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Roman Solar Religion and Ritual

2009-11-16T18:29:00.000-08:00

The traces of a native worship of the Sun are even fewer and fainter among the ancient Romans than among the ancient Greeks. In Latin calendars of the Augustan age, there is recorded, under the date of August the ninth, a public sacrifice to the Sun (Sol Indiges) on the Quirinal Hill. The meaning of the epithet "Indiges" here applied to the Sun is ambiguous and has been variously interpreted by modern scholars. If it implies that the Sun was reckoned among the ancient native gods known as Di indigetes, which we may render as Indigenous Gods, it proves that among the Romans the worship of the Sun was of immemorial antiquity, for the Di indigetes belong to the oldest stratum of Roman religion. On this interpretation, which is the most obvious and natural one, the Indigenous Sun (Sol Indiges) is analogous to the Indigenous Jupiter (Jupiter Indiges), who had a sacred grove in Latium near the river Numicius, and whom Roman mythologists afterwards identified with the deified Aeneas.
The view of the great antiquity of the worship of the Sun at Rome has the support of the learned Roman antiquary Varro, who tells us that the Roman annals recorded the dedication of altars to the Sun and Moon by the old Sabine King Titus Tatius, the adversary and afterwards the colleague of Romulus. Moreover, the ancient Roman family of the Aurelii, who were said to be of Sabine origin, were believed by the ancients to take their name from the sun, which in the Sabine language appears to have been called "ausel": hence the original name of the family was not Aurelii but Auselii. On account of their worship of the Sun the family were granted by the Roman State a place in which they could sacrifice to the luminary.
We have seen that the worship of the Sun was shared by other great branches of the Aryan stock, the Vedic Indians, the ancient Persians, and the ancient Greeks, and it appears to have been common to their northern kinsfolk in Europe, the Lithuanians and the Germans; hence we may reasonably infer that Sun-worship was part, though apparently a subordinate part, of the original Aryan religion, which the various branches of the family after their dispersal carried with them to their new homes.
Hence we need not suppose, with some modern mythologists, that the Romans were reduced to borrowing the worship from the Greeks, in whose religion it had never played an important part. It is more probable, as Franz Cumont has rightly observed, that the adoration of the heavenly bodies, which serve to mark the seasons and exert so great an influence on agriculture, existed from the beginning in the rustic population of Italy, as in the other branches of the Indo-European family. In favour of this view it may be noted that Varro, an eminent authority on agriculture as well as on mythology, at the outset of his book on farming tells us that he will invoke the twelve gods, not the city gods, male and female, whose gilded images stand in the Forum at Rome, but the twelve gods who are the best guides of husbandmen, and among them he mentions the Sun and Moon, "whose seasons are observed at seed-time and harvest," immediately after Father Jupiter and Mother Earth, and immediately before such genuine Italian deities as Ceres, Liber, Flora, and Robigus, the god of Mildew. So learned an antiquary was not likely to interpolate new-fangled Greek gods in the list of the divinities who were to serve as guides to the Italian farmer.
On the Quirinal Hill there was a temple or shrine of the Sun, in which couches were decked out for the accommodation of the god and his divine colleagues who feasted with him; on these sacred couches a place was reserved for the Evening Star under his genuine old Latin name of Vesperug. The name does not savour of Greek influence, and the temple or shrine stood near the temple of the good old Sabine god Quirinus. It may well have been the shrine which in bygone days the Roman State had assigned to the Sabine family of the Aurelii or Auselii as a place where they could sacrifice to the Sun, from whom they took their name. Further, there was an ancient temple of the Sun in or near the Circus Maximus. When a plot to assassinate Nero in the Circus had been detected, special honours were paid to the Sun in this his old sanctuary, because he was supposed to have revealed the designs of the conspirators. On the gable of the temple there was an image of the Sun, for it was not thought right that the image of the god who traverses the open sky should be placed under a roof. In the topographical descriptions of Rome dating from the reign of Constantine the temple is called the temple of the Sun and Moon.
When Augustus conquered Egypt he brought two obelisks away from Heliopolis to Rome, where he set them up, one of them in the Circus Maximus, the other in the Field of Mars. The obelisks still stand in Rome, though not in their original positions; the one which Augustus placed in the Circus Maximus is now in the Piazza del Popolo; the other, which graced the Field of Mars, now stands in the Piazza di Monte Citorio. Each of them bears an inscription which records that, after reducing Egypt to the condition of a Roman province, Augustus in his eleventh consulship (10 B.C.) dedicated the obelisk as a gift to the Sun. Thus these monuments of Egyptian piety, which in their original home at Heliopolis had been consecrated to the Sun, continued in Rome to be sacred to the solar deity.
Indeed, the one which Augustus set up in the Field of Mars was turned to appropriate use, being converted into the gnomon of a colossal sun-dial, the face of which consisted of a pavement with lines inlaid in bronze and radiating from the obelisk as a centre, which was crowned with a gilt ball. The hieroglyphic inscription on the obelisk proves that it was originally set up by King Psammetichus (not, as Pliny thought, by Sesostris) about the middle of the seventh century before our era. In Pliny's time the gigantic gnomon had ceased to mark the true solar time, which the philosopher attributed to a slight displacement of the obelisk either by an earthquake or by floods.
If the worship of the Sun played but an insignificant part in the genuine old Roman religion, it was far otherwise in later times when, under the Empire, at the height of its power or hastening to its fall, the ancient Italian gods were driven into the background by an invading host of foreign and especially of Oriental deities, among whom the Sun-god was one of the most popular. The missionaries of the foreign faiths which, in the decline of paganism, the masses of mankind eagerly embraced as substitutes for the outworn creeds and faded gods of Greece and Rome, were in great measure merchants and soldiers travelling about in pursuit of trade or shifted in regiments on military duty from one end of the Empire to the other. These men brought with them, so to say, in their bales and knapsacks the religious beliefs and practices which they had picked up in distant lands, and which they now unfolded to eager listeners as a new gospel, the latest message to poor trembling mortals from the world beyond the grave.
A striking instance of Sun-worship imported by soldiers into Italy from the East was witnessed at the second battle of Bedriacum, fought in 69 A.D. between the forces of the rival Emperors Vitellius and Vespasian. The two armies met and grappled in the darkness of the night. For hours the combat swayed to and fro, and still the issue hung in suspense. At last the moon rose and turned the trembling balance in favour of the army of Vespasian; for shining behind them and full on the faces of the enemy it confused the sight of the one side and presented them as a visible target to the missiles of the other. The commander of the army of Vespasian seized the opportune moment to urge his men, and especially the Guards, to a desperate charge. Just then, by a fortunate coincidence, the sun rose; and the men of the third legion, who had their backs to the east, at once faced round and saluted it; for having recently served in Syria they had learned the habit of thus greeting the rising orb of day. The effect was instantaneous and decisive; for the enemy, believing that they were saluting reinforcements coming, like the Prussians at Waterloo, to turn the tide of battle, wavered, broke, and fled. Thus the Sun-god crowned with victory the arms of Vespasian.
The cool-headed Vespasian so far yielded to popular superstition as to consult the oracle of God on Mount Carmel and to heal a blind man by spitting on his eyes; but he never seems to have testified his gratitude to the Sun-god for his opportune help at the most critical moment of his career. However, if he failed in respect for the solar deity, several of his successors on the throne made ample amends for his deficiency. At Emesa in Syria there was a large black conical stone which was said to have fallen from the sky and bore the Phoenician name of Elagabalus. It was popularly supposed to be an image of the Sun, and was lodged in a great temple resplendent with gold and silver and precious stones. The god received the homage not only of the natives but of distant peoples, whose governors and kings sent costly offerings every year to the shrine. Among the rest the soldiers of a great Roman camp pitched in the neighbourhood used to visit the temple and admire the handsome young priest when, wearing a jewelled crown and arrayed in gorgeous robes of purple and gold, he tripped gracefully in the dance round the altar to the melody of pipes and flutes and other musical instruments.
This dainty priest of the Sun, then in the full bloom of youth and beauty, and resembling, we are told, the ideal portraits of the youthful Bacchus, was the future Emperor Elagabalus, the most abandoned reprobate who ever sat upon a throne. On being elevated, at age fourteen, to the imperial dignity by the intrigues of his artful grandmother and the favour of the soldiers, the stripling, whose original name was Bassianus, assumed the style of his barbarous god Elagabalus or Heliogabalus, as the name was also pronounced in order to suggest to Greek ears the name of the Sun (Helios). Further, the young fanatic caused the rude fetish of the deity to be transported from Emesa to Rome, where he built a great and stately temple for it on the Palatine beside the imperial palace. The site had formerly been occupied by the genuine old Roman god Orcus. Round about the temple were set up many altars, on which every morning hecatombs of bulls and sheep were slaughtered, incense of all sorts was piled, and jars of the oldest and finest wines were poured, so that streams of mingled blood and wine flooded the pavement. And round the altar on the ensanguined pavement danced the emperor and a choir of Syrian damsels with clashing cymbals and droning drums, while the knights and senators stood looking on in a great circle, and the entrails of the sacrificed victims and the perfumes were carried in golden jars on the heads, not of menials and servitors, but of captains of armies and ministers of state, arrayed in the long loose-sleeved robes and linen shoes of Syrian prophets; for among these degenerate nobles it was deemed the highest honour to be allowed to participate in the sacrifice.
And in the height of summer, lest the Sun-god should suffer from the excess of his own heat, the considerate emperor escorted him to an agreeable suburb, where he had built another vast and costly temple in which the deity might while away the sultry months till the refreshing coolness of autumn should permit of his return to Rome. On these annual excursions to and from the country the god, or rather the stone, was conveyed in a chariot glittering with gold and jewels and drawn by six superb white horses, themselves resplendent in trappings of gold. No man might share the sacred chariot with the deity. But the emperor himself held the reins and went before, walking the whole way backward out of respect for the god, upon whom he kept his eyes fixed, and supported on either side by his guards lest he should stumble and fall. The whole road was thickly strewed with gold dust, and on either side ran crowds waving torches and flinging garlands and flowers on the path. On reaching the summer quarters of his deity the emperor used to ascend certain towers which he had erected for the purpose, and from which he showered on the multitude largess in the shape of golden and silver cups, fine raiment, and all sorts of beasts, both wild and tame, except pigs, for by a law of the Phoenician religion the pious Phoenician emperor was bound to refrain from contact with these unclean animals. In the wild struggle of the crowd to profit by the imperial bounty many persons perished, either trampled under foot by their fellows or pushed by them on the levelled spears of the guards.
It was the intention of this eminently religious but crack-brained despot to supersede the worship of all the gods, not only at Rome but throughout the world, by the single worship of Elagabalus or the Sun. In particular he aimed, we are told, at concentrating the religion of the Jews, the Samaritans, and the Christians in his new temple on the Palatine, which was to be the Zion of the future. In pursuance apparently of this policy he began operations, after a truly Puritanical fashion, by defiling the temple of Vesta and attempting to extinguish her eternal fire. But this religious reformer and champion of monotheism, whose infamous orgies far outdid the wildest excesses of Caligula and Nero, was no believer in celibacy even for the Supreme Being, who could not, in his opinion, reasonably be expected to do without a wife. It was at once the duty and the pleasure of the emperor to select a consort for the deity, and to this delicate task he devoted as much thought and attention as it was in his nature to devote to anything.
His first choice fell on Minerva, whose sacred image, known as the Palladium, was popularly supposed to have been rescued by Aeneas from the flames of Troy and transplanted to Rome, where the goddess was established in a temple, from which she had never since stirred except on a single occasion when she had been forced temporarily to quit the building by a fire. But the emperor was not a man to stand on ceremony. The hallowed image was transported to the palace and the divine wedding was about to be celebrated, when it occurred to the imperial lunatic that his soft Syrian god might be frightened in the nuptial bower by the formidable aspect of a bride in armour; for Minerva could not be expected to lay aside her shield and spear even for the honeymoon. So on second thoughts he sent to Africa for the image of Astarte, the great goddess of love, which Dido was said to have set up in Carthage when she founded the city of old, and which was held in great reverence by the Libyans as well as by the Carthaginians. Her Phoenician worshippers identified her with the Moon, from which, as well as from her affectionate nature, the emperor concluded that she would be a most suitable mate for his Sun-god. So she came, and much treasure with her, and all the subjects of the empire were bidden to contribute to the dowry of the bride. The divine union was consummated, and all Rome and Italy were compelled to hold high revelry in honour of the wedding.
But even the patience of the degenerate Romans, long schooled to submission, could not for ever put up with the freaks and follies, the extravagances and outrages of their dissolute and crazy emperor. They rose in rebellion, slew him in the sordid den in which he had sought to conceal himself from their fury, dragged his body through the streets, and flung it into a sewer; and when it choked the sewer they fished it out and carried it, dripping and stinking, to the Tiber, where they heaved it into the river, weighted with a stone, that the vile body might never come to the surface and never receive the rites of burial. Such was the miserable end of the religious reformer who would have established solar monotheism throughout the Roman empire. Monuments of the attempted reformation and of the ill-starred reformer are extant in the shape of contemporary inscriptions which record dedications to the Sun-god Elagabalus, and make mention of the emperor in his capacity of priest of that deity. As for the sacred black stone, of which so much had been made, on the death of its namesake the emperor it was expelled from the city, and found its way back to Emesa; for there the Emperor Aurelian saw it in the temple when he entered the city after his victory over Zenobia.
Some fifty years after the disastrous attempt of Elagabalus to establish the worship of the Sun at Rome on a new and more solid basis, the scheme was revived by the Emperor Aurelian, a man of a very different character, in whom the stern inflexible temper and military genius of ancient Rome shone bright for a brief time, like the flicker of an expiring candle, in the gloomy evening of the Roman empire. From his youth fortune would seem to have marked him out as the natural champion of the Sun-god. His family name linked him with the Aurelii, the noble old Roman house who bore the name of the Sun and may have deemed themselves his offspring. His mother is said to have been a priestess of the temple of the Sun in the village where he was born. Being sent on a mission to Persia, he received from the Persian king the gift of a cup on which the Sun was represented in the familiar garb and attitude which the future Emperor of Rome had so often beheld in the temple where his mother ministered. When Zenobia, the rebel Queen of the East, was defeated and captured, her people massacred, and Palmyra, her once stately and beautiful capital, reduced to a heap of bloodstained ruins, the temple of the Sun in the city shared the fate of the other buildings; but Aurelian ordered that it should be completely restored. The despatch in which he conveyed the order to the officer commanding the troops at Palmyra has been preserved by the emperor's biographer; it runs as follows:
Aurelian Augustus to Cerronius Bassus: The swords of the soldiers must be stayed. Enough of the people of Palmyra have been slain and cut to pieces. We spared not the women we killed the children: we slaughtered the old men: we destroyed the peasants. To whom shall we leave hereafter the country and the city? The survivors are to be spared. For we think that so few have been sufficiently chastised by the condign punishment of so many. As for the temple of the Sun in Palmyra, which was sacked by the eagle-bearers of the third legion, along with the standard bearers, the dragon-bearer, the hornblowers, and the trumpeters, it is my will that it be restored to its original state. You have three hundred pounds of gold from the coffers of Zenobia: you have eighteen hundred pounds of silver from the plunder of Palmyra: you have the royal jewels. Out of all these see that the temple is beautified: in doing so you will oblige me and the immortal gods. I will write to the Senate requesting them to send a pontiff to dedicate the temple.
Not content with restoring the temple of the Sun among the ruins of Palmyra, the conqueror built a magnificent temple of the Sun at Rome and adorned it with the spoil of the captured city. In it he set up images of the Sun and of Bel, of whom no doubt the latter was the Semitic Baal. Among the votive offerings which it contained were masses of gold and jewellery and fine robes studded with gems. A silver statue and a painted portrait of Aurelian himself were afterwards to be seen within the walls. The splendour of the temple was enhanced by colonnades, in which wines belonging to the imperial treasury were stored. The service of the temple was entrusted to a new college of priests called Pontiffs of the Sun, or Pontiffs of the Sun-god, or Pontiffs of the Unconquered Sun-God, but of the ritual observed in the temple we know nothing.
The coins of Aurelian also attest his devotion to the solar deity. On one of them the Sun is seen offering to the emperor a globe as a symbol of the empire of the world, with a captive lying at their feet; some of the inscriptions on the coins proclaim the Sun-god to be the Preserver or Restorer of the World or even Lord of the Roman Empire. Such legends seem to announce the intention of the emperor to set the Sun-god at the head of the pantheon. It is remarkable that on all these coins the type of the god, in spite of his Oriental origin, is purely Greek, being clearly derived from that of Apollo. On some we see a young man wearing a crown with the solar rays and carrying in his left hand a globe or a whip; his right hand is raised; he is naked except for a light cloak which floats on his back. Sometimes he is represented driving a four-horse car. In the reign of Probus the intimate relation of the emperor to the Sun was signified by a legend on the coins, "To the Unconquered Sun, the Companion of Augustus," and the reorganization of the empire by Diocletian did not affect the now traditional types and inscriptions on the coins which referred to the solar worship. An inscription found at Aquileia records a dedication to the Sun-god by the Emperors Diocletian and Maximian. The armies of Licinius marched to fight the armies of Constantine under the protection of the Sun-god, and a curious inscription informs us that Licinius established in his camp at Salvosia in Moesia an annual sacrifice in honour of the Sun on the eighteenth of November, which was the first day of the year according to the calendar of Antioch. Constantine himself, during the first quarter of his reign, struck many pieces with figures or busts of the Sun-god and legends, "The Unconquered Sun," "To the Unconquered Sun, the Companion of Our Augustus," and so forth.
The imperial patronage thus accorded to Sun-worship for at least half a century before the establishment of Christianity was little more than an official recognition of a universal solar religion which had long been spreading in the empire under the combined influences of philosophic thought, astrological speculation, and Oriental mysteries. Among these mysteries none were more popular, none proved more dangerous rivals to Christianity, than the worship of the old Persian god Mithra, who was now definitely identified with the Sun-god under the title of the Unconquered Sun. About the beginning of our era Strabo affirms without hesitation or ambiguity that the Persian deity Mithra was the Sun. Yet in the opinion of some good modern scholars Mithra originally personified the light, not of the Sun, but of the luminous heaven in general. As to the mode, place, and date of the process which transformed him from a god of light in general into a god of the Sun in particular we have no information. The change perhaps took place in Babylonia, where, under the powerful influence of Chaldean theology and astrology, the Iranian deities were assimilated to their nearest Semitic counterparts, the Supreme God Ahura Mazda being identified with the Sky-god Bel, while the goddess Anahita was confused with Ishtar (Astarte), the goddess of the planet Venus, and Mithra was equated with the Sun-god Shamash.
But Babylonia was only a stage in the triumphal march of Mithra westward. Even under the early kings of the Achemenidian dynasty Persian colonists seem to have settled in Armenia, where, according to Strabo, all the Persian deities were worshipped. It is said that the governor of Armenia used to send no less than twenty thousand colts a year to the Persian king for use at the Mithrakana or festival of Mithra. Of the mode of celebrating the festival at the Persian court we know little or nothing except that the only day on which the king was allowed to be drunk was the day on which sacrifices were offered to Mithra, and on that day he also danced a Persian dance. But the wave of Persian colonization rolled westward beyond the boundaries of Armenia. In its climate, as in its natural products, the tableland of Anatolia resembles that of Iran, and lent itself particularly to the breeding of horses, and hence to the formation of a native cavalry, the arm in which the Persians always excelled. Under the sway of Persia the nobility who owned the land appear to have belonged to the conquering race in Cappadocia and Pontus as well as in Armenia, and despite all the changes of government which followed the death of Alexander these noble lords remained the real masters of the country, ruling each the particular canton in which his domains were situated and, on the borders of Armenia at least, preserving through all political vicissitudes down to the time of Justinian the hereditary title of satrap which recalled their Iranian origin.
This military and feudal aristocracy furnished Mithridates Eupator with many of the officers, by whose help he was so long able to set the power of Rome at defiance, and still later it offered a stout resistance to the efforts of the Roman emperors to subjugate Armenia. Now these warlike grandees worshipped Mithra as the patron-saint of chivalry; hence it was natural enough that even in the Latin world Mithra always passed for the "Invincible," the guardian of armies, the soldier's god. In the time of Strabo the Magians were still to be found in large numbers, scattered over Cappadocia, where they maintained the perpetual fires in their chapels, intoning the liturgy with the regular Persian ritual. A century and a half later the same sacred fires still blazed to the drone of the same liturgy in certain cities in Lydia: for Pausanias tells us that:
the Lydians have sanctuaries of the Persian goddess, as she is called, in the cities of Hierocaesarea and Hypaepa, and in each of the sanctuaries is a chapel, and in the chapel there are ashes on an altar, but the colour of the ashes is not that of ordinary ashes. A magician, after entering the chapel and piling dry wood on the altar, first claps a tiara on his head, and next chants an invocation of some god in a barbarous and, to a Greek, utterly unintelligible tongue: he chants the words from a book. Then without the application of fire the wood must needs kindle and a bright blaze shoot up from it.
Outside of the Anatolian tableland the first to observe the rites of Mithra are said to have been the Cilician pirates. During the civil wars which distracted the attention and absorbed the energies of the Romans in the first century [B.C.], these daring rovers seized the opportunity to issue from the secret creeks and winding rivers of Cilicia and scour the seas, landing from time to time, harrying islands, holding cities to ransom, and carrying off from some of the most famous sanctuaries the wealth which had been accumulated there by the piety of ages. Gorged with plunder and elated by the impunity which they long enjoyed, the corsairs rose to an extraordinary pitch of audacity and effrontery, marching up the highroads of Italy, plundering villas, and abducting Roman magistrates in their robes of office; while at sea they displayed a pomp and pageantry proportioned to the riches which they had amassed by their successful forays. Their galleys flaunted gilded sails and purple awnings, and glided along to the measured plash of silver oars, while the sounds of music and revelry, wafted across the water, told to the trembling inhabitants of the neighbouring coasts the riot and debauchery of the buccaneers. The worship of Mithra, which these sanctified ruffians practised in their fastnesses among the wild Cilician mountains, may have been learned by them from Mithridates Eupator, King of Pontus, whom they assisted in his wars with the Romans.

