Transcript of 402. Christmas: Pagan or ...
Transcript and discussion of 402. Christmas: Pagan or Christian? from The Rest Is History podcast
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Thank you for listening to the rest is history. For bonus episodes, early access ad free listening and access to our chat community sign up@restyshistorypod.com that's restishistorypod.com. End don't get a symbologist started on christian icons. Nothing in Christianity is original. The prechristian God Mithras, called the Son of God and the light of the world was born on December 25. He died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days. By the way, December the 25th is also the birthday of Oziris, Adonis and Dionysus. The newborn Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense and myrrh. Now that was the renowned symbologist Salee teebing. And he is quoted in a great book of Christmas themed scholarship. And that book is the Da Vinci Code by the renowned author Dan Brown. Tom, happy Christmas.

Happy Christmas. And nothing says Christmas like getting friend of the show Dan Brown back onto the rest of history.

Yeah, we love Dan Brown and we love Christmas.

Yeah, he featured earlier in the year. And so we just thought, today is Christmas day. So happy Christmas, everyone who's listening actually on the happy day. And we thought this would be our Christmas present to you, didn't we? We'd bring Dan Brown back.

Now, I don't know whether you picked this up, Tom, but that reading that I did of Salee Tebing, it was like Serena McKellen was doing it.

Oh, yeah, it was like listening to Gandalf. Right?

Because he plays Salee tebeing in the film he does. So I gave.

It was a masterly thank you. I clearly been sitting at my feet and learning from me.

Well, what a lovely Christmas present that is.

Well done, grasshopper.

What a lovely Christmas present to one another. I mean, there's nothing that says Christmas to me like staring at your face several days before the big day. And so here we are.

Of course, we are actually recording this on Christmas morning, aren't we?

Of course we are, Tom. We got up really early today, so there's a serious point here. Salee teebing in this book basically says, everything in Christmas in Christianity is invented. It's all stolen from somewhere else. It was Mithras'day originally, and all the elements of the nativity story have basically been plagiarized from rival cults in the days of the Roman Empire, I suppose. And actually, Tom, the serious point is, you see this idea repeated all the time.

Yeah, it's very popular.

So keen humanists and atheists are always saying, well, actually, I think you'll find that if Jesus existed, which he didn't, he definitely wasn't born on December the 25th. And everything is ripped off from mithraism or from Sol Invictus or all of these other religions.

Well, we did two episodes on Jesus, didn't we? Last time, as our festive offering, we did. And I think we agreed that Jesus probably wasn't born on 25 December. I mean, we don't know when he's born and we don't know which year. But this is not quite what Sali T Bing is saying. He's essentially saying that Christmas is ultimately a pagan festival and that christians have stolen various aspects of pagan cults and kind of bundled it all together to create a kind of pagan mismatch that they're passing off as their own festival. And this is quite a popular theory, as you say.

So popular that until you put me right about two years ago, I believed it to be true myself.

Did you?

I believed that it had been ripped off from other roman rivals.

Well, so the question of whether it's a pagan festival, I mean, that's what we're going to be looking at today. But one thing I think we can absolutely say is that it is a roman festival. It originates as a roman festival, because obviously Jesus was born into the Roman Empire and the center of early christian activity was within the limits of the Roman Empire. I mean, not exclusively, but mostly. So I think you could say that Christmas is one of the festivals that grows up over the course of roman history. But does this make it a pagan festival?

So that's the question, the tantalizing question.

So, I mean, there are kind of various elements to what Salee was claiming.

We should remind ourselves. Sali TV obviously doesn't exist, but he's.

A very distinguished symbologist. So let's cite him. So he is saying that the pre christian God Mithras was born on the 25 December. Actually, he says December the 25th, doesn't he? Which marks him out as american.

That's poor.

But he does. Although in the book, he's actually a british. So that's another thing to chalk up.

To Dan Brown, Master Dan Brown's solicitism.

Yeah. So he's saying that the pre christian God Mithras was born on the 25 December, that the same date was the birth of Osiris, who is an egyptian God. Yes. Adonis, who is a kind of syrian God, and Dionysus, who's a greek God, and that the baby Krishna, who is an indian God, was presented with gold, frankincense, and, you know, these are gods from quite a broad range of backgrounds. So it would be amazing, I mean, if all these gods were born on the same day. And so the question is, is there any ancient source at all that states that Osiris and Adonis and Dionysus were born on the 25 December? What do you think?

I have a lot of confidence both in Lee teebing and indeed in Dan Brown. I mean, we established earlier this year that Dan Brown is very rarely wrong about religious history. Tom. Well, have his senses misled him on this occasion?

There is not a single ancient source that states that Osiris or Adonis or Dionysus were born on the 25 December. Absolutely none. And in fact, Osiris. So he's a very, very significant egyptian God. And we talked about him in our episode on the death of Antinois, Hadrian's beloved, who drowns in the Nile, and Osiris becomes the God of the dead. And so the date of his death and the date of his birth are both seen as being very significant, rather as in the christian story. But Osiris is not born on the same day as Jesus. It's complicated because you have to map up the egyptian calendar onto the greek calendar, onto the julian calendar, onto the gregorian calendar. But basically, he seems to have been born kind of early September.

