Let's Find Out - The Meaning of Christmas: Religion, Myth, Psychology | ASMR

Episode Date: December 25, 2019

What would it be like without Christmas, Hanukkah, and other Winter Solstice holidays? Let's find out the psychological significance of Christmas and all it's traditions... Thanks so much for watching. Have a great Christmas, and happy holidays to everyone. #Christmas #psychology #Jung #ASMR #philosophy #myth

I want you guys to imagine with me for a second. Next December rolls around and we don't see any of the usual Christmas-oriented things. None of the seasonal tents selling Christmas trees popping up on the roadside. You know, first, second week of December rolls around, we don't see any red and white decorations. You don't hear any Christmas songs on the radio. You're not being force-fed. Any gift suggestions on YouTube or the TV? week comes and goes. You don't spot a single Christmas light. No one says happy holidays

and no one wishes you a Merry Christmas. December 24th slips into the morning of December 25th and it's just another Wednesday. How would you, how would we all react to this madness? It's Christmas and no one's celebrating? No parties, no family. meals, no gift giving around the dead tree, dead evergreen tree we lit up with cheap ornaments and stringed lights. Most of, I'd have to imagine most of us, we'd feel like we had something valuable ripped away from our lives. Some might not mind, but most of us would feel something seriously precious to our worldview

in common humanity had been lost. I really feel like it. This book, explore further a little bit of the origins of these traditions I just mentioned. What it says, what they, the fact that we act on out each winner, says about the billions of us that choose to do so and partake him. And M.Y. Santa may have been on more than just a little Coke in his younger days.

And to my non-Christmas celebrating friends, I don't feel left out. because this episode actually has just as much to do with you in whatever traditions you might partake in as the most Christmas intoxicated Hanson fan out there. So these past couple years I've been interested, increasingly interested in exploring the link between religions and myths and what that says, what these enduring traditions mind you,

say about the humans, how we live, form, and act out these rituals in societies all around the world. I definitely still have a long way to go to understand them, but I'd like to share with you guys some things I've found out so far. Christmas in its modern conception is centered on the birth of the Judeo-Christian gods only ever human form, simultaneously himself and his son, in some sort of divine interplay

with a third spiritual entity known as the Holy Ghost. And perhaps the most important aspect of this whole ordeal, this winter, winter phenomena, is his conception, gestation in birth from a virgin. But as strange as this is to

a devout scientist maybe who might adhere to his principles almost religiously, you might say. Let's consider the Incas. I have this book here, a more traditional one, but in it, I'll be getting to it probably a little bit further next year, but I just want to flip to a quick page. It was pretty interesting, pretty insightful correlation. Cultures among many different cultures around the world regarding childbirth, from a virgin some sort of through some sort of divine intervention okay so the

incas believe that after the sun created the earth his rays shown on a mortal woman and she gave birth to a son who was divine and then we go to and we go on the fu-she the legendary Chinese emperor it was thought to be the child of a virgin who ate a particular flower while in Flint's epic, the Caliwala, the Virgin El Matar, was fructified by the east wind. And it was the wind as well, this time in the west, a west wind that quickened Winona, royal maiden of the Algonquin Native American tribe. She gave birth to a son, Michabu, known to the world as Longfellow's Haywatha. All these were impregnations by nature.

But a Mayan maiden, Chemalpat. Chimaltmat was breathed on by the Lord of existence and so conceived. This is the story nearest to the overshadowing of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit. My point is the universality of the reverence for a divine union between woman and something beyond and superior to man. can we just dismiss this collective species-wide insistence that the most good humans should be worshipped and kept alive in our memories at all costs over decades, centuries, millennia, and eons? Especially during the winter solstice, when the days are shortest, the sun is feeblest, the nights are coldest, and we have the most time to reflect on the coming labors

