Santa Claus has its origins in the ancient Aryan religion of Mithraism. Santa’s hat come from the Phrygian cap worn by Mithra, and his outfit comes from the Scythian riding outfit which includes pants (invented by Iranians), as they made horseback riding viable.

The color red also comes from the god Mithra being symbolized by fire in ancient Zoroastrian worship.

Imo, what I find to be the coolest part of the Cult of Mithra (c. 4th century A.D. in Rome) was that it was essentially a handful of Romans LARPing as Persians except they worshipped Mithra as a literal god, meanwhile Zoroastrians “venerated” Mithra, the same way Catholics

venerate Saints. The Zoroastrian term for this was “Yazata”, and Ahura Mazda is the greatest of the Yazata, meanwhile Mithra would have been known only as the Yazata of Covenant, Light, and Oath.

tl;dr these niggas went extra hard for Mithra because this new Hebrew religion took over their empire in only a few generations and they were salty about it

More facts about Mithra since we’re already here: the Statue of Liberty (designed by Freemason Fréderic Auguste Bartholdi) incorporates a lot of Mithraic esotericism—the statue is thought to be Mithra himself.

“Wait did you say “himself”?

Yes, Mithra has an androgynous history (which is again attributed to Romans LARPing as some shit they barely knew). In contemporary Persian, Mitra is exclusively a feminine name, and is juxtaposed with the Avestan goddess Anahita (goddess of waters)

Another influence: the military salute. The salute is Iranian and Mithraic in origin, and it originally symbolizes shielding your eyes from the solar glory of the king or military commander. (See this thread https://twitter.com/narangestan/st …)

Another influence is the fasces. In Persian, the bundle of sticks, known as “Barsom”, is used by Zoroastrian priests to solemnize sacred ceremonies. It’s known as a symbol of unity and strength, i.e. a single twig can be easily broken but a bundle of twigs is unbreakable

A theory on why Constantine made Christianity the the state religion was because the aristocracy was scared that this religion *supposedly* practiced by its adversaries would soon make its way into Rome; it was known by its contemporaries as “The Persian religion!”

. @Mehdi_IR_DC has two really interesting tweets regarding this “Persianization” (or lack thereof) as well: https://twitter.com/mehdi_ir_dc/status/1156078385241743361?s=21 https://twitter.com/mehdi_ir_dc/status/1153361776664293377?s=21

How did Mithraism spread to Rome? In ~150 BC, Parthian King Mithradates I had an envoy of black ops naval men along the eastern shore of Sicily, and this is most likely where the Roman aristocrats came into contact with this hip new oriental religion

These pirates are also the ones to come up with the (first variation) of the Jolly Rogers pirate flag. The bones intersect at a 23 degree angle, which represent the celestial equator being crossed by the ecliptic of the zodiac

How this came to be was that at the time Mithra (associated with Perseus) overcomes the lord of time and fate, Chronos (Zurvan in Persian). The crossed bones represent Perseus’ overcoming of fate (Chronos = the skull -> death), as Perseus overthrows Chronos to usher in

free will and determinism. The equinox is a symbol of turning over unto a new age, a new system, and ideals that Perseus embodied, should be ideals we all should embody.

cc: @TheShiaSlayer

Probably my one last thing for the night: even the HANDSHAKE was originally first used to establish the covenant of belonging to the Mithraic secret society (Remember: Mithra is the god of COVENANT)

I lied: the one last thing I got from @Jason_Jorjani’s interview was that he states between the Mithraic influence of Judaism under the Achaemenids, to the Mithraic influence of the Roman Empire, that Christianity comes out to be 80% Iranian!

Interview: