The Roman Emperor Aurelian declared December 25 as the day of the god Sol Invictus. If I was a follower, what exactly would I supposed to do as far as ceremonies and other actions both as an ordinary man and as a priest and publicly and privately.What about the ladies? Kids? The Emperor?
Feast.
I think lighting candles was part of the celebration.
Hmmm. Had to hit wikipedia and it appears that according to this entry, Sol Invictus is really the Syrian god Ilāh hag-Gabal - even though according to the main entry, there was a tradtional Sol cult.
Personally, I think any true Roman would have been balls to wall for the duration of the Saturnalia and still in recovery mode on the 25th, so the sun is the last thing he’d have wanted to see or think about.
So no public orgies, wine drinking, banqueting, plays, whipping of pretty girls (that was the lupercalia right?) and general merry making? Civilization truly has collapsed.
Um… yeah. This is now daily.
Feasting, fornicating, drinking…the usual stuff that one does on holidays.
If you’re not both just saying these things so the troglodytes in the audience (we know who we are) will feel appropriately shunned and left out, then you may consider yourselves well and truly hated . . . or at least reciprocally shunned right back - and redundantly. Yeah!
Actually, it is more likely that the Feast of Sol Invictus was meant for the Solstice. But the Roman calendar was wonky, so that one year the Solstice fell on dec 25th.
Sol Invictus was never very popular, and worship lasted only a short time. Evidence is scant, mostly based upon coins.
No, the 25th was the nominal solstice, not the actual one. That is, when Julius Ceasar did his calendar reform, the soltice was on the 25th (or 24th). By the third century when Aurelian ruled, the actual solstice would have been on the 21st or 22nd, perhaps as late as the 23rd. But not on the 25th. This was due to the year being a bit less than 365.25 days, so the solstice gradually slipped to earlier days. It was this slippage that Pope Gregory corrected in his reform.
So you might ask why Gregory didn’t reset the calendar to the state it was when Christ was born (not that he was necessarily born on the solstice, of course). The reason was that they weren’t interested in the date of Christmas; they were concerned with the date of Easter. And the date of Easter had been set in the early 4th century at the Council of Nicea. So Gregory reset the calendar so the date of Easter was as correct for the 4th century.
The pride of my extremely small coin collection is a bronze Roman as (very similar to the first one on this page) from the early 300s Anno Domini. I find it wonderfully ironic that it features on the obverse Constantine the Great (the first “Christian” emperor), and on the reverse, Sol Invictus – the god whose feast day would later be replaced by Christmas.