Easter is upon us again. It’s supposed to be a Christian festival, but like Christmas, Lent, All Hallows etc, and several others that are no longer observed, you’d never believe it.
The Muslim version of Lent, Eid, is taken very seriously in this country; in fact so seriously, that our current monarch, supposedly head of the Christian church threw one of them open to Muslims to worship in; with never a thought for the Christian population and how they might feel about it.
Same with other imported fully fledged cultural and social practices . We are encouraged to make space for them which is on the surface courteous, but, the only way we are allowed to do so is by destroying and/or diluting our own culture.
And why should the King have a thought about Christianity you may ask? Christianity in this country and its other cultural and religious festivals are run on a Disney theme park plan and only take centre stage when there’s money to be made from an increasingly impoverished public.
Unfortunately, the church is almost fully complicit in this, with very few of the clergy truly devoted to the Christian faith or the culture that was amalgamated into it and then developed from it over two thousand years.
Religion now takes second place to Chocolate and overeating. In between eating, you are encouraged to visit an American style theme park, or watch American films on tv or in the cinema. Anything except go to church, or focus on the eternal and spiritual mysteries of life and the turning of the seasons.
We have been steadily turned towards Americanising our culture and social beliefs for some time now. In fact, this is becoming so normalised nowadays, that some advertisers no longer replace American speech with British speech when they buy in advertisements, but leave it as it was originally made.
There are or at least were, some good things about America in the past that we could relate to; but they are just as busy dumbing themselves down and living in a fantasy world as they are doing it to the rest of the world.
Tat and superficiality are much easier to sell to people than something you have to work at.
In importing the most superficial aspects of American cultural behaviour wholesale, along with its dafter socially constructed theories, we have not only destroyed our own, but because theirs has no depth to it, we now need continuous stimulation in order to feel alive and fulfilled. Unfortunately, most of this stimulation relies on spending money we haven’t got on things we don’t need, or giving up things that make us healthy into old age, in order to save the planet; such as heating, transport, unadulterated food and eventually I expect, electricity.
I actually did a bit of research for this article as it is not my area of expertise and spent quite a few happy hours looking up English and British customs and traditions, both secular and religious, and how they helped ordinary people shape the year over the last two millennia. The fact that I needed to do this at all, shows just how much of our original culture has receded into the mists of time and is no longer as freely available to us as it once was, just a short time ago.
I was amazed at how much was already in decline even when I was a child. When Christianity first came to this country we were a pagan society. I read that no one knows exactly how this expressed itself, but it certainly wasn’t a group of wannabe hippies pretending to connect with some mythical Druid ancestry, leaping about Stonehenge.
It seems because we were mainly an oral society at that time, we now rely on what the Romans and passing scholars wrote to give us glimpses into what was here, before Latin and Greek scholars such as the venerable Bede, started to write things down about us when they came to live here permanently. Documents like the doomsday book helped us to see the shape of the land and how our ancestors lived in it.
Being composed of farming and herding tribes, the seasons were very important to our ancestors and changes were marked and celebrated as they occurred; either by secular festivals or by giving thanks to God for a success, or, asking him to grant us what we needed to make the crops grow and prevent the livestock from sickening.
Here are some examples, some of which you may or may not have heard of and observed.
These examples also show how Christianity adapted itself to what was already there and incorporated it into the worship of the Christian god. It also shows that the customs engaged in by tribes other than what is now known as England, eventually merged to give a sense of “British identity“ and together were amalgamated by Christianity.
Firstly, on the personal level there was churching, where a woman stays at home for the first six weeks after birth and then if all is well, gives thanks in church for a safe delivery and shortly after brings her child for baptism. As the child grows up, this is followed by confirmation and then marriage and finally burial when the time comes.
Death was taken as seriously as birth.
Usually, the dead were laid out at home, so that friends and family could say goodbye and wish them well in the afterlife. In Wales and Ireland, sometimes sin eaters were employed to eat a meal placed on the dead persons chest and with it, imbibe their sins, so they could avoid purgatory and go straight to heaven. Because Christianity and paganism had fused, the communities that lived not only in England, but those in Wales, Ireland and Scotland all developed more or less the same moral perspective over time and in this sense, were able to live together, at least at the level of the common man. From this, common law evolved, also over time.
From a social perspective, the people of these isles seem always to have celebrated the return of the light in Spring, danced for joy in summer, and burnt fires and Feasted in the winter months to ward off the dark and the unknown.
Such feasts are very much aligned with what used to be the agricultural year. Even in the churches and monasteries it was acknowledged that such celebrations could serve both god and man and the church had sense enough not to try and ban things for quite some time, but usually tacked on a suitable saint as part of the ritual.
Common feasts that are seldom if ever celebrated in the correct evolved way are “blud monath “. Translated from the Scandinavian as blood month, which was the first half of November. This was when any beasts that could not be fed over the winter were slaughtered and salted. It usually coincided with Martinmass on the 11th and thanks were given in church for the animals who had sacrificed their lives for the community.
The next celebration and the last before Christmas was the boy bishop’s crowning on the 6th December, St Nicholas day.
Like other controlled anarchic festivals, it was a way of overturning the established order for a short time to let ordinary people have control for the day and let loose.
April fools was originally for that too.
Harvest home, last sheaf of corn, Halloween, All Saints’ Day, Easter, jump the midsummer fire, mumming, May Day and other spring and summer rites like dancing round the maypole, hobby horsing, summer fairs, beating the boundaries , Lammas tide and of course Morris dancing are just some of the customs and festivals no longer acknowledged or given prominence in this country anymore, unless of course they can be reduced to making people part with their money.
There are so many more than the small list I have just quoted. Some were dropped quite naturally as the nature of life in these islands evolved, especially during the industrial revolution when large swathes of people left the land. However, the most poignant thing of all is how the reasons and therefore the correct way of celebrating such things are no longer passed down and so those that are still practiced, are often meaningless to most people. Even the festivals we do remember such as Easter, Christmas and Halloween are caricatures of their former selves and there is no depth of feeling, or connection to the nature of why this was part of our culture in the common man today.
These things used to be taught both in school and by parents and grandparents to their children, but no longer.
Disney and the marvel universe gets more focus than our historic customs and traditions.
What was so fascinating was all this evolved over a very long time, incorporating Scandinavian, German and French influences with rituals for the respect of the land, the animals and the way things unfolded in this part of the world and finally aligned to Christianity.
We are a Northern European culture and have been forever. We spent the best part of two thousand years developing to the point where we could be of use in the world and to ourselves, amalgamating and developing what fitted with our natural rhythm of life. Yet in less than a generation, we have a monarch who prefers an alien culture and religion to the one he is supposed to represent and who can’t wait for all that personal and cultural striving to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Our ancestors would be furious! Mind you, maybe this is part of a common recurring pattern, Strive to live, flower and show your best and then wither and die?
I can’t remember who said it, but apparently it takes a person of vision and hard work to build a business. His children keep it going to reap the rewards and the grandchildren either sell it or neglect it to the point of destruction because they have only ever seen it as a cash cow.
Two thousand years is too long a time of societal development to expect it to be overturned for another culture’s benefit at whim, just because a cabal of people who believe the world should work for them exclusively want cheap labour.
I don’t want to be a plastic Yank. I want to be a proper English woman standing proudly on the shoulders of all who went before me.