RadixJournal - The Coming of Santa

00:00:00.000 I want to talk about December 25th, Saturnalia, Yule, and other matters around Christmas.

00:00:06.280 Because Christmas is an incredible conflation of so many things, where it's dizzying, in fact.

00:00:16.460 The Christmas tree right behind us, this is a Germanic tradition.

00:00:21.100 Christ Mass, Christmas, which is this older Catholic Mass for Jesus held during this time.

00:00:28.780 As we all know, what do we celebrate on Christmas?

00:00:31.600 The birth of Santa.

00:00:33.040 That's at least what it's become.

00:00:35.160 Santa is the most popular aspect of this for children.

00:00:38.820 Or the epiphany of Santa.

00:00:39.500 The epiphany of Santa, yes.

00:00:41.740 And he is a powerful figure.

00:00:45.180 Christians lament that he is more popular than Jesus, in fact.

00:00:50.000 And he says, who is Santa?

00:00:52.320 Santa is himself a conflation of so many different things.

00:00:57.420 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.

00:01:09.420 And it's multiple things.

00:01:11.060 And sometimes those things have countervailing forces to them, or even seemingly contradictory forces to them.

00:01:18.300 But they are one thing.

00:01:19.680 So I want to start with Santa, actually.

00:01:23.820 Because I think that's easy and, at the very least, fun.

00:01:28.360 There's a lot going on with Santa.

00:01:29.860 There's a lot there.

00:01:30.700 So there's a kind of modern invention of Santa Claus.

00:01:35.380 And 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.

00:01:47.960 I think it's Harper's Monthly.

00:01:49.620 It's still around.

00:01:50.240 It's a high-quality magazine.

00:01:52.160 And he began drawing this figure in a way that resembles the Santa Claus we know.

00:01:58.860 This icon, fat man, beard, we don't quite know the color that he was wearing.

00:02:06.880 It might have been red, might have been green, but he's there.

00:02:09.840 So 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.

00:02:22.880 And it is, in effect, a satire.

00:02:26.160 It's a lot like historians of the ancient world or medieval times, where they're writing history, but it's a wonderful story.

00:02:35.460 And in Washington Irving's case, he's even poking fun at knickerbockers and all that kind of stuff.

00:02:40.900 And there is this notion of a jolly man who arrives on a sleigh and delivers presents.

00:02:48.080 So there is this modern history, and there's no doubt that those things are highly influential.

00:02:54.040 Some people think that Coca-Cola invented Santa Claus.

00:02:58.060 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.

00:03:09.220 It's part of the tradition now.

00:03:10.740 It is, and it's accrued to it.

00:03:13.120 And it's something we can point to.

00:03:14.560 It's something we can point to as a measure to see how other things get co-opted along the way.

00:03:21.840 Exactly.

00:03:22.400 You can look back at different centuries in different Anglo-Saxon parts of Europe.

00:03:26.420 You're doing these things, and the mistletoe, and how did that come about?

00:03:29.820 But a good way to look at it is by looking at how the whole Coca-Cola thing got co-opted in the Red Santa.

00:03:35.660 You can see how traditions can just get assumed that way.

00:03:38.700 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.

00:03:51.060 And then Coke added their layer to the pie as well.

00:03:55.720 And in a way, Christmas has at least become a celebration of capitalism.

00:04:00.340 It's virtuous capitalism.

00:04:03.240 Yeah, go on.

00:04:03.700 The Red is often considered to be a religious, like a clerical reference.

00:04:09.080 That's true, yeah.

00:04:10.960 Bishop, right?

00:04:12.400 Yeah, because St. Nicholas was the Bishop of Myra.

00:04:17.420 He was a historical person.

00:04:19.980 Supposedly, there's a lot of myths written about him.

00:04:22.220 He's probably a real person.

00:04:24.900 Supposedly, he was at the Council of Nicaea.

00:04:26.980 He slapped Arius in the face because he didn't accept the Trinity.

00:04:30.360 I don't know how true that is.

00:04:31.880 But yeah, he's a bishop.

00:04:32.780 So the color red maybe has something to do with it?

00:04:36.200 Yeah, it might very well have something to do with it.

00:04:38.780 And it's interesting because the alternate Santa is wearing green.

00:04:42.700 He might have been wearing green in the Thomas Nast.

