How Persia Created Judaism

The Babylonian year began at the vernal equinox and the Iranian New Year at the autumnal equinox. Then the Achaemenian kings fully adopted the Babylonian calendar and Babylonian month names, with a religious and a civil year, reflected in the Jewish calendar. The spring festival was the important New Year festival for Zoroastrians, beginning on “No Roz” (Norouz), New Day in Persian. The Babylonian calendar began in Nisanu at the corn harvest with an akitu or ritual placing of the images of the gods from the temples to the outside of the city boundaries, a festival full of pageantry lasting a week. The Persians copied the whole festival, and they made it their New Year festival.

The feast of Baga, originally a pre-Zoroastrian and old Aryan feast consecrated to the sun god, was a great and popular festival in ancient Iran. It was connected with the worship of the oldest Aryan deities, called by the compound Bagamithra, who were noted as far back as the fourteenth century BC. Baga was identified in the Rig Veda as Varuna, the twin of Mithras, so Bagamithra means the two gods, but the Iranians came to see Mithras as the Baga, as if Bagamithra stood for Mithras with the title Baga. The festival’s place in the calendar must have been the month dedicated to Baga, and later to Mithras. It was called “Bagayadi” or “Bagayadish” and corresponded to the Babylonian month Tishritu, the patron of which was Shamash the Babylonian sun god, who according to Stuart Jones, is identified with Mithras on a tablet in the library of Assurbanipal. This month might have been that of the earlier Iranian New Year festival, when the year began at the autumnal equinox. So, “Bagayadi”, the same month as the later “Mithrakana” and the modern “mihragan” or “mihrjan”, was the feast of Baga, originally the autumnal equinox. The feast of Baga seems to have been celebrated for five days, and five days were intercalated at mid-year to make the year fully 365 days. Herodotus’ story of five days’ uproar after the Magi of Smerdis were killed, suggests it was at this feast.

In Babylon, long before under Hammurabi, the beginning of the civil year was transferred from Tishritu to Nisan, from autumn to spring. The first month of the Babylonian year, Nisan, could start between 24 March and 23 April, according to van der Spek and Mandermakers. So, the Babylonian year began at the vernal equinox when the Iranian year had its New Year at the autumnal equinox. But a calendar of the Babylonian type was adopted early by the south-western section of the Iranian people, who were influenced by the civilizations of Elam and Assyria-Babylon. At some stage, the Achaemenian kings fully adopted the Babylonian calendar, with its luni-solar year, and Babylonian month names, except perhaps in the beginning of the year. A compilation by Thompson, called Reports of the Magicians and Astrologers of Nineveh and Babylon, has a passage where two different dates, Nisan and Tishri, spring and autumn, are mentioned as the beginning of the year. When the Persians ruled in Babylon, there was confusion between the two systems, the compromise being the acceptance by the Persians of a religious and a civil year, as in the Babylonian and Jewish calendars.

In this scheme, the months and even the days on the month had names taken from yazatas. The tenth month, December to January, was the month of Ahuramazda (as Creator, “Dadvah” or “Dai”), but Mithras had the seventh month (September to October) when he had the great autumn festival. The spring festival was the important New Year festival for Zoroastrians, beginning on “No Roz” (Norouz), New Day in Persian. The Babylonian calendar began in Nisanu (Jewish, Nisan—March to April) at the corn harvest and required an “akitu” or ritual placing of the images of the gods from the temples to the outside of the city boundaries. It was therefore a festival full of pageantry lasting a week. The Persians seem to have copied the whole festival, although for them on the plateau it was at sowing time not harvest time, and they made it their New Year festival. The six seasonal feasts of the Pagan Iranian calendar were rededicated to the Amesha Spentas.

The legend justifies a Jewish feast, the Feast of Lots, held at the Persian New Year, celebrating the Jewish escape and the massacre of their enemies. Yehouah has no role in the story, and the characters are all historically fictitious except for the king. Esther is the goddess Ishtar (Anahita). Mordecai means Marduk (Merodach), who we saw is Ahuramazda and therefore also Yehouah. Haman oddly enough is the king again in another guise (perhaps standing for the king of the old year) because the royal family name Achaemenides in Greek is Hakhamanish in Persian. The story is said to be based on a Persian tale about the shrewdness of Harem queens.

