This book explores the potential ties between the Santa Claus feast and the Roman ritual festivity of Saturnalia as evoked by Claude Lévi-Strauss. It examines whether Jesus Christ’s sacrifice has something to do with a human sacrificial tradition of an ephemeral king in the Roman Saturnalia (Saturnales). Francesca Prescendi, a specialist in Greek and Roman religion, uses her background in the methodology of comparative religions to dig deep in firsthand data, such as epistolary exchanges between scholars, in order to shed light on this intricate cultural practice that engaged both nineteenth-century and contemporary researchers. Associated with ancient human sacrifice, namely the slaying of an ephemeral king at the end of year, such ideas led scholars such as James Frazer and Franz Cumont to claim that Santa Claus originated from old human sacrifice ritual based on the Acts of Saint Dasius Texts (Actes du saint Dasius).
Prescendi, whose writing has been triggered by casual reading of the Lévi-Strauss piece on the subject, sets out in this book to excavate the underlying historicity of the assumed linkages. For Prescendi, the parallels established between Santa Claus and the sacrifice of the ephemeral king in the Roman Saturnalia rituals are not grounded on evidenced historicity. However, based on the close reading of related texts about fertility rites and gladiators’ bloody practices to please divinities, and taking into account mismatched dates and contexts of ritual events, she suggests that there is a plausible connection between Santa Claus and those ancient human sacrificial rituals, albeit real connections remain unproven.
The other objective of the book is to render intelligible the emergence of a modern founding myth about human sacrifice. Prescendi walks her reader through the social and political context of early-twentieth researchers supporting and contesting the authenticity of linkages, in a context characterized by a tense pagan and Christian relationship. The author claims that the scholarly debates around the authenticity or inauthenticity of linkages between today’s Santa Claus and ancient sacrificial practices are informed by Jesus Christ’s sacrificial death. Both pagan and Christian elements were fused together to form those myths, because they share fundamental values of generosity inherent in the human sacrificial ritual for the collective stability of human society.
This book is divided into four chapters, with excerpts of original texts, letters between several scholars, and images. Chapter 1 seeks to answer the question as to whether Romans practiced human sacrifices of an inverted royal figure during Saturnalias. Chapter 2 examines the controversial debates surrounding the historicity of ancient human sacrifice and its relationship with Santa Claus, involving Frazer’s Golden Bough and the response it generated from such peers as Andrew Lang. Pursuing the exploration of these debates in chapter 3, Prescendi highlights the broader religious context surrounding these debates and the pressures exerted on scholars. Chapter 4, which is the longest and most substantial, is devoted to a closer analysis of the primary texts the scholars used to advance their claims regarding the authenticity of ritual linkages. The author delineates the nuances of intentionality with regard to sacrificed human subjects as a distinctive parameter of human sacrifice dedicated to a divinity as well as other non-ritual motives behind the slaying of human subjects whose death is regarded as pharmakos (atonement) for different ritualistic needs.
The reading of this book, as the author acknowledges at the outset, is not going to be a seamless flow. It is interrupted with the insertion of letters that the author shares with future investigators. Despite the fact that they can help in understanding the analysis, such documents may be skipped without altering the continuity of the argument of the book. By interrogating the epistolary exchanges between these prominent antiquarians and anthropologists of the twentieth century interested in the subject, Prescendi paves the way for an innovative research methodology, one not found in published and unpublished academic texts, to study ancient religions and their ramifications in our contemporary understanding as well as certain religious and syncretic practices. One of the merits of this work is to unveil the possible linkages of Santa Claus to other similar non-Christian human sacrificial practices dating back to ancient Roman civilization. Her findings are not definitive conclusions, but bring attention to the plausibility, not historicity, of the origin of the Santa Claus ritual in respect to the Saturnalia victim, the ephemeral king. Surely this book, though written in French, will interest literary and classical studies scholars, philologist-oriented folklorists, and antiquarians.
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[Review length: 735 words • Review posted on June 14, 2017]