Sun Gods as Atoning Saviours 1
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, May 07, 2001
Abstract
Atoning Saviours
I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified,
writes Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:2. The determination not to know anything but the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was narrowing down knowledge to rather a small compass. Evidently converts in Corinth were questioning, and Paul begins by establishing that questions are not allowed to Christians. Paul has to berate the wise and praise the foolish in this epistle. God chose the foolish things of the world not the wise. And so it has always remained—the most marvellous way of gulling the credulous. Anyway, already in the 50s of the first century some people were asking questions and one of the questions will have been whether Jesus was really crucified.
Irenaeus, one of the most frequently quoted Christian writers of the ancient bishops, declares upon the authority of the martyr Polycarp, who claimed to have got it from S John and all the elders of Asia, that Jesus Christ lived to be about fifty years old. There must have been a margin for distrusting the fact of the crucifixion. Yet, if Jesus was a saviour, it is likely that he must have been crucified because other saviours of the same type were. “Sacrilege!” Paul’s Christians, trained in foolishness, cry. “Jesus Christ was the only crucified saviour!” Sorry, other saviours are suspected of crucifixion, and certainly many were cruelly punished for saving humanity. Irenaeus might have felt it politic to deny crucifixion to distinguish the Christian saviour from the others!
The Persian equinoctial ceremonies dedicated to Mithras seem to have involved crucifixion, when Haman the Wicked, standing for the winter sun, is crucified in Esther to arise as the summer sun who is the Saviour, Mithras. The slain Divine Intercessor of the Caucasians, Prometheus, suffered hung on a tree or a rock for the sins of mortal beings. Attis, Ixion, Tantalus were all hung on trees or wheels in crucifixion. Yet the Christian disciple hugs to his breast the bloody cross of the murdered Jesus, confident that he was the one god that ever died for the sins of man.
The Twin Sun Gods
There are two suns, summer and winter, bright and dark or stormy, and these are seen daily when the sun crosses the heavens bright, then sinks to the west darkening and remains dark through the night until dawn. The sun god therefore exists as twins—a bright twin and a dark twin. The god of the full year—the complete annual movement of the sun though the zodiac—is divided into its two half yearly parts—the good god, and his twin, the evil god. In solar mythology, the sun god has two twin sons.
These gods represent the summer and the winter but which is which depends on where you are. In the northern climates, the good god is the bright and light summer sun, while the wicked god is the dark and cold winter sun. In the ancient near east, the good god was the stormy sun of winter which brought the rains, while the wicked god was the fiercely burning hot sun of summer that scorched the earth and parched the vegetation. Either way, their lives are intertwined in the annual cycle, and give us the dualistic ideas that preceded the regression to monotheism. The crucified one, in the ancient near east, paradoxically, is the dark twin which is why saviour gods often have a dark or black complexion.
The summer “bright” sun god is born at the winter solstice, and the increasing hours of lightness in the day show him growing in strength until he reaches his greatest power, the summer solstice—the longest day. The winter “dark” sun god, is born at the summer solstice, and the increasing hours of darkness show him growing in strength until he reaches his greatest power, the winter solstice—the longest night. As one twin grows in power, the other declines in power in an endless battle between light and darkness and good and evil. John the Baptist gives us pause for thought when he says of Jesus:
He must increase, but I must decrease.Jn 3:30
A relic of the original belief in the dual solar nature of the Christian myth, it must have been said at the birth of the summer sun at the winter solstice, for, in this myth, John is the winter sun, as his association with water makes clear. He is Oannes, the Babylonian equivalent (Ea), born at the summer solstice and dying at the spring equinox. 24 June, the end of the summer solstice, was supposedly the birth date of John the Baptist in the Christian calendar, who was born six months before Jesus, according to gospel tradition. In fact, “Jesus” is not a separate god but a title of John—Saviour. The gentile Churches deliberately confused the tradition to distinguish Christians from the followers of John the Baptist. Both were Nazarenes and both had the same sun god, but the Christians had to distinguish their god from the Baptist’s. So they made John the Baptist the herald of Jesus.
In the gospel stories, Jesus actually has a twin called Thomas but that is not his name. It simply means twin, as does his New Testament surname, Didymus. He takes no part in the drama except to doubt the resurrection for which he demands proof and is allowed to put his hand into the god’s spear wound. This is the mythical relic of the spear wound being caused at his hand.
