Festival of the New Sun – December 25 Originally not an official festival, but celebrated by adherents to Mithraism as the birth of the new sun. The Emperor Aurelian was devoted to a single sun god and during his reign it became a public festival complete with chariot-racing in the Circus. He erected a temple to Sol Invictus in AD 274. Saturnalia – December 17 At first lasting only one day, Saturnalia was the Roman midwinter celebration of the Solstice* and the greatest of all the Roman annual holidays. In the late Republic it was extended to two or three days, celebrated over three days in the Augustan Empire and in the reign of Caligula extended to four. By the end of the first century AD, it was technically a five-day holiday celebrated in seven. A cry of Io Saturnalia! and a sacrifice of young pigs at the temple of Saturn inaugurated the festival. They were served up the next day when masters gave their slaves – who were temporarily immune from all punishments – a day off and waited on them for dinner. After dinner there was plenty of clowning and merriment with wine as a social lubricant, sometimes degenerating into wild horseplay. Dice were used to choose one person at the dinner as Saturnalian King – it could be a slave – and everyone was forced to obey his absurd commands to sing, dance or blacken their faces and be thrown into cold water and the like for the entire period. The dice may have been loaded in 54 AD, when Nero was so chosen. He used the opportunity to humiliate Claudius son Britannicus, apparently a poor vocalist, by forcing him to sing. It was traditional to deck the halls with boughs of laurel and green trees as well as a number of candles and lamps. These symbols of life and light were probably meant to dispel the darkness. It was also traditional for friends to exchange gifts and even to carry small gifts on ones person in the event of running into a friend or acquaintance in the streets or in the Forum. Originally the gifts were symbolic candles and clay dolls – sigillaria – purchased at a colonnaded market called Sigillaria which was located in the Colonnade of the Argonauts, later in one of the Colonnades of Trajans Baths. Something similar is still practiced in Romes Piazza Navona today. Gifts which could also include food items such as pickled fish, sausages, beans, olives, figs, prunes, nuts and cheap wine as well as small amounts of money grew to be more extravagant over time – small silver objects were typical – as did their acquisition. How modern the first century writer Seneca sounds when he complains about the shopping season: Decembris used to be a month; now its a whole year. At the same time, Martialis may have been the first sage to remark The only wealth you keep forever is that which you give away. Nor did the fun stop there. During the entire festival, the laws against gambling were relaxed so that everyone including slaves and children could gamble at dice and other games of chance, children using nuts for wagers. Men stopped wearing their uncomfortable togas in favor of the synthesis (a tunic with a small cloak both brightly-colored and also wearable by women) for the entire period and simply donned a felt cap, pilleum to show they were not slaves. Away from Rome, Romans still commemorated the festival. In Athens, academy students such as Aulus Gellius and his friends dined together for the occasion, much as American students in a European university may dine together on Thanksgiving Day. Roman mysteries featuring the Saturnalia festival: The Disappearance of the Saturnalia Silver by Steven Saylor Saturnalia (in German, Tödliche Saturnalien) by John Maddox Roberts Saturnalia by Danila Comastri Montanari Saturnalia by Lindsey Davis Solid Citizens by David Wishart The event has been depicted in this image of a painting by Antoine-François Callet. The Saturnalia can be seen as just one version of many different midwinter festivals created by various cultures around the world (could they all have a distant ur-origin in mans distant past?). To early cultures lacking electric lighting, the daily length of the daylight would be a much more significant issue than it is for our modern one. It is no wonder that the end of the shortening of days was greeted with exuberance and associated with the god Saturn who to the Romans signified abundance. This probably also explains why the Romans decided to locate the state treasury in his temple. Also, as part of the festivities, the normally-bound statue of Saturnus in the Forum was unfettered for the duration of the festival. The rites of the Saturnalia seem strange and difficult to explain. As Saturn was bequeathed to the Romans by the Etruscans, this calls into question their own origins. Many have identified them with the Pelasgians or Sea-Peoples of Asia Minor who were said to have migrated to the Italian peninsula. It is possible that the Etruscans were not even Indo-European speakers, although it is also possible that these migrants cohabitated with Indo-European groups which may