I saw a fantastic movie yesterday, called Defiance. It is based on a true story about a group of Russian Jews hiding out in the forests during World War II. It showed their heroic courage of resistance against the Nazi’s. However, as much as I was moved by their resistance, and ultimate survival in the face of overwhelming evil, I’d like to talk about something else.
There was a scene, which caused me one of those “Aha” moments. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. You are sitting there, reading this, and you stumble across something that causes your brain to go in an unexpected direction, and it makes a series of subsequent connections in your brain, which causes you to suddenly look at this from a new, and perhaps richer and more rewarding perspective.
That’s what happened to in between shoveling handfuls of salted buttery popcorn into my mouth. (The movie was just recently released here in my small town in Japan.) The particular scene in the movie was after a particularly hard winter. This group of people had escaped the cities, where they would have been put into the ghetto’s, which later turned into the horrible Nazi death camps. Because they were living in the forest, they had to build their own shelter, and find their own food. They had just gone through a harsh winter, and one day, they noticed the ice was thawing. The movie showed several moving scenes of people realizing that because the snow was thawing out, and the sun’s warmth was being felt, they had made it through the winter. The melting ice, the sun were signs of hope. The dark cold winter had passed, and the warm and bountiful spring was on its way.
This is where’ the AHA hit me. Imagine you are part of a nomadic tribe in Europe, during the last ice age. About ten thousand years ago. Every year the winter comes and the horrible cold kills many people and makes it difficult to live. Every day the sun gets lower and lower on the horizon as the cold icy death of winter approaches. If you are a nomadic hunter/gatherer this is horrible. You don’t have cities, or guns, or any kind of technology to create any sustainable warmth other than lighting a fire every night. And when everything is frozen, lighting a fire can prove difficult. (Just ask that guy in the Jack London story.)
You’re whole mindset is based on complete dependence on the elements being kind. Warm is good. Cold is bad. Every season that you make it through the winter is a reason to celebrate, just like the Russian Jews did. For them, they only went through that once or twice (I’m not sure how many years they had to hide out in the forests.) But for the primitive hunter-gatherers, it was a yearly occurrence. And also was a yearly occurrence was the celebration that the sun stopped moving lower and lower on the horizon and started moving up, signaling that spring was coming.
So perhaps they created a celebration of sorts. A two-stage celebration. The first stage, when the sun stopped moving lower on the horizon. And the second celebration, which really is a continuation of the first, is when the length of the day overcomes the length of the night. The first is the winter solstice. The second is the spring equinox.
The Winter Solstice. The Birth of the Sun. December Twenty First.
Christmas Day. The Birth of the Son. December Twenty Fifth.
Coincidence?
The Spring Equinox. The overcoming of the darkness by the Sun. March Twenty First.
Easter. The overcoming of Death by the Son. The date varies, but it is directly related to the occurrence of a full moon (light in the darkness) after the Spring Equinox.
Coincidence?
Could it be that the Christian religion, largely spread around the world by European culture, has its roots in primitive man’s mythology, which arose to help overcome the fear of winter, during the ice age in Europe ten thousand years ago?
Let me know what you think.