Mark Green's Atheopaganism Blog

A mendicant is a beggar: a poor person who importunes others for money or other material support. In Pagandom, we remember many holiday traditions rooted in mendicant practices. This post is about the special wonders of traditions involving house-to-house beggary, and the deeper meanings associated with many of them.

I’m thinking about these traditions, and what they mean. What their function is. But to start with, let’s look at them!

First and most famously, there is Wassailing in England: the homes and the orchards. As well as…

Thomasing in England: The former custom of going from house to house on St Thomas’s day (December 21) to beg for small gifts (usually ingredients for Christmas dinner, such as flour). To the west there is…

The Mari Llwd Christmas tradition in southern Wales, with a horse-skull-headed hobby horse engaging in rap battles. And…

Trick or Treating in the United States, which is rather similar to…

Easter Witches in Sweden and Finland.

But it isn’t just the winter months that have mendicant traditions! Palm Sunday is the day for virvonta in Finland, one of those traditions where you can’t easily parse out the pagan and Christian origins. Children decorate twigs (traditionally willow twigs) and go door to door handing them out and blessing the recipients in exchange for treats. The traditional blessing goes like: “I wave a twig for a fresh and healthy year ahead; a twig for you, a treat for me!” (“Virvon varvon, tuoreeks terveeks, tulevaks vuodeks; vitsa sulle, palkka mulle!”).

There are many more such traditions, and not only in Europe. Places like the Philippines have their own door-to-door ways.

But what is the point of all this? Is it just fun and games for the sake of the seasons?

I don’t think so. I think that fundamentally, mendicant traditions are about gestures at redistribution of wealth.

Nature doesn’t just abhor a vacuum. Nature also abhors accumulated excesses of wealth.

Think about it: when we grow a garden, creatures of every sort will try their best to eat it. When we store tons of grain, likewise: flying creatures, scurrying creatures, climbing creatures, burrowing creatures will all take their shot at a share of the big prize.

Nature uses this function sometimes: in the creation of sweet fruit to help distribute seeds, or nectar in flowers to accomplish pollination. But those aren’t vast, unnatural accumulations of food like humans create through agriculture or mass hunting events. We’re pretty unique in that regard.

And nature will do its best to steal whatever it can from that unnatural mother lode and redistribute it.

Accumulation of vast sums of wealth is not a natural behavior. The impulse–to save–makes sense. Squirrels and acorn woodpeckers and other creatures do it.

But not huge, vast amounts of wealth so large that the creature could never possibly use it. That’s pathological, not natural.

I’ll say it again: the compulsion to hoard vast sums of wealth is pathological.

Now, I’m not talking about people whose worth is mostly a house and a retirement fund.

I’m talking about people who have hundreds of millions, and lust after more.

Billionaires, with very few exceptions, are pathological.

When there are huge disparities in resource availability, redistribution mechanisms will evolve. Ranging from the taking of blood by mosquitoes to human revolutions, they will occur.

Mendicant traditions are safety valves. By exercising a little “generosity”, the wealthy blunt the impulse of the poor simply to overthrow them and take their wealth.

And so, social order is maintained…which suits the wealthy, who created it, just perfectly of course.

So here we are, in late-stage capitalism wherein half of the wealth of the planet is held by 1,000 individuals, and the rest is headed there fast. Because that, after all, is what capitalism is for: to funnel wealth created by those who have only their labor to sell to those who have capital to invest with.

To create “more”, and ensure it ends up in the hands of those who already have more than enough.

I find mendicant traditions quaint and charming. They’re often whimsical, humorous, fun.

But the sequestration of wealth when there is so much deprivation in the world? That’s not humorous, whimsical, or fun.

That’s deadly serious. And pathological.

And sooner or later, something is going to give.

Because nature abhors those empty stomachs.

And those piles of wealth.