The Sun Gods 2
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999; Sunday, 02 October 2005
Abstract
The Religions Of Egypt
If one worships a God to secure a happy after life, to hope for his favours and to maintain harmony and order, what is your religion? Ancient Egyptian? These were the objectives, according to c J Bleeker of Amsterdam university, of pious Egyptians in the times of the Pharaohs, and their religion is now classified as a cult of the dead.
It was a dogma of the priests of the Middle Ages that there had been no virtue until God began to instruct the Jews and eventually sent Christianity into the world. The measurement and excavation of Egypt changed it all. Theosophists and Freemasons began to trace their secret rites to the ancient temples on the banks of the Nile.
Egyptian culture is a natural part of human evolution and it helps explain the Christian culture which followed. Egypt was neither inferior to Christendom nor equal to the secular civilization of modern times. Its science remained simple, though Egyptians had a high level of practical skill, learning quickly from experience how to tackle difficult practical problems. Its legends were primitive like those of the Jews, but its ethic was high.
There is no mystery about the beginning of civilization in Egypt and Babylonia. They were desirable countries to live in and people about 10,000 years ago noticed this when farming started in the Near East. Farming migrants must have reached Egypt through the delta area, though there was, then, no delta. The oldest evidence of Egyptian farming comes from about 6,000 BC, but few sites from this long ago have been discovered in the delta, and agriculture was not common in the Nile valley until much later.
The Nile delta formed after the last ice age, when the ice had melted and the sea level stopped rising so quickly. In the ice age, 18,000 years ago, sea level was 125 metres lower than it is now. The Nile fell from the plateau steeply to the sea, depositing only sand where the delta is now. Silt did not settle out until it reached the mouth of the river, 50 kilometres further north than the coast is today. Core samples drilled from the delta show silt starting to accumulate when the sea had risen to 16 metres lower than today, and the rate of rise slowed. As the ice melted, sea level rose about 9 millimetres a year—higher than the rate of silt deposition. When the rise slowed to about 1 millimetre per year, between 6,500 and 5,500 BC, the rate at which silt deposited was sufficient to build the modern delta. Now, the Nile delta accounts for more than half of the arable land in Egypt. The slowing of the rise in sea level also caused deltas to form in Mesopotamia and along the Yangtze river, which like the Nile delta are sites of early civilisations.
The Egyptians had a large advantage over those of the north chilled by the ice age. Their climate was glorious, and their soil, annually replenished from river mud, was remarkably fertile. It was ideal for mankind to develop a new skill called agriculture. People soon began farming on the fertile land. The first evidence of agriculture in the delta appeared about 5000 BC. Few early settlements are known in the delta, perhaps because many were buried as sediment accumulated. One core contains the oldest pottery sherds from the Pharaonic era ever found in the delta. Civilisation will have started even before the delta became important. The river valley upstream was fertile anyway, especially at the fringes of the flood where heavy clays do not accumulate and did not need draught animals to break them up.
First New Stone Age people settled on the soil. Their primitive religious ideas, at the dawn of civilization, were an intense belief in survival, a great deal of magic and demonism and a readiness to imagine spirits throughout nature—trees, stones, rivers. This state of things passes gradually into primitive civilization—no miracle of genius, but a slow process stretching over two thousand years. Villages grew into towns. Chiefs became petty kings, picture writing began, pottery, weaving, and agriculture improved.
Egypt is essentially a one dimensional country. The desert and high cliffs at the edge of the flood plain restricted the early Egyptians to the valley, and the narrow way south or north restricted cultural intercourse along the river. The first Egyptians therefore developed as independent tribes along the river and on either bank who had their own favourite gods and fetishes.
Many Egyptian gods have animal heads, suggesting they were local totem animals. Totemism means a tribe thought it had some family or mystic connection with an animal, and took it as their sacred symbol. The early Egyptians revere the bull in one place, the ram in another, the hawk in another. The totem animal is sacred and cannot be killed or eaten like the sacred cows of the Indians. The reason why Jews do not eat pork is likely to be because pigs were at one time a totem animal for some Canaanitish tribe.
Tribal priesthoods grew round these totems. At this stage, at the beginning of Egyptian history—about 3300 BC—the statues of the gods are animal statues. About 5000 years ago, the narrow strip of land along the river was united. There were no city states here, no clash of cultures or gods, though there were plenty of them. Though the cities were part of one country, they maintained their traditions in priestly schools. Even the unity of Upper and Lower Egypt forced together in contradictory partnership different sets of gods. Priests arranged the deities of the many Nilotic tribes that had united to form the kingdom in hierarchies and families—as man and wife, mother and son, and so on. They reorganized the religion of the whole country but retained influence by keeping lots of the old elements. The priests constantly intrigued, and at times one or another deity became the supreme god.
It was easy for a primitive mind to imagine that the hawk, the lioness, or the bull had a very powerful spirit in it. People did not suppose that a goddess with a cow’s head or a god with a hawk’s head was in the heavens—the animal head stood for its desirable characteristics. Religion, though, is always conservative and the Egyptians were more conservative than most. Worshippers of particular gods resist changes. So later when gods became humanised, they retained their animal features.
However, all Egyptian gods did not have an animal origin:
- Belief in Shadow or Soul
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- Animism and Fetishism.
- Ancestor Worship
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- Deification of sun, moon.
- Deified ancestors
- Polytheism
- Monotheism
- Atheism
A very large number of the Egyptian deities were deified animals but some—the great god Osiris particularly—never had an animal form. Some of these, and they were very old deities, were nature gods—Horus and Ra and other sun gods, Seb the earth god, Neith the sky goddess, and so on. Osiris, on the other hand, is said in Egyptian legend to have once been king of the country, and most scholars believe that this is a case of deification of an ancestor. Later, other gods were added to the pantheon as the spirits of abstract ideas (of love, of war, of writing, of truth, and so on). Anubis was the jackal-headed spirit of death. Briefly, thirteen hundred years before Christ, under Pharaoh Amenhotep IV who called himself Akhnaten, the sun god became fully monotheistic as the Aten, with its rays like nurturing hands.
The Egyptians found it much more natural to adore the sun than did the Mesopotamians. The sun was no less harsh but it had no effect on the annual deluge by the Nile which cut its narrow groove through the desert. The Nile reliably provided the fertile earth and the sun reliably provided the warmth to nurture the crops. There was nothing to fear here, and everything to admire. So, the sun was worshipped in a confusing number of aspects. It became important to Egyptians to interpret human personality in different layers just as the sun was seen in different forms.
The Egyptians saw meaning in every different aspect of the sun, and he appeared in many different forms and with many different titles. Ra was the sun god in his splendour, creator of the Universe, and the first king of Egypt. All other gods sprang from him and so were him. Ra lifted the first land, the Primeval Hill, out of Nun, the watery abyss, making it the place of the first sunrise, the coming of light. He was Atum of the temple of Heliopolis. He was Khepri, “He who Comes Forth”, depicted as a scarab beetle because they were thought to generate spontaneously in animal dung. The scarab beetle pushed its little ball of dung to some suitable spot and the Egyptians saw a parallel with the sun rolling across the heavens. They saw in their imagination a scarab pushing the sun, and so it was painted.
