Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, November 07, 2001

Ancient Beliefs About Resurrection

The central tenets of the Christian belief are not modern but go back to the most primitive human beings. Ideas of life after death might be as old as consciousness, and therefore reflect nothing more than the difficulty a conscious being has in accepting its personal death.

Excavations of prehistoric graves shows that even primitive humans believed their dead somehow lived on and might exert benign or malign effects on those still alive. The bodies of neolithic people often had a paste of red ochre poured over them in simulation of blood, in the apparent hope that the blood would be returned to the body, and with it life—resurrection.

They were often buried in a foetal position implying that the expectation was of a rebirth—reincarnation. The burial of food and weapons suggest that loved ones thought their dead would need these things in the afterlife, thus implying that the individual personality survived, though the body did not—immortality of the soul. These very ancient people, some of them perhaps not of our own species but Neanderthals, obviously expected that their dead would somehow live again, whether in a new body, in the old one revivified or in the spirit.

Christians like to disparage the obsession of the Egyptians with the afterlife as unsophisticated because of their embalming bodies as mummies and leaving personal possessions in their graves. E Yamauchi, a Christian historian and apologist, writes:

To call the survival of the Ba and Ka, hovering over the mummified body, a “resurrection” is to obscure the essential differences in concepts.

Yet the great Egyptologist, E A Wallis Budge, wrote after a lifetime of study:

The Egyptian belief in Almighty God is old, so old that we must seek for its beginnings in pre-dynastic times, but the belief in a future life is very much older, and its beginnings must be as old, at least, as the oldest human remains which have been found in Egypt.

In fact, the Egyptian belief was more sophisticated than the original Christian one. Few Christians now believe in the resurrection of the physical body, resurrection of Jesus or not. They believe that, if they are good, they will go to heaven—a transcendental place—and if they are wicked, they will go to hell. There is no place in modern Christian belief for resurrection of dead bodies, the appearance of Jesus after his death, nowadays, simply being his final miracle as proof of his divinity.

Even so, Christian intellectuals still believe in physical resurrection after death, but quite how is a mystery. They seem to believe it because it was the promise of Jesus but, despite the saints breaking from their tombs in Matthew, proving that others besides Jesus were already being resurrected 2000 years ago, no one has yet met a resurrected person that they knew before death. Most Christians find it impossible to believe and do not believe it, but consistency has never been a trait among Christians.

Egyptians, at one time, apparently believed in bodily resurrection, which is why they took so much trouble in making mummies. But even by the earliest dynasties, few believed it any more. The conservatism of Egyptian society kept them making mummies for millennia but they now justified it as necessary to provide the home of the personality or double (Ka) and the soul (Ba) and as a seed for spirit to grow in heaven.

The first Christians accepted resurrection of the physical body, a concept that the Egyptians had rejected as impossible. The Egyptians thought their dead lived in heaven, a place like the Elysian fields of the Greeks or the Paradise of the Persians—a luxurious and happy place. They had no fear of them returning to earth because no one would want to leave heaven. So unlike the Assyrians and Babylonians they did not fear dead spirits. Both the Egyptian and the Babylonian religions hinted at a doctrine of salvation of sorts through a communion. In Egypt, mummification rituals had an aim of identifying the dead person with Osiris (User, Weser, Ousir) who was resurrected into a reassembled body though thereafter his personality lived on only in the underworld. The Babylonians had the rite of “Puhu” or substitution, whereby the person was identified with Tammuz and thereby freed from sickness.

In ancient Mesopotamia, Tammuz was raised from the underworld by his sister-wife Ishtar, an agricultural myth reflecting the annual renewal of nature. The Ras Shamra texts tell of the slaying of Baal, the Canaanite god,who disappears for seven years with universal mourning. The message “Baal Lives” is broadcast and all nature rejoices. Persephone or Kore is the expression of the same vegetation myth for the Greeks. In each of these, it is a god who is resurrected, not a human being.

What was true of humans was not true of gods. The old Mesopotamian view of death was pessimistic. They conceived of the afterlife as a gloomy, shadowy existence in the “Land of No Return”. Gilgamesh sought in vain the secret of mankind’s lost immortality. When Ishtar told the gatekeeper of the Underworld that she would raise up the dead, it was a calamity, not a hope, because the dead would outnumber the living! Babylonians lived in fear of the spirits of women who had died in childbirth or the spirits of those who had not been buried according to the proper funeral rites.

The ancient Greek attitude was an essentially tragic outlook. Epitaphs reflect an almost universal pessimism about life beyond the grave. Achilles in Hades says he would rather be a landless peasant on earth than king of the Underworld. After Homer’s time a hope for a blissful existence in the Elysian Fields was held out, but only for heroes.

The dominant Jewish view, conditioned by Babylonians and then Greeks, was equally depressing, the dead going to Sheol, a gloomy underground world of dust and silence from which there also was no return. Job cries out:

If a man die, shall he live again?

But he already knows the answer:

Man lieth down, and riseth not. Till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.

The Mesopotamian and Jewish view changed under the influence of Persian Zoroastrianism, which gave Judaism and hence Christianity its modern, but foolish concepts.

In the classical period, the immortality of the soul was stressed in opposition to the body, which was described by the Orphics as “soma sema”, the body a tomb. Plato in The Phaedo taught that the body is the chief hindrance to wisdom and truth. Seneca, the Stoic tutor of Nero and Paul’s contemporary, spoke of “the detestable habitation of the body, and vain flesh in which the soul is imprisoned”.

In the Hellenistic age, the Greek philosophers varied in their views on immortality but agreed on the undesirability of reviving the body. The Stoics, who were pantheists, believed that souls left the body to ascend to the celestial regions of the moon before being absorbed in the All. A Stoic epitaph reads:

The ashes have my body, the sacred air has borne away my soul.

Epicurus, whose philosophy was based upon the atomistic cosmology of Democritus, taught that at death the atoms of the body simply disintegrated. There was no immortality but instead freedom from the terrors of the Beyond. The Epicurean indifference to the afterlife is reflected in such epitaphs as:

It was not, It was, I am not, I do not care.

