Saturnalia

“ The Saturnalia of the Romans are better known than those of the Allobroges and the Picts; because there are many Roman writings and monuments remaining, but there are none of the other nations of western Europe.
The feast of Saturn was the feast of Time. He had four wings; time flies quickly—his two faces evidently signifying the concluded and the commencing year. The Greeks said that he had devoured his father and that he devoured his children. No allegory is more reasonable. Time devours the past and the present, and will devour the future. ”

“ And a trace of the Sacred Marriage may perhaps be detected in the licence accorded to the human representatives of Saturn, a licence which, if I am right, is strictly analogous to the old orgies of May Day and other similar festivals. It is to be observed that Saturn was |Saturn the god of seed, and the Saturnalia a festival of sowing.| the god of the seed, and the Saturnalia the festival of sowing held in December, [1014] when the autumn sowing was over and the husbandman gave himself up to a season of jollity after the long labours of summer and autumn. ”

“ The wild revels of the Bacchanalia, the Saturnalia and the Twelve Nights survive in a milder form in the merriment and jollity which mark the season of Christmas to-day.
Christmas gifts themselves remind us of the presents that were exchanged in Rome during the Saturnalia. In Rome, it might be added, the presents usually took the form of wax tapers and dolls,—the latter being in their turn a survival of the human sacrifices once offered to Saturn.
It is a queer thought that in our Christmas presents we are preserving under another form one of the most savage customs of our barbarian ancestors! ”

“ These were all that remained of the habitation of Herr Hippe, the Wondersmith.
ROBA DI ROMA [Continued.]
CHAPTER IV. Lent.
The gay confusion of Carnival is over, with its mad tossing of flowers and bonbons, its showering of confetti, its brilliantly draped balconies running over with happy faces, its barbaric races, its rows of joyous contadine, its quaint masquerading, and all the glad folly of its Saturnalia. For Saturnalia it is, in most respects just like the festa of the Ancient Romans, with its Saturni septem dies, its uproar of "Io Saturnalia!" in the streets, and all its mad frolic. ”

“ There is not indeed, so far as I am aware, any direct evidence that the Saturnalia at Rome was an intercalary festival; but the license which characterized it, and the temporary reign of a mock king, who personated Saturn, suggest that it may have been so. If we were better acquainted with the intercalary periods of peoples at a comparatively low level of culture, we might find that they are commonly marked by similar outbreaks of lawlessness and similar reigns of more or less nominal and farcical rulers. ”

“ During the Saturnalia the world enjoyed, in thought at least, a perfect freedom. Men who had gone to bed as 27slaves, rose their own masters. From the ergastula and dismal sunless cages they went forth to ramble in the streets and fields. ”

“ The second chapter is full of the Fairy Tales of Antiquity; things which people used to relate round their fires during the ancient Saturnalia, just as our ancestors used to do at Christmas, and as boys read them still. And the Saturnalia were not only, to the ancients, what the Christmas holidays are to us, but [Pg 14] the veritable parents and progenitors of those holidays, as every antiquary knows. It is doubtful whether Macrobius, who wrote a Saturnalia, or Christmas Holiday Book, of his time, was a Pagan or a Christian ”

“ The Saturnalia were not 'saturnine.' Was the theory of a golden age under Saturn not a reflection from the festive period, 'the best day in the year,' says Catullus, which had become associated with the name of Saturn?
Our evidence for sacrifice or hanging of a mock-king is so meagre and shadowy (in one case the dubious [Pg 185] Dasius legend; in the other what Athenæus cites from Berosus, coupled with what Dio puts into the mouth of Diogenes, and with what Strabo tells about the Sacæa) that the ground will not bear the weight of Mr. Frazer's high-piled, eighteen-storied castle of hypotheses. ”

“ All shall be served with the same wine.... Every man's portion of meat shall be alike.
When the rich man shall feast his slaves, let his friends serve with him. ”{11}
Over the whole festival brooded the thought of a golden age in the distant past, when Saturn ruled, a just and kindly monarch, when all men were good and all men were happy.
A striking feature of the Saturnalia was the choosing by lot of a mock king, to preside over the revels. ”

