Mystery Religions IV.2 - AskWhy! Publications
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, November 08, 2001
Christian or Pagan Mysteries. What Differs?
Louis Bouyer, the Catholic priest and theologian, in The Christian Mystery, disparages the Pagan mysteries. “Many of them are not at all mysteries,” he tells us, apparently running them down for not being what they claimed to be. It is only by pretending that some mysteries are different from other mysteries that Christians can have their cake and eat it.
Christianity used to be a mystery—Paul speaks about it often—and no Christian on earth, driven into a theological corner, will not dismiss his difficulties as a mystery of God. The word “mysterion” occurs only once in the synoptics and three times in Revelation, but otherwise, in the bible it is Paul’s word. It appears in the sense of divine secrets as opposed to simply a puzzle in 1 Corinthians 2:1-2, where it seems entirely appropriate, but Louis Bouyer tells us it is here a copyist’s error for “martyrion,” meaning “witness,” not mystery. Just a few verses on, though, Paul speaks of imparting a “secret and mysterious wisdom of God,” and immediately in typically Essenic fashion conflates two scriptural citations to give him a suitable quotation.
Paul is talking of the ending of this age, so the mystery is an eschatological one. The wisdom of this world would disappear and divine wisdom would supersede it. Elsewhere, this eschatological event is a metaphorical divine marriage between God and the righteous world—a “hierogamos.” This metaphor is prominent in the scriptural prophets, standing for the uniting of God with his Chosen Land and People. It was the very eschatological promise made to the Persian colonists by the Persian magi when the temple state of Yehud was set up. The colonists were puffed up by their understanding that the establishment of a temple to Yehouah was a fundamental act in bringing about the eschaton and the victory of Good over Evil. In the Christianization of the hierogamos, God is not the bridegroom but Christ, and Christian converts were the bride, however wicked they had been in life hitherto.
It has to be admitted that there is no mystery about these eschatological allusions except the way they are expressed. Paul determines, like all charlatans, to make common ideas novel by obscure and misleading similes and analogies.
The Fathers of the Church accused the Pagan mysteries of a diabolical counterfeit of Christ’s mysteries. It is therefore quite impossible for Christians to argue that the Pagan mysteries had nothing in common with early Christianity. A counterfeit is an imitation intended to defraud and so of a sufficent resemblence to do so. If the early Church saw the Pagan mysteries as counterfeits of Christian ones then they were undeniably similar, but the Christians cannot claim precedence. If there was counterfeiting at all, then it was Christian counterfeiting.
An early defence, still offered by evangelical types, is to emphasize the differences or alleged differences. Christians who today are outraged by these pages or anything that they consider disrespectful or even blasphemous, never had the least respect for the religions of others. Far from respecting Pagan religions they were intent on running them down as the work of devils, and openly said so. Clement of Alexandria said they were pornographic, illustrating the perpetual unhealthy Christian attitude to sexual matters rather than any true sexual indiscretion. He will have been talking about the “hierogamos,” a prominent concept and rite in Paganism, just as it probably was in the more original forms of Judaism (witness the marriage at Cana in John’s gospel, a ritual marriage not a real one).
Firmicus Maternus runs down Paganism but does not deny that they addressed some of the questions that Christianity was supposed to answer uniquely. Justin Martyr sought to show to Pagans that they were taking no monstrous step in converting to Christianity—much of it would be already familiar.
Aristotle, speaking of the Greek mysteries, said the impression they gave was a question of feeling rather than learning. It was an emotional experience not an educative one. Christianity is just the same. It yields an entirely emotional reaction and has not a whit of knowledge to pass on to its adepts. They get “feelings” of comfort, and security—mainly about the finality of death—it is not! Pagan mysteries seemed to be just the same.
Father Bouyer thinks it is hilarious that Romans could worship Mithras, the god of brigands of Cilicia. He has forgotten that his own god was a brigand himself, or so the authorities of the time thought and punished him for it. What is more, Roman writers used pejorative words that suited their own view, just as we do. Terrorist or freedom fighter? Brigands or people trying to oppose Roman occupation? Mithras was a god of honour not of bandits, so the “brigands” who worshipped him were hardly typical pirates.