Horus began as a sky god but adopted a confusing number of titles and characteristics. He was the “Great God”, the “Lord of Heaven”, “son of Hathor”, the Mother Goddess, but also the “son of Isis and Osiris”, who lost an eye avenging Osiris’s murder by Seth. He was Horakhte, “Horus of the Horizon” or sunrise, depicted as a falcon. Each morning when the priests greeted the rising sun, having already been ritually prepared, the Pharaoh greeted his alter ego, Ra as Horakhte.
Pharaoh, the king of the two Egypts, was also a god—again a sun god. Pharaoh pehaps comes from Ptah and Ra. Ptah, the god of Memphis, produced the egg of the sun and moon. Permanent death has never been a comfortable realisation by humans once they achieved consciousness. People find it hard, for some reason, to imagine their consciousness going forever, despite experiencing it going every night of their lives. Gods never died and humans wanted to be the same. For most societies, it was achieved through some form of communion. For Egyptians the communion was through the Pharaoh, a god on earth. Pharaoh was Horus, the Lord of Heaven, and from the time of king Menes, traditionally the first king of united Egypt, was shown as accompanied by a falcon.
Both were sun gods and according to convention were painted with golden skin. But Horus was also the son of Osiris, the Lord of the Underworld, and when he died became him, while his son became the new Horus. We have here again the unity but division of the triumphant heavenly sun and the vegetation god, dying and being resurrected in an endless seasonal cycle to induce the plants to bloom. In Egypt the king who was the living god was the link between sun and vegetation. The Pharaoh was also Atum-Ra, the Supreme Creator, a title he got after being identified with Horus, but one which in the fashion of religions was to blaze brightly for awhile.
Atum-Ra lived at On or Heliopolis. The centre of worship was the Benben stone, a conical phallic symbol representing the Primeval Hill. Atum-Ra created himself at the first sunrise over the Primeval Hill and the Benben stone solidified from his Primeval Ejaculation. The Primeval Hill was also seen in flights of steps and, in the Third Dynasty, the genius, Imhotep, made models of the Primeval Hill on a heroic scale for his Pharaoh, Djoser. The next dynasty perfected the engineering and built the three huge pyramids of Giza—tombs for the sun-god in the form of his first manifestation over the Primeval Hill.
In the pyramid chambers the dead Pharaoh is called the “Son of Ra”. From the Fifth Dynasty the title, “Son of Ra” was adopted by the Pharaohs. Ra was God, so they became sons of God—Rameses means “Born of Ra” and therefore “son of Ra”. Later storytellers then say the god Atum-Ra appeared on the Benben stone in the form of a Phoenix, the golden plumed sun bird. This cult triumphed for a long time in Egypt and even later, when the Hidden One, Amun, became the main god, he had to be associated with Ra as Amun-Ra.
The supremacy of the sun in Egypt can be seen in every pyramid and obelisk, in every image of the falcon and in the symbol of a disk, whether it be on a barque or between the horns of Hathor and Isis. Even after the invasion of the Hyksos introduced the war chariot to Egypt, one can search in vain for pictures of the sun being carried by a chariot. Egypt was the most conservative of cultures and apparently could not bring themselves to cart the solar disk across the sky, like Apollo. Reflecting the main form of transport along the Nile the sun was most often shown being carried across the sky in a boat carrying a man, a falcon or a beetle. At the same time they could imagine the sun god being swallowed by Neith (Nut), goddess of the heavens, and being reborn from her thighs each morning. Neith was Ra’s virgin mother, the sky.
The certainties of the rule of Ra were to be overthrown when at the end of the third millennium BC the kingdom fell into chaos. Egyptians were quite unprepared for the disaster and it is said the Nile crocodiles were sated with the flesh of suicides. Order had been the norm but order collapsed and with it the old faith in Ra. When order was restored, the outlook was more pessimistic and Osiris, god of the dead, had become more important. The glory in the rule of the sun gave way to an obsession with death. Previously, ritual had been restricted to the Pharaoh as a god, but now came a new egalitarianism and all successful people hoped for a communion with Osiris and a rebirth after bodily death.
The sun was identified with Osiris in the underworld in its nightly journey below the horizon. He disappeared in the west where he was slain by the envious night, and yet always rose again the next morning. Osiris was depicted with a dark face because the sun no longer shined at night and it was assumed did not shine in the underworld. He was represented as a mummy, wearing a mitre, and holding a sceptre and crozier and in his hand a crux ansata. Osiris was Father, Isis, the virgin mother, and Horus, the infant, forming the Egyptian trinity. Horus was now seen more as the son of Osiris than as the Sun of the Horizon. When it transferred to Rome, the Isis cult recognized magic, fortune telling by stars, palmistry, dreams and consultations with the dead, becoming immensely popular in the years of the growth of Christianity.
Ra receded to become an attribute of the Hidden God, Amun, a god of righteousness worshipped at Thebes in the Upper Kingdom, but his glory hardly faded. Amun was the hidden, unknowable, ineffable god. Combined as Amun-Ra, he was the maker of all that is. Even in the Underworld, Osiris was not the final judge of souls, Ra was, as president of a tribunal of godly judges. Osiris took the scales of justice from Ra, who always carried them.
The Middle Kingdom ended with invasions by the Hyksos and, after two centuries, the New Kingdom strengthened the adoration of Osiris even more, a result once again of pessimism. People were looking for a gods who understood human suffering and had Osiris not suffered at the hands of his evil brother Set (Seth)? Images in the tombs in the valley of the kings still showed Ra, usually at the tomb’s entrance, but within were pictures of night fears, the inhabitants of the unconscious that occupy the underworld.
In the world of the living, vast temples to Ra were still built, just as splendidly as before, so he was still considered the god of the living but the preoccupation with death was deeper. At Karnak and Luxor, Amun-Ra still continued to be worshipped in style and the complicated temples there remain a major tourist attraction. Who was this Amun? Initially he had been one of the gods of chaos, being the god of wind, but wind more subtly is breathe and breathe becomes spirit—the word for spirit in the Hebrew Bible is properly breathe or wind! Similarly the word for “spirit” in the Greek New Testament is not the Greek word for “soul” but the Greek word for “wind”, “pneuma”, and translators translate it as they see fit. Amun-Ra was light and spirit together.
The priesthood of Amun with its mighty temples on either side of the Nile at Luxor and Karnak eventually became incredibly rich, especially as Tuthmosis III merged all the priestly schools including the old proud school of Heliopolis under the control of the High Priest of Amun. Constantine the Great of Rome, almost 2000 years later, was to take a similar action when he merged the solar gods of the Romans under the Catholic Christian Pope.
Egypt now was on a long slow decline tempered only by a brief revival under Rameses II. With the gradual decline, the pessimism returned and the importance of Osiris continued to grow. In his Great Temple at Abu Simbel, Rameses cut a cleft into the rock and cut four immense statues of himself to guard the entrance which faced the rising sun. Above the door, sure enough was the falcon of Horakhte but, inside, the Pharaoh depicted himself as Osiris with the crook and the flail. At the very back of the shrine, in the gloom except when the sun’s rays illuminate them at dawn, the Pharaoh sits with Amun, Horus and Ptah.
Though impressive the nature of the temple is a far cry from the earlier sun temples and it was the god of the underworld, Osiris who supervised entry to the four gods in conclave at the back of the temple.
