Part One: Keep the Yuletide Gay: Saturnalia & the Puritan War on Christmas

but we somehe did it. Yeay, Okay. I'm your host, Mario Kildroy. I'm cool people did cool stuff, and every week I tell you about cool people in history like rebels and queers and rebel queers and you know, people who dress up like animals and throw bricks at rich people's houses sometime vaguely in the name of God. With me today is my guest Garrison, Davis Garrison, how are you hi? I was excited. I was. I was really on the edge of my seat with the whole Wheel

of Death bed. I was like, oh wow, there's so many places that this could go. Yeah, it didn't It wasn't considered well ahead of time. That's all right, a metaphor in there, but the real wheel of death is just living in collapsing capitalist dystophia. That's right. And Garrison, who are you besides someone who lives in a collapsing wheel of death? Um? I write podcasts a lot of

the time for a show called it Could Happen Here. Um. I also occasionally do investigative journalism and spend a lot of my time looking at upsetting things and most importantly have really really cute cats. Yeah, yeah, I do, I do. Yeah. Okay, Well, the other voice that you've heard is Sophie, our producer. Hi, Sophie, are you excited for the break? Yeah? This is the last the last week of episodes for the year. Um, cool people to cool stuff and cools. The Meani are

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High I So Garrison. This week we're going to talk about something dear to my heart, near to my heart, whatever, it's both we're going to talk about have you ever heard of this holiday? Christmas kind of So? I grew up very putting christ in Christmas pilled. Yeah. I I

never really got to experience any like secular Christmas. Like I never once believed in Santa at all, because that was because if you re arrange Santa at Satan like, it's it's never yeah, it's I it was very like, you know, we have to read all these chapters of the Bible and will exchange gifts and stuff. But it was it was, you know, we'll we'll go to like the the Christmas themed like Nativity show, and you know,

it's it's all all all that kind of thing. Did they ever in this, in this upbringing that you had around Christmas? Did they? Did they refer to it as like a traditional way of handling Christmas? Ever, I'm just curious.

I mean they traditional in the sense of like they would they would complain about how Christmas has been like commercialized by like secular corporations and been turned into this thing about that's just about buying things now, not that they're actually against buying things, because they're still all like list Christians, but they'd be like, oh, they're they're trying to trying to just all of the malls and all of the all the big businesses are trying to distract

from the true meaning of Christmas in the traditional sense of of of being you know, in the major Well, today we're gonna talk about traditional Christmas, which is not at all what your family celebrated. It's it's not a historical We're going to talk about the War on Christmas, and not the way that we usually hear about it.

We're going to talk about the seventeen hundred year long war on Christmas, waged by people who hate fun, who have tried to sanitize and strip away all the beauty and glory and gayness and rebellion out of one of the most riotous and wonderful times of the year, the fucking winter solstice. We're going to talk about feasting and was sailing and Saturnalia, Yule Christmas, actual bona fide Christmas, and we're gonna talk to some ship on Purison's ready

for the Saturn back in Saturnalia. Yeah, I guess I don't really know enough about Saturnest. Yeah sure, yeah, yep. Okay, I'm going to start by covering a bunch of different holidays, because there are so many holidays that share this time period. And I'm not even talking about or like yeah, so

I'm not talking about that stuff. I'm talking about stuff within the sort of Christian origin, so like you'le tide greetings and we're like kind of in that, all right, all right, yeah, And I want to start with the like weirdly most earnest one that I'm excited about, and St. Lucy's Day. You heard of St. Lucy's Day? I have. I just heard about St. Lucy's Day earlier this year, but I did not look into it. I just I just saw it was the thing. I was like, oh,

that's not St. Nicholas. I wonder who that is? And then I continued on in my day fair enough that is, uh, I am new to St. Lucy's Day. So okay, you know how any given group of people can be oppressors or oppressed pretty much just based on their relationship to power. Yeah that is yeah, I mean, huh so. The Christians were oppressed for a while, like a long time ago, for about two thousand years ago until the early three hundreds, you know, when they became a whatever. The opposite of

oppressed is. I'm not sure you saying there's still not the most persecuted religion on the planet, because that's because that's what I was taught as well. Oh interesting, No, I genuinely do not believe. So while they were actually being oppressed, they did all the stuff they should have done while being oppressed, which is fight against that oppression. And the early Catholics were like pretty notorious for mapping all their stuff, all their stuff on the pagan holidays. Right.

