Pagan Christmas (24 page)

There is also a tinge of love magic to the other anise: star anise or spice star (Illicium verum). The name Illicium comes from a Latin word that means “alluring,” which is related to the fact that it smells like incense and has a pheromone-like effect! Star anise comes from a tree that grows up to 18 meters (about 60 feet) tall. It has white, many-petaled, star-shaped flowers that carry the typical Christmas scent and have been used for ages in Asia as an ingredient in incense powders and sticks. The smoke has a tender but hearty anise aroma that combines well with other scents. The star anise makes a natural, eightpointed Christmas star and is used in powdered form in Christmas baking.

Finally, there is the plant commonly known as “witch anise.” Black cumin (Nigella sativa) has been used as an ingredient for witch incense as well as in incense for the smudging nights.

Saffron: Red Gold for Christmas

Saffron was a sign of the light gods.

VON PERGER 1864, 84

Crocus sativus L., Iridaceae (saffron crocus)

OTHER NAMES

Abir (Persian), crocus (Roman), gewürzsafran, hay saffron, karcom (Hebrew), karkom, karkum (Persian), kesar (Sanskrit), kesara (Hindi), kesari, krokos (Greek), krokus, kumkumkesari, plam phool (Pakistani), saffron, saffron crocus, safrankrokus, sn-wt.t (ancient Egyptian), z’afarân (Arabic/Yemen), zafran

The saffron crocus, which comes from the eastern Mediterranean, is one of the oldest cultivated plants of all. A wild form is no longer known to exist. Saffron was cultivated in Mesopotamia and in Minoan Crete, and later across the whole Roman Empire. A very famous (and very old) area of cultivation is in Oberwallis, Switzerland. The so-called krummenegga (saffron fields) found there were established by returning crusaders in 1420 CE.

The saffron crocus (Crocus sativus) is easy to recognize because of its long stigmas. It is “red gold” that has been known for ages as a spice, healing remedy, aphrodisiac, incense, and dye.

On the islands of Crete and Thera (now called Santorini), saffron had an important ritual significance, as can be inferred from the many pictures of saffron on frescos in the sanctuaries. The saffron crocus was obviously connected with the priests’ adoration of Cybele, the Minoan goddess of nature and fertility. The wall paintings in Thera show that the saffron harvest was in fact the business of priestesses.

Saffron is often called “red gold” because it is even more expensive than gold! Around 250,000 saffron threads (stigmas) are needed to make 1 kilo (about two pounds) of the popular spice, which has been used for healing, love magic, incense, and color as well as its unique flavor. One might even imagine that the gold brought by the holy three kings was actually saffron.

Saffron is a very popular spice for Christmas baking—and in the hemp kitchen. Christmas stars made from hashish, butter, and saffron (“this one really makes the cake yellow”) are a specialty. Saffron seems to enhance the oral absorption of THC and may also play its own part in the general psychoactive effect. Just as hemp was the “simple man’s tobacco,” turmeric (Curcuma longa), the gold-colored spice from Southeast Asia, is the “poor man’s saffron.” However, turmeric does not produce the stimulating effect of real saffron. In old Russia, people made meals with calming, aphrodisiac, or pain-relieving effects by including hemp, saffron, nutmeg, cardamom, and honey.

Your stimulus is a lusty garden of pomegranate trees,

With chosen fruit

With cypress and roses and saffron,

With spice wood and cinnamon

With all kinds of frankincense

With myrrh and aloe[wood]

With all the noble balms.

THE SONG OF SONGS XIV

In antiquity, saffron was associated with sol invictus, the rebirth of the sun, and was believed to contain essences of the gods and goddesses of light and love. In old Rome, it was dedicated to Venus because it could stimulate erotic feelings. When used as an incense, it was believed to lighten human consciousness, as it was considered condensed sunlight that was set free the moment it glowed on the red-hot pan.

Christmas Baking

How deliciously it is steaming! How delicious it smells! How rich it looks! Round like a kiss, round like the horizon, round like the earth, round like the sun, moon, and stars and all the heavenly folks—this is plum pudding.

RIEMERSCHMIDT 1962, 93

In the past, pre-Christmas season started on the first day of Advent, December 1. Today, the shelves fill up with Christmas pastries and spices in September, soon after summer vacation ends, probably mainly for convenience. In earlier days, however, Advent was an important time of preparation for the coming feast. To fail to fill up your stomach on “full stomach night” (December 24) or give money to the poor was considered bad luck!

