Richard, Mark Brahmin, and Gnostic Informant delve into the deeper layers of the Santa Claus myth and its role in shaping metaphysical beliefs. They explore the editorial, “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus,” which emphasizes the unseen world and the power of faith, love, and imagination. The conversation highlights how Santa Claus serves as a gateway for children to understand higher metaphysical concepts, ultimately preparing their minds for belief in religious figures like Jesus. The hosts discuss the psychological aspects of perpetuating the Santa myth among adults and its function as a metaphor for unseen moral authority. This episode illuminates the intricate ways in which childhood myths like Santa Claus can orient our approach to metaphysical thinking and morality.AI-generated summaryTimestamps00:00 Introduction to Christmas Traditions01:19 The Evolution of Santa Claus02:54 Santa’s Modern Image and Capitalism04:14 Saint Nicholas and Historical Roots06:39 Cultural Influences on Santa08:20 Mythological Connections and Symbolism11:53 Norse Mythology and Christian Parallels15:19 The Death of Balder: A Norse Tragedy16:20 Odin’s Descent to the Underworld16:48 The Indo-European Tradition of Descent and Return17:24 Jewish and Greek Mythological Intersections18:29 The Complexity of Orphic Traditions19:35 The Symbolism of Jacob and Dionysus20:41 The Story of Jacob and the Birthright22:19 The Sophistication of Jewish Parables23:32 Christ Figures in Contemporary Media24:42 The Dual Messiah Concept26:52 Joseph as a Proto-Jesus This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
I want to talk about December 25th, Saturnalia, Yule, and other matters around Christmas, because Christmas is an incredible conflation of so many things where it's dizzying, in fact.
The Christmas tree right behind us, this is a Germanic tradition.
Christ Mass, Christmas, which is this older Catholic Mass for Jesus held during this time.
As we all know, what do we celebrate on Christmas?
The birth of Santa.
That's at least what it's become.
Santa is the most popular aspect of this for children.
The epiphany of Santa.
The coming.
The epiphany of Santa.
And he is a powerful figure.
Christians lament that he is more popular than Jesus, in fact.
And he says, who is Santa?
Santa is himself a conflation of so many different things.
And so we have this sort of amazing holiday that's a composite God in the term that Mark developed, which is coming from Roman interpretation, where it's not actually one thing and it's multiple things.
And sometimes those things have countervailing forces to them or even seemingly contradictory forces to them, but they are one thing.
So I want to start with Santa, actually, because I think that's easy and at the very least fun.
So there's a lot.
There's a lot going on with Santa Claus.
There's a lot there.
So there's a kind of modern invention of Santa Claus.
And there's really remarkable images of Santa that were drawn by Thomas Nast, who was an illustrator for Harper's Bazaar, is I guess it was called at the time.
I think it's Harper's Monthly is still around.
It's a high-quality magazine.
And he began drawing this figure in a way that resembles the Santa Claus we know.
This icon, fat man, beard, we don't quite know the color of that he was wearing.
It might have been red, might have been green, but he's there.
So there's another data point just, and I'm looking here at the almost contemporary period of Washington Irving's famous, it is from 1809, A History of New York.
And it is, in effect, a satire.
It's a lot like historians of the ancient world or medieval times where they're writing history, but it's a wonderful story.
And in Washington Irving's case, he's even poking fun at Knickerbockers and all that kind of stuff.
And there is this notion of a jolly man who arrives on a sleigh and delivers presents.
So there is this modern history, and there's no doubt that those things are highly influential.
Some people think that Coca-Cola invented Santa Claus.
That's not true.
But there's no doubt that image of a fat man with a white beard drinking a Coke out of a bottle is highly influential.
It's part of the tradition now.
It is.
And it's accrued to it.
So there's something we can point to capitalism.
It's something we can point to as a measure to see how other things get co-opted along the way.
Exactly.
You can look back at different centuries and different Anglo-Saxon parts of Europe.
You're doing these things and mistletoe.
And how did that come about?
But a good way to look at it is by looking at how the whole Coca-Cola thing got co-opted into Red Santa.
You can see how traditions can just get assumed that way.
Exactly.
