Stick insect forces evolutionary rethink

Well, that's very interesting. But... 1) You don't establish when we know this story to be written; 2) In this case, Noah is much later than some of the events described in Sumerian myth/history. In fact, the flood myth pervades the ancient world. If it is some recording of an historical event, it would make sense that cultures near the event had more detailed history that cultures in say, North America. (I'm not positive the North American and Mesoamerican flood stories do not come from contact with Mediterranean people's such as King SOlomon-era traders, the Vikings, etc.)

The relevance of Sumeria, again, is the issue of whether the Judeo-Christian creation myth (as used here and in this sense, myth does not connote fiction) is influenced by the Sumeria myth. It is a very powerful assertion that has been made that it is, and I am driving at whether there is any basis for this assertion.

In the case of Noah, I consider it likely that Noah is a mythologized (again, "mythologized" refers to an issue of style and intent, not veracity) history of an actual event which occurred within what Noah's people would experience as the whole world. (Compare to Matthew's depiction of a census of the "whole world.") If so, it's a variant of that occurring among the Harappan is corroboration, not a challenge. Sumeria is exceptional because Abraham came from Sumeria.

HERB WOMAN? Little Red Man???

I meant to point out that the Nast's Santa Claus has very little in common with the traditional St. Nick. St. Nick was rarely (if ever, to my knowledge) depicted wearing a red suit in the era immediately before Thomas Nast. However, it is unlikely Nast was meaning to align him with Sumeria; in fact, any resemblance is quite likely coincidental. Ancient bishops (St. Nicholas WAS an ancient bishop) wore a stole, cap, and cape very similar to Nast's Santa Claus, and yet, since the style pre-existed any relationship to Christmas or St. Nick, it's hard to fathom how this style could be relevant except as a coincidence; (you will recall the collective gasp of the MSM that "Pope Benedict is dressed like Santa Claus!" Of course, in that case, he definitely seemed to enjoy and stoke the comparison.)

Of course, neither St. Nick or Santa is "little." And I have no idea what your reference to Herb Woman is about.

Do the Sa'ami draw any connection between the North Pole dwarves and "Reindeer Man"?

Can you source me any info about these North Pole dwarves?

It sounds all very interesting, but I do evaluate all this stuff on my own. Countless are the assertions that Christmas, for instance, is based on a Roman solar festival despite:

1. Christmas is actually based on nine months after the very historically grounded date of Good Friday, (March 25th in our calendar); and on the Maccabean biblical date of the rededication of the second Temple, which Christ (Neviim 25) identified with, and had a special devotion related to.

2. The Roman feast day was initiated AFTER the Maccabean events.

3. The celebration of a feast for the return of light into the world is an obvious metaphor, consistent with the will of the Author of History, for Christmas, even if the Saturnalia legend were true, and it is most definitely false.

4. Much support for the relation comes bringing together discrete data and selectively combining them in internally inconsistent ways, drawing historically impossible relationships from artificially proximate data, and overlooking evidence which contradicts such relationships. Thus such assertions of evolutionary relationships operate much like conspiracy theories. As such, I'm not necessarily going to accept the conclusions of unnamed web sites, even though I must admit some of what you write about the Sa'ami is very tantalizing.

Concerning Christmas, there's this neat little holiday in the far North (above the Arctic Circle) that celebrates the half-way point of the longest night of the year.

That happens on December 24.

Anyway, that's when the shaman climbs out through the hole in the roof of the tent, walks across the snow with his bag over his back, and then delivers stuff ~ goodies to the kids for example.

Then, there's the red nosed reindeer. These guys love amanita muscaria. National Geo has a film of what happens ~ a large amanita is fed to a reindeer. He grabs it in his mouth and he runs away holding the mushroom.

Here's a picture of an amanita:

This particular mushroom has been determined to be the source of SOMA, an hallucinogenic drug, reported in the most ancient of Hindu texts.

