#ChristmasMyths, #7: So why December 25?

 

A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS to all of you, and a Salacious Saturnalis!

Why are we celebrating morning drinking today? There’s a very good reason, and it’s not quite what you think …

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As every child knows, Christmas falls on December 25th every year. Every year.

But is it because it says so in the Bible? Hell no! You won’t fnid any concept of that there.

The very few early Christian churches who did observe the Nativity² celebrated it sometimes in May, sometimes in April, and even occasionally in January. So clearly they had no clue when their legends had it their Saviour was born.

Nor did they know even which year he was supposed to have been born, the celebrated census causing the one-off visit to Bethlehem being a fabrication found nowhere in the historical literature other than the gospel fictions. So not a great datum bu whic to start a calendar then.

And of you think that today you’re ceberating a birthday, it gets even more complicated the further you drill down.

The authors of both Matthew and Luke suggest the Nativity events happened in the days of Herod, the King of Judea.³  But this particular Herod died in 4BC. The authors of Luke talk too about a census “made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria” (one unknown both to historians like Tacitus and Josephus, and also apparently to the authors of Matthew), just to have their boy born in the City of David. But while this placement gets their boy to Bethlehem in order to please their Jewish readers, they face the problem however that according to Josephus, the only historian to mention anything like this, Cyrenius didn’t become governor until either 6 or 10AD.

Quite a problem.⁴

Put beside that larger stumbling block, the problem of the day, or even month, seems almost minor. (But you do have to wonder what sheep and shepherds were doing out in the fields at night in midwinter where snow very occasionally “blankets the region.” Shouldn't tit have ben them who were away in a warmish manger?)

Now, despite the fact that not one of these authors of festive fiction had any clue about any of the alleged history they referred to, there is in fact a very good reason that fifth-century church fathers eventually did settle on a date of December 25 to celebrate when their divine boy was born. And it wasn’t because of anything they’d put in their book.⁵ It was because folk had been out in the streets for thousands of years already on December 25 celebrating the birth of many other divine boys all born the same day. Boys like these, whom everyone at the time would have known:

And so, rather than fighting the ages-old tradition, the church fathers of what was now a state religion enforced by military arms figured thatr with the full might of the Roman Empire now behind them (red James Valliant’s and Warren Fahey’s Creating the Christ for some of the details)they could simply usurp the heathens⁶ by main force. Usurp them by adopting their rituals, banning their heresies, burning their books--and trying to bury the memory that they had ever existed.

Which is a nasty enough story for this benevolent time of year, but it still doesn’t explain why December 25 was such a crowded calendar for divine birthdays. 

To a modern ear it might sound strange, but the simple explanation is that this day in December was the best day to celebrate one of the most important moments of every year: the winter solstice.

That’s why virtually every early northern-hemisphere culture in and out of Christendom celebrated it, from China to India, from Buddhist temples to Celtic dolmens, sometimes adding the legends of divine birth to allow their divinity to absorb the power of the moment.

It’s easy to forget this, living as we do in the two-hundred years out of all human history in which the industrial revolution has made it possible for billions to complain about #FirstWorldProblems, but in a superstitous time and place ignorant of causality, , it was only at the solstice you discovered whether the gods had decided to give this earth and everyting on it the gift of life for another roiund of harvests; pre-industrial society the annual harvest was everything—it was literally life or death.

And in pre-scientific stone-age societies, where all these myths and their rituals were born, it’s easy to forget the cause of the returning harvest was utterly unknown. 

So perhaps it was divine?

It was the result, surmised most cultures, of battles between competing gods; between gods of light (“I am the light of the world,” said Attis, Mithra, Uncle Tom Krishna and all) who every year beat back the darkness, to start the cycle of birth and rebirth again.

Since even the cause of the returning seasons was wholly unknown, making of every new solstice a divine miracle brought by Saturn, Sol Invictus or whichever Saviour figure your worshipped, little wonder then that the turning of the winter solstice was a time to get happy and praise your gods – to celebrate that  your gods were beating back the darkness for another year (and remember, most people in these early times wouldn’t see but very few years in their lives, life expectancy being what it wasn’t).

This is not unimportant. Author Joseph Campbell (author of Hero with a Thousand Faces and the Power of Myth) describes it brilliantly when he writes that through rituals like these we are seeking to “feel the rapture of being alive. Rituals and ceremonies help us find the clues to this within ourselves.” Through rituals like this, he says, we celebrate our passage out of the darkness.  This solstice celebration is perhaps the ultimate and most literal example.

So while December 25 isn’t the winter solstice, it was the first day in the Northern Hemisphere that the day begins getting noticeably longer, and this victory begins being noticeably evident. Just the right time then to celebrate the victory against the forces of darkness with all the rituals at your disposal, in the hope (but not expectation, mind) that they will bring victory again next year.

That we still celebrate this victory today, along with all the trees and the stockings, the Santas and sleighs and mistletoe, and all the hugs and smiles and eating and drinking, and all the revelry and other Pagan trappings of being whole and being alive to celebrate another year with loved ones confirms strongly enough that the whole mythic celebration still has resonance today, even down here in the Southern Hemisphere summer, and even though it’s changed its form a little since the days of ancient Horus.

Just like all good myths should. That’s how they stay alive, even when buried.

So this Christmas, and every Christmas, there's nothing in it either an atheist or pagan can't get behind and celebrate themselves: if it's a celebration of anything at all, it's of "the rapture of being alive"!
Could there be anything better to which to raise a glass or six?

So I wish all of you, even the trolls, a very Merry Christmas.

A Cool Yule-Feast.

A delightful Noel.

A wonderful Nolagh.

A corking Capacrayme.

A Great Triple Night.

A very happy Natalus Solis Invicti.

And a sweaty and Salacious Saturnalia.

Enjoy!

And I’ll see you all in the New Year.

READ THE WHOLE #CHRISTMAS MYTHS SERIES HERE:

• #1: Introduction, and The Miraculous Birth
• #2: The Star of Bethlehem
• #3:  The Song of the Heavenly Host
• #4: The Birthplace and Surroundings of the Little Baby Jesus
• #5: So, What’s With All That Frankincense?
• #6: The Slaughter of the Innocents

NOTES:

1. This and later posts in the series rely heavily on Thomas William Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions, and Joseph Campbell’s Occidental Mythology and  Thou Art That. 2. Until the Romans made Christianity compulsory in 391AD, at which time they decided on a collection of books for their Bible and banned and burned all the rest, early Christian church rituals would often be based around the regular reading and re-reading of one particular Gospel. So the Nativity would only have been celebrated by those who read either Matthew or Luke (since the unknown authors of neither Mark nor John had added this allegedly all-important stgory to theirs--which is curious, don't you think?).
3. Yet again, the authors of both the earlier Mark, on which these two are based, and the later John show precisely zerointerest in the subject.
4. Just to further confound things, Josephus expressly states that as long as Herod the Great lived, the province of Judea was exempt from Roman taxation. Ergo Luke's taxation census must have occurred after Herod's death while Matthew requires it to have happened before.
So why add a census to the story?
One reason was to have their hero born in in Bethlehem, and so fulfil scriptural predictions about a Messiah coming from Bethlehem. But they might have plotted it better.
Another might have been that the taxing, for which the census was supposed to be the purpose, inspired the formation of the Zealots, or Nazarenes—with whom some authors speculate Jesus and his brother James were heavily involved. So by associating their boy with the privations involved this was a dog whistle to their colleagues.
5. “…they put into their book.” The Gospels themselves were being subtracted from and added to by copyists virtually all the way up to the fourth century, when Emperor Consantine ordered Christians to stop squabbling and ordered the production of fifty copies of what has become the canonical Bibles, based on the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus.
6. It started gently. Writing in about 390AD, John Chrysostom refers to the massive public Roman celebrations for Sol Invictus, and says, “On this day, also, the Birth of Christ was lately fixed at Rome, in order that whilst the heathen were busy with their profane ceremonies, the Christians might perform their holy rites undisturbed.” Within a century, the public and even private celebrations for Sol Invictus were banned, barred and buried from sight, with the new state religion taking over.