So there was some illustration that was popular on the East Coast in New York City for decades by Thomas Nast, and it somehow reached the masses.
And then Coke added their layer to the pie as well.
And in a way, Christmas has at least become a celebration of capitalism.
It's virtuous capitalism.
Yeah, go ahead.
The red is often considered to be a religious, like a clerical reference.
That's true.
Yeah.
That's what I mean.
Bishop, right?
Yeah, because St. Nicholas was the bishop of Myra.
He's a historical person.
Supposedly, there's a lot of myths written about him.
He's probably a real person.
Supposedly, he was at the Council of Nicaea.
He slapped Arius in the face because he didn't accept the Trinity.
I don't know how true that is.
But yeah, he's a bishop.
So the color of the colour.
Yeah, it might very well have something to do with it.
And it's interesting because the alternate Santa is wearing green.
He might have been wearing green in the Thomas Nass.
We can't quite tell.
But that's also interesting in terms of the green man and also the green of Dionysus.
And the greenery is part of the winter solstice traditions in Santalia and Yule.
You go outside and all the greenery represents the life that survives during the decay.
This is why evergreen trees become a big thing because they stay green during the winter.
This is why the wreaths are on the houses because they're green.
So green is like the representation of life, Dionysus, the symbol of rebirth and eternal life, basically.
Maybe even a final word on St. Nicholas, unless you had more, but he was known for his secret giving protection of the children and generosity toward the poor.
Later.
Those traditions are coming about.
We don't know.
There's nothing that says anything about that until after the seventh to ninth century.
And all of a sudden, they start, all of a sudden, for some reason, in Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire, in Greek writing, in that part of the world, Saint Nicholas just becomes his own.
It becomes his own cult.
It's like his own religion.
It's like the cult of St. Nicholas just springs up in Constantinople around the 7th and 9th century.
And there's all these stories written about him going around.
And one of the stories is that St. Nicholas met a bunch of prostitutes and felt bad for them and gave him a bunch of big bag of money and said, don't be a prostitute anymore and get saved.
That's literally one of the stories.
That sounds like an alibi and not a story.
It's such a great prostitute's money and he was like, it was to present him from sin.
I keep telling people, Nikki Minaj at these MAGA version things.
This is how Christianity has always been.
There's a lot of you to become a Christian if you're a prostitute.
That's the whole point of Christianity.
You're supposed to be redeemed.
I mean, that's a common backstory for nuns going back into the Middle Ages.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So there's some other interesting aspects of Santa that I should mention.
We've talked about Saint Nicholas, and I believe his saint day is December 9th or 10th or something like that.
So it's around the winter solstice and you can fold it in.
So the other name of Santa we've developed is Sinterclaus.
This might be coming from the Dutch New York Santa Center Claus Santa Claus.
But he has another name, which I never understood as a child, which is Chris Kringle.
What is that?
This is another one, too.
Father Christmas is another.
But where's Chris Kringle?
Like Christopher R. Kringle?
Is that his name?
No, it's actually Christ Kendall.
So it's Christchild, Christ Kent in German, in the sort of other Bavarian dialects.
I notice this, you'll often add an L.
So Vurst becomes Vurstal.
Kent child becomes Kindle.
So Chris Kringle is a corruption of Christchild, in effect.
So you even have in his name, there's an embedded reference to Jesus as well, although it's corrupted in this way that you forget what it's all about.
That's what happens with Santa.
Over time, the face of Santa changes every century that goes by until it becomes what it is today.
And you can see there's different additions happening throughout time.
And then, depending on where his tradition goes, when it starts getting into Germany and France and England, all their traditions get subsumed into the tradition of Santa Claus.
And then next thing you know, you have, there's actually a really old Indo-European layer that might even be pre-Christian.
And that's the tradition of Xania, which is the tradition of hospitality, which is very Indo-European, which is like when you have a guest over, you bring out your wine and you give him food.
And in return, gods will bless you for doing that.
Then Persian tradition and Germanic tradition and Greek tradition and Roman tradition, they all have this big focus on hospitality and treating your family and your close neighbors very well.
So Santa Claus, he comes in the sky with reindeer on a sled.
It's an epiphany.