and the coming actions that we will take in the spring of the new year. Now, a true scientist, in my mind, would want to explain the psychological effects of such an enduring phenomena, you know, centered around religious rituals and mythology, and what that might say, that these memories and ceremonies are kept alive, even in modern times and not just dismiss them and comfort myself with an awkwardly simplistic

hand wave such as it's a superstition you know before we embark on this trip with Santa through his festive Christmas past though let's find out what Carl Young the pioneering psychologist

the archaeologist of the maybe the most influential thinker and insightful thinker into the nature, the true nature of the human mind, at least in modern times, has to say on something as silly as the ritual of putting a Christmas tree in our living rooms and decorating it with, you know, cheap odds and ends. I pulled this excerpt from an interview with a guy named George Korn. a PhD in German literature with Carl Jung in in 1956 I believe 57 I guess shortly before Christmas in Zurich this article was published Christmas Day so it's insightful it gives you it's a nice before we get into this interestingly titled book and There's a lot of overlapping themes in here.

So speaking about an Indian Swami who knocked on the door of a village in Zurich. The man says, forgive me for disturbing you. He said to the householder. I come from Madras and I'm making a study of the local religious customs in Europe. Perhaps you could, and the guy backed away. He stopped him right there and said, I'm afraid you've come to the wrong house. We here in Zurich, we're enlightened people. You know, we do go to church every now and then.

But as Protestants, we're not on the best of terms with world religious symbols. If you were thinking of finding any religious customs here, like the ones in your own country, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. The Swami retired crestfallen. But let us suppose he comes back again, say, in December, and catches the householder and the same guy

in the act of decorating the Christmas tree. In America, he might even see him outside on a ladder and 20-degree weather, attaching, stapling Christmas lights to the outside of his house. He comes up and says, But you told me you had no religious customs. And yet you cut down a fir tree and just to let it dry up in your living room,

covering it with some candles and knick-knacks, which are of no use, no practical use for either heat or eating. He looks at the man and says, tell me, is this prescribed by your religion or any of its holy teachings? The householder shakes his head in astonishment. Not that I know of. It's something that's always been done. One of my expeditions to Africa, Young, continues.

I lived for a while with a tribe on the slopes of Mount Elgin in Kenya. Every morning at sunrise they stepped out of their huts, spat into their hands and held them palm outwards towards the sun. Asked why they did this, they were at a loss for an answer. All they merely said was something very similar. It's what we've always done. So such ignorance earned them the name by, white westerns oftentimes of primitives in their judgment now if our Indian friend

were to publish in Madras his research is among the inhabitants of Zurich he would have some remarkable things to report although they deny it he would say they worship rabbit idols which lay colored eggs on the day they call Easter and then they look for these eggs in these in the garden on that day and they run around, shouting quite a bit. And they also worship on another day they call Christmas, an illuminated tree which they hang over all over with spangles, shiny balls, and sweetmeats. Yet they don't know why they do this.

They're very small-minded and primitive people, he might say. In the very existence of such things as the may pole, the may tree, and the greasy pole for Americans these are more European traditions tell us a great deal about the Christian claim to the Christmas tree

Young continued at best it was a matter of reinterpreting old customs in much the same way as the feast of Christ's nativity was actually grafted on to the already pre-existing winter solstice vegetation festivals The tree symbol has a very venerable history.

The Finnish scholar Uno Holmberg, who investigated the symbolism of the tree of life, called it mankind's most magnificent legend. The countless changes of meaning the tree symbol has undergone in the course of its history are proof of its richness and vitality, meaning its variety of its variety of the of interpretation and its depth of meaning. It's a multi-layered multivalence meaning. The tree has a cosmic significance. It's the world tree, the world pillar, the world axis.

