Margaret Killjoy and Garrison Davis dissect Christmas as a syncretic blend of pagan Saturnalia and Yule, noting December 25th aligns with Sol Invictus. They detail role reversals, mistletoe fertility symbolism, and Santa's evolution from Saint Nicholas to the Finnish Julapuki. The discussion links the Wild Hunt to alien abduction folklore and biblical ascensions, concluding that modern holiday traditions are deeply rooted in pre-Christian chaos rather than purely religious origins. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Wheel of Death Collapses00:03:27
This is an iHeart podcast.
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Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. video on Demand this guy's 2 a.m. 2 a.m. whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like wild bats.
It was like a first like closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, listen to Las Culturistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Hello, gorgeous.
It's Lala Kent, host of Untraditional Ila.
My days of filling up Cups at Sir may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley.
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Hello, and welcome to Wheel of Death.
Every week on Wheel of Death, we no, Sophie's.
I liked it.
I mean, we can do it.
Go for it.
Okay, Wheel of Death.
I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy, and each week I tell you about cool people in history.
Oh, I have to like continue the Wheel of Death thing.
I can't just cut back to the this week on Wheel of Death.
We talked to you about a cool thing that is a wheel that leads to death, which is also cool.
We're all strapped to it's the cycle of time.
We didn't really do it, but we somehow did it.
Yay!
Okay, I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy, on Cool People Did Cool Stuff.
And every week, I tell you about cool people in history, like rebels and queers and rebel queers, and you know, people who dress up like animals and throw bricks at rich people's houses sometime vaguely in the name of God.
With me today is my guest, Garrison Davis.
Garrison, how are you?
Hi, I was excited.
I was really on the edge of my seat with the whole wheel of death bit.
I was like, oh, wow, there's so many places that this could go.
Yeah, it didn't.
It wasn't considered well ahead of time.
No, that's all right.
There's like a metaphor in there.
The real wheel of death is just living in a collapsing capitalist dystopia.
That's right.
And Garrison, who are you besides someone who lives in a collapsing wheel of death?
I write podcasts a lot of the time for a show called It Could Happen Here.
I also occasionally do investigative journalism and spend a lot of my time looking at upsetting things.
And most importantly, have really, really cute cats.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I do.
I do.
Yeah.
Christian Origins and Metaphor00:15:41
Okay.
Well, the other voice that you've heard is Sophie, our producer.
Hi, Sophie.
Are you excited for the break?
Yeah, this is the last week of episodes for the year.
Cool people do cool stuff and cool Zominia are taking time off for a little bit to I was gonna say take a break, but I really feel like none of us are careful catch up on work every year every year Robert and I are like we're gonna take time off And then it's like, no.
No, absolutely not.
Yeah.
But I get to pet some cool dogs and some cool cats and some cool goats.
And it's going to be a good time.
Yay.
Our audio engineer is Ian.
Our music was made by the incomparable musician Unwoman.
Thank you, Ian, for editing our stuff all year.
You're the greatest.
We are very appreciative, Ian.
Hi, Ian.
So, Garrison, this week we're going to talk about something dear to my heart, near to my heart, whatever.
It's both.
We're going to talk about...
Have you ever heard of this holiday?
Christmas?
Kind of.
So I grew up very putting Christ in Christmas pilled.
Yeah.
I'm a perfect guest for this shit.
I never really got to experience any like secular Christmas.
Like I never once believed in Santa at all because that was because if you rearrange Santa, it's Satan.
Like it's, it's never, yeah, it's, I, it was very like, you know, we have to read all these chapters of the Bible and we'll exchange gifts and stuff.
But it was, it was, you know, we'll, we'll go to like the Christmas themed like Nativity show.
And, you know, it's all that kind of thing.
Did they ever, in this, in this upbringing that you had around Christmas, did they, did they refer to it as like a traditional way of handling Christmas ever?
I'm just curious.
I mean, they, we, traditional in the sense of like they would, they would complain about how Christmas has been like commercialized by like secular corporations and been turned into this thing about, that's just about buying things.
Now, not that they're actually against buying things because they're still all like capitalist Christians, but they'd be like, oh, they're trying to, trying to just all of the malls and all of the, all the big businesses are trying to distract from the true meaning of Christmas in the traditional sense of being, you know, Jesus in the manger.
Well, today we're going to talk about traditional Christmas, which is not at all what your family celebrated.
It's not completely ahistorical.
We are going to talk about the war on Christmas and not the way that we usually hear about it.
We're going to talk about the 1700-year-long war on Christmas waged by people who hate fun, who have tried to sanitize and strip away all the beauty and glory and gayness and rebellion out of one of the most riotous and wonderful times of the year, the fucking winter solstice.
We're going to talk about feasting and wasailing and Saturnalia, Yule, Christmas, actual bona fide Christmas.
And we're going to talk some shit on Puritans.
You ready for Saturn back in Saturnalia?
Yeah.
I guess.
I don't really know enough about Saturn as.
