Chapter VIII: The Saturnalia and Kindred Festivals (2)

(M256) In our own country a popular figure during the Christmas holidays used to be the Lord of Misrule, or, as he was called in Scotland, the Abbot of Unreason, who led the revels at that merry season in the halls of colleges, the Inns of Court, the palace of the king, and the mansions of nobles.(761) Writing at the end of the sixteenth century, the antiquary John Stow tells us that, “in the feast of Christmas, there was in the King’s house, wheresoever he was lodged, a Lord of Misrule, or Master of Merry Disports; and the like had ye in the house of every nobleman of honour or good worship, were he spiritual or temporal. Amongst the which the Mayor of London, and either of the Sheriffs, had their several Lords of Misrule, ever contending, without quarrel or offence, who should make the rarest pastimes to delight the beholders. These Lords beginning their rule on Alhollon eve, continued the same til the morrow after the Feast of the Purification, commonly called Candlemas day. In all which space there were fine and subtle disguisings, masks and mummeries, with playing at cards for counters, nails, and points, in every house, more for pastime than for gain.”(762) Again, in the seventeenth century the ardent royalist Sir Thomas Urquhart wrote that “they may be likewise said to use their king ... as about Christmas we do the King of Misrule; whom we invest with that title to no other end, but to countenance the Bacchanalian riots and preposterous disorders of the family, where he is installed.”(763) From the former passage it appears that the Lords of Misrule often or even generally reigned for more than three months in winter, namely from Allhallow Even (the thirty-first of October, the Eve of All Saints’ Day) till Candlemas (the second of February). Sometimes, however, their reign seems to have been restricted to the Twelve Nights. Thus we are told that George Ferrers of Lincoln’s Inn was Lord of Misrule for twelve days one year when King Edward VI. kept his Christmas with open house at Greenwich.(764) At Trinity College, Cambridge, a Master of Arts used to be appointed to this honourable office, which he held for the twelve days from Christmas to Twelfth Day, and he resumed office on Candlemas Day. His duty was to regulate the games and diversions of the students, particularly the plays which were acted in the college hall. Similar masters of the revels were commonly instituted in the colleges at Oxford; for example, at Merton College the fellows annually elected about St. Edmund’s Day, in November a Lord of Misrule or, as he was called in the registers, a King of the Bean (_Rex Fabarum_), who held office till Candlemas and sometimes assumed a number of ridiculous titles. In the Inner Temple a Lord of Misrule used to be appointed on St. Stephen’s Day (the twenty-sixth of December); surrounded by his courtiers, who were dubbed by various derogatory or ribald names, he presided at the dancing, feasting, and minstrelsy in the hall. Of the mock monarch who in the Christmas holidays of 1635 held office in the Middle Temple the jurisdiction, privileges, and parade have been minutely described. He was attended by his lord keeper, lord treasurer, with eight white staves, a band of gentleman pensioners with poleaxes, and two chaplains. He dined under a canopy of state both in the hall and in his own chambers. He received many petitions, which he passed on in regal style to his Master of Requests; and he attended service in the Temple church, where his chaplains preached before him and did him reverence. His expenses, defrayed from his own purse, amounted to no less than two thousand pounds.(765) “I remember to have heard a Bencher of the Temple tell a story of a tradition in their house, where they had formerly a custom of choosing kings for such a season, and allowing him his expences at the charge of the society: One of our kings, said my friend, carried his royal inclination a little too far, and there was a committee ordered to look into the management of his treasury. Among other things it appeared, that his Majesty walking _incog._ in the cloister, had overheard a poor man say to another, Such a small sum would make me the happiest man in the world. The king out of his royal compassion privately inquired into his character, and finding him a proper object of charity, sent him the money. When the committee read the report, the house passed his accounts with a plaudite without further examination, upon the recital of this article in them, ‘For making a man happy, £10:0:0.’ ”(766)

(M257) At the English court the annual Lord of Misrule is not to be confounded with the Master of the Revels, who was a permanent official and probably despised the temporary Lord as an upstart rival and intruder. Certainly there seems to have been at times bad blood between them. Some correspondence which passed between the two merry monarchs in the reign of Edward VI. has been preserved, and from it we learn that on one occasion the Lord of Misrule had much difficulty in extracting from the Master of the Revels the fool’s coat, hobby-horses, and other trumpery paraphernalia which he required for the proper support of his dignity. Indeed the costumes furnished by his rival were so shabby that his lordship returned them with a note, in which he informed the Master of the Revels that the gentlemen of rank and position who were to wear these liveries stood too much on their dignity to be seen prancing about the streets of London rigged out in such old slops. The Lords of Council had actually to interpose in the petty squabble between the two potentates.(767)

