ON January 1st we celebrate the brief but shining life of Lucius Aelius Caesar, Hadrian's "other favorite" and chosen heir who predeceased the Emperor by dying suddenly on 1st January 138 AD. Antonius Subia says:
Long Live Lucius Aelius Caesar
The Prince of Flowers!
Hadrian's First Love
Who raised Temples to Antinous
Lucius Capricornius, who reigned for one day
And for all eternity
Beauty and Spirit of the Latins
The shining one who gave his blood for laurels
~ ANTONIUS SUBIA
ON December 31st we commemorate the Apotheosis of Aelius Caesar.
Hadrian adopted Lucius Ceionius Commodus Verus, and called him Aelius Verus Caesar (portraits by Priest Uendi).
It was said that beauty was his only recommendation. His poor health soon overtook him and Hadrian is reported to have said, "We have leaned against a tottering wall and have wasted the four hundred million sentences which we gave to the populace and the soldiers on the adoption of Commodus."
He died on the Calends of January in the year 138 ... only a few months before Hadrian ... from an overdose of medicine given to help him make a speech to the Senate thanking Hadrian for the succession.
After Aelius Caesar's death, Hadrian adopted Antoninus Pius (September 19, 86 - March 7, 161) on the condition that Antoninus Pius adopt the younger Lucius Verus and Hadrian's great-nephew by marriage, Marcus Aurelius (April 26, 121 - March 17, 180).
Marcus later co-ruled with Lucius as Marcus Aurelius until Lucius' death in 169, at which time he was sole ruler until his own death in 180. Collectively, they are remembered as the Antonine Dynasty of emperors who ruled wisely over a period noted for its peace and prosperity.
In his classic text The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 18th Century historian Edward Gibbon considers the reign of the Antonines, as well as those of their predecessors Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian, the height of the Roman Empire, after which time the empire began its inexorable decline.
Aelius Caesar is a major character in Marguerite Yourcenar's epic historical novel Mémoires d'Hadrien (Memoirs of Hadrian).
Lucius, as we affectionately call him, is the recipient of much bittersweet love and adoration from followers of the Religion of Antinous.
For us he represents so many pretty young men whose bright futures are thwarted by tragic illness.
Aelius Caesar is often called the Western Favorite, because of the possibility that he rivaled Antinous for Hadrian's love.
We venerate Aelius Caesar as the fallen Prince of Flowers, the spiritual twin brother of Antinous whose death is the end of the Saturnalia.
TWO ancient Egyptian papyrus magic spells in use in or near Antinoopolis have been deciphered by Italian archaeologists, who say the curious documents had a "fill-in-the-blanks" format for targeting people to bless ... or to curse.
Antinoopolis was always a place of "magic, sorcery and strange religious fervor " according to Royston Lambert in his authoritative book about Antinous, BELOVED AND GOD.
We know that the priests of Antinous wrote a LOVE SPELL. Lambert notes that even to this day local villagers believe the place to be haunted.
Just last year, scholars in Australia translated a GRIMOIR disguised as a Coptic prayer book which magician-priests at Antinoopolis could have used to cast spells.
But the latest discovery of two spells goes much farther towards enlarging our knowledge of magical skills in the Antinoopolis area.
ON December 28th the Religion of Antinous celebrates the life of Saint Edward Perry "Ned" Warren, who died on this day in 1928.
Estranged and ostracized by "decent" socialites, Saint Ned Warren was a famed gay Bostonian art collector who virtually single-handedly built up the collections of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and Boston Museum of Fine Arts through his passion for Classical art.
As a sissified schoolboy who suffered the taunts of bullies, he wrote a poem comparing a classmate in whom he was infatuated to Antinous.
He and his lover John Marshall travelled around Europe seeking out and buying art treasures for great museums. They were referred to snidely as "the bachelors of art" among society circles in Britain and America.
