Aryan Sun-Myths E-Book

Sarah E. Titcomb

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 193

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Aryan Sun-Myths, the Origin of Religions, by Sarah E. Titcomb, is a very conscientious effort to reduce to a convenient compass, a vast amount of lore, whose sources are scattered through all literature and all languages. This work will afford sufficient information on the subject for all practical purposes while its excellent catalogue of the more important works concerning it, and some very comprehensive explanatory notes appended, may easily lead up to more profound studies.

Leseprobe

Aryan Sun-Myths

The Origin Of Religions

Sarah E. Titcomb

Contents:

Preface.

Introduction.

Aryan Sun-Myths The Origin Of Religions.

Appendices.

Appendix A. - An Explanation Of The Fable, In Which The Sun Is Worshipped Under The Name Of Christ.

Appendix B. The Legendary Life Of Buddha And Its Relation To The Indian Zodiac.

Appendix C. Buddha As A Reformer.

Appendix D. The Persian Account Of The Fall Of Man.

Appendix E. The Legend Of The Travels Of Isis, Or The Moon.

Appendix F. An Explanation Of The Heracleid, Or Of The Sacred Poem On The Twelve Months And On The Sun, Worshipped Under The Name Of Hercules.

Calendar.

Aryan Sun-Myths , Sarah Titcomb

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Germany

ISBN: 9783849623647

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

Cover Design: @ infanta – fotolia.com

PREFACE.

The attention of the writer having been called to the fact that all Indo-Germanic nations have worshipped crucified Saviours, an investigation of the subject was made. Overwhelming proof was obtained that the sun-myths of the ancient Aryans were the origin of the religions in all of the countries which were peopled by the Aryans. The Saviours worshipped in these lands are personifications of the Sun, the chief god of the Aryans. That Pagan nations worshipped a crucified man, was admitted by the Fathers of the early Christian Church. The holy Father Minucius Felix, in his Octavius, written as late as a. d. 211, indignantly resents the supposition that the sign of the cross should be considered as exclusively a Christian symbol; and represents his advocate of the Christian argument as retorting on an infidel opponent thus: " As for the adoration of crosses, which you object to against us, I must tell you that we neither adore crosses nor desire them. You it is, ye Pagans, who worship wooden gods, who are the most likely people to adore wooden crosses, as being parts of the same substance with your deities. For what else are your ensigns, flags, and standards, but crosses gilt and beautified? Your victorious trophies not only represent a simple cross, but a cross with a man upon it." Tertullian, a Christian Father of the second and third centuries, writing to the Pagans, says: "The origin of your gods is derived from figures moulded on a cross. All those rows of images on your standards are the appendages of crosses; those hangings on your standards and banners are the robes of crosses" (Egyptian Belief, 217). Arrian, in his History of Alexander, states that the troops of Porus, in their war with Alexander the Great, carried on their standards the figure of a man. Justin Martyr, in his Dialogue with Trypho, says that there exist not a people, civilized or semi-civilized, who have not offered up prayers in the name of a crucified Saviour to the Father and Creator of all things. Eusebius, the ecclesiastical historian, says that the names of Jesus and Christ were both known and honored among the ancients (Eccl. Hist., lib. i. chap, iv.). We find Saint Paul avowing that he was made a minister of the gospel, which had been preached to every creature under heaven (Col. i. 23). For centuries after the time assigned as the birth of Jesus, he was not represented as a man on a cross. The earliest representation of him was as a lamb (History of our Lord in Art, Vol. I.) . This custom continued until the pontificate of Agathon (a.d. 608), during the reign of Constantine Pogonatus. By the Sixth Synod of Constantinople (Canon 82), it was ordained that instead of the ancient symbol which had been the lamb, the figure of a man nailed to a cross should be represented. All this was confirmed by Pope Adrian I. (Dupuis's Origin of Religious Belief p. 252; also Higgins's Anacalypsis, Vol. II. p. 3).

The writer makes no claim to originality, excepting in the arrangement of this work. The endeavor has been simply to condense what has been obtained from other works.

The original intention was to give a brief sketch, with an appended list of works from which the material was taken; but on making an addition to the book it was deemed best to give references. The references for the original sketch will be found at the end of the book.

The writer has been favored in having an Introduction by one so familiar with the subject as Mr. Charles Morris, author of The Aryan Race.

Boston, February, 1889.

INTRODUCTION.