The story that usually gets told is that the crafty church was like, how do we steal stuff from the Pagans? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, And that part's sort of true. But the other thing that was happening is Catholicism in particular is famous for its syncreticism. Yeah, or syncretism or you think I would have looked up how to pronounce the most important word and what I'm talking about today. The Catholic Church shows up somewhere and it's like, you're all Catholic now, and

people are like, all right, what does that mean? And the church is like, we'll tell you in Latin. And people are like, I don't speak Latin, and the church says, non meh cury est, which is my my Latin joke. It means, that's not my problem. Very funny. Yeah, thank you. Um, I don't speak Latin either, I yeah, me neither. Ye. So you know, it's the it's the fucking forever ago times.

People don't have radio yet. So the pope in the Church and even the Roman Empire of a little bit of a problem with power projection and that they can conquer places, but communication is so slow that places continue to have a decent bit of autonomy. Um, this is an oversimplification, but you get syncretics. Syncreticism based based on this ship that's halfway Catholic and halfway whatever else people

already had going on. So people kept celebrating their holidays and the Church was left with little choice but to accept those holidays and kind of do the best it could to rebrand them. But in many ways and That's the sort of central argument I'm gonna make today, is that people just kept doing the things that they were doing for thousands of years and just being like, okay, it's Christian now, yeah, now they got told that there's like some jesusy wrapping over top of something that that

predates all of that. Yeah, yeah, And as long as they can still cross dress and like bring trees inside and demand ship from rich people, what do they care? And you know, the most famous like the examples of this we can see is like Easter is really obviously fertility spring, like yes, spring thing. There's nothing to do with Jesus. It's about eggs for fox sake, and like bunnies. So Christmas happening around Solstice is not a coincidence. But

there's another not a coincidence Catholic winter Solstice celebration. And this one was like in some places and specifically in Scandinavia, it's even more explicitly not a coincidence. That is a Solstice thing because it's a celebration of light. And the reason Catholics ended up with more than one Solstice holiday is because of the calendar funk up. So like one of them is December thirteen. One of them is December twenty, and it's because of weird Julian Gregory and ship that's

totally over my head, got it. The Feast of St. Lucia. St. Lucy's Day especially popular in Scandinavia for some obvious reason. Uh, Like, it's dark there. It happens on December, and it's a celebration of light, and it's the story of a martyr Lucia. But it's also the story of mutual aid done at a terrible risk, which is why I like it and also not wanting to marry some asshole you don't like. I'm gonna quote a zine by my friend Renna Ry,

who has been on this podcast before. St lucy official hagiography or a Catholic saint biography is violent and sort of boring. In brief, she was a Christian living in the late two when Rome had a policy of rounding up and executing members of this at that time fringe religious movement. When she was forced to marry this high up Roman government dude, Lucy tore out her own eyes to prevent the wedding. In the midst of all of this, Lucy's Christianity was discovered and she was executed in this

horrible way. I won't go into and became a martyr, but I find Lucy's death to be way less interesting than her life as a well off Greek Sicilian Greeks ruled the island before Romans did. She had resources and used them to support fellow Christians and hiding in the catacombs beneath her hometown of Syracusa, sneaking out of her house at night, she brought them food and to keep

her hands free to carry provisions. She lit the path through the catacombs by wearing a crown of candles on her head, which is just an image I like because it's really fucking metal. Yeah, And to quote a little bit more from that z and the Zene is called on St. Lucy, the Solstice and mutual Aid. The story doesn't begin with a martyr plucking out her own eyes or a saint sending a ship full of grained with starving city, which is a later part of the whole

thing that I'm not going to go into. It starts with a simpler miracle, a young girl walking through catacombs beneath an occupied city, her arms full of emmer loaves, cheap wine, garam and oranges. The limestone path lit by candles bound to her head. She moves slowly, careful not to drop her load or cry out when hot wax strips on her shoulders. Roman centuries guard Syracusa and are always listening. At the end of maze of tunnels is an alcove where herodics worshippers of a tripart god, a

sort of Orpheus, have made a home. They reached for her bundles, stuffed bits of bread into their mouth, take swigs of wine, say bless you, bless you daughter, and a lot of the rest of her story, basically all of our story. It's buried under so much fucking I I Am a Catholic saint thing that it's impossible to tell what actually happened. Right. She was like versions where she lost her eyes that got added a thousand years later. The earlier ones don't talk about her losing her eyes.