00:04:45.480 We can't quite tell.

00:04:46.840 But that's also interesting in terms of the green man and also the green of Dionysus.

00:04:51.880 And the greenery is part of the winter solstice traditions in Saturnalia and Yule.

00:04:56.900 You go outside and all the greenery represents the light that survives during the decay.

00:05:00.620 This is why evergreen trees become a big thing because they stay green during the winter.

00:05:05.160 This is why the wreaths are on the houses because they're green.

00:05:08.300 So green is like the representation of life, Dionysus, the symbol of rebirth and eternal life basically.

00:05:16.740 Maybe even a final word on Satan, Inclusus, unless you had more.

00:05:20.820 But he was known for his secret gift-giving protection of children and generosity toward the poor.

00:05:28.280 Later.

00:05:29.180 Those traditions start coming about.

00:05:31.980 There's nothing that says anything about that until after the 7th to 9th century.

00:05:37.940 And 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.

00:05:50.140 It's like his own religion.

00:05:51.020 It's like the cult of St. Nicholas just springs up in Constantinople around the 7th to 9th century. 0.80

00:05:56.100 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 him and gave him a bunch of big bag of money and said, don't be a prostitute anymore and get saved.

00:06:10.800 That's literally one of the stories.

00:06:12.700 That sounds like an alibi and not a story.

00:06:15.880 It's such a Christian story.

00:06:17.100 He gave prostitutes money, and he was like, it was to prevent them from sin. 0.77

00:06:21.620 I keep telling people, Nicki Minaj at these MAGA Christian things, this is how Christianity has always been. 0.99

00:06:27.700 They want you to become a Christian if you're a prostitute. 1.00

00:06:30.400 That's the whole point of Christianity. 0.99

00:06:32.140 You're supposed to be redeemed.

00:06:33.720 I mean, that's a common backstory for nuns going back into the Middle Ages.

00:06:38.560 Oh, yeah.

00:06:39.280 Yeah.

00:06:40.400 So there's some other interesting aspects of Santa that I should mention.

00:06:44.860 We've talked about St. Nicholas, and I believe his saint day is December 9th or 10th or something like that.

00:06:50.100 So it's around the winter solstice, and you can fold it in.

00:06:54.540 So the other name of Santa we've developed is Sinterklaas.

00:07:02.120 This might be coming from the Dutch New York, Sinterklaas, Santa Claus. 0.62

00:07:06.760 But he has another name, which I never understood as a child, which is Kris Kringle.

00:07:12.220 Yep.

00:07:12.500 And Father Christmas is another one, too.

00:07:14.560 Father Christmas is another.

00:07:16.280 But where's Kris Kringle?

00:07:18.940 Like Christopher R. Kringle?

00:07:21.180 Is that his name?

00:07:21.960 No.

00:07:22.480 It's actually Kris Kindle.

00:07:25.120 So it's Christ child, Kris Kent in German.

00:07:29.800 In the sort of other Bavarian dialects, I notice this, you'll often add an L.

00:07:36.160 So Wurst becomes Wurstel.

00:07:38.340 Kris Kindle becomes Kindle.

00:07:41.260 So Kris Kringle is a corruption of Kris Child, in effect.

00:07:47.620 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.

00:07:58.680 And that's what happens with Santa.

00:08:00.220 Over time, the face of Santa changes every century that goes by until it becomes what it is today.

00:08:07.260 And you can see there's different additions happening throughout time.

00:08:11.020 Yeah.

00:08:11.540 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.

00:08:20.120 And then next thing you know, there's actually a really old Indo-European layer that might even be pre-Christian.

00:08:27.360 And 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.

00:08:39.260 And in return, God's will bless you for doing that.

00:08:41.260 In 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.

00:08:53.640 So Santa Claus, he comes in the sky with reindeer on a sled.

00:08:59.540 It's an epiphany.

00:09:00.200 And he shows up and he, if you leave him food and something to eat and something to drink, he blesses you.

00:09:08.780 It's the tradition.

00:09:09.660 It 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.

00:09:25.780 Every generation.

00:09:27.060 And they get it.

00:09:27.900 They're like, oh, we need to leave some milk and cookies for Santa Claus.

00:09:32.100 We might even need to leave something for the reindeer, like some carrots.

00:09:35.180 Just in the DNA.

