Publius Quinctilius Varus is a tragic figure remembered only because of his disastrous defeat in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (9 AD), aka the Varian Disaster and "Rome's greatest defeat." I wonder what he would have thought if he'd known he would gain immortality by committing such a gigantic blunder that it would end up being named after him? There are many paths to fame and screwing up big time is one of them.
According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD), 3rd ed. revised, Varus came from a "patrician family that had been of no importance for centuries. He owed his career to the favor of Augustus," who probably regretted his choice later on when Varus lost three legions in the forests of Germany. According to Tacitus, many of the defeated Roman soldiers were enslaved or sacrificed to the Germanic gods. Not a good end to a legionary's career.
Varus has gone down in history for his monumental defeat in Germania, but he must have been a reasonably competent man to win the favor of a capable administrator like Augustus. Up until the debacle in the Teutoburg Forest, Varus had had a fairly distinguished career:
"Varus became proconsul of Africa (?7-6 BC), and then legate of Syria. When Judea revolted after the death of Herod the Great, he marched rapidly southwards and dealt firmly with the insurgents." (OCD)
"Next heard of as legate of the Rhine army [governor of Germania] in AD 9, Varus fell victim to geography and the German tribes' resistance to Roman rule:"
According to Livius, "Varus and the three legions XVII, XVIII, and XIX were somewhere near the river Weser (perhaps near modern Minden) when he learned of an insurrection in the west. He decided to return to the Rhine and make a detour through the rebellious area. The only road led through a small strip of accessible land; to the south, there were the inaccessible hills of the Teutoburg forest, and to the north, marshes made progress difficult. It was the perfect place to trap the heavy legionaries."
Filmed in 2015 at the supposed site of the disaster in Germany.
The terrain probably made it impossible for Varus to cover his flanks, but he seems to have assumed that he wouldn't have problems from the local Germanic tribes. As it turned out, this was a mistake:
"[He] was treacherously attacked in difficult country by Arminius [chief of the Cherusci], whom he had trusted. The Roman army was destroyed ... and Varus took his own life." (OCD)
Arminius apparently lured Varus into the trap by posing as a friend of Rome and informing him of the rebellion in the west. In a disgraceful act all too familiar from recent history, Augustus blamed Varus not only for the disaster, but for the failure of his entire policy in Germany:
"Varus was made the scapegoat for the signal failure of Augustus' whole German policy. He is alleged to have been grossly extortionate in Syria, torpid and incompetent in his German command." (OCD)
This just begs the question, of course. After all, if Varus was so incompetent and corrupt, why was he given command in Germania in the first place? In any case, the defeat had major repercussions for the Roman empire, which halted its attempts to conquer the Germans and limited its frontier to the Rhine, laying the foundations for many more calamities to come.
Conclusion: If you want to go down in history, you have to either achieve great things like Thomas Edison, kill someone important (like Lee Harvey Oswald), or, like Publius Quinctilius Varus, fail in such a spectacular fashion that your name lives on forever.
Merry Yule, Saturnalia & (Maybe) Mithra's Birthday
Today is "Christmas," whatever that means. The word comes from the Middle English Christemasse, which is turn comes from the Old English Christes-messe or "Christ's Mass," but it's unclear what the word "mass" actually means here. These days it usually refers to the Eucharist (Holy Communion) and the Catholic mass, but it may have had a different meaning when the first Christmas was celebrated in Rome in 336 AD:
"The English noun mass is derived from Middle Latin missa. The Latin word was adopted in Old English as mæsse (via a Vulgar Latin form messa), and was sometimes glossed as sendnes (i.e. 'a sending, dismission'). The Latin term missa itself was in use by the 6th century. It is most likely derived from the concluding formula Ite, missa est ('Go; the dismissal is made'); missa here is a Late Latin substantive corresponding to classical missio." (Wikipedia)
If this is correct, the word "Christmas" means something more like "Christ's Dismissal" or "Christ's Sending," which may refer to the dismissal or "sending out into the world" of the congregation after the service. Various other explanations have been proposed, but the original meaning of "Christmas" -- like the origin of Christianity itself -- is still kind of hazy.
