The Solar Origin of Dualism

The Catholic Church was keen to retain its power over people through its own sacraments being the only path to redemption. Of these the central magical act was the mass or holy communion in which the Christian actually ate the body and drank the blood of their god—Christ—thereby entering him by magic. Usually, as today, the body had to suffice, the priests reserving the blood for themselves. In 1215, among its buttresses against Catharism, the Lateran Council made it an obligation on all Catholics to receive the mass at least once a year after confession.

Plainly, many Catholics had not been receiving mass at all, particularly in the regions where Catharism was strong. Sensibly, they thought once Christ had entered, there was no need for him to enter again at another mass, but the Church charged a price for saying the mass, and it wanted people to think the power of the Christ within would fade if it were not regularly renewed, the more often the better. Cathars had the idea of redemption being through life. To be saved the person had to live a divine life. If they did not, they were reincarnated again and again until they lived a divine life, were consoled and then were delivered back to God in heaven where all human souls were before the fall, and would eventually return.

The Cathar idea was that Christ entered people who were ready to receive him, and thereafter, they had to live as a Christ on earth until they died. They had the idea of theosis—becoming a god. In the gospels, Christ himself is particular that repentance meant living a new life, free of sin and rejecting all temptation lest the chance of entering God’s kingdom be lost. Cathars followed the example of Christ but the Catholic Church opted for commercial magic acts, like market place charlatans.

Fairy beliefs, assuming that they did not arise spontaneously fully developed, derived from something before them that the Christian Church did not like. Much in British folklore hints at Celtic and Teutonic myth, so far as it is known, and many have considered the origin of fairy beliefs to have been purely in northern European Paganism. Yet, the basis of Judaism can now be seen to be the religion of the Persians, and this came from the religion of the Aryan tribes of the Eurasian steppes who spread into both the European peninsula and the Indian one. These people had a solar mythology which evolved differently when the tribes went their different ways, but which have much more in common than bigoted Christians and Jews have been ready to accept. Sir Isaac Newton said (Prophesies):

The Heathens were delighted with the Festivals of their Gods, and unwilling to part with those ceremonies. Therefore, Gregory, Bishop of Neo-Caesarea in Pontus, to facilitate their conversion, instituted annual Festivals to the Saints and Martyrs. Hence the keeping of Christmas with ivy, feasting, plays, and sports, came in the room of Bacchanalia and Saturnalia, the celebrating May Day with flowers, in the room of the Floralia, and the Festivals to the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, and divers of the Apostles, in the room of the solemnities at the entrance of the Sun into the Signs of the Zodiac in the old Julian Calendar.

It sounds purely arbitrary, but, to be convincing to the people, the associations of “the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, and divers of the Apostles” with the age old solar festivals they were assigned to must have had some basis in tradition or logic. The basis was there all right. These were solar personalities adopted by the bishops and priests of a solar religion they believed was acting there and then in history.

The ancient view of time is cyclical, based on the annual cycle of the sun, and the seasons. The sun, above all heavenly bodies, was the visible God. It was the Creator of life, and therefore the Creator. It made the earth fertile. Perhaps influenced by the Aryans, the ancient division of the year was simply into two halves. The Celtic festival of Samhain, celebrated at All Hallow’s Eve on 31 October, means “summer’s end”. An equivalent festival was held six months later at Beltane. Summer was from Beltane to Samhain, and winter from Samhain to Beltane. Thus, the ancient Celtic division of the year was into two. Images of Celtic gods often have two faces for the two halves of the year.

The ramifications of the solar myths arise in the year being divided into these two seasonal suns, summer and winter, wet season and dry season, good and bad. In the ancient Near East, the good god was the winter sun that brought the storms and rain that watered the parched land of the dry season. The fatherhood of God pertains to the heavenly God as the impregnator of mother earth—her fertiliser—the bringer of life to her. In Canaan, the winter sun was the storm god, Yehouah, whose rains were considered as his fertilising semen. God was the lover and husband of the land and the people. Israel is Yehouah’s wife, usually depicted as faithless, like His people. So God waters the barren land with His revivifying waters as His act of grace to mankind, thus making the crops grow and the beasts breed.

The Father is the whole year, the full solar cycle, beginning good and fertilising mother earth, but ending bad, or old and impotent, or he is killed by his wicked brother who ravages mother earth with frost or heat. Each year the son displaces the Father or uncle for the ever virginal and fertile earth. The good sun or season followed by the wicked sun or season is the basis of primitive dualist religions in which there are two spirits, one good and one wicked.

God saved mankind every year. A word appears in Sumerian, “Shush”, which reoccurs over the ancient Near East. It appears in the Zoroastrian Avestan word “Saoshyant” meaning “Saviour”. In Hebrew, it is “Osh”. Joshua means “Yehouah saves”. In Greek, Joshua is rendered as Jesus. So the ignorant message seen on posters outside churches that “Jesus saves”, means that “Yehouah Saves saves”! The meaning of the name Jesus, in other words, proves that Jesus did not save—God did! In the Jewish scriptures, Yehouah is adamant that He is the saviour not anyone else.

Yehouah saves through His annual act of providing for mankind’s welfare by fertilising Nature. When God was wrathful, He withdrew His grace with the result that drought and famine would arrive to punish sinners—non-sinners too, since He “sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” alike according to Matthew 5:45. To keep God as sweet as possible, the priests then said that God needed to be appreciated for what He had done, and wanted to have the first fruits of all harvests, and only the very best of those. In fact, of course, the priests themselves wanted the produce both to eat and to sell for money, originally much of which was to be forwarded to the treasury of the Shah of Persia, but when the Shah lost his empire, the priests were able to keep everything for themselves, and even add to the tithes and taxes, until they were immensely rich, a boon for which they could only thank God.