(M258) In France the counterparts of these English Lords of Misrule masqueraded in clerical attire as mock Bishops, Archbishops, Popes, or Abbots. The festival at which they disported themselves was known as the Festival of Fools (_Fête des Fous_), which fell in different places at different dates, sometimes on Christmas Day, sometimes on St. Stephen’s Day (the twenty-sixth of December), sometimes on New Year’s Day, and sometimes on Twelfth Day. According to one account “on the first day, which was the festival of Christmas, the lower orders of clergy and monks cried in unison _Noël_ (Christmas) and gave themselves up to jollity. On the morrow, St. Stephen’s Day, the deacons held a council to elect a Pope or Patriarch of Fools, a Bishop or Archbishop of Innocents, an Abbot of Ninnies; next day, the festival of St. John, the subdeacons began the dance in his honour; afterwards, on the fourth day, the festival of the Holy Innocents, the choristers and minor clergy claimed the Pope or Bishop or Abbot elect, who made his triumphal entry into the church on Circumcision Day (the first of January) and sat enthroned pontifically till the evening of Epiphany. It was then the joyous reign of this Pope or this Bishop or this Abbot of Folly which constituted the Festival of Fools and dominated its whimsical phases, the grotesque and sometimes impious masquerades, the merry and often disgusting scenes, the furious orgies, the dances, the games, the profane songs, the impudent parodies of the catholic liturgy.”(768) At these parodies of the most solemn rites of the church the priests, wearing grotesque masks and sometimes dressed as women, danced in the choir and sang obscene chants: laymen disguised as monks and nuns mingled with the clergy: the altar was transformed into a tavern, where the deacons and subdeacons ate sausages and black-puddings or played at dice and cards under the nose of the celebrant; and the censers smoked with bits of old shoes instead of incense, filling the church with a foul stench. After playing these pranks and running, leaping, and cutting capers through the whole church, they rode about the town in mean carts, exchanging scurrilities with the crowds of laughing and jeering spectators.(769)

(M259) Amongst the buffooneries of the Festival of Fools one of the most remarkable was the introduction of an ass into the church, where various pranks were played with the animal. At Autun the ass was led with great ceremony to the church under a cloth of gold, the corners of which were held by four canons; and on entering the sacred edifice the animal was wrapt in a rich cope, while a parody of the mass was performed. A regular Latin liturgy in glorification of the ass was chanted on these occasions, and the celebrant priest imitated the braying of an ass. At Beauvais the ceremony was performed every year on the fourteenth of January. A young girl with a child in her arms rode on the back of the ass in imitation of the Flight into Egypt. Escorted by the clergy and the people she was led in triumph from the cathedral to the parish church of St. Stephen. There she and her ass were introduced into the chancel and stationed on the left side of the altar; and a long mass was performed which consisted of scraps borrowed indiscriminately from the services of many church festivals throughout the year. In the intervals the singers quenched their thirst: the congregation imitated their example; and the ass was fed and watered. The services over, the animal was brought from the chancel into the nave, where the whole congregation, clergy and laity mixed up together, danced round the animal and brayed like asses. Finally, after vespers and compline, the merry procession, led by the precentor and preceded by a huge lantern, defiled through the streets to wind up the day with indecent farces in a great theatre erected opposite the church.(770)

(M260) A pale reflection or diminutive copy of the Festival of Fools was the Festival of the Innocents, which was celebrated on Childermas or Holy Innocents’ Day, the twenty-eighth of December. The custom was widely observed both in France and England. In France on Childermas or the eve of the festival the choristers assembled in the church and chose one of their number to be a Boy Bishop, who officiated in that character with mock solemnity. Such burlesques of ecclesiastical ritual appear to have been common on that day in monasteries and convents, where the offices performed by the clergy and laity were inverted for the occasion. At the Franciscan monastery of Antibes, for example, the lay brothers, who usually worked in the kitchen and the garden, took the place of the priests on Childermas and celebrated mass in church, clad in tattered sacerdotal vestments turned inside out, holding the books upside down, wearing spectacles made of orange peel, mumbling an unintelligible jargon, and uttering frightful cries. These buffooneries were kept up certainly as late as the eighteenth century,(771) and probably later. In the great convent of the Congrégation de Notre Dame at Paris down to the latter part of the nineteenth century the nuns and their girl pupils regularly exchanged parts on Holy Innocents’ Day. The pupils pretended to be nuns and a select few of them were attired as such, while the nuns made believe to be pupils, without however changing their dress.(772)