Okay.

This is when the festival is hold Krishna, who know Hare Krishna, all that kind of thing. Is he presented with gold and frankincense and myrrh as a baby? No, he isn't. No evidence for this at all. So all of this. Well, I do know where he's got it from. Basically. He's extrapolating from kind of 19th century scholars who are putting a particular spin on it, and he is hyping it up a bit. That's essentially where it's kind of come from. But there are no ancient sources for any of this. But he does mention this God, Mithras, the preacher.

I love a bit of Mithras.

Mithras, yeah, I love myth. Was he in the World cup of gods? Can't remember.

He did poorly. I think he was, and I think he did poorly. But what I like about Mithras is he was basically, his cult was like a sort. It's like a version of Freemasonry, wasn't it? Roman officers.

Well, right.

They'd have their little clubs and they'd meet underground and stuff.

Right? So is he a pre christian God, Mithras, as teebing claims? Slightly steadier ground here because there is a persian God called not Mithras. But Mithra, okay, who is. He's kind of pre zoroastrian, probably. So very, very ancient. And Mithras is clearly a variant form of that name, Mithra. And there is a reference to a God called Mithras being worshiped before the birth of Christ. And it comes in Plutarch, in his biography of Pompey, the great Caesar's great rival. One of his great feats was to defeat the pirates who were kind of naval terrorists roaming the Mediterranean. And Plutarch says that the pirates who were defeated by Pompey practiced the secret mysteries of Mithras. But the consensus would be that this probably isn't the same as the cult of Mithras that gets practiced by Roman officers, kind of Roman equivalent of Freemasons, because the origins of this seem to be the first century AD, and it seems to have originated in Rome, so not in the east. And again, a bit like Freemasonry, that it's a kind of brotherhood that is drawing on all kinds of different traditions to garnish it, to make it look a little bit more kind of exotic.

So they basically took the name Mithras from a different religion, or Mithra, to make themselves seem a bit more glamorous and a bit more exotic and exciting.

Yeah. So it's kind of orientalist, exotic, kind of window dressing. So I think that Salih is wrong there. He's also wrong in saying that Mithras was buried in a rock. He wasn't. Instead, Mithras emerges fully formed from a rock, it seems. And there don't seem to be any references at all, certainly, that I've been able to find in ancient sources to his dying and being reborn on the third day.

It's important for us to stress this may be salee teebing making a mistake, rather than Dan Brown. Dan Brown may be setting salee teebing up as fallible.

It could be. I don't think that was the plot twist, as I recall.

No, I'm being too generous.

Who knows? Who knows?

Very unusually, because it's Christmas. I'm being too kind.

You are. You're being kind. Well, it is Christmas, 25 December, and Saliti Bing is saying that Mithras was born on the 25 December. And it has to be said that here he is not alone in making this claim. So I'll give you a quote from a book called Stonehenge, neolithic man and the cosmos, which I was reading a couple of weeks ago in preparation for the court case about the Stonehenge tunnel.

Because, of course, you're very keen on that.

Yeah. And this is by a scholar called John north. He said the church was anxious to draw the attention of its members away from the old pagan feast days. And the December date did this very well, for it coincided with the birthday of the invincible son of Mithraism. But again, there is confusion here, and I should warn people who are listening to this while they're kind of wrestling with Brussels sprouts or knocking back another sherry, that there's a certain degree of complexity.

Either that's what people want on Christmas day.

Well, I don't know. I mean, it's interesting because it is a kind of detective story.

Okay.

So I think think of it as a detective story. It's kind of sifting the evidence, but the evidence is kind of intriguing. But there is no denying the fact that we have to dive deep here. So the birthday of the invincible son of mithraism. The invincible son in Latin is Sol Invictus, which is a title that is given to Mithras on kind of various inscriptions that you find in Rome or across the empire. But does this mean that Mithras and the Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun, are one and the same? Which is basically what's being implied here, I think. And the answer is, no, they're not. Yeah.

It's a rival cult, isn't it? Sol Invictus? Is that the case?

Yeah. And so there is a kind of default assumption that Sol Invictus, the unconquered son, is a cult that gets introduced to Rome from Syria by Elegabalis, who was in the news recently. A museum changed his pronouns from he to she.

He's been claimed as a transgender emperor.

Yes, but, Tom, I believe you think.

That is absolute tosh and nonsense.

I don't know, but there is no evidence for it. The sources that tell us this are written a long time after his life for very overt, polemical reasons, and the sources are very, very unreliable. So I think it's difficult to put much weight on that.

But he was. I mean, I see the word perv written in your notes.

Well, this is how he's presented in the sources. So Elagabilis, the el in that it's the God, as in Eloim in the Bible, and he's cast as a sun God being introduced to Rome. And it's presumed that until this point, no one in Rome had worshiped the sun. But this is not true. This is patently not true. So Nero's Colossus, for instance, is a statue of the sun. There's a brilliant essay by a dutch scholar, Stephen Hemans, in which he demonstrates conclusively the presence in Rome of a cult of soul as far back in history as we can trace roman religion at all. Essentially, the idea that the worship of the unconquered sun is introduced to Rome in the third century AD, it's deriving from essentially quite racist preconceptions that scholars in the 19th century have about oriental cults.