Eat, drink, play, come hither (to death).

Paul mocks this saying (1 Cor 15:32). It is therefore not surprising that the Stoics and the Epicureans at the Areopagus in Athens disdainfully dismissed Paul when he began to preach to them the resurrection (Acts 17:31-32). In educated circles, it was an axiom that only the soul had value not the physical body. The Christian hope of resurrection of the body was vain and undesirable.

Greeks considered Thracians a poor ignorant race, but the Thracian religion involved a belief in immortality. Herodotus (Histories 4:94-6) says the Getae believed they did not die, but departed this life to go to their God, Zalmoxis. Zalmoxis was at first a man who lived at Samos as a slave of Pythagoras. After obtaining his freedom, he grew rich and returned to his own country, where he built a chamber where from time to time he received and feasted all the principal Thracians, teaching them that none of them would ever perish, but would go to a place where they would live forever enjoying every conceivable good. Meanwhile, he was digging an apartment underground, and, when it was completed, he withdrew into it suddenly. The Thracians took him as dead, regretted his loss and mourned him. After three full years in his secret chamber, he showed himself once more to his countrymen, who thus believed what he had taught them.

The story suggests the Getae (probably the Goths) believed Zalmoxis had come back to full active life. Zalmoxis was a slave of Pythagoras probably meaning a disciple, so he was a missionary to his own people of the Orphic religion propagated by the Pythagoreans. Strabo says he was also taught by the Egyptians, and was a prophet because he could “report the will of the gods”. He was good enough at this to impress the Thracean king and be appointed a priest. Strabo says he lived in a cavern where he continued as an advisor (prophet) to the king. The story could be an outline of the story of Zoroaster, whose career was similar. As in many of these ancient religions, the reports are those of foreign observers, and they might be deliberately or unintentionally misunderstood.

That Zalmoxis appeared again alive as a fit and normal human being was a more successful resurrection of the body than the Christian one. But is was a fraud, Christians will say, unable as ever to see the possibilities of fraudulence in their own story. Since the account was given by the Greeks, it might have been a deliberate mockery of something inconceivable to the Greek mentality.

That bodily resurrection was just as difficult to accept among gentiles early in gentile Christianity as it is for some today—for different reasons—is shown by the reaction of Pagan critics and of the Gnostics. The raising of a corpse was ridiculed as a shameful act by Celsus, Porphyry and Julian. Gnostic teachers such as Valentinus taught a Docetic view that the resurrection involved only the noncorporal elements of personality.

Anthropologists have found repeatedly that the initiation rites of primitive people is a symbolic death and rebirth. The novitiate undergoes various trials, often bloody and painful like circumcision, which culminate in a ritual death after which the candidate is reborn into their new status in society. The same is found in the Pagan mystery religions. In the cult of Mithras, the candidate symbolically died and was reborn into a higher grade of the cult. The same is true to this day of Masonic initiation.

Descent and Resurrection

How does Jesus’s resurrection compare with the many resurrection stories in religious history—the various pagan tales of dying and rising gods such as Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, and Dionysos?—stories that appeared in the Levant at the beginnings of historical time. Even in the Roman period, some of the deities that died and came to life again were still recognizably gods of the decay and renewal of vegetation. Tammuz, Adonis and Attis never seem to have lost their nature aspect. In the Christian tradition, the idea appears only occasionally.

• For if men do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?
  Lk 23:31—This is Tammuz
• I am the true vine
  Jn 15:1—This is Dionysos, depicted on bas-reliefs in the imperial age as a child emerging out of grapes, vine branches, and acanthus
• Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.
  Jn 12:24—This suggests the corn goddess and her daughter at Eleusis

The concept of resurrection was quite familiar to the Greeks in their myths. The Christian story was folly to them because it was not claimed to be mythical but historical! By the time of Paul, no educated Greeks believed in the stories of the Olympians except as edifying tales, and introductions to poetry and learning. Along comes Paul of Tarsus telling them that a god, a virgin-born god, had really been slain recently in Judaea and has risen from the dead! They laughed.

In the Eleusinian Mysteries, Pluto carried off Persephone in winter to the underworld but she returned in spring, an allegory of the vegetative cycle intended as fertility magic. The question is why should this rural allegory of nature’s cycle appeal to city dwellers? Only by giving it a relevant reinterpretation as an allegory of the soul’s journey to Heaven. Persephone descended into the underworld, a metaphorical death, but was raised up to the freshness of life. She is the goddess of Life and Death. Worshippers of Dionysos considered that the squeezing of the juice from the grape to make wine symbolised the soul leaving the body. Journeys like Odysseus’s were allegories of the soul’s journey home just as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is. In the later Empire the cosmos, represented by the Zodiac, signifying the highest level of spirituality, in short Heaven, was used on graves to show what the dead person hoped would happen to his soul.

The Apostles Creed and the Athanasian Creed but not the Nicene Creed say that between the Friday night and the Sunday morning Jesus was in Hell. It did not appear as a tenet of Christianity until the fourth century AD, has no scriptural foundation save the briefest reference in 1 Peter, yet is an ever present in the Pagan religions of Herakles, Dionysos, Orpheus, Osiris, Hermes, Krishna, Balder, and so on. Indeed one of the most important aspect of the mystery religions seemed to have been the descent and ascent of the soul.

In Sicily, an effigy of the dead Christ is prepared for burial amid wailing which continues from Good Friday until midnight on Saturday when the bishop announces that the Lord is risen and everyone greets the dawn with shouts of joy. A parallel tradition preserved by Christians in parts of Greece reflects Pagan worship of the Spartan god, Hyacinthus, whose three day festival, the Hyacinthia, was held each year in spring or early summer. Hyacinthus, youngest son of King Amyclas of Sparta, was so handsome that Apollo came down to play with him, but one day the god accidentally killed him as they prectised discus throwing. The young god was unable to save his friend but made his blood into a flower. So, the hyacinth—a spring flower, a small purple iris, not our common hyacinth—sprang up from his blood, and Apollo mourned bitterly. A bas-relief on his tomb at Amyclae shows that he ascended into heaven accompanied by a choir of divine nymphs. On the first day his death was bewailed, on the second his resurrection was rejoiced and on the third his ascension was commemorated—the usual story.

