Anyway lets just say when the Romans decide to do something.. they do it BIG. This was the celebration of all celebrations. It was pretty much a week of pure lawlessness where ALL of the Roman courts shut down.
Since the courts were closed, Roman law dictated that no one could be punished for damaging property or injuring people during this weeklong celebration. Everything you can imagine that was against the law was done during this week.. men and women were raped, there was widespread intoxication, robbery.. I mean everything.
Sounds bad right? But thats not all.. At the beginning of the Saturnalia week, each Roman community selected a victim that they forced to indulge in food, sex and other physical pleasures throughout the week. This person was supposed to represent "an enemy of the Roman people" and at the end of the week they brutally murdered this innocent man or woman.
Alright kiddies, are you paying attention? GREAT, cause the story gets better
So anyway, during the years that this celebration went on, a new group of people that wanted to tame these unruly Roman heathens tried to think of ways they could get them to join thier group. This group were called Christians. The Roman pagans didn't want anything to do with these Christians because it meant converting to thier Christian righteous ways. So the Christians made a deal. They pretty much went up to the Roman pagans and were like, "Look, if you join us, we will still allow you to celebrate Saturnalia. You don't even have to change anything."
Ok so here's where the problem came in: there was NOTHING intrinsically Christian about the Saturnalia celebration.. They succeeded in converting extremely large numbers of Romans into the Christian brotherhood, but it didn't sit well with them that so much sinning went on during Saturnalia.
Saturnalia went on from Dec 17-25, and to remedy the fact that there was nothing Christian about it, Christian leaders decided to declare the last day of that week as being the birthday of Yeshua. Christians had little success, however, refining the practices of Saturnalia. As Stephen Nissenbaum, professor of history at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst, writes,
“In return for ensuring massive observance of the anniversary of the Savior’s birth by assigning it to this resonant date, the Church for its part tacitly agreed to allow the holiday to be celebrated more or less the way it had always been.”
The depraved customs of Saturnalia were celebrated this way for HUNDREDS of more years, even adding a few elements. As part of the Saturnalia carnival throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, rabbis of the ghetto in Rome were forced to wear clownish outfits and march through the city streets to the jeers of the crowd, pelted by a variety of missiles. When the Jewish community of Rome sent a petition in 1836 to Pope Gregory XVI literally BEGGING him to stop the annual Saturnalia abuse of the Jewish community, he responded, “It is not opportune to make any innovation.” On December 25, 1881, Christian leaders whipped the Polish masses into Antisemitic frenzies that led to riots across the country. 12 Jews were brutally murdered, huge numbers maimed, and many Jewish women were raped. Two million rubles (whatever the hell that translates to be) worth of property was destroyed.
It's safe to say things got pretty out of hand.
The Christians that migrated to other areas of the world, still observed December 25 as being the birth of Christ. Of course they left all of the sin and controversy surrounding this day back in Rome. A few Saturnalia's practices still slipped through the cracks but were made much more innocent.
Here are a few customs that went on during Saturnalia:
Remember, as part of the Saturnalia carnival throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, rabbis of the ghetto in Rome were forced to wear clownish outfits and march through the city streets. Sound familiar? Well... maybe it LOOKS familiar..
During Saturnalia, there was an established tradition of setting up a decorated spruce at the market square where the young men “went with a flock of maidens and women, first sang and danced there and then set the tree aflame” I'm pretty sure lighting a tree sounds familiar.
Every night of Saturnalia men in every Roman town got sloppy drunk and went from house to house while singing naked. Yep, you guessed it! Carolers!
At the end of the festival, the people of Rome consumed human-shaped biscuits to signify completion when the afore-mentioned selected person was ceremoniously murdered. Human shaped biscuits?
Norse mythology recounts how the god Balder was killed using a mistletoe arrow by his rival god Hoder while fighting for the female Nanna. Druid rituals use mistletoe to poison their human sacrificial victim. It later became a synthesis of the sexual license of Saturnalia with the Druidic sacrificial cult.
In pre-Christian Rome, the emperors compelled their most despised citizens to bring offerings and gifts during the Saturnalia (in December) and Kalends (in January).
Did you enjoy my story? Hope you followed along.. because now I have an assignment. Nothing too hard, I just want you to IMAGINE
Imagine that between 1933-45, the Nazi regime celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday (April 20) as a holiday. Imagine that they named the day, “Hitlerday,” and observed the day with feasting, drunkenness, gift-giving, and various pagan practices. Imagine that on that day, Jews were historically subject to perverse tortures and abuse, and that this continued for centuries.
Now, imagine that your great-great-great-grandchildren were about to celebrate Hitlerday. April 20th arrived. They had long forgotten about Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. They had never heard of gas chambers or death marches. They had purchased champagne and caviar, and were about to begin the party, when someone reminded them of the day’s real history and their ancestors’ agony. Imagine that they initially objected, “We aren’t celebrating the Holocaust; we’re just having a little Hitlerday party.”
If you could travel forward in time and meet them; if you could say a few words to them, what would you advise them to do on Hitlerday?
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