More refined solar interpretations of Judaism came to Yehud from Persia with the Persian colonists. Initially the Persian religious year had begun in September, and the Jewish one too, but the two were switched when the Persian calendar was revised late in the fifth century. The new year ceremony was held at the same time as the Passover, but was again changed when the modified religion, Christianity, moved into northern countries, because there the new year conventionally changed at the winter solstice.

Christianity itself was accepted as the Roman state religion on its solar basis. The practice of Christianity in those days seems to have been more obviously solar than it now is, in its modern form, though there remains the glaring clue that Sunday is the weekly holy day of Christians. Judaism too was radically revised by the rabbis after the Jewish wars to eliminate its manifestly solar aspects.

The sheer persistance and extent of the solar myth in its variants must have seemed divine in itself to the early Christians, who had nevertheless, like the Jews, to contend with the commandment, “Thou shalt have none other gods before me” (Dt 5:7). The early Christians had a reputation for being exclusive to death! But the commandment does not say “there are no other gods but me”. The commandment is that the Judaeo-Christian God is the top God, not the only one! So, if the exclusiveness of the early Christians is true, they were theologically wrong to give away their lives. Nor did they remain exclusive for long because they soon were adopting holidays and ritual artefacts from other Roman religions. Why should anyone be sure, then, that simple people did not do the same with equivalent or similar northern deities? It seems more likely than not that they did, accepting the spirit of the commandment because they regarded these equivalent gods as the same one manifest to different regions or people.

So, the question is whether fairy belief is a popular recollection of the common themes of the simple religion ordinary folk knew—primitive solar Christianity identified with the solar gods of Greece and Rome, and northen Europe. The identification of the Christian Father and Son with classical and particularly northern solar gods would have facilitated the conversion of Europe, but would have left the illiterate population believing a primitive and syncretistic Christianity that the established Church no longer represented. For long this primitive Christianity was no bother to those with no power or wealth who followed Rome, but eventually it strengthened by remaining true when the established Church became corrupt, and started to win over people of higher scholarship and class. This primitive Church became the Cathar religion.

The Church destroyed everything it considered heretical… it was the more original cult that was driven underground by the combined efforts of the Roman, Jewish and ecclesiastical authorities. It was the supreme heresy which came on, made terms with the secular powers, and became the Church of today.

John Marco Allegro

Marie of France had a tale called The Lay of Gugemar in which the chaste hero is hunting a stag but wounds a doe with a fawn, suffering an identical wound himself. In fairy or mythical fashion, the doe tells him that only the woman who suffers insufferable pain for him will cure him, but he must suffer equally for her. He embarks on a fairy ship to a fairy land where the theme of Joseph and Aseneth or the princess in the tower recurs. The princess is kept in the tower by her aged husband, and she seduces the hitherto chaste hero.

Female fairies often seem to be seductresses, echoing the Essene fear of women, but also giving them a sexual freedom that Catholicism could not consider. The doe and the woman are the earth goddess in their maternal and then virginal aspects. The old man is the old year, and the chaste hero is, of course, the new one, the fertilising spring sun usurping his father and copulating with the earth mother—the myth of Oedipus. She is the perpetual virgin, newly virginal every year, ready to be fertilised by the spring sun and rains, abandoning unashamedly the old spent sun in favour of the new vigorous one.

The Father has two sons, one wicked, being the winter sun of the north and the burning summer sun of the ancient Near East. This son ravages the earth, laying waste the vegetation of the fertile season, and threatening drought and death. So, the earth goddess figure, in the fairy stories and mythology, is sold, tricked or forced into a bad marriage. Guinevere had affairs with the wicked Modred and the good Lancelot in different stories.

Sometimes the earth goddess is depicted as the wife of the hero’s uncle, as in Tristan and Iseult, or the two sons are nephews, not direct sons. The annual cycle is the fertilising sun aging into the deathly sun. The two are the whole year. The son of the old year is the newly fertilising sun which then procreates with the eternally virgin earth. The fertile season ends with the death of the fertilising sun, and the ravaging of the earth by the wicked sun, now triumphant. The virgin earth begins loving the good sun, but ends being forced into submitting to the wicked one, his brother. When the new year begins again, the earth is married to the hero’s uncle, or trapped by him in some way. So, the stories arise in which the heroine is married to the hero’s uncle or she is his prisoner.

John, Janus and Diana

The Iranians also had the idea that time lasted for a fixed period—in later Zoroastrianism, 12,000 years. In the beginning is a good Creation, which is spoiled by the evil spirit causing change and observable time. At the end, observable time ends, and the changing world is all wound up in the Eschaton that restores the unchanging perfection of the original Creation to last forever—time stops. The sun is motionless in the heavens for eternity. This is the notion that gave rise to the eternal life of the Christians.

Each year stands for the whole of time in microcosm, from Creation to Eschaton, then beginning again at the new year with the re-establishment of the primal perfection of the original Creation. In the ethical dualist religions like Zoroastrianism, new year’s eve is the eve of the microcosmic Eschaton when primordial chaos returns before the new year is born as a new Creation. The symbol of the new year was, in Rome, a two faced god, Janus, a name which equals John. Janus was one of the main Roman deities. The name is the masculine form of Diana—Dianus. He is on the earliest coins with two bearded faces, looking in opposite directions. The two faces were so that the god looked back to the past and on to the future simultaneously.

He represented two gods, in Europe, the kind summer one and the cruel winter one. In Rome, Janus was identified with Quirinus, originally a Sabian Mars, but for Romans he became the deified Romulus. Romulus and Remus were another pair of solar twins, one of whom killed the other. The ploughed line that Romulus cut to outline the shape of the new city was jumped over by Remus jeering at the power of such “walls” to keep people out. For this Remus was killed, but the crossing of a line is a solar myth of the equinoxes when one sun dies for the other.

