A saltatory gene determines how much mutation occurs in the genes which it controls.

Who Lies Sleeping?

Christmas 1

Traditional Winter Festivities
Christmas Before Christ
Sun Gods
Mithras
Horus

Abstract

Christians never think it strange that the birth date of Jesus is the birth date of many of the incarnated gods of antiquity. That Pagans venerated the birthday of Christ as the birthday of their gods is beyond coincidence. At the winter solstice, the sun seemed to stop declining in the sky for three days. Its was at crisis point. It might die! Then it began to rise on the 25 December, the sun’s rebirth. Both the year and the day of Christ’s birth are unknown. There is no reason to suppose that Jesus the Nazarene was born on Christmas Day. The importance of 25 December to Pagans made Christians think it must have been the birthday of their messiah. When Constantine made Jesus a god, 25 December, the birthday of the sun gods and particularly that of the chief rival to Christianity, Mithras, was selected as his birthday. By celebrating at the same time as Pagan religions, the bishops accaepted Christ as a sun god, hoping to pull in Pagans worshippers. What are the origins of the various ingredients of the now traditional nativity scene?

Traditional Winter Festivities

Midwinter festivities are far older than Christianity and have appeared in every culture of the northern hemisphere. When Christianity, on controlling Europe, first reached England, Northern Germany, and Scandinavia, its missionaries found Pagan rites already celebrated on Christmas day. The early Christians tried to convert Pagan celebrations to Christian ones but with only partial success. In the resulting tangle, Paganism has partially held its own and many objects associated with Christmas are explicable only as deep folk memories. So, Christians incorporated many of these rites into their Church festival.

The root of midwinter rituals is the winter solstice, the shortest day which falls on or around 21 December. In the days before the solstice, rituals were devised to prevent the sun getting any weaker. When they worked, with the day getting longer after the solstice, was the time for celebration. The date of 25 December was when the sun visibly began to rise again after three days at the lowest ebb. It was the Roman festival of the “unconquered sun”, Mithras, proving by his rising again that he was again unconquered. It was chosen deliberately to Christianize this traditional celebration. In Scotland, never subject to the Romans, the main midwinter festival is still the entirely non-Christian one of Hogmanay, the New Year, although the Christmas celebration has advanced in popularity in recent years.

You need something to cheer you up at Christmas

Besides sun worship, today’s Christmas festivities reflect a complex of other Pagan rites, many distorted from their original purpose. The two chief ones are the Roman Saturnalia and the Germanic-Nordic festivities centering around Wotan and tree worship.

The Roman Saturnalia, held on 17 to 19 December, were days of public revelry in honour of the god Saturn, with much sexual licence. During the Saturnalia all business was suspended and many distinctions of rank were forgotten. Masters sometimes waited on their slaves—a custom reflected to this day in the military custom of officers serving Christmas dinner to their men. Saturn is one of the ancestors of Father Christmas.

Evergreens, the mistletoe of the Druids, the yule logs which had been brought in every year to blaze on the open hearths, the feasting and carousing, have all come down to us, often from northern Europe in Pagan days and from Pagan sources. The side boards of the well-to-do are still often graced by the head of a boar, the successor of the beast which slew Adonis. Various modern customs show that Christmas is still a developing institution. Father Christmas is the outstanding example, and so are some carols. The words of “Good King Wenceslas”, for example, were made up by a nineteenth-century clergyman, J M Neale, to go with an old tune.

People who attack the commercialisation of Christmas are missing the target. For uncountable centuries the midwinter festival has been a time for jollity in a most material way.

Christmas Before Christ

The nations of the north also had their greatest festival of the year in midwinter. To these northern barbarians, shuddering in the snow laden forests beyond the Danube, the return of the sun was the most desired event of the year, and they soon learned the time—the winter solstice—when the “wheel” turned. The sun was figured as a fiery wheel, and as late as the nineteenth century there were parts of France where a straw wheel was set on fire and rolled down a hill, to give an augury of the next harvest.

Hence “yule” (from the Teutonic word “hoel” or “wheel”) was the outstanding festival of the ancestors of the French and Germans, the English and Scandinavians. The sun was born, and fires (“Yule logs”, still traditionally symbols of Christmas, though usually in the form of a chocolate cake) flamed in the forest villages, the huts were decorated with holly and evergreens, Yule trees were laden with presents, and stores of solid food and strong drink were lavishly opened. This lasted until Twelfth Day, now Epiphany. The Scandinavians celebrated the 25 December as the birth day of their god Freyr, the son of their supreme god of the heavens, Odin.