The gospels also count among the apostles John and James of Zebedee who are brothers and rivals. John is the same winter sun. James is a rendering of the Hebrew Jacob, and Jacob in the Jewish scriptures is the twin brother and rival of Esau. Jacob is said to mean supplanter—he supplants his brother—and Esau is said to mean hairy. John the Baptist dressed in rough clothing of camel’s hair. Christian images remarkably show John the Baptist as horned like Moses—explained away by Christians as horns of light—and even with the limbs of a satyr and cloven hooves. Esau therefore equates with John, and they are emblems of summer fertility, effectively the classical god of woods and fields, Pan. The reason is again astronomical. John the Baptist is of course the water carrier of Aquarius, but the salvific rains in Palestine extend over December and January and so include the month of Capricorn. He is therefore also the Goat.
Like Esau, Jesus has a brother called James who supplanted him—he becomes the leader of the Nazarenes after him. He has the title, “The Just,” justice being a solar function, and perhaps particularly the harsh summer sun’s. Thus, the two solar gods of the original Christian myth are revealed as John the Baptist and James the Just, the winter and summer suns respectively, John being the Saviour—Jesus. The biblical books try their best to disguise the solar meaning underlying them, but leave enough tantalizing clues to make it evident, if not clear. The real life of a patriotic Jewish bandit has been forced into the container of this solar myth to give us Christianity.
In the complete original solar myth, each god dies when slain by their twin at the equinoxes. The winter dark sun dies at the spring equinox, when the daylight hours exceed the night time ones, while the summer bright sun dies at the autumn equinox, when the night time hours exceed the daylight ones.
In Welsh mythology, as Mike Nicholls has shown, Gronwy slays Llew and Llew slays Gronwy at each equinox in turn. Gronwy, Llew’s dark self, strikes Llew with a spear, but Llew is transformed into an eagle, an interpretation of the sun in Scorpio—the autumn equinox. Llew is the Welsh god of light, and his name means “lion.” The lion is the symbol of the bright sun god because Leo is the constellation of midsummer—the summer solstice. The goat is the symbol of the dark winter sun, being strongest in Capricorn—the winter solstice. Later, Llew kills Gronwy with a spear to have his revenge, while he is standing at the same spot, not literally, but the equivalent spot, the other equinox—Gronwy is the winter sun.
Other examples are Gwyn and Gwythyr, Balder and Hoder/Loki, Gawain and the Green Knight, Lugh and Balor, Balan and Balin, Romulus and Remus, Prometheus and Epimetheus, Merodach and Haman, Krishna and Balarama, Esau and Jacob, James the Just and John the Baptist (Jesus).
Their mode of death is by crucifixion, by transfixing with a spear, or perhaps an arrow, against a tree which thereby makes the shape of a cross with the projectile, or by being burnt on a pyre. In practice, one half of the myth is often suppressed to put more emphasis on the other which leads to salvation.
Solar myths were mixed up with the vegetation myths, the seasonal cycle that required the priests to tell the farmers the proper time to start ploughing. This needed the equinoxes to be noted easily. There is no actual cross in the sky that lets anyone know directly when the equinoxes happen, so the priests found proxies for them. The main one was the start of the year, the autumn equinox. This was noted as when the sun was in Virgo, and its sign was when the sun rose heliacally as if it was replacing the star Spica, which gave its name to the month originally (Chaitra). Spica is significant at the other equinox too because it rises just as the sun sets. The vernal equinox was when the sun was in Aries but there was no clear star marker for it. In Yehud, the sign will have been when the shafts of the dawn sun illuminated the Holy of Holies, and the orientation of the temple will have been fixed to capture the heliacal rising of Spica in Virgo. It meant that the temple was not oriented directly east but about 85 dgrees from the azimuth. H Van Dyke Parunak's revised estimate (Was Solomon's Temple Aligned to the Sun?) was 84 degrees.
