saturnalia

name

1. (historical)An Ancient Roman holiday honoring the deity Saturn.

   “Saturn was an ancient Italian deity. It was attempted to identify him with the Grecian god Cronos, and fabled that after his dethronement by Jupiter he fled to Italy, where he reigned during what was called the Golden Age. In memory of his beneficent dominion, the feast of Saturnalia was held every year in the winter season.”

   “CATULLUS described the Saturnalia as “the merriest festival of the year,” and Seneca [the Younger] reported that “all Rome seemed to go mad on this holiday.” The Saturnalia, named for Saturnus, an ancient agricultural deity, began on Dec. 17.”

   “The Church co-opted these and other pagan festivals and concepts: the Roman Lupercalia and the feast of the purification of Isis became the Feast of the Nativity; the Saturnalia were replaced by Christmas celebrations; Mithra (the Persian sun god) was born in a cave, of a virgin, on Dec. 25.”

   “Inspired by the Roman Saturnalias, the Philadelphia Mummers New Year’s Day Parade, below, will teem with 15,000 mummers – elaborately costumed members of local New Year’s clubs – competing in four divisions.”

   “The sculpture sits about 20 feet from a traditional Nativity scene of Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus, and is backed by a banner from an atheist group reading “Keep Saturn in Saturnalias,” a reference to the belief that the early Christian church substituted Christmas for a Roman pagan holiday.”

noun

1. (alt-of)Alternative letter-case form of saturnalia.

   “It was odd that the literary festival should be turned into a Donnybrook fair, but so it was when I was a boy, and the tents and the shows and the crowds on the Common were to the promiscuous many the essential parts of the great occasion. They had been so for generations, and it was only gradually that the Cambridge Saturnalia were replaced by the decencies and solemnities of the present sober anniversary.”

   “For New York Times photographers, it has been a night to leave their families in order to document the Saturnalia of Times Square.”

   “G N’ R, as they are colloquially known, were an affront to the ears and nostrils of civilised society, a Saturnalia in the flesh and in the speakers.”

2. A period or occasion of general license, in which the passions or vices have riotous indulgence; a period of unrestrained revelry.

   “a man who mounts the Hustings, must not allow himself to be sore-boned, or he invites his opponents to 'touch him on the raw,' not in the exercise of their malice, but their power; an election is a saturnalia."”

   “They lodged men and women on the same floor; and with the night there began a saturnalia of debauchery—scenes such as never before had been witnessed in America.”

   “If at the birth of the Latin kings their fathers were really unknown, the fact points either to a general looseness of life in the royal family or to a special relaxation of moral rules on certain occasions, when men and women reverted for a season to the licence of an earlier age. Such Saturnalias are not uncommon at some stages of social evolution.”

   “Yet if he remained, it would simply mean that his own and Hagthorpe's crews would join in the saturnalia and increase the hideousness of events now inevitable.”

   “It was a raw, violent, guzzling saturnalia that spilled obstreperously through the woods to the officers' club and spread up into the hills toward the hospital and the antiaircraft-gun emplacements.”