Meyer's Helpful Heathen Holiday Hints No. 3
Gentle reader,
'Tis the season, once again, so I feel it is appropriate to present to you this, the third in our line of Helpful Heathen Holiday Hints. There are many who want to get back to a "traditional" Christmas season. I'll take this a step farther and go not just past the commercialization, but past the Christianization of the season as well, back to the season's heathen roots.
Last year in HHHH No. 2, I mentioned the use of the Julleuchter, or Yuletide tower candlestick, in the celebrations of the season. To expand on this idea, I translated the following chapter from Das Erbe der Ahnen by the Arbeitskreis Deutsche Mythologie, K.W. Schütz-Verlag, Coburg, 1942, pp. 125-128. It explains the basic mythology of the Julleuchter quite well.
Nordic-germanic religious belief has lived for millennia in allegorical symbolism, and in those that create this symbolism. Allegorical symbols are more than decoration, more than symbols in a general sense; they are ancestral images of the most inner experience, shaped in forms that speak secretly to those sharing the blood and spirit of those who once created these signs out of their worldly experiences in the ancient past. That is why they still speak to us today, and why they wake in us that original experience, unique and eternal, that yields not to psychology nor to development, because it comes straight from that point in the soul in which the human touches the divine.
This original experience is the birth of the light. To the ancient Germanic tribesman, everything that might appear transitory to us is an allegory of the great everlasting, the All-Father of the world, life and our existence. For that reason, death and becoming are to him a guarantee for the eternity of existence. But holy days and holy nights are for him those times in which this eternal existence is visible, in which life and death touch each other. In the ancient days, on the edge of the Arctic, this experience grabbed and unsettled the Norseman on an annual basis. When the sun, having long since sunk below the horizon, again flashed for the first time behind the southern mountains, across the southern winter sea, when the light in the darkness appeared, he was seized with overpowering happiness, and a joyous festival was dedicated to this rebirth of the light. It was much the same for the peasant on the German plains or in the mountains: when the new light heralded new life and new growth to him, he felt himself to be inwardly connected to this new life. The spark of the joyful, active and divine life arose in him and ennobled the soul toward free achievement and work.
This ancient light enlightened and enlivened Germanic man, from wherever he hailed, in order to fulfill his mission. It shone on the youthful gatherings of the people in spring, when they set forth toward light and life to settle new land outside in Utgard; it shone on the warriors that marched unwavering as the course of the sun, "joyful as a victorious hero". It shone on the venturesome Vikings when they steered their keels across the dark abyss of the sea toward voyages worldwide. And it beamed upon those German men and women who disdained a foreign, alien concept of the divine, sought it within themselves and found it again in the "little spark" spoken of by Meister Eckhart. The religious mind of our people experienced and composed this rebirth of the light in various imagery. One of the oldest and most beautiful is that of the newborn child lying in a golden cradle in the burial mound of the ancestors, giving a wonderful expression to the belief of the bright, divine life in the clan. Another is that of the evergreen tree preserving life throughout the night of the year, letting its branches blaze with light. And a third image, much sung in legends and fairy tales, is that of the maiden with the golden hair, enclosed within a dark tower, in order to reappear again after her imprisonment on its pinnacle, gleaming with new life. This tower, formed in clay, belongs to the loveliest allegorical symbols of our Christmastide. It is adorned with the wheel of the year, the holy Jul, and the heart, the Germanic symbol of intimacy with the divine. Underneath the tower, a small flame burns, the symbol of the light in the darkness, until with the beginning of the new year and the transformation of the light, the large light is ignited atop the tower.
So it may have once burned atop the towers of our ancestors in olden times, mentioned by only one single scholarly work, but demonstrated by many legends and fairy tales and above all these tower candlesticks. In this allegory, the Germanic heroic ethos and deep sensibility have found their shared expression. They live yet today in our German experience of Christmastide, which no foreign spirit can ever distort and darken.
Today it is quite hard, though not impossible, to obtain a Julleuchter. Above all, it is difficult to find one corresponding to the original design. There are some available out there glazed in black, which does not however correspond to the originals excavated in Sweden nor the Allach creations during the 1930's and 40's. Of course, the Allach Julleuchters are somewhat rare and thus expensive; there is also the danger, as is the case with most Third Reich memorabilia, that you'll encounter fakes being passed off as the original thing. From my research, I can recommend this source for a contemporary Julleuchter in the traditional form.
