Santa Claus, Godkiller and Mushroom Shaman
Or: Why, as an agnostic-atheist, I tell my kids Santa Claus is real
Merry Christmas! I’ve got a special one-off article for you today. May your holiday and New Year be full of people you love, fun, and kindness.
Last week, thanks to
’s excellent newsletter Creative Destruction1, I learned that the Santa Claus myth may have roots in the ritual use of psychedelic mushrooms.The story goes like this: The Sami, a tribe of nomadic reindeer herders that live at the northern edges of Scandinavia, would hunker down in their homes during the cold winter months, and await the arrival of a shaman. The shaman dressed like the psychoactive mushroom he consumed, the amanita muscaria, which looks like this:
He also arrived, as was common with the Sami, on a sled driven by reindeer, who also happened to love the amanita muscaria mushroom. Amanita muscaria, incidentally, gives one the sense of flying, which may be the origin of the flying reindeer myth2.
Of course, many of the people would be hunkered down because of Arctic snowstorms, meaning that the shaman could hardly enter through the front door: he had to come down the chimney. They would pay him with gifts of food, and then he’d eat a mushroom, go on a trip, and return with advice for the awaiting people. It must’ve seemed like he was omniscient.
Digging into this myth, I realized just how diverse Santa’s origins are — there is some evidence that he is designed after Odin3, the Norse god who wanders the earth with a long beard and bestows gifts upon those who treat him with kindness. The pagan celebration of Yule is connected to the myth of the Wild Hunt, in which Odin and an army of supernatural riders race through the night sky.
The Wild Hunt in turn influenced the Dutch tradition of Sinterklaas, who kept Odin’s look and horse, but was based on the historical Christian figure Saint Nicholas, who had a reputation for gift-giving and generosity. Another influence was the English legend of Father Christmas, who until the Victorian Era was less about giving gifts to kids, and was instead more about partying and merry-making. His most culturally prominent avatar is the Ghost of Christmas Present in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
During the reformation, Martin Luther, in his attempt to de-center the Catholic Church and its emphasis on Saints such as Nicholas, proposed that gifts should be given to children directly by the Christ Child himself, or Christkindl in German. He failed at supplanting St. Nick, but through his attempts, he gave the jolly elf yet another nickname through the bastardization of Christkindl, Kris Kringle.
The modern Santa Claus, though, is distinctly American. Because American settlers hailed from all corners of the European continent, they smushed all of these traditions together, adding the poem The Night Before Christmas to the canon, and giving Santa his modern image in that most American of things, a Coca-Cola advertisement.
Santa Claus for atheists
I haven’t been a Christian for over 20 years, but I still love Christmas and I still love Santa Claus. My love of Christmas is complicated — I have an extremely difficult time with the religious and commercial aspects, but I adore Christmas carols (especially of The Muppets variety), eating big meals with friends and family, and hunkering down under a big cozy blanket with my wife and kids to watch Christmas movies.
But my love of Santa is pure. I owe the man, and I hold no grudge against him for being fictional.
This is because if there is one person I can thank for pushing me to leave the Catholic Church behind, it is Santa Claus. Santa was my gateway drug to agnosticism. When 10-year-old me found out that Santa wasn’t real, he began asking other questions:
“Is the tooth fairy real?”
“No.”
“The Easter Bunny?”
“Nope.”
“Is God real?”
“What? Oh yes. Yes, God is definitely still real.”
But the revelation was already out: authorities had lied to me, and I, with my beginnings of a rational brain, had discovered their ruse not by them telling me so, but by thinking it through myself. His reindeer can fly? I thought, not yet having had magic mushrooms myself, Ridiculous.
It was a short jump from there to questioning basic Catholic teachings, and a short jump from there to questioning adults moral and political decisions. This must’ve been difficult for the authorities in my life4, but I think that it was across the board good for me, and for any kid who manages it. It’s important, especially at that age, to begin to question authority and think for yourself, and in a culture that is shamefully bereft of coming-of-age rituals, Santa remains a lone holdout.
