Freethought & Rationalism Archive

MarmINFP · 01-17-2008, 02:32 PM

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Originally Posted by jjramsey

Quote:

Originally Posted by MarmINFP

I don't own this book and so I don't know the rest of the passage. Going by your quote, it seems to me that the two paragraphs are referring to two different goddesses. Campbell says, "The reader recalls, perhaps, the Orphic legend..." by which he is referring to something separate but related to the first paragraph(ie he is comparing two myths).

How do other people read this?

The paragraphs are referring to the same event. Zeus Meilichios is Zeus in the form of a snake. From Encyclopedia Mythica's entry on Dionysus:

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According to one myth, Dionysus is the son of the god Zeus and the mortal woman, Semele (daughter of Cadmus of Thebes). Semele is killed by Zeus' lightning bolts while Dionysus is still in her womb. Dionysus is rescued and undergoes a second birth from Zeus after developing in his thigh. Zeus then gives the infant to some nymphs to be raised. In another version, one with more explicit religious overtones, Dionysus, also referred to as Zagreus in this account, is the son of Zeus and Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. Hera gets the Titans to lure the infant with toys, and then they rip him to shreds eating everything but Zagreus' heart, which is saved by either Athena, Rhea, or Demeter. Zeus remakes his son from the heart and implants him in Semele who bears a new Dionysus Zagreus. Hence, as in the earlier account, Dionysus is called "twice born." The latter account formed a part of the Orphic religion's religious mythology.

I realize there are many versions of any given myth and this is particularly true with Greek mythology. There was much mixing of mythological details including which deity plays which part. In some accounts Persephone is the mother and in some accounts Semele is the mother. Acharya even mentions(p.101) that Dionysus "as the Cretan Zagreus, makes him born of Persephone, who was 'visited' by Zeus 'in the form of a snake'." She doesn't seem confused on this matter.

She goes on to speak about Persephone being the archetypal Maiden/Virgin. And earlier she mentioned that Semele was based on the Phrygian earth goddess Zemele and so perpetually a virgin. Furthermore, right before that she mentions that Zeus was also called "the virgin" and so Dionysus born from his thigh would further be an example of virgin birth.

If your interpretation is correct, then the Campbell wrote about it in an unclear manner which is entirely possible. Either way, I don't think it changes the usefulness of the quote for Acharya's argument. It seems she understood that quote better than I did, but she probably read the whole passage.

Acharya's argument seems to be that, to the ancient people, these various mythological characters represent similar meanings.

God Fearing Atheist · 01-17-2008, 02:49 PM

I have some questions for Acharya.

1) Here you quote two secondary sources that assert, without reference to any primary sources, that the taurobolium was practiced by Mithraists. On what sources is this claim based, and what do they read in their original language? Additionally, what are their dates?

2) On page 448 of Suns of God, you say that Revelations 3.14 is 'another clue,' and cite two secondary sources that assert, without reference to any primary sources, that hO AMHN ought to be identified with an Egyptian sun god. Your 'previous discussion' on page 122 similarly asserts, without reference to any primary sources, that Isa 65.16 is a reference to 'the God(s) Amen or Ammon,' that the similar use at Rev 3.14 reveals it's 'adverb[al] or empathic' occurances to be a 'ruse,' and instead is 'a noun, referring to the God Amen/Amon/Ammon, who is interpreted in this passage as "Jesus Christ".' Indeed, the only source I see in the entire discussion is the infidels.org URL of M. D. Aletheia's (19th century! Surprise!) The Rationalist's Manual. It does not seem to cite any primary sources either.

Could you please present an actual argument in favor of those identifications, with appeal to primary sources in their original languages?

I'll have many more later.

Antipope Innocent II · 01-17-2008, 02:54 PM

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Originally Posted by Iasion

OK, skipping over Churchward, Wheless, the next ancient author is...

Pope Leo X !

Surely you jest? She can't be that bad a researcher, surely?