“ Saturn and Ops were husband and wife, and to them we owe the introduction of corn and fruits; for which reason the feast was not held till the harvest and fruit time were over. The vows offered to this goddess were made sitting on the ground, to show that she was Earth, the mother of all things.
The Saturnalia were festivals in honour of Saturn, celebrated the 16th or 17th, or, according to others, the 18th of December. They were instituted long before the foundation of Rome, in commemoration of the freedom and equality which prevailed on earth in the golden reign of Saturn. ”

“ We need not linger over this feast, for it was not attended by folk-customs, and there is nothing to connect it with modern survivals. The Roman festivals that really count for our present purpose are the Kalends of January and, probably, the Saturnalia. The influence of the Kalends is strongest naturally in the Latin countries, but is found also all over Europe. The influence of the Saturnalia is less certain; the festival is not mentioned in ecclesiastical condemnations after the institution of Christmas, and possibly its popularity was not so widespread as that of the Kalends. ”

“ We have found evidence that festivals of the type of the Saturnalia, characterized by an inversion of social ranks and the sacrifice of a man in the character of a god, were at one time held all over the ancient world from Italy to Babylon. Such festivals seem to date from an early age in the history of [pg 408] agriculture, when people lived in small communities, each presided over by a sacred or divine king, whose primary duty was to secure the orderly succession of the seasons, the fertility of the earth, and the fecundity both of cattle and of women. ”

“ The Saturnalia of ancient Rome, taking their name from Saturn, the god of agriculture, are an example which occurs readily to the mind, and modern equivalents are to be found in certain half-pagan, half-religious ceremonies of eastern Europe. ”

“ Saturn’s government [Pg 62] was so wise and beneficial that his reign was called the Golden Age. The poets tell us that all men then lived on a perfect equality, property was held in common, and the earth brought forth its fruits without labor.
Ques. What sacrifices were offered to Saturn?
Ans. He was worshipped with human sacrifices, which seems strange when we consider that he was so mild a king. The planet Saturn was supposed by the ancients to exercise a malignant influence.
Ques. What were the Saturnalia?
Ans. They were solemnities instituted by Tullus Hostilius, king of Rome. ”

“ Sacæa. But to suppose a native Roman survival or recrudescence is also difficult, because Greek and Roman poets, historians, antiquaries, and essayists, all writing on the Saturnalia, know of no such survival. Again, if originally Italian mock-kings were sacrificed yearly in many places, did they die as proxies for real local Italian kings, who would otherwise have been sacrificed? This, as we have seen, is impossible: men would never have accepted the crown on such conditions. Or did they die, like the Mexican victims, as man-gods slain for a real god Saturn? ”

“ Thus the king of the bean of Twelfth Night may have originally reigned for the twelve days, his chief duty being the performance of magical ceremonies for ensuring good weather during the ensuing twelve months. Probably in him and the lord of misrule it is correct to find the lineal descendant of the old king of the Saturnalia, the real man who personated Saturn and, when the revels ceased, suffered a real death in his assumed character. ”

“ The Saturnalia are included on account of their popular, not on account of their religious significance, and appear as feriæ servorum on the 17th December, as well as feriæ ancillarum on the 7th July. ”

“ The pagan nations of antiquity [A] always had a tendency to worship the sun, under different names, as the giver of light and life. And their festivals in its honor took place near the winter solstice, the shortest day in the year, when the sun in December begins its upward course, thrilling men with the first distant promise of spring. This holiday was called Saturnalia among the Romans and was marked by great merriment and licence which extended even to the slaves. There were feasting and gifts and the houses were hung with evergreens. ”

“ In modern times the indulgence of the Carnival is immediately followed by the abstinence of Lent; and if the Carnival is the direct descendant of the Saturnalia, may not Lent in like manner be merely the continuation, under a thin disguise, of a period of temperance which was annually observed, from superstitious motives, by Italian farmers long before the Christian era? ”

