Pagan christmas. Winter feasts of the Kalasha of the Hindu Kush

The volume, the fruit of long-term fieldwork, analyzes in detail the winter ritual cycle of the Kalasha people of the Birir valley, located in Chitral, north-western Pakistan. The Kalasha are the last polytheistic people of the Hindu Kush, a small population of mountain dwellers of special interest not only for anthropology but also for religious studies and Indo-European studies because it offers the only living example of Indo-European "paganism". It is indeed the only religion practiced by speakers of an Indo-European language that was never absorbed by any of the great historical religions - Hinduism, Islam, Christianity - that have moulded the thought and the social organizations of all other peoples belonging to that large linguistic family. After providing a detailed description and interpretation of the rituals centered around the winter solstice festival, the author embarks on a long comparative journey seeking parallelisms in popular Hinduism, pre-Christian European paganisms and, with the neccessary caution, in the ancient Indo-European culture as tentatively reconstructed by linguists and archaelogists.