It seems, at first glance, remarkable with what readiness the Teutonic and Celtic tribes dropped their ancestral faiths and accepted Christianity, now through the persuasions of a missionary, now at the bidding of a chief. But a fuller study of the subject renders the unusual ease of this conversion much less surprising, by making it apparent that they rather added the leading dogmas of Christianity to their old faiths than replaced the latter by the former. They ceased to worship Odin and the lesser deities, and began to worship Christ, the Virgin, and the saints; but they invested the latter with many of the attributes of the former, retained most of their old religious dogmas and ceremonies, and converted primitive Christianity quite as much as they were converted by it. The conversion was, indeed, as much a change of names as of beliefs. Though the ethics of Christianity slowly leavened this swarming mass of barbarism, the theology of the new faith became so closely interwoven with that of the old that it is not easy to this day to separate them. The nineteenth-century critical study of religious beliefs and the progress of the science of comparative mythology have gone far towards clearing up this mystery of the past, and are leading the way to a science of comparative theology, as students break through the artificial barrier of sacredness which has been raised around this or that system of belief, and dare to question where older students deemed it their duty to adore. It is being more and more widely held that no belief can be sacred, that all faith must rest either upon evidence or blind acceptance, and that they who base their belief upon a study of facts are far superior intellectually, and certainly equal morally, to those who accept dogmas upon authority. Faith has been covered with a veil which it was declared impious to lift, and the very word exalted into a kind of magic formula, which was deemed powerful enough to move mountains. But what is faith, critically considered? It is either an unquestioning acceptance of the assertions of ancient books and modern teachers, which the reasoning powers of the individual are autocratically forbidden to deal with; or it is a belief reached through doubt and question, the persistent study of facts and the fullest exercise of the intellect. In the latter case it is the actual belief of the individual; in the former, the belief of somebody else, which has been instilled into the receptive mind of the disciple, and before whose sacredness every intrusive doubt and irreconcilable fact must bow the head in worship.

This dogma is a relic of the Dark Ages. It is based upon the general ignorance which prevailed in ancient communities and their restful dependence upon the superior learning of their teachers. It is utterly out of accordance with the general education of modern peoples, and the spirit of research which is now everywhere active, and which is far too vigorous to be repelled by the highest fence of theological interdict.

The study of the mythological systems of ancient nations has revealed many curious and unlooked-for facts and correspondences. It has been made apparent, in the first place, that those mythologies had their origin in primitive ideas about the movements of the heavenly bodies, the variations of day and night, summer and winter, and other natural phenomena, which were in time, through the modification of human ideas, transformed into the doings of a throng of deific beings. The worshippers did not know whence came their gods. We, who can approach the subject without prejudice and bigotry, and to whom mythology has ceased to be sacred, can easily trace their origin, and point out nearly every step of their unfoldment. It has become evident, in the second place, that a close affinity exists between the mythological ideas of different and often widely separated countries, the resemblance extending not only to their broader features, but in some cases to their minor details of dogma and belief. This correspondence in belief is undoubtedly due to two causes; primarily to the fact that the steps of unfoldment of the human intellect and the growth of ideas have been closely similar in all civilizing peoples; and secondly to the intercourse of tribes and nations, and the outflow of ideas over the earth, by the several methods of peaceful interchange of views, warlike conquest and forcible conversion, and propagandism by missionary efforts. These various influences have tended to bring into some degree of conformity the religious systems not only of Europe, Asia, and Africa, but also those of the Old and the New World, between which some communication very probably existed in ancient times.

The primary religious ideas of all peoples were undoubtedly much the same. The unquestioned supremacy of the sun among the heavenly bodies, the striking changes to which it was subjected in the variation from day to night, and from summer to winter; its life-giving beneficence, and its seeming struggle with the demons of storm and cold; not only everywhere exalted this heavenly body into the position of king of the gods in every system of nature-worship, but gave rise to numerous myths, which necessarily in some measure corresponded, since they were everywhere based on the same phenomena of nature. It is true that nature-worship was not the sole primitive religious conception of mankind. Various other general ideas made their way into and influenced systems of belief, prominent among these being the custom of ancestor worship, which widely, perhaps universally, prevailed in developing nations, and exerted a vigorous influence upon unfolding religions. Mythology, however, occupies the most prominent position in the growth of religious beliefs. Ancestral and other systems of worship have influenced religious practice and ceremony to a marked extent, but have had much less to do with the growth of dogma than the intricate details of the history of the gods, to which the numerous phenomena of nature gave rise. Over religious belief the sun has exercised a dominant influence, and still faintly yet distinguishably shines through the most opaquely obscure of modern theological dogmas.

The work to which I am gratified in being requested to append these introductory remarks', is designed to point out in detail the correspondences of religious dogma to which I have alluded. How well or ill it does so may be left for readers to decide; but as a reader having some previous acquaintance with the subject, I should say that it has done so remarkably well, and that it would not be easy to make a stronger, fuller, and clearer presentation of the facts in so limited a space. The subject is one worthy of a much more extended treatment.