The loss of confidence in the ability of local gods to provide adequately for their people through their earthly representatives or sons led to greater pessimism, and ultimately to a change in religious needs. People became more conscious of themselves and their own ultimate destiny rather than sublimating it in a wider social context presided over by a local god. They became burdened by their souls and concerned about the salvation of their individual personality.
Serapis was introduced by the Greek Ptolemies as a combination of Apis, a bull god representing the sun in Taurus, and Osiris, the god of the dead and the hidden night time sun, and the partner of Isis. Effectively Serapis was the god of all, a hidden god like Yehouah, and was important in the growth of Christianity.
The Judgement Of The Soul
The Egyptians differed most from contemporary peoples in the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and this influenced the life of the people profoundly. The life of Egypt seems at first sight to have been one long preoccupation about the future life. Nearly all the relics we have of Egyptian daily life come from tombs, placed there because of their belief in the after life. This is slightly misleading. The homes of the Egyptians are buried under twenty feet of Nile mud after thousands of years of annual flooding. The tombs, on the contrary, are naturally on raised dry land at the edge of the desert. Tombs are more accessible than buried homes.
The Roman Church believes in two judgements of the dead—the Particular Judgement of each soul after death, and the General Judgement of all men at the end of the world. The Persians believed in a Day of Judgement, when God, Ahuramazda, would destroy the earth, summon before him the souls of all men who had ever lived, reward the good and punish the living. It is clearly from Persia that certain sects of the Jews, and Christ and the early Christians, took this idea of the coming kingdom of Heaven. The Egyptians however believed in a particular judgement of each person at death.
The Egyptians conceived of humans as complex beings on several levels or having several aspects. They had a “khu”, a soul of intelligence, a “ka”, or double, the seat of sense and perception, an ethereal counterpart of the physical body or a sort of guardian angel, the “ba”, a disembodied soul, winged like a bird and flitting about the tombs and cemeteries at night. There were also other fanciful abstractions, an essence of the heart, of the navel, the confusion of which is difficult to resolve.
Probably in prehistoric times, when tribes were merging to form the two kingdoms, besides having to find places for different gods from the tribes, the priests had to find places for different concepts of the human spiritual body and their seat. The “ka” seems to be the original conception of the soul as the shadow, reflexion or double of the body. The “khu” is a recognition of the mind as the seat of the personality. The “ba” is a ghost, thought to be an aspect of the body freed after death and flitting around the graveyards in the form of a white owl.
The home of the dead for the Egyptians gradually receded as they got to know their world better. At first the dead went to a region in the Delta where Osiris had his sea. Later the home of the dead was Syria. Later still it was placed in the sky, a happy garden of Osiris, watered by the celestial Nile, the Milky Way.
Even before the dawn of history, the Egyptians believed that a man’s soul went to live with the god Osiris. At first the Egyptians did not mummify dead bodies. They cut off the corpse’s head and limbs, stripped its flesh from its bones, cleaned the bones, and then put the pieces together again to be buried. They cleaned the corpse to prepare it to meet a god.
What were the sins which disqualified the Egyptian? Obviously this intense belief in a future life of eternal happiness, which would be forfeited by sin, had a profound influence. The famous Book of the Dead gives us the full code of conduct by which the soul was judged. Thoth, the assistant of Osiris who took down the record of a man’s deeds, was the wisdom god of Egypt, the scribe of the great gods; and the Book of the Dead was known to the Egyptians as the Book of Thoth.
The book goes back beyond 3000 BC, but just like the Jewish scriptures was revised by the priests. In its complete form the collection included forty two books and dealt with theology, cosmogony, and all kinds of ecclesiastical rules. The part we have is essentially concerned with the long and arduous journey of the soul after death.
The Morals Of The Egyptians
We deduce the morals of Egypt from its ideals and from the incentives to observe them. If an eternal reward for good conduct and annihilation for evil conduct are not sufficient incentives, then the Christian has little reason to speak.
A funeral song urges the Egyptians not to be miserable in life but to be joyful or to bother too much about the dead in the other world because:
No one comes thence to tell us what is become of them.
To tell us how it fares with them, to comfort our heart.
Until thou approachest the place whither they are gone.
Forget not to glorify thyself with joyful heart,
And follow thy heart as long as thou livest.
Adorn thyself, make thyself as fair as thou canst,
And let thy heart sink not.
Follow thy heart and thy joy.
As long as thou livest upon earth,
Trouble not thy heart until the day of mourning come upon thee.
With joyous countenance keep a day of festival, and rest not in it,
For no one takes his goods with him.
Yea, no one returns that is gone hence.
The spells people were to carry with them when they died emphasize that death makes them like Gods:
Every blessed deed for whom this spell is recited will possess eternal life in the hereafter and will have the same nature as Osiris.Book of the Dead, Spell 147
I am he, who appeared from Nun. My soul is a God.Book of the Dead, Spell 153
Both spells, meant to be recited by the dead person, declare them to believe they are a god or like a god. The second one is Gnostic sounding in that Gnostics believed they had a divine spark in their souls. If death could give the believer happiness and bliss in an immortal life like a god, did they have to do anything for it? Yes, they had to live according to maat, which is like the Persian asha or arta. It is order. Maat was, for human beings, being righteous, truthful and a good citizen. Maat was notionally a goddess, but was actually an abstract order because even the gods were subject to it, again rather like Persia. Ancient people saw humanity and the cosmos as being one, and maat made it so. Living according to maat, being a maatj, ensured the soul’s salvation. The Egyptian noble saw it as being in practice:
Cool of mouth in the presence of the king, friendly and silent, quiet of heart, harmonious of nature, free from passions.
The Egyptian, for living according to maat, was maatcheru, literally a “true voice”, and meaning righteous or just. A prayer was “may my voice be true in the Hall of Judgement for I was maatcheru on earth”. The voice was considered a magical power, which is why God’s name could not be vainly uttered, and why God was able to create by His voice alone. Here, the Egyptian cheru is close to the Greek and biblical logos, “the word”.
The writers of some moral treatises, which have been found amongst the remains of ancient Egypt, seem to have been monotheistic quite early in Egyptian history. The popular gods are rarely mentioned, and then only with the kind of graceful gesture with which a learned Greek might speak of Zeus and Aphrodite. The writers speak of “God” using a word that implies an eternal deity behind the gods of the priests. Even this one “God” is more of a heavenly principle rather than a person.
The writers of these little treatises are educated or middle class Egyptians, and the best known work of the kind is a pseudepigraphical papyrus entitled The Maxims of Ptah-hotep kept in the British Museum at London. Ptah-hotep was an early Egyptian king. The book is not spiritual and does not speak of “sin” or “virtue” or “repentance”. There is also part of a book giving counsels or rules of conduct to judges, teachers, and other professional people.
The book completely ignores the poor as if they did not exist. Egypt was a drastic feudal monarchy, and the workers were not specifically cared for by law, as they were in Babylon, but they did have recourse to justice:
- If a man wishes to live by terrifying others, God will take the bread from his mouth. It is the will of God that we cause men no fear.
- Justice is great, unchangeable, assured; it has not been disturbed since the age of Osiris.
- The limits of justice are immovable.
- Be not puffed up on account of thy science; speak equally with the ignorant and the learned, for the barriers of art are not yet known.