(M261) In England the Boy Bishop was widely popular during the later Middle Ages and only succumbed to the austerity of the Reformation. He is known, for example, to have officiated in St. Paul’s, London, in the cathedrals of Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, Gloucester, Lichfield, Norwich, Lincoln, and York, in great collegiate churches such as Beverley minster, St. Peter’s, Canterbury, and Ottery St. Mary’s, in college chapels such as Magdalen and All Souls’ at Oxford, in the private chapels of the king, and in many parish churches throughout the country. The election was usually made on St. Nicholas’s Day (the sixth of December), but the office and authority lasted till Holy Innocents’ Day (the twenty-eighth of December). Both days were appropriate, for St. Nicholas was the patron saint of school children, and Holy Innocents’ Day commemorates the slaughter of the young children by Herod. In cathedrals the Bishop was chosen from among the choir boys. After his election he was completely apparelled in the episcopal vestments, with a mitre and crosier, bore the title and displayed the state of a Bishop, and exacted ceremonial obedience from his fellows, who were dressed like priests. They took possession of the church and, with the exception of mass, performed all the ceremonies and offices. The Boy Bishop preached from the pulpit. At Salisbury the ceremonies at which he presided are elaborately regulated by the statutes of Roger de Mortival, enacted in 1319; and two of the great service-books of the Sarum use, the Breviary and the Processional, furnish full details of the ministrations of the Boy Bishop and his fellows. He is even said to have enjoyed the right of disposing of such prebends as happened to fall vacant during the days of his episcopacy. But the pranks of the mock bishop were not confined to the church. Arrayed in full canonicals he was led about with songs and dances from house to house, blessing the grinning people and collecting money in return for his benedictions. At York in the year 1396 the Boy Bishop is known to have gone on his rounds to places so far distant as Bridlington, Leeds, Beverley, Fountains Abbey, and Allerton; and the profits which he made were considerable. William of Wykeham ordained in 1400 that a Boy Bishop should be chosen at Winchester College and another at New College, Oxford, and that he should recite the office at the Feast of the Innocents. His example was followed some forty years afterwards in the statutes of the royal foundations of Eton College and of King’s College, Cambridge. From being elected on St. Nicholas’s Day the Boy Bishop was sometimes called a Nicholas Bishop (_Episcopus Nicholatensis_).(773) In Spanish cathedrals, also, it appears to have been customary on St. Nicholas’s Day to elect a chorister to the office of Bishop. He exercised a certain jurisdiction till Holy Innocents’ Day, and his prebendaries took secular offices, acting in the capacity of alguazils, catchpoles, dog-whippers, and sweepers.(774)

(M262) On the whole it seems difficult to suppose that the a curious superstitions and quaint ceremonies, the outbursts of profanity and the inversions of ranks, which characterize the popular celebration of the twelve days from Christmas to Epiphany, have any connexion with the episodes of Christian history believed to be commemorated by these two festivals. More probably they are relics of an old heathen festival celebrated during the twelve intercalary days which our forefathers annually inserted in their calendar at midwinter in order to equalize the short lunar year of twelve months with the longer solar year of three hundred and sixty-five or sixty-six days. We need not assume that the license and buffooneries of the festive season were borrowed from the Roman Saturnalia; both celebrations may well have been parallel and independent deductions from a like primitive philosophy of nature. There is not indeed, so far as I am aware, any direct evidence that the Saturnalia at Rome was an intercalary festival; but the license which characterized it, and the temporary reign of a mock king, who personated Saturn, suggest that it may have been so. If we were better acquainted with the intercalary periods of peoples at a comparatively low level of culture, we might find that they are commonly marked by similar outbreaks of lawlessness and similar reigns of more or less nominal and farcical rulers. But unfortunately we know too little about the observance of such periods among primitive peoples to be warranted in making any positive affirmation on the subject.

(M263) However, there are grounds for thinking that intercalary periods have commonly been esteemed unlucky. The Aztecs certainly regarded as very unlucky the five supplementary days which they added at the end of every year in order to make up a total of three hundred and sixty-five days.(775) These five supplementary days, corresponding to the last four of January and the first of February, were called _nemontemi_, which means “vacant,” “superfluous,” or “useless.” Being dedicated to no god, they were deemed inauspicious, equally unfit for the services of religion and the transaction of civil business. During their continuance no sacrifices were offered by the priests and no worshippers frequented the temples. No cases were tried in the courts of justice. The houses were not swept. People abstained from all actions of importance and confined themselves to performing such as could not be avoided, or spent the time in paying visits to each other. In particular they were careful during these fatal days not to fall asleep in the daytime, not to quarrel, and not to stumble; because they thought that if they did such things at that time they would continue to do so for ever. Persons born on any of these days were deemed unfortunate, destined to fail in their undertakings and to live in wretchedness and poverty all their time on earth.(776) The Mayas of Yucatan employed a calendar like that of the Aztecs, and they too looked upon the five supplementary days at the end of the year as unlucky and of evil omen; hence they gave no names to these days, and while they lasted the people stayed for the most part at home; they neither washed themselves, nor combed their hair, nor loused each other; and they did no servile or fatiguing work lest some evil should befall them.(777)

(M264) The ancient Egyptians like the Aztecs considered a year to consist of three hundred and sixty ordinary days divided into months and eked out with five supplementary days so as to bring the total number of days in the year up to three hundred and sixty-five; but whereas the Aztecs divided the three hundred and sixty ordinary days into eighteen arbitrary divisions or months of twenty days each, the Egyptians, keeping much closer to the natural periods marked by the phases of the moon, divided these days into twelve months of thirty days each.(778) This mode of regulating the calendar appears to be exceedingly ancient in Egypt and may even date from the prehistoric period; for the five days over and above the year (_haru duaït hiru ronpit_) are expressly mentioned in the texts of the pyramids.(779) The myth told to explain their origin was as follows. Once on a time the earth-god Keb lay secretly with the sky-goddess Nut, and the sun-god Ra in his anger cursed the goddess, saying that she should give birth to her offspring neither in any month nor in any year. He thought, no doubt, by this imprecation to prevent her from bringing forth the fruit of her womb. But he was outwitted by the wily Thoth, who engaged the goddess of the moon in a game of draughts and having won the game took as a forfeit from her the seventieth part of every day in the year, and out of the fractions thus abstracted he made up five new days, which he added to the old year of three hundred and sixty days. As these days formed no part either of a month or of a year, the goddess Nut might be delivered in them without rendering the sun-god’s curse void and of no effect. Accordingly she bore Osiris on the first of the days, Horus on the second, Set or Typhon on the third, Isis on the fourth, and Nephthys on the fifth. Of these five supplementary or intercalary days the third, as the birthday of the evil deity Set or Typhon, was deemed unlucky, and the Egyptian kings neither transacted business on it nor attended to their persons till nightfall.(780) Thus it appears that the ancient Egyptians regarded the five supplementary or intercalary days as belonging neither to a month nor to a year, but as standing outside of both and forming an extraordinary period quite apart and distinct from the ordinary course of time. It is probable, though we cannot prove it, that in all countries intercalary days or months have been so considered by the primitive astronomers who first observed the discrepancy between solar and lunar time and attempted to reconcile it by the expedient of intercalation.

