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Christmas Books - Ep 30
196 Plays3 years ago
Join Kim as she talks to Professor Chris Gosden of Oxford University about the historical and prehistorical links to Christmas books we all know and, perhaps, love. We take in an ambitious collection of four books from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, to John Masefield’s Box of Delights, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising and Terry Pratchett’s The Hogfather.
Links
- Chris Gosden's profile on the University of Oxford's website
- Chris Gosden's book The History of Magic
- A Christmas Carol on Project Gutenberg
- The Box of Delights from publisher Egmont
- The Dark is Rising from publisher Penguin
- The Hogfather on Terry Pratchett Books
- Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton on Oxford Scholarship Online
- Herne the Hunter
Contact
- Twitter: @prehistpod, @kimbiddulph
Recommended
Transcript
Historical and Modern Roots of Christmas
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:10
Speaker
Merry Christmas, everyone. Or should I say, yo, Saturnalia. Or maybe Sol and Victo comitee. Vess hail, drink hail. Yes, we're looking at Christmas traditions in books today, and the extent to which some of them can be traced back into prehistory. But fear not, this podcast is not going to say Christmas is a pagan festival, nor that it was created by Charles Dickens in 1843. But it's maybe a bit of both.
00:00:39
Speaker
and half a dozen of the other. To do this, I am joined by a distinguished guest indeed, Professor Chris Godston. Hi, Chris. Hello. Hello. Lovely to speak to you. Yeah, great to be
Chris Godston's Archaeological Insights
00:00:52
Speaker
here. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's lovely to talk to you because of your huge breadth of knowledge, really. You are obviously based at the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Oxford. Yeah. And your research interests are quite broad, aren't they?
00:01:10
Speaker
I've strayed around all over the place. I've worked in Papua New Guinea, various parts of Central Asia, just done a book on the English landscape and identities through time. I went to the Pitt Rivers Museum for a long time here in Oxford, so got into more sort of anthropological things.
00:01:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's lovely. I did a stint myself at the Pitt Rivers a while a few years ago as a Just Maternity cover in the Education Department. It's such a lovely museum. It's an amazing museum. Yeah, possibly the best of all museums.
00:01:48
Speaker
I think so too, yes. I mean obviously at the moment of course with Dan Hicks and his book as well, really challenging the idea of how a lot of the things got into that museum, but they've been working with source communities as well for many years haven't they? Many years, yeah. Now it's a long standing thread in the pit room to work with people from whom the material came.
00:02:13
Speaker
Yes, was stolen or bought. Yeah, so I think your huge areas of research is really, really interesting to talk about some of the things we're talking about today, although perhaps my podcast has been a lot more focused really on Northwest Europe. But I would love at some point to branch out a bit. But this is my expertise. My expertise is much narrower than yours.
00:02:45
Speaker
But luckily for me, I have got hold of your recent book, which is The History of Magic from Alchemy to Witchcraft from the Ice Age to the Present, which really shows kind of how much information that you can kind of muster into a book. Yes, there's a huge amount of interest in magic at the moment, as you might
00:03:10
Speaker
imagine, and every area that I delved into, whether it was Jewish magic or Chinese magic or African, there's an explosion of academic.
00:03:22
Speaker
interest in various forms of magic. But a lot of it has never really been translated into a more popular guise. So that's what I was hoping to do, to show the range of different magical practices and the depths of magical histories, but in a way that's reasonably accessible.
Magic's Place in Modern Belief Systems
00:03:41
Speaker
It really is. I'm really enjoying it. I think it's amazing just how ubiquitous magic is around the world and through time.
00:03:50
Speaker
Yeah well that's my big argument really that magic has been often left out of human history and it's been a constant thread as you say of human history as far back as we can we could look really and although it's always said to be dying out lots of people everywhere today still believe in magic including places like Britain
00:04:15
Speaker
Oh, yes. So not only does it have a really deep history, it has a really sort of vibrant presence as well.
00:04:22
Speaker
It really does. And I think as archaeologists, sometimes we come across that quite a lot with talking to people who at sites that are being dug or studied where there are often modern tales of magical happenings. Yeah. I was struck by some of the detail data in your, in your first chapter about kind of the prevalence of magic in the modern Western kind of world. Was it something like 20% of Americans believe in witches?
00:04:50
Speaker
Yeah, no. And across the Western world, it varies a little bit, but North America and various parts of Europe, up to 75% of people have some sort of magical belief. And various things are making a comeback. So at the moment, astrology is pretty big. There's a whole series of apps you can get to tell
00:05:19
Speaker
like on the basis of astrology and lots of people are using all these things and taking them, I mean, sometimes quite tongue in cheek, but sometimes people take them really seriously as well.
00:05:31
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that I have been, in the past, quite snotty about it all, about astrology in particular. I remember going to Stonehenge and we were part of the archaeology society at my university, so we were getting into the stones, you know, in amongst the stones, which was really exciting. But we were delayed by Mystic Meg at the time, who was doing her prediction.
00:05:59
Speaker
at the stones, which is hilarious. Yeah, yeah. Well, as with any area of human endeavour, there are people one should take seriously and people slightly less, and people who don't particularly take themselves seriously as well. So, yeah, now I think magic comes in all shapes and sizes. Yeah. Oh, yes, I've seen. And communication with the dead seems to be quite an important thing that a lot of people believe in.
