Ramadan Mubarak

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 February, covering the following four themes: 

1) the Roman Mithraists who referred to one another as ‘syndexioi’, as well as Mithraic antecedents and affiliated tendencies in both Europe and Asia 

2) 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’

3) the MAGA regime which emancipated both the Proud Boy rank & file and leadership and appears to be molding the group into the paramilitary force referred to as “Trump's army”

4) the West’s disturbing historical and cultural connections to fascism, which ties all this together

Here we go for February, first a few short items on Mithraism:

Dig It

Archaeologists found a piece of the 2,000 year old Roman basilica just a ten minute walk from the London Mithraeum | Bloomberg SPACE.  I guess archaeology is still alive and they haven’t dug everything up yet that there is to be found.  Who knows what Mithraea are still out there or what other smaller relics have yet to be discovered; perhaps even a written liturgy of less disputed authenticity than the Mithras Liturgy of the syncretic Paris Magical Papyrus.  Or, perhaps we’ve already reached peak Mithraism; only Aion knows for certain.

Risin' Up to the Challenge of our Rival

I’ve been reading up on Zoorkhaneh, a unique, ancient and present-day martial art form acting as a “fusion of different aspects of Persian culture, including pre-Islamic influences from Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, and Gnosticism”.  It’s a significant contrast from the minimal way in which (to jump back to the present) fist-fighting and “culture” (drinking and reciting Pat Buchanan’s tired prose) are synthesized in Proud Boys groups; in Zoorkhaneh the martial arts are authentically positioned within a broader cultural context of faith, music, poetry, dance and visual art.  It’s hard to imagine this correctly replicated in a modern-day western context, as it would be like sandwiching a MMA match in between a rap battle and a knitting circle, all taking place in a church basement.  With its community-focus, Zoorkhaneh does mirror certain aspects of the far-right’s Active Clubs (minus the actual far-right politics), a group which the Proud Boys will quite possibly fold into, as many individual members have already made the switch.  

On the Shoulders of Giants

I’m nearly two years late in expressing some credit due to the late Roger Beck who passed away in April of 2023.  He was professor emeritus at the University of Toronto where I did my undergrad degree and was an important scholar of the field of Mithraic studies, prolific author of so many other books and articles, attendee of the First International Congress of Mithraic Studies, and also a translator and playwright.  I corresponded with Prof. Beck between January 2009 and October 2011 to get his help in successfully ensuring that the Toronto Tauroctony (CIMRM #606 / accession n.927.68) was finally given a proper plaque by the Royal Ontario Museum curators when many of the Greco-Roman artifacts were moved around during the 2009 Rome gallery renovations.  

Before being donated to the ROM, the artefact was displayed at the office of Simeon Janes - an important Toronto developer and the man responsible for the Annex and the Junction neighbourhoods - located at the King and Bay intersection of what is now the city’s financial district.  The Toronto Tauroctony was mistakenly restored with upward-pointing torches by both Cautes and Cautopates, when traditionally (in every fresco or sculpture besides this one) Catuopates’ torch should be pointing downwards.  The artefact itself was brought from Ostia to Toronto by Janes during his travel adventures following his wife’s death.  In 1872 Janes' young son Walter passed away and was laid to rest where the Wesleyan Methodist cemetery once stood in Port Hope, a small city just south of the town where I live, while Janes himself, his wife Maria and daughters Eva and Louisa are buried in Mt. Pleasant cemetery in Toronto.

I got to hear Prof. Beck in person at the University of Toronto in 2010 when he delivered the paper Star-Talk: a Gateway to Mind in the Ancient World as part of the panel Data from Dead Minds? Challenges on the interface of History of Religions (in Greco-Roman Antiquity) and the Cognitive Science of Religion, along with Alison Griffith, Panayotis Pachis, Colleen Shantz and Edward Slinger.  This was at the 20th Congress of the International Association of the History of Religions which took place at UofT’s Bahen Centre for Information Technology.  

I read Prof. Beck's The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire, Beck on Mithraism: Collected works with new essays, The Roman Mithras Cult: A Cognitive Approach, written with Olympia Panagiotidou, as well as a number of his journal articles.  I initially discovered Prof. Beck's works in 1993 while researching in the stacks of UofT’s Robarts Library when I was still in high school, apprenticing for Dr. Ted Banning from the Department of Anthropology on his Wadi Ziqlab neolithic excavation documentation.  Everything I read prior to that was Cumont, or interpretations of Cumont (including some Jung and a section from the ‘Man, Myth & Magic’ encyclopedic series), because that's all there was in the Toronto Public Library System at that time.  I'm just a hobbyist and of no real significance in this field, but Prof. Beck was a giant like Cumont, Vermaseren, Hinnels, Bianchi, Clauss and Gordon.  We all stand on the shoulders of giants, each hoping to contribute in our own way to Mithraic studies via the fields of archaeology, history, classics, architecture, cultural studies or neuroscience.  I’d like to have been a student of his, but it wasn’t in the cards.  In another lifetime perhaps. 

