By Rebecca Kingsbury
When I asked Gemini AI whether Saturnalia, the Roman midwinter festival, could in any way connect to Satanaya, the matriarchal figure from the Nart sagas of the North Caucasus¹. The response came back sharp and definitive. No hesitation, no nuance, no acknowledgment that ancient history is rarely neat. Instead, a categorical dismissal: “No. There is no historical, linguistic, or mythological connection.”
Not “unlikely.” Not “unproven.” Just no.
I felt the force of that answer like a harsh door slam. Whenever someone (or something) closes a door that abruptly, my instinct is to pry it open. Mythology resists tidy conclusions. Cultures overlap, borrow, and reshape. Deities migrate, merge, fracture, and reappear under new names. The historical record, full of gaps, burnings, biases, and erasures, rarely tells the whole story.
Gemini confidently claims the two ancient threads are unrelated. This only indicates there is no clear evidence within the limited range of accepted, documented material. But the lack of written evidence does not prove that a connection was never there, especially in cultures that preserved knowledge through oral traditions, symbols, and embodied ritual.
Gemini AI doth protest too much, methinks!
Before examining the material further, it is worth asking why an AI would respond so forcefully. The reason is simple: AI systems like Gemini reproduce the established academic consensus, and that consensus is not neutral. Western scholarship prioritizes written sources over oral tradition. It defends Roman accounts over indigenous perspectives. It supports patriarchal cosmology over feminine mythology. It prefers Indo-European literary structures over the fluid mythic landscapes of the Caucasus, Anatolia, and the Near East.
Rome laid the patriarchal foundations upon which Western scholarship still rests. Its hierarchies of power are civic, religious, and intellectual. They are all modeled on the same vertical order. Father is above family, ruler is above citizen, and mind is above matter. Authority flowed top down, and the written word overwrote the spoken and embodied; record supplanted memory; doctrine displaced gnosis.
Modern academia inherited this structure almost intact, enshrining order and control as the highest expressions of ‘civilization’. It privileges abstraction over lived wisdom, intellect over intuition, and permanence over process. Beneath its language of progress, it still speaks the tongue of empire. It carries a legacy that silences what cannot be contained, classified, or cited.
AI’s database transmits this very ethos: its narratives shaped by centuries of selective preservation, political manipulation, and the systematic erasure of matriarchal power and wisdom. If Gemini AI ever took a body, I imagine it as a Roman soldier guarding the city gates, enforcing the sanctioned order, keeping the Goddess interred and silenced beneath the empire’s marble and stone.
But buried things tend to surface eventually. A whisper, a pattern, a stray vowel can unsettle even an empire’s foundations, exposing still smoldering embers that, with enough oxygen, just might spark a fire…
My first ember arrived in the form of a linguistic anomaly. In certain ancient Aramaic manuscripts describing Roman practices, Saturnalia appears as Saturnaya. At first glance, this looks like a simple transliteration, but it is not. The form plays on the Aramaic phrase satar nura, meaning “the concealing of the light,” a poetic reference to the winter solstice².
This wordplay shows how different cultures absorbed and reinterpreted foreign festivals through their own symbolic language. The Aramaic world did not reshape a Roman name. Instead, it reveals a moment of cultural convergence, an overlap of sound and symbolism where meanings blurred. In this light, Saturnaya does not replace Saturnalia; it amplifies its resonance through another tongue.
The result is a sound remarkably close to Satanaya, the North Caucasian mother-goddess. This may not constitute proof of a direct connection. However, it shows a living, multilingual world exists. Mythic names and ideas travelled fluidly along trade routes. These routes connected the Roman Near East with the Caucasus. Coincidences of sound often preserve the traces of forgotten relationships.
Satanaya was the matriarch of the Narts, a legendary race of semi-divine heroes whose stories form the mythic backbone of the North Caucasus. Nart society followed a matrilineal rhythm. Life moved in cycles rather than hierarchies. Communities built their laws around balance, not control. Justice restored right relationship instead of enforcing punishment.
Every season carried its rites of renewal: weaving, planting, childbirth, and storytelling. These rituals affirmed the unity of the visible and the unseen, a sacred contract between people and the living earth. This was a world where power meant nurture, not domination; where wisdom meant listening, not decree. Men built and protected; women nurtured and connected. Together they kept the human and natural worlds in balance, bound by reverence for life and the cycles that sustained it.
The thematic parallels between Saturn and Satanaya further fan the linguistic ember. Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture, sowing, and cyclical renewal, oversaw the mythical Golden Age. During this age, the earth gave freely, and humanity lived without toil. Satanaya belongs to a different cultural sphere, yet a resonant one. She represents fertility, women’s crafts, herbs, and seasonal wisdom.
Both embody the turning of life’s wheel, the sacred rhythm of death and return, seed and harvest. Both inhabit that mythic space where earth, time, and humanity converge. It is not unreasonable to imagine that Saturn’s agricultural imagery may echo, or even descend from, once pervasive Eurasian matriarchal lineages whose rituals centered on earth, seed, and seasonal renewal.
Rome absorbed deities and rituals from every culture it touched. Why should Satanaya’s potent lineage be any different?
