Hiram and Father Christmas/Santa Claus

Do you believe in Father Christma/Santa Claus? And do you believe in Hiram? Strange questions at first glance, but not so much on closer inspection. Hiram and Father Christmas/Santa Claus are both legendary figures with a very limited historical basis, but whose symbolic impact cannot be denied. While it would be difficult to compare Hiram and Father Christmas/Santa Claus in terms of the depth of their meaning, they do share one characteristic: they are syncretic figures, born from the combination of several symbolic figures who have risen to the rank of quasi-divinities in a secularised world.

A religious background 

Both Hiram and Father Christmas/Santa Claus have a clear religious origin. Hiram is a biblical character who appears in the story of the construction of Solomon's Temple, of which the Bible offers us two versions (I Kings 5 to 7 and II Chronicles 2 to 4). However, the Masonic Hiram is quite different from the biblical figure whose name he bears, and has evolved considerably in the legend of the rank of Master.

Father Christmas/Santa Clause can be traced back to Saint Nicholas, Bishop of Myre (c. 270-343), a saint initially venerated in the Orthodox Churches, whose cult reached the West in the 11th century and developed particularly in Northern Europe and in the countries of Germanic culture.

These two figures, however, went far beyond their historical religious framework and took on a much wider symbolic dimension.

From biblical Hiram to legendary Hiram 

In the earliest version of the building of the Temple (First Book of Kings), Hiram plays a rather minor role, especially late in the story. The chronology of this first account is as follows : Solomon asks King Hiram of Tyre for help in building the Temple, and Hiram agrees to supply him with cedar and cypress wood. We are told how the work was organised under the direction of a high official called Adoniram. We are then shown the construction of the Temple and its dimensions, stating that it was completed in seven years, and Solomon himself appears as the master builder. Solomon then builds his own palace, which takes thirteen years. It is only at this point that the text tells us that Solomon asked for Hiram, the son of a widow from the tribe of Naphtali and a Tyrian father, to be sent to him : this highly gifted foundryman made all the liturgical furnishings in bronze, including the two pillars B and J. It is therefore clear that Hiram only appears in the First Book of Kings when the building is completed and that he merely decorates it. There is no further mention of him once his work is finished, and there is nothing to suggest that he died on the building site.

In the Second Book of Chronicles, the name Hiram becomes Huram, both for the king of Tyre and for the craftsman who is called Huram-Abi. This time he is the son of a widow from the tribe of Dan and a Tyrian father, and his skills are more extensive : he works not only with bronze but also with gold, silver, iron and cloth. Huram of Tyre sends him to Solomon at the very beginning of the project. However, he does not play a major role in the rest of the story, which only credits him with making the bronze liturgical objects, including the two pillars. Otherwise, Solomon is again portrayed as the sole builder. Here the narrative is tighter, omitting the building of Solomon's palace and ignoring the character of Adoniram.

The figure of Hiram is therefore far from dominating the account of the construction of the Temple, and the ancient operative masons clearly did not recognise him as the chief architect of the site. In fact, the English Old Charges never mention Hiram by name. Some state that the architect of the Temple was the son of King Hiram of Tyre, but do not name him Hiram. The architect of the Temple often remains anonymous or is called Aynon or Aymon. It is not until Dumfries MS no. 4, c. 1710, that the name Hiram appears for the first time to designate the craftsman who worked for Solomon. He was indeed sent by King Hiram of Tyre, the son of a widow of the tribe of Naphtali, and it is stated that he was brought from Egypt. But there is still no mention of his murder, at least not explicitly. At most, one question might suggest that he might have died : 'Q where layes ye master A in a stone trough under ye west window looking to ye east waiting for ye son rising

to sett his men to work.' The stone trough may resemble a sarcophagus, but it is from there that the Master sends his men to work. Does this mean that the Master of the Lodge takes the place of Hiram, who has risen from the grave? It is not yet clear.

Hiram

In the Graham MS of 1726 we find Hiram again as a workman on the temple. There is no mention of his death, but for the first time the idea appears that a wage dispute among the workmen led Solomon to set words for the different Degrees so that each would receive the wages to which he was entitled. But much more than that, it is this manuscript that reveals the legend of the discovery of Noah's body by his three sons, his raising by five points and the choice of a word in M B (in this case 'There is yet marrow in this bone'). All the elements were there to make up the Hiram legend as we know it today : a claim for a wage, a compromised word, a dead man, a body to be found and raised, a new word to be defined.

It was clearly by this time that the legend had become established, since the Wilkinson manuscript of 1727 explicitly mentions Hiram's tomb, and the Masonry Dissected of 1730, the story of Hiram's murder, the search for his body, his raising by the five points and the choice of the M B word are known to the Freemasons of the Premier Grand Lodge of London.

The Masonic figure of Hiram is therefore a composite one. Originally, of course, there was the biblical figure that adorned the Temple of Solomon. But other figures were superimposed on him. First of all, probably, Adoniram, Solomon's chief workman, the man who directed the workmen; a French Masonic movement of the eighteenth century, the Adonhiramite Freemasonry, made Adoniram (spelt Adonhiram) the hero of the third degree. It is perhaps from the story of Adoniram that the idea of murder comes, for in the Bible the chief labourer Adoram (generally identified with Adoniram) is stoned to death by the wrath of the people during a social conflict between the people and Solomon's successor, Rehoboam (I Kings 12, 1-19). Then comes the curious story of the discovery of the body of Noah, which provides the ritual basis for the raising to the Master Mason degree. Finally, in the nineteenth century, the esoteric figure of the murdered god reborn was superimposed on Hiram and he was compared, almost divinised, to Christ, Osiris, Mithras and Adonis. From this perspective, some saw Hiram as an allegory of the annual revolution of the Sun, which descends under the signs of Libra, Scorpio and Sagittarius, represented by the Three Evil Companions, only to be reborn under Capricorn.

From the Holy Bishop of Myre to Father Christmas/Santa Claus

If the legendary Hiram is the result of the superimposition of several characters or concepts, the same can be said of Father Christmas/Santa Claus. The character himself can be traced back to Saint Nicholas of Myra, a bishop who took part in the Council of Nicaea in 325, the first ecumenical, or universal, council. His cult is attested in the Christian East as early as the 6th century and spread to the West as early as the 11th century, when his relics were transferred to Bari in Italy. Some of his bones were taken to Lorraine and Freiburg (Switzerland), which explains why his veneration was particularly widespread in the German-speaking world.

Saint Nicholas is said to have distributed his gifts to the poor, and in the West the most popular legend about him is that of the three children : three lost children found shelter with a butcher who then killed them, cut them up and put them in the salting room. Saint Nicholas resuscitated the children and granted forgiveness to the butcher. Saint Nicholas became the patron saint of children. Saint Nicholas' benevolent relationship with children and his great generosity have given rise to a widespread custom in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Lorraine and Alsace : on 6 December, the day of Saint Nicholas, a man dressed as a bishop, with a crozier and a mitre, goes from house to house giving sweets to good children. Since the 16th century, he has often been accompanied by a companion known in French as le Père Fouettard (the bogeyman) : this figure, dressed in black and sometimes with a black face, often looks like a boor or a coalman and carries sticks or a whip.

While Saint Nicholas rewards well-behaved children, the bogeyman is there to punish those who are not. Sometimes likened to a Moorish slave, he is often seen as the evil butcher of legend who has repented and accompanies Saint Nicholas on his rounds. In the canton of Vaud in Switzerland, this role was given to an old woman called the Chauchevieille, a kind of witch who accompanied the man known in the region as the Bon-Enfant.

Saint Nicolas distributing gifts

After Protestantism rejected the cult of saints, the custom of celebrating Saint Nicholas survived in the Netherlands in a secularised form, Sinterklaas, which lost its episcopal attributes. The same happened in the other Protestant countries, where St Nicholas lost his mitre and crozier and donned a hooded robe, often red, a forerunner of today's Father Christmas/Santa Claus outfit. It was the secularised form of Sinterklaas that crossed the Atlantic with Dutch emigrants and gave rise to the American Santa Claus, popular from the early 19th century.

But why was the figure of Saint Nicholas, celebrated on 6 December, transformed into Father Christmas/Santa Claus, a figure associated with Christmas, celebrated on 25 December since 336 AD ? This is clearly a complex syncretic process, which we will try to understand. There are elements of Roman, Christian and possibly Germanic origin.

On the Roman side, there was the Saturnalia, which took place between 17 and 23 December in honour of Saturn, the god of the underworld. It was a time of feasting, eating and giving, during which houses were decorated with holly, mistletoe and ivy. As a carnival, this time of year reversed social values and temporarily abolished the differences between men and women, masters and slaves. In 274, the Emperor Aurelian added the 25th of December to the celebrations to commemorate the birth of Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun, giving the festivities a distinctly solsticial dimension.