(M265) Thus we infer with some probability that the sacred Twelve Days or Nights at midwinter derive their peculiar character in popular custom and superstition from the circumstance that they were originally an intercalary period inserted annually at the end of a lunar year of three hundred and fifty-four days for the purpose of equating it to a solar year reckoned at three hundred and sixty-six days. However, there are grounds for thinking that at a very early time the Aryan peoples sought to correct their lunar year, not by inserting twelve supplementary days every year, but by allowing the annual deficiency to accumulate for several years and then supplying it by a whole intercalary month. In India the Aryans of the Vedic age appear to have adopted a year of three hundred and sixty days, divided into twelve months of thirty days each, and to have remedied the annual deficiency of five days by intercalating a whole month of thirty days every fifth year, thus regulating their calendar according to a five years’ cycle.(781) The Celts of Gaul, as we learn from the Coligny calendar, also adopted a five years’ cycle, but they managed it differently. They retained the old lunar year of three hundred and fifty-four days divided into twelve months, six of thirty days and six of twenty-nine days; but instead of intercalating twelve days every year to restore the balance between lunar and solar time they intercalated a month of thirty days every two and a half years, so that in each cycle of five years the total number of intercalary days was sixty, which was equivalent to intercalating twelve days annually. Thus the result at the end of each cycle of five years was precisely the same as it would have been if they had followed the old system of annual intercalation.(782) Why they abandoned the simple and obvious expedient of annually intercalating twelve days, and adopted instead the more recondite system of intercalating a month of thirty days every two and a half years, is not plain. It may be that religious or political motives unknown to us concurred with practical considerations to recommend the change. One result of the reform would be the abolition of the temporary king who, if I am right, used to bear a somewhat tumultuary sway over the community during the saturnalia of the Twelve Days. Perhaps the annually recurring disorders which attended that period of license were not the least urgent of the reasons which moved the rulers to strike the twelve intercalary days out of the year and to replace them by an intercalary month at longer intervals.

(M266) However that may be, the equivalence of the new intercalary month to the old intercalary Twelve Days multiplied by two and a half is strongly suggested by a remarkable feature of the Coligny calendar; for in it the thirty days of the intercalary month, which bore the name of Ciallos, are named after the ordinary twelve months of the year. Thus the first day of the intercalary month is called Samon, which is the name of the first month of the year; the second day of the month is called Dumannos, which is the name of the second month of the year; the third day of the month is called Rivros, which is the name of the third month of the year; the fourth day of the month is called Anacan, which is the name of the fourth month of the year; and so on with all the rest, so that the thirty days of the intercalary month bear the names of the twelve months of the year repeated two and a half times.(783) This seems to shew that, just as our modern peasants regard the Twelve Days as representing each a month of the year in their chronological order, so the old Celts of Gaul who drew up the Coligny calendar regarded the thirty days of the intercalary month as representing the thirty ordinary months which were to follow it till the next intercalation took place. And we may conjecture that just as our modern peasants still draw omens from the Twelve Days for the twelve succeeding months, so the old Celts drew omens from the thirty days of the intercalary month for the thirty months of the two and a half succeeding years. Indeed we may suppose that the reformers of the calendar transferred, or attempted to transfer, to the new intercalary month the whole of the quaint customs and superstitions which from time immemorial had clustered round the twelve intercalary days of the old year. Thus, like the old Twelve Days of midwinter, the thirty days of the new intercalary month may have formed an interregnum or break in the ordinary course of government, a tumultuary period of general license, during which the ordinary rules of law and morality were suspended and the direction of affairs committed to a temporary and more or less farcical ruler or King of the Bean, who may possibly have had to pay with his life for his brief reign of thirty days. The floating traditions of such merry monarchs and of the careless happy-go-lucky life under them may have crystallized in after ages into the legend of Saturn and the Golden Age. If that was so—and I put forward the hypothesis for no more than a web of conjectures woven from the gossamer threads of popular superstition—we can understand why the Twelve Days, intercalated every year in the old calendar, should have survived to the present day in the memory of the people, whereas the thirty days, intercalated every two and a half years in the new calendar, have long been forgotten. It is the simplest ideas that live longest in the simple minds of the peasantry; and since the intercalation of twelve days in every year to allow the lagging moon to keep pace with the longer stride of the sun is certainly an easier and more obvious expedient than to wait for two and a half years till he has outrun her by thirty days, we need not wonder that this ancient mode of harmonizing lunar and solar time should have lingered in the recollection and in the usages of the people ages after the more roundabout method, which reflective minds had devised for accomplishing the same end, had faded alike from the memory of the peasant and the page of the historian.

