Happy 2025

Welcome back all you kajillion Pueri Superbi readers!  Here are some new addenda to my piece Mithraism As Proud Boy Prototype: Underground Clubs of the Syndexioi and Pueri Superbi (an alternate PDF version features bonus reference-section hyperlinks) based on writings I’ve come across this past month.   My general theme here is the Roman Mithraists (who referred to one another as syndexioi), the Proud Boys far-right extremists (who I sometimes refer to in Latin as Pueri Superbi given that they are self-described Western Chauvinists), their sponsoring MAGA regime, and what connects these groups: the West’s disturbingly deep historical/cultural connections to fascism.  Allons-y / Let’s go!

Yet Another Fascist Syndexioi

Michael Moynahan - enthusiast of industrial music, black metal, the Church of Satan and Julius Evola, and a prominent member of the Abraxas Clique who propagated the work of neo-Nazi accelerationist James Mason - was also “interested in the ancient martial religion of Mithraism, a favourite among the Roman legions and briefly a serious contender against Christianity”, according to Gary Lachman’s analysis Julius Evola: Mussolini's Mystic.

The Taming of the Coup

While this has already been stated before, just a reminder that soon-to-be President Donald Trump has promised to free the coup participants and imprison Chaney.  A recent Pentagon extremism study shows how the number of military participants the January 6 coup was lowballed.  A Miami Proud Boy was sentenced for his role in the January 6th coup, while another putschist who entered the Capitol with his mother has fled to Ottawa (bringing along his snowboard: quite the refugee!), has successfully claimed asylum and is therefore eligible for Canadian health care coverage despite being ideologically opposed to social medicine, hoping that on January 20 “Donald Trump will take office and pardon me no doubt”.

What Upcoming Event Rhymes With “Assume Prostration”?

Speaking of January 20, now that it’s only 18 days and just a few waning hours away, it’s worth being reminded that the U. S. presidential Inauguration ritual - which would have been a coronation if George Washington had chosen to be King instead of President - is being treated as a coronation due to Trump’s invitation of foreign leaders such as Xi Jinping, Javier Milei and Nayib Bukele.  I’m not opposed to global diplomacy, but doing it coronation-style is somewhat ironic considering that a coronation’s solar crown was a symbol which syndexioi were supposed to refuse upon receiving the rank of miles.  I’m also not suggesting that Trump, his cabinet choices, or his future paramilitary Proud Boys and other brute squad members have undergone formal Mithraic initiation, rather that it all tracks on a purely symbolic level.

The American inauguration tradition was referred to by Walter Cronkite as “the satisfaction of two apparently contrary desires: for change and for permanence”.  This is similar to the dual nature of the god Mithras: exemplifying transformational change through his struggle with the bull, and also exemplifying permanence though his connection to the leontocephalus (lion-headed figure) who corresponds to Aion, deity of Eternity.  Politics broadly speaking is a function of the spectrum ranging from change to tradition, the slow process of stumbling to the right decision by alternating between knee jerk “voting the bum out” vs. a “democracy of the dead” voting according to ancestors.  Surely there must be a better way… but that’s a topic for another time.

The recently deceased former President Jimmy Carter described the inauguration ritual as “a final signing of a contract between the new president and the people whom he will govern”, evoking Mithras' function as god of contracts, like the one signed under his auspices between the Hittites and the Mitanni.  The event itself takes place at noon, a time with solar significance as the symbolic midpoint between day and night when the sun is ballpark directly overhead, even though technically solar noon (or high noon) won’t occur until about 19 minutes later due to Earth’s elliptical orbit and axial tilt, so if you’re watching the inauguration keep an eye out for something empyreal at 12:19pm; perhaps a Surya Mudra from Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard or Usha Vance, or something heliacal from Trump himself.

It would be cool if, for this time around, they re-invoked the role of pullarius, the priest of the sacred chickens of Rome, as that would fit with the Proud Boys’ rooster symbolism and the fact that the new administration and the January 6 putschists that they about to release from jail are a bunch of cocks, and that Trump was too chicken to serve in the military and used his wealth to get a pass, plus chickens make nice pets and taste quite good and I have fond memories of watching Chicken Bingo at Sneaky Dee’s while sharing King’s Crown nachos and drinking cheap draft from lines of questionable cleanliness.  