By the end of the first century of our era the worship of Mithra and his identification with the Sun appear to have been familiar to the Romans; for in an address to Apollo the poet Statius, enumerating the titles by which that deity was called, suggests that the god might prefer to be known as "Mithra, who under the rocks of the Persian cave twists the bull's struggling horns." The allusion is plainly to the most widespread and familiar monument of Mithraism, the sculpture which represents Mithra in a cave, kneeling on the back of a bull and twisting its head back with one hand, while with the other he plunges a knife into its flank. [Above: Mithras Tauroctonos ("Mithra the Bull-Slayer")]
The ancient scholiast Lactantius Placidus, commenting on this passage of Statius, not only explains Mithra as the Sun whom the Persians worhipped in caves, but completes the solar interpretation by adding that the horned bull is the horned Moon, and that the scene is laid in a cave to signify an eclipse of the sun by the interposition of the moon. In the group of Mithra and the bull, as the scholiast correctly observes, Mithra is regularly portrayed in Persian costume wearing the usual tiara or peaked Phrygian cap; but the scholiast proceeds to say that Mithra was also represented with the head of a lion, and he explains this representation either with reference to the constellation of the Lion which the Sun enters in his course through the zodiac, or as a symbol of the superiority of the Sun-god over all the other gods, like the superiority of the lion over all the other beasts. In this interpretation the scholiast appears to have erred. The figure of a lion-headed god, standing with a serpent twined round his body and holding one or two keys in his hands, is explained with greater probability as a personification of Time, answering to the Persian divinity Zervan Akarana, Infinite Time, which from the period of the Achemenides was deemed by a Magian sect to be the origin of all things and the begetter both of Ormuzd and Ahriman.
Compared to the other Oriental deities, such as the Phrygian Great Mother, the Carthaginian Astarte, and the Egyptian Isis and Serapis, the Phrygian god Mithra was a late arrival in Rome. The nature of the Anatolian plateau explains in some measure the long seclusion of the deity from the western world. It is a bleak upland region of steppes and forests and precipices, which offers few attractions to the stranger; and there, in the solitude of the mountains or the dreary expanse of the unending plains, Mithra remained for ages isolated amid natural surroundings which formed a not unsuitable setting for his stern and soldierly religion. Even during the Alexandrian age, after the victorious Greek armies had swept over the country, Mithra never descended from his highland home to the soft skies and blue seas of Ionia. A single late dedication to the Sun Mithra, found at the Piraeus, is the only monument of his worship on the coasts of the Aegean. The Greeks never welcomed this god of their ancient enemies to their hospitable pantheon.
But no sooner was the Anatolian tableland overrun by Roman armies and annexed to the Roman empire than the worship of Mithra spread like wildfire to the remotest regions of the west and south. The soldiers adopted it with enthusiasm, and from about the end of the first century of our era they carried it with them to their distant camps on the Danube and the Rhine, on the coast of France, among the mountains of Wales and Scotland, in the valleys of the Asturias, and even on the edge of the Sahara, where a line of military posts guarded the southern frontier of the empire. In all these widely separated quarters of the globe they left memorials of their devotion to Mithra in the shape of monuments dedicated to his worship. At the same time merchants of Asia introduced the religion into the ports of the Mediterranean and carried it far into the interior by waterways or roadways to all the important trading cities and marts of commerce. In our own country Mithraic monuments have been found in London, York and Chester. Finally, among the apostles of the new faith must be reckoned the Oriental slaves, who were everywhere and had a hand in everything, being employed in the public service as well as in private families, whether they toiled as labourers in the fields and the mines, or as clerks and bookkeepers in counting-houses and government offices, where their number was legion.
At last the foreign deity wormed his way into the favour of the high officials and even of the emperor. Towards the close of the second century of our era an immense impulse was given to the propagation of the religion by the attention bestowed on it by the Emperor Commodus, who, in keeping with his brutal and cruel character, is said to have polluted the rites by human sacrifice. The dedications, "to The Unconquered Sun Mithra for the safety of Commodus Antoninus Augustus, our Lord," and numerous other Mithraic dedications dating from the reign of Commodus, attest the popularity which the worship attained in the sunshine of imperial favour. From the early years of the third century the religion was served by a domestic chaplain in the palace of the Caesars, and inscriptions record the vows and offerings of its devotees for the prosperity of the Emperors Septimius and Alexander Severus, and afterwards of Philip. Still later the Emperor Aurelian, who, as we have seen, established an official cult of the Sun at Rome, could not but sympathize with Mithra, the god who was himself now regularly identified with the Sun.
By the beginning of the fourth century the Mithraic faith had spread so widely and struck its roots so deep, that for a moment it seemed as if it would overshadow all its rivals and dominate the Roman world from end to end. In the year 307 A. D., Diocletian, Galerius, and Licinius had a solemn meeting at Carnuntum on the Danube, and there consecrated together a sanctuary "to the Unconquered Sun-god Mithra, the favourer of their empire." So near did Mithra come to being the Supreme God of the Roman empire. Yet a few years later and that same empire bowed its neck to the yoke of another Oriental god, and the Sun, the Unconquered Sun, of Mithra set forever.
The popular identification of Mithra with the Sun in the later times of classical antiquity is placed beyond the reach of doubt by a multitude of inscriptions, found in all parts of the Roman empire, which directly qualify Mithra as the Sun or more usually as Mithra the Unconquered Sun. Nevertheless on many monuments of the worship Mithra and the Sun are represented by separate figures as if they were distinct deities. In one scene we see Mithra standing in his usual Oriental costume opposite a young man, naked or clad in a simple cloak, who is either standing or kneeling at the feet of Mithra. In some reliefs Mithra is putting on his companion's head or removing from it a large curved object which sometimes resembles a horn or a deflated leathern bottle. The kneeling personage is usually passive, but sometimes he lifts his arms, whether in supplication or to put aside or retain the mysterious object which is being placed on his head or removed from it. In some reliefs the scene is more complicated: Mithra is displacing the enigmatical object with his right hand, while with his left he places on his companion's head a radiant crown. In one scene of a great relief found at Osterburken we see Mithra holding the same object over the head of the kneeling figure with his right hand, while he puts his left hand to the hilt of his sword at his belt, and the radiant crown lies on the ground between them.
The exact significance of the scene is uncertain, but the standing or kneeling figure who receives or loses the radiant crown is interpreted as the Sun, towards whom Mithra seems to adopt an attitude of superiority by conferring upon him or removing from him the crown of rays which is the emblem of his solar character. Perhaps the scene refers to a contest between the two deities in which Mithra remained the victor. It has also been suggested that Mithra is pouring oil or other liquid from a horn on the head of the Sun as a solemn form of baptism or investiture in sign of the powers which that deity will wield when he is crowned with the diadem of rays. In another scene of a great relief found at Heddernheim we see Mithra holding out his hand to the kneeling Sun as if helping him to rise: the head of the Sun is surrounded by a nimbus.
On several monuments the two gods are represented standing opposite each other and shaking hands. Mithra wears his usual costume: the Sun is either naked with a nimbus round his head, or he wears a cloak and the radiant crown and carries a whip. The meaning of the scene is obvious. The two deities have concluded a treaty of alliance, and peace and harmony will henceforth reign between them. In the relief at Osterburken, as if to give a religious consecration to the union of the two gods, they are represented shaking hands over an altar. Further, the peace between Mithra and the Sun is sealed by a banquet, at which they are portrayed reclining side by side at the festive board and holding up goblets in their right hands, while about the table are gathered a number of guests as partakers of the sacred feast. The importance attached to this divine banquet is attested both by the number of the monuments on which it is figured and by the important place assigned to it in the series of subsidiary scenes arranged around the central piece, the sacrifice of the bull by Mithra. Often, especially in the great sculptured reliefs which have been found in the valley of the Rhine, the relief representing the banquet is the last of the whole series, as if it formed the concluding act in the history of the god's exploits, the Last Supper of which he partook before quitting the scene of his earthly labours.
Remembering that according to the Christian Fathers a sort of communion was celebrated in the Mithraic mysteries, we can understand why the devotees of the religion set so high a value on this last feast of Mithra and his companions, or should we say his disciples? The sacramental act which the liturgy appears to have prescribed was accomplished in memory of the example set by the Divine Master. This relation between a legend and the ritual is established by a fragmentary relief discovered in Bosnia. It represents two devotees reclining at a table on which loaves are set out: one of them holds a drinking horn: both are in the attitude in which Mithra and the Sun are regularly represented on the other monuments. Round about the two devotees, or rather communicants, are grouped the initiated of various grades in the mystic hierarchy, including the Raven, the Persian, the Soldier, and the Lion, wearing the masks which are appropriate to their names and which they are known from other sources to have worn in the sacred rites. A text of St. Jerome, confirmed by a series of inscriptions, informs us that there were seven degrees of initiation in the Mithraic mysteries, and that the initiated took successively the names of the Raven, the Occult, the Soldier, the Lion, the Persian, the Courier of the Sun (heliodromus), and the Father.
These strange names were not simply honorary titles. On certain occasions the officiants disguised themselves in costumes appropriate to the names they bore. These sacred masquerades were variously interpreted by the ancients with reference either to the signs of the zodiac or to the theory of transmigration. Such differences of opinion only prove that the original meaning of the disguises was forgotten. Probably the masquerade was a survival from a time when the gods were supposed to wear or assume the form of animals, and when the worshipper attempted to identify himself with his deity by dressing in the skin and other trappings of the divine creature. Similar survivals in ritual are common in many religions.
To complete the history of Mithra we must notice the monuments on which the Sun is represented driving his chariot, which is drawn by four horses at full gallop. With the left hand he grasps the reins, while he holds out his right hand to Mithra, who approaches to take his place beside the Sun in the chariot: sometimes, indeed, Mithra clings to the arm of the Sun-god as if preparing to leap into the whirling car. Sometimes the Ocean, into which the Sun's chariot descends at night, is indicated by the figure of a bearded man reclining on the ground and leaning on an urn or holding a reed. Yet the daily disappearance of the Sun setting in the sea does not suffice to explain this scene nor the part which Mithra plays in it.
To understand it we must compare the scenes carved on some Christian sarcophaguses, which present so striking a resemblance to the Mithraic sculptures that the two series can hardly be independent of each other. On the Christian sarcophaguses it is the prophet Elijah who stands erect in his car drawn by four galloping steeds. He grasps the reins with his left hand, while with his right he holds out his mantle to the prophet Elisha, who stands on the ground behind the car. In front of the car, and beneath the rearing steeds, the figure of a bearded man is stretched, leaning with his left arm on an urn from which water is flowing. The reclining figure represents the Jordan, from whose banks the prophet Elijah was swept away to heaven on the chariot and horses of fire. In the light of this parallel we may suppose that Mithra, like the prophet of Israel, his earthly labours over, was believed to have ascended up to heaven in the Sun's bright chariot, though doubtless he was thought still to look down upon and protect the faithful worshippers whom he left behind him on earth. Sic itur ad astra.
It remains to mention among the Mithraic sculptures two figures which are commonly supposed to be connected with the solar character of Mithra. The great scene of the sacrifice of the bull, which occupied the central place in Mithraic art and probably in Mithraic religion, is regularly flanked by two youthful male figures dressed like Mithra and wearing the usual peaked Phrygian cap. Each of them grasps a burning torch, but one of them holds the burning end of the torch up, while the other turns it down towards the earth. Though they are most commonly represented in the scene of the sacrifice, where they are in a sense the acolytes or satellites of Mithra, yet they also occur in large numbers as detached sculptures.
For example, they are found in couples as votive offerings in the usual subterranean sanctuaries. In the scene of the sacrifice they are portrayed as smaller than Mithra, but not disproportionately so, and they are always dressed exactly like him. For the most part they take no part in the sacrifice, but stand motionless as statues, gazing into space or absorbed in the contemplation of the flame of their torch. Sometimes, however, the torch-bearer who stands behind the bull grips the animal's tale below the bunch of ears of corn in which the tail terminates: the gestures seems to indicate that he is about to detach the bunch of ears from the tail. Two pairs of statues of these torch-bearers are accompanied by inscriptions, from which we learn that the one who held up his torch was called Cautes, and that the one who held down his torch was called Cautopates. Elsewhere the same names have been found on inscribed pairs of pedestals, though the statues which stood on the pedestals are lost. The addition of the words "deus" ("god") to the names in some of the inscriptions proves that both Cautes and Cautopates were regarded as divine.
The meaning and etymology of these two barbarous names are uncertain, attempts to derive them from the Persian appear to have hitherto failed; but from some of the inscriptions in which they occur it seems indubitable that both names are merely epithets of Mithra himself. One of these inscriptions reads, "d(eo) i(nvicto) M(ithrae) Cautopati," that is, "To the Unconquered god Mithra Cautopates," and a certain number of dedications ought to be read similarly. Another inscription runs, "deo M(ithrae) C(autopati) S(oli) i(nvicto)," that is, "To the god Mithra Cautopates, the Unconquered Sun." Hence it would seem that in the great scene of the sacrifice of the bull, which occurs so often in Mithraic art, Mithra is represented thrice over. Now we are told by the Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite that the Magians celebrated a festival of the Triple Mithra; and this statement, which has been much discussed, is illustrated by the monuments in question, which represent Mithra in three distinct forms, namely, the central figure of Mithra slaying the bull, flanked by two torch-bearers Cautes and Cautopates. Hence apparently we are driven to conclude that the sculptor meant to portray a triune god or a single deity at three different moments of his existence.
This Mithraic trinity has nothing to correspond to it in the religion of Zoroaster, but it may well be of Babylonian origin. Now according to Semitic astrology Mithra is a solar god; hence the two torch-bearers must also be the Sun, but they must represent him under different aspects or at different moments of his course. Perhaps the two youths stand for the brightening or the fading glow of the morning or evening twilight, while the god stabbing the bull between them may represent the splendour of noon. Long ago the learned French antiquary Montfaucon interpreted the three figures of these reliefs as the rising sun, the mid-day sun, and the setting sun. This would explain why in many reliefs the figure of Cautes, who holds up his torch, is accompanied by a cock, the herald of the dawn. So in Greek mythology the cock was regarded as the herald of the Sun and was accounted sacred to him; and Plutarch speaks of an image of Apollo holding a cock in his hand, which he naturally interprets as a symbol of the dawn and sunrise. Similarly in two Mithraic monuments the torch-bearer who holds up his torch in one hand supports a cock on the other. Hence we infer that this youth, named Cautes, was regarded as an emblem of the rising sun, and we may suppose that in the daily liturgy Cautes was invoked at sunrise, the bull-slaying god at noon, and Cautopates at sunset.
A more recondite theory would explain the two torch-bearers as symbols of the vernal and the autumnal sun respectively, the one waxing and the other waning in power and splendour. In favour of this interpretation it is pointed out that Cautes and Cautopates are sometimes represented holding in their hands, the one the head of a bull, and the other a scorpion; or a bull is seen browsing or resting beside Cautes, while a scorpion crawls at the feet of Cautopates. Now at a very remote date the Bull and the Scorpion were the signs of the zodiac which the sun occupied at the vernal and the autumnal equinoxes respectively, although in classical times, as a consequence of the precession of the equinoxes, the sun had long retrograded to the signs of the Ram and the Balance. It is tempting to conjecture that the traditional emblems of the constellations which once marked the beginning of spring and the beginning of autumn were transmitted from Chaldea to the west and preserved in the symbolism of the mysteries long after they had ceased to correspond with the facts of astronomy.
Be that as it may, we may be fairly certain as to the general significance of the two torch-bearers in Mithraic art. The one who lifts his torch is a personification either of the matutinal or of the vernal sun which mounts higher and higher in the sky and by its growing light and strength imparts fertility to the earth. The other who depresses his torch personifies the declining sun, whether the great luminary appears to haste at evening to his setting, or to sink day by day lower and lower in the autumnal and wintry sky.
Far more obscure and difficult to interpret is the scene of the sacrifice of the bull, which, as we have seen, occupies the central place in Mithraic art, as the sacrifice itself doubtless formed the supreme act in the Mithraic religion. In the crypts, which constituted the Mithraic temples, a sculptured group representing Mithra in the act of slaying the bull was regularly placed at the far end, facing the entrance, in a position corresponding to that which is occupied by the altar in Christian churches. Not only so, but reduced copies of the group were placed, like crucifixes with Christians, in domestic oratories and no doubt in the private apartments of the faithful. The number of reproductions of it which have come down to us is enormous, comparable to the number of crucifixes which would be found in the ruins of Europe by the hordes of infidel and iconoclastic invaders which may one day lay the whole fabric of western civilization in the dust.
A possible clue to the meaning of the mysterious sacrifice is furnished by certain curious details of the sculptures which represent it. On almost all the monuments the tail of the dying bull ends in a bunch of ears of corn, and on the most ancient of the Italian monuments three ears of corn are distinctly represented issuing instead of blood from the wound in the bull's side. The inference seems inevitable that the bull was supposed to contain in itself certain powers of vegetable fertility, which were liberated by its death.
Now according to the ancient Avestan system of cosmogony the primeval ox, created by the Supreme God Ahura Mazda, contained in itself the seeds of all plants and of all animals except man; it was slain by the evil demon Ahriman, but in its death it gave birth to the whole vegetable and animal creation, always with the exception of the human species, which was supposed to have had a different origin. Thus in the Bundahish, an ancient Pahlavi work on cosmology, mythology, and legendary history, we read:
On the nature of the five classes of animals it says in revelation that, when the primeval ox passed away, there where the marrow came out grain grew up of fifty and five species, and twelve species of medicinal plants grew; as it says that out of the marrow is every separate creature, every single thing whose lodgment is in the marrow. From the horns arose peas, from the nose the leek, from the blood the grape-vine from which they make wine -- on this account wine abounds with blood -- from the lungs the rue-like herbs, from the middle of the heart thyme for keeping away stench, and every one of the others as revealed in the Avesta. The seed of the ox was carried up to the moon station; there it was thoroughly purified, and produced the manifold species of animals. First, two oxen, one male and one female, and, afterwards, one pair of every single species was let go into the earth.
Again, in another passage of the same treatise we read:
As it (the primeval ox) passed away, owing to the vegetable principle proceeding from every limb of the ox, fifty and five species of grain and twelve species of medicinal plants grew forth from the earth, and their splendour and strength were the seminal energy of the ox. Delivered to the moon station, that seed was thoroughly purified by the light of the moon, fully prepared in every way, and produced life in a body. Thence arose two oxen, one male and one female; and, afterwards, two hundred and eighty-two species of each kind became manifest upon the earth.
Hence it seems highly probable that the Mithraic sculpture of the sacrifice of the bull represents the slaughter of the primeval ox, which in dying produced from the various parts of its body the whole vegetable and animal creation, always with the exception of mankind. We can now understand why, in the Mithraic group of the slaughter of the bull, the animal is always represented fallen with its head to the right, never to the left. The reason is given in the Bundahish, which tells us that "when the primeval ox passed away it fell to the right hand." Thus we may fairly conclude that in the belief of the Mithraic devotees the slaughter of the primeval ox was a creative act to which plants and animals alike owed their origin. We can therefore understand why the priests should have transferred that beneficent, though painful, act from Ahriman, the evil spirit, to Mithra, the good and beneficent god. In this way Mithra apparently came to be deemed the creator and source of life, as indeed he is described in a passage of Porphyry. Thus the sad and solemn scene which always met the eyes of Mithraic worshippers in the apse at the far end of their temples commemorated the consummation of the great sacrifice which in ages gone by had given life and fertility to the world.
But perhaps the sight of the tragic group in the religious gloom of the vaulted temple awakened in the minds of the worshippers other thoughts which moved them still more deeply. For it is possible, we are told, that in the Mithraic religion the cosmogonic myths were correlated with the ideas entertained by the Magians as to the end of the world. In fact, the two sets of beliefs present a resemblance which is naturally explained by the identity of their origin, if we suppose that both narratives are variants of a single primitive theme.
We know, both from Greek writers and the Mazdean scriptures, that the ancient Persians believed in a resurrection of the dead at the end of this present world. Thus the Greek historian Theopompus recorded that according to the Magians men would come to life again and be immortal. According to Aeneas of Gaza, in his treatise on the immortality of the soul, "Zoroaster predicts that a time will come in which there will be a resurrection of all the dead." The statements of these Greek writers are amply confirmed by the sacred books of the ancient Persian religion, which explicitly teach the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, good and bad alike, at the end of the present dispensation. They predict that in these last days there will rise a Redeemer or Saviour named Soshyans or Saoshyant, who will be the agent of the resurrection. He it is, we are told, "who makes the evil spirit impotent, and causes the resurrection and future existence." In the task of bringing the dead to life the Redeemer will be assisted by fifteen men and fifteen damsels, and their labours will last for seven and fifty years.
Now the way in which they will bring about the resurrection is this. They will slay an ox called Hadhayos, and from the fat of that ox and the sacred white "hom" or "haoma" (the equivalent of the Sanscrit "soma") they will prepare ambrosia ("hush"), and they will give it to all the men, and all men will drink of it and become immortal forever and ever. Then will all men stand up, the righteous and the wicked alike. Every human creature will arise, each on the spot where he died. The souls of the dead will resume their former bodies and they will gather in one place, and they will know those whom they knew formerly in life. They will say, "This is my father, and this is mother, and this is my brother, and this is my wife, and these are some other of my nearest relations." They will come together with the greatest affection, father and son and brother and friend, and they will ask one another, saying, "Where hast thou been these many years? and what was the judgment upon thy soul? hast thou been righteous or wicked?" And all will join with one voice and praise aloud the Lord God Almighty (Ahura Mazda) and the archangels. There in that assembly, which no man can number, all men will stand together, and every man will see his own good deeds and his own evil deeds, and in that assembly a wicked man will be as plain to see as a white sheep among black. In that day the wicked man who was a friend of a righteous man will make his moan, saying, "Why, when he was in the world, did he not make me acquainted with the good deeds which he practised himself?" Afterwards they will separate the righteous from the wicked, and the righteous will be carried up to heaven, but the wicked will be cast down into hell. For at the bidding of the Lord God Almighty (Ahura Mazda), the Redeemer and his assistants will give to every man the reward and recompense of his deeds.
Hence it would seem that Mithra succeeded to the place which in the old Persian religion had been occupied by Soshyans or Saoshyant, the Redeemer or Saviour. Thus in the belief of his worshippers "the sacrifice of the divine bull was in truth the great event in the history of the world, the event which stands alike at the beginning of the ages and at the consummation of time, the event which is the source at once of the earthly life and of the life eternal. We can therefore understand why among all the sacred imagery of the mysteries the place of honour was reserved for the representation of this supreme sacrifice, and why always and everywhere it was exposed in the apse of the temples to the adoration of the worshippers." [F. Cumont, "Textes et Monuments," i. 188.] On the minds of worshippers, seated in the religious gloom of the subterranean temple, the mournful scene of the slaughter of the bull, dimly discerned at the far end of the sanctuary, was doubtless well fitted to impress solemn thoughts, not only of the great sacrifice which in days long gone by had been the source of life on earth, but also of that other great sacrifice, still to come, on which depended all their hopes of a blissful immortality.
A rite which presents a superficial resemblance to the sacrifice of the bull in the Mithraic religion was the ceremony known as a "taurobolium." This strange sacrament consisted essentially in a baptism or bath of bull's blood, which was believed to wash away sin, and from which the devotee was supposed to emerge born again to eternal life. Crowned with gold and wreathed with fillets, the candidates for the new birth descended into a pit, the mouth of which was covered with a wooden grating. A bull, adorned with garlands of flowers, its forehead plastered with gold leaf, was then driven on to the grating and there slaughtered with a sacred spear. Its hot reeking blood poured through the grating on the worshipper in the pit, who received it with devout eagerness on every part of his person and garments, till at last he emerged gory from head to foot, and received the homage, nay, the adoration, of his fellows as one who had been born again to eternal life and had washed away his sins in the blood of the bull. It does not appear that this baptism of blood ever formed part of the regular Mithraic ritual. The many inscriptions which mention it, with the exception of one which appears to be forged, explicitly refer the rite to the worship of the Great Mother and Attis.
Yet worshippers of Mithra are known to have sometimes submitted to the repulsive rite; for we possess the dedication of an altar to the Mother of the Gods and Attis by a certain Sextilius Agesilaus Aedesius, who describes himself as Father of Fathers in the religion of the Unconquered Sun-god Mithra, and at the same time claims to have been "born again to eternal life by the sacrifices of a bull and a ram." But the Father of Fathers ranked as the highest dignitary, a sort of little pope, in the Mithraic hierarchy; accordingly we can hardly doubt that the example set by so exalted a prelate was often followed by the inferior clergy. In fact, we hear of another Father of Fathers who boasted, with honest pride, that not only he himself but his wife also, with whom he lived for forty years, had been washed in the blood of the bull.
Another high dignitary of the Mithraic church was the Father of the Sacred Rites, though presumably he ranked below the supreme pontiff, the Father of Fathers. Two of these Fathers of Sacred Rites similarly bragged of having been regenerated by the application of bull's blood. Again, one of the inferior clergy, a simple Father and Sacred Herald of the Unconquered Sun-god Mithra, records that he too had partaken of the sacrament of the bull. This last prelate would seem to have mixed up his religions in a very liberal spirit, for, apart from the preferments which he held in the Mithraic communion, he informs us that he was priest of Isis, hierophant of Hecate, and arch-cowkeeper of the god Liber, who apparently laid himself out for cattle-breeding. And far from being ashamed of having been drenched with the blood of the slaughtered bull, this reverend pluralist prayed that he might live to repeat the performance twenty years later; for though in theory the blood was supposed to regenerate the votary forever, it seems that in practice its saving efficacy could not safely be trusted to last longer than twenty years at the most, after which the sacrament had to be repeated. Thus we may conclude that the worshippers of Mithra were often glad to practise a barbarous rite which, though it formed no part of their own religious service, yet served to remind them of that supreme sacrifice to which they attached the deepest importance as being nothing less than the great central fact in the history of the world.
The striking similarities which may be traced in certain points between Mithraism and Christianity were clearly perceived by the Christian Fathers; indeed we are indebted to their writings for our knowledge of some of the parallels which otherwise might have been forgotten. In accordance with their general theory of the world, they explained the resemblances as wiles of the devil, who sought to beguile poor souls by a spurious imitation of the true faith. Thus Justin Martyr tells us that in the mysteries of Mithra the evil spirits mimicked the eucharist by setting before the initiates a loaf of bread and a cup of water with certain forms of words.
But the Father who appears to have possessed the most intimate knowledge of Satan and the greatest skill in unmasking him under all his disguises, was Tertullian, and to his ruthless exposure of the great Enemy of Mankind we are indebted for certain particulars which, but for his scathing denunciation, might long have been consigned to the peaceful limbo of oblivion. Thus in his essay on "The Soldier's Crown" he reveals some points in the curious ritual observed when a Mithraic votary was promoted to the rank of soldier in the sacred hierarchy, for Mithraism had its Salvation Army. The ceremony took place in one of the crypts which formed the regular Mithraic temples. There a crown was offered to the candidate on the point of a sword, and a pretence was made of placing it on his head; but he was instructed to wave it aside and to say that his crown was Mithra. Thus was his constancy put to the proof, and he was counted a true soldier of Mithra if he cast down the crown and said that his crown was his god.
This, according to Tertullian, was a diabolic counterfeit of the conduct of a true Christian who should learn to despise the glories of this frail fleeting world in the prospect of a better world that will last forever. "What hast thou to do," asks the Father in a glow of religious emotion, "what hast thou to do with flowers that fade? Thou hast a flower from the rod of Jesse, a flower on which hath rested the whole grace of the Holy Spirit, a flower incorruptible, unfading, eternal." He reminds the Christian soldier of the Spirit's promise: "Be thou faithful unto death and I will give thee a crown of life"; and he recalls the boast of the great Apostle of the Gentiles uttered when the time of his departure was at hand: "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing."
Further, we learn from Tertullian that among the Mithraic rites there was a species of baptism at which remission of sins was promised to the initiate at the baptismal font. This also, according to Tertullian, was a device of Satan, whose cue it is to invert the truth by aping the holy sacraments in the mysteries of idols. In further proof of the craft and subtlety of the devil Tertullian adds: "And if I remember aright, Mithra marks his soldiers on their foreheads: he celebrates the offering of bread: he enacts a parody of the resurrection; and he redeems the crown at the point of the sword. Nay more, he enacts that his high priest shall marry but once, and he has his virgins and celibates." Here "the offering of bread" obviously refers to the same sacrament of bread and water which Justin Martyr stigmatizes as a diabolic imitation of the eucharist. The virgins and celibates of Mithra appear to have anticipated the nuns and monks of Christianity. It is not so certain what "the parody of the resurrection" alludes to. But from the words which Lampridius uses in describing the profanation of the mysteries by Commodus, it seems clearly to follow that the death of a man by violence was dramatically represented in the mysteries. For the historian says that Commodus "polluted the Mithraic rites with real homicide, whereas the custom in them is only to say or to pretend something that creates an appearance of fright."
Again, Zacharias the Scholiast, in a life of the Patriarch Severus of Antioch, which must have been written about 514 A.D., asks, "Why in the mysteries of the Sun do the pretended gods reveal themselves to the initiates only at the moment when the priest produces a sword stained with the blood of a man who has died by violence? It is because they only consent to impart their revelations when they see a man violently put to death by their machinations." The mysteries of the Sun here referred to are probably those of Mithra, but the writer appears to be mistaken in supposing that human sacrifices ever formed part of the Mithraic ritual. All that we can safely infer from his testimony, confirmed by that of Lampridius, is that one of the scenes acted in the mysteries was the pretended killing of a man, and that a bloody sword was produced in proof that the slaughter had actually been perpetrated. We may conjecture that the supposed dead man was afterwards brought to life, and that this was the parody of the resurrection which Tertullian denounced as a device of the devil.
If the Mithraic mysteries were indeed a Satanic copy of a divine original, we are driven to conclude that Christianity took a leaf out of the devil's book when it fixed the birth of the Saviour on the twenty-fifth of December; for there can be no doubt that the day in question was celebrated as the birthday of the Sun by the heathen before the Church, by an afterthought, arbitrarily transferred the Nativity of its Founder from the sixth of January to the twenty-fifth of December. From the calendar of Philocalus, which was drawn up at Rome about 354 A.D., we learn that the twenty-fifth of December was celebrated as the birthday of the Unconquered Sun by games in the circus. These games are mentioned by the Emperor Julian, who tells us that they were performed with great magnificence in honour of the Unconquered Sun immediately after the end of the Saturnalia in December. The motives which induced the ecclesiastical authorities to transfer the festival of Christmas from the sixth of January to the twenty-fifth of December are explained with great frankness by a Syrian scholiast on Bar Salibi. He says:
The reason why the fathers transferred the celebration of the sixth of January to the twenty-fifth of December was this. It was a custom of the heathen to celebrate on the same twenty-fifth of December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity. In these solemnities and festivals the Christians also took part. Accordingly when the doctors of the Church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnized on that day and the festival of the Epiphany on the sixth of January. Accordingly, along with this custom, the practice has prevailed of kindling fires until the sixth.
The custom of holding a festival of the Sun on the twenty-fifth of December persisted in Syria among the pagans down at least to the first half of the sixth century, for a Syriac writer of that period, Thomas of Edessa, in a treatise on the Nativity of Christ, informs us that at the winter solstice "the heathen, the worshippers of the elements, to this day everywhere celebrate annually a great festival, for the reason that then the sun begins to conquer and to extend his kingdom." But the pious writer adds that, though the power of the Sun waxes from that day, it will afterwards wane again; whereas, "Holy Church celebrates the festival of the Nativity of Christ, the Sun of Righteousness, who begins to conquer error and Satan, and will never wane." This opposition between the natural Sun of the heathen and the metaphorical Sun of Righteousness of the Christians is a rhetorical commonplace of ecclesiastical writers, who make use of it particularly with reference to the Nativity. The pagan origin of Christmas is plainly hinted at, if not exactly admitted by St. Augustine in a sermon wherein he exorts his Christian brethren not to solemnize that day like the heathen on account of the sun, but on account of Him who made the sun. Similarly Leo the Great rebuked the pestilent belief of those who thought that Christmas was to be observed for the sake of the birth of the new sun, as it was called, and not for the sake of the Nativity of Christ.
The last stand for the worship of the Sun in antiquity was made by the Emperor Julian. In a rhapsody addressed to the orb of day, the grave and philosophic emperor professes himself a follower of King Sun. He declares that the Sun is the common Father of all men, since he begat us and feeds us and gives us all good things; there is no single blessing in our lives which we do not receive from him alone, or at the hand of the other gods perfected by him. And Julian concludes his enthusiastic panegyric with a prayer that the Sun, the King of the Universe, would be gracious to him, granting him, as a reward for his pious zeal, a virtuous life and more perfect wisdom, and in due time an easy and peaceful departure from this life, that he might ascend to his God in heaven, there to dwell with him for ever. However the deity to whom he prayed may have granted him a virtuous life, he withheld from his worshipper the boon of an easy and peaceful end. It was in the press of battle that this last imperial votary of the Sun received his mortal wound and met a most painful death with the fortitude of a hero and the serenity of a saint. With him the sun of pagan and imperial Rome set not ingloriously.