Advent time is baking time. Grandmothers lure their grandchildren into the kitchen with cookie dough and seductive spices—much like the witch of the enchanted woods in the Hänsel and Gretel story! It might be the last time in the year when grandparents, parents, and children work together in the kitchen, shaping cookie dough with little cookie-cutters and making sugar icing for gingerbread houses—all in a sticky, chaotic, wonderful-smelling paradise.

Cutting out and baking cookies in the shape of stars, fir trees, mushrooms, and crescent moons recalls the fertility rituals of days past. In remembrance of the old saying, “Sweet as a delicious gift of charity and the fullness of giving” (Riemerschmidt 1962, 106), the people used everything the kitchen and larder had to offer to make delightfully rich baked goods: English plum pudding, hutzel pear bread, Yule logs, cookies, and more. Today, depending on family tradition and region, popular German Christmas specialties include Nuremberg liebkuchen (traditional spiced cookies), Dresden stollen (sweet Christmas bread with dried fruit), Basle leckerli (gingerbread), speculatius (almond cookies) and springerle (anise cookies).

Swedish Yule pastry in symbolic shapes: fir tree (world tree), sun and moon, man (god) and woman (goddess), Yule buck, and Yule boar.

Christmas idyll in a witches’ house. The witch makes the fire under the cannibal pot for cooking the kidnapped children, while her fat companion smokes a baccy pipe in happy expectation. (Wilhelm Busch, Hänsel and Gretel, Bilderpossen, 1864)

Marzipan

Marzipan is made from sweet and bitter almond pastes that are mixed with sugar and rosewater and formed into various shapes. In bygone days, people sometimes also added one of the gifts of the holy three kings—myrrh. The original Italian name for this popular Christmas sweet, marci panis (Marcus bread), harks back to the ninth century, when merchants brought the bones of St. Marcus to Venice. Marcus became the patron saint of the city of canals.

Grandmother’s bakery. (Christmas card with a drawing by Elspeth Austin, England, undated)

Arnalf of Villanova, a Catalan doctor who died in 1311, first documented the invention of marzipan. Since 1407, it has been among the most popular sweets of Christmas in Lübeck, Germany. The pastry chefs of Niederegger, who are among the world’s best, are forbidden to take the recipe for marzipan out of the house; it has been kept secret for hundreds of years. A recipe for making marzipan appears in the handwritten cookbook started in 1533 by an Augsburg patrician’s daughter, Sabina Welserin (Ehlert 1990, 13).

Gingerbread and Christmas Pepper

Piper nigrum L., Piperaceae

OTHER NAMES

Black pepper, pfeffer

Pepper (Piper nigrum) comes from “the country where pepper is growing”—more succinctly, from India. In England, chili pepper (Capsicum annum L., Solanaceae) is called Christmas pepper, perhaps simply because the fresh peppers are colored green and red.

The German word for pepper, pfeffer, is reflected in the German name for the gingerbread—pfefferkuchen. Pfefferkuchen is made with spices similar to those used in pfeffernüsse and liebkuchen, traditional German spiced cookies made from recipes handed down from medieval convent bakeries. Nuremberg liebkuchen contained cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, ginger, cloves, and rosewater—but strangely enough, no pepper! Whence, then, comes this German name for gingerbread?

A mix of peppercorns in all the Christmas colors.

In German, “pepper” is a folk synonym for a multitude of spices. The word also relates to the old custom of “peppering”—the ritualized beating of young girls with the life rod on December 28, the day of the innocent children. The friends attending the peppering received a pepper cake (pfefferkuchen) as a thank-you present from the beaten girl. The priests forbade this old fertility ritual and renamed the peppery pastry in remembrance of the martyred St. Stephen, who was killed by stoning, a kind of peppering. “The name recalled the stones with which Stephen was killed; and thus they really made believers taste the fact that, for the faithful, the hardest and the most bitter thing can yet become sweet” (quoted in Vossen 1985, 103).

Today, these old customs drive some feminists crazy. On December 28, 2002, the newspaper Harburger Wochenblatt published an account of a ruling against Father Christmas under the title “Grievous Bodily Harm and Provocation.” The announcement stated, “Father Christmas is guilty of grievous bodily harm by means of the husband (provocation), according to criminal code §223. Thank God.” This amusing anecdote shows how the old peppering custom handed down through the centuries has commanded attention right up to the present day—now more out of misunderstanding, ignorance, and lack of sense of humor than anything else.