Yeah.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yep.
Okay.
I'm going to start by covering a bunch of different fucking holidays because there are so many holidays that share this time period.
And I'm not even talking about other things or like, yeah.
So I'm not talking about that stuff.
I'm talking about stuff within the sort of Christian origin.
So like Yuletide greetings.
And we're like kind of in that.
All right.
All right.
Yeah.
And I want to start with the like weirdly most earnest one that I'm excited about.
And St. Lucy's Day.
You ever heard of St. Lucy's Day?
I just heard about St. Lucy's Day earlier this year, but I did not look into it.
I just saw it.
It was a thing.
I was like, oh, that's not St. Nicholas.
I wonder who that is.
And then I continued on in my day.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fair enough.
That is, I am new to St. Lucy's Day.
See, okay, you know how any given group of people can be oppressors or oppressed, pretty much just based on their relationship to power.
Yeah, that is, yeah, I mean, uh-huh.
So the Christians were oppressed for a while, like a long time ago, for about 2,000 years ago until the early 300s, you know, when they became whatever the opposite of oppressed is.
I'm not going to say that.
Are you saying they're still not the most persecuted religion on the planet?
Because that's, because that's what I was taught as well.
Oh, interesting.
No.
I genuinely do not believe.
So while they were actually being oppressed, they did all the stuff they should have done while being oppressed, which is fight against that oppression.
And the early Catholics were like pretty notorious for mapping all their stuff, all their stuff on the pagan holidays, right?
The story that usually gets told is that the crafty church was like, how do we steal stuff from the pagans?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that part's sort of true.
But the other thing that was happening is Catholicism in particular is famous for its syncreticism.
Yeah.
Or syncretism, or you think I would have looked up how to pronounce the most important word in what I'm talking about today.
The Catholic Church shows up somewhere and is like, you're all Catholic now.
And people are like, all right, what does that mean?
And the church is like, we'll tell you in Latin.
And people are like, I don't speak Latin.
And the church says, non mihi curi est, which is my Latin joke.
It means that's not my problem.
Very funny.
Yeah, thank you.
I don't speak Latin either.
Yeah.
Me neither.
Yep.
So, you know, it's the fucking forever ago times.
People don't have radio yet.
So the Pope and the church and even the Roman Empire have a little bit of a problem of power projection in that they can conquer places, but communication is so slow that places continue to have a decent bit of autonomy.
This is an oversimplification, but you get syncreticism based based on this.
Shit that's halfway Catholic and halfway, whatever else people already had going on.
So people kept celebrating their holidays, and the church was left with little choice but to accept those holidays and kind of do the best it could to rebrand them.
But in many ways, and that's the sort of central argument I'm going to make today, is that people just kept doing the things that they were doing for thousands of years and just being like, oh, okay, it's Christian now.
Yeah.
Now they got told that there's like some Jesus-y rapping over top of something that precedes all of that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And as long as they can still cross-dress and like bring trees inside and demand shit from rich people, what do they care?
And, you know, the most famous, like the examples of this we can see is like Easter is really obviously fertility spring, like spring thing that has nothing to do with Jesus.
It's about eggs for fuck's sake and like bunnies.
So Christmas happening around solstice is not a coincidence.
But there's another not a coincidence Catholic winter solstice celebration.
And this one was like in some places and specifically in Scandinavia, it's even more explicitly not a coincidence that it's a solstice thing because it's a celebration of light.
And the reason Catholics ended up with more than one solstice holiday is because of the calendar fuck up.
So like one of them's December 13th and one of them's December 25th.
And it's because of weird Julian Gregorian shit that's totally over my head.
Got it.
The feast of St. Lucia, St. Lucy's Day, especially popular in Scandinavia for some obvious reason.
Like it's dark there.
It happens on December 13th and it's a celebration of light and it's the story of a martyr Lucia, but it's also the story of mutual aid done at a terrible risk, which is why I like it.
And also not wanting to marry some asshole you don't like.
I'm going to quote a zine by my friend Renna Rai, who's been on this podcast before.
St. Lucy's official hagiography or Catholic saint biography is violent and sort of boring.
In brief, she was a Christian living in the late 200s CE when Rome had a policy of rounding up and executing members of this, at that time, fringe religious movement.
When she was forced to marry this high-up Roman government dude, Lucy tore out her own eyes to prevent the wedding.
In the midst of all of this, Lucy's Christianity was discovered and she was executed in this horrible way I won't go into and became a martyr.
But I find Lucy's death to be way less interesting than her life.
As a well-off Greek Sicilian, Greeks ruled the island before Romans did, she had resources and used them to support fellow Christians in hiding in the catacombs beneath her hometown of Syracusa.
Sneaking out of her house at night, she brought them food, and to keep her hands free to carry provisions, she lit the path through the catacombs by wearing a crown of candles on her head, which is just an image I like because it's really fucking metal.
Yeah.
And to quote a little bit more from that zine, the zine is called On Saint Lucy, the Solstice in Mutual Aid.