00:06:27
Speaker
Yeah, people worry about the dead a lot and being dead themselves, how dead the dead are, what one should do with the dead. Yeah, no, it's and it is a constant worry. And it's it's the only the only thing we can be really certain of in this world. I think that one day we will be amongst the dead ourselves. And there's some amazing stories of people like Revenants
00:06:51
Speaker
For instance, in the Middle Ages, there was a belief that people who were dead and buried could come back to life. And there's a story of a priest who haunted the monastery that he lived in and was attacked by a couple of monks in the middle of the night, and they wounded the apparition of the priest in the leg.
00:07:15
Speaker
And then when they look back at his tomb, back into his tomb, then the body was well preserved, but it had a wound in the leg. So there's all sorts of beliefs in revenants and people who could walk.
00:07:31
Speaker
Wow. And yeah, I think there's people I know around me and where I live who are spiritualists and talk to the dead. But it seems to me like such a
00:07:47
Speaker
a human thing that people have been doing for so long because this is something we posit about the Neolithic and the Bronze Age in particular, don't we? About the use of human remains and bringing the dead back into the world of the living and speaking to them and so on.
00:08:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And in some cultures, the dead never really leave the world of the living. So in China, for instance, then the well-being of the living depends very directly on how powerful and engaged their ancestors are.
00:08:21
Speaker
And there's a lot of means of connecting with the ancestors, divination to ask them questions, what will happen in the future? Why did various things happen in the past? And the prestige of the ancestors depends on their ability to look after their descendants, the living and the well being of the living depends on how powerful and influential the dead are. So so there's, yeah, no, there's, there's no
00:08:50
Speaker
total separation between living and dead, as sometimes we might think. Yes, indeed. And I think one of the other things that I was really interested in in your book at the moment is about the triple division of society into magic, religion and science, and how there's not a really easy way to divide those up, because there's quite a lot of intermixing of some of those ideas.
Intersection of Magic, Religion, and Science
00:09:17
Speaker
Like, for instance, as you say, in China with the divination, I mean, things like the calendar came out of that because they had to be able to predict the future. You have to know when the future is. Yes, that's right. That's right. Now, the book's very much about the sort of interrelationship between magic, religion and science.
00:09:38
Speaker
So my definitions of the three of them. So for me, magic is to do with the with human participation in the universe, that we can link with the universe in various different ways through speech, through actions, through thought. So the saying of spells that the practicing of various forms of action. So magic says that we connect with the universe and it also connects with us, of course, through that
00:10:09
Speaker
things like the moon, the stars and the planets, the astrological notions that we can be affected by all of these things.
00:10:17
Speaker
religion says that there's a single God or lots of gods and that we mediate our relationship with the universe through those so we don't have such a direct connection with the universe as we might with magic and then science of course says we should stand back and try and look at the whole thing a bit more objectively and think about some
00:10:42
Speaker
forces and mass and processes of growth and all of that sort of thing. And recently, people have either said directly or tended to imply that you had to choose one
00:10:57
Speaker
one or possibly two of these, but you couldn't you couldn't entertain all three. But I think there's no need to choose between magic, religion and so they do slightly different things. And maybe a sort of healthy balance in life comes from entertaining some belief in all three of them, which which then includes magic, which is that the bit that people are only culturally people are less likely to say that they believe in.
00:11:23
Speaker
Yes, it was interesting. I saw someone on Twitter the other day say, I am a scientist. I do this. I've done whatever. And yet I still have to rely on how many magpies I've seen to say what my day is going to be like. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I don't see any contradiction between that necessarily at all. But it's just that science has often said that in order to be modern, you have to be rational. And rationality means giving up.
00:11:53
Speaker
a logical belief like magic. But I don't think magic just works from a series of different
00:12:01
Speaker
logics really and explores how we are in the world and you know our well-being and all of those sorts of things. You know you said well-being and I was going to say that I think that this idea of magic being us mediating, being part of the universe and connecting to it and mediating it and it mediating us feels very much like mindfulness
00:12:25
Speaker
as well, this whole new kind of movement to get us thinking in the moment, about what's around us and stuff. Yeah. So things like medicine, so obviously, both magical practitioners and modern health practitioners are really concerned with health and illness and all of those sorts of things. And one of the things that modern medicine is slightly more inclined to
00:12:53
Speaker
to get into these days is one sort of emotional state, overall state of being rather than just, you know, germ theory or physical states. And often magical practitioners will talk to the person who's unwell and find out, you know, in many places, illnesses
00:13:19
Speaker
So the magician in order to work out what sort of demon it is and how to get rid of it might ask someone about their mental state, why they were possessed, how it came to be, what the circumstances of their lives are, that they think led to this. So we could translate that into, you know, something a bit more like psychoanalysis. So maybe, you know, maybe people get well, because they've probed the circumstances of their lives, thought about the demons,
00:13:48
Speaker
And as you say, I mean, things like mindfulness are very much about immersion in the world and thinking about our role, our position in the world. And one of the things I mean, I end the book by by a bit of an argument for magic, not so much that I believe in all of it or any of it, really. But but I think one thing that magic gives you and possibly also things like mindfulness is a much more moral relationship with the world.
00:14:17
Speaker
So science will ask, can we do this? Magic will ask, should we do it?