Finally, here’s something uplifting and healing on the subject:

Gingerbread was used medicinally against fever, when it was written on and eaten in a special way; against backaches, when one carried it in one’s pocket and ate from it during the time from Christmas to Candlemas (February 2); and against worms, when cooked as a mash with yeast liquor and used as a compress on the stomach. In the convents, gingerbread was baked with healing herbs (Hiller 1989, 174).

Cinnamon Stars

Cinnamomum verum J. Presl., Lauraceae (cinnamon)

Unlike pepper cake (gingerbread), which contains no pepper, cinnamon stars actually contain cinnamon (Cinnamomum verum). This spice too may have some unwanted side effects. In the area of the Lüneburger heath in Germany, it was said that cinnamon stars sometimes were made so well that Father Christmas, magically attracted, would come for the farmer’s wife. Given the right dosage and the proper preparation, cinnamon may very well contribute to erotic seduction.

In antiquity, cinnamon was among the best known and most widely used spices and aromatic substances. Even though the Greeks were not acquainted with the cinnamon tree, there were some legends there about its origin. The people believed that the cinnamon tree grew in Arabia. In the Bible, cinnamon is mentioned several times as kinnamon and described as a perfume and incense (Rätsch and Müller-Ebeling 2003, 731).

In combination with dried orange slices and walnuts, cinnamon sticks are also a very popular Christmas decoration.

Nutmeg and the Lucky Cookies of Hildegard von Bingen

Myristica fragrans Houtt., Myristicaceae (nutmeg and mace)

OTHER NAMES

Almendra de la semilla, balla (Banda), Banda nutmeg, bazbaz (Persian), bisbâsa al-hindî (Arabic/Yemen), buah pala (Malayalam), bush-apal, chan-thet (Laotian), hindî, jaephal (Hindi), jan-thet (Tahi), jauz-i-bûyâ (Arabic, “fragrant nut”), ju-tou-k’ou, juz, mada shaunda, massa, miskad, moscada, moscata miristica (Italian), moschocaria, moschocarydia, muscade, muscadier, muscadier cultivé, muscatennußbaum, muschatennuß, muskach’u (Callawaya), muskatnußbaum, musque, myristica moschata, noix muscade, nootmuskaat (Dutch), noz moscada, nuce muscata, nuez moscada, nutmeg, nutmeg tree, pala banda, roudoukou (Chinese)

There are scents that sing the way of the senses, others of the spirit.

BAUDELAIRE 1857

Nutmegs are the seed of the Myristica fragrans fruit, which is coated with a golden-yellow seed coat, the “nutmeg flower” or mace. Nutmeg is the psychoactive ingredient of Hildegard von Bingen’s “happy cookies.”

Nutmeg and mace (the seed coat of the nutmeg) are most appropriate spices for the Christmas feast of love. The two are well known in India, the Middle East, and Europe, where they have been used as aphrodisiac substances and love magic as well as spices. In medieval times, nutmeg was considered helpful for encouraging “Venus trading.”3

The nutmeg tree is from the Southeast Asian “spice island” known as the Island of Banda and is among the oldest cultivated trees of humanity. Botanically speaking, the nut is the seed of the plant’s fruit. Mace, the so-called “nutmeg flower” is the dried seed coat (arillus). Both not only are good tasting and aromatic, they may also have a consciousness-altering effect at higher doses. Nutmeg has a musk-like smell and a pheromone-like effect.

The medieval herbalist and abbess Hildegard von Bingen was well acquainted with the uplifting effect of nutmeg:

The nutmeg has a great warmth and a good mixture in its powers. When a human being eats nutmeg it opens his heart, and his sense is pure, and it puts him a good state of mind. Take nutmeg and (in the same amount) cinnamon and some cloves and grind them up. And then, from this powder and some water, make flour—and roll out some little tarts. Eat these often and it will lower the bitterness of your heart and your mind and open your heart and your numbed senses. It will make your spirit happy, purify and cleanse your mind, lower all bad fluids in you, give your blood a good tonic, and make you strong (Hildegard von Bingen, Physica, I, 21).

Cookies for Preventing Sadness

Based on a recipe by Hildegard von Bingen

Bake cookies at 350° (180° Celsius) for 5 to 10 minutes. Beware! They have a strong effect.

THE REBIRTH OF THE SUN

Hail to you, sun!

Hail to you, light!

Hail to you, shining day!