§ 3. The Saturnalia and Lent.

(M267) As the Carnival is always held on the last three days before the beginning of Lent, its date shifts somewhat from year to year, but it invariably falls either in February or March. Hence it does not coincide with the date of the Saturnalia, which within historical times seems to have been always celebrated in December even in the old days, before Caesar’s reform of the calendar, when the Roman year ended with February instead of December.(784) Yet if the Saturnalia, like many other seasons of license, was originally celebrated as a sort of public purification at the end of the old year or the beginning of the new one, it may at a still more remote period, when the Roman year began with March, have been regularly held either in February or March and therefore at approximately the same date as the modern Carnival. So strong and persistent are the conservative instincts of the peasantry in respect to old custom, that it would be no matter for surprise if, in rural districts of Italy, the ancient festival continued to be celebrated at the ancient time long after the official celebration of the Saturnalia in the towns had been shifted from February to December. Latin Christianity, which struck at the root of official or civic paganism, has always been tolerant of its rustic cousins, the popular festivals and ceremonies which, unaffected by political and religious revolutions, by the passing of empires and of gods, have been carried on by the people with but little change from time immemorial, and represent in fact the original stock from which the state religions of classical antiquity were comparatively late offshoots. Thus it may very well have come about that while the new faith stamped out the Saturnalia in the towns, it suffered the original festival, disguised by a difference of date, to linger unmolested in the country; and so the old feast of Saturn, under the modern name of the Carnival, has reconquered the cities, and goes on merrily under the eye and with the sanction of the Catholic Church.

(M268) The opinion that the Saturnalia originally fell in February or the beginning of March receives some support from the circumstance that the festival of the Matronalia, at which mistresses feasted their slaves just as masters did theirs at the Saturnalia, always continued to be held on the first of March, even when the Roman year began with January.(785) It is further not a little recommended by the consideration that this date would be eminently appropriate for the festival of Saturn, the old Italian god of sowing and planting. It has always been a puzzle to explain why such a festival should have been held at midwinter; but on the present hypothesis the mystery vanishes. With the Italian farmer February and March were the great season of the spring sowing and planting;(786) nothing could be more natural than that the husbandman should inaugurate the season with the worship of the deity to whom he ascribed the function of quickening the seed. It is no small confirmation of this theory that the last day of the Carnival, namely Shrove Tuesday, is still, or was down to recent times, the customary season in Central Europe for promoting the growth of the crops by means of leaps and dances.(787) The custom fits in very well with the view which derives the Carnival from an old festival of sowing such as the Saturnalia probably was in its origin. Further, the orgiastic character of the festival is readily explained by the help of facts which met us in a former part of our investigation. We have seen that between the sower and the seed there is commonly supposed to exist a sympathetic connexion of such a nature that his conduct directly affects and can promote or retard the growth of the crops.(788) What wonder then if the simple husbandman imagined that by cramming his belly, by swilling and guzzling just before he proceeded to sow his fields, he thereby imparted additional vigour to the seed?(789)

(M269) But while his crude philosophy may thus have painted gluttony and intoxication in the agreeable colours of duties which he owed to himself, to his family, and to the commonwealth, it is possible that the zest with which he acquitted himself of his obligations may have been whetted by a less comfortable reflection. In modern times the indulgence of the Carnival is immediately followed by the abstinence of Lent; and if the Carnival is the direct descendant of the Saturnalia, may not Lent in like manner be merely the continuation, under a thin disguise, of a period of temperance which was annually observed, from superstitious motives, by Italian farmers long before the Christian era? Direct evidence of this, so far as I am aware, is not forthcoming; but we have seen that a practice of abstinence from fleshly lusts has been observed by various peoples as a sympathetic charm to foster the growth of the seed;(790) and such an observance would be an appropriate sequel to the Saturnalia, if that festival was indeed, as I conjecture it to have been, originally held in spring as a religious or magical preparation for sowing and planting. When we consider how widely diffused is the belief in the sympathetic influence which human conduct, and especially the intercourse of the sexes, exerts on the fruits of the earth, we may be allowed to conjecture that the Lenten fast, with the rule of continence which is recommended, if not strictly enjoined, by the Catholic and Coptic churches during that season,(791) was in its origin intended, not so much to commemorate the sufferings of a dying god, as to foster the growth of the seed, which in the bleak days of early spring the husbandman commits with anxious care and misgiving to the bosom of the naked earth. Ecclesiastical historians have been puzzled to say why after much hesitation and great diversity of usage in different places the Christian church finally adopted forty days as the proper period for the mournful celebration of Lent.(792) Perhaps in coming to this decision the authorities were guided, as so often, by a regard for an existing pagan celebration of similar character and duration which they hoped by a change of name to convert into a Christian solemnity. Such a heathen Lent they may have found to hand in the rites of Persephone, the Greek goddess of the corn, whose image, carved out of a tree, was annually brought into the cities and mourned for forty nights, after which it was burned.(793) The time of year when these lamentations took place is not mentioned by the old Christian writer who records them; but they would fall most appropriately at the season when the seed was sown or, in mythical language, when the corn-goddess was buried, which in ancient Italy, as we saw, was done above all in the months of February and March. We know that at the time of the autumnal sowing Greek women held a sad and serious festival because the Corn-goddess Persephone or the Maiden, as they called her, then went down into the earth with the sown grain, and Demeter fondly mourned her daughter’s absence; hence in sympathy with the sorrowful mother the women likewise mourned and observed a solemn fast and abstained from the marriage bed.(794) It is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that they practised similar rules of mourning and abstinence for a like reason at the time of the spring sowing, and that the ancient ritual survives in the modern Lent, which preserves the memory of the _Mater Dolorosa_, though it has substituted a dead Son for a dead Daughter.

