The Holly King

by Chris Martin

Though the screen dips to black for a quick breather, when we return to the still rotoscoped Wolfram, he is already charging on.

  “The point remains, though, that the Roman church identified these dates and assigned them a correlative Christian holiday, with the radically liturgical idea that they be integral to the still solidifying narrative of the birth and death of Christ. They are applied to these dates in order to be a seasonal metaphor, a yearly reminder. A post card, if you will, reminding you the believer which portion of the narrative you are rewitnessing as it unfolds.

  “I should add, though it probably goes without saying, the clergy and other orthodox believers have never been comfortable with the placement of a holiday dedicated to reverence of and meditation on the arrival of the Christ child around the time of the winter solstice. Which historically has favored a great deal of happy celebrations with the likes of Saturnalia, festivals of the holly and the oak, Bruma and other celebrations of the coming light.

  “But ironically,” Wolfram adds, “nothing could be more Christian than Christmas. Not just because of the faith it celebrates, but because they are both a riot of ancient and contemporary symbolism, mixing superstition and belief and folklore. They also have a keen ability to survive by adaptation without giving away too much of their messages.”

  Two hands open a book and up pop concentric circles of carnival tents, with little banners fluttering, pitched on an anonymous golden field of yesteryear.

  Declares Carson: “Or, like I said, Christmas is when the freaky circus comes to town.”

  We look over the settlement of tents as an eagle soars up to us and, over a long drumroll and a jumbling dixieland march brings us down into the grassy streets of the carnival. We dive in and out of the tents whose names you can almost completely miss. Things like: The Grinch; Christmas Decorations (an overly garnished suburban home, its electricity humming and fizzling); The North Pole, inside of which we find Rudolph and Mrs. Claus baking a cake – Santa assumedly having a compound all to himself. We fly past a tent with a bloviating politician proclaiming “Home Before Christmas!” and the silhouette of a soccer match on a blasted no man’s land inside. Naturally, there’s a sooty-cobblestoned, English fog laden tent reserved for A Christmas Carol, adorned with a John Leech inspired Tiny Tim feebly reclining on the front steps, waving his little hand and tossing us a cheery, Brit-urchin, “ ’ello!”

  But our flight isn’t ended: there’s Christmas Tree. Twelve Days of Christmas (with a hasty visit to Sir Toby Belch that knocks several flightless partridges out a pear tree). Yule (with logs and goats). Noel. Knecht Ruprecht (a hooded ringer for Rupert Murdoch, scaring the children). St. Nicholas (the Ottoman). Wassail (not just the drink, but the cider drinking razzle dazzle, all to the health of yonder apple trees).

  Then finally the show stopping favorite, the tent called Holly Ivy Mistletoe. The flaps part and we enter, finding the peace of a winter forest, ripening with poisonous red berries. The quietude is suddenly torn by the violent dueling of two creatures – one a stout, golden tree-man, the other a frail green, holly-shrubbed knight. We join them underway in their bloody broadsword grudge match, heaving and swinging, slashing through tunics, buffeting against helmets. It ends, inevitably, in a grisly only-in-animation landscaping by the Oak Tree when he finally chainsaws and brush-clears the poor old Holly-knight, whose collapsed, mangled body is carried away by an entourage of Burgess Meredith-like wrens (complete with consoling mutterances, scarves and longshoreman’s caps), leaving blood spattered berry imprints on the snow.

  The buff, victorious Oak Tree, arms raised like Ben Roethlisberger, turns to a shivering unimpressed maiden waiting nearby, her bored indifference suggesting she’s seen it all before.

  “Heh heh heh,” he says.

  The voice of Professor Wolfram returns. “When we celebrate Christmas or, if you like, Christianity itself, what we are celebrating is an accumulation of traditions sprung up throughout Semitic Asia and then Europe over the last 2,000 years.

  “Keeping in mind: to the Romans and Jews at the time, Christianity was a modern and radical, even dangerous reinterpretation. A usurpation, to some, of thousands of years of belief, being reimagined and retold in an utterly different and somewhat antagonistic way. ”

  Our guide the eagle flies past a tent called Sol Invictus, and then Bruma, next door to Saturnalia, whose pageant the eagle grabs before entering the tent called Resurrecting Gods. Here, a smoky music hall with a dozen or so platforms and catwalks where demi-gods like Mithras, Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, Tammuz and Odin live, die and are reborn in sideshows of Victorian melodrama.

  “One example of this fluid correspondence between cultures is the Roman mystery cult of Mithras, which started in Persia, the other great power to the east. Conceived as a sun god at first as well as the keeper of contracts and truth, like Apollo, his mystery seeped west into Rome where it became distinctly, emphatically Roman.”

