Calendar Wars

“Divi filius” means “son of god.” Octavian was the adopted son of Julius Caesar, who was now to be called “Divus Julius,” “Julius the god.” Needless to say, all this took place on the first day of the new year according to Caesar’s calendar.

Over the course of the next 50 years or so there followed a concerted effort to portray the reign of Augustus Caesar, the “son of god,” as the advent of a “New Age,” the “Golden Age” which everyone had been waiting for. The promulgation of the Julian calendar throughout the Roman empire was an integral part of this policy. And like the Pharaohs of old, Augustus sought to identify himself with the sun as a way of emphasizing his connection with the new solar calendar. He proclaimed the Greek god of the sun, Apollo, as his own personal god, and also sought to promote a cult of the Roman sun god, Sol, who had previously played only a very minor role in Roman religion. Gaston Halsberghe, on page 27 of The Cult Of Sol Invictus, notes that sun worship was first popularized in Rome by Augustus, “who made it the very basis of his religious policy.” But in the eyes of a majority of Romans, sun worship remained a foreign import, associated with the Greeks or the Egyptians, and therefore many of the Caesars who came after Augustus tried to find other gods with whom to identify themselves. What they needed was a popular religion of sun worship, but it took several hundred years for this to develop. 

From the start, the popular celebration of Roman religion had always been centered in two months: March, the original first month, and December, which remained the last month throughout all the changes in the Roman calendar. Under the republic, the Liberalia became the big March festival, and it was followed by the Saturnalia in December. The Saturnalia began on December 17, precisely 9 months after the start of the Liberalia on March 17, and it had a similar plebeian tone. It was dedicated to the god Saturn, who was considered the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Cronos. Cronos in Greek mythology was the father of Zeus, whom Zeus overthrew in order to become king of the gods. The Roman plebeians seized upon this legend as the basis for an image of Saturn as the “Lord of the Golden Age,” the ruler of mankind in the era before the advent of Jupiter. During the Saturnalia, the spirit of the “Golden Age” was supposed to be briefly revived. People wore special costumes in place of togas; slaves were allowed to talk back; everyone wore a “pileus,” a woolen cap which was normally worn by emancipated slaves. Like the Liberalia, the Saturnalia had a riotous quality, but it was considered more serious and even aristocrats were expected to participate. 

Although the literary proponents of the rule of Augustus sought to appropriate the concept of a revived “Golden Age” for their own use, the spirit of the Saturnalia was incompatible with the veiled dictatorship, military conquests and massive increase in the use of slave labor associated with the Augustan “New Age.” On page 2 of the anthology, Saturn from Antiquity to the Renaissance, edited by Massimo Ciavolella and Amilcare Iannucci, appear the following lines from a poem by the Roman writer Tibullus, which sum up the image of Saturn in Roman tradition:

How well man used to live with Saturn as king,

Before the earth was laid open for faraway campaigns.

And the poem concludes:

No armies, no rage to kill, no war existed;

Nor had the cruel smith with brutal skill yet forged a sword.

But now in the reign of Jove, slaughter and wounds are ever-present,

Untimely Death comes now by sea, by a thousand other ways.

But already under the Roman republic, there was also another religious current developing, one which was to prove far more compatible with the rule of the Caesars than either the Liberalia or the Saturnalia. This was the current associated with the “mysteries.”

The original mysteries were the mysteries of Eleusis, a small town situated not from Athens. They were based on the legend of the abduction of Persephone, the daughter of the goddess Demeter, by Pluto, the Greek god of the underworld. In order to get her daughter back, Demeter, who was the goddess of grain and vegetation, blighted the earth, leading to a compromise whereby she had Persephone for six months, during which time plants grew, and Pluto for six, during which time they did not. After Athens got control of Eleusis, a new wrinkle was added to the traditional story, according to which following her abduction Persephone had a baby, the infant Dionysos, who was born to bring peace and joy into the world. Adulation of the baby Dionysos became the central ritual at Eleusis, and this rite was supposed to be kept a secret, hence the notion that what happened at Eleusis was a “mystery.”