The description in the story of the parade through the streets in royal robes, and of mock combat, features in the Persian New Year celebrations, when the old year lost in mock combat to the New Year and was hanged or crucified. The Jews took this New Year celebration, like the rest of their religion, from the Persians and then had to find a reason for it—much as Christians found reasons for celebrating Pagan festivals as Christian holidays. The Persian and Jewish New Years were at the spring equinox—Easter (Esther) to us!

“Sada” preserves the meaning of the festival, for it is “the hundredth”, the hundredth day from the end of the Zoroastrian winter—which had contracted from a full half year to only five months, from the beginning of Aban (October-November) to the end of Esfand (February-March). This uneven division of the holy year seemed to have given mystical significance to the numbers seven and five. Here too is a hint of the division of the year into pentacosts (fifties), winter neatly dividing into three of them. Summer did not divide so neatly, four pentacosts with a remainder of ten. The extra days might have been combined with the five intercalated days to give the New Year holy festival which needed twelve days to represent the twelve epochal millenia of Zoroastrian cosmic time.

The feast of “hamaspathmaidyem” was in the last days of Esfand, the end of the year. It was connected with a religious ceremony, perhaps including a remembrance of the dead. Originally at the end of the month Azar (November-December) and immediately before the month Dai (December-January), was a festival of the souls (fravashis) of the departed. It corresponds precisely with our All Souls and All Hallows eves. It must have been the original New Year feast at the end of the summer at the autumn equinox, but was transferred in its importance to the beginning of summer at the spring equinox.

So, the Iranians had notable feasts in the spring and the autumn. The spring festival welcomed back the growth of herbage, and the autumn one was the Mithrakana, a harvest festival for the end of the current season and a fertility festival for the coming spring dedicated to Mithras. A sacrifice of a bull to Apollo was made at the Athenian Bouphonia. It will be the practical source of the bull-slaying images in Roman Mithraism, though the myth accounting for it drew on the heavenly Perseus astride the bull Taurus. However, since all domestic animals return to the Ox-soul, any could be used for sacrifice depending on the circumstances. With a different intention, it seems a bull was sacrificed to Anahita too, but here to promote human fertility. In Sasanian times, Mithrakana was the one time when the king could get drunk. Having settled, it seems the Persians had two New Years, one in the spring and one in the autumn, but they celebrated other festivals including the solstices.

So the Jews had four New Years, but the religious one in spring was the most important one in a theocracy, and Rosh ha-Shanah in the autumn preserved the old harvest festival, as the occasion when creation is judged by God.

The New Year, Esther and Crucifixion

Its purpose seems to be a mythical justification of the Jewish feast of Lots or Purim, which occurs in the last month of the Jewish year, most often in March. In Babylon, the New Year had long been the time when fate was determined for the coming year. It was determined by drawing lots. “Purim” is the plural of “Pur,” which is neither a Semitic nor a Persian word. The Assyrians, however, did have a word “Puru” meaning a stone that could be used like a dice for casting lots, and its use in such a sense has been found on Assyrian tablets. Presumably because of the chance element in casting lots, “puru” also meant “fate,” the Rabbis tell us, a point that will be significant.

In a Greek version, the book is identified as having been presented to one of the Ptolemies and his queen, Cleopatra, dating it to about 114 BC or about 78 BC. Since Jewish heroes are listed in Ecclessiasticus, a book recognized as being no earlier than about 150 BC, and the heroes of Esther do not appear in the list, it seems clear that the book was written around 100 BC, give or take a decade or two. It was therefore Hasmonaean and was possibly offered as an excuse for the celebrations inaugurated for the victory of the Maccabees (161 BC) known as the Day of Nicanor on the 13 Adar. It was plainly a late adaptation to the New Year festival celebrated in the Persian empire, and proves the syncretistic tendencies at work therein.