More widely, the deity whose death brings on the death of vegetation is Kore at Eleusis, the daughter of Demeter, the corn Goddess. Yet elsewhere it is a dying god, Attis, Adonis, Tammuz, Osiris. The Persian religion is also unclear because Mithras and the goddess Anahita were so closely connected that Herodotus mistook Mithras as the goddess. Mithras killed the primeval bull which is likely to be the sun rising heliacally in Taurus, suggesting that Mithras is the summer half year, and the good sun of the northern tribes. Anahita does not seem to have been introduced until the Persians entered the near east in which case she would have been the Virgin sun heliacally rising as Spica in Virgo, and standing for the winter sun, the good, sun of the hot near eastern climates. Anahita was a water goddess which would mean she was associated with the winter rains that fertilised the earth. Mithras had been considered a good god in the north but now had become the bad sun of the hot season. The Persians in the fifth century swapped their calendar and made the day for celebrating Mithras an autumn day, in September. Thus the God and the Goddess stood for the same period of time, the wet season of winter.
Spica is the sheaf of corn held by Virgo, and the September sunrise might have been seen originally as the birth of Mithras, the winter sun. Virgo will have been Anahita seen as walking the land preparing it with her water, and Mithras the benevolent sun fertilised it with the water of life—semen. In spring, the winter sun died, crucified as the hot sun of the dry season rose into the sky. Anahita sacrificed a bull, the heliacal rise of Taurus, to bring back the winter sun to life, and since Mithras was the winter sun, this will be likely to have been where Herodotus made his error. The priests or priestesses of Anahita sacrificed the bull for Mithras.
In the Cybele myths, Attis is said to have been revivified as a goddess, seeming to combine the female and the male vegetative principles. The good winter sun was crucified or castrated in spring and the Virgin goddess was revived in autumn, giving birth to the good sun as the heliacal rise of the sun in Virgo. The goddess is both mother and lover of the sun god, their mutual love causing the plants to grow. She is also the old nurse, in many myths such as those of Eleusis, so that she appears in her triple aspect of Maiden, Mother and Crone.
Origin of the Crucifixion of the Gods
The doctrine of salvation by crucifixion had, like many of the ancient forms of religious faith, an astronomical origin. The sun is hung on a cross or crucified when it passes through the equinoxes. People in northern climates were saved by the sun’s crucifixion when it crossed over the equatorial line into the season of spring, at the vernal equinox at Easter, and thereby gave out a saving heat and light to the world and stimulated the generative organs of animal and vegetable life. The sun that is crucified is the dark winter sun, lacking the warmth and brightness of the summer. It is resurrected as, or supplanted by, its twin, the bright warm fertilizing summer sun that continues on to ascend into heaven.
When the dark sun is the undesirable one that is crucified, it shows that the myth is appropriate to northern climates. The legend is read as the salvific death of the evil winter sun to resurrect the summer sun. This seems to have been the Persian new year ceremony when it was the wicked Haman who was crucified. The Persians coming from the north and settled on the cooler Iranian plateau will have had the northern view originally, but changed it when they adapted to hot Babylonian conditions, and changed their calendar, as historians know they did.
In the hot climates of the ancient near east, the summer sun is undesirable because it burns up the landscape, so the myth was read as the unjust death of the desirable winter sun having nourished the land, leaving the people forlorn until he came again in the autumn. The cool winter sun that had brought the rains, the bounteous sun, made the sacrifice, and his death was bewailed. He had done nothing but kindness, but still had to die at the hands of his cruel adversaries. In Ezekiel, the women outside the temple gates bewailed the death of Tammuz, suggesting the latter interpretation.
The date of Jesus’s resurrection is the position of the sun at the time of the vernal equinox when the priests could declare that the winter sun was dead—the day was now longer than the night. March 25th was considered the end of the sun’s passing through the vernal equinox. Christ is plainly the loved sun god not the hated one, so he is the dark winter sun of the ancient near east, like Krishna, and is depicted as dark skinned in some pictures. Moreover, the “black but comely” lover of the Song of Songs was said to mean Jesus.
At a later part of the year the autumn equinox sees the bright summer sun transform into the dark winter sun. The ancients in the near east must once have celebrated the death of the blazing summer sun and the arrival of the stormy sun at the autumn equinox, when they carved or painted sexual organs on the walls of their holy temples with fertilization in mind. This was certainly the case with the temple at Jerusalem, the symbolism of which is purely sexual, the temple being the womb of the land, fertilized by Yehouah at the autumn equinox when its rays shone directly into the holy of holies from the Mount of Olives.
The Cross
The fertilizing winter sun having been crucified, and the summer sun risen into the heavens in resurrection, the blood of the grape, ripened by its the heat, was symbolically “the blood of the cross,” or “the blood of the Lamb.” Jesus is not the true vine for no reason.