From J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (London, 1911ff).

2009-11-14T16:14:00.001-08:00

Some time before his accession, Prince Amenhotep, then hardly more than ten years old, was married with all the customary pomp to a little princess of about eight or nine, Nefertiti.
[Image: The famous limestone bust of Nefertiti, found abandoned and incomplete in a sculptor's workshop in Akhetaten (modern Tell Amarna), Akhnaton's new city of the Aton. The name Nefertiti means "A Beautiful Woman Has Come."]
Scholars do not agree about the bride's parentage. Sir Flinders Petrie identifies her with Tadukhipa, daughter of Dushratta, king of Mitanni. Arthur Weigall rejects this view on account of the princess's "typically Egyptian" features, and supposes her to be the daughter of Ay, a court dignitary, while the striking resemblance between her portraits and those of her young husband has prompted others to suggest that she was his half, or even his full sister. Brother and sister marriages were common in Egypt, as everyone knows.
We have no opinion to express on the subject. Yet, we find it difficult to dismiss Sir Flinders Petrie's version on the sole ground of Nefertiti's looks. For, if the princess were indeed the daughter of Dushratta, then her mother would be the sister and her paternal grandmother, the paternal aunt of Amenhotep the Third, while the prince's paternal grandmother -- the chief wife of Thotmose the Fourth -- was, as we know, Dushratta's paternal aunt. In other words, the wedded children would be even more closely related than ordinary first cousins are, and there would be nothing strange in their resembling each other as brother and sister. However, it makes little difference whose daughter Nefertiti actually was. To history, she remains Akhnaton's beloved consort. It is curious to observe that her beauty, revealed in her famous limestone portrait-busts -- the loveliest masterpieces of Egyptian sculpture -- has made her far more widely known than her great husband to the modern European public at large.

It is probable that the idyllic love that was to bind the prince and his consort together all through their years began long before their actual connubial life. If the features and more particularly the expression of the face do reveal something of what we call the soul, then we must suppose that the two children, heir-apparent and future queen of Egypt, had much in common. Their earliest portraits represent them both with the same regular, oval face, slender neck and large, dark eyes full of yearning; with already, in their gaze, a touch of thoughtful sadness which is not of their age. A delicate, almost feminine charm seems to have distinguished Akhnaton's person all his life. But it was balanced in latter days, as his portraits testify, by a stamp of manly determination. In early youth, and especially in childhood, before his struggle with the surrounding world had actually begun, his virile qualities had not yet found their expression; the delicate charm alone was prominent; and the newly-married prince resembled his wife even more than he did in subsequent years. [Image: Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (Akhnaton), reigned ca. 1353-1336 BC.]
The two played together, sat and read or looked at pictures together, listened together to the stories that grown-up people told them. They admired together a lotus-bud that had just opened; they watched a velvety butterfly on a rose, or a flight of swallows going north with the coming of hot weather. A painted bas-relief, dating perhaps a few years later, pictures the prince leaning gracefully on a staff while Nefertiti gives him a bunch of flowers to smell. An indefinable sweetness pervades the whole scene, which we may plausibly take to be a faithful likeness of the young couple's everyday life.
It is probable, too, that Prince Amenhotep soon initiated his child-wife into what could already be called his higher life. Whatever be her parentage, the worship of the Sun was nothing new to the little princess. But through her daily contact with the inspired child with whom she was now wedded, what had meant to her, until then, little more than a mere succession of grown-up people's gestures, became an act of personal love. Although his own ideas were yet far from definite, Prince Amenhotep probably taught her to see the Sun as he did, that is to say, as the most beautiful and the kindest of gods; we do not know if we should add, at this early stage of his religious history: as the only God worth praising.
If Nefertiti be, as Sir Flinders Petrie suggests, the daughter of the king of Mitanni, then one may suppose that she told her young husband about Mithra and perhaps Surya, the sun-gods of her country, and that she described to him in a clumsy manner, putting too much stress upon details, as children do, some of the rites with which they were worshipped there. It is doubtful whether there could be in those details, as she presented them, anything impressive enough to be of psychological importance in the prince's evolution. But he may have seized the opportunity to tell the little girl, pointing to the fiery Disk in heaven, that this was the only real Sun, under whatever name and in whatever way one may praise Him in different lands. And she possibly felt that there was truth in his childish remarks, and began to look up to him as to somebody very wise -- wiser even, perhaps, than the grown-up people.

Besides his administrative duties; besides the State functions, and occasionally the State banquets over which he presided -- like that one given in honour of Queen Tiy's visit to the new City, and represented upon the walls of the tomb of Huya -- besides even the daily worship he offered publicly at the altar of the Sun, pictorial evidence reveals to us different episodes of Akhnaton's private life which lead us to infer, about him and his creed, more than one could expect at first sight.
In nearly every painting he is portrayed with his consort and often (as in the feasting scene just mentioned) with one or more of his six (or seven) children. And the attitudes in which he has allowed the artists to represent him, doubtless in a spirit of absolute fidelity to living life, are most eloquent in their naturalness.
We have already recalled the lovely painted relief of the Berlin museum in which the young Pharaoh is seen smelling a bunch of flowers that Nefertiti gracefully holds out to him with a smile. On the walls of the tomb of Huya he is pictured seated, admiring the performances of several pretty naked dancing-girls, while the queen, standing by his side, refills with wine his golden cup. In the tombs of Mahu and Aahmose he is painted in his chariot, with Nefertiti next to him, and actually kissing her while he drives. Princess Meritaton, his eldest daughter, stands in one of those pictures in front of her parents, and plays with the horses' tails while the king and queen look lovingly at each other, their lips ready to unite. Even in scenes depicting State solemnities, such as the reception of the tribute of the empire -- scenes in which, one might think, there was little place for intimacy -- Akhnaton and Nefertiti are represented side by side, hand in hand, and with their arms around each other's waist. And, contrarily to the age-old custom of Egyptian artists, the queen is nearly always pictured on the same scale as her husband.
One finds hardly less evidence of their great love in the written documents than in the paintings. Whatever be the inscription in which she is referred to, the queen is seldom named without some endearing epithet. She is "the mistress of the king's happiness"; the "Lady of grace"; "fair of countenance"; "endowed with favours"; "she at the hearing of whose voice the Pharaoh rejoices." And one of the most current forms of oath used by the king on solemn occasions -- the oath engraved upon the boundary-stones of the new City, and quoted in the beginning of this chapter -- is: "As my heart is happy in the queen and her children ..."