Long before Christianity, as mid-winter approached, Rome was lit up with joy. It was the festival of the old vegetation-god Saturn who, as a god, died or was displaced by Jupiter, the sky-god, but had a fine temple on the Capitol. His festival lasted seven days, from 17 to 24 December, and was the most joyous time of the joyous Roman year. For the whole week, no work was done, the one law being good cheer and good nature, but the 25 December was the culmination of it all, the greatest festival in the Roman calendar—the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun…

There was great rejoicing, illuminations and public games, and all shops were closed. Presents were exchanged, and the slaves were indulged in special liberties—on this one day they were free. They donned the conical cap of the freedman—as frolickers continue at Christmas, and on other festive occasions today, to don caps of paper—and sit at table while masters wait on them.

On 25 December, crowds filled the streets and raised festive cries, and the women of Rome paraded, singing in a loud voice, “Unto us a child is born this day”. Stalls laden with presents lined the streets near the Forum, but the great present of the season was a doll, of wax or terracotta. Hundreds of thousands of these dolls were on sale on the stalls and held in the arms of passers by. Once human beings were sacrificed to Saturn, and, as human life grew more important than religion, the god or his priests had to be content with effigies of men or maids—dolls! It was a time of peace on earth, for by Roman law no war could begin during the Saturnalia, and of good-will toward all men.

The festival went back far into the mists of prehistoric times. It had been earlier a one-day festival, the feast of Saturn, an important magico-religious festival for insuring the harvest of the next year, rejoicing that the year’s work was over, and helping and propitiating the god of fecundity by generous indulgence in wine and love. The mysterious winter dying of the sun was also arrested.

The entire known world of two thousand years ago had its “Christmas without Christ”. The figure of Christ was drawn in all its chief features before a line of the gospels was written, unarguably in the details relevant to Christmas. The first symbol of the Christian religion, the manger or basket cradle of the divine child, the supposed unique exhortation to humility, was one of the most familiar religious emblems of the Pagan world. Had it been exhibited to a crowd in one of the cosmopolitan cities of the Empire, it would have been strange or new to few. One might pronounce it Horus, another Hermes, another Dionysos, but all would have shrugged their shoulders nonchalantly at the news that it was just another divine sun child in the great family of gods. The world flowed on. The names only were changed.

The identity of these old traditions with Christmas are no longer disputed by scholars. Only ignorant fundamentalist ministers and some barmy priests of other denominations deny it. The celebrations of the birthdays of Mithras and Horus are as certain as the Saturnalia. Legends of the miraculous birth of gods, demigods, and heroes in the ancient world were as certain as that the Chaldeans knew astronomy and the Romans built tenement buildings.

Christians never think it strange that the birth date of Jesus is also the birth date of many of the incarnated gods of antiquity. They never think it curious that it was for ancient astronomers when the old sun died and was re-born and a new sun began to climb again in the heavens. At the solstice, it seemed to hover at the same altitude in the sky for three days, the critical time in the slow decline and possible death of the sun. Then it began to rise on the 25 December, the great day of the sun’s rebirth. That Pagans venerated the birthday of Christ as the birthday of their gods is beyond coincidence.

Sun Gods

Astronomically, the sun begins a new year of life at the winter solstice, and so the 25 December, or some day proximate to that date, was selected in remote antiquity for the celebration of God’s birthday, when sun gods were worshipped. At the first moment after midnight of 24 December the nations of the East would rise to celebrate the arrival of 25 December, the birthday of their gods.

At midnight on the twenty-fifth of the month, Savarana, which is our December, millions of Krishna’s disciples celebrated his birthday by decorating their houses with garlands and gilt paper, and giving presents to friends. The people of China also traditionally celebrated this day, closing their shops. Buddha is said to have been born on this day after the Holy Ghost had descended on his virgin mother Maya. The god of the Persians, Mithras, was born on the 25 December long before the coming of Jesus.

The Egyptians celebrated this day as the birth day of their great saviour Horus, the Egyptian god of light and son of a virgin mother, the queen of the heaven, Isis. Osiris, god of the dead and the underworld in Egypt, another son of a holy virgin, was born on the 25 December. Adonis, revered as a dying and rising god among the Phrygians then the Greeks, was born on the 25 December. His worshippers held him a yearly festival representing his death and resurrection, in midsummer. Even the temple at Jerusalem was used to celebrate the birthday of the god Adonis in the years when Jesus might have been born, Herod being no Jew by conviction. The cave in Bethlehem which is said to have been the birth place of Jesus was also previously a place in which the birthday of Adonis was celebrated.

