The Rest Is History - 402. Christmas: Pagan or Christian?

Episode Date: December 25, 2023

“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…” Is Christmas as we know it merely an invention, created by plagiarising from rival cults, such as the worship of Mithra, the Iranian sun god, during the days of the Roman Empire? Is Christmas in fact based on a pagan festival, that Christians have made their own? Or has Christmas always been an authentically Christian celebration, born of its tradition and rituals? Join Tom and Dominic as they delve into the roots of Christmas, the importance of the Roman festival of Saturnalia, the cult of Sol Invictus, and much more. 📱Protect your tech valuables with our exclusive 20% off discount at http://uk.mous.co/RestHistory🎒 Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. T-Bing groaned. Don't get a symbologist started on Christian icons. Nothing in Christianity is original. The pre-Christian god Mithras, called the son of God and the light of the world, was born on December the 25th. 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 Osiris, Adonis, and Dionysus. The newborn Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Now that was the renowned symbologist Sir Lee Teabing, 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 air and said, we just thought today is Christmas day. So happy, 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 Salih Teabing, it was like Sir Ian McKellen was doing it.

Oh, yeah. It's like listening to Gandalf. Right. Because he plays Salih Teabing in the film. Yeah, he does. So I gave him. No, it was a masterly. Thank you.

You have clearly been sitting at my feet and learning from me. Yeah, he does. So I gave him... No, it was a masterly. Thank you. You have 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. Yeah. 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. Well, of course, we are actually recording this on Christmas morning, aren't we?

Of course we are, Tom. We got up really early today. Yeah. So there's a serious point here. Salih Teabing 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 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 the 25th of December. I mean, we don't know when he's born, and we don't know which year, but this is not quite what Sir Lee Teabing 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 mishmash 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. 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 Salih was claiming. We should remind ourselves, Salih TV obviously doesn't exist. Doesn't actually exist, no. But, you know, he's a very distinguished symbolologist, so let's cite him. So he is saying that the pre-Christian god Mithras was born on the 25th of 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 British, so that's another thing to chalk up to Dan Brown's mastery. Another Dan Brown solacism. Yeah, so he's saying that the pre-Christian god Mithras was born on the 25th of December, that the same date was the birth of Osiris, who is an Egyptian god, Adonis, who's 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 myrrh. So these are gods from quite a broad range of backgrounds. So it would be amazing 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 25th of December? What do you think? I have a lot of confidence in both in Lee Teabing 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 25th of December. Absolutely none. And in fact, Osiris, so he's a very, very significant Egyptian god. Yeah. And we talked about him in our episode on the death of Antinous, 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 at kind of early September. This is when the festival is held. Krishna, who is 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 is, I don't know where he's, well, I do know where he's got it from. He's 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 i mean 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 pre i love a bit of mithras mithras yeah i love

mithras was he in the world cup of gods can't remember uh 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 of, it's like a version of Freemasonry, wasn't it? For Roman officers. They'd have their little clubs and they'd meet underground and stuff. Right. So is he a pre-Christian god, Mithras, as Sili Tebing claims? Slightly steadier ground here because there is a Persianian god called not mithras but mithra okay who is he's he's kind of pre-zerastrian probably so very very ancient um and mithras is clearly a variant form of of that name mithra and there is a reference to a god called Mithras being worshipped 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 Salih Teabing

making a mistake rather than Dan Brown. Dan Brown may be setting Salih Teabing 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, 25th of December, and Salih Teabing is saying that Mithras was born on the 25th of 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 um 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 tunnel yeah yeah and this is by 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 yeah but that there's a certain degree of complexity here so either that's what people want on christmas day probably well i don't know i mean it's 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. 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 various inscriptions that you find in Rome or across the empire. But does this mean that Mithras and the Sol invictus the unconquered son are one and the same and 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 son invictus is that their case yeah and so there is there is a kind

