Robert Tulip

Although somewhat hesitant to engage with this mildly splenetic response from spin, I feel obliged to defend the connection between Mary and Isis. This material touches on some deep culture wars, both ancient and modern. I hope responses can steer away from emotional diatribes that fail to engage with evidence.

The ancient culture war can be seen in the description of religious change given by Robert Graves in his Introduction to the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology. Graves argues that a recurring theme in religious politics is that the myths of conquered societies attain ongoing life in subordination to the dominant mythology of the conqueror. We can see this process in operation in the gradual emergence of Christianity to its dominant position. The mythology of Egypt persisted for thousands of years until the successive conquests from Syria, Greece and Rome destroyed it. However, one of the beauties of myth is that very old stories have an inherent power by their very durability, having stood the test of time and proved their utility. The archetype of the virgin mother, from Neith, Hathor and Isis, provided a fertile seed bed from which the Mary cult could draw. But an important part of Christianity was its intense misogyny, linked to an alienated supernatural monotheism in which all spirituality is controlled by a single patriarchal sky father. This meant that rather than seeing Mary as equal to Jehovah, as Isis was equal to Osiris, Christianity had to find a new way to recognise feminine spirituality. Placing the Isis virgin mother trope into the historical fiction of Jesus of Nazareth was the solution, while giving a clear nod to the Egyptian antecedents in the Lazarus story, and in the queen of heaven myth with her cosmic crown of twelve stars.

In the Bible, John gives new life to Osiris by lightly concealing him as Lazarus, while also giving Mary and Martha the same role as the Egyptian Mertae, Isis and Nephthys. As Massey argued, the structure and names of the two myths are too similar to be unconnected. Christianity borrowed the myth from Egypt.

The modern culture war relates to theosophy and fascism. Gerald Massey was hostile to theosophy because he thought it was too speculative and magical and lacked the basis in evidence that he saw as central. Massey wanted to place comparative religion within a scientific framework. However, the popular appeal of Madame Blavatsky and her theosophical followers meant that Massey was crowded out of the picture. Christians had been fuming since their defeat at the hands of Charles Darwin. But theosophy, and anything associated with it, was a much easier target than the science of evolution. So the cultural war over religion saw the church suffering a strategic defeat at the hands of science, but compensating with a small tactical victory over the recrudescent hermetic magic of theosophy. In the process, writers such as Massey were crunched.

The use by theosophy of the swastika symbol, and the appropriation of this symbol by Hitler, was the last straw. Theosophy faced a suspicion of association with extreme right wing racist views from which it has not recovered. We can see how this broad cultural politics meant that academic sympathy for theosophy, in an environment dominated by the success of the hard sciences, would be seen as irrational. Even more, the Nazi link gave theosophy an odor of the illiberal, reinforcing the disdain in which such material was held in the universities.

Against this framework, the work of Massey and others like him was quietly neglected, but never answered or refuted. Mainstream Egyptology has preferred instead to pursue safer empirical topics rather than the philosophical problem of the relation between Egyptian thought and Christianity. Just as Christians say the Christ Myth Theory has been refuted, but can never say exactly where, spin says Massey is obsolete but neglects to engage with his actual information about Isis. As I quoted above, Massey asserts that “In the “discourse of Horus” to his Father at his coming forth from the sanctuary in Sekhem to see Ra, Horus says, “I have given thee thy soul, I have given thee thy strength, I have given thee thy victory, I have given thee thy two eyes (mertae), I have given thee Isis and Nephthys”, who are the two divine sisters, the Mary and Martha of Beth-Annu (Records, vol. 10, p. 163).” I have no reason to think Massey is misquoting his cited source, but assuming it is accurate, he provides here an Egyptian text in which Horus, Osiris, Isis and Nephthys have the same respective roles as Jesus, Lazarus, Mary and Martha.