The story doesn't begin with a martyr plucking out her own eyes or a saint sending a ship full of grain to a starving city, which is a later part of the whole thing that I'm not going to go into.
It starts with a simpler miracle.
A young girl walking through catacombs beneath an occupied city, her arms full of emmer loaves, cheap wine, garum, and oranges, the limestone path lit by candles bound to her head.
She moves slowly, careful not to drop her load or cry out when hot wax drips on her shoulders.
Roman sentries guard Syracusa and are always listening.
At the end of maze of tunnels is an alcove where heretics, worshipers of a tripart god, a sort of Orpheus, have made a home.
They reach for her bundles, stuff bits of bread into their mouths, take swigs of wine, say, bless you, bless you, daughter.
And a lot of the rest of her story, basically all of her story, it's buried under so much fucking I am a Catholic saint thing that it's impossible to tell what actually happened, right?
There's like versions where she lost her eyes that got added a thousand years later.
The earlier ones don't talk about her losing her eyes.
Wren makes the argument that maybe the whole thing about a suitor and all that stuff is beside the point and it was actually just the mutual aid shit that matters.
So that's the setting the scene.
That's going to be the one of the solstice days.
I mean, I have so much more sympathy for this era of Christianity, especially the people who are kind of more on the Gnostic side of it at this point.
Yeah.
Before the Catholics like teamed up with the state.
Yep.
Because like all of this type of stuff that you're talking about sounds way more cool and metal.
It's like it's been it's people trying to like it's it's it's doing way more interesting like mysticism that's divorced from a lot of the like dogmatic practices that were that were common at the time.
It's people trying to sort through trying to trying to build stories about like spiritual development in a world that is currently under threat of empire and that that's why they're trying to find new ways to build other forms of spirituality.
And it's so much cooler.
And then as is often the case, the people then, once they gained power, became the oppressors themselves.
Yep.
Yep.
No, this is the fact that you come from a conservative Christian background and then also are really into Gnosticism and shit was like why I really wanted you to be on this.
Sweet.
So there's another holiday that the Christians celebrate around the same time of year.
It's that one that, again, you've heard of, many people are familiar with.
It's called Christmas.
And the canonical story of Christmas goes something like this.
There was this couple, Mary and Joseph.
They weren't fucking for whatever reason.
Maybe Joseph was gay and was keeping Mary around to be his beard.
I think supposedly God was like, hey, don't fuck your wife until she has a son.
I don't think too hard about this.
Anyway, one night, an angel shows up, visits Mary.
He's probably a series of spinning concentric rings or something.
Like, one can hope.
Yeah.
And he's like, this is totally chill.
Don't, don't freak out.
Let's do it.
And Mary is like, yeah, let's do it.
And then she's-I mean, I would.
If a series of concentric eyeball rings showed up in my bedroom at 3 a.m., I know what I would do immediately.
Yeah, I mean, like, there has to be at least 17 eyes, or I'm not interested.
Yeah.
I mean, and thankfully, there is eyes, eyes within eyes.
So I think the bases are going to be covered.
Yeah, I think much like Mary, we were good.
That's enough, right?
And she gets pregnant.
Joseph is like, sweet, this is totally cool with me.
And then at the end of December, in the manger, they give birth to a kid who is pretty much guaranteed to be a trans man since his name is Jesus Christ, but he has no dad.
So therefore, he has no Y chromosome.
So he's XX.
To say nothing, of course, about Eve, who was cloned from Adam and is therefore XY.
So true.
Yeah.
This is what's really important.
You know, there's also, so like, there is this version of the story that is often taught in church, but some people in church would also teach a slightly different version of the story.
Okay.
In which we don't actually know when Jesus was born.
Oh, yeah.
But the date of December 25th comes from the magicians coming to visit Jesus.
And they mapped out where he would be based on star charts.
And that led them to figure out where he would be on December 25th.
So years later, when the magicians came with gifts, they came on December 25th, which is then why we give gifts on Christmas.
That is the other story that was told, which is weird because it's not only including like astrology, it's also including actual magicians, which most of modern Christianity doesn't really like to talk about.
Yeah, the fact that three sorcerers are like an important part of the Jesus story is really interesting.
It's so weird.
And in the like more medieval Christmas that we're going to be talking about, the Magi show up 12 days later as the 12 days of Christmas and it's called Epiphany.
It's January 6th.
And then there's like, I read like five different versions of how they came up with December 25th.
I didn't hear that one.
That one's really interesting.
It doesn't say anywhere in the Bible when Jesus says that.
No, this is this is pure speculation.
Yeah.
Okay.
So our guy Jesus, he grows up to be really important.
He gets murdered by the state, like actually a lot of our heroes.
I'm not really trying to paint him as a cool people.
Whatever.
He's fucking complicated.
I'm not opening that.
I've opened a lot of cans of worms right now, but I'm not opening that one.