“ Saturnus belongs, like Janus, with whom he was closely connected in legend [1184] , to an age into whose religious ideas we cannot penetrate, and survived into Roman worship only through Greek resuscitation [1185] , and in the feast of the Saturnalia. All we seem to see is that he is somehow connected with things that are put in the earth [1186] —seed, treasure, perhaps stores of produce; to which may just be added that the one spot in Rome at all times associated with him is close to the market, and that market-days (nundinae) were said to be sacred to him [1187] . ”

“ One of the oldest and most renowned of the European gods was Saturn, whose name was given by the ancients to one of the planets and to one of the days of the week. He was worshiped by the inhabitants of Italy more than a thousand years before Christ came, and centuries before Rome took her place among the nations of the earth. His temples were located in various parts of Italy, the latest and the principal one being at Rome. His chief festival, and the greatest of all the Roman festivals, was the Saturnalia celebrated at the time of the winter solstice. ”

“ A great riot took place when an attempt was made by some fastidious and exclusive egotists to introduce partitions which should partially divide one portion of these receptacles into individual compartments. The Saturnians boast that they have no paupers, no thieves, none of those fictitious values called money,—all which things, they hear, are known in that small Saturn nearer the sun than the great planet which is their dwelling-place. ”

“ No doubt, in the accounts of remote antiquity your god Saturn is plainly described as living on earth in human guise. Anything whatever may obviously be pictured as incorporeal which never had an existence; there is simply no room for such fiction, where there is reality. Since, therefore, there is clear evidence that Saturn once existed, it is in vain that you change his character. He whom you will not deny to have once been man, is not at your disposal to be treated anyhow, nor can it be maintained that he is either divine or Time. ”

“ Tell me, all ye brethren Gods,
“How we can war, how engine our great wrath!
“O speak your counsel now, for Saturn’s ear
“Is all a-hunger’d. Thou, Oceanus,
“Ponderest high and deep; and in thy face
“I see, astonied, that severe content
“Which comes of thought and musing: give us help!”
So ended Saturn; and the God of the Sea,
Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove,
But cogitation in his watery shades,
Arose, with locks not oozy, and began,
In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue
Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands. ”

“ On russet hills and by roadsides stiff with rime.
In nature, dead, the life gods stir,
From Rhadamanthus and the Isles,
Where Saturn rules the Age of Gold,
Come old, old ghosts of bygone gods;
While dim mists earth's outlines blur,
And drip all night from lichen-greened roof-tiles.
In men's hearts the mad gods rise
And fill the streets with revelling,
With torchlight that glances on frozen pools,
With tapers starring the thick-fogged night,
A-dance, like strayed fireflies,
'Mid dim mad throngs who Saturn's orisons sing. ”

“ The kindest thing that can be said of the Saturnians, is that they were exceedingly saturnine. They hadn't a chance, and they knew it. Everyone expected trouble with Saturn.
Earth got it on Earth, with an overwhelming majority of one vote and eighty-three million dollars.
The Friendship Tower spitted the occasionally-blue sky over Capitol City in less than eleven months from the time its corner-stone was laid, and waited in awesome emptiness for the first friendly meeting of worlds within it. ”

“ Saturn was an ancient king of Italy, who, far anterior to the founding of Rome, introduced civilization from some other country to the Italians. He established industry and social order, filled the land with plenty, and created the golden age of Italy. He was suddenly removed to the abodes of the gods. His name is connected, in the mythological legends, with "a great Saturnian continent" in the Atlantic Ocean, and a great kingdom which, in the remote ages, embraced Northern Africa and the European coast of the Mediterranean as far as the peninsula of Italy, and "certain islands in the sea;" ”

“ Sibilley is the form in which it appears in a Cornish register in 1692; in 1651 it is Sibella. [75]
Section VIII.—Saturn, &c. Saturnus was a mythical king of ancient Italy, peaceful, and given to agriculture, indeed, his name is thought to come from satus (sown) . It is very odd that he should have become the owner of all the fame of the Greek Kronos, infanticide, planet rings, and all; but so completely has he seized upon them that we never think of him as the god of seed-time, but only as the discarded king of heaven and father of Jupiter. ”