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Acharya S on Pope Leo X ' In fact, Pope Leo X, privy to the truth because of his high rank, made this curious declaration,
"What profit has not that fable of Christ brought us!" *
(From http://www.truthbeknown.com/origins.htm)

No - looks you weren't kidding. This is amazingly bad. And funny. What next - Von Daniken-style alien pyramid builders? Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code cited as a source?

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* The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, by Barbara Walker

Yes, well using a piece of New Age crap like that as a reference explains much.

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As scholarship, this is a total failure. Acharya S failed to check this "fact", something which would have taken merely a few minutes of research. Instead she un-critically repeated one of the best known urban legends in this field.

"A few minutes" is stretching things. It took me less than fifteen seconds to check this quote using WikiQuote and find its real source. This is an error so basic it's hilarious.

MarmINFP · 01-17-2008, 02:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gstafleu

Quote:

Originally Posted by youngalexander

Whilst trouping about Bavaria in 06 I discovered that Sol Invictus was alive and well and 'beaming' in the many splendid baroque churches in that fair land.

You should try Vienna too one day:

This is from the side of the Stephansdom!

Gerard Stafleu

Quote:

Originally Posted by No Robots

Wow, that's great, Andrew. Here we have a fine and very early example of how Christian practice borrowed from paganism. This quotation makes it very clear what the source of the practice is, why it was adopted, and the symbolism that it carries. Further, it makes it clear that the practice has nothing at all to do with fundamental doctrine.

MarmINFP · 01-17-2008, 03:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Malachi151

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Originally Posted by MarmINFP

However, most of the book is about how Judaism is likewise based on pagan myths.

This is "essentially" true, though not strictly, because the term pagan is very specific in the most technical sense. Pagan, bascially by definition, refers to the religions of the Greeks and Romans during the time of the rise of Christianity.

Yes, it is often used more broadly to mean anything outside of the Abrahamic faiths, but that really just starts painting with too broad a brush. The idea that you can basically lump Abarahamic into one basket and everything else in the "pagan" basket is not helpful to scholarship.

Anyway, yes, Jewish religion(s) descended from some other polytheistic Mesopotamian source, and also continued to pick up influences from other sources throughout history. Ancient Judaism was also relatively diverse compared to post-Christian Judaism as well.

Nevertheless, that doesn't really address the issues.

The central question is, at its origin, were the ideas that gave rise to the cult of Jesus Christ gleaned from the Jewish scritpures and other stories written by Jews, or were they gleaned from Greek/Roman cult practices, emperor worship, temples, rites, stories, plays and writings?

My anwser to that is very simple. All of the ideas came from Jewish works.

Did some ideas from Hellenistic culture make their way into Jewish works in the hundreds of years prior to Christianity? Sure, but they were given a distinctive Jewish spin as well.

Are things like the Twelve Tribes of Israel likely to have originated from zodiac designations when what became Judaism evolved from earlier Mesopotamian religions? Absolutely.

But, to say that (as Acharya does) the author of the Gospel of Mark invented the twelve apostles because of some intended reference to the zodiac or to zodiac symbolism or something (its never clear exactly what these supposed references are supposed to mean) instead of that the author of the Gospel of Mark invented the twelve apostles because the number twelve is used as a major number throughout Judaism, just like 40 days is, etc, and that in major stories about hero figures in Judaism the hero (namely Joshua (Jesus)) appoints twelve helpers, is bogus.

Now, if you ask me. Why did the author of Mark invent the twelve apostles?

My answer is that he invented the twelve apostles because this followed the tradition of Jewish hero stories, where the leader apoints twelve people to help him, based on the twelve tribes of Israel.

Were there really twelve tribes of Israel? No, almost certainly not.

Where did the claim of twelve tribes come from? Probably from the zodiac.

Did Jews in the 1st century associate the twelve tribes with the zodiac and think that the twelve tribes had some "astrotheological significance"? No, probably not, and I've seen no evidence of such. Did Jews of the 1st century actually believe that there were historically twelve tribes of Israel? Absolutely.

