IN: History
The Unconquered Sun
What do we celebrate on Christmas day?
There is a debate raging about Christmas that you probably have never heard about. It is a long-standing and acrimonious debate, which stretches from the halls of academia to the cathedrals of Rome. It has been the subject of books and academic papers and, almost certainly, at least one or two angry arguments at the dinner table that left turkey on the ground and a bowl of eggnog overturned in somebody’s lap.
It is about the place of Christ in Christmas. But it doesn’t inflame politicians or pop culture dialogue. It is not about whether we should replace the Christ in Christmas with an X. It is not about the propriety of nativity scenes or the skin color of the saints and savior depicted in them. It is not about whether Christmas should share space with Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or Festivus, or whether Santa Claus belongs next to the icons of saints.
It is about whether Christ got to Christmas first.
How are holidays formed?
Let’s start here; each holiday has its own unique character. For example, during Songkran, the Thai new year celebration, the entire country erupts into a water-fight so all-consuming that even the elephants join in. Dia de Los Muertos, with its festive skeletons and dancing, is drastically different from Halloween, even though the two are celebrated within days of each other and both deal with the same themes of death and the beyond.
The unique character of each holiday grows naturally out of its history and the traditions that produced it. Each symbol and ritual tells us a bit about that history, but of course, sometimes we have no clue what the symbols mean without a lot of digging.
Younger holidays are fairly easy. In America, where I was raised, most people can decipher the symbolism of the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving with little difficulty. The firecrackers, the star-spangled banners, the turkey and the corn — each of these has a place in the revisionist story that Americans tell about the holidays and their historic roots.
In comparison, Christmas, Easter, and Halloween do not yield their secrets easily. Each one is full of clashing and contradictory symbolism. Speculating about Easter is such a popular pastime that it generated a South Park episode; why put rabbits, eggs, and spring flowers alongside the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth? Halloween invites some obvious questions, too. Why is a night full of demons, witches, and grim reapers, given the name Halloween, which translates to All Saints’ Eve?
These contradictions crop up because older holidays evolved over centuries and across many cultures, with each culture selecting and keeping some aspects of the holiday and inventing others to suit its purposes. But this makes the whole process seem peaceful; in reality, holidays have always been a battleground of culture, with many competing practices and rituals fighting and fusing, often bitterly.
The war of the holidays
It is a favorite trick of the college jackass to point out to their religious families that our modern holidays resulted from the Christian church’s attempts to suppress pagan populations, grafting images of Christ and his saints on top of much older pagan holidays.
Easter, for example, has roots in the fertility festivals of the spring equinox under the auspices of the goddess Eostre.¹ The eggs, rabbits, and spring flowers associated with Easter are symbols of fertility and spring that have persisted alongside the celebration.
As the story goes, the Church wanted to rein in the pagans, since they were gleefully celebrating the goddess of fertility by, unsurprisingly, indulging in being fertile. This might not have been such a problem, but those pagans who had converted to Christ remembered the fertility festivals and were quite fond of them. So, rather than losing a good portion of their parishioners to spring debauchery, the Church reached deep into its bag of tricks and decided that the holiday should be used to celebrate the rebirth of the soul bought by Jesus on the cross. The neutered celebration that resulted was an acceptable compromise.
It’s an interesting thesis. It fits quite nicely into the modern “religion is oppressive” narrative, and certainly explains the bunnies. I am not particularly qualified to weigh in on the truth of it though I suspect modern accounts are influenced in both tone and content by modern ideologies, many of which are notoriously hostile to religion. But it illustrates something important, which is that several holidays are the result of Christianity being celebrated on top of something more ancient.
A similar process happened for Christmas. This one is somewhat less ambiguous since it occurred within the heart of the Roman Empire. The earliest record of Christmas that we have is from the Chronography of 354 A.D., which recorded that a feast celebrating the nativity was held on December 25th of 336 A.D. The same day was also used to celebrate the birth of the Roman god Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, the patron deity of the Roman Sun Cult. Over time, the celebration of Christmas appears to have overtaken this holiday, especially since it was promoted by the Roman Emperor Constantine throughout his life, and sanctioned as the official church of the Roman State in 380 A.D.
Controversies over Christmas
While the above account is true in some of the broad strokes it is false in many of the specifics, and this is where the contentious debate begins.
For many Christians, the notion that the holidays might not map accurately onto the events they are supposed to celebrate is already an unthinkable suggestion. An article in The Independent in 2017, for example, indignantly reported that one in five British citizens did not know that Jesus of Nazareth was born on December 25th. The writer was apparently unaware that the evidence for Jesus’ birth date is shaky at best, meaning that the other four in five Brits are probably wrong.
