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

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

Margaret talks with Garrison Davis about how the Church tried, and largely failed, to stop the wild revelry of the winter solstice.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to Wheel of Death. Every week on Wheel of Death we... No, Sophie's... I liked it! I mean, we could do it. Go for it. Okay, Wheel of Death. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and each week I tell you about cool people in history. Oh, I have to like continue the Wheel of Death thing. I can't just cut back to the...

This week on Wheel of Death we talked to you about a cool thing that is a wheel that leads to death, which is also cool. We're all strapped to. It's the cycle of time. We didn't really do it, but we somehow did it. Yay! Okay, I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, on Cool People Do Cool Stuff, and every week I tell you about cool people in history, like Rebels and Queers and Rebel Queers, and 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 really on the edge of my seat with the whole Wheel of Death bit.

I was like, oh, wow, there's so many places that this could go. Yeah, it wasn't considered well ahead of time. That's all right. There's like a metaphor in there. The real Wheel of Death is just living in a collapsing capitalist dystopia. That's right. And Garrison, who are you besides someone who lives in a collapsing Wheel of Death? I write podcasts a lot of the time for a show called It Could Happen Here. 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 week of episodes for the year. Cool people do cool stuff and cool zomini are taking time off for a little bit to... I was going to say take a break, but I really feel like nothing else is okay. No, no, it's not going to happen.

I don't want to believe it. We're not... Let's catch up on work. Every year, Robert and I are like, we're going to take time off. And then it's like, no. No, absolutely not. Yeah. But hopefully I get to pet some cool dogs and some cool cats and some cool goats and it's going to be a good time. Yay.

Our audio engineer is Ian. Our music was made by the incomparable musician Unwoman. Thank you, Ian, for editing our stuff all year. You're the greatest. We are very appreciative, Ian. Hi, Ian. 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. You're the perfect guest for this shit. I never really got to experience any secular Christmas. I never once believed in Santa at all because that was... Yeah. Because if you rearrange Santa at Satan, it's never... Yeah, it was very... We have to read all these chapters of the Bible and we'll exchange gifts and stuff.

We'll go to the Christmas-themed nativity show and it's all that kind of thing. Did they ever... In this upbringing that you had around Christmas, did they refer to it as a traditional way of handling Christmas? Ever? I'm just curious. Traditional in the sense of they would complain about how Christmas has been commercialized by secular corporations and 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 capitalist Christians. But they'd be like, oh, they're trying to...

All of the malls and all of the big businesses are trying to distract from the true meaning of Christmas in the traditional sense of being Jesus in the manger. Well, today we're going to talk about traditional Christmas, which is not at all what your family celebrated. It's not Jesus in the manger. It's completely ahistorical. 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 1700 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 wassailing and Saturnalia, Yule Christmas, actual bonafide Christmas, and we're going to talk some shit on piercings. You ready for that? The Saturn back in Saturnalia. Yeah. I guess. I don't really know enough about sadness. Yeah.

Sure. Yeah. Yep. Okay. I'm going to start by covering a bunch of different fucking holidays because there are so many holidays that share this time period. And I'm not even talking about other faiths. Like bonza or like conica. Yeah.

So I'm not talking about that stuff. I'm talking about stuff within the sort of Christian origin. So like Yule 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. Lucie's Day.

You heard of St. Lucie's Day? I just heard about St. Lucie's Day earlier this year, but I did not look into it. I just I just saw it was a thing. I was like, oh, that's not St. Nicholas. I wonder who that is. And then I continued on in my day. Yeah. So to share enough, that is I am new to St. Lucie'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, uh-huh. So the Christians were oppressed for a while, like a long time ago for about 2000 years ago until the early 300s, you know, when they became a whatever the opposite of oppressed is.

I'm not quite sure. We're 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? And 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'd think I would have looked up how to pronounce the most important word in what I'm talking about today.

The Catholic Church shows up somewhere and is 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-mehicuri est, which is my Latin joke. It means that's not my problem. Very funny. Yeah, thank you.

