Being that we’re in the midst of Saturnalia at the moment, and amongst the many functions and meanings of this festival is that it is a cathartic “festival of reversal,” for just this post I’m going to change things up slightly, with potential implications for a future post falling outside of Saturnalia that will follow-up on what is mentioned here in a particular manner.
Without further ado, let me get to it.
Yesterday, my planned multi-part and multi-tradition/pan-polytheist Winter Solstice ritual did not occur, mainly due to lack of participation (i.e. none of the people I invited were able to come), so I was on my own. When the last of the expected attendees dropped out, I was in the thick of writing one last potential piece to use for the ritual; I finished writing it, and used it in my ritual later, and I actually think it got into the proper spirit of the subject far better than I had expected, for a variety of reasons…
Some of you may remember back to, lo, those days of yore in which I would write a few contrafacta around this time of year, re-purposing various (mostly) traditional Christmas carols and hymns into polytheist versions of such appropriate to my own practices. The great advantage of this is that people generally know the tunes, even though getting people to sing them correctly with the new words is often a task unto itself (!?!). As I was looking through some of my old compositions of this type trying to figure out which ones to use in my ritual yesterday and throughout Saturnalia, I realized I had forgotten which tune I had used for one of them, and so had occasion to look back at the old blog and see if there was a clue there. Alas, there was not, so instead I went to a list of traditional Christmas carols and tried to figure out which one it might have been. The answer was not difficult to discern, luckily; but as I perused this list, I saw a number of songs that I had not yet used. Some of them I had considered using before but didn’t because they simply didn’t crystallize with a clear idea for me over the last few years, but others I had not considered using. Two of these in particular were ones that are a lot more like folk songs, and I suspect they may have had their origins as such at some stage–after all, one of the songs associated with Christmas for many people is “Greensleeves,” which was a love song Henry VIII wrote for one of his mistresses, and even though the lyrics were changed to make it into a Christmas hymn, people still call it “Greensleeves” at this time of year (which may be the root of the “romantic” Christmas song that so plagues the radio airwaves of the last fifty years…who knows?). To slightly paraphrase a W. B. Yeats poem’s title, these types of composition are often occasions of writing new lyrics “for the sake of the tune.”
The two songs in question were “I Saw Three Ships (Come Sailing In)” and “The Holly and the Ivy.” Both have such thin connections to Christmas, it seems, that a spider’s web looks like the pillar of the universe in terms of its thickness, but this makes me suspect all the more that they’re originally folk tunes, and they have that sort of sound anyway. I had only heard the first verse of each of these previously, and once I had the full lyrics in front of me, that thin-ness of connection seemed all the more obvious. (While I’m not making a scholarly argument for their folk origins, I am certainly claiming that they “feel” like they probably are!) As such things easily lend themselves to changes in lyric, I went in that direction, and was happy to have done so after a hiatus of at least three years of doing such publicly on my old blog (though I’ve written one or two since then that I have not shared, that will be in a forthcoming publication collecting all of these together which I’ve had in the work for over three years as well!).
The one for “I Saw Three Ships” was fairly obvious to do, and involved a great deal of just “reversing” what was already there. The result was, well, somewhat obvious, but nonetheless perhaps appropriate to the context and occasion. I went back-and-forth on “The Holly and the Ivy,” and struggled with it because I was attempting initially to make it connect to Brumalia and therefore Antinous via the ivy, and was trying to make “holly” into “grape-vine,” and it wasn’t really gelling correctly, so I decided to leave it off.
Then, in the course of doing things yesterday, the idea started to germinate once again…
And, I realized that the holly connection is quite obvious to another figure associated with the day involved: Cú Chulainn! Just to confirm my suspicion, I went back to Táin Bó Cúailnge‘s first recension and checked to see how often holly appears in it, and it is mentioned by name far more frequently than any other tree I could think of (though some unspecified trees, branches, and types of wood are also mentioned far more frequently than I think all of the individual types of tree/plant combined), which made its usage that much more apt. From there, it went in the direction it did, and I’m not only pleased with the result, and think that the final composition far outstrips the original thinly-Christmas-based version, but in and of itself it is a good piece, with parts of it even sounding very much like they could have come from at least medieval Irish, if not older, traditional lore.
I will give both songs here before I propose what this post is mostly dedicated to, which you can guess from the title…!
I Saw A Boat
I saw a Boat come sailing in
At Solstice-tide, at Solstice-tide
I saw a Boat come sailing in
At Solstice-tide in the evening.
And of what sort was that fair Boat
At Solstice-tide, at Solstice-tide
And of what sort was that fair Boat
At Solstice-tide in the evening?
It was the Boat of Million-Years
At Solstice-tide, at Solstice-tide
It was the Boat of Million-Years
At Solstice-tide in the evening.
And Who was on that Boat so fair
At Solstice-tide, at Solstice-tide
And Who was on that Boat so fair
At Solstice-tide in the evening?
It was the Boy Antinous
At Solstice-tide, at Solstice-tide
It was the Boy Antinous
At Solstice-tide in the evening.
And Who was with that Boy this eve
At Solstice-tide, at Solstice-tide
And Who was with that Boy this eve
At Solstice-tide in the evening?