And he shows up and he, if you leave him food and something to eat and something to drink, he blesses you.
It's the tradition.
It is funny how kids, my children, they obviously learned it from me, of course, but it's like these traditions that don't even need to be written down are perpetuated for thousands of years every generation.
And they get it.
They're like, oh, we need to leave some milk and cookies for Santa Claus.
We might even need to leave something for the reindeer.
It's in the DNA.
It goes back to thousands of years.
Indo-European culture has always been like this.
Ovid's metamorphosis, there's a story where Mercury and Jupiter disguise themselves as humans, they go to Phrygia during the wintertime, in midwinter, where it's cold, and they go house to house trying to see if anyone will let them in.
And everyone's get the fuck out of here.
I don't know who you are.
Get out of here.
And then this poor couple, Philemon and Bacchus, lets them come in the house.
They take their last log in the middle of the winter and they light up a fire and they take their last bottle of wine and they get their last, I think there's like a, they had like a goose and they cook the goose and they bring out bread and they just they put on this big sinea, this hospitality show for these two strangers.
And then they start pouring the wine and the wine won't stop pouring.
They think the wine's going to be empty and it just not just keeps pouring.
It's like a miracle.
Obvious relations to the gospel.
So we were actually reading the gospel of Mark last weekend.
You have this miracle of the multiplication of loaves and multiplication of loaves.
And wine.
So the wedding of Cana is celebrated on January 6th by the Orthodox Church.
Boom.
So also, I hear a little echo of there's no room at the end as well.
This notion of will you take in the weary traveler in the terms of the nativity scene of Jesus Christ or Jean-Valjean for that matter, but that notion of their no one will take them.
Everyone's being selfish.
They're not honoring hospitality and they end up in a manger.
You hear a little echo of that in that story of, was it Mercury and Apollo who are doing that?
Yes, Mercury and Jupiter.
Mercury and Jupiter, excuse me, yeah, who are the weary travelers waiting for some cookie?
You're right.
The birth of Jesus has that same narrative in Matthew where they're at the end.
They didn't even have any rooms left.
So they had to go to the manger.
But the myth there is that you don't know who's a God and who's not a God, essentially.
You're obligated to be respectful and humble to whoever comes to your door.
And you can see how the kids think this for Santa Claus.
They're like, you leave out the milk and cookies.
You don't know if Santa's going to be there or not.
You're not going to, you don't know for sure, but you're supposed to do it.
It's part of the tradition.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Richard pointed out a possible, which I found intriguing, a possible influence of Santa Claus, and which one that is not usually made.
People point to Odin.
And I think that's a sort of inspiration.
Oh, yeah.
I think he's also, yeah, he doesn't have the slave reindeer, but he has a, I can't remember which animal.
He's a slepnir, an eight-legged horse.
Oh, that's right.
The eight, yeah.
Yeah.
So eight reindeer, eight-legged horse.
That seems like a, yeah, he appears like an epiphany style with that horse.
So you can see, I can definitely see how that could be the iconography there.
Thor similarly has a chariot that's drawn by two goats, for example.
And these are all like sort of celestial chariots being drawn through the sky and so forth.
So very similar to the sleigh.
Obviously, Solindictus has that too.
Yeah, Richard pointed to one that I hadn't thought of or hadn't seen anyone else point to, but the idea that he might have a kind of association with Hephaestus or Vulcan because he's associated with the heart.
He emerges from the fireplace, essentially.
Yeah.
Eventually, he will develop this sort of red garb.
So it almost does seem like he's a fire god.
He's a craftsman.
He's a maker of toys and stuff.
That's all.
Exactly.
That's what I was thinking.
When I think of Santa, I almost think of Albrecht and like Wagner's ring cycle, where he's down there with all these forced slaving away, forcing people to make toys.
And if I get down, yeah, the dwarves.
He's surrounded by daftals or dwarves.
Yeah.
Or the daft in Greek religion.
So again, there seems to be this conflation of like traditions.
If I differentiate to finish this point, though, Richard, as far as Odin is concerned, the term elf comes from Norse mythology, right?
Sure.
The elf is a Norse being ultimately.
