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Pagan Christmas Zine
My research question was: Are there elements of Christmas that can be traced back to Paganism? How did these Christmas traditions that we know today start?
My curiosity came from the irony of the hatred of “Witchcraft” by Christians and the Catholic Church, since I had once read somewhere that many Christmas traditions come from Paganism. The term “witchcraft” goes back to the middle ages, and it meant the use of harmful magic. Accusations of sorcery, supernatural harm and magic were a common occurrence for Christians, who believed in the extermination of those “who worship the devil”. The term was also associated to religions that diverged from Christian believes, such as Pagan ones (Pagan being a christian term used to designate religions that did not worship the “God of Abraham”, the central figure to Christiany, Judaism and Islam). It was only during the 1920’s that Witchcraft started taking another association, as the neopagan Religion “Wicca” became popular. Since the religion has mostly roots in ancient Paganism the term “Pagan” became even more associated to Witchcraft.
My goal with the visual essay was to make a short book underlying this message, but mostly being informative about the root of some of these traditions. I researched mainly online but was also able to find interesting books and articles on the topic. The book “Christmas in ritual and tradition, Christian and pagan” by Clement Miles was very useful for my research, as it tries to trace Christmas as far back as possible to its origin.
The last one, as the author goes on to explain, can be traced to way back then when Christians started celebrating Christmas, and he concludes his book pointing out the hypocrisy of the Church for condemning Pagan religions when the origin of these Christians traditions are tangled and blended with Pagan history.
The idea of the drawings itself came from other sources. The book “Pagan Christmas” (by Rätsch and Müller-Ebeling) came out to be a great resource of pinpointing the origins of certain traditions, and how they are related to Paganism. I also read the Christmas chapter from “Rituals and Traditional Events in the Modern World” (by Laing and Frost), that talks about Gift Giving, decorating a Christmas Tree and other Christmas decorations.
I choose some of these traditions to illustrate that are still very popular and wrote short descriptions on their origins – making sure nothing I’m stating is deemed as “true”, since this topic is very blurry and there is no way of saying for sure that Christians took these traditions from Pagans. For the Illustrations, I took inspiration from Edward Gorey, a favorite artist of mine.