The story of Narcissus depicts the soul descending to the plant level where it is incarnated as a flower. Psyche is the Greek word for soul and the story of Cupid and Psyche is yet another allegory of the journey of the soul into Hell to be restored. Venus is jealous of Psyche’s beauty and banishes her. Venus’s son Cupid and Psyche fall in love but she disobeys him and he cannot prevent the punishment. Psyche desperately tries to find Cupid but suffers many tribulations before she descends to Hades. Cupid finds her overwhelmed by a magic sleep representing death and restores her to Olympus (Heaven). The soul is saved by divine love as it is in Christianity.

The Greek romantic novels presuppose the stories of dying and rising dieties. The old legends emerge in the novels adapted to mortal life, shorn of superstition and presented in a feasible way. Chariton, writing at the beginning of the Christian era, if not earlier, mentions an empty sepulchre. In the story, Chaereas goes to the grave of his supposedly deceased wife, Callirhoe.

• He arrived at the tomb at daybreak
• He found the stones removed and the entrance open. At that he took fright
• No one dared enter the tomb
• He could not believe that his wife was not lying there
• He searched throughout the tomb, but could not find anything
• Finally, Chaereas says, speaking in spirit to his wife, “I will search for you by water and by land”.

At some points, agreement between the story of Chaereas and the New Testament is almost word for word. The connexions with the fourth gospel are particularly clear, since there the fact of the empty tomb is especially emphasized and elaborately portrayed (Jn 20:5). The motif of an empty tomb occurs in several stories of gods, though not in the case of Osiris, and resurfaces in early Christianity.

The Third Day

The resurrection tradition in the gospels is not necessarily copied from the the dying and rising deities, but features are present which are also in pagan traditions, suggesting a common origin in the psychology of comtremporary culture. One is the third day. The gospels take it for granted that Jesus rose on the third day, although we find in Matthew:

For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

Mt 12:14; cf Jonah 1:17

According to the Pyramid Texts, Horus “drives away the evil in Osiris on his fourth day”, that is, after three days and three nights, probably meaning Osiris’s resurrection. A Greco-Egyptian book on magic supports this idea:

On the river bank in Busiris, where the boats come in, I am going to cry out the one who stayed in the water for three days (and) three nights, namely the hesies, whom the current bore out to sea.

The Egyptian-Coptic-Greek word “hesies” refers to Osiris, or to the one who drowned in the Nile and became Osiris—the god himself, but Plutarch says, in the Egyptian calendar of festivals, Osiris dies on Hathor 17th, to be “discovered” on the third day, the 19th. The two phrases, “on the third day” and “after three days and three nights” are used together with reference to both Jesus and Osiris.

As far as Attis is concerned, his death was celebrated on March 22, his resurrection on March 25, after three days and three nights. In the case of Adonis we have no direct witness, but he is thought to have been the original source of the prophecy of Hosea:

After two days will he revive us, in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight.

Hos 6:2

Jesus himself is resurrected at the full moon, but the moon is invisible for about three days at the new moon when the beginning of the month was determined and the New Year pronounced. According to a Jewish belief that originated in Persia, the soul stays near the body for three days after a person’s death:

For three days the soul hovers over the grave, contemplating a return to the body, but once it sees that the facial color has faded, it goes away, never to return.

Gen Rab 50:10

This is reflected in John. Lazarus has been in the grave for four days by the time Jesus resurrects him. The miracle is immense beyond comparison (Jn 11:17, 39).

The traditions often require a prolonged search for the departed deity. The devotees carry out the search in a kind of theatrical drama. Albrecht Dieterich gives us the wording of their cry of joy on finally discovering their god:

We have found (Osiris)! We all rejoice!

While there is no trace of a symbolic search for the body of Christ in the liturgy of the early church, a story of comparable form is found in the gospels. The women who go to the tomb on Easter Sunday morning, as well as some of the disciples who follow them, are searching for the body. This is most apparent in the fourth gospel, the latest tradition (Jn 20:1).

Osiris and Isis, the Heavenly Mother

Egypt was the home of the myth of a slain and resurrected god. Plutarch, writing in late antiquity, gives us in On Isis and Osiris a concise account of the life of Osiris, but as Plutarch knows, the story is incomplete. Egyptian sources complete it, but the love of Isis was proverbial:

May “such-and-such” love me all her life, just as Isis loved Osiris.

A Greco-Egyptian magical papyrus

“I am the Resurrection and the Life” is essentially what the Egyptians chanted about their god Osiris, the judge of the dead. He had been slain by “the powers of darkness” embodied in his wicked brother, Set. His sister and wife, Isis, had sought the fragments of his body and put them together again and he had arisen from the dead, and was enthroned in the world of souls, to judge every man according to the weight of his works. The resurrection of Osiris was the basis of the Egyptian’s firm hope of eternal life. Every year Egyptians mourned for days over the slaying of Osiris and then rejoiced exceedingly over his resurrection.

Isis and Osiris were mythical sovereigns of prehistoric Egypt, possibly based on real people, but were thought of as incarnated gods who suffered in the world before ascending to Heaven. So Isis worship began in Egypt, but she became Hellenized on the way to Rome adopting the Greek language and many non-Egyptian elements. Isis was worshipped in Greece in the fourth century BC and in Rome about 100 BC.

The successor of Alexander the Great who inherited Egypt, Ptolemy I (305-285 BC), aiming to continue the policy of spreading Greek culture and religion syncretistically throughout the conquered lands, modified the religion by introducing a Hellenised form of the Osiris and Isis cult into Alexandria. Kings promoted syncretism as social cement, sometimes quite blatantly to those who think religion comes from God. The new cult of Isis and Serapis seems to have been modelled on the Eleusinian mysteries which had been popular for hundreds of years. The hierophants of Eleusis were called Eumolpides and Ptolemy invited one of these, Timothy, and a poet, Demetrius of Phaleron, to design a mystery of Isis and Osiris based on the Eleusinian mysteries.