The only bone of contention in the work is its inclusion of the dogmas of Christianity among mythological outgrowths. And yet very few of these dogmas are the direct fruit of Christ's teachings. Very many of them are the work of later theologians, who were influenced both by their own religious education and the demands of their congregations. Christianity arose among the Jews, a people whose religious system had never been strongly mythological, and had become much less so in the course of time. But the new doctrine was not accepted by the Jews. It found its chief converts among peoples of Aryan origin, — the Greeks, the Romans, the Teutons, the Celts, etc., — peoples among whom mythology had become extraordinarily developed, and whom it was simply impossible to convert in a mass to radically new ideas. They accepted Christ and his moral teachings, with the skilfully organized church system of the primitive Christians; but their older mythological belief was not worn as a cloak to be thrown off at will, but was rather a plant whose roots had penetrated to every fibre of their beings, and had become an intimate part of the texture of their minds. It strongly influenced the most learned among them. With the unlearned it continued the prevalent system of belief, and insinuated itself into the dogmas of the new church with a power impossible to resist. It may be repeated that the Christian theology of to-day was not born with Christ and his apostles. Its growth was slow. Traditions arose, partly based on old myths, partly on misconceptions of Christ's life and teachings, which affected even the writers of the several lives of Christ, and more strongly those who were farther removed from Christ.

From the very start legendary dogmas of mythological origin seem to have arisen in the new church, to have become the firm beliefs of congregations, and to have affected the minds of theologians much more than they themselves were aware of. And as the new faith spread through the world, it became more and more imbued with old thought, until mythology became the woof of that system of which morality was the warp.

Christianity, properly considered, is not a system of belief, but a system of ethics. Christ taught no creed. His life was spent in the inculcation of lofty ideas of morality. The few dogmas which he did assert are full of evidence of the influence of the preceding Hebrew faith, and were doubtless the outcome of his early religious education. Many of his utterances have been tortured into creeds, but few of them bear the interpretations that have been laid upon them. He was a moral teacher, pure and simple, and as an inculcator of moral ideas he stands at the summit of mankind. His teachings are the simplest and loftiest, his life was the noblest and most self-sacrificing, that literature and history present to our gaze. But for the dogmas of Christianity he is not responsible. They grew up after his death, through the slow years and centuries, under the influence of a host of more ancient ideas and mythological conceptions, and the bulk of them have no more to do with the Christianity taught by Christ than has the mythology of the Aztecs. Christianity was simply thrown into a world seething with religious beliefs and fancies, and could not but take up some accretion of these prevailing ideas, which gathered around it like clouds around the sun. The pure light of Christ's teachings lay within, but was long almost lost in the obscuring doctrine that belief is the essential of virtue, conduct a minor accessory; that lapse from virtue may be readily pardoned, lapse from faith is unpardonable. Such a doctrine has done infinite mischief to the cause of Christianity. Fortunately it is ceasing to prevail. The sun is burning through the clouds, and the example of Christ's life and the loftiness of his precepts are becoming of more value in religion than the creeds advanced by later theologians; and we may look forward with hope to the time in which conduct will become the essential feature of religion, and faith be relegated to its true position in the history of human thought.

CHARLES MORRIS.

ARYAN SUN-MYTHS THE ORIGIN OF RELIGIONS.

The results obtained from the examination of language in its several forms leaves no room for doubt, Max Müller tells us, that there was a stage, in the history of human speech, during which the abstract words in constant use among ourselves were utterly unknown, when men had formed no notions of virtue or prudence, of thought and intellect, of slavery or freedom, but spoke only of the man who was strong, who could point the way to others and choose one thing out of many, of the man who was not bound to any other, and able to do as he pleased.

Language without words denoting abstract qualities implies a condition of thought in which men were only awakening to a sense of the objects which surrounded them, and points to a time when the world was to them full of strange sights and sounds, — some beautiful, some bewildering, some terrific; when, in short, people knew little of themselves beyond the vague consciousness of existence, and nothing of the phenomena of the world without.

In such a state they could but attribute to all that they saw or touched or heard, a life which was like their own in its consciousness, its joys, and its sufferings. The varying phases of that life were therefore described as truthfully as human feelings or sufferings, and hence every phase became a picture, which remained intelligible as long as the conditions remained unchanged. In time, however, the conditions were changed. Men advanced in knowledge and civilization, and no longer thought of nature as possessing life and consciousness like their own.