00:14:24
Speaker
What are the broader spiritual, what will this do to our relationship to the world generally? And is this a good thing? So I think a bit more magical mindfulness will get us thinking about how much we can and should take from the world under what circumstances. And given the ecological mess we're in, those sorts of questions are extraordinarily important.
00:14:52
Speaker
Yes, and urgent. Urgent, exactly. Yeah, I mean, I think that magic is so central to the way we think about things. And this, I come at it, of course, through stories. This is what I absolutely love. And there's, you know, how many stories that have been written in the last few hundred years or even the last 20 years in English or in any language in the Western world,
00:15:18
Speaker
feature magic in some way. Magic is so important, I think. And that leads us quite neatly onto our first book, because we're going to look at a few Christmas books.
Magic in Classic Literature
00:15:29
Speaker
And you can't do this without talking about A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Really epitome of Christmas books. Yeah, no, it is. It is. And an incredibly popular one when it was
00:15:44
Speaker
first written in the 1840s. I mean, it seems to us slightly sort of patriarchal and, you know, the rich helping the poor and all that sort of thing, which it obviously was. But yes, as you say, central to a Christmas carol, the various
00:16:01
Speaker
ghosts that come to Scrooge and talk to him about the past, the present and his potential future. And again, it's a lot about his sort of it's about his emotional states, ultimately. What sort of what sort of person does he want to be? Does he want to look after
00:16:23
Speaker
and everybody else, in which case he will become much more a member of society again. Or does he want to die a lonely old man by refusing all these vital relationships? So the ghosts come to humanize Scrooge and in the end they manage to do it.
00:16:43
Speaker
Yes, I mean, we all know the story about the ghosts and his transformation. And to me, it seems like it's really an example of what you're saying about this magical thinking and being so moral. And it's about his moral responsibility for the people around him to help them or to just engage with them in terms of his nephew, for instance, to be part of society and not to hold himself separate.
00:17:11
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's right. And for someone in a relatively privileged position in Britain that was awash with poverty, to see that he had some responsibilities, he couldn't just choose and see the people who work for him as means of making him more money.
00:17:28
Speaker
he had some sort of reciprocal responsibility to them. But it is interesting that Dickens chooses magical means to get those points across. First of all, the ghost of Jacob Marley, his old business partner, who says that I'm damned
00:17:47
Speaker
I'm damned to an uncomfortable eternity in chains because I was so unpleasant to people around me. And if you don't want to end up in the same position, you ought to do something about it now. Yes. So yeah, magic and magic and Scrooge and Christmas are all intimately intertwined at A Christmas Cowl.
00:18:07
Speaker
Yeah, it's an interesting use of ghosts. I mean, obviously, Dickens was apparently completely fascinated by ghost stories. And he definitely made, I think Jacob Marley, particularly, and then the ghost of Christmas yet to come, are obviously quite scary ghosts as well, which he loved.
00:18:25
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And there's the drama of it all, of course, it's interesting that they would come to make you change your ways. Because that's quite a novel. Do you think that's a novel use of ghosts? Or is it because I feel like ghosts come from mostly for revenge in most other stories? Yeah, yeah. Now that's yes. And probably many stories since yes, it's it's it's a good
00:18:51
Speaker
point, it's harder to think of ghosts that come for some sort of positive purpose. And of course, Scrooge does achieve redemption through the ghosts in both in the life that he lived and presumably in the life thereafter as well, that he wasn't damned to wander the world in chains like Jacob Marley's, Marley's ghost was. So no, no, it is it is a really interesting. Well, Dickens, you know, took old
00:19:21
Speaker
old themes. And people say it's, you know, it's part of that sort of mid Victorian revival of Christmas, where people really getting into the whole notion of Christmas and, and all the, the trappings that we've come to see, or many of them trees and, you know, turkeys and all those sorts of things. Yes. Coming back with a vengeance. Yeah, well, you kind of rehabilitated Christmas, didn't he? Because it was in variance, really, at the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:19:50
Speaker
Okay, we're going to take a quick break and we're going to talk more about some other Christmas books and their possible links and the history behind them after the break. Hello again, we're back. I know we could talk about Christmas Carol for a long time. But let's move on to another Christmas book because we've got quite a few to talk about. And this is quite close to my heart. I remember the TV show with a lot of
00:20:19
Speaker
Well, I remember the theme tune and I remember how it made me feel, but I didn't remember much of the story of The Box of Delights. Yes, okay, yes. No, great. Because I was only little when the TV show came out. I was much less little, it must be said. No, it's a great book and was not an innovative TV show, was it not?
00:20:45
Speaker
It was at the time. I mean, obviously you can see a little bit where the drawings are now when you watch it again. But the book is great. I mean, it was written in the 30s by John Macefield, but obviously the TV show was an adaptation in the 1980s.
00:21:00
Speaker
the pricey of the book is that there's this boy who's going home for Christmas from school, so he's been at boarding school, it's called Caharker, the year is 1934, and he gets, he comes, oh no, something gets stolen from him on the train on the way home. And then he gets pulled into this strange series of events
00:21:27
Speaker
focusing on a man who he knows as Cole Hawkins, who gives him a box to look after. And the box of delights is very magical and it allows K to travel through time and to fly and to get smaller and bigger.