The Greeks celebrated the 25 December as the birthday of Apollo, the great sun god, and it was also the day upon which were celebrated, by their respective worshippers, the births of Adonis and of Mithras. That day was the birthday of Hercules, the son of their supreme god, Zeus, through the mortal woman Alcmene. Bacchus, the god of wine and revelry among the Romans, known among the Greeks as Dionysos, was born on this day. The 25 December was so highly regarded as a day suitable for the birthday of a god that it was selected for the apotheosis of Alexander the Great when he was first acclaimed as God in the temple of Amon (Jupiter) in 322 BC.

Mithras

A prosperous Asiatic sun religion dwelt on the Vatican hill before the Popes commandeered it for Christianity. Mithras was an Aryan sun god, called by the Romans “the Unconquerable Sun”. The reform of the Persian religion by Zoroaster (Zarathustra) had put the ethical deity Ahuramazda so high above the old nature gods that he was practically the one god. But Mithras stole upward, as gods do, and Persian kings of the fifth century BC put him on a level with Ahuramazda. The Persians conquered and blended with Babylon, and Mithras rose to the supreme position and became an intensely ethical deity. He was, like Aten and Christ, the sun of the world. He sacrificed the pleasures of life, like Christ, but unlike Zeus.

Mithraism spread rapidly, was respected, and was strikingly like Christianity. During the third and fourth centuries AD, Mithras had become the most important solar god in the Roman Empire. Drastic asceticism and purity were demanded of his worshippers. They were baptized in blood. They practiced the most severe austerities and fasts. They had a communion supper of bread and wine. They worshiped Mithras in underground temples, artificial caves called grottos, which blazed with the light of candles and reeked with incense.

They celebrated the epiphany of this god, saviour of the world, on 25 December. Aurelian adopted the 25 December in 274 AD as the day to celebrate “Natalis Solis Invicti”, the birthday of Sol Invictus. As that day approached, near midnight of the 24th, Christians might see the devotees of Mithras going to their temple on the Vatican, and at midnight it would shine with joy and light. The saviour of the world was born. He had been born in a cave, like so many other sun-gods, and some of the apocryphal gospels put the birth of Christ in a cave. He had had no earthly father.

F Cumont, the great authority on Mithras, who it is now fashionable to disparage, collected for us details about the Persian religion, and more than one of the Christian Fathers refers to the similarity of the two religions. Mithras had had 25 December as his birthday for ages. He was eternal—the unconquered and unconquerable sun—the sun god as a spiritual god, with light as his emblem and honesty his supreme command. What could the Christians do? Nothing, until Constantine. Then they took 25 December, and Mithraic garb, customs and ritual, and so zealously dissolved the Mithraic religion into Christianity that only scholars know anything about it.

Horus

A Roman writer of the fourth century, Macrobius, in a work called Saturnalia (1:18) discusses the practice of representing the gods in the temples as of different ages. He says:

These differences of age refer to the sun, which seems to be a babe at the winter solstice, as the Egyptians represent him in their temples on a certain day, that being the shortest day, he is then supposed to be small and an infant.

This is confirmed and elaborated by a Christian writer, the author of the “Paschal Chronicle”, who says:

Jeremiah gave a sign to the Egyptian priests, saying that their idols would be destroyed by a child-saviour, born of a virgin and lying in a manger. That is why they still worship, as a goddess, a virgin-mother, and adore an infant in a manger.

He wants to explain age old customs to which their god is indebted as imitations of their own much later god. The stories of Jesus and Horus, the god in question, are similar. Horus was a sun god of the Egyptians. In the adjustment of the rival Egyptian gods, when the tribes were amalgamated in one kingdom, about 3000 years before Jesus was born, Horus was made the son of Osiris and Isis.

In the Egyptian religion that emerged from the syncretism, Osiris, a supreme and transcendental god who had acquired the attributes of most other Egyptian gods, was the father of Horus. Among his many titles were Lord of Lords, King of Kings, God of Gods, the Resurrection and the Life, the Good Shepherd, Eternity and Everlastingness, the god who “made men and women to be born again.” He became Serapis in the Hellenistic period, a god much like the Christian concept of Yehouah. Horus and his Father, Osiris, were even interchangeable, reminding us that Jesus said:

I and my Father are one.