Osiris was identified with Serapis, so the consort of Isis became Serapis instead of Osiris. Apis was already the god of the bright world and Osiris the god of the dark world, so by combining the two Ptolemy made a universal god, like Yehouah. The idea was that Greeks and Egyptians could feel equally comfortable at worship and the Ptolemaic Empire would be strengthened. The religion surpassed Ptolemy’s best dreams and became a root of Christianity.

For the Egyptians, Serapis or Osiris was the Lord of life and death and so he remained in the mystery cult. Ancient Egyptians texts promised a worshipper, in Barbara G Walker’s words:

As truly as Osiris lives shall he live;
As truly as Osiris is not dead, shall he not die;
As truly as Osiris is not annihilated, shall he not be annihilated.

It expresses the sentiment of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. In this quotation, the abstract “he” means the dead person, and as E A Wallis Budge wrote: “Everywhere in the Book of the Dead, the deceased is identified with Osiris from 3400 BC to the Roman period.” By identifying himself with Osiris, the initiate became immortal. The Hermetic literature having the same roots, confirms this when it says:

For those who have attained knowledge (gnosis), the blessed end is deification.

Thus everlasting life could be had by initiation or by receiving knowledge by accepting a discourse (logos). The Pharaohs were considered to have been Osiris incarnate. After the New Kingdom (from 1570 BC) initiates into the religion believed that they would enjoy identification or communion with the god at death, thus triumphing with him over death.

Despite this Christians can assert:

Isis does not promise the “mystes” immortality, but only that henceforth he shall live under her protection, and that when at length he goes down to the realm of the dead he shall adore her.

Quite how a dead man can be protected by the goddess so that he can thereafter adore her without having some form of immortality is hard to understand.

Within the sphere of influence of the Ptolemaic Empire, which included Palestine at least part of the time, the cult of Serapis and Isis spread in the two centuries preceding the events of the gospels. Temples to Isis or Serapis have been found at Athens, Pompeii and Puteoli. In the first century BC, Isis was regarded as a universal goddess, identified with Rhea, Demeter, Hestia, Hera, Aphrodite, Leto, Nanaia, Artemis and Astarte. She is the feminine principle, the Mother Goddess, like Cybele. Her advantage over Cybele was being Egyptian which gave her a history much longer than that of the Anatolian goddess.

Caligula built a temple to Isis in Rome in 38 AD, but from the time of Julius Caesar there had been a temple to Isis and Serapis on Capitoline Hill. Josephus even associated it with Jesus, in relating the story of the rape of the beautiful but naïve Paulina by the priests of the temple of Isis, a possible allusion to the virgin birth of Jesus and a suggested explanation. The priests were crucified. There was a temple of Isis in Southwark, London. Isis worship was so widespread and popular in the Roman Empire at the time of the foundation of Christianity that an early Christian was able to write that some lands were full of the “madness of Isis” and it is suggested that Claudius deliberately promoted the cult of Cybele and Attis to temper its success and power.

The popularity of the cult was sustained for another four centuries, based on its offer of immortality to its followers and its majestic ceremonial. The last recorded festival of Isis was held in Rome in 394 AD but it was one of the last of the old faiths to die out, surviving less flamboyantly—it was illegal—against the Christian onslaught until the fifth century AD.

The Myths of Isis and Osiris

Plutarch wrote in the beginning of the second century AD a full account of the myth of the death and dismemberment of Osiris by Set and his double revivication by Isis. His account matches the early Egyptian texts.

Osiris, Isis and Horus are the Egyptian Trinity. When a new cult was being developed or imposed, the priests who rose to power often pushed the older deities upstairs by calling them “mother” or “father” of the gods. They remained notionally in charge of their offspring but practical honours were offered to their children. Osiris, Isis and Horus were made co-equals in a holy family, while older gods were pushed upstairs into obscurity, and another old Egyptian god Set was discredited, and he was made the murderer of the popular Osiris, the god equivalent in Egypt to Christ in Christendom.

Nut, the sky goddess, was the spouse of Ra, the sun god, who begot Osiris. By dallying with Thoth, the divine messenger, she gave birth to Isis, and by dallying again with Seb, the earth-god, to Set. Isis and Osiris so instinctively loved each other that they had relations with each other, unwittingly in the divine mother’s womb. Osiris and Isis were therefore brother and sister but, after the fashion of the Pharaohs they married. Osiris became ruler of Egypt, which he civilized, and he then set out to civilize the world.

The loving pair annoyed the prince of darkness, Set, whose father, Seb, is the equivalent of the Roman Saturn. Osiris was murdered by Set, who enticed Osiris to enter a handsome chest, fastened it down with molten lead, and had it flung into the Nile. The desolated Isis sought her brother and lover high and low. This search for the missing god or goddess is a common feature, and was dramatically represented in all the old mysteries. The chest was washed up on the coast of Syria and became lodged in the trunk of a tree which grew to such proportions that it was eventually cut down and used in as a column of the palace at Byblos with the coffin inside the trunk. Isis eventually found it there. After an interlude that smacks of the Demeter and Brimos story, she took the chest and set the tree in a temple swathed in linen like the tree of Attis.

Back in Egypt, Isis lay in the form of a hawk upon the dead body of Osiris and thus miraculously conceived her son Horus. Or she left the coffin at a place in Egypt while she went to see Horus. The evil Set found the body of Osiris and tore it into fourteen pieces, and scattered them. Isis painstakingly sought the parts of Osiris’s body and Isis and Horus put them together. As the wings of Isis fluttered over the corpse, Ra then reanimated him, and Osiris was resurrected. But, to confuse Set, Isis effected to have each part buried where she found it, which is why there were fourteen graves of Osiris in Egypt. But she could not find a penis which the fishes had swallowed, and had to make a synthetic one to conceive, in this version, their child Horus. Osiris then reigned as the king of the dead while Horus reigned on earth. At the core of this myth is a doctrine of a beneficent god slain by the powers of darkness and rising again from the dead.

