Festivals and ritual were dedicated to formidable beings - beings who were visible and seen, familiar in the camps and the towns, demanding, corrupting, and very very present and real.
Lesser gods were incorporated also and usually the deity presented was used merely as a spruik and facade for the demons; for the genuine planetary deities did not walk the Earth any more, and whilst their grace and composure was present in the forces of the World, in tissue and sinew, their living conscious beings would not and could not participate in the physical realm directly.
Every age that one is born to appears worse than the previous, and it may feel to be so, but in truth at the time of the birth - this very special birth - the world was in great peril. For it itself may have lost its soul and teetered on its cosmic path - persuaded by Humanity’s waywardness, reckless to divinity.
The forces of corruption are simple: the demonic forces of destruction are particular to themselves.
Every year following on the cycle of the world has this birth event added into it repeating and enlivening and reviewing what was once. The point of the birth was as dawn in the World where the darkness was evacuated and Divinity illumined. It began with the child who later became a man and then a God.And this is how it will be for every individual so told. We are as an infant and then as a child, and then upright in the human spirit, embracing our inner God.
This is a time for vision and dreaming and refuting the darkness that grips the soul and contests our World: in seeing the sun eking up the horizon and knowing that we have all been saved in time … and although it may take awhile to realise, it has been done.
Through the power and generosity that is Christ, we are whole and impermeable to that which would tear us apart.
Christmas is a time for all good things to recognize one another and separate out from the arcane glamour and treacherous destructive forces. For we have a celebration like no other infilling the expanses of the Cosmos, as the Kingdoms of Humanity rejoice.