Many will say that expressions of love found in official documents are not always to be taken literally. But we believe that they should be taken so here, for they were written at the command of one who, all through his career, lived up to his ideal of integral truth with unfailing consistency. He, one of whose first actions as a king was to have the tomb of his father reopened and the name of Amon erased from therein, because he saw in it the symbol of a false religion; he, who ended by losing an empire rather than depart from his uncompromising sincerity of purpose, cannot be expected, in any case, to make a show of feelings which he did not have. [Image: Akhnaton and Nefertiti.]
One has, therefore, to accept without reservation the conclusion that forces itself upon one's mind through both pictorial and written evidence -- namely, that Akhnaton loved his consort ardently.
As we have said before, he had not chosen her, but had been wedded to her when about ten years old or less. The marriage was, no doubt, the work of Queen Tiy; and if Nefertiti was, as Sir Flinders Petrie maintains, the daughter of Dushratta, king of Mitanni, it was perhaps chiefly prompted by political motives. But as it often happens in the case of child-marriages, the little prince and little princess soon grew tenderly attached to each other and, as years passed, they unconsciously stepped from affection to love. In the inscriptions on the boundary-stones of Akhetaton, which were erected between the official foundation of the City and the time the king and court came to settle in it -- between the sixth year and the eighth year of the reign -- one, and sometimes two of Akhnaton's daughters -- Meritaton and Makitaton -- are mentioned. The third one, Ankhsenpaton, was born, according to Weigall, just before the departure of her parents from Thebes. Three others at least -- Neferuaton, Neferura, and Setepenra -- (and perhaps four, if Weigall and other authors are right) were born in the new capital. All six (or all seven) were Nefertiti's children. And there is no allusion of any sort to other children, or to "secondary wives," in the existing documents concerning the royal family; so that, as far as history knows, Akhnaton, in contrast with most kings of antiquity, and of his own line, seems to have been contented all his life with the love of one woman, given to him to be his chief wife while still a child.
Not that he had, apparently, any prejudice against the customs of his times regarding marriage, still less against polygamy as a human fact. And it would be absurd to attribute to him the mentality of a modern European bourgeois on this much-debated subject of private morality. In this matter, as in many others, he seems to have been well in advance of our times -- not to speak of more prudish ages. And if he possessed but one wife, as repeated evidence suggests, this was not because he had any moral objection to polygamy, but simply because he loved that one woman with deep, complete, vital love.
If we judge him through the pictures his artists have left of him, Akhnaton was far from being one of those austere thinkers who shun pleasure as an obstacle to the development of the spirit or even as a meaningless waste of time and energy. He seems, on the contrary, to have believed in the value of life in its plenitude, and the paintings that represent him feasting, drinking, listening to sweet music, caressing his wife, or playing with his children, apart from their merit as faithful renderings of everyday realities, had possibly a definite didactic significance. In practically every one of them the lofty symbol of the Religion of the Disk -- the Sun with downward rays ending in hands -- radiates over the scene depicted, so as to recall the presence of the One invisible Reality in the very midst of it, and to emphasise the beauty, the seriousness, nay, the sacredness of all manifestations of life when experienced as they should be, in earnestness and in innocence, and considered with their proper meaning. Whether they stand together in adoration before His altar, or lie in each other's arms, the Sun embraces the young king and queen in His fiery emanation; His rays are upon them, holding the symbol ankh -- life -- to their lips. For life is prayer. One who puts all his being in what he feels or does -- as he who "lived in truth" surely did -- already grasps, through the joyful awareness of his body to beautiful, deep sensations, a super-sensuous, all-pervading secret order, source of beauty, which he may not be in a position to define, but which gives its meaning to the play of the nerves. And he is able above all to acquire, through the glorious exaltation of his senses in love, a positive, though inexpressible knowledge of the eternal rhythm of Life -- to touch the core of Reality.
In allowing a few scenes of his private life to be thus exhibited to the eyes of his followers -- and of posterity -- was it Akhnaton's deliberate intention to teach us that pleasure, when enjoyed in religious earnestness, transcends itself in a revelation of eternal truth? We shall never know. But one thing can be said for certain, and this is that the instance of that perfect man, on one hand so aware of his oneness with the Essence of all things, on the other so beautifully human in his refined joie de vivre, is itself a teaching, a whole philosophy. And in him one can see an expounder of precisely that wisdom which our world of to-day, tired of obsolete lies, is striving to realise, but cannot; a man who lived to the full the life of the body and of the spirit, seriously, innocently, in harmony with the universal Principle of light, joy, and fecundity which he worshipped in the Sun. Whether we imagine him burning incense to the majesty of the rising Orb, or listening to the love-songs of the day in midst of merriment and enjoying them with the detachment of an artist; whether we think of him entertaining his followers of the marvellous unity of light and heat, thirty-three hundred years before modern science, or abandoning himself to the thrill of human tenderness in a kiss of his loving young queen, the same beauty radiates from his person.
And it is that beauty which, before all, attracts us to him, and, through him, to the Religion of the Disk, that glorious projection of himself in union with the Cosmos.

The importance of Akhnaton himself as a living illustration of his Teaching cannot be overestimated. He was, it seems, fully conscious of it when, in his hymns, he gave to posterity such sentences as the following: "I am Thy Son, satisfying Thee, exalting Thy name. Thy strength and Thy power are established in my heart; Thou art the living Disk; eternity is Thine emanation (or attribute)...." "He" (i.e., Aton, the One God) "hath brought forth His honoured Son, Ua-en-ra (the Only One of the Sun) like His own form, never ceasing so to do. The Son of Ra supporteth His beauties"; or when he wrote the significant passage already quoted: "Thou art in my heart. There is no other who knoweth Thee except Thy Son Nefer-kheperu-ra Ua-en-ra (Beautiful Essence of the Sun, Only One of the Sun). Thou hast made him wise to understand Thy plans and Thy power"; or the following words, still more strange at first sight: "Every man who (standeth on his) feet since Thou didst lay the foundation of the earth, Thou hast raised up for Thy Son who came forth from Thy body, the King of the South and the North, Living in Truth, Lord of Crowns, Aakhun-Aten, great in the duration of his life (and for) the Royal Wife, great in majesty, Lady of the Two Lands, Nefer-neferu-Aten Nefertiti, living (and) young for ever and ever."
These bold statements of his relationship to God cannot be understood in their proper sense unless one replaces them in their context, that is to say, in the whole system of ideas at the basis of the Religion of the Disk; especially unless one connects them with that hardly less bold assertion that the "Heat-and-light-within-the-Disk" and the Disk itself -- Energy and Matter -- are one. This having been proved correct as a result of modern scientific speculations (correct, at least, in the manner of an hypothesis which does actually account for the known facts) cannot be called "dogma." Yet, religiously speaking, as we have previously tried to explain, it argues the substantial unity of God (an impersonal God, of course) and Nature, visible and invisible; the existence of the same unchangeable Thing -- divine Energy -- at the bottom of all things visible and invisible, material and immaterial, which change everlastingly. In other words, for as much as one is able to infer from the hymns -- his only surviving works -- Akhnaton's Teaching seems to have been founded on an implicit if not explicit pantheistic monism.
As we have already endeavoured to make clear in a former chapter, the young king's claim to be the Son of God (without his pretending, as other Pharaohs, to have been miraculously conceived from any particular deity) was nothing but the expression of the total consciousness he had of the presence of the ultimate Essence of all things within him; the assertion, repeated at various epochs, by the author of the Chandogya Upanishad and by the fully "realised" souls of all the world, that he "was That."
What we wish to stress here is that, though he found nowhere around him anyone who possessed, like him, the knowledge of the Unchangeable within the transient, of Godhead within nature and within man, he was aware that this direct, sensuous, so as to say, experience of oneness was the goal of created life. And he was aware that he himself, who had reached it, stood apart from the average man -- as far apart from him, indeed, as he from the crowd of still less awakened sentient beings, if not further; apart from him, and yet linked up with him, as each definitely superior species is linked up with the less conscious ones that precede and condition its coming into being. He was a man -- physically conceived and born as all men -- and yet more than a man. He was, not merely in name but in fact, the Beautiful-Essence-of-the-Sun, since he felt that Essence, that indefinable Energy, running through his nerves; the Only-One-of-the-Sun, since he alone was aware of the real nature of the fiery Disk, while other creatures, though worshipping It, knew It but dimly or not at all; Akhnaton -- the Joy of the Sun -- since every new step towards more complete consciousness brought new joy (experience had taught him that), and since the Soul of the Sun, which is the Soul of the Universe -- the One without second -- became fully conscious of Itself within him; the Son of God, Who was alone to know His Father. As the visible Disk and the invisible, intangible "Heat and Light," the Energy within it, were one, so was he one with that same all-pervading Radiant Energy experienced within him. And he knew it. His nerves knew it. His body -- an atom of matter finally tracing its origin to our parent star (like all matter on earth) -- was aware of the Power within its depth; of its soul, which is none but the Sun's own Essence, which is God. God and created nature were one in him, Akhnaton, precisely because he was not, by a miraculous birth, set apart from nature, but was a man naturally conceived and born and reared. They were all the more one because he was, also, a man who, with both his exceptional intellectual gifts and his clear insight into eternal truth beyond the reach of pure intellect, lived to the full the happy natural life of all creatures. On the other hand, he could and he did live the natural life of the body and of the mind in perfect beauty and "in truth," only because he fully knew the higher meaning of it; because he was a "realised soul," a perfect Individual -- a Son of God.
Now, perhaps, we can venture to explain what appears to be the strangest of those assertions of Akhnaton's divinity, to which scholars hardly ever refer in their comments on his religion save, at most, like Sir Wallis Budge, in a spirit of biased criticism which misses the point. The statement we are thinking of is the last one quoted in a preceding paragraph: "Every man who (standeth on his) feet, since Thou didst lay the foundation of the earth, Thou hast raised up for Thy Son who came forth from Thy body, the King of the South and the North, living in Truth, etc.... and for the Royal Wife, great in majesty, Lady of the Two Lands, Nefer-neferu-Aten Nefertiti, living and young for ever and ever."
Taken literally, this would seem to indicate that Akhnaton believed all men to have been born and to have lived for himself and for his consort, from the dawn of the human race onwards, which is obviously not what he intended to say. But if, as we have tried to show above, the young Pharaoh was aware at the same time of his divinity as a fully conscious centre of Cosmic Energy and of his humanity as one who had human parents; and if, in his eyes, to reach that total consciousness of the divine within one's self was to exhaust the highest possibilities of our species (becoming one's self, so as to say, the culmination of it), then the amazing passage appears in a new light. It has a meaning, and a lofty one, too. It signifies that since the time, far-gone indeed, when God did "lay the foundation of the earth," the whole scheme of life has been steadily tending towards the creation of its supreme type: the God-conscious and therefore godlike human being -- the Son of God. It means that every individual man was born with latent possibilities of Godhead which he would generally not feel at all, or feel more or less dimly; which he would perhaps try to express, in art and life, but which the fully conscious superman alone -- the cosmic Individual, God and himself in one -- was destined to carry to their utmost realisation. And that Individual, aware of his real nature and "living in Truth"; that eternal Man in whose heart were "established" the "strength and the power" of the living Disk, was himself, the "King of the South and the North, Lord of Crowns" -- Akhnaton of Egypt, son of Amenhotep Neb-maat-ra, a very definite figure in time and space. He knew none who had, in his days or before, attained to a similar consciousness of their identity with the Soul of the Sun. And we, who have heard the names of several very ancient sages said to have realised Godhead within themselves, know not if they actually flourished before or after him, for their lives are not dated. It may be that some of them indeed preceded him in time. It may be that many more, of whom nobody has heard, preceded them. It may be also that Akhnaton was, in fact, the first man to realise "in his heart," to the full, the presence of that same hidden Energy which radiates in the Sun-disk -- that he was the forerunner, in a way, of a new species, superior to man. He is, at least, the first such one whose life can be followed step by step, with historical certitude, and dated with an approximation of but a few years.
That idea that he was the culmination of an evolution which had begun with the "foundation of the world" was perhaps at the root of the public honours the young king seems to have rendered to his ancestors. We know that, among those to whom he erected shrines in his newly-founded sacred City, Akhetaton, were the great warrior-like Pharaohs of his dynasty, Thotmose the Third and Amenhotep the Second, the builders of the Egyptian empire -- staunch worshippers of the national gods, above all of Amon, to whom they consecrated the spoils of their conquests. No man could have been more alien than they to the gentle king who preached the doctrine of one nation, the earth, united in the love of one God, the Sun. And yet, they had their shrines, "each of which had its steward and its officials" in the City of the One God. Arthur Weigall tells us that it was Akhnaton's desire to show, in this manner, "the continuity of his descent from the Pharaohs of the elder days and to demonstrate his real claim to that title of ‘Son of the Sun,' which had been held by the sovereigns of Egypt ever since the Fifth Dynasty, and which was of such vital importance in the new religion."
But in the light of our comments on the true meaning of that title (which the Founder of the Aton faith would have claimed anyhow, because he had every right to claim it, even apart from his royal birth), it would seem that those temples to the memory of the dead Pharaohs were erected in quite a different spirit. An unbroken filiation to royal ancestors of a "solar line" two or more millenniums old could not add much weight to the claim to divinity of one who had experienced, through his nerves, the presence in him of the Soul of the Sun. While, on the other hand, if "all men" had gradually developed their possibilities only in order that he might finally appear, in the full-bloom of his individual Godhead -- if they had all been "raised up" for him, as he says himself -- then surely his own immediate forefathers were, in a still much more direct and effective manner, responsible for his coming. Whatever might have been the gap between them and him -- between their world and his, between their gods and his -- yet it remained a fact that they and not others had given him that body in the depth of which was rooted his true solar consciousness (not that of historical or legendary connections with any particular deity, but that of vital identity with the Radiant Energy of the One Sun -- the One God). They deserved their shrines, not for justifying any dynastic claims of his, but simply for being the human progenitors that had given birth to him, the godlike Individual, the Sun in flesh and blood.
One more point, however, clearly referred to in the passage quoted a few pages above from the Longer Hymn, seems to need explanation, and that is the place given by Akhnaton himself to "the Royal Wife ... Nefer-neferu-Aten Nefertiti" in the Religion of the Disk.
There can be no doubt that the person here mentioned is actually the Pharaoh's consort, the beautiful young queen whose portrait-busts in the Berlin Museum are perhaps the most widely admired of all the masterpieces of Egyptian sculpture. Her titles -- "great in majesty, Lady of the Two Lands, living and young for ever and ever" -- only confirm her identity. And no explanation of any kind can be put forward to account for this allusion to her, save that the Founder of the Aton cult wished to say that which he said, i.e., that he believed the evolution of man to have culminated in himself (the only man he knew to be God-conscious) and in her. The question is therefore: on what grounds was she, in his eyes, entitled to such an exalted position in the hierarchy of creatures that "every man who standeth on his feet" since God "did lay the foundation of the earth," had been "raised up" for her, no less than for him? In other words, of what significance was she in his Teaching, and in what light should she be looked upon by those who wish to be his followers?
From all available written and pictorial evidence it appears, as we have already seen, that Akhnaton and Nefertiti loved each other dearly. If the young king had taken no "secondary wives," as had been the custom with his fathers, it was simply because, in this one queen of his and in the children her love had given him, "his heart was happy," as he himself declares in so many inscriptions. The extraordinary importance he seems here to give his consort may be just a proof of how deeply he felt all that he owed to her. From what one knows of his earnest and sensitive nature, one may infer that he understood better than any other man the supreme value both of tenderness and of pleasure. It is difficult -- and it would be perhaps indiscreet -- to attempt to say more. Akhnaton is one of those rare characters so admirably balanced and beautiful that they should be felt rather than discussed. And average imagination, which dissociates the spiritual from the physical and the emotional planes instead of comprehending them in their organic continuity, will probably always remain unable to conceive what that sacred intimacy with his queen (faintly reflected in a few attitudes upon the bas-reliefs of the time) actually meant to him, whose body and soul were in tune with each other and with the silent music of Life. The young Pharaoh knew how profoundly the woman who loved him and whom he loved was one with him. And just as he had ordered her features to be represented upon the monuments along with his, and on the same scale, so did he bring in her name and titles, along with his, in the bold statement that he was the Man for whom "all men" had been "raised up" from the beginning of the world. He could not conceive of himself apart from her. We may think that he would have been anyhow the perfect individual whom he was. But he probably believed that, without her, something vital would have been missing in his life. He had needed the warmth of love she had given him, and all the knowledge he and she had acquired together, in their love, to become complete. And therefore, in none of his highest claims did he consider himself alone. He was "he and she." In him, the perfect Individual reflected and expressed the godlike Couple, for ever one, in divine union on all planes.
This is one interpretation of the meaning of the place given to Nefertiti in the above quotation. There is another. The "Lady of the Two Lands" may perhaps be considered here not only as the Wife, inseparable from Akhnaton himself -- "one flesh" with the conscious flesh of the Sun -- but also as his best disciple, the model and prototype of all those who wish to follow him. And "all men," it may be suggested were "raised up" for her in the sense that her approach to eternal truth, through the simplicity of a loving heart, corresponded to an essential stage which they all had to reach before being able to experience within themselves the immanent Soul of the Sun.

Very little, it is true, is known of the extent to which she "understood" her lord's religion. When the king instituted Merira as high-priest of the Disk, he is supposed to have addressed him as his "servant who hearkeneth to the Teaching" and with "all the works of whom" he was satisfied. At least, those are the sentences put into his mouth in the inscription on the walls of Merira's tomb. Other courtiers similarly claim to have understood the Pharaoh's "Teaching of Life"; to "hearken to his words," etc. We shall never know how far such statements, even when attributed to the king himself, expressed his actual opinion of his nobles or were merely boasts on the part of officials competing with one another in loyal zeal. But from the little history tells us and permits us to guess about what happened in Egypt only a few years after Akhnaton's death, one can safely say that most of the Pharaoh's followers (including the high-priest Merira) were not the fervent disciples that they had consistently pretended to be during his lifetime. On the other hand, without the protestations of faith in him and in his Teaching which one reads on the walls of their tombs; without, indeed, any outward claim, it is possible, even probable, that Nefertiti had imbibed more of the spirit of the Religion of the Disk than any of them. That she was the "Royal Wife," his beloved, was perhaps a reason, but could surely not have been a sufficient reason for the young king to have her standing at his side and officiating with him in most if not all the ceremonies in honour of his God, had she not shown an earnest attachment to the new faith, and had she not grasped the essentials of it through the path of devotion if not also through that of knowledge. And the fact that, in spite of her being a woman, he committed to her charge the temple of the Setting Sun -- the "House-of-putting-the-Aton-to-rest" -- argues at the same time his utter disregard for custom and his recognition of the queen's genuine zeal for his Teaching. [Image: Relief depicting Akhnaton and Nefertiti offering to the Aton. Meritaton, their eldest daughter, is the small figure on the left.]
Not enough is known of Nefertiti for one to say if she was or not a disciple as "intellectual" as some others might have been -- one who could have explained the Teaching rationally, or even written philosophical comments upon it. But she certainly was one who accepted it wholeheartedly and put it at the centre of her life, both because she deeply felt its beauty and because she deeply loved its inspired Promoter. Devotion had doubtless led her to the very gates of knowledge, if not to knowledge itself.
And, in stating that from the beginning of the world "all men" had been "raised up" for himself and for her, Akhnaton has perhaps simply wished to stress how far advanced in the human evolution is the real Disciple -- the devotee who gets a glimpse of ultimate truth through his (or her) absolute love for a God-conscious being and for the Sun, God's visible Face, if not for the divine impersonal Energy that resplends, though in a different manner, in both of these. Of those who had attained the higher stage of complete consciousness of their identity with the Essence of the Sun, he knew none but himself. He has said so: "Thou art in my heart and there is none who knoweth Thee save Thy Son, Nefer-kheperu-ra Ua-en-ra...." But he knew at least one whose sincerity and wholeheartedness contrasted with the lip-homages of most of his followers, the superficiality or actual indifference of many of which he was probably beginning to become aware; one who, through intense devotion, had transcended herself and was, even without having his direct knowledge of the supreme "Heat-and-light-within-the-Disk," nearer to him and nearer to It than any other. And that one was his consort -- the same individual whose love had perhaps played its part in the awakening of his own deeper consciousness.
It is possible that by declaring "all men" to have been "raised up" for her as for himself, he was alluding to her devotion as typical of a true disciple's; of one, that is to say, who is on the way to attain the goal of man that he hadattained. It is also possible that he simply meant that she was inseparable from himself, the God-conscious Man. But we believe that, still more probably, the two interpretations can be put forth at the same time as complementary. The former may, in a way, be the consequence of the latter in the particular case of Queen Nefertiti who was first Akhnaton's consort and then only his devout disciple. The latter, in turn, is not independent of the former, in the sense that the beautiful "Lady of the Two Lands" was perhaps such a perfect wife precisely because she was her lord's disciple and collaborator -- one with him on all planes, as we have said. And that oneness on all planes with a God-conscious Teacher is perhaps the highest stage which can be reached by all those to whom is not given, here and now, the direct experience of Godhead within life. The world is therefore "raised up" for the few who reach it, as well as for the fewer still who, like Akhnaton, go further beyond.