One thing that isn't hazy is why we celebrate Christmas on Dec. 25 (Gregorian Calendar) even though nobody has the slightest idea when Jesus was born. The date was first adopted by the Western Christian Church, sometime during the first half of the fourth century, because the early church needed to compete with important pagan festivals like the celebration of the winter solstice.
Christmas is a classic example of how the early church Christianized the pagan West by taking over its traditions.
"The Christian ecclesiastical calendar contains many remnants of pre-Christian festivals. Christmas includes elements of the Roman feast of the Saturnalia and the birthday of Mithra. The Chronography of 354 AD contains early evidence of the celebration on December 25 of a Christian liturgical feast of the birth of Jesus. This was in Rome, while in Eastern Christianity the birth of Jesus was already celebrated in connection with the Epiphany on January 6." Source: Wikipedia.
Christmas traditions have deep roots in the ancient pagan world. Take the Christmas tree, for instance. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "The use of evergreen trees, wreaths, and garlands to symbolize eternal life was a custom of the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, and Hebrews. Tree worship was common among the pagan Europeans and survived their conversion to Christianity in the Scandinavian customs of decorating the house and barn with evergreens at the New Year to scare away the Devil and of setting up a tree for the birds during Christmastime. It survived further in the custom, also observed in Germany, of placing a Yule (1) tree at an entrance or inside the house during the midwinter holidays."
(1) "Yule or Yuletide ('Yule time' or 'Yule season') is a festival historically observed by the Germanic peoples. Scholars have connected the original celebrations of Yule to the Wild Hunt, the god Odin, and the pagan Anglo-Saxon Mōdraniht [Old English 'Night of the Mothers']. ." (Wikipedia)
"Later departing from its pagan roots, Yule underwent Christianised reformulation, resulting in the term Christmastide. Many present-day Christmas customs and traditions such as the Yule log, Yule goat [see next video], Yule boar, Yule singing, and others stem from pagan Yule traditions."
Also see The Symbols of Yule.
In Rome, the period of the winter solstice brought the seven days of the Saturnalia. "Saturn’s great festival, the Saturnalia, became the most popular of Roman festivals, and its influence is still felt in the celebration of Christmas and the Western world’s New Year." (Encyclopedia Britannica).
"The Saturnalia was the most popular holiday of the Roman year," according to the University of Chicago. Catullus describes it as 'the best of days' ... and Seneca complains that the 'whole mob has let itself go in pleasures" ... Pliny the Younger writes that he retired to his room while the rest of the household celebrated ... It was an occasion for celebration, visits to friends, and the presentation of gifts, particularly wax candles ... perhaps to signify the returning light after the solstice, and sigillaria [figurines given as traditional presents]."
Everything in Rome came to a stop during the Saturnalia, a festival of licentiousness and role reversals, among other things. According to History Extra, "We say that during Christmas today the whole world shuts down – the same thing happened during the Saturnalia. There were sometimes plots to overthrow the government, because people were distracted – the famous conspirator Cataline had planned to murder the Senate and set the city on fire during the holiday, but his plan was uncovered and stopped by Cicero in 63 BC."
Some Christians see the Saturnalia (and, by extension, Christmas itself) as satanic, which isn't too surprising since Christianity demonized all of the old pagan gods while simultaneously hijacking many of their traditions for their own purposes. In one case, that of Mithra (Mithras) -- the early church's main competitor -- the Christians may have appropriated a pagan god so completely that some have argued that Christ is Mithra in another form.