Haman’s plot is to “hang” Mordecai, but the plot backfires and in the end Haman himself, is crucified. Hanging to Persians and therefore here means crucifixion. Both Josephus (90 AD) and Jerome (400 AD) knew that Haman was crucified. The feast of Purim is held on 14 and 15 Adar, the last month in the Jewish year, which ends when the first new moon is seen to rise after the vernal equinox. On average, this will be about the start of April in our calendar. Purim is therefore held about two weeks before at the spring equinox. The New Year in Persian and Babylonian societies was considered to start when the days became longer than the nights, in other words, at the vernal equinox, so Purim is plainly a New Year celebration in fact.

Every New Year is a resumption of time from the beginning. ((M Eliade, Cosmos and History).

The end of the year is the End of Time when the Good will triumph, and the Persian New Year celebrations were seen as the triumph of Good over Evil. There is a hope and an exhortation here to moral improvement year by year, perhaps the source of our New Year resolutions to be kind to cats and to drink less. Good would be ultimately victorious and everyone should try to help achieve it.

Past time, the year gone is crucified as the Evil Spirit and the New Year is born as the Good Spirit raised up from his neglected position and placed in power through the intercession of the goddess. This role reversal is an extremely old motif of the New Year celebrations seen in the Roman Saturnalia, which itself came from the Babylonian Sacaea. Sir James Frazer tells us that masters and slaves changed places and the masters served the slaves.

Meanwhile, the king temporarily abdicated while a mock king reigned only to be crucified like Haman at the end. According to Eliade, the king’s duty was to regenerate time, and this he did by killing the false king representing the Old Year, whereupon he himself, the true king, stepped up as if renovated as the New Year. The king is crucified and is resurrected. Remember this all happens at Easter!

The New Year Festival in Genesis

The New Year Festival (NYF) in the ancient near east (ANE) was celebrated annually on the basis that the world was created every year, indeed was being continuously created. The main characteristic of a myth is that it is a timeless tale, timeless because it tells a story that is happening continuously. Its continuous happening explains the world, and its being acted out by the people each year was the human contribution to the sustenance of the cosmos. Each year, the celebrations gave humanity a fresh start—they helped to renew it, and then it felt to them renewed. The cosmos, including the people were born again, the bible even speaking of the birth pangs of the renewal and salvation that depended on it, even Yehouah feeling them. The “born again” idea is very old indeed. 95 In the Babylonian New Year ritual, the king is firmly identified with the community and has a central role in the New Year celebrations, the objective of which was to make sure that the king remained capable of representing his people. The king participated in a ritual combat in which the New Year fought the Old Year in a battle that also stood for the ultimate victory of Good over Evil and Order over Chaos. The hymn called the “Enuma Elish” was chanted. In it, the defeat of the dragon of Chaos, Tiamat, permitted the Creation to take place. Thus each year a new Creation was enacted and Chaos was defeated to ensure that the king maintained Order.

The drama of Baal and Mot was enacted at the New Year Festival, in the autumn, after the dry season and in anticipation of the autumn rains. Mot threatens Baal, “I shall surely pierce you”. It seems he did indeed, and Baal entered the underworld as if dead—the season when the crops burnt off in the summer sun. But before descending to the underworld, Baal had fertilised the earth and its beasts. Baal sent word to Mot, described as the gods’ (plural) son, asking whether he means him to be Mot’s slave. (One of the main words for God in the Jewish scriptures is “elohim”, which literally means gods.)

Some of the psalms belong in the context of a Jewish New Year Festival. The NYF was the harvest festival or the Feast of Booths, the details of which are set out in Numbers 29, but are reiterated elsewhere more summarily.

In 1 Kings 8:65, extended back into the mythological time of Solomon, it is simply called a feast. The passages from Exodus show that it was the New Year Feast, and it was held in autumn. So the Festival of Booths was the New Year Feast whether or not it was understood as it, because that is when it was held. Some elements of the NYF hinted at in the Jewish scriptures were:

Part of the annual coronation ceremony of the king seems to have been a ritual humiliation, whereby the king is rejected, stripped of his regalia and reduced to commonality and confession—he has to confess his misdeeds! It still survives in the mischief nights preceding Guy Fawkes’ night in the UK and the trick and treat nights of the USA, both corresponding to the ancient autumnal New Year, and there is a similar tradition associated with the twelve nights of Christmas because it is the modern New Year.

