Saturnalia began on December 17. This year Saturn is sharing the night sky with the much brighter upstart planetary deities, Venus and Jupiter; but Saturn is still brighter than any star in the sky, shining to the south for several hours after sunset. In my part of the world, the earliest sunsets, 4:11pm have already passed and the shortest days are more or less upon us. Between December 16th and Christmas Day, day length in central Vermont will be about 8 hours and 52 minutes plus or minus a few seconds. From the 15th to the 26th, the sun will rise and set at about the same positions on the east and west horizons (123° and 237° respectively). The latest sunrises are still yet to come on December 29th, but the point that we name the solstice will happen at 4:21am on 21 December. The longest night stretches between sunset on the 20th and sunrise on the 21st, but the changes in night length are negligible between now and the end of the year. It is not truly one longest night, but a fortnight of long nights. The solstice is here.
Keeping track of differences that are so slight seems to go against the essence of the season. Much like with Mardi Gras, this holiday is not particularly my thing, but I do relish the required breakdown of order. And Saturnalia is time to turn everything on its head. Clocks are anathema in this festive time. The only rule is Misrule. Order is just wrong.
Tricksters in the Tree
The Dawn of Everything made a point that I have repeatedly revisited in the years since reading the book. When discussing whether humans favor cooperation or competition, the authors said that there is ample evidence that we’re opportunists: we favor whatever works in the moment for satisfying our desires. But what seems to be a constant, at least since we began recording our lives a few thousand years ago, is that none of us likes to be told what to do.
Hear, hear!
Though I have to say that this might be a stronger female trait than male. I know plenty of men who are perfectly happy to take orders from superiors. I personally do not know one women who doesn’t get pissed off when you try to tell her what to do. Many of the women I know will put in effort to do the opposite rather than follow commands. Granted, I may know a skewed sample of ornery females with my Irish roots and Western upbringing, but history and literature feature more women like the ones I’ve lived with than those who follow dictates willingly and without much question.
I’m thinking this is the true reason why men have largely filled the role of soldiering.
In any case, Saturnalia is when order breaks down. Intentionally. There’s cross dressing and reversed hierarchies, or just no dressing and no hierarchies… There are boy bishops and lords of misrule. Slaves become masters and women get to sit down and be served. Schools close, magistrates go home, and courts of law hear no cases. There is feasting and drinking and merriment. There are taboos against many kinds of work. And no commands are followed.
If you’re a Hobbesian sort of mentality who believes that humans need coercion to behave their damned selves, note this: in spite of all this chaos, actual crime — against other humans and against property — has historically been low if not nonexistent during the Midwinter revels. Things get broken, of course, and misplaced. There are complaints about noise from fussy folks like Pliny, and probably more than a few people decide that they would rather not return to the daily order. Wives and servants and field hands have been known to up and wander off never to return, taking advantage of the confusion at this time of year. But there is not wholesale thievery. Nobody goes on a killing spree. People don’t maliciously injure each other or destroy things. In fact, there is quite a bit of care shown to our fellow beings. It would seem that we are quite capable of getting along with each other and lending a helping hand even in the midst of a week long bender.
I’m never good at following rules. Nor at making them. I’m a merry anarchist all the year round. I am the very type of that opportunistic person who does what works and expects others to do the same. Rules just get in the way. I follow exactly one. Do no harm. (Yes, it’s a doozy…) So Saturnalia doesn’t mean that much to me. But I still toast the days of misrule and disorder. And I give free rein to my crotchety unwillingness to do what I am told.
So here’s permission granted to do what you will. I would say harm none, except statistics seem to show that you probably won’t cause harm anyway. In fact, you’ll probably be kinder and more caring when the rules break down than when you are forced to follow them.
Does make one wonder why we ever do…
Now, here’s a recycled essay for Saturnalia. Cheers!
To set the proper mood, here is a carol for Saturnalia from the Ashmolean Latin Inscriptions Project.
Io, Saturnalia! Today we cast off the orders imposed on us from our parasitic overlords and do as we will. Well, we would if our overlords would allow it. Which doesn’t happen any more. That should be telling. Actual slaves in Rome had more freedom than we do. We don’t even get bathroom breaks, never mind seven days.
Now, there were no wages involved; this was not paid time off — though there were gifts. But then again, slaves were part of the household, so there was less need for wages to pay for their needs. They couldn’t up and move elsewhere, and there were some pretty nasty masters. But most slaves were more or less cared for; their needs were met. It looked bad in public if your household was starved and abused, and the work a starved and abused slave does is not that great. So masters suffered a lack of service and status if they were mingy and mean. This wouldn’t have have stopped the worst offenders. I’m sure they didn’t care about the service, and the wealthy don’t suffer from bad publicity. But the majority of Roman slave-owners probably treated their slaves at least as good as we treat our favored pets — for approximately the same reasons. Master and slave both prospered when the slave’s needs were met. Slaves ate better than our working poor. They had clothing and places to live, unlike those who work for us. They had health care and proper rest time, again in unflattering contrast to our necessary workers. They could marry and raise a family in relative freedom from want — relative, that is, to the working poor today. My own sons, who are not poor, nor properly of the working class, do not have that basic freedom granted Roman slaves. (I have given up on being a grandmother…)
Most importantly, slaves set their own work schedule. They lived at work, so to speak, but they did not do work every minute of every day. There was substantial down time. As long as the work was done, it didn’t matter how. In fact, it seems that many masters generally deferred to slaves in ordering the work because the slaves were the experts. They did the work and knew the best ways to order their days so it would get done. A Roman would have scoffed at Taylorism, in which every minute is ordered to achieve some theoretical maximum production, in which work is monitored by a manager — someone who does not do the work and is therefore not a practical expert at that work.
