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We are all very familiar with the story: the child who will be the savior of his people is born surrounded by miracles and wonders. His mother became pregnant under mysterious and godly circumstances. His birth was lowly, hardly benefiting a king or a god. The birth was foretold ages before and announced by miracles and cosmic signs. The new baby’s life is in danger from the current king, and he must be spirited away. This is the outline of the story of Jesus as we have come to know it, but it is also the story of Adonis, Dionysus, Mithras, Arthur, and literally hundreds of other gods and heroes of myth, legend, and religion. This story of Christmas is not new. It is older than the "Jesus Story". Jesus is not now, and in fact never has been, the reason for the season but rather the season is the reason for Jesus!!! That might appear as a very strange statement coming from one who has spent almost 20 years studying the "Jesus" only to come to the conclusion that there was never a "historical Jesus" in the first century but only a a Roman "literalization" of the "Christ Within" each of God's children. If you don't understand that statement that "the Season is the reason for 'Jesus'" then you have to understand just what "Jesus" really is; a "Spiritual Concept" revealing the Divine Potential in all of us as the Creator's Children in which He resides.
As my studies and the years rolled by and as I read more and more of the religious myths and legends of the world, and learned about the psychological and social necessity for myths to expresses Divine religious concepts, I discovered the ever-elusive "Real Meaning of Christmas". As I learned to embrace myth and symbol, and to separate myth and symbol from superstition I discovered the real meaning to our "Christian Christmas" but it is not what you think.
Time for a history lesson - this time of year is a universally sacred and special time, for it is the time of the Winter Solstice, the time when the Sun has died and is about to be "reborn". Thus the theme of the "birth" of the "Christ Child" as the newborn Sun, symbolic of the Creator and His life that is shared with us through light and photosynthesis. It is this "newborn Sun" emerging from the Winter Solstice that begins its new life across the Sky as it grows and the daylight it shares from the shortest days of light to the longest days of light at the Summer Solstice. At the Winter Solstice (December 21-24th) daylight is scarce and darkness rules supreme. The evil of darkness had triumphed over God and His Sunlight for 3 days but this is about to change. Although nights are long and cold, and darker than usual the tilt of the earth has reached its maximum and the earth, as a spinning top, now regresses in it spin and begins to "wobble" the other way for the next six months. Light a "newborn" child grows day by day so does God's Sun thus again we see the themes of the "birth of God's child, His Sun" and track its life day by day for the next six months as God's Sun, like child, grows from infancy (less daylight) to full maturity (the longest daylight per day). But at this time, the Winter Solstice, our Christmas, the harvests are in. The flocks and herds are gathered to be protected again the evil of darkness and its cold. This time of the year, the Winter Solstice, this "dark=evil", or this "d=evil", or this "devil" has come to see and destroy with its bitter cold and destruction of the harvests of the Earth. Normal life is suspended, and there is but on the wait; the wait of mankind for winter to die and God's Sun to be "birthed". But this waiting no longer was to be feared by mankind; everything was okay because the folks of 10,000 years ago and earlier knew from experience that the world would restore itself as it had every year after year. This was God's message to mankind; out of death comes life. These same plants that died will sprout again. The emphasis is on "the same" and not another. Hidden here is the Universal Doctrine of "Eternal Life" modeled year after year by not only the Heavens and God's Sun but Mother Nature as well. But not only that mankind knew that within and connected to this Doctrine of Life from the Dead was connected intimately another religious Doctrine of "Order" and "Harmony". Egypt called it "Ma'at" and God's "Order" as seen in the Heavens and in Nature was expressed by them to all mankind as the "42 Negative Confessions" that read like the Torah of Moses. In fact it was the Egyptian