Groundhog Day. Where to begin? Did you know that the groundhog was initially a serpent? Of course, that was before the Catholic church (by way of Pope Gelasius I) got hold of the pagan traditions, turned a pagan goddess into a Catholic saint, and changed the name from Imbolc to Candlemas.
Consider this excerpt from Carmina Gadelica, Volume 1 by Alexander Carmicheal, a collection of traditional Gaelic folklore:
Thig an nathair as an toll
La donn Bride,
Ged robh tri traighean dh’an t-sneachd
Air leachd an lair.
Which, translated from Gaelic to English, means:
The serpent will come from the hole
On the brown Day of Bride,
Though there should be three feet of snow
On the flat surface of the ground.
The Imbolc festival, dedicated to the goddess Brigid, was originally a celebration of fertility and the coming of spring, halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Now the Imbolc festival is called Candlemas by the Roman Catholic church and supposedly celebrates the trip that Joseph and Mary made, forty days after the birth of Jesus, to present the newborn Savior at the Temple of Jerusalem, as described in Matthew 2:22-40.
The thing is, according to the writings of a nun named Egeria, who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land from 381 to 384, the Candlemas celebration was observed on February 14th. According to Egeria, February 14th was a day solemnly kept in Jerusalem with a procession to Constantine I's Basilica of the Resurrection, and with a homily preached on Matthew 2:22, which clearly indicates the celebration of the presentation of Jesus at the Temple of Jerusalem. So it would appear that, more than one hundred years before the time of Pope Gelasius I (494-496), Candlemas was traditionally celebrated on February 14th, which would put the birth of Jesus forty days before, on January 6th.
What does this say about the Christmas celebration, or, as many pre-Christianity pagans knew it, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, "the birthday of the unconquered sun," which occurred four days after the winter solstice, on December 25th? Dies Natalis Solis Invicti was a sun-worshipper's holiday that celebrated the first detectable lengthening of daylight hours after the long winter nights. Ironically, when later Christians refused to take part in the sun-worshipping festivities, they were ridiculed by traditional pagans as atheists due to the fact that they didn't believe in a god that could be seen, like Solis Invicti, but in an invisible god.
So when did the recognized birthday of Jesus go from January 6th to December 25th, and why? The "when" is easy: sometime between the celebrations that Egeria observed in Jerusalem (381-384) and the time when Pope Gelasius I (494-496) moving of the Candlemas date from February 14th to February 2nd. The "why" depends on who you believe. The Catholic church's official claim is that the date of December 25th was derived merely by calculating nine months after the date of the conception of Jesus, March 25th. If that's the case, however, then why was the recognized date of Candlemas moved to twelve days prior, which caused the traditional celebration of the birth of Jesus to move from January 6th to December 25th?
Are you starting to see a pattern here? Incidentally, the pagan goddess Brigid was called a triple goddess in Celtic cultures, due to the fact that she embodied three personas (a trinity, if you will): Brigid the poetess, Brigid the smith, and Brigid the doctor. Sound familiar? The goddess Brigid from the pagan tradition is now Saint Brigid of the Catholic Church. The goddess Brigid was traditionally described as the goddess of poetry, cows, healing, smithcraft, holy wells, eternal flames, and healing. Saint Brigid, coincidentally, is the patron saint of poets, blacksmiths, healers, midwives, dairy maids... you get the idea.
This blog is getting lengthy, so I'll try to wrap it up, but while we're on this subject, the modern holiday of Easter can be traced back to a spring equinox celebration of a pre-Christianity pagan goddess named Eostre, goddess of the dawn. For the sake of Pete, the very name of the holiday is derived from hers! And don't get me started on the "coincidences" between the Anglo-Saxon god Woden (later called Odin in Norse mythology) and Jehovah, between the pagan celebration of Samhain and the Catholic celebrations of All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, between early Persian and Egyptian religious beliefs and the coinciding beliefs of Catholicism... I could go on for days.
For the record, the Latin term paganus, like the Germanic term heathen, originally referred to someone living in a rural area. Since many different old religions were practiced in rural areas of the world, and since rural areas were "Christianized" later than larger cities, the terms pagan and heathen came to mean any adherent of a non-Abrahamic religion.
It is apparent that the Catholic church, which directly influenced the various Christian sects that developed in recent history, has incorporated many aspects of the pagan traditions into Christianity in order to more easily convert, and thus subjugate, the stubborn pagans. I submit that the majority (if not all) of Christian traditions are merely the renaming and unlawful annexation of older religious or spiritual traditions. Meet the new god, same as the old god.
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