The Severan dynasty held Rome
in the early third Common Era,
and produced one of the strangest emperors
that ever held imperial ear.
Elagabalus, age fourteen,
became emperor in two-eighteen,
and brought with him from Emesa
a cult that shocked the Roman scene.
He was hereditary priest of
Elagabal, the sun god of his city,
a black stone worshipped at a temple,
a Semitic deity, un-pretty
to Roman eyes that wanted Jupiter,
Mars, the ancestral Capitoline three.
He brought the black stone to Rome itself,
installed it above all others visibly.
He tried to marry it to Athena.
When that failed, he tried Astarte.
He held processions with the stone
in a chariot, barefoot, sweaty, hardly.
He is alleged — with what truth we
do not fully know — to have done many things:
married a Vestal Virgin, violating
the sacred celibacy that the office brings;
married several times to women,
married a charioteer in woman's dress,
preferred to be called "lady" by servants,
sought surgeons to perform a change of sex.
Whether these accounts are accurate,
or hostile propaganda spun
by enemies after his fall,
the modern scholars debate as one.
Some see in Elagabalus
an early transgender figure,
the first recorded ruler who
sought physical transformation with rigor.
Others see only slander, the
standard tropes of Roman invective
used to destroy reputations
of rulers who proved ineffective.
The deflationary polytheist
notes: whatever the truth, the attempt
to raise a Semitic sun god to
Roman supremacy was not exempt
from consequences. The Roman elites
were deeply offended. The Praetorian Guard
assassinated him at eighteen, dragged
his body through streets, threw it hard
into the Tiber, and his mother's body
with him, the sewer their tomb.
The black stone was sent back to Emesa.
The old gods reclaimed their room.
But the seed had been planted.
A sun-centered monotheistic faith,
imported from Syria, had briefly
occupied the imperial wraith.
This was the first attempt to make
solar monotheism Rome's state cult.
It failed under Elagabalus.
It would succeed under Aurelian's result.
Aurelian fifty years later,
after the Crisis of the Third Century,
would make Sol Invictus the state god,
the "Unconquered Sun" of imperial sanctuary.
That syncretic sun-cult would merge
with mystery religions and with others,
would become the cultural matrix
into which Christianity hovers.
December twenty-fifth was Sol Invictus'
birthday, the winter solstice celebration,
the "dies natalis Solis Invicti,"
the unconquered sun's inauguration.
Christians would later fix their Christmas
on this same date, adopting the feast,
merging the birth of the Son of Man
with the rebirth of the Sun in the East.
This is not accidental. The Sol Invictus
cult and the Christ cult were cousins,
sharing iconography, festivals, theology,
the rayed halo, the midwinter reasons.
Elagabalus failed. But the cultural current
he represented — eastern solar monotheism
colonizing the Roman imperial cult —
would continue its strong historical prism.
Three strands had been converging now
toward what would become monotheistic Rome:
Jewish exilic covenant-monotheism,
Persian dualistic cosmic home,
Egyptian Akhenaten's old Aten
(a lost current but not forgotten),
Syrian solar-theologies rising,
Platonic philosophy unforgotten.
All were feeding into the stream
that would break through under Constantine
and become the official faith of Rome
and then of Europe, clean and clean.
But we are not there yet. The third century
still held the old gods in their frame.
Elagabalus was the weird episode
that Rome tried hard to forget by name.
His memory was damned, "damnatio memoriae,"
his name scratched out, his image defaced.
But history remembered him as
the strangest emperor Rome had faced.
Stand.