Holidays

Arthur George¹

(1)

Solvang, CA, USA

Arthur George

End Abstract

Our days of the week are named after Norse and other Germanic gods and goddesses, together with heavenly bodies formerly associated with deities.¹ Eight of our months are named after two Roman gods (Janus and Mars), three Greek and Roman goddesses (Aphrodite, Maia, and Juno),² a Roman holiday of purification rituals (the Februa), and two Roman rulers who were mythologized and considered divine (Julius Caesar and Augustus). In light of this, we can rightly suspect that our calendar and its seasonal holidays have mythical origins and meanings, and further that the seasonal holiday cycle was celebrated within a mythical framework.

No culture’s calendar marks merely the running of time. Calendars incorporate sacred moments. Our seasonal cycle is “the patterned unfolding of sacred moments” around which people “plot their lives, in accord with an inheritance of memories that matter and a cycle of rituals that revisit them.”³ Such holy moments are packaged with myths, rituals, and symbols which form chapters in the progression of the sacred master-narrative of the year. Holiday rituals, at least traditionally, have mediated and placed us between the human and the divine, and they still can and should. The mythology and symbolism of our holy days also lends them an artistic character, which over history has inspired some of humankind’s greatest art.

In ancient Greek myth, the course of the year was overseen by a triad of goddesses called the Horae (“the Seasons”) representing the three traditional seasons of the ancient Greek year (spring, summer, autumn).⁴ The Greeks called the course of the seasons the dance of the Horae.⁵ The characteristics of the Horae evolved in a manner similar to the seasonal holidays themselves. In their earliest known form, the Horae were closely tied to the seasonal cycle of vegetation and reflected people’s concerns about fertility, as reflected in their early names:

• Thallo, meaning blossoming, especially of fruit trees, was a goddess of spring, budding and blossoming, and of youth, representing the return to life during this season, and also was a protector of youth.
• Auxo (or Auxesia), meaning growth and increase, personified summer, and was the protector of vegetation, growth, and fertility.
• Carpo, referring to bearing and harvesting fruit, was responsible for autumn and its processes of ripening and harvesting the crops.

As one would expect, this ancient triad was dear to early Greek farmers. As Greek culture became more urban and city-states emerged, and Greek mythology became Olympian, however, a different triad of Horae evolved. While they were still tied to the seasons, they also took on roles associated with higher urban civilization and culture.⁶ This is evident from their parentage: They were all daughters of Zeus and Themis. Themis, daughter of Uranus (heaven) and Gaia (earth), was a Titaness counselor who personified divine order, law and order, human social order and norms, propriety, and morality. These characteristics were reflected in her daughters, the Horae, who brought such gifts into our world:

• Eunomia, meaning both good (eu) green pastures (nomia) and good law (nomos), was the spring goddess of green pastures, but also the goddess of governance according to good laws.
• Eirene, meaning peace, was the goddess of peace and wealth. She was associated with late spring, because this was the military campaigning season when peace was at stake.
• Dike, meaning “justice” as well as “just retribution,” was the enemy of falsehood and the protector of the wise administration of justice. She wrought just punishment on the wicked and rewarded the virtuous.

While still personifying nature and seasons, the Horae also had become keepers of order in our world, serving to “mind the works of mortal men,”⁷ as Hesiod put it. So too, they guarded the gates to Mt. Olympus, which is to say the gates of Heaven.

Dike is especially instructive. She represented the way of the universe as a whole, as well as of each thing comprising it, which way is manifested in the course of the seasons. She was the natural law and “way of life” of the cosmos to which everything, including humans, should conform,⁸ much like the goddess Maat in Egypt. Dike called upon people to live in harmony with the universe, and live nobly according to high principles.⁹ Robert Graves called Dike “an artificial deity invented by the early philosophers.”¹⁰

This evolution of the Horae from more primitive associations with nature and vegetation to higher, abstract concepts dealing with human conduct and ways of being, right up to individual spiritual experiences and practices, is typical of the evolution of myths, religion, and, as occurred in Greece, philosophy as well. This same kind of evolution is also reflected in the history of our seasonal holidays. Now we have our own dance of our own Horae.