As I mentioned in a previous post, an inauguration is etymologically derived from the word auger: what the Romans used as a method for foretelling what was auspicious before battle or diplomacy.  It looks like the U.S.  will be engaged in both in the coming years, with naive hopes of ending conflicts in the Middle East and in Ukraine, and ridiculous plans to annex Canada, Panama and Greenland.  Best of luck to all parties involved; may the chickens eat and shit in auspicious directions, may they come home to roost, and may justice prevail despite former Trump Administration cabinet member Steve Bannon’s bygone prison release statement advocating for “rough Roman justice”, though he was referring here specifically to the news media and FBI.  

Trump’s choice of QAnon conspiracy theory fan Kash Patel to lead the FBI got me thinking about the large number of QAnon participants in the January 6th coup including the iconographic Jacob Chansley, alias “The QAnon Shaman”.  Chansley’s bison-horned fur hat made some coup followers joke about his resemblance to the horned and fur hatted logo for the band Jamiroquai, and the band's founder and singer Jay Kay’s propensity for elaborate hats.  In response, Kay tweeted a clarification that he was not in fact the QAnon Shaman, stating “loving the headgear, but not sure that's my crowd.”  

Acid-jazz and funk/disco aren't everybody's bag, and I'm only moderately into the band myself and have never seen them live, though I think that their Little L video is great, and John Heder’s choreography of Canned Heat in Napoleon Dynamite was brilliant.  Plus, there are many progressive elements to the band’s genre broadly speaking: the civil rights significance of funk and disco in the queer and African-American communities, the anti-colonial / anti-corruption theme in Afrobeat (partially a funk/soul derivative), and funk’s immerse contribution to hip-hop and house music.  

No musical genre is immune to the more crass forms of commercialism; it's always two steps forward one step back [sorry] and the band itself isn’t without controversy, for example Jay Kay’s cultural appropriation of headgear and his ridiculous sports car fetish.  Still, it got got me thinking: what if, in a Marvel/DC-style parallel universe, the January 6th Coup has instead been instigated and led by Jamiroquai instead of Trump, Bannon, Ali Alexander, Roger Stone, and the QAnon, Oath Keepers and Proud Boys Networks?  To be absolutely clear, I don't think that Jacob Chansley was Jay Kay (or vice versa), but it's nice to imagine a better world that could have been, or perhaps one that could arise in the future.  So just for a moment, instead of the MAGA rock and patriot new country running through the heads of the January 6th coup plotters, imagine what things would have been like under a funk/soul regime.  I hastily generated some AI images of what this would look like, but they’re a bit too cheesy to post even here, so you can make your own or just use your imagination.

Further Similarities between Mithraists and the Proud Boys

As stated previously, both of these groups are mystery cults combining worship with progressive (meaning in ‘stages’ or ‘levels’, not in any political sense) initiation.   Both also involve chthonic basement-dwellers: alt-rightists and Proud Boys because they literally live in their parents’ basements, Mithraists because they worship subterraneously.  Basement dwelling, often denigrated, is frequently a function of family poverty, limited economic opportunities and emotional or mental health issues, none of which deserves stigmatisation.  We should all be so lucky to have a habitable basement; I don’t!  Still, there’s admitted schadenfreude (Nationalsozialismuschadenfreude?) in picturing accelerationist neo-Nazis such as Patrick Macdonald and Robert Rundo in their moms’ basements.  Rundo, the founder of the neo-Nazi Rise Again Movement and the Active Club network, was released from prison with time served and said he “plans to move to Florida and take care of his mother”; who knows if she has a basement?  Active Clubs are the group that Proud Boys want to be; they are organized around physical training as opposed to meme-ing and recreational drinking, and there is continuity between the two groups.  If Trump decides to use them as his Sturmabteilung, we are seriously fucked.

The founder of the actual Proud Boys also made the news recently, when this past December 15 the New York Young Republicans held their 112th annual black-tie gala at Wall Street’s Merchants’ Exchange building, featuring attendant Gavin McInnes who told reporter Ali Breland “you should slit your wrists”, in addition to keynote speaker Steve Bannon who stated “we want retribution. And we’re going to get retribution”.  Rereading my auris caninae copy of The Roman Mystery Cult: A Cognitive Approach by Olympia Panagiotidou and the late great Roger Beck, I came across the 2013 argument by Chalupa and Glomb that the sacrina (military bag) in the Miles (soldier) grade was actually a bull’s hindquarter, suggesting that this grade contributed to the communal meal by acting as butchers.  If true, this aligns with Gavin McInnes early description of the Proud Boys: “We will kill you, that’s the Proud Boys, in a nutshell. We will kill you. We look nice, seem soft, we have boys in our name, but like Bill the Butcher in the Bowery Boys, we will assassinate you”.