The Principle Germanic Gods Part I

2009-09-29T15:36:00.000-07:00

Jacob Grimm
19th Century Germany

WODAN (ODIN)

The highest and most supreme deity, universally worshipped among all Germanic tribes, was called Wuotan in Old High German, Odin in Norse. According to pagan conception, Wodan is the ruler of the world, wise and skilled in arts, the all-powerful and all-pervading god, ordainer of wars and battles, on whom at the same time depends the fertility of the soil. He carries a spear or staff and is the all-seeing eye of the sun. He stands at the head of all dynasties of kings. His name is indelibly imprinted on many places. In language the "Wodan span" describes a portion of the hand. Ravens and wolves, which before all other animals were associated by our people with his name, scent his victorious approach. Because he simultaneously appears as the god of poetry, of measure, of apportioning, of boundary, of dice, so can talents, treasures, arts, be regarded as emanating from him.
Wodan looks down to earth through a window from his dwelling in the sky, which is completely in accord with the old Norse idea. Wodan has a throne named Hlidskjalf, sitting upon which he can look over the entire world and can hear everything which takes place among men. When Loki wished to conceal himself, Wodan spied out his hiding-place from this seat. Sometimes Frigga, Wodan's wife, is also conceived as sitting near him, then she too enjoys the same prospect. Pagan perception makes the divine quality of seeing through everything dependent on the placing or adjustment of the chair and just as this quality leaves the god when he does not sit upon it, so can others, as soon as they take the chair, participate in the power. This was the case when Freyr spied the beautiful Gerd away down in Jotunheim. The word hlidscialf seems to mean literally door-bench, from hlid and skialf. This idea of a seat in heaven, from which god looks down to earth, is still not extinguished among our people.

Hlidskjalf

"There is a great dwelling called Valaskjalf, owned by Odin, which the gods built and roofed with pure silver. It is there in this hall that Hlidskjalf is to be found, the high seat as it is called; and whenever the All-Father sits on this throne he can see over the entire world" (Deluding of Gylfi 16).

In the eyes of our forefathers, victory was the foremost and highest of all gifts. However, they regarded Wodan not only as awarder of victory; he was also conceived by them generally as the god by whose favor man has to expect every other distinction, in whose hands all higher goods are held.

Just as the souls of slain warriors arrive in Indra's heaven, so the victory-granting god of our forefathers takes up heroes fallen in battle into his company, into his army, into his heavenly dwelling. Probably it was the belief of all gods and noble men that they would be allowed after their death into closer fellowship with the deity. Valhall (Valhalla) and Valkyrja (Valkyries) are closely related with the idea of wish and of choice. Therefore dying means, and even according to Christian view, to go to God, to return to God. In the North, to journey to Odin, to be a guest of Odin, or to visit Odin meant nothing other but dying and was synonymous with journeying to Valhalla, being a guest in Valhalla. But among Christians curses developed from this: Go to Odin! Here is shown the reversal of the good-natured being with whom one wishes to abide, into an evil one whose abode inculcates fear and terror.

Concerning the peculiarities of the shape and outward appearance of the god, as these are imprinted on the Norse myths, I have discovered few remaining traces with us in Germany. Odin is one-eyed, wears a wide-brimmed-hat and broad cloak. When he desired to drink from Mimir's well, he had to leave one eye as a pledge.

Norse myth provides Odin with a wonderful spear named Gungnir, which would compare with the lance or sword of Mars, not the staff of Mercury. This spear he lends the hero for victory. The god of victory is given two wolves and two ravens which as warlike, courageous animals follow the battle and throw themselves on the corpses of the fallen. The wolves were called Geri and Freki and Hans Sachs drolly relates in a verse that God the Lord has chosen wolves for hunting dogs, that they are his animals. The two ravens are called Hugin and Munin, from Hugr and Munr ("thought" and "memory"). They are wise and clever, sit on the shoulders of Odin and speak into his ear everything which they see and hear. Wolf and raven were also sacred to the Greek Apollo. The Gospels represent the Holy Ghost as a dove which during baptism flies down to Christ and hovers in the air above him. Is this a pagan memory? [Image: Odin carving runes on his spear; illustration by F. Von Stassen (1914). To learn the secret of the runes Odin hung himself on the World-Tree, Yggdrasil.]

Odin's Self-Sacrifice on Yggdrasil
I know I hung on the wind-swept tree nine full nights
wounded by a spear and dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which none knows from where the roots come.
They did not comfort me with the loaf nor with the drinking horn:
I looked down below me and groaning took the runes up
and fell back down thereafter.

Havamal 138-139

In the shape of a bearded old man Wodan appears like a water spirit or water god and to do justice to the Latin name Neptune, which some older writers use of him. Wodan's rule over the water as over the wind explains how he walks on the waves and approaches through the air in a storm. Odin provides ships with a favorable sailing wind (oskabir).

Our antique stories tell of Odin's wanderings, of his wagon, trackway and companions. We know that even in remotest antiquity the seven stars which form the Bear in the northern sky were conceived as a four-wheeled wagon whose shaft consists of three stars inclined downwards. This constellation may in pagan times have borne the complete name of Wodan's wagon, after the supreme god of heaven.

In some districts, the great open highway of heaven -- to which people long attached a peculiar sense of sacredness, and perhaps allowed this to eclipse the older fancy of a "milky way" -- was possibly also called Wodan's Way or Wodan's Street.

Of greater significance appear the names of certain mountains which were sacred to the worship of the god in pagan days. Not far from the holy oak in Hesse which Boniface cut down, lay a Wodansberg. Other names are Gudensberg, Gotanesberg. Of the Hessian Gudensberg the story goes that King Charles lies imprisoned in it, that he there won a victory over the Saxons, and opened a well in the wood for his thirsting army, but he will yet come forth of the mountain, he and his host, at the appointed time.

These names, which describe the wagon and mountain of the old god, are found principally in Lower Germany where paganism long asserted itself, and a remarkable practice of Lower Saxon folk during corn harvest alludes to this. It is the custom to leave a bushel of grain standing on the field for Wodan to give his horse. According to the Edda, Odin rides the best of all horses, Sleipnir, to whom eight legs are attributed; Sleipnis verdr (food) is a poetic name for hay. Other legends speak of a tall white horse by which the god of victory was to be recognized in battles. Besides the gift of drink for Odin, a gift of grain was often left for Odin's horse.

Ninth-century picture stone from the island of Gotland, Sweden: A valkyrie with a drinking-horn greets Odin as he arrives at Valhalla astride Sleipnir, his eight-legged horse, on which he will fight at Ragnarok.
The generosity of antiquity shines from such customs. Man does not wish to take possession of everything for himself, of all that has grown for him. He gratefully leaves a part back for the gods, who will in future also protect his crops. Greed increased, when the offerings ceased. Ears of corn are set apart and offered here to Wodan, as elsewhere to kind
spirits and elves, e.g., to the brownies of Scotland.

Wodan is, as far as it is possible to piece together an idea of his nature from fragments of the old beliefs, the most spirited god of our antiquity. Among all other gods he shines forth. All heroes and royal families trace back their ancestry to him. Among his sons are several divinely celebrated -- especially Baldur and Saxnot appear as his sons.

But the high place which the Germans allot to their Wodan leads to yet another observation. Monotheism is something so necessary and essential that almost all pagans, consciously or unconsciously, proceed accordingly from recognizing among the bright throng of their gods, a highest deity who bears within himself the qualities of all the others so that the latter are only to be regarded as emanations from him, his rejuvenation and renewal. This explains how separate qualities come to be attributed now to this, now to that particular god, and why one or another of them, according to different peoples, comes to be invested with the highest power. Thus Wodan resembles Hermes and Mercury; on his own he stands higher than both. Conversely the German Donar (Thunor, Thorr) is a weaker Zeus or Jupiter. What was added to the one, must be taken away from the other. Ziu (Tiw, Tyr), however, hardly does more than administer one of Wotan's offices, yet he is identical in name with the first and highest god of the Greeks and Romans. The Greek Hermes is youthful, the German Wodan fatherly, in their conception. Ziu and Fro (Freyr) are mere offshoots of Wodan and thus all manifestations of the gods meet and intermingle.

Throughout paganism trilogies appear of the principal gods which I have arranged below according to the third, fourth and fifth day of the week: Tuesday (Ziu's day), Wednesday (Wodan's day) and Thursday (Thor's day).

Latin Mars Mercurius Jupiter
Greek Ares Hermes Zeus
Keltic Hesus Teutates Taranis
Old H.G. Ziu Wuotan Donar
Old Norse Tyr Odinn Thor
Slavic Svantevit Radigast Perun
Indian Shiva Brahman Vishnu

This is the power that is warlike, creative and thunderous (fertilizing the earth).

DONAR (THOR): THE THUNDER GOD

The god ruling over clouds and sky, announcing himself through rolling thunder and flashes of lightning, whose bolt flies through the air and strikes the earth, was described in our ancient speech with the word Donar itself, OS Thunar, AS Thunor, ON Thorr. Thor is imagined as driving, since the rolling of thunder resembles a heavy wagon passing by. His wagon is drawn by two he-goats. Other gods have their wagons too, especially Odin and Freyr, but Thor is distinctively thought of as the god who drives. Thor is never seen as riding like Wodan nor is he provided with a horse. He either drives or he goes on foot. It is expressly said that he walks to hold court, to pass judgement. He is never represented in a wild host or in company with women. Although his son and yielding to him in degree of influence, Donar again appears to resemble Wodan as an older god worshipped before the latter, enthroned in forests, on mountain tops, hurling the ancient stone weapon and lightning bolt.
Thunder, lightning and rain, among all natural phenomena, are regarded as his actions. Thunder, in particular, is attributed to an angry and punitive god. Donar also resembles Wodan in his capacity for anger.

Donar purifies the weather and sends down fruitful rain. The oak is sacred to Donar and his hammer measures land, just as later does Wodan's staff. He attacks giants more often than he fights in battles at the head of heroes or reflects upon the art of war.

His name persists in popular curses, Wodan's only in protestations. In the figure of Rotbart (Barbarossa) Donar could also be imagined as waiting within a mountain. All heroes ascend to Wodan's heaven, ordinary folk return to Donar. Compared with the noble, fine Wodan, Donar reveals something about himself which is boorish, peasantlike, uncouth. He seems a very old deity, displaced in course of time by another closely-related but more all-embracing god, although not everywhere pushed into the background.

We can trace mountain names in Germany with complete certainty to the worship of this native god. Universally known is the Donnersberg in the Rhine Palatinate, on the border of the old state of Falkenstein, between Worms, Kaiserslautern and Kreuznach. Another, Thuneresberg, is in Westphalia, on the Diemel, not far from Warburg. In the Middle Ages a great popular court was still held there, linked to the sacredness of the place. On the Knüllberg in Hessen is found a Donnerkaute, in Bernerland a Donnerbühel. In Scandinavia also there is no lack of mountains and rocks bearing Thor's name.

As the fertility of the land depends on thunderstorms and rains, thunder gods such as Zeus appear as the oldest divinities of agricultural nations, to whose bounty they look for the thriving of their cornfields and fruits. Adam of Bremen too attributes thunder and lightning to Thor expressly in connection with dominion over weather and fruits: "Thor, inquiunt, praesidet in aëre, qui tonitrua et fulmina, ventos imbresque, serena et fruges gubernat," "Thor, they say, rules in the air, governing the thunder and lightning, the winds and rains, fair weather and crops." Here then the worship of Thor coincides with that of Wotan, to whom likewise the reapers paid homage, as on the other hand Thor as well as Odin guides the events of war and receives his share of the spoils. To the Norse mind Thor's victories and struggles with the giants have put in the shade his peaceful office, the rule over weather and harvest. Nevertheless to Wodan's mightiest son, whose mother is Earth herself [Jorth], we must, if only for his lineage's sake, allow a direct relation to agriculture. He clears up the atmosphere, he sends fertilizing showers, and his sacred tree supplies the nutritious acorn. Thor's minni [remembrance drink] was drunk to the prosperity of cornfields.

Like Zeus and Jupiter the German thunder god was also portrayed as wearing a long beard. In the old Norse sagas he appears everywhere as red-bearded, which must be related to the fiery phenomenon of lightning in the air. If he is angry, he blows in his red beard and thunder resounds. Men in need of help call on Donar's red beard. There is often talk of his divine anger. The red beard of the Thunderer is not forgotten in curses of a later, Christian time. Even today the North Frisians exclaim: Diis ruadhiiret donner regiir! = "This is red-haired thunder's work!").

Just as the thunder god is given red hair and a wagon, so he is also given the thunderbolt as a weapon or "missile" in present day language.
According to popular belief, when the lightning flashes from a cloud a black bolt simultaneously flies down to earth, embedding itself as deep as the highest church tower. Whenever there is renewed thunder, it begins to rise towards the surface. After seven years it is again to be found on the earth. Every house in which it is kept is safe from storm damage and as soon as a storm approaches, it begins to sweat. Such stones are also called thunder axes, thunderstones, thunder hammers, Albdonar, Alpgeschosse (from the Elbe), ray stones, devil's fingers. Stone hammers and stone measures found in pagan graves also bear the same name.

Norse mythology provides Thor with a wonderful hammer called Mjollnir in the Edda, which he hurls against the giants. It has the quality of returning by itself into the hand of the god after throwing. As this hammer flies through the air, the giants know it. Its throwing is preceded by thunder and lightning. Skilled dwarfs have forged it. The hammer of the god was held to be a sacred tool. Just as it knocked hostile giants to the ground, so it hallowed the sealing of marriage bonds and made sacred land and boundaries like the sign of the cross with Christians. The flash of lightning was held in the Middle Ages to be the lucky consecrating omen of an enterprise. The hammer is the primeval, simple tool essential for almost all handwork, which is used symbolically with many trades. To denote boundaries the Hamarsmark is hammered in, a cross provided with hooks. Later, crossed oaks were often used as a boundary, called Mälbaume ("marking trees") (in the Sachsenspiegel). [Image: M.E. Winge's "Thor and the Giants" (1890). Alone among the gods, Thor never rides a horse, but either travels on foot or rides in his goat-drawn chariot, as depicted here.]

Just as Christ, through his death, overpowered the monstrous serpent, so Thor triumphed over the Midgardworm or Midgard serpent, the snake that encircles the world. The similarity of the sign of the cross and of the hammer makes it possible that the newly converted Germans imagined Christ to be the god of thunder and provider of rain. In fact, the earliest troubadour still calls Christ the Lord of thunder.

According to the Edda, Thor's thunder wagon is drawn by rams. A half-concealed relationship may exist between them and another mythical "weather" creature which is imagined to be a goat or horse but always as a wagon-pulling beast. It is significant that the Devil, the modern representative of the thunder god, is also attributed with the creation of goats and rams, and Ziu like Thor lays aside and picks up the bones of goats which have been eaten, so that he can bring them back to life again. According to the belief of Swiss shepherds the goat has something
devilish about it, a creation of the Devil. In fact, goats feet are held to be diabolical and are not eaten. In Carinthia, cattle killed by lightning are regarded as hallowed by God. No one, not even the poorest, dares eat them.

Thor was regarded after Odin as being the mightiest and strongest of all the gods: the Edda represents him as Odin's son. Usually Thor is named at the same time as Odin, sometimes before him, and perhaps he was feared even more than Odin.

An unmistakable relic of the worship of the thunder-god is the special observance of Thursday, which was not extinguished among the people till quite recent times and was revealed in early traditions of the Middle Ages. On Thursday evening there must be no sawing or cutting of wood.

If we compare Thor with Wodan, then the latter is more mentally alive and loftier, whereas the former has the advantage of a rough, sensual strength. Prayers, oaths and curses preserved his memory more often and longer than any other god, but only a part of the Greek Zeus is incorporated in Thor. Clearly both gods have shared in the power which is also fitting to Zeus. However, Wodan is represented as Donar's (Thor's) father and superior to him, just as the father is more powerful than the son.

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World - The Statue of Zeus at Olympia

2009-09-28T12:40:00.000-07:00

By Paul Curtis
Author

Constructed in 450 B.C., the statue of Zeus at Olympia was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. This region of Western Greece gave its name to the Olympic games, originally an ancient Hellenic festival also held to honor Zeus. The Temple was designed in the simple Doric style  and constructed to house the statue which became the focal point of the Temple.

The Athenian sculptor Pheidias was conscripted to raise this "sacred" building. He began construction planning in 440 BC.  The statue was created from metal, ivory and sculpted marble; his head was wreathed with olive sprays, in his right hand he held a gold and ivory victory figure and in his left an inlaid golden scepter.  He wore golden sandals and his throne was decorated with ebony and ivory gold and other precious metals and every kind of gemstone and when the throne figure was completed it was almost too big to fit in the temple.  Many worshippers visited the temple over the following 450 years and some work was needed to restore the ageing masterpiece during the reign of the Roman Emperor Caligula who tried to have the statue transported to his palace in Rome, but the plan failed to materialize.  After the temple of Zeus was ordered closed and the Olympic Games banned in 391 AD by emperor Theodosius I, Olympia was struck repeatedly by earthquakes, landslides and floods.  By the time the temple was badly damaged by fire in the fifth century AD the statue had been transported to the city of Constantinople to the palace owned by a wealthy Greek.  It survived there until 462 AD when a severe fire destroyed it.  Today nothing remains at the site of the old temple except fallen columns and debris and nothing remains at all of the greatest work of art in Greek sculpture.

Bell Beaker Cultures in Central Europe

2009-09-19T03:17:00.002-07:00

Selection from Wikipedia
Edited by Pat Chouinard

In their large-scale study on radiocarbon dating of the Bell Beakers, J. Müller and S. Willingen (2001) established that the Bell Beaker Culture in Central Europe started after the year of 2500 B.C.Two great coexisting and separate Central European cultures – the Corded Ware with its regional groups and the Eastern Group of the Bell Beaker Culture – form the background to the Late Copper Age and Early Bronze Age. Their development, diffusion and long range changes are determined by the great river systems. As a third component counts the indigenous Carpathian Makó/Kosihy-Caka culture.[23]
     The Bell Beaker settlements are still little known, and have proved remarkably difficult for archaeologists to identify. This corresponds to contradictory results of anthropologic research[17] and to the modern view of Bell Beakers who, far from being the "warlike invaders" as once erroneously described by Gordon Childe (1940), added rather than replaced local late Neolithic traditions into a cultural package and as such did not always and evenly abandon all local traditions.[24]
      Bell Beaker domestic ware has no predecessors in Bohemia and Southern Germany, shows no genetic relation to the local Late Copper Age Corded Ware, nor to other cultures in the area, and is considered something completely new. The Bell Beaker domestic ware of Southern Germany are not as closely related to the Corded Ware as would be indicated by their burial rites. Settlements link the Southern German Bell Beaker culture to the seven regional provinces of the Eastern Group, represented by many settlement traces, especially from Moravia and the Hungarian Bell Beaker-Csepel group being the most important. The relationship to the western Bell Beakers groups, and the contemporary cultures of the Carpathian basin to the south east, is much less.[25] Research in Northern Poland shifted the north-eastern frontier of this complex to the western parts of the Baltic with the adjacent Northern European plain. Typical Bell Beaker fragments from the site of Ostrikovac-Djura at the Serbian river Morava were presented at the Riva del Garda conference in 1998, some hundred km south-east of the Hungarian Csepel-group. Bell Beaker related material has now been uncovered in a line from the Baltic Sea down to the Adriatic and the Ionian Sea, including countries such as Bielo-Russia, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia, Albania and even Greece.[26]
       The Bell Beaker culture settlements in Southern Germany and in the East-Group show evidence of mixed farming and animal husbandry, and indicators such as millstones and spindle whorls prove the sedentary character of the Bell Beaker people, and the durability of their settlements.[25] Especially some well-equipped child-burials seem to indicate sense of predestined social position, indicating a socially complex society. However, analysis of grave furnishing, size and deepness of grave pits, position within the cemetery, did not lead to any strong conclusions on the social divisions.
       The Late Copper Age is regarded as a continuous culture system connecting the Upper Rhine valley to the western edge of the Carpathian Basin. Late Copper Age 1 was defined in Southern Germany by the connection of the late Cham Culture, Globular Amphora Culture and the older Corded Ware Culture of "beaker group 1" that is also referred to as Horizon A or Step A. Early Bell Beaker Culture intruded[27] into the region at the end of the Late Copper Age 1, at about 2600–2550 BC. Middle Bell Beaker corresponds to Late Copper Age 2 and here an east-west Bell Beaker cultural gradient became visible through the difference in the distribution of the groups of beakers with and without handles, cups and bowls, in the three regions Austria-Western Hungary, the Danube catchment area of Southern Germany, and the Upper Rhine/lake Constance/Eastern Switzerland area for all subsequent Bell Beaker periods.[28] This middle Bell Beaker Culture is the main period when almost all the cemeteries in Southern Germany begin. Younger Bell Beaker Culture of Early Bronze Age shows analogies to the Proto-Únětice Culture in Moravia and the Early Nagyrév Culture of the Carpathian Basin.
        During the Bell Beaker period a border runs through southern Germany, which divides culturally a northern from a southern area. The northern area focuses on the Rhine area that belongs to the Bell Beaker West Group, while the southern area occupies the Danube river system and belongs to the homogeous East Group which overlaps with the Corded Ware Culture and other groups of the Late Neolithic and of the earliest Bronze Age. Nevertheless, southern Germany shows some independent developments of itself.[27] Although a broadly parallel evolution with early, middle and younger Bell Beaker Culture was detected, the Southern Germany middle Bell Beaker development of metope decorations and stamp and furrow engraving techniques do not appear on beakers in Austria-Western Hungary, and handled beakers are completely absent. It is contemporary to Corded Ware in the vicinity, that has been attested by associated finds of middle Corded Ware (chronologically referred to as "beaker group 2" or Step B) and younger Geiselgasteig Corded Ware beakers ("beaker group 3" or Step C). Bell Beaker Culture in Bavaria used a specific type of copper, which is characterized by combinations of trace elements. This same type of copper was spread over the area of the Bell Beaker East-Group.
      Previously archeology considered the Bell-beaker people to have lived only within a limited territory of the Carpathian Basin and for a short time, without mixing with the local population. Although there are very few evaluable anthropological finds, the appearance of the characteristic planoccipital Taurid type in the populations of some later cultures (e.g. Kisapostag and Gáta-Wieselburg cultures) suggested a mixture with the local population contradicting such archaeological theories. According to archaeology, the populational groups of the Bell-beakers also took part in the formation of the Gáta-Wieselburg culture on the western fringes of the Carpathian Basin, which could be confirmed with the anthropological Bell Beaker series in Moravia and Germany.[17]
        In accordance with anthropological evidence, it has been concluded the Bell Beakers intruded in an already established form the southern part of Germany as much as the East Group area.[27]

