X-Nico

5 unusual facts about Lord of Misrule


Asterius of Amasea

One of them, Oration 4: Adversus Kalendarum Festum attacks the pagan customs and abuses of the New Years feast, denying everything that Libanius had said supporting it - see Lord of Misrule for extensive quotations.

King of Fools

Lord of Misrule, a European court figure appointed to preside over the Feast of Fools

Lord of Misrule

The Lord of Misrule was generally a peasant or sub-deacon appointed to be in charge of Christmas revelries, which often included drunkenness and wild partying, in the pagan tradition of Saturnalia.

Significantly, for Asterius the Christian feast was explicitly an entry from darkness into light, and although no conscious solar nature could have been expressed, it is certainly the renewed light at midwinter, which was celebrated among Roman pagans, officially from the time of Aurelian, as the "festival of the birth of the Unconquered Sun".

In ancient Rome, from the 17th to the 23rd of December, a Lord of Misrule was appointed for the feast of Saturnalia, in the guise of the good god Saturn.



see also