Wren makes the argument that maybe the whole thing about a suitor and all that stuff is beside the point, and it was actually just the mutual aig ship that matters. So that's that's the setting, the scene that's going to be the one of the Solstice days. I mean, I have so much more sympathy for this era of Christianity, especially the people who are kind of more on the gnostic side of it at this point. Yeah, before the

before the Catholics like teamed up with the state. Yeah, because like all of this type of stuff that you're talking about sounds way more cool and metal. It's like it's been it's people trying to like it's it's it's it's doing way more interesting like mysticism that's divorced from a lot of the like um dogmatic practices that were

that were common at the times. People trying to sort through trying to trying to build stories about about like spiritual development in a world that is currently under threat of empire, and that that's why they're trying to find new ways to build other forms of spirituality. And it's it's so much it's so much cooler. And then, as as is often the case, the people then once they

gained power, became the oppressors themselves. Yep, yep. No that this is the fact that you come from a conservative Christian background and then also are really into narcissism and ship was like why I really wanted you to be on this sweet. So there's another holiday that the Christians celebrate around the same time of year. It's that one that again you've you've heard of many people are familiar with. It's called Christmas, and the canonical story of Christmas goes

something like this. There was this couple Mary and Joseph. They weren't fucking for whatever reason. Maybe Joseph was gay and was keeping Merry around to be his beard. I think supposedly God was like, hey, don't fuck your wife until she has a son. I don't think too hard about this anyway. One night, an angel shows up visits Mary. He's probably a series of spinning, concentric rings or something like one can help. Yeah, and he's like, this is

totally chill, don't don't freak out. Let's let's do it. And Mary is like, yeah, let's do it. And then, I mean, I would if if a series of concentric eyeball rings showed up at my bedroom at three a m. I know what I would do immediately. But yeah, I mean, like, there's to be at least seventeen eyes or I'm not interested. Yeah, I mean, and thankfully there is there is eyes eyes within eyes. So I think I think the bases are are going to be covered. Yeah, I I think much

like Mary, we were good. That's enough, right, And she gets pregnant. Joseph is like, sweet, this is totally cool with me. And then at the end of December in the Manger, they give birth to a kid who was pretty much guaranteed to be a transman since um, the kid's name is Jesus Christ, but he has no dad so therefore he has no Y chromosome, so he's sex to say nothing of course about Eve, who was cloned from Adam and is there for x Y. So so true. Yeah,

this is what's really important, you know. There's also so like there is this version of the story that that we're else that is often taught in church, but some people in church would also teach a slightly different version of the story in which we don't actually know when

Jesus was born. Oh yeah, but the date of December comes comes from the comes from the magicians coming to visit Jesus, and they mapped out where he would be based on like star charts and and and that, and that led them to figure out where he would be on December. So like years later, the magicians came with gifts. They came on December, which is then why we give

gifts on Christmas. That that is the other story that they were that was told, which is weird because it's not only including like astrology, it's also including like actual magicians, which most most ambodied Christianity doesn't really like to talk about. Yeah, the fact that three sorcerers are like an important part of the Jesus story is really interesting. It's so weird and in the like more medieval Christmas that we're gonna

be talking about. The Maji show up twelve days later as the twelve Days of Christmas and it's called Epiphany. It's January six. And then there's like I read like five different versions of how they came up with December twenty five. I didn't hear that one. That one's really interesting. It doesn't say anywhere in the Bible when no, this is this is pure pure speculation. Yeah, okay, So our guy Jesus, he grows up to be really important, he gets murdered by the state, like actually a lot of

our heroes. I'm not really trying to pain him as a cool people that whatever. He's fun and complicated. I'm not opening that. I've opened a lot of cans of worms right now, but I'm not opening that one. People celebrate his birthday by buying PlayStations or whatever and then getting really mad about living in a multicultural society where not everyone believes in Santa Claus who is totally not aware goat from Finland. But we'll talk about that later.

Based So that's the story of Christmas. It's boring. Let's tell a better one. Christianity's whole claim to fame is that it's not paganism. Like they pretty much defined paganism as like not us, right, that is like what it means to be pagan in a lot of ways. But Christianity, especially Catholicism, is so fucking pagan. It's extremely pagan, and that's kind of the main thing it has going for it from my point of view as a you know, folk Catholic or lapsed Catholic, whatever the funk I am.

