Mithraism

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In Christian tradition the Magi, Three Wise Men, Three Kings or Kings from the East are said to have visited Jesus after his birth, bearing gifts. They are mentioned only in the Gospel of Matthew (Mt 2) , which says that they came “from the east to Jerusalem” to worship the Christ, “born King of the Jews”. Because three gifts were recorded, there are traditionally said to have been three Magi, though Matthew does not specify their number.

The word Magi is a Latinization of the plural of the Greek word magos, itself from Old Persian maguŝ from the Avestan moγu. The term is a specific occupational title referring to the priestly caste of Zoroastrianism. As part of their religion, these priests paid particular attention to the stars, and gained an international reputation for astrology, which was at that time a highly regarded science. Their religious practices and use of astrological sciences caused derivatives of the term Magi to be applied to the occult in general and led to the English term magic. In the Eastern church a variety of different names are given for the three, but in the West the names have been settled since the 8th century as Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar.

According to the Gospel of Matthew, the magi found Jesus by following a star. The Biblical text indicates that they found Jesus around two years after his birth, rather than on the exact day (Matt. 2:7–8, 16). On finding him, they gave him three symbolic gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh. The Magi are described as having followed a star to Bethlehem, which thus traditionally became known as the Star of Bethlehem,, also called the Christmas Star. Christians generally regard the star as a miraculous sign given by God to mark the birth of the Christ (or Messiah). The candidate for the three wise men can be found in the constellation of Orion the hunter. It has three stars at its belt that align with Sirius. What makes Sirius the prime candidate for the star of Bethlehem is that it is the brightest star in the sky next to the sun.

At four o’clock in the evening, on December 25, Sirius rises above the horizon in Jerusalem. This was the first such event in the Age of Pisces. The three stars on the belt of Orion point down towards Sirius, the star of Bethlehem. Orion is not a trivial constellation; it plays the part of the Son of Man in the Gospels.

Orion includes the prominent asterism known as the ‘belt’ of Orion: three bright stars in a row, also known as the Three Kings. Surrounding the belt at roughly similar distances are four bright stars, which are considered to represent the outline of the hunter’s body. Apparently descending from the ‘belt’ is a smaller line of three stars (one of which is in fact not a star but the Orion Nebula), known as the hunter’s ‘sword’. In artistic renderings, the surrounding constellations are sometimes related to Orion: he is depicted standing next to theriver Eridanus with his two hunting dogs Canis Major and Canis Minor, fighting Taurus the bull. He is sometimes depicted hunting Lepus the hare.

It is possible that the naming of the constellation Orion preceded the Greek mythology surrounding that character. It has been suggested that Orion is named from the Akkadian Uru-anna, the light of heaven, the name then passing into Greek mythology. As such, the myth surrounding Orion may derive simply from the relative positions of the constellations around it in the sky. The ancient Sumerians saw this star pattern as forming part of an image of a shepherd (sometimes in a chariot) with his sheep and in some versions a shepherd’s crook. The Bible mentions Orion three times: Job 9:9 (“He is the maker of the Bear and Orion”), Job 38:31 (“Can you loosen Orion`s belt?”), and Amos 5:8. (“He who made the Pleiades and Orion”) In ancient Aram, the constellation was known as Nephila, Orion’s descendants were known as Nephilim.

The stars were associated with Osiris, the god of death and underworld, by the ancient Egyptians. The Giza pyramid complex, which consists of the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Pyramid of Khafre and the Pyramid of Menkaure, is said to be a sky-map of the Belt of Orion, that is, of Osiris.

In Babylonia, the month Tammuz was established in honor of the eponymous god Tammuz, who originated as a Sumerian shepherd-god, Dumuzid or Dumuzi, the consort of Inanna and, in his Akkadian form, the parallel consort of Ishtar. The Levantine Adonis (“lord”), who was drawn into the Greek pantheon, was considered by Joseph Campbell among others to be another counterpart of Tammuz,[1] son and consort. The Aramaic name “Tammuz” seems to have been derived from the Akkadian form Tammuzi, based on early Sumerian Damu-zid. The later standard Sumerian form, Dumu-zid, in turn became Dumuzi in Akkadian.

Beginning with the summer solstice came a time of mourning in the Ancient Near East as in the Aegean: the Babylonians marked the decline in daylight hours and the onset of killing summer heat and drought with a six-day “funeral” for the god. Readers in four-season temperate cultures may doubt shepherd-god as a vegetation god: Though recent discoveries reconfirm him as an annual life-death-rebirth deity: tablets discovered in 1963 show that Dumuzi was in fact consigned to the Underworld himself, in order to secure Inanna’s release, though the recovered final line reveals that he is to revive for six months of each year (see below). In cult practice, the dead Tammuz was widely mourned in the Ancient Near East.