Right. They associate it with elegabolis and they say he's bonkers, he's dressing up as a woman, he's doing the oriental stuff, talking to the. Yeah, very poor form, et cetera, et cetera.

But also that they see worshiping the sun as a kind of oriental cult and therefore it has to be associated with an oriental figure. So this is basically what seems to underpin this. So Mithras and Sol Invictus are definitely separate gods and in fact there are mithraic freezes that show them as separate individuals. But then there's the question, what about Sol Invictus? Is his birthday on the 25 December? So it's definitely not Mithras. We don't know when Mithras'birthday is.

Right.

He's not born on the 25 December because he's not Sol Invictus. But what about Sol Invictus? Where does the idea that Sol Invictus has his birthday on the 25 December come from?

Tom, if I'm honest, this is what I previously believed to be true, that Christmas was a ripoff of Sol Invictus's festival. And I'm ashamed to say I may have written a column in BBC History magazine some years ago making this case.

Well, you would not be alone. So probably our greatest living historian of paganism, who's been on the rest of history, two brilliant episodes on paganism. Oh, Ronald Hutton. Yeah. So in his great book, stations of the sun, which is a kind of history of the. Of the ritual year in Britain, he talks about Christmas, and this is what he says about it. The first absolutely certain record which places it upon the 25 December is the calendar of Philocarlos, which was produced in three, five, four and apparently at Rome. And he then adds, the reason for the choice of this date and the success of it was stated with admirable candor by a christian writer, the scriptocyrus, in the late fourth century. And Hutton then goes on to quote what this figure, this supposed fourth century christian writer, the scriptocyrus, wrote, and he says, so I'm quoting the scriptocyrus here. It was a custom of the pagans to celebrate on the same 25 December the birthday of the sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity. In these solemnities and revelries, the christians also took part. Accordingly, when the doctors of the church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true nativity should be solemnized on that day.

So they completely ripped off the 25 December sol and victus ritual.

This is basically what it's saying. And this is the source for the claim that christians base the 25 December on the fact that Sol Invictus celebrated his birthday on the 25 December.

But, oh, there's a twist. Don't tell me you're going to bracket Ronald Hudson with Dan Brown. Tom.

Well, so the first question, who is the scriptor? Cyrus? So it literally means a syrian writer. He is not, in fact, from the fourth century.

Shocking scenes.

This is a name that was given in the 19th century. And almost all this stuff, all the thing about Christmas being pagan, it's reflecting 19th century scholars who are discovering all these new texts or whatever and working up theories that say James Fraser and the golden bow is a classic example that all religions are expressive of certain kind of universal death resurrection kind of ideas. So they're kind of attuned to look for these parallels and to make them. But the truth is, this is a syrian text that was discovered in the 19th century by western scholars. And the scriptoCyrus, the syrian writer, is an anonymous scribe who is in the twelveth century. So not the fourth century, in the 12th century is annotating a manuscript by a local bishop. And the quote that Hutton has given and the quote that people always cite in their things about why Christmas is pagan, they miss out a crucial sentence which precedes it. And this is the sentence, the reason why the fathers of the church moved the 7 January celebration to the 25 December was this, they say. So the context for this is that in the east, in Syria, for instance, christians celebrate Christmas on the 7th or 6th.

I can't remember which it is. And the Sarus script of the syrian writer, he has met with Christians, Latins from the west, because of the crusades, and he's aware that Christians in the latin world are celebrating Christmas on a different date to the day that he is. And he's trying to explain it. And of course, he takes for granted that the date on which he and his church are celebrating Christmas day is the authentic one, and therefore that the Christians in Rome and the west have got it wrong. And he's trying to say, well, well, why have they? And that basically is the reason it's not dating from the fourth century. It's his attempt to explain why the Christians in the west have got it wrong and it's casting aspersions on them. So it's designed to be a kind of calumny, basically. However, that said, the reason why this stuck, I think, is because probably the birthday of Sol Invictus was celebrated on the 25 December. So the calendar that Ronald Hutton cited, it's kind of almanac, and it does date to three, five, four. And it has this entry, n invicti, cm xxx. So what does that mean?

So the n stands for natalis. So nativity, birth, invicti, of the unconquered one, cm, it's short for sequences, missus. So that means that chariot races were ordered xxx is 30 in roman numerals. So essentially the translation would be 30 chariot races were ordered to mark the birthday of the unconquered one. So that seems absolutely clear. Yeah, but of course, unsurprisingly, there are still complexities, because basically there are complexities around. These are very fragmentary pieces of evidence on which to build whole castles.

Right.