(M270) Be that as it may, it is worthy of note that in Burma a similar fast, which English writers call the Buddhist Lent, is observed for three months every year while the ploughing and sowing of the fields go forward; and the custom is believed to be far older than Buddhism, which has merely given it a superficial tinge like the veneer of Christianity which, if I am right, has overlaid an old heathen observance in Lent. This Burmese Lent, we are told, covers the rainy season from the full moon of July to the full moon of October. “This is the time to plough, this is the time to sow; on the villagers’ exertions in these months depends all their maintenance for the rest of the year. Every man, every woman, every child, has hard work of some kind or another. And so, what with the difficulties of travelling, what with the work there is to do, and what with the custom of Lent, every one stays at home. It is the time for prayer, for fasting, for improving the soul. Many men during these months will live even as the monks live, will eat but before midday, will abstain from tobacco. There are no plays during Lent, and there are no marriages. It is the time for preparing the land for the crop; it is the time for preparing the soul for eternity. The congregations on the Sundays will be far greater at this time than at any other; there will be more thought of the serious things of life.”(795)

§ 4. Saturnalia in Ancient Greece.

(M271) Beyond the limits of Italy festivals of the same general character as the Saturnalia appear to have been held over a considerable area of the ancient world. A characteristic feature of the Saturnalia, as we saw, was an inversion of social ranks, masters changing places with their slaves and waiting upon them, while slaves were indulged with a semblance not merely of freedom but even of power and office. In various parts of Greece the same hollow show of granting liberty to slaves was made at certain festivals. Thus at a Cretan festival of Hermes the servants feasted and their masters waited upon them. In the month of Geraestius the Troezenians observed a certain solemnity lasting many days, on one of which the slaves played at dice with the citizens and were treated to a banquet by their lords. The Thessalians held a great festival called Peloria, which Baton of Sinope identified with the Saturnalia, and of which the antiquity is vouched for by a tradition that it originated with the Pelasgians. At this festival sacrifices were offered to Pelorian Zeus, tables splendidly adorned were set out, all strangers were invited to the feast, all prisoners released, and the slaves sat down to the banquet, enjoyed full freedom of speech, and were served by their masters.(796)

(M272) But the Greek festival which appears to have corresponded most closely to the Italian Saturnalia was the Cronia or festival of Cronus, a god whose barbarous myth and cruel ritual clearly belong to a very early stratum of Greek religion, and who was by the unanimous voice of antiquity identified with Saturn. We are told that his festival was celebrated in most parts of Greece, but especially at Athens, where the old god and his wife Rhea had a shrine near the stately, but far more modern, temple of Olympian Zeus. A joyous feast, at which masters and slaves sat down together, formed a leading feature of the solemnity. At Athens the festival fell in the height of summer, on the twelfth day of the month Hecatombaeon, formerly called the month of Cronus, which answered nearly to July; and tradition ran that Cecrops, the first king of Attica, had founded an altar in honour of Cronus and Rhea, and had ordained that master and man should share a common meal when the harvest was got in.(797) Yet there are indications that at Athens the Cronia may once have been a spring festival. For a cake with twelve knobs, which perhaps referred to the twelve months of the year, was offered to Cronus by the Athenians on the fifteenth day of the month Elaphebolion, which corresponded roughly to March,(798) and there are traces of a license accorded to slaves at the Dionysiac festival of the opening of the wine-jars, which fell on the eleventh day of the preceding month Anthesterion.(799) At Olympia the festival of Cronus undoubtedly occurred in spring; for here a low but steep hill, now covered with a tangled growth of dark holly-oaks and firs, was sacred to him, and on its top certain magistrates, who bore the title of kings, offered sacrifice to the old god at the vernal equinox in the Elean month Elaphius.(800)