In ancient times there lived, it is supposed on the highest elevation of Central Asia, a noble race of men, called the Aryan. Speaking a language not yet Sanskrit, Greek, or German, but containing the dialects of all, this clan which had advanced to a state of agricultural civilization had recognized the bonds of blood, and sanctioned the bonds of marriage. That they worshipped Nature, — the sun, moon, sky, earth, — a comparison of ancient religions and mythology in the lands peopled by Aryans demonstrates. Their chief object of adoration was the Sun. To this race, in the infancy of its civilization, the Sun was not a mere luminary, but a Creator, Ruler, Preserver, and Saviour of the world.

As there could be no life or vegetation without light, the Sun, as a light-bringer, becomes Creator, and if Creator, then Ruler of the world — the Father of all things. In driving away the darkness, and likewise in fertilizing the earth, the Sun becomes the preserver and kind protector of all living things— the Saviour of mankind. As the Sun sometimes scorches and withers vegetation and dries up the rivers, he was conceived of as a Destroyer also. As Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer the Sun was three persons in one — the Trinity.

It is very hard for man at the present day to realize the feelings with which the first dwellers on earth looked upon the Sun. " Think of man," says Professor Müller, "at the dawn of time. . . . Was not the sunrise to him the first wonder, the first beginning to him of all reflection, all thought, all philosophy? Was it not to him the first revelation, the first beginning of all trust, of all religion? "

The Aryans looked up to the sky and gave it the name of Dyaus, from a root-word which means to shine; When, out of the forces and forms of nature, they fashioned other gods, this name of Dyaus became Dyaus Pitar, — the Heaven-Father, or All-Father. The earth they worshipped as the Mother of All.

They said that the Sun was the Son of the Sky, or the Heaven-Father, and that the immaculate virgin, the Earth (sometimes it was the dawn or the night), was the Mother of the Sun. Hence we have the Virgin, or Virgo, as one of the signs of the zodiac.

As the Sun begins its apparent annual northward journey on the twenty-fifth of December, this day was said to be his birthday, and was observed with great rejoicings. On this day the sign of the Virgin is rising on the eastern horizon, the Sun having reached the winter solstice.

The division of the first decan of the Virgin represents a beautiful immaculate virgin with flowing hair, sitting in a chair, with two ears of corn in her hand, and suckling an infant called Iesus (Jesus in Latin), by some nations, and Christ in Greek (from the Greek Christos, — an Anointed One, a Messiah). This infant denotes the Sun, which at the moment of the winter solstice, precisely when the Persian magi drew the horoscope of the new year, was placed on the bosom of the Virgin. (See Appendix A.)

The zodiacal sign of Aries was anciently known as the Lamb; consequently, when the Sun made the transit of the equinox under this sign, it was called the Lamb of God.

The birth of the Sun was said to be heralded by a star — the Morning-star, which rises immediately before the Virgin and her Child. As the Sun appears to start from a dark abode, it was said that he was born in a cave, or dungeon, and the splendor of the morning sky was said to be the halo around his cradle. As the Sun scatters the darkness, it was said that he would be the destroyer of the reigning monarch, Night. Warned of this peril by oracles, Night tries to prevent the birth of the Sun, and, failing in that, seeks to take his life. For this reason it is said that the Sun is left on the bare hillside to perish, as he seemingly rests on the earth at his rising. He meets with temptations on his course, is beset by foes, clouds of storm and darkness; but, in the struggle which ensues, he is conqueror, the gloomy army, broken and rent, is scattered. The daughters of his foes, the last light vapors which float in the heavens, try in vain to clasp and retain him, but he disengages himself from their embraces; and, as he repulses them, they writhe, lose their form and vanish. Temptations to sloth and luxury are offered him in vain; he has work to do, and nothing can stay him from doing it. He travels over many lands, and toils for the benefit of others; he does hard service for a mean and cruel generation. He is constantly in company with his Twelve Apostles — the twelve signs of the zodiac.

As he approaches midsummer, he appears in all his splendor, he has reached the summit of his career; henceforth his power diminishes, and he meets with an early and a violent death, from which there is no escape. When the extreme southern limit of his course is reached, his enemies — darkness and cold, which have sought in vain to wound him — win the victory. The bright Sun of summer is slain, crucified in the heavens, and pierced by the spear (thorn, or arrow) of winter. He who has performed such marvellous miracles, healing the sick and raising the dead, cannot save himself; a stern fate decrees that he must die an ignominious death.

As the Sun wakens the earth to life after the long sleep of winter is passed, it was said that he raised the dead. He is crucified, with outstretched arms in the heavens, — outstretched to bless the world he is trying to save from the terror of darkness, — to the tree, or cross. It was an ancient custom to use trees as gibbets for crucifixion, or, if artificial, to call the cross a tree, the tree being one of the symbols of nature-worship, which denoted the fructifying power of the Sun. The Sun crucified was the Sun in winter, when his fructifying power is gone.