Proof that Janus was a god of the year is that Hadrian increased the number of faces to four to represent four seasons, and some depictions show the two faces differently—one as a young cleanshaven man and the other as an older bearded man. These coins have on them the numbers CCC (300) and LXV (65) adding up to the days in the year.

The forward looking face of the god of the new year looked on to the state of heaven that would ultimately prevail for everyone. The backward looking one looked on to the wicked god’s evil deeds, causing motion, chaos and misery in the world, blighting the good Creation. But, for the Cathars, also in the mainly wicked past were the dead saints who had achieved perfection despite it, and already found their way into heaven. Those who were not able to achieve perfection were reborn, like the year, until they achieved it.

Janus originally had a staff in his right hand, and a key in his left. He is called Patulcius (opener) and Clusius (closer). His titles Patricius, Curiatius, Quirinus originate in his worship in the gentes, the curiae and the state, and not to the god himself.

Janus was highly revered by the Romans as the oldest of gods. He was considered the ultimate beginning, the Creator, and was always mentioned before any other god, even Jupiter. In the songs of the Salii (schools of martial dancers headed by councils of twelve) he is specifically the Good Creator! He is also called Leucesie, in the archaic Latin of these songs, which is Lucetie, “Light-Bringer”. As the origin of all organic life, including human life, he was a god of agriculture—he was consivius, “he who sows or plants”.

Janus was plainly a god of light and day, akin to Mithras. The two faces of Janus are the rising and setting sun. He opened the gates of the sun in the morning and closed them in the evening. Entrances and arches were named after him as Januae and Jani. All gateways and housedoors were under his protection. As the beginning of the day—dawn—was sacred to Janus, he was also called Pater Matutinus, Father of the Morning (Latin, Matuta, morning). Recollect that the Essenes and the early Christians examined by Pliny hailed the rising sun and sang hymns to the dawn.

Janus was or became the god of the beginning and origin (fons et origo) of all things. Janus is the year, and so has 12 altars and the calends (first day) of each month were sacred to him. He was the Ouroboros serpent, the snake swallowing its tail of the Phœnicians, making him the god of the year and the endless motion of the sun through the zodiac. Danaus must be another form of Janus. Here, he is the summer sun, “danos” meaning parched, but Danaus had fifty daughters, the Danaids who stood for rain and fertility, being depicted with watering cans or sieves spraying out water as the rain, and also standing for semen. Danaus is a solar twin, his brother being Ægyptus, whose father was Nilus, the fertiliser of Egypt.

The beginning of the year was most sacred to Janus. The word January (Latin, Januarius) is from the name Janus. The first month was dedicated to him from 153 BC when the date of the Roman new year changed from the vernal equinox in March. On 9 January, the festival called Agonia was celebrated in his honour. He was invoked before any other god at the start of anything important. His priest was the Rex Sacrorum, the representative of the ancient king in his capacity as religious head of the state.

The calends were dedicated to both Janus and Juno, and the Rex Sacrorum made sacrifices to both. Juno therefore identifies with Diana, and Janus with Jupiter. He is a pre-Latin—Sabine—Jupiter. When the Sabines and the Latins merged in Rome, the Latin sky god became the top one, but the Sabine one retained many vital functions. Jupiter is also Jove which is Yehouah, known in the east as a god of the year and a rain god, just as Jupiter was best remembered by countryfolk who invited him to bring rain in season. As the goddess of hearths and fires, Vesta was invoked at every sacrifice and religious occasion, like Janus, originally at both the beginning and the end, but later perhaps Janus was invoked at the opening of the ceremony and Vesta at the close.

Juno, Iovino, a feminine form of Iovis (Jove) is the Queen of Heaven and especially heavenly light in the form of the new moon. Diana too is a goddess of the moon. Danaë seems also to be the same name as Diana, and has a moon aspect (Selene, Helen), and is identified with the white goddess of barley flour. Another Goddess called Ino was a sea goddess but was also Leucothea, the White Goddess, and was also Mater Matuta, matching Janus. Juno was specifically known as Juno Lucina, “Juno, the Light-Bringer”, making her the parallel of Lucifer, which also means Light-Bringer. Janus is therefore Lucifer. Jupiter too is entitled “Lucetius” the bringer of the light of day, and also the full moon, and his special days were the full moon days or ides in mid-month when a white lamb was sacrificed. Diana was also called Lucina, and the name of both goddesses make them goddesses of birth, seen as coming from darkness into light. It is tempting to see both Diana and Juno in a hypothetical original name “Diuna”, the “Two in One”, and Diunus for Janus.

Curiously, Janus has little mythology associated with him. The Romans seemed less inclined to mythologize than the Greeks, but the one story he does have is that of his meeting the nymph Cardea or Carna, Ovid says, apparently in error. She was a tease who invited her suiters into a cave, then instead of following she ran away. When she met Janus, she tried the same trick, forgetting that he could see out of the back of his head, or perhaps that he could foresee the future, and so he caught her out. The result of their liaison was that Janus rewarded the nymph with the power to scare off the strigæ and lamii, the nocturnal vampires, and power over doorways (her name means “She of the Hinge”), thus keeping homes safe. Ovid says she had the power “to open what is shut and shut what is open”, the same attributes as Janus. By having the power to vest upon Cardea power over the evil spirits later known as witches, Janus had that power himself. Cardea was herself a Roman Artemis, a virgin huntress. Cardea then is simply a title of Diana. Cardea first did these duties at the city of Alba Longa, the White City.