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The #ChristmasMyths, #4: The Birthplace and Surroundings of the Little Baby Jesus

 

Part of a continuing series¹ looking at the pagan origins of the Christmas Myths, one day at a time. Today, the cunning tale and the pagan origins of where Jesus was said to be born…

JESUS WAS BORN IN a manger (a trough or a box) and visited by shepherds, say the authors of Luke.²

No, say the authors of Matthew, he was born in a house in which he and Mary were visited by an unconfirmed number of wandering vagrants from the East (three being a later gloss). And there were no little drummer boys. (Although Grace Jones almost manages to make you wish there were!)

 

 

But note that the authors of Mark and John (whoever they might be, since they assuredly weren’t either Mark or John) don’t bother with any of this old carry on. To them, it clearly didn’t matter a hoot who visited where or when or how, or in what manner of receptacle he was born--they simply didn’t consider the events important enough to either document or dream up.

Others followed them.

And others just made up their own stories to suit themselves.

JUSTIN MARTYR  WRITING IN 150AD or so reckons “the actual place of Jesus’ birth was a cave.” Yes, Jesus was born in a cave, agreed Eusebius, the first true ecclesiastical historian, writing at the council of Nice in 327AD and clearly wholly unaware of the stories yet to be grafted to the narrations that appear later in Luke and Matthew: 

Tertullian, Jerome and other early Christian Fathers agreed (as much they could every agree on anything).

That Christian ceremonies have been celebrated for centuries in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, in a cave, support this idea.

So, where was he actually born? Well, who knows, frankly.

Who even knows, quite frankly, if He was even born at all, since all we’re really celebrating is the myth made up by Matthew and Luke based on borrowings of legends from abroad.

SO LET’S CHECK OUT  the pagan and eastern myths associated with the birth of gods—since it was these myths our authors were responding to, borrowing from, and hoping their man to receive credit thereby.

And the story they actually hatched was riven with weasel-like cunning. You see, the idea of there being “no room at the inn” or being born as an outsider is virtually a cliché—the idea in myth that the Hero’s journey begins with him being an outsider, who eventually takes over.

Who could resist that drama! Not the unnamned authors of our two gospels, that’s for sure.

And the stable itself that everyone seems to know abouut is mentioned nowhere at all (other than by implication as being where you might find a trough or be if you're not in an inn); and neither are the animals mentioned who are milling around on stage at every decent school Nativity.

So from where and whence do schoolrooms around the world get that part of their nativity pastorale? Astonishingly, the humble origins associated with birth in either a cave or stable or other humble circumstances is first associated with all those other great virgin-born gods in the great myths, from Zeus to Chrishna to Abraham to Mithra toApollo to Hermes to Dionysus --and it is from them that the tales of stables truly derive.

SO ONCE AGAIN WE find there’s nothing new here in the use of the myth and the association with earlier greater gods, though with this tale the earlier myths show through even beyond the tales told in the Christian book.

There's one god of particular interest however, and he was the Roman god Mithra, Christianity’s great competitor in the marketplace at the time the Christian myythology was being written, who was said to born on December 25. And the two symbols most associated with old Mithra were the cave, being a scene of initiation, and an association with the winter solstice. (Just one of the reasons you're singing songs and giving presents this week, when the northern hemisphere celebrates the solstice.)

The cave is an interesting one. Perhaps the greatest symbolic association with the cave is as a place in which the emergence of light happens, a powerful theme with which to associate this new sect’s great man, and a theme that still appears in virtually every Christmas card depiction of the Nativity.

Early second century carvings and reliefs, indicating how early Christians were already reworking their stories to fit the market, show a child in a crib with an ass, an ox and the Magi – which, by their headdress, are clearly priests of the Lord Mithra. In marketing terms, that’s like showing Pepsi bending the knee to Coke.

A similar message is given by the use of the ox and ass, who appear everywhere in carols and nativity scenes, but nowhere in the Christian account. Where they do come from is actually Egypt: the ass is associated with the god Set, and the ox with the god Osiris (for whom Mozart wrote some pretty damned gorgeous music).

 

 

 

The appearance of Set and Osiris in these carefully-crafted tales was no accident, and once again would have been obvious to every man and his acolyte back in the day. As everyone in the Middle East knew back then, the gods Set (the ass) and Osiris (the ox) were always at war with each other. Always. So to see them reconciled at the birth of this infant, both of them bending their knees to boot, was a powerful mythological hint that these two Gods (representing a union of light and dark) were handing over their powers to him too --and their supporters should think of following suit.

SO IN THAT LITTLE Christmas scene concocted by our two sets of early Christian authors, Osiris and his brother Set, as well as Mithra, are all to be found recognising the Christ.

Cunning, huh.

Not a bad way to use the symbolism of myth to introduce your own man as the new power.  (Set, by the way, was eventually crucified in the Egyptian myths. Just thought you’d like to know.)

All very cunningly and carefully done, because as Joseph Campbell points out,

In that very earliest depiction, we already find the Catholic idea that the older myths are prefigurements of the new. That particular arrangement [of ox and ass and Magi huddled around the Christ figure] could not in the second and third centuries have been mistaken by anybody as meaning anything else.

Thus does myth become propaganda. But the original metaphors behind the myths still remain.

READ THE WHOLE #CHRISTMAS MYTHS SERIES HERE:

• #1: Introduction, and The Miraculous Birth
• #2: The Star of Bethlehem
• #3:  The Song of the Heavenly Host

Tomorrow: “The Divine Child Recognised & Presented With Gifts.”

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1. This and later posts in the series rely heavily on Thomas William Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions, and Joseph Campbell’s Occidental Mythology and  Thou Art That.

2. Note that Luke has the shepherds visit, but only mentions a “manger” — not a stable or animals. The entire setting for the manger, which as ‘everyone’ knows, is simply a trough or open box, is inserted into the story not because of anything in the gospels but because of a loaded passage from Isaiah (1:3), and the marketing gimmick alluded to above.
    The trough itself could have been anywhere, of course, from a stable to a house to an inn or even (as Justin Martyr and the the so-called Infancy Gospel ascribed to Jesus’ brother James assert) to a cave outside Bethlehem.
    Take your pick. The original authors of the Biblical mythology certainly did.