I don't speak Latin either. Yeah, me neither. Yeah. So, you know, it's the fucking forever go times. People don't have radio yet. So the Pope and the church and even the Roman Empire have a little bit of a problem of power projection in that they can conquer places, but communication is so slow that places continue to have a decent bit of autonomy.

This is an oversimplification, but you get syncretism based on this. Shit 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 going to make today is that people just kept doing the things that they were doing for thousands of years and just being like, oh, okay, it's Christian now.

Yeah. Now they got told that there's like some Jesusy rapping over top of something that pregates 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 fuck's 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 it's 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 fuck up.

So like one of them is December 13th and one of them is December 25th. And it's because of weird Julie and Gregorian shit. That's totally over my head. Got it. The Feast of St. Lucia, St. Lucia's Day, especially popular in Scandinavia for some obvious reason, like it's dark there. It happens on December 13th 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 going to quote a zine by my friend, Rene Rye, who's been on this podcast before. St. Lucia's official hagiography or Catholic St. Biography is violent and sort of boring. In brief, she was a Christian living in the late 200s CE 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 use them to support fellow Christians in 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 zine, the zine 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 grain to a 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, garum 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 drips on her shoulders. Roman centuries guard Syracusa and are always listening. At the end of maze of tunnels is an alcove where heretics, worshipers of a tripart God, a sort of orpheus, have made a home. They reach for her bundles, stuff bits of bread into their mouths, take swigs of wine, say bless you, bless you, daughter. And a lot of the rest of her story, basically all of her story, it's buried under so much fucking, I am a Catholic saint thing that it's impossible to tell what actually happened, right?

Sure. There's 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. Ren 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 age shit that matters. So 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 doing way more interesting like mysticism that's divorced from a lot of the like dogmatic practices that were that were common at the time is people trying to sort through the 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 that the people then once they gain power became the oppressors themselves.

Yep. Yep. No, that this is the fact that you come from a conservative Christian background and then also a really into Gnosisism and shit 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 Mary 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 would if if a series of concentric eyeball rings showed up at my bedroom at 3 a.m. I know what I would do immediately. But yeah, I mean, like there's to be at least 17 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 think I'm 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 a manger, they give birth to a kid who is pretty much guaranteed to be a transgender. Guaranteed to be a trans man since the kid's name is Jesus Christ. But he has no dad.

So therefore he has no Y chromosome. So he's XX to say nothing, of course, about Eve, who was cloned from Adam and is therefore XY. So true. Yeah. This is what's really important. You know, there's also like there is this version of the story that that we're also that is often taught in church. But some people in church would also teach a slightly different version of the story. OK.

In which we don't actually know when Jesus was born. Oh, yeah. But the the date of December 25th comes comes from the comes from the magicians coming to visit Jesus. And they they mapped out where he would be based on like star charts and and that and that led them to figure out where he would be on December 25th. So like years later when the magicians came with gifts, they came on December 25th, which is then why we give gifts on Christmas. That that is the other story that they were right that was told, which is weird because it's not only including like astrology. It's also including like actual magicians, which most most most of modern 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.

Yeah, it's so weird. And in the like more medieval Christmas that we're going to be talking about the the major I show up 12 days later as the 12 days of Christmas. And it's called epiphany. It's January 6th. And then there's like I read like five different versions of how they came up with December 25th. I didn't hear that one. That one's really interesting. It doesn't say anywhere in the Bible when you know this is this is pure pure speculation.

Yeah. OK, 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 paint him as a cool people did whatever. He's fucking 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 a were 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 define 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. For my point of view as a, you know, folk Catholic or lapsed Catholic, whatever the fuck 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 Daedra.

There's like trans mutation. Yeah. 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 dress. You can carry a horse skull around. You can demand rich people give you shit. You can get drunk and accost the aforementioned rich people. Lots of stuff you can do. Christmas. Nowhere in the Bible does it mention Jesus' birthday. In 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 you're looking at this 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 we're totally not pagans. And this isn't also the holy day of Sol Invictus, which was declared 25 years earlier or 26 years earlier or something. Jesus totally isn't just another sun god. Nope. Sun god, son of God. Anyway, yeah. Yeah. So December 25th had, or rather this, I think specifically December 25th,

I should have put this on my notes. I spent so long reading a million different fucking holidays and got all confused. The holy day of Sol Invictus, which is the unconquered sun, which is the official religion of Rome before Christianity took over, but not by a long time. So Sol Invictus is fucking weird. And most of the people I know who are like, most of the people I read about who are into Sol Invictus are not like, if you mean someone who's like, man, you know what rules like Imperial Rome, you're not meeting a good person. Yeah.