Cardea’s tree was the thorn tree (hawthorne, whitethorn), the may tree, because it blossoms in May, and this would immunize the house against the vampire. The month is named from “maia” meaning Great Mother, or Mother Earth—identified with Cybele or Diana of the Ephesians—a goddess who was at Rome offended by marriage and had to be propitiated by burning five torches of hawthorn before the month began. From Lemuria at the nones of May, May was considered unlucky for marriage in classical times. That is the origin of the proverb, “Cast not a clout till May goes out”. People were not to take off their winter clothes until the end of May, then would put on their new summer ones, a tradition that came into Christianity at Whitsuntide. The proverb had nothing to do with the temperature, but was spoken in ancient Greece, and more recently in north eastern Spain, according to Robert Graves (The White Goddess). The forbidden period only ended on 15 June, the ides of June.

In fact, as Plutarch explained, May was the month of purification, linking it with Catherine, when temples and holy images were cleaned. Vesta’s day was 9 July, but Vesta (Greek, Hestia) was Diana. She had taken a vow of perpetual virginity, whence her link with Catharine. The purity of the virgin in Christianity stands for spiritual integrity, as it did for both Cathar and Catholic Christians notionally, at least.

The Rex Nemorensis was the sacrificial king of the grove in the worship of Diana Nemorensis at Nemi, by the Lacus Nemorensis or Speculum Dianae (Mirror of Diana), in the Alban hills, Aricia, near Rome. The temple, and oak and poplar groves of Diana were on the north eastern bank of this lake. Within the temple was the fountain Egeria, identified with the goddess. The consort of Diana was Virbius, a local form of Janus.

The myth is that Virbius had been the chaste male companion, Hippolytus, of the virginal Diana, and was killed in his chariot when his horses stampeded. Diana was so fond of Hippolytus, she asked Asculapius to resurrect him, which he did (only to be punished by Zeus with a thunderbolt at the indignation of Hades and the Three Fates). To protect the reborn Hippolytus, Diana wrapped him in a thick cloud, changed his appearance disguising him as an old man, and carried him to Aricia where horses were forbidden. There he became known as Virbius, a man for the second time (vir bis), supposedly because he had been resurrected, but possibly signifying a man with two aspects (the Janus priest). An alternative spelling is Verbius, suggesting a link with spring (ver) as the original beginning of the year. The priest who took his role was the Rex Nemorensis, the guardian of the grove. His duty was to keep intruders off the sacred precinct and to guide in the faithful, for which purpose, he carried respectively a whip and a rod, the charioteer’s implements. He was ritually married to Egeria, the Dianic fountain. Much of this suggests a cult of a ritual rebirth, Diana being a cthonic and birth goddess, the divine fountain hinting at baptism.

The cult was also a cult of undesirables, much like early Christianity, especially runaway slaves. Rex Nemorensis had to be a runaway slave and had to perform the sacred ritual of slaying his predecessor. In the myth, he was a runaway slave favoured by the goddess but who had to prove his worth by defeating the mighty warrior, who guarded the grove. He was, of course, the incumbent Rex Nemorensis, and this was a periodic ritual. To establish his worth even to fight the incumbent Rex Nemorensis, the challenger had to break a branch from the tree, an act which was forbidden, and had to be defended by the incumbent Rex Nemorensis. It was probably a branch of mistletoe. The priestess of Diana, touched the victor, doubtless with her divine water, crowned him with a wreath, and declared, “Thou art Rex Nemorensis”. Curiously, the Rex Nemorensis was also called the Hooded, reminding us of the legend of Robin Hood, who also was, in fact, the king of the woods who led a band of outlaws.

The Roman Poet Horace (c 30 BC) wrote of secret mysteries being performed in silence by night for Diana:

I yield to your mighty art, and suppliant beseech you by the realms of Proserpine, and by the powers of Diana, not to be provoked, and by your books of enchantments that are able to call down the fixed stars from heaven, Canidia, at length spare your magic words.

Horace, Epode 17

Diana becomes Jana, the Moon Goddess, and Janarra was in some places the Italian word for witch (not strega). Diana’s title, Herodias, the Heroic, in Italy simplified to Aradia, who was, according to Charles Godfrey Leland ( Aradia, or the Gospels of the Witches, 1899 ), the American writer and folklorist, the daughter of Diana and Lucifer, and the founder of witchcraft in Italy. Aradia was, Leland claimed, the goddess of the witches, and he called the witch cult the Old Religion.

Historical but non-classical references to a cult of Diana or Janus (Dianus) occur in Italy from the fourth century AD. The worship of Diana, as a moon goddess and a Juno, a goddess of birth, evidently continued after the classical period ended, and references keep popping up in church edicts and decretals about these practices, which evidently persisted:

There seems to have been a flourishing cult of Diana among European country people in the fifth and sixth centuries, and she was looked upon as a goddess of the woods and fields, except by those who thought she was a devil.

Julio Baroja, The World of Witches

From Regino of Prum, in 906 AD, who mentions Diana, she explicitly appears in 1006 AD, 1310 AD, called Herodias, 1313 AD, called the queen of a nocturnal society, 1390 AD, when a Milanese Inquisition tried a woman who was of the “Society of Diana”, the “Goddess of Night”, 1457 AD when Nicholas of Cusa reported of three women in Bressanone who were of the “Society of Diana”, 1576 AD, when Bartolo Spina (Quaestico de Strigibus ) said witches gather at night to worship “Diana”, and 1647 AD, when a woman admitted to worshipping Diana under a walnut tree in Benevento.

Oaks were sacred to Janus, and he was seen as a god like Pan. J Rhys identified Janus with the three-faced or three-headed Celtic god, Cernunnus, a chthonian divinity compared by Rhys with the Teutonic Heimdal, the warder of the gods of the underworld. This is the same god that Margaret Murray took to be the object of worship by the witches, as the “Horned God”. Like Janus, Cernunnus and Heimdal were considered to be the fons et origo of all things. The three-headed god was a triple oak-god worshipped in the form of two vertical beams and a cross-bar, the reason why the door, consisting of lintel and two side-posts, was sacred to Janus. Perhaps, this Pi cross evolved into a Tau cross for the Cathars, though some say the Cathar symbol was a Pi shape.