There's blood sacrifice, there's blood drinking, there's cannibalism. There's tons of gods with shrines that you can go around and pray to, like you're in Skyrim visiting DeAndre Trent is like transmutation of it's it's weird stuff. Yeah. You can walk around with a crown of thorns. You can walk around with a crown of candles. You can weave branches into wreaths, you can decorate trees, you can cross stress, you can carry a horse skull around. You can demand

rich people give you ship. You can get drunk and accost the aforementioned rich people. Um, lots of stuff. You

can do. Christmas, nowhere in the Bible doesn't mention jesus birthday, and the fourth century the Church was like, let's say it's winter solstice nine months after spring equinox, which was when he was conceived, because the angel and Mary got dirty during the fertility rites, which is like again, if if if you're looking at this from like a from like an anthropological standpoint or like a standpoint of like pagan folk rituals, you're like, yeah, that obviously makes sense.

There's a reason why the story is told in this way. Yeah, no, totally. And let's have our God be born on the exact day that the sun begins to return to the world, because truly not pagan and this isn't also the holy day of soul in Victus, which was declared twenty five years earlier or twenty six years earlier or something. Jesus totally isn't just another Sun god, Nope, son Sun Sun God,

son of God anyway. Yeah, yeah, so December twenty five had or rather this I think is specifically December twenty five. I should have put this in my notes. I've spent so long reading a million different fucking holidays and it got all confused. Uh, the holy day of Soul in Victus, which is the unconquered Son, which is the official religion of Rome before Christianity took over, but not by a

long time. So Soul in Victus is fucking weird. Um, And most of the people I know who are like most of the people I read about who're into Soul Invictus or not. Like, if you meet someone who's like, man, you know what rules like Imperial Rome, you're not meeting a good person. Red red flag. Yeah, So it would be too easy to say Christmas is just the continued celebration of Soul in Victus. It wouldn't really be true.

The a lot of arguments happening about how the worship of Soul and Rome, which was sort of predate soul Invictus or doesn't. There's like lots of fucking arguments you can get into. But specifically Christmas revelers took more from other traditions, specifically medieval Christmas, which is my favorite. Christmas took a lot from saturn Alia. Yes, so let's talk about saturn Alia. Saturn was a god of time and abundance and agriculture and liberation and a bunch of other ship.

Roman gods had very expansive portfolios. It was very impressive. They do seem to collect a lot of like I don't like magic cars, Like they have a really strong hand, you know. Yeah, um Rome was around for a long time. Rome is still around, but like ancient Rome as a sort of imperial force around for a long time. And before there was the Feast of Soul in Victus, there was saturn Alia. It was a week long festival centered on winter solstice. And there's not like a specific pamphlet.

Historians have found that's like in Latin and it's like how to celebrate Saturnalia. Instead, people have had to cobble together the best that people can understand, and so it's probably like conflating a lot of different times because this was celebrated for a very long time. But Saturnalia absolutely happened, and we know some stuff about it, and it's fucking interesting. For a week, masters served their slaves and every which is this role reversal thing that was going to come

up again and again. Everyone wore bright, tacky clothes against the style at the time. Everyone got free speech for a hot minute, so everyone basically told their bosses and their masters and ship what was up. People gambled, which wasn't normally allowed. They used coins and nuts for their gambling, and they gave everyone presence. The festivities were presided over by the Lord of Saturnalia, which was decided by drawing lots.

Everyone got together and drew a lot. If you won or lost, depending on how you looked at it and depending on how anthropologists are interpreting this particular thing, you become king for the week. You're the King of Saturnalia. You're not actually really in charge, although everyone has to do what you say. It's but you're in charge of sewing chaos. You give commands everyone has to follow, and yeah, I'd be like, I don't know. Everyone stand on their

head and run around and do whatever weird? Should I come up with a lot of pressure actually to be the the Lord of Saturnalia, you'd be like, I have to be the most hedonistic that anyone has ever been. I have to plan to be the most chaotic thing, which is it's challenging. It's it's it is. It can be challenging to plan to plan out chaos because chaos is often spontaneous. Yeah. Do you know what else is chaotic and disruptive of our narrative? Oh? Is it capitalism?

Trying to convince you to buy things? It is um in this very well fitting here, learn about some ship you can buy while I complain about what happened to traditional Christmas, which is supposed to be about chaos, not Christ and not well presence. Yes, actually maybe it is a return to traditional Christmas. Who's to know? Return with a V. Yeah, here's some ads and we are back, and I don't get the reference. Return with a V. Oh, I'm just I'm just doing a just a small Yeah.