  The figure of Mithras gets up from his dais, dusts himself off, checks his watch and says good night to his fellow deities before exiting through the rear flap of the tent. He emerges in a forest and makes his way along a path that descends into a wide-mouthed, torchlit cave.

  “It was a time not for one religion, but several, expressed as cults or secret societies, whose meanings an adherent would take on and cherish as part of their identity. The cult of Mithras found inspiration among the Roman military and ruling elites around the first century, coincidental to, but in another part of the world from, the first inspirations of Christianity. Barracked in Rome, as men of war and society will, the officers developed a series of ritual vows and ethical promises, each one bestowing greater and greater status, each culled from the story of Mithras’ divinity. In the last stage the initiate is called Father and his designation is Saturn, the god of reaping, abundance and repose. The overseer of time, whose time of the year is December. The quotes between existing, traditional myth and the new revitalizing cult were taken for granted by the Romans.”

  Mithras enters the cave which blossoms in the torchlight into a surprisingly colorful, ornamented temple, with statues, columns, painted benches, and an icon-dusted mosaic floor. The god greets each member solemnly with what looks like a secret handshake – very Rotarian – and makes his way to the front altar where the figure of a bull waits for him, with blinking patient bull eyes. The god turns and bows one more time before his initiates, then mounts the bull from behind, pulls out a sword and plunges it into the seizing, aching bull.

  “While part of the cult’s mystery lies in the ritualistic adoration of the slaying of a bull, the tauroctony, another aspect was Mithras’ virgin birth. The story being that every year, he is born from stone, in blazing triumph. Suffused with Roman ambition, he takes on the greatest power he could find: Sol, the Sun, whom he subjugates but does not kill, instead becoming the keeper or enforcer of the sun’s return. Between the slaughter of a bull, a mainstay of neolithic religions, and the virgin birth of the sun’s savior, you have the convergence of the old and the new world views.”

  Having killed the bull, our god reaches up through the cave to the sun whose angry face is drawn ready to rumble. And they do, around and around the cosmos, above the earth, apparently covering an earthly year. Tiring, but with one last yank, Mithras pulls the sun down into the cave where the two of them, now brothers in arms, feast on the bull, their mouths turning greasy and tomatoey like Sunday BBQers.

  “The date celebrating Mithras’ birthday of course,“ Wolfram continues, “was December 25. In the fourth century, when the steady rise of Christianity became unavoidably competitive with Roman cults like Mithras, the Roman elite brought Mithras out of their secret bunkers and anointed December 25 as Sol Invictus, the day of the Unconquerable Sun.”

  Mithras arm in arm with his buddy the Sun, the pretty-eyed bull at their side, standing before a jubilant crowd in front of the Pantheon. But hearing a sharp, hey-over-here! whistle, all heads turn to a poor, grubby, togaed b
arker who thumbs their attention to the Son of God/Son of Man, dying on a cross. The crowd oohs and ahhs, drifting away from bewildered,

  superhero Mithras.

  “There is much to be said about Mithraic rituals shared or absorbed by Christians. A not insignificant example being Mithras’ aspect of the covenant, a fundamental metaphor of Christianity that establishes God’s promise of everlasting life through the death of His only begotten Son.”

  We are momentarily back on the rotoscoped, redbearded visage of Prof. Wolfram. “When we talk about Christmas as a Christian holiday, we are talking about celebrating the birth of Jesus, the Son of God. This time, the god-child is not born from stone but in a manger. We are therefore celebrating the birth of God as a man. The god is now divine and carnal, living and dying as a man but living again, divinely in heaven. So when we talk about Christmas, we are celebrating one half of a year long resurrection story.”

  We come back to the eagle, who plants his Roman pageant at the top of the Resurrecting Gods tent and then flies off into the pink fields of early morning sunlight. In just a few wingthrusts, he’s over a sunny-hued alluvial marsh, flapping leisurely past Sumerians collecting grasses from the muck... .

  “Even before Mithras, resurrection was an idea with a great deal of currency among the people living along the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Jordan rivers. Where the actions of nature – the floods then the food and then the fallow, the giving and the taking – were one and the same. Equating these eternal events with an eternal god gives us a grateful sense of blessing. God, or even the son of a god, must die because we must eat him to live. So we celebrate his birth as much as we mourn his death.”

  ... as the eagle agilely swerves from the lunging jaws of a crocodile. He climbs into the fat glow of Mesopotamian sunlight, before plunging toward a carnival tent on the riverbank with a sign outside that says: “Exit to Land of Ice and Snow,” and in we go.

  “Not surprisingly, Christ, as an agricultural flood and fallow deity seems less meaningful in the north than the waxing and waning of sunlight.”

  We reemerge in the somber half-light of snow heavy pine forests and a frigid gray-iced lake. A glimpse to the west: a limp, light-worn sun slipping into a crease of horizon, taking its light with it.