What really makes me love the tradition, though, is the lesson it taught me after I learned that Santa wasn’t real. My parents told me that now I was the keeper of the Santa Claus myth, that it was up to me to try and make Christmas a little more magical for my little sister. The lesson here was that stories have power, as do the people that tell them. Stories can make lives brighter, they can make lives darker, they can be used to enlighten, and they can be used to control.
Lying to kids (and other objections to Santa)
The main objection I hear to teaching kids about Santa Claus is that it constitutes “lying” to kids, which undermines their trust in you. I do not fully agree with this — parents play make believe with their kids all the time, and being the parent of young kids is a constant exercise in incrementally exposing them to hard truths.
(It is worth noting that I got internet famous for accidentally revealing to my five-year-old the existence of Nazis, so I am not claiming to be a pro at this particular parenting skill.)
But Santa Claus can be handled in a way that it constitutes pretending and not lying:
“Mom, is Santa real?”
“Do you think he is?”
And then discuss!
For our part, the hardest part of the Santa Claus myth has been battling some of the creepier American elements, like “he sees you when you’re sleeping,” mass consumption, and the new surveillance state trend, Elf on the Shelf. The way we present Santa to our kids is as someone who brings all kids who celebrate presents, as there are no bad kids. This also gives us a reason to donate to toy drives, and to explain why Santa doesn’t bring EVERYTHING our kids want — because all kids deserve something nice5.
The discomfort around all of the icky parts of Santa Claus isn’t enough to dissuade me from inviting him into my home, though. This is because Santa Claus is magic when you’re a kid, but he’s even more magic when you learn about the kaleidoscopic cross-cultural influences that contributed to his myth. He is a delightful example of the thing that we humans just can’t stop doing with stories — we steal them, we change them to suit our purposes and our times, and we contort them to the moral lessons we want to convey.
To me, experiencing a story as real, and then later learning to examine it, dissect it, research its complex history, and then put it back together in a way that better reflects your own values and times, is a vital human experience, and is something I wouldn’t deny my kids for all the world.
Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays! For Auld Lang Syne!
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The video below is worth a watch. One of the more fascinating elements of the myth is that some shaman (not Sami, but in Siberia) did not eat the mushroom itself, as it was toxic, but instead, drank the urine of their reindeer after they ate the mushrooms. The reindeer urine maintained its psychoactive properties, but had none of the toxins.
Odin hasn’t just been mashed up with Santa Claus — he’s also been mashed up with Jesus. In the Norse myths, Odin sacrifices himself to be hung on Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life, where he hangs for nine days and nine nights with a spear wound in his side, returning to life with knowledge of the other realms, which he uses to the benefit of all.
And I admit it’ll be difficult for me when my kids do it.
Our policy is “Something you want, something you need, something to wear, something to read.”
hell yeah! Santa Claus can also be the gateway drug into animism. i've never heard any credible accounting—from a material-reductivist perspective—of exactly *how* the motifs of entheogenic shamanism became so perfectly encapsulated in the Coca-Cola-capitalist version of Santa Claus. (elves, too. elves, fairies and sprites are woodland spirits traditionally associated with mischief, altered states, time dilation, etc. they're frequently (almost stereotypically) pictured resting on or playing under amanita muscara mushrooms, even by artists who have no idea of the entheogenic implications. and, somehow, elves became Santa's helpers.) from a materialist POV, there's no clear line of transmission from indigenous shamanism to the arch-mascot of secular consumerism. it requires a bunch of vague hand-waving about "inspiration," even though nobody knows how, when, or why the "inspiration" took place. but it only takes a couple of metaphysical adjustments to get there from an animist perspective: Santa Claus is an archetypal figure that is some kind of real—independent of the various cultural interfaces that humans have invented for it—that is insinuating itself into our reality, through the psychic germination we mistake as human-driven "inspiration." you can get there via Carl Jung too, but that's still only a hop-skip-jump from animism anyway. and if you want something straight-up metal, there's always Sam Kriss' interpretation: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-black-mountain.
Merry Christmas!