So it's not 100% certain, I think, that Invictus does refer to the sun to soul, because there are other entrants that do name check soul in the same almanac, and they don't call him Invictus. Okay, but let's assume it does refer to soul. Yeah. The question is. So this is Hemans in his essay, do we know that this feast of soul on December the 25th antidates the feast of Christmas at all? Because the major feast day of soul, and we know this because we have all kinds of references to it, at least back to the time of Augustus, was the 20 eigth of August. And this feast then gets supplemented in two, seven, four by the emperor Aurelian. He's this great conqueror who stitches the fragmenting parts of the roman empire back together again. He's the guy who builds the walls around Rome to protect it. And he is a great enthusiast, it seems, for the worship of soul, of the sun. And in this almanac, the one that comes out in three, five, four, the one that records the 25 December is the birthday of the unconquered one. It also specifies that on the 22 October, 36 chariot races, so that's six more than on the 25 December, were staged in honor of soul.

So in other words, this is a bigger celebration of Seoul than the 25 December. So it's possible, I would say, even probable, that the birth of Seoul on the 25 December is a feast day, but it's not relative to other feast days, the biggest in the calendar. And the truth is that if you look at the calendar of roman feast days, there are a lot of them. I mean, there are loads and loads. Every month. There are loads of feast days. They don't have weekends, but they do have feast days. So I would have said that actually, it would be very difficult for, say, christians to pick a day of the year at random and not have it coincide with some kind of feast day.

And then Twitter based humanists would attack them and say, they're just ripping off somebody else. They've got an invented festival and they've just ripped off somebody else's. They'd do that whatever date they've chosen, right?

Yeah, probably. But I think that if it is Saul's birthday on the 25 December, the question is, is it a big enough. Is it a popular enough ceremony for christians to decide, well, we must mark the birth of our savior on this day? I mean, I think probably not, because you have this simply for soul. You have a bigger festival earlier in the year. Why didn't they go for that? However, the question then is, was there another much more popular festival at around this time in late December that perhaps the christians could have appropriated?

Oh, what a cliffhanger.

So I think we should take a break at this point. And when we come back, what drama. Find out what this feast day might conceivably have been.

The solution to Tom's Christmas mystery awaits after the break. The first people to live in Italy were the aborigines. Their king, Saturnus is said to have been a man. So just that. No one lived as a slave, nor had any private property for as long as he sat on the throne. Instead, all things were common to all and undivided, as though it were just a single estate for everybody's use. It is to commemorate this way of life that during the Saturnalia, slaves are mandated to sit down with their masters at banquets and everyone is held to be of equal rank to everyone else. So that's the historian Justinus, who lived in the second century AD, and he is talking about the Jeremy Corbyn of pre roman God, pre roman Italy, the king Saturnus. So kind that everything was held in common. There were no slaves. Life was just one long. It was a tremendously egalitarian laugh under Saturnus, wasn't it, Tom?

Well, so Saturnus, I mean, better known as Saturn, as in the planet.

Right.

As in the God who gives his name to Saturday.

Oh, well, the king of the aborigines in Italy is actually a God. Is that.

Yes.

Right.

Okay. And so he and another God, Janus, who is the God of the new year, because he has two faces looking to the old year and to the new year. The Romans preserved a memory of how these two gods had once ruled over Leisham, the area around Rome, and that their seat had been the hill that comes to be called the capital. So that's looking down over the roman forum, but which, before it was called the capital, was called the Mon Saturnius, the hill of Saturn. So this is where we're plunging again into deep waters, because the question of where Saturn comes from, who he is, what his cult consisted of, very, very difficult to get a handle on, because the origins of these gods are very, very obscure. We just don't have the sources. And, of course, the Romans are not writing about their gods, as I don't know, a contemporary anthropologist would. And so the question of how seriously do they take this stuff? Are there variants of the legends? Very, very complex. So one way always, to start with this is to ask, what does Saturn mean? And we have a scholar called pharaoh, who lived around the same time as Julius Caesar, who states very clearly that the name of Saturn comes from the latin word satus, which means the planting or the sowing.

However, there are alternative theories also.

But of course.

So maybe it comes from a town in Laisham called Satria.

When you say Leisham, I would say Latium for that. Is it called Latium? Is that what people call.

As in Lazio?

That's in Lazio, yeah, Lazio.

That's in Lazio.

That's what I was thinking. Well, Leisham, I've never heard it called that. But, Tom, I bow to your expertise.

That's how I've always called it. Maybe I got it wrong. I don't know. Okay. And there's a third theory, which is that the Etruscans worshiped a God called Satre. And we know about this because in 1877, a weird. It's a bronze model of a sheep's liver.

Okay.

And livers would be kind of inspected by etruscan priests. It was found at Pierkensa in Tuscany. So in the homelands of the Etruscans. And a portion of it is kind of holy of this liver is holy to this God, Satra, who appears to be a very menacing God. He has a thunderbolt, but otherwise, we know absolutely nothing about him. Okay, so it's not entirely helpful. But I've said the likeliest explanation, he's something to do with perhaps the harvest and perhaps the Saturnalia is staged to celebrate the end of the harvest or something like that. But it's late, though, because it's December.

So hold on, Tom. This podcast is just overturning a lot of things that I thought. So Saturn has nothing to do with. He's not a greek God.

