Mystery Religions II.1
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, November 07, 2001
Abstract
Ancient Beliefs About Resurrection
The central tenets of the Christian belief are not modern but go back to the most primitive human beings. Ideas of life after death might be as old as consciousness, and therefore reflect nothing more than the difficulty a conscious being has in accepting its personal death.
Excavations of prehistoric graves shows that even primitive humans believed their dead somehow lived on and might exert benign or malign effects on those still alive. The bodies of neolithic people often had a paste of red ochre poured over them in simulation of blood, in the apparent hope that the blood would be returned to the body, and with it life—resurrection.
They were often buried in a foetal position implying that the expectation was of a rebirth—reincarnation. The burial of food and weapons suggest that loved ones thought their dead would need these things in the afterlife, thus implying that the individual personality survived, though the body did not—immortality of the soul. These very ancient people, some of them perhaps not of our own species but Neanderthals, obviously expected that their dead would somehow live again, whether in a new body, in the old one revivified or in the spirit.
Christians like to disparage the obsession of the Egyptians with the afterlife as unsophisticated because of their embalming bodies as mummies and leaving personal possessions in their graves. E Yamauchi, a Christian historian and apologist, writes:
To call the survival of the Ba and Ka, hovering over the mummified body, a “resurrection” is to obscure the essential differences in concepts.
Yet the great Egyptologist, E A Wallis Budge, wrote after a lifetime of study:
The Egyptian belief in Almighty God is old, so old that we must seek for its beginnings in pre-dynastic times, but the belief in a future life is very much older, and its beginnings must be as old, at least, as the oldest human remains which have been found in Egypt.
In fact, the Egyptian belief was more sophisticated than the original Christian one. Few Christians now believe in the resurrection of the physical body, resurrection of Jesus or not. They believe that, if they are good, they will go to heaven—a transcendental place—and if they are wicked, they will go to hell. There is no place in modern Christian belief for resurrection of dead bodies, the appearance of Jesus after his death, nowadays, simply being his final miracle as proof of his divinity.
Even so, Christian intellectuals still believe in physical resurrection after death, but quite how is a mystery. They seem to believe it because it was the promise of Jesus but, despite the saints breaking from their tombs in Matthew, proving that others besides Jesus were already being resurrected 2000 years ago, no one has yet met a resurrected person that they knew before death. Most Christians find it impossible to believe and do not believe it, but consistency has never been a trait among Christians.
Egyptians, at one time, apparently believed in bodily resurrection, which is why they took so much trouble in making mummies. But even by the earliest dynasties, few believed it any more. The conservatism of Egyptian society kept them making mummies for millennia but they now justified it as necessary to provide the home of the personality or double (Ka) and the soul (Ba) and as a seed for spirit to grow in heaven.
The first Christians accepted resurrection of the physical body, a concept that the Egyptians had rejected as impossible. The Egyptians thought their dead lived in heaven, a place like the Elysian fields of the Greeks or the Paradise of the Persians—a luxurious and happy place. They had no fear of them returning to earth because no one would want to leave heaven. So unlike the Assyrians and Babylonians they did not fear dead spirits. Both the Egyptian and the Babylonian religions hinted at a doctrine of salvation of sorts through a communion. In Egypt, mummification rituals had an aim of identifying the dead person with Osiris (User, Weser, Ousir) who was resurrected into a reassembled body though thereafter his personality lived on only in the underworld. The Babylonians had the rite of “Puhu” or substitution, whereby the person was identified with Tammuz and thereby freed from sickness.
In ancient Mesopotamia, Tammuz was raised from the underworld by his sister-wife Ishtar, an agricultural myth reflecting the annual renewal of nature. The Ras Shamra texts tell of the slaying of Baal, the Canaanite god,who disappears for seven years with universal mourning. The message “Baal Lives” is broadcast and all nature rejoices. Persephone or Kore is the expression of the same vegetation myth for the Greeks. In each of these, it is a god who is resurrected, not a human being.
