December Days 2020 #17: j0, 54turn41!4!
Dec. 17th, 2020 11:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]
Because it is the prescribed day for the festival, I'm putting in the other ofazurelunatic's prompts for this month:
The comic itself follows an old woman well-established in her Jack Chick-type church as she thinks she can bring the newest neighbors over for worship services, only to find that they've decorated their house with pagan symbols, including a rooftop-sized Horned God with a very large phallus, which completely scandalizes the older woman as the neighbor explains to her about his constitutionally-protected expression and that since nobody's asked the giant Santa to come down, they clearly aren't going after all pagan symbols. The older woman goes to the pastor and they round up an entire group to sing carols at the new neighbors, which is apparently in the middle of their Saturnalia rites, which apparently involves outdoor sex and the children providing percussion for such a ritual. They have a fence that presumably would block anyone on the street from seeing anything, although it's not so tall that the heads of the carolers aren't visible above the top of it, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if what happens after this comic is that someone makes complaint to the child protective services about the endangerment of the children and that they are removed from the household because of prejudice against the pagans, but also because the parents weren't exactly exercising sound judgment by being skyclad in the neighborhood without a much taller fence.
Anyway, the actual point of the comic is that the old woman who has been the most fervent Christian is visited by an incarnation of the Horned God, including his large penis, and that the old woman has some of her age melt away as she has sex with the God, which opens her mind, presumably, to more pagan interpretations of the universe. And then she's much cheered about everything that happened that night. Since it's a parody of a Jack Chick tract, it runs on Chick Tract logic, and therefore, for the most part, it doesn't have to make sense, so long as it gets the message across and inspires the right feelings in the people who are reading it.
I think I was first introduced to this comic by J. Brad Hicks, or![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bradhicks sometime when I was on LJ around this time of the year, whichever year it was. I forget what he had to say about it, although I could probably find it in much the same manner of finding this comic. The point is more the association of the word and the comic itself than anyone else's commentary on it.
The actual thing itself seems to be one of the midwinter festivals, and might be an antecedent to various festivals where social order is overturned and things are reversed, where the strict social order is overthrown and license given to those to speak their minds and do those things that would otherwise be cause for censure of some sort. Social pressure-loosening, a public ritual, and other such things. At least, according to The Other Wiki, which makes the Saturnalia comic linked above possibly wrongly-titled, as the celebration underway by the pagans in the comic is not quite name-checked, but appears much more aligned with Sol Invictus rather than Saturnalia. That said, The Other Wiki also notes the proximity to the solstice and suggests that some practices of Saturnalia were related to the returning light of the sun after said solstice, so maybe it's named properly after all. As one might note, the surviving evidence for a lot of things from classical Greece and Rome is fragmentary at best (sometimes literally), and any reconstructionist will have to deal with their lack of primary sources at some point. This being the mid-90s, though, when the popular conception was having a neopaganism revival, having just exited the Satanic Panic, there was ample space for flourishing ideas, regardless of whether they were well-researched or worth anything, and the conceptions that non-pagans had about pagans were the sort of thing that gave Jack Chick a desire to write his works seriously (and for many other people to laugh at him for it, despite Jack Chick's views being taken very seriously at all levels of government).
One of the things that I included in my time capsule to my future self was a news article about a student who had recently succeeded in their challenge to wear their pentacle to school, as a protected religious symbol (or at least, on the idea that if the Christian students get to wear crucifixes, then the school has no grounds to discriminate against the Wiccan wearing her pentacle). That version of me, of course, had no idea that the religious debate would pivot sharply in the next year to going after Muslims, based on the actions of a few fanatics, and after that, would become entirely obsessed with the idea that queer people were indoctrinating their children into their queer ways by existing close enough to them. So paganism would fade out of the public eye, even though it wouldn't necessarily have any less people practicing. (There's something in my head that wants to compare choosing a practice of paganism like choosing the right open source software combination, in the sense that there are a whole lot to choose from, the learning curve is sometimes pretty steep, some people may need to try a few before finding the right one for them, once you have found the right one, you Know…and that there are plenty of people out there who are evangelizing their particular one as superior to all the rest, they can be pushy, argumentative, and insist that their way is the only right way, and if you don't like that, you can fork off, and that there's not a small amount of people in both circles who can be terrible, abusers, and firmly tied to ideologies like white supremacy and white nationalism as a part of their identity, or because they want to use that particular platform to promote their hateful identity.