CRM
'Tis the season, once again, so I feel it is appropriate to present to you this, the third in our line of Helpful Heathen Holiday Hints. There are many who want to get back to a "traditional" Christmas season. I'll take this a step farther and go not just past the commercialization, but past the Christianization of the season as well, back to the season's heathen roots.
Last year in HHHH No. 2, I mentioned the use of the Julleuchter, or Yuletide tower candlestick, in the celebrations of the season. To expand on this idea, I translated the following chapter from Das Erbe der Ahnen by the Arbeitskreis Deutsche Mythologie, K.W. Schütz-Verlag, Coburg, 1942, pp. 125-128. It explains the basic mythology of the Julleuchter quite well.
The Birth of the Light
Nordic-germanic religious belief has lived for millennia in allegorical symbolism, and in those that create this symbolism. Allegorical symbols are more than decoration, more than symbols in a general sense; they are ancestral images of the most inner experience, shaped in forms that speak secretly to those sharing the blood and spirit of those who once created these signs out of their worldly experiences in the ancient past. That is why they still speak to us today, and why they wake in us that original experience, unique and eternal, that yields not to psychology nor to development, because it comes straight from that point in the soul in which the human touches the divine.
This original experience is the birth of the light. To the ancient Germanic tribesman, everything that might appear transitory to us is an allegory of the great everlasting, the All-Father of the world, life and our existence. For that reason, death and becoming are to him a guarantee for the eternity of existence. But holy days and holy nights are for him those times in which this eternal existence is visible, in which life and death touch each other. In the ancient days, on the edge of the Arctic, this experience grabbed and unsettled the Norseman on an annual basis. When the sun, having long since sunk below the horizon, again flashed for the first time behind the southern mountains, across the southern winter sea, when the light in the darkness appeared, he was seized with overpowering happiness, and a joyous festival was dedicated to this rebirth of the light. It was much the same for the peasant on the German plains or in the mountains: when the new light heralded new life and new growth to him, he felt himself to be inwardly connected to this new life. The spark of the joyful, active and divine life arose in him and ennobled the soul toward free achievement and work.
This ancient light enlightened and enlivened Germanic man, from wherever he hailed, in order to fulfill his mission. It shone on the youthful gatherings of the people in spring, when they set forth toward light and life to settle new land outside in Utgard; it shone on the warriors that marched unwavering as the course of the sun, "joyful as a victorious hero". It shone on the venturesome Vikings when they steered their keels across the dark abyss of the sea toward voyages worldwide. And it beamed upon those German men and women who disdained a foreign, alien concept of the divine, sought it within themselves and found it again in the "little spark" spoken of by Meister Eckhart. The religious mind of our people experienced and composed this rebirth of the light in various imagery. One of the oldest and most beautiful is that of the newborn child lying in a golden cradle in the burial mound of the ancestors, giving a wonderful expression to the belief of the bright, divine life in the clan. Another is that of the evergreen tree preserving life throughout the night of the year, letting its branches blaze with light. And a third image, much sung in legends and fairy tales, is that of the maiden with the golden hair, enclosed within a dark tower, in order to reappear again after her imprisonment on its pinnacle, gleaming with new life. This tower, formed in clay, belongs to the loveliest allegorical symbols of our Christmastide. It is adorned with the wheel of the year, the holy Jul, and the heart, the Germanic symbol of intimacy with the divine. Underneath the tower, a small flame burns, the symbol of the light in the darkness, until with the beginning of the new year and the transformation of the light, the large light is ignited atop the tower.
So it may have once burned atop the towers of our ancestors in olden times, mentioned by only one single scholarly work, but demonstrated by many legends and fairy tales and above all these tower candlesticks. In this allegory, the Germanic heroic ethos and deep sensibility have found their shared expression. They live yet today in our German experience of Christmastide, which no foreign spirit can ever distort and darken.
Today it is quite hard, though not impossible, to obtain a Julleuchter. Above all, it is difficult to find one corresponding to the original design. There are some available out there glazed in black, which does not however correspond to the originals excavated in Sweden nor the Allach creations during the 1930's and 40's. Of course, the Allach Julleuchters are somewhat rare and thus expensive; there is also the danger, as is the case with most Third Reich memorabilia, that you'll encounter fakes being passed off as the original thing. From my research, I can recommend this source for a contemporary Julleuchter in the traditional form.
CRM
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