A number of pastoral poems and songs relate the love affair of Inanna and Dumuzid the shepherd. Inanna’s name is commonly derived from Nin-anna “Queen of Heaven” (from Sumerian NIN “lady”, AN “sky”), although the cuneiform sign for her name is not historically a ligature of the two. In some traditions Inanna was said to be a granddaughter of the creator goddess Nammu or Namma. These difficulties have led some early Assyriologists to suggest that Inanna may have been originally a Proto-Euphratean goddess, possibly related to the Hurrian mother goddess Hannahannah, accepted only latterly into the Sumerian pantheon, an idea supported by her youthfulness, and that, unlike the other Sumerian divinities, she at first had no sphere of responsibilities The view that there was a Proto-Euphratean substrate language in Southern Iraq before Sumerian is not widely accepted by modern Assyriologists.

Along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were many shrines and temples dedicated to Inanna. The temple of Eanna, meaning “house of heaven” or “house of An” in Uruk was the greatest of these. The god of this fourth-millennium city was probably originally An. After its dedication to Inanna the temple seems to have housed priestesses of the goddess. The high priestess would choose for her bed a young man who represented the shepherd Dumuzid, consort of Inanna, in a hieros gamos or sacred marriage, celebrated during the annual Akitu (New Year) ceremony, at the spring Equinox. In late Sumerian history (end of the third millennium) kings established their legitimacy by taking the place of Dumuzi in the temple for one night on the occasion of the New Year festival.

According to one story, Inanna tricked the god of culture, Enki, who was worshipped in the city of Eridu, into giving her the ‘Mes’. The ‘Mes’ (“maes”) represented everything from truth to weaving to prostitution. Inanna traveled to Enki’s city Eridu, and by getting him drunk, she got him to give her hundreds—the exact number is unknown, because the text breaks off—of Mes, which she took to her city of Uruk. Upon sobering up, Enki sent mighty Abgallu (sea monsters, from ab, sea or lake + gal, big + lu, man) to stop her boat as it sailed the Euphrates and retrieve his gifts, but she gave him the slip. This story may represent the historic transfer of power from Eridu to Uruk.

Aratta is a land that appears in Sumerian myths surrounding Enmerkar and Lugalbanda, two early and possibly mythical kings of Uruk also mentioned on the Sumerian king list. Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta is a legendary Sumerian account, preserved early post-Sumerian copies, composed in the Neo-Sumerian period (ca. 21st century BC). It is one of a series of accounts describing the conflicts between Enmerkar, king of Unug-Kulaba (Uruk), and the unnamed king of Aratta (probably somewhere in modern Iran or Armenia). It is notable for its strong parallels to the Tower of Babel narrative of Genesis.

The goddess Inanna, the goddess of love and war, resides in Aratta, but Enmerkar of Uruk pleases her more than the lord of Aratta, who is not named in this epic. Emmerkar, who is furthermore to recite the “Incantation of Nudimmud”, a hymn imploring Enki to restore (or in some translations, to disrupt) the linguistic unity of the inhabited regions, named as Shubur, Hamazi, Sumer, Uri-ki (the region around Akkad), and the Martu land, wants Aratta to submit to Uruk, bring stones down from the mountain, craft gold, silver and lapis lazuli, and send them, along with “kugmea” ore to Uruk to build a temple. Inana bids him send a messenger to Aratta, who ascends and descends the “Zubi” mountains, and crosses Susa, Anshan, and “five, six, seven” mountains before approaching Aratta. Aratta in turn wants grain in exchange. However Inana transfers her allegiance to Uruk, and the grain gains the favor of Aratta’s people for Uruk, so the lord of Aratta challenges Enmerkar to send a champion to fight his champion. Then the god Ishkur makes Aratta’s crops grow.

Aratta was a city, city-state, or country with which Sumerians had close trade and religious ties in the third millennium B.C. Its location is not known. Of four general sites suggested for Aratta, two are located in eastern Asia Minor: the Van-Urmia area and the Ayrarat district of historical Armenia. The Anshan-Hamadan area of western Iran was the choice of S. Cohen who translated one of four sources to mention Aratta, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. However, since the publication of that work (1973), several of the criteria he used for locating Aratta have been challenged.

To the Sumerians, Mashu was a sacred mountain. Its name means “twin” in Akkadian, and thus was it portrayed on Babylonian cylinder seals –a twin-peaked mountain, described by poets as both the seat of the gods, and the underworld (60). References or allusions to Mt.Mashu are found in three episodes of the Gilgamesh cycle which date between the third and second millennia B.C.Mashu was located in a forest in the “land of the Living”, where the names of the famous are written(61). It is alluded to in the episode “Gilgamesh and Humbaba”. Mashu is mentioned directly in the episode “Gilgamesh and the Search for Everlasting Life”. This story unfolds after the death of Gilgamesh’s friend, Enkidu, a wrenching experience which makes Gilgamesh face his own mortality and go searching for eternal life. It is en route to Utnapishtim, the one mortal to achieve immortality, that Gilgamesh comes to Mashu “the great mountain, which guards the rising and setting sun. Its twin peaks are as high as the wall of heaven and its roots reach down to the underworld.