Was the author of Mark thinking about the zodiac or Jewish story telling tradition when he used twelve apostles? He was thinking about Jewish story telling tradition.

So this I think is the clear difference in the line of reasoning used by those who see the elements of the Jesus story as "Jewish" in origin vs. "pagan" in origin.

BTW:

http://www.biblegateway.com/keyword/...1=31&bookset=1

Your interpretation is a valid possibility, but so is Acharya's. We have no way of knowing with clear certainty about the many tangled threads of influence. Even figuring out probabilities is largely guess work. I'm fine with this, but I get the sense that people in this thread are looking for an impossible clear certainty. Some claim that Acharya is too certain in her conclusions as well. Whether or not its true, I'm fine with that too.

God Fearing Atheist · 01-17-2008, 03:20 PM

One more real quick.

All over page 482, ישועת is identified as the name 'Yeshua (Jesus)' in various OT passages. But ישועת is not the name יתושוע or ישוע and is never, so far as I'm aware, transliterated with ιησους. Could you explain the philosophy of your 'simple translation' here?

GakuseiDon · 01-17-2008, 03:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gstafleu

Quote:

Originally Posted by youngalexander

Whilst trouping about Bavaria in 06 I discovered that Sol Invictus was alive and well and 'beaming' in the many splendid baroque churches in that fair land.

You should try Vienna too one day:

This is from the side of the Stephansdom!

This is where I get wary. Is use of the sun in imagery an indication of a belief in sun worship? If anyone seriously wanted to suggest it based on the jpg here, in the absence of further information I'd have to say it is pretty inconclusive. Representations of the sun just doesn't prove "sun worship". From what I've seen, Acharya appears to rely a lot on these kinds of stretches.

MarmINFP · 01-17-2008, 03:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Malachi151

What Acharya S and others do with the Gospels, in the best of cases (most times the analysis isn't even this good) is like taking something like The Grapes of Wrath, and going through it and taking every mention of a day of the week or a month and then concluding that these are all secret references to ancient Anglo-Saxon gods and Roman themes.

I realize your exaggerating for rhetorical effect, and so I assume you already realize that this isn't a valid comparison. There is no connection between The Grapes of Wrath and the Anglo-Saxon gods. Acharya is comparing gods of different mythologies.

The point your trying to make is that Acharya stretches the evidence too much. This is always a danger, but the only way to avoid it is to not theorize about anything and give up on scholarship. I'd suspect that there are few theories about ancient cultures that don't find disagreement from some sector of scholars.

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True, you could point out that day of Thursday originates from the day honoring the god Thor, but you have to show that this was the intent of the author.

Have you ever read literary criticism? Scholars argue over the intent of living authors even when the author states their intention. We have no way of knowing the real intentions of ancient authors. Heck, most people are clueless about the real intentions of their own loved ones.

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Just because Thursday is named after the god Thor doesn't mean that people today make this association, any more than the fact that the Twelve Tribes of Israel are likely to have originated from some zodiac symbolism means that later Jews put any significant on this or thought about it in such a way.

Its highly probably that the Israelites knew the significance of 'Twelve' when they borrowed it, but sure over the centuries the original meanings becomes less clear. Most modern Christians are ignorant about the Biblical studies of early Christian texts, but that doesn't alter the original intentions of those texts.

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The same for Samson supposedly being a mythical descendant from a sun god, etc., etc., throughout the Jewish scritpures. It takes more than simply showing that the root of some word comes from some other meaning in order to show a relationship between the one set of ideas and another.

The English language is filled with all kinds of words with all kinds of roots that have nothing to do with how those words are used or thought of today. Someone arguing that a story using those words is really "secretly" referring back to the original root meanings has a lot of work cut out for them.

Interpretation is challenging. Acharya uses all resources including etymology because most of the original evidence was lost or destroyed long ago. As she is theorizing about a complex and broad subject(astrotheology), her job is even more difficult than scholars who focus on a single category of texts. Anyways, etymology is a perfectly respectable area of study.