00:09:36.060 It goes back to thousands of years.

00:09:37.980 Indo-European culture has always been like this.

00:09:40.420 Ovid's metamorphosis, there's a story where Mercury and Jupiter disguise themselves as humans.

00:09:48.700 They go to Phrygia during the wintertime, midwinter, where it's cold.

00:09:53.980 And they go house to house, trying to see if anyone will let them in. 0.96

00:09:57.860 And everyone's like, get the fuck out of here. 0.98

00:09:59.240 I don't know who you are. 0.99

00:10:00.000 Get out of here.

00:10:00.720 And then this poor couple, Philemon and Bacchus, lets them come in the house.

00:10:05.320 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.

00:10:15.600 And they cook the goose, and they bring out bread, and they put on this big Xenia, this hospitality show for these two strangers.

00:10:23.980 And then they start pouring the wine, and the wine won't stop pouring.

00:10:29.480 They think the wine's going to be empty, and it just keeps pouring.

00:10:32.660 And it's like a miracle.

00:10:34.280 Obvious relations to the gospel.

00:10:37.160 So we were actually reading the gospel of Mark last weekend.

00:10:40.160 You have this miracle of the multiplication of loaves and—

00:10:43.460 Multiplication of loaves.

00:10:44.440 And the wedding at Cana is celebrated on January 6th by the Orthodox Church.

00:10:49.480 Boom.

00:10:50.340 So also, I hear a little echo of there's no room at the inn as well.

00:10:55.580 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.

00:11:04.200 But that notion of there no one will take them, everyone's being selfish, they're not honoring hospitality, and they end up in a manger.

00:11:12.100 You hear a little echo of that in that story of—was it Mercury and Apollo who are doing that, or?

00:11:18.060 Yes, Mercury and Jupiter.

00:11:20.560 Mercury and Jupiter, excuse me, yeah.

00:11:22.540 Who are the weary travelers waiting for some comfort.

00:11:25.840 But you're right.

00:11:26.240 The birth of Jesus has that same narrative in Matthew, where at the inn, they didn't have any rooms left, so they had to go to the manger.

00:11:32.640 Right.

00:11:32.840 But the myth there is that you don't know who's a god and who's not a god, essentially.

00:11:37.080 You're obligated to be respectful and humble to whoever comes to your door.

00:11:42.080 And you can see how the kids think it's for Santa Claus.

00:11:45.000 They're like, you leave out the milk and cookies, you don't know if Santa's going to be there or not.

00:11:48.820 You're not going to—you don't know for sure, but you're supposed to do it.

00:11:51.580 It's part of the tradition.

00:11:53.140 Yeah.

00:11:53.440 Yeah, Richard pointed out a possible—which I found intriguing—a possible influence of Santa Claus, and which one that is not usually made.

00:12:03.800 People point to Odin, and I think that's a clear sort of inspiration.

00:12:07.500 Oh, yeah.

00:12:07.860 I think so, too.

00:12:08.440 He's also—yeah, he doesn't have the slave reindeer, but he has a—I can't remember which animal.

00:12:13.820 A slepnir, an eight-legged horse.

00:12:16.080 Oh, that's right.

00:12:16.920 The eight—yeah.

00:12:17.580 Yeah, so eight reindeer, eight-legged horse.

00:12:19.800 That seems like a—

00:12:21.040 Yeah, he appears like an epiphany style with that horse.

00:12:24.200 So I can definitely see how that could be the iconography there.

00:12:28.080 Thor similarly has a chariot that's drawn by two goats, for example.

00:12:32.560 And these are all like sort of celestial chariots being drawn through the sky and so forth.

00:12:36.920 So very similar to the sleigh.

00:12:39.780 Obviously, Sol Invictus has that, too.

00:12:41.980 Yeah, Richard pointed to one that I hadn't thought of or hadn't seen anyone else point to,

00:12:46.940 but the idea that he might have a kind of association with Hephaestus or Vulcan, because he's associated with a heart.

00:12:53.160 He emerges from the fireplace, essentially.

00:12:56.080 Yeah.

00:12:56.260 Yes, you know, eventually he will develop this sort of red garb. 0.93

00:12:59.700 So it almost does seem like he's a fire god.

00:13:03.100 He's a craftsman.

00:13:04.200 He's a maker of toys and stuff.

00:13:06.140 Oh, exactly.

