Here’s my final addendum 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 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

Cult Film Alluding to a Mystery Cult

The indie film GNOME SICK - 7 Slays Til Mithras - featuring a plot device alluding to an historic take on an ancient mystery cult - was reminiscent of the campy works of Ed Wood. While this film didn’t have the budget for the CGI and all-star cast of something like Sinners (the recent and excellent Louisiana vampire flick) if you’re inspired to go out and watch GNOME SICK, you can expect a B-Movie horror flick along the lines of Leprechaun as opposed to something high budget from Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise (FX’s Alien: Earth has been great so far), though of course GNOME does share Ridley Scott’s fascination with the Syndexioi / Mithraism.  

I’m of the rare opinion that one can still enjoy the concepts underlying a film even if watching it is not a Hollywood-level experience - Michel Gondry’s book You'll Like This Film Because You're In It: The Be Kind Rewind Protocol was a necessary read prior to my 2006 involvement in the Toronto indie sci-fi Ghosts With Shit Jobs - plus there are plenty of crappy high-budget films out there.  GNOME SICK evoked tones of Valley of the Dolls, Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands and even a bit of Groundhog Day for being stuck inside of Christmas against one's will.  The self-referential and fourth wall breaking moments include a junkie sheriff talking to the camera while wearing a “high school drama program” t-shirt along with the protagonist, and some dialog featuring lines such as “those bones look like props” (they sure did).  

No surprise, there’s very little actual Mithraic or even Roman content to it, with the god acting as a stand-in for a blood-sacrificing pagan cult that runs the town of Christmas, California.  Mithras - depicted here as an ahistorical evil Santa complete with CGI elves - must kill seven members of the town’s community and steal their souls before being killed by his own son, a process which in turn must be repeated each generation, the first victim being a musician named Raven¹ (the first of the seven Mithraic grades of initiation).  This film makes for good low-budget fun if you’re a horror fan.  The gore is ridiculous and so over the top (one victim is murdered by “Mithras” in his own BBQ) as to be trope-inducing as opposed to genuinely scary, which for me is great because I can no longer handle films that are genuinely scary in a jump-startle way.  Overall it was more entertaining than most of the high-budget feature films I've seen this past year, and sometimes you need a good distraction because regular life can be treacherous and replete with perils.

Down and Out or Up and At ‘Em?

The Proud Boys nearly tripled in numbers around the November 14, 2019 “Million MAGA March” after Alex Jones invited them to act as his bodyguards, but are they finally going the way of the dodo?  Is my thesis fundamentally flawed?  I hope it is, if so I gladly concede, and to quote Billy Joel, “you may be right, I may be crazy”.  While the group has sued Washington for a ridiculous amount that unfortunately I believe they will succeed in obtaining, there has been pushback from the DOJ (even under Trump minion Pam Bondi) and the Proud Boys are also being sued by the Metropolitan AME Church - a historical Black church in Washington - over the use of the “Proud Boys” moniker which they no longer own.  Proud Boy / Pueri Superbi January 6 Coup ally The Oath Keepers are being resurrected, at least if their formerly incarcerated leader Stewart Rhodes is to be believed; a similar surge is desired by far-right militia group the Texas Three Percenters.  While The Atlantic’s Ali Breland recently argued that the Proud Boys are still fractured over their current leader Enrique Tarrio’s FBI informant role, he suggested that they “might not stay underground forever. Under the right conditions, they could surge once again”.  If so, that would be very bad indeed.

Proud Boys have “been spotted at a “Tesla Takedown” event in Salem, Oregon, marched with anti-abortion activists in San Francisco, and confronted protesters outside of the “Alligator Alcatraz” ICE facility”, but they’ve had their mojo stolen by DHS and ICE who’ve throw migrants into unmarked vans to be detained indefinitely, enticed new recruits with a $50,000 sign-on bonus and used an antisemitic dog whistle taken from the title of an influential National Alliance book as a promotional slogan.  Ethics aside for a moment - yes, innocent people will be separated from their parents, children, siblings and friends, and many will likely die in the process - one unintended consequence here is that in raiding farms and hotels and zipping off these workers to Salvadoran Guatanamos, ICE and the MAGA regime are making these industries more expensive and it’s not like documented Americans are lining up to work under low-wage and poor working conditions in agriculture and industry.  Food will get more expensive, certain types of produce will become less available, and - to be petty for a moment - fewer Americans will be able to afford to take vacations because the cost of hotel cleaners and other staff will go up.

Trump has also stolen their thunder, effectively making them superfluous by adopting their agenda.  According to Proud Boys Chair Enrique Tarrio the things they

The aptly named Proud Boy and momentary member of the bar Sol Invictus was not wrong when on the anniversary of the Charlottesville horror he wrote:

In other words: why should they waste their time protesting when the White House already does what they want?

What Is The West Anyways?  

Proud Boys have always described themselves as Western Chauvinists, by which they mean misogynists celebrating the traditions of Europe.  This may be a bit reductionist, but since Europe is named after Europa, the mother of Minos, brother of Cadmus, abductee of Zeus and a Phonecian princess from the city of Tyre in Lebanon, which is not generally seen as a part of Europe, but rather of Western Asia or the Middle/Near East, it’s therefore both ironic and appropriate - depending on one's political bent - that an entire continent is named after a tale about an abduction and assault.  Of course, in geographic terms Europe is a peninsula of the Eurasian² continent, so strictly speaking it's more of a sub-continent.