Torah for Ancient Mankind for they knew that there was no Eternal Life without mankind living according to the Laws and Commandments of God that were and yet are today expressed in the Heavens above us and in Nature around us. God was then and is today literally teaching mankind on the blackboard of the Sky daily as well in Mother Nature as well His will for mankind and the hope and rewards that awaited him on the other side of this life and how they are to be obtained. This Winter Solstice is so important for at the heart of it is not the birth of some "historical person" in some first century but teaching held sacred by these "Gnostics" (knowers) of the hidden revelation and knowledge of the "birth within you" of the Christ as you awaken to the reality that you truly are God's Temple and God through His Christ dwells and lives in you. The Gnostic Paul in the New Testament says is so beautifully:
Col 1:26-27 26 Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints: 27 To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory: (KJV)
Eph 5:14 14 Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. (KJV)
Above we read the call and the plea for mankind to awaken to his spiritual potential. Hidden within every man are his own "solstices" and "equinoxes" that are to be experienced as the pattern for the development of "his Soul". Man was to awaken to the fact that he is the embodiment of this Creator and that this Creator lives in and through him and experiences His creation through mankind. Heaven above him and Nature around were singing the same song and taught mankind this same message over and over again; year after year. Today this message is obscured and distorted sadly; so sadly because instead of looking for "the Christ Within" and "awakening to this mystery hidden from us...that within us dwells a slumbering Christ" we are peering to the sky looking for the coming of one who will fix everything we messed up instead of looking within to the "birth of the Christ child" in us and loosing him to grow in us and through us our soul prospers. This is what the real "historical Paul" preached and not the one of Rome's making:
Col 1:28-29 28 Whom (the Christ in you which is our hope) we preach, warning every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom; that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus: 29 Whereunto I also labour, striving according to his working (the Christ Within), which worketh in me mightily. (KJV)
Answer for yourself: Where is this Christ and where does He Work? Is is some bagel shop in Jerusalem on in Bethany? It is "Within" us! Paul is speaking of deep things here; he is speaking of the "Descent of the Soul into matter; that matter being the flesh of mankind".
In this verse Paul instructs that we preach "the Christ Within" and not the one of Rome's creation. Possibly Paul knew or had been warned by "the Christ" that there would come a time later where this revelation of "the Christ Within" would be destroyed and accompanying it would be much forgery of religious documents that were to muddle this whole Divine Truth. That is why we find him admonishing us to "teach" the truth and share this wisdom of the Ancients who received these "spiritual doctrines" in the first place.
Answer for yourself: Have you ever looked up that word for "wisdom" in the above verse? Well hold on!!! The word used by Paul here is "SOPHIA"! This is none other that the Gnostic expression for the feminine aspect of God called "Sophia" and it and its concepts go all the way back to Egypt for Isis is the first Sophia!
Thayer's Greek Lexicon: 4678 sophia- wisdom, broad and full of intelligence; used of the knowledge of very diverse matters:
a) the wisdom which belongs to men
Notice the definition encompasses knowledge of realms not only "human" but "divine" that were given to mankind and expressed in maxims and proverbs held sacred by earlier Priesthoods. It involves also the integral mixture of science and learning in a religious sense. This knowledge is not just for "head knowledge" but for the goal of being "presented perfect" and complete to God at the end of our lives through a life lived in "righteousness" and "godly and upright living". The goal of all of this is right before us: we are to be presented to our Creator at the end of our lives as "perfect" through the working of "the Christ Within" us as He slowly "leavens the whole lump" of our life.
We are to be made perfect. No, that does not mean sinless like Christianity might want us to think.