That worked a lot better than I thought, for both good and ill.)
As I was saying, the idea of the reversal of the social order and similar concepts, like the jubilee, are really quite important in maintaining a society that's willing to play by the rules presented to them. It also tends to not have so many knives sharpening at the prospect of dethroning the aristocrats and the patricians and killing them all before redistributing their wealth. The United States, for as much as it declares itself a Christian nation, is remarkably resistant to the concept found in their writings (which, okay, every Christian is selective about which parts of their writings they're adhering to) of leaving the edges of one's fields for the poor, and of having the fields themselves lie fallow on a seventh year, with whatever grows there to be collected by the poor, and in that same year to free slaves, forgive debts, and otherwise rebalance the scales of wealth and power, or even to provide those who have been taken from with some excess of their own. (Given how much effort has been put to perverting the message of the Christian Foundational Writings to justify slavery, illiteracy, usury, hoarding of wealth, theocracy, and many more such sins, and that the United States is basically built on the premise of stealing the land, labor, and resources of "inferior" people to enrich "superior" people, it's not surprising they sweep the jubilee under the rug and behave like Levites and hypocrites when it comes to the lessons of the Good Samaritan and other spots in the Writings that do not discriminate when they lay things out like
It turns out that 2020 was one of those years where it was made abundantly clear that things are super-lopsided, have been for years / decades / centuries (depending on how wealthy you are and the color of your skin) and the usual mechanisms for trying to bring harmony back have been subverted, broken, or ignored. And the election of a centrist Democrat to the Presidency doesn't erase those problems from (continuing to) exist, not when there's enough of the intransigent other party that believes firmly that they are the chosen and should be the only people allowed to exercise the power of government, who cloak themselves in Christianity while violating all of its tenets repeatedly and obviously, and who have this year said more clearly than ever that they intend to remain in power by telling poor white people that everybody but the rich white people who are responsible for their poverty are the reason they're poor, because the "undeserving" are being pampered with their "hard-earned" money.
So, in the spirit of Saturnalia, a non-exhaustive list of things that are true but can only apparently be said when the social order has been uprooted, upheaved, and the people who are slaves and the downtrodden are able to speak freely (even if they don't have and never really had the attendant freedom to make their vision of the world a reality, because Saturnalia never lasts long enough.):
There are a lot more of those statements, of course, so many that even a supercomputer would have to take processing time to iterate over the array of them and display them for all to see and understand. And the biggest worry many of the people who are downtrodden and struggling in these times is that when this period of disruption ends, when the vaccines have gone through and the businesses have reopened and people are busily trying to re-create the life that happened before, that when this long Saturnalia ends, people will collectively pretend it didn't happen, that there isn't any reason to change or to take lessons learned from inside the disruption and continue to apply them when outside of the disruption. That, much like there is already pressure to forgive, forget, and put the murderous administration that will end on 21 January 2021 behind us as a fever dream of the last four years, that everything that's been done to make life work during the pandemic will disappear as "too expensive," "too difficult," or "no longer necessary," despite how effective it is and how many people who have otherwise been shut out were able to participate, sometimes for the first time in their lives.
So, perhaps, if there is one thing to take from this year, from the last several years, it's the rallying cry of the festival, "Io Saturnalia!", which can be both the invocation of a triumph and the punctuation of a joke. Choose wisely and well who to cheer…and who to mock, for there is and will be ample opportunity for both.
Because it is the prescribed day for the festival, I'm putting in the other of
azurelunatic's prompts for this month: Saturnalia!The first thing that comes to mind when hearing about this particular midwinter festival is a webcomic that would be lost to the world, were it not for the Internet Archive, fittingly named Saturnalia, which is NSFW for nudity, cartoon sex, Jack Chick type fundamentalists (as this is a parody of a Chick Tract), 1995 attitudes regarding paganism (from non-pagans and pagans alike), and also contains menstruation and the involvement of children in adult ritual practices, which I suspect is, again, meant to be a parody of the nativity play and the attitude of the fundamentalist Christians to get more converts by appealing to "family values" and wanting the children to come to church for various things, like a nativity play.