have already been in Etruria. In any case these people founded the town of Saturnia in Etruria and were probably responsible for the introduction of Saturn to the Italian peninsula. Were they also responsible for the festival? Some have assumed that the festival was bequeathed, like so much else, to Rome by the Greeks, whose god Kronos was equated with Saturn. But the evidence for this is scanty as there is little in the Greek record to indicate a Saturnalic tradition. Note also that the name of the festival itself seems to indicate a non-Greek origin. In my opinion, it is more likely that we should look to the Etruscans for the perpetuation of the festival. Perpetuation rather than origination because it is clear that in ancient Mesopotamia there were traditional practices which pre-dated those of the Etruscans and Romans. There, over four thousand years ago, it was believed that the nadir of daylight was the weakest moment in an annual struggle between the chief god Marduk (or sometimes his predecessor, Enlil) and his enemies, monsters of chaos. The way of the world in their belief was sort of like a wind-up clock which by the end of year began to run down as seen by the dying harvested fields and waning sunlight. Death might overwhelm the world if Marduk did not rejoin and re-win his fight with the monsters below the earth. It is also apparent that the Saturnalia tradition did not arrive whole, but rather had a number of different antecedents, which themselves were changed and adapted over the centuries before it reached Rome. This should not come as any surprise for consider how much Saturnalia has been changed and adapted in comparison with the Christmas celebrations of our own day. I think that these many different traditions help to understand why some of the Saturnalia traditions, e.g. the unfettered god, are so contradictory or inexplicable. Again like our own Christmas, bits and pieces from a number of traditions from different times and places have been combined together, often without much conscious understanding or memory of their original purposes. In any case, Marduks struggle was not to be performed by the god alone. Ordinary people, it was felt, had a threefold role to play as well: (1) they were required to purify themselves of the evil that the past year had brought upon them, (2) they needed to renew the strength that the year had drained away and (3) if they failed in either of these, they would play it safe and try to find a scapegoat who could take the consequences. These roles had special significance for the king whose household represented the fortunes of the entire people. Under the direction of the priests there would be re-created the story of the creation of the world, at the end of which the king was supposed to die so as to accompany Marduk into the underworld and battle at his side. Among kings, unsurprisingly this was an unpopular ritual and the eventual inspiration for the idea of dressing a criminal as a mock king for a short time before killing him in the real kings place. At the same time, it was also tradition for another criminal to be set free. Perhaps this act of forgiveness and generosity lay behind the tradition of the unfettered god? Another of the traditions was the festival called Zagmuk. It included huge bonfires and burning of Marduks enemy in effigy. Bonfires are a logical development it seems of a festival held during the waning of the light. It was this festival also which seems to have inaugurated the exchange of gifts. In Persia and Babylon, the festival was called Sacaea. This appears to be the original tradition in which masters and slaves traded roles and in which one of the slaves was appointed head of the household. As played out in ancient Babylon, in proper season the king would repair to the temple dedicated to Marduk, be stripped of his insignia by the chief priest and swear that in the past year he had done nothing wrong. The chief priest then would speak for Marduk and re-invest the king with his kingdom. We can see how the priestly class simultaneously protected its power and provided an explanation for terrifying, unexplainable natural events. The Roman rationalization of the Saturnalia by the contemporary writer Macrobius can be found at De Saturno & Jano Tractatus (in English). The excesses of the Saturnalia were targeted by Christian writers from the second century, but its celebration survived well into the fifth. * Solstice is a Latin word, by the way, coming to English from Old French and then Middle English, and originally derived from sol sun + status, the past participle of sistere to come to a stop, cause to stand. This makes sense if you think about the solstice as the suns path reaching an endpoint and then turning around and going the other way. During the few days during which this direction change is occurring, it will appear that there is actually no movement at all
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 17:36:22 +0000
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