Like most Christians, Bouyer is as blind as a mole, however scholarly he might be, utterly dazzled by his mental fetish. Any other religion is inferior, and this is not a matter of opinion—they know! So Father Bouyer declares with utter conviction that these mystery religions could not fulfil the hopes they engendered. He knows this and he knows that Christianity can and does, but his basis for these conclusions has nothing to do with his scholarship, or anything objective, but merely with his unhealthy obsessions—his own indoctrination and self-delusion. They could “seem” only “caricatures” of Christianity, but a caricature needs something to caricature and Christianity came after these religions, so could not have been it. That is why he has to use the weasel word “seem” to save him from an obvious impossibility. It is not impossible for Christians of course, because ever since Justin Martyr they have believed that the devil could caricature something in advance. In this, they have forgotten the origin of their own religion in Persian Zoroastrianism, because only the good god has the power of forethought. That is the devil’s fatal defect.
Bouyer knows that the content of the Christian mystery is “attested by the word of the creative god coming down to our level, to restore us, or rather raise us to his.” In view of this the Pagan mysteries could not “fail to appear derisory.” Are you following the words of this Catholic intellectual? No one intelligent could fail to see that the believer in a Pagan mystery could have made changes appropriate to their beliefs and finshed up with the diametrically opposite conclusion—Christianity could not fail to appear derisory. No one intelligent could believe that the creative god could devise such a foolish procedure. The creative god has every means imaginable at his disposal, sufficient to be able to create the universe, but can only think of appearing on earth to be mistaken for a bandit, then get crucified to put over some absolutely essential meassage to billions of human beings. He might be powerful but is either simple or he is the god of second hand car dealers.
Father Bouyer can say with the assurance of desperation, “the mysteries for those who celebrated them were nothing but rites”! Yet he can go on to say that it is on meditation on the myth—itself not hidden, and published fully by the sixth century BC—that the mystery, the religious aspirations of the rites, were to come. For Bouyer, subtle distinctions he can see—but only religious pedants can—make the Mysteries of Eleusis utterly different from Catholicism. Christianity has its own banal rites repeated several times a day for those sufficiently fanatical to want to celebrate them. The people at both ends of the church could be doing something useful but think that God wants them to waste their time telling Him how wonderful and blessed He is. Christianity has its mythological justification for these rites, meditation upon which is supposed to bring the converts closer to God. What differs?
Seven Christian Arguments Against the Dependence of Christianity on the Mystery Religions
The latter day saviours of Christianity come out with God’s Truth again with seven points to show that first-century Christianity did not “borrow” (Christians do not steal things!) essential beliefs and practices from the Pagan mystery religions. They impose a limit of the first century hoping that they are on safe ground because Christianity was at first a Jewish religion and substantial influences of Paganism came later.
1. First the Christians tells us our logic is unsound. We are so simple that we have committed the grievous error of “false cause,” a fallacy committed whenever someone reasons that just because two things exist side by side, one of them must have caused the other:
Mere coincidence does not prove causal connection. Nor does similarity prove dependence.
Needless to say, it is the Christians who are simple, or, to be more correct, not simple but thoroughly dishonest for assuming their audience—not really critics of Christianity but Christian acolytes they wish to impress—are simpletons. That should not surprise us by now. Christian apologists forever set up straw men to knock down in front of their adorers to get a cheer. So let us at once agree that the occurrence of two events side by side indeed does not mean that one caused the other—necessarily.
However, Christians would certainly bring up their children to believe in the Christian myth and not Satanism, and they would be astounded if any of their children finished up worshipping Satan and knowing nothing about Christianity. They take it for granted that a child brought up in a Christian environment is most likely to finish up Christian. When the children do finish up being Christian, is that a coincidence? Of course not. There is a causal connexion. When anyone is brought up in any particular environment, it would be bizarre if they were not affected by that environment.
The proponents of a Pagan influence on Christianity are saying no more than that. Christianity grew up in a Pagan environment. Any rational person—not Christians—recognises that, that being the case, Christianity must have been influenced by Paganism.
Now, although this is totally reasonable, the crucifixers cannot accept it. The main reason is their insistence that Christianity was revealed by God. It sprang into existence small but perfectly formed. Thereafter it only had to grow—an easy business once the Christians had state backing because they destroyed everything and everybody who contradicted them. So the Christian’s instance of “false cause” is really a sorry attempt to muddy the water. There was a plain cause. It was the natural influence of social surroundings.
2. Now Christians accept that there are small “alleged” similarities between Christianity and the mysteries but they are either “greatly exaggerated or fabricated.” Christian scholars describe Pagan rituals in language they borrow from Christianity, carelessly using words like “Last Supper” for the ritual meal of Mithraism or “baptism” in the cult of Isis. And they get apoplectic that the word “saviour” should be applied to Osiris or Attis as though they were saviour gods in any similar sense.
In all this, of course, the Christians are arrogantly claiming certain words in the English language as their own. Most of these words, as some Christians will admit, they did not invent themselves but took from elsewhere. Why then should they now have exclusive use of them? They are not copyrighted by Christianity but are in the public domain and can be used as people see fit.