People celebrate his birthday by buying PlayStations or whatever, and then getting really mad about living in a multicultural society where not everyone believes in Santa Claus, who is totally not a were goat from Finland, but we'll talk about that later.
Based.
So that's the story of Christmas.
It's boring.
Let's tell a better one.
Sol Invictus and Saturnalia00:05:52
Christianity's whole claim to fame is that it's not paganism.
Like they pretty much define paganism as like not us, right?
That is like what it means to be pagan in a lot of ways.
But Christianity, especially Catholicism, is so fucking pagan.
It's extremely pagan.
And that's kind of the main thing it has going for it, from my point of view, as a, you know, folk Catholic or lapsed Catholic, whatever the fuck I am.
There's tons of gods with shrines that you can go around and pray to, like you're in Skyrim visiting Daidre.
There's like transmutation.
Yeah.
It's weird stuff.
Yeah, you can walk around with a crown of thorns.
You can walk around with a crown of candles.
You can weave branches into wreaths.
You can decorate trees.
You can cross-dress.
You can carry a horse skull around.
You can demand rich people give you shit.
You can get drunk and accost the aforementioned rich people.
Lots of stuff you can do.
Christmas.
Nowhere in the Bible does it mention Jesus' birthday.
In the fourth century, the church was like, let's say it's winter solstice nine months after spring equinox, which was when he was conceived.
Because the angel and Mary got dirty during the fertility rites.
Yeah.
Which is like, again, if you're looking at this from like a from like an anthropological standpoint or like a standpoint of like pagan folk rituals, you're like, yeah, that obviously makes sense.
There's a reason why the story is told in this way.
Yeah.
No, totally.
And let's have our God be born on the exact day that the sun begins to return to the world because we're truly not pagans.
And this isn't also the holy day of Sol Invictus, which was declared 25 years earlier or 26 years earlier or something.
Jesus totally isn't just another sun god.
Nope.
Sun God, son of God.
Anyway, yeah.
Yeah.
So December 25th had pre, or rather, this, I think it was specifically December 25th.
I should have put this in my notes.
I spent so long reading a million different fucking holidays and got all confused.
The holy day of Sol Invictus, which is the unconquered sun, which is the official religion of Rome before Christianity took over, but not by a long time.
So Sol Invictus is fucking weird.
And most of the people I know who are like, most of the people I read about who are into Sol Invictus are not like, if you meet someone who's like, man, you know what rules?
Like Imperial Rome, you're not meeting a good person.
Red flag.
Yeah.
So it would be too easy to say Christmas is just the continued celebration of Sol Invictus.
It wouldn't really be true.
There's a lot of arguments happening about how the worship of soul in Rome, which was sort of predates Sol Invictus or doesn't.
There's like lots of fucking arguments you can get into.
But specifically, Christmas revelers took more from other traditions.
Specifically, medieval Christmas, which is my favorite Christmas, took a lot from Saturnalia.
Yes.
So let's talk about Saturnalia.
Saturn was a god of time and abundance and agriculture and liberation and a bunch of other shit.
Roman gods had very expansive portfolios, which is very impressive.
They do seem to collect a lot of like, I don't know, like magic cards.
Like they have a really strong hand, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rome was around for a long time.
Rome is still around, but like ancient Rome as a sort of imperial force, around for a long time.
And before there was the Feast of Sol Invictus, there was Saturnalia.
It was a week-long festival centered on winter solstice.
And there's not like a specific pamphlet historians have found that's like in Latin and it's like how to celebrate Saturnalia.
Instead, people have had to cobble together the best that people can understand.
And so it's probably like conflating a lot of different times because this was celebrated for a very long time.
But Saturnalia absolutely happened and we know some stuff about it.
And it's fucking interesting.
For a week, masters served their slaves and every which is this role reversal thing that was going to come up again and again.
Everyone wore bright, tacky clothes against the style at the time.
Everyone got free speech for a hot minute.
So everyone basically like told their bosses and their masters and shit what was up.
People gambled, which wasn't normally allowed.
They used coins and nuts for their gambling.
And they gave everyone presents.
The festivities were presided over by the Lord of Saturnalia, which was decided by drawing lots.
Everyone got together and drew a lot.
If you won or lost, depending on how you looked at it and depending on how anthropologists are interpreting this particular thing, you become king for the week.
You are the king of Saturnalia.
You're not actually really in charge, although everyone has to do what you say.
But you're in charge of sowing chaos.
You give commands, everyone has to follow.
And yeah, it'd be like, I don't know, everyone stand on their head and run around and do whatever weird shit I come up with.
Be a lot of pressure, actually, to be the Lord of Saturnalia.
You'd be like, Yeah.
I have to be the most hedonistic that anyone has ever been.
I have to plan to be the most chaotic thing, which is, it's challenging.
It can be challenging to plan to plan out chaos because chaos is often spontaneous.
Yeah.
Do you know what else is chaotic and disruptive of our narrative?
Oh, is it capitalism trying to convince you to buy things?
It is in this very well-fitting here.