What was true of humans was not true of gods. The old Mesopotamian view of death was pessimistic. They conceived of the afterlife as a gloomy, shadowy existence in the “Land of No Return”. Gilgamesh sought in vain the secret of mankind’s lost immortality. When Ishtar told the gatekeeper of the Underworld that she would raise up the dead, it was a calamity, not a hope, because the dead would outnumber the living! Babylonians lived in fear of the spirits of women who had died in childbirth or the spirits of those who had not been buried according to the proper funeral rites.
The ancient Greek attitude was an essentially tragic outlook. Epitaphs reflect an almost universal pessimism about life beyond the grave. Achilles in Hades says he would rather be a landless peasant on earth than king of the Underworld. After Homer’s time a hope for a blissful existence in the Elysian Fields was held out, but only for heroes.
The dominant Jewish view, conditioned by Babylonians and then Greeks, was equally depressing, the dead going to Sheol, a gloomy underground world of dust and silence from which there also was no return. Job cries out:
If a man die, shall he live again?
But he already knows the answer:
Man lieth down, and riseth not. Till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.
The Mesopotamian and Jewish view changed under the influence of Persian Zoroastrianism, which gave Judaism and hence Christianity its modern, but foolish concepts.
In the classical period, the immortality of the soul was stressed in opposition to the body, which was described by the Orphics as “soma sema”, the body a tomb. Plato in The Phaedo taught that the body is the chief hindrance to wisdom and truth. Seneca, the Stoic tutor of Nero and Paul’s contemporary, spoke of “the detestable habitation of the body, and vain flesh in which the soul is imprisoned”.
In the Hellenistic age, the Greek philosophers varied in their views on immortality but agreed on the undesirability of reviving the body. The Stoics, who were pantheists, believed that souls left the body to ascend to the celestial regions of the moon before being absorbed in the All. A Stoic epitaph reads:
The ashes have my body, the sacred air has borne away my soul.
Epicurus, whose philosophy was based upon the atomistic cosmology of Democritus, taught that at death the atoms of the body simply disintegrated. There was no immortality but instead freedom from the terrors of the Beyond. The Epicurean indifference to the afterlife is reflected in such epitaphs as:
It was not, It was, I am not, I do not care.
Eat, drink, play, come hither (to death).
Paul mocks this saying (1 Cor 15:32). It is therefore not surprising that the Stoics and the Epicureans at the Areopagus in Athens disdainfully dismissed Paul when he began to preach to them the resurrection (Acts 17:31-32). In educated circles, it was an axiom that only the soul had value not the physical body. The Christian hope of resurrection of the body was vain and undesirable.
Greeks considered Thracians a poor ignorant race, but the Thracian religion involved a belief in immortality. Herodotus (Histories 4:94-6) says the Getae believed they did not die, but departed this life to go to their God, Zalmoxis. Zalmoxis was at first a man who lived at Samos as a slave of Pythagoras. After obtaining his freedom, he grew rich and returned to his own country, where he built a chamber where from time to time he received and feasted all the principal Thracians, teaching them that none of them would ever perish, but would go to a place where they would live forever enjoying every conceivable good. Meanwhile, he was digging an apartment underground, and, when it was completed, he withdrew into it suddenly. The Thracians took him as dead, regretted his loss and mourned him. After three full years in his secret chamber, he showed himself once more to his countrymen, who thus believed what he had taught them.
The story suggests the Getae (probably the Goths) believed Zalmoxis had come back to full active life. Zalmoxis was a slave of Pythagoras probably meaning a disciple, so he was a missionary to his own people of the Orphic religion propagated by the Pythagoreans. Strabo says he was also taught by the Egyptians, and was a prophet because he could “report the will of the gods”. He was good enough at this to impress the Thracean king and be appointed a priest. Strabo says he lived in a cavern where he continued as an advisor (prophet) to the king. The story could be an outline of the story of Zoroaster, whose career was similar. As in many of these ancient religions, the reports are those of foreign observers, and they might be deliberately or unintentionally misunderstood.
That Zalmoxis appeared again alive as a fit and normal human being was a more successful resurrection of the body than the Christian one. But is was a fraud, Christians will say, unable as ever to see the possibilities of fraudulence in their own story. Since the account was given by the Greeks, it might have been a deliberate mockery of something inconceivable to the Greek mentality.
