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Diarmaid MacCulloch, the eminently readable author of numerous books on ecclesiastical history, gave his bestselling work on the history of Christianity the provocative subtitle ‘The first three thousand years’, making the point that there is much in Christian ritual and iconography that is drawn from pre-Christian practice.
The Catholic Church makes no bones about this. When Pope Gregory I (Gregory the Great; AD 590-604) sent St Augustine of Canterbury on a mission to convert the English to Christianity, he recognised the difficulty of eradicating established cultural practices. Seeking to provide continuity for the new English converts, he advised Augustine not to destroy pagan shrines but to cleanse them with holy water, install relics, and convert them to Christian churches.
Pope Gregory based his advice on the successful Roman practice of syncretism: the integration of local deities into the state religious pantheon. Gregory also recommended adapting local ceremonies and festivals, and this pragmatic approach is often cited as a key method by which Christianity expanded during the early Middle Ages.
In this light, it is perhaps understandable that English Heritage should recently have linked the celebration of Christmas on 25 December to the pagan festival of Sol Invictus (the Invincible Sun), marking the rebirth of the sun after the solstice. The charity was soundly criticised for this in some parts of the press, however, just as it was in March 2025, when its Easter Adventure Quest booklet for children proclaimed that Easter started as a celebration of spring when people ‘welcomed warmer days and new life by honouring the goddess Eostre, who gave Easter its name’.
Key calendar dates
English Heritage would have been well-advised to consult a former trustee – Professor Ronald Hutton – for a historically informed view of such matters as these. In Stations of the Sun: a history of the ritual year in Britain, Ronald says that the sole medieval reference to Eostre occurs in Bede’s Temporum Ratione (The Reckoning of Time), written in the 7th century AD, where the Northumbrian monk records the names by which the months are known in English, along with his thoughts on their etymology. April is named ‘Eosturmonath’, he wrote, ‘after a goddess called Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month’.
It was Jacob Grimm, co-author (with his brother Wilhelm) of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, who elaborated on Bede’s etymological speculation, noting the linguistic similarity between Eostre and Easter. Writing in his book Teutonic Mythology (1835), he speculated that Eostre was a fertility goddess related to various Indo-European dawn deities, such as the Greek Eos, Roman Aurora, and Indian Ushas.
Ronald’s book points out that there is no independent evidence that such a goddess ever existed, arguing that ‘Eosturmonath’ might simply mean the ‘month of spring’. Early Christian writings contain no references to pagan antecedents for this particular festival, and instead explicitly and repeatedly connect Easter with Passover, references to which in the Gospels were used to determine that the Crucifixion occurred on 25 March. Because of the widespread belief that Jesus was conceived on the same date as he died, it followed that the Annunciation and conception also took place on 25 March and that the Nativity therefore took place nine months later, on 25 December.
These and other key dates in the life of Christ were brought together by the monk Dionysius Exiguus who, in AD 525, proposed a new Christian calendar, starting with AD 1 as the year of Jesus’ birth. This was adopted by the Council of Tours in AD 567, and 25 March was thereafter designated as the official first day of the Christian year.
Double dates for New Year
For later generations, the relevance of all this is that 25 March, known as Lady Day, became the official date of the New Year for legal purposes – the day on which rents were paid, contracts made, and periods of employment begun or ended. Double dating is hence often found in historical narratives (for example, the date of the execution of Charles I is sometimes given as 30 January 1648/1649 because the year did not then end until 24 March 1648), but this changed when Britain switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, establishing New Year’s Day as 1 January.
In Pisa, New Year’s Eve continues to be celebrated twice a year: on 25 March according to the Calendario Pisano and on 1 January according to the Gregorian calendar, which Tuscany adopted on 20 November 1749. Costumed parades and religious services mark the March date, and the highlight is the ceremony of the sunbeam, when a ray of sunlight enters Pisa Cathedral from an aperture in the dome at noon.
Originally, when the dome was completed in the 1380s, the sunbeam lit a spot in front of the high altar. Alterations made to the cathedral during the 17th century ended this effect, but it was revived in the late 1980s, using a different window and a different target – an egg-shaped mark on the pillar next to Giovanni Pisano’s magnificent pulpit.
The lesson from all of this is that events in many cultures do tend to cluster around the dates of the midsummer and midwinter solstice, as well as the spring and autumn equinox, and many are no doubt of very ancient origin, but proving continuity or a direct connection is virtually impossible to achieve.
The mistake made by English Heritage was to present as ‘fact’ what is actually folklore, and of relatively recent date. Indeed, in Queens of the Wild: pagan goddesses in Christian Europe (2022), Ronald Hutton shows that many of our ideas about the continuity of pagan practice date from the formation of the Folklore Society in 1878 and from the lasting influence of Sir James Frazer’s multi-volume work The Golden Bough (1890), which sought the origin of all religions in the nature’s seasonal cycle of death and rebirth.
Poisonous books
First editions of The Golden Bough can be purchased for around £1,000 in handsome gold-and-green bindings. Fortunately, these are not the bright green covers that publishers began to use in the 19th century for the first mass-produced books, which replaced expensive leather covers with more affordable cloth bindings. Those bindings in an eye-catching emerald-green colour indicate the use of arsenic mixed with copper.
In the past, tens of thousands of books in public and university libraries with vivid green covers have been isolated as a precautionary measure to protect those handling them from the potentially serious side effects of contact with the toxic pigment. Testing for arsenic was previously slow and expensive, but Graham Bruce and Morgan Facchin, scientists from the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St Andrews, have now developed a hand-held device that uses light to detect the unique reflectance pattern from arsenic in a fraction of a second.
The technique can also be used to test 19th-century clothing, candles, and wallpaper for arsenic content, although an article in Issue 1 of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Journal of Environmental Monitoring (published in 2005) described the story of the mass-poisoning of Victorians by arsenical wallpapers and household furnishings as ‘an urban myth’.
Fresh thinking
Sherds has stumbled across an unmissable opportunity for changing the thinking of ministers, senior ‘officials’ (the title that civil servants like to be known by), and ‘global experts’ (whatever those are). The Battcock Institute at Downing College in Cambridge has been launched to provide a ‘safe space’ where harassed policymakers (poor things) can spend time away from the Westminster rat race to develop fresh thinking and to break away from predictable ideas. Dr David Halpern, the Institute’s Director, told The Times that such policy retreats will appeal because of the ‘raw glamour’ of Cambridge: ‘it’s a beautiful place… it’s got beautiful rooms, it’s got very nice dinners’.
He also wants to invite ‘the crazy, awkward squad’, to offer ‘annoying’ challenges to received opinions: ‘phenomenally valuable people who are kind of cognitive disruptors of a system’. Sherds can think of a number of archaeologists who fit that description. The only problem is that the Battcock Institute’s website gives no indication of how to apply, and it seems that the cost of a two-week policy retreat (with nice dinners) is likely to be at least £6,500. As Private Eye would say (quoting George and Ira Gershwin): ‘nice work if you can get it’.
