Stuart Mason wrote:This is something I've been wondering ever since I first watched Zeitgeist years ago. I don't know if this deserves it's own thread and feel free to move it elsewhere if not, but I didn't see anywhere else it really fit. Why Horus?
Hi Stuart, thanks for joining the discussion on
Christ in Egypt. I was wondering if you were going to participate after our recent interesting conversation on Egypt. Readers may wish to see the debate between Stuart and me from June this year on the nature of Egyptian religion in the thread
Militant Atheism.
I think this is a really good question you have posed, and it illustrates how mythic evolution is not simple. The relation between Christianity and Egyptian antecedents is complex, and the idea of simple complete parallels has been used to confuse a lot of readers. Christian apologists mounted the "Zeitgeist Challenge" to say effectively that if there was no evidence of Horus nailed to a tree then Jesus must be the supernatural son of God as literally described in the Gospels. This was an ignorant and ideological critique, but it reflects popular belief in simple literal religion, and Murdock wrote
Christ in Egypt partly to respond to it.
Some features of Christ parallel Horus and others parallel Osiris. Main Horus parallels include the virgin birth to Mary/Isis after the winter solstice, the war with Satan/Set, Christ/Horus as a child and young heroic man at 12 and 30, the trinity and holy family with Osiris, Isis and Horus, and the main one, Christ/Horus as the rising sun. Christian ideas such as 'He is risen" and "Sun of Righteousness" show clear evidence of being borrowed from the Horus myth.
You have a good point that Osiris is the main one who actually comes back to life in Egyptian myth, like Jesus, but
Christ in Egypt provides interesting evidence that this mytheme applies also to Horus, in his role as symbolising the rebirth of the sun each day and year.
If one were to look for an Egyptian pre-cursor to Christ, Osiris rather than Horus would be the most glaring candidate. The central event in Jesus' story is his death and resurrection through which his followers hope to achieve a paradisical afterlife for the rest of eternity. This is something nearly identical to Osiris' story but nothing like Horus'.
Yes, and it illustrates how Christianity combined motifs from Osiris and Horus into the single universal anointed savior Jesus Christ. God never gets murdered by Satan in Judaism, and in syncretising Judaism with Egyptian and Greek myth, the Christians mutated the Egyptian story to fit the box of Yahweh. So you are right - the Egyptians assigned the cycle of rebirth to the father, while Christians transferred it to the son, while also giving Christ attributes that the Egyptians had given to the son, Horus.
Jesus and Horus do have some similiarities, but not in the central attributes. At least not with the Jesus of the canon gospels. Osiris is the one who died, resurrected, ascended to heaven, became judge of the dead, facilitated the continued afterlife in either heaven or hell, etc.
It really depends what you consider the "central attributes". You are right about the resurrection motif as mainly linked to Osiris, but by the way this does also apply to Horus, for example after he is bitten by the scorpion sent by Set and restored to life by Isis, and as I just mentioned there is the daily and yearly rebirth of the sun as Horus. And this scorpion story again has its astral meaning, with the sun passing through the constellation of Scorpio in autumn as it prepares to die each year in winter. But I think you downplay the idea of a dynamic young living savior figure in both Christ and Horus. My sense, although I am not certain on this point, is that Osiris is more a passive representative of eternal life, who nonetheless delivers final judgment, while Horus is the active living divine principle. Again, the power of Christianity rested partly in its combination of these two key attributes in Christ.
I've only browsed Christ in Egypt and know of Acharya's work mainly through reading some of her articles and listening to an interview or two. From what I've seen, I find CIE to be very well researched though I disagree with some of it's conclusions. I've also seen alot of the arguments made by advocates of Acharya's work, so I have a running idea of the case being made in regards to Jesus and Horus. It's my understanding that CIE is largely in response to critics of Acharya's earlier books and the Zeitgeist film. But what surprised me was to find out that the similarities between Osiris and Christ are directly acknowledged in the Horus-Jesus argument.
I don't think you should be surprised by this Stuart. Murdock's goal is to find the truth, by looking at the evidence. She is not pushing some simplistic agenda, of the sort that might be inferred from Zeitgeist Part One, that ignores the allegorical complexity in the material. It is worth noting that the Zeitgeist movement has effectively banned discussion of religion because they find it too complicated for the simple political message they are trying to push. But Murdock is arguing that reality is complicated, so ignoring the depths of the issues will not provide sound foundations for understanding reality. It is precisely this political desire to ignore the depths of meaning that led to literal historical Christianity in the first place.
Acharya even wrote an article with the page title "
Is Jesus a Remake of Osiris". This to me is where it gets strange. The argument is that Horus was sometimes regarded as a reincarnation of Osiris, therefore the mythos of Osiris and Horus are completely interchangable. So when the Horus/Jesus comparison is brought up and skeptics make the obvious observation that Horus never did any of these major things Jesus did, Horus proponents respond by saying that Osiris did them so you can therefore say Horus did too, basically using Osiris as a gap filler for the places where the Horus-Jesus comparison breaks apart. OK, I guess
technically that works and I don't have a problem with it per se, but I wonder then why not use Osiris in the first place since he's the one that really has the parallels?