Only think of eagdrasil, the world ash of Nordic mythology, a majestic evergreen tree growing at the center of the world. This tree, particularly its crown, is the abode of the gods. Hence the village tree in India, the German village linden tree, around which the villagers gather in the evenings, they are sitting in the shadow of the gods. The tree also has a maternal aspect. In German mythology, the first human beings ask in Embla come from the ash and the alder trees as their names show. Among the Akuts of Siberia, a tree with eight branches was the birthplace of

the first man. He was suckled by a woman, the upper parts of whose body grew from its trunk. These and many similar ideas, they're not invented. They're simply, they simply came into men's heads in bygone times. The sort of natural revelation, if you will, to give an example, one evening an English district commissioner in Nigeria heard a tremendous racket going on in the barracks of native troops. Six soldiers had put a raving comrade in chains. When the DC arrived, the black man lay quiet and was released on his orders. In explanation of his strange behavior, he said that he had wanted to go home because his tree was calling him, but now it was too late. The commissioner learned further that when the guy was a little child, the man's mother had once put him to rest under a tree,

and while she went to work, and he laid there all day. The tree then talked to him and made him promise that he would hasten to it without delay. whenever he heard it calling and would bring it food. Several times the tree had called him, said the soldier, and each time he had brought it the best he had in his miserable hut. On this evening far from the village, he'd heard the tree calling out loud for him, but yet he couldn't obey the order because he was on active military duty.

Often this here, what young claims is that the tree symbolizes the Newman the psychic fate of the person his his inner personality and there's something to be said for that spirit that we project on such a deeply natural object that grows and has roots and branches and evolves and and that says something he believes, just as the constellations and all the stories and narratives that we project up into them, says something about our psyche. It says something about our minds, to be less new agey sounding, just in the bare facts of it. The fact that this man projected onto this tree such a, such a personality, such a rich personality, and they

characteristics of that personality tell you a lot about what was going on in that man's head the values that he held most highly so in the dream of the biblical king nebuchadnezzar the king himself is actually symbolized by a tree there's also an old rabbinic idea being an idea of a rabbi that the aging the aging atom was actually granted one look, one last look, into paradise. In the branches of the withered tree, there lay a child. We might further mention, Young continues, the old patristic ideas of Christ as the tree of life itself.

And so at this point, the interviewer asks George Gerster, doesn't the custom still practice today in many places of planting a tree at the birth of a child? also fit in with this context and young says yeah certainly the reason for this unthinking ritual act is the participation mystique between man and the tree humans in the tree both share the same fate both are part of the same physical physical earth realm so at this point the guy steers it back to the Christmas tree. Having several quite different sets of symbols here been fused into one? The tree, the lights, the evergreen branches, the decorations, the distribution of Christmas

presents, all these have their own symbolic value. And in numerous folk customs, some of the components are differently combined. And Young agreed. He definitely agreed with that. But let us not forget the total combination, the lighted decorated tree, is also found outside, meaning distinct from the nativity in a lot of non-Christian contexts. For instance, in alchemy, known, young was interesting like Isaac Newton even if you guys didn't know. Young was a

scholar of alchemical texts especially the older ones because pre-scientific ones particularly because of the psychological significance of them these were people who were investing a large amount of their time not crazy that it's way

more complex than just looking for a way to make gold through cheaper, less valuable, more available metals. I guess what I've found, Young's connection to alchemy is best explained. His actual, one of his books in his later life was called, was titled Psychology and Alchemy. And in it, he relates the process of transformation of metals, you know, cheaper metals into more valuable ones like you know mercury in the gold or whatever it might be to the actual

individuation process within human minds themselves so the transformation into a superior person you know superior more disciplined more ascetic more individuated more independent more heroic version of yourself you know we're all the it's a very old trope the one the hero's journey the quest you know the holy grail and but the quest through and against your own fears to be able to command your own psyche and master your own mind and in the process become a more self just become a more whole more well-developed more a master of your own realm sort of thing so young emphasizes the parallel between the chemical actual you know pre-scientific chemical process of compounds and liquids and you know the chemistry of it