I was like, I was like, you're you're doing some light fascism right there, like the Roman, like when you like carve it into stone and like to use a V instead of a you got it. I'm I'm aware of contemporary politics and how they refer to ancient things. That's literally my job is ancient ings. That's true too. So there's also human sacrifice, which is fairly chaotic, I will say, because like chaos is not inherently good or bad, right, No,

chaos is beyond pastic like leading. So yeah, thanks, thanks, So the exact type of human sacrifices subject to debate. Dead gladiators were definitely offered up to the god's saturn, and I feel like that's like halfway cheating in terms of human sacrifice because the guy is dead already, right, But yeah, also at the same time, he died because you had a being a gladia Yeah yeah, yeah, which the whole gladiator thing whatever, I'm not gonna do a

total tangent on It's way different and more interesting. You think, it's not just two people go into a death pit and one person leaves. It's not beyond thunderdome gladiators actually like often survived and lived fairly long lives, and people didn't die every time because it was this fucking sporting event that happened for hundreds of years. Like, it's more like how people play football and get horrible concussions to

shorten their lifespan. Yeah, it's like halfway between mm A fights slash professional football and what we conceive of as gladiator fights. I feel like it's the actual gladiator fights. Got it. But people did die and probably more during Saturnalia for some because they needed some dead people get offered up to the god. Later, the Romans were like, what if we use candles as representatives of human life

and we sacrifice these candles by lighting tapers. So it's possible that the tapers part of Christmas where everyone has taper candles, It's possible that that traces back to fast advising humans. Really really makes you look at those candles differently, huh. Yeah. It's also possible that the Lord of Saturnalia, after being king for a week, was sacrificed to Saturn, which is like way more metal and full car of a story. Yeah,

what a weird few weeks that would be. Wow. I know, I know you're like, you just like go out with a bang, you know. I guess so you just you you don't care what happens because it doesn't matter for you. That would increase the chaos, yes, yeah, and uh and I this is not my favorite part because I don't think you should slit fake king's throats. Um, that's what

real kings are for. Yeah. Shortly after Saturnalia was the first day of the new year Colens and Colens is actually the first day of any month, and this whole thing. You got a holiday first day of every month, but Colens. The first day of January New Year's Day was like a real big one. And Colens, there were gifts. In the northern regions of the Empire. There was cross dressing, just like a fuck ton of cross dressing. It gets

called ritual trendsvestis um unfathomably based. And this continues for thousands of years. I will just say, someone say, people are still doing it now. I know. If you want to celebrate traditional Christmas, go to a drag show that is more traditional of for Christmas. I I that is what my plans are, all right, great, and also dressing up like animals just part of it, all part of Colens.

This goes in great because I'm going to a dreg show dressed up as cat will because I'm going to a Batman Returns themed drag show, which is as we know, the best Christmas movie, so I will be both both both cross dressing and where it could animal costume true Colenn's spirit right there, Michelle Piper is really a Clen's icon. Absolutely do you know? And this? Do you know who that is? Margaret? Yes, as an actress who is in

movies that were around when I was younger. Yeah, I'm I couldn't pick her out of a lineup or tell you what movies she's in. Besides, apparently she's Catwoman. Hilarious. And in my defense, I am both name blind and face blind. I pretty much keep track of everyone based on their haircut and if they could change their haircut, they're different people. Yeah. So sometimes when I write my scripts, I forget to put in names because I'm like, no,

one don't remember a name. It's a meaningless signifier. Why would you names? It's just red to both flaps, It doesn't matter. Yeah. Uh, this is the closest I can find to a true origin of Christmas is Saturnalia. There's other stuff and we're gonna get to it. We're gonna get to Yule in a second. But celebrating the darkest time of the year with chaos, revelry, and roll reversal. So let's talk about more of that. Let's talk about Yule.

So Christmas barrows a lot from Saturnalia, but Christmas gets called Yule sometimes, right, And that's the stuff of Germanic paganism. We don't know a ton about Yule as it was actually celebrated because a lot of Germanic pagan information was filtered through Christian observers, which is really interesting. For this is my main one of my main arguments that used against like the Nazi Germanic pagan types is that I'm like, oh, you like specifically think all of these specific things that

are very similar to Christianity. That's totally not because a Christian monk told you that a single man was the most important fucking anyway, whatever. What is important is that we're going too adds again again. Just it's really important that we get to add breaks in this episode. That's what's important in life. So here's here's some of them, and we're back full. It was a twelve day celebration. Uh. The name Yule literally means Odin um oh I did