That’s all I’ve got that’s antiquity related; now back to modern times.

Portents of a Violent Future

Donald Trump recently used the Napoleon quote “he who saves his country does not violate any laws”, a real Sun King move; the White house even used AI to literally depict him as a heroic Sun King.  Trump pardoned or commuted sentences for quite a few Proud Boys who took part in the January 6th coup including Enrique Tarrio - still the group's leader - who played both sides by acting as an offsite planner and an FBI informant, as well as Joe Biggs, Gilbert Fonticoba, Gabriel Augustin Garcia, Kenneth Bonawitz, Alan Fischer III, Zachary Johnson, Dion Rajewski, Daniel Lyons Scott, Edward George Jr., Arthur Jackman, Steven Miles, Timothy Earl O'Malley, Paul Rae, Barry Bennett Ramey, Anthony Sargent, Daniel Lyons Scott, Kevin Tuck, Nathaniel A. Tuck, Tom Vournas, Christopher Worrell, James Brett IV and Leonard Lobianco.

Several of these high-profile released Proud Boys have discussed goals like running for sheriff (Enrique Tarrio), running for congress (Zachary Rehl), starting a new men's group to fight “wokeism” (Ethan Nordean) and fighting for prison reform (Joe Biggs), plus reiterating their desires for vengeance (Tarrio, along with the allied Oath Keepers’ leader Stewart Rhodes).   There’s a precedent for these far-right power moves: Joe Kent, chosen by Donald Trump to run the National Counterterrorism Center, hired Proud Boy Graham Jorgensen as a campaign consultant for his 2022 House of Representatives campaign.  It will be somewhat easier for them to pursue these goals without blowback now that video evidence of the January 6 coup has been removed from the U.S. government website.  Susan Benesch argued in Just Security that “because of the pardons and commutations, we can expect the far right to push further and harder against the law. By excusing and even celebrating past illegal attacks, President Trump has given a tacit but clear endorsement of future violence. And in pardoning everyone, he declined to draw any line between acceptable and unacceptable or even unlawful conduct, so extremists will see no reason to abide by norms. On the contrary, they’ll see lawbreaking as virtuous or even heroic”.   

What’s in a Name?

One stumbling block towards this potential growth of retributive violence was the news that the Proud Boys lost legal control of their own name.  The Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, attacked by Proud Boys in 2020, now owns their name and branding rights, and has begun selling branded merch to recoup damages.  It remains to be seen whether the group will have to change their moniker (hopefully not to ‘Pueri Superbi’, as that would make me feel somewhat liable).  Perhaps now the Proud Boys will return to using ‘The Saviors of Liberty’, the “supergroup of right-wing fraternal organizations” that included many Proud Boys and was brought together to turn Jan.6 putschist Ashli Babbitt into a martyr.  While the names ‘Camicia Nera’, ‘Squadristi’, ‘Braunhemden’ and ‘Sturmabteilung’ are already taken, they could use Roger Stone's suggested name for the group: ‘The Ancient Order of Orange Men’, my suggestion ‘Pud Boys’, or simply ‘The Boys’.  

Vice to Violence

While its leadership has publicly opposed racism and disavowed violence, in practice the group functions as a soft gateway to overtly white supremacist groups and the Proud Boys “serve as a radicalization to violence vector”.  Case in point: the racist, homophobic and anti-migrant Proud Boys associate Terry Newsome met several times with Tom Homan, head of Trump’s immigration policy in order to discuss deportations.  Another example comes from a literary analysis of the origins of the group via its original founder Gavin McInnes.  From Vice to Violence: How the Nineties Invented the Alt-Right was written 3½ years ago, though I just came across it after listening to a recent interview with its author Hal Niedzviecki, founder of Broken Pencil and Canzine.  With the benefit of hindsight, Niedzviecki explores the “Manly Transgressive” identity of misogyny, xenophobia and below-the-surface extremism in 1990’s indie / alternative publications.  