Red flag. Yeah. So it would be too easy to say Christmas is just the continued celebration of Sol Invictus. It wouldn't really be true. There's a lot of arguments happening about how the worship of Sol in Rome, which was sort of predate Sol Invictus or dozens, 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 Saturnalia.

Yes. So let's talk about Saturnalia. Saturn was a god of time and abundance and agriculture and liberation and a bunch of other shit. Rome and gods had very expensive portfolios, which is very impressive. They do seem to collect a lot of like magic cards. Like they have a really strong hand, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

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 Sol Invictus, there was Saturnalia. 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 like told their bosses and their masters and shit. What was up? People gambled, which wasn't normally allowed.

They used coins and nuts for their gambling and they gave everyone presents. 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 sowing chaos. You give commands. Everyone has to follow. And yeah, it'd be like, I don't know, everyone stand on their head and run around and do whatever weird shit I come up with. You a lot of pressure actually to be 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 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 in this very well fitting here. Learn about some shit 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. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back. And I don't get the reference return with a V. Well, I'm just doing a small eco-fascism joke. Yeah, I was like, you're doing some light fascism right there. Oh, like the Roman, like when you like carve it into stone and like you use a V instead of a U. See, Margaret, you got it. I'm aware of contemporary politics and how they refer to ancient things. That's literally my job.

Contemporary politics is ancient things. 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 good and evil. What a fantastic like lead-in. So. Yeah, thanks, thanks. The exact type of human sacrifice is subject to debate. Dead gladiators were definitely offered up to the God Saturn. And I feel like that's like halfway cheating in terms of human sacrifice, because the guy's dead already, right?

But also at the same time, he died because you had a bunch of gladiator games. Being a gladiator, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, the whole gladiator thing, whatever, I'm not going to do a total tangent on it. 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. Yeah, it's more like how people play football and get horrible concussions to shorten their lifespan. Yeah, it's like halfway between MMA 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. They 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 sacrificing 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 don't care what happens because it doesn't matter for you.

Yeah. That would increase the chaos. Yeah. And this is not my favorite part because I don't think you should slit fake king's throats. 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 in this whole thing.

You get 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 transvestism. Unfathomably based. Yeah. Wow.

And this continues for thousands of years, I will just say. Some would 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 for Christmas. 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 drag show dressed up as Catwoman, 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 cross-dressing and working animal costume. True Colens spirit right there. Michelle Pfeiffer is really a Colens icon. I absolutely.

Do you know who that is, Margaret? Yes, as an actress who is in movies that were around when I was younger. So true. You did it. I'm so proud of you. Yeah. 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. Oh, I know. 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 will remember a name.

It's meaningless. It's a meaningless signifier. Why would you include names? It's just red to most flaps. It doesn't matter. Yeah. This is the closest I can find to a true origin of Christmas, the Saturnalia.

There's other stuff and we're going to get to it. We're going to get to Yule in a second. But celebrating the darkest time of the year with chaos, revelry, and role reversal. So let's talk about more of that. Let's talk about Yule. So Christmas borrows 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 one of my main arguments I used against like the Nazi Germanic pagan types is that I'm like, Yeah.

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 go into ads again. Again. Just...

It's really important that we get to ad breaks in this episode. That's what's important in life. So here's some of them. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced,

cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today

is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match

and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Yule was a 12-day celebration.

The name Yule literally means Odin. Oh, I did not put that together. Yeah, one of Odin's many names is J-O-L with some marks over it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's pronounced basically Yule from Old Norse. And Yule is a big old feast. There's ale, there's sacrifice, including probably human sacrifice at various points.