00:21:45
Speaker
It's got a couple of Alice in Wonderland themes running through it, but also, to me, it also has a little bit of similarity to the line The Witch and the Wardrobe sometimes as well. Yes, similar sort of feeling. We'd all like a magic box like that, wouldn't we, where we can travel free time and fly and all those things.
00:22:06
Speaker
I particularly like the moment where Cole Hawkins goes into the painting and walks away into the painting. Yes, yes, that is pretty spectacular. But what struck me throughout the book as very odd was how all of these things happened and nobody really blinked an eyelid at all. And it was like, oh, yeah, yeah, we're just kind of he's just walking into the
00:22:29
Speaker
into the thing, and we're just flying through the air, and it was so strange. But there's a reason for that, which we find out at the end. And through this, there's a lot of interesting people that he comes across out there, like King Arthur turns up, Father Christmas turns up, and the Hunter, who we'll talk about a little bit later, I think, in another book.
00:22:54
Speaker
fairies, there's animals who talk, there's all sorts of things. Yeah, yeah. And as you say, yes, it is a little bit like the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. And it does mix together what we would often see is the sort of the pagan pre-Christian past around here with slightly more Christian themes. And so in some ways, it's almost a sort of mirror image of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which
00:23:21
Speaker
which was obviously emphasizing Christianity, whereas the box of delights is more, as you say, Arthur and Father Christmas and various elements of paganism. Yeah, but I mean, for people who believe in magic, then you mentioned that people didn't bat an eyelid when flying happened or someone walked into a picture. But then if you do believe those things, then they are true.
00:23:51
Speaker
and they are a part of the world that you live in, in a sense. Yeah, and I think it's also, though, interesting that it's now, I think, going into a children's story, obviously, and children obviously believe a lot in magic, and we try to help them believe in magic as well for as long as we can, and we hold on to it, don't we? Yeah, we do.
00:24:13
Speaker
And then before, so that they don't see the cold light of day, it's a little bit like that with bringing the flowers and butterflies to life and make it into that in the house and things like that. But also, there always has to be something scary, doesn't there? It does. Yes, and the box of delights is definitely a battle between good and evil.
00:24:39
Speaker
Yes. And the evil are supposedly churchmen as well, which I always find quite funny. The wolves, the wolves are running. I remember that so much, but I didn't remember the whole story around it. But it was that feeling when I was little, I was about five or six of the wonder of it, the magic of it, but the terror as well behind that magic.
00:25:06
Speaker
Yes, quite a lot of that. You do get that in a lot of old stories, don't you? Which are meant about about magical beings or monsters or which were meant always to terrify children into obedience. They were, they were. But as you said before, I mean, we want to keep a sense of magic and with kids for as long as possible.
Magic's Influence on Science
00:25:30
Speaker
And one of the things that we never know about the world is what it's like. And if we close down,
00:25:36
Speaker
the sets of possibilities as to what it's like, where more orthodox forms of belief tend to do, then we start to miss. And science often starts with flights of imagination, things that seem weird and bizarre when people first say, like a lot of quantum mechanics.
00:25:57
Speaker
Yeah, there's nothing as weird as quantum physics. My brothers tried to explain it to me and I do not understand it at all. Yes, I've read quite a lot and yes, I understand it very briefly and then.
00:26:10
Speaker
And then I turn around and all the understandings gone. So I think, I think magical practices. Quantum state, in fact. Yes, that's right. Yes, the half-life of my, my quantum understanding is very brief. But I think, I mean, the good thing about magic is, is that it does open up possibilities. And it doesn't say no too quickly. It does say, you know, what if, and what if we think about the universe as being like this?
00:26:37
Speaker
Yeah, and as you say that the sort of.
00:26:41
Speaker
the bad magicians are a bit like the magisterium in Philip Pullman. Yes, yes, absolutely. I think there's a big parallel there, whether or not he did. I mean, obviously, Philip Pullman has a particular axe to grind, it feels like. He does, he does. Yeah, yeah. But he creates such an amazing world around it. And I think that that's, that's the, yeah, it's
00:27:08
Speaker
It's something about the monster has to be killed, doesn't it? You create as well these terrors, because there are terrors in the world, but at the end of the story, they end up dead. Yes. And that's good for kids as well, isn't it? All the things that scare you.
00:27:28
Speaker
are scary, but can ultimately be dealt with. So yeah, no, there's a there's definitely a reassuring message. And, and, and some of the baddies in the box of delights are really interesting people, aren't they? I mean, often, often in fiction, the baddies are more interesting than the goodies. And there is a slight tendency in this on occasions, I think. Yeah, but magic.
00:27:53
Speaker
magic is ultimately the source of enchantment and delight and ultimately wins out, which we all want to see. It makes me think of some of the Christmas traditions from around the world. Some of them are pretty terrifying as well, aren't they? Like Krampus or the Marie-Clude, the horse. Oh, that's fine. It's so scary. And I'm 42. It's ridiculous.
00:28:21
Speaker
Well, our inner child is always there to be scared, isn't it? I mean, Christmas, the death of the son.
00:28:30
Speaker
is a lot about death and the promise of renewal, but the fear that renewal won't actually happen. Oh, yes. Oh, well, we'll come on to that, I think. I mean, I just wanted also to mention with Box of Delights the interesting revelation of who Cole Hawkins
00:28:53
Speaker
ended up being supposedly this Spanish mystic Ramon Lull, I don't know, it's probably not how you pronounce the second name, who is like 13th, 14th century theologian, who in the book, he's immortal, and he found almost like the Philosopher's Stone that kept him immortal or something like that.