00:13:06.960 That's what I was thinking.

00:13:08.140 When I think of Santa, I almost think of Albrecht in, like, Wagner's Ring Cycle,

00:13:12.560 where he's down there with all these forced slaving away, forcing people to make toys.

00:13:17.960 And if I get down—

00:13:18.700 The dwarves.

00:13:19.160 He's surrounded by dactyls or dwarves. 1.00

00:13:23.380 Or the dactyls in Greek religion.

00:13:25.780 So, again, there seems to be this conflation of, like, eight different traditions.

00:13:33.280 If I could just finish this point, though, Richard, as far as Odin is concerned, the term elf comes from Norse mythology, right?

00:13:40.080 Sure.

00:13:40.380 The elf is a Norse being, ultimately.

00:13:43.300 So the fact that he's worked up and inherited by—

00:13:46.160 You're already—as soon as you adopt the word elf, you're adopting Norse mythology.

00:13:50.880 Right.

00:13:51.140 That's it.

00:13:51.540 It's not Christian anymore. 1.00

00:13:53.200 There's no one else in the Bible.

00:13:54.860 And 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,

00:14:05.580 this idea that Norse myth represents, to some extent, Christian rock, like a kind of Christian rock, right?

00:14:12.980 So, in other words, there's all these kind of veiled references in Norse mythology to Christianity.

00:14:18.860 And cheap among them, of course, we have the hanging god with Odin hanging on the tree, as Jesus is hanging on the tree.

00:14:24.980 The common sort of conventional view is that it's going in the other direction.

00:14:28.100 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.

00:14:37.240 We're arguing that there is essentially messaging that is Christian in Norse mythology.

00:14:43.400 But one example of this would be Baldr, right?

00:14:46.580 And Baldr is this god who dies and he's slain by the mistletoe.

00:14:50.720 And so the mistletoe, of course, becomes an important feature of the imagery of rather Christmas.

00:15:00.520 If you're caught under the mistletoe with a woman, you kiss the woman and so forth. 0.98

00:15:05.220 We're all familiar with this idea of the mistletoe.

00:15:07.320 The mistletoe, if I'm remembering the myth correctly, and either Neil or Richard can correct me on this,

00:15:13.720 but the mistletoe is the one thing, essentially, that can harm Baldr.

00:15:19.300 You end up leading to his death.

00:15:21.500 It's the one thing that doesn't swear the oath to protect Baldr.

00:15:25.520 His immortality, yeah.

00:15:26.680 Yeah.

00:15:27.380 And so it ends up, Loki, there's a blind god, a hoarder or something like that.

00:15:32.660 I can't remember the guy's name.

00:15:33.740 But 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.

00:15:44.080 They're throwing objects at him because he's invulnerable and they're, like, making light of the fact that he's indestructible.

00:15:50.340 So Loki sneaks the mistletoe into the hand of this blind god. 0.81

00:15:56.260 And we can imagine there's all kinds of interesting symbolism going on there.

00:15:59.640 And the blind god throws the mistletoe and kills Baldr.

00:16:04.840 And Baldr, in my mind, is a kind of clear Christ figure.

00:16:08.300 He's a kind of, he's coded Jesus, essentially.

00:16:11.380 He's the son of Odin.

00:16:12.200 Yeah.

00:16:12.780 After the destruction of all the gods, after Ragnarok, Baldr returns.

00:16:17.920 And it does seem, essentially, about that.

00:16:21.480 Importantly, though, Odin has to perform the Katavasis, the descent down into the underworld.

00:16:29.640 And then he has to go down there and talk to the witches and then work a deal out.

00:16:35.200 And then he was able to do the Anabasis and rise up.

00:16:39.100 Baldr can return then.

00:16:40.600 This is not my wheelhouse, but I do know that the tradition is that he does have to descend to hell as well.

00:16:47.120 This is huge in Indo-European traditions, once again.

00:16:52.180 Odysseus does this.

00:16:53.480 Hercules does this.

00:16:54.420 Dionysus does this.

00:16:55.720 The descent into the underworld and the return by the savior.

00:16:59.500 It's just such a common motif.

00:17:01.680 And Baldr is one of the gods that does this.

00:17:03.980 Baldr and Odin, I should say.

00:17:05.520 Odin is the one that goes down.

00:17:06.680 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.

