stephan huller

I admit I do not know as much about the religion of Hellenistic Egypt as I should but I remember reading somewhere that Harpocrates (= the young Horus) was born on December 25th. I don't know where it was. I wish someone could tell me the source. Yet I strongly suspect this is the reason this Christian group was called 'the Harpocratians' (= Celsus, Origen) which was later corrupted to Carpocratians. Of course it all depends on determining whether Harpocrates really was understood to have been born on December 25th. What is the evidence for that?

sotto voce

This allegedly Christian group.

Presumably they went in for circumcision, too.

DCHindley

I thought it was because they were members of the association of Harp Craters and Shippers, a voluntary association based in Alexandria. According to Ceasar's The Civil War, the grain that filled the holds of the corn ships provided the most exquisite repository for harps made of pure gold, such as were crafted by the Therapeutae and kindred souls.

DCH

stephan huller

I found this "One would like to think the presentation happened on December 25, natalis inuicti, the day of the birth of Horus (Harpocrates)." Sarolta A. Takács - Isis and Sarapis p 93

But where is he getting this information?

stephan huller

Macrobius Saturnalia 1.21.12:

This is their sign for Osiris, and by it they indicate that this god is the sun, which with royal power looks down upon the world from on high. And indeed in ancient usage the sun is called the eye of Jupiter.
[13] Among the Egyptians Apollo (and he is the sun) is called Horus —whence the name “hours” (horae) has been given to 24 divisions which make up a day and a night and to the four seasons which together complete the cycle of the year [14] It has also been a practice of the Egyptians, when they wish to dedicate a statue of the sun under its own name, to represent it with the head shaved except on the right side, where the hair is allowed to remain. The hair that is kept shows that the sun In never hidden from the world of nature, and the retention of the roots after the locks have been sure indicates that it is an essential property of the song even when it is invisible to us, to reappear like those locks. [15] This same attribute of a half-shorn head is also a symbol of the time when the light is reduced and when the sun, as though shorn of its growth and with a mere stubble, so to speak, remaining, comes to the shortest day (which the men of old called the winter solstice, using the word bruma for winter, from the shortness of the day, as though to say “short day.” But when the sun rises again from its narrow retreat, it reaches out to the summer hemisphere, growing in strength as though by a process of birth, and it is believed to have come then into its own realm. [ 16] That is why, among the signs of the zodiac, the Egyptians have dedicated an animal, the lion, in that part of the heavens where in its yearly course the sun’s powerful heat is hottest. And the Sign of the Lion there they call “The House of the Sun,” because a lion seems to derive its essential qualities from the natural properties of the sun.

mountainman

Carpocrates of Alexandria



What forms might this negative bias take in a Gallic heresiologist?