WeeklyWorker

14.12.2023
John Reinhard Weguelin ‘The Roman Saturnalia’ (1884)

A world turned upside-down

Festivals of wild disorder symbolically assert human solidarity. Mike Macnair explores the history, ancient and modern, of a constantly reproduced Golden Age

Christmas festivities are not uncommonly linked to the Roman Saturnalia.1 In favour of the link are midwinter, feasting, the display of greenery and the giving out of presents. There are, however, significant differences - and these differences are politically as well as historically interesting.

The first is the date. Saturnalia originally was one day, December 17, but was gradually extended to run from December 17 to December 21.2 The background to December 25 as the date of Christmas is that the birth of Jesus of Nazareth is unknown. At some point - pretty certainly after the Roman empire adopted Christianity under emperor Constantine the Great (306-337) - December 25 was adopted. This date was previously the Dies natalis Solis Invicti (‘birthday of the unconquered sun’). This in turn was an ‘official’ date that had been adopted by the emperor, Aurelian, in 274, as part of his promotion of ‘Sol Invictus’ (‘Unconquered Sun’) as chief god and patron of the empire.3

The background to this, in turn, is that slave-owner urbanism as a mode of production was accompanied by highly particularistic local polytheism, and limited ‘syncretism’ of local gods with the famous Greek pantheon of Olympus and its Roman equivalents. The (partial) unification of the Roman empire (which before around 300 worked as a tribute-extracting overlay on local government by cities) entailed a degree of religious unification; and this role was at first performed by the deification at Rome of recently deceased emperors, and in the provinces of the actual reigning emperors.4

The 3rd century, however, saw a succession of disasters - and, if the emperor was himself god, he might be considered as directly responsible for earthquakes and pandemics, as well as for barbarian invasions and economic chaos, So it was better to make the emperor a vice-regent for a ‘head god’. This was the role of Sol Invictus, and afterwards of the Christian god. December 25 thus illustrates the character of post-Constantine Christianity as a state religion, imposed from the top down - first in the late Roman empire and its Byzantine inheritor, then by medieval kings.

Golden Age

Equally not part of modern Christmas is the aspect of Saturnalia that was ‘world turned upside-down’: slaves were at this time allowed a degree of free speech to cheek their owners, owners and slaves ate together, and in some versions, the owners would serve the slaves.5 I stress modern Christmas, because this aspect was present in medieval and early modern Christmas and new year festivities, but disappeared in England in the Restoration.6

The background is that at some fairly early date the Roman god, Saturn, was identified with the Greek god, Kronos. And Kronos was identified as presiding over a pre-agricultural ‘Golden Age’, in which the earth was so fruitful that no-one needed to work, as early as the poet Hesiod’s Works and days (probably written some time between 750 and 650 BCE) - obviously implying equally no need for slavery. Authors of the time of Augustus added that the Golden Age lacked also private property (clearest in Ovid’s Metamorphoses).7 A festival for Saturn identified as Kronos would thus naturally involve both feasting and the temporary lifting of social hierarchy. This may already have been true of the classical Athenian Kronia festival of Kronos (which was, however, a summer harvest festival rather than a midwinter one).8

The image of the ‘Golden Age’ can hardly be an actual social recollection of pre-class hunter-gatherer society thousands of years before the iron age regimes in which it appears. Rather, like the recurrent reappearance of forms of utopian communism between antiquity and the present, it reflects the fact that - contrary to the claims of ideologues of class rule from antiquity to today - radical inequality between humans is not natural to our species. In consequence it repeatedly throws up counter-myths imagining alternatives, as well as occasional efforts to enact them.

Festivals of disorder and the inversion of social hierarchy are not limited to the Saturnalia, although they have been given the tag, ‘Saturnalian’.9 The Kalends of January (New Year’s Day) were distinctly separate from the original Saturnalia, but Ronald Hutton argues in Stations of the sun that they were (partially) absorbed into the medieval ‘12 days of Christmas’. The celebrations, denounced by late antique and early medieval bishops, involved cross-dressing, dressing as animals, and other forms of ‘misrule’.10 Alessandro Testa argues in his recent Rituality and social (dis)order that this year-end festival of inversion, and perhaps also the Romans’ February 15 Lupercalia or March 14/15 Mamerialia, fed into the classic medieval and early modern European Carnival, held immediately before the beginning of Lent (a date that varies with the date of Easter). Testa suggests that here we are concerned with a different dating of the beginning of the year to March rather than January.11

Hutton makes the point, as I observed above, that the ‘social inversion’ aspect of Christmas and New Year disappeared in England in the Restoration. He explains this by the recent experience of the English upper classes of the world actually turned upside-down in the Civil War, Commonwealth and Protectorate of 1642-60: not just Levellers and Diggers and early Quakers (who were much more threatening to the upper classes than modern Quakers), but all sorts of other sectaries and jumped-up types. But the phenomenon of the disappearance of festivals of social inversion, along with the rise of capitalism, actually seems much more widespread than the English case.12

Carnival

With Carnival, we arrive at a point that has been given direct historical and modern political significance. Mikhail Bakhtin’s 1940 doctoral dissertation on the 16th century French writer, François Rabelais, was finally published in Russian in 1965, and translated into English as Rabelais and his world in 1968. It has given the students of literature and a part of the left the idea of the ‘carnivalesque’ as the natural expression of the popular culture of the lower orders and as a form of actual resistance to the hierarchical social order.