Learn about some shit you can buy while I complain about what happened to traditional Christmas, which is supposed to be about chaos, not Christ and not.
Well, presence, yes.
Actually, maybe it is a return to traditional Christmas.
Capitalism and Christmas Chaos00:02:20
Who's to know?
Return with the V. Yeah, here's some ads.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I said, Hi, Dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Yeah, mom.
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If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today, now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
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Human Sacrifice and Fights00:07:00
What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the like the president?
You think everyone's the president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Leslois proves that.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It's a good one.
I like that saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we are back.
And I don't get the reference.
Return with a V. I'm just doing a small fascism joke.
Yeah, I was like, you're doing some light fascism right there.
Just a sprinkle.
Like the Roman, like when you carve it into stone and like you use a V instead of a U. I'm aware of contemporary politics and how they refer to ancient things.
That's literally my job.
Contemporary politics is ancient things.
That's true, too.
So there's also human sacrifice, which is fairly chaotic.
I will say, because chaos is not inherently good or bad, right?
No, chaos is beyond good and evil.
What a fantastic lead in.
So yeah, thanks.
Thanks.
So the exact type of human sacrifice is subject to debate.
Dead gladiators were definitely offered up to the god Saturn.
And I feel like that's like halfway cheating in terms of human sacrifice because the guy's dead already, right?
But also at the same time, he died because you had gladiator games.
Being a gladiator.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Which the whole gladiator thing, whatever, I'm not going to do a total tangent on it.
It's way different and more interesting, you think.
It's not just two people go into a death pit and one person leaves.
It's not beyond Thunderdome.
Gladiators actually like often survived and lived fairly long lives and people didn't die every time because it was this fucking sporting event that happened for hundreds of years.
Yeah, it's more like how people play football and get horrible concussions to and shorten their lifespan.
Yeah, it's like halfway between MMA fights slash professional football and what we conceive of as gladiator fights, I feel like is the actual gladiator fights.
Got it.
But people did die and probably more during Saturnalia for some, because they needed some dead people to get offered up to the god.
Later, the Romans were like, what if we use candles as representatives of human life and we sacrifice these candles by lighting tapers?
So it's possible that the tapers part of Christmas where everyone has taper candles, it's possible that that traces back to fascinating humans really makes you look at those candles differently, huh?
Yeah.
It's also possible that the Lord of Saturnalia, after being king for a week, was sacrificed to Saturn, which is like way more metal and folk are of a story.
Yeah.
What a weird few weeks that would be.
Wow.
I know.
I know.
You're like, you just like go out with a bang, you know?
I guess so.
You just, you, you don't care what happens because it doesn't matter for you.
Yeah.
That would increase the chaos.
Yeah.
And I, this is not my favorite part because I don't think you should slit fake kings' throats.
That's what real kings are for.
Yeah.
Shortly after Saturnalia was the first day of the new year, Calenz.
And Calenz is actually the first day of any month in this whole thing.
You get a holiday first day of every month.
But Calenz, the first day of January, New Year's Day, was like a real big one.
And Calenz, there were gifts.
In the northern regions of the empire, there was cross-dressing, just like a fuck ton of cross-dressing.
It gets called ritual transvestism.
Unfathomably based.
Yeah.
Wow.
And this continues for thousands of years, I will just say.
Some would say people are still doing it now.
I know.
If you want to celebrate traditional Christmas, go to a drag show.
That is more traditional for Christmas.
That is what my plans are.
All right.
Great.
And also dressing up like animals.
Just part of it all.
Part of Calenz.
This goes in great because I'm going to a drag show dressed up as Catwoman because I'm going to a Batman Returns themed drag show, which is, as we know, the best Christmas movie.
So I will be both cross-dressing and wearing an animal costume.
True Colleen spirit right there.
Michelle Pfeiffer is really a Cleanse icon.
Absolutely.
Do you know who that is?
And this, do you know who that is, Margaret?
Yes, as an actress who is in movies that were around when I was younger.
So true.
You did it.
I'm so proud of you.
Yeah.
I couldn't pick her out of a lineup or tell you what movie she's in, besides apparently she's Catwoman.
Hilarious.
And in my defense, I am both name-blind and faceblind.
Oh, I know.
I pretty much keep track of everyone based on their haircut.
And if they change their haircut, they're different people.
Yeah.
So sometimes when I write my scripts, I forget to put in names because I'm like, no one will remember a name.
It's meaningless.
It's a meaningless signifier.
Why would you names?
It's just random mouth flaps.
It doesn't matter.
Yeah.
This is the closest I can find to a true origin of Christmas is Saturnalia.
There's other stuff, and we're going to get to it.
We're going to get to Yule in a second.
But celebrating the darkest time of the year with chaos, revelry, and role reversal.
So let's talk about more of that.
Let's talk about Yule.
So Christmas borrows a lot from Saturnalia, but Christmas gets called Yule sometimes, right?
And that's the stuff of Germanic paganism.