Janus and John

William Woods (A History of the Devil ) tells us that when examined by the Inquisition using torture, some of the Cathari confessed to having been traduced by the Devil. The records say he was a black man who sometimes “seemed to have two faces”! The Cathars were keen on a John—supposed to be the author of the gospel, a version of which they used exclusively—apparently not to be identified with the Baptist. They ought not to have been interested in John the Baptist because they were not much interested in aqueous baptism, at all, except perhaps as a token purification, the real purification being a commitment to the divine life confirmed by the consolamentum.

In the Christian gospel of John, Christ is called by John the Baptist, the Lamb of God. In western tradition, John is depicted as carrying a dish with a lamb on it, standing for the Lamb of God taking away the sins of the world (Jn 1:29). Christ died at easter when his co-religionists celebrated by eating a lamb. Primitive Christianity used an image of Christ as the Good Shepherd carrying a lamb, not a human figure on the cross. If the witches were Cathars, either Catholics deliberately misrepresented the lamb as a goat, or the Cathars might have used the goat as a satirical representation of Catholicism. Interestingly, in Somerset is the cave called the Witch’s Cave at Wookey Hole, and nearby is the Cave of the Lamb.

S John the Baptist as Pan

I have been unable to confirm images of S John as Pan. A page devoted to midsummer lore gives this picture of a fiddling satyr with no indication that it is S John. However, Alexander Hislop (The Two Babylons) explains the identity of John the Baptist and Pan, and the mythology of the summer festivals. In Babylon, Syria, and Phœnicia, at midsummer the summer solstice, the fourth month, called Tammuz (Dumuzi, June), began. The name of the month suggests it was anciently associated with Tammuz. When Europe was Christianized towards the end of the sixth century, a midsummer festival was popular in many countries. Pope Gregory I had said the missionaries should meet the Pagans half way to bring them into the Church. So midsummer day, the feast of Tammuz, was made a Christian festival.

The Feast of the Nativity of S John is 24 June, midsummer day. Nothing in the gospels of Christ had specifically happened at midsummer, but the date of the birth of Christ had been set at 25 December, and the gospels said John was born six months before. Voila! John the Baptist must have been born on midsummer day!

After being slain, Tammuz apparently reappeared as Oannes (Dagon), in the Babylonian Mysteries. Jerome calls Dagon—the fish tailed god—Piscem moeroris, the Fish of Sorrow. Capricornus is generally shown as the goat horned fish. Dionysus (Bacchus), like Tammuz, was the Lamented One, and Hesychius adds that Bacchus was called Ichthys, the Fish. (Christ was symbolized as a fish.) So, Dionysus was represented as Capricorn, the goat horned fish, Oannes, but Pan too had the title Capricornus, the Goat Horned. Capricorn and Aquarius are adjoining Zodiacal signs standing for the rainy season in the ANE, when the good sun, the stormy sun god, brings the lifegiving rain to these arid regions. Either could stand for John the Baptist.

John the Baptist, in Church Latin, was Ioannes. The Eastern day began in the evening, so a festival held on the 24 June began on 23 June, S John’s Eve. Its characteristic ritual was the building of fires, typical of ancient sun worship. In pre-Christian Britain, the Pagan festival of the 24 June was celebrated among the Druids by blazing fires.

These midsummer fires and sacrifices were to obtain a blessing on the fruits of the earth, now becoming ready for gathering, as those of the first of May, that they might prosperously grow, and those of the last of October were a thanksgiving for finishing the harvest.

Toland, Account of the Druids

Toland adds that some renowned person, carrying a sacrificed animal, walked barefoot over the coals three times after the flames had ceased, then presented the animal to the Druid, who waited in a whole animal skin at the altar. If the nobleman escaped harmless, it was a good omen, but if he was burned, it was unlucky for the community and himself. The same superstition was true of the S John’s fires. When the local fire burned low, everyone jumped through it, and children were thrown across the glowing embers, regarding it as a lustration—a baptism of fire. Then a hobby horse appeared and this also passed several times through the fire before chasing the crowds in all directions.

The priests of the Argive hero Phoroneus, mythical discoverer of how men could use fire, “walked over live coals and cinders with their feet naked”, according to Pliny and Strabo. The priests of Apollo did the same, and it will have been a standard ceremony for sun gods. In the Aeneid, translated by Dryden, the young Apollo naturally appeared at Delphi “exactly in the middle of summer”. In the bible, children passed through the fire to Moloch (Jer 32:35).

Even so, perhaps the Cathars actually were interested in the person of John the Baptist, and did use the image of a goat. The witch Isobel Gowdie said that sometimes they would call their master, Black John. Gods that are depicted as black or dark, like Osiris and Krishna, are often the winter sun. John the Baptist, curiously, could be represented as a satyr. Satyrs were images of the old nature god, Pan, equated by the Church with Satan, but Christians do not regard John the Baptist as wicked. They have given him the special role of the herald of their incarnated God, Jesus. Yet, statues often show John the Baptist as horned like Moses. He is shown with the limbs of a satyr, and even with cloven hooves!

The Catholic Church follows the bible placing the eve of the birth of John the Baptist on midsummer’s eve, six months before the birth of Jesus. S John’s eve was certainly popular in the mediæval year. Ghosts and spirits were supposed to be abroad, and witches had most power. Great meetings of witches were arranged when they cast their most effective spells, and foretold to maidens who would be their future sweethearts and husbands. The need-fire, or the S John’s fire, was kindled at midnight, the moment when the solstice was supposed to take place, and young people of both sexes danced round it, and leaped over it, as a purification and a protection against evil influences.