- If thou art great after having been of little account, if thou art rich after having been poor, if thou art at the head of thy city, put on one side that thou hast reached the first rank. Harden not thy heart because of thy elevation, for thou hast become the steward of God’s property. Put not at the back of thy head him who was thy equal, but be a companion to him.
- Command only in order to direct: if thou art despotic, thou goest toward evil. Let thy thoughts be neither haughty nor base.
- Treat thy people as well as thou canst: it is the mark of those favored by God.
- Let the love thou feelest pass into the heart of those whom thou lovest: cause all men to be loving and obedient.
These maxims demonstrate as high a rule of life as any religion ever taught.
A wife was metaphorically chained to a man but the author of the maxims advises:
She will be doubly attached if the chain is sweet to her.
In fact, women were as free as men in ancient Egypt, and had their own property. Nowhere, until we come to Greece and Rome, do we find anything remotely approaching the long subjection of women under Christianity or the least need for any kind of woman movement.
- The daily bread is under the dispensation of God. When thou ploughest, labour in the field that God hath given thee.
- If thou wouldst be a perfect man, make thy son pleasing to God.
- Wisdom is more difficult to find than the emerald, for the emerald is found by slaves amongst pegmatite rocks.
- As to the vivacity of an ardent heart, moderate it; the temperate man penetrates obstacles.
- The man who is busy all day has not a good moment; and the man who enjoys himself all day will not keep his fortune.
Four thousand years ago educated Egyptians were monotheistic and had the same code of conduct as we have.
Inscriptions on tombs like that of a provincial governor also show the compassion of many officials in this ancient country:
He lowered the shoulder of the proud; he shortened the hour of the cruel; he was the husband of the widow and the refuge of the orphan.
He was the father of the orphan, the husband of the widow, the eye of the blind, the foot of the lame.
He gave bread to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, and clothed the naked.
He was exempt from all vice, virtuous in all his thoughts; there was no guile in him.
These eulogies might be exaggerated as inscriptions on tombs often are, but they give us the Egyptian ideal. Three millennia before the Sermon on the Mount is supposed to have been written its finest contents were commonplaces in Egypt! The seven works of mercy were required of a man by Osiris. The very phrases at times sound like the phrases of the New Testament.
Isis And Horus
Osiris, a very old Egyptian god, generally regarded as a deified king of the prehistoric period, was turned by the priestly legend makers into a son of the oldest and discarded gods, and brother of Set. Their sisters were Isis and Nephthys. This was the usual way of adjusting the claims of rival deities when political fusion brought their worshippers under one head.
But quite early, it was represented that Set had killed his brother god, Osiris. Set gave a banquet and, producing a beautiful chest or cabinet, said that he would give it to any person present who would lie in it. Osiris took up the challenge, and the conspirators nailed down the lid and poured molten lead on it. It was put on the river and drifted out to the Asiatic coast.
Then began the adventures of Isis in search of the body of her brother and husband—a subsidiary legend said that they had been married in the womb—until she found it in Syria. She hid the body but Set found it and tore it into fourteen pieces, which he buried in different localities—a priestly explanation of why there were fourteen rival “graves of Osiris” in Egypt). Isis recovered the fourteen parts. She reassembled the pieces but lacking the penis had to make an artificial one with which she conceived Horus—a kind of virgin birth because no god or mortal actually penetrated her. Seeing her grief, the god Ra who had had to be given an important role as the God of some other sect—restored Osiris to life and he became the god and judge of the dead.
Osiris’s death was annually celebrated with long and very popular ceremonies. A figure of him was laid on a bier, with corn sprouting round it, or corn was actually planted in the figure and grew out of it. The ceremony therefore seems like a celebration of the annual death and rebirth of the vegetation god, but it might have been a celebration of the annual flooding of the Nile which fertized the crops and might have been seen as an annual rebirth. Either could easily and quickly have been conflated with the annual death and rebirth of the sun. The point is that for several millennia before the time of Christ all Egypt annually celebrated the cruel death and restoration to life of a god who became the judge and recorder of the dead.
Isis naturally shared the popularity of Osiris. During the greater part of Egyptian history she was rather a private or domestic deity, without great temples. She was the model spouse, the model mother: with the women the most popular figure of the Egyptian “holy family”. Late in Egyptian history her importance grew so much that temples were built to her, her cult was Hellenized and spread as far as Rome. The cult of Isis was not immoral, and involved no sacred prostitution. Roman writers tell us that devotees of Isis were ascetic, and in Egypt the worship of her was in the latest period associated with a cult of virginity and asceticism. She was the predecessor and prototype of the Christian Mary.
An early Christian work, the Paschal Chronicle, tells us that every year the temples of Horus presented to worshippers, in mid winter, about 25 December, a scenic model of the birth of Horus. He was represented as a babe born in a stable, his mother Isis standing by.
The Roman writer Macrobius in Saturnalia makes the same statement about the representation of the birth of Horus in the temples and adds that the young god was a symbol of the rebirth of the sun. The whole world by the year 1 AD was familiar with the Egyptian statues or pictures of Isis with the divine babe Horus in her arms.
The Chinese Religions And Confucius
Civilization appeared in China, about 2700 BC. At the earliest stage, Nature is full of spirits. Every tree, forest, river, lake has what the Chukchi call its “master”, or indwelling spirit. Every animal has a spirit. Of the disembodied spirits of men there are whole legions of sour and malevolent shades haunting the villages and living in the deserts, so that we have a very large belief in “devils” (so prominent in the Chinese religion). They work terrible havoc among men, and there is quite an army of shamans (devil fighters, magic practicers) to keep them at bay.
But some spirits, especially those in the greater elements of Nature, rise above the common level, and, one of them reaches a level not far removed from monotheism. The Chukchi have a supreme spirit, a sky god, whom they regard as a “life giving being” or even “creator”, though they do not pray to or worship him. The chief spirit of the Yukaghirs and the Karyaks is also a sky god, and there is a naïve belief that if the animal sacrifices to him are neglected, he goes to sleep and the course of Nature is disordered. Other Mongolian tribes have no particularly outstanding spirit, but there is a general vague respect for “heaven” (the sky spirit) and the “will of heaven”.
In the sixth century before Christ, when the Chinese kingdom had fallen into decay and confusion, two sages arose, certainly influenced by the message of Zoroaster passing back along the silk road to China. These were Lao-tse and Kong-fu-tse (Confucius). They took from Zoroaster the idea of “Arta” or Order, but seemed to reject the meddlesome Ahuramazda, so both were practical atheists, and the immense influence they had shows that educated China denied any interfering god twenty five hundred years ago.
Lao-tse knew nothing of a personal god, though the moral system he founded, Taoism (Tao is the Chinese for “way” of life), was later mixed with ritualistic Buddhism, and became a tissue of superstitions.
The moral system of Kong-fu-tse is hardly more than a pure secularism. No one in the world disputes that, when Kong was pressed to declare his opinion on a religion, which he never mentioned, he said:
To give oneself earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them—that may be called wisdom.
Two thousand five hundred years ago this great sage founded an atheistic code of morality as high as any in the world. For two thousand years it was the standard of Chinese gentlemen, and never took a religious form.
