Festivals of Ancient Calendars

The Panathenaea honoured Athena with a procession that carried a newly woven robe to her cult statue, the scene shown on the Parthenon frieze. Every fourth year a Great Panathenaea added to the athletic, musical and rhapsodic competitions, making it one of the largest public festivals of the Greek world.

The City Dionysia was an Athenian spring festival for Dionysus that Peisistratus expanded into a state occasion with competitive tragedy and comedy. Nearly all surviving classical Athenian tragedy, including Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, was written for first performance here.

Lupercalia fell on 15 February at the Lupercal cave, where the Luperci struck onlookers with strips of goatskin to promote fertility. It outlasted the Roman state religion into the late fifth century, and the campaign of Pope Gelasius I against it is a well documented case of a festival suppressed under Christianity.

The Birthday of the Unconquered Sun was observed on 25 December and gained prominence under Aurelian in 274. Scholars debate whether the date was already an old solar feast and how it relates to the Christian choice of the same day for the Nativity, so this stop shows a contested question rather than a settled one.

Vetrnaetr, the Winter Nights, opened the Old Norse winter in mid-autumn with sacrifice to the elves, honour for the disir and ancestral spirits, and seasonal slaughtering and feasting. Ynglinga saga names it among the three great seasonal blot observances.

The Disablot honoured the disir, female guardian and ancestral spirits. The Ynglinga saga and Heimskringla record a great assembly at the Temple of Uppsala, and saga literature also attests a smaller household rite of the same name kept by women of the family.

Modranicht is the one pagan Anglo-Saxon observance Bede names directly, placing the start of the pagan English year on the night now called Christmas Eve. Bede does not describe the rite, so any link to offerings for female spirits like the continental Matronae is reconstruction, not direct testimony.

Maidyozarem is the mid-spring feast of the six Zoroastrian gahambars, each tied to one of the seven bounteous creations and kept over five days with communal prayer and shared feasting. Parsi and Irani communities still keep the cycle today, separate from the New Year festival Nowruz.

Toxcatl was one of the eighteen twenty-day veintena festivals of the Aztec solar calendar, dedicated to Tezcatlipoca. A young man chosen a year earlier to impersonate the god was sacrificed at its culmination, and Sahagun's informants recorded the rite in detail; the festival is also remembered as the setting of Cortes's 1520 attack in Tenochtitlan.

Nemontemi were the five days that closed the 365-day Aztec solar year after its eighteen twenty-day months. Sources describe them as empty or unlucky days of fasting, quiet and caution, and the atlas notes their close Maya counterpart, the Wayeb of the Haab calendar.

Qhapaq Raymi, the Royal Festival, was held around the December solstice and centred on the huarachikuy, the coming-of-age trials of young Inca noblemen who received the noble earspools. Garcilaso de la Vega counts it among the four principal festivals of the Inca solar year, and its date was set by the sky rather than by a written calendar.