We Are Proud Riders of the Caribou

Happy birthday to a certain North American country that I live in which is still being threatened with annexation by a southern hyperbolic dictator.   I'm not big on flag waving, hence the weird caribou/moose image above.  I have many criticisms of Canadian federal policy, but being swallowed by the Trump regime would only make things worse, so I’m glad that hasn’t occurred.

So 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 both Europe and Asia 

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 both the Proud Boy rank & file and leadership and (I genuinely hope that I’m wrong on this) appears to be molding the group into the paramilitary force referred to as “Trump's army”

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

Here we go again:

Jinx On You!

I've hacked my way through Thomas Stanley’s The History of the Chaldaick Philosophy published in 1662; certainly its author probably did not foresee somebody reading their text 363 years into the future, and on a cellphone no less.  I came across it in trying to figure out the origins of the term ‘jinx’, which according to one theory is based on the supposedly ill-omened Eurasian wryneck bird (Jynx torquilla), sometimes known as the snake-bird for its ability to turn its neck 180 degrees and hiss like a snake.  According to Stanley, jynx was also the name of a Chaldean initiatory order, one of seven in fact (just like the Syndexioi / Mithraists), and hence my interest in reading the book.

Adventures in Apophenia

One might be (incorrectly) inclined to see Mithraic symbolism in the most random of places, even a panel from Dav Pilkey’s sadly no longer in print graphic novel The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, one particular image of which compares somewhat to the Fiano Romano Mithraic relief featuring Cautes and Cautopates.  Don’t get too excited though; my assumption is that this resemblance is purely a coincidence, but a funny one nonetheless.

Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital 

Mithril is Tolkien's priceless mineral used for weapons, armor and jewellery.  According to Alicia Matz’s Mithra-ndir: Gandalf and the Roman cult of Mithras, Tolkien’s Gandalf is essentially an avatar of Mithras in modern fantasy-fiction.  The head of Thiel’s surveillance company Palantir’s London office is Louis Mosley, the grandson of the British Union of Fascists’ founder Oswald Mosley.

They’ve Guano Use for Bats

Recently I read the fascinating Bat Conservation International article Bats in Greco-Roman Antiquity.  Since bats roost in caves, and since Syndexioi / Mithraists either utilized natural caves or built their own simulated caves for their rituals, I’ve always wondered: did the bats bother Mithraists?  They don’t appear to figure into their iconography¹ .  I’ve often felt that DC Comics’ Batman character had a certain Mithraic vibe to him: the cape, the Manichean outlook, the darkness, the quests, plus comic book superheroes are essentially classical heroes and gods revamped for modern times.  I’m certainly not the first to suggest that; just read or watch practically anything by Neil Gaiman.  He wears a cowl instead of a Phyrgian cap though, and more a black/grey than red/blue colour scheme to his costume.  Still, a possible subject for future exploration.

No Place Like Gnome

GNOME SICK - 7 Slays Til Mithras just came out.  I used to be a massive horror fan when I was 12 to 13.  After purchasing many individual copies of Fangoria magazine at Toronto’s The World’s Biggest Bookstore² , I bought a subscription with my hard-earned babysitting money.  My room was plastered with various genre posters: Freddie Kruger, the Hellbender Cenobites, Leatherface, even Eddie from Iron Maiden⁶ .  

At a certain point, I realized that life is scary enough.  Having had sufficient direct encounters with injury and the morbidity of those around me, I removed the posters (which anyhow likely caused irrevocable traumatic harm to my younger siblings).  After watching everything that Cronenberg did in one fell swoop (thank you National Film Board festival) and attending many a TIFF Midnight Madness, I almost completely stopped watching horror and/or gory films, but now and then I do enjoy an episode of Black Mirror or of Love Death + Robots, I still watch Lair of the White Worm about once a year, and I’m a big fan of softer, not-really-horror-but-just creepy stuff like Tim Burton’s work, plus the tad-heavier work of Vivienne Medrano.  I worked locations for Silent Hill which was a lot of fun⁴ , and I got a production credit for Ghosts With Shit Jobs (though mostly I was the locations manager).  It’s just that the world is full of real-life monsters, so no need for make-believe ones.  

I get why horror is entertaining - my first written piece in grade 4 was an AOTKT-inspired The Big Mac That Ate New York, and I used a real cow brain³ filming a scene from The Chrysalids for a grade 7 student production.  I’ve met two of the three main protagonists of Twilight (both were charming) though I’ve never watched a moment of the show, and have wandered around many of the filming locales of It, though I’ve only seen clips of the film.  I’ve studied and experienced enough violence and death in my now sedentary and pedantically-reflective semi-rural middle-aged life that I prefer to avoid the unnecessary shock when possible.