Plants also possessed their greatest powers, and were plucked or dug up with due incantations and ceremony. The clergy condoned this so long as the only incantations used in gathering medicinal herbs were the creed and the Lord’s prayer. Maidens who wanted to know if their lovers were true were told to go out at midnight on S John’s eve, strip themselves naked, go to a particular plant or shrub, and dance round it in a circle, repeating the words they had been told. After the ceremony, they were to gather leaves of the same plant, carry them home and place them under their pillows, and what they wanted to know would be revealed in their dreams. Mediæval treatises on the virtue of plants give directions for gathering them, in which young naked girls were to do the plucking.

Why should Cathars or witches be interested in John the Baptist? Is it because John the Baptist and the Catholic Christian Jesus mythologically were originally the same god—the winter rain-giving sun of Palestine? The Orthodox Church puts S John’s eve, not in the midsummer, but at twelfth night, the old Christmas! It is rationalised as the celebration of the occasion of the baptism of Jesus, which Christians consider as a rebirth—through baptism still they claim to be “born again”. John the Baptist brought about the rebirth of Jesus, and so acted as his mystic father. The descent of the dove, a bird with originally more sexual connotations than peaceful ones, represented the spirit of the father entering into Jesus. The father of Jesus in his myth specifically is God, Yehouah—Iove, Ieua, Yah, Ea—and Ea was the Babylonian god of freshwaters, written in Greek as Oannes which is John (Roman, Ioannes). Cathars disregarded all earthly sacraments including baptism, but they were re-born by their consolamentum as a spirit, an angel, waiting only for physical death to re-join God. Each year the sun is not “born” but is “born again”, translating for a Cathar into a rebirth in the spirit. Perhaps, John the Baptist was the Cathar’s Janus, or Janicot—Little John, who looked both ways at the year’s end, backwards and forwards in time.

John’s worshippers were called Nazarenes, just as the first Christians were. The Christian easter celebrates the victory of a god of light ( Jesus = Lucifer? ) over darkness (death). Dividing the Supreme Power into two, one good and one evil, denotes an advanced religion, more so than monotheism, because all the original tribal religions were monotheistic—each tribe had its own god—but the good god and the bad one have to be properly distinguished. In any locality, which was which was in no doubt, but when religions travelled with their believers, then confusion entered.

One could object that they were born six months apart (Lk 1:36). For Christians, midsummer is S John the Baptist’s day, 24 June, really the summer solstice, but supposedly the birthday of John the Baptist, six months before Jesus. This precise six month difference makes the two personifications the summer and the winter suns. Being born in summer makes John the Baptist the winter god, and therefore the wicked sun of the northern climates. He would, however, be the kind sun of the near east. It seems, though, that they cannot be the same god.

But the birthdate of Jesus was set arbitrarily, in the depths of winter, by the Catholic bishops emulating Sol Invictus. For Romans, Sol Invictus became the summer sun of the north, and therefore the beneficent sun, whereas the winter sun was the cold and cruel one. But, in the near east, the summer sun is the wicked one and the winter sun of storm and rain is the good one. A Jesus who is crucified and speared in the side at the spring equinox is the beneficent winter sun, being killed by, or to make way for, the burning summer sun. A Jesus born in midwinter, in Palestine, would be the hot severe summer sun who dies at the autumn equinox. By identifying Jesus with the Sol Invictus of the northern climes, they made him into the vengeful summer sun of the east.

What, though, of the Lion of Judah (Leo)? For Jews, the summer sun is the sun of David, the Jewish prince who would return as a warrior messiah to avenge the wrongs done to them and make them princes of the world. Christians consider Jesus to be of the line of David, a “son” of David, and so he is the summer sun, just as David was, a warrior—cruel but a bringer of justice to the righteous, and punishment for the unrighteous.

In explanation, the Christians deny that Jesus was a warrior messiah, claiming the Jews have got their own mythology wrong. Jesus is loving, not vengeful, though he is the Judge at the Eschaton, so he is going to get his own back on sinners. And, yes, Jesus will come on the clouds of heaven with the armies of heaven at his Parousia, to defeat the Devil for good and bring in the kingdom of God. It sounds pretty warrior-like, but Christians say it is not. What they always conveniently forget, or explain away when reminded, is that Jesus denied being of the line of David (Mk 12:35-37). He is therefore not the Lion of Judah, and not the summer sun.

In the ancient near east, there were two new years, the civil one and the religious one, held at the equinoxes, so that the year was divided into two seasons, and each equinox began a different new year. The Jewish religious year began at the vernal equinox, when night and day are in balance, the winter sun being crucified and the summer sun beginning to ascend. It was Passover. The death of the winter god, led him to be raised up at dawn as the sun rising in Aries, and so he was the lamb of God, and lamb was ceremonially eaten.

In the north, the goddess Kore, the Maiden, meaning Nature, also returns in spring from Hades with her fecundity, and the sacred marriage—a hierogamos—occurs between god and goddess. The Maiden mates with the bright solar god, who has just displaced his dark rival, and, out of it, the bright summer sun will be reborn at the winter solstice. The Christian Churches have lost this holy wedding except as the concept of the Christian being married to Christ, but even so, this equinox was the day chosen for the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, nine month before Christmas. In John, there is a marriage, scarcely mentioned except as the scene of the miracle of changing water to wine, but it would have been this hierogamos—a religious occasion, not any real marriage.

In the ancient near east, this happens at the autumnal equinox, the cool winter sun born at midsummer is involved in the hierogamos fertilising the fields and eventually giving birth to the next winter sun at the following midsummer. The winter god had been most benevolent watering the fields in the time of the main rains in December and January when he was Capricorn, the Goat—John the Satyr—and Aquarius, the water carrier—John the Baptist. By fertilising the fields and animals for another season, he is also the Saviour or Jesus.

