Why Celebrate Ancient Holy-Days?

In the calendar, you can see that today is an occasion noted as Mundus Cerialis Patet.  There is a handy link on that date to the Wickerpede’s page on the Mundus Cerialis, which was a semi-circular pit in Ancient Rome that was opened on a few occasions during the year–August 24th, October 5th, and November 8th–and into which offerings were made.  As the pit and its covering was considered an entrance to the Underworld, as overseen by the Earth-Goddess Ceres, this was one of several days on which the collective dead of the Romans, the Di Manes, were honored and were essentially thought to be allowed free access to the mortal world.  In one sense, it was a “holiday” for the dead to visit this world.

I have some of my own peculiar and idiosyncratic interpretations of this date and its significance in terms of some of my own practices that are involved in various Mystery traditions, Eleusinian spirituality, and Antinoan matters, but those are not the focus of the present inquiry; I only note them here as a backdrop for the question “Why celebrate ancient holy-days” and the potential answer to that question for anyone who does so:  namely, “Because I want to.”  Here at P.S.V.L.’s Theological Questions, though, we try to go for answers and explanations that go slightly beyond the obvious, at least most of the time, so here we go in that endeavor for the present question!

One could well ask this question in relation to this matter in particular, because there is no longer a Mundus Cerialis, we don’t even know where it was in Rome, and I do not personally have any kind of approximation of one myself in my own Shrine or anywhere else near me or where I regularly do ritual.  As this is not something that is strictly tied to seasonal matters, there isn’t any local analogue I can reasonably use to adapt this festival into my immediate geographic and seasonal context.  While there are many modern polytheists who probably venerate Demeter and/or Ceres, there are very few who have a specifically Eleusinian-based practice, and probably fewer still who combine those things into Roman dates and contexts for an added significance.

But one reason I wanted to address this question today is because the last question was prompted by a holy day (actually, a series of them!) that is of more recent vintage, i.e. about 2003 or so.  When one innovates modern festivals, or attaches significance for modern practices to a historical date that is known from ancient sources but is celebrated in a different manner, one is engaging in an organic process of meaning-construction.  A need is perceived for something, and so ritual actions are chosen and dates are selected to have a particular meaning that is symbolically-charged and puts a person into a landscape and a timescape of belonging to a larger world order, cosmic harmony, and ideal relationship with one’s surroundings in a Deities-filled universe.  Sometimes, these spawn out of actual experiences that are taken as especially important when they uniquely occur in the lives of modern practitioners or communities of practitioners.  These and other processes are perfectly fine and are understandable quite easily by most people, just as anniversaries (of marriages, engagements, or even first dates or first meetings, foundations of schools, companies, towns, or countries, or of the release of books or films, etc.) also grow organically when some seemingly ordinary date takes on more significance for a person or group of people.

Likewise, seasonal markers are important, and are easily understandable by most (but note, not by all–on which more in a moment!) people.  When the beginning of Spring occurs, it is easy to understand why one might want to celebrate the returning fertility of the earthly landscape with rituals, symbols, and celebrations that highlight these things.  It would be foolish to celebrate the fertility of the earth in the dead of winter when there is a foot of snow on the ground, for example.  This is why adapting these festivals, especially when they are either ancient festivals, secular celebrations, or holidays in other religions (the way that certain aspects of secular and religious Easter often get incorporated into Vernal Equinox festivals by polytheists and pagans), to one’s local landscape and seasons becomes important, and if one is following traditions that have close seasonal ties from one geographic region but one lives in another (as for those European-tradition-following polytheists who live in Australia, for example), takes on an even greater importance in those circumstances.