Stone "Ship" May Be Viking Burial Mound

2009-08-30T11:47:00.002-07:00

The Ancient American, Volume 1, Issue 6
By Carol Bass

An unusual mound of stones in the shape of a ship which could date back to Viking settlements in the New World has been discovered in an area forest. History experts who have visited the site suspect the 65-foot stone structure may be a large “cairn,” an ancient European burial site constructed for the dead by the Viking and Celtic cultures. The exact location of site, which is in Windham County, is being kept under wraps to avoid the possibility of vandalism.
When first sighted through undergrowth, the ‘cairn’ appears to be just another short stretch of old New England stone wall, but on closer inspection, the boat shape of the stone pile becomes immediately apparent. The ‘cairn’ is close to 50 feet long and at its widest point measures 30-40 feet wide, and is four feet high. It is a near exact stone replica of a New England dory, a narrow at the bow and stern, with a very wide-mid-section. It is in fairly good shape and is only slightly damaged on one side where a growing tree has caused part of it crumble.
The structure was discovered by photographers Virginia and William Welch of Hampton. The couple saved it from near demolition by officials who have been planning to reforest the area. The state Department of Environmental Protection has now flagged the site to protect it for further observation and study.
The site has been viewed by several regional historical societies, including the Early Sites Research Society of Rowley, Mass., and the Gungywump Society of Noank. Officials from the societies agree that the site is ‘Nordic’ in nature, although no definitive conclusion has been reached about the origin of the artifact.
All who have viewed the site, however, agree with David Barron, president of the Gungywump Society, the structure is ‘very definitely not just a pile of stones. It was deliberately laid, deliberately set out, and has a deliberate plan to it.”
The Gungywump Society is a group of avocational archaeologists and historians who study historical phenomena throughout the state.
The mounds origins remain unknown now, although it is known that Vikings were in Canada. Barron said he wouldn’t suggest the mound is Viking in origin, because he said, “There is no evidence yet beyond the fact that it is unique and in the shape of a boat.”
Welch noted that the centerpiece of the structure, which he described as a ‘a slab that appears to have been standing,” resembles European burial places, or ‘cairns’.
This particular cairn, if that is what the structure is, is unusually large, according to Barron.
The presence of Viking in the New World before Columbus has been a debatable topic for years. It is agreed that the Vikings visited ancient Russia, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, Iceland and Greenland.
Experts who have visited the Windham Country site are cautious to theorize about its origins. They all agree with Welch, however, that it is ‘something that appears to be very old. It’s an artifact that goes far beyond the English-Colonial period,” he said.
“Our main objective right now is to keep it low key Riggio said, “One of the problems we have today is that field, stone is in such high demand there pillaging of old stone walls and their stones get robbed every day.” Welch thinks the structure has at least ‘superficial similarities’ to European cairns which commemorate burial sits.”

America's Viking Heritage

2009-08-30T10:11:00.002-07:00

Frank Joseph
(The Ancient American, Volume 1, Issue 6)

Through the ominous visor of the helmet feature on this month’s cover once peered the eyes of a Norse warrior. Found at a Swedish site belonging to the 7th century A.D., it predates the generally accepted beginning of the so-called “Viking Age,” 200 years later. For unknown millennia before, culturally related Germanic peoples inhabited the lands of the Baltic and Scandinavia, steadily growing in the number of settlements, until the relationship between burgeoning population and shrinking living space made the Norse look beyond Northern Europe, around the turn of the 9th Century . It was then that they began referring to th4emselves as “Vikings”, or “Bay-raiders”, after their early sorties among the fjords of their own homelands. And, while the title persisted for the duration of the Viking Age, the Norse very quickly expanded their activities far beyond local bays and inlets. Their great courage and incomparable long-ships took them throughout Russia to North Africa, as far as Ireland, Greenland, Iceland and . . . America.
Most salaried historians have long demonstrated a knee-jerk rejection of any notion that Vikings actually landed here, dismissing such embarrassing suggestions as many tall tales. Even after the critics were forced to acknowledge 40 years ago that a northern Newfoundland site, L’Anse aux Meadows, yielded physical evidence of an 11th Century Norse settlement, they continue to deny the Vikings any farther. Clearly, Establishment academics are clinging to a deteriorating position. The two widely this issue are certainly authentic artifacts which confirm Viking impact on America. The very text of the Kensington Runestone establishes its authenticity, even down the smallest detail. For example, the runic author describes his Minnesota location as an “island”. Nowhere in the broad vicinity of its discovery does the area remotely resemble anything like an island. Yet, at the same time of the date inscribed on the Stone, 1362, the present location of Kensington was an island surrounded by a shallow lake that has long since vanished, a fact not recognized until long after the deaths of all persons who found the Stone in the late 19th Century. Moreover, modern stone-carvers have affirmed that the Runestone was inscribed by an expert mason, while the artifact’s discoverers were only simple farmers, with no such skills.
A contrary view is taken by rune-researcher, Jane Sibley. Kensington SAtone is not authentically Viking. But unlike other critics, Jane makes a provocative presentation of new evidence and challenges the defenders of the runestone to find convincing responses. Whatever we may think of her assessment, her advocacy of new testing for the controversial artifacts points future research in the right direction.

The Development of the Germanic Languages

2009-08-29T14:54:00.003-07:00

Deanna Gallo

First, let us define the Germanic languages. The Germanic languages are a sub-family of languages which descend from the large Indo-European language family. The Germanic languages are subdivided into three groups. The Western Germanic family includes English, Dutch, German, Afrikaans and the lesser-known Frisian. The North Germanic languages are Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic. A third group, East Germanic, which included Gothic, is now extinct.
The Proto-Germanic dialect of Indo-European that would in time give rise to the various Germanic languages probably emerged in a small area of Northern Europe around 2500 BC. Proto-Germanic retained much of the grammar characteristic of Indo-European; for example, grammatical gender and the inflectional system of nouns and adjectives.
At the same time, however, Proto-Germanic differs from the other Indo-European languages in specific and regular ways. Grimm's Law describes the sound-shift of several Indo-European consonants into their Germanic forms. The Indo-European p-sound, for example, becomes the sound f in all Germanic languages. Among other notable changes, k becomes the Germanic h, and d becomes t.
The Germanic languages are also characterized by their dual system of verbs, which is preserved in English today. So-called weak verbs form their past tense by the addition of a d or t sound, as in the English walked and helped. Strong verbs form their past tense by changing the verb internally, as in sang and brought.
By 500 BC, Germanic speakers had spread through much of Northern Europe, and the language had by this time diverged into western, northern and eastern dialects. It is believed that at this time these dialects were mutually intelligible. Runic inscriptions made around this time allow linguists to study the Germanic dialects. It is around this time, also, that the first written records of the Germanic peoples appear; the Roman historian Tacitus wrote an account of Germanic customs and catalogued the geographical location of several tribes.
What is known as the Migration Period occurred between 300 and 700 AD, and the Germanic dialects were taken into new lands. In many of these places, such as Ireland, France and Spain, Germanic eventually gave way to other, more dominant languages. But in other places, Germanic established itself as the predominant language. The Vikings, speaking a Germanic dialect known as Old Norse, brought their language into Iceland, where it is spoken today in a form not much different from the original Old Norse. In England, three Germanic-speaking tribes brought their dialects, which would soon merge to become Anglo-Saxon, or Old English.
By the tenth century AD, the various Germanic languages had evolved to a point where they were no longer mutually intelligible. Around this time, the Eastern Germanic languages were assimilated and soon disappeared. The principal northern dialect, Old Norse, gave rise to the earliest recognizable forms of Icelandic, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. And the main western dialects were now Old English, Old High German, and Old Franconian, which would later emerge as Dutch.

These now fully divergent languages would continue their separate development throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, and would finally become the modern Germanic languages.

Vikings in Greenland

2009-07-21T16:36:00.000-07:00

Norse colonization of the Americas began as early as the 10th century, when Norse sailors (often referred to as Vikings) explored and settled areas of the North Atlantic, including the northeastern fringes of North America.
While the Norse colony in Greenland lasted for almost 500 years, the continental North American settlements were small and did not develop into permanent colonies. While voyages, for example to fetch timber, are likely to have occurred for some time, there is no evidence of enduring Norse settlements in North America.[1]

According to the Sagas of Icelanders, Norsemen from Iceland first settled Greenland in the 980s. Erik the Red (Old Norse: Eiríkr rauði), having been banished from Iceland for manslaughter, explored the uninhabited southwestern coast of Greenland during the three years of his banishment.[2][3] He made plans to entice settlers to the area, even purposefully choosing the name Greenland to attract potential colonists, saying "that people would be more eager to go there because the land had a good name".[4] The inner reaches of one long fjord, named Eiriksfjord after him, was where he eventually established his estate Brattahlid. He issued tracts of land to his followers.[5]

Map of the Eastern Settlement, covering approximately the modern municipalities of Qaqortoq, Narssaq and Nanortalik. Eiriksfjord (Erik's fjord) and his farm Brattahlid are shown, as is the location of the bishopric at Gardar.
At its peak, the colony consisted of two settlements, the Eastern and the Western Settlement, with a total population of between 3000 and 5000; at least 400 farms have been identified by archaeologists.[5] Norse Greenland had a bishopric (at Garðar) and exported walrus ivory, furs, rope, sheep, whale or seal blubber, live animals such as polar bears, and cattle hides. In 1261, the population accepted the overlordship of the Norwegian King although it continued to have its own law. In 1380, the Norwegian Kingdom entered into a personal union with the Kingdom of Denmark.
The colony began to decline in the 1300s. The Western Settlement was abandoned around 1350 and by 1378 there was no longer a bishop at Garðar. After a marriage was recorded in 1408, no written records mention the settlers. It is probable that the Eastern Settlement was defunct by the late 1400s, although no exact date has been established. The most recent radiocarbon date found in Norse settlements as of 2002 was 1430 A.D. (+/- 15 years). Several theories have been advanced to explain the decline. The Little Ice Age of this period would have made it harder to travel between Greenland and Europe, as well as making it more difficult for the Greenlanders to farm; in addition, Greenlandic ivory may have been supplanted in European markets by cheaper ivory from Africa. Despite the loss of contact with the Greenlanders, the Norwegian-Danish crown continued to consider Greenland a possession and the existence of the island was not forgotten by European geographers. It is also possible that the lands west of Greenland were remembered.
Not knowing whether the old Norse civilization remained in Greenland or not—and worried that if it did, it would still be Catholic 200 years after the Scandinavian homelands had experienced the Reformation—a joint merchant-clerical expedition led by the Norwegian missionary Hans Egede was sent to Greenland in 1721. Though this expedition found no surviving Europeans, it marked the beginning of Denmark's assertion of sovereignty over the island; see Danish colonization of the Americas.

Vinland and L'Anse aux Meadows
Main articles: Vinland and L'Anse aux Meadows

According to the Icelandic sagas ("Eirik the Red's Saga" and the "Saga of the Greenlanders"—chapters of the Hauksbók and the Flatey Book), the Norse started to explore lands to the west of Greenland only a few years after the Greenland settlements were established. In 985 while sailing from Iceland to Greenland with a migration fleet consisting of 400-700 settlers[5][6] and 25 other ships (14 of which completed the journey), a merchant named Bjarni Herjólfsson was blown off course and after three days sailing he sighted land west of the fleet. Bjarni was only interested in finding his father's farm, but he described his discovery to Leif Ericson who explored the area in more detail and planted a small settlement fifteen years later.[5]
The sagas describe three separate areas discovered during this exploration: Helluland, which means "land of the flat stones"; Markland, "the land of forests", definitely of interest to settlers in Greenland where there were few trees; and Vinland, "the land of wine" (or as suggested by modern linguists "the land of meadows"), found somewhere south of Markland. It was in Vinland that the settlement described in the sagas was planted.
All four of Erik the Red's children were to visit the North American continent, his sons Leif, Thorvald and Thorstein and their sister Freydis. One of the sons, Thorvald, died there.

Leif's winter camp

Using the routes, landmarks, currents, rocks, and winds that Bjarni had described to him, Leif sailed some 1,800 miles to the New World with a crew of 35—sailing the same knarr Bjarni had used to make the voyage. He described Helluland as "level and wooded, with broad white beaches wherever they went and a gently sloping shoreline."[5] Leif and others had wanted his father, Erik the Red, to lead this expedition and talked him into it. However as Erik attempted to join his son Leif on the voyage towards the continent of North America, his horse slipped on the wet rocks near the shoreline and he was injured and thus stayed behind.[5]

Leif wintered in 1001, probably at Cape Bauld on the northern tip of Newfoundland, and his German foster father Tyrkir (de) was there found drunk of what the saga describes as "wine". Squashberries, gooseberries, and cranberries all grew wild in the area. There are varying explanations for Leif apparently describing fermented berries as "wine". In Old Norse, there could be two different meanings for the word "vin" depending on whether a short i or long í is used. A long í in the word "vin" could mean "wine", while a short i could mean "pasture", and linguistic research indicates that the pasture or meadow argument is probably the most logical in the name Vinland. Interestingly, in modern Icelandic, "vin" with a short 'i' means "oasis". Leif spent another winter at "Leifsbodarna" without conflict, and sailed back to Brattahlid in Greenland to assume filial duties for his father.

Thorvald's voyage

In 1004, Leif's brother Thorvald Ericson sailed with a crew of 30 men to Newfoundland and spent the following winter at Leif's camp. In the spring, Thorvald attacked nine of the local people, who were sleeping under three skin-covered canoes. The ninth victim escaped and soon came back to the Norse camp with a force. Thorvald himself was killed by an arrow that succeeded in passing through the barricade. Although brief hostilities ensued, the Norse explorers stayed another winter and left the following spring. Subsequently another of Leif's brothers, Thorstein, sailed to the New World to retrieve his dead brother's body, but he only stayed for one summer.[5]

Karlsefni's expedition

It was in 1009 that Thorfinn Karlsefni, also known as "Thorfinn the Valiant", supplied three ships with livestock and 160 men and women[6] (although another source sets the number of settlers at 250). After a cruel winter, he headed south and landed at Straumfjord, but later moved to Straumsöy, possibly because the current was stronger there. A sign of peaceful relations between the indigenous peoples and the Norsemen is noted here; the two sides bartered with furs and gray squirrel skins for milk and red cloth, which the natives tied around their heads as a sort of headdress.
There are conflicting stories but one account states that a bull belonging to Karlsefni came storming out of the wood, so frightening the natives that they ran to their skin-boats and rowed away. They returned three days later, in force. The natives used catapults, hoisting "a large sphere on a pole; it was dark blue in color" and about the size of a sheep's belly,[7] which flew over the heads of the men and made an ugly din.[7] The Norsemen retreated. Leif Ericson's half-sister Freydís Eiríksdóttir was pregnant and unable to keep up with the retreating Norsemen. She called out to them to stop fleeing from "such pitiful wretches", adding that if she had weapons, she could do better than that. Freydís seized the sword belonging to a man who had been killed by the natives. She pulled one of her breasts out of her bodice and struck it with the sword, frightening the natives, who fled.[7]

Territories and voyages of the Vikings

Settlements in continental North America aimed to exploit natural resources such as furs and in particular lumber, which was in short supply in Greenland due to deforestation.[8] It is unclear why the short-term settlements did not become permanent, though it was in part due to hostile relations with the indigenous peoples, referred to as Skrælings by the Norse. Nevertheless, it appears that sporadic voyages to Markland for forages, timber, and trade with the locals could have lasted as long as 400 years.[9][10]

Evidence of continuing trips includes the Maine Penny, a Norwegian coin from King Olaf Kyrre's reign (1066-80) found in a Native American archaeological site in the U.S. state of Maine, suggesting an exchange between the Norse and the Native Americans late in or after the 11th century; and an entry in the Icelandic Annals from 1347 which refers to a small Greenlandic vessel with a crew of eighteen that arrived in Iceland while attempting to return to Greenland from Markland with a load of timber.[11] In addition, Norse materials have been excavated in several Inuit communities.

Aftermath

For some centuries after Christopher Columbus' voyages opened the Americas to large-scale colonization by Europeans, it was unclear whether these stories represented real voyages by the Norse to North America. The sagas were first taken seriously when in 1837 the Danish antiquarian Carl Christian Rafn pointed out the possibility for a Norse settlement in or voyages to North America.

The Skálholt-map

North America, by the name Winland, was first mentioned in written sources in a work by Adam of Bremen from approximately 1075. It was not until the 13th and 14th centuries that the most important works about North America and the early Norse activities there, namely the Sagas of Icelanders, were put into writing.
The question was definitively settled in the 1960s when a Norse settlement was excavated at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland by the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad and her husband, outdoorsman and author Helge Ingstad. The location of the various lands described in the sagas is still unclear however. Many historians identify Helluland with Baffin Island and Markland with Labrador. The location of Vinland is a thornier question. Most believe that the L'Anse aux Meadows settlement is the Vinland settlement described in the sagas; others argue that the sagas depict Vinland as being warmer than Newfoundland and that it therefore lay farther south.

Hare Indian dogs, as illustrated in ''Fauna Boreali-americana, Or, The Zoology of the Northern Parts of British America, 1829
Purported runestones have been found in North America, most famously the Kensington Runestone, that are thought by some to be artifacts from further Norse exploration, although they are typically considered to be hoaxes. There are two maps depicting North America, "The Vinland map", that some believe is related to Norse exploration, although it is considered to be a modern forgery, and the Skálholt Map, made by an Icelandic teacher in the year 1570.
The Hare Indian dog of the banks of the Mackenzie River and Great Bear Lake are thought by some to have originated from crossbreedings between native Tahltan Bear Dogs and Icelandic breeds brought by the viking explorers.[12]

The Bosnian Pyramid Phenomenon

2009-03-29T21:29:00.003-07:00

By Robert M. Schoch
Boston University

Semir Osmanagic announced it to the press with fiery conviction: “The history of civilization has to be rewritten,” he said. “Bosnia will become a giant on the world archeological map” (quoted from a May 4, 2006 Reuters Report By Daria Sito-Sucic). On the outskirts of the Bosnian town of Visoko, half an hour drive northwest of Sarajevo, Osmanagic claimed there were two monstrous pyramids (dubbed the “Pyramid of the Sun” and the “Pyramid of the Moon”), and perhaps several smaller pyramids as well. Even the prestigious New York Times picked up the story: “Some See a Pyramid to Hone Bosnia’s Image. Others See a Big Hill.” (New York Times, May 15, 2006, page A8). At least four different websites were devoted to the “Bosnian Pyramids” (http://www.bosnianpyramids.org/ http://www.bosnianpyramid.com/ http://www.bosnian-pyramid.com/ and http://www.piramidasunca.ba/). The supposed pyramids formed the stuff of heated debate at other websites (most notably, perhaps, that of the Archaeological Institute of America, http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/osmanagic/update.html), chat-rooms, and blogs across the Internet.