That bodily resurrection was just as difficult to accept among gentiles early in gentile Christianity as it is for some today—for different reasons—is shown by the reaction of Pagan critics and of the Gnostics. The raising of a corpse was ridiculed as a shameful act by Celsus, Porphyry and Julian. Gnostic teachers such as Valentinus taught a Docetic view that the resurrection involved only the noncorporal elements of personality.
Anthropologists have found repeatedly that the initiation rites of primitive people is a symbolic death and rebirth. The novitiate undergoes various trials, often bloody and painful like circumcision, which culminate in a ritual death after which the candidate is reborn into their new status in society. The same is found in the Pagan mystery religions. In the cult of Mithras, the candidate symbolically died and was reborn into a higher grade of the cult. The same is true to this day of Masonic initiation.
Descent and Resurrection
How does Jesus’s resurrection compare with the many resurrection stories in religious history—the various pagan tales of dying and rising gods such as Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, and Dionysos?—stories that appeared in the Levant at the beginnings of historical time. Even in the Roman period, some of the deities that died and came to life again were still recognizably gods of the decay and renewal of vegetation. Tammuz, Adonis and Attis never seem to have lost their nature aspect. In the Christian tradition, the idea appears only occasionally.
- For if men do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?Lk 23:31—This is Tammuz
- I am the true vineJn 15:1—This is Dionysos, depicted on bas-reliefs in the imperial age as a child emerging out of grapes, vine branches, and acanthus
- Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.Jn 12:24—This suggests the corn goddess and her daughter at Eleusis
The concept of resurrection was quite familiar to the Greeks in their myths. The Christian story was folly to them because it was not claimed to be mythical but historical! By the time of Paul, no educated Greeks believed in the stories of the Olympians except as edifying tales, and introductions to poetry and learning. Along comes Paul of Tarsus telling them that a god, a virgin-born god, had really been slain recently in Judaea and has risen from the dead! They laughed.
In the Eleusinian Mysteries, Pluto carried off Persephone in winter to the underworld but she returned in spring, an allegory of the vegetative cycle intended as fertility magic. The question is why should this rural allegory of nature’s cycle appeal to city dwellers? Only by giving it a relevant reinterpretation as an allegory of the soul’s journey to Heaven. Persephone descended into the underworld, a metaphorical death, but was raised up to the freshness of life. She is the goddess of Life and Death. Worshippers of Dionysos considered that the squeezing of the juice from the grape to make wine symbolised the soul leaving the body. Journeys like Odysseus’s were allegories of the soul’s journey home just as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is. In the later Empire the cosmos, represented by the Zodiac, signifying the highest level of spirituality, in short Heaven, was used on graves to show what the dead person hoped would happen to his soul.
The Apostles Creed and the Athanasian Creed but not the Nicene Creed say that between the Friday night and the Sunday morning Jesus was in Hell. It did not appear as a tenet of Christianity until the fourth century AD, has no scriptural foundation save the briefest reference in 1 Peter, yet is an ever present in the Pagan religions of Herakles, Dionysos, Orpheus, Osiris, Hermes, Krishna, Balder, and so on. Indeed one of the most important aspect of the mystery religions seemed to have been the descent and ascent of the soul.
In Sicily, an effigy of the dead Christ is prepared for burial amid wailing which continues from Good Friday until midnight on Saturday when the bishop announces that the Lord is risen and everyone greets the dawn with shouts of joy. A parallel tradition preserved by Christians in parts of Greece reflects Pagan worship of the Spartan god, Hyacinthus, whose three day festival, the Hyacinthia, was held each year in spring or early summer. Hyacinthus, youngest son of King Amyclas of Sparta, was so handsome that Apollo came down to play with him, but one day the god accidentally killed him as they prectised discus throwing. The young god was unable to save his friend but made his blood into a flower. So, the hyacinth—a spring flower, a small purple iris, not our common hyacinth—sprang up from his blood, and Apollo mourned bitterly. A bas-relief on his tomb at Amyclae shows that he ascended into heaven accompanied by a choir of divine nymphs. On the first day his death was bewailed, on the second his resurrection was rejoiced and on the third his ascension was commemorated—the usual story.
