An interesting point in history, both of which tie into yesterdays contrafactual about the Emperor Julian and the cult of Sol Invictus. On this date in IXXIV AUC the Emperor Antoninus Pius died and was succeeded by his adoptive son Marcus Aurelius. Gibbon begins the Decline and Fall on this date, so, Happy is the country that has no history! and cites the barely documented reign of Pius as a demonstration. The lack of documentation, he said, was due to it being the happiest, and dellest reign in Wesrern history (Kudos to you Pius!) As the curse goes, may you live in interesting times! When I first read Gibbon, I had already read Foundation, so I made a side story, wherein Arius Seldonus persuaded Pius to found At the opposite ends of the Earth, two Museums which would which would duplicate the knowledge of the Museum in Alexandria, and assure it was available in Latin, as well as starting new research according to the principles of his work of encyclopedic natural philosophy, inspired by Pliny, the Novum Organum (after the Organum of Aristotle). The First Foundation, in the city of Terminopolis in north Britain, had learned to make clear glass, then lenses, then telescopes, and with telescopes, and the invention of the magnetic compass, charted both shores of the Atlantic by MXXVIII AUC. In that year, 274 the Roman emperor Aurelian made Sol Invictus (Unconquered Sun) the official sun god of the later Roman Empire and a patron of soldiers, an official cult alongside the traditional Roman cults. For the Roman festival of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, or Birthday of the Unconquered Sun, 25 December was selected. That is fact in this world. The god seems to have been a typically Roman syncretistic combination of Mithras-Apollo with the ancient Latin numin Sol (roughly correspondent to Helios) This I incorporated into my side story. It marked the adoption of an overarching Cosmology which would contain all the cults of the Empire, as hunduism contained the cults of India. In my contrafactual cult of Sol Invictus, there was the Unknown High creator, then there is Sol Invictus, an obedient demiurge in the Zoastrian mode, which in turn has as its manifestation the sun, and as its avatars, the sun gods from Apollo to Quetzalcoatl and beyond. In the ordering of the spheres of Sol, Sol is aided by the powers of Language, Love, Lunacy, Life, War, Law, and Time (and possibly more) personified in the seven planets of Sol. It was specifically noted that we did not know certain things, and new gods might be discovered. An interesting case is the issue of Love, which Neopolitanus theory of Amatory Attraction of Matter claimed was the heart of the Verse and co-equal with Light and Mind in demiurgic function. More divisive were the disputes about the nature and number of the signs of the Zodiac, until it was decided at Nicea that there was an invisible thirteenth House! The other gods had their cults, and many other pagan systems ware assimilated in the future As evidence of the plausibility of this scenario, on this day in 1074 AUC (Can never keep my Ds and Ls straight, but it was 321, fifteen years after he was a acclaimed as emperor of the West by the army, three years before the battle of Malvian Bridge.) the Emperor Constantine I decreed that the dies Solis Invicti (sun-day) was the day of rest in the Empire, a recognition of the fact that more people were following the seven day week then the Roman pattern which gave everyone their eighth day after staring work as the day of rest. youtube/watch?v=CpVQaa33PhA
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 03:34:12 +0000
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