Thayer's Greek Lexicon:
5046 teleios-
Oh yes the Winter Solstice. You see as the Sun in born on December 25th where it overcomes the darkness so is God's Christ born within him where he overcomes the darkness within himself (d=evil, devil). In so doing he grows and matures in own cycle of life just like God's Sun and lets God's light shine or "reflect" from within him. Likewise man is to have his own "second birth"; a "spiritual birth" from which he is to pattern himself after God's Sun and let God's light and life shine from within him onto those around him and the sphere of influence he has been given and attained in his life. Like God's sun who follows the Divine Order and Pattern of the cycle of its life so is man to follow this same "pattern" for his life as his Soul grows to reflect the glory of God more daily throughout his life. Man begins his spiritual journey only after he as been raised from the death of the flesh. That is why early early Gnostics considered mankind "dead" while alive until he had his "ephiphany" to realize the Divine (Christ) within him and the resultant responsibilities that accompany such an awareness. In closing this short summary let us not forget that as the Christ is the manifestation of God in a masculine sense so likewise the counterpart of this Christ is the Sophia which is the manifestation of the feminine God as well. We don't hear much of this today because of the success of Rome to obliterate these Gnostic "Chrestians" know later as "Christians" once purged of their Ancient understanding of the "Christ Within".
To honor the Spiritual Truths hidden in the Solstices and Equinoxes and God's messages to mankind within them, our ancestors embraced at the Winter Solstice, for example, the symbols of life in the face of death, of light in the face of darkness. Great fires were lit on mountaintops and in fields to ward off the darkness and the cold, not as a physical shield, but as a psychic or spiritual shield. To them, the dark and cold were real and distinct entities and required real and unmistakable forces to drive them away.
These traditions were earthy to say the least. But ancient man tired to follow "the pattern". Since Egypt man understood "So Above, So Beneath". Earth was to be a "Pattern of Heaven above". Thus all the "sacred geometry" we find in the architecture of Egypt where their Temples and Pyramids were structured in alignment to the Heavens above. You may already have heard of the Giza Plateau and the alignment of these 3 massive pyramids in alignment with the 3 stars in the "belt of Orion". We see in the New Testament the same religious philosophy:
Luke 11:2 2 And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth. (KJV)
Earth is cast and reflect the image of Heaven; literally become "Heaven on Earth". Egypt knew this like no other nation that has ever existed. Egypt understood the "Pattern" as did Moses, Pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty.
But as societies became more "civilized", the festivals didn’t disappear. Instead, they became fully ingrained in the lives of the citizens. So deeply ingrained, in fact, that we are still celebrating them almost as they originally existed but we don't know it today since the meaning of them has been lost or corrupted beyond recognition; unless you study. It was in my studies of Judaism, Comparative Religions, and Egypt that I found the links and overlaps that lay hidden behind the Roman obliteration of God's "Appointed Times" today (the Equinoxes and Solstices).
There is no clue in the Gospels to the time of the year when this Jesus (the Roman Christ Without) is supposed to have been born, but we can safely deduce that he was not born in midwinter, because that is the rainy season in his part of the world, and shepherds would not be out at night. Jewish mothers cherished birthdays, but Jesus’ mother, Mary, seems to have forgotten it, or just decided to leave it out of her own story. Early Roman Christians found themselves in the awkward position of telling the world of the most tremendous birth there ever was on this planet and being completely unable to say when it happened. Let us get the timeline correct; it was after 180 A.D. that the "birth narratives" of Jesus appear for the first time. We know for a fact that the First New Testament of Marcion in 145 A.D. did not contain any "birth narratives". Luke 1-3 were absent as was the genealogy in the Gospel of Matthew. These were added later. It was centuries before anyone tried to give Jesus a birthdate, but again we can assume that he truly wasn't born in the year 1.
So for several hundred years the various Christian churches celebrated the birthday of their savior on different dates. The eastern churches generally kept it on January 6th, where it remains for some and which is now the Epiphany. Other churches chose April 24th or 25th; and some placed it in May. It was not until 354 CE that December 25th was chosen as the anniversary of the birthday of the Christ.
Answer for yourself: Why December 25th? Why not the 1st or the 10th or the 30th? The church that established December 25th was the Church of Rome. It was then the leading church of its day (and arguably still is), and what Rome said was accepted.
Answer for yourself: But why did Rome wait so long to apply a date, and again, why the 25th?