Romans were exceedingly practical. Romans recognized that a manager — or even a master — had no practical experience doing the work and therefore was not the best authority on how the work should be approached. Moreover, they disliked the cost of management. At the least, the Roman masters had to provide fancier clothes to the overseers — who did no productive work — when the slaves were perfectly capable of doing the work without the additional expense of oversight and its fancy tastes.
There was plenty of bureaucracy in Rome (mostly to extract taxes), but there was relatively little direction of work — because Romans recognized that management costs more for no increase in productivity. Perhaps there would have even been deterioration in the quality of work done as slaves became surly, chaffing under artificial order imposed upon them and their work, order that interfered with their work. In any case, there weren’t many slave overseers aside from farm managers, who were more concerned with keeping the farm operational than with task management of individual slaves.
Now, I’m not pining for Roman times nor do I wish to see actual slavery imposed upon work. But it is interesting to note that actual slaves were shown more respect for the work that they did and were generally treated better in material terms than we treat our workers today.
There is a common misconception — regularly man-splained to me when I call it out — that work is supposed to be done for someone else. Perhaps for the community or in exchange for wages, but not for the individual doing the task. And all I can say is: No, no and no! That is exactly NOT the point of work. That is the point of exploitation and hierarchy and, yes, slavery. The actual point of work done is to benefit the body doing the work — it is done to meet the worker’s needs — and we have utterly lost that point in our culture. Work is now completely given over to our overlords without even the minimal care given back to the worker that a Roman master showed his slaves. Even worse, work is now done for the profit of others, not even the material benefit of others.
I think we need to chew on that today as we think about overturning order.
Because we do need to overturn this order. It is destructive. It is getting little necessary work done. It benefits nobody. And it is chewing up the planet. We need to remember why humans do work. It’s not to earn money; it’s to care for themselves and their dependents. We are just like every other being on this planet — who we are destroying with our imposed orders and screwy notions of work.
So we truly need a general breakdown in imposed order.
I know that frightens quite a lot of people. We spend a lot of time convincing ourselves that we need this order. We talk about our competitive nature, our selfish genes, our intrinsic violence. We actively divert attention from the abundant evidence that life is not any of that, and therefore, being alive, we can’t be any of that. Competitiveness, selfishness, violence. These are not beneficial traits. They confer no adaptive edge. A violent isolated individual who does not integrate into a community will die quickly and without progeny. Simple as that. We have to be convinced that we are of this nature, a nature that requires controlled order, precisely so that others can order us and therefore expropriate our productivity. Yes, there are damaged and broken individuals, since this culture of imposed order is very good at creating damaged and broken individuals. But if anyone is selfish and violent and competitive, it is the maladaptive overlord class that is quickly running our entire species to extinction. And they are not representative of human nature — whatever that means.
That is perhaps the crux of the matter. We spend way too much time talking about ourselves, gazing inward with increasingly tortured labels and theories, when we really need to be looking out at the rest of the world in order to understand life. At least, we need to be looking at reality and not probing our brains for more labels and theories. We need more living and less thinking. To go back to the original theme, we need more work and less order, maybe no order at all. Just do what needs to be done to care for ourselves and our dependents. And do no more than that.
There is so much written about what the future will bring and how we can save the world from us. I suppose it’s the nature of this artificial, mediated world we’ve created for ourselves, but it doesn’t seem to occur to most people that the future doesn’t exist. All we need to do is live well, here and now, in the present. It also doesn’t seem to occur to people that the world doesn’t need saving. It will take care of itself. Herself, let’s give this planet agency and personhood, shall we? She is presently saving herself. She has rather time-honored methods of eradicating harm and imbalance. We have triggered those corrective measures and are experiencing them in real time.
We don’t need to save the world, but we might want to think about saving ourselves. No, not think, do. We need to do more and think less and maybe not order anything at all. Because we are not in charge here. We are not the masters. We are the working hands on this living planet. And we need to get back to work.
Fortunately, the work we need to get back to is beneficial to ourselves. It meets our present daily needs, and it will help save ourselves from ourselves and stop triggering the planet’s corrective measures. Even better, much of the work we need to get back to is fun. It is play. It is delightful, beautiful, creative. It is living. It is that meaning of life that we can’t seem to find in a world of imposed order.
So… Io, Saturnalia! Hail the breakdown of order! And let’s get back to life!
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