But not everyone understands why this is, and I have an example of that from my own life.  I was at an interfaith event in Ireland back in about 2004, and I was on a panel along with a Muslim and a Catholic.  Sadly, while this event’s planned portion went quite well with each of our own statements and a brief period of discussion between the panelists (as we all knew each other and at that point respected each other), the question period which then took up most of the event’s remainder featured people from each of these religious groupings in the audience asking questions to people of the other religions on the panel that were intended to critique or “expose” the (perhaps “apparent” to the people asking the questions?) stupidity or irrelevance of that particular religion.  A pagan used the occasion to ask the two monotheists about their ostensible Deities’ megalomaniacal tendencies, and a Muslim did ask me about the nature of my Deities in order to point out that these were just clever djinn (with the implication that I’m therefore dim-witted!) that were succeeding in confusing me and deluding me away from the reality of Allah’s “true” godhead.  But, the very first question that was asked was asked by a blank-faced Christian woman, who wondered why it was necessary or important to have particular festivals at particular times of year celebrating, for example, fertility.  I explained that it wouldn’t be sensible to celebrate a fertility festival in the late Fall or dead of Winter, and she seemed entirely non-plussed by this.  Even though explaining to her (which I didn’t, and thought I probably should have later) that it would be non-sensical in her religious context to celebrate Jesus’ birth in August, or to have an Easter observance during November because the “birth of light in darkness” doesn’t make sense in the Summer and a festival of “resurrection of the Son/Sun” doesn’t make sense in a time of year when the days are getting shorter and the leaves are falling from the trees might not have helped her to understand the question better because these are “seasonally appropriate” symbolically to the European and western Asian climate and symbolism, I thought that should have been obvious.  One of the problems, particularly of the more Protestant traditions (and this woman was a Protestant) is that there has been a deliberate attempt to de-ritualize things as much as possible, which takes a lot of the symbolism and ceremony out of these larger holy days in Christian tradition, so that an Easter service and a Christmas service might not appear that much different in its accoutrements to any other Sunday.  This kind of “more transcendent” theological viewpoint that occurs when one de-ritualizes and de-immanentizes a religious practice makes it seem that one’s message is “more universal” and available at any time of the year, on the side of advantages, but then loses any and all grounding and physical reality as a result.  The appeal of and even need for such a grounding is something that is essentially outside of the perception of both necessity and utility for many who participate in these more transcendental, ostensibly universal, and generally monotheistic religions.

But as this post is not intended to be focused on pointing out the faults of these other theological systems, let us return to our main discussion!

I certainly highly value anything which carries on the traditions that were followed by our ancestral customs, even when I am not directly or genetically related to the ancient Romans (at least in any certain fashion, but who knows?).  The spiritual lineages to which I belong and to which I attempt to adhere put a value on these things, and part of my job as a person who practices with a reconstructionist methodology is to look at these things, get to know as much about them as possible, and find their significance in my own life, and even if it takes effort to “force” them to be significant for me, that effort in and of itself can be very valuable.

It can sometimes be difficult to do this, because religion is inextricable from culture, and culture is inextricable from landscape, and the importance of the latter is something I touched on above when it comes to seasonal festivals.  But what about a day like this day of the opening of the mound/world of Ceres, which happens several times a year that don’t seem to be particularly seasonally-linked, and which is also dependent on a very particular type of civic shrine which no longer exists?  There is no analogue, as I stated above, to the Mundus Cerialis where I live, and to imagine what such a thing might be (other than, perhaps, a semi-circular shrine to the veterans of a particular war, for example, of which there is one in the town about 25 miles from here that I used to live in, but which I have no ready access to any longer without forward planning!) without creating it myself is difficult, nonetheless things are possible for such a day.

As this would be one of the days where the Di Manes are given offerings, making this one of a variety of annual Ancestor-honoring festivals is certainly not a bad idea, and making the focus on the communal rather than just personal Ancestors might not be a bad idea, either.

But, with that additional detail of this being in essence a “vacation-day for the Dead,” these dates might have a potential further analogue in the Irish quarter-day of Samain in late October/early November.  It is said that the “veil between worlds is thin” during that holy tide, and that the Ancestors may visit and be more easily accessible on those days.  In older Irish practices, it seems that one of the things that was done to not only acknowledge this but to “give space” to these returning Ancestors was that people did not venture out after dark, lest something potentially dangerous, insanity-inducing, or even deadly befall them.  So, today, I decided very consciously not to venture out past dark, no matter for what seemingly important, pressing, or sensible reason.  I’m kind of glad I did, because there have been some odd winds blowing, quite literally, that have sounded to me like they are not just the “regular” sort of winds that blow from time to time everywhere.  Perhaps something larger is going on this night which I might not have appreciated if it had not been this particular night…who knows?

So, to put it briefly, I think celebrating festivals that have been given to us through our lineages from the ancient world is a useful and important thing, not just for its own sake or because it is what our Ancestors-of-lineage used to do (though those are both also perfectly good and fine things!), but because looking at these and taking them seriously in our own modern contexts and finding their potential continued significance for us is important, and an excellent way to exercise one’s devotional and ceremonial creativity and the ever-unfolding puzzle of finding the significance of oneself and one’s own life circumstances in the ever-developing process of the cosmos and our endless dance of devotion with our Deities.