It was the Winter Solstice and had been the "birthdate" of God's Sun and the Light of the World for thousands of years previously. The ancient Romans had a marvelous and hedonistic festival called Saturnalia. As mid-winter approached, Rome was lit up with joy. This was the festival of the old vegetation-god Saturn who (as a god) died, or was displaced by Jupiter, the sky-god, but Saturn had a fine temple on the Capitol, and his festival lasted seven days and was the most joyous time of the ancient Roman year. For one day slaves are free. They associated freely with their masters, partied with them, drank their wines, and ate their food. This was the one time of the year when slave and master were equal, and it is a tradition that exists to this day in the form of our office Christmas parties.
In ancient Rome during the Saturnalia, stalls laden with presents lined the streets near the Forum, and the great present of the season was a doll usually made of wax or terra cotta. Hundreds of thousands of dolls lay on the stalls or in the arms of passers-by. Perhaps at one time human beings were sacrificed to Saturn, and, as man grew larger than his religion (as we constantly do), the god (or his priests) had to be content with effigies of men or maids, or dolls. Crowds filled the streets and raised festive cries. It was literally a time of peace on earth -- for by Roman law no war could begin during the Saturnalia -- and of good will toward all. For the whole week, from December 17th to 24th, no work was done (again, another tradition that exists in modern America – unless you are in retail or finance). The law was good cheer, good nature. But the 25th also is a solemn festival, for it is marked in large type on the Roman calendar "Birthday of the Unconquered Sun."
Nearby to ancient Rome, in what is now Iran and Iraq, was the home of another and even more prosperous Asiatic religion. Mithraism, as it was called, gave the early Christians a very hard time. Not merely because it spread more rapidly, and was more respected, but because it was so strikingly like Christianity.
Mithra was an Aryan sun god. The reform of the Persian religion by Zarathustra had put the deity Ahura Mazda so high above the old nature-gods that he was practically the one god. But Mithra stole upward, as gods do, and Persian kings of the fifth century BCE put him on a level with Ahura Mazda.
Then the Persians conquered and blended with Babylon, and Mithra rose to the supreme position and became an intensely ethical deity. Mithra was the Sun of the world in the same sense as the Roman Jesus. He was honored with the sacrifice of the pleasures of life, including a life of celibacy. Drastic asceticism and purity were demanded of his worshipers. They were baptized in blood. They practiced the most severe austerities and fasts. They had a communion supper of bread and wine. They worshiped Mithra in underground temples, or artificial caves, which blazed with the light of candles and reeked with incense, and every year they celebrated the birthday of Mithra as a god who had come, they said, to take away the sins of the world; and that day was December 25th.
As that day approached, near midnight of the 24th, ancient Christians would have seen the stern devotees of Mithra going to their temple on the Vatican, and at midnight it would shine with joy and light. The Vatican still has and promotes "midnight mass" but no longer for Mithra but for Jesus.
At the Winter Solstice the Savior of the world was born (God's Christ). He had been born in a cave, like so many other sun gods. Some of the apocryphal Gospels, the ones that didn’t make the final cut, put the birth of Jesus in a cave instead of a stable. Mithra had had no earthly father. He was born to free men from sin, to redeem them.
F. Cumont, the great authority on Mithra, has laboriously collected for us all these details about the Persian religion, and more than one of the Christian Fathers refers nervously to the close parallel of the two religions. The Savior Mithra was in possession, had been in possession for ages, of December 25th as his birthday. He was the real "unconquered sun" - a sun god transformed into a spiritual god, with light as his emblem and purity his supreme command.
Answer for yourself: Do we detect here in this perversion of the Ancient's understanding of God's Winter Solstice the same emphasis on "light" and "order" as related to morality? Yes and that is good but the core of it is bad when the "Christ Within" is replaced with a "Christ Without". There is no external Christ for God is not a man but yet man can be Godly!