Some 500 years before the founding of the Roman empire, the legend of Eleusis underwent yet another permutation. The author of the new version was an Athenian named Onomacritos, the founder of what became known as the Orphic mysteries. According to this version, the father of the baby Dionysos was Zeus, not Pluto, and while still an infant, Dionysos had been killed and eaten by the evil Titans, whom Zeus then destroyed by fire, giving rise to the race of mortal men from their ashes. In order to atone for the sins of the Titans, it was necessary to partake in a ritual meal of bread and wine, symbolic of the flesh and blood of the baby Dionysos but expressing the transmutation of the primitive cannibal urge into civilized vegetarianism. Those who partook in this ritual would enjoy eternal life. These ideas formed the basis for a religious organization composed exclusively of men and claiming to live a pure, celibate life. The Orphic mysteries gradually spread from Greece to southern Italy, where they enjoyed considerable popularity. But although the central figures in the Roman Liberalia resembled Demeter, Persephone and Dionysos, there is no indication that the Liberalia had an Orphic component. Orphism was more of a middle class religion, and there was a persistent rumor that many of its initiates had a homosexual orientation.

Taken together, the mysteries of Eleusis and the Orphic mysteries came to constitute a kind of template for the mystery religions which swept the Roman world under the late republic and the empire. In Italy the themes of the Orphic mysteries were further popularized in a less elitist form by the Bacchic mysteries, Bacchus being the Roman name for Dionysos. In Egypt the Ptolemaic cult of Sarapis was associated with the mysteries of Isis and Osiris, which then spread from Egypt to Italy and Rome itself. And starting under the reign of the Roman Caesar Claudius about 50 years after the time of Augustus, the public celebration of the Phrygian mysteries was introduced into Rome with the intent of supplanting the Liberalia as the big March festival. It entailed the commemoration, on March 24 and 25, of the death and resurrection of Attis.

According to legend, Attis was a young man, the lover of the goddess Cybele, who was unfaithful to her. By way of punishment, she drove him insane, causing him to castrate himself and die. On March 24, the “Day of Blood”, the priests of the Phrygian mysteries marched in procession in Rome, flagellating themselves for the sins of Attis. They carried a pine tree, symbol of the dead Attis. But the next day, Attis was resurrected in a ceremony enacted in the “Phrygianum”, a temple devoted to the worship of Cybele. The main feature of the ceremony, notes Maarten Vermaseren on page 118 of Cybele and Attis, was a ritual meal, probably of bread and wine, which was said to confer immortality on the initiates. Vermaseren also points out, on page 46, that the Vatican was later built on the site of the Phrygianum.

The later mystery religions had certain themes in common which were ultimately derived from Eleusinian and Orphic tradition. Their central figures were goddesses, such as Isis or Cybele, whose worship was associated with the death and rebirth of an unfortunate young man, such as Osiris (who was torn apart in the Ptolemaic version of Egyptian mythology) or Attis. Initiates into the mysteries could attain eternal life by partaking in a ritual meal of bread and wine, symbolic of the flesh and blood of the resurrected young man. These religions presented themselves as an alternative to the worship of Jupiter or Caesar, but not a hostile alternative like the Liberalia or Saturnalia. The Golden Age was not to be had on earth but only in heaven in the form of individual immortality. These beliefs were entirely compatible with the rule of the Caesars and were actively promoted by many of them. It was therefore only natural that the Caesars should eventually come up with a mystery religion of their own, a mystery religion which was centered around the birth of the sun on December 25, exactly nine months after the resurrection of Attis on March 25.

The mystery religion of the Caesars was called Mithraism. Mithraism was a mystery religion in the same sense as the others in that it entailed a ritual meal of bread and wine which was said to confer immortality on the initiates. But the spirit of Mithraism was quite different from that of the other mystery religions. Mithra originated as the Persian god of the sun. Starting perhaps about 200 years after the time of Augustus, he was then taken over by the Romans, identified with the figure of Sol Invictus, “the invincible sun,” and depicted as a mighty warrior. He was said to be born on December 25, the alleged date of the winter solstice, with only one purpose in mind, to kill a huge bull, the first animal ever created, from whose body all good things would flow. Franz Cumont, on page 136 of The Mysteries of Mithra, puts it this way:

Then came an extraordinary prodigy to pass. From the body of the moribund victim sprang all the useful herbs and plants that cover the earth with their verdure. From the spinal cord of the animal sprang the wheat that gives us our bread, and from its blood the vine that produces the sacred drink of the Mysteries.

This legend in turn provided the rationale for the Mithraic ritual meal of bread and wine. Maarten Vermaseren, on page 47 of Mithriaca I, brings out the connection as follows:

Many Mithraic monuments spread over the Roman Empire are worked on two sides, the obverse representing the bull-slaying and the reverse showing the sacred meal. These two scenes are intimately connected – the meal is only possible after the miraculous slaughter of the bull.

Killing the bull – an animal who was traditionally associated with Dionysos – also had the implication of a repudiation of sexual desire, and Mithraic initiates were expected to remain celibate. 