Because of our Christian culture and its imagery, the cross is necessarily the instrument of the saviour god’s torture. However, because the celestial origin of crucifixion in solar myths is that the sun crosses over the celestial equator, the heavenly sign of the equinoxes, the image of a crossover in the sky would be a cross like the Greek letter Chi (X) not a Plus (+). Constantine’s cross in the heavens that signalled his victory at the Milvian bridge was a Chi not a Plus, and the traditional Roman sign of the Christian was Chi Ro, the first two letter of the name Christ. This shape is the shape a man takes when he is stretched out by bonds such as he might have if tied to the ground, to a tree or a wheel. So we might be looking for icons in which the god is depicted such that his body forms a cross, like that of the famous illustration by Leonardo.
It has always been presumed that death, and especially death by crucifixion, involved the highest state of suffering possible to be endured by mortals. Hence, the gods must suffer in this way as an example of courage and fortitude which their followers must emulate. To do this they must be superior to their devotees. They must not merely die, but submit to the most ignominious mode of suffering death that could be devised—crucifixion. This gave the highest finishing touch to the drama.
And thus the legend of the crucifixion became the crowning chapter, the aggrandizing episode in the history of their lives. It was presumed that nothing less than a god could endure such excruciating tortures without complaining. Hence, when the victim was reported to have submitted with such fortitude that no murmur was heard to issue from his lips, this circumstance of itself was deemed sufficient evidence of his godship.
The story of the crucifixion, therefore, deified or helped deify great men and exalt them to the rank of gods, though it was usually falsely added for this purpose. Though some of the disciples of Buddhism, and some of the earliest professors of Christianity also, including, according to Christian history, Peter and his brother Andrew, voluntarily chose this mode of dying in imitation of their crucified Lord, they were not promoted to divine honours. Christianity focused all its attention on the singular sacrifice of its Christ but had it evolved slightly differently some of the earliest saints at least would now be worshipped as gods. They had been granted the divine qualification of crucifixion.
To retain their following, religions are based on unchangeable dogmas which disciples must accept to the exclusion of all knowledge adverse to their own creed. Whenever they are able, they actually destroy contrary evidence for fear of rivalry. Then they magnify their own religion to a unique position above all others. The earlier Christian saints, having determined like Paul, to know only “Jesus Christ and him crucified,” made stern efforts to obliterate from the page of history facts damaging to their case.
The disciples of the Christian faith have burnt books, blotted out passages and bowdlerised testaments which suggested the opposite of their belief. Not only that, they have demolished monuments showing crucifixions of previous atoning gods so that they are now unknown. Hence, the disbelief of Christians when other cases are mentioned. It continues in more recent times.
An ancient sculpture or icon in context tells us more about origins, and there have been reports of a crucified Hindu god, assumed to be Krishna, in ancient temples. Iconography can be placed in a historical period more closely than a text. Those responsible for evaluating these pictures should do so, not just pretend they are not there. Documents themselves are often unreliable, especially religious ones that have a clear purpose of persuasion to a particular belief. It is better to regard them as unreliable until they can be shown to be genuine.
A report on the Hindu religion, made out by a deputation from the British Parliament, sent to India to examine their sacred books and monuments, was left in the hands of a Christian bishop at Calcutta, with instructions to forward it to England. On its arrival in London, it was so horribly mutilated as to be scarcely recognisable. An account of the crucifixion was gone. But, if the Christian myth was syncretized to Krishna in the years since Christianity arrived in India, written sources like this would be valueless. No one knows when a legend was introduced.
Krishna
Krishna, which means dark, plainly suffers huge losses, cursed as he was to lose the whole of his people and to die alone and miserable. The only death of Krishna now in the Mahabharata is to be shot in the sole of his foot by a hunter’s arrow while practising yoga in a forest. It seems odd, to the western way of thinking, that a man who had seen everyone he knew, including most recently his brother, Balarama, killed off under a curse, should be peacefully practising yoga in the forest. That is the way of mythology. It gave Krishna, by sitting crosslegged—possibly a remnant of the original myth—a way of receiving an unlikely wound in the sole of his foot, just as Achilles was killed in his heel. Christians will say that crossed-legs can hardly be seen as an indication of crucifixion, but they are indeed symbolic of the equinoxes, as the symbolic torchbearers of Mithras’s icons show. The uplifted torch with right leg over left is the bright summer sun, while the downturned torch with left over right is the dark winter sun. The hunter, Jar, who killed Krishna only has to be identified with the brother, Balarama, to restore the original myth—the summer sun killed the winter sun by crucifixion.
