Here are more addenda to Mithraism As Proud Boy Prototype: Underground Clubs of the Syndexioi and Pueri Superbi based on items I’ve read this past month, covering the following four themes: 

I) the Roman Mithraists who referred to one another as ‘Syndexioi’, as well as Mithraic antecedents and affiliated tendencies in Europe, Asia and North Africa

II) the self-described Western Chauvinist Proud Boys who I've referred to in Latin - the language of the Roman Empire that defined the West - as ‘Pueri Superbi’

III) the MAGA regime which emancipated the Proud Boy rank & file and leadership and is headed on a horrible trajectory towards funding the group to the tune of $100 million and turning it into the paramilitary force referred to as “Trump's army”

IV) the tragic emergence and perseverance of fascism from the history and culture of the West, which ties all of this together

No Bull?

On a recent visit to the Wutai Shan Buddhist Garden, I noticed that the lion upon which the Manjushri Bodhisattva is seated has several bull-like attributes, including hoofs instead of paws, long bovine ears and a bovine tail.  Not being a practising Buddhist I can only guess: was this artistic license?  A shoutout to local dairy producers?  Is it a reference to the Yama Dharmaraja dharmapala (Manjushri’s wrathful aspect) and therefore buffalo-like attributes?  For what it’s worth, I think it has some serious Mithraic tauroctony vibes to it.  Of course, there are lots of unrelated sculptural icons featuring the mounting of a bull, but to a hammer, everything’s a nail.

Yezidis and Syndexioi: Common Origins?

I read the late Peter Lamborn Wilson’s final book Peacock Angel: the Esoteric Tradition of the Yezidis this past winter and - though it’s taken me a few months to process writing about it -  it has several Mithraic references.  I met Wilson in Manhattan in 1997 through the late Brad Will, who brought me to Wilson’s Brecht Forum talk discussing Bakunin’s split from Marx at the First International over the (quite correct, in my opinion) critique of the “proletarian dictatorship” becoming an authoritarian self-perpetuation leading to slavery and suffering, in contrast with a free society generated by rebellious grassroots voluntary organization. I subsequently booked Wilson to do a talk at the late Symptom Hall in Toronto². 

Wilson’s writing delves into history, politics, religion, mythology, anthropology, ethnobotany and counterculture.  I respect someone like him who kept his work accessible to the non-academics who comprise the vast majority of humanity.  I grew up in a world prior to the web, and there was really nothing in the public library system or bookstores, even in this country’s largest city, with much diversity of opinion or scholarship beyond that of Franz Cumont when it came to the field of Mithraism specifically.  It wasn’t until a high school archaeology apprenticeship program, and my subsequent university admission, that I got access to the stacks at UofT’s Robarts and other libraries containing a diversity of views in book and journal format, that I realized why Mithraic scholarship had been such an ivory tower field for so long.  Wilson’s unique avoidance of direct use of the internet as an act of luddite protest certainly limited the scope of his readership, but understood within context, this was an understandable means of avoiding the barriers the digital word poses towards immediatist, disalienated and convivial forms of living that he advocated.

Though focused on Yezidi esotericism, there are a number of Mithraic references in Peacock Angel.  Wilson points to Kreyenbroek who posited that “Mi(th)ra was the supreme deity of the Ur-tradition, god of fire, sacrificer of the bull” (p.59) and that “Yesidism preserves the bull sacrifice, the initiated grades, the caves and underground temples” (p.60).  He goes into the Carl Ruck-influenced amanita muscaria (fly agaric) origin theory and mentions Mithras’ identification - via David Ulansey’s once-popular theory - with Perseus, founder of Mycenae (literally “Mushroom City”), thereby suggesting a Yezidi haoma consumption ritual sharing a common source of origin with the Syndexioi mystery cult (p.127), and he brings up the centrality of lion, rooster, dog, snake, egg and cave symbolism (chapter 8) which also figure into Mithraic iconography.

Yezidis have been murdered, raped, enslaved, the subjects of fatwas and otherwise horribly persecuted by Islamist movements such as ISIS/Daesh because they are a pre-literate and oral culture and not a “religion of the book”, their theology holds their primary deity Melek Ta’us to be beyond good and evil and despite the faith becoming a schismatic Sufi order, this resulted in their refutation of Islam.  Perhaps it’s in this spirit that Wilson dedicated his final book to the Yezidi martyrs, Wilson bearing a certain amount of responsibility for practicing an esoteric form of Islam for several decades before becoming critical of exoteric Islam, finally declaring that “the age now demands the proclamation of the precedence of the esoteric overt the exoteric” (p.5).  With Wilson’s passing, followers of the late Murray Bookchin may rejoice, for one of the chief proponents of what they deemed to be “lifestyle anarchism” is no longer around to get under their skin.  With that schism out of the way, theoretically this will leave social anarchists free to focus their opposition against MAGA.  

