Osbert

I am not an academic, a lot of this is personal speculation.
( My english is far from satisfactory)
I posted this thread on another board and had no comment, maybe Iwill get no comment here either.
This is as abridged as possible in order not to bore the reader too much.
A long, long time ago when semi feral human beings were roaming the forests and the planes, they were still unaware and uninterested in the logistics of the process of reproduction.
Man, ignorant and confused by the nine months invisible gestation period in the womb, had not yet made the connection between the sexual act and birth of the baby.

They believed pregnancy was the work of an external agent like the wind that literally puffed up, impregnated women like a cloth/sail. In other words, women were “masters” of their own fertility. Female were mysterious and magic; goddesses were worshipped in great numbers.

It wasn’t until men began to keep and herd large animals that they observed, over a period of time, the cause and effect of horse, ram and bull mounting their respective partners.

Finally, they twigged and the penny dropped: the first Ram-god, Bull-god, and Antelope-god were born. The Patriarchy originates from then. Heroes, kings and chieftains could wage war in the knowledge that the gain would be for the benefit of their own heirs.
To have horns was good, here’s a fine example of Moses: http://www.cptryon.org/hoagland/trav...ins/moses.html
The very first gods were images celebrating the potency of animals; early Mesopotamia is a fine example.
These new Gods and old Goddesses lived side by side until the arrival of a new set of godheads; witnessing what the Sky did when making love to Mother Earth: thunder, lightning and the rain that fertilized and made the crop grow was a much more impressive performance than any bull or ram could organize. The Sky/Thunder-god was born.
Jehovah, Zeus, Thor, Haddad etc, were such gods. Their worshippers vilified and banished previous deities.

Jehovah, for instance, replaced an earlier goddess Sheol (means: womb, hell); she was banished to the underworld and this is why to this day we somehow believe that Hell is a big cavern underground and it is also why God has no jurisdiction in hell.

The next generation of Gods was the so called “dying gods” or solar/priapic gods: Osiris, Tammuz, Mithras, Jesus; These younger gods do what the sun does: die and resurrect.

The Bible has become so important because, after the chaos caused by the fall of the Roman Empire. People needed desperately some order and continuity to get on with their lives. The waves of barbarian hordes were very unsettling; they still looked to Rome for a return to peace and order.
Unfortunately, by then, the only Institution of any stability was the Church of Rome who was very quick and very unscrupulous in exploiting these demands for order.
God’s desire is still translated through the Church.

Roger Pearse

Unless they left written records behind them, or you have a time-machine, this would appear to be pure imagination.

Mithras does not die and resurrect. The familiar list of deities suggests that you are being influenced by some very lazy material online.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Osbert

Thanks Mr Pearce, nice of you to comment so dryly. At least I got a comment.


The " uninterested in the logistic of the process of reproduction" came from Robert Graves (The white Goddess) and partly from Giambattista Vico ( The new science)



Sorry about using Mithra, this is what I meant:
Most of the mystery religions of the Mediterranean in the time of early Christianity were centred on a single divine figure (in the case of Orphism, the central figure is essentially an avatar of his own master, Dionysus), who had in most cases originally been a minor deity, whose mythology contained a narrative involving the deities death. In several cases, the original mythology seems to have been completely hijacked and abruptly altered, often bearing very little relation to the original myth; this is particularly noticeable in the way that Mithra somehow became Mithras. A number of the Mediterranean mystery religions of the period contain several similarities to each other, such as a prominent life-death-rebirth narrative, and the central deity being semi-human; this group (including the religions of Osiris-Horus, Dionysus, Mithras, Aion, Adonis, and Attis) were identified as connected in early times, and as a group were named Osiris-Dionysus after the two earliest groups.

Roger Pearse

You see that my comment applies to these gentry equally?

It would be necessary to show that Mithras derived from Persian Mitra, and evidence for this is lacking, tho.

Such intentionally vaguely worded parallels (I know that these are not your ideas, of course) are a staple of some literature, but do not tell us anything meaningful about any of the cults in question. In particular, for Mithras it is usually factually wrong.

The "Dying God" idea derives from Frazer's Golden Bough. There is a sense in which pagan cults were aware of the death-rebirth motif; that they were is one of the evidences of the truth of Christianity (you perhaps did not know that?) But such arguments are outside the scope of my interests in this forum. I merely comment on the factual element.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Osbert

I am afraid I do not see that your comments applied to these gentry as well;
as far as I can remember Robert Graves was Emeritus Professor at Cambridge and Vico was famous for his brilliant translations of Roman Law from Latin into Italian.
Where would you suggest the cult of the Bull, the Ram and the Ass sprang out if not of Phallic origin?

Evidences of the truth of Christianity? That is very intriguing because I certainly did not know that; what do you mean by truth?

Roger Pearse

Neither possessed either a time-machine or any literature from this hypothetical period when people ran about ignorant.

You should beware of presuming that the important and qualified have no religious or political prejudices to indulge. I am not sure that it is a safe presumption. Surely what we all want to see is *evidence*?

Pardon me, but I have no interest in discussing the meaning of the word 'truth'.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Loomis

It looks to me like the guy who wrote Psalm 89:6 thought that Jehovah was not a sky god.

Loomis

Whaddia think Roger?

Was Jehovah a sky god?

Loomis

<edit>

He was asking about a certain type of truth. He was asking about a certain type of truth that you introduced into this thread. You called it, “the truth of Christianity.”

Remember?

Anat

Osbert, I agree with Roger that we can only speculate on beliefs of prehistorical humans, but I would speculate that they had religions of one kind or another well before the introduction of agriculture and herding, based on anthropological records from hunter-gatherer societies first contacted in modernity. Such societies also have at least some traditional understanding of the human reproductive process, so again I don't think this had to wait for the adoption of herding. As for the origin of bull, ram etc deities - I would guess the reason for their adoption was their economic importance, and thus the need to control them, just like grain deities.