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Just as all cultures have celebrated the cardinal
points of the tropical year, the autumnal equinox,
winter solstice, vernal equinox & summer solstice,
ancient Romans would proclaim "Io Saturnalia!" in
reference to the "Natalis Solis Invicti", meaning
Birth of the Sun-Invincible, which was celebrated
on the winter solstice plus or minus a day or two,
depending on what epoch the Roman calendar was in.
The ancient festival of light was properly deemed
"birth of the Sun-God", on the first of the month
of capricorn, since the Saturn-God limits Apollon-
Re (the Sun-God) from falling any further down in
the southern skies of winter in the northern hemi-
sphere when Apollo would begin returning from his
winter vacation in the land of the "hyperboreans",
the mythical people who lived eternally like Adam
and Even--meaning Autumn and Evening, or superior
aspect of Venus, celebrated on the autumn equinox
of libra, as symbolized by Venus illuminating the
evening sky, hence the "Evening Star". What would
become modern-day Xmas, OE Christes Maesse, comes
from the Roman emperor Aurelian in 274 AD when he
officially proclaimed the 25th of the tenth month,
December, thenceforth to be Natalis Solis Invicti,
even though the actual solstice was closer to the
21st in that epoch of the old Julian calendar. As
saturnalia had been celebrated December 17 - 25th
of every year since at least several centuries BC,
then emperor Aurelian's decision to associate the
birth of Jesus-Christ in Bethlehem with the great
feast day of Saturn is actually quite commendable.
Even the Mayan calendar holds the winter solstice
as the cornerstone for predicting equinoctial pre-
cession against stars on the caelestial firmament.
That's why 13 Baktun, Friday December 21, 2012 AD,
is the great new year of precession per the Mayan
long-count, with the winter solstice Sun conjunct
the Mayan "sacred tree", which is the apparent in-
tercept of the galactic and ecliptic planes as we
are viewing it from Earth, which by ancient Mayan
reckoning has already repeated seven times making
Dec 21 '12 the beginning of the eighth great year.
The Mayan haab intercalation interval, 1508 haabs
equals 1507 tropical years (C.P. Bowditch, p1906),
showed the average Mayan tropical year 365.242203
mean solar days--which is very nearly exactly the
modern-day average, and equals 25,626.83 tropical
years per great year...about 9,360,000 solar days,
so the seasons precess 1 degree every 26,000 days.
Io Saturnalia!
Daniel Joseph Min
*Min's Astronomy Home Page On The World Wide Web:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1VJBADD137948.6355092593@Gilgamesh-frog.org
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On 25 Nov 2003, Nevermore <burned@thestake.net> wrote:
In <3fc39f3e$1@news.modempool.com> Archilocus wrote:
Actually they are pretty sure, it's just not very popular.
This holiday belongs to Charles Dickens and has been celebrated in the
Western world for just about the past 170 years since Dickens wrote "A
Christmas Carol" when everybody who read the story suddenly thought it
would be fun to actually celebrate this holiday. People who go about
whining about the need to "put Christ back in Christmas" conveniently
overlook (or simply never realized) that Christians largely ignored the
holiday for the better part of 1,800 years.
<snips>
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