In the view of several scholars, Mashu is also the mountain mentioned in the story that Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh. Utnapishtim, sometimes called the “Sumerian Noah”, told Gilgamesh how the gods had become angered with humanity and decided on the Flood as one means to exterminate it. A sympathetic god warned Utnapishtim and told him to build a boat and board it with his family, relatives, craftsmen, and the seed of all living creatures. After six days of tempest and flood, Utnapishtim’s boat grounded on a mountain. He released a dove and a swallow, both of which returned to him. Then he released a raven which did not return; Utnapishtim and his family came down from the mountain. When the disgruntled gods are finally reconciled with the re-emergence of humanity, Utnapishtim and his wife are taken by the god Enlil to live in the blessed place where Gilgamesh found him “in the distance, at the mouth of the rivers”.

The early inhabitants of Mesopotamia were familiar with two parts of the Armenian highlands: [24] the Diarbekir-Van-Urmia area in the south and (perhaps) the Ararat area in the north. In the stories of the Gilgamesh and Aratta cycles, eastern Asia Minor was considered a source of timber, precious stones, metal and skilled craftsmen. The Mother goddess is especially associated with the area, as are hybrid creatures such as the Scorpion-people, and monsters like Humbaba. Eastern Asia Minor is regarded as the place of salvation after the Deluge in most versions of the Flood story, including the account in Genesis. The early inhabitants of Mesopotamia also, apparently, regarded eastern Asia Minor as the location of the paradisical Garden of the gods, as well as the entrance to the underworld.

The Hurrians, who lived in the environs of Lake Van, sited many of their myths in eastern Asia Minor. The volume of Hurrian material which, currently, is not great, can be expected to increase with future discoveries and publications. At present, nonetheless, based solely on the Kumarbi cycle, three images emerge of eastern Asia Minor: it was a place of metals and metallurgy from remote antiquity, a place where Ishtar/Saushka, the goddess of love and war, had special influence, and a place where monsters lived and grew–be it the serpent/dragon Hedammu, or Ullikummi himself, a monster made of volcanic rock.

Mashu, as described in the Epic of Gilgamesh of Mesopotamian mythology, is a great mountain through which the hero-king Gilgamesh passes via a tunnel on his journey after leaving the Cedar Forest, a forest of ten thousand leagues span. The corresponding location in reality has been the topic of speculation, as no confirming evidence has been found. One theory is that the only location suitable for being called a “cedar land” was the great forest covering Lebanon and western parts of Syria and, in consequence, “Mashu” is the whole of the parallel Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon ranges, with the narrow gap between these mountains constituting the tunnel. The word “Mashu” itself may translate as “two mountains”, from Babylonian twins.

Ararat, Armenian Masis, is a stratovolcano, formed of lava flows and pyroclastic ejecta, with no volcanic crater. Above the height of 4,200 m (13,780 ft), the mountain mostly consists of igneous rocks covered by an ice sheet. A smaller 3,896 m (12,782 ft) cone, Little Ararat, rises from the same base, southeast of the main peak. The lava plateau stretches out between the two pinnacles. The bases of these two mountains is approximately 1,000 km2 (386 sq mi) wide.

The Sumerians were a non-Semitic people and were at one time believed to have been invaders, as a number of linguists believed they could detect a substrate language beneath Sumerian. However, the archaeological record shows clear uninterrupted cultural continuity from the time of the Early Ubaid period (5300 – 4700 BC C-14) settlements in southern Mesopotamia. The Sumerian people who settled here farmed the lands in this region that were made fertile by silt deposited by the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.

Despite the lack of corroborating written records, it is generally agreed that Sumerian speakers were farmers who moved down from the north, after perfecting irrigation agriculture there. The Ubaid pottery of southern Mesopotamia has been connected via Choga Mami Transitional ware to the pottery of the Samarra period culture (c. 5700 – 4900 BC C-14) in the north, who were the first to practice a primitive form of irrigation agriculture along the middle Tigris River and its tributaries. The connection is most clearly seen at Tell Awayli (Oueilli, Oueili) near Larsa, excavated by the French in the 1980s, where 8 levels yielded pre-Ubaid pottery resembling Samarran ware. Farming peoples spread down into southern Mesopotamia because they had developed a temple-centered social organization for mobilizing labor and technology for water control, enabling them to survive and prosper in a difficult environment.