The comic itself follows an old woman well-established in her Jack Chick-type church as she thinks she can bring the newest neighbors over for worship services, only to find that they've decorated their house with pagan symbols, including a rooftop-sized Horned God with a very large phallus, which completely scandalizes the older woman as the neighbor explains to her about his constitutionally-protected expression and that since nobody's asked the giant Santa to come down, they clearly aren't going after all pagan symbols. The older woman goes to the pastor and they round up an entire group to sing carols at the new neighbors, which is apparently in the middle of their Saturnalia rites, which apparently involves outdoor sex and the children providing percussion for such a ritual. They have a fence that presumably would block anyone on the street from seeing anything, although it's not so tall that the heads of the carolers aren't visible above the top of it, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if what happens after this comic is that someone makes complaint to the child protective services about the endangerment of the children and that they are removed from the household because of prejudice against the pagans, but also because the parents weren't exactly exercising sound judgment by being skyclad in the neighborhood without a much taller fence.
Anyway, the actual point of the comic is that the old woman who has been the most fervent Christian is visited by an incarnation of the Horned God, including his large penis, and that the old woman has some of her age melt away as she has sex with the God, which opens her mind, presumably, to more pagan interpretations of the universe. And then she's much cheered about everything that happened that night. Since it's a parody of a Jack Chick tract, it runs on Chick Tract logic, and therefore, for the most part, it doesn't have to make sense, so long as it gets the message across and inspires the right feelings in the people who are reading it.
I think I was first introduced to this comic by J. Brad Hicks, or
bradhicks sometime when I was on LJ around this time of the year, whichever year it was. I forget what he had to say about it, although I could probably find it in much the same manner of finding this comic. The point is more the association of the word and the comic itself than anyone else's commentary on it.The actual thing itself seems to be one of the midwinter festivals, and might be an antecedent to various festivals where social order is overturned and things are reversed, where the strict social order is overthrown and license given to those to speak their minds and do those things that would otherwise be cause for censure of some sort. Social pressure-loosening, a public ritual, and other such things. At least, according to The Other Wiki, which makes the Saturnalia comic linked above possibly wrongly-titled, as the celebration underway by the pagans in the comic is not quite name-checked, but appears much more aligned with Sol Invictus rather than Saturnalia. That said, The Other Wiki also notes the proximity to the solstice and suggests that some practices of Saturnalia were related to the returning light of the sun after said solstice, so maybe it's named properly after all. As one might note, the surviving evidence for a lot of things from classical Greece and Rome is fragmentary at best (sometimes literally), and any reconstructionist will have to deal with their lack of primary sources at some point. This being the mid-90s, though, when the popular conception was having a neopaganism revival, having just exited the Satanic Panic, there was ample space for flourishing ideas, regardless of whether they were well-researched or worth anything, and the conceptions that non-pagans had about pagans were the sort of thing that gave Jack Chick a desire to write his works seriously (and for many other people to laugh at him for it, despite Jack Chick's views being taken very seriously at all levels of government).
One of the things that I included in my time capsule to my future self was a news article about a student who had recently succeeded in their challenge to wear their pentacle to school, as a protected religious symbol (or at least, on the idea that if the Christian students get to wear crucifixes, then the school has no grounds to discriminate against the Wiccan wearing her pentacle). That version of me, of course, had no idea that the religious debate would pivot sharply in the next year to going after Muslims, based on the actions of a few fanatics, and after that, would become entirely obsessed with the idea that queer people were indoctrinating their children into their queer ways by existing close enough to them. So paganism would fade out of the public eye, even though it wouldn't necessarily have any less people practicing. (There's something in my head that wants to compare choosing a practice of paganism like choosing the right open source software combination, in the sense that there are a whole lot to choose from, the learning curve is sometimes pretty steep, some people may need to try a few before finding the right one for them, once you have found the right one, you Know…and that there are plenty of people out there who are evangelizing their particular one as superior to all the rest, they can be pushy, argumentative, and insist that their way is the only right way, and if you don't like that, you can fork off, and that there's not a small amount of people in both circles who can be terrible, abusers, and firmly tied to ideologies like white supremacy and white nationalism as a part of their identity, or because they want to use that particular platform to promote their hateful identity.