Mithraism found its main base of support in the Roman army, and in conjunction with the cult of Sol Invictus, it became something like the official religion of the Roman empire during the period leading up to the conversion of the Roman Caesar Constantine to Christianity. Under Diocletian, Constantine’s predecessor as Caesar, huge torchlit processions were held every December 25 in honor of Mithra. In Roman iconography, Mithra was invariably represented wearing a “Phrygian cap”, a red cap which closely resembled the “pileus”, the cap which Romans had been expected to wear during the Saturnalia and which was originally worn by liberated slaves. The Mithraic message was clear: freedom and immortality were to be attained through mastery of war. This was the direct opposite of the message of the other mystery religions, but Mithraism nonetheless closely resembled them in its negative attitude towards male sexuality and obsession with the flesh and blood of Dionysos, the divine figure lurking behind the Mithraic bull and all the dying and reborn gods of the mystery religions.

Significance

Just where did this obsession come from? Prior to the introduction of the baby Dionysos at Eleusis, the rites of Dionysos were often associated with women called “maenads”, who were said to go off into the hills, kill a goat or bull, symbolic of Dionysos, and eat its raw flesh. And since Dionysos was originally viewed as a god of sex, it is apparent that a negative attitude towards male sexuality was a key factor in motivating the activities of the maenads. Perhaps fear of pregnancy played a role here, and also resentment of male sexual aggression as symbolized by Pluto’s rape of Persephone in the original legend of Eleusis. But there is no indication that eating Dionysos in the form of a goat or bull was associated in the minds of the maenads with achieving immortality. The promise of immortality was a kind of cover story introduced into the Eleusinian tradition by the Orphics in order to soften and rationalize the hostility to male sexuality that was at the heart of it. By the same token, eating Dionysos in the form of bread and wine had a much less aggresive image than eating raw flesh, and so it was that the Orphic ritual meal of bread and wine went on to become the characteristic rite of mystery religions that appealed to a broad spectrum of Greco-Roman society.

However, although there exists an extensive scholarly literature on the subject of the mystery religions, there is one feature of all of them that is hardly ever mentioned, and that is that nobody ate a god of their own nationality. Although Dionysos is generally pictured as a Greek god, the Greeks themselves viewed him as either Thracian or Phrygian, the confusion probably being due to the fact that the Phrygians were of Thracian origin. Likewise, the Romans never ate Liber, their own sex god, in effigy, but only Bacchus, their name for Dionysos and a name which was derived from Greek. In the Egyptian mysteries patronized by the Ptolemies, Osiris was eaten in effigy, but not by the Egyptians themselves, only by the Greeks and Romans. Attis too was eaten in effigy by the Romans but not by the Phrygians, from whose culture the legend of Cybele and Attis was derived. The obvious explanation for the reluctance of the Greeks and Romans to eat a god of their own nationality is that eating someone’s flesh and blood, in however sedate, symbolic and spiritual a form, is nonetheless an aggressive act, one which they evidently felt more comfortable visiting on others rather than on themselves.

It would seem that the mystery religions represented a convergence and synthesis of two distinct trends in Greco-Roman culture. On the one hand they were clearly a form of veiled protest against Greco-Roman militarism. The more militarist Greco-Roman society became, the greater the popularity of the mystery religions, which reached their peak under the rule of the Caesars. Yet at the same time, the mystery religions also represented a way of cannibalizing, in a somewhat literal sense, prestigious foreign cultures and assimilating them to the Greco-Roman way of life. The Egyptians and the Phrygians in particular were both viewed by the Greeks and Romans as bearers of ancient cultural traditions who were nonetheless no match for the Greco-Romans in the military arena and therefore treated with a mixture of respect and contempt perfectly symbolized in the rite of eating them in effigy. On the other hand, the Greco-Romans were never able to achieve a lasting conquest of the Persians, and therefore Mithra got to kill rather than be killed in Roman mythology. Only victim peoples were assigned victim gods, which brings us to the Jewish mysteries, also known as Christianity.