00:29:16
Speaker
which he gives up at the end, I think. But it was an interesting character who the Catholic Church hasn't been able to decide whether he's a saint or a heretic. But he apparently came up with the idea of the Immaculate Conception. But sadly also, I was reading the idea of the expulsion of Jews from Europe.
00:29:42
Speaker
So, an interesting character to choose, I think, for that book.
00:29:46
Speaker
Yes, yes. And that sort of period in in actual history, 13th and 14th century was a period of resurgence of magic. And Christianity was often bound up with and actually, I mean, what is what is the immaculate conception, if not magic? Well, yeah, so that's, that's where as you were saying before, I mean, religion and magic do blend together. And a lot of practices of
00:30:16
Speaker
religion, like miracles, are magical. Walking on wood, bringing the dead back to life, the Immaculate Conception, all of all of these sorts of things. And Keith Thomas has said that the Catholic Church is this huge mechanism for the production of magic. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, yeah. So so a lot of these, these figures, like Ramon Moo, did did combine
00:30:44
Speaker
Christian and much more magical. And I think in the high, late Middle Ages, people didn't make the distinctions that they've come to much more recently. I mean, people would keep the host under their tongue in mass and take it home and give it to a sick cow in order to make the cow better and those sorts of things. So we, much, much later on, through Protestantism, I think, have come to separate the two.
00:31:16
Speaker
So it's interesting in the box of delights that they're much more intermingled.
00:31:21
Speaker
than, you know, they often are in our world, magic. Yes, indeed. But if we want to go into a bit more paganism, let's move on to our third book, which is The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. Now, this is a sequence of books, but a focus on The Dark is Rising itself, because it's based around Christmas, starting on the solstice on the 21st of December.
00:31:49
Speaker
And this was published in 1965, so it's very much kind of a resurgence, I guess, in interest in paganism at that time. And it's much darker, as I said, than the dark, than Box of Delights. Very much the battle between light and dark, isn't it? That's the whole point of the whole series. It is, it is. Yes, and because it's set at Christmas, then that's
00:32:16
Speaker
And we're all hyper-conscious at this time of year of how dark it's getting, and we hope that beyond the dark it will get light again. And maybe particularly this year, we're looking forward to light, not just physical light, but generally, our lives getting better in the new year.
00:32:37
Speaker
through the magic of vaccines. The magic of science, yes, that's right. You almost do have to have faith in it, though, don't you? Because we don't know how it works, really. We can't conceive of it, but we know it does. Anyway, I mean, the book is set in the Thames Valley, so kind of around Marlowe, Maidenhead area, which is interesting because it's not far from me, where I live a little bit further north.
00:33:06
Speaker
It's got quite a lot of, so maybe early medieval paganism, hasn't it, with possibly references to Woden and Loki. Wayland is in there as well. Wayland's got a lot in there as well, yes.
00:33:23
Speaker
And a very interesting character, obviously associated with Will and Smithey up near the White Horse in Uffington. But based on this early English story about, well,
00:33:40
Speaker
Yeah, well, I suppose there is a parallel in Scandinavian stories as well, isn't there, about Weyland and how he is a magical smith who can make anything. And at Weyland Smithy, you just need to leave your horse there and it'll be shooed overnight. Yeah, I think you need to leave a hate knee as well. Yeah, you've got to leave something. He doesn't do anything for nothing.
00:34:06
Speaker
No, no, no. And why? Why would you really even if you're a magical? And in many, many cultures, then people like Smith's have magical thought to have magical powers because they're
00:34:18
Speaker
able to transform bronze and iron and gold and whatever in quite amazing ways. And I think looking back in prehistory, you know, the first time that people smelted and cast bronze, where you could take a solid and make it into a liquid and back into a solid again.
00:34:40
Speaker
That's pretty amazing, really. And we sort of take those things for granted. But if you'd never encountered that before, and therefore the person who was able to do that.
00:34:50
Speaker
control fire had the right mix of metals in order to make the bronze that would melt. I mean, then maybe if they could do that, they could do all sorts of other, other powerful things. Yeah. And of course, making something that shone golden as well. Yeah. Yeah.
00:35:10
Speaker
It's such an important time. And in the book, Susan Cooper creates these signs which are the sign of fire, water, iron, bronze, wood and stone. It's almost like it's the three age system with a few other things.
00:35:30
Speaker
or the medieval notion of the humors, fire and water that every human beings are mixtures of those things we need to get the balance right. Yeah and it's almost like there are there are six which correspond to her three types of magic, two for each type and she's got
00:35:50
Speaker
the wild magic which is the nature and the high magic which is the universe and the old magic which is human magic. So the human magic of iron and bronze and nature is kind of wood and stone and the high magic is fire and water. So it's really well thought out. It is and it's a really interesting set of
00:36:14
Speaker
of distinctions. And the old magic clearly takes one back to the Neolithic and the Bronze Age and its origins, where people were able to do all sorts of things. And maybe some of that should be
00:36:30
Speaker
recaptured. And then as you say, there's nature magic, which doesn't really care about human beings so much. Just gets I mean, occasionally, we can attempt to control it, but it doesn't really doesn't really mind too much about us. Yeah, and then the high, the high magic is yes attempts to, to control that the broad powers of the universe. Now I really like that sort of superstructure that she applies
00:36:57
Speaker
to it. There's a lot of depth and variability there, isn't there? There is. Also, at the end, the end is obviously massively important. It always is in the book, the ship burial coming out. Sorry if anyone hasn't read this. Should have said spoiler alert.
