If you don’t know what that is, I don’t blame you. It has been conveniently left out of the history books because it is super heavy metal.

TL;DR it’s sort of a loose set of traditions that were constructed to humble the elites. It was a celebration of the working class, women, and anyone who is generally not glorified very much or very often in the society.

My understanding is that there were three basic pillars to this throughout the ages.

1. Sacred Marriage (that’s the literal translation of Hieros Gamos from greek) between a Temple Priestess and the King. The Priestess would channel the Maiden Goddess (Inanna, Astarte, Athena, Venus, etc) and the King had to please her in front of the whole village/town/city. If he was impotent in any way and failed to please the Goddess, he would be punished severely, flogged, humiliated, or even murdered by the Priestess herself.

Let me repeat that—if the King couldn’t get it up in front of everyone he has ever met and give the Priestess an orgasm, she had the right to kill him.

\m/ xD \m/

Widespread Sacred Marriage Rites reminded the people of the power of the Divine Feminine. Even if the King/Emperor was the usual face of power—the women, gender nonconformists, and scholars of all genders were the ones calling the shots. He was just a pretty, intimidating mouthpiece.

I suspect that Athens, named for Athena, started off a lot like this and then some dramatic scene took place where the Sacred Marriage was outlawed— maybe some early patriarch was deemed to be too flaccid for the Goddess, but he wouldn’t accept the verdict and somehow overcame the status quo, giving rise to the Patriarchy we have inherited. (But let me not give away the whole plot of my historical fiction novel)

And by the way, this would guarantee that you don’t end up with elderly, decaying leaders. She has to play a goddess, and he has to perform well. There’s no way Trump can get it up like that and make anyone O. (Not that getting it up is the only mark of a good lover, but this is a heterosexual display that was also supposed to b symbolic of making the crops grow and a bunch of other stuff, so P in V was very much the main event)

Moving on.

2. King for a Day is what i would call the next widespread winter tradition. It is much more tame. Every culture did this differently, but the meat and potatoes of it is that the slaves, for one evening, were entitled to something the Elites had.

In many settings throughout the ancient world it was the dining quarters of the Elites. The working class would eat all the expensive, imported food and drink their finest wines out of their most intricately carved horns and chalices.

I imagine them breaking many of these expensive things in drunk humor. (I would)

The rich would have to do their best to cobble together a celebration of their own in the slave’s quarters, experiencing their poverty firsthand.

This is the sort of exercise that led to the gift giving traditions we still practice today—so keep in mind, gift giving, at its roots, is about a redistribution of wealth. so don’t feel guilty when someone gets you something expensive and you only got them something small or made them something. The point is to give what you have that the other person has not. If you are a poor artist like me, give a small artworks, and accept cash money with grace.

Gift giving is okay, but wouldn’t you love to take over Mar-a-lago for 24 hrs with your friends, family, and coworkers?

King for a Day was an exercise in sympathy and charity for the rich, and it was just the best night of the year for the poor. 10/10 Bring it back. There should be no arguments against it.

3. Tears of the Strong Man, in the same vein, was all about giving back to the elite class the abuse they themselves had been dealing out to the slaves and the workers all year long, but this time, it was very physical.

There were many iterations of this, but the Sumerians had the coolest one so I’ll share that.

Basically, the King would kneel and each citizen would come up to him and slap him in the face as hard as they could until he cried.

Crying was very important to the ritual behavior of people in ancient Mesopotamia. It was seen as a liminal gesture, allowing communication with the Gods, or passage between Earth and Heaven. Basically, if you weren’t at your emotional limits, the Gods did not care to listen.

The point of this was obviously to humble the King and remind him that his lifestyle is only so lavish because every worker in the system is propping that up for him.

They wanted their king to have riches and be opulent in his dress and all that, so their enemies would envy them, but they believed if they didn’t remind the King of his mortality and his humanity, he might start to think of himself as a God. And that is exactly what happened wherever these practices were stopped.

In conclusion, these traditions all reflect a sort of Socialist Monarchy, which may sound oxymoronic, but it was literally a monarchy tempered by redistribution of wealth and regular role reversal practices. The ancients understood the danger of letting one big strong man have all the power. They knew they had to control him, as he controlled all of them.

They realized that the Big Strong Man had a role in society, and that it was at the top, as a sort of spokesperson for the tribe, and a scary adversary to their opponents. But they also knew that the same man could not be expected to make military decisions, manage finances, and every other responsibility we expect of our world leaders today. There were wise folks of all genders, mostly women, who made the real decisions behind the curtain.

Honestly, if I knew that I was going to get to party at the King’s house at the end of the year and watch him, and the Priestess get it on in front of everyone, AND I might get a turn to smack him right in the face, I would be okay laboring all year for that.