The identification of Mithra's birthday with Christmas is sketchy. While many sources claim that the god was born on Dec. 25, other sources say that this isn't true and the story seems to be a much later invention. According to Wikipedia, for instance, "It is often stated that Mithras was thought to have been born on December 25. But Beck states that this is not the case. In fact he calls this assertion 'that hoariest of 'facts'. He continues: 'In truth, the only evidence for it is the celebration of the birthday of Invictus on that date in the Calendar of Philocalus. Invictus is of course Sol Invictus, Aurelian's sun god. It does not follow that a different, earlier, and unofficial sun god, Sol Invictus Mithras, was necessarily or even probably, born on that day too.'"
Mithra was said to have been born from a rock (in one version of the story) According to The Mysteries of Mithra, by Franz Cumont (p 131), "the tradition ran that the 'Generative Rock,' of which a standing image was worshiped in the temples, had given birth to Mithra on the banks of a river, under the shade of a sacred tree, and that shepherds alone, ensconced in a neighboring mountain, had witnessed the miracle of his entrance into the world." Like the story of Jesus's birth, the presence of shepherds in the fields suggests that Mithra was born in the spring or summer, not in the dead of winter. Whatever the case, however, the Jesus/Mithra connection is persistent in popular culture:
Related: Sol Invictus and Christmas
One interesting fact about Mithraism is that it appeared in the Roman Empire around the same time that Christianity appeared and seems to have dropped out of sight around the same time that Nicene Christianity became the official state religion of Rome:
"The Roman deity Mithras appears in the historical record in the late 1st century A.D., and disappears from it in the late 4th century A.D.," according to The Tertullian Project. It's tempting to see this as circumstantial evidence that Christianity evolved out of Mithraism, but the truth is that all forms of pagan religion began to fade out after the church consolidated its power in the 4th century. Besides, very little is actually known about the teachings of Mithraism, an "organization of cells," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised), whose beliefs have to be reconstructed mostly from inscriptions.
None of this really matters, though. Mithras probably wasn't born on Dec. 25, but then neither was Jesus so what difference does it make? The connections between Christmas, ancient Yuletide celebrations and the Roman Saturnalia are clear, so if you're a pagan you might as well go ahead and celebrate Mithra's birthday today as well. Of course, this assumes that you see Christmas as a religious holiday in the first place. A lot of people don't:
"Most Americans celebrate Christmas, but its importance to people as a religious event continues to wane, according to a new survey by Pew Research." (News & Observer, 2017). Note: this article is now hidden behind a paywall.
"The poll found that while 90 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas, only 55 percent regard it as a religious holiday. Further, the survey found, a decreasing majority of Americans believe in the main elements of the Christmas story as told in the Bible: that Jesus was born of a virgin mother; that three magi came to visit, bearing gifts; that an angel announced the baby’s birth; and that the infant was cradled in a manger."
Christmas has become secularized and increasingly commercial, to say the least. The holiday has degenerated into a month-long orgy of rabid consumerism and mass insanity, a typical example of the decline of the modern world. (Next video from 2018)
I have mixed feelings about Christmas. I'm an atheist, I don't believe that Jesus existed and I think that Christianity was a disaster for the Roman Empire and the West in general, but I'm not one of those rabid anti-Christians who protest manger displays and fly into shrieking tantrums every time someone says "Merry Christmas." And while it's obvious that the early (Western) church made Dec. 25 Jesus's birthday in order to hijack a pagan festival, I'm not especially bothered by that fact. I don't get all offended about it and start foaming at the mouth.
I can't stand what Christmas has become, but the holiday is a Western tradition so even though I'm a complete heretic I support the open celebration of the holiday because the West and all of its values and institutions and traditions are under attack by politically-correct vermin. I'd rather see a return to our true pagan roots (something I don't think is possible, by the way), but given the choice between Christianity and, say, Islam or Cultural Marxism or, God forbid, modern neopaganism, I'll take Christianity any day even though I don't believe a word of it.
So Merry Christmas and if saying that offends somebody I couldn't care less.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Barbarians, Catholic Church, Christianity, Commentary, Culture, Paganism, Religion, Videos | Permalink