Biblical “scholars” are utterly incapable of relating their ideas to history that actually happened rather than the mythology of the bible that is barely confirmed anywhere else. Genesis and the Psalms suggest that the bible has fragments of a record of a NYF in which Yehouah ensured a victory for cosmic order over chaos. Scholars presume, by accepting the biblical chronology as fact, the great NYF hinted at in the Jewish scriptures was in the monarchic period. The kingship of the god Yehouah and his victory over chaos and evil—the forces opposing the purpose of Israel in the world—was shown as a ritual drama. The evidence, they say, is in the kingship and the royal psalms, but the psalms are mainly if not quite entirely post-Persian! The countries that were known to celebrate an elaborate New Year ceremony of the victory of God over Chaos were Persia and Babylonia.

The first biblical account of Creation (attributed to P, a priestly editor) ends at Genesis 2:4a. It is taken from the liturgy of the Babylonian and Persian New Year festival. It is quite different from the second (J-E) account which continues from then on. It assumes a watery basis on which reality is created by God who completes the job in six days, resting on the seventh, thus giving an explanation of the seven days constituting the week. The origin of the myth is Zoroastrian and so it is post-Persian, as Julius Wellhausen recognized over 100 years ago, but which Jews and Christians still have not realized.

The New Year in Canaanite Religion

The cycle involves the defeat of the sea, the potential wild chaos of the unpredictable winter winds and rains, the entry of Baal into his palace (temple), the bringing of the benign rains to fertilize the earth, the submission of Baal to Mot, the parching summer sun, his death and the withering of the vegetation, the sacrifice of a calf to remind the gods, Anat’s reception of the sacrifice and her consequent destruction of Mot and release of Baal, and the beginning again of the cycle. Mot and Yam are protected from ultimate destruction as sons of El, and so is Baal. The winter gales are the chaos that fringes the civilized world and always threatens, becoming the monster Lotan or Leviathan. The victory of Baal over Yam is the Creation myth, in the sense that the defeat of wintry chaos begins the New Year, and it is marked by the New Year festival, held near the autumnal equinox, the days in the modern Jewish calendar marked by Rosh ha Shanah and Succoth when the rains began.

The “height of Zion” appears in Jeremiah 31:12, as a place of joy for all the good things like grain, wine, oil and livestock, suggesting the harvest festival that heralded the New Year. 286 Jewish tradition has a closer match with the original than the scriptures. When the shofar is blown on New Year’s Day (Rosh ha Shanah), Satan is confused, and ten days later on the Day of Atonement the shofar annuls his power. In between are the days of penitence. The reason for it all is that the ten day festival celebrates the beginning, existence in time, and end of the world—the world from the creation to the Judgement Day. At the Creation God made the world perfect before Satan spoilt it. This spoiling no longer is recorded in the Jewish religion, but it corresponds with the Persian one. The ten days actually stand for the whole of creation, and the Day of Atonement is the Judgement when Satan is destroyed and the world begins again in a state of perfection. The Perfection of Creation is restored.

The New Year in Old Testament Research

Mowinckel also commented on the allusions in Psalms to a judgement of the “enemies”, a battle with a dragon, and a creation, which he concluded was an annual ritual dramatizing the enthronement of a divine king following his victory over primæval chaos. The New Year ceremony in Babylon and Egypt was celebrated by the dramatization of cult and creation myths in which the central character was the god as the divine king. The procedure was an extended imitative magic ritual of great potency and importance—it was the renewal by creation of the whole of the forthcoming year without which the community would suffer in vitality and prosperity.

In the biblical ritual, the divine king was Yehouah, the creator, or rather someone, probably the high priest, in the role. The circumstances of universal history were taken to be reflected in the annual festivities of the religion—one that Mowinckel thought began as a Canaanite fertility rite. The occasion was the New Year, when the people were led by the priests, themselves led by the divine king, David, in the procession. David, of course, is a title meaning “He Who is Loved”, or “the Beloved One”, the Canaanite god, Hadad.