There's a lot of stories about prisoners of war from Rome being human sacrificed. People can get fun arguments about this stuff. I'm like more worried about offending the Norweeboos than the Christians in terms of like people who are gonna get up in my mentions about this shit. But, and when they would do these sacrifices, called blot, 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 like preparing it for slaughter to like eat.

Yeah, it'd be like, I don't know, like, yeah, I don't know. It doesn't seem like you're giving up much. If I'm like, 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. 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 not a representative of the tree of life like what I learned. Yeah, no, it is not.

I mean, it could be many things. 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 great. 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 consumerist 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 often part of it. And they would also like decorate their houses like branches and reeds and shit. 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 it, in my house, we decorate the tree with all of these different Christmas ornaments that are very like specific and particular and all of memories associated with them. That is very fucking traditional Christmas. And also decorating the tree with nuts is 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. I mean, I'm literally doing my best guess as presented 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 entrails of sacrifice. No, I'm not heard that, but I mean, I could see how you'd 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 unlike really, they're like on websites that might as well be geocities 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 shit on the tree. Absolutely. And like Collins in Rome, you will came with men dressing like women, women dressing like men, and everyone dressing up like animals. Because as soon as you have a moment where you like drop social norms,

everyone's like, fuck yeah, time 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 a skull of an animal or whatever. Yeah, it's kind of more in line with some of our current Halloween stuff. Yeah, absolutely.

There's actually a lot of weird overlap. We're going to 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 Halloween. Also, both Colens and Yule had leaving food out for the deities. I mean, Santa Claus, whatever.

The angles like of the Anglo-Saxons called the main night of Yule mother's night. Only they called it in English, a bit of English. And the food was left out for the hungry mother spirits because they just wanted to be metal as 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.

The hungry mother. Mistletoe may or may not have come from Yule specifically. It wasn't a Christmas thing until the 18th century. The mistletoe got like added either back in or added in for the first time. But mistletoe is pagan as fuck. The whiteberries are the semen of the gods. Alrighty then.

Okay. Everyone who was like, everyone who was like doing something else while listening to this episode is like, all I ever would do is purge up. Which is interesting because their poisonous is fuck. You know. Nope. Not going to make too easy of jokes to make. Not doing it.

Okay. Well, I was going to say it's a note to self about don't go down on gods. Oh. See, I can't. I cannot support that though. Sorry. You're willing to risk the poison? Absolutely. As a matter of fact, that's what I'm doing after this. No.

This is like not a series of concentric eye rings shows up in the background on the cares screen. Mistletoe garlands everywhere. Amazing. But yeah. This is like how, so it's this incredibly potent fertility symbol, the mistletoe because it's like the semen tree or whatever. And so this is how powerful syncretism is

because it's at the fucking 18th century and people are still adding new fertility rights into Christmas shit. This wasn't even one that like held on the whole time. This was like in the 18th century, people were like, you want to bring that witch shit back into this? And everyone's like, yeah, I do. Let's make out under the fucking under God's semen. Another thing that comes from Yule.

So Odin is one of the central figures of Yule because it's literally named after him. Yeah. 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 2009 film called the wild hunt. Oh, I've not watched that.

It's a LARP gone wrong movie. Oh, I feel like we have talked about this before. Yeah, I've tried to make everyone watch it. We almost watched this and instead we watched Night Riders. Night Riders, which was not a bad choice. No, Night Riders is better. Let's not start the Night Riders thing again. Robert will hear us and then bring it up

in every conversation for at least two months. We don't need this. Well, the movie, the wild hunt, a lot of my LARP are friends don't like it because they don't like any LARP gone wrong movie, but I enjoyed it. Anyway, the wild hunt is this thing that's found through a ton of cultures.

It's this like ghostly hunt through the heavens. Sometimes it's led by Odin. Sometimes it's led like hunters are the ghosts of the dead. It's in like, it's not always led by Odin, right? Because there's a ton of fucking cultures and there's just like pale riders and just like all this shit 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 folklore 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 shit. 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 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.

And there's versions of it all over the place and it's Santa. Santa riding around in the sky base is the fucking wild hunt. I mean, that's super interesting because this idea of the wild hunt, some of that in a folklore sense, the modern version of that would be alien abductions. Oh, yeah.