00:17:21.960 On a case-by-case basis, of course.

00:17:24.240 And remember how much Jewish tradition borrows from Greek and Persian thought, too.

00:17:29.900 So you're going to have a mixture of things that come from both sides and back and forth.

00:17:36.260 Of course.

00:17:36.940 It's going to get messy.

00:17:38.100 So there are notions of descending to the underworld and rising again, obviously before Christ.

00:17:43.280 He's an Adonis who goes to the underworld and falls in love.

00:17:48.340 Or Persephone falls in love with him.

00:17:49.920 Then he returns to Venus and back again.

00:17:52.360 Orpheus.

00:17:53.280 Odysseus.

00:17:54.060 Yeah.

00:17:54.480 This goes to the underworld and speaks with Achilles.

00:17:57.060 So there is that tradition.

00:17:58.960 I guess what is stressed in REM is that is a kind of proto-Jewish tradition.

00:18:05.340 It's a phonic tradition in opposition to other traditions.

00:18:11.580 And so it's not just so much that it's coming from Indo-European myth.

00:18:17.180 Central.

00:18:17.660 There's a big difference there.

00:18:19.100 Yeah.

00:18:19.740 Whereas a lot of the Indo-Europeans is just an attribute.

00:18:22.000 It's just like a side story.

00:18:23.440 Whereas the Jewish side and the Orphics are like this, too.

00:18:27.040 It becomes the central thing.

00:18:28.400 And the Orphics, I think, are a great example that helped illustrate the complexity of the case that we're making.

00:18:35.780 So, for example, Orpheus.

00:18:37.840 We class Orpheus as essentially a kind of Aryan figure.

00:18:40.960 He's the son of Apollo.

00:18:42.920 He's a Christian, too.

00:18:44.200 Yeah.

00:18:44.500 But he's also a dying and rising god.

00:18:46.240 So that would be an example of an Aryan dying and rising god, effectively. 1.00

00:18:49.320 But the argument there is that still the Orphic tradition itself is proto-Jewish in perspective, right?

00:18:56.760 Because it's actually—

00:18:58.140 You 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.

00:19:07.920 I love it.

00:19:08.460 I love it.

00:19:08.880 Yeah, yeah, no.

00:19:09.700 We knew you could appreciate our autism, man.

00:19:12.260 We knew that you could appreciate our autism.

00:19:14.860 But, yeah.

00:19:15.420 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 these phonic gods. 0.87

00:19:26.680 And the chief god there would be Dionysus, right?

00:19:29.460 So Dionysus, we would code as a sort of—we see as coded as proto-Jewish, effectively. 0.55

00:19:35.840 And going back to the earlier discussion where, yeah, clearly Dionysus is associated with Yahweh. 0.99

00:19:40.560 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 fuck. 1.00

00:19:49.680 He's got the— 1.00

00:19:50.680 Both.

00:19:51.280 Yeah.

00:19:51.840 Yaakov.

00:19:52.740 Yaakov is Dionysus' second name, epithet.

00:19:55.120 And Yaakov, even the name sounds similar.

00:19:58.820 It sounds like Jacob.

00:20:00.140 Are you saying it sounds like a little like Jacob?

00:20:01.820 Yeah, the—so the word Bacchus comes from Bacchus and Yacchus.

00:20:08.880 There's two different layers and different dialects.

00:20:12.240 And Yacchus survives in a lot of Greek sources.

00:20:15.020 Yacchus, the Yacchus—there's a family with the last name—but Dionysus, one of Dionysus' names is Yacchus, Yacchus.

00:20:22.780 So it's like, when you see the name Jacob in Hebrew, it's Yacchus.

00:20:27.540 And you've got to go, huh.

00:20:29.220 A lot of scholars actually do think that there might be some overlapping linguistic connection between Jacob and Dionysus.

00:20:38.940 The name Jacob.

00:20:39.860 He washes his clothes in wine.

00:20:41.940 Real quick on the Jacob thing, and I don't want to get too off track, but I just want to say something.

00:20:45.500 Because we talked about this last time I was talking to you guys.

00:20:47.500 It almost makes me think that there might be something historically—a historical kernel there.

00:20:52.880 Because why make up a story where the main character has to do this assertion of the one who actually was supposed to have the birthright?