The ceremony occurred near the spring equinox at harvest time. On this occasion or at a parallel one held at the autumn equinox, water was poured on the ground from the pool of Siloam to induce, by magic, the winter rains to fertilize a new harvest. Robertson Smith (Religion of the Semites) had already noted the magical significance of pouring water over the altar, and Sir J G Frazer had found similar rites of imitative magic in connexion with fertility rituals among widespread agricultural communities. The New Year ceremony of the enthronement of of Yehouah was, then, a creative drama meant to induce the events it dramatized. Each year, God symbolically took his powers anew by defeating the chaos monster, then creating heaven with its lifegiving sun and rain, and the earth, the womb of all life. It was signalled by the sun rising over the mount of Olives (Elyon, the Most High) and illuminating the Holy Place by shining directly into it. The Holy Place of the temple represented the womb of the earth, and God impregnated the earth by his life giving light, then, in the autumn ritual, the rains would appear representing God’s semen.

Moreover, they show that Baal was not a generic title for a variety of Ugaritic gods, but stood for one important son of El. They also include a myth about the slaying of a monster, paralleling passages in the bible where a monster called Rahab or Leviathan is defeated. They supported Mowinckel’s hypothesis of a cult myth celebrated at a New Year festival. Paul Humbert (1935) showed that Genesis 1 was chanted as part of the liturgy of a New Year festival. Johannes Pedersen similarly showed that the exodus story was the cult myth created as a new interpretation of the Passover festival—once a harvest festival of the Canaanites—and the Sinai events justified a New Year celebration at Jerusalem which dramatized a theophany, the sealing of a covenant, and the ordination of divine commands, according to Sigmund Mowinckel. The theological beliefs of the Canaanites of Ugarit and those of the Palestinian hills, whether called Hebrews, Israelites, or Judahites in the bible, were apparently as similar as can be expected in descriptions separated by almost a millennium of history, and major cultural changes brought on by different overlords, notably that implemented by the Persian shahs.

Yehouah the Sun God and the New Year

The temple was really dedicated in 417 BC, but in the myth the whole event has been set back in antiquity, half a millennium before, in the pretence that the real temple is the second temple. If it was, the first temple was not dedicated to Yehouah. The dedication took place in the month Ethanim, the seventh month—September to us. At one time, Ethanim had been the first month, showing that the religious year had begun in September. Now the civil year begins in September and the religious year begins in Nisan. Nisan is the month of the spring equinox and Tishri (Ethanim) is the month of the autumnal equinox. Nisan 1 was the “New Year of Kings” and reigns were reckoned from then. The Persians similarly had their two New Year celebrations at the time of the equinoxes, and similarly changed the occasions around. Nisan has the sign of the lamb not a ram, and even Maimonides accepts that the Pascal lamb is the lamb of the Persian zodiac.

S Mowinckel saw the Feast of Booths as the New Year festival when the Ark was led in procession and Yehouah was celebrated entering the temple. None of it applied to the Canaanite kingdom of Israel but it was introduced by the Persians when they established the temple state. Most of the older legends in the Jewish scriptures are merely retroscripted for polemical and propaganda purposes by the Persian and post-Persian authors. A small amount, especially of poetic material, might be older having been considered suitable for retention from the Canaanite religion of Yehouah, and some materials have perhaps been brought from other sources at a later date even though the material itself was older—the Egyptian tale of the two brothers for example. The New Year rituals however seem to be fairly direct adaptations from Persian and Babylonian precursors.

These verses actually sound as if they refer to the sun rising at one of the equinoxes, and they might have been taken from a New Year liturgy. The dawn radiance of the sun illuminates the scene at the climax of this ceremony. J Morgenstern saw it as the dawn sun shining directly from its appearance over Olivet—the very place where Jesus ascended into heaven!—through the east gate and into the Holy of Holies, brightly illuminating the normally dark room. The Glory of God (Shekinah) had entered. The solar temple, designed fairly uniformly over the ancient Near East is now acepted as a womb—the womb of the earth. Its three parts were:

So, this event happens at the Feast of Booths, the equinoctial celebration of the indwelling of Yehouah. The Persian New Year celebration was a rehearsal of the eschaton when the New Year fought and conquered the old, just as Marduk battled Tiamat.

