The following essay by HAO member (and Humanist-at-Large), Henry Beissel, is presented in response to the suggestion posted a few weeks ago that humanists should celebrate a new winter holiday called Humanlight (http://humanistottawaweb.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/a-humanist-holiday-humanlight/)

Nothing is more conducive to a sense of good fellowship and of sharing, to initiating and maintaining friendships, engendering feelings of love, and generally strengthening the social fabric, than a celebration. Whatever the occasion, a celebration brings us together in a spirit of joy, and leaves us feeling better about ourselves, about the other celebrants, and about life itself. We experience ourselves in harmony with the world.

Celebrations come in different sizes, depending on the occasion, and generally only those included stand to benefit. An anniversary between lovers may involve just two people while their wedding is likely to be celebrated by two extended families and their friends; winning a hockey or football game may lead a whole city to celebrate, while the anniversary of a victorious historical battle is likely to engage an entire nation.

Since inclusiveness entails exclusivity; for every one enjoying a communal feast, there is at least one who is excluded from it. Often those excluded far outnumber those included. In fact, the smaller the number included the larger the number of those excluded. Alas, all too often, exclusion creates resentment and envy. Therefore, if civic unity is the objective, we must make our celebrations as all-encompassing as possible.

There is another reason for this. Not all celebrations succeed in creating the desired level of accord and amity all the time. It would seem that the smaller the festive gathering the greater the likelihood that the celebration may go awry for some or all participants. Negative emotions such as anger, envy, and jealousy, which divide us, diminish proportional to the enlargement of the circle of celebrants. As the individual becomes an ever smaller part of the festivities, his or her personal concerns are absorbed by the larger subject or theme of the celebration.

In our fractious, fragmented world, which is alarmingly–some would say, suicidally– divided against itself, celebrations that include as many people as possible are therefore extremely desirable to promote peace and harmony. To achieve this, we must go out of our way to celebrate occasions global in scope, which impact our lives beyond private, national, political, and all parochial issues. That’s why I propose that we institute four celebrations world-wide to celebrate the arrival of the four seasons.

The proposal is restorative rather than innovative because there is plenty of evidence that long before recorded history, our ancestors celebrated the changing of the seasons. Archeologists have uncovered countless structures in all parts of the world, which, like the monumental stone circle at Stonehenge, prove that our ancestors not only understood the movements of the sun but were able to calculate it precisely. Schooled by millennia of observing the stars night after night drifting across the sky, they recognized patterns and learnt to measure them. They understood that the sun’s cycles determine the rhythm of everything alive, and that their own survival depended on, and was tied to, the revolving wheel of the seasons. That’s why they came to celebrate, with different rituals in different times and places, the summer and winter solstices as well as the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

These seasonal festival have survived to this day, but very often in forms that disguise their origins. When doctrinaire religions rose to power several millennia ago, they condemned celebrations of nature as pagan, and therefore evil, because they embodied a different, essentially animistic set of beliefs. With characteristic intolerance and arrogance, they attempted to suppress such heathen practices. But the seasons always rule the fundamental patterns of people’s lives, and when the new religions saw they couldn’t eradicate the infidel feasts, they simply coopted them by investing them with their own myths, renaming them to reflect their own teachings, and often shifting their dates away from the solar events that gave rise to them.

Perhaps the most telling example is “Christmas”. This feast at the winter solstice was already appropriated by the religions of Mesopotamia over 4,000 years ago, and was celebrated by them for twelve days as a New Year’s festival called “Zagmuk”. During this time, their god Marduk was said to be battling the monsters of chaos threatening to destroy the world.

We Canadians have no difficulty understanding why the onset of winter should be accompanied by fears of annihilation, and why humans would celebrate the beginning of the sun’s return in the longest, darkest night of the year. It’s an annual northern experience that starts each December (the corresponding southern one begins in June), and in Scandinavia, where the sun disappears entirely for weeks each year, it was celebrated as “Yuletide” with bonfires lit everywhere in anticipation of the eventual restoration of light and warmth.

The Romans celebrated “Saturnalia” at the winter solstice–a feast that lasted two weeks ending with the New Year on January1, and involved generous exchanges of presents among friends, lovers, and family, as well as opulent communal meals in halls festooned with laurel and with a tree decorated with burning candles.