Massey goes on to explain how the association between Isis and the throne appears as Mary sitting at the feet of Christ, while Nephthys’ position as a home goddess is recapitulated in Martha’s role as servant. You can read the other parallels in my long quote from Ancient Egypt The Light of the World above. I am happy to take Massey’s text here as reliable. If anyone wants to check his source be my guest. I cannot see why he would give this reference (Records vol 10) if others could not seek to falsify it. Others who have looked into this material (Kuhn, Harpur, Murdock) have strongly backed the argument. My internet searching shows that criticism is only from Christian apologists.Perhaps it is better not to wear emotional commitments so transparently upon your sleeve spin. The description of my ideas as “shit” reflects a lack of comprehension. It reminds me of Freud’s dream of Jung as upwelling mud. Scholarship has narrow irrational boundaries, as we see in the exclusion of Christ Mythicism. The exclusion of new age cosmology through hand-waving appeals to irrelevant comparisons to excrement says more about the excluders than about the material that is excluded.

The question of what constitutes “reasonable source materials” in this field is hotly contested. Already in this thread a range of ancient sources have been cited only to be dismissed with airy ignorance. Part of the culture war here is that the Egyptians saw their gods as allegory for natural entities and forces, especially the sun and moon. Two thousand years of stony sleep have allowed the Christian rejection of natural theology to ossify into deep subconscious cultural prejudice, overlaid with a shallow empiricism, such that the hidden continuation of natural theology within Christianity is denied. ”Schlock” is another charming term. There is no schlock needed to analyse pre-Christian virgin mother myths. In terms of natural cycles, we see that the sun appears to be born anew every day from the virgin mother night. The association between purity and fertility has a deep attraction. It is simply unimaginable that the extensive age-old veneration of this trope of the virgin mother in so many ancient societies would simply vanish, to be replaced by a similar historical myth using many of the same names and stories, but with no connection between them.

Christian sources are very different from what I am presenting, since they seek to defend established traditions whose factual basis is highly dubious. By contrast, I am looking at how the Mary myth could actually have evolved from its antecedents.Scholars of the last century have largely ignored comparative mythology. The difficulty and sensitivity have made it largely too hot to handle, although scholars such as Witt belie this problem. Egyptology has simply moved on to more amenable empirical topics, after seeing with alarm the Gnostic implications of a rigorous study of the meaning of Egyptian religious texts.

Isis in the Ancient World, http://books.google.com.au/books?id=...epage&q&f=true by RE Witt, published by Cornell University Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, says Isis was “one of the most sublime deifications of motherhood and yet in the Osiris Hymn called the ‘Great Virgin’. Witt says Isis was known as ‘the Lady of Bread’. This name displays continuity with the Virgo motif of the star Spica, the ear of wheat.

I would have more respect for that argument if anything you had said in this thread amounted to more that the automatic gainsaying of the material I have cited, a la the John Cleese method. The ‘antiquarian’ canard simply reflects the cultural politics of ancient studies, and the fact that once the astrotheological content of Egyptian religion was revealed by writers like Massey, and Dupuis and others before him, it was quietly placed in the academic ‘too hard’ basket. The assertion that so-called antiquarian works should not be cited is evidence-free. I am not talking about Massey’s opinions, I am talking about the facts he cites from old Egyptian sources showing myths about Isis in the same story line as appears for Mary in the Lazarus story in the Gospel of John.If you can refer me to good recent work that analyses the archetypal relation between Isis and Mary I would be happy to read it. Witt is excellent. Unfortunately, Murdock’s Christ in Egypt falls victim to the ‘no true Egyptologist’ fallacy, such that an interest in this topic excludes a researcher from the guild. Murdock is rigorous, but her research falls under the taboos of the culture wars. So you accept there is a migration of tropes. I imagine that admission would be enough to give conniptions to Jeffrey Gibson. In this case the migration of tropes is rather exact, with Egyptian figures having the same names and roles as their Christian counterparts. Yes it is a complex topic, but this example is simple, and hardly facile. Shamanism would take us into a broader field. From the summary I have read of Allegro, I understand he does actually have an interest in how ancient religion sought to connect the earth to the heavens. Allegro was shunned because of the illegal status of hallucinogenic drugs. Rather like Graham Hancock, Allegro’s efforts to respect ancient use of such natural substances elicited a hostile reaction. It bears comparison to astrotheology, because both assert the existence and value of significant lost traditions. I am not talking about easy solutions. Ancient mystery schools used oral teaching, and most of their ideas have been lost, or preserved only in distorted reflections in extant sources. But it is entirely possible and legitimate to look at the cracked mirror of the gospels to ask what ancient myths it actually reflects. The authors were working under profound political constraints, required to produce a text that would be historically believable and spiritually authentic. This meant the subordinated source deities had to be acknowledged in veiled form. That reminds me of the real ten commandments in Exodus 34, where the first command of God is to destroy the sacred groves of Asherah, the queen of heaven. Asherah bears comparison to Isis. Opposition to astrotheology is at the foundation of the Judeo-Christian cosmology. Ah, you are so subtle spin! There is no question that astrotheology has a higher respect for Buddhist and Hindu religion than Christianity does. The intent here appears to be to imply that Indian religion is a byword for irrationality. Again, the extremely ancient origins of Indian myth gives its stories an archetypal power, as in Egypt. The exclusive limits of modern western rationality often like to point to an excluded other as a symbol of the irrational. Such summary dismissal of the myth of Isis is a shallow and inadequate response to material that deserves proper study.