Hindus had a motive to suppress any crucifixion myths—to avoid parallels with Christianity that might have lost proselytes to the missionaries. Editors of the Hindu sacred texts will have altered the legend in the present era—when Christianity reached India with the heretical Christians called Nestorians—to avoid any implication that they had derived it from Christianity, or indeed to eliminate any possibility of Krishna being mistaken for Christ that might have assisted Christian proselytizing. The Krishna legends were still changing in the Christian era, as is shown by the accretion of the legends of Gopala to those of Krishna in the early centuries AD.
If this is true, Christians argue, it would have been better for Hindus to have kept Krishna crucified. Having their own crucified saviour would have stopped the Nestorians from making converts among the Hindus, whose crucified saviour was much older than Christianity itself, and who had existed long before Christians ever came to India. The assumption is that the crucifixion of Krishna had the same import as the crucifixion of Christ. Naturally, it would have been important as the god’s ultimate sacrifice, but Christians made it central to their outlook—Hindus probably did not. Indians attracted to the idea of crucifixion, and the success of Christianity shows it is an attractive idea, will have been more prepared to turn to Christ if they saw him as an aspect of Krishna, or even as another avatar of Vishnu. For most sun gods, crucifixion seems to have been an essential but not always the central part of the god’s myth.
There is nothing surprising about any god with a solar aspect being crucified or suffering some equivalent fate, and so we should not be surprised to hear that there is or was such a legend about Krishna. And it would not help to ask a Hindu what they thought the original legend was, or whether they counted Krishna as a sun god. A Hindu cannot enlighten us about the true origins of Krishna, once it had been suppressed, any more than a Christian can enlighten us about the suppressed history of Christ. Both have their preferred mythology that they will believe despite any evidence to the contrary.
Krishna is considered to have been a historic figure, like Christ, living about the time of the Indo-European conquest of India in 1000 BC. But he has acquired the attributes of a sun god just as Christ did in his elevation. He was an avatar of Vishnu, a sun god, who creates Krishna the dark twin and his brother Balarama the light twin from two hairs of his head, one dark and one white. He also had the patronymic Vasudeva, signifying he was a sun god.
The Romans saw Christ as a sun god and put the control of the solar religions of Rome in the hands of the bishops. No one can deny that Christian iconography shows Christ as a sun god. Later religions might have syncretized with Christianity by adopting a crucified saviour, but Christians do not like the fact that crucifixion was an earlier syncretization of ancient mythology with Christianity. Paul and others realised the value of having a newly crucified example of an old phenomenon.
Suffering Saviours
These myths arose before the time of Christ, but their exact date cannot be fixed, because the history of ancient mythology is not known and probably cannot ever be known, and not least because chronology before the time of Alexander the Great (330 BC) gets increasingly uncertain. Some, like Alcestis, can be dated to before the life of the author of a work in which they appear. The dating of icons, especially from distant or isolated cultures is also uncertain. Even mainstream studies of the ancient Near East are involved in controversy over dates, Peter James, for example, claiming in a well argued case that several centuries have been mistakenly inserted into near Eastern chronologies.
Nevertheless, these instances show that the belief in the punishment of gods was prevalent long before the crucifixion of Christ. These crucifixions and atoning deaths are not vouchsafed as actual occurrences. They are mythical not real events. To establish the atoning punishment of divine saviours preceding Christ is an easier task than showing that some were crucified, but six will prove it as well as the sixteen given by Graves. Indeed, one case is sufficient. The reader is left to decide.
Tammuz was a god of Assyria, Babylonia and Sumeria where he was known as Dumuzi. He is commemorated in the name of the month of June, Du’uzu, the fourth month of a year which begins at the spring equinox. The fullest history extant of this saviour is probably that of Ctesias (400 BC), author of Persika. The poet has perpetuated his memory in rhyme.
Trust, ye saints, your Lord restored,
Trust ye in your risen Lord;
For the pains which Tammuz endured
Our salvation have procured.
Tammuz was crucified as an atonement offering: “Trust ye in God, for out of his loins salvation has come unto us.” Julius Firmicus speaks of this God rising from the dead for the salvation of the world. This saviour which long preceded the advent of Christ, filled the same role in sacred history.
