Psychedelic Mr Claus
Years ago when I was a graduate student in Oriental Studies, I had a professor who was the epitome of academic eccentricity. E B was a philologist: he worked with words, a lot of them – Cherokee, old French, Hindi, Sanskrit and more. Word play was an obsession, and he often set his word games to music, composing such ditties as 'The Brain Behind the Face', 'Rig Veda X. 129' and 'On First Looking into Whitney's [Sanskrit] Grammar'. More importantly, one never knew what he would say or do next. His way of bringing a class to attention was to shout in a stentorian voice something so outrageous and irrelevant to what we were doing that we would gasp at first, but in the end almost always laugh. Instead of whisking us through a particular Sanskrit paradigm he would ask, for instance: Who watched the Johnny Carson show last night? Then there would ensue a long commentary not only on Mr Carson, but also a thorough examination of the state of American popular culture.
It was, I suppose, a kind of Zen that E B was practicing. He wanted to startle the student into some form of realisation that what we often do is absurd, and that too often we pursue the absurd as if it is intrinsically worthwhile. Far too often, E B let the details of philology overwhelm any consideration of theory and method; the reverse was also true in his case. But sometimes the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated things can lead to a new level of understanding. E B knew this well: put two unrelated things – say, Sanskrit grammar and a talk-show host – and no one can predict the result. Perhaps we can call this E B's proto-chaos theory.
Years later, when I too had become a professor, I found myself in front of a bright class of about twenty students, all eager to learn what they could about Indian civilisation. It was a cold December day toward Christmas, near the end of the fall semester when the seasonal hysteria was beginning to ramp up. I had announced the topic for my lecture: Soma, the powerful drink that plays such a prominent role in the Rig Veda and in Indian religion in general. If they had read their assignments, the students would have learned the basic things about the drink: that the word soma means something that is 'pressed out' of something else; that Soma was a golden-coloured liquid; that it was made from a plant that was not green; that sometimes it was red with white nodules on its top, and grew under the birch tree. It was also called ekapada, which means 'the one with one foot'.
The ancient Indians drank Soma's golden juice in order to experience a divine high that produced a more successful ritual sacrifice and a more spiritual and pleasurable world than this ordinary one. Indra, the chief god of the ancient Indians, drank the liquid and became an invincible warrior who killed the evil serpent. Soma was dangerous, however, to the unitiated and if not properly prepared could lead to death instead of nirvana. No one knew for certain what Soma was, but one candidate was a mushroom, the Amanita muscaria, or Fly Agaric.
I listened to my professorial self droning on, and both my students and I began to enter the first stage of academic doze that so often characterises the lecture hall after lunch. Just as I was about to fall out of my chair, I remembered E B and shouted the first thing that came into my mind: Santa Claus! Startled, the students sat up waiting for my next pronouncement, when one student shouted in amazement, 'Holy cow – Santa Claus is a mushroom!' In an instant, the argument was engaged and the fur began to fly. I sat back and listened, only occasionally joining in until the very end.
Creator of gods
Before exploring the potential connections with Santa Claus, let us first look a bit more at the background regarding Soma. This divine, potentially hallucinogenic drink of the ancient Indians is referenced in the Rig Veda in several ways – Book Six, for instance, is entirely devoted to the deity Soma, who has the same name as his drink. Although Soma the god was never one to have temples or shrines devoted to him, he was nonetheless a powerful conduit to power and knowledge; the Rig Veda refers to him as a 'God for gods' and his drink as the 'creator of gods'. Many Rig Veda hymns on the god Indra, for instance, mention Soma – Indra drinks the Soma and suddenly he can kill the mythological serpents. The Rig Vedic sacrifice had the priest as the head efficient of the service.
This theory came into its own during the 1960s, in a book written by R Gordon Wasson, a Connecticut banker. Wasson's wife was Russian, and it was she who showed her husband the difference between poisonous mushrooms and other kinds, and it was Wasson who eventually made the connection between the Rig Veda and the practices of the Siberian shamans, as noted below. Despite a fairly mainstream background, Wasson had developed a long-term interest in psychedelics in general. During the 1950s, he wrote a book on peyote, the hallucinogenic cactus of spiritual importance to some Native American tribes. He became extremely serious about trying to figure out what Soma was. Wasson was not a Sanskritist, but he ended up writing a relatively influential book called Soma: The divine mushroom. Eventually, this work received quite a bit of notoriety; there is even a pamphlet published by the American Oriental Society trying to refute his view of these issues.