The Nature of Things Holy, Including Days

Humans have always had holidays. Why? How did they first appear long ago? And why are there so many of them? Why do holidays always have rituals? Which vestiges of old holiday rituals can be seen in our holidays today? Why have such rituals persisted when we no longer understand their meaning? What mix of pagan, Judeo-Christian, and modern secular traditions do our holidays exhibit? The list of important and interesting questions could go on and on. This book considers them by focusing on the principal mythological underpinnings of holidays.

We need only reflect for a moment on these questions to realize that holidays are somehow essential to the human experience, that they are rooted in our very being. They have always functioned to help develop and maintain the structure and integrity of human communities, as well as the health of our individual psyches and spiritual life. Nevertheless, we don’t often think about holidays in such terms. This book asks us to do so.

The perspective of this book can be seen in the very meanings of “myth” and “holiday.” For our purposes, a myth can be understood as a narrative story that is not historically accurate but conveys an important sacred truth, and which usually but not always involves divine figures, heroes, or supernatural events. There is something holy about a myth that resonates with our souls or psyches. And “holiday,” as we can easily guess, means “holy day.” Holidays are conceived of as sacred time set apart from everyday profane life. There is normally at least one myth associated with any holiday, which either purports to explain its origin or enhances its meaning and makes it more sacred. Myths and holidays go together.

To glimpse how holidays function in this way, we need only consider the example of our vacations. We take them to get away from it all, and we come back from them to our normal lives refreshed, with our “batteries recharged.” (Actually, in British English the usual term for vacation is “holiday,” which better expresses the dynamic at work.) Vacations are our personalized, extended holidays. Our traditional seasonal holidays, though usually spanning only one day, serve a similar purpose as days set apart to have a more meaningful experience of life. But because of their mythical character, holidays are more powerful than typical vacation days.

What does it mean for a particular day – or anything else – to be considered holy or sacred? How and why does this come about? To understand this, we must look back into our ancient past, before there was anything that we might recognize as religion, and before anthropomorphic deities, and consider what may have happened in light of human psychology. In ancient times when the rituals that developed into holiday festivals first emerged, people did not yet have developed ideas of religion or a writing system in which to express any such ideas. While our holidays did derive from perceptions of the divine that later resulted in religions, they were not originally established on the basis of ideas, beliefs, or creeds. Rather, the primitive rituals from which our holiday celebrations arose came directly from our ancestors’ confrontations with the overwhelming powers and mysteries in nature that they did not understand or control, powers which could be either harmful or beneficial. Their reactions of awe and terror to such forces and unknowns were highly emotional, often irrational. People developed rituals in an attempt to control or placate these powers. Rituals were based on divine models, or archetypes.¹¹ Holidays too emerged at times of the year when people developed rituals for confronting, honoring, and trying to control these powers, together with myths to understand and explain them.

Many holidays commemorate what we think were historical sacred, perhaps mythical events that occurred only once, for example the creation of the world (New Year’s Day), Christmas as the birth of Christ and Easter as his resurrection, Jewish Sukkoth (Feast of Booths) to commemorate the Hebrews’ Exodus and 40-year stay in the wilderness under Yahweh’s protection, and the Islamic New Year commemorating Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina (the Hegira). Other holidays mark not one-time events but those which recur each year (whether naturally or by human designation) and in which divine forces or deities are especially active. These include the sprouting of new vegetation in the spring (also sowing) (as in Easter and May Day), harvest time, the annual appearance of our ancestors’ ghosts (Halloween), and any number of winter and summer solstice holidays. Other holidays are more purely human creations, arising in order to satisfy psychological needs that build up over a period of ordinary time between other holidays. Examples are Groundhog Day , Valentine’s Day and Carnival, together bridging New Year’s and the arrival of spring celebrated during Easter and May Day. It seems that we need holidays frequently. The fact that we manufacture some holidays strictly out of need and desire can give us insight into their underlying nature and shows that psychological factors are at work, even when there are ostensible external (e.g., historical) pegs on which to hang a holiday. Finally, other holidays are more purely socio-political, which almost by definition are modern and are based on traditions that have acquired a nearly mythical character (e.g., Independence Day, Thanksgiving).