00:37:18
Speaker
a ship burial coming out of an island in the river, and being this early English king that he has to take the final sign from. And so the main character, Will Stanton's kind of mentor, Merryman, tells them about, you know, this is one of three great ship burials in this area, one of them being Taplow,
00:37:42
Speaker
Before Sutton Hoo was excavated, Teplo was the richest Anglo-Saxon burial in England. But it's not a ship burial. Sadly, it's in a wooden chamber. It was really, really rich, comparable to Sutton Hoo, not quite as rich, but
00:38:07
Speaker
It's not a ship, I'm afraid. No, it's not a ship. I have to point that out. Maybe it contained an old king. Who knows? Who knows? Yes, probably. Yeah, some kind of very high ranking person there. There's another person who turns up and I think we'll take a break and then we'll discuss this other person after that.
00:38:30
Speaker
All right, we're back.
Mythical Figures and Human-Animal Bonds
00:38:33
Speaker
So one of the characters that turns up in The Dark is Rising is from the nearby Windsor Forest or Windsor Great Park and the special oak tree where this ghost again, a ghost, is supposed to guard the oak tree and haunt it. And this is the famous Hearn the Hunter.
00:38:56
Speaker
Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, and hunters are a key element of many, many mythologies in Northwest Europe and elsewhere. I bet they are. But so much has been said about her and the hunter and because he was supposedly, he's married, mentioned in the Merry Wives of Windsor, I did, that was a spirit. Oh, is he? Okay. Yeah, by Shakespeare, obviously.
00:39:20
Speaker
just for anyone who doesn't know. And as a great, horned man who was the old keeper of Windsor Park. So he's given quite a, you know, a really boring and normal job. And yet, and then he's wearing these antlers with
00:39:37
Speaker
is really odd, and he leads this ghostly hunt sometimes. Because he's wearing antlers, of course, there's been so many early 20th century, maybe some later as well, kind of theories that he is from this European idea of a horned being that goes back to, say, Cernunnos, an Iron Age god of wild things.
00:40:06
Speaker
Even, of course, and then you make the connection, you know, maybe 11,000 years ago or so. End date, end date. Go back to Starcar with the antler frontlets that people wore on their heads, all because of the antlers. And it seems so attractive, that theory, isn't it? Trying to make this connection for through such a long time, but surely that's not possible.
00:40:36
Speaker
What are your thoughts? Star Car for people who haven't come across it is one of the most incredible sites in Britain. It's a Mesolithic site, as you say, about 11,000 years ago. And it was on the edge of a it was a settlement on the edge of a lake and various things got chucked into the lake. And one of them was a well, a series of them were were these front
00:41:00
Speaker
parts of the skulls of deer which still had their horns on and had holes bored in them so that they would have taken probably leather thongs to strap to people's heads. And for that site there's lots of different theories were these used to
00:41:16
Speaker
The old theory was that people would hunt deer with these on their heads so that the deer would think that they were deer and wouldn't run away, which sounds a little bit unlikely. And then there's also a possibility of animism and magic. And for many people in the world, past and present, the distinctions we would make between animals and humans aren't necessarily made.
00:41:39
Speaker
in the same way. So we tend to think people are people and deer are deer. But that's not necessarily how they thought in the Mesolithic. And maybe, you know, deer as well as being something to eat with sacred animals where
00:41:56
Speaker
were animals that were, you know, closely connected to humans. And then, as you say, when you get to her and the hunter, then there's a sort of the blend of the human and animal is still there and a really interesting one and both slightly alluring and slightly dangerous as well.
00:42:15
Speaker
the animality of people. But the question of whether, you know, these beliefs lasted from the Mesolithic through the Neolithic Bronze Age into the Iron Age and so on and so forth. I mean, it's impossible to
00:42:34
Speaker
But maybe these most significant of animals, things like deer, which have always been in these islands, people would have constantly played within their imagination and in their lives and kept coming back in various different ways.
00:42:49
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's more likely that it's something that somebody just thought of again and, you know, different people thought of again and again and again. And it's just such an attractive idea, isn't it? I mean, because there's also the Côte des Trois Freres as well in France, isn't there, with the supposed horns?
00:43:08
Speaker
magician type person, but it's unclear really because the picture is now quite difficult to actually see, isn't it? And it goes on an early drawing of it. An early and rather imaginatively reconstructed. Possibly imaginative, yeah. Which does look like some combination of a person and something like a deer.
00:43:32
Speaker
But throughout human history, there's been this, as you say this, and you mentioned in your books, you know, perhaps in the Natufian period as well in the Fertile Crescent about the interchangeability between humans and gazelles, is that right? Yeah, no, there is, yes, there's human beings buried, whole human, except for their head. And instead of the human skull, there's a gazelle skull. Yeah.