That's kind of like the high strangeness idea of there's been these types of stories that are either referencing some type of hallucination or some type of 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 hunt. Sometimes it's more like sci-fi with the little grey aliens. Sometimes it's a weird sleep paralysis demon

coming into your room and transporting you to another place. There's all these slightly different versions of it. No, I like that. I really like that alien abduction is the new Santa. I mean, the new wild hunt. And then Santa himself is a mix match of a ton of different shit. A bunch of different European cultures will sort of claim Santa. But for my money, Santa Claus is a mix of Old St. Nick

and this Finnish creature Jullapukki, the Christmas goat, who is a pre-Christian figure. And he's basically a were-goat. Sophie, you've heard of this creature. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have not. Oh, Garrett, you'll like this. Yeah, I've been like, I've been like a crampus piled 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 were-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, huh, curious. What, what, what does that remind me of? Yeah, so Santa Claus is a fucking were-goat. Sometimes he's an invisible spirit who helps bring in the new year

by helping the light return. Okay. And it's like worth noting here that Finland has its own pagan traditions, 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 if you don't yell at me, Finns, and if you do, just yell Bercale Vito Satana at me, and I'll be like, hey, hey, 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 Protestant's 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 let's end the episode, and you have to wait until Wednesday

to hear about medieval Christmas. Sorry. Oh, I'm going to be on the edge of my seat until Wednesday. I know. We definitely don't record these back to back. We record these live when they drop. We're going to be peering out of the night sky, hoping not to be taken away by a scary ghost man.

I was so scared of alien abduction as a kid. That actually tracks my egg pie. Now I live alone in the woods. But I still feel like you're afraid of alien abduction. I don't know. 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 the whole Wild Hunt thing is very reminiscent of the type of forest alien abductions that people talk about. And it just connects to the overall high strangeness idea of these types of being taken to these other places that we see throughout folklore.

Even stuff like Elijah being carried to heaven in Cherry It's a Fire. It's the same idea. Wait, I don't know that. Tell me that. I'm a bad Christian if that's a Christian thing. There's multiple stories in the Bible of how people being taken up and then sometimes returned. Enoch being one, which is resulting in stuff like the Emerald Tablet.

We have Elijah being taken up inside a Cherry It. But that's like an alien craft coming down, picking you up and taking you up into the sky. That is what that story is. You just have different versions of it lasting now. And then I love that lights in the hills and the skies is like a persistent part of folklore and just like a part of people's lived experiences

of just like, what's that fucking light over there? It's just like a thing that happens when you spend a lot of time away from cities. Cool. Well, we're going to talk about revelry on Wednesday. Garrison Davis, do you have anything that you would like to tell our listeners? What are you plugging? Well, I just wrapped up a series that I just wrapped up a series

that I wrote with my colleague James Stout about trans people living in a ranch in rural Colorado and how they survived an attack by fascists. So it could happen here. It's a four part series. So that just wrapped up. That's kind of the most recent thing that I have done. And I should have a very interesting article coming out soon,

but I do not know when that's going to be fully published. But you can, if you follow me on either Twitter or Instagram at Hungry Bowtie, you will certainly be alerted when this bizarre thing 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 you go through all that work

and all of that transmutation, then I'm surely I'll probably talk to you because that does seem slightly impressive. Margaret, you have a book that is available for pre-order, correct? I do, yeah. My goal is to always have a book available for pre-order the entire run of this show, apparently. My current book available for pre-order

is called Escape from Incel Island. It is a adventurous science fiction adventure novel, novella. 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 to read books, but I have a hard time paying attention to something for a long time. I highly recommend Escape from Incel Island. And if you're an in-cell and you live on an island,

I highly recommend Escape from Incel Island, but also you have to stop being an in-cell first. That's, oh, you can buy it by going to tangledwilderness.org, and it is available for pre-order now. And Sophie, do you have anything you would like to plug? No, just add CoolZone Media on Instagram and Twitter. Yay, oh yeah, because this is all part of CoolZone Media, which is cool.

Bye, everyone. Cool people who did cool stuff is a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts on CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, so you don't miss any podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price?

Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.