We'll come to that. We'll come to that. Okay, so the Romans start associating their gods with greek gods as they become more familiar with the world second century.

He's not Kronos.

We'll come to that. But just at the moment, just looking at what seems to be the most primordial stories that are told about Saturn. So his temple is the oldest, according to priestly records, is the oldest in the forum. You can still see the base of it. It's at the foot of the Palatine near the capital, and it was consecrated in four nine, seven BC. And the worship of Saturn traditionally was said to be even older than that. So he's a very, very venerable God. And the proof of the fact that to the Romans that his worship was older, in fact, even than the founding of Rome itself, is that sacrifices at his altar were made in the greek manner. So Romans make sacrifice by putting their togas up over their heads. So if you think of, there's a famous statue of Augustus as a priest, and he has his head, he has the toga over his head like a kind of veil, but they do it in the greek manner, I. E. Bareheaded. And this is before the coming of Aeneas to Rome. So essentially they're dating the worship of Saturn in the forum.

What will become the forum to before Aeneas, who's in the long run, his line will give rise to Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome. So very, very ancient. And the stories that are told about Saturn, and it's hinted in that passage from Justinus that you were quoting, is that he was a king who ruled over a golden age, and the Romans called it the Saturnia Regina. No slaves. Everyone shares property in common. Kind of wonderful. And in the Aeneid, the great poem that is written by Virgil to celebrate the origins of Rome, Aeneas is a trojan prince who escapes the sack of Troy and is destined to give rise in the long run to Rome. Saturn is cast as the God who introduces civilization to the region around Rome, and he is welcomed there by Janus, this two headed God. He establishes his seat on what will become the capital. So to quote Virgil, Saturn's reign was the age of gold, men like to say. So peacefully calm and kind, he ruled his subjects. Ah, but little by little, a lesser tarnished age came stealing in, filled with the madness of war, the passion for possessions.

So this is the great roman idea. There was a golden age and then gradually turned to iron. And you can trace a kind of family tree. So he gives birth to a king called Picus, which is the Latin for woodpecker. And there are various theories, again, as to why did he use woodpeckers to tell the future? Or was he turned into a woodpecker by the sorceress Cersei? I mean, all kinds of things. He in turn is succeeded by faunas, so as in fawn, who has goat's heads, and by the time of Caesar, so Cicero, the great scholar, orator, Caesar's contemporary, he says, I've got no idea who or what Faunus was. So even the Romans themselves are kind of confused by this. But I think the central idea of Saturn is that he rules over a golden age and this is the tradition that kind of passes into the bloodstream of roman culture. But inevitably, there is also a counter theory.

Oh, we love a counter theory on.

The rest of his history, that, in a way, he is a symbol of the savagery that had existed before the coming of.

Oh, so not a golden age at all. Quite the reverse.

Right. So there are hints in christian writings, and christians obviously have their own agenda. I mean, they absolutely have reasons to make Saturn look as bad as possible, but they claim that during the Saturn alia, gladiatorial entertainments are staged and that the gladiators who die in these are being offered up to Saturn as offerings. And it does seem to be the case that he is seen as being quite menacing because his cult statue in his temple in the forum, his ankles are bound by thick wool, so they're kind of symbolizing the fetters that make him dangerous. And this, I think, is why you mentioned Kronos. So Kronos is the Greek for time. He's the father of the gods, at least the leading gods and goddesses. And he's been told that he will be overthrown by his son, by one of his children, and so he devours them. And the only one who manages to get away is Zeus, who comes to be equated by the Romans with Jupiter, the king of the gods. And the equation of Saturn with Kronos does make him seem a more kind of a sinister figure. I mean, he eats his children.

And that's unacceptable behavior.

Very bad conduct. Yeah, even for a God.

Yeah. So basically, Saturn embodies two contradictory theories. He's a menacing tyrant who devours his children and who got overthrown by Zeus and fled to Italy. Or he's a king who ruled over a golden age, and his temple is still in the forum, and people worship him.

He's all over the place, Tom. He's all over the shop.

Yeah, it absolutely is all over the place. But I think, mean, this is when I said that it can be treacherous to explore the history of these gods and even to try and work out what they meant to the Romans, because often they do embody incredibly contradictory traditions. And the Romans are fine with that?

Yeah, they are fine with that. Because presumably, the reality is that these gods mean different things to different people at different times. I mean, we're talking about a vast span of history, hundreds and hundreds of years. So the meaning of these gods will have changed, presumably, during this period.

They will have changed, but I think that they can mean different things to different people at the same time. Okay, it's kind of that complicated. But there's no question that the great feast day of Saturn is on the 17 December. Now, note, not the 25 December, the 17 December. And this feast is the Saturnalia very, very highly loved festival. I mean, loved in the way that Christmas is loved by us. It's the day of the year that people look forward to so much so that rather, as with our Christmas day, that the festive season extends much beyond Christmas. So likewise, by first century BC, essentially, the Saturnalia has come to last for a week, so it runs until the 23 December. And Augustus, who's very conservative, he doesn't approve of innovation. He says that it should be only three days. I mean, Augustus is very much kind of, why are people putting up Christmas decorations in August? Kind of a guy. That's absolutely what he'd be on. And he's saying, it shouldn't be seven days. We'll have it three days. But then Caligula, who's very much a guy who likes a party, he says, no, we'll push it back.

