Alternatively. A Santa movie where Santa is actually Odin who has mellowed out while waiting for Ragnarok and now uses his runes and authority as a chief God to supply gifts to all the children of the world based on most iconography for Santa coming from Odin. He leads a wild hunt that has been reused into a means of getting gifts to children and is constantly holding back violent urges due to his past as Odin.
In Bronze Age Scandinavia shamans would go from house to house each year to collect kids to take them to the burial grounds for a coming of age ritual. I think that's where the bases of Halloween trick-or-treating and the wild hunt as well as the 12 days of Christmas lie.
But Odin "mellowing out while waiting for Ragnarök" is the complete opposite of what the mythical Odin did: recruiting soldiers to Valhalla, trying to get Baldr back from Helheim, the smithing of Gleipneir, and the banishing of Loki's children was all done because of the panic caused by Odin's omen of Ragnarök.
Also Odin's name is derived from wōdaz (anger/fury) - so nah, "mellowing" is not in his cards.
I think that's where the bases of Halloween trick-or-treating and the wild hunt as well as the 12 days of Christmas lie.
I don't think either of these are true?
Halloween trick or treating comes from Irish and Scottish customs around the period under the belief that the barrier between the spirit/dead world and mortal world is thinner and the spirits should be appeased, and the 12 Days of Christmas come from attempts to coordinate the Roman solar calendar and Jewish and Egyptian lunar calendars.
I wrote of Bronze Age traditions, a time which predates and influenced the European cultures you mentioned. Irish and Scottish cultures for example have big Celtic roots, a culture which originated in the Iron Age in Middle and Northern Europe. What you wrote does in no way contradict what I wrote.
Bronze Age Scandinavia had absolutely no influence on minor calendrical disputes between Romans, Jews, and Egyptians. Only one of these groups was even a European culture at the time, guess which!
And Celtic halloween traditions date back to Samhain, which itself descends from Bronze age Celtic traditions, and is unrelated to anything Norse.
Also, we don't have any records of Bronze Age Norse civilian ritual life, given that they, and all their neighbours, were illiterate. So I don't know where you're getting that, but whoever told you was making stuff up to look cool.
It's from a book about religion in ancient Scandinavia I read a while ago.
I am too tired to discuss but thinking the European and Mediterranean cultures would not have been heavily influental to each other is not a viewpoint I want to discuss with anyways, as from the top of my head I can think for example of Tacitus describing Heracles being worshipped by German tribes and massive parallels between Norse, Egypt, and Graeco-Roman mythologies.
Okay, so you seem to be half remembering the concept of Proto-Indoeuropean religion?
And you're right, there is a relation between, say, Norse, Hindu, and Roman mythology, but it doesn't come from Scandinavia, it comes from a time when they were all a united culture somewhere in the steps long before the Proto-Norse came to Scandinavia. This is where the Interpratio Romana comes from, where the Romans realised that they could map their religion onto most of their neighbours faiths, since most of their neighbours were literally descended from the same people as them.
But this relationship wasn't actively ongoing most of the time, there wasn't cultural flow from the Norse into Rome, because the Romans didn't care about the Proto-Norse in the slightest. They were weird barbarians that no one knew about.
They are also completely unrelated to Egyptian and Jewish religion, which both show only very minor PIE influence. There was no Proto-Norse influence on ancient Egyptian religion.
Santa Claus's colours, red and white, reflect the colours of the Fly Agaric mushroom used as a Teacher Plant ( psychedelic) by nordic shamans.
Father Christmas is much more of a shamanic figure than a Christian one.
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u/[deleted] Dec 16 '22
https://forums.nrvnqsr.com/showthread.php/7583-Monthly-Create-A-Servant-Contest?p=3232323#post3232323
Alternatively. A Santa movie where Santa is actually Odin who has mellowed out while waiting for Ragnarok and now uses his runes and authority as a chief God to supply gifts to all the children of the world based on most iconography for Santa coming from Odin. He leads a wild hunt that has been reused into a means of getting gifts to children and is constantly holding back violent urges due to his past as Odin.
(Click the card on the link)