"Very few suspect that the holidays [i.e., Catholic holy days] of today, in the century of skyscrapers, radio, great movements of the masses, are celebrated and continue . . . a remote tradition, bringing us back to the times when, almost at the dawn of humanity, the rising motion of the first Aryan civilization began; a tradition, in which, moreover, the great voice of those men is expressed rather than a particular belief.
A fact unknown to most must be first of all remembered, viz., that in its origins the date of Christmas and that of the beginning of the new year coincided, this date not being arbitrary, but connected to a precise cosmic event, namely, the Winter Solstice. The Winter Solstice falls in fact on December 25(in Julius Caesar`s calendar reform in 46 bc the winter solstice date was set on the 25th of December), which is the date of Christmas, subsequently known, but which in its origins had an essentially solar significance. That appears also in ancient Rome: the date of Christmas in ancient Rome was that of the rising of the Sun, the unconquered God, Natalis solis invicti. With that, as the day of the new sun — dies solis novi — in the imperial epoch brought the beginning of the new year, the new cycle. But this “solar birth” of Rome in the imperial period, in its turn, referred to a somewhat more remote tradition of Nordic-Aryan origin. Of the reset, Sol, the solar divinity, appeared already among the dii indigetes, that is, among the divinities of Roman origin, passed on from even more distant cycles of civilization. In reality, the solar religion of the imperial period, in a large measure had the meaning of a recovery and almost of a rebirth, unfortunately altered by various factors of decomposition, of a very old Aryan heritage."
JULIUS EVOLA - La Difesa Della Razza (1940)