Sumer (Sumerian: ki-en-ĝir, Akkadian: Šumeru; possibly Biblical Shinar) was a civilization and a historical region located in southern Iraq (Mesopotamia), known as the Cradle of civilization. It lasted from the first settlement of Eridu in the Ubaid period (late 6th millennium BC) through the Uruk period (4th millennium BC) and the Dynastic periods (3rd millennium BC) until the rise of Babylon in the early 2nd millennium BC. The term “Sumerian” applies to all speakers of the Sumerian language.

Although other cities pre-date Sumer (Jericho, Çatalhöyük and others, either for seasonal protection, or as year-round trading posts) the cities of Sumer were the first to practice intensive, year-round agriculture (from ca. 5300 BC). The surplus of storable food created by this economy allowed the population to settle in one place instead of migrating after crops and grazing land. It also allowed for a much greater population density, and in turn required an extensive labor force and division of labor. This organization led to the necessity of record keeping and the development of writing (ca. 3500 BC).

If seen as a cross, the four lines emanate from the center to the four cardinal directions, and this is commonly associated with the Sun. Other proposed correspondences are to the visible rotation of the night sky in the Northern Hemisphere around the pole star. The symbol for a heavenly Big Dipper/Polaris timekeeper called in Sanskrit a swastika (“to be good”). According to Symbols.com, the swastika and related signs (among them tetraskeles and triskeles) are traditionally associated with migration. Clearly, the positions of the Big Dipper and the North Star in the night sky would have been of utmost importance to migrating people, especially as they foretold the equinoxes and solstices.

Long before this symbol was politicized, militarized, perverted and turned on the diagonal (right) as a symbol of Hitler and Nazism, it was cut into stone in diverse places by diverse cultures, clearly carrying information of great import to human activity.Most of us who’ve looked beyond Nazism know that the swastika is a symbol of the sun. Let’s look a little deeper. According to Symbols.com, “(its) spectrum of meaning is centered around power, energy, and migration. It is closely associated with the tetrasele and the triskele and thus with tribal migrations.” We also learn that “it was used by most of the ancient cultures of Eurasia.”The swastika is a very old ideogram. The first such signs preserved to our days were found in the Euphrates-Tigris valley, and in some areas of the Indus valley. They seem to be more than 3,000 years old. Yet it was not until around the year 1000 B.C. that the swastika became a commonly used sign, first maybe in ancient Troy in the north west of today’s Turkey.

It seems to me like there are an awful lot a Christians out there that seem absolutely positive that Jesus is, of course, unique and the first of his kind.  They are unaware that the myth of their Christ is similar to several other god-men myths.  Here are some of those other mythical god-men that Jesus, the Christian Messiah, apparently shares roots with. They have all experienced the same: Attis of Phrygia, Dionysus/Bacchus, Horus/Osiris, Krishna of India, Mithra of Persia and Zoroaster/Zarathustra.

Osiris’s coming was announced by Three Wise Men: the three stars Mintaka, Anilam, andAlnitak in the belt of Orion, which point directly to Osiris’s star in the east, Sirius (Sothis), significator of his birth . . . Osiris’s “son” or renewed incarnation, Horus, shares the following in common with Jesus:–Horus was born of the virgin Isis-Merion December 25 in a cave/manger with his birth being announced by a star in the East and attended by three wise men.

–Mithra was born of a virgin on December 25 in a cave, and his birth was attended by shepherds bearing gifts. –He was considered a great traveling teacher and master.

–He had 12 companions or disciples.

–Mithra’s followers were promised immortality.

–He performed miracles.

–As the “great bull of the Sun,” Mithra sacrificed himself for world peace.

–He was buried in atomb and after three days rose again.

–His resurrection was celebrated every year.

–He was called “the Good Shepherd” and identified with both the Lamb and the Lion.

–He was considered the “Way, the Truth and the Light,” and the “Logos,” [Word] “Redeemer,” “Savior” and “Messiah.”

–His sacred day was Sunday, the “Lord’s Day,” hundreds of years before the appearance of Christ.

–Mithra had his principal festival on what was later to become Easter.

–His religion had a eucharist or “Lord’s Supper,” at which Mithra said, “He who shall nto eat of my body nor drink of my blood so that he may be one with me and I with him, shall not be saved.”

–“His annual sacrifice is the Passover of the Magi, a symbolical atonement of pledge of moral and physical regeneration.”

Furthermore, the Vatican itself is built upon the papacy of Mithra, and the Christian hierarchy is nearly identical to the Mithraic version it replaced . . .

. . . Virtually all of the elements of the Catholic ritual, from miter to wafer to altar to doxology, are directly taken from earlier Pagan mystery religions.