So the fact that his work is generated, but so it's you're already you as soon as you adopt the word elf, you're adopting Norse mythology.
Right.
That's it.
It's not Christian anymore.
And these things lead to another dimension of this conversation, I think, is especially when Richard, the thesis that I've developed and Richard and I have developed in REM theory is this idea that Norse myth represents to some extent Christian rock, like a kind of Christian rock, right?
So in other words, there's all these kind of veiled references in Norse mythology to Christianity.
And cheap among them, of course, we have the hanging god with Odin hanging on the tree as Jesus is hanging on the tree.
The common sort of conventional view is that it's going in the other direction.
There was a pre-existing hanging god, and that's the reason the Vikings and whoever became attracted to the God of Jesus or were able to accept them because they had this precedent.
We're arguing that there is essentially messaging that is Christian in Norse mythology.
But one example of this would be Balder, right?
And Baldur is this God who dies and he's slain by the mistletoe.
And so the mistletoe, the mistletoe, of course, becomes an important feature of the imagery of Christ, rather, Christmas.
If you're caught under the mistletoe with a woman, you kiss the woman and so forth.
We're all familiar with this idea of the mistletoe.
The mistletoe, if I'm remembering the myth correctly, and either Neil or Richard can correct me on this, but the mistletoe is the one thing essentially that can harm Baldur.
It ends up leading to his death.
It's the one thing that doesn't swear the oath to protect Baldur.
His immortality.
Yeah.
And so it ends up Loki.
There's a blind god, a hoarder or something like that.
I can't remember the guy's name, but the blind god is armed with the mistletoe by the mischievous Loki because all the gods are using Balder as a kind of practice, target practice.
They're throwing objects at him because he's invulnerable and they're like making light of the fact that he's indestructible.
So Loki sneaks the mistletoe into the hand of this blind god.
And we can imagine there's all kinds of interesting symbolism going on there.
And the blind god throws the mistletoe and kills Baldur.
And Balder, in my mind, is a kind of clear Christ figure.
He's a kind of coded Jesus, essentially.
He's the son of Odin.
Yeah, after the destruction of all the gods, after Ragnarok, Baldur returns.
And it does seem essentially about this.
Importantly, though, Odin has to perform the catabasis, the descent down into the underworld to hell.
And then he has to go down there and talk to the witches and then work a deal out.
And then he was able to do the Anabasis and rise up.
Balder can return then.
This is not my wheelhouse, but I do know that the tradition is that Jesus has to descend to hell as well.
This is huge in Indo-European traditions.
Once again, Odysseus does this.
Hercules does this.
Dionysus does this.
The descent into the underworld and the return by the Savior.
It's just such a common motif.
And Baldur is one of the gods that does this.
Baldur and Odin, I should say.
I guess it goes down.
What Mark would say to that is that it is an Indo-European tradition in a sense, but he would, and I would classify it as proto-Jewish in the sense that it is coming from somewhere else than the solar tradition.
And on a case-by-case basis, of course.
And remember how much Jewish tradition borrows from Greek and Persian thought, too.
So you're going to have a mixture of things that come from both sides and back and forth.
Of course.
It's going to get messy.
So there are notions of descending to the underworld and rising again, obviously before Christ.
He's an Adonis Adonis who goes to the underworld and falls in love, or Persephone falls in love with him, and then he returns to Venus and back again.
That's okay.
This goes to the underworld and speaks with Achilles.
And so there is that tradition.
I guess what is stressed in REM is that is a kind of proto-Jewish tradition.
It's a thonic tradition in opposition to other traditions.
And so it's not just so much that it's coming from Indo-European myth.
Central.
That's what that there's a big difference there.
Yeah.
Whereas a lot of the Indo-Europeans, it's just an attribute.
It's just like a side story.
Whereas the Jewish side or and the Orthics are like this too.
It becomes the central thing.
Yeah.
And the Orphics, I think, are a great example that help illustrate the complexity of the case that we're making.
So, for example, Orpheus, we class Orpheus as essentially a kind of Aryan figure.
He's the son of Apollo.
Illustration, too.
Yeah, but he's also a dying and rising god.
So that would be an example of an Aryan dying and rising god, effectively.
