The Feast of Saturnalia-A Roman Slave’s Carol— The Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2024-‘25

 

The Feast of Saturnalia--A Roman Slave's Carol is a festive tune from the Asholean Latin Inscriptions project and members of Oxford University Faculty of Classics. 

Today marks the first day of Saturnalia, the famously lascivious Roman harvest and solstice festival.  It was first celebrated on this date—accounting for a couple of changes of calendars—in 496 BC.  Saturnalia was the Roman Feast of Saturn, the god of Harvest, and a dies festus, a legal holiday when no public business could be conducted.  At various points during the Republic and Empire festivities extended over seven, three, and finally five days. 

For a long time, all I knew about Saturnalia was that when I was in Cheyenne East High School the Latin Club nerds plastered the school with posters reading Io Saturnalia! Which roughly translated to “way to go, big fella!” or something.  They also had a slave auction fundraiser in the lunchroom where leering gym teachers bought the comeliest girls and likeliest boys draped in their mothers’ bed sheets.  Kind of creepy, when you think about it.

Saturnalia cavorting in a Roman wall fresco. 

But as a student of all things religious, I have since learned a thing or two about it.

Saturnalia is just one of the many festivals common in Europe and elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere around the period of the solstice.  Unlike others, it was a harvest festival, which seems strange until you remember that Rome not only had a pleasant Mediterranean climate but was in a period of historic warming prior the Little Ice Age, the onset of which helped plunge the continent into the Dark Ages.  But that’s another story.

                                                    Saturn Eating his Son by Fracisco Goya. 

The public ritual of the holiday was observed at the Temple of Saturn, one of the most important buildings in the Forum.  A lectisternium, a ceremonial couch, was set up before the Temple and the statue of Saturn was unbound—the rest of the year he was tied up because of his unfortunate habit of eating people.  He was depicted as a semi-depraved old man caring a harvesting scythe.  Christians would later adapt that image to Father Time associated with the celebration of the New Year.   A feast was laid out for the god before the couch so that he wouldn’t get hungry and revert to his nasty cannibalism.

The public ritual and spectacle aside what made Saturnalia especially popular with Roman plebeians and the large population of slaves were the carnival-like traditions.  Customs from the earlier Greek Festival of Dionysus—the Roman Bacchus—were incorporated into the celebrations.

Public cavorting and sexual hijinks were notorious features of Saturnalia in a painting by Ernesto Biodoni.  A good time was had by all.

Social norms of the rest of the year were set aside.  Private parties and public revelry were the order of the day.  Restrictions on gambling were loosened and even slaves could try their luck at games such as casting knuckle bones, many trying to win enough money to buy their freedom.   Exchanging small gifts—saturnalia et sigillaricia—either made by hand or purchased at special holiday markets was a highlight.  Slaves were exempted from punishment by their masters, in theory at least.

The most telling was the turn-about feature of the celebration.  Slaves and common laborers were supposed to be served feasts by their masters and were free to express disrespect.  Sometimes complete role reversal was practiced.

A fresco of another popular Saturnalia tradition--gambling--was found in the buried ruins of Pompeii. 

With the rules of public decorum suspended, it was a very good time for wine merchants and public drunkenness was common.  So were sexual hi-jinks, including usually forbidden mixing among classes, master and slave.

After 250 AD Saturnalia was subsumed into the new Festival of Sol Invictus decreed by Emperor Aurelian in celebrations of a Sun cult.  The return of the sun on December 25 was a high point of the multi day celebration.  Although the original Saturnalia ended before that date a confusion about the two Roman holidays led to the popular misconception that the early Church "stole" December 25 for it celebration of the birth of Christ.

Around 250 AD Emperor Aurelian created the new official cult of Sol Invictus, a Sun deity which may have borrowed from the Persian warrior cult of Mithra, ans celebrated the return of the Sun on December 25, just after the conclusion of Saturnalia.

This led to the often told tale is that the early Christians, still persecuted, hid their celebration of the Feast of the Nativity during Saturnalia to avoid detection.  The trouble was that the date for that celebration was not yet fixed.  In fact, it was often celebrated in the Spring—the lambing season when shepherds would have been in the fields on the lookout for wolves.  Even when Christmas was settled on December 25, it was two days after the customary end of Saturnalia but did coincide with the feast of Sol Invictus.  Later Emperors began to suppress the Sun festival with the rise of Christianity, around 390 AD.  The first written reference to a festival of Natalis Invicti was the Philocalian calendar of 354.  But a spring celebration of the nativity persisted more generally for another 100 years by which time the Festival of Sol Invictus was banned and reduced to a rural folk celebration.  

