Marmalade Daydreams

Last week I enjoyed the type of entertainment that can only be bought in blood, but before the more sensitive constitutions blanch at my words, imagining my delight at cockfighting or worse, allow me to explain. For nine consecutive nights, besting my Maccabean forebears by one, I caroused and reveled, toasting friends old and new; I indulged in delicacies at a gourmet feast around a roughly-hewn candle-lit table, I dipped anchovy-encrusted pizza in blue cheese dressing; I sang karaoke ‘til five in the morn, and danced my ass off at the school’s holiday party. For a week, I crawled into work bleary-eyed and unbathed and, to their credit, my colleagues, my students, and my family said not a word. Why no concern at my apparent descent into hedonism? Has young Stein finally accepted Bukowski’s crown of thorns, the aesthetic life above any moral prerogative? No, my detractors’ catcalls notwithstanding, I see myself as but a seasonal sot, a December drunkard. I blame the ancient Romans.

Now those in my inner circle may object, recalling my use of ancient Rome as the scapegoat of any number of problems, from global catastrophes to personal shortcomings, and I in turn bite my thumb at them. I still maintain that, if not for that accursed civilization, my students would be endowed with normative cognitive functions and I would be King of the Jews. But that’s besides the point. How could these people be responsible for my annual attempts to sabotage my good standing in the community by staggering about in bedraggled delirium systematically induced via nightly intoxication and sleep-deprivation? In a word, Saturnalia.

In Cosmos & History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, Mircea Eliade writes of the “primitive” belief in cyclic time, that, from the macro- to the microcosmic, all things wax and wane like the lunar phases, like the vegetal world. This belief in periodic regeneration is the basis for the New Year celebrations found in cultures from hunter-gatherer tribes to the great civilizations of antiquity. Despite our contemporary cult of progress, we retain cultural vestiges of this belief today. Consider our symbology for the dawning (another cyclic event) of the New Year – the old shrouded man, carrying a sickle and an hourglass (all symbols of our fragile mortality), transforms to a shining baby, a beautiful symbol of the restorative properties of time. Out of death rises life; out of entropic dissolution, the world is created anew.

Even before the Hellenistic influence associated Saturn with Kronos, father of Zeus, lord of the Titans who, interestingly enough, became known as the god of time, the Romans celebrated their agricultural god with Saturnalia, a week of bacchanalia beginning December 17. Similar to the Babylonian New Years rituals, law was suspended or even reversed. Masters served slaves, sexual mores were trumped, and, as you might imagine, there was a lot of drinking involved. In some periods, a mock emperor was installed, whose drunken proclamations were made law. Historians believe that this week-long party in ancient Rome survives in Carnival. I know it survives in Brooklyn.

It sounds to me like this party has the potential to get out of hand, especially with the acclaimed “reversal of fortunes” – an opportunity rife for exploitation by the socially marginalized – a slave rebellion. How did the party end? With the execution of the mock emperor, all masters reassumed their positions of power by whatever means necessary. Out of chaos, order is restored, whether through violence or coercion. By ritualistically allowing the populace to releasing latent tensions for a week each year, one might argue, it makes for better control. I imagine that during that week of chaotic excess, there are moments in which one sees the need for order, and though it’s eminently enjoyable, there’s a sense of relief as it winds to a close.

And so it goes. Last night, the date we post-pagans know as Christmas Eve, marks the traditional end of Saturnalia, and it found my family together nodding out on the couch in front of television’s warming glow after an evening of board games and cookie baking. I’m sure it is no coincidence that the early Christians, living in the Roman Empire, placed the celebration of the birth of their Lord at the end of Saturnalia. It allowed new converts to participate in the shared experience of dissolving social, moral, and cosmic boundaries, but, following Saturnalia’s dying throes, mopping up the bacchanalian aftermath, their holiday installed a new order, a shining baby to forgive the sins of mortality and the promise of eternal life, an escape from the cosmic cycle.

As for me, I prefer the model of cyclic time. Next week I’ll make my resolutions in an attempt to maintain the order that I feel here by the familial hearth, but, assuming the future resembles the past and that my resolve dissolves ere the crocuses bloom, I can always atone come Yom Kippur. Bless the cultural remains of “primitive” wisdom.