The story of Narcissus depicts the soul descending to the plant level where it is incarnated as a flower. Psyche is the Greek word for soul and the story of Cupid and Psyche is yet another allegory of the journey of the soul into Hell to be restored. Venus is jealous of Psyche’s beauty and banishes her. Venus’s son Cupid and Psyche fall in love but she disobeys him and he cannot prevent the punishment. Psyche desperately tries to find Cupid but suffers many tribulations before she descends to Hades. Cupid finds her overwhelmed by a magic sleep representing death and restores her to Olympus (Heaven). The soul is saved by divine love as it is in Christianity.
The Greek romantic novels presuppose the stories of dying and rising dieties. The old legends emerge in the novels adapted to mortal life, shorn of superstition and presented in a feasible way. Chariton, writing at the beginning of the Christian era, if not earlier, mentions an empty sepulchre. In the story, Chaereas goes to the grave of his supposedly deceased wife, Callirhoe.
- He arrived at the tomb at daybreak
- He found the stones removed and the entrance open. At that he took fright
- No one dared enter the tomb
- He could not believe that his wife was not lying there
- He searched throughout the tomb, but could not find anything
- Finally, Chaereas says, speaking in spirit to his wife, “I will search for you by water and by land”.
At some points, agreement between the story of Chaereas and the New Testament is almost word for word. The connexions with the fourth gospel are particularly clear, since there the fact of the empty tomb is especially emphasized and elaborately portrayed (Jn 20:5). The motif of an empty tomb occurs in several stories of gods, though not in the case of Osiris, and resurfaces in early Christianity.
The Third Day
The resurrection tradition in the gospels is not necessarily copied from the the dying and rising deities, but features are present which are also in pagan traditions, suggesting a common origin in the psychology of comtremporary culture. One is the third day. The gospels take it for granted that Jesus rose on the third day, although we find in Matthew:
For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.Mt 12:14; cf Jonah 1:17
According to the Pyramid Texts, Horus “drives away the evil in Osiris on his fourth day”, that is, after three days and three nights, probably meaning Osiris’s resurrection. A Greco-Egyptian book on magic supports this idea:
On the river bank in Busiris, where the boats come in, I am going to cry out the one who stayed in the water for three days (and) three nights, namely the hesies, whom the current bore out to sea.
The Egyptian-Coptic-Greek word “hesies” refers to Osiris, or to the one who drowned in the Nile and became Osiris—the god himself, but Plutarch says, in the Egyptian calendar of festivals, Osiris dies on Hathor 17th, to be “discovered” on the third day, the 19th. The two phrases, “on the third day” and “after three days and three nights” are used together with reference to both Jesus and Osiris.
As far as Attis is concerned, his death was celebrated on March 22, his resurrection on March 25, after three days and three nights. In the case of Adonis we have no direct witness, but he is thought to have been the original source of the prophecy of Hosea:
After two days will he revive us, in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight.Hos 6:2
Jesus himself is resurrected at the full moon, but the moon is invisible for about three days at the new moon when the beginning of the month was determined and the New Year pronounced. According to a Jewish belief that originated in Persia, the soul stays near the body for three days after a person’s death:
For three days the soul hovers over the grave, contemplating a return to the body, but once it sees that the facial color has faded, it goes away, never to return.Gen Rab 50:10
This is reflected in John. Lazarus has been in the grave for four days by the time Jesus resurrects him. The miracle is immense beyond comparison (Jn 11:17, 39).
The traditions often require a prolonged search for the departed deity. The devotees carry out the search in a kind of theatrical drama. Albrecht Dieterich gives us the wording of their cry of joy on finally discovering their god:
We have found (Osiris)! We all rejoice!
While there is no trace of a symbolic search for the body of Christ in the liturgy of the early church, a story of comparable form is found in the gospels. The women who go to the tomb on Easter Sunday morning, as well as some of the disciples who follow them, are searching for the body. This is most apparent in the fourth gospel, the latest tradition (Jn 20:1).