(M273) In this last ceremony, which probably went on year by year long before the upstart Zeus had a temple built for himself at the foot of the hill, there are two points of special interest, first the date of the ceremony, and second the title of the celebrants. First, as to the date, the spring equinox, or the twenty-first of March, must have fallen so near the fifteenth day of the Athenian month Elaphebolion, that we may fairly ask whether the Athenian custom of offering a cake to Cronus on that day may not also have been an equinoctial ceremony. In the second place, the title of kings borne by the magistrates who sacrificed to Cronus renders it probable that, like magistrates with similar high-sounding titles elsewhere in republican Greece, they were the lineal descendants of sacred kings whom the superstition of their subjects invested with the attributes of divinity.(801) If that was so, it would be natural enough that one of these nominal kings should pose as the god Cronus in person. For, like his Italian counterpart Saturn, the Greek Cronus was believed to have been a king who reigned in heaven or on earth during the blissful Golden Age, when men passed their days like gods without toil or sorrow, when life was a long round of festivity, and death came like sleep, sudden but gentle, announced by none of his sad forerunners, the ailments and infirmities of age.(802) Thus the analogy of the Olympian Cronia, probably one of the oldest of Greek festivals, to the Italian Saturnalia would be very close if originally, as I conjecture, the Saturnalia fell in spring and Saturn was personated at it, as we have good reason to believe, by a man dressed as a king. May we go a step further and suppose that, just as the man who acted King Saturn at the Saturnalia was formerly slain in that character, so one of the kings who celebrated the Cronia at Olympia not only played the part of Cronus, but was sacrificed, as god and victim in one, on the top of the hill? Cronus certainly bore a sinister reputation in antiquity. He passed for an unnatural parent who had devoured his own offspring, and he was regularly identified by the Greeks with the cruel Semitic Baals who delighted in the sacrifice of human victims, especially of children.(803) A legend which savours strongly of infant sacrifice is reported of a shrine that stood at the very foot of the god’s own hill at Olympia;(804) and a quite unambiguous story was told of the sacrifice of a babe to Lycaean Zeus on Mount Lycaeus in Arcadia, where the worship of Zeus was probably nothing but a continuation, under a new name, of the old worship of Cronus, and where human victims appear to have been regularly offered down to the Christian era.(805) The Rhodians annually sacrificed a man to Cronus in the month Metageitnion; at a later time they kept a condemned criminal in prison till the festival of the Cronia was come, then led him forth outside the gates, made him drunk with wine, and cut his throat.(806) With the parallel of the Saturnalia before our eyes, we may surmise that the victim who thus ended his life in a state of intoxication at the Cronia perhaps personated King Cronus himself, the god who reigned in the happy days of old when men had nothing to do but to eat and drink and make merry. At least the Rhodian custom lends some countenance to the conjecture that formerly a human victim may have figured at the sacrifice which the so-called kings offered to Cronus on his hill at Olympia. In this connexion it is to be remembered that we have already found well-attested examples of a custom of sacrificing the scions of royal houses in ancient Greece.(807) If the god to whom, or perhaps rather in whose character, the princes were sacrificed, was Cronus, it would be natural that the Greeks of a later age should identify him with Baal or Moloch, to whom in like manner Semitic kings offered up their children. The Laphystian Zeus of Thessaly and Boeotia, whom tradition associated with these human sacrifices, was probably, like the Lycaean Zeus of Arcadia, nothing but the aboriginal deity, commonly known as Cronus, whose gloomy rites the Greek invaders suffered the priests of the vanquished race to continue after the ancient manner, while they quieted their scruples of conscience or satisfied their pride as conquerors by investing the bloodthirsty old savage with the name, if not with the character, of their own milder deity, the humane and gracious Zeus.

§ 5. Saturnalia in Western Asia.

(M274) When we pass from Europe to western Asia, from ancient Greece to ancient Babylon and the regions where Babylonian influence penetrated, we are still met with festivals which bear the closest resemblance to the oldest form of the Italian Saturnalia. The reader may remember the festival of the Sacaea, on which I had occasion to touch in an earlier part of this work.(808) It was held at Babylon during five days of the month Lous, beginning with the sixteenth day of the month. During its continuance, just as at the Saturnalia, masters and servants changed places, the servants issuing orders and the masters obeying them; and in each house one of the servants, dressed as a king and bearing the title of Zoganes, bore rule over the household. Further, just as at the Saturnalia in its original form a man was dressed as King Saturn in royal robes, allowed to indulge his passions and caprices to the full, and then put to death, so at the Sacaea a condemned prisoner, who probably also bore for the time being the title of Zoganes, was arrayed in the king’s attire and suffered to play the despot, to use the king’s concubines, and to give himself up to feasting and debauchery without restraint, only however in the end to be stript of his borrowed finery, scourged, and hanged or crucified.(809) From Strabo we learn that this Asiatic counterpart of the Saturnalia was celebrated in Asia Minor wherever the worship of the Persian goddess Anaitis had established itself. He describes it as a Bacchic orgy, at which the revellers were disguised as Scythians, and men and women drank and dallied together by day and night.(810)

