Santa Claus is an indispensable hero of the winter holidays, but we very rarely think about why he is so dear to us. The largest anthropologist of the twentieth century, Claude Levi-Strauss, revealed the amazing hidden meaning of New Year’s rituals. In Russian, excerpts from his essay are published for the first time.
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Claude Levi-Strauss (Claude Levi-Strauss), French ethnographer and anthropologist, a classic of structuralism – a trend that influenced all the humanities in the 1908th century. Born in Brussels in 2009, he died in Paris in October XNUMX at the age of XNUMX. His groundbreaking studies of the American Indian tribes laid the foundation for a theory of primitive thinking that fundamentally changed the Western understanding of culture. He was convinced that different civilizations are based on common mechanisms of understanding of the world – universal structures that unite humanity.
«Santa Claus is not a mythical creature, because there is no myththat tells about its origin and functions. This is not a legendary character either, because there is no semi-historical narrative associated with him. In fact, this supernatural and unchanging being, forever fixed in its form and defined by a unique function and periodic return, belongs rather to the family of deities. By the way, at certain periods of the year, children perform cult actions towards him in the form of letters and prayers: he rewards the good and leaves the evil without a gift. The only difference between Santa Claus and a real deity is that adults do not believe in him, although they encourage their children to believe in him and support this belief with many hoaxes.
Santa Claus expresses, first of all, the difference in status between childrenon the one hand, and adolescents and adults on the other. Indeed, there are few human groups in which, in one form or another, children (sometimes also women) have not been excluded from the society of men by ignorance of certain mysteries or by faith – carefully maintained – in some illusion that adults reserve the right to expose at the right time, thus marking the accession of younger generations to their community. Myths and rituals of initiation have a very definite practical function in human societies: they help the elders to keep the younger ones in subjection and maintain order among them. Throughout the year, we refer to the coming of Santa Claus to remind children that his generosity will be commensurate with their good behavior. And the periodic nature of the distribution of gifts makes it possible to subject children’s requests to a certain discipline, to reduce to a short period the time when they really have the right to demand gifts …
From Antiquity to the Middle Ages “December holidays” show the same features. First of all, the decoration of buildings with green plants; then exchanging gifts or giving gifts to children; fun and feasts; and, finally, fraternization between rich and poor, masters and servants. Moreover, in the Middle Ages, children did not stay patiently waiting for toys to come down to them through the chimney. Usually they dressed up and gathered in a crowd, went from house to house, singing and congratulating on the holiday, and in return they received fruits and pies. A significant fact: to reinforce their right to collect tribute, they reminded of death. The course of autumn is ritually accompanied by a dialectical action, the main stages of which are: the return of the dead, their threatening and annoying behavior, the establishment of a certain modus vivendi with the living on the basis of the exchange of services and gifts, and, finally, the triumph of life, when the dead, gratified by gifts, leave the living. leaving them alone until next fall. Anglo-Saxon countries willingly divide these relations into two extreme, opposing forms – Halloween, when children pretend to be dead to extort bribes from adults, and Christmas, when adults please children to activate their status as alive.
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But who can personify the dead in the society of the living, if not all those who in one way or another are not fully incorporated into the group, who participate in this otherness, which is the sign of the highest dualism – the dualism of the dead and the living? So it should not be surprising that foreigners, slaves and children become the main recipients of benefits. Low political or social status, age inequality provide equivalent criteria in this respect. And it is not surprising that Christmas and New Year (its counterpart) turn out to be holidays when gifts are given, because the festival of the dead is, in fact, the festival of others, since being different is the first approximate idea that we can form about death. Among our contemporaries, another attitude towards death continues to exist, perhaps not out of the traditional fear of spirits and ghosts, but out of fear of everything that death is as such in life: impoverishment, poverty, deprivation. Let us ask ourselves: why do we rush about with Santa Claus so much, why do we resort to such precautions and make sacrifices so that his prestige among children does not suffer?
Isn’t it true, inside of us lives the desire to believe, at least a little, into kindness without a second thought, into uncontrolled generosity, in a short period when all fears, envy and bitterness go aside for a while? Of course, we cannot fully share this illusion. But our efforts are justified: when it is supported by others, it gives us at least the opportunity to warm ourselves by the fire kindled in these young souls. The belief that we maintain in children that toys come to them from the other world provides an alibi for that secret movement of the soul that actually induces us to give them to the other world under the pretext of giving them to children. Gifts remain a real sacrifice that we bring the sweetness of life, and the main thing in it is not to die. From pagan prayers to the dead, we came to a prayer in half with spells addressed to young children – the messengers of the world of the dead in many traditional cultures – so that they, believing in Santa Claus, agreed to help us believe in life.
* Essay “Le Pere Noel supplicie” first published in Les Temps Modernes (No. 77, 1952). Lévi-Strauss talks in it about Père Noël, the French Santa Claus. Translation by Irina Shubina.
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