The Sociology and Psychology of Holidays

One does not have to be a psychologist to see that humans like to envelop themselves in sacred time and space (reality) fairly often. One cannot live in that realm constantly, however, so we set aside special times of the year for such experiences.

Holidays used to be communal affairs that strengthened human bonds within what the mythologist Joseph Campbell called the “mythologically instructed community”¹² and socialized people into sharing community values and responsibilities, leading to what the anthropologist Victor Turner called communitas. This social process in turn supported the individual. Formerly the important communities were villages and church congregations, which often amounted to the same thing. In today’s urbanized society where we hardly know our next-door neighbor and most of our acquaintances are from the workplace, usually a commercial organization with commercialized values in which employees are disposable and come and go, we lack this former sense of community. As a result, holidays no longer serve this communal function, except within the family and, with religious holidays, dwindling church congregations.

Nevertheless, even in our modern secular culture, our holiday celebrations remain a refuge, because they are just about the only occasions when we all drop our everyday routines in order to live, albeit briefly, in sacred time. What are we to do with it?

In the final chapter of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell addresses this situation where the mysteries associated with the old myths have been lost. Unlike ancient peoples, we no longer view animals with reverence, nor is the reappearance of vegetation in the spring or the growth of crops a divine process. Even that last refuge of the divine mystery, the heavens, has been found to be susceptible to explanation by science and human exploration. These trends affect our holidays and how we can celebrate them. The communities in which holidays used to be celebrated and gave them meaning either no longer exist or are declining. Essentially, we are left only with the human community of the whole planet on the one hand, and the individual on the other.

While it is important for the entire human community to come together as one for many purposes, when it comes to celebrating sacred time on holidays the individual is now paramount. Campbell recognized that the human psyche is both our most important remaining mystery and the realm in which one can experience the divine in sacred time and space, even in the conditions of contemporary society.

The leading twentieth-century scholar of comparative religion Mircea Eliade described humans as by nature “religious man.”¹³ In a similar vein, the nineteenth-century Russian writer Anton Chekov once observed that if a man does not believe in God, it is only because he believes in something else. This explains why most people who abandon traditional organized religion still pursue spirituality in some alternative way, or they might find meaning by founding or joining a noble social or political movement, which activity meets similar psychological needs. This behavior shows that people need to generate and experience positive psychic energy (libido) to achieve a healthy state of mind. Accessing and experiencing the “sacred” serves this purpose. The need to experience the sacred is a trait that evolved in us over time because it must have had evolutionary (survival) value, although it is hard to pinpoint what exactly that was in prehistoric times.¹⁴ The clear result, however, is that we seek and inevitably detect the sacred in our world. Establishing and celebrating holy days during which we can enter a sacred dimension is part of this spiritual quest.

Archetypal Ritual Traditions in Holidays

We color eggs on Easter, but so did Iranians on New Year’s,¹⁵ and people in Gaelic lands on May Day. We have our house-to-house trick-or-treat ritual on Halloween, but so did ancient Romans at some of their festivals, as did the English, Irish, and Scots on various holidays. In many ancient and modern holidays people make a lot of noise as part of the ritual, use fire, make offerings or sacrifices, and share meals. People held similar bonfire rituals at Easter, on May Day (Beltane), on midsummer night, and on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Why We Have Holidays
• 2. New Year’s Day: Creation Renewed and Re-lived
• 3. Groundhog Day: Prophecy, Rebirth, and Renewal
• 4. Valentine’s Day: How a Saint Became Eros
• 5. Unmasking Carnival
• 6. Easter and Our Resurrection
• 7. May Day: Beltane Fires and the May Queen-Goddess
• 8. National Myth: The Goddess Behind America’s Independence Day
• 9. Halloween: Eve of Transformation
• 10. Thanksgiving: Our American Mythmaking in Action
• 11. Christmas: New Beginnings and the Birth of the Divine Child-Hero
• Back Matter