Santa Claus is Real!

APPENDIX B

It's the most wonderful time of the year...when the world falls in love...and all that jazz! You may have noticed, depending on where you live, that the days are getting much colder, the nights darken early (even more so thanks to Daylight Savings --- and please don't tell me you're one of those morons who calls for the abolition of Daylight Savings Time, in the same breath along with the Electoral College, gas stoves and the patriarchy! Learn to appreciate tradition, and its superiority to all these modern ideas...on the other hand, if you're one of these 'Put Christ back in Christmas' folks, well, let me tell you, unless you've read this whole book --- and I ain't even done writing it --- and understand the true identity of the Blessed Sacrament, then know that Yule, the festival which falls on December 25th, is far older than Christianity, celebrated in so-called Pagan times from Egypt (where the birth of Osiris/Horus was celebrated) to Greece (Dionysus) Iran (Mithras) (and Rome plagiarizing these latter two for her vulgar orgies) and Britain --- and if you have read and agree with me on the theological and mycological identity of the Holy Trinity, you've got it all wrong! Now I'm going to tell you the truth --- according to the Hyperboreans) and your body is telling you to get off that stupid diet and fatten up for the winter to come --- for there will always be lean times ahead, if we should make it that far; but for now, enjoy the abundance that God has given! Just observe the squirrels gathering acorns, as Ratatoskr climbs up and down the World Tree with messages from Erda to Odin. Such as the following:

But let us leave Palestine behind! and go North even beyond the Aesir and the Lapps, beyond the Thousand Lakes and East of Eden on the Black Sea, flying with the reindeer towards the North Pole, where Santa Claus first set up shop, in Eastern Siberia. Here is where so many of our religious and cultural leitmotifs originate, in the adoration of the Sacred Mushroom, Amanita Muscaria, King of Kings; and His mother the White Goddess, the Holy Birch Tree. I first attempted to write 'Santa Claus is Real!' 20 or so years ago, before ever seeing one of these magical mushrooms in person, based on intuitive acceptance of the truth uncovered by R. Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina in Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, which I had read several years earlier, in highschool. The dubious philological arguments of that book in tracing Vedic ritual and poetry (the source of much contemporary Indian belief and philosophy) to the Fly Agaric is much more difficult to follow than the pictorially obvious connexion with modern Father Christmas.

O Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining...

See Father Christmas, all dressed in red & white! Coming down from the birchwoods of Siberia, in Europe and the Mediterranean we often find the God sitting under a fir tree. The post-Exilic Prophets of Judaea condemned this worship of the Sacred Tree and Ba'al, alias Beli, God of Light, the Divine Child of the Winter Solstice...yet originally this was the same Shield of King David, that Solomon sent for the Cedars of Lebanon to woo the Queen of Sheba.

But the main thing is: red and white!

"Do you understand now, or what more?"

The above passage, while it quotes Herr Heinrich, is from Pagan Christmas: The Plants, Spirits, and Rituals at the Origins of Yuletide, by Christian Ratsch and Claudia Muller-Ebeling (sorry I forget the ASCII symbols for umlauts at the moment) which I am currently attempting to read for the second time but is already overdue at the library so I probably won't finish till next year, but highly recommend for its insight into the botanical rituals associated with Midwinter, Yule, the Solstice, Nativity &cetera...

Like most books about the botanical and mycological origins of religious custom, (excepting Soma and a very few others) a lot of the scientific and scholarly aspect is highly dubious. This may make it more entertaining to read, to some extent, but ultimately increases confusion and ignorance, especially as many of these same ideas, true or false, just get regurgitated from book to book, and cut and paste on the internet, to the point where soon you'll just get an AI overview rather than some left-wing dragon-believer with the prescience of mind to host me on his podcast and explain the true Gospel, the Word as it was in the beginning, when that lazy cow licked the salt off the primordial snow of Creation...

However, this is a great book if you wanna get 'lost in the weeds' (pun intended!) of all the many variegated roots and flowers associated with the Miracle of Christ's birth (and other myths of the winter solstice) across this wonderful wide world!

Furthermore, let's address the reindeer---Wasson's book goes into detail about how both humans and reindeer in Siberia would relish the urine of a man who had consumed the mushroom ---modern chemistry, while far behind the research done on cannabis and traditional psychedelics, has uncovered the identity of two distinct and different-acting chemical agents, ibotenic acid and muscimol, each with very different effects. Sunlight potentially can induce the chemical change that can be deliberately wrought by simmering the crushed mushroom caps in water below boiling-point, from the more toxic and uncomfortable (but perhaps more visionary?) ibotenic acid to the more relaxing (and theoretically safer) muscimol --- but as always, the FDA has not approved and does not condone any of these silly statements of fairytale fancy; at least until RFK gets confirmed! (LOL - don't go tryin' ta figure my political views --- I always vote for the Santa Claus/Ras Tafari ticket...) (although the meaning of the two-party system and four-year terms is touched upon in Chapter II - The Two Trees) and finally, the easiest way to turn one into the other is by eating the mushroom raw and/or drinking the Red Potion and then pissing out a golden shower of further metabolized nectar of the Gods...don't try this at home!

Well then! what were you expecting? some well-reasoned plea of suasion to convince you of the veracity of my claim! Bah! Humbug: that's what I think of all your plebian rationality, your bourgeois dogma of logic and propriety, your capitalist lust for caffeine and alcohol, sex and distraction...sure I've got coffee to brew, German lager to pick up to fill the fridge for the season, a wife and wish the kids'd go play in the snow and give us some time alone; and of course my 8- & 16-bit video games to get back to urgently calling...but for now, up before the cock crows, you'll never find me deny Him, oh no, I sit sipping my tea (I'd tell ya what's in it but --- have you been paying any mind?)