G'day Dawnbreak.
Well, I'd have to believe in the Abrahamic religious mythology to believe in 'Satan'. It isn't something that I believe in, so, to me, 'Satan' is merely another mythological character from a mythological story.
Now 'Satan Claus', commonly known of as 'Santa Claus', well, there's a story behind it all, the below being one point of view about it ...
Father Christmas
In considering the character of Santa Claus, and given that he is so closely associated with elves and antlered reindeer, the question is often posed as to whether there is a Witchcraft connection here. Also, is the name Santa perhaps a play on Satan (being a straightforward anagram), or does Santa Claus really emanate, by phonetic corruption, from Saint Nicholas as we are led to believe ?
As we have seen, the concept of Father Christmas (with customary holly-sprig in his cap) is a direct representation of the gift bearing Yuletide Holly King, sometimes called Father Winter or Grandfather Frost. His one-time pagan image was brought into line with the Christian festival in the 17th century, whereas Santa Claus first appeared by that name in America as late as the middle 1800s. And then, of course, there is the Kris Kringle portrayal. Are they all the same character and, if so, how can an historical Christian bishop possibly equate with the jolly, pipe-smoking Yuletide Elf ?
Back in the very earliest days of the Roman Church in AD325, one of the bishops at Emperor Constantine's Council of Nicea was a certain Nicholas of Myra from Asia Minor (modern Turkey), who claimed to have a personal dialogue with Jesus and an angel. At this Church conference the bishops were debating the nature of the Holy Trinity - the Father, Son and Holy Ghost - and of how Jesus was not simply the Son of God, but was also God incarnate. There were, nonetheless, some bishops of the pre-Roman school who opposed this new Imperial dogma and averred that Jesus was the Son as created in the flesh by God - but he was not himself God. The leading spokesman for this opposition faction was an aged Libyan priest of Alexandria named Arius, but when Arius rose to address the Council in this regard, Nicholas of Myra punched him in the face - an event which paved the way for the emergent Nicene Trinity Creed.
Other than that, very little is recorded about Bishop Nicholas (Ad 271-343) until a fictitious biography was written by the Greek missionary Methodius in the 9th century. Then, as a direct outcome of this, schoolboys, pawnbrokers, sailors, prostitutes, merchants and apothecaries all claimed the violent bishop as their patron saint ! Methodius reported in his text that Nicholas had given a bag of gold to each of the three girls to save them from prostitution - whence, apparently, the three golden balls used as a sign of pawnbrokers, although the connection is difficult to comprehend. He was also said to have the power to calm the seas, while the story which established his traditional link with children claimed that Nicholas successfully restored to life three boys who had been cut into pieces and preserved in brine by their inn keeping parents !
Following these reports, Nicholas became the elected patron saint of Greece, Apulia, Sicily, Lorraine and Russia - becoming especially popular with the Eastern Orthodox Church. Then, based upon the 'bags of gold' story, a new tradition grew in and around The Netherlands to the effect that St. Nicholas would return each year to bring gifts for well-behaved children on the eve of hid 6 December feast day - a tradition which has long been acted out in places such as Denmark, Holland and Belgium.
The origin of the modern Santa Claus story is often attributed to 17th-century Dutch settlers in America (in New York to be precise, which was called New Amsterdam until the 1700s). They are said to have taken the St. Nicholas tradition across the ocean with them, but tis is completely untrue. The Dutch colonial settlers were, in fact, members of the Protestant Dutch Reform Church, who had no empathy whatever with Catholic saints. Santa actually emerged from a character introduced to Pennsylvania by the German settlers - a character called Pelznichol (meaning Furry Nicholas) and sometimes referred to as Old Nick. He was reckoned to be a mischievous hobgoblin (akin to Hodekin and Robin Goodfellow) and by 1827 he was firmly established in the Philadelphia Yuletide festivals.
Reminiscent of Enkidu in the old Mesopotamian legend of Gilgamesh, Pelznichol was a somewhat wild, hairy individual who was noted for playing tricks on people once a year - a tradition which was transformed into gift giving. The Dutch of Pennsylvania, along with various other settled families, became attached to the custom of Pelznichol (alternatively Belsnickle), but they gave his gifts a Christian flavour by relating them specifically to children and calling them Krist-kindle ('Christ-kin'). By the 1840s this definition was adapted for Pelznichol himself, who became known in some communities as Kriss Kringle. Alternatively, from around 1823, it was reckoned that Kriss Kringle actually was the Christ child who, with no real explanation, appeared as an old bearded twin of Santa Claus. To differentiate between the two, it was said that, while Santa came down the chimney, his Christian twin came in through the keyhole.
To discover the true identity of Santa Claus, we shall return again to Pelznichol. Meanwhile, though, we should take a look at some other events which established the character in the guise that we know him. In doing this, we can go back to early 17th-century England, where we discover the first use of the Father Christmas name in connection with the Holly King tradition. This occurred in the year 1610 when Father Christmas, in a tall hat bedecked with holly, made his first ever appearance by that name in the Christmas Masque productions of William Shakespeare's colleague, the playwright Ben Johnson. Making his stage entry at the same time with a group of children was Cupid - a name eventually used for one of Santa's reindeer.
