Saturday, December 23, 2017

The Sad Plight of Santa Claus

The Mispent Youth of Santa Claus

 

The Sad Plight of Santa Claus

Dec. 23, 2017
Unfortunately for the children the hero of the season, an elderly gentleman who commonly is known as “Santa Claus,” is having no end of trouble with the notorious ICE police. For one thing, although his original documents seem to have gotten lost during one of Earth’s chronic wars, the evidence seems to indicate that he was born somewhere in Iran.
       Another cause for friction with the authorities has to do with his former position, before he assumed his present name. Santa Claus is, as most people know, a foreshortened form of Saint Nicholas. However in his youth and indeed, until he was quite well along in years, he went by the name of Mithra, or Mithras in the Greco-Roman world. He worked for a couple of centuries as the God of the Roman Empire, until the Christians conquered. After Jesus became the Pantocrator there were no openings for any other Gods, so Mithras found himself compelled to take up a trade.
       Back in his younger and more energetic days, he also gained quite a reputation as a bullfighter. Statues of him may be found all through Southern Europe and Anatolia, wearing a cape and his trademark santa-claus hat, and often very little else. He has a sword in his hand and the bull which he has just killed is usually seen lying at his feet.
       The story that he had to bring gifts to the children each year to make up for the children he killed when he was a God is probably religious propaganda. There is really no evidence to indicate that living human children were ever sacrificed to Mithras. Nevertheless, his devotees did put up a long and brutal struggle against the rising influence of the new God whom the Greco-Romans called Jesus.

Meanwhile, Back in Iran

On the other hand, the Magi who brought gifts that enabled the hejira of the Holy Family were probably in their own way devotees of Mithra. The reason I say “in their own way” is that these Three Magi were learned adherents of the faith of Zarathustra.

       Archaeologists have never found a statue of Mithra killing the bull in Persia, and most likely never will. All of the carvings, mosaics, or other impressions of Mithra’s Tauroctony have been found in connection with works that were constructed by the Romans.

       It is something of a mystery, how Mithras became the God of the Empire. The Persian Zoroastrians had venerated Mithra as the embodiment of their sacred covenant; the presence of Mitra as the God of Light in the Vedas demonstrates that this figure was around long before the advent of Zardosht. But the Greeks and Romans were always at war with the Persians.

       According to late Zoroastrian sources, Alexander and his armies attempted to exterminate the religion. Since Alexander did not rule Persia long enough to have attempted such a task if he had desired to, it is likely that his name covers for the total effect of a successive line of Selucid rulers who all did their best to repress the Native religion.

      Despite the best efforts of rulers like Antiochus IV and his military thugs, the faith of Zardosht not only survived but became the foundation of the Parthian kingdom which drove out the former Greek overlords. Beyond that, even in Anatolia, where the Greeks continued to rule, kings demonstrated their fascination with the Persophile cult by adopting the name ‘Mithradates.’ Nevertheless, modern scholars question whether the Roman worship of Mithras had anything in common with the Mithra of the Persians, aside from the name.

New Age when the New Age Was Pisces

The most likely explanation for Roman Mithraism is that it was the New Age religion of its time. Foiled in their effort to eradicate the Ethical Religion of Zarathustra, the Greek Kings and their Roman successors did everything they could to appropriate its power. Their opinion that Mithra was the primary culture-hero of the Persians may well have derived from the role of Mithra as the Lord of Covenants and Contracts. Once the Greeks found it necessary to negotiate once again with an ethnically Persian power, they would observe how Mithra was invoked whenever the Persians signed a peace treaty.
       As a personification of the Zoroastrian covenant, Mithra bound the followers of Zarathustra together in a relationship of holy love. This aspect of the Persian deity seems to have been lost on the imperialistic Romans, who seem to have preferred to develop a personal relationship with a God who could take them to high places. It is indeed curious how this need for an unconquerable Divine Ego emerged from a culture which, in its Republican phase, had served Gods who had exerted themselves to preserve and defend the Roman community.
       This shift from community values to a faith in an Unconquered Ego which symbolized itself as Sol Invictus, is probably the key to appreciating the difference between Mithra in his original Zoroastrian context, and the “New Age” cult of Mithra which became the State Religion of The Empire at a critical stage in its history.
       It could be that this shift was the harbinger of a trend towards self-reliance, individualism, and capitalistic social organization that would be the hallmark of the Western societies 1500 years later. But reliance on an ethic of the ego, however adapted to the mentality of the military, was a weakness which kept Mithraeism from being able to either compete or co-exist with the new faith in the Infant whom the gifts of the Three Zoroastrians had saved from Herod’s bloody dynastic purge.

Magi on a Civilizing Mission

       This triumph of ego over community values may very likely have been the result of the reliance, by the wealthy men who controlled public affairs, on slaves – not only for menial labor but also for the fulfilment of their more intimate desires. There is nevertheless, reason to believe that in the earlier Hellenistic phases of co-optation, Mithraesm had not been entirely disconnected from the influence of its parent religion.
       The Three Magi whose gifts enabled the hejira of the holy family were very likely on a civilizing mission similar to that of Vivakenanda and the other East Indian teachers who introduced the perennial philosophy to the conquering British.
       Nevertheless in the long run, the fact that the priests of Mithras depended on a class of egotistic and ambitious Romans for their economic base determined that the cult of Mithras in the Empire would take a different course than in Persia, where the Zoroastrian priests found themselves responsible for maintaining sufficient cohesion and goodwill among the believers that a kingdom of Zoroastrian Pathans (Parthians) could not only liberate Iran from the Greeks, but could continue to sustain itself in the face of repeated assaults by ambitious Romans like Crassus.





image of Mithra & Associated Godlings: from Wikipedia, Louvre Museum [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]
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