with a mystical component where it wasn't there was a mental aspect of the the actual performer of the alchemical processes so it couldn't be just any old person doing it and again this is probably tied into witchcraft you know in all sorts of mystical uh endeavors but but yeah the most interesting part of it was young's exploration into the simultaneous exploration simultaneous desires for knowledge of the natural world and the interior the mental world the psychological world because up until very very recently up until maybe 400 years ago at most the common conception of the world was of us living in a very very

animated world the world was not cold and dead and the world was filled with spirit numinous numa I guess and actually in a lot of ways young I believe young and maybe I might be wrong about this but I know people do believe that there's a profound disconnect between us and the world nowadays because of our kind of of arrogant scientific pretensions that we're kind of at the end of knowledge you know we only have a few more things left to figure out and we'll be masters of the physical universe whereas back before science started wowing us with its you know domineering dominance over nature we were very much in tune a lot of people

you know that's where ghosts and spirits and demons and trolls and you know fairies and a lot of minor and major mythical figures were still very much a part of everyday life everyday experience it wouldn't be so um it wouldn't be so astounding to hear of someone being off in the woods and encountering a fairy or something and you know maybe we lost something when we jumped right into you know dismissing all the connections and relationship between ourselves which we're actually you know part again part of the universe like I always point out it's our our brains and we're the most complex organisms that we know about in the universe our brains have more neural

connections with our each individual brain of network of ours we have more connections between our neurons than there are not atoms but subatomic particles in the universe in the entire known 14 billion year old universe so also interesting in the book are the famous physicist Wolfgang Polly the his dreams were actually being analyzed in this book psychology and alchemy and young collaborated with him in his later life on the a causal connection principle known as synchronicity a lot of people probably know about that term

yeah I think this sums it up best here I'm on the Wikipedia page for psychology and alchemy Young's fundamental thesis in this book and where I was approaching with Wolfgang Polly was that guy was a significant part in player in the exploration, the fleshing out of the quantum subatomic realm of physics, which at its core is very probabilistic, increasingly less deterministic, as we once conceived

of in a Newtonian clockwork, billiard ball, physical objects, everything can be divided into ultimate undivisible indivisible atoms atoms non-divisible particles and ultimately they're like what do we do now that we're at the core pretty much the bottom of this and nothing it adheres to very distinct outcomes everything's once you get to a fine enough resolution and a low enough length of low enough scale, small enough scale, everything is probabilistic. Everything is only variations of certainties. You can only boil it down to degrees of certainties where I was getting at. And this ultimately begs the question.

What is the fundamental nature of the cosmos? because quantum mechanics as powerful as it is at determining or at least predicting what the most probable outcome is of as far as positions and velocities and momentum of subatomic particles are it doesn't give any concrete master of the universe type of understanding of physics it still leaves a lot to be yet to be understood between you know our consciousness first and foremost i guess being the most important thing the um the medium with which we exist within and everything else is exterior to that but

on a larger level we also exist within and as a part of the universe and what so what does it mean for our consciousness to be to arise from material that at its core is non-deterministic and just a sea of fluctuating probabilities. So Young's fundamental thesis in this book, Psychology and Alchemy, is that for pre-scientific humans, there's not a sharp distinction between subject and object, us and exterior objects in the world distinct from us. And thus, this leads pre-scientific humans,

to unconsciously project their own inner states onto external objects, especially objects that are unknown to them. So a reflective analysis of alchemical symbols becomes revelatory about unconscious psychic life in this period of time. So that's partly the reason... Yeah, there was a distinction between... And I'm boiling this... I'm boiling this.

Yeah, my head, I guess that's good. visualization of what's going on. I'm trying to mold this around, I'm trying to connect the dots between this Christian symbolism and, you know, symbolism and rituals and religion in general, in a larger scale. Because before we thought we're these arrogant dominators of nature, the great mother, earth, we didn't experience objects. as we didn't say that's that tree that's uh that's just you know distinct that's in it or inanimate in a lot of ways we didn't look at it from our cold that's just a mechanistic mechanistic thing you know group of cells or whatever like perspective we actually um before science uh took

over our modern minds, you know, as an extremely undeniably powerful, yet still incomplete theory about the world. People didn't distinguish between the qualities of objects they were perceiving and their own values, emotions, and beliefs. It's partly for this reason that the alchemists say, they cannot say aloud what the philosopher's stone really is and why there are so many different symbols to work with there so this is for me it's it's insightful again into the Christmas tree going back into it young says back into our interview here the chemical symbols symbolism clearly shows it's also a transformation symbol a symbol a symbol of the process of self-realization According to certain alchemical sources, the adept climbs the tree.