If the initiates of Isis had a ritual immersion to introduce them to the sect, why is it not a baptism? If the worshippers of Mithras celebrate his triumphal supper before he ascended in glory into heaven, why should they not call it a Last Supper? If people from time immemorial have given thanks to their god, who had seemed to them to have died in winter, when he was born again in the spring, why should they not call him a saviour of the earth?
The truth is that Christians do see the connexions between Christianity and the earlier religions of the world, but they cannot accept them. So they lie themselves blue.
3. The Christians next tell us the chronology is all wrong, because almost all of our sources of information about the Pagan religions alleged to have influenced early Christianity are dated much later. Critics quote from documents written 300 years later than Paul to find influences on him when, just because a cult had a certain belief or practice in the third or fourth century after Christ, it did not necessarily have the same belief or practice in the first century. This is a Christian favourite.
The Christians of the fourth century onwards went into a fury of pillaging Pagan books, temple breaking, school closing and icon smashing, and now they gloat that only late sources of information about Pagan religions remain. That history is sufficient reason to reject this barbaric religion, and it should be sufficient reason for any civilised person—again the Christians have plainly to be excluded. Because of Christian vandalism, we have to concede that most of the evidence has gone.
Nevertheless, for the reason given at (1) above as well as the remnants of unsavaged evidence, few unprejudiced people will deny that the cultural milieu of the Roman world must have influenced those who lived in it. Christians lived in it and must have taken these influences into their religious practises—especially because they had relatively few to begin with, being a new religion, and because those they had were Jewish and like Jews were unpopular. The mystery cults were however popular.
4. Christians plead that their real hero, Paul, would never have consciously or even unconsciously taken from the Pagan religions. They remind us that Paul told us himself he was trained as a Pharisee (Phil 3:5) and warned the Colossians against the very sort of influence that advocates of Christian syncretism have attributed to him, namely, letting their minds be captured by alien speculations (Col 2:8). Since people take in their environmental influences just as they take in their mother’s milk, it is quite fatuous and absolutely dishonest to pretend that Paul was free of these things. Christian apologists try to deify Paul as well as Jesus.
If it is true that Paul was brought up until beyond the age of seven living in Tarsus, a great Pagan metropolis and centre of several major Pagan cults, can any reasonable person pretend that this all had no influence on him? There must have been unconscious influence even if there were conscious rejection of it. Yet it would be hard, once again assuming that Paul is not a god, that he did not consciously do whatever helped him in his objective of spreading his newly invented cult into the wider Empire. Paul was happy to admit that he was all things to all men. That means he was unscrupulous.
His claim to have been a Pharisee is denied by most Jewish scholars who cannot see the depth of understanding of the scriptures a student of Gamaliel would need just to get entrance to his school, let alone graduate. His claim is unlikely to be consistent with the gospels also. There was no love lost between Pharisees and the priesthood, yet Paul was happy to work as a brownshirt for the priests.
Finally, it is not surprising that Paul should warn his new converts against defaulting to any of the other religions or philosophies of the time. He was desperate to build up his own following. But those with their judgement unfogged by Christianity today can see that Paul was simply a quack promoting exactly the same sort of quack remedies as the other religions.
5. Christians now pretend that Christanity can have had nothing to do with the mystery religions because Christianity was exclusive—it would not allow its worshippers to worship any other god. Quite how this shows that Christianity was not indebted to the mysteries is anybody’s guess. Anyone could set up a golf club tomorrow that was exclusive to jockeys. Therefore, according to Christians, because the golf club was exclusive and all other golf clubs were open, my golf club had no relationship whatsoever with other golf clubs. You have to admit that either the crucifixers who think like this are insane or they are trying to kid credulous people.
Apart from that, it is hard to understand what is ethically good about stopping people from examining other beliefs. The pragmatic answer is that the only good about it is that it ensures that your own followers will not be likely to abscond to another quack religion. That obviously proved beneficial to Christianity because it came out on top of the spoil heap. Christians explain to us that someone could become initiated into the mysteries of Isis or Mithras without giving up their former beliefs, but to be received into the Church, according to the preaching of Paul, they had to forsake all other saviours for the Christian one. So what was the Christian god afraid of? Did it think it stood no chance in equal competition?
Right from the beginning Christianity was restrictive, conservative and defensive. It dare not face equal competition and it tilted the board in its own favour by refusing to play by the rules of the multi-ethnic religious world of Rome. That is why Roman magistrates considered it illegal, not because they unfairly picked on innocent saintly Christian converts.