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The #ChristmasMyths, #3: The Song of the Heavenly Host

 

Part of a continuing series* looking at the pagan origins of the Christmas Myths, one day at a time. Today: the story of lonely shepherds, and what a flock of angels does to them late at night …

SO, THERE YOU ARE out there abiding in your fields, minding your own sheep flock’s business –a  shepherd watching your flock by night—and  all of a sudden this old angel shows up, and then another, and then another—until out there in your back paddock you’ve pretty much got the whole Heavenly Host flying about just above the campfire.

 

 

And then they all start singing--and pretty bloody angelically by all accounts (well, by the one account). And let’s be honest, over the years human beings have put some pretty damned heavenly music to the words they are supposed to have sung.

 

 

 

But if the story all sounds just a trifle far-fetched, perhaps that’s why only one of the Gospels’ authors chose to add it to their collected tall tales of Jesus’ great adventures. Only Luke. (Mark and John don’t even bother with any of this Nativity stuff. And Matthew couldn’t have shepherds cluttering up his story, could he: it was already full of Magi.)

And where did Luke get this part of his tall tale from?  Easy. Once again, he just lifted it from those old myths of the pagans and from the east, in which the the birth of every world-historic leader was marked by the sound of heavenly singing—or at least by a loud heavenly voice making a joyful noise.

They’re all nice stories, so why wouldn’t an authow wanting his hero to be thought nice just gently borrow them?

IT HAPPENED IN INDIA when the virgin Devaki bore Chrishna, “the quarters of the horizon were irradiate with joy,” or so the legends tell us, “as if moonlight were over the whole earth.” Not to mention all the spirits and nymphs dancing and singing, and the very clouds emitting “low pleasing sounds” and “pouring down a rain of flowers.”

It would all be very splendid indeed, if true.

The Buddha’s birth too—“born for the good of men, to dispel the darkness of their ignorance”--brought forth a similar celestial celebration: great light, flowers, music heard all over the land, all beings everywhere full of joy, all the gods of the thirty-three heavens singing ding-dong merrily on high. Kind of makes a few angels in a field look just a little bit sad, don’t you think?

Crikey, even Confucius himself couldn’t get himself born without the reported appearance of celestial music.

Nor could the Egyptian Osiris, at whose birth a loud voice was heard proclaiming, “The Ruler of all the Earth is born.” (And so, if you were Egyptian, he was.)

The divine Apollo entered the world in Delos to the joy of all the gods in Olympus, it was said, “and the Earth itself laughed beneath the smile of Heaven.” Hercules’s father Zeus yelled down from heaven to proclaim the birth of his son—by all accounts not very tunefully, but the trend at least is clear.

The “heavenly Apollonius” went one better than just having a tune at his birth: not only did music attend his birth, but a flock of swans appeared, surrounding his mother, clapping their wings in rhythm, singing in unison and fanning the air with a gentle breeze. Lovely! Who needs angels when you’ve got the whole corps of Swan Lake up there in the sky.

SO YOU CAN SEE there is nothing either unique or odd in stories with a heavenly host proclaiming a momentous birth.

What is unique or odd however is that only one of the Gospels bothers to make mention of this portentous event at all. Which, if it were more than just a good story to tell around a campfire, is passing strange don’t you think?

READ THE WHOLE #CHRISTMAS MYTHS SERIES HERE:

• #1: Introduction, and The Miraculous Birth
• #2: The Star of Bethlehem

Tomorrow: “The Divine Child is Recognised & Presented With Gifts.”

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* This and later posts in the series rely heavily on Thomas William Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions. Unless otherwise attributed, all quotes are sourced from there.

The #ChristmasMyths. #2: The Star of Bethlehem

Part of a continuing series looking at the pagan origins of the Christmas Myths, one day at a time. (Introduction is here.) Today, the story of three mendicants and a star.

We Three Kings of Orient are
One on a tractor, Two in a Car
One on a scooter Tooting his hooter
Following yonder star …
~ Fred Dagg, ‘The Authorised Version’

LONG BEFORE THE GREAT Fred Dagg first sang or the Bethlehem Star burst into print, Jesus was born under a star that guided three wise men to his stable door, stopping at Herod’s palace to ask the way. Actually, only the first of these things really happened.

The real story about the last thing however is marginally more interesting than what you’ve heard —especially its real origins; which is infinitely more compelling for being true.So settle back and pull up your star charts.

THE STORY OF STARS and wise men and Jesus is only barely told. For all the amount it fills up space on so many Christmas cards, the story itself only appears in one of the gospels, the one written well after Jesus would have died that erroneously bears the title of ‘Matthew.’ You may consider its inclusion passing strange for a few reasons:

• why this one author chose to add the tale, when the Bible itself was so equivocal on what amounts to astrology; 
• why the authors of the other Gospels choose to ignore the embroidery altogether; 
• why the author(s) of Mark, the earliest Gospel from whom the author(s) of Matthew borrowed most of his, didn’t bother to include any of it; 
• why the three men who we’re told are so wise, and despite being led by this star, lost their way so badly they ended up in Jerusalem instead of Bethlehem; where they very unwisely dobbed in the new baby to King Herod, causing the King to “slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof,from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.”
     I mean, they don’t actually seem to be very wise, do they.

So if any of this sounds in any way wise, or even literarily or historically correct, then I have some gold, and frankincense and myrrh to sell you.


OF COURSE, IT’S NOT INTENDED to be taken as either literarily or historically correct. What idiot would? It was written as myth, based on other myths, to appeal  to a credulous audience who was rather partial to the occasional celestial message from the skies.

The Roman historian Tacitus tells us, for example, that at a crucial moment in the reign of the Emperor Nero,

A comet having appeared at this juncture, the phenomenon, according to the popular opinion, announced that governments were to be changed, and kings dethroned.  In the imaginations of men, Nero was already dethroned, and who should be his successor was the question.

Indeed, popular opinion also had it that brilliant stars were also seen at the birth of every Caesar, Canon Farrar declaring in his own Life of Christ:

the Greeks and Romans had always considered that the births and deaths of great men were symbolised by the appearance and disappearance of heavenly bodies…

Frankly, the credulous Roman people were prepared to accept that a sign from the sky would indicate either a coming coup, or the coming of a great man.

This then was the audience to whom the authors of Matthew were talking when they wove their tale—one to whom it would have been passing strange if his story of this new Messiah did not contain some sort of clear cosmic sign.

SO WHY DID THOSE authors need to add the Three Magi from the East who were following what they told Herod was “His star”? Perhaps because it was from “The East” that this tradition of the “cosmic herald” derived.

Consider the birth of the Buddha, which was supposed have been announced in the heavens by what was called a “Messianic star” rising on the horizon. “Wise men,” known as “Holy Rishis,” were informed by this that their Messiah was born.

Famous births in India also enjoyed their own celestial shining light. The Indian Nakshatias divided the astrological field into 27 constellations, any one of which could direct your life—any unfavourable signs needing to be assuaged by a ceremonial S’Anti. When Crishna was born, “his stars” were said to be seen in the heavens.