Osiris and Isis, the Heavenly Mother
Egypt was the home of the myth of a slain and resurrected god. Plutarch, writing in late antiquity, gives us in On Isis and Osiris a concise account of the life of Osiris, but as Plutarch knows, the story is incomplete. Egyptian sources complete it, but the love of Isis was proverbial:
May “such-and-such” love me all her life, just as Isis loved Osiris.A Greco-Egyptian magical papyrus
“I am the Resurrection and the Life” is essentially what the Egyptians chanted about their god Osiris, the judge of the dead. He had been slain by “the powers of darkness” embodied in his wicked brother, Set. His sister and wife, Isis, had sought the fragments of his body and put them together again and he had arisen from the dead, and was enthroned in the world of souls, to judge every man according to the weight of his works. The resurrection of Osiris was the basis of the Egyptian’s firm hope of eternal life. Every year Egyptians mourned for days over the slaying of Osiris and then rejoiced exceedingly over his resurrection.
Isis and Osiris were mythical sovereigns of prehistoric Egypt, possibly based on real people, but were thought of as incarnated gods who suffered in the world before ascending to Heaven. So Isis worship began in Egypt, but she became Hellenized on the way to Rome adopting the Greek language and many non-Egyptian elements. Isis was worshipped in Greece in the fourth century BC and in Rome about 100 BC.
The successor of Alexander the Great who inherited Egypt, Ptolemy I (305-285 BC), aiming to continue the policy of spreading Greek culture and religion syncretistically throughout the conquered lands, modified the religion by introducing a Hellenised form of the Osiris and Isis cult into Alexandria. Kings promoted syncretism as social cement, sometimes quite blatantly to those who think religion comes from God. The new cult of Isis and Serapis seems to have been modelled on the Eleusinian mysteries which had been popular for hundreds of years. The hierophants of Eleusis were called Eumolpides and Ptolemy invited one of these, Timothy, and a poet, Demetrius of Phaleron, to design a mystery of Isis and Osiris based on the Eleusinian mysteries.
Osiris was identified with Serapis, so the consort of Isis became Serapis instead of Osiris. Apis was already the god of the bright world and Osiris the god of the dark world, so by combining the two Ptolemy made a universal god, like Yehouah. The idea was that Greeks and Egyptians could feel equally comfortable at worship and the Ptolemaic Empire would be strengthened. The religion surpassed Ptolemy’s best dreams and became a root of Christianity.
For the Egyptians, Serapis or Osiris was the Lord of life and death and so he remained in the mystery cult. Ancient Egyptians texts promised a worshipper, in Barbara G Walker’s words:
As truly as Osiris lives shall he live;
As truly as Osiris is not dead, shall he not die;
As truly as Osiris is not annihilated, shall he not be annihilated.
It expresses the sentiment of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. In this quotation, the abstract “he” means the dead person, and as E A Wallis Budge wrote: “Everywhere in the Book of the Dead, the deceased is identified with Osiris from 3400 BC to the Roman period.” By identifying himself with Osiris, the initiate became immortal. The Hermetic literature having the same roots, confirms this when it says:
For those who have attained knowledge (gnosis), the blessed end is deification.
Thus everlasting life could be had by initiation or by receiving knowledge by accepting a discourse (logos). The Pharaohs were considered to have been Osiris incarnate. After the New Kingdom (from 1570 BC) initiates into the religion believed that they would enjoy identification or communion with the god at death, thus triumphing with him over death.
Despite this Christians can assert:
Isis does not promise the “mystes” immortality, but only that henceforth he shall live under her protection, and that when at length he goes down to the realm of the dead he shall adore her.
Quite how a dead man can be protected by the goddess so that he can thereafter adore her without having some form of immortality is hard to understand.