Even the Catholic Encyclopedia notes:
Nature Worship generally, and Agrarian in particular, were responsible for the Tammuz cult of Babylon, with which the worships of Adonis and Attis, and even of Dionysus, are so unmistakably allied. Much might have been hoped from these religions with their yearly festival of the dying and rising god, and his sorrowful sister or spouse.
The cross of Christ, as experts seem to agree, was actually a bar placed across the top of an upright, so it was not a cross at all. It was a “Tee” (T), called “Taw” in Hebrew and “Tau” in Greek. So the cross that the victim was suspended from was actually a crossbar, and perhaps in those days this was called the cross. The “Taw” sign was the symbol of the dying and rising god, Tammuz, and “Taw” was the sign that was made on the heads of those marked for salvation by the god. So, crucifixion images might not be as conventional as the ones based on the Catholic crucifix.
Speaking of this crucified Messiah, the Anacalypsis informs us that several histories are given of him, but all concur in representing him as having been an atoning offering for sin. And the Latin phrase “suspensus lingo,” found in his history, indicates the manner of his death. He was suspended on a tree, crucified, buried and rose again. Attis is the Phrygian version of Tammuz, and Adonis and Jesus could equally well be included here as other versions of the same god.
Prometheus (Hesiod 800 BC)
Prometheus was an Indo-European sun god, as his procurement of the sun’s energy as fire shows. He was the Caucasian Orpheus, the benefactor of humanity, whom he taught skills he had learned from Athene (whose birth from the head of Zeus he had assisted). The skills were those such as architecture, astronomy, navigation, mathematics, metallurgy, medicine and such like. In Attica he was worshipped as the god of craftsmen.
Zeus wanted to destroy humanity and spared them because of Prometheus’s plea. But Prometheus was getting too clever and suffered the fate of several saviours who upset Zeus. The legend of Prometheus justifies the sacrificial practice in the ancient Near East of offering fat (for the fire) and bones (for the sweet smell) to the gods while the lean flesh is reserved for the priests. In particular, Prometheus stole the fire of the sun from Olympus by hiding a glowing charcoal in a stalk of fennel and taking it to mortal beings who had been condemned by the angry Zeus to eat their flesh raw. He is depicted as Zeus Prometheus at Thurii, where he holds a swastika (Sanskrit, pramantha—prometheus), the symbol of the sun and fire—produced by a fire drill (swastika), often a tedious process which made the Aryans prefer to keep their fires permanently alight. So, the cause for which Prometheus suffered was his love for the human race. Humans were punished by Zeus but Prometheus took pity on them and gave them warmth. Therefore, he too was punished by Zeus.
The punishment of Prometheus was described by Hesiod, and other writers. Prometheus was crucified on a symbolic tree, depicted as a post, situated near the Caspian Straits. Hesiod writes:
With shackles and inescapable fetters Zeus riveted Prometheus on a pillar.
The illustration is of an ancient Laconian bowl with Prometheus on it, tied to a pillar, a symbolic tree like the cross, while the eagle eats at his liver. The point about the carrion eating birds in these legends is that the crucified corpse was left hanging to be pecked by birds, doubtless a familiar sight at one time, and deserving a mythical explanation. An anonymous poet describes a scene like it, thus:
Lo! streaming from the fatal tree
His all atoning blood,
Is this the Infinite?—Yes, ’tis he,
Prometheus, and a god!
Well might the sun in darkness hide,
And veil his glories in,
When God, the great Prometheus, died
For man the creature’s sin.
Christians complain that Prometheus is not “crucified” here, because “a real crucifixion is on a cross, and Prometheus is not on a cross. He is just tied to a tree, with his feet on the ground, and is is not nailed to anything.”
The word crucifixion refers nowadays to a cross, but the ancient punishment which it represents is most commonly hanging on a tree, a form that applied to several ancient gods. Most scholars, even Christian ones, recognize that the cross is a symbolic tree. Justin Martyr, thinking he is quoting from a psalm, tells us that Jesus was considered to have been hung from a tree:
Let them rejoice among the nations. The Lord hath reigned from the tree.1 Apology 41,
Indeed the scriptural reference in Deuteronomy 21:22—often taken as prophetic of Jesus—is to hanging on a tree, and Peter and the apostles (Acts 5:30;10:39) say Jesus had been hanged on a tree. Crucifixions generally did not involve nailing but tying, and tying even when the hands or wrists were nailed to make sure the weight was carried even if flesh yielded. Ultimately, the point is that the saviour of mankind, here the Titan Prometheus, was cruelly punished, or at least had to suffer cruelly in the myth.