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This is a lot of what Acharya does in Suns of God, she makes claims based on lots of word associations or other types of associations, but then concludes that the people using these terms, ideas, deities, etc. were themselves aware of these facts and used them as such intentionally.

As I said above, its likely that whoever first borrowed that element was aware of it. This doesn't seem absurd. People in those days were much more aware of astrological cycles than we are today. Why wouldn't they have noticed that the patterns of their myths fit objective patterns that they observed on a daily basis?

MarmINFP · 01-17-2008, 03:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GakuseiDon

This is where I get wary. Is use of the sun in imagery an indication of a belief in sun worship? If anyone seriously wanted to suggest it based on the jpg here, in the absence of further information I'd have to say it is pretty inconclusive. Representations of the sun just doesn't prove "sun worship". From what I've seen, Acharya appears to rely a lot on these kinds of stretches.

I see such evidence from a psychological standpoint. Interpreting according to Jung or Campbell, its true that most people don't consciously wosrship the sun. However, the sun is such a powerful symolism that it survives despite conscious attempts to theologize it away. This partly relates to archetypes, but you could simply think of it in terms of memes.

Yes, objectively speaking the connection between symbolism and theology makes no direct sense. The thing you forget is that humans aren't primarily rational creatures.

jjramsey · 01-17-2008, 05:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MarmINFP

In some accounts Persephone is the mother and in some accounts Semele is the mother.

And in the quote that I gave, Campbell was clearly referring to the accounts where Persephone is the mother. In the first paragraph, he is explicitly referring to Persephone. In both paragraphs, he refers to Zeus taking serpent form and the cave, which would indicate that he is talking about the same thing in both paragraphs. Actually, the "cave" part is a clear tell.

First paragraph: "...the earth-goddess Demeter, of whom she had been born, left her in a cave in Crete ..."

Second paragraph: "And the virgin conceived the ever-dying, ever-living god of bread and wine, Dionysus, who was born and nurtured in that cave ..."

Notice that the only previous mention of a cave is in the first paragraph. Campbell is not talking about Persephone in the first paragraph and Semele in the second. It's all Persephone.

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01-17-2008, 02:49 PM	#252
God Fearing Atheist Veteran Member Join Date: Sep 2000 Location: Massachusetts, USA -- Let's Go Red Sox! Posts: 1,500	I have some questions for Acharya. 1) Here you quote two secondary sources that assert, without reference to any primary sources, that the taurobolium was practiced by Mithraists. On what sources is this claim based, and what do they read in their original language? Additionally, what are their dates? 2) On page 448 of Suns of God, you say that Revelations 3.14 is 'another clue,' and cite two secondary sources that assert, without reference to any primary sources, that hO AMHN ought to be identified with an Egyptian sun god. Your 'previous discussion' on page 122 similarly asserts, without reference to any primary sources, that Isa 65.16 is a reference to 'the God(s) Amen or Ammon,' that the similar use at Rev 3.14 reveals it's 'adverb[al] or empathic' occurances to be a 'ruse,' and instead is 'a noun, referring to the God Amen/Amon/Ammon, who is interpreted in this passage as "Jesus Christ".' Indeed, the only source I see in the entire discussion is the infidels.org URL of M. D. Aletheia's (19th century! Surprise!) The Rationalist's Manual. It does not seem to cite any primary sources either. Could you please present an actual argument in favor of those identifications, with appeal to primary sources in their original languages? I'll have many more later.

01-17-2008, 03:20 PM	#256
God Fearing Atheist Veteran Member Join Date: Sep 2000 Location: Massachusetts, USA -- Let's Go Red Sox! Posts: 1,500	One more real quick. All over page 482, ישועת is identified as the name 'Yeshua (Jesus)' in various OT passages. But ישועת is not the name יתושוע or ישוע and is never, so far as I'm aware, transliterated with ιησους. Could you explain the philosophy of your 'simple translation' here?

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