While others are willing to budge on the birthdate of Jesus, there are still many unanswered questions about why December 25th was chosen for Christmas. Some have argued that Christmas was grafted on top of the feast of Sol Invictus as a way of suppressing it, while others simply think that it was a competing holiday that eventually grew more popular.
The Feast of Sol Invictus itself is also a matter of some question. How popular was the feast, really? It was created by the Roman Emperor Elagabalus, who in 220 A.D. tried to place the Sun God at the top of the Roman Pantheon. This was not a particularly popular gesture, and it happened during an era when courtiers were notoriously stab-happy. Elagabalus only lasted a few years before, at the tender age of eighteen, he was (very predictably) murdered with swords.
In 274 A.D., Emperor Aurelian reformed the Sun Cult, elevating it to a new level of political and institutional power. But there does not appear to be evidence that he specifically appointed the 25th of December as a holiday to Sol Invictus, though in 274 A.D. he did choose that day to dedicate the new temple of Sol — it certainly seems likely that a regular day of celebration would have been proclaimed at that time, too. But there is much that remains unanswered.
As intriguing as such controversies may be to some, there is a reason that we do not often hear this story. That is because, as much interest and importance as individual groups may attribute to it, neither the Christians nor the Romans nor the Pagans got to December 25th first.
The Divine did.
The winter solstice
I have written elsewhere about the Old-Fashioned Holy. The idea is simple enough. It starts by admitting that we are small, which most people can agree on regardless of their belief system.
Our small size means that we are attuned to the cycles of the world around us, since they form the environment we must navigate. We are shaped at the level of biology and psychology to respond to these larger patterns with awe and a deep sense of meaning — perhaps because reverence ensures that we will take such patterns seriously and shape our lives to accommodate them. Thus our breath is taken away by mystical experiences, by standing in the shadow of grand redwoods, by witnessing the full glory of the Milky Way on a cloudless night, or by gazing upon the code of life and its graceful double helix. Whether you believe there is something divine that lies behind those experiences or not, they still leave us quaking in wonder, and that wonder shapes history.
December 25th sits at the historic nexus of one of these much larger patterns — the winter solstice. In modern times the winter solstice happens on December 21st, due to changes in our calendars and also to the imperfect fit of calendars to the actual motion of the Earth around the Sun. In the fourth century A.D., the acknowledged date of the solstice was December 25th.² The Christians and the Sun Cult were not competing over a random day that they both wanted to make holy. They were fighting over the right to claim a day that was already sanctified by the motions of the cosmos.
Why would the winter solstice be a sacred day, though? What is it that rendered the winter solstice so special that Christians and Romans and Pagans all felt, deep in their bones, that it was holy?
The answer is that due to a particular quirk of the Earth — its tilt — the winter solstice is the darkest night of the year. It is also the night that the darkness reverses, and the light starts to return.
Fear the dark, celebrate the light
It is hard for us to imagine the psychological importance of the night, now that we have electricity. For most of history, however, our ancestors had a fraught relationship with the night. Night was deadly, depriving humans of their sight in a world of rugged terrain where nocturnal predators could still see. Night was also inevitable, rolling in like a wave to blanket towns and valleys, holding them hostage until dawn. It could be kept at bay with campfires and candles and oil lamps and torches, but those required maintenance and their light only stretched so far.
Night was also the provenance of those who preferred to keep their deeds hidden from the daylight, so there was not only danger from the land itself but also the people who dwelt in it. Murderers, and thieves, and drunks, and kidnappers; night afforded cover for most of the unsavory things that people wanted to do. We are quick to praise Thomas Edison for the invention of the light bulb, but few people think through the full consequences of what he accomplished. How many murders and thefts never happened because he stripped them of their dark cover? It must have been many, but we will never know the count.
With that as the background, try now to imagine yourself in a world where night is not only dangerous, but where for six months out of the year its dark horizon grows and expands each day, slowly consuming more of the light. As the night grows, the world grows colder and wetter. Diseases proliferate. You begin to hear stories of people who wandered out in the dark or the snow and did not come back — people you knew. Your aging father’s cough grows worse. The food your family has stored after the harvest slowly begins to dwindle.
What would it be like, in this world, if you knew nothing of physics? Imagine that every year, when the light came back, you viewed it not as the inevitable consequence of the Earth’s tilt and its fixed motion around the sun, but as a choice made by a god, or the outcome of a grand battle between good and evil — an event that could easily end differently the next time around.
