Dying-Resurrecting God-men

By Sophia Elise

The ancient world was full of mythology, ceremonies and rituals that became the foundation for modern Christianity. Every ancient culture, from the Aztecs to the Sumerians, have an archetype of the Dying-Resurrecting God who identifies with the vernal equinox, the time of his (or her) re-birth. It is fundamental to the earth cycles of life, and death, and life again.

• His father is God and his mother is a virgin.
• He is the Savior, Son of Man and the Son of God
• He is born in a cave on the 25th of December – after the winter solstice when ‘light’ was returning to the world.
• His followers have the opportunity to be born again through baptism in water (or blood)
• His first miracle was to turn water into wine
• He dies at the vernal equinox (March 20-21) time as a sacrifice for the sins of the world
• After his death he descends to Hell, defeats the Devil, and on the third day he rises from the dead
• Forty days after his worldly death he ascends into Heaven to sit at the right hand of God
• His followers await his return and their own resurrection
• His death is celebrated through a ritual meal of bread and wine which symbolize his body and blood.

Who fits these characteristics? Actually, it is one or more archetypes who have existed in the mythologies of the ancient world.  At the heart of the Pagan Mysteries were myths concerning a dying and resurrecting God-man. He was known by many different names, and Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, called him The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In Egypt he was known as Osiris, in Greece as Dionysus, in Mexico the great Aztec Quitzalcoatl. In Asia Minor, Ba’al, in Syria as Adonis, in Sumeria and Babylon as Tammuz, in Persia as Mithras and within the confines of the last two thousand years of western civilization, he is Jesus. He is even a she in the Greek personification of Persephone.

Before the birth of Christianity, most of the inhabitants of the Mediterranean world worshiped Pagan deities unique to their culture and heritage.  All of these polytheistic traditions had their own “mysteries” into which some of the most influential historical people, including Plato, Aristotle and Socrates, were initiated. The initiation rights of these mystery schools brought about personal transformation and enlightenment to the initiates.  Only those fully initiated into the inner mysteries will understand the full nature of the myths attached to the individual archetype of the Dying-Resurrecting God-man.

So much of this vital information concerning the mystery schools and the Dying-Resurrecting God-man have been obliterated. The early Roman Catholic Church did everything in its power to hide this knowledge by seizing, storing or burning the sacred texts of these past civilizations. It systematically destroyed Pagan sacred literature in a brutal program of eradicating the Mysteries – a task it performed so completely that today Paganism is regarded as a ‘dead’ religion.But these are the facts if we go back into ancient civilizations, ancient religions and the beliefs of the mystery schools. An the ‘hero with a thousand faces’ will live on, into the modern world with such archetypes are Superman, Luke Skywalker and Yoda.

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