In China too, the same astrological influences predominated, and the birth of Yu the legendary founder of China’s first dynasty, was said to have been accompanied by a star, as was the birth of the Taoist sage Laotse.

In the Muslim world, a star and several other celestial signs were supposed to have appeared at the birth of Ali, Muhammad's great disciple.

According to Hebrew legends, a “brilliant star” was also supposed to have shone at the birth of Abraham, and the star at Moses’s birth was so bright it was supposed to have been seen and reported by Egyptian Magi to their king.

In Egypt too, tables were kept with tables of the constellations and their movements for every hour of every month of the year—all of which were supposed to have influence on human beings, and to herald forthcoming events—not least the birth of a Pharaoh.

That’s a lot of stars to have appearing and disappearing in the cosmos. All these appearances on cue would have demanded many more “special stars” and astrological events than even the ancient heavens could have provided. But as we said, they were al a fairly credulous lot.

For his story, Matthew chose to hook directly into the Persian tradition of strangeness in the heavens, where from ancient times they looked to the heavens for guidance, and to the stars for divination. Astrologers were said to have “swarmed throughout the country.” And according to Matthew’s addition to the Gospels it fell to what seems to be three Persian Magi, the Zoriastrian priesthood who followed the god Ormuzd, to distinguish “his star” and announce to the world—or at least to Herod—that the newborn had been granted divine sanction thereby.

A strange tale indeed. (Or an interesting one, if you consider all the sources.)

But if you want to sell your man as a Messiah to an uncritical world ready to believe that the great men of myth and history already had stars to their name, and misguided astrologers to guide them, then evidently that’s a tale a budding Gospel writer decides he has to write.

Well, one of them at least.

READ THE WHOLE #CHRISTMAS MYTHS SERIES HERE:

• #1: Introduction, and The Miraculous Birth

This afternoon: “The Song of the Heavenly Host.”

* * * *

* This and later posts in the series rely heavily on Thomas William Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions. Unless otherwise attributed, all quotes are sourced from there.

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The #ChristmasMyths, #1: The Myth of the Miraculous Birth

 

TIME FOR A SHORT STORY.

A story about the Christian Christmas stories,

A story about where that some of that stuff of legend and mythology came from – what the myths really mean, why early Christian authors wanted to borrow them, and why in some form or other they are told and retold. So …

Q: What’s mythology?
A: Someone else’s religion

Q: What’s the Christian Christmas story based on?
A: Someone else’s stories.

The Christian Christmas story is based on Mythology borrowed from elsewhere. I’m going to look at the pagan origin of each of these myths and legends one day at a time: the miraculous birth; in a humble place; of a youngster of impressive genealogy; accompanied by a tremendous star; and (in Luke) a heavenly choir; recognition of the divine child by passing vagrants wise men; their presentation of gifts; and the slaughter of innocents by a king fearing the child might displace his crown.

The early Christian writers did well in writing their story but, rather than being made up out of whole cloth, it was woven together from earlier myths and legends and the stories of other religions, with most of which they and their readers would have been familiar, to tell the bigger tale those writers wanted their readers to embrace.

Stay with me as I tell the stories.

Today, the Myth of the Miraculous Birth . . .

Far from being unique to the Christian Christmas story, the Virgin Birth Myth is so common in world mythology as to have been the leitmotif of any god anywhere--it's almost like it's a prerequisite for any god that the story appear in his biography if he (or she) is to be taken in any way seriously. So no wonder those early Christian authors wanted it for their own.

The tale appears in American Indian mythologies; in Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology; in Asian and Indian mythologies of every kind -- and even in Maori mythology here in New Zealand. It’s ubiquitous—and not just because everyone copied, but because, like all mythology, it reveals some fundamental truth.

LOOK AT SOME OF the places and times that share the tale.

It appears in ancient Indian myth in the figure of Heri Chrishna, or Crishna the Saviour, who is born of the chaste virgin Devaki, selected on account of her purity, begotten by the deity Vishnu, and said to be “the very person of Vishnu himself in human form.”

Thai mythology has a virgin-born god and saviour called Codon, his mother, a beautiful young virgin, was “impregnated with sunbeams” while out praying one day.

In Buddhist mythology, The Buddha was born of the Virgin Maya, or Mary, after the divine power called “The Holy Ghost” was said to have descended on her in the form of a white elephant! (A little like the session with a white bull enjoyed by Pasiphae, the mother of the Minotaur, but with seemingly more pleasant results.)

Like someone else we could mention, it was said of the Buddha, “He in mercy left paradise, and came down to earth because he was filled with compassion for the sins and miseries of mankind.”  From the time of his birth however, Maya’s womb was sealed up “like a casket in which a relic is placed” and she lived thereafter as a perpetual virgin. So it didn’t all end well for her.

The Hindus have a Lord and Saviour call Salivahana, a “divine child born of a Virgin, in face an incarnation of the Supreme Vishnu.”
China too has the demi-god Fo-hi, conceived when a virgin tasted the divine lotus, and at whose birth a rainbow appeared.

Laotse too, the founder of Taoism, was said to have been “a divine emanation incarnate in human form,” born of a virgin out of his mother’s side. The sages Yu, Hau-ki, Xaca, Confucius were also said to all be god-begotten and virgin-born.

Stop me if any of this is sounding at all familiar.

NOW IT MIGHT BE argued that all this was a bit distant to early Middle Eastern authors. Maybe. But the Middle East of the time was one vast trade route. In any case, there was plenty of virgin-born action closer to home.

In Egypt there was the Saviour Horus, god of vengeance, sky and protection and the second emanation of Ammon, conceived in bizarre fashion out of the virgin Isis and said to be born on December 25; the god Ra, “born from the side of his mother, but was not engendered,” and the sons he himself divinely “engendered”; the god-king Menes likewise.

By the rivers of Babylon (where they sat down) they told stories of how their god-king Nebuchadnezzar was created by the god Bel, engendered by the god Marduk, “and deposited himself the germ of [his] life in the womb of [his] mother.”

Zoroaster in Persia too—who Plato says the Persians considered to be the son of the Supreme God Orasmasdes--was “born in innocence, of an immaculate conception, of a ray of the Divine Reason.”

As was the Indian/Persian angelic divinity Mithras, said to have enjoyed a virgin birth, 12 companions and an ascension into heaven, and around whom the Romans built a religion that at the time of the Gospels’ creation was among the most popular going around—the Pagan Christ—the sun-god ‘Sol Invictus Mithras’ said to be the “favourite deity” of Asia Minor whose “mysteries” had “permeated the Roman Empire and extended from India to Scotland”—and whose birthday just happened to be on December 25.

If they were to be successful, this last was the main religion the early Christians either had to knock off or usurp—or absorb.

Justin Martyr to Emperor Adrian: “The story of Jesus’ divine birth ‘says no more that what you
Pagans say of those whom you style the sons of Jove.’” Picture shows birth of Dionysus-Zagreus,
first son of Jove to a mortal woman, who was was torn apart by the Titans 
before being resurrected and ascending to heaven. Nice story. But who would ever believe it?

THE EARLY CHRISTIAN WRITER who revelled in the unlikely name of Justin Martyr relied on all this and more when he wrote to Emperor Adrian arguing that the just-written story of Jesus’ divine birth “says no more that what you Pagans say of those whom you style the sons of Jove.” True enough. Jove aka Jupiter aka Zeus was, if you recall your cursing properly (“By Jove!) not only “omnipotent” but also the first and the last; the head and the midst; the giver of all things; the foundation of the earth, and the starry heavens.”

So he was a divine and all-powerful fellow. And so were Jove’s sons, by Jove!

Among the divine sons of Jove aka Zeus we can find Hercules, the son of Jupiter by a mortal mother Alcmene;Bacchus (aka Dionysus), delivered by the mortal mother Semele “by a lightning-bearing flame” (which must have hurt the poor woman); Amphion, by the mortal mother Antoiope; Prometheus, the deliverer of fire to humans, and a deity uniting divine and human nature; Perseus, by the mortal virgin Danae; Mercury, by the mortal mother Maia; Aeolus, by the mortal mother Acasta; Apollo, delivered under a tree to the mortal mother Latona; Aethlius, by the mortal mother Protogenia; Arcas, by a mortal mother; Aroclus, by another mortal mother.

The legendary founder of Rome Romulus was said to have been the son of God by the “pure virgin” Rhea-Sylvia

That’s a lot of begatting going on. So it seems that if any bogus Messiah were to be taken at all seriously around these parts, he needed as a minimum some kind of supreme being in his bloodlines and maybe a bit of virgin-birthing to kick his story off.

Roman and Greek rulers themselves were not immune to having their stories so embroidered. The legendary founder of Rome Romulus was said to have been the son of God by the pure virgin Rhea-Sylvia. Julius Caesar was supposed to have a God for a father, as was Augustus. Alexander the Great was said to have been the son of either Jupiter/Zeus or Ammon (depending on who was telling the story) by the mortal mother Olympias, who was impregnated by a divine snake, all of which no doubt amused his warrior father Philip. His general and partial successor Ptolemy Soter (Ptolemy Saviour) was also said to carry the divine afflatus, as was Cyrus, King of Persia.

Alexander the Great was said to have been the son of the mortal mother Olympias, who was impregnated by a divine snake

Plato too was believed by many to have been the son of God by the pure virgin Perictione, and his father Aris was said to have been admonished in a dream to leave her bits alone because she was pregnant to a god. Plato’s story, and Aris’s, is shared by the mother of Apollonius, and the father ofPythagoras. Aesculapius, “the great performer of miracles, was supposed to be the son of a god and the worldly mother Coronis.” She supposedly -gave birth on a mountain (it’s a long story), with the help of a passing goat-herd, to a child whose head was “encircled with fiery rays.”

Even closer to the Middle Eastern home was Simon Magus, a Hebrew hero contemporary with Jesus who performed miracles and was believed to be the son of a god.

And that’s not to mention the various offspring of Odin (who, because of his predilection for wandering the skies delivering gifts, was said to be one of the forebears of the Santa story), including Baldur and Thor; or the various virgin-born gods in the ancient South America that helped the Spanish so much in selling their own version of the virgin-born story to a fearful population—god-king-saviours like the MexicanQuetzalcoatl, the Mayan Zama, Bochica of Colombia, Manco Capac (offspring of of the god Peru), Votan of Guatemala, and Zome of Brazil. Meanwhile, North American Indians celebrated the divine birth of Wasi, if you were Cherokee; of Qaagagp if you were an Edue of California; of Tarengawagan if you were Iroquois; and Michabou if you were Algonquin.

Not to forget the miraculous birth of the trickster      

and miracle-worker Maui, conceived                

here in New Zealand to the divine                 

Tama-nui-te-ra and the mortal mother Taranga          

Not to forget the miraculous birth of the trickster and miracle-worker Maui, conceived here in New Zealand to the divine Tama-nui-te-ra and the mortal mother Taranga, and the hero of many delightfully tall tales.

NOW, IT’S FAIRLY OBVIOUS that not one  of these stories relate actual historical events. In each of them, the story is intended either to be taken as the sort of exaggerated boasting Arabs still enjoy today, or to be taken as a metaphor—a symbol in the most basic sense. According to mythologist Joseph Campbell, the symbol embodied here is that of “the birth of spiritual man out of animal man.” A symbol, in other words, of an important transformation in human affairs --- the coming into maturity of mankind.

This relates strongly to what Campbell calls "the Hero Myth," universal in so many cultures, in which the son is born to a father who is, let’s say, a hero warrior gone off to the wars after conception never to return.  The son’s first quest as a man—his first spiritual journey—is the quest to find his father. In other words, to find himself.

There is then [says Campbell] a whole tradition of mythologies involving the spiritual begetter and the son who must go in quest of his father.
    This is not always a Virgin Birth in the physical sense…

But important to the tale that his thought-to-be father is often revealed not to be his real birth-father – his origins, like mankind’s, being lost in the mists of time.

No surprise then in the Jesus story that his parents fail to understand him when, in the story, the twelve-tear-old Jesus tells his parents “he must be about his Father’s business.”

And note that even in the Synoptic Gospels themselves, when the Jesus stories first appear, we never find Jesus from his own mouth (as told by his take-tellers) declaring himself to be either a god or God, or to be worshipped as one.²

So if you do take these as Gospel, then you’d surely have to believe him.

Understanding the myths is far more interesting than arguing for them being literal or historical fact. Isn’t it odd that instead of enjoying the metaphorical meaning of these myths and stories, so many folk get hung up instead on the literal fiction.

Happy Horusmas!

---

NOTES

1. This and later posts in the series rely heavily on Thomas William Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions. Unless otherwise attributed, all quotes are sourced from there.

2.  “If we seek in the first three Gospels to know what his [later] biographers thought of Jesus, we find his true humanity plainly stated, and if we possessed only the Gospel of Mark, and the discourses of the Apostles in Acts, the whole Christology of the New Testament  would be reduced to this: that Jesus of Nazareth of was ‘a prophet mighty in deeds and in words, made by God Christ and Lord.’ ” – Albert Réville
And check out the Question ‘Is Jesus God?’ at the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible site.

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The *real* reason for the season

 

Yes folks, it’s time for that post again because …

It’s the Christmas season. Yuletide. The festive season. And we need to know the real reason for the season, which is …. probably not what you think it is.

We’ve had the cartoon, so like all good Christmas dinners, let’s have a Christmas joke:

Q: "What's the difference between God and Santa Claus?"
A: "There is no God."

Ha ha ha.  The fact is, dear readers, at least Santa—well, Saint Nicholas at least—was a real figure, if not a real bloke, even if the many other inspirations for the Santa Claus character were not.

But God, or Christ, is suspiciously hard to find. (Which makes you sort of wonder what kind of message he’s allegedly trying to send by being so, well, non-omnipresent and all, and by only sending notes via obscure Bronze- and Roman-era texts.) And the harsh fact about him and Christmas, whatever else you may have heard, is that Christ himself was never even in Christmas --except in fiction and by order of the first few Popes.