But the argument there is that still the Orphic tradition itself is proto-Jewish in perspective, right?
Because it's you guys like trying to purify the tradition and bring back what can we let's find the real pure Apollonian Indo-European tradition and resurrect it.
I love it.
I love it.
Yeah, yeah.
No, we knew we could appreciate our autism, man.
We knew that you could appreciate our autism.
But yeah, and so in this case, we see Orpheus as basically indicated as an Aryan figure that's drawn into a kind of decadence that's essentially caused by the Islanic gods.
And the chief god there would be Dionysus, right?
So time of Dionysus, we would code as a sort of, or we see as coded as proto-Jewish, effectively.
And going back to the earlier discussion, where, yeah, clearly Dionysus is associated with Yahweh.
But even when you look at like a sort of sober analysis of Jacob's blessing and looking at the description of Judah, it's fucking fine.
He's got Yakos.
Yakos is Dionysus' second name epithet.
And Yaakov, even the name sounds similar.
It sounds like Jacob is, are you saying it sounds like a little like Jacob?
Yeah, the, yeah.
So the word Bacchus comes from Vakis and Yakis.
There's two different layers in different dialects.
And Yakis survives in a lot of Greek sources.
Yakis, the Yakis, there's a family with the last name.
Dionysus, one of Dionysus' names is Yakis, Yakos.
So it's like when you see the name Jacob in Hebrew, it's Yaakov.
And you got to go, huh?
A lot of scholars actually do think that there might be some overlapping linguistic connection between Jacob and Dionysus, the name Jacob.
He washes his clothes in wine.
Real quick on the Jacob thing, and I don't want to get too off track, but I just want to say something because we talked about this last time I was talking to you guys.
It almost makes me think that there might be something historically, a historical kernel there, because why make up a story where the main character has to do this usurbation of the one who actually was supposed to have the birthright?
It almost sounds like something in history really happened here where this became the legend of it.
I don't know.
I could be going off track there.
You're talking about Jacob stealing the birthright.
Jacob stealing the birthright.
It's like, where does that story come from?
I think it's not a historical truth to it.
I think it's a game plan.
I think that they're recognizing a kind of evolutionary.
Yeah, but it's basically a game plan is the way that I see it.
So the parable is teaching the behavior.
It's saying our object here is to steal the birthright of the firstborn.
And the firstborn has different meanings in this context.
One of the meaning is the sort of first inhabitants of the land, founders.
So you go to steal the birthright of the firstborn, effectively.
And so I think it's game plan essentially is what we're looking at.
And that's the level of consciousness and sophistication of these parables.
And that's why we're playing without a fucking game.
So we're playing football and they actually are playing with plays.
And we're just like going out there like, hey, how are they figuring out how to block us every time we do this?
Because we don't actually have a game plan.
And so that's what we're faced with.
And that points to the sort of this.
And a lot of us don't even know that we're on their team and we're throwing the ball on their end zone.
So it's to their credit.
I think that it shows the level of sophistication of Jews is remarkable.
And not only that, the information is communicated intergenerationally, esoterically through parables.
They don't even have to be explicit about it.
They use this supra language, a symbol language to communicate the information as opposed to being required to be explicit.
Because being explicit would get them in trouble, of course.
This way to go under the radar.
And the genius in the ultimate sort of coup de grace is that they got us to hold the Torah as sacred, right?
They got us to venerate and pass.
That's what I mean by we're throwing touchdowns in their end zone.
Like even if you're a Christian that like, oh, the Jews killed Jesus.
It's like they're laughing at the fact that you think that they are the chosen people who predicted your Messiah that you worship.
You already gave them the W.
I don't care how much you hate them and think you're fighting against them.
They already beat you.
You're playing in their game.
You're on their team, actually.
Yeah.
And honestly, I think that this is one of the kind of maybe underappreciated values of, though I think that people who have followed our work do appreciate it.
But in contemporary works of Jem, in film, for example, there will be these sort of clear kind of Christ figures.
The example that comes to my mind is E.T., right?
E.T. is a kind of obvious example.
And there's all kinds of messaging in there effectively indicating him.
He's got a satellite epiphany too in the sky at the slide.
Yeah, yeah.