We don't know a ton about Yule as it was actually celebrated because a lot of Germanic pagan information was filtered through Christian observers, which is really interesting for this is my main, one of my main arguments they use against like the Nazi Germanic pagan types is that I'm like, oh, you like specifically think all of these specific things that are very similar to Christianity.
That's totally not because a Christian monk told you that a single man was the most important fucking anyway, whatever.
Ads, Money, and Marketing00:03:22
What is important is that we go into ads again.
Again, just it's really important that we get two ad breaks in this episode.
That's what's important in life.
So here's some of them.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
Hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen.
She says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Come on.
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The Wild Hunt and Yule00:14:59
Yule was a 12-day celebration.
The name Yule literally means Odin.
Oh, I did not put that together.
Yeah, one of Odin's many names is J-O-L with some marks over it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's pronounced basically Yule from Old Norse.
And Yule is a big old feast.
There's ale, there's sacrifice, including probably human sacrifice at various points.
There's a lot of stories about prisoners of war from Rome being human sacrificed.
People can get a fun arguments about this stuff.
I'm like more worried about offending the Norwegus than the Christians in terms of like people who are going to get up in my mentions about this shit.
But and when they would do these sacrifices, it's called blot, I think was the Germanic pagan style of sacrifice.
You intentionally cut the throat so that arterial blood goes all over everyone in the audience.
And so then they would sit down and feast.
And this, I know more about them sacrificing animals, but then they like sacrifice the animal and then they eat the animal, which doesn't seem like a sacrifice.
Yeah, that's like preparing it for slaughter to like eat.
Yeah.
And be like, I don't know.
Like, yeah, I don't know.
It doesn't seem like you're giving up much if I'm like, I'm prepared to sacrifice a lot by continuing to have what I have.
Yes.
I'll have it in your name, dear all-father.
But you know, whatever.
Who am I to tell them that they're doing their sacrifice wrong?
They sit down and eat feasts covered in blood.
And if I had anything to say to them, they would murder me.
And they would feast.
The burning of the Yule log comes from this tradition.
And the Yule tree, the Christmas tree, you'll be shocked to know comes from Yule.
Really?
It's not a representative of the tree of life, like what I learned.
Oh, yeah, no, it is not.
I mean, it could be many things.
Sure.
But yeah, no.
Yeah, no, it's about like basically like if you're cold, they're cold.
Bring them in about like tree spirits.
That's that's great.
That's actually, that's actually pretty rad.
Yeah, because I actually assumed that the bringing the tree inside was like a when it became a Christmas tree, because it seems like a very modern, destructive, consumerist thing to like cut down a living tree and put it in your house and watch it slowly rot.
But they bringing the tree inside to decorate was often part of it.
And they would also like decorate their houses like branches and wreaths and shit.
And they would decorate trees with images and icons of everything that they wanted to bring in with the new year.
So it wasn't even just specifically like, oh, we want the tree to look pretty, but like, like it, in my house, we, you know, decorate the tree with all of these different Christmas ornaments that are very like specific and particular and they all have memories associated with them.
That is very fucking traditional Yule Christmas.
And also decorating the tree with nuts is probably a fertility thing.
Everything was a fertility thing that obsessed with sex.
What's wrong with these people?
One problem with researching anything pagan is that there's a ton of fake history around and or not even like fake history, but like incorrect information or like best guesses that get presented as fact.
And I mean, I'm literally doing my best guesses to present both as fact, but I'm trying to be aware of that.
There's this persistent rumor, and I'm wondering if you've heard this rumor that the decorating of trees in pagan times was like entrails of sacrifice.
No, I've not heard that, but I mean, I could see how you'd be like Christmas garland.
It's like hanging intestines around the tree.
Yeah.
I can't find any information besides like lots of people talking about that rumor.
No one's like, this is a true thing.
Well, there are some things, but there aren't like really, they're like on websites that might as well be geo cities with like animated gifts of candles or whatever, you know.
It's completely possible.
I don't fucking know.
But candles and nuts and fruits and icons and shit on the tree.
Absolutely.
And like Calens in Rome, Yule came with men dressing like women, women dressing like men, and everyone dressing up like animals.
Because as soon as you have a moment where you like drop social norms, everyone's like, fuck yeah, time to cross-dress.
And that rules.
The dressing like animals was like probably a little bit less like modern furry culture and a little bit more like I'm a spooky ghost.
Here's a skull of an animal or whatever.
Yeah, it's kind of more in line with some of our current Halloween stuff.
Yeah, absolutely.
There's actually a lot of weird overlap.
We're going to get to wasaine later.
There's a lot of overlap between Halloween and Christmas and all of these like chaos traditions.
They basically kind of split out the chaos parts of Christmas and gave it to Halloween.
Also, both Collens and Yule had leaving food out for the deities.
I mean, Santa Claus, whatever.
The Angles, like of the Anglo-Saxons, called the main night of Yule mother's night.
Only they called it in Anglish instead of English.
And the food was left out for the hungry mother spirits because they just wanted to be metal as fuck, right?