But Warren was so fabulously rich, and museums depended on him so much, that nobody dared say anything to his face about his blatant homosexuality. His gifts to the Boston MFA made up 90 per cent of its Classical collection, one of the finest in the world.
Even so, he found puritanical Boston deeply disagreeable, and spent most of his life in England when he was not at his apartment in Rome.
The famous Warren Cup and Rodin's statue The Kiss are just two of the most well-known objects he rounded up -- both of which were rejected by museums in Britain and America as being too raunchy. Museum curators feared museum-goers could be lured into thinking unwholesome thoughts.
Warren in fact actually commissioned the The Kiss from Rodin, explicitly saying he wanted large genitals on the man. To this day, photographs of the famous statue tend to avoid a full-frontal male view for that very reason.
The Warren Cup is a solid silver goblet which dates back to the 1st Century CE/AD and was found near Jerusalem. It is believed that it was deposited along with other valuables (some gold coins, jewellery and other precious items) in a cache by the servants of a fleeing Roman nobleman during one of several Jewish uprisings. It is even possible that it was buried during the uprising that was crushed by Hadrian's legions.
The cup itself is considerably older, and may date to Republican times. And it is done in a retro-style which was a bit archaic even when it was new.
As the photos demonstrate, the Warren Cup shows two scenes (one on each side of the cup) of a man and a youth having sex on a couch. The silverwork is exquisitely done and the hair and draperies and facial expressions are beautifully rendered. It also reflects a bit of tongue-in-cheek wit by showing a servant boy peering curiously around a door frame at the lovers.
On one side a young man (barely more than a boy himself) is having his way with a young boy. On the other side, an older man with a beard is having anal sex with a younger man who is seated on top of him and holding onto what appears to be perhaps part of the drapes of a canopy bed. A servant looks on from the doorway off to the right side.
Saint Ned is believed to have purchased the Warren Cup from an antiquities dealer in Italy.
His efforts to sell it to museums in London and the U.S. were rebuffed.
The Warren Cup's unabashedly gay sex theme is impossible to ignore. The cup has been controversial in the art world ever since it first came to light in the 19th Century.
For many, many years, museums on both sides of the Atlantic refused to obtain it (despite its unquestionable value as a remarkably important historical piece of art) because of Victorian and Edwardian moral objections to its "immoral and beastly" theme.
At one time a curator for the British Museum was interested in acquiring the Warren Cub.
But other experts reminded him that one of the members of the board of directors of the British Museum was the Archbishop of Canterbury. The result was that museum officials were loathe to show his reverence even a photograph of the cup, let alone ask him to condone purchasing it for the collection.
So the cup languished in Warren's personal collection for many years and changed hands many times after his death, never ever being put on public display.
The British Museum finally purchased the Warren Cup for a large sum in 1999 -- and even then there was much titillation in the tabloid press.
Ned Warren wrote extensively about his views that homosexuality is a spiritual state of being, something divinely magical. Taunted as a schoolboy for being a bookworm and a sissy (he would get up at 5 a.m. to read Greek until breakfast), he nonetheless had many crushes on other schoolboys. He wrote about them all in his diary, and even wrote a poem about one especially beautiful boy whom he called a modern Antinous.
As an adult, he continued to proclaim his notion of idealized homosexual love, much to the distress of his family in Boston.
He even wrote a book entitled The Defence of Uranian Love about the same time that Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray was published.
He also used his wealth to sponsor the educations of numerous boys and young men who showed promise but had no money.
He was very generous and had a big heart. For example, he heard that the daughter of a vicar in his district in England had become pregnant out of wedlock and was going to be forced to give up the child.
Saying "this is as bad as Boston," he was so outraged that he legally adopted the little boy himself. He allowed mother and son to live upstairs in his home in England at his expense and loudly defied anyone to besmirch her honor or that of Travis, the little boy.
Ned Warren and his lover John Marshall had a stormy, on-again off-again relationship, but they were together at their flat in Rome in February of 1928. On the evening of the 15th, John went to bed early not feeling well. Ned tiptoed in later and kissed him good night and got in bed beside him. John was dead by morning.