00:21:03.940 It almost sounds like something in history really happened here where this became the legend of it.

00:21:10.020 I don't know.

00:21:10.700 I could be going off track there.

00:21:11.840 You're talking about Jacob stealing the birthright.

00:21:13.700 Jacob stealing the birthright.

00:21:14.900 It's like, where does that story come from if there's not a historical truth to it?

00:21:19.780 I think it's a game plan.

00:21:21.220 I think that they're recognizing a kind of evolutionary—

00:21:24.400 Or both.

00:21:25.560 Yeah, but it's basically a game plan, is the way that I see it.

00:21:29.640 So the parable is teaching the behavior.

00:21:31.740 It's saying our object here is to steal the birthright of the firstborn.

00:21:36.360 And the firstborn has different meanings in this context.

00:21:39.620 One of the meanings is the sort of first inhabitants of the land, the founders.

00:21:44.280 So you go to steal the birthright of the firstborn, effectively.

00:21:47.520 And so I think it's game plan, essentially, is what we're looking at.

00:21:51.640 And that's the level of consciousness and sophistication of these parables. 0.99

00:21:56.800 And that's why we're playing without a fucking game. 0.99

00:21:59.500 So we're playing football, and they actually are playing with plays. 0.99

00:22:03.480 And we're just going out there like, hey, how are they figuring out how to block us every time we do this?

00:22:08.420 Because we don't actually have a game plan.

00:22:11.320 And so that's what we're faced with.

00:22:13.180 And that points to the service.

00:22:15.020 And a lot of us don't even know that we're on their team.

00:22:17.260 We're throwing the ball on their end zone.

00:22:19.520 So it's to their credit.

00:22:21.020 I think that it shows the level of sophistication of Jews is remarkable.

00:22:26.400 And not only that, the information is communicated intergenerationally, esoterically, through parables.

00:22:34.080 They don't even have to be explicit about it.

00:22:35.820 They use this super language, a symbol language, to communicate the information, as opposed to being required to be explicit.

00:22:43.400 Because being explicit would get them in trouble, of course.

00:22:46.360 So this is a way to go under the radar.

00:22:48.740 And the genius and the ultimate sort of coup de grace is that they got us to hold the Torah as sacred.

00:22:55.620 Right?

00:22:55.980 They got us to venerate.

00:22:57.500 That's what I mean by we're throwing touchdowns in their end zone.

00:23:00.220 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.

00:23:13.320 You already gave them the W.

00:23:15.160 I don't care how much you hate them and think you're fighting against them.

00:23:18.340 They already beat you.

00:23:19.300 You're playing in their game.

00:23:20.460 You're on their team, actually.

00:23:21.440 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.

00:23:32.300 But in contemporary works of Jem, in film, for example, there will be these sort of clear kind of Christ figures.

00:23:40.900 The example that comes to my mind is E.T., right?

00:23:43.880 E.T. is a kind of obvious example.

00:23:45.340 And there's all kinds of messaging in there effectively indicating him as the extra-terrestrial epiphany, too, in the sky at the slide.

00:23:53.480 Yeah, yeah.

00:23:54.120 And 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.

00:24:01.800 And 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.

00:24:13.860 Jesus is helping us.

00:24:15.980 He's a savior.

00:24:17.180 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.

00:24:23.140 I 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.

00:24:34.720 And I think they would say Jesus played his part as our suffering messiah, but now we're waiting for the triumphant messiah.

00:24:40.700 I think that's what they would say if they were around today.

00:24:42.820 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?

00:24:50.560 So I think that essentially he's got it correct, that the Jesus in the gospel represents the dual messiah.

00:24:57.560 So he represents both aspects.

00:24:59.600 He represents the messiah been David and also the messiah been Joseph.

00:25:03.900 Sure.

00:25:04.100 So he represents, and I think that-

00:25:05.740 Second coming is the-

00:25:06.760 Yeah, and who really brings it home is this guy Price, right?

00:25:10.160 Basically, Thomas is a twin that comes back, and it's like a fake resurrection, essentially.

00:25:15.320 And so Thomas is the twin that comes back, and he's also given the name Judas.

00:25:19.620 So he's coded Jewish, and-

00:25:22.300 There's different traditions of Thomas as the one who gets crucified and Jesus gets away scot-free.