And there's all kinds of biblical messaging in Close Encounters as well, which is a kind of prequel.
You could argue to E.T.
And.
But so they're saying they're admitting esoterically in their work.
Once you're able to decipher the messaging in contemporary Jewish works that yeah, Jesus is actually pretty based.
Jesus is helping us, he's a savior, he is king of the Jews on some level, like literally king of the Jews in the sense that he's a messiah for us as well.
I think if the Essenes were here today, they would think because they had two.
They had this motif in the Dead Sea Scrolls of two Messiahs, the suffering Messiah and the triumphant Messiah, and I think they would say, Jesus played his part as our suffering messiah, but now we're waiting for the triumphant messiah.
I think that's what they would say if they were around today.
Yeah, we had this conversation on our last call and Richard Carrier i'm sure you're familiar with his work or his ideas on dual messiah, right.
So I think that essentially he's got it correct that the Jesus in the gospel represents the dual messiah.
So he represents both aspects.
He represents the messiah Ben David and also the messiah Ben Joseph sure, so he represents, and I think that second coming is the yeah, and who really brings it home is uh, this guy Price, right.
Basically, Thomas is a twin that comes back and it's like a fake resurrection, essentially.
And so Thomas is the twin that comes back and he's also given the name Judas, so he's coded Jewish and there's different traditions of Thomas as the one who gets crucified, and Jesus gets away scot-free.
There's like weird that that that becomes part of Islamic tradition actually, so there's a Gnostic version of it and there's a Muslim version of that story.
There's a lot of weird stuff with Thomas and the twin, but the bottom line being that there are two Jesuses and one.
Joseph Ben Messiah is essentially coded Gentile oh, you got Judas and Jesus is like Israel, the greater Israel, because he's in the Galilee, the north.
The northern kingdom is called Israel, and then Judas is the kingdom of Jerusalem, the south, and it's Judah, and he's betrayer and he's greedy and he said, he's the temple, that's where the bank is, basically where all the money is kept.
So he's.
That's what Judas is.
And in the Old Testament, Joseph is the one who gets sold by his brothers.
Jesus is the son of Joseph, and guess who's the one who comes up with the idea to sell him to the Ishmaelites?
Judah for 20 shekels.
Judah takes 20 shekels and goes, we're going to sell Joseph down to these Ishmaelites and then that's it.
We'll get rid of him and our father won't love him more than us anymore.
So there's this like jealousy aspect, and it's totally.
What's happening in the New Testament is a rewriting of Judas, Judah as Judas by the way, it's the same same word in Greek.
If you re-ceptuagent, his name's not Judah, it's Judas, Judas.
It is Judah.
It's the same person.
It means Judah.
Judas means Judah.
Judas, Hebrew, Judas is Greek.
That's the difference.
Yeah, no, that's exactly the case.
We've actually gone over that in our classes.
And yeah, Joseph is sold into slavery.
And Joseph is the one who is coded Gentile, essentially.
He's the one of the tribe of God.
Code of many colors.
Yeah.
And he's the non-Judean, essentially, that the other brothers become jealous of, effectively.
Yeah, he has a different mom, too.
Yeah, there's a lot of weird stuff going on with Joseph.
He's a proto-Jesus.
And then when he goes down to Egypt, it's like a catabasis.
It's a descent into the underworld.
He goes into a dungeon.
He's basically dead.
He's nothing.
He's in a dungeon.
He's dead.
And then he has a dream about grapevines and bread, which has a Eucharistic imagery going on.
And then he ascends from the dungeon and becomes the second most powerful man in Egypt next to Pharaoh.
So then he's the second, like the right hand of the God the Father.
Jesus ascends to the throne where he's the second God next to the God the Father.
So you can see in Joseph, everything from Jesus comes from, you can get it all in Joseph, basically.
I mean, that's a fascinating reading.
And also he is thrown into the pit, right?
So he is a dying and rising God in that sense, the emergence out of a pit.
And then he's also lamb blood is smeared on the coat of many colors, right?
And not only that, Jacob literally laments for as if he was dead.
Like he puts on the sackcloth and ashes and performs like an ancient Near Eastern moment of mourning for like a period of time.