It was dear Nyx in Aspects Three
At Solstice-tide, at Solstice-tide
It was dear Nyx in Aspects Three
At Solstice-tide in the evening.
And what to us bring forth did She
At Solstice-tide, at Solstice-tide
And what to us bring forth did She
At Solstice-tide in the evening?
The Sun Unconquered borne did She
At Solstice-tide, at Solstice-tide
The Sun Unconquered borne did She
At Solstice-tide in the evening.
And what the Sun—now born—does see
At Solstice-tide, at Solstice-tide
And what the Sun—now born—does see
At Solstice-tide in the evening?
The Earth in splendrous form He sees
At Solstice-tide, at Solstice-tide
The Earth in splendrous form He sees
At Solstice-tide in the evening.
And what now shall we sing for He
At Solstice-tide, at Solstice-tide
And what now shall we sing for He
At Solstice-tide in the evening?
We sing Him praise and thanks, do we
At Solstice-tide, at Solstice-tide
We sing Him praise and thanks, do we
At Solstice-tide in the evening!
The Holly and the Oak-Tree
The Holly and the Oak-Tree,
When they are both full-grown—
Of all the trees that are in the woods,
The holly loves the Hound.
O, the hum of distant battles,
And the barking of the hounds,
The playing of the merry harp:
These three are the best sounds!
The holly bears a blossom
As white as fallen snow,
And Dechtine bore Ulster’s Hound
All the paths for us to show.
O, the hum of distant battles,
And the barking of the hounds,
The playing of the merry harp:
These three are the best sounds!
The holly bears a berry
As red as any blood,
And Dechtine bore Ulster’s Hound
To bring the Cronn to the flood.
O, the hum of distant battles,
And the barking of the hounds,
The playing of the merry harp:
These three are the best sounds!
The holly bears a sharp thorn
That pierces flesh and skin,
And Dechtine bore Ulster’s Hound
So that poet’s words may begin.
O, the hum of distant battles,
And the barking of the hounds,
The playing of the merry harp:
These three are the best sounds!
The holly bears a hard bark
As bitter as the gall,
And Dechtine bore Ulster’s Hound
So that heroes in fear pall.
O, the hum of distant battles,
And the barking of the hounds,
The playing of the merry harp:
These three are the best sounds!
The holly grows in bushes
As thick as any wall,
And Dechtine bore Ulster’s Hound
So that kings may feast in the hall.
O, the hum of distant battles,
And the barking of the hounds,
The playing of the merry harp:
These three are the best sounds!
The holly’s wood burns hottest
So that smiths may swords adorn,
And Dechtine found Ulster’s Hound
On Solstice-tide in the morn.
O, the hum of distant battles,
And the barking of the hounds,
The playing of the merry harp:
These three are the best sounds!
The holly’s barbs were sharpest
When the Hound fought in the Táin,
And Dechtine found Ulster’s Hound
At Newgrange on the Boyne.
O, the hum of distant battles,
And the barking of the hounds,
The playing of the merry harp:
These three are the best sounds!
So, there you have those…!
AND NOW (at last!)!
I had so much fun doing this, and was so pleased with the results, that I want to share my joy a bit with all of you in several ways.
- First, I want to invite all of you reading this to make your own compositions about the holidays around this time of year, using some Christmas carols as your template, but putting in genuine lore and such related to your own particular tradition’s Deities, the dates involved, the rituals concerned, and so forth!
- Then, obviously, USE THEM!
- But, also, SHARE THEM!
- And in relation to the latter point, share them with me in what will be a little contest between now and Dies Cista Deorum (December 26th), running through midnight of that particular date, which will then be judged by me (and a little divinatory help!), and the top winner will receive a poetic commission by me of up to 50 lines on a polytheism-related topic of your choice!
So, there is my suggestion! While one should, of course, pour one’s best efforts into this endeavor since it is ultimately for the Deities, this is also intended to be friendly, even though one can have some rivalries in it. Challenge someone you know to come up with their own, and suggest the song they have to use, for example, and then reciprocally allow them to do the same with you and see who generates the more interesting results–chances are, you’ll both come up with something very intriguing! (I was going to issue this as a challenge to particular individuals, but I didn’t want to potentially impose on them if they didn’t want to do so from the start…!?!)
And, please, for the love of all the Deities and all that is holy and decent, try to stick to traditional Christmas carols and hymns, not the toxic wasteland of “Christmas songs” that are only such because they have the word “Christmas” in them that are being played endlessly in coffee shops, stores, and other public places these days. I honestly heard the only Queen song I absolutely cannot stand in this context the other day, which I believe is called “Thank God It’s Christmas,” which was a true low in their illustrious career. While I have done this type of thing with The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” (which many in Ireland consider the best Christmas song ever, and many Americans consider the worst!), please let us not see any versions of “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” as that might make me vomit so profoundly that you may get sprayed wherever you happen to be reading my responses…
[And I know some of you particularly contrarian individuals will take that in itself as a challenge, so if you do, it better be fuckin’ good!]
There we are! I await your results with great anticipation!
P. SUFENAS VIRIUS LUPUS 