Within the sphere of influence of the Ptolemaic Empire, which included Palestine at least part of the time, the cult of Serapis and Isis spread in the two centuries preceding the events of the gospels. Temples to Isis or Serapis have been found at Athens, Pompeii and Puteoli. In the first century BC, Isis was regarded as a universal goddess, identified with Rhea, Demeter, Hestia, Hera, Aphrodite, Leto, Nanaia, Artemis and Astarte. She is the feminine principle, the Mother Goddess, like Cybele. Her advantage over Cybele was being Egyptian which gave her a history much longer than that of the Anatolian goddess.
Caligula built a temple to Isis in Rome in 38 AD, but from the time of Julius Caesar there had been a temple to Isis and Serapis on Capitoline Hill. Josephus even associated it with Jesus, in relating the story of the rape of the beautiful but naïve Paulina by the priests of the temple of Isis, a possible allusion to the virgin birth of Jesus and a suggested explanation. The priests were crucified. There was a temple of Isis in Southwark, London. Isis worship was so widespread and popular in the Roman Empire at the time of the foundation of Christianity that an early Christian was able to write that some lands were full of the “madness of Isis” and it is suggested that Claudius deliberately promoted the cult of Cybele and Attis to temper its success and power.
The popularity of the cult was sustained for another four centuries, based on its offer of immortality to its followers and its majestic ceremonial. The last recorded festival of Isis was held in Rome in 394 AD but it was one of the last of the old faiths to die out, surviving less flamboyantly—it was illegal—against the Christian onslaught until the fifth century AD.
The Myths of Isis and Osiris
Plutarch wrote in the beginning of the second century AD a full account of the myth of the death and dismemberment of Osiris by Set and his double revivication by Isis. His account matches the early Egyptian texts.
Osiris, Isis and Horus are the Egyptian Trinity. When a new cult was being developed or imposed, the priests who rose to power often pushed the older deities upstairs by calling them “mother” or “father” of the gods. They remained notionally in charge of their offspring but practical honours were offered to their children. Osiris, Isis and Horus were made co-equals in a holy family, while older gods were pushed upstairs into obscurity, and another old Egyptian god Set was discredited, and he was made the murderer of the popular Osiris, the god equivalent in Egypt to Christ in Christendom.
Nut, the sky goddess, was the spouse of Ra, the sun god, who begot Osiris. By dallying with Thoth, the divine messenger, she gave birth to Isis, and by dallying again with Seb, the earth-god, to Set. Isis and Osiris so instinctively loved each other that they had relations with each other, unwittingly in the divine mother’s womb. Osiris and Isis were therefore brother and sister but, after the fashion of the Pharaohs they married. Osiris became ruler of Egypt, which he civilized, and he then set out to civilize the world.
The loving pair annoyed the prince of darkness, Set, whose father, Seb, is the equivalent of the Roman Saturn. Osiris was murdered by Set, who enticed Osiris to enter a handsome chest, fastened it down with molten lead, and had it flung into the Nile. The desolated Isis sought her brother and lover high and low. This search for the missing god or goddess is a common feature, and was dramatically represented in all the old mysteries. The chest was washed up on the coast of Syria and became lodged in the trunk of a tree which grew to such proportions that it was eventually cut down and used in as a column of the palace at Byblos with the coffin inside the trunk. Isis eventually found it there. After an interlude that smacks of the Demeter and Brimos story, she took the chest and set the tree in a temple swathed in linen like the tree of Attis.
Back in Egypt, Isis lay in the form of a hawk upon the dead body of Osiris and thus miraculously conceived her son Horus. Or she left the coffin at a place in Egypt while she went to see Horus. The evil Set found the body of Osiris and tore it into fourteen pieces, and scattered them. Isis painstakingly sought the parts of Osiris’s body and Isis and Horus put them together. As the wings of Isis fluttered over the corpse, Ra then reanimated him, and Osiris was resurrected. But, to confuse Set, Isis effected to have each part buried where she found it, which is why there were fourteen graves of Osiris in Egypt. But she could not find a penis which the fishes had swallowed, and had to make a synthetic one to conceive, in this version, their child Horus. Osiris then reigned as the king of the dead while Horus reigned on earth. At the core of this myth is a doctrine of a beneficent god slain by the powers of darkness and rising again from the dead.
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Moses and Exodus
