Santa Claus: The Polar God 

 

 

The shopping mall has now replaced  the North Pole where the avatar Santa Claus resides. Santa Claus has the three major characteristics of God:  Omniscience (knows everything)     Omnipotence (can do anything)     Omnipresence (can be everywhere)  .(Part 2 of 5)

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Santa Claus’ workshop at the North Pole associates him with the cosmic axis on which he descends and ascends. Our chimneys also symbolize the cosmic axis which carries Santa from one realm to another. Christmas night is  totally mystical for his sleigh is pulled by eight flying reindeer who traverse the whole world in one night. Like God, Santa knows everything about us and is omnipresent. Santa Claus is in essence a watered down version of the Hindu god, Siva, of  the celestial pole. Please join me on my polar express through the labyrinth of deception that has clouded the true meaning of Christmas.

 

John O’Neill (Night of the Gods, two volumes) insisted that mankind’s oldest religions centered on a god of the celestial pole. Jocelyn Godwin’s book, Arktos: The Polar Myth,  tells us that: “It is in medieval Iran that we find extant literature on the Spiritual Pole and the experience of mystical ascent to it. The Iranian Sufis, drawing not only on Islam but on the Mazdean, Manichean, Hermetic, Gnostic and Platonic traditions, blended a sacred knowledge said to be ‘scientific’, mystical and philosophically practical. “ The religion and mythology of a polar god  was first formulated by the priest-astronomers of ancient  India, Babylon, Sumeria and Egypt and  spread  to Greece, Rome, and the rest of the world.

 

 

The parallels between the origins of Santa Claus (Santaism) and Buddhism are striking. The altar of a Buddhist temple has a statue of a corpulent laughing Buddha/Santa with an offering of fruit or food which mirrors offerings of milk and cookies to Santa, while Buddhist prayers are generally offered up with incense to God. When I was a child I wrote my letter to Santa and then burned it in the fireplace not knowing that the smoke was a prayer to God.  Buddhism teaches that we incarnate many times until we attain God realization,  Santa knows who has been naughty or nice that year  which parallels  Buddism and  Hinduism’s cyclic  judgment of all beings. The second most striking parallel between Santaism and Hinduism is their focus on pilgrimages to a holy mountain where God resides.  Almost every tradition has its name for this mountain with the same significance; the Persian Alborj, the Montsalvat of Western Grail legend, the Arab mountain Qaf and the ancient Greeks had several sites that were considered places of the omphalos (navel) stone, such as the oracle at Delphi, while also maintaining a belief in a world tree, the Xmas Tree, and Mount Olympus as the abode of the gods.  

 

Many religious structures symbolize the polar axis. The stupa of Hinduism, and later Buddhism, reflects Mount Meru, and Siva  is often mystically connected with Mount Meru, which esoterically is both the cosmic and terrestrial axis with its north and south poles.  The upright bar of the cross is sometimes seen as representing a world axis, while the steeple of a church or minaret of a mosque indicates a place where the earthly and heaven meet. In Mesopotamian civilizations, the ziggurat works as a polar axis. Structures such as maypoles in pre-Christian Europe, linked to the Saxons’ Irminsul, and totem poles among Pacific Northwest Native Americans also formed local or temporary world axes.

 

Many cultures equate a hill, a mountain or a pyramid as a symbol of the polar axis or axis mundi. For example, the Sioux consider the Black Hills to be the axis mundi, while Mount Kailash is holy to several religions in Tibet. Often, within the same belief system, several places may be considered the axis mundi; in Islam, the Dome of the Rock, where Muhammed was raised and lowered from heaven, as well as the shrine at Mecca play this role. The Temple Mount, site of the Dome of the Rock, is also holy to Judaism and Christianity. Other nearby sites that are considered sacred and are on hills include the Mount of Olives and Calvary.

 

 Hindu fundamental belief is that the Vedas are  eternal (sanatana)  and not composed by a human being (apaurusheya).  They believed that: at the end of a creative cycle God, Paramatma, dissolves everything within Himself, there is only one principle, Spirit: everlasting, ever conscious, ever new Bliss. But in each new creative cycle Spirit again projects Itself as  the Trinity—Father-Son-Holy Ghost.  We, ourselves, are the epitome of the whole of creation.The material universe is the vast body of God, the cosmic electrical energy is the astral form of God, and the soul or life in everything is the essence of God. Even a grain of sand has life. The great rishis imparted this knowledge of the Holy Trinity orally through numerous generations.   The Christian Holy Trinity—Father-Son-Holy Ghost corresponds with the Hindu Trinity, Aum-Tat-Sat. God, the Father is Sat, spirit beyond all creation, Christ the Son is Tat, the Christ intelligence in all creation, The ation that structures creation.  

The Vedic Siva, not unlike Santa,  bestowed food, wealth and other blessings on those who deserved it. With the divine Soma, he was called the progenitor of heaven and earth, and presides over the marriage ceremony.  Siva, the third god of  the Hindu Trinity, and one of the great gods of our solar system, is the regenerator and destroyer who destroys things in one form and brings them back in a more perfect form. Siva is the Savior of Spiritual man as he kills the negative traits of the ego.

 

Santa Claus has the three major characteristics of God:     Omniscience (knows everything)     Omnipotence (can do anything)     Omnipresence (can be everywhere) Omniscience is the best known characteristic of Santa Claus.  He is omnipotent as he can produce anything he chooses and is omnipresent as he has the ability to be everywhere at once, knows the behavior of everyone, and maintains lists of those who have been naughty or nice.   Unlike Christianity, which teaches that there is a single (thus ``final’’) judgement, Santaism has an annual judgement, and thus has a cyclic cosmology perhaps resembling the karmic principles of Hinduism and Buddism more than Christianity.  Merry Xmas