On the Western Christian side, we know that the celebration of the birth of Christ (Christmas) was officially set for 25 December in 336. This date had been in use in some regions since the 2nd century, but the decision in 336 was clearly intended to counteract the cult of Sol Invictus. As for Saturnalia, a reminder of it can be found in the Middle Ages in the form of the Feast of Fools, of which there are various forms in Europe. In northern France, an Episcopus Stultorum (Bishop of Fools) was elected from among the young, sometimes called the Abbé de Liesse, the English equivalent of which is Lord Disrule. Originally, the clergy took part in these festivities and allowed themselves to be ridiculed. From 26 to 28 December, the Bishop of the Fools and his court of young men reigned supreme with the utmost indecency. Excesses of all kinds, disturbances and even crimes were not uncommon, and the first local ecclesiastical condemnations came as early as the 12th century, but these practices continued in some towns until the 17th century. It seems that in order to counteract the Festival of Fools, the Church sought to move the good-natured festivities associated with Saint Nicholas to the period after Christmas. Thus, the king of the festivities was no longer a wanton young man who overturned moral values, but a wise old bishop who rewarded virtue and punished vice.

Morals were safe. And the figure who was to become Father Christmas, though old, still retained some of his youthful features : he is eternally young and old, like the sun, which is constantly renewed.

Finally, some believe that Santa Claus borrowed part of his identity from pagan Germanic traditions, seeing him as an avatar of the Germanic-Scandinavian god Odin. These Nordic references would explain why Father Christmas/Santa Claus has a boreal dimension and is said to live at the North Pole. Of course, we can't completely rule out a form of reminiscence born of the collective unconscious, but there is no historical evidence to support this hypothesis. What's more, it originated in the second half of the 19th century in the völkisch current of German nationalism that culminated in Nazism. The Nazis set out to de-Christianise Christmas by trying to link it to their fantasies of ancient Germanic paganism. This eminently ideological vision, with no real historical basis, can be found today in certain neo-pagan circles (Wicca and others), which share the same de-Christianisation project in the name of a reinvented neo-paganism served up in a New Age sauce.

A study of the historical and traditional sources of the figure does not explain why Father Christmas/Santa Claus has spread throughout the world, freeing himself from his religious roots. The answer lies in the United States. We often hear that it was a Coca-Cola advertising campaign in 1931 that created the modern Santa Claus. This is a misleading statement, although it is true that Coca Cola can be seen as the main agent in the worldwide spread of the figure of Santa Claus. In fact, the Father Christmas/Santa Claus we know, dressed in red (but sometimes yellow or green), is clearly documented in 19th century America. Derived from the Dutch Sinterklaas, he became particularly popular after the American Civil War (1861-1865). America was torn apart and needed positive symbols to unite it. President Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) therefore decreed that Christmas would henceforth be a national holiday. But this was less a Christian Christmas than an expression of a secularised civil religion that extolled the values of family, charity, generosity, forgiveness and kindness. Santa Claus naturally became the patron deity of this modern, secular Christmas. 

Mercantilism was to spread this new secular quasi-divinity around the world. And although today Father Christmas/Santa Claus seems to be inseparable from the Christmas festivities, his adoption was not without resistance. On 23 December 1951 for example, Mgr Sembel (1883-1964), Bishop of Dijon in France, had an effigy of Father Christmas hung and burnt in front of his cathedral, calling him a usurper and a heretic !

Is Hiram a Masonic Father Christmas/Santa Claus ?

Admittedly, this question is a little provocative, but it deserves to be asked. Does this mean that Freemasons who "believe in Hiram" are comparable to children who believe in Father Christmas ? Of course not! The figures of Hiram and Father Christmas are very different in terms of who they are intended for. Santa Claus is a figure for children and, more generally, for the population as a whole. He embodies values of generosity and benevolence that Freemasons will have no difficulty in accepting, but he is an exoteric reality with only a very distant connection to the sacred. His religious roots, his links with solstice celebrations and his probable symbolic assimilation to the sun have all been forgotten, and all that remains of him is a consensual figure widely exploited by commercialism. At best, for adults, he evokes nostalgia for childhood, for a time when the world was wonderful and enchanting, and embodies a kind of welcome respite from the difficulties and trials of life.

Hiram, on the other hand, plunges us into a drama far removed from the smell of gingerbread that permeates Father Christmas's world. The Masonic Hiram, like Santa Claus, is a fictional character who can claim no more historicity than Santa Claus : but he does not offer us an escape from reality through nostalgia for the sweets of childhood. On the contrary, he confronts us with the world at its most violent and shows us the tragic fate of a man who remains faithful to his ideal at the cost of his own life. And the esoteric teaching of the Hiram legend is that we must die to ignorance, violence and greed in order to build the temple of humanity.

But in both cases we see that an imaginary character can have a great impact on our lives. Imagination is an essential human dimension, and these two legendary figures remind us of this in their own way. A better world can only be created if we are first able to imagine it, and in this respect Hiram and Father Christmas have much in common. But Santa Claus offers us no means of making our dreams come true, and remains rather disembodied in his optimism. Hiram, on the other hand, shows us a path, a path of suffering, of renunciation, of death to illusions: and it is only when we have reached the end of this path of suffering that he shows us the light that should illuminate the world of our dreams.