In the ancient near east, at the autumn equinox, the stern and punishing summer sun was killed in turn, and was reborn the following morning in Virgo, the sign of the birth of the king. So, the Jewish civil year began at the autumnal equinox. The Church in Europe Christianized the celebration of the autumn equinox, the ascendance of the winter sun and the death of the summer sun under the name of “Michaelmas” on 28 September, the feast of the Archangel Michael, but Michael is really the sun god anyway—the god of justice and vengeance for wrongdoing—the King and Judge—the Lion of Judah. He is the Christian Marduk, Mithras, and Michael the archangel, the Christ of the Parousia. There seems little doubt that the Christians have mixed up the suns of the two seasons.

The summer sun’s death, in the north, identifies him with John Barleycorn, spirit of the fields, the sun’s life transfused into the corn. The corn god had to have the last sheaf harvested, just as in biblical times he had the last corner of the field. The last sheaf was dressed in fine clothes, or woven into a wicker man who was cut and burned, with rejoicing. Ceremonial fires and pyres are always to encourage the sun god to rejuvenate the sun.

For the Jews, the death of the good winter sun, was meant to be avenged by the ascension of the sun of righteousness, the stern summer sun of justice—the punishing sun. As the Judge at the Eschaton, for Christians, this is Jesus, so he is Michael because that is his role. So believed the Essenes. So, the two faces of Janus are the good sun, John the Baptist, and the judging and avenging sun, called by Christians, Jesus and Christ. Vengeance was the work of the Devil, Cathars thought, so their own God was John. He was Christ, and the Christ of the Catholics was Satan disguised as Michael. Michael was a good angel, for the Cathars, the only true son of God, so he was identified with John, and they saw the Catholic Jesus as Satan.

John was the popular name of male witches, and Joan of Arc’s father was a Jack (Jacques d’Arc). James and John are another pair of solar twins, the sons of Zebedee. The Jack tales of European folklore seem to be memories and debasements of the seasonal cycle, in which the giant is the Father, the old sun or old year, or the wicked sun, and the widespread reverence for a John (Jack) who does it. The Jacks are shown as a type of simple or naïve hero.

The Jack o’Lent paraded through European streets at the beginning of Lent and then publicly burnt is plainly the winter sun. The Christian justification of this ceremony is that Jack o’Lent is the effigy of Judas. Effigies of Judas were commonly burnt at Easter, pyres and burning being ever associated with solar ceremonies. In the Catholic parts of Liverpool, by the Dock Road, the custom was to light bonfires at Good Friday and burn the Judas. Judas was being depicted as the wicked sun, identified in some places as a Jack. Since the winter sun in Palestine was the good sun, John the Baptist and Jesus the Saviour, the ceremony looks to be a mockery of what might have been the primitive Christian (Cathar) understanding of these things.

The Catherine Wheel

Catharine means “pure”, a good reason to think that some saint Catharine might have had a Cathar connexion. The word “pure” has a likely etymological connexion with “pyre” and “fire” because fire was the archetypal purifier. The Roman hagiology contains the record of six saints called Catherine. Most are medieval historical figures but the first is hidden in the shadows of time, or, more likely, is mythical. S Catherine of Alexandria is supposed to have been a virgin and martyr, whose day of commemoration recurs on the 25 November, and in some places on the 5 March.

To people of the middle ages, S Catherine was ranked in Germany with the fourteen most helpful saints in heaven (The Fourteen Holy Helpers), and was the constant theme of preachers and of poets. She was revered by the Cathari. Numberless chapels were dedicated to her, and in nearly all churches her statue was set up, the saint being represented with a wheel, her instrument of torture, and sometimes with a crown and a book. In England, 62 churches were dedicated to her and there are still about 170 medieval bells that carried her name.

Catherine in the myth was a king’s daughter, whom the emperor Maxentius (307-312) sought to marry. Because she was the “Bride of Christ”, she despised earthly marriage, had rejected many offers of marriage, and so rejected the emperor. However, she urged him to be good and give up his Paganism. Finding that his philosophers and theologians could not answer the princess’s arguments, the emperor had Catherine scourged and cast into prison for her cheek. The empress was sent to reason with her, but the virgin converted the empress and a Roman general and his soldiers too. That annoyed the emperor who ordered her to be broken on the wheel, but it was the wheel that broke. The emperor decided simply to behead her, the punishment that a high born dissenter would have received anyway. The martyr’s body was borne by angels to Mount Sinai, where, in the sixth century, Justinian I built the famous monastery in her honour. She was taken to heaven and betrothed to Christ by the Virgin Mary!

The universal admission of Catholic scholars is that these stories are legendary. The cult of this saint was never heard of before the ninth century at the monastery built in her name. That she despised marriage and refused even to marry an emperor makes her sound Cathar. The whole mythology of virgin saints going back to S Paul could indicate that the Cathar rejection of marriage was just a continuation of the preferences of the earliest Christianity, and before them, the Essenes. D H Farmer in The Oxford Dictionary of Saints says that the cult was spread in the Middle Ages by the crusaders, and she became associated with the chief saint of chivalry, S George, in the Golden Legend. 56 English murals of her were known and 35 still exist. Abroad, her cult thrived in Sinai, Cyprus, Venice and France.

As the confounder of heathen sophistry she was invoked by theologians, apologists, preachers and philosophers, and was chosen as the patron saint of the university of Paris. As the most holy and illustrious of Christian virgins she became the tutelary saint of nuns and virgins, generally.

S Catherine’s feast day was the Celtic Lammas, midsummer, celebrated in many places with the utmost splendour. At certain dioceses in France, it was a holy day of obligation as late as the beginning of the seventeenth century. Later, the Catholics were reluctant to settle on a date for her and eventually removed her from the ranks of the saints. Dom Deforis, the Benedictine editor of Bossuet’s works, criticized a panegyric Bossuet had written about Catherine, thus discrediting the legend. The saint’s feast was removed from the Breviary at Paris about this time, and the devotion to S Catherine has since lost its earlier popularity, being suppressed by the Holy See in 1969.