If you were to consume one, you'd experience a sensation akin to flying ~ as do the reindeer when they eat it. And, you'd think the reindeer were also flying.

Just letting you know, the concept of "red nosed flying reindeer" is really, really ancient, and this mushroom has been in use in North Eurasia for thousands of years.

Check the colors ~ betcha' these guys had the red suit trimmed in white long before St. Nikolas.

You will want to check out Nast's drawing of Santa Claus visiting a Union camp. Note his jacket? Dark field with white dots.

http://www.sonofthesouth.net/Original_Santa_Claus_.htm

Concerning "dwarfs" the Sa'ami have just about the highest incidence of dwarfism in the world (with the Inuit in first place I believe). The Dutch have always had Swarte Pete traveling with their Sinter Klaus (which predates our Santa Claus stories by centuries). Pete's a little guy.

What you do not want to do here is confound the modern "popularization" of Santa Claus with how he was known from the most ancient of times in Northern Europe, even among the pagans.

See, that's exactly why I ask for clarification: These are all unrelated tidbits string together unnaturally, and with contradicting evidence omitted, to look like there are relationships that there are not

Your supposed matching of Santa Claus in the Union camp with the amanita? It's a flat-out misinterpretation of selectively chosen data. Look closer at Santa Claus. He is also wearing striped pants, and the "dots" aren't dots, but stars. As such, he's not dressed in a spotted red jacket, but in a star-spangled and presumably BLUE jacket. It's a non-representative, specially-themed depiction of Santa Claus DRESSED AS UNCLE SAM, not as a Sumerian. Again, the red jacket for Santa is only a recent innovation, possibly inspired by suppositions of what a 3rd-century bishop like Nicholas might have worn.

The "red-nosed reindeer" explanation is slightly more plausible... but not much. One shot of NG footage where a deer happens to catch a mushroom in a perfect position in his mouth to look like a shiny red nose hardly establishes that reindeer typically ran around with mushrooms appearing to be their noses, so much so that they would be called "red-nosed reindeer."

No, red noses happen when humans are exposed to cold, snowy weather for long periods of time. Hence, Santa is often poetically described as having both a "shiny, red nose" and "rosy cheeks." A red-nosed reindeer would probably (via strictly poetic lisence) refer to the lead reindeer, who would be the one to cut through the red-nose-inducing wind.

>> Concerning "dwarfs" the Sa'ami have just about the highest incidence of dwarfism in the world (with the Inuit in first place I believe). <<

Except Santa doesn't work with dwarves. He works with elves. If you are going to say, "yes, but elves are short, too," consider that there are many civilizations that are much, much shorter than Sumerians.

Why elves? Is it a distinction without a difference? Not hardly! Santa works with elves because to accomplish what he does in legend requires magic, and elves are mythical magic-users. But elves were not short (as Tolkein very angrily insists). They are commonly depicted as short by people who mention them because of their association with magic don't necessarily want to depict them as menacingly powerful; being small balances being magical when it comes to seeming threatening. Case in point: Santa is often described as an elf, even though he is quite a large fellow, because his beneficient personality is so well-established that he is non-threatening as a full-sized person in spite of his height. If this bears any resemblance to Sumerian imagery, it is probably simply a deductive process in common for depicting magical beings.

Meanwhile, I am not totally ripping apart what you have posted. This whole "flies around the world with magic reindeer" is certainly independent of Christian thought, and while St. Nicholas is a patron of gift-giving, it seems only tangentially (and thus, plausibly secondarily) related to him; his famous gift-giving had little to do with toys: he purchased a family of women out of sexual slavery.

The man (shaman is an Amerindian concept) delivering goodies through a roof sounds very plausibly like a legend which was grafted onto St. Nick from another, alien tradition; and -- keeping in mind that Christmas is an actual, recorded date of the remembrance of the birth of Christ -- a winter solstice is nearly universally a cause of a feast. In the case of Christmas, it's coincidence with other feasts probably permitted it to be celebrated much more boistrously than more important Christian holidays like Easter and Pentecost.