Rituals

As the judge of the dead, Osiris was a stern moral judge, and personal immortality, prefigured by the resurrection of Osiris, was the firmest of beliefs for Egyptians. The Pyramid Texts—inscriptions on the inner walls of the oldest pyramid tombs—show that this was common Egyptian doctrine three thousand years before Christ, and must go back to the dawn of civilization. Egyptian priests mimicked the resurrection of Osiris over the corpse as a pledge of a glorious resurrection in the kingdom of Osiris. The priests of Isis shaved their heads and bodies and wore white linen garments in token of the purity which the religion of Isis demanded. They never ate flesh meat, or even vegetables that had been in contact with manure, and no wine was admitted into their houses. Salt even was eschewed, since it led to an increase of the appetite for food and drink. The cult of purity was dominant in later Egypt.

The national festival of Osiris lasted eighteen days and included a most elaborate ritual in the temple. At Sais, one of the centers of the Osiris cult, this myth was annually celebrated in November, the period of sowing the corn in Egypt, in a sacred and solemn ceremony. Inscriptions and bas-reliefs in the temples show that the image of Osiris was buried, and in the end he was shown rising from his bier under the spreading wings of Isis. The death of Osiris caused the Nile to flood and the land to become fertile.

There were four days of mourning and lamentation over the dead god, whose sufferings were represented as a sacred drama on a lake at night, while the people lit lamps to illuminate their houses and allowed them to burn all night in honour of the god in particular and the deceased in general. This is reminiscent of the Christian festival of All Souls held at the beginning of November when candles are burnt all night in honour of the dead. Though the Church only recognised this ceremony in 998 AD, Sir James Frazer has shown that it was simply incorporating the ancient Pagan custom. The festival of All Saints held one day earlier was recognised in 835 AD and undoubtedly has the same origin.

Three days later the priests bore to the river a golden casket into which they poured water, and at that moment the worshippers raised the cry that Osiris had been found. A gold figure of a cow with a black cover represented Isis during the sacred drama, and the shaven priests and the worshipers beat their breasts and lashed their shoulders to let blood flow. Firmicus Maternus wrote a valuable book, The Errors of the Profane Religions, which records many Pagan beliefs and ceremonies which the Church Christianized. Firmicus believed that the devil had given the world these legends in advance to spoil the chances of Christianity when it came. He says of the Egyptians:

They have in a temple an image of Osiris buried, and this they honor with an annual lamentation. They shave their heads… they beat their breasts. And when they have done this for a few days, they pretend that they have found the fragments of the torn body, and they lay aside their grief and rejoice.

In other places where the passion-play was given, a boy impersonated Osiris, and was found by the priests. The boy playing the god is wrapped in a shroud and is led back from hell carrying a napkin by two priests, a tradition which seems to be echoed in the John’s story (Jn 20:6-12) of the tomb empty save for two shining figures, a shroud and napkin.

A great feature of the festival, all over Egypt, was the making of images of Osiris with grains of corn planted inside them and gradually growing out of them, a symbol of new life, of the resurrection of the corn-spirit from what was left of the dead plant. All Egypt was from time immemorial familiar with a story of a suffering, slain, and risen god, the greatest benefactor of mankind.

Bishop Cyril of Alexandria highlights the antiquity of the Osiris myth compared with Christianity. Writing his Commentary on Isaiah, he had arrived at this obscure passage:

Woe to the land shadowing with wings which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia: That sendeth ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels of bulrushes upon the waters, saying: Go, ye swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled…

Isa 18:1-2

Modern translators do not understand it, but Cyril of Alexandria did, and he explains what it means. Properly translated, the passage reads:

Woe to the land of the fluttering of the wings of birds, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia: That sendeth hostages by the sea and letters of papyrus upon the waters, saying: Go, ye swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled…

Isa 18:1-2

The women sent letters on rafts to some people abroad, and Cyril, living on the coast of Egypt had seen them. In the myth of Osiris, the body of Osiris floated to Byblos and Isis went there to recover it. To explain the “letters of papyrus” in Isaiah, Cyril notes that every year the “friends of Venus”, meaning priestesses of the Phœnician Astarte, mourned at Byblos. The divine lover whose death the priestesses mourned was the Phœnician Adonis, the Lord Tammuz of Babylonia.

The women of the land “beyond the rivers of Ethiopia”, Egypt where flocks of birds lived amongst the reeds of the Delta, wrote a letter on papyrus, put it on a raft, and sent it out to sea to float like the coffin of the god to Byblos, and inform the friends of Venus that Osiris’s body had been found, and so their mourning turned into the joy of the resurrection. In short, every year the Egyptian devotees of Osiris and Isis floated a message in the sea to the devotees or priestesses of Astarte at Byblos. Christians will accept that Isaiah wrote this reference to the Osiris ritual seven centuries before Jesus was born.

Alexandria had at least three slain and resurrected gods, for the worship of the Persian god Mithras flourished there, as everywhere else after the Persian conquests. Firmicus describes the Mithraist celebration in Rome. Every year the Mithraists laid a statue of Mithras on a bier, mourned his death, and then, in a blaze of candles, rejoiced at his resurrection. Alexandria did not differ from other cosmopolitan cities of the time.

Isis

Apuleius in the Golden Ass is coy about revealing the secrets of the mysteries of Isis, teasing the reader that he cannot say and the reader should not ask. Agreeing eventually to say something about it, he tells the reader to “believe it is the truth”, as if it might not be after all. The reader is left just as unsure as he was at first! Doubtless, this is the writer’s way of defending himself from the accusation of revealing ineffable secrets. Whether strictly true or not of any particular cult, Apuleius succeeds in giving us a good impression of the rituals, which was probably his aim. He says he is taken to the frontiers of death but, at the darkest hour, he saw the sun shining brightly, and then he returned through the four elements, coming face to face with the gods of heaven and earth. It seems that lighting, mirrors and some unknown method of illuminating suddenly were involved. Apuleius’s hero, Lucius, seemed not too noble and some Christian wag remarked that the mystery divinities were not fussy about who they accepted as initiates. It was projection!

