Posts Tagged ‘household spirits’

Magickal Traditions Hidden In the Mundane

  It’s really rather pleasantly shocking how many customs with pagan or magickal roots are tucked amongst the seemingly Christian holiday season cheer. Indeed the entire premise of the Christmas holiday is deeply indebted to the ancient polytheistic festivals which could never quite be stamped out. And with mainstream Christmas upon us, I thought we might take a quick look at the continuing magickal trends you might not have noticed going on today and indeed throughout the holiday season and into the New Year ahead.

  This Christmas, the story of the birth of the Christian semi-god Jesus Christ will be reenacted in churches and schools all over the world as part of the Nativity play. But did you know that this classic tale is actually a re-working of an even older myth concerning the Eastern deity Mithras, who also had a birthday on December 25th? The Apostle Paul, who’s version of the birth of Christ is the most heavily relied upon for the traditional Christmas story, hailed from Ephesus- a center of worship for Mithras in the later Roman Empire. His writing was highly influenced by his surroundings and thus incorporated several of the elements of the Mithras cult and birth story into his telling; including both the idea of the virgin birth and visit of the three wise men to his birth site (in a cave vs. a stable). Indeed it is likely that the early church fathers cast Jesus’s birthday in the winter to take advantage of the pre- pagan winter festivities in the first place.

  The Eastern Star associated with the Nativity story, and its derivative decorative value over the holidays is likewise an element of older cults which was refashioned to suit monotheistic needs. Intriguingly, some of its greatest usage is attached to ancient mother goddess cults, including that of the goddess Asherah: the oft forgotten wife of the god Yahweh ~ the original version of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim God celebrated on Christmas. Many other nature symbols, like snowflakes and poinsettias, which are also associated with the holidays were likewise used in older pagan cults. None more so than mistletoe. Added into the Christmas mythos through its Germanic and Norse usage during winter festivals, it is linked inevitably to the Norse gods through its appearance in the myth of Baldr, the dying god of Viking myth. Following a prophecy detailing Baldr’s impending death, his mother extracts promises from all of the plants and creatures of the world but forgets about the lowly mistletoe tucked up in the oak trees. And so when the mistletoe is unwittingly tricked into stinging Baldr at the behest of the trickster god Loki, the sting is fatal and Baldr is committed to the Afterlife until the end of the world (Ragnarok) when he will emerge to lead the new world order. The theme of the dying god appears over and over again throughout world mythology, indeed the story of Jesus Christ itself represents a ‘dying god’ myth. The re-use of mistletoe as part of the Christmas festival is therefore most fitting indeed.

  Also stemming from northern European pagan traditions are the Yule log and Christmas ornaments. The giant Yule log was traditionally chosen to be burned on the Winter Solstice, the darkest and longest night of the year. The cheerful fire of the long burning log was intended to ward off the evil spirits that lurked in the dark. Families would gather together on this dark night both in fear of the darkness and in celebration of the upcoming new year ahead. The winter holidays were highly important in the pre-scientific world. In a time where you cannot fathom the astrological and natural reasoning behind the turning of the seasons, when all the plants die and the weather gets bad ~ you want to do everything you can to encourage a better season to come round.


  Christmas ornaments, however, are perhaps the most gory of modern holiday traditions. Rumor has it that Germanic warriors would hang the heads and saddle gear of conquered foes on trees near their residence as trophies of their battle. These dark prizes eventually transitioned into more metaphorical baubles which in turn were placed on the first famous Christmas trees popularized by the Germanic Prince Albert at the court of Queen Victoria in nineteenth century England. Decorated vegetation was not however limited to Northern European traditions, decorated boughs of a variety of plants were common features of ancient Roman and Greek festivals, and were intended to both encourage the future bounty of the crops and protect the house from evil spirits.