Again, this gets to the question of what you consider primary. Of course, in purely religious terms a case can be made for Osiris as the restorer of life, but the association between Horus, the sun and the living king has an arguably equal or greater resonance with the Christ myth. And we see that Osiris is directly (although hidden) acknowledged in the Gospel of John through his identification with Lazarus (el-osiris), the mummified figure who is restored from death by Jesus. I don't think that Osiris and Horus are interchangeable, as they have distinct roles and identities.
At risk of answering my own question, the Horus thing seems to come from an (over?)emphasis on astrotheolgy. Horus is a Sun god and because of that he's used instead of Osiris because a Sun god fits better with the astrotheology argument. I don't know, that's just my guess. But reading some of the books, articles, and board messages I see a focus on astrotheology that seems a little extreme. Astrotheology is just an ordinary subset of mythology. It's not a particularly veiled or profound mystery or an ultimate truth behind the myths. Some myths are astrotheological, some aren't. I'd also say that different cultures' myths were astrotheological to different degrees. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the impression that some feel that astrotheology is a sort of forbidden science that's kept hidden from the world by academia, but I honestly don't know of anyone who studies myths that hides or denies the fact that world mythology is based in part on the movement of heavenly bodies. That's pretty much mythology 101. But to propose nearly everything as astrotheological would be going overboard. This excerpt from the aforementioned Osiris/Jesus article sums up my issue.
You are right that I, for one, see astrotheology as a forbidden science. It is actually not taught in Myth 101, but suppressed, mocked and hidden. Myth 101 tends to respect the Christian myth that Jesus was a real man largely as described in the Bible. In my own study of this material, as I have explained in various threads at Booktalk, I have found numerous allegories for stellar observation in the Bible that are completely unknown and undiscussed. These allegories rest on a hypothesis of the primacy of 'as above so below' as stating that events on earth reflect observed events in the sky. To really understand this, we have to actually look at the sky without the weight of Christian literalist presuppositions.
I disagree with your suggestion that astrotheology is a subset of mythology. Rather, if we say for example that Jesus Christ is an allegory for the sun, we find that astrotheology provides a systematic scientific foundation for rebasing the myth in actual life and observation. This is in fact a profound veiled mystery, including why this understanding remains so heavily suppressed, and is not discussed in universities or media or conferences, and remains confined to self published books and the internet. Astrotheology is actually a new and revolutionary theory of the nature of religion. It is only now getting past the point experienced by all new paradigms of being ignored by the defenders of the old paradigm.
Is Jesus a Remake of Osiris wrote:In spite of the rampant evemerism regarding the Osirian earth-wandering legend, Osiris is essentially the sun, regularly identified as such in the Egyptian Bible, the Book of the Dead.
Osiris is "essentially the Sun"? While Osiris did acquire solar assosciations as Egyptian gods tended to do, by and large I don't think one could honestly reduce Osiris' mythos to him being the Sun. If you were to scroll through Osiris' attributes and functions I'd say his solar associations, if not tertiary, were secondary at best. Osiris is the god of resurrection, vegetation, personification of the Nile, etc. He's not like, say, the Sun god Helios of Greek myth. Later the article says "In telling the Osiris myth, Diodorus paradoxically lapses into the evemerist perspective that Osiris was a 'real person' who walked the earth". But why is it a paradox? Evemerism isn't an all-or-nothing stance. You can feel some gods might be based on historical persons and that some might not. This objection seems to rest on the idea that astrotheology is the near sole basis of myth. The gods are pre-supposed to be stars, therefore there can't be any other meaning or basis for them. That both ancient writers and a considerable number of Egyptologists believe Osiris may have been based on a real person(with no apparent religious or political motivation for doing so) is dismissed out of hand. I have no solid stance about whether there was an "historical Osiris" or not, but I certainly think it was possible. The matter isn't as cut an dry as saying Osiris or the Anunnaki or the Olympians were just planets. That is in my opinion a major oversimplification. It would be similar to being asked what kind of store Wal-Mart is and someone answering that it's a clothing store. Well, yes, Wal-Mart does sell clothes, but it also sells alot of other stuff too and can't be labelled simply as a clothier. Likewise while myths do sometimes have an astrotheological basis they are not solely astrotheological nor were they viewed that way by the ancients.
Interesting perspectives Stuart. Taking your Wal-Mart analogy, I would argue that saying religion is originally astrotheological is more like saying Wal-Mart is a low price store. Wal-Mart is far more than that, but its low prices are fundamental to its identity and success.
Re the attributes of Osiris, it is clear that each of these - vegetation, the Nile - follow an annual resurrection cycle driven by the sun. There are many different associations with Osiris, and the centrality of the sun to Egyptian religion naturally makes the association with Osiris important. As I mentioned in the atheism thread, I think there is also a match with the constellation Argo. It might also be speculated that the Milky Way, the destination of transmigration of souls, may have been viewed like a big Osirian mummy in space.
I thought this discussion was going to start around September so I'm behind on the comments. If this is something that's been brought up already then my apologies. This is just something I wonder whenever I see the Horus-Jesus comparison because it seems kind of quirky to me when Osiris is right there.
Thanks again Stuart. I hope you can read over the Booktalk threads on
Christ in Egypt and let us know if you find anything you want to comment on. Hopefully the threads here are sufficiently accessible to enable sensible comment by people who have not read Christ in Egypt cover to cover. It is superb that the author DM Murdock is participating. Your question here 'Why Horus?' gets to the heart of the debate, so I hope others will respond to this thread as well.