of default assumption that soul invictus the unconquered son, is a cult that gets introduced to Rome from Syria by Elagabalus, who was in the news recently. Yeah. 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 yeah the sources that tell us this are written a long time after his his life for very overt polemical reasons and the sources are very very unreliable so i think it's 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 in the sources you know so elegabalus the l in that it's the god you god as in Elohim 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 worshipped 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 3rd century AD, it's deriving from essentially

quite racist preconceptions that scholars in the 19th century have about oriental cults. Right. And they associate it with Elagabalus and they say, he's bonkers. He's dressing up as a woman. He's doing the oriental stuff, talking to the sun, very poor form, et cetera, et cetera. But also that they see worshipping 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 friezes that show them as separate individuals. But then there's the question, what about Sol Invictus? It's his birthday on the 25th of December. So it's definitely not Mithras. We don't know when Mithras' birthday is. He's not born on the 25th of December because he's not Sol Invictus.

But what about Sol Invictus? Where does the idea that Sol Invictus has his birthday on the 25th of December come from? Tom, if I'm honest, this is what I previously believed to be true, that Christmas was a rip-off of Sol Invictus' 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.

Ronald Hutton. Yeah. So in his great book, Stations of the Sun, which is a kind of history 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 25th of December is the calendar of Philokalos, which was produced in 354 and apparently at Rome. 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 scriptus Cyrus, in the late 4th century. Hutton then goes on to quote what this figure, this supposed 4th century Christian writer, the Scriptus Cyrus, wrote. He says, so I'm quoting the Scriptus Cyrus here, It was a custom of the pagans to celebrate on the same 25th of 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 25th of December Sol Invictus ritual. This is basically what it's saying. And this is the source for the claim that Christians based the 25th of December on the fact that Sol Invictus celebrated his birthday on the 25th of 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 script Osiris? 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 in The Golden Bough 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 scriptosiris, the Syrian writer, is an anonymous scribe who is in the 12th century, so not the 4th 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 7th of January celebration to the 25th of 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 Cyrus Scripter, 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, the Christians in Rome and the West have got it wrong. He's trying to say, well, why have they? That basically is the reason. It's not dating from the 4th century. It's his attempt to explain why the Christians in the West have got it wrong, and it's casting aspersions on them. 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 25th of December.

So the calendar that Ronald Hutton cited is kind of almanac, and it does date to 354, 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 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. 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. So it's not 100% certain, I think,

that Invictus does refer to the sun, to Sol, because there are other entrants that do name-check Sol in the same almanac, and they don't call him Invictus. But let's assume it does refer to Sol. The question is, so this is Hiemann's in his essay, do we know that this feast of Sol on December the 25th antedates the Feast of Christmas at all? Because the major feast day of Sol, and we know this because we have all kinds of references to it, at least back to the time of Augustus, was the 28th of August. This feast then gets supplemented in 274 by the Emperor Aurelian. He's this great conqueror who stitches the

fragmenting parts of the Roman Empire back togetherian. 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 Sol, of the sun. And in this almanac, the one that comes out in 354, the one that records the 25th of December as the birthday of the unconquered one. It also specifies that on the 22nd of October, 36 chariot races, so that's six more than on the 25th of December, were staged in honor of Sol. So in other words, this is a bigger celebration of Sol than the 25th of December. So it's possible, I would say even probable, that the birth of Saul on the 25th of 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? Christians to decide, well, we must mark the birth of our saviour on this day. I mean, I think probably not, because you have this, simply for Sol, 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. I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment it's your weekly fix

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that's therestisentertainment.com 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 a.d and he is talking about the jeremy corbin of pre-roman god roman italy the king saturnus so kind that everything was held in common there were no slaves uh life was just one long it was 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 correct? 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 Latium, the area around Rome. Their seat had been the hill that comes to be called the Capitol.

So that's looking down over the Roman Forum, but which before it was called the Capitol, was called the Mons 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, is 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. Of course, the Romans are not writing about their gods as a contemporary anthropologist would. The question of how seriously do they take this stuff, are there variants of the legends, 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, well, 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 Latium called Satria.