Anyway, this Christian exclusivism should negate any possible relations between Christianity and its Pagan competitors, or any hint of syncretism in the New Testament because it would have caused immediate controversy. If that were true Christianity would have been a very spare religion. It came out of Palestine with nothing except perhaps baptism, and even that was a problem because the followers of a rival cult, that of John the Baptist, emphasised it more. Everything else, it had to get after its god had died—not a very efficient or forward thinking god, you might conclude—but Christians tell us God works in mysterious ways! The rest it picked up from Paganism or by harking back to Jewish precedents.
In any case, whatever exclusivism it had at first, applied to the original Jewish Christians, who were already solely worshippers of Yehouah. Mostly these died in the Jewish War, were fed to wild beasts or burnt as human torches. The ones who remained were gentile converts, who while loyal to the new jealous god, were quite unaware there was anything wrong in applying to their new religion the Pagan traditions they had been used to.
6. Christians are incapable of recognising that they base their beliefs on a myth just as other religions did. Even if the Christian myth is true history, they do not know it is, so they have to take it on trust. So Christian apologists, knowing no more than anyone else, fraudulently assures their flocks that the religion of Paul was grounded on events that actually happened in history, while the mystery cults were essentially nonhistorical. They tell us the death and resurrection of the Christian god happened to a historical person at a particular time and place, and has absolutely no parallel in any Pagan mystery religion.
What more is to be said. It does not matter whether your myth includes the assertion that your god is historical or not, without objective proof, it remains a myth. And only Christians say that the others are purely fictional myths because no one now knows whether gods like Hercules, Orpheus or Osiris were real people or not. They might once have been but their origins are lost in the mists of time. Christian origins are not lost in the mysteries of time at all. They simply do not exist except in the stories told by Christians.
The best guess, expressed in The Hidden Jesus is that the gospels are based on a historic person, but he is not the person Christians have been conditioned to see. He came to be seen as a saviour messiah by an apocalyptic Jewish sect. Paul realised how similar their story was to the idea of the god of the Pagan mysteries and decided to start a new religion based on it.
7. The apologist finishes by telling us that really the mystery religions were influenced by Christianity not the other way round. It’s a bit like saying Newton was influenced by Einstein! Thus, Bruce Metzger said:
It must not be uncritically assumed that the Mysteries always influenced Christianity, for it is not only possible but probable that in certain cases, the influence moved in the opposite direction.
Now this is quite a cautious statement although, like all Christian statements, even by Christian scholars, it is intended to mislead the unwary. The reason is that nobody except the ignorant could make any such assumption. Syncretism is a two way process and if the Christian religion took from others in the first four centuries, it doubtless also gave. But, just as the first Christians would not allow their followers to have anything to do with the mystery religions, now no Christian is allowed to believe that anything in Christianity came from the mystery religions. Any similarities must, therefore have been because the mystery religions took from Christianity.
Metzer is careful to say “in certain cases” it happened but no Christian will remember this condition and the intent is to give the impression that Christianity gave wonderful things to barbarians too ignorant to come up with religious food, drink, ablutions or whatever. Only Cretans and Christians can spread such rubbish. The religion approved by Constantine the Great, so called by Christians, was not the Christianity of Jesus or even Paul but a syncretistic religion combining the various solar religions of the Empire under the name of Christianity.
Christians can believe they won out against Paganism, if they wish, but others, who puzzle over the immense differences between the doctrine and practice of the Christian churches and whatever they can glean from the gospels about the teaching of the Christian god, will see that this diplomatic coup of Constantine is largely the reason. Christianity and the other dominant religions of the Empire had grown together by the syncretism which was imperial policy. Constantine completed that policy. God’s Truth tells a different story but it is only for consumption with communion wafers. Constantine never converted to Christianity until his deathbed.
Pagan Traces
Some scholars claim that Christianity did not copy rituals of the mystery religions but developed them separately. Christianity…
- had an initiation rite
- had a redeeming saviour figure who died and was resurrected
- indulged in a symbolic sacrificial ritual, the sacrifice of the god having rendered lesser sacrifices superfluous
- had an assurance of salvation of the soul.
It revered its saints, in the same role as the lesser gods of the mystery religions, as guardians, intermediaries, patrons and protectors; it revered cult objects and relics of the saints particularly if they were bits of human body, a truly primitive adaptation; it assured its favourites victory in battle as it did Constantine at the Milvian Bridge, a cynical extention of the original Nazarene belief that God would help the Elect in the battle for the kingdom; just like the mystery religions, it provided centres of pilgrimage where votive offerings were made, often to effect healing; it replaced genii with guardian angels; it replaced divine rulers with the divine right of kings—a distinction of no practical importance; it depicted its holy people with the solar halo like solar deities and Roman Emperors.