The Saturnalia and "the birthday of the unconquered sun" and the birthday of Mithra were not all we need mention. A Roman writer of the fourth century, Macrobius, in a work called "Saturnalia" discussed the practice of representing the gods in the temples as of different ages. He says:
"These differences of age refer to the sun, which seems to be a babe at the winter solstice, as the Egyptians represent him in their temples on a certain day: that being the shortest day, he is then supposed to be small and an infant."
Here we see the birth of the "Christ child"; the infant Horus in Egypt (the "Karast Child" of Egypt which is again symbolic of God's Sun but only in a spiritual sense). There was no real Horus as there is no real Christ unless we consider them spiritual manifestations of the Divine Creator in all of us; the "Horus/Christ within us". As I have been telling you the Ancients told of very difficult to understand religious concepts by the use of allegory and myth. Only in our day have we forgotten that and have made these "Divine Allegories" literal and in so doing fallen into Idolatry. If you have read our Egypt-Christian website and of the Hebrew Pharaohs then you understand that this is the same hideous sin that caused the Exodus and the spiritual revolution of Moses better known as Akhenaten today.
This same idea, that being the Sun being symbolized as an infant
child (Horus) is confirmed by, and receives very interesting addition
from, an anonymous Christian writer, the author of the Paschal
Chronicle, who had an explanation for the reason Egyptians worshipped
a virgin goddess and a magical child. He says:
"Jeremiah
gave a sign to the Egyptian priests, saying that their idols would be
destroyed by a child-savior, born of a virgin and lying in a manger.
Wherefore they still worship as a goddess a virgin-mother, and adore an
infant in a manger." (Col. 385 in the Migne edition, vol. XCII.)
The deity in Isis' arms is Horus, a very old sun god of the Egyptians. Horus was the son of Osiris and Isis, who was the sister and the spouse of Osiris. "A virgin mother" is a matter of words. In one Egyptian myth she was made pregnant by Osiris in their mother's womb: in another and more popular, she was miraculously impregnated by contact with the phallus of the dead Osiris. Osiris had been killed by his brother and later his body had been cut into 14 different pieces which later Isis sought for and found all but his penis. This original "humpy-dumpty" story began in Egypt and not finding the last part of Osiris' body she magically crafted his male organ and from it was able to conceive the "Son of God". Thus being a perpetual virgin Isis is the prototype for all later "virgin birth" stories.
Whatever we make of the original myth, however, Isis seems to have been originally a virgin (or, perhaps, sexless) goddess, and in the later period of Egyptian religion she was again considered a virgin goddess, demanding very strict abstinence from her devotees. It is at this period that the birthday of Horus was annually celebrated, around December 25th, in the temples. As both Macrobius and the Christian writer say, a figure of Horus as a baby was laid in a manger, in a scenic reconstruction of a stable, and a statue of Isis was placed beside it. Horus was, in a sense, the Savior of mankind. He was their avenger against the powers of darkness (Set, Osiris' brother had killed Horus' father as the Sun had been killed by the approaching Winter Solstice). In such a way the baby Horus was to become the light of the world. His birth festival was a real first "Christmas" or "Karast-mas" before Jesus.
Answer for yourself: Does not all this sounds awfully familiar? And remember it all came from the stars and Astronomical knowledge connected with the Winter Solstice. But there is still more!
In nearby Alexandria there was a similar Greek celebration on December 25th of the birth of a divine son to Kore (the "virgin"). The general idea of a divine son being born in a cave or other humble surroundings was common. J.M. Robertson gives three in his Christianity and Mythology. Hermes, the Logos (like Jesus in John), the messenger of the gods, son of Zeus and the virgin Maia, was born in a cave, and he performed extraordinary prodigies a few hours after birth. He was represented as a "child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger." Dionysus (or Bacchus) was similarly represented. The image of him as a babe was laid in a basket-cradle in the cave in which he was born. There is good reason to think that Mithra was figured in the same way.
But there is even more to undermine the "truth" of the "literalized" Jesus story as unique and somehow special.
Season's Greetings
Bet
Emet Ministries