When you say Latium, I would say Latium for that. Is it called Latium? Is that what people call it? As in Lazio. As in Lazio, yeah. Lazio. As in Lazio. That's what I was thinking. Latium. I've never heard it called that. But Tom, Latium? Is that what people call it? As in Lazio. As in Lazio, yeah. Lazio. As in Lazio. That's what I was thinking of. Latium. I've never heard it called that, but Tom,

I bow to your expertise. That's how I've always called it. Maybe I've got it wrong. I don't know. And there's a third theory, which is that the Etruscans worshipped 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 inspected by Etruscan priests. It was found at Piacenza in Tuscany, so in the homelands of the Etruscans. And a portion 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 uh the end of the harvest or something like that but but it's late though because it's december so hold on tom you this 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 oh we'll come to that okay so the ravens start associating their gods with greek gods as they become more familiar with the Greek world.

That's right. So in the third, 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 Capitol. Oh it was consecrated in 497 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 Regna, 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 Capitol. 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. 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 Pecus, which is a 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 sorcerer Circe? I mean, all kinds of things. He, in turn, is succeeded by Faunus, so as in faun, 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 is History. That in a way, he is a symbol of the savagery that had existed before the coming of civilization. So not a golden age at all, quite the reverse. 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 Saturnalia, 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. Yeah. So basically, Saturn embodies two contradictory theories. He's a menacing tyrant who defiles 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. It's all over the place, Tom. It's all over the shop. Yeah, it absolutely is all over the place. But I think that, I 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. It's kind of that complicated. But there's no question that the great feast day of Saturn is on the 17th of December. Now note, not the 25th of December, the 17th of 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. Likewise, by first century BC, essentially the Saturnalia has come to last for a week. It runs until the 23rd of December. Augustus, who's very conservative, he doesn't approve of innovation. He says that it should be only three days. Augustus is very much kind of, why are people putting up Christmas decorations in August? Kind of a guy.

I mean, that's absolutely what he'd be on. And he's saying, you know, 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 we, in Suetonius, to give a permanent boost to the gaiety of the nation,

he added an extra day to the Saturnaliaalia which he called the festival of the young so i don't know he's appealing to the youthful constituencies he's pandering and uh seneca great philosopher yeah tutor of nero hated caligula with a passion and he kind of grumbles that once december was a month now it fills the year so So again, that's very familiar. So this might seem a parallel, as does the fact that Saturnalia, 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 Io Saturnalia. Io Saturnalia. What's that mean? It means brilliant. Saturnalia is here. Hooray. Okay. Have fun. Okay. Let's celebrate. Kind of happy Christmas.

Yeah. And it's hugely, hugely look 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 probably 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 yeah leotard perhaps or something 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 Justinus, 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 freed men. 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 also have riotous drinking, gambling, which normally is illegal. This has become legal. And you get groups of people they

rather like we celebrate christmas i suppose kind of you know you meet up and have um we're feeling a little bit hungover aren't we a little bit fragile as we record this if yourself tom because yesterday yesterday we had the rest is history christmas lunch and what we did we served the producers of that didn't we we did yes we went and got of that, didn't we? We did, yes. We went and got the Guinness, got the wine. Yeah. 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 organise pranks and japes.

Oh, japes. Yeah. And pranks. I'm not sure I approve of pranks and japes, to be honest with you. So Lukin, who is a second century writer, he writes of how fun it is to become, in a 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 Akris for Slush. And it's obviously, you know, you're called a princeps. It's a parody of the powers that the emperor has over, you know, all his fellow citizens. And there's a notorious occasion where a future emperor does get voted princeps. 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, his 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 sigillaria. 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. 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, you know, scholars would have today. Definitely, yeah. And also the other thing is that you give gifts of mincemeat that are not actually made of mincemeat. They're made of clay or plaster or whatever. Okay. That's a bit weird.