The culture of Japan is mixed. The popular religion was Buddhism, adopted from China, but Japanese nationalism led to an artificial revival of the old religion, Shintoism, in the nineteenth century, when it was practically dead. Shintoism is said by the people to have eight million gods. It is an ancient Nature and ancestor worship revivified. Confucianism was, like Buddhism, brought over from China, and it has been the moral standard of educated Japanese. As in China, it has remained atheistic, and, whatever may be thought about Japanese character since European and American influence began, every writer on the Japanese before that time gives them a high moral character.
Some say they have a sacred book called Bushido, but it seems to be a collection of moral sentiments culled from any suitable source. In 1871, Japanese officials and the middle class—themselves indifferent to, or contemptuous of, religion—sent a deputation to Europe to study Christianity and see if it was suitable for the ignorant masses. Their impartial judgment on Europe’s religion was that Christianity was inferior to Buddhism.
Buddha And The Religions Of India
In India, Brahmanism grew out of the old Vedic faith, and Buddhism out of Brahmanism—now Hinduism. Brahma was the saviour and androgynous creator. Krishna like Osiris was dark skinned, representing the hidden sun at night. Buddhism too has the features of a sun myth—emerging from the womb of the virgin dawn, the hero ascends the sky to meet and conquer a wicked dragon, after which the fires of sunset redden over his funeral pile.
The ancient literature of the Hindus, written in Sanskrit, showed they were related to the peoples of Europe, and more closely related to the Persians. In a treaty, drawn up more than thirty three centuries ago, the names of Hindu and Persian divinities occur as those of a still united people. Soon after, the Hindu branch of the Indo-Europeans migrated into the sunny and fertile plains of India.
Their religion is described in their sacred books, the Vedas, but these were written ages afterwards and, like the Jewish scriptures and other sacred books, they falsify history, and adorn the primitive life and thought of crude pastoral invaders with the more advanced ideas of later ages. Their early religion was a variant of the religion of the Aryans, the common ancestors of the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Slavs, Teutons and Celts.
A large number of tribes survive in India today belonging to the population of India before the Aryans arrived, the Dravidians. Million of these, in the shelter of the hills and valleys, cling to animism, or nature worship. The Todas, for instance, believe vaguely in wandering spirits of the hill, the river, and the pool, and in a small number of greater spirits which can hardly be dignified with the name of gods. The Khasis are substantially at the same level. In brief, these relics of the early population show us the phase of belief in universal spirits and the beginning of the creation of major spirits and gods.
The Hindu early sacred books, the Vedas, did not begin to appear in writing until about 1000 BC, and the later religious ideas are confused with the earlier. But the original religion is fairly clear—the worship of great spirits or gods who control and dwell in the more important elements of Nature. They are gods of the sky, gods of the air, and gods of the earth.
One particular Hindu god was Dyaus (the sky) or Dyaus Pitar (Sky Father, who became Zeus and Jupiter). This was the great god at an early date in Nature worship. From Europe to the coast of China the Heavenly Father is the principal god, where heaven is the physical heaven, the sky. Dyaus is not a monotheistic god in Vedic religion but is accompanied by a legion of gods and goddesses. The sun god, under many names (Surya, Mitra, Vishnu) early displaced the sky god in importance. His mother is Ushas (the Dawn), later represented as a maid. There is a sky god of rain, later the god of water (Varuna). There are, in the air, Vata (wind god), Inara (or rain and lightning), and others, and on the earth are Agni (of fire), Prithivi (mother earth), and many others. The early Hindus had risen above the primitive level to the deification of the great elements of Nature.
Seven centuries before Christ, the priests of the Hindu religion, which was now elaborately organized, and had great temples and ritual, entered upon a phase of speculation or metaphysics. The supreme principle became a deified abstraction called by them Brahma, while the priests called themselves Brahmans. The modern development of this Brahmanism, is the religion of the educated Indians today.
The mass of the people of India had no wish to understand this new development. Their religion was, as it is today, a mixture of the primitive belief in minor spirits with a worship of the congenial and amorous Hindu gods. But the crudities of the popular religion and the empty wordiness of the Brahmans gave rise to a number of reformers.
Jainism, which still has many followers, was one of the new sects or reforms started at this period. It is now a superstitious sect, priding itself that it is a refinement of Hinduism, but its founder, who still lived in the time of Buddha (sixth century BC) rejected all gods and all speculations about them. He retained, however, the doctrine of reincarnation, the germ of many superstitions. Sikhism is in turn a reform of Jainism.
Another group which arose in India about the same time as Jainism had no mystic features whatever. Like Epicureanism in Greece and Rome at a later date, it was rather a frame of mind than a system. It rejected gods and religious speculations, and concentrated upon happiness in this life. One might call it ordinary common sense atheism. Buddha, the Enlightened, or Gautama, his real name, was the son of a chief or small prince, born about 560 BC. He renounced his position, became a wandering teacher of the proper way to live, and gathered disciples about him. But, instead of founding a religion, he wanted to divert people from religion.
Like Kong-fu-tse, Buddha distrusted and rejected all speculation about gods. His complete silence about gods and his advice to his disciples to avoid all such speculation, are universally admitted. The significance of his silence in such an age is plain enough. Buddha was, like Kong-fu-tse, a purely humanitarian and atheistic moralist. One of the greatest religious founders was a practical atheist. One of the most lofty ethical systems was purely humanitarian.
Buddha denied the existence both of a world soul and an individual soul. Some say that Buddha continued to believe in reincarnation, but how could Buddha deny the existence of a soul yet believe in reincarnation? Buddha’s doctrine was purely humanitarian. Its essence is that all earthly existence is suffering, the only means of release from which is renunciation and eternal death. It was a religion of humanity and a system of practical morality, the keynote of which is universal charity, kindness to all beings, animals as well as men.
The asceticism and pessimism of Buddha are explained by the terrible confusion and disorder of his age. His doctrine of universal human love, five centuries before Christ, is the highest note of ethics. His rejection of all religion now explains how all educated Asia reached the final goal of religious evolution, atheism, two thousand years before Europe. Buddhism unfortunately lost popularity, and it now has few followers in India proper.
Astronomy
Among the objects that would stir the minds of primitive people and which would quickly be given a sign or name, is the sun—the creator of the shadow. Rising awareness revealed to people the rising and setting of the sun, the passing days and years, the return of winter and summer, growth and decay, calm and storm. The objects that changed seemed like actors in a drama, either enemies or friends. These actors became gods and heroes to people, and they played the game of copying their actions to show they had noticed them. Then the games generated superstitions that the gods would not respond unless the games were played, and religion had been founded. Events in the history of the tribe were related to the mythical beings behind the planetary events, and the heavenly gods became part of the local tribe.
The Indians, Egyptians, Persians, Ancient Greeks and Romans each had their zodiacs, signs indicating the position of the sun in the heavens, which differed very little from one another suggesting that they all had a common root—it was in Mesopotamia. Akkadian astrologer priests founded astronomy, believing that the heavenly bodies had an influence which ruled over human and worldly affairs. The astrological idea of ruling occurs in the story of creation in Genesis where the sun is said to “rule the day”, and the stars to “rule the night”. Note however that when the sun is in any particular sign, it is the sign opposite to it in the zodiac and the constellations of that portion of the heavens that is visible from our earth at night.
