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| 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/)]