The historiography of the ancient world is seriously distorted by an all pervasive need to ignore, deny or minimize the fact that the Romans and their Greek allies murdered some 2 million Jews during the period of roughly 150 years following the establishment of the Roman empire. According to the figures given by Josephus in his account of the First Jewish War, the Romans killed a total of 1,356,460 Jews during the course of the war. The Roman historian Dio Cassius stated that the Romans killed 580,000 Jews during the Second Jewish War. Many hundreds of thousands of Jews were also killed by the Romans during the “Diaspora Revolt” of the Jewish communities in the eastern Mediterranean area who rose in protest against the massacre of Jews in Iraq carried out by the forces of the Roman Caesar Trajan. Egypt is thought to have been the home of some 1 million Jews at the start of this period, yet hardly any remained by the end of it. The large Jewish community in Syria was also totally wiped out, and that in Anatolia greatly reduced. The Jewish population of the land of Israel declined from perhaps 2 or 3 million to approximately 750,000. So even if the figures given by Josephus and Dio Cassius were somewhat exaggerated as many historians maintain, a figure of at least 2 million Jews killed by the Romans during the era of the Jewish Wars is still indicated by the evidence.

There are two main reasons why the Holocaust visited on the Jewish people by the Romans some 2000 years ago is so invisible in the historical literature. In the first place it puts the origins of Christianity in a whole new light. Christianity arose at the same time and in the same area where the massacres took place. It took one Jew out of the millions who had been massacred and made him the dying and reborn god of a mystery religion just like all the others, a mystery religion which promised eternal life to all who would eat of the symbolic flesh and drink of the symbolic blood of the dead Jew. Viewed in this light, Christianity appears less as a reflection of the wonderful message of Jesus and more as a result of the efforts of the survivors of the massacres to assimilate to Greco-Roman society. And in the second place, noticing the mass murders also has the effect of raising the question, just why did the Romans try to eradicate the Jewish people in such a brutal fashion? This question leads in turn to an examination of Jewish influence on the Greco-Roman world, which turns out to be far more extensive than is generally recognized. 

According to the census of the population of the Roman empire conducted during the reign of the Caesar Claudius several decades before the outbreak of the First Jewish War, there were 6,944,000 Jews then living under Roman rule, which meant that Jews formed approximately 10% of the population of the Roman empire. And since there were very few Jews living in the western portion of the empire at that time, the Jewish population in the eastern Mediterranean region was probably closer to 20% of the total population of that area. Moreover, outside of the land of Israel, most Jews in the eastern Mediterranean region then lived in large Greek speaking cities like Alexandria, Antioch and Sardis, where they formed a minority which may have been even larger than 20% of the total. This minority had its own laws, which conflicted with Roman law on a number of key points. Jewish law frowned on slavery and mandated hospitality to runaway slaves (Deuteronomy, Chapter 23, Verse 16), whereas Roman law provided the death penalty for flight from slavery. Jewish law banned the worship of idols, whereas the Romans expected their subjects to worship statues of the Caesars as gods. Jewish law required Jews everywhere to contribute to the upkeep of the Temple in Jerusalem, making the Jews appear to the Romans as a state within a state, one which stood in blatant contradiction to the ideology of the Caesars. Moreover, Jewish beliefs and customs inevitably began to spread from this state within a state to the non-Jewish population, and of these beliefs and customs, none proved more popular than the legally mandated custom of abstaining from work every seventh day.

Historians have found it impossible to deny that the idea of resting on the seventh day originated with the Jews, but they have been extremely reluctant to accept the obvious corollary, namely that the Jews also popularized the concept of the week. To the contrary, insofar as they even raise the question of the origins of the week in Greco-Roman culture, their normal tendency is to present it as Babylonian in origin. According to the standard account, the ancient Babylonian astronomers believed that there were seven “planets”, namely Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter, plus the sun and moon. This belief became the basis for an astrological cult according to which human destiny was ruled by the movements of the seven planets, which were actually divine entities. The practitioners of this cult, who became known as “Chaldeans”, eventually introduced it to the Greco-Roman world, where it became the basis for the concept of the week. Proof that the Greco-Romans got their concept of the week from the Chaldeans and not the Jews is seen in the fact that they identified the days of the week with various divinities rather than simply numbering them as the Jews did.

However, there are several problems with this view. In the first place there is no evidence that either the Babylonians or the Chaldeans linked the idea of the seven planets to the concept of the week or themselves followed a seven day weekly cycle. And in the second place, there is conclusive evidence that the Greco-Roman concept of the week did not originate with the Chaldeans. In the Chaldean system, the planets were listed in order of decrease in the length of time it took for them to complete one full orbit in the sky: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon. But the Greco-Roman days of the week follow a different order, and this point was commented on by the Greco-Romans themselves. As Eviatar Zerubavel brings out on page 15 of The Seven Day Circle, the Greek writer Plutarch wrote a treatise, now lost, entitled: “Why Are The Days Named After The Planets Reckoned in a Different Order from the Actual Order?” By “Actual Order,” Plutarch meant the Chaldean order. Plutarch wrote his treatise about 100 years after the time of Augustus; its title shows that the concept of the seven day week had taken hold in Greco-Roman society by that time and that it was linked in Plutarch’s mind to the Chaldean planetary system but was seen as different from it. 