Since the rituals of the mystery religions had been established by the time Christianity came along and the environment of the Christians was steeped in them, it is too far fetched to imagine that Christianity developed these same rituals, beliefs and practices independently or that long established religions had to pinch the rituals of Christianity, a newly invented one.
Manifestly Pagan or magical customs survived into the Christian era. Animals or animal heads were cemented into the foundation of important buildings, often churches, just as the Romans used to. Holy places especially wells but also standing stones and hilltops were re-dedicated to Christian saints and the custom of making votive offerings (usually coins) to the spirit of the well continued as it always had under the old god. Churches or chapels would be built over wells or on top of hills, the latter usually dedicated to S Michael. Remember the Essenes identified the Archangel Michael with the Prince of Light and high places such as hills and tall structures such as the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico were always dedicated to the Sun. Tree spirits became “Gospel Oaks” beneath which Christian vicars spoke their sermons.
About 900 AD, people fancied they took part in nocturnal processions led by the goddess Diana (Cybele), or, some say, Herodias, the wife of Herod Antipas. Some observers thought the people taking part were dreaming or deluded. The Church didn’t think so. It issued the Canon Episcopi saying demons were at work endangering souls. The Church considered these demons important and persistent enough to keep on issuing edicts like this until 1310 AD. Margaret Murray argued convincingly that a Pagan religion continued underground until the Middle Ages. It seems unlikely that any widespread, popular and organised Pagan movement could have survived so long, but remnants of one of the Pagan religions that went underground in 391 AD could have persisted after organised resistance to Christianity had faded away. These daring and arcane customs of ancient and forbidden wisdom were normally practised by only a few “witches” but occasionally grew in popularity as a fad. When they did the Church got neurotic and issued an edict.
The Sheela-na-Gig in Irish tradition is considered to be lucky. It is the obscene figure of a grotesquely ugly woman, exposing her vulva, found carved on churches from about 1000 AD in countries on the Atlantic seaboard of Western Europe. Equivalent male figures are found in the continental countries. In Egypt similar though less grotesque clay images of the Roman period are found. They were probably warnings of the sins of the flesh and often appear in that context with other carvings. Yet they were considered to be lucky rather than the opposite. How then did the idea of good luck come to be associated with a warning about sin? Could it be because they were associated with a folk memory of a mother or fertility goddess or, in the male examples, a god like Priapus? The Romans had a custom of giving a building strength and protection by carving somewhere on it a phallus. And the “green man”, this time a grotesque male sprouting leaves and branches around his face or from his mouth, is another pre-Christian figure found on churches that seems to stem from the Roman period.
And yet more remains! There is a series of Christian Mysteries—Gnostic cults, Celtic Church, Cathars and Albigenses, the Fedeli d’Amor and Knights Templar, the Masons, the Rosicrucians and the Illuminati, the Hesychasts. Theosophists and Anthroposophists continue the tradition, believing Jesus was a man trained to a high level by the Essenes. At the age of thirty he donated his body to the Christ, one of the highest gods, third in the hierarchy of the Absolute, the Demiurge, the Christ—the Overseer of the Jewish People, Jesus. After working through Jesus for three years the Christ departed on Easter Day as Tibetan sages also did but returned on an astral plane to continue to teach his disciples. Arius held that before the creation the Absolute created a Logos, a divine spirit that entered Jesus replacing his own spirit. Jesus is therefore an avatar of this divine principle.
Christianity is largely a Pagan faith.
It is for the Christian theologians to declare honestly whether Jesus Christ was the only son of God—“the only begotten of the Father” (Jn 1:14)—considering that long before his time wonder-workers in other countries were called “Son of God” and left similar proofs of their divine claims.
While Christians say it is only 2000 years since the birth of their religion and the incarnation of their saviour, most of the heathen religions and their divine incarnations are assigned a date hundreds or even a thousand years earlier. The inference is that if there has been any “borrowing,” Christianity has been the borrower. Traces of Paganism still present in Christianity prove that Christians did copy Paganism, and the statements of the Church Fathers show that they saw many of the same concepts in Christianity as in the Pagan religions which already existed when Christianity was invented.
The doctrines of Christianity are an outgrowth from older, in many ways similar, religions, with similar doctrines and principles. Only priests and preachers who love their salary more than the cause of truth—historically a large class—or who are deplorably ignorant of history, have the effrontery to continue the pretence that Christianity was uniquely revealed. But truth has a way of emerging in spite of efforts to evade, ignore, or invalidate it.