The story of Prometheus’s punishment, burial and resurrection was acted in Athens, in a trilogy of plays written by the great Greek playwright, Æschylus, five hundred years before Christ, showing its great antiquity. Prometheus Bound is the only survivor of the three plays. Zeus had decided to put an end to humanity, but the titan, Prometheus, intervenes, saving them, so Zeus punished him for it. What Prometheus had done was to make humans immortal, so that Zeus’s thunderbolts did not force them to descend in death to Hades. Besides this, when the wrath of Zeus terrified them and they knew they were about to die, Prometheus gave them hope. Now, these are the very gifts that Christians still believe Christ has exclusively conferred upon them—the hope and expectation of life after death!
Besides these gifts, though, Prometheus taught people how to be civilized. Christians also think that to be Christian is to be peculiarly civilized in outlook, despite all the historical evidence to the contrary. Some non-canonical myths of Jesus have him teaching humanity ploughing, planting the vine and so on, just as Prometheus did, and Orpheus after him too. The civilization Christians attribute to Christ is the love of others, something they like to boast about so long as they never have to put it into practice. Loving someone as strange to them as Arabs is just too much! The myth of Prometheus later made him the creator of humanity as well, moulded by him out of clay, according to Pausanias in the second century AD. The goddess, Athena, breathed life into the clay figures to vitalize them. Non-Christians, like Lord Byron, depicted Prometheus as a kind god whose aim was to make the wretched human condition more tolerable. Christians like John Milton saw the parallel of Prometheus and Christ, Milton using Prometheus as an image of Christ, even though he preceded Christ by hundreds of years.
The modern story of this crucified God, which has him bound to a rock for thirty years, while vultures preyed upon his vitals, is a Christian fraud, inasmuch as the crucifixion aspect of the drama was omitted. Yet even in the extant translations of Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, the god is plainly crucified, albeit on a rock:
Force: Seize his hands and master him.
Now to your hammer. Pin him to the rocks.
Drive stoutly now your wedge straight through his breast, the stubborn jaw of steel that cannot break.
Now for his feet. Drive the nails through the flesh.
When Prometheus is crucified in this way, Force taunts him just as Jesus was in the gospels:
Run hot now, you there on the rocks,
Go steal from gods to give their goods to men
What will they do to lift these woes from you?
Prometheus, whose name means “forethought,” had foreseen it all, just as Jesus was supposed to have, and muses to himself in his agony that he had:
Nothing, no pang of pain that I did not foresee.
A chorus of maidens lament his agony and desolation, weeping in sorrow. Soon we hear the very line that is attributed to Christ addressing Paul (Acts 26:14), proof enough that the author knew the play:
Don’t kick against the pricks,
The version of Prometheus given by Aeschylus has Prometheus bound for eternity, because as a god, he was immortal and his liver grew again every night, but Zeus fired a thunderbolt that sent the captive to Tartarus still bound.
Zeus’s thunderbolt shook the earth, rocks were rent, the whole frame of nature became convulsed, and in a storm, which seemed to threaten the dissolution of the universe, the solemn scene closed, and Prometheus departed to the underworld in death. Tartarus is the abyss of the underworld—the equal of the Christian Hell—and to go there means death! Prometheus had told Zeus the secret he wanted to know, and Zeus, responding to his son Herakles’s pleas, allowed Herakles to kill the eagle and free the captive. Prometheus was freed from Tartarus, and later was elevated to Olympus. Confinement to Tartarus is death, liberation from Tartarus is resurrection. Christians find it impossible to understand this.
The dismissal to the underworld after the crucifixion suggests that Prometheus was crucified at the autumn equinox. He is therefore the beneficial summer sun of cool countries being sent back to Hades at the end of the summer. Prometheus is only restored to Olympus because the centaur, Cheiron agrees to lose his immortality to allow Prometheus to regain his. So here the redeemer of humanity is himself redeemed by the self-sacrifice of his personal redeemer Cheiron!
Several other benefactors of humanity—and therefore saviours—were cruelly punished by Zeus. At one time they were the gods of foreign, rebellious or defiant people and so have been punished in hell in the myths of the Greeks.