Marduk and the New Year in Babylonian Religion

Even at the dawn of writing in Ur, great temples were being built, and elaborate ceremonies were being held, probably the New Year celebrations. Some sort of cultic meal is illustrated even in these early times. The priest had to stand naked before the god, apparently as proof that he was pure and unblemished. Music, whether carols or laments, were a feature of these festivals.

The most important festival, of several days duration, was the Akitu, the New Years’s festival. At first, it was celebrated at the autumn equinox, then it was moved to the spring. At Babylon, the image of Marduk was conveyed, partly by barge, then in a lavish procession to a ceremonial house outside the city wall. While the cult statue was away, the temple was ritually purified. Meanwhile, the king prepared to make atonement on behalf of the people. To do this, he had to be slapped in the face hard enough to draw tears. The tears expiated any wrongs. The creation epic was recounted, punctuated by hymns and prayers, rather as the Christian nativity is narrated as readings from the gospels, with carols and prayers in churches at Christmas. Then the image of Marduk’s son was brought from Borsippa on a divine visit to his father, then returned. Different cities had equivalent but variant ceremonies. What is certain is that large numbers of people joined this festivals of purification and expiatory rites.

A genre of purely fictional or invented myths began to appear from about 765 BC. They can be dated from their contemporary references which show they are fiction but set in a real historical matrix, however slight. It was a sort of literary fiction because its style was unsuitable for recitation at a festival. A myth was deliberately composed for Sennacherib when he was campaigning against Babylonia, and plainly meant for performance in the New Year ceremonies. In it Marduk is put on trial before the gods for some offence. As a trial of a god, an Italian scholar sees in it a source of the trial and execution of Jesus. It is a passion myth! It shows that the rulers of the Assyrians were actually quite cynical about religion, using it manifestly as an instrument of control and propaganda as early as the eighth century BC.

The library of Assurbanipal had a creation myth that must have been the original of several stories in Genesis. It is the Babylonian creation epic, Enuma Elish, When Above, a poem in praise of Marduk to establish him as the king of gods, and shaper of the universe. It was written about 1400 BC after Marduk had replaced the earlier gods, and its language is archaic Akkadian and it seems to be the older myth updated. The original hero was probably Bel (Enlil). The legend is the story of the fight between Bel and the Dragon, with the account of the creation prefixed. Much of the poem is the direct speech of Marduk, probably incorporated from older works. It was in regular use during the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods, when it was read as part of the New Year Festival. In Assyria the hero was Assur.

Marduk might have had a name for each week of the year, with the remaining fortnight reserved for the New Year ceremonies. This became the epic related each year at the New Year ceremony. In Assyria, the myth was the same except that Ashur was Marduk.

The New Year and the Return—Haggai and Zechariah

The name “Haggai” is said to be a shortening of Haggiah meaning a “festivity of Yehouah”, supposedly in anticipation of the joyous return from exile. Haggai did not seem a very joyful man, and this is folk etymology. Literally, it looks to mean “The Ravine”, which in the Zoroastrian eschatological context in which the book ends, reminds us of the Abyss of Judgement, over which is the Chinvat bridge for the passage of righteous souls to heaven (a place associated in later Judaism with the Qidron Valley, the Vale of Jehoshaphat). If the meaning “festival” is sound, then it comes from the founding of the New Year Festival in Yehud, in imitation of the one in Babylon, at this very time.

The fourth vision (Zech 3:1-10) is of a coronation ceremony involving Joshua, the High Priest. The purpose of the ceremony seems to be to stand for the removal of the iniquity of the land. Joshua, the salvation of the colonists, is shown as accused of some wrong and dressed in filthy old garments seeming to represent this. It is an adaptation of the renewal ceremony of the Persian king at the New Year festival. The king dresses down as the Old Year, now in tatters, but in the course of the ceremony his rags are removed and replaced by bright finery as the New Year, a ritual that also stood for the Creation because God turned Chaos into Order. In Persian religion, every New Year was a new creation, and the king had to be crowned anew. In the ceremony, Joshua is crowned, not with a “turban” but with a “mitre”, the Mithraitic head dress still worn by Christian bishops.