  Other household holiday decorations possess further overlooked magickal significance. Have you ever noticed how many anthropomorphic figures there are around Christmastime? Gingerbread men, snowmen, figurines of angels, the nativity characters and Santa and his crew: there are hundreds of thousands of little simulacra of people associated with the holidays. And while such representations of humanity may seem commonplace in today’s society, for thousands of years and indeed still in some cultures such things were and are forboden. From the ancient so-called Venus figurines of prehistoric Europe to the statues of the classical world, the recreation of the human form was considered sacred and powerful. Perhaps the most well known remnant of this concept are the voodoo dolls of Santeria and other Afro-Caribbean traditions. Their Christmas cousins may be just as powerful. From the helpful elf who watches over children’s good behavior to the angels atop the tree: these personifications of the human soul and spirit are no less powerful if one chooses to believe in them.

  And finally, let us consider the concept of the infamous Santa Claus himself. The story of Santa is ripe with magickal elements. Ultimately, he is a semi-deity who lives in a magickal dimension on the northern fringes of the human world accompanied by a bevy of miraculous toy-making beings and flying creatures. And though the tradition of Santa is not very old in and of itself, the idea of powerful house spirits who bear gifts and good fortune goes back to the very beginning of time in almost every culture. In some cultures, particularly in Eastern Europe and Japan, these house spirits are still widely venerated in the modern world.

  Ultimately, though Christmas is a monotheistic holiday. Its modern celebration is chock full of symbolism and traditions which hearken back to earlier times and brighter pagan customs. One needs only look closer to find them and celebrate their wonder.

In the modern world, there are innumerable devices to help remind us of our daily to-do lists and which keep every conceivable bit of data close to our fingertips on the keyboard. Memory, therefore, becomes rather overrated. Why remember something if a handy-dandy post-it note or your Blackberry can do it for you? Why remember faces and names if a Facebook album can organize them so much more easily? And why memorize facts if Google, Wikipedia, and Encyclopedia Britannica have us covered? With all of this convenience, it is no surprise that memory loss is on the rise as we appear to be losing our capacity to retain as much direct information as we previously could.

Once upon a time, mankind had to be multilingual, they had to be able to do complicated math in their head, and they had to remember their family lineage, their local geography, and their tales of myth and religion. And they did. It was a simple matter of remembering it or losing it. Because something once forgotten, was forgotten forever. The average man or woman could not read or write, they had few maps, no cameras, and therefore had fewer ways to record all the little tidbits of information we, in contemporary society, so often take for granted. Recipes, spells, songs, family history, engineering instructions ~in the modern world, all of these can be written down and referred back to; there is no need to know them by rote. But in the societies that came before us on the grand time line of earth, lives ~ both magickal and mundane ~ were ruled by what, and whom, they could remember. And in ancient societies it was often much more a matter of who was remembered than anything else.

Rome provides us with several classical examples of the power of memory and remembrance. Its broad spectrum of opposites (rich vs. poor; literate vs. illiterate; urban vs. country, Republic vs. Empire etc) allows for a vast array of valuable viewpoints a scholar can look back on and pull positive life lessons from. The Pax Romana (27 BCE-180 AD) in particular stands on a wonderful cusp of literacy where the written word was becoming accessible to more people and thus people of more classes and more ways of life were recording what they felt it was important to remember.

Rome, overall, adored the idea of remembrance. It was always looking backwards over its shoulder, usually at ancient Greece, to use the power of the past to magnify its energy in the present. But the Roman people were also looking forward, and both the poor and the rich were striving to be remembered by the future.

Roman Ancestors: Real & Imagined

From a modern viewpoint, Rome is the past. But the Romans were aware that there was a past beyond them: that people had come before them: that these people had lived, and laughed, and built civilizations; ones which, would ultimately lead to Rome itself. And this past was alive and a part of their everyday routines.

Ancestor worship was a very strong component of both urban and rural Roman religion. The power of one’s family was honored second only to the later cults of the emperors. Roman homes, which also doubled as Roman business offices, were built around the notion of ancestor worship and incorporated an idea of public and private adoration and remembrance of the ancestors. Upon entering a Roman house, one first encountered a short hallway which featured the death masks of the house’s ancestors. Although it sounds a bit macabre, it is not so far removed from our own sphere of familiarity. Check out your own walls and mantles: have any photos of your family up there? Same thing; we just have better technology to preserve images.