The early Church did seem to want to mount a feast or festival that competed with the pagan solstice festivals and to which locals could adapt some of their beloved customs.  At the same time, the Church went through periods of vigorously trying to stamp out vestiges of those same pagan festivals.  For this reason, the exchange of gifts was outlawed through much of the early Middle Ages.

But customs did persist.  Although most of the trapping of Christmas were borrowed from the Nordic Yule, Celtic, and Druidic customs, the cultural influence of Rome’s long occupation of Britain can be seen in the carnival-like observation of Christmas there up to the Puritan era  which included the same role-reversals, public revelry, and drinking.  The vestiges of it can be seen on Boxing Day, when masters give presents to servants and often serve them meals on the day after Christmas. 

Today’s song, The Feast of Saturnalia–A Roman Slave’s Carol was created as a tongue-in-cheek joke by the scholarly Ashmolean Latin Inscriptions Project and members of Oxford University Faculty of Classics.

The Feast of Saturnalia-A Roman Slave’s Carol— The Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2022-‘23

The Feast of Saturnalia--A Roman Slave's Carol is a festive tune from the Asholean Latin Inscriptions project and members of Oxford University Faculty of Classics. 

Today marks the first day of Saturnalia, the famously lascivious Roman harvest and solstice festival.  It was first celebrated on this date—accounting for a couple of changes of calendars—in 496 BC.  Saturnalia was the Roman feast of Saturn, the god of Harvest, a dies festus, a legal holiday when no public business could be conducted.  At various points during the Republic and Empire festivities extended over seven, three, and finally five days.

For a long time, all I knew about Saturnalia was that when I was in Cheyenne East High School the Latin Club nerds plastered the school with posters reading Io Saturnalia! Which roughly translated to “way to go, big fella!” or something.  They also had a slave auction fundraiser in the lunchroom where leering gym teachers bought the comeliest girls and likeliest boys draped in their mothers’ bed sheets.  Kind of creepy, when you think about it.

Saturnalia cavorting in a Roman wall fresco.

But as a student of all things religious, I have since learned a thing or two about it.

Saturnalia is just one of the many festivals common in Europe and elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere around the period of the solstice.  Unlike others, it is a harvest festival, which seems strange until you remember that Rome not only had a pleasant Mediterranean climate but was in a period of historic warming prior the Little Ice Age, the onset of which helped plunge the continent into the Dark Ages.  But that’s another story.

Saturn had an unfortunate habit of eating humans as depicted in this 1637 painting by Peter Paul Rubens.

The public ritual of the holiday was observed at the Temple of Saturn, one of the most important buildings in the Forum.  A lectisternium, a ceremonial couch, was set up before the Temple and the statue of Saturn was unbound—the rest of the year he was tied up because of his unfortunate habit of eating people.  He was depicted as a semi-depraved old man caring a harvesting scythe.  Christians would later adapt that image to Father Time associated with the celebration of the New Year.   A feast was laid out for the god before the couch so that he wouldn’t get hungry and revert to his nasty cannibalism.

The public ritual and spectacle aside what made Saturnalia especially popular with Roman plebeians and the large population of slaves were the carnival-like traditions.  Customs from the earlier Greek festival of Dionysus—the Roman Bacchus—were incorporated into the celebrations.

Public cavorting and sexual hijinks were notorious features of Saturnalia in a painting by Ernesto Biodoni.  A good time was had by all.

Social norms of the rest of the year were set aside.  Private parties and public revelry were the order of the day.  Restrictions on gambling were loosened and even slaves could try their luck at games such as casting knuckle bones, many trying to win enough money to buy their freedom.   Exchanging small gifts—saturnalia et sigillaricia—either made by hand or purchased at special holiday markets was a highlight.  Slaves were exempted from punishment by their masters, in theory at least.

The most telling was the turn-about feature of the celebration.  Slaves and common laborers were supposed to be served feasts by their masters and were free to express disrespect.  Sometimes complete role reversal was practiced.

A fresco of another popular Saturnalia tradition--gambling--was found in the buried ruins of Pompeii.

With the rules of public decorum suspended, it was a very good time for wine merchants and public drunkenness was common.  So were sexual hi-jinks, including usually forbidden mixing among classes, master and slave.

Around 250 AD Emperor Aurelian created the new official cult of Sol Invictus, a Sun deity which may have borrowed from the Persian warrior cult of Mithra, which celebrated the return of the Sun on December 25, just after the conclusion of Saturnalia.