The followers of Isis liked two of her aspects in particular, the bereaved wife weeping for her dead husband and the heavenly mother of the child Horus. Her grieving role likened her to Demeter who mourned her daughter, Persephone, in the Eleusinian mysteries, to Astarte who mourned her dead son, Adonis, and to Cybele who mourned her dead son, Attis. In her second role, Isis had a pronounced effect on the Christian perception of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Isis was endlessly depicted holding the divine child Horus, so there was no break in continuity when the Christian image of the Madonna and Child took over. Looking at old figurines, it is often quite impossible to tell which was which.

Mary was first called the “Mother of God” in Alexandria, the Egyptian centre of Isis worship, in the third century. Just after 400 AD Epiphanius denounced women who worshipped Mary as a goddess. Yet by 430 AD Proclus hailed her as the Mother of God and an intermediary between God and man. Nestorius objected to this. But a decisive sermon was preached in 431 AD at Ephesus which led to Nestorius being discredited and Mary elevated to the Queen of Heaven. In another of those pointed coincidences, Diana or Artemis, whose day was 13 August, had been the goddess of the Ephesians and represented an aspect of Isis. In the sixth century, a popular myth that Mary had been miraculously carried to Heaven by Jesus and his angels was officially recognised by the Church as “The Assumption”. Now it is a great Roman Catholic festival held on… 13 August!

There are several other strange coincidences.

• Many paintings of the Virgin Mary contain a crescent moon. Isis and Artemis were associated with Selene, the moon goddess.
• The Pagan Queen of Heaven was Astarte, the Ashtaroth of the Bible. In Paphos in Cyprus, women made offerings to the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven in the ruins of the ancient temple of Astarte!
• In many countries, Mary is the Stella Maris, the Star of the Sea. Isis was the goddess of the sea, a role she had assumed from Venus (Astarte) who was born of the foam of the sea, mourned Adonis just as Isis mourned Osiris, and of course was the Morning Star.
• The festival of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin is held on 25 March because it is precisely nine months before the official birth date of Jesus on 25 December. It is no coincidence that the birth of Jesus was set on the same day as the birth of the sun god who was identified with Horus (Ra), the son of Isis and Osiris. 25 March is thus also the date of the Annunciation of Isis.

The Meaning of Resurrection

Christians like to quibble here about the meaning of words, believing that they have a trade mark on some of them, and because they are quite incapable of realising that the story of the raising of Jesus is no less mythical than that of Osiris. Christians admit that Osiris is the only god for whom there is clear and early evidence of a “sort of resurrection”. Nevertheless, we are warned by the Christian scholars, the Egyptian view of the afterlife cannot be considered in the same breathe as the “resurrection” of Judaeo-Christian traditions. They say, really Osiris was not resurrected because he remains in the underworld as its king, and the use of “resurrection” is an unwarranted application of a Christian word to an unsuitable context. Father Roland de Vaux, the Catholic archaeologist of Qumran, notes:

What is meant of Osiris being “raised to life”? Simply that, thanks to the ministrations of Isis, he is able to lead a life beyond the tomb which is an almost perfect replica of earthly existence. But he will never again come among the living and will reign only over the dead. This revived god is in reality a “mummy” god.

Resurrection is indeed a raising from the dead and Osiris was sufficiently raised from the dead in his legend to father the child Horus, albeit with a synthetic privvy member. What is more, when did Jesus ever come “among the living” other than in his myth? As to ruling in the underworld, we are to understand that Jesus, in his legend, sits in heaven on the right hand of God. Whether you rule heaven or hell you are dead to this world and alive somewhere else, so what is the difference between the resurrection of Jesus and Osiris? Christians are utterly incapable of seeing the incongruity of their arguments.

Dionysos and Orpheus

Dionysos seems to mean Son of God from Dio—god, and Nyos—something born. The Mysteries of Dionysos rivaled those of Demeter at Eleusis but were more active. Dionysos was a god of the lower regions including the earth and the regions below. Thus he was in charge of the fate of men and of their souls and was considered an important god to stay on good terms with. Dionysos was the only begotten son of Zeus (Jupiter, in Rome) and Persephone (Roman Propserpina) and was called “Zagreus” as their heir. But the Titans tore him to pieces, roasted him and completely devoured him except for his heart which Athena saved. Zeus punished the Titans by firing a thunderbolt to turn them to ashes. From the ashes he made mankind. A mortal woman, Semele, took a love potion made from the heart and mated with Zeus. But she forced Zeus to reveal himself and shriveled up, as mortals who see the face of a god do. Her baby however was saved and, sewn into Zeus’s thigh, was protected until he was reborn—another interpretation of the name Dionysos is “twice born”. The god Dionysos then saved his mother from Hades and elevated her to Olympus.

After he had arisen he said to mankind:

It is I who guide you. It is I who protect you, and who save you. I am Alpha and Omega.

He was slain for redeeming humanity and was called “the slain one”, “the sin bearer” and “the redeemer”. The rest of his career he spent wandering the world giving mankind arts, crafts and agriculture, particularly cultivation of the vine and wine making. He was named the god of wine and revelry. His disciple, Acoetes, was, like Peter, a boatman and in one adventure, like Peter, he was freed from jail when the doors miraculously flew open. Dionysos is the intelligence of the world. Because he is part of everyone he provides us with perception, understanding and creativity—he was the god of poets.

Dionysian initiation is to awaken the higher mind, to comprehend its participation in the whole. Nightly celebrations were held in which the votaries would observe the “sparagmos”—the tearing apart of a live animal, the eating of its flesh, and the drinking of its blood, symbolic of the Titans’ eating the body of Dionysos. Participants believed they were in fact partaking of the god’s body and blood. Since the flesh represented the god the worshippers absorbed part of the god giving them communion with him.

Having temporarily received his powers they abandoned themselves to frenzied dancing becoming ecstatic. Because Dionysos was the god of the vine, worshippers practised ritual intoxication and, because he was the god of fertility and the regenerative power of sex, they practised ritual intercourse. The cult survived well into the Christian era despite persecution by the Christians. His life and death cycle however was unusual in being celebrated in alternate years, one for his death then the next for his resurrection as “the Light of the East”.