  “Up here,” the professor explains, “it makes sense to proclaim that Christ is the light of the world, born at the darkest time of the year, the same moment when the sun returns. Birth and resurrection remain the same idea. Only the causes are different.”

  The world is dark, windy, primitive outside a tent that turns out not to be a tent, but the stone entrance to an earthen mound, sunless and foreboding.

  “Here,” Prof. Wolfram cheerfully proclaims, “in the beginning was death.”

  We pan right to a raging storm lashing trees, howling over figures caped in deer and bearskin trudging through snow. One of these Germani men lifts his icicle-ringed eyes – the very drudgery of life – in time to behold the hallucinatory, screeching Wilde Jagd approaching. Soulless undead black riders atop empty-eyed black horses, joined by dogs seething with spittle, sweep overhead, their host always just emerging from the churning clouds of the nightstorm. They chase a hapless fat soul with wasted dangling breasts driven mad by its fear of death.

  Seeing this, our Germani’s eyes pop out of his skull with shards of ice flying. His eyes waggle with horror on their stiff optical nerves, just like his tongue. But too late. The host of the Wild Hunt grins with predatory recognition and then turns on us and our Germani. We run until we reach a huge stone bower – trapped! Terrified, our poor hunter literally melts in fear like buttered syrup down the mound wall though we escape inside at the last second. Only to encounter the cold stone tomb inside.

  “The only salvation,” the professor says, “and I chose this word pointedly, is the winter solstice. Whoever noticed this, that at some predictable time the days begin to be longer, the nights a little shorter, and then prove to others that this was so, every year at the same time, undoubtedly made everyone very happy. When that shortest day arrives, it’s worth celebrating its end.”

  Inside this stone bower, the tip of early morning sunlight breaks over the horizon and reaches its fingers into and along the stone walls. We venture timidly outside and while the winter sunlight now makes the forest sweet and gentle, there stands our Germani man, in death shroud and sandals.

  “When the church chose, or simply allowed, Christmas to be celebrated at the winter solstice, it also allowed all the prevailing symbols and legends of a post-Ice Age northern Europe in to the party.”

  Our Germani reaches for a chalice handed to him, and lo! his death shroud slips down to his hairy ankles. Horrified anew, he grabs the only living thing at hand to cover his undelineated privates. He watches the illustrator’s hand scrawl “Holly,” with a helpful pointing arrow, there’s then a breathholding pause, and our benighted Germani shrieks in pain. A stage manager's arm reaches from frame left, swaps out the holly with a yellowish wad of mistletoe, shoves the holly on top of his head like a victorious wreath, picks him up by the scruff of his neck and tosses him onto an enormous stone ceremonial table filled with roasts, drinking vessels and a couple of mini-torches. Reclining like the Venus d’Urbino, he becomes the center of the pagan solstice celebration as cardinals and other birds land on him and peck at the mistletoe berries. He eats and drinks like a slob.

  “And that’s the end of the story?” Carson asks.

  “Not entirely. You could make the case that the Reformation was the final heave ho by the north of the queasy Mediterranean gospel of eating the godflesh in the eucharist when it created its own version of Christianity. So when the center of power and influence drifted north and European culture spread around the globe, it introduced its own strange abstractions which you see in the tropics or when the southern hemisphere celebrates Christmas in summer. Spray painted trees in Florida and elves on the beaches of Copacabana.”

  Stage curtains close on our feasting Germani, the curtains turn into canvas flaps, and we retreat out of a tent festooned with candy canes, horns, angels, tinsel. Reindeer graze and goats prance outside. The Germani, in beach shorts and shades, emerges like a fat banker on holiday, sitting in a recliner as bikinied girls with Santa hats toss a beach ball under palm trees stringed with colored lights shaped like candle flames.

  “On the one hand,” Professor Wolfram concludes, “Christmas has proven remarkably resilient mingling traditions of faith and temporality, desert and forest, rain and snow, sunlight and darkness, birth and death.

  “But on the other, one has to wonder. The impulse to make Christmas everything to everyone, as it did early on, to be an occasion to make merry while also being a religious observance, still churns uncomfortably on, in a mild confusion of intent, in every corner of the spinning, hemispherical globe. Leaving some of us every year to scratch our heads, bemused, and ask: what exactly are we celebrating again?”

  Professor Wolfram, eyebrows arching over a happy-to-be-provocative twinkle in his eyes, disappears behind the closing black.

  * * * * *

  Part Four

  In which Carson visits his mother for Christmas in the planned evangelocal community,

  Hosanna Hills; evangelocalism is explained and the Rev. Mike Battle hosts the

  Hosanna Hills Christmas Eve talent show

  Up through the black, replacing Prof. Wolfram, an insert card rises:

  CHRISTMAS WITH MY MOTHER