After 250 AD Saturnalia was subsumed into the new Festival of Sol Invictus decreed by Emperor Aurelian in celebrations of a Sun cult.  The return of the sun on December 25 was a high point of the multi day celebration.  Although the original Saturnalia ended before that date a confusion about the two Roman holidays led to the popular misconception that the early Church "stole" December 25 for it celebration of the birth of Christ.

This led to the often told tale is that the early Christians, still persecuted, hid their celebration of the Feast of the Nativity during Saturnalia to avoid detection.  The trouble was that the date for that celebration was not yet fixed.  In fact, it was often celebrated in the Spring—the lambing season when shepherds would have been in the fields on the lookout for wolves. Even when Christmas was settled on December 25, it was two days after the customary end of Saturnalia but did coincide with the feast of Sol Invictus.  However later Emperors began to suppress the Sun festival with the rise of Christianity, around 390 AD.  The first written reference to a festival of Natalis Invicti was the Philocalian calendar of 354.  But a spring celebration of the nativity persisted more generally for another 100 years by which time the festival of Sol Invictus was banned and reduced to a rural folk celebration.   

The early church did seem to want to mount a feast or festival that competed with the various pagan solstice festivals and to which locals could adapt some of their beloved customs.  At the same time, the Church went through periods of vigorously trying to stamp out vestiges of those same pagan festivals.  For this reason, the exchange of gifts was outlawed through much of the early Middle Ages.

But customs did persist.  Although most of the trapping of Christmas were borrowed from the Nordic Yule, Celtic, and Druidic customs, the cultural influence of Rome’s long occupation of Britain can be seen in the carnival like observation of Christmas there up to the Puritan era   which included the same role-reversals, public revelry, and drinking.  The vestiges of it can be seen on Boxing Day, when masters give presents to servants and often serve them meals on the day after Christmas.

Today’s song, The Feast of Saturnalia–A Roman Slave’s Carol was created a tongue-in-cheek joke by the scholarly Ashmolean Latin Inscriptions Project and members of Oxford University Faculty of Classics.

 

Thanksgiving in the Time of a Plague and Murfin Verse

It will be a Thanksgiving like no other.  Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house is off the table for many of due to soaring Coronavirus infection rates, deaths, expanded mitigation rules, and desperate pleas.  Many of us will be hunkered down with our immediate family or limited bubble.  Others will be locked down alone in dorm rooms, nursing homes, and apartments.  Some will even be sequestered in basements, garages, and single bedrooms in their own homes expecting only a plate to be left by the door.  For most of us the y’all come family, friends, and lonely strays feast around a groaning table is this year a super spreader event that just might kill Grandma.

So I am taking a pass this year on my most requested annual holiday blog entry, Murfin’s Thanksgiving Rules which was written for just such a sprawling gathering in mind.  Hopefully we can dust it off and haul it out again next year.

Of course too many of us are ignoring the tearful pleas of exhausted nurses, the gloomy prognostications of Dr. Fauci trooping legions of public health officials, and the nagging of governors and mayors.  Some of those folks are motivated by Trumpian fake news syndrome, you-can’t-tell-me-what-to-ism, and take-that-libtards defiance.  But most of those crowding airports and bus terminals, jamming highways, and showing up at home, where ever that is are simply pandemic burnt out and desperate for the embrace of loved ones whatever the risk.

The controversy over Thanksgiving gatherings reflects the deep divides in our country, and often in our families.

Social media, naturally, has broken out shaming and smearing those who have made different choices than our own.  It echoes the relentless social and political divides among us, but is also a new twist on Thanksgiving controversies.  More on those in a bit.

Despite this, the passion on all sides shows just how important today is for almost all of us.  it is our only national feast day, something else common to most cultures.  Here we have no other common feat, accessible to all unless you count burgers and brats on the grill on Memorial Day.  Members of the many religious groups that populate our country may have their particular feasts—Christmas and Easter, the Passover Seder, Eid ul-Fitr, Diwali for example—but only Thanksgiving allows us all to gather around one table and is largely devoid of the chest-thumping jingoism connected to other Federal Holidays. 

For generations it has brought us together like no other occasion and has often encouraged our greatest virtues—generosity, acceptance of our differences, our love not only of family but our communities, and fostered a sense of gratitude for what we have even in the most trying of times.  This year many of us feel what Thanksgiving represents even more deeply.  And so do those over yonder who don’t agree with you about much of anything.

Ron Cobb's iconic 1968 cartoon from the Los Angeles Free Press perfectly illustrates the critisism of Thanksgiving as a settler/colonist travesty.