By the second century BC, the rites of Dionysos had become popular, not only in Thrace, Macedon, Greece and Asia Minor, but also in Magna Graecia, Sicily, Etruria and Rome, where Dionysos was identified with Liber. In 186 BC, the republican senate took severe measures to suppress this cult. It survived and became a major religious institution. In Imperial Rome, it consisted both of a serious religion and a conglomerate of supporters’ clubs, a variety of eating and drinking societies held under the auspices of the god.

Terracotta statuettes, coins, vase paintings, tomb and sarcophagi carvings, and frescoes all testify to the worship of Dionysos being popular in Southern Italy, Campania and Etruria in the fourth and third centuries BC. The Romans too were familiar enough with Bacchus, as the plays of Plautus show, the author treating the rites scornfully. A subterranean Bacchic chamber was discovered at Volsinii, dated in the third century. An Etruscan haruspex about 200 BC who was also a priest of Bacchus, left an epitaph that shows the sect was well established and accepted in Etruria. Liber and the Bacchanals are central to Naevius’s tragedy, Lycurgus, from the fragments that remain. The poets showed Bacchanalia as ecstatic, irrational, violent, and even lunatic. Despite this neither the people nor the nobility had shown any previous inclinations to persecute it.

The religion was accepted until 186 BC, when suddenly, in response to a scandal, the worship of Bacchus was declared illegal, and the full power of the Roman state was used to repress it. Its meetings were broken up, its leaders arrested, worshippers hunted, and severe punishments disbursed, more than half of them capital. Livy gives the official line. The religion had been a cover for outrageous and illegal practices, sexual licence, forgery and even murder, and its meetings had been held clandestinely because they involved alarming initiation ceremonies that corrupted youth.

The cult had spread like a contagion while the authorities were apparently quite in the dark about it, so says Livy. Then a former slave and courtesan, Hispala spilled the beans and stood witness against the cult when her paramour, a young noble, complained of a plot to steal his inheritance. Hispala described the Bacchanals as a cover for orgies, homosexuality, pederasty during initiatiation of boys, human sacrifice, and so on. These charges have stuck ever since. The woman and her young customer had to be held in protective custody while the purge of the sect took place. The charges then seem to have been extended, and the fear became one of a seditious conspiracy to assume power in the state.

A senatus consultum banned the religion forever except in special cases when such as no more than two men and three women met. The ancient altars and sacred images were also to be preserved (confirming that the religion had been practised unmolested for a long time). People all over Italy had, until then, practised these rites perfectly legally, and it is hardly surprising that they were shocked and fled in horror at the prospect of losing their lives. Many even committed suicide, for Romans a noble duty, rather than embarrass your friends and family or invite divine wrath. Arrests were still being made in 181 BC. In the fashion typical of witch hunts, the Senate encouraged people to name names and made it a crime to hold back any information or conceal anyone. It was said to involve thousands, and eventually seven thousand were named, a majority of whom were sentenced to death.

The incident was uncharacteristic of the Romans who had been notably tolerant of foreign cults. Officials had introduced the Sibylline Books from abroad, and used them and the oracle of Delphi to obtain divine advice when it was needed. On their advice, they had introduced the cult of Æsculapius, then that of Dis Pater and Prosperpina, then the Venus Ericina, and latterly the Magna Mater. Yet here the Senate approved a quaestio extra ordinem, mandating both consuls to investigate and to take whatever urgent action they deemed necessary with no appeal or repeal—effectively dictatorship—the consuls having absolute power in this matter, placing them above the law, yet approved by the Senate.

Part of the fear might have been the cult’s organisation. The accusation constantly wheeled out in the inquisition was that of conspiracy called coniuratio, implying that the concerns were more political than religious or social. The cult was indeed well organised with priests and priestesses, and male and female officials with the titles sacerdotes and magistri. The authorities might have seen such a well organized body as potentially threatening, just after Hannibal had been rampaging all over Italy. The cult also had a common fund, swore oaths of allegiance, and met at cult centers. Of all this, it was suppressed except that the priestesses could retain their offices and meet in small groups only. There is no evidence of sedition anywhere in the affair, however, so, if there was any such threat from foreigners in Italy, it has been carefully hidden under the Bacchanalian cover.

That the threat was one of secret support for the Canaanites of Africa seems unlikely, unless Hannibal had left a secret guerilla army behind him. Hannibal had fled to Syria and tried to sell to Antiochus the Great the idea of taking the battle against Rome back into Italy, implying perhaps that he had a fifth column already there. Any Canaanite sympathisers willing to act as saboteurs must have been ready to support the Syrian king as a mutual enemy of Rome, but Antiochus was the king of the Canaanites of Canaan and Phœnicia, so the bond could have been there all right. After the peace of Apamea (188 BC), with Antiochus defeated and his plan rejected, Hannibal went to Bithynia, failed to get support, and committed suicide there in 183 BC.

Either the Senate was sorting out Hannibal’s secret army or its purpose was to make the most of the threat of insurrection for its own reasons! Like the present day “War on Terror”, it was used to justify a widening of legal jurisdiction.

By Blackening the cult and magnifying its threat to society, Roman leaders obtained the support needed to suspend normal judicial processes, to cross the legal boundaries between Roman and Italian jurisdiction, and to display their authority in Italy.

Erich S Gruen, Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy

What were the allegations against young men? Possibly they were a right of passage initiation ceremony akin to circumcision, an introduction into manhood. Dionysos was believed to have been born again, and since circumcision is a symbolic human sacrifice, it might have been seen as signifying a death follwed by rebirth. Certainly, Bacchic matrons had the trick of plunging their torches into the Tiber and withdrawing them still lit, and in the myth of Brimo, a fire ceremony involving the apparent burning of a child seems to have been justified by the myth, as the basis of immortality. Such ceremonies, especially perhaps circumcision could have seemed barbarous to Romans, and they are easily misrepresented, just as tabloid writers misrepresent innocent or unimportant things today for their own purposes. If Carthaginians worshipped by rites seen by Romans as Bacchic, and these had entered Italy several centuries before, they might have attracted Canaanites and thus become a cover for saboteurs. Some classical writers thought Jewish ritual was Bacchic.