Niedzviecki identifies cultural forces from this era including including Henry Rollins’ 2.13.61 Press, Jim Goad - who Gavin McInnes praised as “the greatest writer of our generation” for his zine ‘Answer Me’ and book ‘The Redneck Manifesto’, and Adam Palfrey’s Feral House Press: instrumental in promoting ‘Siege’ the disturbing work of neo-Nazi James Mason which has been responsible for much of the improperly termed “lone wolf” acts of far-right domestic terrorism.  He connects the dots between McInnes’ co-founding of Vice to his founding of the Proud Boys to the group’s role in spearheading the January 6th Capitol coup via what he accurately identifies as “anti-establishment roguery, aggrieved male disenfranchisement, and racial paranoia”.  He shows how we reach the present era of “hundreds of alt-right media outlets and opinions available at the tap of a screen” and in which “Pepe the Frog refuses to retire”.

Adventures in Super Tarrio Land

In a discussion between Proud Boys ethnographic researcher Samantha Kutner and pardoned chairman Enrique Tarrio released February 17, 2025, at just under 40 minutes into the interview Tarrio mentions reading about the Roman Empire during his three years of incarceration for seditious conspiracy.  While this time and place is certainly worth studying in order to understand the contemporary West, a correlation exists between an obsession with Rome and an advocacy of far-right ideology, or an ‘Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline’ to quote Tallulah Trezevant.

Several days later Tarrio was arrested for hitting a heckler's cell phone out of her hand during a Washington press conference.  Disturbingly, Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Raiklin, a psychotic Trump supporter and self-designated “Secretary of Retribution” was also in attendance at this very same press conference.  Raiklin has previously drew up something he termed a 'Deep State target list':  a vigilante death warrant for the public officials that he considers to be traitors, along with their families and staff.  Hopefully this mutual attendance does not portend Raiklin’s further collaboration with Tarrio and the Proud Boys as they already share a history.

Grant Tudor and Amanda Carpenter described how, after being released following two years of prison, Tarrio immediately appeared on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ show to discuss authoritarian entrenchment, stating that “success is going to be retribution. We have to ensure the next four years set us up for the next 100 years.”  Grant Tudor further provides a history of authoritarian leaders such as Chile’s Pinochet, Peru’s Fujimori, Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Orbán and Turkey’s Erdoğan pardoning and utilizing paramilitaries in the style of Mussolini’s blackshirts and Hitler’s Sturmabteilung.  Trump is doing the same thing with the Proud Boys; after all, no rightwing extremist group played a bigger role in orchestrating the January 6th coup than them. 

Saints and Soldiers

This month I completed Rita Katz’s ‘Saints and Soldiers: Inside Internet-Age Terrorism, From Syria to the Capitol Siege’.  This was a book that I listened to in audiobook format during my commute and at the gym, and the narrator was great but did make the same error as in the audiobook for ‘Radicalized’ by Max Kutner (not ‘Radicalized’ by Cory Doctorow; all three are excellent, but Doctorow’s is sci-fi / speculative fiction, whereas Katz’s and Kutner’s are non-fiction, though all three share the topic of extremism).  The error in both Katz’s and Kutner’s was the mispronunciation of the 'Order of Nine Angles' as 'Order of Nine Angels', a reasonable error for a narrator unfamiliar with that group and the meaning of the name.

Aside from that one quirk, ‘Saints and Soldiers’ analyzes the parallel and symbiotic relationship between Islamist and far-right terrorism, and asks why the former has been taken so much more seriously than the latter especially when it comes to the online platforms that facilitate the growth of these movements: back then on 8chan/8kun (pulled from Cloudflare), TheDonald.win (shut down) and Parler (scraped), and immediately afterwards on Patriots.win and Telegram.

It also explains how “January 6 was entirely predictable — it was planned in broad daylight”, with the Proud Boys being the most significant of contributors, and that there was no lack of intelligence - her SITE Intelligence Group having sent police “more than two dozen alerts between Dec. 23 and Jan. 7 noting the rising risk of violence related to the coming gathering” - but rather a lack of will when it came to prevention of the damage, injuries and death that resulted, not to mention how it has led us to Proud Boys once again threatening the Capital Police, this time at the ‘Principles First’ summit, an anti-MAGA republicans alternative to CPAC.

Thanks for reading and see you next month, unless the loud orange turd down south annexes the country in which I presently reside.  How an invasion might play out is anyone's game; I'm not exactly holding my breath.  Perhaps it's just denial, but I like to think of it as a hyperbolic bargaining strategy to distract from very real tariffs.  Still, hypothetically speaking, offering the newly fired-by-DOGE masses a military salary, free health care (TRICARE), post-secondary education (Army Tuition Assistance Program), cheaper eggs (powdered, in MRE’s) and the enticement of Canadian Maple Syrup would be enough to lead a 51st state occupation force across the border.  If Trump is a Red Caesar, perhaps his Rubicon is the St. Lawrence.