The Zodiac is a division of the firmament into twelve segments or signs each one of thirty degrees, comprising three decans of ten degrees each. As the sun passed from decan to decan, and from sign to sign, the astrologer priests publicly proclaimed the exact moment of its entry into each. The first decan they called the Upper Room, the second the Middle Room, and the third the Lower Room. The six summer signs, being bountiful, were considered specially holy, while the six winter signs were not only less holy but as powerful for evil as the others were for good.
The ancients imagined the earth as flat, and surrounded by water, the Oceans. It is a sphere, three fourths covered by water, this water covering forming the Oceans, and the whole is enclosed by a gaseous atmosphere which fades imperceptibly into space at a height of a few hundred miles. The earth traces an elliptical path round the sun in a flat plane called the plane of the ecliptic, making the complete journey in a year of 365 days and 6 hours. Half of the earth is always illuminated by the sun and the opposite half is in darkness, but the entire sphere spins on an axis making an entire revolution in a day of 23 hours, 56 minutes. When we are in the illuminated half of the sphere we experience day time and when we are in the dark half we experience night.
The earth’s axis of spin is inclined always in one direction at an angle of 67 degrees from the plane of the ecliptic There are times when, in each hemisphere, the tilted axis of the earth inclines towards or away from the sun producing the seasons. The variation in the length of day and night during different periods of the year is also due to the inclination of the axis of the earth. When the north pole of the axis is most inclined away from the sun is the winter solstice, meaning “the standing still”, when the days seem to stop changing in length. When the north pole of the axis inclines towards the sun, at the other end of the journey, is the summer solstice. When the earth arrives roughly halfway between these two points, on either side, are the spring and autumn equinoxes, equal day and night, when the length of the day and night are the same.
As the earth moved in its orbit the fixed stars forming the background to the sun changed but the ancient zodiac was arranged on the theory that the earth was flat and immovable, and it was the sun that made an annual circuit round the earth. The groups of stars in the different signs or constellations forming the backdrop of the sun were named after some fancied resemblance to men, women, animals or other objects of Nature—the Ram, the Bull, the heavenly Twins, the Crab, the Lion, the Virgin, the Scales, the Scorpion, the Archer, the He goat, the Man with the water pot, the Fish with glittering tails. As the sun god traversed his supposed annual passage through the twelve signs, he was worshipped in his different aspects according to the constellation forming the seasonal backdrop—the Lion represented the sun when at his fierce summer strength, the Balance, when the days and nights are equal, the Water pourer, the commencement of the rainy season, and so on.
Spring begins at the vernal equinox, the start of the annual cycle of the ancient zodiac, when the sun seems to enter the constellation called Aries, 21 March. Summer starts at the summer solstice, when the sun appears to enter Cancer, the longest day, 21 June. Autumn begins at the autumnal equinox, when the sun appears to enter Libra, 23 September. Winter begins at the winter solstice, when the sun appears to enter Capricorn, the shortest day, 21 December.
The modern zodiac is a fixed one which does not match the sun’s true journey through the heavens, but, in fact, the zodiac changes, matching the sun’s motion. The reason is the precession of the equinoxes where the equator and the ecliptic cross each other. The equinoxial points (Aries and Libra) move fifty seconds of arc westward every year. So, now the seasonal and cultic signs of the sun have become separated. Not since the second century BC has the vernal equinoxial sign of the Ram really been the first in the Zodiac.
After the sun’s ascent from its lowest point of declination at the midwinter solstice, about 22 December, each year it fails to arrive on time at the vernal equinoxial point, when the days become longer than the nights. The different signs of the ancient zodiac therefore moved forward one degree in 71 or 72 years, and 30 degrees or one whole sign in 2,152 years. Between the years 4340 and 2188 BC, the Bull was the vernal equinoxial or chief sign. Between 2188 and 36 BC it was the Ram or Lamb. Between 36 BC and 2117 AD the chief sign will be Pisces, the fish, and thereafter for another 2152 years it becomes Aquarius, the water carrier. In 25,868 years all the signs would have made a complete circuit.
The astrologer priests considered the various signs of the zodiac, as well as the sun, moon, and five planets, as gods. Though the sun moves through all the signs of the zodiac in a year, when the Bull was the vernal equinoxial sign, the sun was described as being in Taurus. Then the sun in Taurus was supreme God, and sun gods were associated with bulls. When the Ram was the vernal equinoxial sign, the sun was said to be in Aries. Then the sun in Aries was supreme God, and gods were associated with rams or lambs. Although it was only in March that the sun was at the vernal equinoxial point, the Bull god, for 2152 years prior to 2188 BC, was always supreme, and the Ram god in Egypt or Lamb god in Persia, after that date.
They ascribed people’s temperaments to the planet under which they were born, giving us the adjectives “saturnine” from Saturn, “jovial” from Jupiter and “mercurial” from Mercury. They also believed the virtues of herbs, gems and medicines were due to their ruling planets. Each planet was associated with romantic stories of struggles, victories, and defeats and, according to their position in the zodiac, were accounted powerful and victorious at one time, and weak and dying at another. The sun passing through the twelve signs of the zodiac is depicted in the stories of the twelve labours of Hercules, the twelve patriarchs, and the twelve tribes of Israel, from which came the twelve apostles.
The Indo-Europeans
Writing had been largely the prerogative of priests and the king’s administrators but the invention of the alphabet eventually allowed everyone to be literate. Acquiring knowledge became cheaper and easier. Everyone did not need a personal tutor but instead could turn to a book. At the same time a body of people came invading from somewhere in Asia, perhaps from the steppes of Eurasia where traditionally invaders came. They were the Indo-Europeans, pastoralists not farmers, more active and adventurous, with a new language and customs, and new gods—they were patriarchs. They pushed into Iran then dispersed further east to India but some came west to Asia Minor, Greece and the rest of Europe.
Their main weapon was the battle axe and these traced the movement across Europe from about 1700 BC. In Europe the mother goddess was still worshipped but the patriarchal Indo-Europeans displaced her forcefully, bronze weapons being overwhelming against the stone tools of the natives. A pattern is repeated in mythmaking throughout history. Whenever invaders take over a culture, it either demonises the gods of the defeated people or takes them into its pantheon as lesser gods, Hebrew patriarchs or, in the case of Christianity, saints. Some such process might explain how the Hindu god Brahma was reduced to the Hebrew patriarch Abraham.
In Britain, the Aryan invaders made old temples much grander like that at Stonehenge, rededicating it to their sky gods and aligning it to the midsummer sunrise and various other significant points in the heavens. Many solar disks, some with a central cross giving the impression of a four spoked wheel are found.
Before the patriarchs took over society the Aryans probably had a sky mother, the equivalent of the Egyptian goddess, Nut, but by the time they were spreading all over Europe and Asia the Aryan supreme god was, Dyaus Pitar, the sky Father, though various sun gods were always his rivals. Dyaus is the origin of words for god like Deus and Theos, and also the word day. Pitar is related to the Egyptian Ptah, and the word pater, or father.