The adept climbs the tree. A very ancient shamanistic motive. The shaman, in an ecstasy, he climbs the magical tree in order to reach the upper world where he will find his true self. By climbing the magical tree, which is at the same time a tree of knowledge, he gains possession of his spiritual, personality meaning that separated and he wasn't in union with his spiritual self and also meaning that we have ideals towards which we have potential that we have to reach you know latent within us

that we have to unlock through heroic journeys you know whether it's a shamanistic um who lucidgenic ritual you have to where you have to contend with your own inner conflicting inner personalities and forces within your own mind also informed by the larger collective psychic unconscious

cultural artifacts dwelling in your head that you've assimilated throughout your life and or it could be a physical thing you know it could be a physical what's all mental fundamentally, but it could involve physical confrontation between, you know, an altercation or overcoming, well, starvation or any other extremely challenging physical process enduring, you know, the cold or something like that, which I'm sure was an integral part of

shamanistic rituals in the north in particular. So to the eye of the psychologist, the shamanistic and how chemical symbolism is a projected representation of the process of individuation, this process of becoming your ideal, you know, at least much closer towards it than you otherwise would have if you hadn't undergone, willingly undergone this, this process, this church. journey, this journey, this hero's journey, that it rests on an archetypal foundation is evidenced by the fact that the patients who have not the slightest knowledge of mythology and folklore spontaneously produce the most amazing parallels to the historical tree symbolism.

And this is still young speaking here. Experience has taught me that the authors of these pictures were trying to express a process of inner development, independent of their conscious volition. And the interviewer, George Gaster, your conception of the Christmas tree is in no way disturbed by the fact that the custom dates only from the 17th century and young. Why should that be any objection to my view that the Christmas tree, which in the longest and darkest night of the year, symbolizes the return of light, is archetypal. On the contrary, the way of the Christmas tree has caught on in various countries and rapidly

took root, so to speak, so that most people actually believe it is an age-old custom. It's only further proof that its appeal is grounded in the depths of the psyche, in the collective unconscious, and far exceeds that of the crib, the ox, and the ass. in one of your books you remark that the interviewer again here continues people decorate the christmas tree without knowing what is at the back of this custom and young says it's an old pagan one it's uh it's not i who use this expression but the church omnis heik observasio observatio est pagnorum it says in an old papal declaration with reference to decorating the houses with green branches this and similar many other customs are definitely pagan and they definitely are pagan they're actually

very much rooted in who knows how far back they go but it's recorded in this uh even the roman times inviting especially in north's mythology as well inviting the evergreen trees as symbols of good luck and symbols of life, obviously. When everything else is dead, you still have some of these trees with green branches on them. And why wouldn't you invite that in your home? In the mistletoe, even, they used to cut that up and they used to carry, they would cut it up and spread it to all the houses in the village, symbolic of good luck rebirth, coming of the lengthening,

up the day in the spring time when they would be able to harvest more food. And he says, an evangelical theologian Dan Hauer in Strausberg preached in the middle of the 17th century in the 1600s. Against the fir trees, people set up in their houses as Christmas and bedecked with dolls and candles. These old divines were not so wrong according to their lights. So Gerster continues to ask him, now that you've elucidated this background as an empirical investigator, the increasing popularity of the Christmas tree must rejoice your heart as a psychotherapist. I conjectured you agree that Christmas trees are healthy, a measure of psychic hygiene, and Young verifies that, and he says you're correct. The archetypes are, so to speak, like

many little appetites in us as if with the passing of time they get nothing to eat. They start rumbling and upset and get upset with everything. Catholic Church takes this very seriously. They, just now it's, and this is in the 1950s, remember, it's setting about reviving the old Easter customs. In the abstract greeting, Christ is risen. you greet someone with that on certain days. No longer satisfies the craving of the archetypes for images.