I did? I did not put that together? Yeah. One of Odin's many names is j O L with some marks over it. Yeah, it's pronounced basically, you'll from Old Norse and you will the big old feast. There's ale, there's sacrifice, including probably human sacrifice at various points. Um, there's a lot of stories about prisoners of war from Rome being human sacrifice. People can get a fun arguments

about this stuff. Um, I'm like more worried about offending the Norwee Boos than the Christians in terms of like people who are going to get up in my mentions about this ship. But and when they would do these sacrifices um called block I think was the Germanic pagan style of sacrifice. You intentionally cut the throat so that arterial blood goes all over everyone in the audience. And so then they would sit down a feast and this

I know more about them sacrificing animals. But then they like sacrifice the animal and then they eat the animal, which doesn't seem like a sacrifice. Yeah, that's that's that's like, that's like preparing it for slaughter to like eat, yeah, and be like I don't know, like yeah, I don't know, it doesn't seem like you're given up much. If I'm like I've I'm prepared to sacrifice a lot by continuing to have what I have. I'll have it in your name,

dear all Father. But you know whatever, I'm who am I to tell them that they're doing their sacrifice wrong. They sit down and eat feasts covered in blood, and if I had anything to say to them, they would murder me so and they would feast. The burning of the Yule log comes from this tradition, and the Yule tree, the Christmas tree, you'll be shocked to know comes from Yule. Really, it's it's not a representative of the Tree of life, like what I learned. Oh yeah, no it is not.

I mean, it could be many things, uh, but yeah, no, yeah, no, it's about like basically like if you're cold, they're cold, bring them in about like tree spirits. That's that's great, But um, that's actually that's actually pretty rad. Yeah, because I actually assumed that the bringing the tree inside was like a when it became a Christmas tree, because it seems like a very modern, destructive consumers thing to like cut down a living tree and put it in your

house and watch it slowly rot. But they bringing the tree inside to decorate was was often part of it. And they would also like decorate their houses like branches and wreaths and ship and they would decorate trees with images and icons of everything that they wanted to bring in with the new year. So it wasn't even just specifically like oh, we want the tree to look pretty,

but like like it in my house. We you know, decorate the tree with all of these different Christmas ornaments that are very like specific and particular in all of memories associate with them. That is very fucking traditional Yule Christmas. And also deck rating the tree with nuts as probably a fertility thing. Everything was a fertility thing that obsessed

with sex. What's wrong with these people? One problem with researching anything pagan is that there's a ton of fake history around and or not even like fake history, but like incorrect information or like best guesses that get presented as fact. And I mean, I'm literally doing my best guess is presented with as fact. But I'm trying to be aware of that. There's this persistent rumor, and I'm wondering if you've heard this rumor that the decorating of

trees and Pagan times was like and trails of sacrifice. No, I've not heard that, but I mean I could, I could see how you would be like Christmas Garland. It's like hanging intestines around the tree. Yeah, I can't find any information besides like lots of people talking about that rumor. No one's like this is a true thing. Well, there are some things, but they're on like really, they're like on websites that might as well be geo cities with

like animated gifts of candles or whatever. You know, it's completely possible. I don't fucking know, but candles and nuts and fruits and icons and shipped on the tree. Absolutely, And like Colens in Rome, ull came with men dressing like women, women dressing like men, and all everyone dressing up like animals. Because as soon as you have a moment where you like drop social norms, everyone's like fuck

yeah timed to cross dress and that rules. The dressing like animals was like probably a little bit less like modern furry culture and a little bit more like I'm a spooky ghost. Here's the skull of an animal or whatever. Yeah, it's kind of more more more in line with some of our current Halloween stuff. Yeah. Absolutely, there's actually a lot of weird overlap. We're gonna get to a sailing later. There's a lot of overlap between Halloween and Christmas and

all of these like chaos traditions. They basically kind of split out the chaos parts of Christmas and gave it to how Loween. Also, both Collens and Yule had leaving food out for the deities, I mean, Santa Claus whatever the angles like of the Anglo Saxons called the main knight of Yule Mother's Night, only they called it in English, sort of English. And the food was left out for the Hungry Mother spirits because they just wanted to be medalist.