Not even in the Roman-era texts:

[The New Testament itself gives two different and incompatible stories of the birth of Jesus, explains Christopher Hitchens.] None of the four gospels gives any notion of what time of year (let alone in what year) the supposed Nativity occurred. Only two gospels mention the virginity of Mary and only one has any mention of a "manger" [which is nothing more than a fancy name for trough – but try singing “Away in a trough” and see where that gets you!].
    Nowhere is there any record of a "stable." Wise men and shepherds are likewise very unevenly distributed throughout the discrepant accounts. So that the placement of a crèche surrounded by a motley crew of humans and animals has no more Scriptural warrant than does The Life of Brian [and many fewer laughs].
    Moreover, the erection of this exhibit near the turn of the year is actually a placation of the old Norse gods of the winter solstice - or "Yule" as the pre-Christians sometimes called it.
    I myself [says Hitchens] repose no faith in any man-made text or made-man redeemer, so when it's Christmas I say "Merry Christmas" with a clear conscience, as I respect Ramadan and Passover, and also because "Happy Holidays" is so thin and insipid.
    I don't mind if Christians honour the moment by displaying, and singing about, reindeer (a hard species to find in the greater Jerusalem/Bethlehem area). Same for the pine and fir trees that also don't grow in Palestine. I wish everybody joy of it.

And so do I. I just wish the Christians would leave off bashing us over the head with their myth—and their values.

So many facts that appear in your nativities don’t even come from those texts. We celebrate Christmas in December, yet the best we can tell from those Christmas stories is that the character of Jesus wasn't even born in December, let alone at Christmas time: he was born in July.¹ Which makes him a cancer.²  Just like religion itself.

And God doesn’t even like Christmas trees, for Chrissake!

So the reason for the season, and how the season is celebrated, have very little originally to do with what you might have thought it did.

Historians themselves however do know the "reason for the season," and it's not because of anything that happened away in a stable at a time of a non-existent census.  Even the Archbishop of Canterbury knows the truth, conceding a few Christmasses ago that the Christmas story and the Three Wise Men -- the whole Nativity thing itself --  is all just "a legend." Legends in fact that borrowed in whole cloth from other times and other places, and thereafter usurpedand occupied  by the Christian church.

Speaking for myself,  I really like myths and legends.

I’m even happier when we remember they’re stories, not historical accounts. (Q: What’s the definition of mythology? A: Somebody else’s religion.)

So the simple fact to remember at this seasons is that 'Christmas' itself was originally not even a Christian festival at all.  The origins of what we now all enjoy was most likely the lusty pagan festival to celebrate the winter solstice, the festival that eventually became the Roman Saturnalia (right).

In the pre-modern northern hemisphere, (from whence these traditions started) this time of year was especially important; the time of year when days stopped getting darker and darker, and started once again to lengthen.

A halfway point in winter, that bleak season of hibernation before planting could begin again and you knew by now that the crops being stored to keep the wolves at bay would see you through. Or not. And if they would, you had something to celebrate: that another year on earth was maybe possible!

So this was a time of the year for great optimism.  The end of the hardest part of the year was in sight (particularly important up in Lapland, the pagan home of the Norsemen where all-day darkness was the winter rule), and those all-important food stocks would soon be replenished.

All this was something worth celebrating with enthusiasm, with gusto and with plenty of food and drink and pleasures of the flesh -- and if those Norse sagas tell us anything, they tell us those pagans knew a thing or two about that sort of celebration!  They celebrated a truly Salacious Saturnalia.

Thus was born the now-celebrated tradition of being blathered for most of what has become the Christmas month.

One other popular celebration (and stop me if you’ve heard this before) involved having a chap put on the horns and skin of the dead animal being roasted in the fire (worn with the fur side inside and the blood-red side outside ), and giving out gifts of food to revellers.  This guy represented Satan, or at least some species of evil-doer, and the revellers celebrated beating him back for another year by making him a figure of fun (I swear, I'm not making this up). 

Observant readers will spot that the gift-giving and the red outfit lined with red fur (and even the name itself, almost) are still with us in the form of Santa.  So Happy Satanmas, Santa!

 

SUCH WERE THE celebrations of the past.  But the Dark Age Christian do-gooders didn’t like the pagan revels. Too little sackcloth and ashes for their liking. Instead of bacchanalia, these ghouls of the graveyard wanted instead to talk about suffering and their sores, and to spread the misery of their religion worldwide; instead of throwing themselves into such lewd and lusty revels, they thought everyone should be sitting at home mortifying their flesh  – and  very soon they hit upon a solution: first they stole the festivals, and then they sanitised them. 

And instead of lusty revels with Satan and mistletoe, they gave us insipid nonsense around a trough along with Magi, stars, and shepherds – with only an angel or two to excite a bit of lust.  (Just think, the first 'Grinch' who stole Christmas was really a Pope!)

So given this actual history, it's somewhat churlish of today's sanitised saints of sobriety to be complaining now about history reasserting itself and folk claiming Christmas back for their revels.

BECAUSE THE VERY BEST OF Christmas is still very much pagan, for which you should really thank Odin, not the baby bloody Jesus.

The mistletoe, the trees, and the presents; the drinking and eating and all the red-blooded celebrations; the gift-giving, the trees and the decorations; the eating and the singing; the whole full-blooded, rip-roaring, free-wheeling, overwhelming, benevolent materialism of the holiday -- all of it all fun, and all of it fully, one-hundred percent pagan.

And commercial! (Spoiler alert, the modern Christmas was born that way: it was invented by capitalism.) Says Leonard Peikoff in 'Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial' (s), the festival is "an exuberant display of human ingenuity, capitalist productivity, and the enjoyment of life." I'll drink to all that, and then I'll come back right back up again for seconds.

Ayn Rand sums it up for mine, rather more benevolently than my brief introduction might have led you to expect:

“The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion: it is good will toward men—a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property (though it is supposed to be part, but is a largely unobserved part) of the Christian religion.
The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: ‘Merry Christmas’—not ‘Weep and Repent.’ And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form—by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance....
    “The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying is good for business and good for the country’s economy; but, more importantly in this context, it stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decoration put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only ‘commercial greed’ could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.

And so say all of us.  I wish you all, wherever you are a  Cool Yule, a Salacious Saturnalia, and a very Happy Christmas.

PS: Here’s some related Hot Facts from the Hot Facts Girl. Concentrate as well as you can…

 

 

 

1. Yes, this is simply a rhetorical flourish. Jesus' birth may have happened in March. Or in September -- or not at all -- but it certainly did not happen in December. More on that here.

2. "A cancer. Like religion." Think that's harsh? You should try Landover Baptist's Bible Quizzes. Or Sam Harris's 'Atheist Manifesto.' Ouch! [Hat tip for both, good old Stephen Hicks] And, I confess, I pinched the quip from Australian comedy team The Doug Anthony All Stars.

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#ChristmasMyths, #7: So why December 25?