In 1822 the next major step came when the American writer Clement Clarke Moore penned a Christmas poem for his own children. It drew upon various traditions, especially that of the Russian Grandfather Frost, who had a sleigh and a reindeer (unlike St. Nicholas who always rode a white horse). It related also to the fur-clad German Pelznichol, whose signature was said to be Thunder (Donner) and Lightning (Blitzen), which provided two more reindeer names for Moore's poem - along with Cupid, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, and Comet. (Rudolph did not appear until as recently as 1939 in a story by Robert L. May) In spite of the anomalies, Moore's poem was entitled A Visit From Saint Nicholas - soon to become widely known in publication as The Night Before Christmas, which begins:
'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
Not only were the now famous reindeer introduced in this poem, but it established the first known link with stockings and chimneys, while giving a description of the newly developing Yuletide Elf character:
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.
His eyes - how they twinkled ! His dimples so merry !
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry.
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow.
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself.
Thus, the modern Santa was beginning to evolve, although one would hardly recognise him from the strange little fellow depicted in the 1848 edition of Moore's poem. In 1869 a colour edition was released, with pictures by an unknown artist, which brought the character a little closer to today's image. Oddly, though, this chubby elf with the red bobble-hat and pipe was still called St. Nicholas in the poem, although being as far removed from the historical bishop as one could possibly stray. But nowhere yet was this character called Santa Claus.
The magazine Harpers Weekly had, by that time, commissioned the political cartoonist Thomas Nast to produce a series of drawings of the popular elf for the annual covers of their Christmas editions, and these developed the character still further, making him a little larger and less elfin. Meanwhile, the separate Father Christmas (looking more like a druid with holly in his hair) was pursuing his own rather more wiccan career in England, appearing in 1888 in Thomas K. Hervey's The Book of Christmas not with reindeer, but riding on the back of a goat and carrying a wassail bowl.
To complete the picture of Santa in America, along came Haddon Sundblom who (from 1931 to 1964) created a new representation each Christmas for the Coca-cola advertisements which appeared worldwide in The Post and National Geographic magazines. And so the familiar modern Santa portrayal finally emerged in true Disney style - but why was he suddenly called Santa Claus ? And why were the folk in Denmark now calling their one-time Saint Nicholas by the new name of Sinterklaas ? Had some other tradition perhaps become interpolated during the early decades of the 20th-century ? It certainly had.In fact two other traditions had become merged with that of the American Yuletide Elf - the first being England's own druidic Holly King, Father Christmas. More importantly, though, was the re-cementing of the original Pelznichol culture - by then widely recognised as that of Kriss Kringle - for it was actually Pelznichol, the wild hobgoblin (a counterpart of Hodekin and Robin Goodfellow, or Puck) who carried the alternative name which became Santa Claus.
To understand how this transpired, we need to go back in history again to Europe, where Pelznichol was so called because he was a nick (a sprite). Consequently, one of his familiar names was Old Nick. So, from the moment that Clement Clarke Moore's Christmas character appeared, 'dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot', the beginning of a merger was apparent between his St. Nicholas and the other Furry Nicholas.
Old Nick, meanwhile, had been the very figure most associated with Pope Gregory I's description of the devil, taking over totally from the earlier fallen angel depictions in medieval times, so that the devil was (and still is) often referred to as Old Nick. Where did this devil live ? Apparently, he lived in the far North according to the churchmen who quoted the Old Testament book of Jeremiah (1:14): 'Then the Lord said unto me, Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land'. So the legendary Old Nick (Pelznichol) supposedly came from the North Pole, just as Santa does today - having no geographical relevance whatever to the historical St. Nicholas.
The rest of the story follows from this very root, and from the appearance of Pope Gregory's Satan (Old Nick) character in European Passion plays from the 12th century. It is, however, from the writings of Jacob Grimm (of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale fame) that the puzzle is finally pieced together. In his comprehensive research work entitled Teutonic Mythology Grimm explains that, in the course of the Christian plays of the Middle Ages, it was common for a famous saintly bishop (generally St. Nicholas) to develop a split personality within the plot. While the traditionally benevolent saint would remain in character, his alter ego would degenerate into an additionally scripted figure of opposition akin to Pelznichol - a wild satanic creature called Claus.
And so it was that, when the Holly King, St. Nicholas, Father Christmas, Kriss Kringle and Pelzb=nichol finally merged into the one all-embracing character, it was the Old Nick alter ego from the Christmas plays who finally reigned supreme. It was he who determined the Yuletide Elf's name for all time - for he was the 'Satan Claus', or as he has become better known (by the way of a strategic anagrammatical switch from the original satanic definition to a more acceptable saintly style), Santa Claus.
Realm of the Ring Lords
Beyond The Portal of the Twilight World
By Laurence Gardiner
(Pages 177-183)