That the Aryan supreme god was called “The Father” (Pitar) proves that Jesus was certainly revealing nothing new when he addressed God as Father. The habit had begun several thousand years before. In Greece and Rome, Dyaus Pitar metamorphosed into Zeus Pateras and Jupiter respectively. In Egyptian mythology, Ptah, the Father, is the unseen god force and the sun was viewed as Ptah’s visible proxy who brings everlasting life to the earth
In India, Dyaus Pitar all but disappeared because he was so remote, merely smiling through the clouds. The invaders ended the Indus civilisation and introduced the pantheon of Hindu gods into India. Indra was the storm god while the twins, Mitra and Varuna, took on the light aspects. The two were Eternal Light, with Mitra a sun god but Varuna, which means sky in Sanskrit being the senior of the two. Together they drove a chariot across the sky with rays as arms. The Greek word, Christ, probably has the same root as the Hindi word Kris (as in Krishna), a name for the sun.
The Rig Veda, the oldest of the Hindu bibles has many common features with the Persian Avesta, showing their common origins. Mitra was the Persian god who entered the Roman Empire as Mithras, a solar god. The tradition from Persia seems different perhaps because there are gaps caused by the destruction of conquest, not least Alexander’s. The main reason though must be the influence of Zoroaster who tried to organise the pantheon and promote an essentially monotheistic outlook with Ormuzd as the transcendental god. Ormuzd or Ahura Mazda was perhaps originally Dyaus Pitar or the dual god Mitravaruna, certainly a sky god who was represented as a winged solar disc.
At the colossal monument carved on a cliff face at Behistun, Darius salutes the god hovering before him as a winged disc, declaring: “Ahura Mazda came to my aid”. There seems little doubt that Ormuzd under the influence of Zoroaster, had become a second, transcendental sun. The goddess had been Nature but her role as the Great Mother, creating everything, was usurped by male transcendental gods, outside of Nature, invented by the ingeniously patriarchal Indo-Europeans.
Ormuzd was the all powerful, all wise and all good who created the cosmos. Why then should such a good god want to create evil? One answer is that he did not, because there was an unltimate creator, namely Zurvan, who is eternal time, and he it was who created the two opposed spirits. Another answer is that it was to test mankind. Each person had the choice of good or evil and had to take one or other of the choices because the two were in battle and each person contributed to the outcome in however small a way. Everybody had a responsibility for the ultimate outcome of the cosmic battle and could not escape it. Zoroaster made Ormuzd into a god of personal moral choice. The sign of Ormuzd remained the sun however, and the hymns and poetry of Zoroastrianism still used solar chariot metaphors. The sun on earth was fire and so fire was kept burning in the Zoroastrian temples as symbolic of the god.
Modern Zoroastrians conceive of good and evil as opposing aspects of Ormuzd himself—no more than spirits, aspects or emanations of the god which resolved themselves in the fullness of the transcendental god himself. The modern Parsees are like this. Zoroaster always saw lying as personified as an evil to be avoided. Perhaps the priests or Magi wanted something more frightening to keep the congregations worried about their souls. The Lie in person became Ahriman, the Persian Satan, an equal enemy of Ormuzd. That's as may be, but the religion is more logical in its thoroughly dual form and the best authorities on Persian religion see it as the original religion, and not a debased form. It has the advantage of relieving the good god of responsibility for evil, and leaves the choice of good or evil entirely to people themselves. There are no excuses.
When Cyrus the Persian conquered most of the known and some of the unknown world in 550 BC, he spread the moral outlook of Zoroaster, while appearing, in his propaganda, to be restoring ancient religions that had been themselves debased from some original that was curiously similar in its morality to Zoroastrianism. One of his successors, Darius II sent reliable colonists into Judah to replace the pro-Egyptian population that were then living there, at a time when Egypt was constantly threatening revolution and was promoting dissent. The Jewish colonists were set up as a nation of priests in charge of a large and powerful temple meant to promote an ethical god like Ahuramazda, and simultaneously raise taxes for the shah.
So, Judaism has precisely the same light and darkness, dualistic terminology—especially the apocalyptic literature—after the so called return as the Persian Religion. Evil will be defeated at the End Time when the cosmic battle between good and evil is won by the forces for good. The Community Rule of the Dead Sea Scrolls explains how the God of Israel shaped two spirits, the Spirit of Truth and the Spirit of Error. The Spirit of Truth stems from the Abode of Light while the Spirit of Error stems from the Source of Darkness. The Prince of Light has dominion over all the Sons of Righteousness while the Angel of Darkness has dominion over the Sons of Error. The Essene works seem to have been written for men but on the assumption that women should properly be included, “Sons” should be read as “Children”, as it is in the Christian gospels.
These Persian ideas imbued the Essene sectarian works and appear clearly in the Christian Gospel of John where we find expressions like, “Life was the light of men”, “the light shines on in the dark, and the darkness has never quenched it”, “he came as a witness to testify to the light”, “the real light which enlightens every man” and many more. It should be remembered that these images had already entered Jewish thought before the gentile Christians found similarities with Mithraism, another Roman religion with its roots in Persia.
Mithras was an important god in the common pantheon of the Iranians and the Indians before Zoroaster in Persia diminished him in favour of Ormuzd. Mitra was the twin of Varuna in the Indian variety of the Aryan pantheon but Zoroaster sought to promote monotheism and gave all the attributes of Mithras to Varuna as Ormuzd while relegating Mithras himself to the level of a mere angel. In Mitannian inscriptions of the middle of the second millennium BC, before the reforms of Zoroaster, Mithras is an important god, linked in the Avesta with Ahura Mazda as the god Mithrasahura. The Mithras of the Roman mystery religion was actually Ormuzd but with the older name of Mithras retained.
In the old songs of the Avesta, Mithras is identifiably a sun god pulled along in a chariot with four shining white horses and having one wheel of gold bejewelled with light. This wheel is probably not one of the wheels of the chariot but the wheel of the sun god himself, the solar nimbus or corona, the halo used to depict saints and kings approved by the sun god. Persian kings were signified in image by the fiery aureole surrounding them, the sign of divine approval. In the Book of Daniel, written after the “return”, God is described enthroned on a throne like fiery flame, his countenance as the sun when it shines in its strength and “His wheels like burning fire”. Why should a throne have wheels? The reference is to the solar discs used to denote the sun god. The same appears in Ezekiel where the cherubs have fiery wheels. Indeed much of the Hebrew bible is a testimony to the Hebrew god as a sun god.
Christ is traditionally depicted with a nimbus of gold with four spokes because, though a notable Jewish nationalist was crucified by Pilate to the consternation of his confused followers, the legend which then grew about him was decorated with the full panoply of a sun god. On the high alter of S Peter’s at Rome Christ is depicted as the sun in the form of a huge golden sunburst. The monstrance in Catholic churches which serves to house the communion host for worship before mass is in the form of a radiant sun.
Mithras was also a god of celestial light, often depicted as a sun or alongside a sun, for Mithras, in Mitraism, like Ormuzd in Zoroastrianism, was a transcendental sun rather than the golden object glowing in the daylight sky. The sun itself was called the eye of Mithras, and the extension of Mithras beyond the sun is shown by his depiction with the moon and stars and because he could arrive before the dawn and depart after sunset. Nevertheless he was depicted as a sun and had the crucial attribute of a sun god of dispensing justice—he was a moral and an honourable god who fought evil and honoured contracts. Curiously, just as the Jews had a god who was interested in forming contracts or covenants with people, the meaning of Mithras is “Contract”, and there seems little doubt that each initiate into the mysteries of Mithras entered a personal contract with the god, just as Christians believe they do.