Ned never recovered from that blow. He returned to England, where his health declined rapidly. Saying he couldn't face Christmas and New Year's without John, he died in a nursing home in England on December 28, 1928, at the age of 68.
He was cremated on January 1, 1929. But because he had always been blatant about his homosexuality, no members of his family attended the funeral and none of the museums that had benefitted so much from his largesse sent a representative to the memorial service.
His ashes were buried in the non-Catholic cemetery in Bagni di Lucca, Italy, a town known as a spa in Etruscan and Roman times.
We honor Edward Perry "Ned" Warren, 1860-1928, who wrote a poem likening a boy he loved to Antinous.
Followers of the cult of Mithras often associated these two dates with the god, and were even said to celebrate the New Year on December 25th, as it marked his birth.
IN celebration of the return of Antinous Invictus, for the five days between December 25th and the 1st of January, we commemorate the Golden Age of the reign of Saturn.
This is a time outside of time, and an occasion for joy and freedom from the world when Sol Invictus returns.
The divine twins are born, Osiris and Isis, Seth and Nephthys, Castor and Pollux, Freyr and Freya (for whom this time is also known as Yule).
(Image: Antinous as the Ghost of Christmas Present by S.L. GORE.)
We celebrate the Saturnalia with indulgence and as the festival of Liberty and total Freedom. There shall be no authority and no submission during this sacred period.
There is to be no war, and no form of violence committed, only peace and harmony and the many joys of ecstasy are allowed.
The rejoicing of the Saturnalia ends with the apotheosis of the Prince of Flowers, Aelius Caesar, on January 1st.
ON Tuesday at 16:00 Universal Time (8:00 a.m. at the Hollywood Temple of Antinous) the sun "stands still" ("Sol Stasis") — the 21/22 December Solstice for the year 2021. 
SECRET, males-only rituals from the ancient cult of Mithras have been recreated in an original Roman temple after it was reconstructed several metres below London’s street level.
Mystical chants, ghostly light effects and the sounds of bells, horns and other Roman instruments form part of a sensory reconstruction that will greet visitors at the London Mithraeum museum, which opened to the public recently.
Sophie Jackson, director at Museum of London Archaeology, which conducted a dig on the site, said the building was a rare trace of the city’s Roman past that people could experience first-hand.
“London Mithraeum is not only a truthful presentation of the archaeological remains of the temple of Mithras, it is a powerful evocation of this enigmatic temple,” she said at an event to mark the opening.
One of the most important Romano-British sites of the 20th Century, the 3rd-century Temple of Mithras was discovered in 1954, after wartime bombing devastated the buildings above it and its foundations were later spotted by archaeologists.
The discovery sparked huge public interest, attracting 30,000 people a day to queue up and view the site over a two-week period.
Taken to pieces to make way for an office building, it was rebuilt ... “roughly and somewhat inaccurately”, according to Mola archaeologists ... in the 1960s around 100m away.
The museum housing the temple has also put on display hundreds of objects found during an archaeological dig on the site five years ago.
FOR the first time, experts have found geological proof that the prehistoric builders of Stonehenge aligned it to the Solstice axis, and it has to do with an Ice Age "fluke" of terrain.
The discovery was made by accident during road work.
In what is described as a "missing piece in the jigsaw" in our understanding of one of the world's greatest prehistoric sites, excavations confirm the theory that its ancient processional route was built along an ice-age land form which was naturally on the solstice axis, according to Professor Mike Parker Pearson, a leading expert on Stonehenge.
The monument's original purpose still remains shrouded in mystery, but this is a dramatic clue, he said.
The route, known as the Avenue, extended 1.5 miles from the standing stones' north-eastern entrance to West Amesbury.
The discovery came only after the closure of a modern road which bisected the route, allowing archaeologists to excavate there for the first time.
