Word: saturnalia
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Christians are old hands at this kind of syncretism; the Christmas celebration is an absorption of the Roman festival of the Saturnalia. D.T. Niles, 53, general secretary of the East Asia Christian Conference and top spokesman for the Asian churches, put it neatly: "The Christian Gospel is a seed. If you sow it, you get a plant. The plant will bear the mark of both the seed and the soil. The trouble with the missionaries was that they brought Christianity to us as a potted plant. Now we are breaking the pot and putting the plant in our own soil...
...Dolce Vita (in Italian). A vivid allegory of a modern Roman saturnalia...
...Dolce Vita (in Italian). A vivid allegory of a modern Roman saturnalia...
This macabre and sordid tone prepares for the final obscenity: Dawn breaks over the Saturnalia and the revellers run down through a forest to the seashore, where fishermen have just netted an enormous, fleshy sting ray. This could have been a powerful, almost mythic ending if Fellini had not ruined it with a phony conversation between Marcello and an innocent young girl...
...Dolce Vita (in Italian). Federico Fellini's vast (three hours) dramatization of the Apocalypse as a modern saturnalia wallows in boredom, but also develops episodes of transcendent moral horror...