Mithras was identified by the Babylonians with their sun god Shamash and gave to him various astrological interests. He was identified by the Greeks with Helios and Apollo, by the Romans with Sol Invictus. Can anyone doubt that he was a sun god? He created life on earth and ended by being carried aloft in a fiery chariot. In heaven, he was now the mediator with the mighty but distant Ormuzd, the Most High god who lived beyond the stars. Mithras himself therefore had to be equally transcendental. At the End of Time he would send an all consuming fire from which only the righteous would emerge.
Also Indo-Europeans were the peoples of Europe, notably the Greeks and the Romans. Their sky god, Zeus or Jupiter remained as the Most High god of both pantheons and took on the attributes of light. Among the Greeks, however, Apollo evolved into a sun god so that eventually his myth described the Island of Delos, on which he was born, turning to gold at his birth, which was announced by a cockerel (sunrise), and the round pool on the island shone all day with a golden light. The infant was armed with a bow and arrows, which symbolise sunbeams.
He slayed the serpent, Python, wounding him then following him to the Oracle of Mother Earth at Delphi, named after Delphyne a monster and the mate of Python, to finish him off. The legend signifies the conquest, by the patriarchs, of the religion of the Great Mother Earth—Ge or Gaia to the Greeks, described as a monster—and her replacement by Apollo. In historic times the oracle was dedicated to Apollo but plainly it was originally dedicated to the Mother Goddess.
From about the fifth century BC, the association of Apollo with Helios became more explicit. Helios was, of course, always a sun god, but until he was identified with Apollo, he was not an Olympian because Zeus controlled the sky. On Greek vases he is shown driving his four horse chariot across the heavens. Augustus claimed Apollo as his patron and even claimed to be a son of the god.
In 274 AD Aurelian declared Sol Invictus, the Unconquerable Sun, meaning Mithras, as the god of the Roman state. He set up a pontifical college under a High Pontiff and began to wear a diadem, the Persian crown which represented the sun, and claimed to be Lord and God. Diocletian dedicated a temple to Mithras at Carnuntum. However, Constantine was more impressed by the power of the Christian bishops with their disciplined organisation, modelled on the secular administration. Needing their help he put the religion of the state in the hands of the Christians, taking Christ to be, like Mithras, another transcendental sun god with the role of mediator with the Most High god.
Julian the Apostate had seen many of his family murdered by the triumphant Christians and again banned Christianity in favour of the old Pagan solar religion. However, he had power for only three years before being killed fighting the Persians on the eastern front. His edict against Christianity had only been enacted for about half that time, so relatively little had yet been achieved in turning the clock back to Paganism. It is said that as he lay dying, Julian flicked some of his blood toward the sky and declared:
You have won, Galilaean.
The victory of the Galilaean meant the end of the old solar worship, though possibly for most people at the time, there was little to choose between one solar religion and the next. None of them involved mindless worship of an inanimate glowing ball in the sky. All had by then changed into religions of individual choice in which the personality would be helped to survive death by the saviour or mediator. Nevertheless, they all were declared devils.
The Bogie of the modern nursery illustrates the way other peoples gods were demonised. The word “Bogie” is identical with the Slavonic “Bog”, a word meaning god. It is the “Baga” of the cuneiform inscriptions—the name of the Persian supreme power. The chronicle of the glories of Darius, king of Persia, inscribed on a stele situated on the high road from Babylon to the east, was known as the Rock of Behistan and considered as a Holy place. It’s name, properly Bagistane, “the place of the Baga”, referred to Ormuzd or Mazda, chief of the Bagas—the old Sanskrit Bhaga of the Rig Veda. He was Lord of Life, the Giver of Bread and the Bringer of Happiness. The name which, to the Vedic poet, to the Persian of the time of Xerxes and to the modern Russian, suggests the supreme majesty of god, has been reduced in English to that of an ugly and predatory demon.
Contrary to popular belief, classical peoples were no less advanced in their morals and spiritual practices, and might have been more advanced, than the Christians. All the ancient people of history were not ignorant and superstitious and believed their deities to be literal characters. This slanderous propaganda has been part of the conspiracy to make ancient people appear as if they were truly a dark, dumb rabble that was in need of the light of Jesus.
Zeus was a sky god, whence his thunderbolts, yet the Greeks venerated a birth cave and a death cave of Zeus on Crete, surely proving that they thought he had lived. Well, of course, such shrines had been invented by the priests precisely for the dark, dumb rabble who would believe anything, but classical philosophers knew the natural origins of their gods, and that rarely had they been real people, whatever the average Greek or Roman punter thought. It was the dark, dumb rabble who were and remain the Christians.
To the modern mind the word “myth” carries with it a derogatory implication which relegates a belief to the world of nonreality. A myth is fiction. It is false and valueless, except perhaps as entertainment. Not so with the ancients. With them a myth was a spiritual tool, by which truth and wisdom could be expressed, just as Christians regard their book of myths as a spiritual tool. Spiritual truth and experience were incapable of expression or communication merely by means of words. A myth would enhance spiritual truth as a drama illuminates human actions. By the end of the pre-logical phase of human mental development, sometime between the Sumerians and the Greeks, the myth was known to be a fiction and deceived nobody except children—until the third century AD.
Because everyone knew it not to be a true story, attention could be given wholly to its hidden meaning, the deepest of spiritual truths. As a literary device, it captured lofty wisdom in the guise of a human story that could be easily remembered. It was the universal mnemonic by which ancient knowledge was remembered in an age before writing.
It is an arrogant Christian delusion that they came out on top because they had the only true religion. After three or four thousand years of history, organised religions had converged into essentially the same species. It happens to have been called Christianity. Comment
From Stephen Hoy
Thank you for making your synopsis of the mythological basis for sun worship available online. Your final paragraph struck me as a bit off the mark, perhaps because I am embedding it within the context of a study of the early centuries of the Christian church. I think we can be more precise when assigning blame.
While reviewing the history of the early church, I learned that within the first three or four centuries, church leaders began to settle on a specific approved interpretation of the Christian mythos. A number of serious theological disputes emerged. Among these, we find several authorities (eg Arius, Pelagius, Nestor) whose interpretations of scripture align closely with themes present in your discussion of sun gods. It is significant that the most serious disputes escalated to a point where the dissenting parties either submitted to the will of the ruling authorities, or were publicly executed with all the force that an established state religion has at its disposal. Using forceful dominance to acquire and maintain power is found throughout history in nations, religions, and tribes in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific.
My analysis of the root cause of this forceful dominance differs from yours in that I ascribe arrogance not to the many varieties of Christian beliefs, but rather to the self centered conceptions of specific men and women who apply force to acquire and maintain a dominant role within their society. This recognition seems to have a more practical application for identifying proscriptive behavior than your less precise target. I am sure there is little doubt to either of our minds that we may count ourselves blessed to live in a country and century where the power of the church is separated somewhat from the power of the state. Still, many force filled structures have emerged to enforce Right Thinking, and we should be alert to those who self centeredly seek to wield that power.
Thank you again for your effort on your website, and for your attention to my comments.
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Moses and Exodus
