A Dutch Celebration of a Festival

The festival I am going to describe, which is celebrated in the catholic southern provinces of Holland, is the festival of the Innocents. It follows immediately on that of the birth of Jesus Christ and the Church celebrates it on the 28th day of December, with only the saint's days of St. Stephen the first martyr and St. John the Baptist, on the 26th and 27th, intervening between the festival of the Innocents and the festum nativitatis domini, Christmas Day. This close temporal relationship between the two festivals is explained by biblical history. The Innocents are the children King Herod commanded to be murdered in Bethlehem, in order to bring about the destruction of the newborn king of the Jews, of whom he had heard through the three Mages from the Orient. Meantime, however, the angel of the Lord had urged the holy family to take flight into Egypt, thus for the time being saving the new-born king of the Jews.

But there is a deeper meaning hidden behind the fact that the stoning of St. Stephen and the murdering of the Innocents has been commemorated by the Church in such close proximity to the date of the birth of the Saviour. The sacrificial death of Christ is thereby anticipated. Freud has taught us that according to the Talion principle we must conclude from the sacrificial death of Christ that the guilt expiated through him and which mankind has inherited — the original sin — must have been a murder and a parricide, if we take into account the abundant analogies in other religions, particularly in those of the primitives and in Totemism.

What St. Stephen's guilt was we are told in the Acts of the Apostles: … “Then they suborned men, which said, We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses, and against God. And they stirred up the people, and the elders, and the scribes, and came upon him, and caught him, and brought him to the council, And set up false witnesses, which said, This man ceaseth not to speak blasphemous words against this holy place, an