That worked a lot better than I thought, for both good and ill.)
As I was saying, the idea of the reversal of the social order and similar concepts, like the jubilee, are really quite important in maintaining a society that's willing to play by the rules presented to them. It also tends to not have so many knives sharpening at the prospect of dethroning the aristocrats and the patricians and killing them all before redistributing their wealth. The United States, for as much as it declares itself a Christian nation, is remarkably resistant to the concept found in their writings (which, okay, every Christian is selective about which parts of their writings they're adhering to) of leaving the edges of one's fields for the poor, and of having the fields themselves lie fallow on a seventh year, with whatever grows there to be collected by the poor, and in that same year to free slaves, forgive debts, and otherwise rebalance the scales of wealth and power, or even to provide those who have been taken from with some excess of their own. (Given how much effort has been put to perverting the message of the Christian Foundational Writings to justify slavery, illiteracy, usury, hoarding of wealth, theocracy, and many more such sins, and that the United States is basically built on the premise of stealing the land, labor, and resources of "inferior" people to enrich "superior" people, it's not surprising they sweep the jubilee under the rug and behave like Levites and hypocrites when it comes to the lessons of the Good Samaritan and other spots in the Writings that do not discriminate when they lay things out like
Then the king will say to those at his right hand, "Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.'So.)
Then the righteous will answer him, "Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?'
And the king will answer them, "Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.'
Then he will say to those at his left hand, "You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.'
Then they also will answer, "Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?'
Then he will answer them, "Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.'
And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
It turns out that 2020 was one of those years where it was made abundantly clear that things are super-lopsided, have been for years / decades / centuries (depending on how wealthy you are and the color of your skin) and the usual mechanisms for trying to bring harmony back have been subverted, broken, or ignored. And the election of a centrist Democrat to the Presidency doesn't erase those problems from (continuing to) exist, not when there's enough of the intransigent other party that believes firmly that they are the chosen and should be the only people allowed to exercise the power of government, who cloak themselves in Christianity while violating all of its tenets repeatedly and obviously, and who have this year said more clearly than ever that they intend to remain in power by telling poor white people that everybody but the rich white people who are responsible for their poverty are the reason they're poor, because the "undeserving" are being pampered with their "hard-earned" money.
So, in the spirit of Saturnalia, a non-exhaustive list of things that are true but can only apparently be said when the social order has been uprooted, upheaved, and the people who are slaves and the downtrodden are able to speak freely (even if they don't have and never really had the attendant freedom to make their vision of the world a reality, because Saturnalia never lasts long enough.):
- Black Lives Matter.
- Defund The Police.
- Libraries Have Never Been Neutral.
- WEAR. A. GODSDAMNED. MASK.
- Eat The Rich. Barring that, Tax The Rich To Their Last Million (At Least).
- Correct Pronoun Usage Is Not Optional.
- Accessibility Benefits Those Who Need It And Those Who Find It Convenient.
- Charity Is Not A Substitute For A Social Safety Net.
There are a lot more of those statements, of course, so many that even a supercomputer would have to take processing time to iterate over the array of them and display them for all to see and understand. And the biggest worry many of the people who are downtrodden and struggling in these times is that when this period of disruption ends, when the vaccines have gone through and the businesses have reopened and people are busily trying to re-create the life that happened before, that when this long Saturnalia ends, people will collectively pretend it didn't happen, that there isn't any reason to change or to take lessons learned from inside the disruption and continue to apply them when outside of the disruption. That, much like there is already pressure to forgive, forget, and put the murderous administration that will end on 21 January 2021 behind us as a fever dream of the last four years, that everything that's been done to make life work during the pandemic will disappear as "too expensive," "too difficult," or "no longer necessary," despite how effective it is and how many people who have otherwise been shut out were able to participate, sometimes for the first time in their lives.
So, perhaps, if there is one thing to take from this year, from the last several years, it's the rallying cry of the festival, "Io Saturnalia!", which can be both the invocation of a triumph and the punctuation of a joke. Choose wisely and well who to cheer…and who to mock, for there is and will be ample opportunity for both.