00:43:57
Speaker
So that seems to us quite bizarre, but people are obviously combining these species. And we know that for many thousands of years, people very intensively hunted gazelle in that area. So they're incredibly important animals. And again, maybe not the separations we've come to make between human and animals. So shamanism is often
00:44:21
Speaker
that the shaman is able to inhabit a bear or a reindeer or some other sperm for a while at least becomes that other animal and it becomes them. Yeah and I mean we're also ignoring the fact that people dress up as animals all over the world at the moment you know and have done for all of recorded history. There's loads of that.
00:44:47
Speaker
Yeah, there is, there is. And yeah, people, fancy dress parties, people who often turn up as, as various different creatures. Yeah. Yeah. And the characteristics, the fierceness of lions or the, you know, docility of sheep or whatever people apply those to other human beings. So yeah, yeah. And I think someone like her, the hunter,
00:45:12
Speaker
does keep coming back and back in so many different tales because of that mixture. And we're slightly unusual in that apart from our pets, we don't really live with animals. But for most people, for most of history, the sheep sometimes would have lived in the house. But if not, in the barn right next to it. So these
00:45:37
Speaker
These weren't distant creatures that they saw when they went out for a walk in the country. These were living beings, which were in some ways as much a part of the family as other humans were.
00:45:50
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So it's wonderful. Herne the Hunter has turned up in so many of these Christmas books because he is associated with Midwinter. And so he was actually in the Box of Delights as well. And he turns up in another Christmas book, which is perhaps the silliest of all the books that we are going to be looking at today. And I'm sure I'll have lots of Terry Pratchett fans writing and saying that that's a terrible thing to say. Yes, I can say that.
00:46:19
Speaker
But I say it with so much love. I absolutely adored Terry Pratchett's books when I was a teenager. And then I kind of felt like I'd grown out of them. I think it was an insufferable 20 year old. And then recently I've gone back to them because this year we've really needed something that makes us feel safe and warm and fuzzy. And Terry Pratchett did that for me.
00:46:45
Speaker
He was endlessly inventive as well, wasn't he? There was no end to it, so there is no end to his inventiveness. I know, it's amazing. I mean, there were a few that I hadn't actually read by the time I decided I was too old for that kind of thing. And one of them was The Hogfather, which I read recently and I absolutely loved it. It was hilariously funny.
00:47:10
Speaker
And Hern the Hunter turns up as Hern the Hunted. He actually turns up in a couple of the others as well. He's the god of small furry things that get crunched in the woods, which I think is just hilarious. But in The Hawkfather, which was first published in 1996, by the way, so really, I should have still been reading it, but I don't know why I gave up.
00:47:33
Speaker
And there was a two-part TV film made of it 10 years after that, which I haven't watched, I need to get a hold of, that would be really good. What's wonderful is that, so the idea of, obviously he's not called Father Christmas, he's called the Hog Father, because his sleigh is pulled by hogs, wild boar across the
00:47:56
Speaker
which feels to me quite like quite a Scandinavian gods like thing to do. Don't you think? Yeah, no, definitely. Definitely. Who has Hulks pulling his chariot? Is it Thor? Anyway, I think he does. I think he does. Yeah. Because obviously Odin or Woden has a sleep near. Yeah. No sleep near, which is the eight legged horse. But I think possibly Thor has a. Yeah. So anyway, he's obviously got that from there.
00:48:26
Speaker
And there's the Trund Holm Chariot as well from Denmark, which is more pros actually.
00:48:31
Speaker
a four-legged horse, but that's an image of the sun on a chariot that's pulled by this horse. Oh yes, the Chinatown chariot is lovely. Yeah, late bronze. Late bronze. Yeah, amazing thing. Amazing thing. Absolutely lovely. Yeah, it is.
Modern Christmas and Ancient Celebrations
00:48:44
Speaker
So what happens in this book is that the auditors of the universe have decided that humans can't have things that don't exist. They're not allowed. And so they get the Assassin's Guild in Ankh-Morpork to assassinate
00:49:01
Speaker
the Hogfather. And they send their most ingenious assassin, Mr. Teatime, and he finds a very ingenious way to kill the Hogfather by going through the Tooth Fairy. And then the Tooth Fairy, he controls all of the children in the world through their teeth and forces them to not believe in the Hogfather.
00:49:30
Speaker
And then death comes along and he has to become the Hogfather to save Christmas, save the Discworld, because otherwise the sun won't come up. Yes, yes, yes. So it brings us full circle, doesn't it? An intended and serious consequence of killing the Hogfather, yes.
00:49:50
Speaker
I like Terry Pratchett's invention of December the 32nd, which is when regeneration happens. And these things obviously go back to a long way, the death of the sun and various forms of hopes for regeneration of it all. But yeah, Terry Pratchett's given a very sort of 20th century tweak and dimension.
00:50:17
Speaker
But this is one of the things that happens, isn't it, that people equate Christmas, be it Christmas time and the pre-Christian version of midwinter festivals, going again, pushing it all the way back to the Neolithic and the midwinter solstice alignments that we see at places like Mays Howe or Newgrange, and of course the Stonehenge, which goes without saying really.