00:25:28.620 There's the weird- that becomes part of Islamic tradition, actually. 0.98

00:25:33.060 So there's a Gnostic version of it, and there's a Muslim version of that story.

00:25:36.820 There's a lot of weird stuff with Thomas and the twin.

00:25:38.820 But the bottom line being that there are two Jesuses, and one Joseph ben Messiah is essentially coded Gentile. 0.90

00:25:45.460 So you got Judas, and Jesus is like Israel, the greater Israel, because he's in the Galilee, the north. 0.86

00:25:51.820 The northern kingdom is called Israel.

00:25:53.880 And then Judas is the kingdom of Jerusalem, the south, and it's Judah. 0.58

00:25:58.520 And he's a betrayer, and he's greedy, and he's the temple.

00:26:02.820 That's what the bank is, basically. 0.96

00:26:04.100 That's where all the money is kept.

00:26:05.500 So that's what Judas is. 0.75

00:26:06.640 And in the Old Testament, Joseph is the one who gets sold by his brothers.

00:26:12.220 Jesus is the son of Joseph.

00:26:13.780 And guess who's the one who comes up with the idea to sell him to the Ishmaelites? 1.00

00:26:18.860 Judah, for 20 shekels.

00:26:21.240 Judah takes 20 shekels and goes, we're going to sell Joseph down to these Ishmaelites, and then that's it. 0.91

00:26:27.380 We'll get rid of him, and our father won't love him more than us anymore.

00:26:30.220 So there's this jealousy aspect.

00:26:31.700 And it's totally what's happening in the New Testament is a rewriting of Judas, Judah, as Judas.

00:26:39.640 By the way, it's the same word in Greek.

00:26:41.880 If you're a Greek Septuagint, his name's not Judah.

00:26:44.220 It's Judas.

00:26:44.980 It is Judas.

00:26:45.660 It's the same person.

00:26:46.380 It means Judah.

00:26:46.980 Judas means Judah. 0.86

00:26:48.760 Judas Hebrew. 0.98

00:26:49.640 Judas is Greek. 0.98

00:26:50.300 That's the difference.

00:26:51.180 Yeah, no, that's exactly the case.

00:26:52.640 We've actually gone over that in our classes.

00:26:55.040 And yeah, Joseph is sold into slavery.

00:26:58.020 And Joseph is the one who is coded Gentile, essentially. 0.91

00:27:01.840 He's the one of the tribe of God.

00:27:03.480 Code of many colors.

00:27:04.920 Yeah.

00:27:05.300 And he's the non-Judean, essentially, that the other brothers become jealous of, effectively.

00:27:11.760 Yeah, he's a different mom, too.

00:27:13.520 There's a lot of weird stuff going on with Joseph.

00:27:15.820 He's a proto-Jesus.

00:27:17.020 And then when he goes down to Egypt, it's like a catabasis.

00:27:20.520 It's a descent into the underworld.

00:27:22.420 He goes into a dungeon.

00:27:23.980 He's basically dead.

00:27:25.300 He's nothing.

00:27:26.040 He's in a dungeon.

00:27:26.840 He's dead.

00:27:27.740 And then he has a dream about grapevines and bread, which has a Eucharistic imagery going on.

00:27:33.400 And then he ascends from the dungeon and becomes the second most powerful man in Egypt next to Pharaoh.

00:27:39.680 So then he's the second right-hand of the God the Father.

00:27:44.320 Jesus ascends to the throne where he's the second God next to the God the Father.

00:27:50.000 So you can see in Joseph, everything from Jesus comes from—you can get it all in Joseph, basically.

00:27:55.960 No, I mean, that's a fascinating reading.

00:27:57.960 And also he is thrown into the pit, right?

00:28:00.720 So he is a dying and rising God in that sense, the emergence out of a pit.

00:28:04.160 And then he's also—lamb blood is smeared on the coat of many colors, right?

00:28:09.480 And not only that, Jacob literally laments for as if he was dead.

00:28:15.140 Like, he puts on the sackcloth and ashes and performs like an ancient Near Eastern moment of mourning for like a period of time.

00:28:26.560 And he's basically dead in the eyes of Jacob.

00:28:29.100 So he's a dying and rising God in that sense.

00:28:31.600 Yeah, yeah.

00:28:32.060 No, that's fascinating.

RadixJournal - January 06, 2026

The Coming of Santa

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