Lammas was the time for craft festivals. The wheel being her symbol, she was made the patron saint of wheelwrights, mechanics, and craftsmen in general. The London Gild of Haberdashers was called the Gild of S Catherine the Virgin. She was also the patron saint of spinsters. The medieval gilds displayed their wares, decorating their shops in bright colors and ribbons, marching in parades, and performing mystery plays and dances for the onlookers.

But, the Latin word for a craftsman is “cerdo”, from the Greek word “cerdos” meaning “gain”, or in this context what today we call “added value”. Catharine is derived from “catharos”, but Catharine seems to have been identified with Cardea with a metathesis of consonants, whether in ignorance or with deliberate punning intended. In the Spanish Pyrenees, near the heart of Catharism, the peasants had a harvest dance called the cerdaña, likely to be a memory of Cardea, suggesting she was a grain goddess. The identity of Catharine and Cardea would properly explain why Catharine is the patron of craftsmen, and why Cathars were often skilled in such crafts.

The saint’s ritual was to take a large wagon wheel to the top of a hill, cover it with tar, set it aflame, and roll it down the hill. Diana Nemorensis, Diana of the Grove, is the goddess Nemesis whose day was 13 August. She has a cut branch of an apple tree in one hand and a wheel in the other. The flaming disk stands for the sun or the cycle of the year. The sun or sun god is invited by the ritual to cross the heavens, or is perhaps meant to be waning to the equinox, the original year end.

Cronos is Saturn whose feast is the Saturnalia, held at the year end. Chronos is the god of time, and there seems no doubt that Cronos is or originally was Chronos. The celebration of the god of time falls at the year end. So the Saturnalia is a celebration of the end of time inasmuch as the year has ended, and in ancient tradition from the Persians, each year stood for the whole of historic time. Time consumes everything, even what it has produced itself, and so Chronos devours his own offspring.

The wild hunt of the witches is twelve days of merriment associated with the new year commemorations and corresponding with the Roman Saturnalia, and the Jewish festival of Purim—a slightly misdated equinoctial new year ceremony brought separately from Persia, that there would have been held at Passover. Several places in Britain, have the tradition of people cross dressing or dressing as animals and cavorting around in January. These are relics of the ancient new years celebrations in which chaos is replaced by order in an enactment of Creation. In Scotland, this was a Hogmanay tradition.

Newark on Trent, in Nottinghamshire, has a specific legend of S Catherine. In the thirteenth century two rival knights fought over the Lady Isobell. Where the loser died a spring emerged, but the victor, full of guilt, went abroad where he caught leprosy. S Catherine appeared to him urging him to return to bathe in the water of the stream. He did so. He found that Isobell had died, seemingly of grief, but the water indeed cured him. He built a chapel around the well called today S Catherine’s Well in Devon Park, and resolved to live such a holy life that the Church called him S Guthred. Devon is the ancient Celtic word for a divine river, and Isobel was a favourite witch name. It suggests a pre-Christian holy well Christianised by the Cathars, and might then suggest that the Cathars did have some interest in the purifying function of water.

Agnes was another of the names noted by Murray as common among witches from the witch trial evidence. S Agnes was said to have been, like S Catherine, a noble Roman virgin who refused to compromise her Christian faith or her virginity, sounding therefore like a Cathar Perfect. Not only was she a spotless virgin martyr but her parents were also immaculate, according to the Partiforium ad usum Sarum of 1554. Like S Catherine, she was the Bride of Christ. She was popular early in the Roman Church being praised by Ambrose, Jerome and Prudentius. She is depicted with a sword at her throat and most likely, if a martyr, she was beheaded, although burning and stabbing through the throat are in different traditions. Because Agnes sounds like agnus, meaning a lamb, a lamb is her symbol, often with a flag, and two lambs were customarily offered at the high altar, then kept by the priest until shearing time. The nuns of S Agnes, in Rome, blessed these lambs whose wool they used to weave the pallia of archbishops. Her feast day is 21 January, and popular tradition says that virgins dream of their future husband on S Agnes Eve. In some places S Agnes was identified with S Anne.

Christopher is one of those saints like S Catherine who has been reduced by the Catholic Church. His feast day was on 25 July, but his legend seems totally fictitious. Early saints who have no genuine history are often old gods reduced to sainthood to allow their old worshippers to continue their practices while being nominally Christian. Christopher is supposed to have been a giant persecuted in Anatolia by Decius, but nothing is certainly known about him other than he is early and from the east.

Christopher means Christ-bearer because he is said to have carried the infant Christ over a river feeling, in so doing, the weight of sin in the world on his back. It suggests that the saint himself was originally considered to carry the sins of the world, making him the equivalent of Christ. It is possible that he was originally Lucifer, who was the Christ of the Cathars and therefore perhaps of the original primitive Christianity. In this early dualistic or Gnostic Christianity, God had two sons, Christ and Satan, and it was Christ who was Lucifer, not Satan, as the name means Light-Bringer. Christ is the Light of the World. Satan was evicted from heaven, and the primitive Christians adored Lucifer who was also called Michael, and was an archangel. Imperial Christianity transformed itself into Catholicism, leaving the true Christians as an unimportant rump of no importance, and it even accepted the Cathar Christ as a saint, until they began to grow in numbers after the first millennium. Then the Catholic Church had to denigrate them, claiming that the Cathar Christ was Lucifer, the Devil, and hounding them into oblivion.

Further Reading

• More on heretical beliefs
• More on documents pertaining to heresy
• More on the Inquisition
• More on witches, and more, and more

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