Credit for figuring out the answer to Plutarch’s question should go to the great classical scholar Franz Cumont, author of Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans, first published in 1912. Working with original, unpublished manuscripts known as “Hermetic” literature, Cumont linked the origins of the planetary week to a specific astrological doctrine. This was the notion that every single hour of every single day was “ruled” in turn by one of the seven planets, which were listed for this purpose in the conventional Chaldean order. Starting with Saturn as the “ruler” of the first hour of the first day, this means that the “ruler” of the first hour of the second day will be the Sun. If the sequence is extended for seven days, the “rulers” of the first hour of each day will appear in the same sequence as the order of the days in the Greco-Roman planetary week: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus. 

Who wrote these “Hermetic” manuscripts? They were the work of Greek philosophers and mystics living in Alexandria during the period of Greek and Roman rule in Egypt. These writers proclaimed themselves the followers of “Hermes Trismegistus,” “Thrice-greatest Hermes,” a mythical figure combining features of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. They surrounded their activities with an aura of secrecy, an aura reflected in the connotations of the word “hermetic,” meaning tightly sealed and therefore closed or hidden. And in fact, although these secretive mystics are known to have invented a version of the week which has now swept almost the entire world, their motives for doing so have remained a sealed book unto this day. 

One thing is for sure: they were familiar with the Jewish concept of the week. Alexandria was the home of the largest Jewish community in the ancient world outside the land of Israel. That community produced an extensive Greek language literature directed in part towards familiarizing a non-Jewish Greek language audience with basic Jewish beliefs and concepts. As if in response to this literature, the Hermetic astrologers created an alternative to the Jewish concept of the week, one which was at odds with the Jewish concept in a number of ways. Their planetary week did not have a day of rest, and it asserted that human destiny was ruled by pagan divinities rather than the Jewish God. Moreover it contained an inherent tendency to exalt one day of the week over all the others, but this day was not the Jewish Sabbath but rather Sunday. Of all the seven planets, the sun is the only one which really does have a clear, obvious and significant effect upon human life. Originating in a country which had practiced sun worship for thousands of years, and created in a milieu not far removed from that which had supplied Julius Caesar with the basis for his solar calendar in the form of the concept of a leap year, the Hermetic concept of the week was a natural fit for the growing tendency of the Caesars to identify themselves with the sun and promote sun worship as the official religion of their empire.

A key question in this context is: just how did it happen that the Jewish Sabbath came to be equated with the Hermetic Saturday? In the Hermetic system, Saturday was the first day, whereas the Sabbath was of course the last day in the Jewish system. It would seem that the main reason for identifying the two was the perception of a certain similarity between Judaism and the Saturnalia. In particular, both Judaism and the Saturnalia were associated with a negative attitude towards the institution of slavery, which was the foundation on which the empire of the Caesars was built. But just as the Caesars sought to replace the Saturnalia with the celebration of the “birthday of the sun” on December 25 as the big December festival, so too did the Hermetic astrologers lay the basis for the replacement of the Jewish Sabbath with Sunday as the high point of the week. This change took place in conjunction with the elimination of the Jews themselves, whose community in Alexandria was devastated during the same period that the Hermetic concept of a planetary week took hold.

Conclusions

By the time of the conversion of Constantine to Christianity, the basic elements of the modern “civil calendar” were already in place. These included:

(1) The notion that the reign of Augustus marked the start of a new era, a “Golden Age” fundamentally different from everything that had gone before. This notion provided the basis for the subsequent Christian practice of dividing all time into Before and After the birth of Christ, which had taken place during the reign of Augustus.

(2) The notion that the birth of the new era took place on December 25, the birthday of the sun god with whom the Caesars identified themselves, which provided the basis for the subsequent Christian claim that Christ was born on this day.

(3) The notion that Sunday was a special day, more important than any of the other days of the week, which provided the basis for the subsequent Christian claim that Christ rose from the dead on a Sunday, which should therefore be the day on which Christians should gather to pretend to eat his flesh and drink his blood.

Through force and violence, first the Greco-Romans and then the Europeans have imposed this calendar system upon the greater part of the modern world. I leave it to the reader to decide whether the so-called “civil calendar” is really an appropriate basis for measuring time in a peaceful, united world.

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