PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

In the days of the emperor Arcadius, long after the rest of the region had been thoroughly Christianized, the city of Gaza remained proudly, defiantly, faithful to the Old Ways, its eight temples daily thronged with worshipers.

At the heart and center of pagan Gaza stood the Marneion, the marble-clad temple of Zeus Marnas, famed for its size and beauty. Though latterly identified with the Greek Zeus, the god of this temple (Aramaic Mâr-nâ, “our Lord”) was none other than the old Canaanite Thunderer, Ba'al Hadad himself, god of that place for more than 3000 years.

So few Christians were there among the Gazans that, when the city's newly-appointed bishop, Porphyrius, arrived to take charge, he could find only a handful in a city of several hundred thousand inhabitants.

In those days, when a new bishop rode into his city for the first time, it was customary to give him a triumphal welcome, the road before him strewn with branches and palm fronds, the air perfumed with incense. On March 21, 395, however, the people of Gaza gave Porphyrius a satirical entry instead. They strewed the road before him with thorns, fouled the air with burning cowpies, and met him with jeers instead of the expected hymns.

Porphyrius burned hot with anger, but the emperor would brook no interference with the city or its ways. Gaza was a wealthy city, and paid its taxes faithfully, fattening the imperial treasury with its annual revenues.

Porphyrius soon ingratiated himself with the empress, predicting that she would soon bear a son. When she did so, after the child's baptism, he was finally given the permission he had long sought to destroy the temples of Gaza.

Imperial troops entered the city on May 12 in the year 400. The plunder and rapine continued unabated for twelve days and nights. When they were finished, pagan Gaza was no more.

The Sun goes away. The Moon goes away. What do you do?

Obviously, you make fire magic. That's the logic underlying Hanuka.

We hear much of the pagan roots of Christmas; rarely, if ever, do we hear of the pagan roots of Hanuka. But that doesn't mean that they're not there.

In most years, the Jewish Festival of Lights spans the dark of the Moon closest to the Winter Solstice. Dark of the Sun, Dark of the Moon. So we make light to bring back Light, every night more light, until the Moon comes back and we know that the Cycle has been renewed.

Whew.

Rabbinical accounts make it clear that, as is usual with Jewish holidays, the holiday itself came first, with the historical etiology—the Maccabees and their trick oil cruet—added later to “sanctify” the old nature holiday.

Though I can't prove it, I suspect that what we see in contemporary Hanuka is the latter-day descendant of an old pan-Mediterranean Winter Solstice celebration. If we could travel back 3500 years to the temple-palace of Knossos at the time of the dark Moon nearest the Winter Solstice, I'm guessing that in the House of the Double Ax, we'd find oil-lamps in the windows and bonfires in the courtyards. Probably there would have been garlands of greenery decking the courts and doorways as well, since this was pretty much de rigueur for any special occasion in those days.

Chances are that they would have been eating fried foods as a special festival treat. The olive harvest, the last harvest of the growing season, would then have been newly finished; with the pressing of the olives would have come the year's greatest abundance of new oil.

So, probably, in additional to the usual singing and dancing, we'd have been eating some sort of fried holiday goodie similar to the banuelos of Sfardic Jewry: deep-fried dough soaked in honey syrup, and dusted with crushed almonds. The gifts of the olive: richness and light.