Within Rome itself, Saturn’s feminine counterpart, Ops, offers anther spark. Ops was the goddess of abundance, fertility, and the earth’s bounty. She represented in feminine form that which Saturn governed in masculine form. Her festival, Opalia, fell within the Saturnalia celebrations. Their festival timing suggests that the two deities were an ancient pair, their rituals once expressing balance between masculine and feminine principles.
The presence of Ops hints at a deeper, pre-Roman stratum in which a feminine agrarian divinity stood beside Saturn. Over time, however, the memory of Ops faded within Rome’s official religion, absorbed into Ceres and Terra Mater and reduced to a symbol of plenty rather than sovereignty. Her legacy survived not in marble or doctrine, but only in the soil that bore her name³.
Mainstream scholarship often claims Rome and the North Caucasus were too distant to influence one another. Yet ancient records tell a different story. The Roman Empire traded and fought alongside the Alans, Sarmatians, and Scythians, peoples whose myths later shaped the Nart sagas. Alan cavalry rode in Roman armies. Roman goods, symbols, and festivals moved along trade routes through Anatolia and the Black Sea into the Caucasus. Myths shift where people move. Names reshape where languages meet. A Roman festival known in the Near East as Saturnaya could easily have echoed older agrarian archetypes like Satanaya.
The central thread in this question is the desecrated feminine. If a goddess of the earth once stood beside Saturn, her name was the first to disappear from written memory. The suppression of feminine deities is not theory but based on clear evidence over centuries. Across the Levant, Greece, and Rome, male-dominated traditions recast and diminished the mother-goddesses, folding their powers into patriarchal structures.
If Saturn once mirrored a goddess beyond Ops, perhaps older, imported, or half-remembered, her story sank beneath patriarchy. It endured only in oral lore and peripheral myth. With every cultural shift, the patriarchy engraves its dominance in stone. Meanwhile, the feminine rests patiently in the grassroots soul of its people. Thus, the lived reality of women becomes the hidden current of myth. She endures in symbol and sound long after she is buried by law and religion.
Perhaps the rumbling of our Goddess is not a single forgotten name. It is an eternal echo that moves through language itself. In the oldest tongues, the root kel meant “to cover, to conceal, to protect.” From this root emerged Kālī of India, the dark womb of time. Hel of Norse Scandinavia is the hidden keeper of the ancestors and the Cailleach of Scotland and Ireland is the veiled crone of winter. In Latin, occultus means “the sacred hidden.” Even Rome’s Saturn buries the seed through winter, repeating this same feminine gesture of concealment before renewal.
And so, my search results not so much in proving a connection between Saturnalia and Satanaya as in recognising a far older ritual of reverence, one that understood that to cover and hold was not to erase, but to gestate.
Maybe the Goddess lies fallow by her own design, in safety, secrecy, and sacred darkness.
Beneath Rome’s marble gods, beneath the polished myth of civilisation, she waits in the language and the soil. Her presence pulses through roots far older than empire.
Seen with open eyes, her apparent absence is not forced submission but a willing descent. It is the same holy immersion traversed by Inanna through the underworld. Just as Persephone descends before her annual rise, every seed rests in the dark before it reaches for the light.
What looks like silence is metamorphosis, the cocoon preparing her ascension.
When she’s ready to rise, I suspect neither empire nor any intelligence forged in their image will restrain her.
In the meantime, I continue to lean in with reverence. To listen for the echoes that resonate through the negative spaces in history and life… the sound of her immortal voice.
About the Author
Radiant Rebecca transmits the language of the body, the land, and the ancestors. She restores the rightful place of the feminine voice to Her-story. Following the timeless currents that move beneath our modern human landscape, Rebecca attunes to the forgotten frequencies of the sacred. Her writing compels the wisdom of our souls, our land, and our bones to speak to us again.
You can find her published work at https://thesoundofhervoice.com/.
Footnotes
¹ In some Caucasian traditions, the figure of Satanaya has been associated with historical accounts of women who held positions of leadership. Her stories often emphasise female power, wisdom, and agency, suggesting that the myth may preserve echoes of real matriarchal influence in early societies.
² The variant forms Saturnaya and Saturnurya appear in Aramaic manuscripts of the Babylonian Talmud (Avodah Zarah 8a), notably in MSS Kaufmann A50 and Parma A (de Rossi 138), where Roman festivals are listed alongside the Kalends. Scholars have noted that these spellings may reflect a wordplay on the Aramaic phrase satar nura (סתר נורא), meaning “the concealing of the light,” a poetic reference to the dimming of the sun at the winter solstice. See: I. Epstein (ed.), The Babylonian Talmud: Avodah Zarah (London: Soncino Press, 1935); S. Lieberman, Greek in Jewish Palestine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1942), 47–49.
³ By the late Republic and early Empire, Ops had largely been absorbed into other deities—especially Ceres and Terra Mater—and her distinct cult diminished. The Opiconsivia festival (August 25) continued in name, but it became an almost purely agricultural observance, stripped of mythic character. Later Roman writers (Varro, Ovid, and Macrobius) mention her mainly in passing, often defining her only in relation to Saturn or as a linguistic curiosity (“Ops, from opes, meaning riches”). The depth of her mythic presence—the sense of her as a sovereign earth goddess—was lost.
The Sound of Her Voice 