00:50:43
Speaker
Yeah, I know, I mean, people were obviously, and again, as they were more conscious of animals, they were almost certainly more conscious of things in the heavens, or in the sun. The sun is hard not to be conscious of, but people would have been very hyper aware of the passage of the sun along with the moon and the stars and so on. And places like New Grange,
00:51:09
Speaker
are amazing. I mean, it's 3200 BC. It's estimated to weigh something like 200,000 tons of stone. And they've got this thing aligned so perfectly that the chamber down the middle, for a few days around the 21st of December, the sun, if it does shine in that era at all, will shine straight down the chamber and hit a stone at the end.
00:51:33
Speaker
So there's a sun obsession there, but also a precision of engineering and being able to construct this thing so massively, but so precisely. So there's enormous effort gone into worrying about the sun. And the dead are there as well. So maybe they're there to help the regeneration of the sun in some way that we now no longer understand.
00:51:59
Speaker
Yeah, because I mean, again, spoiler alert, if anyone hasn't seen or read The Hawk Father, there is this idea of the idea of Father Christmas come is so old. And there was apparently it was one guy called Rogan Taylor in 1980, who suggested that Father Christmas was based on shamans. Right.
00:52:21
Speaker
Siberian shamans who flew through the sky on sleighs pulled by reindeer and wore red and white because of the red and white Flyer Garak, which they took in order to get them into trances and went through the smoke hole in Siberian dwellings. So hence the chimney. But it's all a load of rubbish. I mean, Siberian shamans do none of those things.
00:52:46
Speaker
No. They don't get into transits using fly agaric. They don't wear red and white at all. They certainly don't do that, yeah. No, and they've got no connection to flying reindeer. They don't go around on sleighs. What I find fascinating sometimes is these things are such attractive ideas, even though there's no basis to truth, that they take hold of the psyche of quite a large number of people and they become the truth.
00:53:15
Speaker
like the idea that, you know, Coca Cola created the red and white for the Christmas. Those are obviously the dangers of magic and mythology, that we can make connections everywhere. But most of them, many of them have no historical basis whatsoever. I mean, it's interesting that
00:53:38
Speaker
In the fast-changing world of today, we're always looking for ancient anchors, whether within our own world or, say, in the case of the further Christmas theories in the world of Siberia. And those anchors are seen to give our beliefs today.
00:53:57
Speaker
a bit more sort of solidity and believability in a sense. And clearly, I mean, the middle of the year, the death of the sun, all that sort of thing has been something that people are worried about forever. But again, a bit like Star Car and the deer frontlets. I mean, to make a connection between, say, New Grange and Father Christmas or, you know, Christmas ritual is such a massive stretch.
00:54:25
Speaker
it is, except for, you know, it's the Northern Hemisphere and things get, we get shorter days in mid-winter. And that's it. And there's the endless recreation of reasons, or attempts, magical attempts to get the sun back again. Even as you say, when, you know, religion has made a much bigger impact or science has made a much bigger impact as well. It's just
00:54:55
Speaker
Christmas feels like. It inspires this kind of storytelling and it makes us make links with these past traditions, sometimes furiously. It does. There's also this need to make what was almost purely a secular holiday, really, from the early modern times. It was
00:55:19
Speaker
Yeah, there were obviously religious aspects to it, but huge amount of secularization, not necessarily pagan, it doesn't go, you know, but there's a lot of secular traditions to do with Christmas. And of course, from the 19th century, these include things like the tree and stuff like that. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
00:55:37
Speaker
Christmas of all the festivals is that great sort of blending of Christianity and non-Christian pre-Christian. But I mean, we shouldn't ever think that Christianity came out of nowhere. I mean, it had its own
00:55:51
Speaker
set of histories which were based in some of these pre-Christian belief. And it's interesting also that the 19th century version of Christmas almost really helps to solidify that idea of the nativity as well because it became such a family holiday instead of a family festival and not a festival of revelry and with your community and the people around you and your neighbors and so on, but a family get together again.
00:56:19
Speaker
Yeah, no, we're all we're all in our own homes. And as you say, family is is being celebrated almost as much as everything being being safe and safe and warm and protected from the dark and the evil forces of the universe.
00:56:35
Speaker
Well, we could, of course, talk for much longer, but I think we're going to have to draw things to a close. I hope you've enjoyed listening and thank you so much for talking to me, Chris. It's been really brilliant. I've really enjoyed it. It was a really interesting conversation. Thank you. You're very welcome. Well, no, I'm very welcome. It's a privilege to have you on. Thank you. No, pleasure.
00:57:06
Speaker
So I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Thank you for listening. I think that I want to give a plug again for Chris's book, which is The History of Magic, but also for another book which is called The Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton.
00:57:24
Speaker
which is really fascinating look at the traditions in mainly Britain, but also sometimes in Ireland as well, about the traditions that happened throughout the year. And the first or about seven or eight chapters are all about Christmas, because it was such a fascinating time.
00:57:44
Speaker
And I've drawn on some of the stuff in that book for this podcast. So I'll put the links to that in the show notes as well as to all the books that we discussed today. Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol, John Macefield's The Box of Delights, Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising, and Terry Pratchett's The Hogfather.
00:58:03
Speaker
If you haven't read any of these, or maybe one or other of them, give them a try this Christmas. Why not? Let us know what you thought of them as well. If we didn't look at your favourite Christmas book that features magic and possibly pre-historical leanings, then tell me about that as well. I'd love to hear about it. Maybe I'll do it next year. Merry Christmas, everyone.
00:58:36
Speaker
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00:58:49
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.