Guest Spots: Sole picks the West’s five greatest myths

Since leaving longtime label Anticon, indie rapper Sole has released The Pyre — a collaboration with artist Ravi Zupa — as well as a free mixtape of his signature rhymes over radio-hit beats from the likes of Rick Ross and Kanye West, titled Nuclear Winter: Vol. 1. In addition, Sole and the Skyrider Band has been working with the label Fake Four. Inc and just finished a US tour with IDM artist Egadz.

Sole (a.k.a. Tim Holland) took a few minutes out of his busy tour schedule to pen a piece on the greatest myths in Western civilization. On the list, just in time for the holidays, is a new perspective on the story and significance of Santa Claus.

Five Western Myths
by Tim Holland, a.k.a. Sole

1. Santa Claus

The modern Santa gets his roots from Sinter Klaas, the Dutch father of Christmas. Sinter Klass, with the help of his ‘”Zwarte Pieten,” a.k.a. enslaved “black devils,” brought gifts to children. He moved his residence to the North Pole, where he seemingly swapped out the Moors for Inuits. Today this myth lies at the center of our entire economy and arguably our way of life.

My biggest problem with Santa is that it teaches children that something comes out of nothing, and it gives them an early and tangible affirmation of the supernatural. Even during periods of relative prosperity, it’s not uncommon for an American parent to take a second job around the holidays simply to perpetuate this myth. Maybe history laughs last, as yesterday’s “Moors” are replaced the world over by today’s work force.

2. The Epic of Gilgamesh

The first epic poem ever written, there is something about the crudeness of the poetry, its repetition, and style that really floors me. This is where much of “Genesis” in the old testament draws its roots, most notably the tale of “The Great Deluge.” In the Sumerian version, the “gods” decided to wipe out mankind simply because we were making too much noise, not because the city was corrupted and perverse.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is a story of a tyrant king created by the gods who seeks the leaf of immortality to be more like them. Although the leaf was stolen by a snake, Gilgamesh ironically attained immortality through the stone tablets that preserved this myth for 10,000 years. It is well known that Iraq/Babylon/Sumer is “the cradle of civilization,” and this bizarrely written story speaks to the roots and motifs that pervade our “civilization.”

3. Behold A Pale Horse by William Cooper

This is another story that has captured the imagination of conspiracy theorists, rappers, Tea Party members, and free thinkers alike. There are very powerful ideas in this book about how society is constructed. It explains how people are dumbed down, how information is organized, and how the world would be ruled. The basic premise of this “myth” is that secret societies control the world (on behalf of aliens), which wouldn’t be so annoying if so many people didn’t favor ready-made catch-all answers over researching history.

These stories were used for different ends by different groups in different times, but the result is always the same: “Do nothing; watch YouTube videos; you’re helpless.” I hate this myth the most, because it takes facts, twists them, and misleads the less educated. In the ’80s, it was William Cooper. These ideas were then adapted by Alex Jones and are today being reworked by Glenn Beck on Fox News. Karl Marx said, “All that is solid melts into air”; in America, the reverse is also true.

4. The Matrix

Forget about the second and third Matrix movies. The original Matrix was inspired by the ideas of Jean Baudrillard, a French philosopher inspired by OG situationist Guy Debord. Baudrillard believed that “man had ceased to be man and the world had ended when the spectacle took over.” The basic idea here is that the “spectacle” has its own agenda; it is an abstraction of power, finance, and media that grinds the Earth and its inhabitants down as raw resource. We are here as spectators — numbers in a giant machine that is controlled by little more than market forces.

Like in The Matrix, the modern worker is completely alienated from his labor and his reality. Thanks to modern technology and social networking, mankind manages to bypass both physical and geographical limitations. Technically, our bodies are not hooked up to giant fields that harvest us for energy to feed the machine, but we might as well be.

5. Revelations

America is a Christian nation, and even reformed Christians hold on to a lot of Christian beliefs. One of the most pervasive is Armageddon. Atheists hedge bets on societal collapse. Evangelicals don’t mind carbon emissions as long as Christ makes it back in time to rescue the pious. New-Agers wait for Atlantis to rise or 2012, when Jon Cusack will save a handful of whites. In reality, Revelations was about the fall of the Roman Empire, and it still is.