Unable to suppress these popular festivities, the Christians finally appropriated them when the Bishop of Rome, Julius I, decreed in 325 C.E. that henceforth, on December 25, the birth of Christ, the date of whose birth was unknown (and who may, for all we know, never have been born), should be celebrated. Associated “pagan” customs were quickly “sanctified” by reinterpretation: the tree became the cross, the presents the gifts of the Magi, etcetera.

Thus a feast that should include all people on this planet was hijacked to become a festival of the faithful of a particular ideological persuasion to the exclusion of all others. Well, not quite. The annual experience of winter with its devastating effects on all living beings is so profound and traumatic that people everywhere are drawn instinctively to the celebration of Christmas, even when they’re not Christians. Confused about how to refer to it with sincerity, many of them have taken to calling the festival “Xmas” (where “x” stands for an unknown entity) and to sending each other “compliments of the season”. All of this is indicative of a desire to join with others in a celebration that includes everyone.

Other religions celebrate a festival of light under different names, and associated with different myths, around this time of year. What I propose is that we reclaim the feast of the winter solstice for all people. All we need to do is to move it to the day of its occurrence, December 21, and to rename it. “Winter solstice” would do fine, “Yule” might be acceptable too, or someone may propose something more catchy–so long as the name doesn’t tie the feast to a particular creed.

We should do the same with the other seasons. In the case of Easter, this is even more easily accomplished because it exhibits quite openly the features of its origin and significance as a celebration of nature. Its very name is derived from the Sanskrit usra meaning ‘dawn’, whence we came to name the direction where the sun rises ‘east’. In Greek culture, Eos was the goddess of dawn, and Eastron (Ostern) was the name of an ancient Scandinavian and a Teutonic goddess of spring and fertility.

The Greeks celebrated the arrival of spring at the vernal equinox with a three-day festival dedicated to Dionysos. It began with a ritual sacrifice of a goat to represent the death of winter. This was accompanied with choral singing which developed into theatrical performances that became the birth of tragedy (in Greek, tragos is ‘goat’ and oide is ‘song’). After the burial of winter came the resurrection of nature, celebrated by the performance of comedy (komos=a feast of music and dancing) and orgiastic fertility rites in which all participated.

It takes no great detective skills to recognize how Christianity attempted to replace the natural elements of the spring festival with religious myths. To make the spring celebrations part of the Christian calendar (also at the Council of Nice in 325 C.E.), this feast of joy, pleasure, and ecstasy had to be converted into a sombre occasion focussed, rather morbidly, on a crucifixion and on sin. But Christians haven’t quite succeeded. The dominant popular features of Easter are the lecherous rabbits and the other symbol of fertility–the egg, neither of which have any correspondence in Christian mythology. Our instinctive responses to the forces of nature prevail, and the life-affirming aspects of the rebirth of nature today find their expression in the festivities of carnival, too early for us to celebrate with abandon in our frosty neck of the woods.

So, let it remain ‘Easter’, but let’s celebrate it annually at the vernal equinox on March 21, when spring properly begins. And let’s restore the festivities celebrating the arrival of summer at the July 21 solstice, and the arrival of autumn at the September 21 equinox. Since Christianity didn’t have any use for them in their religious calendar, they have almost disappeared, except for certain midsummer celebrations and for Thanksgiving in the fall. But they too were festive occasions for our ancestors in prehistoric times. They were associated with great fireworks in praise of the sun to celebrate its life-giving force and to express thanks for a rich harvest.

The four seasonal festivals I propose are not intended to replace any religious feasts. Let Christians and Jews, Moslems and Hindu–let all religions engage in their own celebrations. The more the merrier! But religious feasts are exclusive and therefore divide us. They need to be balanced by celebrations in which all humankind can participate, and nothing can unite us as convivially and joyously as festivities to greet the arrival of the seasons.

So, let’s celebrate spring and summer, fall and winter on the day when the sun ushers them in! We will experience ourselves in harmony with each other on these occasions because before nature we’re all equal. In celebrating the perpetual renewal of the natural cycle, we will give expression to the sheer joy of being alive. We will also implicitly acknowledge thereby the supremacy of nature on whose vagaries our future is dependent. At a time when tremendous strides in technology have led too many of us into delusions of grandeur, this is a welcome reminder that human beings are not the masters of nature but its children.