Part 9: Equinox, Solstice and Good Excuses to Celebrate, Cont.

So, the Saturnalia marked the New Year’s rite of passage, the sun’s decision to stand and not retreat and, what was even more heroic of it, to reverse its course. Sol Invictus! Saturnalia celebrations were as wild and woolly as any initiation rite humans have ever staged. People tended to get so carried away with the merriment that they’d offer the victorious sun a human sacrifice - somebody who, it seems, frequently regarded himself as being deserving of the honor.

Onlookers fear the sight of such excessive emotion. Few care to look beneath the surface to try to understand what spiritual needs are being met by the exuberance, by the release of conscious restraints. Especially in the religious life we find those who would constrict the human spirit, to squeeze it into a corset of righteousness, to lace it up and suppose, like Dr. Bovary’s surgical treatment of a club foot, that it will permanently and on its own merits take the form they have so callously imposed upon it. It doesn’t work that way. Without the emotional projections rituals initiate, we are all quite desperate - the effect of restless and ruthless gods in the overcrowded tenements of our minds.

Early Christians understood this. Having no idea whatsoever about the actual date on which Mary produced her Divine Child, they easily decided, several hundred years after the event, to make a deal with the Roman Emperor Constantine. Constantine was a follower of the Persian Savior Mithras/Cronos on which god’s account he had lent his considerable Imperial support. Wishing to convert to Christianity and to bring his subjects with him, but not wishing to risk public displeasure by relinquishing the Mithrasian Saturnalia holidays, he offered the Christians the use of his former Savior’s birthday in exchange for his conversion. The Christians accepted the proposal. They already had something to celebrate, but they needed the formal occasion, the structure of celebration. Mithras’ birthday, December 25th, the Saturnalia, became the birth of Christ. (Mithras/Maitreya is, coincidentally, our Future Buddha.)

The apotheosis of Time as Cronos/Mithras/Aion/Saturn. Cyclical time seen as the Uroboros (tail eating makara or plumed serpent).

Imagine, then, the surprise of the Basques who had long taken festive note of both Solstice and Equinox but called them god-knows-what in their own language only to find that the Christianized Roman conquerors of Iberia were creating a bit of bizarre religious history for them.

According to these post-Constantine Romans, the Basques, at the time, were and had been hard-core pagans who worshipped Jupiter, Juno, Diana, Mercury, and Saturn/Cronos, among others. The Basques, no slouches when it came to holidays and fiestas, particularly liked Saturn and the Saturnalia. And as Julius Caesar himself noted, they fought bulls on all their fiestas.

Astrological representation of the "deadly" planet Saturn and his dominion over Aquarius and Capricorn. Sigil of planet Saturn.

All proselytizing religions in one way or another assimilate the gods of the converted. The incorporation usually necessitates a bit of accommodating distortion, but in the case of the Basques the task was accomplished with more than an excess of illogic.

San Fermin, in whose honor the Bulls are run at Pamplona, was invented to account for people’s new Christian religious zeal. Unfortunately, the name "San Fermin" is purely a verbal corruption of Saturnine. There is not now and never has been a saint called Fermin.

But history is history and we therefore are informed about one Saturnino, an aristocratic young Egyptian, who went to the Holy Land and became a close personal friend of that otherwise solitary saint, John the Baptist. Saturnino, after witnessing St. John’s Christening of Jesus of Nazareth, became one of Jesus’ disciples, and then, after the Crucifixion, escorted Peter to Rome; and he did all this while managing to avoid being mentioned in a Biblical or in any other historical account.

Saturnino, anticipating Jerry Lewis by two thousand years, evidently had the stuff that only the French seem to appreciate. He went to Gaul and there obtained those inexplicable rave reviews. He also met a boy named Honesto who became his protege.

Honesto went south and in Pamplona (Pompey’s "polis" or town), on the steps of a temple to the Roman Goddess Diana, he founded the Church of San Cernin - an early variant pronunciation of Saturnino. We note that Saturnino’s name is already decomposing into canonical terms - somewhat prematurely since Saturnino wasn’t even ill, much less dead, a normal requirement for the honor.

When Honesto was asked by the father of one convert, Firminus, to provide more authoritative support for his evangelical mission, he returned to France and brought Saturnino/San Cernin, himself, alive and well, to Pamplona where the latter’s astounding, though historically unnoticed, presence caused the entire population to convert instantaneously to Christianity.

Firminus became a disciple of Honesto and after seven years of apprenticeship, at the age of twenty-four, journeyed to Toulouse, France, in order to be elevated to the rank of Bishop for which honor and no other apparent reason he changed his name to Fermin. As Bishop Fermin, then, he returned to his native Pamplona.

Meanwhile, the very charismatic Saturnino/San Cernin left France for a short time, and, unaccountably, during this brief absence, managed to lose a considerable amount of his popularity. (There is no accounting for French taste.) He was condemned to death and was duly martyred by being dragged to death by a bull.

Bishop Firminus/Fermin was not having much better luck. French authorities came and arrested him on October 10, 302, at which time he was sentenced to death by bull-dragging; but because the public protested this outrage, the event was not staged on schedule. Though having been frequently tortured, he managed to survive until the Autumnal equinox, September 25th, 303, at which time he was quietly decapitated. Naturally, this tragedy became the anniversarial occasion of a grand fiesta and corrida.

So, Saturnino/San Cernin, an associate of Christ and John the Baptist, had a disciple, Honesto, (whose fate nobody seems to know) who had a disciple, Firminus/Fermin, who lost his head on September 25, 303. We have here three men whose overlapping lives nevertheless managed to span several centuries of some rather intense persecution. Attempts to compress their lifespans into a more believable chronology have never succeeded, there being no way to construct a timetable that can conform to the Church’s actual history.

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