The Dark Becomes Light

By Phil Polizatto,WWH – I wish all of you a most wondrous Winter Solstice. The shortest day is at an end. The longer ones begin. The dark becomes light. It’s my favorite day of the year. To me it is holy. But I know there are some who’d prefer I wish them a Merry Christmas and others who’d like the simple and all-inclusive “Happy Holidays.” So Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! And because of his hippie message of peace and love I must wish Jesus a Happy birthday as well, whenever that may have been! Happy Birthday Jesus! Thanks for the pamphlet on how to be a good person!

The New Testament gives no date for Jesus’ birth. This suggests that even the earliest Christians didn’t know or they didn’t care. They knew and cared about his message. That’s all that mattered. Religious scholars have tried to pin down a date, but their mathematical conclusions are centuries apart. Their best guess is sometime between September 11, 3 BC, and November 18th, 243 AD.

More troublesome to me is that the birth of Jesus has become so intertwined with the traditions normally associated with the season that it’s difficult to distinguish what’s Christian and what’s Pagan. Yes, Pagan! But I suspect many of you already know this. Even the Church admits the celebration of the birth of Christ was conveniently timed to coincide with the pagan rituals of Winter Solstice as celebrated by the Romans… Saturnalia.

It was a week-long festival of lawlessness, debauchery, and decadence. Most everyone got drunk. People went from house to house singing naked. Promiscuity was encouraged. Each Roman community selected a victim whom they forced to indulge in food and other physical pleasures throughout the week. Reminds me of San Francisco in the 60’s!

Roman pagans introduced this orgiastic holiday in the 4th Century. It was observed from December 17th to the 25th. During this period, Roman courts were closed, and Roman law dictated that no one could be punished for damaging property or injuring people. The festival began when “an enemy of the Roman people” was chosen to represent the “Lord of Misrule.” At the festival’s conclusion, December 25th, Roman authorities destroyed the “forces of darkness” by murdering the innocent man or woman.

But in 312 AD, The Emperor Constantine had an “epiphany” and made Christianity the dominant religion throughout the empire. Try as they might, neither Constantine nor the Church was able to “extinguish” the pagan rituals of Saturnalia and make the holiday one that celebrated the birth of Jesus instead, even though they didn’t know the exact date of his birth. To remedy this, they said “Why don’t we just say Jesus was born on December 25th, the concluding day of the festival? They reasoned that by incorporating Christ’s birth into Saturnalia, paganism would eventually fade into a minor role and the birth of Jesus would become the primary focus of the holiday.

It didn’t work. Many of the pagan traditions of Saturnalia became so entangled with the religious holiday; they remain part of Christmas traditions today. In a perverse way, our inordinate consumerism this time of year has possibly made us more pagan than ever. I have even seen an ad in which a young boy in his pajamas is kneeling in front of a Christmas tree, hands clasped, praying to Santa! Each year it becomes more difficult to separate Jesus from Santa. They are like Siamese twins joined at the hip, buddies holding hands as they shower the earth with their gifts.

Every country that celebrates Christmas has its own national folklore about its origins. The stories go back centuries. But one would have to go back in time even further… not just back to legends of different countries, not just back to Saturnalia, but back many thousands of years to the indigenous peoples of Siberia. It is here that you will find unmistakable similarities to Christmas traditions of today: Santa climbing down chimneys to deliver gifts, stockings hung near hearths, ornaments on Christmas trees, a team of reindeer flying through the sky, and the colors of Christmas, red and white.

Just as we use horses to pull wagons, just as the Inuit and Athabaskans of Alaska use dogs to pull their sleds, the Tungusic people who live in the Arctic regions of Siberia herd reindeer and use them as draught animals to haul their loads and pull their sleds. The reindeer are also used for their meat, milk, and skins.

And just as hard-working horses and dogs get hungry, so do reindeer. Their favorite food is mushrooms. Not just any mushrooms, but Amanita muscaria, sometimes called Fly Agaric. These beautiful red and white mushrooms contain very strong psychotropic agents. They cause visions and altered states in humans. The reindeer love these mushrooms which only grow nestled between the roots of firs and evergreens, otherwise known as Christmas trees. They have a symbiotic relationship with the tree and for a long time the mushrooms were thought to be the fruit of the tree.

You might call the Christmas tree the hostess with the mostess, for Amanita muscaria is the caviar of entheogens. The state of mind you’re in when you ingest it will determine what kind of “trip” you’ll have. If you close your eyes and voyage inwardly, you may see kaleidoscopes of ever-changing scenes, some beautiful, others horrid. If they’re horrid, it’s because you’re clinging to your ego. The need for self-identity becomes an all-consuming battle. You’ll force your eyes open, gasping for a glimpse of the “real world,” trying to find something to latch on to. You’ll find yourself in a dream where every detail of the natural world is a spiritual awakening, but only if you rid your self of the ego and become one with the universe. The more you try to keep your ego intact, the more frightening the trip. The more you let go, the more exquisite. Surrender! To struggle is hell; to relax, divine!

The Tungusic people rely on their Shamans to teach them surrender and guide them toward the divine… and to keep them safe during the journey. Amanita muscaria is highly toxic unless prepared properly. The white dots on the red cap of the mushroom are strychnine. Only Tungusic Shamans may harvest the mushrooms and prepare them so villagers get only the psychotropic effects and not the toxic ones. They are responsible not only for the spirituality of their people, but their safety as well.

To this day, a Tungusic Shaman wears a ceremonial red and white fur-trimmed jacket when gathering the magic mushrooms. After he prepares them and if the harvest is hefty, the Shaman will hang some on the lower boughs of the “Christmas” tree to dry. Then he’ll collect the rest and put them in little bags. When he gets back to the village he’ll distribute them among the families. It is the eve of Winter Solstice.

If snows have drifted up the doors, the Shaman might enter through the smoke hole in the roof. The bags are often put in socks and hung around the fireplace to dry or the mushrooms removed and strung across the room like a string of popcorn. Then in the morning, they’ll be ready to share their gifts of revelations. What greater gift can one receive than the gift of enlightenment?

It’s no surprise then to find villagers on the morn of Winter Solstice mesmerized by the mystical vision of their Shaman in his sleigh, skating gracefully over the tundra’s snow and ice. He urges his reindeer onward at such a fast pace some villagers swear he defies gravity and flies up into the sky. Is it because the villagers, the Shaman, and his reindeer are all high?

They hear him exclaim as he flies out of sight, Happy Winter Solstice to all, and to all, much peace, love, joy, and light.

Namaste!

Once again, I owe many thanks to my friend Jerry Weiss, a member of the Naraya Cultural Preservation Council, for suggesting this topic and pointing me in the right direction. Aho Mitakuye Oyasin! For more detailed information on Tungusic rituals read this superb article by Dana Larsen: http://www.dosenation.com/listing.php?id=5514

To contact Phil or find out more: check out his website and blog For a copy of HUNGA DUNGA
Phil Polizatto – Worldwide Hippies Bureau Chief – West Coast USA, is a graduate of The School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. He was a feature writer for the overseas division of UPI, a copywriter for CBS, and an award-winning corporate film producer. Mr. Polizatto is a published poet and a regular contributor to Worldwide Hippies as well as a variety of other arts and literary journals. Hunga Dunga is his first published novel. He resides in the Pacific Northwest.