Hello and Happy Samhain / Halloween / Allhallowtide for those that celebrate.  Thanks for taking time out from your sugar rush to read my take on the spooky ancient past in which cadres of men would recline in two facing rows in cave-like rectangular rooms to carry out strange rituals featuring chanting, masks and open flame, and on the spooky present in which cadres of men recline in two facing rows across dark rectangular board room tables and cause spooky action at a distance wearing enchanting political masks and instigating open flame wars.  Yes, it’s another series of addenda to Mithraism As Proud Boy Prototype: Underground Clubs of the Syndexioi and Pueri Superbi, based on items I’ve read this past month.  Just as the spooky Mithraic deity Aion / Arimanius was a hybrid of human, feline, serpent and avian symbols, this writing is constructed from 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 appears 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

Stick vs Stylus

On page 124 of her Archaeological Evidence of the Cult of Mithras in Ancient Italy doctoral thesis focusing on the archaeological traces of the cult of Mithras in the Roman Empire, Vittoria Canciani suggests that the seventh frame of Ostia’s Mitreo di Felicissimo klimax heptapylos mosaic features an inkwell and stylus, as opposed to what has previously been identified as a patera (libations bowl) and a rabdos (stick). I defer to her expertise here as she’s the one with the PhD and I can see how an inkwell and stylus might symbolize some sort of secretarial or archival function of the pater grade.  Admittedly however, if Canciani had argued that this symbol was actually an avocado - carried from Peru to Rome by a pair of swallows using a strand of creeper held under the dorsal guiding feathers - I’d probably still figure out some symbolic way to link it to my thesis, perhaps identifying the avocado as a taboo and profane item which must be denounced by alpha-male types with domination ambitions, not unlike Roman imperialists and Proud Boys alike.

Invincible Sun Hero-God and Invincible Sun-Powered Hero-God 

There’s a lot of shared symbolism between Mithras and Superman.  One’s a secret god (according to Vermaseren), the other’s a god with a secret identity.   They’re dressed in similar blue and red outfits and capes, as depicted in the Mitreo di Palazzo Barberini.  While Mithras wore a felted Phrygian cap, Clark Kent wore a felted fedora.  Mithras was born from the rock, Superman was born from the rocket.  The Mithraic Aion / Arimanius was a god of infinite time, and Superman (in the 1978 Christopher Reeve movie) had the power of time travel, flying faster than the speed of light around the Earth to reverse its spin and reverse Lois Lane’s death.  One was a classical god in the original sense, the other a modern American god in both the Neil Gaiman sense and idealtype sense, with Kal-El translating as “the ease of a god” in Hebrew.

The recently released collection Superman: The World: “A Celebrated Lineup of International Storytellers Pay Tribute to DC’s Man of Steel in a Commemorative Hardcover Collection” features the story “The Hero and the Bull,” by Ethem Onur Bilgiç from Türkiye which plays into this shared symbolism, and takes place at Göbekli Tepe, a Stonehenge of sorts (but older) in the vicinity of Nemrut Dag in ancient Commagene which the late great Roger Beck theorized was “the ‘missing link’ between Iranian Mithraism and Roman Mithraism”.  I’m looking forward to reading this, having seen the 2025 Superman film a few weeks ago (less campy than I’d hoped, but still fun), and having had Superman bedsheets back when I was five.

Ceremonial Magic: Not Just for Goths and Weirdos

The word ceremony comes from the Latin caerimonia, meaning "sacredness, reverence, or a sacred rite", possibly deriving from the Etruscan city of Caere near Rome where sacred rites were performed.  Mithraists/syndexioi were famous for their ceremonies and rituals, though many specific details are yet to be discovered/uncovered.  It doesn’t help that so much about their ceremonies were written by critical voices (early Christians), and The Mithras Liturgy - while potentially useful for invocatory purposes - may be more a reflection of post-Mithraic developments and syncretist factors than of whatever was going on in the Roman Empire in the 1st-5th centuries.  

Either way, having recently watched the 2024 Shogun remake (tea ceremonies & seppuku) and an uncomfortable amount of professional baseball (opening pitches & rally caps) due to my home town making it to the World Series, I’ve been noticing the many ceremonial facets of life: weddings, funerals, meals, holidays, professional sports, boat launching, even the small rituals involved in waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night.  Social groups are certainly very ceremonial / ritualistic: it’s something human beings really seem to crave, Proud Boys and Syndexioi being cases in point as far as their initiation rituals are concerned. If the right is better (funded) at both meme-proliferation and podcasting, could the same also be said about their superiority in the ceremonial realm? That said, the assassination of Christian Nationalist and fascist-fellow-traveller Charlie Kirk did occur following a well-publicized ritualized curse by progressive feminist witches; just sayin’.

ICE ICE Proud Boys

The One Beautiful Bill Act funded ICE to the tune of $29,850,000,000 despite their loss / disappearance of 3000 undocumented migrants during Operation Midway Blitz.  That’s enough money to hire and train 10,000 new agents, which is considerably more than the Pueri Superbi / Proud Boys ever could; while they may well have facilitated some job hookups, they were never designed to function as a human resources group.  It’s not that I envision direct recruitment of the Proud Boys by ICE, but both groups appeal to the same sort of brutes, plus one is essentially recreational while the other is professional (in the literal sense only), so there could still be coexistence.  However, GOP Candidate Jake Lang, the pardoned January 6 2021 putschist running for the Florida Senate seat previously held by Marco Rubio, has said that the Proud Boys should be deputized in order to hunt migrants.  According to prosecutors, Lang, wore a gas mask and wielded a baseball bat at the Capitol Hill coup, striking police while shouting "This is our house, we paid for this fucking building.”  If according to Carl Von Clausewitz war is a continuation of politics by different means, then the reverse can also be true and running for political office can be a continuation of a “war”.  