Fuck right, And I'm really into this, especially since I'm pretty sure it was my mom who left eight the cookies we left out for Santa Hungry Mother. Missiletoe may or may not have come from Yule specifically, it wasn't a Christmas thing until the eighteenth century. The missiletoe got like added either back in or added in for the first time. But missiletoe is pagan as fuck. The white berries are the semen of the gods. Alrighty then, okay, it was like everyone who's like doing something else will

into this episode. Is like everyone which is interesting because they're poisonous as fuck, you know, you know. So Nope, not gonna make too easy, too easy, too easy of jokes to make not doing it. Okay, Well I was gonna say, it's a note to self about don't go down on God's Oh ah see, I can't. I can't. I cannot support that though. Sorry, you're willing to You're willing to risk the Yeah, the poison. Yeah, here's here's like,

as a matter of fact, that's what I'm doing after this. No, this like a series of concentric eye rings shows up in the background on the Gears screen, mistletoe garlands everywhere. Amazing. Um. But yeah, and this is like, how so is this incredibly potent fertility symbol the missiletoe because it's like the Seman tree or whatever. Um. And so this is how powerful syncretism is because it said, the fucking eighteenth century and people are still adding new fertility rights into Christmas ship.

This wasn't even one that like held on the whole time. This was like in the eighteenth century people were like, you want to you want to bring that which ship back into this and everyone's like yeah, I do. Like, let's make out under the fucking under God's semen um. Another thing that comes from le so Odin is one of the central figures of Yule because it's literally named after him, and Yule is famed for the Wild Hunt, and the Wild Hunt is found in a ton of cultures.

I really like the Wild Hunt, especially the Canadian two thousand nine film called The Wild Hunt. I watched that. It's a large gone wrong movie. Oh, I feel like you. We have talked. We have talked about this before. Yeah, I've tried to make everyone watch it. We almost watched this, and instead we watched night Writers, Night Writers, which was not a bad choice. Writers thing. Again, Robert will hear us and then bring it up in every conversation for

at least two months. We don't okay, we don't need this. Well, the movie The Wild Hunt. A lot of my LARPer friends don't like it because they don't like any Larpe gone wrong movie. But um, I enjoyed it anyway. The Wild Hunt is this thing that's found through a ton of cultures. It is this like ghostly hunt through the heavens. Sometimes it's led by Odin. Sometimes it's led like hunters

or the ghosts of the dead. It's in like it's not always led by Odin, right, because it's a ton of cultures and there's just like pale riders and just all this ship is like really fucking common. It's this thing that people fucking see and they either see it in the woods on the ground or they see it in the fucking sky in the heavens, and then they

like attribute all this foclore to it. And I'm really interested in it because I've spent a lot of time living alone in the woods and sometimes at night you hear the Wildest Ship, and I'm just like, like, I have a night where I was like convinced I heard the Wild Hunt. I might have been sleep paralyzed. A lot of my understanding of mythology comes from the fact that I suffer from sleep paralysis. I mean, yeah, because that's that's that that makes sense anyway. Sometimes the Wild

Hunt abducts people. Sometimes it's an omen being like you see the Wild Hunt, you're gonna die. I didn't die, to my knowledge. There's versions of it all over the place, and Santa Santa riding around in the sky bass the fucking Wild Hunt. I mean that that's that's super interesting because like like this this, this, this, this idea of like the wild Hunt, right, some of that in a folklore sense. Has the modern version of that would be

like alien abductions. Oh yeah, right, Like that's kind of like the that's kind of like the high strangeness idea of like there's been these types of stories and that that are that are either like referencing some type of hallucination or some type of like dream state that we enter to sometimes and it always filters through whatever stage our culture is in. So sometimes it's stuff like this in the wild Huse. Sometimes it's more like sci Fi

with the with like the little gray aliens. Sometimes it's you know, a weird sleep paralysis demon coming into your room and transporting you to to another place. There's like always always like slightly different versions of it. No, it's I like that, I really like that. Um. Alien abduction is the new Santa I mean the new Wild Hunt. And then Santa himself is a mixed match of a ton of different ship and a bunch of different European cultures,

was sort of claim Santa Um. But for my money, Santa Claus is a mix of old St Nick and this finished creature Julapuki, the Christmas goat who was a pre Christian figure, and he's basically aware goat. Sophie, have you've heard of You've heard of this creature? I have not. Oh, gare you'll like this? Yeah, I've been like I've been like Crampus pilled for a long time. But so, yeah, he's this like man who turns into part goat part

man sometimes. So he's a fucking wear goat and he wears red robes like lined with white fur and rides around in a sleigh pulled by reindeer and scares kids. Oh really, huh curious? What what? What does that remind me of? Yeah? So Santa Claus is a fucking wear goat. Sometimes he's an invisible spirit who helps bring in the

