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/)]

A Window in Need of Repair

A Window In Need of Repair

Jiang Qing -- 

By unidentified photographer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

A Window in Need of Repair

Dec 4, 2004

The window casement needs to be restored. The window itself has been shattered by a cruel stone.

My force has been spent. Isis has forgiven me for wounding her cheek. I fall down at her feet. What more can a stone do?

As I feel the warmth of The Mother Who Has Forgiven, I realize that everything is different in here. A stereo phonograph is playing, “Let’s Do the Twist Like We Did Last Summer,” and the Houris and Heroes are dancing.

Outside the broken window, everything is in commotion. It’s not just the tanks in the streets.

The angry ghosts that float by, looking like mouths full of sharp teeth with hardly any bodies at all, are denouncing an alleged conspiracy between Nixon and Kissinger, and the Communist Party Chairman who wrote the Little Red Book.

a

Back in the Material World

When I look back into the material world, I can observe that my own body is trying to get some sleep. But Thieu is complaining that her cheek has been wounded, and she is demanding some answers.

I can’t give her the answers she needs, because I wasn’t there. When I look out the window, I can see that there is a cactus with very sharp spines outside the bedroom window. But the spines are not nearly so sharp as the questions that are being asked by the ghosts who have flown in from the Poison Tree.

They are asking, who buried that sheath of faggots bound with an axe, in the courtyard of the schoolyard where they died. Was it the French Foreign Legion? Was it the Catholic Church? Was it something the Samurai forgot to take with them when they went back to their homes in Japan? What is this tree that grew up from the seed, that grows hatchets and vials of poison in place of edible fruits?

a

Fleeing to the Archetypal Place

Thieu is leading me down to an archetypal place. Guided by only the moonlight, we skirt about under the cliff where the Sphinx crouches like some cruel interrogator.

As we continue, we encounter Isis. Thieu asks her why her cheek has been bruised by a stone. I see the bloody bruise on her cheekbone, and realize that I have made a rather ugly impression.

“It all has to do with a jealous little Godling named Set,” declares Isi s. “He has been trying to get me stoned to punish me for an alleged act of adultery.”

“Don’t worry about the paint remover,” the Sphinx calls down from her cliff. “I know that the Men of the World shall do everything they can to restore the glamour of the Jealous God’s monument. . Everything, that is, except to make meaningful reparations to those whom their controlling ways have wounded. And so, since the foundations are crumbling, I am going to let the tower fall.”

a

Voices on the Lawn

Thieu and I are hearing voices out there on the lawn. A furious argument has broken out between a man and a woman. The howling is becoming a violent fight. The spirits who are angry at the way that they died at Tuol Sleng have pulled down the curtains, so that we can no longer see the angels who are singing the Song of the Spheres.

The man and woman are chasing each other around the saguaro cactus that stands guard over the corner of the lawn.

“Don’t get involved,” advises Thieu. “They might be dangerous people.”

The angry spirits, who still burn in shame over the way that carnal agony seduced them into betraying those whom they held most dear, roll back the turf from the lawn. The man and the woman both look down in shock, because the bright light that is shining from below has clearly been generated by Hellfire.

Down there, Richard Nixon, Chairman Mao, Chou en Lai, Pol Pot, and various other figures whose features are obscured by the shadows, are being summoned to something that certainly looks like the Court of the Last Judgement. In the background we hear a discussion about why Henry Kissinger is taking so long to respond to the summons that was delivered to him.

Except for Henry, who is still pleading diplomatic immunity, these souls are in the custody of devils in uniform, who have them all handcuffed together. The Sphinx, who is enthroned in the Judgement Seat, is taking depositions from Tibetan monks who were tortured. The painters are scraping off the paint remover from the walls, and all the scenes of horror the great leaders had hoped would be forgotten forever are coming back to life.

We see the cities burning. We see the napalm falling on the peasant, and on the water buffalo. We watch the Bouncing Betties rise up from under the soil like horrible apparitions to blow off the feet of the children. We watch the crocodile swimming in the big rain-filled crater that the B-52’s have made.

“You must learn how to be able to speak about the pain,” I find myself consoling Thieu. “It’s obvious, these ghosties will not stop tormenting the people of the earth, until they have been given voices with which they can scream.”

a = a

The Pregnancy of Chairman Mao

“These horrors shall be repeated, until they are remembered, and their significance has been assimilated,” declares an intellectual in glasses, who died of torture when Phnom Penh was purged.

“We shall never be able to give a form and a voice to the Theater of Cruelty, unless we are able to sustain each others’ spirits with a little bit of carnal tenderness,” declares Thieu, with a sad little sigh.

I feel a pang so acute that all that I can do is to kiss her tittie. General George Armstrong Custer gallops up from the hole in the ground, to arrest both the man and the woman for creating a domestic violence incident.

Custer empties his Colt revolver into the sky, as a police car arrives to haul off the victims.

“It’s hard to give birth to a Revolution,” declares Chairman Mao. “That’s why I became too heavy to be sent to Hell.”

“Like everything else that you have ever said, that is an out and out lie,” declares a tortured Tibetan monk. “Your waistline attained it’s legendary size, because you were caught eating everyone else’s dinner.”

“And people thought I was the Lord of the Shadow,” declares Adolph Hitler, with a frown.

“Don’t worry, my son,” Custer comforts him. “People will still remember you as the Father of Genocide.”

a = a

“Mao Turned Me Into a Bad Dog”

The man who is chasing the woman about the Saguaro cactus has become a fat Chinaman, who wears a Red Star on a uniformed hat. The woman also has Chinese features, but her body is much more graceful.

“You turned me into your bad dog,” Jiang Qing accuses the fat Chinaman. “I wanted to change the national culture by transforming our relation to the arts, but you were an old pervert who just wanted blood. Every time I had just about gotten all of the stage props in place, you would say, ‘go sic ‘em bitch!’ and I would need to bite someone. But I put up with it, because I believed that you were the world’s greatest revolutionary hero.

“All of this I could put up with, until I noticed all the young girls you were going to bed with in your old age. College girls I could understand; I would be jealous, but then I would think, that perhaps it was good for them to learn revolutionary theory from the Grand Master. But you had a thing about virgins! It wasn’t until I found myself alone in bed, wondering why it always had to be a virgin, that I began to realize just what you were, and what you had always been. You never really listened to anyone who had enough education to give you a proper critique of your theories. You think it is only a little thing, but it was the principal reason why we had to bury so many Red Chinamen in so many shallow graves.”

GGYYgg