Joshua seems to be taking an eschatological role suggesting that a later editor might have done the same as he did to the figure of Zerubabel in Haggai—turned a mythical figure (Zoroaster, the Saoshyant or Saviour) into a historic one, this time Joshua, which means Yehouah’s Saviour. The mention of courts before the temple had even been built, suggests a later addition. Many scholars think the coronation of Joshua is an interpolation, but perhaps a redacter has simply substituted the name Joshua for Zerubabel along with a few minor enhancements. Enoch has been identified as the personification of the New Year, and so possibly Joshua has been substituted here for Enoch, but Enoch is the Jewish Zoroaster, so we link once again to Zerubabel.

The New Year in Babylonian Myth

Another example is the Egyptian myth that each night, when the sun passed beneath the earth, it was threatened by the dragon Apophis, necessitating the priests to get into the celestial telephone exchange called the temple to practise the rituals, chant the hymns, and utter the spells and prayers that would save the sun god from a fate that would affect everyone on earth. The ritual involved the recitation of the myth of Ra’s origin and ancestry, and how he was to defeat the serpent of the night that threatened him, and everyone else. In Babylon, at the New Year (Akidu) festival, the priests of Marduk reminded the god how he was to defeat Tiamat and create the world. Everyone seemed to join in the ceremonies which thereby became a social obligation. Effectively the recitation and enactment of the myth sustained the world. The ritual was not a celebration of the past, but an affirmation of the present. The past and the present were not distinct.

At the Babylonian Akidu (New Year) festival myth, the Enuma Elish was recited by a solitary priest on the fourth day of twelve days of ceremonial, standing for the twelve months of the year, which were the twelve ages of Creation in microcosm. The purpose of it was to regenerate the king at the start of the year, at the spring equinox, and the creation myth was an important part of it. A portion of a ritual text from the Seleucid era describes the whole procedure, and has been published in ANET.

New Year and Persia

Ashurbanipal took the hands of Sin and Ninku at Harran, according to a royal inscription. It echoes the practice of the monarch taking the hand of Bel Marduk at the Babylonian New Year ceremonies and copied by Cyrus. These observations hint at syncretic tendencies in these religions, and it is interesting to speculate whether Bel-Marduk, the god of Babylon, had also begun to take on universal characteristics at this time.

New Year and Enoch

Enoch had lived another 300 years, making 365. This suggests that Enoch represented an ideal year—he was perfect because he represented the expectations of a New Year and so he was the Spirit of the New Year. The New Year festival held at Easter was most important to Persians, and gave rise to the Jewish Festival of Lots (Purim). To judge by this story, the Old Year, standing for the reality of the wickedness of the world infested by the Evil Spirit’s demons, was crucified to put an end to it. Celestially, it was the spring equinox when the sun crossed the celestial equator making a notional cross in the sky.

The New Year and Exodus

The Passover myth of Exodus 1-15 gave a new reason for the celebration of the seasonal New Year when the sun crossed the celestial equator. The opportunity was there to constantly remind the Israelites that the Egyptians were their historic enemies. So the old spring equinoctial festival was given a new spin by associating it with the Exodus from Egypt and bondage. With this constant reminder, the Jews would become the ideal sentinels for Persia on the boundary of Egypt and Asia. Since this was also closely associated with the covenant of God with the Israelites on Sinai, the festival also reminded them that they were committed to a covenant with the new Persian god, and therefore with Persia.

New Year in the Babylonian Creation Epic

In images of the creation epic, Marduk often has two faces, showing him to have been a likely model for the Sabine god, Janus, adopted by the Romans, also a god of the morning. The Babylonian creation epic was enacted each New Year, the two faces looking backwards on to the pre-creation chaos and forwards to the order created. Despite Marduk being the chief of the gods, Nabu, judging by theophoric names, was the most popular.

The New Year and the Return

The myth is that they went up on the first day of the year in the second year of Darius (or Cyrus), presumably meaning that the new state was declared on that day, making the Persian New Year a famous day to remember in Jewish history.