But note that earlier I said, the “house’s” ancestors and not the “family’s” ancestors. Those masks would stay with the house even if the family were to die off into obscurity or the house sold to another family. The idea of “family” or “ancestry” was not just an emotional concept, or a list of past relatives and their notable deeds, it was associated with place as well. Both the spirits and there memory were given a physical location. The ancestors of the house would stay with the house, not necessarily the family, becoming remembered spirits of a place and not just of a family. It gives whole new meaning to the idea of ‘if these walls could talk.’ The orator Cicero famously bought a ‘used’ house as such.

The house would also feature at least one altar to the household gods, who are often simply referred to as the Lares Familiares (which literally translated means house guardians/spirits, however they most likely would have had individual names only members of the household would have been aware of) and the Penates. Typically after passing through the aforementioned hallway, one would enter a central square or rectangular open air atrium, which featured a public altar (a lararium) for business associates and other guests of the open areas of the house to pay respect to their associate’s Lares at. Accessible through narrower hallways or beyond storerooms, smaller, more private lararium have been found, typically displaying signs of much heavier usage than the public altar on display. It is conceivable that family secrets were passed down and hidden family rituals were performed at these smaller more personal altars. The remembrance of the ancestors was, it seems, divided into public and private spheres.

Imagine the wider scenario in the modern world. Do you know who lived in your house or apartment before you? The Romans believed that the people that lived in a house imprinted on it, leaving the Lares behind. The terms Lares and Penates may, in fact, have an older, more local meaning for the Roman region and may be a watered down remembrance of the ancient local gods, the genius loci, that were worshiped in the area prior to the Latin tribes’ emigration to it. Given that your home might have some household gods lurking round it in Roman fashion, it might be helpful to show some respect to the Lares that have been left behind, or to perhaps attempt a spiritual cleanse to encourage the household spirits to accustom themselves to your presence and over to your aid.

The Political Power of Memory

Politics and class distinctions were also ruled by the idea of a remembered family history: the longer a lineage, the more status and power, often regardless of wealth. Whole genealogies were crafted, occasionally from thin air, in an effort to connect powerful personages to the past. The Emperor Augustus and his uncle, the infamous Julius Caesar, for instance, connected their lineage back to the mysterious and mythic Aeneas, going so far as to have their court poet, Virgil, craft the eponymous Aeneid in their family’s honor. Through the figure of Aeneas, they linked their family back to the Battle of Troy, the Trojan royal family, the goddess Aphrodite/Venus herself (as she was reputedly Aeneas’ birth mother), and the founders of Rome, the twins Romulus and Remus, who were themselves purportedly the 13th generation of descendants down from Aeneas. Therefore the imperial family, in one fell swoop, used the memory of the past to link themselves to their city’s founders and to the divine.

The first was a sound political move, the second allowed them to take their power a step further. The connection with the divine was indeed, one of the Emperor Augustus’ primary talking points when he convinced the waning Senate to deify Julius Caesar as a god, starting a tradition of deifying the Emperor which would continue until the pagan Empire’s fall to Christianity. Although initially intended to be a cult revolving around the recently dead Emperor and other members of the imperial family, the cult quickly came to include the living Emperor as a god, similar to the Egyptian style of royal worship. Money took on a new significance in the cult of the Emperor. Having the Emperor’s head on the coin was not just a way to let the people all round the Empire to know what the Emperor looked liked or to indicate that the money was minted in his reign, it became a small, portable, spiritual token. The use of the past for political power is not an unfamiliar concept in politics and one still used in the modern age. The French Revolution looked back to the Roman Republic as a model, sparking off a Greco-Roman Renaissance. In 20th century Italy, Benito Mussolini summoned up the glory days of Ancient Rome by bulldozing the streets into some semblance of their ancient geography. And consider President Obama’s references back to President Lincoln. All instances of memory being used for political power.