And I'm really into this, especially since I'm pretty sure it was my mom who left, ate the cookies we left out for Santa.
The hungry mother.
Mistletoe may or may not have come from Yule specifically.
It wasn't a Christmas thing until the 18th century.
The mistletoe got like added either back in or added in for the first time.
But mistletoe is pagan as fuck.
The white berries are the semen of the gods.
Alrighty, then.
Okay.
Everyone who was like, everyone who was like doing something else while listening to this episode is like, well, everyone just perked up.
Yeah.
Which is interesting because they're poisonous as fuck.
You know?
You know, nope, not going to make too easy, too easy, too easy of jokes to make.
Not doing it.
Okay, well, I was going to say it's a note to self about don't go down on gods.
Oh, see, I can't, I can't, I cannot support that, though.
Sorry.
You're willing to, you're willing to risk the poison.
Yeah, no, I'm not.
You're just like, as a matter of fact, that's what I'm doing after this.
No, this is like a series of concentric eye rings shows up in the background on the gear screen.
Mistletoe garlands everywhere.
Amazing.
But yeah.
And this is like how, so it's this incredibly potent fertility symbol, the mistletoe, because it's like the semen tree or whatever.
And so this is how powerful syncretism is because it's at the fucking 18th century and people are still adding new fertility rights into Christmas shit.
This wasn't even one that like held on the whole time.
This was like in the 18th century, people were like, you want to bring that witch shit back into this?
And everyone's like, yeah, I do.
Like, let's make out under the fucking, under God's semen.
Another thing that comes from Yule.
So Odin is one of the central figures of Yule because it's literally named after him.
Yeah.
And Yule is famed for the wild hunt.
And the wild hunt is found in a ton of cultures.
I really like the wild hunt, especially the Canadian 2009 film called The Wild Hunt.
Oh, shit.
I've not watched that.
It's a LARP gone wrong movie.
Oh, I feel like you, we have talked, we have talked about this before.
Yeah, I've tried to make everyone watch it.
We almost watched this and instead we watched Night Riders.
Night Riders, which was not a bad choice.
No, Night Riders is thing again.
Robert will hear us and then bring it up in every conversation for at least two months.
We don't need this.
We don't need this.
Well, the movie The Wild Hunt, a lot of my LARPer friends don't like it because they don't like any LARP gone wrong movie.
But I enjoyed it.
Anyway, The Wild Hunt is this thing that's found through a ton of cultures.
It's this like ghostly hunt through the heavens.
Sometimes it's led by Odin.
Sometimes it's led, like hunters are the ghosts of the dead.
It's in like it's not always led by Odin, right?
Because there's in a ton of fucking cultures.
And there's just like pale riders and just like all this shit is like really fucking common.
It's this thing that people fucking see.
And they either see it in the woods on the ground or they see it in the fucking sky in the heavens.
And then they like attribute all this folklore to it.
And I'm really interested in it because I've spent a lot of time living alone in the woods.
And sometimes at night, you hear the wildest shit.
And I'm just like, like, I have a night where I was like convinced I heard the wild hunt.
I might have been sleep paralyzed.
A lot of my understanding of mythology comes from the fact that I suffer from sleep paralysis.
I mean, yeah, because that's that's that that makes sense.
That makes sense.
Anyway, sometimes the wild hunt abducts people.
Sometimes it's an omen being like, you see the wild hunt, you're going to die.
I didn't die, to my knowledge.
And there's versions of it all over the place.
And it's Santa.
Santa riding around in the sky is the fucking wild hunt.
I mean, that's that's super interesting because, like, a lot, like, this, this, this, this idea of like the wild hunt, right?
Some of that, in a folklore sense, has the modern version of that would be like alien abductions.
Oh, yeah, uh-huh.
Right?
Like, that's kind of like the high strangeness idea.
Yeah.
Of like, there's been these types of stories that are either like referencing some type of hallucination or some type of like dream state that we enter to sometimes.
And it always filters through whatever stage our culture is in.
So sometimes it's stuff like this in the wild hunt.
Yeah.
Sometimes it's more like sci-fi with the with like the little gray aliens.
Sometimes it's you know a weird sleep paralysis demon coming into your room and transporting you to another place.
Yeah.
There's like all these all these like slightly different versions of it.
No, that's I like that.
I really like that alien abduction is the new Santa.
I mean the new wild hunt.
And then Santa himself is a mixed match of a ton of different shit.
A bunch of different European cultures will sort of claim Santa.
But for my money, Santa Claus is a mix of old Saint Nick and this Finnish creature, Julapuki, the Christmas goat, who is a pre-Christian figure.
And he's basically a were goat.
Sophie, you've heard of this creature.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I have not.
Oh, Garrett, you'll like this.
Yeah, I've been like, I've been like Krampus pilled for a long time, but so yeah, he's this like man who turns into part goat, part man sometimes.
So he's a fucking were goat.
