The Stories That Survive Conversion
This is the fifth essay in a series on myth, memory, and what our ancestors knew. Previously: The Mountain That Waits, The Wolf You Were Warned About, Blood Memory, and What the Dead Expect From Us.
The Swedish word for Christmas is jul. It’s a term with no Christian etymology at all. It predates the conversion by centuries, and in the soft power takeover the name managed to stay. The rituals shifted, the theology changed, but the word held, and so did quite a lot else.
This is one way for old systems to survive new ones. They don’t resist, they adapt. They put on the new clothing and keep the old body underneath. And if you know where to look, the old ways are still there.
What the Church Couldn’t Kill
When Christianity arrived in Scandinavia, it faced a practical problem. The people it was trying to convert already had a functioning religious calendar, a set of rituals tied to the agricultural year, and a deep attachment to places, springs, groves, and hills that had been considered sacred for longer than anyone could remember. The missionaries had two options: destroy everything and start over, or absorb what was already there and redirect it.
The midwinter feast became Christmas, placed on a date that had nothing to do with the actual birth of Christ and everything to do with the solstice celebrations already happening across Northern Europe. The sacred springs became holy wells blessed by saints. The old harvest festivals became church holidays. Keep the rhythm, change the name, and let the generations to come believe they were doing something new when they were really doing something very old.
In the Falköping region of Sweden, where I filmed the first episode of our documentary series, there’s a tradition called the Staffan’s Ride — Staffansritten. On the day after Christmas, riders would move from farm to farm on horseback, watering their horses at a spring called Horskällan that flows from the base of Ålleberg, one of the old plateau mountains. The tradition is nominally Christian — Staffan is Saint Stephen, the first martyr. But the ride itself, the horses, the sacred spring, the midwinter timing — none of that is Christian, it’s older. The church attached a saint’s name to a ritual that was already happening, and the ritual continued with a new label.
The Alpine Krampus — the horned, fur-clad figure who accompanies Saint Nicholas — is straightforwardly pre-Christian. The Yule goat in Scandinavian Christmas traditions has more to do with Thor than the manger in Bethlehem.
What the Old Architecture Actually Did
The pre-Christian calendar was built on the movement of the sun and the agricultural cycle, the things that determined whether your family survived the winter. The rituals attached to it marked time, organized labor, reinforced community bonds, and connected the living to the dead at specific moments when the boundary was said to be thin. They were functional in that they enforced reciprocity.
Even something as small as the Swedish Santa Claus which we still call Tomte, the gnome-like guardian of the farm, operated on this principle. You left him a bowl of porridge on Christmas Eve, and in return, he protected the household. If you neglected him, things went wrong — livestock fell sick, tools broke, small misfortunes accumulated. It was a relationship maintained through obligation on both sides.
The church, through its missionaries, chose not to rip out the functional architecture. They built on top of it. The church calendar mapped onto the solar calendar, and much of the underlying structure is still there.
The result was neither pure Christianity nor pure paganism. A Viking Age pendant from the post-conversion period merged Thor’s hammer and the Christian cross into a single piece. You can still see Scandinavians wearing them today. It was a layered system where the new theology provided the narrative. In the early days, people went to church on Sunday and left offerings at the spring on Tuesday, and saw no contradiction in this, because at some fundamental level both acts were doing the same thing — maintaining the relationship between the human world and whatever lies beyond it. The church didn't manage to put a serious stop to this until the 16th century — a thousand years after the conversion began.
What Breaks When You Remove Both Layers
When Christianity replaced the old Norse religion, it preserved the underlying architecture — the traditions and rituals survived in adapted form. What changed was the narrative on top, and narratives are replaceable in a way that deep structures are not.
So when secular modernity arrived, it didn’t just replace the Christian narrative. It dismantled the architecture underneath as well. The sacred calendar was replaced by the commercial calendar. The holy days became holidays, with no deeper meaning than days off work. The sacred places became heritage sites. The rituals became traditions in the weakest sense of the word, things that continue, though fewer and fewer could tell you why. And the reciprocity disappeared entirely. What remains of Christmas in its modern form is mostly consumption — a one-way flow where gifts are expected but nothing is owed in return. You could walk into a Swedish Christmas celebration today and see nothing that tells you it has anything to do with Christ.
The Staffan’s Ride still happens in parts of Sweden. But nobody waters their horses at Horskällan because they believe the spring carries the blessing of the warriors sleeping inside the mountain. They do it because it’s tradition. And in modern Sweden, that word has come to mean something closer to habit than to inheritance.
This is the difference between a living tradition and a dead one. A living tradition is connected to something — to Christ, to the land, to the dead, to a community’s understanding of its place in the world. A dead tradition is a costume with nobody inside it.
What Remains
The old layers are still there, for anyone willing to look. The word jul sits in the language, unchanged. The maypole still rises at Midsummer, and at Easter the Swedish kids dress up like witches.
They’re evidence of a system so deeply embedded that a thousand years of Christianity couldn’t remove it, and a hundred years of secularism hasn’t managed to either. The architectural structure outlasts the narrative.
The question is whether the architecture can survive without any narrative at all. Whether the deep structure holds when there’s nothing on top of it — no gods, no God, no story about why any of it matters.
No purpose.
As Nietzsche put it: Give a man a why, and he can bear any how.
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I am of the belief that a return to paganism would expedite patriotic and national revival.