Back in ancient Rome, it was not just the Emperor that strived to be remembered and revered in the public collective after he was gone. The funerary artifacts of the upper and middle classes indicate an interest in persevering an individual memory of themselves, leaving behind what we presume are life-like portraits of themselves on their coffins. And there were too, the aforementioned death masks. The poets of the Pax Romana indicate the philosophical state of mind of the times in their work. Ovid sums up the idea of immortality through the written word rather well numerous times, but a particular favorite of mine is in his less political and more romantic work Only the Poets are Immortal which sums it up rather nicely, albeit full of hubris for his field:

“For myself, let Apollo bestow on me cups
Overflowing with the waters of Castaly;
Let the myrtle that dreads the cold adorn my brow
And let my verses ever be scanned by the eager lover.
While we live we serve as food for Envy;
When we are dead we rest within the aureole
Of the glory we have earned.
So, when the funeral fires have consumed me,
I shall live on,
And the better part of me will have triumphed over death.”

Rome Remembered: Active Memory on Rome’s Streets and in Today’s Libraries

But the collective Roman memory of the past wasn’t just based on family and imperial legends. There were, and are still, a few remaining slightly credible written sources which would have been available to the upper classes of Rome and the academics of the later empires. Oral histories, preserved by the writer Livy, recorded the kings, legends, and hazily remembered festivals of the early Roman Republic. Secrets and prophecies were also purportedly recorded in a grouping of texts called the Sibylline Oracles, a jumble of pseudo-mythical and prophetic texts which were initially protected in a sacred cave not far from Rome by the Sibyl: a magickal dedicant and sometime prophetess; until Augustus collected them in the library of his house on the Capitoline hill in Rome. Later scholars revised, edited, and added, and the remaining texts were then preserved, resulting ultimately in a Renaissance period compendium of the Oracles. But where both of these preserved bits of memories highlight the amazing nature of the Greek traditions and the Latin tribes of central Italy, few historical mentions are made of the prehistoric Etruscans whose ruins dotted the Roman countryside. For one reason or another, the Roman people chose to almost consciously ignore many aspects of these direct cultural predecessors or else make connection with them taboo. There are in fact several sources which indicate the Romans, like the medieval denizens of the region after them, regarded the Etruscan ruins as haunted or else the ancient equivalent of Boo Radley’s house; either possessed of dark spirits or lived in by those on the fringe of society.

And beyond this, the poetry and literature, particularly of the 1st to 3rd centuries AD, has preserved snippets of the more homespun and philosophical nature of remembrance conducted on an everyday level. We know that the Roman doctors had thousands of herbal cures, passed down through generations of trial and error. We know that Roman magicians, frowned upon by Roman law but still to be found in the marketplace and on seedy street corners, hawked spells and potions they claimed to have learned in far-away lands. Priests conducted traditional ceremonies, some public and some private, supposedly handed down through the generations. And recent excavations in Roman cities indicate that certain eateries and market food stalls lasted longer in the marketplace, possibly favored above others because of their standardized food recipes, presumably also passed down through the generations. However, although these are referenced in what sources we have, these everyday activities (bar farming which we have an incredibly dense and detailed grouping of texts on, most notably Cato’s De Agricultura) are not recorded in particular detail. A few spells, a few chants, and an occasional half-recipe have crept in. And although it is very possible that this discrepancy in the historical record is due to a lack of relevant texts having been preserved; it seems then, that of all the things the Romans wanted to remember, they wanted to remember each other. Be it for personal or political reasons, they wanted to remember those people, those individuals who had come before them and whose foundations they had built their empire on.

It is, perhaps, a lesson we can learn from them. Honor your ancestors. Remember where you’ve come from. Send a prayer to your great great grandmother or favorite great uncle, ask for some guidance from the spirits of your house, be they family or be they adopted Lares. Reorganize your family photo collection, hang some updated photos on the wall. Set up a subtle altar in front of it and every time a guest comments on a picture you will know that whether they intended to or not, they’ve just paid homage to your household spirits, Roman style.

Sources:

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