Were they really man-made pyramids, perhaps dating back thousands of years? (Some advocates placed them as much as 12,000 or 14,000 years in the past.) Now covered with soil, trees, and other vegetation, Bosnian pyramid buffs argued that the “pyramids” needed to be excavated to reveal their glory and prove that Bosnia, of all places, was the virtual origin of, well not just pyramids, but perhaps even civilization. Tunnels reputedly associated with the pyramids were said to contain cryptic engravings that could just possibly be the oldest writing ever discovered. Detractors, on the other hand, saw the so-called pyramids as simply interesting, but perfectly and completely natural, geomorphologic features - - that is, they are just big hills. Some even argued that the whole notion of the Bosnian pyramids was not just a mistake or an ill-conceived notion, but a downright hoax designed to bring prestige, fame, power, and money to Bosnia, Visoko, and the head of the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation, the Bosnian-American (he now resides in Houston much of the time where he maintains a business) Semir (“Sam”) Osmanagic (also spelled Osmanagich). Indeed, on May 12, 2006, National Geographic ran an article on their website titled “Pyramid in Bosnia -- Huge Hoax or Colossal Find?” (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/pyramid-bosnia-1.html). It did not help Osmanagic’s case, at least in the eyes of the traditional academic community, that he is an advocate of “alternative history” (see his website http://www.alternativnahistorija.com/), and of his numerous books (mostly published in Bosnian), the one widely available in English, titled The World of the Maya, almost seems purposefully written to provoke the ire of traditional archaeologists.

Having more than a casual interest in ancient pyramids (after all, I am the author of two books focusing on pyramids: Voyages of the Pyramid Builders, and Pyramid Quest), I wanted to see first-hand what all the pyramid fuss in Bosnia was about. If there really was a huge pyramid, larger than the Great Pyramid of Egypt, in Bosnia, then I wanted the opportunity to study it. On the other hand, if there were no pyramids in Bosnia, that would be important to know too. But how to get to Bosnia? The answer turned out to be easy. My friend and professional colleague, Dr. Colette M. Dowell, simply contacted the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation and Semir Osmanagic. Initial contact was followed up with emails and phone calls, and quickly we received an invitation to visit Visoko and see the “pyramids” for ourselves. We made the trip to Bosnia during July and August 2006.

The afternoon we arrived in Bosnia, Osmanagic insisted on taking us straightaway to the so-called “Pyramid of the Sun.” I observed the excavated areas of huge stone blocks; blocks that I was told were most definitely not natural. Clearly, Osmanagic insisted, they were man-made concrete blocks that cannot be explained geologically, put into place with a sophisticated ancient technology that has now been lost. Amazingly, he explained, the “concrete” blocks proved to be harder and more durable than any modern concretes or cements. But he and I were apparently seeing different things, perhaps viewing an entirely different world. Where he saw concrete blocks and human intervention, I saw only perfectly natural sandstones and conglomerates that had broken into larger or smaller blocks due both to tectonic stresses and gravity slumping. For a week and a half this seemed to be the dominant theme: Osmanagic and others who worked with and for him insisting that this or that feature can never occur in nature, and thus must be artificial and human-made, versus me finding a perfectly reasonable geological explanation for each of the same features.

The geology around Visoko is incredibly rich, and I suggested to Osmanagic that, in lieu of “pyramids,” he might redefine his “Archaeological Park” as a “Geological-Archaeological Park” and focus more on the geology. Visocica Hill (the one dubbed “Pyramid of the Sun”) and Pljesevica Hill (“Pyramid of the Moon”) are composed of layers of sandstone, clay, mudstone, siltstone, and conglomerates apparently deposited in an ancient lake and river system during Miocene times (about 5.3 to 23 million years ago). The rocks have been tilted and bent due to tectonic stresses. The tectonic forces plastically deformed the clays and mudstones, but the sandstones and conglomerates broke into semi-regularly shaped pieces that Osmanagic and his team have excavated in numerous places, interpreting them as “pavements,” “terraces,” “concrete blocks,” “foundation stones,” and so forth. Interestingly, and tellingly, the sizes of the sandstone and conglomerate blocks found are a function of the thickness of the original rock layers. Thin sandstone layers, stressed tectonically, broke into small blocks while thick and durable conglomerate layers broke into massive blocks. This is exactly the pattern expected among natural rock formations. The sandstones also typically preserve various sedimentary and depositional features, such as ripple marks and the traces of ancient burrowing animals. These same rocks are also rich in paleontology. In some of the sandstone layers, and in many of the mudstone layers, I found large accumulations of fossil leaf debris and even some fairly complete Miocene fossil leaves. I believe that the real treasure of Visoko may be a huge fossil biota just waiting to be uncovered, not some imaginary pyramids.

While wondering the streets of Visoko, being offered all sorts of pyramid souvenirs, from tee shirts to copper plates bearing depictions of the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun (stylistically rendered either as a stepped Mayan-style pyramid or, less frequently, as a smooth-sided Giza-style pyramid), I continued to hope against hope that I could find some “truth” underlying the “pyramid mania” that has gripped the region. One last possibility might be the evidence of the reputed tunnels found in the area that supposedly connect one pyramid to another. We had the opportunity to explore one tunnel that is currently open; to put it mildly, I was disappointed with what I saw. The tunnel had clearly been entered and modified in recent times, as evidenced by the graffiti found in places, the collapsed ceilings and walls, and the stories that the Yugoslavian army (Bosnia and Herzegovina was part of the former Yugoslavia) had once used the tunnels for military purposes, and possibly purposefully destroyed parts of them. If this was an ancient tunnel, it was difficult to tell now. The much-touted “ancient inscriptions” seem not to be ancient at all. I was told by a reliable source that the inscriptions were not there when members of the “pyramid team” initially entered the tunnels less than two years ago. The “ancient inscriptions” had been added since, perhaps non-maliciously, or perhaps as a downright hoax.

So, no pyramids, but there are many fascinating and genuine archaeological wonders in Bosnia. On the summit of Visocica Hill, which overlooks Visoko, are the remains of a medieval fort built on top of Roman ruins, and there is also evidence of Neolithic occupation of the hill, dating back perhaps 5,000 years. While in Bosnia we also visited megalithic ruins attributed to the Illyrians (circa 4th century B.C.), a possible Paleolithic cave (unfortunately, we had neither the time nor equipment to enter it; I would love to return and explore it), and fascinating medieval cemetery monuments to the dead.

Despite my failure to validate the Bosnian pyramid dreams, Semir Osmanagic and all the members of the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation were most gracious hosts. They spared no effort to make sure that I could view all aspects of the so-called pyramids, even arranging for me to take a short airplane ride to see them from the air. Bosnia is a beautiful country with amazing scenery and a rich history. The people are extremely friendly and hospitable, and Bosnia exhibits a wonderful mixture of Western (Austro-Hungarian) and Eastern (Turkish and Islamic) traditions. Even in the absence of pyramids, it is certainly a country worth visiting.

Stonehenges on both sides of the Atlantic

2009-03-29T21:21:00.000-07:00

By Robert M. Schoch
Boston University

North of Boston, near North Salem, New Hampshire, is a labyrinth of megalithic stones that have been the object of wonder and a topic of heated argument for more than two centuries. Sprawling over a couple of dozen acres are found stone walls and various structures that at first glance look like building foundations, cellars, tunnels, and caves - - all composed of laid stone, sometimes still in natural shapes and sometimes roughly worked. The largest placed stone has been estimated at eleven tons. Parts of the complex have been given evocative names, for example, the “Oracle Chamber” and the “Sacrificial Table.” Large erected stones on the periphery of the complex are aligned with significant astronomical positions such as the sunrise and sunset on the equinox, mid-summer and mid-winter sunrises and sunsets, and apparently various lunar motions and stellar alignments, some of which appear to date to the second millennium B.C. This is the site variously known as “Mystery Hill,” “Mystery Hill Caves,” or since the 1980s as “America’s Stonehenge.”

What is “America’s Stonehenge”? Superficially it bears little similarity to the Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain of England. How old is America’s Stonehenge? Who built it and why? What was it originally like? These are all unanswered questions, but many answers have been proposed.

Solid historical records of America’s Stonehenge date back to the early nineteenth century when Jonathan Pattee lived on and at the site from 1826 to 1855. Pattee and his family used parts of the structure as foundations for buildings and as root cellars, and some people have suggested that Pattee and his five sons built the structures. But, based on one of the stones that is surrounded by a tree stump that began growing in 1769, at least part of the structure must date prior to Pattee’s time. In modern times a number of charcoal samples have been collected from the site, in more or less close approximation to the stone structures, and radiocarbon analyses have yielded dates from historical times to around 2,000 B.C.

Since Pattee’s time, the site has had a checkered history. It was used as a ready quarry (not unlike the Great Pyramid in Egypt during Muslim times), and the structures were dismantled and rock carried away to build local foundations, churches, and other buildings. It is estimated that perhaps 40% of the rock was removed during the nineteenth century.

In the 1890s a professor of architecture at Dartmouth College, Hugh Morrisson, argued that Native Americans who had no tradition of such stone building could not have erected the structures. In 1936/7 William B. Goodwin purchased the property, carried out various excavations and studies, and promoted the view that Culdee Monks from Ireland had circa 1000 A.D. crossed the Atlantic, settled in New Hampshire, and built the site. In the 1950s the area came under the control of Robert E. Stone who first leased and then purchased “Mystery Hill.” In 1958 Stone opened the site to the public, and he initiated a still-ongoing program of serious study, documentation, excavation, and restoration of the site.

Numerous researchers have become involved with, or offered interpretations of, America’s Stonehenge. Opinions range from the notion that it is, after all, simply colonial foundations and root cellars, to linking it to ancient European cultures, such as those that constructed megalithic buildings in Malta and Greece, to thinking in terms of a medieval influx of Europeans across the Atlantic (variations on the themes of Norse warriors or Irish Monks), to attributing the sighting stones constructions to ancient Native Americans. The late Barry Fell, in particular, popularized the concept that some of the stones found at America’s Stonehenge (and many found elsewhere as well) contain cryptic inscriptions written in various Celtic or Gaelic (Ogham), Iberian, and Phoenician scripts, giving clues as to potential builders, or at least visitors to, the site (see Fell’s book, America B.C.). Other researchers have countered that the so-called inscriptions are simply plow marks, root remains, or natural erosion features in the stone.

I am convinced that there was contact between the Old and New Worlds in pre-Columbian times, but I would not hang the case on America’s Stonehenge. I have had the opportunity to explore the site firsthand, and I do not know what to make of it. I tend to think it is not all of one piece - - that is, it may be a mixture of modern (eighteenth and nineteenth century) and ancient structures, but even among the ancient portions I could find no definitive evidence of non-Native American influence. In some ways America’s Stonehenge is a microcosm of the general arguments often encountered in archaeology where the hard evidence is just too sparse to come to a definitive conclusion. It may seem like a copout, but in the case of America’s Stonehenge I rather not judge until, and unless, some compelling evidence is discovered that can be used to firmly attribute and date it.

Turning to the “real” Stonehenge in England, which definitely is thousands of years old and astronomically aligned, new theories and developments continue to be proposed. Last year (2005) Timothy Darvill, professor of archaeology at Bournemouth University, and archaeologist Geoff Wainwright announced that they had found the exact quarry from which the bluestones of Stonehenge were taken over 4,000 years ago. Site of the quarry: Carn Menyn, a mountain in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire, in southwest Wales. This meant, according to their interpretation, that huge monoliths had been quarried and moved some 240 miles to the site of Stonehenge, a truly incredible feat. But just this month (June 2006), geologists from the Open University using geochemical analyses, led by Professor Olwen Williams-Thorpe, have countered that the bluestones used to construct Stonehenge were not moved over two hundred miles by humans, but brought the distance by Ice Age glaciers and then utilized by ancient humans. Even if this proves to be the case, and as a geologist it certainly makes sense to me, it was still a truly monumental feat to carve the bluestones and erect them as the magnificent structure that we see today.

Two Sides of Judas and the Gnostic Gospels

2009-03-08T07:27:00.004-07:00

Robert M. Schoch
Boston University

Judas Iscariot, for some the archetypal villain, the man who betrayed Jesus for a pecuniary reward, has been all over the news since the National Geographic Society recently (April 2006) aired a documentary on the newly released “Gospel of Judas.” This third to fourth century manuscript, written on papyrus and found in a cave in Upper Egypt in the 1970s, is a Coptic translation of a text that was known to Christians of the second century A.D. Until now, however, modern scholars did not have an actual copy. Various persons, perhaps out to make a buck (not unlike the traditional Judas?) have hailed the contents as revolutionary, with the potential to turn Christian beliefs up side down, et cetera, et cetera.

The Gospel of Judas portrays this disciple not as a traitor, but as possibly the most beloved and trusted disciple, a man who was only carrying out his master’s orders, even to the point of arranging the arrest of Jesus (as he was ordered to do by Jesus himself) so that the apocalyptic kingdom of God could be ushered in. Well, how does this really differ from the traditional Judas? If, as Christians seem to believe (not being a member of the sect, I cannot speak firsthand on this issue), Jesus had to be sacrificed in accordance with the scriptures to save humanity, then there had to be a Judas, active or passive, either following orders consciously or simply caught in the drama and impelled by God’s will rather than his own, to accomplish the feat. Likewise, there had to be soldiers to take Jesus away, a Pilate to condemn him, and so on - - a cast of thousands to accomplish the divine will. None of these persons, including Judas, really had any choice in their roles perhaps. Is it not better to believe that at least Judas was conscious of his acts and thus undertook them knowingly, and unselfishly (unselfish, in that he did not want to see his rabbi, Jesus, suffer; but Judas knew it was a necessary part of the drama)?

This line of thinking can lead inexorably to the ultimate Christian heresy, that Judas was the real Christ and Jesus of Nazareth was just a pretender and a pawn of the Infinite Wisdom. In modern times, the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges has touched upon this idea in a short fictional piece (translated into English as “Three Versions of Judas,” and published in the collection entitled Labyrinths [New York: New Directions, 1964]). Think about it: The man (or god manifested as a man) that really suffered in terms of ignominy and, some believe, descent and everlasting hereafter in hell for his betrayal, is Judas, and it is this suffering that was the ultimate sacrifice to redeem sinful humankind. Jesus of Nazareth, in contrast, preached and gained a following, gathered power and fame, has been revered and worshipped for two thousand years by a loyal following, and all because he suffered for half a dozen hours on a cross and then appeared in a form that might have been a telepathic hallucination to a handful of followers (see The Easter Enigma by Michael C. Perry [London: Faber, 1959]). Some people would say that sounds like a pretty good tradeoff. Whose sacrifice was greater, that of Judas or that of Jesus? So who is the true redeemer, the true Christ?

Such thoughts invert tradition, and in the first centuries of the common era there was a sect of Christianity that held many ideas such as these that were suppressed by the future mainstream Christians (mainstream simply because they won the battle of ideas that would dominate later centuries). This grouping of so-called heretical ideas is now often referred to by the collective name of Gnosticism. Gnosis refers to “knowledge,” and in this context knowledge of the secret mysteries and understanding of the divine. The Gospel of Judas can therefore be viewed by some people as just one more Gnostic writing that may be interesting in terms of the light it sheds on beliefs held by certain sects during the second through fourth centuries A.D., but is not really too important, and certainly nothing to overturn standard Christian doctrine.

Indeed, besides the canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, there are literally dozens of other gospels known from the first two or three centuries following the death of Jesus. Besides the Gospel of Judas, there is the Gospel of Thomas (sometimes referred to as the “fifth gospel,” see for instance Marcello Craveri, The Life of Jesus [New York: Grove Press, 1967]), the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel according to the Hebrews, the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of James, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary (Mary Magdalene), and many others, including such related texts as the Apocryphon [Secret Book] of John and the Sophia of Jesus Christ. Of course, as is the case with the four synoptic gospels, these various texts (including that of Judas) were almost certainly not written by the persons whose names they carry. In fact, all were almost surely written generations after the events and sayings they reputedly report.

To truly understand Christianity, one must look at the canonical writings of the New Testament in the context of other early Christian writings. Such texts have been known to varying degrees since ancient times, but were greatly augmented by the 1945 discovery in Upper Egypt of the Nag Hammadi library of Gnostic codices dating to the early centuries A.D., including copies of the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip. The recently uncovered Gospel of Judas comes from the same general area and is clearly related to the texts of Nag Hammadi. When it comes right down to it, there is nothing necessarily special about the texts that made it into the New Testament, except that they were the ones picked by those early church fathers who gave rise to what is now considered the orthodox Christian view of Jesus and his followers. If a Gnostic sect had survived and reached the status of orthodoxy, the world might now be discussing with amazement the discovery of some ancient text portraying St. Judas Iscariot, head of the pantheon of Christianity, as a villain and traitor extraordinaire.

The International Conference on Ancient Studies Dubai, November 29 & 30, 2008

2009-03-05T18:29:00.000-08:00

A news report
by Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D.
Boston University

For two days (November 29 & 30, 2008) a star-studded group of ancient history researchers and an enthralled audience congregated at the pyramid-shaped Raffles Hotel, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, for “The International Conference on Ancient Studies: The Mysteries of Ancient Civilisations” [note the British spelling].

Day one was devoted to Egypt. Robert Bauval summarized his work on the correlation of the three major pyramids of Giza with the Belt of Orion (representing Osiris to the ancient Egyptians), commemorating the period of circa 10,500 B.C., which for the ancient Egyptians may have represented Zep Tepi, or the First Time. Next, moving our gaze from the stars to the stones, I (Robert Schoch) summarized my work on re-dating the Great Sphinx. The traditional date is circa 2500 B.C.; I presented evidence that the earliest portions of the Sphinx must date back to at least 5000 B.C., and possibly much earlier.

In the afternoon, Mahmoud Marai presented his discoveries in the Western Desert of Egypt, some 700 kilometers west of Abu Simbel. Dating from the Middle Kingdom (circa 2000 B.C.), hieroglyphic inscriptions mention the legendary Kingdom of Yam. Once considered merely a myth, it appears that Yam was a genuine place, perhaps located in the Western Desert, and there was a caravan route from Egypt to Yam. Dr. Thomas Brophy ended the day with a presentation on the astronomy of archaeological sites, dating circa 4800 B.C. and earlier, in the Nabta Playa region of the Western Desert.

Michael Cremo opened day two, addressing the evidence for modern humans hundreds of thousands to millions of years earlier than recognized by conventional archaeologists. Next were discussions of Central and South American archaeology. John Major Jenkins summarized his work on the Mayan long count calendar, culminating in the date of December 21, 2012, when the Solstice Sun will be aligned with the Galactic Center. Dr. Constantino Manuel Torres followed with a presentation on the ancient peoples of San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, analyzing the well-preserved mummies, art, and other cultural remains of the region. In the final presentation, Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna explored the indigenous peoples of the Amazon rainforest, an area of extreme cultural diversity and antiquity. The conference concluded with a lively panel discussion among the presenters as they fielded questions from the audience.

The International Conference on Ancient Studies was unlike anything that had previously been held in Dubai. Grateful thanks go to His Royal Highness Sheikh Ahmed Bin Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, president of Dubai Event Management Corporation, under whose patronage it was held, as well as to the sponsors: The Trade Commission of Chile, Raffles Dubai, the Dubai Convention Bureau, Al Husn Real Estate, Arab Media Group, BurJuman Rotana Dhamani, and AdBox Events. Special thanks go to Dr. Mohammad Naeemat (Chairman of AdBox), Ali Bin Karam (Chief Executive Officer of AdBox), and Jean-Paul Tarud-Kuborn (Trade Commissioner of Chile to the Gulf Cooperation Council). Given the success of the conference, I hope that it will become an annual event.

Photo: International Conference on Ancient Studies, Dubai, panel discussion on November 30, 2008. From left to right, Dr. Robert M. Schoch, Dr. Thomas Brophy, Dr. Constantino Manuel Torres, John Major Jenkins, Robert Bauval, Michael Cremo, Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna, and Mahmoud Marai. (Photo Credit: Courtesy of Robert M. Schoch, copyright 2008.)