While Proud Boy founder Gavin McInnes has lost his defamation lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center, he’s slid back into a “Godfather” role for the group that he once claimed to have cut ties with.  The winds have shifted since under the Biden presidency and the group has become greatly emboldened, though still divided into “standard” and “national” factions due to current leader Enrique Tarrio’s federal informant role.  

Andy Campbell, critical biographer of the group with his 2022 We Are Proud Boys has pointed out that now “there’s very little divide between the people already in politics and what the Proud Boys represent, which is political violence against dissenters.”  Currently it’s antifascists - the Proud Boys’ quintessential foe - who are in the hot seat.  On a similar note, and tying in to last month's post, the Colorado Springs Anti-Fascists and the Front Range Anti-Fascists have revealed a membership overlap between the Christian nationalist and Turning Point USA (led by Charlie Kirk prior to his assassination) and the more openly fascist Patriot Front (led by Thomas Rousseau who’s unfortunately still alive).

Pueri Genetrix

This month’s Tablet Magazine published Banned for Life, a sympathetic article about Gavin McInnes that ignores both his own well documented antisemitism and the well documented antisemitism of the group that he founded.  The article also featured something that was news to me in terms of the origins of the Proud Boys / Pueri Superbi.  Like anyone with even the faintest familiarity with the group I was already aware of the group’s name deriving from Aladdin: The Musical’s Proud of Your Boy, but what I’d previously been unaware of was how

I don’t doubt Tablet Magazine’s fact checking; I believe this is what McInnes told them, that McInnes himself believes the story, and it could very well be true, but considering his revulsion as a “hipster fascist clown” I wouldn't put it past him to embellish or otherwise alter the Proud Boy origin story along the lines of Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight: a different version each time the origin story’s told.  All personal histories are embellished mythical origin stories: we recall and re-tell what makes us heroic, or at least interesting, and forget the rest.

Make Ballrooms Great Again

I get the desire for increased diplomacy with allies and enemies and everything in between.  If that necessitates a bigger ballroom then so be it; even an extremely kitschy-looking one.  Dance is a social good, even when it’s elitist.  Still, I don't think the ballroom premise is the genuine primary goal of Trump's East Wing demolition and rebuilding plans mandating “traditional and classical architecture”, which I alluded to last year in my piece.  By knocking it down he also got rid of the old Presidential Emergency Operations Center built in 1941.  The PEOC was rebuilt beneath the north lawn during the Obama presidency and Trump visited it with Melania and Barron during the May 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd.  After reemerging he vowed to sic “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” on intruders, and later threatened that whoever revealed that he had been in the bunker “should be charged with treason and executed”.

It's not that I think he's going to be installing a White House mithraeum / spelaeum.  That said, the boundaries of what I thought to be unlikely outcomes have long been transcended, plus a situation room / operations room does have similar dimensions and would function with some similar elements of ritualized solemnity as a mithraeum.  After surviving two well-publicized assassination attempts and others which were kept mum, and just two days following the assassination of his (comparatively) young campaigner and MAGA advocate Charlie Kirk, Trump announced his plans for his East Wing renovations.  Spooked much Donald?  

Plenary & Interplanetary Authority

If the planned 'Arc de Trump' and third term weren't sufficient to scare you, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller mentioned in an October 6th CNN interview that “under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, the president has plenary authority”, or in other words: limitless power.  Combined with the antifa moral panic which resulted in death threats being made against a Rutgers university professor of the history of anti-fascism, forcing him to flee with his family to Spain, my guess is that many U.S.-based activists committed to opposing fascism are going to either quit, go into “sleeper cell mode” or begin operating in an underground capacity for the foreseeable future.  Meanwhile the moderate, above-ground and peaceful ‘No Kings’ rally was met with both knife-wielding Proud Boys and an online response by Trump of symbolically shitting on the moderate / liberal / Democrat constituent that still represents tens of millions of Americans.  The F16 that he flew in for his Truth Social AI-generated video was pure Top Gun, but combined with the solar crown he was depicted wearing and a cockpit-halo, the overall effect was that of a modern day (and demented) Apollo-Helios-Sol Invictus.  After all, the chariot was cutting-edge warfare transportation technology thousands of years ago; if the gods existed now, wouldn’t they want to be depicted using a more modern device like a fighter jet?  Trump sure seems to think of himself as some sort of solar god, and in this case - as I wrote last year - he’s truly l’anus solaire.

‘Til next time (assuming there is a next time), and while the veils are thin, here’s my ritualistic annual Halloween toast for the coming year: for an end to racist and antisemitic rhetoric from Young Republican leaders and Trump's nominee for U.S. special counsel, an end to senate candidates with SS tattoos, an end to food stamp blockages, an end to the authoritarian shutdown of the U.S. Congress, an end to white supremacy disguised as refugee policy, and an end to the dangerous and destabilizing resumption of U.S. nuclear testing.