Suddenly the winter solstice takes on a new degree of significance, doesn’t it? Because in a world where the return of the light is not guaranteed by physics, the slow advance of the night brings with it a dark fantasy — an unanswered question that lingers at the back of everybody’s mind.
What if this is the year the light doesn’t come back? What if this is the year that the darkness continues to advance, unchecked, and never goes away?
Perhaps, in later years, people only half-believed such fears, trusting that the world was regular and cyclical. Go back far enough, however, and fear of the night’s victory probably took on the force of a religion. Fear of the dark is deeply rooted; most of us felt it keenly as children and still feel it as adults. In a world where such darkness and uncertainty was your context, would you pray on the evening of the solstice that the light would return? Would you celebrate when you had evidence that, yes, indeed, it would?
The name Sol Invictus, “The Unconquered Sun,” suddenly ceases to be a fanciful quirk of history. And suddenly it makes sense why religious traditions might view the winter solstice as a day of great importance for their faith. It is the night that hope won. December 25th wasn’t chosen at random. The solstice has a power of its own that resonates with the hearts of the people who are subject to it. We don’t feel it as keenly now because we have electricity and modern amenities to insulate us from the dangers of night and winter. But its importance is preserved in our culture and traditions.
Divinity got there first. The religious traditions that followed tremble with awe in the afterglow.
The good news
It’s Christmas day. I find myself at the nexus of a motley group of readers from different backgrounds and different creeds. I fall somewhere in the uncomfortable middle, neither Christian nor Atheist nor Pagan. And I knew today that I wanted to write something about this day and why it is special — but it is difficult to do that when the people around you vary so drastically in the form and content of their beliefs about the holidays. Is there any common ground, at all? Is there anything at all about this day that transcends our differences?
This is the best that I can do: Today is the day that light starts to come back. It was built on the faith that the light is returning, and the hope that warmth and spring are around the corner.
The west has adopted this theme of hope, celebrating it in different ways. In ancient Rome, it was the Unconquered Sun — the day that the light started winning once more in its battle with the night. In the Christian tradition, it is the Unconquered Son — the child sent as a gift of God to a world on the brink of collapsing into darkness, bringing the seeds of a new message that would someday bloom and redeem the world.
In modern society Christmas is the day that we draw into ourselves and celebrate the virtues of home, and family, and generosity. It is the day we talk about peace and goodwill and faith. It is an unfettered celebration of human goodness — the unconquered light inside of us that, we hope, will begin to take back the night.
This year we need that common thread of hope. For the past few years, we have been pressed under the bitter acrimony of modern politics. Our society and the people within it have had to endure the ravages of the pandemic, greed, prejudice, and oppression. We have had to fight a growing sense of isolation as the fear of disease has frayed the bonds between us — bonds we did not even know were there until they began to snap.
We have grown brittle, and cold, and pessimistic. We have grown afraid, consumed by the belief that the world will burn; we fear that the government, or corporations, or the rich, or the law, will grind us under their boot. We fear that we’re not far away from the end. We have also grown angry; our rage is the rage of autumn — the forest has turned red like fire because all the leaves are dying.
Today is important. It is the day that we celebrate the light that still shines within us. The unconquered sun, that will rise again. Whatever form that light takes, my hope for this Christmas season is that it is there for you and that you celebrate and find joy within its warmth.
That will be my prayer for this coming year. I will pray that the light within us rises sooner. I will pray that it sets later, and that it will shine longer, and brighter, and that under its gaze the world will be warmer. I will pray that it delivers us from our anger and fear and pessimism. I will pray that the whole world becomes a little more like Christmas, where we choose to dwell on hope, and family, and brotherhood, and all of the beautiful human qualities that represent the best of who we are. And I have a simple, childlike faith in all of us, that within us those qualities will remain unconquered. Sol Invictus.
Merry Christmas, and blessings to all of you.
Footnotes
¹ This itself is up for debate. The chief reference that we have in support of this comes from Bede, a church father who wrote in the 8th century, while the Christianization of England was largely completed by the 7th. It seems unlikely to have been a fabrication, however, given a great deal of circumstantial evidence that is tied together by Eostre’s existence.
² In fairness, even this is slightly off. By the fourth century A.D., due to the inaccuracies of the Julian calendar, the actual date of the winter solstice fell a few days before the 25th. But at the time the Julian calendar was implemented it was December 25th, and this day gained the full force of tradition, which has continued ever since.