The final part of a series exploring the pagan origins of all the familiar Biblical Christmas Myths,¹ so you can think about them all as you're out carolling. Today, the reason we celebrate on December 25 …

As every child knows, Christmas falls on December 25th every year. Every year.

But is it because it says so in the Bible? Hell no!

The early Christian churches who did observe the Nativity² celebrated it sometimes in May, sometimes in April, and even occasionally in January. So clearly they had no clue when legend had it their Saviour was born.

Nor did they know even which year he was supposed to have been born, the celebrated census causing the one-off visit to Bethlehem being a fabrication found nowhere else in the historical literature. So not a great way to start a calendar then.

The authors of both Matthew and Luke suggest these events happened in the days of Herod, the King of Judea.³  But this Herod died in 4BC. The authors of Luke talk too about a census “made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria” (one unknown both to historians like Tacitus and Josephus, and apparently to the authors of Matthew), just to have their boy born in the City of David. But while they get him to Bethlehem in order to please their Jewish readers, they face the problem that according to Josephus, the only historian to mention anything like this, Cyrenius didn’t become governor until either 6 or 10AD.

Quite a problem.⁴

Put beside that larger problem, the problem of the day, or even month, seems almost minor. But you do have to wonder what sheep and shepherds were doing out in the fields at night in midwinter where snow very occasionally “blankets the region.” Shouldn't they have been away near a manger?

Now, despite the fact that not one of them had any clue, there is in fact a very good reason that fifth-century church fathers eventually did settle on a date of December 25 to celebrate when their divine boy was born, and it wasn’t because of anything they’d put in their book.⁵ It was because folk had been out in the streets for thousands of years already on December 25 celebrating the birth of many other divine boys all born the same day. Boys like these, whom everyone at the time would have known:

And so, rather than fighting the ages-old tradition, the church fathers of what was now a state religion enforced by military arms figured with the full might of the Roman Empire behind them they could simply usurp the heathens⁶ by main force. Usurp them by adopting their rituals, banning their heresies, burning their books--and trying to bury the memory that they had ever existed.

Which is a nasty enough story, but it still doesn’t explain why December 25 was such a crowded calendar for divine birthdays. 

 To a modern ear it might sound strange, but the simple explanation is that this day in December was the best day to celebrate one of the most important moments of every year: the winter solstice.

That’s why virtually every early northern-hemisphere culture in and out of Christendom celebrated it, from China to India, from Buddhist temples to Celtic dolmens, sometimes adding the legends of divine birth to allow their divinity to absorb the power of the moment.

It’s easy to forget this, living as we do in the two-hundred years out of all human history in which the industrial revolution has made it possible for billions to complain about #FirstWorldProblems, but in a pre-industrial society the annual harvest was everything—it was literally life or death.

And in pre-scientific stone-age societies, where all these myths and their rituals were born, it’s easy to forget the cause of the returning harvest was utterly unknown. 

So perhaps it was divine?

It was the result, surmised most cultures, of battles between competing gods; between gods of light (“I am the light of the world,” said Attis, Mithra, Uncle Tom Krishna and all) who every year beat back the darkness, to start the cycle of birth and rebirth again.

Since even the cause of the returning seasons was wholly unknown, making of every new solstice a divine miracle brought by Saturn, Sol Invictus or whichever Saviour figure your worshipped, little wonder then that the turning of the winter solstice was a time to get happy and praise your gods – to celebrate that  your gods were beating back the darkness for another year (and remember, most people in these early times wouldn’t see but very few years in their lives, life expectancy being what it wasn’t).

This is not unimportant. Author Joseph Campbell (author of Hero with a Thousand Faces and the Power of Myth) describes it brilliantly when he writes that through rituals like these we are seeking to “feel the rapture of being alive. Rituals and ceremonies help us find the clues to this within ourselves.” Through rituals like this, he says, we celebrate our passage out of the darkness.  This solstice celebration is perhaps the ultimate and most literal example.

So while December 25 isn’t the winter solstice, it was the first day in the Northern Hemisphere that the day begins getting noticeably longer, and this victory begins being noticeably evident. Just the right time then to celebrate the victory against the forces of darkness with all the rituals at your disposal, in the hope (but not expectation, mind) that they will bring victory again next year.

That we still celebrate this victory today, along with all the trees and the stockings, the Santas and sleighs and mistletoe, and all the hugs and smiles and eating and drinking, and all the revelry and other Pagan trappings of being whole and being alive to celebrate another year with loved ones confirms strongly enough that the whole mythic celebration still has resonance today, even down here in the Southern Hemisphere summer, and even though it’s changed its form a little since the days of ancient Horus.

Just like all good myths should. That’s how they stay alive, even when buried.

So this Christmas, and every Christmas, there's nothing in it either an atheist or pagan can't get behind and celebrate themselves: if it's a celebration of anything at all, it's of "the rapture of being alive"!

Could there be anything better to which to raise a glass or six?

So I wish all of you, even the trolls, a very Merry Christmas.

A Cool Yule-Feast.

A delightful Noel.

A wonderful Nolagh.

A corking Capacrayme.

A Great Triple Night.

A very happy Natalus Solis Invicti.

And a sweaty and Salacious Saturnalia.

Enjoy!

And I’ll see you all in the New Year.

READ THE WHOLE #CHRISTMAS MYTHS SERIES HERE:

• #1: Introduction, and The Miraculous Birth
• #2: The Star of Bethlehem
• #3:  The Song of the Heavenly Host
• #4: The Birthplace and Surroundings of the Little Baby Jesus
• #5: So, What’s With All That Frankincense?
• #6: The Slaughter of the Innocents

NOTES:

1. This and later posts in the series rely heavily on Thomas William Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions, and Joseph Campbell’s Occidental Mythology and  Thou Art That. 2. Until the Romans made Christianity compulsory in 391AD, at which time they decided on a collection of books for their Bible and banned and burned all the rest, early Christian church rituals would often be based around the regular reading and re-reading of one particular Gospel. So the Nativity would only have been celebrated by those who read either Matthew or Luke (since the unknown authors of neither Mark nor John had added this allegedly all-important stgory to theirs--which is curious, don't you think?).
3. Yet again, the authors of both the earlier Mark, on which these two are based, and the later John show precisely zerointerest in the subject.
4. Just to further confound things, Josephus expressly states that as long as Herod the Great lived, the province of Judea was exempt from Roman taxation. Ergo Luke's taxation census must have occurred after Herod's death while Matthew requires it to have happened before.
So why add a census to the story?
One reason was to have their hero born in in Bethlehem, and so fulfil scriptural predictions about a Messiah coming from Bethlehem. But they might have plotted it better.
Another might have been that the taxing, for which the census was supposed to be the purpose, inspired the formation of the Zealots, or Nazarenes—with whom some authors speculate Jesus and his brother James were heavily involved. So by associating their boy with the privations involved this was a dog whistle to their colleagues.
5. “…they put into their book.” The Gospels themselves were being subtracted from and added to by copyists virtually all the way up to the fourth century, when Emperor Consantine ordered Christians to stop squabbling and ordered the production of fifty copies of what has become the canonical Bibles, based on the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus.
6. It started gently. Writing in about 390AD, John Chrysostom refers to the massive public Roman celebrations for Sol Invictus, and says, “On this day, also, the Birth of Christ was lately fixed at Rome, in order that whilst the heathen were busy with their profane ceremonies, the Christians might perform their holy rites undisturbed.” Within a century, the public and even private celebrations for Sol Invictus were banned, barred and buried from sight, with the new state religion taking over.