And he wears red robes, like lined with white fur and rides around in a sleigh pulled by reindeer and scares kids.
Oh, really?
Huh?
Huh.
Curious.
What does that remind me of?
Yeah.
So Santa Claus is a fucking were goat.
Sometimes he's an invisible spirit who helps bring in the new year by helping the light return.
Okay.
And it's like worth noting here that Finland has its own pagan traditions, several different ones.
The different Finnish tribes have different religions and pagan cultures that are separate from like the Germanic pagan traditions and also separate from the Slavic traditions.
Closer to the Slavic ones as far as I understand, but please don't quote me on that or please don't yell at me, Finns.
And if you do, just yell perkale vito satana at me.
And I'll be like, I know what those words mean.
And then if you yell any other words, I won't understand them.
So, oh yeah, and then like Saint Nicholas, the whole thing with him is that, well, that's the Protestants' fault.
I think we'll get to that later.
Basically, everyone has solstice holidays, usually filled with weird demons in the sky.
How could you not?
And now let's talk about medieval Christmas.
Just kidding.
Now let's end the episode and you have to wait till Wednesday to hear about medieval Christmas.
Sorry.
Oh, I'm going to be on the edge of my seat till Wednesday.
I know.
We definitely don't record these back to back.
We record these live when they drop.
You're going to be peering out of the night sky, hoping not to be taken away by a scary ghost man.
I was so scared of alien abduction as a kid.
No, yeah.
That actually tracks magpie.
Now I live alone in the woods.
But I still feel like you're afraid of alien abduction.
I don't know.
I like sometimes my friends come over and then they're like, what was that noise?
And I'm like, I don't know, something outside.
And they're like, how does that not scare you?
And I'm like, the outside makes a lot of noises.
I'm in the forest.
Yeah.
No, but like that, that the whole wild hunt thing is very reminiscent of the type of like forest, like forest alien abductions that people talk about.
And it just connects to the overall high strangest idea of these types of being taken to these other places that we see throughout folklore.
Even stuff like Elijah being carried to heaven in chariots of fire.
It's the same idea.
Wait, I don't know that.
That's just like, you know, there's a bad Christian, if that's a Christian.
There's just multiple stories in the Bible of people being taken up and then sometimes returned.
Enoch being one, which is resulting in stuff like the Emerald Tablet.
We have Elijah being taken up inside a chariot.
But that's like an alien craft coming down, picking you up and taking you up into the sky.
That is what that story is.
You just have different versions of it lasting now.
And then I love that lights in the hills and the skies is like a persistent part of folklore and just like a part of people's like lived experiences of just like what's that fucking light over there is just like a thing that happens when you spend a lot of time away from cities.
Escape from Incel Island00:04:40
Cool.
Okay.
Well, we're going to talk about revelry on Wednesday.
Gary, you'd like to play.
Garrison Davis, do you have anything that you would like to tell our listeners?
Yeah, what are you plugging?
What are you plugging?
Well, I just wrapped up a series that I that I just wrapped up a series that I wrote with my colleague James Stout about trans people living in a ranch in rural Colorado and how they survived an attack by fascists.
So that's that's on it could happen here.
It's a four-part series.
So that that just that just wrapped up.
That's kind of the most recent thing that I have that I've done.
And I should have a very interesting article coming out soon, but I do not know when that's going to be fully fully published.
But you can, if you follow me on either Twitter or Instagram at Tungiboutai, you will certainly, certainly be alerted when, when this bizarre thing is finally, is finally published.
And if anyone would like to get to know Garrison well, please transform yourself into a series of concentric rings embedded with eyes within eyes and show up at their P.O. box.
You know, sure.
If you go through all that work and all of that transmutation, then Shirley I'll probably talk to you because that does seem slightly impressive.
Margaret, you have a book that is available for pre-order, correct?
I do.
Yeah.
My goal is to always have a book available for pre-order the entire run of this show, apparently.
My current book available for pre-order is called Escape from Incel Island.
It is a adventurous science fiction adventure novel novella.
It's very short.
You can read it in one day if you're the kind of person who's like, I like the idea of being someone who reads books, but I have a hard time paying attention to something for a long time.
I highly recommend Escape from Incel Island.
And if you're an incel and you live on an island, I highly recommend Escape from Incel Island.
But also you have to stop being an incel first.
That's oh, you could buy it by going to tangledwilderness.org and it is available for pre-order now.
And Sophie, do you have anything you would like to plug?
No, just at CoolZone Media on Instagram and Twitter.
Yay.
Oh, yeah, because this is all part of CoolZone Media, which is cool.
Bye, everyone.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of CoolZone Media.
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He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
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Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, the guy was a spy.
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Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists, we have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's blue.
2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like, wild bats.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
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Hello, gorgeous.
It's Lala Kent, host of Untraditional Ila.
My days of filling up cups at Sur may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley.
Life on the other side of the hill is giving grown-up vibes, but over here on my podcast, Untraditionally Lala, I'm still that Lala you either love or love to hate.