Of course Thanksgiving has been fraught with controversy in recent years.  For years Native American protests that the holiday represents European settler colonialism, American racism, cultural erasure, and actual genocide have begun to register with many of the rest of the current inhabitants of this country.  It is hard to deny that our First Nations, as the Canadians call their aboriginal peoples, have an excellent point.  The people we call Pilgrims represented a tip of the spear of a virtual invasion.  Despite their reliance on the wisdom and assistance of the natives to survive their first brutal year at Plymouth and the shared harvest feast they reportedly had, in less than a generation the settlers were engaged in brutal warfare to annihilate or displace their former neighbors.

Growing numbers joined in a boycott of the holiday.  Others, bowing to family pressure showed up to dinner armed with arguments that the whole affair is a racist travesty.  Next to those who tried and inflict their own brand of religion on a typically diverse American family or brought their political chips-on-the-shoulders to the table these folks were the cause of an epidemic of eye-rolling, groans, and occasional full blown family drama.

As if that weren’t enough, there seemed to be no end of other reasons to hate Thanksgiving—the ecological damage of factory farming, the ethical and health horrors of carnivorism, gluttony in the face of a starving world, wanton consumerism in the launch of the holiday shopping season, and the brutal enjoyment of men hurtling themselves at each other in a modern re-creation of the Roman gladiator spectacles.  Whew! And if all that wasn’t enough, we should not gloat in the embrace of our families and friends because too many are alone.

Now there is more than a kernel of truth to all of these criticisms.  And there is nothing wrong with taking time at the holiday to consider them—and to consider how we can all do and be better.

The cornucopia, a horn shaped basket of ancient Greek origins that overflows with bountiful produce, is a symbol of Thanksgiving as a harvest festival.  

On the other hand, there is much to admire in Thanksgiving.  First, it is, after all at its heart, a harvest festival.  Virtually every culture that has been dependent on agriculture marked the critical completion of the harvest, which staved off starvation for another year, with some sort of festival.  Just because we are Americans, doesn’t mean that we don’t deserve a festival, too. 

A discussion of those divisions, an explanation on how to separate the Pilgrim First Thanksgiving myth from our celebration, and a history of our observances can be found in full here if you are interested.

Buy maybe our physical separations this year will let those particular controversies slide, if only for a year.  Our need for each other may just be enough to bring us together even if it is only on Zoom.

Whatever your circumstances you are welcome to share a prayer or meditation I devised a while back for a typically diverse family gathering.  I found myself asked to say grace at a typical extended family Thanksgiving.  Around the table were Catholics ardent and lapsed, liberal Protestants, Jews (mostly secular), a practicing Buddhist, and unchurched secularists.  And I, of course, was a Unitarian Universalist with Humanist leanings.  To be inclusive, to whom should I address a prayer?  What deity, if any, should I invoke?  Should I lead with a Chinese menu of options—pick a god from column A and a spirit from column B?

This is what I came up with.  You may find it useful—or not.  Feel free to use it if it fits.  Or adapt it to your needs and circumstances.  No pressure.

A Thanksgiving extended family and friends meal like the one where I first said my prayer.  Mine is the empty seat.

A Thanksgiving Prayer for Those Who Don’t Pray

 

Thanks for the hands.

All of them.

            That dug and scratched,

            reaped and loaded,

            milled and butchered,

            baked and cooked,

            served and scrubbed.

 

The cracked,

            the bleeding,

                        the blistered hands.

 

The hands that

hewed and smelted,   

            sawed and hammered,

            wove and sewed,

            put together and took apart.

 

The calloused,

            the greasy,

                        the grimy hands.

 

The hands that

            wrote and painted,

            plucked and keyed

            carved and created.

 

The graceful,

            the supple,

                        the nimble hands.

 

The hands that

            caressed and fondled,

            stroked and petted,

            held and are held,

            grasped and gave,

            played and prayed.

 

The warm,

            the soft,

                        the forgiving hands.

 

And today bless even the hands that

            shoved and scourged,

            slapped and smote,

            bound and chained us.

 

The harsh,

            the hateful,

                        the heavy hands.

 

Today they cannot still our hands

            from their pleasure and their duty.

 

The void of anger they create,

            our hands fill with love.

 

The gentle,

            the clasping,

                        the reaching hands.

 

—Patrick Murfin

Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival— The Feast of Saturnalia - A Roman Slave’s Carol

Today marks the second day of Saturnalia, the famously lascivious Roman harvest and solstice festival.  Snatches of a Latin lyre Saturnalia song has been reconstructed from ancient manuscripts and other archeological evidence, but it is frankly not pleasing to modern ears.  Instead we will celebrate the season with a modern burlesque based on the familiar Twelve Days of Christmas that describes many of the feast’s traditions.

