How old are modern pagan shindigs’ tangible roots? I thought it was all made up out of whole cloth around the turn of the (previous) century. Sure, it may be based on some scattered historical facts and gatherings, but dispel (heh) my ignorance here: all modern pagan rituals and rites are the product of modern woo-infatuated individuals and are merely ‘inspired by’ older practices, not a continuance of.
Note I don’t give a crap about quibbling with definitions. Haha, sure, the church and all trappings and festivals are actually pagan. Got it. That’s clearly not what I’m talking about.
Go look up Samhain; the timing and the similarities are pretty hard to ignore. All Saints Day (Nov 1) follows All Hallows Eve (Oct 31) right about the same time.
Christianity has a long history of syncretism (the word used to describe the Christian co-opting of pagan holidays and rituals); almost every major Christian holiday is placed squarely on top of an existing pagan one. That way, people could nominally celebrate the birth of Christ, while still celebrating Saturnalia, Yule, etc… for the first few generations, until they eventually were celebrating the birth of Christ with a lot of odd pagan trappings. Same goes for Christ’s death and resurrection, etc…
For example, the idea of a Christmas ham is distinctly pagan; originally, it was a Yule ritual as a offering to Freyr, and just sort of stuck around in places like England, Germany, etc…
These pagan holidays tended to be centered around either astronomical or agricultural life events. That’s why we have Yule, Christmas, Saturnalia, etc… all around the winter solstice, we have Easter, Passover, Nowruz, and Sham el Nessim all more or less around the vernal equinox. The Celtic holidays tend to be halfway between the equinoxes and solstices - Imbolc, Lughnasadh, Samhain and Beltane.
Well, we aren’t talking about new age style “paganism”, here, but about old established traditions. I don’t know for how long the Saint John fires have been around, but they certainly weren’t invented last century. And I doubt that anybody decided to create a pagan celebration during the 16th century or the middle ages, etc… So, I strongly suspect that these bonfires/firewheels/whatever they do locally are actual surviving pagan traditions.
I can’t think of an equally obvious tradition, apart from local ones where such or such place of worship (a fountain, for instance) has been in use for longer than Christianity has been in existence. If, say, women are supposed to become pregnant by drinking from the fountain or whatever, it’s likely that they have been drinking from it during the last 2000 years or so at least.
Christmas is probably the next best candidate, indeed, it taking place around the winter solstice and some older traditions (having people parading with lighted lamps or candles, for instance) seeming to be related to light. But it has been recycled so much by Church first and merchants second, that it bears little likeness to what it could have been originally. While Saint John day never has been a major religious holyday so probably stayed close to its original self.
Given the commonness of the basic search terms, I’m having trouble finding anything concrete about them. Where does the certainty that they “certainly weren’t invented last century” come from? Any cite that the traditions were regularly practiced (in their modern form) throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?
Although my knowledge of this is derived from old folklorist essays that you won’t find on the internet (or anywhere else, really) and anecdotal family knowledge (my grandmother wasn’t even born at the turn of the previous century, and was participating in these celebrations as a kid), it’s not difficult to find cites about this tradition. The first one that turned up, for instance, concerning Germany, from this page
On the other hand, I noted reading the corresponding wikipedia article that the burning of a witch effigy in the fire in northern Europe (mentioned by the OP, I believe) is a 20th century innovation