Still, I do plan on watching GNOME SICK - 7 Slays Til Mithras just to see if it has anything to do whatsoever with Mithraism.  My reading of the preview is that it’s a B-movie take on the Leprechaun and Christmas Slay legacies, switching Pagan for Satanic.  And it’s pretty much mainstream chatter nowadays that one very popular Pagan or pre-Christian Yule-time celebration was that of the Man in Red, that Jolly Ol’ Invincible Sun: Mithras.  I’m curious how it’s going to play out, and I’m still a big fan of indie film-making.  As well, I have an admittedly-weird theory that I may explore here in a future post: the symbolic parallels between vampires and the Mithraic / Syndexioi leontocephaline figure.

Future Proud Boy Absorption into ICE?

The night before January 6, Trump asked his final chief of staff Mark Meadows to contact political advisor Roger Stone and national security adviser Mike Flynn, men with ties to the Proud Boys (who I’ve referred to as the Pueri Superbi) and to the Oath Keepers.  Roger Stone in particular brought Florida Proud Boy Jacob Engels to Washington to assist at the Willard Hotel on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6.  This past April, MAGA influencer and white nationalist Laura Loomer invited Jacob Engels on her podcast to discuss the IceRaid.US blockchain-based web form developed by Jacob Meyers for the purpose of identifying potential ICE kidnapping victims. 

Myths in Modern Times

John Ganz has suggested that “Trumpism contains many myths, including the idea of the stolen election, which I contend is less a statement of fact than an imaginative projection of a shared sense of dispossession. Populism is mythic: it creates a world of heroic people and villainous elites, and a vision of a cataclysmic showdown between the two. People want a little more myth, struggles, enemies, battles, triumphs, etc.”

Similarly, Marc-André Argentino argues that “within violent extremist milieus, fictitious and original characters allow individuals to construct detailed personal identities explicitly aligned with ideological narratives. These characters are intentionally crafted to embody specific extremist symbolism e.g. nihilistic violence, militant discipline, or martyrdom fantasies.”  Argentino is referring to the nihilist and misanthropic accelerationist Com, 764, NLM & MKY networks here, but the sentiment applies as well to their comparatively moderate accelerationist cousins The Proud Boys.

A Corrupt Cop, a Beatified Coupist and Other Legal Shenanigans

Recently the former leader of the D.C. Police intelligence division Shane Lamond was sentenced to 18 months in prison for leaking information to Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio ahead of the Jan. 6th 2021 Capitol coup.  On the same day, five Proud Boys pardoned by Trump recently sued the federal government for $100 million, hiring the notorious and abusive last resort co-attorney Augustus Sol Invictus, claiming they were victims of “egregious and systemic abuse of the legal system and the United States Constitution to punish and oppress political allies of President Trump.”  Given that the Trump admin will pay just short of $5 million to putschist Ashley Babbit’s family there’s a high likelihood they'll win their lawsuit, but I’m curious what they'd spend their money on.  $100 million can buy a lot of vape juice. 

Perhaps the funds will be contingent on training and integration of the Proud Boys into existing military structures.  Only days after this lawsuit the National Guard and the Marines were deployed in LA, an 8pm curfew was established and the governor of California was threatened with arrest so that ICE can continue kidnapping people to El Salvador and make arrests without warrant or judicial review and to serve as a preemptive warning to Atlanta, Chicago, New York and other Democrat-majority cities.

What's been lost in the $100 million lawsuit and the troop deployment is the double-standard of heavily policing anti-kidnapping protesters while granting immunity to Proud Boys who participated in the Capitol siege  as a “force multiplier”.  Enrique Tarrio sent the Proud Boys a voice message on January 4, 2021 acknowledging their plan to storm the Capitol and remained in contact with the Proud Boys Ministry of Self Defense during the January 6 rally.  As the attack unfolded Tarrio wrote the encrypted message “Make no mistake … We did this.”  The Proud Boys not only led the charge, they are charging the US government a $100 million service fee for their efforts.  

Molly Conger does an excellent job breaking down the technical aspects of this lawsuit, explaining how the American judicial system handles lawsuits and clemency decisions, and providing background information on Proud Boy co-attorney Sol Invictus (whose name is both an epithet of and an associate of Mithras, and who I discussed in my article).

Conger is more optimistic than me and doesn’t think that the Proud Boys will get their full $100 million.  Her argument is that, while she does think they will settle for a large sum, the case is too full of holes and various legal and formatting errors.  I’m more of a doomer/pessimist and think they’ll get all of the money they ask for, but like Conger I wonder who invited Tarrio (and his mom) to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump and hook up this money transfer using this lawsuit as a fig leaf.  My bet’s on Mar-a-Lago regular, seven time convicted felon, Trump associate since 1979, ratfucker, first-degree Proud Boy and January 6 coup planner Roger Stone, who I previously discussed in my November 2024 piece.