How did Soma become linked with a mushroom? This was based on Wasson's best guess, and it was he who suggested Fly Agaric as the most probable candidate. This mushroom is relatively ubiquitous, growing particularly in spongy material under birch trees. One of the few places that it does not grow, however, is in the expanse of what is modern-day India – though Wasson hastens to note that this alone does not mean that it was not available millennia ago. Rather, he cleverly suggests that the mushroom could have simply been 'left behind' and then forgotten, perhaps in Afghanistan or in the higher parts of Pakistan, where the mushroom is found. The people commonly referred to as the Aryans – those who are thought to have written the Rig Veda – came into the Subcontinent, perhaps through the Khyber Pass, and were using Soma's properties in their religious experiences. But when they settled in the Punjab, they were forced to go back to harvest it continually, as it would not grow in the plains of India. Soma eventually disappeared from their lives, though it stayed on in their sacred texts.
Religion of children
Wasson focused on the religious aspect of the Soma puzzle. Nonetheless, for many who grew up in the United States or Europe, the mention of reindeer would instantly bring to mind another figure entirely – that of Santa Claus. Who indeed was Santa Claus, and what was his relation to other myths that surfaced around Christmas time? Was he a recent creation of a capitalist cola company in cahoots with the corporate commercial world? What did he have to do with Christianity, or religion in general? Was he not ubiquitous and growing in influence in the Global Village? Was he a serious subject worthy of academic investigation? Was old Saint Nick a figment of the imagination of Clement Moore, the poet who composed the iconic 'Twas the Night Before Christmas'? And what exactly was going on on Christmas Eve, anyway?
What my students began to see was that Santa Claus could be the transmutation of a psychedelic plant into a red-and-white dwarf. Note that Santa carries a bag of goodies, which he hands out to the users of such things. Note that he travels by flying reindeer. What is the connection? A north European or Teutonic one? In Scandinavia and Siberia, according to the accounts of well-known ethnographers, shamans have historically collected the urine of reindeer in a special flask, drinking it to become high. This is because the reindeer eat psychedelic mushrooms, then allow their kidneys to filter out much of the poison – making it safe for humans to consume. And what is the origin of rein-, and could it be related to the Latin ren for kidney, or rein, the German word for pure? Is it possible that the Hindu's high regard for the urine of the cow, including its ingestion, constitutes the remains of the Vedic Soma ritual?
Moving along, then, once he arrives on your roof with his reindeer, what does Santa do? Instead of knocking on your front door, he comes down the chimney, bag of goodies and all. The reindeer remain on the roof, calmly chewing their cud. Santa then puts his gifts under the tree and flies away – disappearing into nothing until he is called forth again by the winter season. Look closely now. Could we not say that the chimney represents the birch tree under which the mushroom grows? Do we not put trees in our houses at Christmas time? Why do we do that? What do we put under the tree and why? And even more to the point, what do we put on the tree? Candy canes, which are red and white. Why? Are these not symbols of the shaman, who staggers under the power of the drug, unable to walk and in need of a cane? Is it possible that the Christmas tree, with its bright colours, its lights, and the myriad things that we hang on it, is nothing but the recreation of the tree of the inebriated priest officiant?
Are we, then, dealing with a whole set of symbols that are pre-Christian but have been hidden? Of course, Christianity has been victorious with its symbols for the most part. But perhaps it is impossible to push this older symbology completely into the closet – some of those old references will to stick their heads out every so often. That they might do so on Christianity's most important holiday might indeed make good sense.
Well, what do we do with all this? People have tended to shy away from working seriously with such seemingly fanciful theories – those proposed by Wasson, or the possible pre-Christian roots of the Santa Claus myth more generally – largely because they sound too laughable. In fact, this risibility could be a central component of the process of marginalisation, a widely documented technique of domination of one religion over another. In this case, I submit that Santa Claus and all of his accoutrements have become a religion of children. That does not mean that they constitute childish pursuits, but rather that the dominant forces in society have chosen this as the easiest way to subvert these echoes of pre-Christian religions systems – to keep it, in other words, an unconvincing form.
As told to Carey L Biron.
~ Ted Riccardi is professor emeritus at Columbia University, and author of two Sherlock Holmes novels. He is currently affiliated with the Social Science Baha in Kathmandu.