And the origin of the very curious notion of FLYING reindeer makes some sense, too... but relating an Indian drug to an Iraqi myth taking place in Lapland... well, it does kinda smack of making unwarranted associations.

Shamanism is THE religion of the Northern coast of Eurasia. It is incidentally found in North America as well. The Ainu in Japan turned traditional shamanism into Shinto, and that became the official state religion of Japan.

As far as Nast is concerned, I looked for his genealogy. He was born in Germany, in Landau. There was a large Jewish community here. His mother's maiden name appears to be Abriss.

Makes me wonder who his sources were for his understanding of Christmas traditions (even though he was baptised in a Catholic church).

Interesting guy ~ and it tells you how little genealogical information can inform you sometimes ~ frequently does nothing but add to the questions.

Now, let's turn to the topmost part of the Great Sphinx at Giza. From the rear, if we could find a shot, it would look like a mushroom. Here's a side-shot for a reminder:

The topmost part, or the head, appears to have stood above the plain from which the stones for the pyramids were cut. It has a far older surface than the rest of the Sphinx. The body is known to have been cut at the same time as the stones.

The face was carved into the existing natural structue ~ presumably it is of the fellow who commanded the construction of the Great Pyramid.

Now, look closely ~ (which you can't, but we can pretend for a moment) ~ the headdress part shows signs of being painted red. It has white dots and/or stars. Obviously the first paint job was applied long before the climate turned dry and warm.

Nast produced his RED JACKETED SANTA CLAUS shortly after he did the bit with Santa meeting the Union troops.

He's drawing on a really old tradition here ~ besides, by the 1860s when Nast started drawing, the Dutch and Scandinavians had already created a Santa Claus image that involved red clothing, white trim, white dots, etc.

Even Walt Disney gets into this business. He was actually Walt Keppel Disney. His grandpa Keppel adopted grandma's surname though. Mt. Keppel, in Norway, is considered holy in the old shamanistic religion. Of course that surname, Keppel, can be found elsewhere although it looks to have its origins in Norway.

Many Keppels are dwarves ~ Walt was not. On the other hand, Minnie Mouse originally had only a red dress with white spots. Walt's interest in Christmas imagery is well known. His interest in hallucinogenic imagery is less well known, but it's pretty obvious he was drawing on some rather pre-Christian sources in "Fantasia".

All of which is entertaining, and may be meaningful.

I could go on with this all day. Still, there are those who refuse to believe that any pagan image at all, particuarly not that created by a bunch of doper shamen in the Arctic, could have latched on so strongly to Christmas. That's why they keep wanting to drag everything back to the Greek guy in Turkey.

Regarding "Indian Drug", the folks using the Soma abandoned amanita muscaria when they got to India (on their way from Northern Eurasia). There are several reasons, one of which is that it doesn't grow well there, and second, there are better drugs in India.

Amanita Muscaria was identified as soma because it was taken in urine. The critical ingredients do not metabolize in the human body, so they are excreted into the urine intact where they can be passed on. The ancient Indian sources reflect this. Modern users also collect reindeer urine. An alternative is to collect the shamen's urine since they eat the mushroom first.

This is the ONLY drug of its type that is not metabolished.

Concerning the Winter Solstice, I am sure the Church in Rome paid attention to that, as did the Church in Constantinople, etc. On the other hand, December 24 is NOT the Winter Solstice. It is, instead, the midpoint of the longest night, a nearly coincidental, but vastly more meaningful astronomical phenomenon for people above the Polar Circle who wouldn't have seen the Sun for the last 20+ days.

Separatist Protestant church groups throughout Scandinavia generally AVOID anything that happens on or around that date ~ odds are most of them have forgotten why though (note: much of Scandinavia was Christianized far later than imagined ~ parts still aren't!)

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