Osiris was a god who suffered at the hands of the evil Set—another Asiatic god conceived of as the brother of Osiris—died and rose again, to reign eternally over the souls of the righteous dead. He is depicted as dark in complexion, suggesting he is the sun of night or winter, the gentle sun of the ANE who is father of the sun of the horizon, the sun that daily passes from the eastern horizon to the western one. His worshippers believed that, like their god, they would inherit eternal life. Some say Osiris’s coming was announced by the “Three Kings” or the “Three Wise Men”—the three stars Mintaka, Anilam and Alnitak in the belt of Orion, which point directly to Osiris’s star in the east, Sirius (Sothis), the sign of his birth. Osiris typified the Christian idea of a messiah, a saviour god, rather than the Jewish idea of a conquering king. His flesh was also eaten in the form of communion cakes of wheat, the plant of truth, just as Christians devour wafers which are the body of their saviour god.

In the bible, Psalms 23 is an Egyptian appeal to Osiris. A hymn to Osiris as the Good Shepherd begs him to lead the deceased to the green pastures and still waters of Paradise, the nefer-nefer or most beautiful land, to restore the soul to the body and give protection in the valley of the shadow of death (the Tuat). Before the Lord’s Prayer, an Egyptian hymn to Osiris-Amun (Amen) began, “O Amen, O Amen, who art in heaven.” Amen was also invoked at the end of every prayer. It was later rationalized, in Judaism, into a nod of assent signifying “Truly” or “Verily”.

Horus was born of the virgin Isis-Meri, Isis the Beloved, on 25 December. Like his father, his birth was announced by that star in the east (Sothis) and attended by the three wise men. Isis was the sister and the lover of Osiris, but whether we should speak of her as “a virgin mother” is a matter of words. In one Egyptian myth she was fecundated by Osiris in their mother’s womb, in another and more popular, she was miraculously impregnated by contact with the false phallus of the dead Osiris. Virginity in goddesses is a mythical virtue not a practical one. It is as real as the eternal life that all of these speculative religions promise.

Why should Pagan beliefs have to be used to explain the Christian virgin birth myth? The Septuagint plainly, but in a false translation, said, “A virgin shall conceive”, and this was taken to refer to the Messiah. Moreover, if Jesus despised conjugal relations, as early Christians believed, they could not accept that he, as a god, would have chosen the vile union necessary to enter the world. The early Christians in whose circles the gospel stories developed, will have seen this as an implication their God was virgin born, like the equivalent Pagan legends. It would have seemed a necessity of any god in the Hellenistic world.

The birthday of Horus was annually celebrated in the temples, about 25 December. A figure of Horus as a baby was laid in a manger, in a scenic reconstruction of a stable, and a statue of Isis was placed beside it. In the catacombs at Rome are pictures of the baby Horus being held by the virgin mother Isis—the original Madonna and Child. Horus was the rising sun, the sun of the east. He was the daily saviour of mankind, saving us from perpetual darkness. He was the light of the world. His birth festival was a Christmas without Christ.

This spectacle is still presented in every church in the world on 25 December. Catholic priests have taught their flocks to believe S Francis of Assisi invented this touching scene of the humble birth of the redeemer. Francis of Assisi will never have read the obscure “Paschal Chronicle”, but some other Christian writer had seen and reproduced it, and it had come to the knowledge of S Francis. Christ’s crib is an exact reproduction of the scene exhibited in Egyptian temples centuries before Christ, and the Egyptian legend itself is thousands of years older than Jeremiah. On the analogy of the Christian practice, the Egyptian legend must have described Isis as having given birth to her divine son in a stable. In Alexandria, there was a similar Greek celebration on 25 December of the birth of a divine son to Kore (the “Virgin”).

And this is not the end. The Greeks had a similar celebration. The idea of a divine son being born in a cave was common, or there were actually several scenic representations of the birth of these gods in their festivals. J M Robertson gives some in Christianity and Mythology. Hermes, the Logos (like Jesus in John), the messenger of the gods, son of Zeus and the virgin Maia, was born in a cave, and he performed extraordinary prodigies a few hours after birth. He was represented as a “child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger”. Dionysos (Iacchos, Bacchus) was similarly represented. The image of him as a babe was laid in a basket cradle in the cave in which he was born.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.