Just below the modern road’s surface, they unearthed ditches dug by prehistoric builders.
Professor Parker Pearson identified naturally-occurring fissures that once lay between ridges which follow the route of the Avenue.
The ridges were created by Ice Age meltwater and naturally point directly at the mid-winter sunset in one direction and the mid-summer sunrise in the other.
Professor Parker Pearson is excited by the evidence, which he describes as "hugely significant".
"It tells us a lot about why Stonehenge was located where it is and why they were so interested in the solstices," he said.
"It's not to do with worshipping the sun, some kind of calendar or astronomical observatory.
"It's about how this place was special to prehistoric people. This natural land form happens to be on the solstice axis, which brings heaven and earth into one."
He explained that Stonehenge is "all about the solstices" and our ancestors could see this in the land.
ON December 17th the Religion of Antinous celebrates the life of the Sufi mystic Jalaluddin Rumi who dedicated his life to the illumination he received through the love of another man.
The mystic lover and poet Jalaluddin Rumi, better known simply as Rumi, was united with his beloved on this day.
Born in Afghanistan in 1207 CE, his family moved to Turkey while he was still young.
In the city of Konya, not far from the Bithynian birthplace of Antinous, Jalaluddin Rumi established himself as a traditional Islamic teacher.
But then one day he met Shams-e-Tabriz, a wandering Sufi mystic.
Shams set Jalaluddin free from worldly concern and revealed the inward love of god as expressed through music, poetry and the whirling dance that simultaneously confuses and centers the soul of one who spins.
When Shams mysteriously disappeared, Jalaluddin went in search of him, only to discover that Shams was within his own heart.
From that day forward, Jalaluddin Rumi became a profound teacher of mystic eloquence whose poetry refers to god as the Lover within.
The homoerotic character of Jalaluddin Rumi's spirituality, referring both to his love for Shams and his love for god, has ingratiated him to gay men because of the depth and sensitivity and sacred intimacy that his words exude.
Jalaluddin Rumi and his Mevlevi Order are the last remnants of the Bithynian-Phrygian ecstasy cults of Dionysus and Attis, and they are distantly connected to the Religion of Antinous, through the mystical charge of homoerotic spirituality.
Jalaluddin Rumi expressed total love, proclaiming that all religions were one. And on the day of his funeral, his bier was followed by a procession made up of representatives from five different faiths.
We sanctify Jalaluddin Rumi as a Saint in the Religion of Antinous. He died on December 17th, 1234.
ON this day in 1987, Marguerite Yourcenar died.
She wrote the landmark Mémoires d'Hadrien (Hadrian's Memoirs), which is considered by many to be the finest historical novel of the last century.
It is through her literary genius that millions of people around the world have been drawn to the modern-day Religion of Antinous.
She truly is a saint of Antinous.
A gay man's courage in the face of imminent death helped most hostages at his café in the heart of Sydney to escape ... though he paid for his bravery with his life.
Worshipers of Antinous in Australia and New Zealand have canonized Tori Johnson as a Saint of Antinous ... the first Saint of Antinous from Australia ... for wrestling a gunman to the ground ... giving a chance for others to flee to safety.
Tori, an openly gay man who had been with his partner Thomas Zinn for 14 years, was the manager of Lindt Chocolat Café in busy Martin Square in the heart of the financial district of Sydney on 16 December 2014.
He was on duty when an Islamic radical held the staff and customers as hostages for 11 hours ... before Tori rushed him in order to permit the other hostages to flee to safety ... resulting in Tori's death.
Tori, 34, who was one of two persons killed during the Sydney siege, soon became a national symbol of heroism. Candlelight vigils along with statues and memorials have commemorated his selfless heroism for trying to snatch the weapon from the gunman to allow the other hostages to escape.
When Tori heard of a 6-year-old boy (photo at left) who had never eaten a candy Easter egg because of a rare food-allergy disorder, Tori invited the boy and his family to the café. 