We'll have four days. So it's Atonius. To give a permanent boost to the gaiety of the nation, he added an extra day to the Saturnalia, which he called the festival of the Young. He's appealing to the youthful constituent.

He's pandering.

And Seneca, great philosopher, tutor of Nero, hated Caligula with a passion. And he kind of grumbles that once December was a month. Now, it fills the very, very kind of familiar. So this might seem a parallel, as does the fact that, you know, it's a time where people enjoy themselves, but it is also a feast day of the God. So it is holy to the God. And it's on this day that the woolen fetters around his ankles in the temple are removed. There is this public sacrifice done in the greek style, so bareheaded. There is a great public banquet held at which a statue of the God is laid down on a couch, so kind of like he's come to take part in the fun. And you have these cries of, ayo, Saturnalia. Yo, Saturnalia.

What's that meme?

It means brilliant. Saturnalia's here. Hooray. Okay, have fun. Okay, let's celebrate kind of happy Christmas. Yeah. And it's hugely, hugely looked forward to, as I said. And I think that is it Christmas, though. I think it's more like the festivals you get at carnival than Christmas. So it's all about the subversion of convention. And to the Romans, conventions are very, very important, but this is the day, this is the season when you can overturn things. So men and women alike go about wearing this item of clothing called a synthesis, which is a costume that initially seems to have been female and traditionally is only worn at dinner parties. But roman men, on the Saturnalia, they take off their toga and they put on this synthesis. So it's subversive both because it's men wearing a quite feminized item of clothing, but also because you are wearing something that you should properly only wear at a dinner party out on the streets.

So it's a bit like as if blokes were wearing ball gowns on Christmas day.

Not quite. Yeah. A leotard, perhaps, or. Yeah, or cocktail dress, perhaps, or something like that.

Yeah. I'm not going to adopt that ritual myself, by the way.

So there's gender confusion. Okay. There's confusion of proprieties. There is also very famously, and this is hinted at in that passage that you read from Justinius, it's probably the one thing that everyone knows about the Saturnalia, which is that it's a great day for slaves. So free people will wear the palaeus, which is the liberty cap that is given to freedmen. So again, that's a kind of subversion of traditional orders. Slaves are allowed to talk back to their masters if they want to, and they are served at dinner by their master, and they're allowed to eat first. So this is turning, again, the kind of traditional proprieties. Absolutely. On its head. You have rioters drinking, gambling, which normally is illegal. This has become legal and you get groups of people rather like we celebrate Christmas, I suppose. Kind know you meet up and have. We're feeling a little bit hungover, aren't we? You're a little bit fragile as we record this. Speak for yourself, Tom, speak yourself because yesterday we had. The rest is history. Christmas lunch.

And what we did, we served the producers at that, didn't we?

We did, yes. We went and got the guinea, got the wine. So rather in a similar way, groups of friends would get together and they would choose a princeps or a rex, so an emperor or a king who.

Would organize pranks and so japes and pranks. I'm not sure I approve of pranks and japes, to be honest with you.

So Lucian, who is a second century writer, he writes of how fun it is to become, and I quote, the supreme master of everyone with a win at the knucklebone. So they roll the knucklebones to decide who's going to become the princeps. So that not only do you get out of having to follow embarrassing orders yourself, but you get to make all your friends do as you say. You can order one man to yell out some disgraceful secret about himself and order another to dance naked, pick up the flute girl and carry her around the room three times.

I'm so glad we didn't tell the producers this before we had our Christmas.

I know. And it's obviously you're called a princeps. It's a parody of the powers that the emperor has over all his fellow citizens. And there's a notorious occasion where a future emperor does get voted prince. Eps this is Nero, and according to Tacitus, Nero gets voted princeps of their kind of group of friends. And he gets his stepbrother, Britannicus, who is the son of Claudius, to stand in the middle of the party and sing a song. And Britannicus sings a sad song about how Claudius'dad is shoving him to one side and allowing Nero perhaps to become emperor. So it could be a moment for pathos as well as fun. The one thing about it that is kind of reminiscent of Christmas, and I think it's the thing that people always pick up on, is that people gave each other presents. So they give each other candles and they give each other dolls that are called sigilaria. Some of these are images of gods, some of them are kind of images of hunchbacks or grotesques or whatever. Mostly they're very cheap, they're kind of mass produced, but they can be very rich, kind of very expensively done.

And Macrobius, who is a guy writing in the christian period, the late fourth century, and he's very, very nostalgic for the festivities of the Saturnalia. And he and his friends have a big debate about, what are these dolls? Are they substitutes for the sacrifices that were originally made to Saturn, or are they just toys and they can't decide? Which is quite a kind of modern sounding debate. I mean, it sounds like the kind of debates that scholars would have today.

Definitely.

Yeah. And also the other thing is that you give gifts of minced meat that are not actually made of mince meat. They're made of clay or plaster or whatever.