The Proud Boys have also been in the news recently due to the legal proceedings of Shane Lamond, former head of the Washington DC police intelligence unit.  Lamond, a white cop in a majority African-American police force, was recently convicted for tipping off Enrique Tarrio, the imprisoned head of the Proud Boys who took over after McInnes left the group in order to personally avoid the pokey.  The Washington DC police likely replaced Lamond with a new intelligence head quite quickly.  While the police did not become acephalous, the same can not be said for the Proud Boys: still acephalous, and arguably leocephalous.  It will also be interesting to see how things play out once Trump releases Tarrio and whether or not he plays nice with McInnes.  I don’t try to provoke infighting between members of the far-right (not that I’m opposed to other people doing that, it’s just really not my skill set) but if I were Tarrio, I’d be somewhat concerned about getting attacked by McInnes upon being released from prison by Trump for having been an informant, and Vice [apologies again] versa if I were McInnes in terms of getting attacked by Tarrio for passing the buck and setting him up to do serious prison time. Who knows though; maybe they’ll just kiss and make up.

The Original Red Pill

A few weeks ago the USDA decided that extracts and constituents of the Amanita muscaria, or Fly Agaric - used for ritual purposes by north Eurasian shamans and perhaps influential on the Santa Claus motif - is no longer considered safe as a food additive.  I mention this because  Boston University's Caro Ruck’s book Mushrooms, Myth and Mithras: The Drug Cult that Civilized Europe - certainly a very enjoyable read - operates on the premise that the secret sauce of the Mithraic cult was Fly Agaric usage, which arguably explains some of the mushroom-shaped interiors of Mithraea when viewed straight-on, the redness of the phrygian cap worn by Mithras, and the similarities to the Eleusinian Mysteries which most certainly involved entheogens (the proto-LSD ergot in that case), plus it gives a certain credence as to why the Mithraic rites were so popular and why they induced a sense of wonder in their followers and perhaps why there was no written liturgy (if we discount the Egyptian Mithras Liturgy as being somewhat apocryphal).   The gist of Ruck’s argument is that in the tauroctony, the red-garbed Mithras and the white sacrificial bull together symbolize the red cap and white stem of the Amanita muscaria.  There is some parallel in Ruck’s work to John Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (certainly not everyone’s cup of tea), as well as Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations and the R. Gordon Wassson’s Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality in terms of entheogenic explanations for mystery cults and spiritual/religious formation broadly speaking.

A Musky Taint

My final addendum is to note how, just the other day, Elon Musk temporarily changed his X profile name to Kekius Maximus.  The name is a nod to Pepe the Frog, the alt-right and white supremacist hate symbol and the mimetic source for American incel and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes’ Groyper movement.  It is also a nod to Russell Crowe’s¹ Maximus character from the 2000 Gladiator film, which recently spawned a sequel, and Crowe visited Ostia Antica for Gladiator II’s promo.  Since Ridley Scott directed Gladiator, directed and produced the highly Mithraic Raised by Wolves and produced Alien: Romulus, also influenced by Roman mythology, I think there's a good chance that he would have gotten Crowe to visit the Ostia Mithraeum.

That’s all for now.  Here’s hoping we all survive the next few weeks, and the next few years…

1  Along with several other crew members I shared a joint with Crowe at the former Maple Leaf Gardens on set for Cinderella Man for nine months while installing and maintaining the inflatable mannequins used in the film's crowd scenes; he seemed like a nice enough guy at the time, and certainly nothing like Hando.  Ron Howard’s directorial portrayal of Max Baer evoked an antisemitic bent even despite Akiva Goldsman’s co-authorship of the screenplay, perhaps foreshadowing the significant damage Ron Howard would do decades later by launching J. D. Vance's political career through the cinematic portrayal of his Hillbilly Elegy.  Also on set was Paul Giamatti, a genuine mensch who visited the crew with his young son Sam in our inflatables production office: the former Green Room of the Toronto Maple Leafs.