Saturnalia was the Roman feast of Saturn, the god of Harvest, a dies festus, a legal holiday when no public business could be conducted.  It was first celebrated—accounting for a couple of changes of calendars—in 496 BC.  At various points during the Republic and Empire festivities extended over seven, three, and finally five days.

For a long time, all I knew about Saturnalia was that when I was in Cheyenne East High School the Latin Club nerds plastered the school with posters reading Io Saturnalia! Which roughly translated to “way to go, big fella!” or something.  They also had a slave auction fundraiser in the lunch room where leering gym teachers bought the comeliest girls and likeliest boys draped in their mothers’ bed sheets.  Kind of creepy, when you think about it.

But as a student of all things religious, I have since learned a thing or two about it.

Saturnalia is just one of the many festivals common in Europe and elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere around the period of the solstice.  Unlike others, it is a harvest festival, which seems strange until you remember that Rome not only had a pleasant Mediterranean climate but was in a period of historic warming prior the Little Ice Age, the onset of which helped plunge the continent into the Dark Ages.  But that’s another story.

Saturn had an unfortunate habit of eating humans as depicted in this 1637 painting by Peter Paul Rubens.

The public ritual of the holiday was observed at the Temple of Saturn, one of the most important buildings in the Forum.  A lectisternium, a ceremonial couch, was set up before the Temple and the statue of Saturn was unbound—the rest of the year he was tied up because of his unfortunate habit of eating people.  He was depicted as a semi-depraved old man caring a harvesting scythe.  Christians would later adapt that image to Father Time associated with the celebration of the New Year.   A feast was laid out for the god before the couch so that he wouldn’t get hungry and revert to his nasty cannibalism.

The public ritual and spectacle aside what made Saturnalia especially popular with Roman plebeians and the large population of slaves were the carnival-like traditions.  Customs from the earlier Greek festival of Dionysus—the Roman Bacchus—were incorporated into the celebrations.

Public cavorting and sexual hijinks were notorious features of Saturnalia.  A good time was had by all.

Social norms of the rest of the year were set aside.  Private parties and public revelry were the order of the day.  Restrictions on gambling were loosened and even slaves could try their luck at games such as casting knuckle bones, many trying to win enough money to buy their freedom.   Exchanging small gifts—saturnalia et sigillaricia—either made by hand or purchased at special holiday markets was a highlight.  Slaves were exempted from punishment by their masters, in theory at least.

The most telling was the turn-about feature of the celebration.  Slaves and common laborers were supposed to be served feasts by their masters and were free to express disrespect.  Sometimes complete role reversal was practiced.

A fresco of another popular Saturnalia tradition--gambling--was found in the burried ruins of Pompei.

With the rules of public decorum suspended, it was a very good time for wine merchants and public drunkenness was common.  So were sexual hi-jinks, including usually forbidden mixing among classes, master and slave.

Around 250 AD Emperor Aurelian created the new official cult of Sol Invictus, a Sun deity which may have borrowed from the Persian warrior cult of Mithra, which celebrated the return of the Sun on December 25, just after the conclusion of Saturnalia.

This led to the often told tale is that the early Christians, still persecuted, hid their celebration of the Feast of the Nativity during Saturnalia to avoid detection.  The trouble was that the date for that celebration was not yet fixed.  In fact it was often celebrated in the Spring—the lambing season when shepherds would have been in the fields on the lookout for wolves. Even when Christmas was settled on December 25, it was two days after the customary end of Saturnalia but did coincide with the feast of Sol Invictus.  However later Emperors began to suppress the Sun festival with the rise of Christianity, around 390 AD.  The first written reference to a festival of Natalis Invicti was the Philocalian calendar of 354.  But a spring celebration of the nativity persisted more generally for another 100 years by which time the festival of Sol Invictus was banned and reduced to a rural folk celebration.   

The early church did seem to want to mount a feast or festival that competed with the various pagan solstice festivals and to which locals could adapt some of their beloved customs.  At the same time, the Church went through periods of vigorously trying to stamp out vestiges of those same pagan festivals.  For this reason the exchange of gifts was outlawed through much of the early Middle Ages.

But customs did persist.  Although most of the trapping of Christmas were borrowed from the Nordic Yule, Celtic, and Druidic customs, the cultural influence of Rome’s long occupation of Britain can be seen in the carnival like observation of Christmas there up to the Puritan era   which included the same role-reversals, public revelry, and drinking.  The vestiges of it can be seen in Boxing Day, when masters give presents to servants and often serve them meals on the day after Christmas.

Today’s song, The Feast of Saturnalia–A Roman Slave’s Carol was created a tongue-in-cheek joke by the scholarly Ashmolean Latin Inscriptions Project and members of Oxford University Faculty of Classics.