Imperialism Old and New

Speaking of fascism, I came across a Mithraic reference in Heidnischer Imperialismus (Heathen Imperialism) by Julius Evola  - the self-described “super-fascist” and influence to both Steve Bannon and Aleksandr Dugin - via Davide Marino and Milan Reith’s Pagan Imperialisms: Julius Evola’s “Esoteric Collaborationism”.  The reference is from Evola’s book’s introduction, and it describes “the tradition of the Aryans of Iran, which arose in the form of the warrior cult of Mithra, the avatâra of the ancient Aryan god of the luminous sky, the “Ruler of the Sun,” the “Slayer of the Bull,” the hero with torch and axe, the symbol of the reborn “through power”.  This ties into my earlier point about the fascist fascination with Mithra/s and the Syndexioi.  Mithraism is also of interest to those of us who are non-fascist or anti-fascist, but my point is that there’s a strong continuity between those evoking an ancient imperial past with those advocating an imperial(ist) future.

Now You Don't Talk So Loud   Now You Don't Seem So Proud

While the Proud Boys are no longer considered to be a terrorist group in New Zealand, and while in the U.S. a similarly antisemitic group has emerged called The Old Glory Club, the Proud Boys themselves are still maintaining their innocence in the January 6th coup by suing the US government for $100 million (each!), initially with the aptly-named Augustus Sol Invictus as one of their lawyers before he was terminated as counsel on July 7th due to being "suspended from the Middle District bar by operation of Local Rule 2.04(b)(2)”.  While I’m glad that they’ve lost their I.P. and I sincerely hope that - as others smarter than me have suggested - they are fading into irrelevance, nothing is ever kismet / fated, and unfortunately I believe they’ll succeed at this by settling for a very large amount, given the recent $5 million settlement with the late putschist Ashli Babbit’s family.  Users of Proud Boy-affiliated Telegram chat groups recently advocated for the hanging of former U.S. President Barack Obama along with celebratory fireworks to “MAKE PUBLIC HANGINGS GREAT AGAIN”, so the sooner the Proud Boys / Pueri Superbi disappear the better, but I’m not holding my breath just yet¹.

Too Cold  Too Cold

I agree with journalist and managing editor of The American Prospect Ryan Cooper who has argued that Trump “is attempting to turn the United States into a fascist dictatorship”, though Cooper differs with me by suggesting that ICE - which has a $170 billion budget in which Stephen Miller has a financial stake - is becoming the new Geheime Staatspolizei (gestapo) as opposed to my argument that the Proud Boys are becoming the new Sturmabteilung (brownshirts).  ICE is creating the externalities of higher food prices and American companies at risk of closing down due to a gutted workforce and Scott Shuchart, former ICE assistant director under Biden, expressed his concern that new recruits “are going to be Proud Boys and other insurrectionists and hoodlums”. Perhaps this is just partisan politics on the part of Shuchart. As yet there’s no smoking gun proving a massive influx of Proud Boy membership into ICE; only the indirect connection of the multiple meetings held by border czar Tom Homan - head of Trump’s immigration policy - with Proud Boy-linked activist Terry Newsome, including a closed-door Chicago session to coordinate deportations. Either way, deportation has proven to be extremely profitable for some.

Trumpspeak

It was no big surprise that Trump - who has dined with Nick Fuentes - made an antisemitic Shylock comment.  He’s a fascist who uses fascist language.  As reported by Jordan Green in The Assembly, Jon Lewis - senior researcher at George Washington University’s Project on Extremism - pointed to similarities in language between a Truth Social post by Trump and the manifesto of Payton Gendron, the white supremacist mass shooter who deliberately targeted and fatally shot 10 African-Americans in a Buffalo grocery store in 2022.

Now that the U. S. Senate has confirmed far-right conspiracy theorist and Proud Boy employer Joe Kent to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, Trump has created conspiracy theories about both former President Obama and Beyoncé in order to deflect from members of his own base who are unhappy with his proximity to late financier and child abuser Jeffrey Epstein.  He’s now in the line of fire of Elon Musk and Marjorie Taylor Greene, two powerful and reality-challenged individuals who command the attention of much of MAGA’s “fickle and amorphous mob that charlatans of various stripes try to steer in this or that direction”.  Trump continues to keep busy serving big oil interests, advocating for the censorship and cancellation of critical late night comedy shows (free speech be damned), taking promotional tours of Alligator Alcatraz, and combining work with leisure by golfing in Scotland.

Just Another News Cycle

Across the globe anti-migrant values have become mainstreamed and kitschy white-ethnonationalist projects are proliferating.  In my country, a bizarre right-wing mini-coup was busted in the army and Patrick Gordon Macdonald, Canada’s modern-day Leni Riefenstahl, is due to be sentenced to somewhere between 14 and 18 years on September 8th, and as such arguably it’s time to update the legal definition for “material support for terrorism”.  Kyle Benton - yet another neo-Nazi US army veteran - was sentenced to two years in prison³.  American neo-Nazi accelerationist leader Brandon Russell’s sentencing is coming up on August 7th, and Elon Musk’s Grok AI MechaHitler ran amok on X.  John Gantz - author of the Jock/Creep Theory of Fascism which explains the difference between Italian and German variants using idealtypen (ideal-types)⁴ recently pointed out how J. D. Vance opposes any American citizenship which “includes the brown hordes and rejects the white supremacists”.  This truly sucks, because if and when Trump kicks the bucket - and he’s no spring chicken - Vance is next in line for the MAGA-minus-Trump presidency.

Well on that cheerful note, adios ‘til September, and thanks for reading!