Who is Santa Claus? And why does he have a red beard and a white moustache? This week, Caitie and Jordan take a look at how Christmas has been coopted over the centuries, and how the idea of a jolly man on a sleigh who delivers presents has been around for as long as there have been Christmas trees.
00:00:52.320Santa is himself a conflation of so many different things.
00:00:57.420And 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.
00:01:30.700So there's a kind of modern invention of Santa Claus.
00:01:35.380And there's really remarkable images of Santa that were drawn by Thomas Nast, who is an illustrator for Harper's Bazaar, as I guess it was called at the time.
00:01:52.160And he began drawing this figure in a way that resembles the Santa Claus we know.
00:01:58.860This icon, fat man, beard, we don't quite know the color that he was wearing.
00:02:06.880It might have been red, might have been green, but he's there.
00:02:09.840So there's another data point, and I'm looking here at the almost contemporary period of Washington Irving's famous, it is from 1809, A History of New York.
00:03:22.400You can look back at different centuries in different Anglo-Saxon parts of Europe.
00:03:26.420You're doing these things, and the mistletoe, and how did that come about?
00:03:29.820But a good way to look at it is by looking at how the whole Coca-Cola thing got co-opted in the Red Santa.
00:03:35.660You can see how traditions can just get assumed that way.
00:03:38.700Exactly. 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.
00:03:51.060And then Coke added their layer to the pie as well.
00:03:55.720And in a way, Christmas has at least become a celebration of capitalism.
00:05:31.980There's nothing that says anything about that until after the 7th to 9th century.
00:05:37.940And all of a sudden, for some reason, in Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire, in Greek writing, in that part of the world, St. Nicholas just becomes his own cult.
00:05:51.020It's like the cult of St. Nicholas just springs up in Constantinople around the 7th to 9th century.
00:05:56.100And 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 him and gave him a bunch of big bag of money and said, don't be a prostitute anymore and get saved.
00:07:41.260So Kris Kringle is a corruption of Kris Child, in effect.
00:07:47.620So 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.
00:08:11.540And 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.
00:08:20.120And then next thing you know, there's actually a really old Indo-European layer that might even be pre-Christian.
00:08:27.360And that's the tradition of Xenia, 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've given food.
00:08:39.260And in return, God's will bless you for doing that.
00:08:41.260In Persian tradition, in Germanic tradition, in Greek tradition, in Roman tradition, they all have this big focus on hospitality and treating your family and your close neighbors very well.
00:08:53.640So Santa Claus, he comes in the sky with reindeer on a sled.
00:09:09.660It is funny how kids, my children, I guess 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.
00:10:00.720And then this poor couple, Philemon and Bacchus, lets them come in the house.
00:10:05.320They 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.
00:10:15.600And they cook the goose, and they bring out bread, and they put on this big Xenia, this hospitality show for these two strangers.
00:10:23.980And then they start pouring the wine, and the wine won't stop pouring.
00:10:29.480They think the wine's going to be empty, and it just keeps pouring.
00:11:53.440Yeah, Richard pointed out a possible—which I found intriguing—a possible influence of Santa Claus, and which one that is not usually made.
00:12:03.800People point to Odin, and I think that's a clear sort of inspiration.
00:13:54.860And these things lead to another dimension of this conversation, I think, especially when Richard—the thesis that I've developed and Richard and I have developed in R.E.M. theories,
00:14:05.580this idea that Norse myth represents, to some extent, Christian rock, like a kind of Christian rock, right?
00:14:12.980So, in other words, there's all these kind of veiled references in Norse mythology to Christianity.
00:14:18.860And cheap among them, of course, we have the hanging god with Odin hanging on the tree, as Jesus is hanging on the tree.
00:14:24.980The common sort of conventional view is that it's going in the other direction.
00:14:28.100There 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.
00:14:37.240We're arguing that there is essentially messaging that is Christian in Norse mythology.
00:14:43.400But one example of this would be Baldr, right?
00:14:46.580And Baldr is this god who dies and he's slain by the mistletoe.
00:14:50.720And so the mistletoe, of course, becomes an important feature of the imagery of rather Christmas.
00:15:00.520If you're caught under the mistletoe with a woman, you kiss the woman and so forth.
00:15:05.220We're all familiar with this idea of the mistletoe.
00:15:07.320The mistletoe, if I'm remembering the myth correctly, and either Neil or Richard can correct me on this,
00:15:13.720but the mistletoe is the one thing, essentially, that can harm Baldr.
00:15:33.740But the blind god is armed with the mistletoe by the mischievous Loki because all the gods are using Baldr as a kind of practice, a target practice.
00:15:44.080They're throwing objects at him because he's invulnerable and they're, like, making light of the fact that he's indestructible.
00:15:50.340So Loki sneaks the mistletoe into the hand of this blind god.
00:15:56.260And we can imagine there's all kinds of interesting symbolism going on there.
00:15:59.640And the blind god throws the mistletoe and kills Baldr.
00:16:04.840And Baldr, in my mind, is a kind of clear Christ figure.
00:16:08.300He's a kind of, he's coded Jesus, essentially.
00:17:06.680Mark 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.
00:18:58.140You guys are trying to purify the tradition and bring back—what can we—let's find the real pure Apollonian Indo-European tradition and resurrect it.
00:19:15.420And 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 these phonic gods.
00:19:26.680And the chief god there would be Dionysus, right?
00:19:29.460So Dionysus, we would code as a sort of—we see as coded as proto-Jewish, effectively.
00:19:35.840And going back to the earlier discussion where, yeah, clearly Dionysus is associated with Yahweh.
00:19:40.560But 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 fuck.
00:22:57.500That's what I mean by we're throwing touchdowns in their end zone.
00:23:00.220Like, 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.
00:23:21.440Yeah, 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.
00:23:32.300But in contemporary works of Jem, in film, for example, there will be these sort of clear kind of Christ figures.
00:23:40.900The example that comes to my mind is E.T., right?
00:23:54.120And then there's all kinds of biblical messaging in Close Encounters as well, which is a kind of prequel that you could argue to E.T.
00:24:01.800And 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.
00:24:17.180He 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.
00:24:23.140I think if the Essenes were here today, they would think, because they had this motif in the Dead Sea Scrolls of two messiahs, the suffering messiah and the triumphant messiah.
00:24:34.720And I think they would say Jesus played his part as our suffering messiah, but now we're waiting for the triumphant messiah.
00:24:40.700I think that's what they would say if they were around today.
00:24:42.820Yeah, 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?
00:24:50.560So I think that essentially he's got it correct, that the Jesus in the gospel represents the dual messiah.