Blavatsky on Christmas and the Christmas Tree

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 10 pages

Written for the December 1879 number of The Theosophist and timed so that it would reach Western subscribers in the middle of the festivities it describes. Its subject is Christmas then and Christmas now, and the opening survey is affectionate before it is critical: holly and ivy in every house and evergreens in the churches, a custom taken from the Druids so that sylvan spirits might flock to the evergreens and remain unnipped by frost until a milder season.

The argument turns on a contrast anyone can check. Set the waxen infant in its bejewelled cradle, the Virgin in satin and pearl as Queen of Heaven, against the worm-eaten manger of a country inn where the Gospel places the birth, and the display tallies ill with the contempt for riches of one who had nowhere to lay his head — making it harder, she notes, to read the eye of the needle as anything but a rhetorical threat. From there she makes a comparative point about liturgical language, setting the Latin the Roman parishioner cannot follow beside the Sanskrit the modern Hindu devotee cannot follow and the Zend unknown to the Parsi, and observing that all three priesthoods are thereby left free to evolve new dogma out of their own fancy.

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