The gate of the year

Fresco of the XIII century, from the Oratory of Saint Sylvester, in the Basilica dei Santi Quattro Coronati (Church of the Four Crowned Saints), on the Caelian Hill, Rome. Pope Saint Sylvester is represented here in front of the Emperor Constantine, thus assuming on himself the role of the pontiff who actuated the passage from the pagan Rome to the Christian Rome. Such historic function of transition was assigned on him also as regards the calendar, because his feast was fixed on December 31, the last day of the year.
The connections are however more complex. It has emerged, in fact, that in the Imperial Rome, of the twenty-one public sanctuaries dedicated to the god Silvanus, at least five became, during the Middle Ages, churches or monasteries dedicated to Saint Sylvester (Palmer 1978, p. 228). Thus it seems that there was a slow transformation of the Roman god of the woods in the image of the Saint, who maintained in his name the reference to the plant world. A legend, furthermore, associated the Saint with Mount Soratte, where archaic rituals involving the transformation into wolves were practiced. This mountain would have given refuge to Saint Sylvester, and here was founded a cult place devoted to the Saint, in which therapeutic rituals took place, intended to preserve from leprosy (Palmer 1978, p. 231).
Also in France, it seems that the cult of the Saints Sylvester and Silvanus should be a superposition, in many places, of the Christian cult upon the popular worship of a god of the woods, the Silvanus silvestris of the Gallo-Roman syncretism. This cult was, in its turn, inspired to the worship of an older Wild Man, of which Gargantua constituted the form which reached literary reputation due to the works of Rabelais (Gaignebet-Lajoux 1985, p. 107).

[Image: http://library.artstor.org]




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Fresco of the XIII century, from the Oratory of Saint Sylvester, in the Basilica dei Santi Quattro Coronati (Church of the Four Crowned Saints), on the Caelian Hill, Rome. Pope Saint Sylvester is represented here in front of the Emperor Constantine, thus assuming on himself the role of the pontiff who actuated the passage from the pagan Rome to the Christian Rome. Such historic function of transition was assigned on him also as regards the calendar, because his feast was fixed on December 31, the last day of the year. The connections are however more complex. It has emerged, in fact, that in the Imperial Rome, of the twenty-one public sanctuaries dedicated to the god Silvanus, at least five became, during the Middle Ages, churches or monasteries dedicated to Saint Sylvester (Palmer 1978, p. 228). Thus it seems that there was a slow transformation of the Roman god of the woods in the image of the Saint, who maintained in his name the reference to the plant world. A legend, furthermore, associated the Saint with Mount Soratte, where archaic rituals involving the transformation into wolves were practiced. This mountain would have given refuge to Saint Sylvester, and here was founded a cult place devoted to the Saint, in which therapeutic rituals took place, intended to preserve from leprosy (Palmer 1978, p. 231). Also in France, it seems that the cult of the Saints Sylvester and Silvanus should be a superposition, in many places, of the Christian cult upon the popular worship of a god of the woods, the Silvanus silvestris of the Gallo-Roman syncretism. This cult was, in its turn, inspired to the worship of an older Wild Man, of which Gargantua constituted the form which reached literary reputation due to the works of Rabelais (Gaignebet-Lajoux 1985, p. 107). [Image: http://library.artstor.org]