A different point of view.
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Christ Myth
©1997 Ed Selby
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 story of Jesus. Jesus is not now, and in fact never has been, the reason for the season.
At Halloween we talked about the myths and legends surrounding that glaringly pagan holiday – a holiday that many modern Christian churches are trying to turn their believers from because of its pagan and, in their eyes, demonic roots. Yet these same people embrace and honor the highest of pagan celebrations as part of their own religion, ignoring its roots and assigning new meanings to the old symbols. But as Saturday Night Live’s Stuart Smalley said, "That’s…okay."
During my spiritual and intellectual journey, I had a particular problem with Christmas. "Christ Mass" or the Feast of the Anointed One didn’t not ring true to my heart. I found no reason to accept the divinity of Jesus, as expressed in the Bible or as interpreted by those who contend that Jesus was real. I rejected his divinity, and his historical accuracy. I was not and am still not convinced that Jesus ever existed; therefore, a holiday celebrating his birth was a ridiculous concept, a Mad Hatter’s un-birthday.
Then, as I read more and more of the myths and legends of the world, and learned about the psychological and social necessity for myths, 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 Christmas.
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. Daylight is scarce. Nights are long and cold, and darker than usual. The harvests are in. The flocks and herds are gathered. Normal life is suspended, and there is the wait – the wait for winter to die. But the Waiting was okay because the folks of 4000 years ago knew that the world would restore itself.
To honor that, our ancestors embraced 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 palpable entities and required real and palpable forces to drive them away.
These traditions were earthy to say the least. The peasants and workers of the fields were filled with superstitious beliefs. 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.
There is no clue in the Gospels to the time of the year when Jesus 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 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. It was centuries before anyone tried to give Jesus a birth date, 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.
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. But why did Rome wait so long to apply a date, and again, why the 25th?
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."
But this is just the beginning!
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. He was the sun of the world in the same sense as 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 this 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 Savior of the world was born. 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.
The Saturnalia and "the birthday of the unconquered sun" and the birthday of Mithra were not all. 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."
This 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 is Horus, a very old sun god of the Egyptians. Horus was the son of Soirees and Isis, who was the sister and the spouse of Soirees. "A virgin mother" is a matter of words. In one Egyptian myth she was made pregnant by Soirees in their mother's womb: in another and more popular, she was miraculously impregnated by contact with the phallus of the dead Soirees. Virginity in goddesses is a relative matter.
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; he was the light of the world. His birth festival was a real Christmas before Jesus.
All of this sounds awfully familiar doesn’t it? 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." Dionysos (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 Jesus story as unique and somehow special.
In the ancient nations north of Nazareth and Bethlehem, there were other mid-winter festivals, the greatest and most sacred of their year. To these northern barbarians, shuddering in the snow-laden forests beyond the Danube, the return of the sun was the most desired event of the year, and they soon learned, approximately, the time -- the winter solstice -- when the "wheel" turned. For them, the sun was figured as a fiery wheel; and as late as the nineteenth century there were parts of France where a straw wheel was set on fire and rolled down a hill, to give an augury of the next harvest.
Hence "Yule" (from the same old Teutonic word hoel or wheel) was the outstanding festival of the ancestors of the French and Germans, the English and Scandinavians. The sun was born; and fires ("Yule-logs," such as are burned in British homes at Christmas today) flamed in the forest-villages. The huts were decorated with holly and evergreens – plants that seemed to defy the death brought by winter. Yule trees were laden with presents, and stores of solid food and strong drink were lavishly opened. This lasted for 12 days.
Thus almost the entire civilized world of more than two thousand years ago "had its Christmas before Christ." "The figure of Christ," says Kalthoff, "is drawn in all its chief features before a line of the Gospels was written." At least the figure of Jesus in what is deemed its most captivating form was drawn in every feature long before it was presented in the Gospels. The first symbol of the Christian religion, the manger or basket-cradle of the divine child, the supposed unique exhortation to humility, was one of the most familiar religious emblems of the pagan world. Had it been exhibited to a crowd in one of the cosmopolitan cities of the Roman Empire, it would not have been new, unique, or overtly special. One person might pronounce the child figures name as Horus, another Mithra, another Hermes, another Dionysos; but all would have shrugged their shoulders nonchalantly at the news that it was just another divine child in the great family of gods. The world flowed on. Only the names were changed.
So here we have all of these ancient cultural influences, each with its own importance and firm entrenchment with the people who followed the beliefs. What is a good Christian to do? Let’s not delve into the political history of ancient Rome and Christianity. Let’s take it as a given that the Roman church had great sway over the rulers of the time, and what they did was a move that has been repeated over and over again in the history of Christianity. If you can’t beat ‘em, and you refuse to join ‘em, at least make it appear that you defeated them. So sometime between 354 and 360 CE, a few decades after Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity (a great milestone in world history), the celebration of Christmas was shifted to the day of the Unconquered Sun. Thus the birthday of the Christ was born.
Whew! I hope everyone was taking notes, because there will be a quiz on this during coffee.
So what do we do with this information? What I did, and I believe I was wrong, was reject the whole notion of Christmas. Combine gross commercialism with consumer-competition to celebrate the divinity of a baby that has as much historical validity as a real person as all of his archetypal predecessors and you have the perfect Bah Humbug for an unbeliever. But then my Christmas miracle occurred. I’m not sure exactly when it happened, probably while reading something by Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung, but I began to revel in the symbolism of Christmas. There is so much light-heartedness and joy in the symbols that like the Grinch, my heart grew to embrace it.
The evergreen trees that we decorate with twinkling lights and trinkets and tokens of our past harkened to the days when our ancestors would light candles and lamps against the darkness and cold of the world. These dancing beacons of warmth and almost living light, serve to inspire us to be lights unto the world. Not in any parochial religious sense, but in a universal spirit of peace, community and love.
The Christmas tree stands for me, as it did for my ancestors, as a symbol of life's determination against all odds to persevere. Faced as we are with all manner of perils today, we can learn from this symbol.
Even the childness of Santa Claus (by the way, we all know that Saint Nicholas was a real character -- the myths surrounding his life are another talk altogether – he died on December 25th) is not lost on me. Even though he is a supernatural being that defies all logic and sense, I can’t help but see the magic his myth does in the eyes and hearts of children. I get frustrated with my fellow humanists who say that we should sit the holiday out, just not participate because doing so lends credibility to the myths and superstitions upon which much of the holiday is based.
I think they are making a mistake. To not celebrate deprives us of the opportunity to build bridges to our fellow people, rather than more walls to further divide us.
Second, I feel to develop a neo-scroogean "Bah Humbug" attitude to the holidays tends to lend credibility to a myth about humanists -- that we're just a bunch of nay-sayers who have nothing else to do but complain and shoot down other’s beliefs.
I feel it is imperative that humanists and non-theists continue to join in the general merriment, and celebrate the symbols of warmth, light, peace and community! It ain’t hurting anyone to do so.
But the name… Christmas. We need to do something about that. It separates the Christian from the non-Christian, the atheist from the theist. Yule still smacks of the supernatural. Generic "Holidays" lacks the warmth and fun of the season. Christmas divides us. I like the name conjured on Seinfeld a few weeks ago – a new holiday for those of us who can’t do Christmas or Hanakuh or "the holidays". From now on for me, its time for Festivus! So to you, my friends, my family, my fellow UUs, a happy and joyful Festivus. May the light and warmth of the season fill your hearts with joy and your homes with love.