So in order to set it at rest, they had recourse to hair goddess, a fertility symbol. The hair goddess, meaning rabbit goddess. And lately the church has even reintroduced ancient fire ceremony, the Easter fire. The primordial fire is not lit with matches, but Flint and Steele. feel. So a tremendously nourishing procedure for humans, for our as humans feeling. This inner man, we enter human again, this is the 50, so man was placeholder for the word human, has to be fed, a fact that moderns with their frivolous trust and reason and often overlook to our own arm. The Christmas tree is one of those customs which are food for the

soul nourishment for the inner human mind and the more primordial the material they use the more promising these customs are for the future that was Carl young in his concept of archetypes volumes of literature on it are roughly that we are born we have a nature we're not by any means a blank slate we have you know just as you know dogs know to chase certain things animals you know have instincts we also have instincts we have social instincts we have a plethora of different archetypes but some are actually more sophisticated than others apparently and you know we have more contemporary archetypes more tropes like archetypes range from

you know, the more, most primordial being the mother and the father and the son and daughter, the child, to increasingly more morally sophisticated versions, moral being, ideas that inform how you should act with other people and yourself, in society, to, you know, the archetypes of the devil, God, the wise old man, the woman, the trickster and the hero, the hero being one of the most well-known archetypes, popularized by his name Joseph Campbell in his 1949 hero with a thousand faces. Okay, so that's all to point out that we don't understand ourselves, and we don't understand exactly why it is that as a society we choose to

partake in these ridiculous seeming, ridiculous seeming religious customs, but necessary. I personally, I get a lot of joy out of seeing festive lights, festive, any sort of, you know, decorations, a holiday spirit and cheer and this, this, you know, ambiguous, nebulous, vague term we call the Christmas spirit, and that we get up. upset when people reign upon and it's it's really something it says a lot about our own minds so it's something to think about it is a tradition that in numerous cases we could have chosen as a society there could have been some two radical individuals that completely stamped it out like in communist Russia I don't know if they still if that ever came

back I'm not sure I haven't looked that up but tried to secularize meaning de-religify if that's a word take the religious aspect out of the winter celebration and Stalin and Lenin they actively propagandistically created this manipulated the figure of the Russian figure known as dead morav dead moraz I think it's dead moraz maybe yeah a Slavic obviously you know very very old ancient actually might be one of the original old man winner archetypes

that informed the myth of Santa Claus as we're about to find out so let's Finally, now that we got that little primer out of the way, let's tap into Santa Shoules and to find out, let's see exactly what they're trying to convey here. It's a cute little story. I might gloss through some of it. It's essentially about a girl who, whose father, or maybe it's about the father who reads to his daughter.

A very bright little 10-year-old-old-ish. girl very bright who set in the modern times it's i like this book because it's it's probably not going to be enduring christmas literature it's probably not going to survive a thousand years into the future and form new uh you know christmas traditions but it is one of the many um new insertions into the main stream and spirit of the Christmas consciousness conscious you know sense of uh what Christmas is just like and I I didn't have the one with Santa on it maybe this maybe they stop putting them on on these I don't know but I won't get into it this time but the modern conception of Santa is only about a hundred and maybe 150 years old at most and uh

It just goes to show you that traditions, you have to really ask yourself why they're still around and why certain things do drop off and get discontinued, so to speak. And other things just get translated and transformed and manipulated and, you know, still endure for some reason. And Santa Claus is... a pretty old archetype or trope, whatever you might want to say. So let's dive into a little bit of alternative.

We're going to say alternative for now. History of Santa Claus.