#ChristmasMyths. #6: The Slaughter of the Innocents

Part of a continuing series looking at the pagan origins of the Christmas Myths,* one day at a time. Today, the story and pagan origins of King Herod’s weapons-grade infanticide …

Massacre of the Innocents, Peter Paul Rubens

The story is familiar enough as a postscript to the whole Nativity. The life of the infant just born and celebrated in a manger is immediately under threat by the evil king, put in danger by the ruler’s fear that the new baby (who he’s been told is a Messiah) will come to usurp his reign. So the new parents immediately make plans to get out of Dodge:

A heavenly voice whispered to the foster father … and told him to fly with the child across the river … which was immediately done. This was owing to the fact that the reigning monarch … sought the life of the infant Saviour, and to accomplish his purpose, he sent messengers to kill all the infants in the neighbouring places.

The barbaric story was just as familiar to listeners in the first, second and third centuries when the authors of the Matthew gospel were pulling together their stories, but the protagonist when the story was told and retold was always very different – and diverse! The story was so familiar because it has been told and retold about virtually every pagan, eastern and Egyptian Saviour in all of mythological history.

The story told in quote above is not from the Christian Bible, but is actually a description of the divine baby Crishna fleeing ahead of the messengers of the evil King Kansa, who had heard a prophecy that his niece’s child would slay him. (I won’t give you spoilers on that one.)

No Biblical author but one wanted to put his name to this story, nor yet any historians -- who unanimously agree that the mass infanticide never happened. In the story concocted by the authors of Matthew however (it appears nowhere else in the not-so-Good Book) it was the “wise men” who dobbed in the infant to Herod when they stopped in, lost, on their way to the birthplace in Bethlehem. (None of which sounds very wise to me, really, especially since they they were supposed to be accomplished astrologers supposed to have been guided by a star. But then, no one ever said myth was supposed to make sense.)

So other than detail – and, to be sure, wise men appear in other versions of the story too, only in slightly differing roles – it is the exact same story, right down to the many years that the new infant then spends out of the country in humble circumstances (Crishna in Mathura, where he was fostered by herdsmen; Jesus in Matarea,** near Cairo).

In fact, for the names Chrishna and Jesus, you could easily substitute all or any of the following Saviours, whose early biography is all but identical:

• Salivahana,  the virgin-born Saviour who fled from the southerly part of India with a tyrant in pursuit. (This tyrant was said to have been successful.) 
• The Buddha’s life was in danger when the whose wise men of  King Bimbarasa told him that a youth newly-born to the north etc., whereupon messengers were sent etc.
• The same story is told by the East Mongols, with the divine infant this time being pursued by a King Patsala. This boy was captured, thrown into the Ganges in a copper chest. whereupon he enjoyed a Moses-like resurrection and went back to avenge himself against the king.
• In China, Hau-ki  shared a similar story.
• So too does the great Egyptian god Horus, with whom Jesus also shares a birthday (but more about that tomorrow), and the great Persian monarch Cyrus, whose grandfather was warned about him by his wise men (the word “wise” being used quite profligately in those times).
• The great patriarch of three religions, Abraham, shared a similar fate according to all the legends when, in Babylon, King Nimrod ordered “all women in child guarded with great care, and all children born of them put to death.” Many children were slaughtered, according to legend, but not our hero.
• The chief of the religion of the Magi himself, Zoroaster, was obliged for similar reasons to fell from Persia into Egypt,where his mother was sent the message by good spirits: “Fear nothing! [The supreme god] Ormuzd will protect this infant. He has sent him as a prophet to the people.  The world is waiting for him.”
• In Greek Myth, the story was shared by Perseus, son of the virgin Danae; Hercules, son of the virgin Leto; Telephos of Arcadius; the Trojan hero Paris; Jason, the hero of the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece; and Dionysus, the god of wine, who also shares a birthday with Iesus – to name just a few.

Indeed, the story of the Dangerous Child raised by outsiders who had to be killed by those he threatened was virtually universal, appearing in legends crafted around heroes as diverse as Roman emperors, Greek Saviours, Indian divinities, Chinese sages, Egyptian gods, English saints, Hebrew heroes … and anonymous Judean figures around whom later authors wove their own Christian myths.

As mythologist Joseph Campbell says of this trope (and his observation may be taken as representative of every single one of the #Christmas Myths posted in recent days):

When a marvellous occurrence is said to be have happened everywhere, we may feel sure that it never happened anywhere. Popular fancies propagate themselves indefinitely, but historical events, especially the striking and dramatic ones, are rarely repeated.

That it is only the authors of the Matthew gospel that choose to use the symbol is merely an oddity. (The authors of the only other gospel to mention the birth, those of  Luke, talk instead of a leisurely journey home “full of wonder” at the events surrounding them, with no fear of Herod, no slaughter, no mourning for children slain.)

The point of all myth is the metaphor. So what’s our metaphor in this otherwise barbaric story?

The symbolism of pursuit and slaughter is obvious enough. And the mythic metaphor is clear enough: the representative of the status quo, the tyrant king, refuses to open to the new generative principle of the age, which returns to overcome the tyrant’s power and to bring something new to the world. A clear and powerful metaphor which is why it’s been so well used by storytellers through the ages. (Just a shame so many children under two had to die, fictionally, to tell it.)

Outside theology, perhaps the most celebrated literary example of the Dangerous Child myth is that of the Theban Oedipus, made famous by Sophocles’s famous play and now known almost as widely as the myth put together by the authors of the Matthew gospel.

So to summarise: In the the Infancy story and its subsequent Massacre of the Innocents motif, Joseph Campbell sees “a very familiar mythological narrative”: Taken together, the whole theme of persecution, pursuit, the humble hiding place, the tyrant king, and the new saviour who eventually outwits him all evoke the fearsome dangers that the new generative principle needs to overcome to give a new voice to the people.

Powerful stuff.

No wonder at least one of authors of the gospels decided to borrow it.

READ THE WHOLE #CHRISTMAS MYTHS SERIES HERE:

• #1: Introduction, and The Miraculous Birth
• #2: The Star of Bethlehem
• #3:  The Song of the Heavenly Host
• #4: The Birthplace and Surroundings of the Little Baby Jesus
• #5: So, What’s With All That Frankincense?

Tomorrow: “Why December 25?”

* This and other posts in the series rely heavily on Thomas William Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions, and Joseph Campbell’s Occidental Mythology and  Thou Art That. ** This is according to a local legend that causes them to still burn a lamp in remembrance of the visitation, and to the third-century figures Chemnitius of Stipulensis and Peter Martyr, Bishop of Alexandria, who have helped feed the Greek Orthodox belief in the legend.