Okay, that's a bit weird.

It is a bit weird. France Dupont, who writes, she's written a brilliant book on everyday life in the Roman Republic, daily life in ancient Rome. She writes about the Saturnalia. For one day, nothing was as it seemed. Neither the relationships between people nor the presence that changed hands. Order would return on the following day. Anarchy, chance, deceptive appearance. The Saturnalia was the flip side of the true life of roman citizens. Right. And so it seems to be a kind of safety valve to slaves to cast off the kind of the traditional.

Order on the thing with the slaves. I mean, presumably there were bounds that they couldn't overstep. So they can talk back to their masters, but, I mean, the next day they're going to be slaves again, and their masters absolutely remember? So, of course, it's probably not quite as. No, this wonderful release, because it must be, and to some degree, if you've got a very horrible master, the whole thing must just be grotesque parody that you have to go through.

Anyway.

Sorry, go on.

No, I mean, you're absolutely right that, of course, every slave knows that once the Saturn, Alia is gone, the master can absolutely punish you for anything that you said. But I think the idea is that it gives a slave the chance to make a complaint that he or she might think that the owner would be amenable to. I mean, I think it's kind of a little bit like that. But you're right that, of course, there are lots of people who don't like it. Chiefly intellectuals. So intellectuals seem to have really disliked the Saturnalia.

They never like fun, do they? Let's be honest.

No. So Seneca, who we've already mentioned, complaining about the fact that Saturnalia goes on all year, he hates having to discard his toga because he feels that it infringes his dignity. And he says that it's disrespectful to the ancestors of the roman people, who had only ever discarded their togas when the republic was in peril and fallen on evil days. And Pliny the younger, who's absolute Funster, when everybody is having fun and celebrating the Saturnalia, he retreats to his study and reads.

Oh, well, you can read it. I sometimes read at Christmas. Yeah, well, reading is a nice thing to do at Christmas.

Yeah, but not if you've invited guests over.

No.

And they're all having kind. I suppose it's kind of like small children rushing around screaming, high on sugar.

And you think, I'm going to read some dickens.

Read some dickens in my study. But it has to be said that roman poets seem to have adored it. So Catullus, great love poet, contemporary of Julius Caesar, he called it the best of days. Statius, poet, writing under domission, he celebrated a lavish Saturnalia that had been hosted by the emperor. And Horace, intriguingly, gives us a flavor of what it might have been like outside Rome, because in one of his poems, he describes how every December there's this local cult, this village feast, which is in honor not of Saturn, but of faunas, the king with the goat horns, and it sounds quite like the Saturnalia. So he sacrifices lots of produce, he throws big parties, lots of presents go out. It's a season of plenty. And then they all go out into the fields and they all have a big dance, a big knees up, surrounded by their cattle, and it all sounds great fun. So I think philosophers, intellectuals, they don't like the Saturnalia poets. They absolutely seem to have loved it. And I think it's clear from this that December was associated with merrymaking and that the Saturnalia, it clearly has influenced the celebration of fairness out in the fields.

The question then is, did it influence other cults?

Christianity?

Right. So, salient factors. It's not the same date. We've already pointed that out. The two festivals are actually celebrated simultaneously throughout late antiquity. So you can do the Saturnalia and then you can do Christmas. So it's not like they've very obviously been emerged. They're seen as being separate as late as the fourth century into the fifth century.

Would people do both? If you're a bit promiscuous about your.

Religion, I mean, there are christians who really hate this, but, yes, I think that there are people who are doing both.

Right.

So you could say, well, it's a season of goodwill, but I think that the Saturnalia is arising from things that are to do with Saturn, as you'd expect. Presents? No, Christmas. The tradition of present giving is, I mean, it's basically, I think it's 15th century.

So Saturnalia has presents, but Christmas doesn't.

No.

Interesting.

No, it's kind of early modern phenomenon.

Right.

This idea of electing a prince Eps, who can organize fun. So that seems quite like the Lord of misrule that you get in Christmas celebrations. And the idea that the lord of misrule, the medieval lord of misrule is descended from the kind of saturnalian figure, is very, very popular in the late victorian period. So James Fraser, who wrote the golden bow, he's all over that. But the Lord of misrule is a medieval tradition. There doesn't seem to be anything that joins it to antiquity. So basically, it seems convergent evolution. So the way that just because a bird, a pterosaur and a bat all have wings doesn't mean that they have all evolved from one another.

Right.

And, of course, the whole idea that Christmas festivities originated in saturnalian celebrations, it doesn't originate with atheists or humanists. It originates with puritans who want to abolish all this kind of merry making.

Sort of Cromwellians.

Yeah. And so they recognize, I think, that these celebrations, they're an inheritance from the catholic past, from before the reformation, and casting them as pagan, it makes it easier for them to abolish them. So I don't think that there are really any links at all between the Saturnalia and Christmas. Really controversial. They're both in December, and you can imagine why you'd want to celebrate, have fun in the depths of darkness.

The darkest depths of the winter. Exactly.