(M275) As the worship of Anaitis, though of Persian origin, appears to have been deeply leavened with coarse elements which it derived from the religion of Babylon,(811) we may perhaps regard Mesopotamia as the original home from which the Sacaean festival spread westward into other parts of Asia Minor. Now the Sacaean festival, described by the Babylonian priest Berosus in the first book of his history of Babylon, has been plausibly identified(812) with the great Babylonian festival of the New year called Zakmuk, Zagmuk, Zakmuku, or Zagmuku, which has become known to us in recent times through inscriptions. The Babylonian year began with the spring month of Nisan, which seems to have covered the second half of March and the first half of April. Thus the New Year festival, which occupied at least the first eleven days of Nisan, probably included the spring equinox. It was held in honour of Marduk or Merodach, the chief god of Babylon, whose great temple of Esagila in the city formed the religious centre of the solemnity. For here, in a splendid chamber of the vast edifice, all the gods were believed to assemble at this season under the presidency of Marduk for the purpose of determining the fates for the new year, especially the fate of the king’s life. On this occasion the king of Babylon was bound annually to renew his regal power by grasping the hands of the image of Marduk in his temple, as if to signify that he received the kingdom directly from the deity and was unable without the divine assistance and authority to retain it for more than a year. Unless he thus formally reinstated himself on the throne once a year, the king ceased to reign legitimately. When Babylonia was conquered by Assyria, the Assyrian monarchs themselves used to come to Babylon and perform the ceremony of grasping the god’s hands in order to establish by this solemn act their title to the kingdom which they had won for themselves by the sword; until they had done so, they were not recognized as kings by their Babylonian subjects. Some of them indeed found the ceremony either so burdensome or so humiliating to their pride as conquerors, that rather than perform it they renounced the title of king of Babylon altogether and contented themselves with the more modest title of regent. Another notable feature of the Babylonian festival of the New Year appears to have been a ceremonial marriage of the god Marduk; for in a hymn relating to the solemnity it is said of the deity that “he hastened to his bridal.” The festival was of hoar antiquity, for it was known to Gudea, an old king of Southern Babylonia who flourished between two and three thousand years before the beginning of our era, and it is mentioned in an early account of the Great Flood. At a much later period it is repeatedly referred to by King Nebuchadnezzar and his successors. Nebuchadnezzar records how he built of bricks and bitumen a chapel or altar, “a thing of joy and rejoicing,” for the great festival of Marduk, the lord of the gods; and we read of the rich and abundant offerings which were made by the high priest at this time.(813)

(M276) Unfortunately the notices of this Babylonian festival of the New Year which have come down to us deal chiefly with its mythical aspect and throw little light on the mode of its celebration. Hence its identity with the Sacaea must remain for the present a more or less probable hypothesis. In favour of the hypothesis may be alleged in the first place the resemblance of the names Sacaea and Zoganes to Zakmuk or Zagmuku, if that was the real pronunciation of the name,(814) and in the second place the very significant statement that the fate of the king’s life was supposed to be determined by the gods, under the presidency of Marduk, at the Zakmuk or New Year’s festival.(815) When we remember that the central feature of the Sacaea appears to have been the saving of the king’s life for another year by the vicarious sacrifice of a criminal on the cross or the gallows, we can understand that the season was a critical one for the king, and that it may well have been regarded as determining his fate for the ensuing twelve months. The annual ceremony of renewing the king’s power by contact with the god’s image, which formed a leading feature of the Zakmuk festival, would be very appropriately performed immediately after the execution or sacrifice of the temporary king who died in the room of the real monarch.

(M277) A difficulty, however, in the way of identifying the Sacaea with the Zakmuk arises from the statement of Berosus that the Sacaea fell on the sixteenth day of Lous, which was the tenth month of the Syro-Macedonian calendar and appears to have nearly coincided with July. Thus if the Sacaea occurred in July and the Zakmuk in March, the theory of their identity could not be maintained. But the dating of the months of the Syro-Macedonian calendar is a matter of some uncertainty; the month of Lous in particular appears to have fallen at different times of the year in different places,(816) and until we have ascertained beyond the reach of doubt when Lous fell at Babylon in the time of Berosus, it would be premature to allow much weight to the seeming discrepancy in the dates of the two festivals. At all events, whether the festivals were the same or different, we are confronted with difficulties which in the present state of our knowledge may be pronounced insoluble. If the festivals were the same, we cannot explain their apparent difference of date: if they were different, we cannot explain their apparent similarity of character. In what follows I shall, with some eminent Oriental scholars,(817) provisionally assume the identity of Zakmuk and Sacaea, but I would ask the reader to bear clearly in mind that the hypothesis leaves the apparent discrepancy of their dates unexplained. Towards a solution of the problem I can only suggest conjecturally either that the date of the festival had been for some reason shifted in the time of Berosus, or that two different festivals of the same type may have been held at different seasons of the year, one in spring and one in summer, perhaps by two distinct but kindred tribes, who retained their separate religious rites after they had coalesced in the Babylonian empire. Both conjectures might be supported by analogies. On the one hand, for example, in the Jewish calendar New Year’s Day was shifted under Babylonian influence from autumn to spring,(818) and in a later part of this work we shall see that the Chinese festival of new fire, at first celebrated in spring, was afterwards shifted to the summer solstice, only however to be brought back at a later time to its original date. On the other hand, the popular festivals of our European peasantry afford many examples of rites which appear to be similar in character, though they fall at different times of the year; such, for instance, are the ceremonies concerned with vegetation on May Day, Whitsuntide, and Midsummer Day,(819) and the fire festivals which are distributed at still wider intervals throughout the months.(820) Similarly in ancient Italy the agricultural festival of the Ambarvalia was celebrated by Italian farmers at different dates in different places.(821) These cases may warn us against the danger of hastily inferring an essential difference between Zakmuk and Sacaea on the ground of a real or apparent difference in their dates.