It is a bit weird. Franz 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. 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, you know, they can talk back to their masters. But I mean, the next day they're going to be slaves again and their masters will remember. So it's probably not quite as, this wonderful release. Because it must be, to some degree, if you've got a very horrible master, the whole thing must just be this grotesque parody that you have to go through. Anyway, sorry sorry go on no no you're i mean you're absolutely right uh that of course every slave knows that once the saturnalia is gone you know the master can absolutely punish you for anything that you said yeah um but i think i think the idea is that it gives you know a slave 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. Some 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 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 the 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 an absolute funster, when everybody is having fun and celebrating 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. And they're all having fun. I mean, I suppose it's kind of like small children rushing around screaming high on sugar. And you think, well, I'm going to go home. I'll 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. Yeah. Statius, poet writing under Domitian. He celebrated a lavish saturnalia that had been hosted by by the emperor and um horace intriguingly gives us a flavor of what it might have been like outside rome because he in one of his poems he describes how every december there's this kind of this local cult this village feast which is in honor not of saturn but of faunus the the kind of you know the the king with the with the goat horns and it sounds

quite like the saturnalia so he he sacrifices lots of produce he throws big parties lots of presents go out you know it's a season of plenty and then they all go out into the into the fields and they they all have a big dance big knees knees up, surrounded by their cattle, and it all sounds great fun. So I think philosophers, intellectuals, they don't like 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 Faunus 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 merged. 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. So you could say, well, it's a season of goodwill. Yeah. But I think that the Saturnalia is arising from things that are to do with Saturn. You know, it's, as you'd expect, presents, no. Christmas, the tradition of present giving is, I mean, it's basically, I think it's 15th century.

Ah, so Saturnalia has presents, but Christmas doesn't. No. Interesting. No, it's kind of early modern phenomenon. Right. This idea of electing a princeps who can, you know, 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 Bower, 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. 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 merrymaking. So the Cromwellians, yeah.

Yeah. And so they recognize, I think, that these celebrations, you know, 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 depth of darkness. The darkest depths of the winter, exactly.

The darkest depths. But that then raises, I suppose, raises the question, well, did Christians deliberately choose December the 25th for that reason? I mean, I don't think they choose it because it's the birthday of Sol and Victor. 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 25th of 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 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? Why wouldn't you celebrate someone's birthday? Mad. It's seen as a 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 325, 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 25th of 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 day it is 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 we say uh 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 right and jesus becomes incarnate right he is conceived in her womb and this date for complicated reasons that i won't go into right 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 25th of 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 25th of March, then nine months on from that is the 25th of December. And I think that that is how you get it. And that's absolutely

what you would expect because you would expect, you know, this is unbelievably holy for Christians. They're not going to nick it from the worship of a sun or from Saturn. And I think the whole, 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… Well, 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. 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 and i thought dominic oh 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 this is the choir of saint 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. 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, 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 um so it's an advent hymn yeah so we probably shouldn't be

putting it out on the 25th of december because course Christ has come, but what the hell it's a, it's a Roman hymn. It's festive. And so, uh, I think a perfect way to end this episode and to wish everyone a very, very happy Roman Christmas. Well done, that was fantastic. Uh, Merry Christmas, everybody. And take it away, please, Ambrose. Sint urgentium, postenne parfum virtis, mire et oramne seculum, aris tecet parfus Deum. Non ex vivis semine, ser mystico spiramine, verbum Dei facur est paro, rupusque ventris floruit. Albus fulvescit virgilis, claustrum pui dodis

permanent, vexima virtutum micant, versatul in templo Deo. Proceda tecana noso, oonis auta regia, genine giga substantiae, allae que sut currat via. Amen. firma nostrii corponis, virtutae firmans perpeti. Pressepe iam fulget tu, lo lengue nox pirat novum, quod nulla nox interponent, fideque iurgi luceant. SET CHRISTIM REX VESIME, TIBI PATRIQUE GLORIA, Tivi Patrique Gloria Cum Spiritul Paracleto

Insem Viterna Secula Amen Amen. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club.

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