What If?: Hakuna Boys

You’ve gotta wonder: what if back in the day Gavin McInnes had taken his family to see The Lion King Broadway musical instead of Aladdin?  It’s one of those great What If? questions, like “What if Bruce Wayne and his family hadn’t gone to see The Mark of Zorro in the theatres that day?”, putting aside the fact that Batman is DC and What If? is Marvel.  I’ve seen The Lion King twice now (I worked for a couple of summers as a puppeteer on other much smaller productions, so I’m a fan), and I don’t think the Proud Boys would have caused as much damage as they have if they’d instead have been named after the song Hakuna Matata even in an ironic way, even putting aside the central role of gay icon Elton John in composing the score, given that the Proud Boys claim (insincerely) to be less homophobic than they are transphobic.  

To return to the Mithraic pretense/theme of my thesis, The Lion King musical does have the key symbolic elements of the seven Mithraic initiatory stages:

But again, these are all ubiquitous symbols, and the further one reads into fairy tales, fables, myths, mythic tales, films, shows and plays, especially those derived from the Western canon (and not just the work of Caroline Lawrence, M J Polelle or Rick Riordon) the more often most if not all of these symbols can be found in a single work.

A Blast from the Past: Some Largely Forgotten Details

On January 4, 2021 Donald Trump met with Katrina Pierson, one of the Jan. 6th "Save America" rally organizers, in the dining room off the Oval Office. Pierson, who also spoke before Trump on January 6, later told the committee investigating the Capitol attack that she was worried about what she was hearing from the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and she knew things would get chaotic at the “wild” protest, but her concerns were ignored and she did not testify at Trump’s impeachment trial.  Cindy Chafian, organizer of the January 5th evening rally, invited Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio to speak but he was unable due to being arrested the previous day for bringing gun magazines to Washington and burning a Black Lives Matter banner stolen from a church.  Tarrio suspiciously toured the White House on December 12, 2020, just a few weeks before the January 6, 2021 coup.

God Hates Flags 

Trump keeps dialing it up to eleven. Now that even Canadian Girl Scouts refuse to visit the U.S. and the graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl has been banned, and the Department of Defense is being renamed the War Department, he’s attempted to ban flag burning, which is arguably his prerogative to denounce, but this will create some interesting conflicts with the virtues of freedom of speech and the right to protest against the government: both things he’s ostensibly in favour of.  Girard, Durkheim and Weber would have had lots to say about this, as would Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle in their work on the totem myth.  In their epic Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (imagine Georges Sorel minus the fascism), Marvin and Ingle argued that

His Bedroom Window It Is Made Out of Bricks

He’s taken over the Washington, DC police with the National Guard despite falling crime rates, and plans to expand this model to Chicago, New York and Baltimore with the other major Democratic-run cities to follow.  His critic (from within broad-tent Republicanism) former national security adviser John Bolton has suspiciously had the FBI sicced on him.  And, for his encore, his yellow icing on the orange cake: Trump is cancelling mostly-built offshore wind farms under the guise of national security.  So much for sustainable energy generation and good luck to island and coastal peoples: better relocate inland/uphill, build a boat, or learn how to swim.

Valued Members Flourishing

Jared Wise has been hired as “a valued member” and senior adviser of the Justice Department despite having repeatedly yelled "kill 'em" as he and fellow rioters attacked law enforcement during the January 6, 2021 Capitol coup.   While violent putschists are walking free and in governmental employ, the January 6 prosecutors are being purged, pink-slipped and culled.  Christian nationalist Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth reposted a video from his pastor suggesting that women should not be allowed to vote, which is obviously terrible but arguably only 52% as bad as when Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn entered the White House in mid-December of 2020, urging Trump to use the army to seize voting machines, presumably in order to cancel voting altogether.  American history is being rewritten as white nationalist: no more references to the Navajo Code Talkers, no Fort Liberty it’s Fort Bragg once again, no Juneteenth greetings, and no learning about Frederick Douglass, desegregation, Little Rock and Ruby Bridges in the classroom. 

According to a recent Counter Extremism Project report, American neo-Nazi movements are flourishing: The Base founder Rinaldo Nazzaro released a video calling for the group’s supporters to embrace extremism, Active Club movement founder Rob Rundo has outlined plans for a magazine, a Texas Active Club chapter opened a new gym, and the Blood Tribe celebrated a rally in New Hampshire.  Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, stated that “frankly, white supremacists have never had it so good as they do now under Trump.”  One white nationalist group has been busy establishing an intentional community exclusively for white people in the outskirts of Arkansas.  While this Judenfrei project is not unique, nor the first, it’s interesting in that one of the interview questions for prospective members of this not-so-quaint hideaway asks about men’s fascination with the Roman Empire, a popular 2023 meme, something which Tallulah Trezevant explained in her Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline article on how X leads its users towards extremes based on their interest in Roman history, and something which I referred to in my original piece.

Turbocharged Explosives

Using “Western” instead of “white” as a veil for its racism, the Proud Boys have functioned as a pipeline leading to more overtly racist organizations like the Patriot Front-led Active Club network or the Aryan Freedom Network, which “openly advocates preparing for a ‘Racial Holy War’”.  The latter group pays specific tribute to the violent white supremacist group The Order who murdered Jewish radio host Alan Berg in 1984, and claims to be “turbocharged by President Donald Trump’s return to the White House” due to “his hardline stance on immigration and his invocation of ‘Western values’”.   Brandon Russell, an explosives accumulator and (co-)founder of the neo-Nazi accelerationist network Atomwaffen Division, was finally sentenced to 20 years for his attempt at destroying the electric grid of Black-majority city Baltimore and possibly even the entire state of Maryland.  While even Trump has limits on who he’s willing to designate as a political prisoner, I’m not certain if that will be the case for a post-Trump MAGA 2.0 successor.

And on that sombre note, that’s all, it’s been swell, and thanks for reading.