There is a vast range of writing on this theme, which I am not going to reference here. There is, however, a significant political antecedent to Bakhtin’s and similar arguments. Lenin in the conclusion to Two tactics of social-democracy in the democratic revolution (1905) argues:

Revolutions are the festivals of the oppressed and the exploited. At no other time are the masses of the people in a position to come forward so actively as creators of a new social order as at a time of revolution. At such times the people are capable of performing miracles, if judged by the narrow, philistine scale of gradual progress. But the leaders of the revolutionary parties must also make their aims more comprehensive and bold at such a time, so that their slogans shall always be in advance of the revolutionary initiative of the masses, serve as a beacon, reveal to them our democratic and socialist ideal in all its magnitude and splendour, and show them the shortest and most direct route to complete, absolute and decisive victory.13

And, indeed, Bolshevism sought to use Russian carnival culture as one among its various means of reaching the masses.14

Should the workers’ movement and the left adopt Saturnalia and Carnival, and pursue a ‘carnivalesque’ policy as the road to resistance and ultimate revolution? Yes and no.

The ‘yes’ consists in Carnival as an expression of mass creativity - Lenin’s point about the people as creators, capable of performing miracles. Really mass movements, like the 1984-85 miners’ strike or the first year of the anti-Iraq war campaign, naturally throw up ‘carnivalesque’ activities and productions of one sort or another. These may be vulgar and uncomfortable for the cultivated middle classes, and inconsistent with ideas of the beauty of uniformity.15 By these characteristics they display all the more clearly that the creativity of the lower orders is coming into play.

Further, Saturnalia, Carnival and similar festivities are symbolic assertions of human solidarity. In this respect, it makes no difference how far the festivity was limited and controlled by the upper classes (as was certainly the case with Saturnalia, and to a considerable extent with Carnival; though this is, of course, debated16). Ehrenreich makes the interesting, though no doubt contestable, point that the suppression of ‘carnivalesque’ public festivities is correlated with epidemics of depression and alcoholism.17

The ‘no’ consists in the inherent limits of Saturnalia, carnival and so on. These are feasts that unavoidably come to an end: most clearly in Carnival, immediately and inexorably followed by the privations of the Lent fast. It is just as true today that we cannot all be permanently on strike, out in the streets dancing or demonstrating, and so on. Food still has to be grown, produced and distributed. The power systems, transport and communications have to be kept running. Clothes have to be produced. And so on and on. Revolutionary crisis, mass strikes, etc, inherently disrupt the order of production. This disruption then becomes the basis on which, on the one hand, the mass of the subordinate classes become tired and demoralised and, on the other, the ruling class assembles a sufficient political coalition to ‘restore order’. The phenomenon has been repeated over and over again.

In this respect the image of the ‘festival of the oppressed’ is misleading. Our task is to create institutional forms that will enable the creativity of the masses within the framework of continued productive life, not dependent on being temporarily freed from this - both before the outbreak of revolutionary crisis, in the form of demanagerialised workers’ parties, trade unions, cooperatives and so on; and after the resolution of revolutionary crisis, in the form of a new constitutional order that will be one of democratic self-government.

Onwards then to the new Golden Age of the semi-state and the transition to communism.

  1. Googling ‘Saturnalia Christmas’ produces 17.5 million hits. A sloppy example from the first page is here: www.academuseducation.co.uk/post/how-saturnalia-became-christmas-the-transition-from-ancient-to-present.↩︎

  2. Wikipedia’s entry ‘Saturnalia’ is carefully put together and well-referenced: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturnalia.↩︎

  3. Christians adopted: ‘Scriptor Syrus’, Latin in GH Halsberghe The cult of Sol Invictus Leiden 1972, p174, English in R Hutton The stations of the sun Oxford 1996, chapter 1. For Aurelian, see Halsberghe chapter 6, especially pp144 and 158-59.↩︎

  4. Wikipedia, ‘Roman imperial cult’: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_imperial_cult.↩︎

  5. F Dolansky, ‘Celebrating the Saturnalia: religious ritual and Roman domestic life’ in B Rawson (ed) A companion to families in the Greek and Roman world Chichester 2011, chapter 2.↩︎

  6. R Hutton The stations of the sun Oxford 1996, chapter 9.↩︎

  7. KJ Reckford, ‘Some appearances of the Golden Age’ Classical Journal vol 54, pp79-87 (1958); see also Virgil Georgics Book 1, lines 125-28. Ovid in Metamorphoses (book 1, lines 135-36) attributes landownership along with fraud to the fourth (iron) age.↩︎

  8. JN Bremmer Greek religion and culture, the Bible and the ancient Near East Leiden 2008, pp82-83.↩︎

  9. HS Versnel Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman religion vol ii: Transition and reversal in myth and ritual Leiden 1993, p115.↩︎

  10. R Hutton The stations of the sun Oxford 1996, chapters 1 and 2.↩︎

  11. A Testa Rituality and social (dis)order Abingdon 2021, chapter 3.↩︎

  12. See, for example, B Ehrenreich Dancing in the streets London 2007, chapters 5 and 6.↩︎

  13. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/tactics/ch13.htm.↩︎

  14. J von Geldern Bolshevik festivals, 1917-1920 Berkeley CA 1993.↩︎

  15. See, for example, publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6x0nb4g3&chunk.id=ch20&toc.id=&brand=ucpress. See also ‘Epilogue’, J von Geldern Bolshevik festivals, 1917-1920 Berkeley CA 1993.↩︎

  16. A Testa Rituality and social (dis)order Abingdon 2021 passim.↩︎

  17. B Ehrenreich Dancing in the streets London 2007, chapters 7 and 8.↩︎