The Trump administration, which has nominated official with ties to antisemitic extremists to lead its ethics agency, which wants to create an ‘Office of Remigration’ à la Martin Sellner, and which threatened outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley with execution, found itself in the awkward position of organizing a highly politicized celebration of the army’s 250th anniversary due to its coincidence with the Marines’ and National Guards’ crackdown on the LA protests and Trump’s own 79th birthday celebrations.  

The Libertarian Relationship with the Far-Right

Here’s a counterpoint to what I wrote back in April: Alex Skopic has pointed out how economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek supported Mussolini and Pinochet respectively, making my point moot when it comes to my differentiation between libertarians (such as the CATO Institute) and neo-fascists who identify with certain libertarian views (the Proud Boys).  In this respect, libertarianism can function as simultaneously separate from and a handmaiden to the far right, allowing tech-bros like Thiel and Andreesen to maintain plausible deniability while materially supporting the far-right.

Yet Another Fascist in the Military

In the ‘army’ section of my original piece discussing the problem of white supremacy in the armed forces, I mentioned the example of presently incarcerated former Canadian reservist Patrik Mathews who recruited for the white supremacist group The Base⁵ . 

One important anecdote that I forgot to mention in this ‘army’ section was how St. Petersburg, Russia resident Rinaldo Nazzaro, founder of The Base, worked with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from 2004 to 2006, completed multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan in Iraq, worked with U.S. forces in the Middle East on counterterrorism measures and had top-secret clearance.  Added to the list is Jeremy MacKenzie, the founder of Diagolon / Second Sons Canada - one of the largest and most active white nationalist networks in Canada - and an Afghanistan combat veteran.

I’d Be Lion If I Didn't Say I Found This Interesting

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Operation Rising Lion⁷ , featuring the Trump-allied summer solstice bombing of nuclear weapons manufacturing facilities in Iran, which is the heir to the Persian civilization that is central to the Mithraic myth and the name of its fifth initiatory level.  

To be clear, I see this as purely coincidental, not synchronous in the Jungian sense, and with no underlying significance other than the fact that these spots have ancient old world heritage and as such were the crossroads of Roman, Parthian, Sasanian and other empires.  However, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte did call Trump “Daddy” after the bombing, and that ties back to my suggestion that Trump exemplifies the top Pater level in the Mithraic / Syndexioi hierarchy.  As well, a Republican-led Pax Americana is now being imposed between two countries hosting Mithraea: one in Caesaria, the other in Varjavi, though both ancient sites are in rough shape and not very well maintained.   In response to the bombing, the Proud Boys wrote “Fuck this shit.”  Does this signal a split?  The $100 million up for grabs suggests that it does not.

Well, that’s all for July. Have a good Canada Day, don’t get hit by fireworks if you celebrate, and if you’re First Nations, you have my sympathy and solidarity. See y’all in August.

1  There’s nothing I’ve come across this far but please, dear reader, correct me if I’m wrong.

2  Sadly this store was bought out by the Chapters-Indigo chain and then shuttered.

3  Two actually; we screwed up the first series of takes, and the butcher was a family friend and hooked me up.  Also, after my crew was done filming we left the very human-looking cow brain at the base of the school flag pole, which was very creepy in hindsight, but in our defense we were fourteen and lacking fully-developed frontal pre-cortexes at that age.

4  I got to meet my childhood hero: production designer Carol Spier.  Well, actually, I tried to get her to move her car, because - as a Locations staffer - I was guarding one side of the road from being parked on with my orange film company pylons.  However, she quickly outranked me, as she well deserved to, and got to park her car wherever she wanted.

5  The formatting got pretty garbled here; The New Mithraeum’s Gabriel Simeoni did a great job web-formatting my writing, but unfortunately - and no fault of his - the Enkidū interface scrambled some of the sentences in the footnotes section, plus the interface blocked all footnote-section hyperlinks.  My original piece can still be read in pdf format which is non-garbled and contains the original hyperlinks. 

6  I saw the band at Toronto’s CNE circa ~1992, and I realize Eddie’s a band mascot/logo like the Jerry Bear or the Heartogram as opposed to a horror film character, but he’s still a zombie.

7  As I've written previously, reverence for and use of lion symbolism is ubiquitous and not unique to the Syndexioi / Mithrarists who used it to symbolize their fourth and central initiatory degree.  Many cultures are fascinated by this alpha predator, and it’s featured on many emblems and flags including those of Jerusalem and pre-1979 Iran.  I once spent several boring hours watching the court proceedings of local neo-Nazi Douglas Skead, and I whiled away the painfully slow court proceedings counting the six lions and various other symbols comprising the Canadian Coat of Arms affixed on the wall above the judges head.  Due to police corruption the case was subsequently dropped and the accused remains free.