Why then? The Peace of Apamea left the Romans free to concentrate on the Italian peninsula where Hannibal had campaigned for so many years. More “Foundations”—Roman colonies—were set up to secure Italy. The Bacchanalian oppression was part of this campaign. By it, the patres took powers they did not have over the neighbours of Rome in Italy. Under the excuse of restricting the Bacchants, the authorities sent out a plethora of directives to magistrates all over Italy, had them inscribed on bronze plaques and erected everywhere, and were able to round up the people they suspected of being traitors, assassins, conspirators and poisoners. About thirty years later, Polybius could say blandly that all of these crimes throughout Italy were under the jurisdiction of the Roman Senate. The excuse of the Bacchants provided the chance for the Senate via its questio extra ordinem to set up legal norms subject to its legislature everywhere in Italy. Extraordinary powers became normal powers. None of the local authorities seem to have objected, and the Roman Senate thereafter was the legal ruler of all Italy. The Romans seemed to have had no aim of trying to control private belief which they knew was impossible. Their aim was to subject cults and collegia to public scrutiny and regulation via the Senate, and thus maintain control.

It was not the last time in history that adherents of a religion with a questionable public image was singled out as scapegoats to protect an alleged national interest.

Erich S Gruen

Dionysos was the product of a God’s union with a mortal woman—he was a Son of God—and was represented as a bearded young man of distinguished appearance. He taught men laws, gave them happiness and peace as well as the vine, and taught them how to be civilised. He suffered a violent death, descended into hell, was resurrected and ascended into heaven. Communion with the god was by a meal.

There was also a story that he had ridden on two asses which he then placed in the heavens as constellations. In the Babylonian calendar, the zodiacal sign cancer was the foal and the ass and marked the zenith of the sun’s power before it began to decline to winter. Jesus, of course, triumphantly entered Jerusalem on “an ass and a colt, the foal of an ass” curiously matching the Dionysian legend rather than Old Testament prophecy which meant only one animal. A Gnostic jewel shows a foal and an ass together with a crab and is inscribed: “Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God”.

In mythology a god becomes identified with the animal sacred to him. There is an image from the wall of the Domus Gelotiana on the Palatine showing Jesus on the cross but with the head of an ass. The ass is associated with the vine—Justin Martyr speaks of the ass tied to the vine—and Jesus is also associated with the vine. He says, “I am the true vine”. To the people of the time he might as well have said “I am Dionysos”. Furthermore, the Eucharist cup in the early Christian text, the Didache, is described as “the holy vine of David” so the wine was Jesus and Jesus the wine.

Orpheus

The cult of Orpheus remodelled the Dionysian cult. Orpheus was probably a real person, an early reformer of the Dionysian religion just as Jesus is supposed to have transformed Judaism, Zoroaster the Persian religion and Buddha Hinduism. Orpheus became the name of Thracian Priest-Kings who were thought of as the god Dionysos incarnate and originally might have been ritually slain.

In myth, Orpheus married Eurydice who was bitten by a snake and died. Orpheus was heartbroken and determined to find her, eventually descending to hell to recover her. He charmed the nether gods with his music and got them to promise that Eurydice could return with him on condition that he did not look back as she followed him on the journey back to life. But, fearing that she was not behind him, he looked back and Eurydice fell back to the underworld. Orpheus was totally distraught and rejected the ministrations of the Thracian women who tried to console him. Enraged they tore him to pieces.

Orphism was an ascetic, more intellectual form of Dionysianism. From the myth of Dionysos the Orphics believed their god died and rose again. They also believed in a form of original sin. Zeus had killed, with a thunderbolt, the Titans who had eaten Zagreus, and mankind sprang from their ashes. Mankind is therefore partially good, from Zagreus, and partially bad, from the Titans. Orpheus worshippers had to rid themselves of the bad and this they did through living lives of ritual and moral purity through a series of incarnations. If they succeeded through all the levels they became free of the “circle of birth” or “cycles of becoming” gaining immortality through divinity. The rules of purity included absence from any kinds of animal foods, avoiding the pollution of death and birth, wearing white raiment and other ascetic practices.

Orphic mysteries re-enacted the death of Zagreus, and its ritual involved the sacrifice of the calf or kid of Dionysos. Small portions were eaten raw (omophagia) as a sacramental meal. When the initiates had fulfilled the “solemn rite of the banquet of raw flesh” they became permanent vegetarians, dressed in pure white garments and avoided the taint of childbirth and funerals. The votary adopted the name Bacchus (the Roman name of the god) to symbolise that he had become at one with his Lord. When Orphics died they were buried with small gold tablets inscribed with instructions for their conduct in the underworld.

Orpheus is a missionary for civilisation—a musician, polymath, mystic, astrologer, he travelled the world doing good works. Orphics actually made use of missionaries which was unusual among Western religions. Hitherto there had been no concerted attempts by them to recruit believers but thenceforth missionary zeal began to spread, culminating in the dominance of Christianity. Some scholars consider Saul of Tarsus to have been an initiate of Orpheus, and Orphism and Christianity seem to have coalesced in some places.

Orpheus and Jesus both performed miracles, descended to hell, suffered cruel deaths and were raised to heaven by divine fathers. But they offered their adepts different routes to salvation—Orpheus appealed to those who sought salvation through self-effort and knowledge, Jesus appealed to those who favoured divine love. Otherwise they were much the same type of religion. Orphism greatly influenced the philosophy of Pythagoras so that Pythagorean philosophy is essentially that of the Orphic religion. The Orphics and Pythagoreans had an ethical approach at least equal to that of Christianity and in Orpheus’s ability to charm the beasts extended spirituality to them too, an aspect not seen in Christianity until St Francis of Assisi, more than a thousand years after Christ.

At Delphi, Dionysos was received into the priesthood of Apollo, and he also has the title “Dendriticus” meaning “He of the Tree”. Sabazius is another name for Dionysos and some old writings suggest that the Jews at one time worshipped him. Orpheus was clearly connected with Jesus in the minds of the early Christians from his frequent depiction in the Roman Catacombs. Orphic figures represented King David or Jesus himself.

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