spin

I'd respond, Robert Tulip, if there were anything there that needed a response, but assertions, antiquarian tomes, mythological encyclopedias, and wanderings into stuff about nazis and theosophy, signal clearly that there is smoke, though, beyond that, nothing. Jeez, why spend so much effort just to rabbit on? I'd say "nothing comes of nothing, speak again", but I'm afraid you would... with the same results. You know, the same sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

As to Allegro, "Allegro was shunned because of the illegal status of hallucinogenic drugs." Sorry, Allegro's career was ruined well before the mushroom stuff. He was shunned because he wouldn't play the safe team game regarding the DSS. When he was the only member to publish his quota of texts, most of the others on the team got together to pour shit over the result. The funny thing is that while Allegro published his portion by 1968, no other translator provided their portions within decades. That explains why the world had access to the pesharim, but not the other important texts (not found in cave #1), for as many decades. Allegro's most shunning moment was when after five years of silence from Milik regarding the publication of the Copper Scroll, Allegro published his own version to get the text out to the public five years after the text had been cut open at Manchester. The reaction was functionally the slow end of his academic career. The mushroom thing was published in 1970, the year he left academia.

And no, I wasn't having a go at the Hindu religion, but at laddies who traded their stress suits for orange oblivion. Get it on, bang the gong, get it on. Life was simpler then.

Robert Tulip

Reviewing this discussion with spin, I initially provided ancient Egyptian evidence showing the links between Isis and Mary. Spin then went into full deflection mode, ignoring all content, but using terms such as 'rubbish', 'shit', 'Marc Bolan fan', etc etc. There may be little more to say when discussions here are treated as such rhetorical games and there is so little interest in exploring the facts.

A nice summary of the links between Mary and pagan goddesses is at http://www.northernway.org/twm/mary/mother.html It says "Isis was one of the first Madonnas, frequently protrayed as nursing Horus, her Divine Son. She was highly venerated during the years of the early Christian church, and most scholars agree that the cult of Isis strongly influenced the cult of Mary."

The archetype of Isis/Mary is deeply astral. I think it is a fascinating cultural question why astrotheology is the subject of such disdain. I do think the status of theosophy is relevant, even if it provides spin an opportunity for more irrelevant deflection. The challenge in this Isis Mary connection is to keep the baby and throw out the bathwater. As far as I can see spin has no interest in such a distinction but is willing to throw out everything holus bolus in order to restrict discussion to his peculiarly narrow vision of scholarly boundaries.

Toto

I don't think that anyone would dispute the later connections between Mary and Isis. (This is part of the criticism that some Protestant sects make of the Catholic Church.) But can you claim that there is any indication that the gospel writers had Isis in mind when they wrote the birth stories? The character of Mary in the gospels is merely a young woman.

Or would any woman fit in to this universal virgin mother archetype?

