Merry Antichristmas!, or let’s talk about Sol Invictus

Ave Mithras, Sol Invicti!

Hail Mithras, the unconquered sun!

• A Taste of History, February 2021.

For reasons that should be self-evident, “Christmas” is not something Satanists should celebrate. No. That sounds way too dogmatic. “Christmas” is not something Satanists should want to celebrate. In December, the Western world goes absolutely ape-shit for the Festival that Taste Forgot. When non-Christians celebrate “Christmas” explicitly, they are internalizing Christian colonialism; they willingly become colonized bodies. The Satanic Temple has proposed five holidays that should be celebrated (as holidays in the Satanic Calendar): Lupercalia, Hexennacht, Unveiling Day, Halloween, and Sol Invictus (https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/holidays). I’ll discuss each of these when they come up in the calendar across the year. But right now, I want to discuss Sol Invictus.

Sol Invictus is a celebration of the “return of the sun”: “the unconquerable sun” as the name translates from the Latin. And this is one of the many different “return of the sun” celebrations cultures around the world, and across time, but under different names, celebrated after the Winter Solstice. Up to the solstice, the days are getting shorter (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), and the nights longer. After the solstice, the days begin to get longer: the frozen days of winter are being defeated by the “unconquerable sun”. That sort of thing. The cult of Sol Invictus was spread throughout the ancient world, honouring many gods as more or less representing the same thing – “the unconquerable sun”. These gods include Zeus/Jupiter, Apollo, Mithras, Mars/Ares, etc. The cult became the state religion across the Roman empire under Aurelian in the third century CE, and it remained so until the emperor Constantine made Christianity the state religion in the fourth century. The British/American philosopher Thomas Paine noted, in his essay “Origin of Free-Masonry” (originally written in 1805, but not published until 1818), that “… the Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun …”. This seems then, true to brand, for Christian co-option of Sol Invictus.

The feast day for Sol Invictus was, on the modern calendar, 25 December. Most intelligent Christians I know don’t believe that December 25th is Jesus’s birthday; the real date is probably sometime in the Spring based on Scriptural references (which aren’t relevant here). While Jesus’s birth was celebrated by the earliest Christians, the date was not confirmed until well into the fourth century CE. So why December 25th? The early Christian writers did what all Christians do best: take over other people’s holidays (or their land, or their bodies, or their minds). If, during this time, the cult of Sol Invictus was the state religion of the Roman Empire, in order for Christianity to achieve its ascendancy, it insinuated itself into and took over the Sol Invictus celebrations (among others). A friend of mine said to me once “culture eats policy for breakfast”; that is, no matter what policies you put into place, the culture of the environment will always win. If you want to change people’s minds, you need to do so in such a way that the culture changes with the new policies. If the early Christians wanted their religion to dominate, rather than just conversion, they also needed to take over existing institutions and convert them from the inside. Throughout the Roman empire, folk are celebrating December 25th as a holiday (as Sol Invictus). The early church, realizing they could not change the culture instead changed the referent of that culture, and Sol or Mithras became Jesus. So, the celebration of Sol Invictus is colonized by Christianity, and its key celebration in December is magically transformed into the birth of their Savior.

In recognizing Sol Invictus as a major celebration in modern Satanism, I believe we need to return Christianity’s favour by recolonizing “Christmas”. Christianity has colonized so many cultures and destroyed so many religions that it is our Satanic duty to disrupt their celebrations. And returning December 25th to celebrating Sol Invictus is one step in that direction.