new year by helping the light return. It's like worth noting here that Finland has its own pagan traditions, um several different ones, the different Finnish tribes of different religions and pagan cultures that are separate from like the Germanic pagan traditions and also separate from the Slavic traditions closer to the Slavic ones as far as I understand, but please don't quote me on that or please don't yell at me fins and if you do, um, just the

altbatically beat the soft and not at me, and I'll be like, hey, I know what those words mean. And then if you yell any other words, I won't understand them, so oh yeah, and then like St. Nicholas, the whole thing with him is that, well that's the Protestants fault. I think we'll get to that later. Okay, basically everyone has Solstice holidays, usually filled with weird demons in the sky. How could you not? And now let's talk about medieval Christmas.

Just kidding. Now it's in the episode and you have to wait till Wednesday to hear about medieval Oh, I'm gonna be on the edge of my seat till Wednesday. I know. We definitely don't record these back to back. We record these when they drive to be peering, peering out of the night sky, hoping not to be taken away by a scary ghast man. I was so, I was so scared of alien abduction as a kid. Yeah,

it actually tracks magpie. Now I live alone in the woods, but I still feel like you're afraid of bilion abduction. I don't know. I like, like sometimes my friends come over and then they're like, what was that noise? And I'm like, I don't know, something outside And They're like, how does that not scare you? And I'm like, the outside makes a lot of noises. I'm in the forest.

Yeah no, But like that that the whole wild hunting is very reminiscent of the type of like forest like forest alien abductions that people talk about, and it just it it just connects connects to the overall high stranger, this idea of of you know, of of these types of of being taken to these other places that we see throughout folklore, even stuff like um ali jab being carried to heaven in like chariots of fire. Like it's

it's it's the same, it's it's the same idea. Wait, I don't know that that's just like well just like um you know there's a bad Christian if that's a Christians just multiple multiple stories in the Bible of people being being being taken up and then sometimes sometimes returned. Um Enoch being one, which is you know, resulting in stuff like the Emerald tablet. We have, we have Elijah being taking being taken up, um inside inside a chariot.

But you know it's like that's like an alien craft coming down, picking you up and taking you up into the sky. That's that is what that story is. Um, we just have different different versions of it. Let lasting now and then. I love that like lights in the hills and the skies is like a persistent part of folklore and they're just like a part of people's like lived experiences of just like what's that fucking light over there? Is just like a thing that happens when you spend

a lot of time away from cities. Cool. Okay, Well, we're gonna talk about Revelry on Wednesday, Garrison to play Harrison Davis. Do you have anything that you would like to tell our listeners? What are you plug in? What do you plug in? Well? I just wrapped an fast series that I that I I just I just trapped up a series that I wrote with my colleague James Stout about trans people living in a ranch in Rule, Colorado and how they survived in attack by fascists. So

that's that's on. It could happen here. It's a four part series. So that that just that just wrapped up. That's kind of the most recent thing that I have that I've done and I should have. I should have a very interesting article coming out soon, but I do not know when that's gonna be fully fully published. But you can if you follow me on either Twitter Instagram at Hungry about I, you will certainly certainly be alerted when when this bizarre, bizarre thing is finally is finally published.

And if anyone would like to get to know Garrison, well, please transform yourself into a series of concentric rings embedded with eyes within eyes and show up at their po box. You know, sure if if if you go through all that work and all of the transportation, then I'm I'm surely I'll probably talk to you. That is that? That's that does seem slightly impressive. Margaret, You are you have a book that is available for pre order? Correct? I do? Yeah. My goal is to always have a book available from

pre order the entire run of this show, apparently. My current book available for pre order is called Escape from Insul Island. It is a adventurous science fiction adventure novel novella. Um it's very short. You can read it in one day. If you're the kind of person who's like I like the idea of being someone who reads books, but I have a hard time paying attention to something for a long time. I highly recommend Escape from Insel Island. And if you're an in cell and you live on an island,

I highly recommend Escape from Insil Island. But also you have to stop in and in Cell first. That's oh. You could buy it by going to trink Tangled Wilderness dot org and it is available for pre order now. And Sophie, do you have anything you would like to blog? Just at cool Zone Media on Instagram and Twitter. Yeah, oh yeah, I work because this is all part of the cool Zone Media, which is cool by everyone. Cool people who did cool stuff is a production of cool

Zone Media. But more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.