Robert Tulip

As far as an explicit nod to an Isis myth is concerned, beyond the broad virgin mother archetype it gets harder to disentangle possible intentions other than in the rather explicit reference to the Egyptian Gods in the Lazarus resurrection story and those linked to it.

I do not think the original virgin birth stories were added to Mark's gospel in order to assert actual belief that a man Jesus Christ was born of a virgin mother. This idea, separating the holy from the material, is so widespread from India to Babylon to Egypt to Greece that it really is an indispensible attribute of a universal god-man. The Gospel authors were aware of a range of myths in these neighbouring societies, all colouring the central theme of realized prophecy from the Jewish scriptures.

As far as the topic of this thread is concerned, 'warmed up' is not quite how I see the continuity between Egypt and the Bible. If Isis was last night's roast potatoes, Mary is not just today's bubble and squeak. Mary is by no means the end of the story. Rather, the link with Isis points forward to a final reconciliation, an eschatological unity in which the 'resurrection of the saints' is understood as the spiritual recognition of the true meaning of myth, and the continuity is seen between the Christian stories and their pagan ancestors. Lazarus and Mary are parables for the resurrection of Osiris and Isis, understood as ongoing celebration and veneration of their myths.

All these stories have to be assessed against what is physically possible. Considering Christian theology as memetic evolution, parsimony requires that an idea built on precedent is a more probable explanation of that idea than the suggestion that it sprang into existence fully formed. Isis is a major part of the precedent for the evolution of the Mary myth, together with other goddesses such as Demeter, Innana and Asherah. But the politics of patriarchy conceals these sources. The Big Lie of the historical Jesus is designed to enable the patriarchal power of the church. This sexist model of social control is obsolete. To overthrow the sexist delusions of the church we need to understand the true mythical origins of faith, including respecting the sacred autonomy of the female through the Isis Mary tradition.

mountainman

Well there you have a massive problem because nobody really knows in which century the Gospel writers wrote.

OTOH everyone must clearly acknowledge that the Roman Empire was pagan until the 4th century,
and a number of Roman Emperors worshipped the cult of Isis (and other Egyptian deities) before this time.


Therefore the examination of Egyptian evidence from the epoch BCE may be a moot point because these Egyptian deities were physically worshipped by Roman Emperors during the first three centuries of the common era.

So how did these Roman Emperors present Isis?





εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

spin

When you start exploring facts, Robert Tulip, I will be more inclined to talk with you.

What is the evidence you use to adduce a cult of Mary in early christianity and at what stage in the chronology of that early christianity does the evidence point to?

The reason why I call you on this rubbish is because you are so umm, single-minded with your views. I have already indicated that there are signs of an astrological import in the Hebrew religion. The mother goddess is in herself not astral, yet, because the year, its seasons and the accompanying astral signposts are part of the cultural heritage of most if not all religions, one can expect some reference to the year, the seasons and the astral signposts in the traditions of the religion. But it seems here you are, turning a blind eye to the rest of the cultural baggage of the religions you are meddling with and banging your gong about astrotheology. That makes your baby and bathwater image more a cliche poorly applied, because no-one is in fact throwing out the baby, except you. You're the one avoiding all the rest of the tradition for what you presume to be, judging by your gong banging, the only important issue. I go for nuance rather than shoehorning.

Toto

Why should that matter? Just read the description of Mary in the gospels. Do you see any resemblance between that young woman and the goddess Isis?

Robert Tulip

The similarity in character between Mary and Isis can be seen by comparing the Magnificat at Luke 1 where Mary explains her agenda to the description of Isis given by RE Witt in Isis in the Ancient World. There are strong points of similarity in their broadly loved positions as queen of heaven. Both have compassion for the lowly as tender mothers, while connecting earth to heaven through a divine blessing.

Witt provides this description of Isis, most of which could apply to Mary.
Compare this to the Magnificat at Luke 1:46

Toto

I beg to differ. Isis was a powerful goddess, Mary a lowly handmaiden.

There is no tradition of Mary as healer. Jesus was the healer.
But Mary had not followers in the early church

Nope.

Isis didn't have great things done for her - she did them herself.