Darkest depths. But that then raises, I suppose, raises the question, well, did christians deliberately choose December the 25th for that reason? I don't think they choose it because it's the birthday of Sol Invictus. I don't think they choose it because of Saturnalia, for the reasons that I've explained. And actually, we know, I think, why the christians choose December the 25th, despite the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever in the gospels for him being born on that day, and they do it quite late. So the reason that it takes christians so long, we said that the earliest mention of Christmas being celebrated on the 25 December isn't until the middle of the fourth century. And the reason for that, I think, is that christians viewed the celebration of birthdays as a pagan practice. So Oregon, the great philosopher, possibly a eunuch, he writes a commentary on the Gospel of St. Matthew. And in it he observes that we learn from scripture that no birthday was ever celebrated by a righteous man.

Why wouldn't you celebrate someone's birthday? Mad?

It's seen as a pagan thing that pagans do. It's not something that Jews, and therefore, by extension, Christians, are doing. So then why did they start doing it in the mid fourth century? And I think it's all to do with debates about who or what Christ was. To what extent is he divine, to what extent is he human? And there are lots of people, lots of christians, who are saying that Christ is purely divine. And therefore the man Jesus is born, and then the divine Christ enters him. This is not what comes to be orthodoxy. So at the council of Nicaea in three, two, five, they declare that Jesus is God of God, light of light, very God of very God, but also that he came down and was incarnate, I. E. Made flesh and was made man. So therefore, if you're trying to see off people who think that Jesus wasn't really man, it's important to identify his birthday. And that's why I think it's shortly after the council of Nicaea that you start getting celebration of his birthday. But that, of course, still doesn't explain why it's the 25 December. And I think that, as you would expect, the reason for it lies in christian reasons.

Just as the Saturnalia is held for reasons that have to do with the worship of Saturn, so Christmas is celebrated on the deities for reasons that have to do with the inheritance of jewish tradition. And both jewish and christian scholars are very, very into the idea that the great calendar of the Ages has an inherent symmetry. So jewish scholars, they argue that the creation of the world, the birth of Abraham, Abraham's heirs, that they are all born on the same day, that will be the day when the messiah is born and Israel gains its redemption. So this idea that there's a kind of a patterning that's stamped by God on the flow of time. And christian scholars inherit this, and for the same reason, they come to believe that Jesus had died on the anniversary of his incarnation. So in other words, Christ comes into the world on the same day that he leaves it. And there is therefore a kind of a perfect symmetry to the structure of his life and death.

When you say he came into the world, is that being born or being conceived?

No, it's the incarnation. So it's when the archangel Gabriel appears to the Virgin Mary and Jesus becomes incarnate, he is conceived in her womb. And this date, for complicated reasons, that I won't go into, but it's to do with the dating of the Passover and all kinds of things. Christians first in Carthage and then in Rome, come to identify this with the 25 March. So this is lady day. It's the day that Tolkien identifies as being the day on which the ring is thrown into the crack of doom to mount Doom. It's the holiest day of the year. I mean, Tolkien, of course, absolutely knew this, and this beds down, I think, over the second, the third into the fourth century. And, of course, once you've worked out that the incarnation is the 25 March, then nine months on from that is the 25 December. And I think that that is how you get it. And that's absolutely what you would expect, because you would expect this is unbelievably holy for christians. They're not going to nick it from the worship of a sun or from Mithrash from Saturn. And I think, as I said, the whole reason why they start celebrating Christmas is because it's about one faction of christians trying to make a point to another faction of Christians.

Those are the people that they're conscious of. They're not interested in what pagans are doing.

So they're basically reminding the other christians. They're saying, christ was human as well as divine, and let's have a massive party on his birthday to remind, not.

Have a party, but I think at that point, because we don't really know how they're celebrating it.

So we don't know what they were doing when they start celebrating Christmas.

Not really.

There's probably a lot of singing hymns and praying. Is that Tom?

Probably. But we know that over the course of the centuries that follow, of course, it becomes the great feast day. It is a time of celebration, because in the depth of winter, you do want to have a celebration.

Of course you do.

And I thought, Dominic, that we might end with some roman festive music. Would you like that?

Oh, Tom, I would love that. As long as you're not going to be singing, I would really enjoy that.

No, I'm not. So this is the choir of St. Bartholomew the great, who, last Wednesday, they did a medieval carol service, and one of the hymns that they sang was written by St. Ambrose in the fourth century. The fourth century, wow. It's a properly roman hymn, and Ambrose is a very roman figure. He'd been a governor in Milan, and then everyone in Milan said, no, we don't want you as a governor. We want you as a bishop. And so he, obedient to that, he became one of the great fathers of the Church. And he wrote this hymn, veini Redemptor Gentium, which is come, redeemer of the peoples of the world, redeemer of the nations. So it's an advent hymn. So we probably shouldn't be putting it out on the 25 December because of course Christ has come. But what the hell, it's a roman hymn. It's festive. And so I think a perfect way to end this episode and to wish everyone a very, very happy Roman Christmas.

Well done, Tom. That was fantastic. Merry Christmas, everybody. And take it away, please. Ambrose.

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