However, in order to do that and be something of our own, rather than just reactionary and blasphemous, we need to look to the celebration of Sol Invictus for what it means to Satanism beyond a post-colonial desire to strike back at Christianity. In his Hail Satan! podcast, dated November 27, 2023, titled “Satanic Holidays”, Joseph Rose doesn’t see the relevance of Sol Invictus (among other celebrations) for Satanism (https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-tk4sm-1c167f3b?utm_campaign=w_share_ep&utm_medium=dlink&utm_source=w_share). Instead, he sees this as yet another example of appropriating something vaguely pagan in order to appear “anti-Christmas”. His point is that just because something is pagan, doesn’t mean it is right for Satanists to recognize. And in principle, I agree. However, Sol Invictus, as a celebration of the “return of the sun” needs to be read symbolically (just as non-Theistic Satanists view the Devil). What is relevant to Satanists in the Sol Invictus celebration is the idea of “the light of knowledge”; that in celebrating the “return of the sun” we are recognizing the Luciferian impulse to, again, eat of the Tree of Knowledge, to learn. Sol Invictus becomes a celebration of knowledge and learning for modern Satanism. How do we celebrate this? By giving gifts of books, of learning new things, of educating ourselves in some way. Sol Invictus celebrates our continued learning. My girlfriend told me that this year if I’m going to celebrate Sol Invictus by the gifting of a book, it had to be a book that really means something to me. I need to share with her an important piece of my heart. I like that idea too. So, I bought for her a copy of Shel Silverstein’s 1964 The Giving Tree (I can say this here because she doesn’t read my blog). I love books anyway, so having a holiday that specifically celebrates the gifting of knowledge is something that I can get behind.

Often linked with Sol Invictus is the Roman holiday Saturnalia, which occurs for several days, from about December 17th until the 23rd. Christianity has taken over this holiday too. The Saturnalia, back in the day, celebrated the Titan Saturn/Cronos and was largely an agricultural festival marking the end of the harvest. This was observed by several days of excess: eating and drinking, merriment, gift-giving, and most significantly, reversals of social norms. In this latter point, slaves would be served by their masters at banquet tables, the downtrodden were raised high, and a “King of the Saturnalia” was crowned. If any of you have read Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World, the Saturnalia sounds very much like the medieval carnivalesque he wrote about. This celebration too has a tremendous appeal to modern Satanists, particularly in its excesses of consumption, feasting, and drinking. In the same podcast episode I referenced earlier, Rose likewise criticizes the mindless adoption of the Saturnalia for the same reasons he rejects Sol Invictus: just because we are resurrecting an ancient pagan celebration, doesn’t make it Satanic. While the date and some of the symbolism of Sol Invictus have influenced “Christmas”, the Christian celebration (at least historically) owes more to the Saturnalia than the other. On this point, Rose does not see a problem in Satanists celebrating “Christmas” as it is a deeply indulgent celebration, echoing the Saturnalia, and Satanism is all about self-gratification and indulgences. Rose puts it succinctly: he just likes getting presents.

There are several reasons Rose and I part ways on the issues of Sol Invictus, Saturnalia, and “Christmas”. The first one has to do with rejecting anything with “Christ” in its name; we give credence and power to Christianity by speaking its name. Secondly, I think Rose’s logic is flawed: if, as he argues, Satanism is all about indulgences and gratifications, why do we need a special holiday to allow that? Surely this is how we live our lives (assuming we want to live this way) all year long. We do not need license to “live deliciously”. And in the general Satanic reappropriation of the Saturnalia, we’re missing the most important element – the reversals of social norms. It is not a reversal if we’re just doing what we do all year round.

I disagree with Rose when he diminishes Satanic exploration of pagan (Celtic, Roman, Native) celebrations as simply equating paganism with Satanism. He is right insofar as these are two different things – paganism and Satanism. Any Christian or non-Christian celebration needs to be considered and discussed for its relevance to the kind of Satanism we wish to practice. “Does this speak to Satanists?” is what we need to ask ourselves and our Satanic congregations (however defined). Saturnalia: not so much as we don’t need cultural license to indulge and gratify ourselves. We “hail ourselves” all year long. But Sol Invictus recognizes the gifting of knowledge as a crucial part of Satanism. It could be argued that if I criticize Saturnalia for simply recognizing what we do all year, surely the learning aspects of our practice are also throughout the year. But just as the sun rededicates itself to our world after the Winter Solstice, personified/symbolized as Sol Invictus, our December 25th celebration is our rededication to the pursuit of knowledge. The 14th-century Persian poet, Hafiz, wrote:

Even after all this time

The sun never says to the earth

"You owe Me".

Look what happens with

A love like that.

It lights the Whole Sky

And I think this is the same ethos by which we should worship the sun at Sol Invictus.

Ave Satanis

Ave Lilith

Ave te Ipsum

(and Ave Sol Invictus)