The New Year and Genesis Myths

The New Year Festival must have been held originally in the autumn, before the winter rains and after all the harvests were in. As part of the creation myth, the flood narrative will have been recited, mimed to song or enacted. Noah survived to be the first vine grower (Genesis 9:20, so he might have been a type of Orpheus. The aim of the cult festival was to reinforce cosmic order, and rebuff the forces of chaos assailing it. The original flood myth might have been to explain an immersion ceremony. After the initiate had been baptized, he was promised eternal life with the gods. It was might have been the founding myth of the mystery religions which spread to Greece and the Roman empire.

New Year in Mesopotamian Myth

The main festival in Mesopotamia was the New Year festival held in spring or in autumn. Its significance was the renewal of the land through the sprouting of new buds, or the end of the summer scorching. They were the precise equivalent of Easter and Christmas, annual death and rebirth. The divine drama in the valley of the two great rivers was so close to that of the Christians at Easter that the noted archaeologist and Christian professor A H Sayce wrote to The Times to say that God had sent the rituals to prophesy the passion of Christ! It is asking too much perhaps to expect a Christian to be objestive about his work but really the only remedy is to keep them away from any archaeological digs that might have anything to do with the formation of the Christian religion. Who knows what they have destroyed in protection of their absurd beliefs.

New Year and Cyrus the Persian

The interesting thing was that Cyrus offered himself to the Babylonians as a deliverer or Saviour (in Greek, Soter), just as he did to the Judahites. He said Babylon’s god, Marduk-Bel, had chosen him, Cyrus, as a righteous king who would rule the world. To prove it he ritually took the god’s hand at the New Year festivities, thus legitimising him in the official title of the Babylonian king—“king of the land” of Babylon. Marduk-Bel was offered to his own worshippers in a new light—as a god with a world outlook not merely a local one.

New Year and the Faravahars (Fairies) in Zoroastrianism

Fravashis (“faravahars”) or protective spiritual doubles were mainly creatures of the night. The time of night, from sunset to sunrise was dedicated to fravashis. They were venerated at their own festival held at the New Year, or rather on the last night of the old year, in the old calendar being in the autumn, so broadly corresponding with the Christian “All Hallows Eve” (Halloween) and “All Souls Day”, but later, with the change in the calendar, in the month Nisan or roughly March to us—Easter—the Persian festival commemorated in the scriptural Book of Esther! The ritual ended with the lighting of fires before dawn to assist the fravashis to return to their abode before the sun rose. Their association with night, the creation of the Evil Spirit, and the fact that worship otherwise was not to be done at night shows that the fravashis were not thought of a fully benign. They are the relic of the worship of dead spirits, and originally might have been good or bad.

New Year as Sympathetic Magic

Frazer found that magic and religion were inseparably intertwined in many tribal cultures he had data on. Many religious rituals seem based on sympathetic magic, such as the annual renewal, or New Year ceremonies which enact Nature myths apparently with the aim of reminding the gods of their duties. Kings too, who often were shamans in tribal times, were long afterwards thought to have had magical powers, or to have even been divine.

New Year Festivities as Social Bonding

The central meaning of ritual is whatever pertains to rites, formal ceremonies, procedures or acts of a solemn and social character, often religious. Arnold van Gennep, a Belgian anthropologist, coined the phrase “rites of passage” in the title of his seminal book (Rites of Passage, 1908). Before religion was conceived as a distinct activity, rituals were formal family, clan or tribal occasions with no particular “religious” significance. He showed that ritual was meant for social bonding and the social demarcation of status, time and space. Celebrating birthdays and other anniversaries like the New Year, change of status in society, and the crossing of boundaries into sacred spaces offered ways of dividing up time, space and society.

New Year as an Agricultura Festival

When people settled into an agricultural life, a variety of annual events to do with survival had to be marked, notably the New Year, often connected with sowing, and the harvest when the first fruits were gathered, being two prominent examples. These times were festivals and when people began to believe in spirits and gods, these spirits and gods were rewarded with thanksgivings and worship in praise and gratitude. Special places for these celebrations were called sacred, and the ceremonies became holy days and then holidays. Zwemer would not have appreciated these matters and probably could not because he already knew religions were revealed and did not evolve with society.