Oldest Script Found in the Indus Valley

2009-03-04T20:37:00.000-08:00

A new discovery made by archaeologists in Pakistan may help prove that Mesopotamia was not the first civilization to develop a system of writing, and that the invention of script itself is far older than previously thought. Graham Hancock, a journalist and amateur archaeologist who has been the target of criticism from mainstream academics for his controversial theories, firmly believes that civilization as we know it is merely a vestige of a once glorious age on which many of our Atlantean myths are based. To a limited degree, this find may help support his contention.
The site, known as Harappa, the location of the ancient Indus valley civilization which also bears its name, was settled in 3500 B.C., and over the succeeding millennia grew in a vast urban sprawl that became one of the chief civilizations of ancient times. The new find itself, however, changes all the rules. The artifact uncovered was an ancient piece of pottery dating back almost eight thousand years to around 5500 B.P.
The pottery had etched into its surface various “plant-like” and “trident-shaped” symbols. According to BBC Online News, “Experts believe these may have indicated the contents of the jar or signs associated with a deity.”
Most recently, it was Egypt that was credited as the birthplace of writing. A collection of small, clay tablets engraved with an archaic form of hieroglyphics was found in 1998 in the tomb of the Scorpion King, one of the rulers of Egypt prior to the foundation of the glorious Old Kingdom. Carbon-14 dating revealed that the tablets had been inscribed around 3300-3200 B.C., a few centuries earlier than the supposed invention of cuneiform writing around 3100 B.C. by the Sumerians.
Archaeologists now believe that this system of writing did not develop as a natural outgrowth of a spoken language. They contend that it was invented at the order of a ruler who needed to find the best way to make records and levy taxes. A uniform system of writing would be the perfect agent for not only civic leaders, but priests wishing to put down in writing their various incantations, descriptions of holy rites and the stories which their faiths were based upon. It is very probable that pre-Columbian civilizations such as the Aztec and Maya also were based on such practical necessity.
The key to understanding the Indus Valley script is an extrapolative comparison to known Egyptian hieroglyphics. But unlike the Scorpion inscriptions, as the author of a recent BBC article on the subjects states, there was nothing that could be used to compare with the Harappan script, no common Rosetta stone from which to unlock its mysteries.
“It’s a big question as to if we can call what we have found true writing,” Dr. Richard Meadow told BBC News Online, “but we have found symbols that have similarities of what became Indus script.” Meadow told BBC that his excavators will continue to search for more examples of this unique writing system in order to determine if it is indeed a genuine form of writing, and, if so, how it developed from its primitive form to the more advanced writing we see today. The Harappan Civilization left no linguistic descendents; their language is essentially dead, which makes the task of deciphering it next to impossible. The Rosetta Stone was important because it contained two other known languages: ancient Greek and Demotic. Champollion, the eighteenth century linguist who cracked the code of the hieroglyphs, used these two languages to cross-reference it, after which the ancient writing could be read at last. No such relic for the Harappan Civilization exists today, at least to our present knowledge.
Dr. David Whitehouse made the following observation in an article in BBC News:
“What we know of the Harappan civilizers makes them unique. Their society did not like great differences between social classes or the display of wealth by rulers. They did not leave behind large monuments or rich graves. They appear to have been a peaceful people who displayed their art in smaller works of stone. Their society seems to have petered out. Around 1900 B.C., Harappa and other urban centers started to decline as people left them to move east to what is now India and the Ganges.”
Whitehouse closes his article by stating that perhaps writing arose independently in three places at once between 3500 B.C. and 3100 B.C. Doubtless, there is much more to this story than mainstream scientists or archaeologists are prepared to admit. The clock is constantly turning back the antiquity of civilization, as new evidence is uncovered. This teaches us that the truth is subjective to the discoveries of the hour, leading to a veritable transformation of our understanding of modern archaeology. In time, more relics will be unearthed and perhaps the visions of Graham Hancock and others will be forever validated. n

Caucasian Mummies of China

2009-03-04T17:14:00.003-08:00

In ancient times, many Westerners found themselves in intimate contact with China and other parts of Asia, and vice versa. This story is about the Aryans, forerunners of both Western and Eastern cultures; Western cultural connections to the East; Chinese influence on Western civilization; and their interaction leading up to the Tarim Basin discoveries. This essay concentrates on the Steppes and Western China, but it will not rule out the Wesstern connection and will discuss it quite candidly. The word Aryan is a derivative of the word Arya, which in Sanskrit means “noble.” The Aryans created the great culture of the Hindus, sweeping southward across the Himalayas and pressing deep into the Indian subcontinent, a land which got its name from another Sanskrit word Sindu, which refers to the Indus river, and the fertile land along its banks, which saw the rise of many great civilizations. (Chouinard, 211) Geographically speaking, there are four possible homelands of the original Proto-Indo-European race. (Renfrew, 89) The first is an Asiatic cradle, from which a primordial civilization spread out in numerous directions, colonizing most of Europe, Asia, and other regions as well. (Renfrew, 90) The second is that of Southern Russia, in the area of the Caucasus, a place which gave its name to the Caucasian race, or white population of Europe and their descendants. The third is Central Europe, and the fourth is the Northern European plain, most specifically Scandinavia. (Renfrew, 90–92) V. Gordon Childe, in his book The Aryans: A Study of Indo-European Origins, discussed at length the various contending theories concerning a European, rather than Asiatic origin for the Indo-Aryans. (Mallory, 6) Omalius d’Malloy was the first to suggest that the Aryans had their origins in the North-central European plain. His view was countered by Latham’s conviction that it was in the Ukraine where the Aryan homeland can be found. (Mallory, 42) “They showed extraordinary prevision; it may at once be said that in the present state of our knowledge the cultural conditions are fulfilled only in one of those two directions.” (Mallory, 44) Childe notes that Poesche in 1878 supposedly determined that the Rokitno Swamp as the most logical nesting place of the Indo-Aryan nations. This view was spurred by his erroneous conception that Nordic blondness and albinism were synonymous. Indeed, not only was the climate not suited for the evolutionary development of the Aryan people, it also lacked the necessary environment for a horse-driven society, or for the development of agriculture, two institutions which must be considered characteristic of the ancient Aryans, if not originated by them. (Renfrew, 92–94) Around 1100 b.c., a mass migration of Aryan-speaking Nordics penetrated southward beyond the Caucasus. (Grant, 104) They most certainly assimilated into the existing population. The old Darwinian law which states the more progeny produced the greater chance a species has for continuance and survival definitely applies here: there were too few Aryan invaders to adequately “modify the blood of the autochthonous race and to substitute Aryan languages for the ancient Mediterranean and Asiatic tongues.” (Grant, 105) It was from the steppes of Mother Russia that these first “Northmen” came, two races which we now call the Achaeans and Phrygians. (Grant, 105) Records of their early migrations were recorded by Mesopotamian scribes. They told of fierce, light-skinned nomads descending from the north and establishing key settlements throughout the region. As these Russian Nordics expanded outwards, they colonized not only Europe and the Middle East, but regions far from their homeland in Central Asia, Siberia, Japan, and beyond. (Pierce) One of the places our ancestors went to colonize and conquer was a harsh, unforgiving realm known as the Tarim Basin, an autonomous province on the western frontier of China, which includes as part of its exotic landscapes the desolate Takla Makan Desert. (NOVA) Takla Makan is a wasteland of unrelenting sand dunes, winding slopes of whirling dust extending to the horizon. Patches of scorched vegetation litter the terrain. Rising from the sea of rippling sands stand immense mountain ranges and rocky enclaves, burning hot in the summer and frigid cold during the winter. These treacherous rock formations stand in silence, speaking only to the dead and to the memories of a past long forgotten by men, but remembered by the sentinels of eternity. (NOVA) Any visitor to the region would be quick to point out that the ancient gods have never left; the desert is still ruled by them. The inhabitants of this rugged landscape still depend on them for their survival. In many ways it remains as it did 3,000 years ago when the newcomers first arrived. These places speak of primordial mysteries unmatched both in their beauty and their cruelty. Who can comprehend the glorious miracles that were performed here, the classic stories of the ancient barbarians who made a home for themselves in one of the most unlikely of places? (NOVA) It was here that two worlds, East and West, met face to face on the battlefield of human endeavor, and for an instant became one. (Chouinard, 201) It was here that the city of Niya flourished for five centuries before being left in ruins sometime around the third century c..e. The masters of Niya were not Chinese, nor were they Mongolian, Siberian, or Turkic. In fact they didn’t resemble any known Asian races at all. Their appearance was striking; their tall stature, blond hair, and round, deep-set eyes set them apart from the native population; they were an entirely different race and not members of the Oriental world. The Chinese were resentful of this, feeling their long-held beliefs of Chinese supremacy under attack. (Mallory and Mair, 209) The excavation of a large burial site in Niya was the first transgression. It was set inside an elaborate temple that exhibited architectural styles showing Indian, Persian, and even Greek and Roman influences. (NOVA) Pieces of pottery and metalwork were marked by swastikas, a racial archetype which also signifies a religious connection to both Hinduism and Buddhism. To demonstrate the Chinese authorities’ audacious attempts to conceal the truth, the author of an article published by National Geographic told an infuriating story. They found a piece of pottery which bore an impression of the potter’s thumb. The author asked if he could take with him to the United States for further examination. (NOVA) Chinese archaeologist Wang Binghua then asked, “Would you be able to tell if the potter was a white man?” The author said he didn’t know. Binghua stuffed the artifact into his pocket, and neither the author of the article nor anyone else ever saw it again. On the temple there was an engraving with a sun disc, as well as a swastika, which hinted at the cult of Mithras, an Indo-Iranian religion which, although much older than Christianity, was a rival image to Christ and spread rapidly throughout the Roman Empire during the first to third centuries c.e. Dr. Kamberli is confident that Western societies built great cities and civilizations along the Silk Road, a pathway connecting Western and Eastern Europe with China and the central Asian steppes. (NOVA) British archaeologist Sir Aurel Stein made a map of Niya in the early 20th century. He also retrieved hundreds of wooden documents, written in an obscure script similar to an Indian alphabet or some form of Aramaic, the language that Jesus probably spoke. Ancient Chinese texts, dating as far back as the second century b.c.e., identified a group of people known as the Yuezhi. They were depicted as treacherous, yellow-haired barbarians with a propensity for destruction. In 1980, there was an expedition to the lost city of Loulan. A unit of archaeologists, funded by the Chinese government, was sent to confirm or deny certain rumors regarding the racial composition of some of China’s earliest peoples. Lying in the sweltering heat was just the kind of evidence they were looking for: the mummified remains of a 40-year-old, brown-haired woman with clear Caucasian traits. Team leader Mu Shun Ying was impressed by its immaculate state, and dubbed the woman the “Loulan beauty.” Radiocarbon dating set this mummy at around 3,800 years old. (Barber, 132) In close proximity to the “beauty” was another mummy, in a tomb constructed from wood. Radiocarbon dating on the materials used to construct the tomb placed its origins as early as 6,000 B.P. (Barber, 132) One hundred and fifty miles from the site of the ancient metropolis of Niya is the humble village of Zaghunluq. It was there that a Uygur archaeologist named Dolkun Kamberti discovered a burial site which would later prove instrumental in debunking many of the beliefs held by Red Chinese scholars, which they endured with much consternation. (Mallory and Mair, 24) It wasn’t until the early 1990s that an American team was permitted to go beyond the city of Niya and taste the forbidden fruit of knowledge, a reality that lay rotting in a storeroom at a sweltering Chinese museum. These 4,000-year-old relics could change China’s relationship to the West forever.An expedition mounted in 1996 comprising Dr. Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese literature at the University of Pennsylvania, and a group of his colleagues, including Dr. Jeannine Davis-Kimball, executive director at the Center for the Study of Eurasian nomads, was dispatched to further investigate.. (Mallory and Mair, 24-26) They first arrived at the Urumchi Museum, where they were waved into a large chamber filled with rows of mummies, some looking as they had died within the past 48 hours, others seriously deformed or in a state of advanced decomposition. Some appeared Mongolian, perhaps the ancestors of Genghis Kahn, but others, as shocking as it might seem, were clearly Western and were dated as far back as 4,000 B.P. (Barber, 44) The expedition members were motioned to a table on which was lying a young maiden, half-covered in a thin shroud. She appeared to have been sacrificed. Her eyes were gouged out, her limbs directly under her pelvis had been ripped out, and her arms above her elbows were missing. Underneath her, laying face-down in the choking dust of the earth was a young child, no older than a year, its face screaming for air: mouth open, hands clenched, even remnants of mucus and tears. (NOVA) Attached to these unfortunate sacrificial victims was the honored mistress of the tomb, clearly of Aryan origin: tall and long-nosed with a narrow visage and blond hair. She must have been a real beauty when she was alive, said Dr. He, one of the archaeologists who found her. Her long blond hair, still almost perfectly preserved, caressed her narrow shoulders and ran downward towards her once ample breasts. (Barber, 94) She had been rescued from an ancient burial site in 1978 by Chinese archaeologist Wang Binghua at Qizilchoqa, east of Urumqi, which is the capital city of Xinjiang-Uyghur Autonomous Region. (Barber, 93) Due to its anomalous nature, the discovery was intentionally buried by the Communist regime for almost 20 years. But you cannot annihilate truth, no matter how hard you try. Looking into the mummy’s lifeless eyes, one could catch a fleeting glimpse of the world’s grand design. In time, she would transcend her earthly demise and gain near-immortality, for it would soon become clear that she represented a turning point in contemporary archaeology. (Barber, 93–96) Scientific reconstructions of the faces reveal the startling appearance of Anglo-Saxons and other Teutonic tribes. Astounding as it may seem, many scholars in the United States still maintained that their authenticity was in question. Yet after this expedition Mair confirmed unequivocally that they are indeed genuine. (Chouinard, 208) Like Kennewick Man, this series of awesome discoveries challenges us to rethink Europe’s role in the development of global history and civilization. Now, not only are Caucasians appearing in prehistoric North America, but also in China. Found with the mummies were wool tartans, like those of the Celtic tribes of Western Europe. The Chinese were incapable of producing wool textiles. (Chouinard, 89) Victor Mair and his company then took a perilous trek into the heartland of the Basin. The government had forbidden expeditions into this region, but an exception was made. This should have been an indication that something was seriously wrong. The Chinese Communists had maintained strict control on the exchange of information regarding the 4,000-year-old mummies and the white population they represented. (Mallory and Mair, 19) Nevertheless, the group was led to a burial site which, according to the Chinese authorities, contained the remains of a Yuezhi. The American team was not impressed. First, the alleged Yuezhi’s head was missing, making it extremely difficult to determine ethnicity. (Mallory and Mair, 51) Its body was also covered with fungus, and it was clear that the grave had been tampered with. Obviously the Chinese officials had intended to show them a mummy which would discourage them from validating the discovery that China was not alone in its technological, yes, even spiritual development. (Mallory and Mair, 51–52) Scientists and scholars made the perilous trek to Western China. There are reports of a vast civilization of fair-haired giants, who were once nomadic but settled along what is known today as the site of the ancient Silk Road. This was known as the Tocharian civilization. The creators of this great society, the Tocharians, were often called Arsi, a word which was derived from the Sanskrit arya and the Old Persian ariya meaning Aryan. (Mallory and Mair, 7–8) Tocharian has been positively identified as one of the earliest branches of the Indo-European family of languages. Though now extinct, many of its linguistic patterns resemble those of Celtic, Slavic, and other now-defunct dialects that can be traced to a group of peoples who had their origins on the Russian steppes near the area of the Ural Mountains. (Mallory, 67) Some scholars were so bold as to proclaim that Tocharian was in fact a Celtic dialect. It is very likely that the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans was either the north Caucasus or Central Russia, from which a large extent of the population moved west into Europe, as others pushed southward into India, Persia, and the Middle East, and a smaller complement, the ancestors of the Tocharians, moved eastward into China. (Mallory 67–69) Dr. Mair investigated a cave-like temple at Kizil and Kumtura located in the Tien Shan Mountains north of the Tarim Basin. In it were examples of Indo-European script, a linguistic link to the peoples of the West. (Mallory and Mair, 13–19) Despite a melding of Buddhist and Hindu imagery, and the fact that parts of the paintings were purposefully defaced by peoples of other faiths, the European signature was not to be mistaken. (Mallory and Mair, 21–34) Victor Mair noted it immediately. The images showed hundreds of finely dressed men, with red or blond hair always parted in the middle, an obvious European hair-style. Their pinkish skin tone, blue or green eyes, and long, pointed faces showed that they were in fact of Indo-Aryan extraction; their bodies were by far much taller and slenderer than most Asians. These same people eventually spread throughout northeastern and central Asia, moving into Ferghana and Bactria, north of China just beyond the Pamirs. (Mallory and Mair, 102)In his book The Wanderings of Peoples, published 1912, A. C. Haddon affirmed that Chinese civilization was spurred by the firebrand of “semi-cultured” peoples from the west. Dr. Han Kangxin believes, as does Dr. Mair, that the original inhabitants of the Basin were related to the European races. Indeed, Kangxin even believes they were related to the Cro-Magnons, although others disagree. Some share the opinion that it was the European rather than Asiatic races that led to the establishment of early Chinese civilization. In 1951, the German archaeologist Robert Heine-Geldern showed similarities of metallurgy in Europe and China around 800 b.c..e. Socketed battle-axes and spearheads which were used in abundance in early China were compared to those of Hallstatt and the Indo-European homeland, indicating they were brought there by nomadic Aryans some 3,000 years prior. Although it might be considered the product of an overactive imagination, Heine-Geldern also claimed that the first Chinese Empire of Chi’n Shih Huang Ti, founded in 221 b.c.e., was the creation of Aryan invaders. (Pierce) Many formerly disputed theories are now being exonerated. Dr. David W. Anthony, an anthropologist at Hartwick College in New York, linked the awesome migration patterns of the Indo-European race to the invention of wheeled wagons. Extensive excavations in southern Russia and Kazakhstan have revealed 5,000-year-old burial mounds containing traces of numerous wagon wheels. Not only were such artifacts found in Eastern Europe, but also in the Gobi Desert, which lies on the northeastern border of the Tarim Basin. (Pierce) It is now accepted by almost all archaeologists that the Ukraine was the birthplace of mounted culture, entirely discrediting assertions that identify the origins of horse-riding and the chariot with China or the Middle East. The mummies of the Tarim Basin are a link to not only the human past, but also to the evolution of both Eastern and Western culture. This is not the story of one culture overtaking the other, but rather an East-West synthesis. Regardless of invasion, colonization, and oppression, the contact of two distinct peoples can have ramifications beyond the imagination. ■WORKS CITED:Barber, E. J. W. The Mummies of Urumchi. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.Chouinard, Patrick. A Legacy of Gods and Empires: The Quest for Ancient Mysteries. Clearwater: Shadow Books, 2003Grant, Madison. The passing of the great race, or, The Racial Basis of European History. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1918.Mallory, J. P.; Mair, Victor H. The Tarim mummies: Ancient China and the Mysteries of the Earliest Peoples from the West. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000.Mallory, J. P. In Search of the Indo-Europeans. Language, Archaeology and Myth. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989Pierce, William L. “Aryans: Culture Bearers to China.” National Vanguard, July 1998, updated 2004.Renfrew, Colin. Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1988.NOVA: The Mysterious Mummies of China. PBS, August 1997
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Enigma of the North Atlantic Crescent

2009-03-04T17:12:00.002-08:00

A group of scientists who recently formed the North Atlantic Bio-Cultural Organization (NABO) have made it clear that Asiatic migration is not the only possible path taken by prehistoric peoples into the New World. They posed the question "Could Kennewick Man, the 10,000 year old Caucasian-like skeleton found in the Columbia River in Washington State, be related to the oldest cultures of Western Europe?" This question is part of a new theory emerging about how North America developed, and how the dispersal of peoples across the North Atlantic could have formed a circumpolar Mesolithic culture which was responsible not only for mass migration between the two major continents, but also the interbreeding and establishment of hybrid cultures. The Center for the Study of the First Americans at Oregon State University recently began to process genetic testing of human remains found both in Eastern North America and Western Europe. Further examination of the human mitochondrian cells, may now prove a Caucasoid link to the origins of the first Americans dating as far back as 28,000 BC. Known as the "power packs" of DNA, these cells helped scientists form four categories of ancestral groups or lineages which are viewed as the founding genetic material on which Native Americans are based. Congruent with existing dogma, and fueling the argument in favor of Asiatic origins for the New World population, they could be traced back to Siberia and northeast Asia, specifically in the Baikal and Altai-Sayan regions. However, there is a fifth lineage that is also credited as one of the founding genetic strains of present-day Native Americans. Known as the "haplogroup X," this genetic signature is the vestige of either a later population found in Europe and the Middle East or a possibly primeval population of Caucasoid ethnic groups that inhabited Asia and was also part of the tribes that followed the coastline on small boats to a point where they could disembark and settle. Kennewick and Spirit Cave Man, are one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the idea that Europeans settled and lived in North America thousands of years before the first Viking expeditions. Such widely-distributed journals as Ancient American magazine have been instrumental in validating and bringing to light the idea of contact between Old World and New World cultures before Columbus, but such finds make even these ancient dates seem relatively recent. If the genetic testing is correct, than our attitude towards Native Americans and are whole view of the world must inevitably change for good or for bad. I hope this brief article has prompted more curiosity about this subject. My curiosity is already peaked. ■