I'm thinking that the Aryan (Irano-Afghan) words Khwar "Halo" which is sometimes mentioned conjointly with Airyana "the holy land of the Aryans" in the Avesta, and Gerezda (fatty oil associated with immortality) or maybe a later form had folk-fused together and this is where the Christening ritual really originated.
Oy! We were talking about the thoroughly non-religious non-ceremonial practice by women of rubbing a soft greasy stuff commonly called "cold cream" nowadays, to soften their skin or remove earlier layers of face paint; how it got to be called by the same name as a dairy product; and why Frenchmen sometimes spelled the word for the dairy product with an "s" that wasn't originally there. Shipley said the Turks got
khorozma "cold cream" from the Greeks (they first encountered the Greeks in the 1050's) and that this word got mixed up with the
cranum "cream" word in France; this makes perfect sense to me. You proposed instead that the Turks named cold cream after
Khorasan "Afghanistan" which made no sense to me at all. The Turkish word has an "m" in it (otherwise it would not have gotten mixed up with "cream") like the Greek
chrisma and not "n" like in
Khorasan or "d" like
gerezda; but now you are telling me that they threw all those words into a blender-- and then stepped into a time machine to go back three thousand years with their cold cream, and this is how Mideastern kings and priests of 2000 BC got the idea to rub something of greasy consistency, but totally different ingredients, which they called by a totally dis-similar Semitic word
m-sh-ch, onto their heads.
Well why did Christians start drinking blood?
Jesus told them to break bread, remembering how his body was broken, and to drink wine, remembering how his blood was spilled; they were never to forget that he had been put to death gruesomely, and had accepted this voluntarily. This is the very core of Christianity, and Zoroaster (who died peaceably in bed at a ripe old age) has absolutely zero to do with it.
It would help if you could confirm this [the use of "chrisis aleiphon" in Aristophanes].
The Perseus site has an enormous library of ancient Greek texts, and a bunch of search tools which I am having a terrible time figuring out how to use. I can sometimes get as far as a list of texts in which particular words occur, but only that once with the "Aretaeus of Cappadocia" text (about rubbing oils on head injuries, and smaller doses on head colds) did I manage to get to where it showed me the particular line. I'll keep trying to figure out what I did. Anyhow, I searched
chrisma (the form that means "the stuff that you are rubbing on" as in the source for Turkish
khorozma) and I got that it comes up once in Aeschylus (the oldest preserved dramatist, from the first generation to meet Persians: "Ask the Mede whom I brained at Marathon what kind of man I was!" is on his tombstone), but not where or in what context; and once in Lucian (2nd century AD) with an indication that in that text it was something smeared after plastering a wall, that is, a "varnish" of some kind.
What I just cannot get you to seem to understand is that it is a PERFECTLY ORDINARY AND NATIVE WORD in Greek. It got used to translate a ceremonial meaning from the Hebrew, but it hadn't carried any such freight before they met Jews, and didn't always carry any such special meaning afterwards either. The only association with anything Iranian is that Greek and Iranian are both Indo-European languages, so roots from Proto-Indo-European commonly show up in both languages, as words which differ from each other by a regular pattern of sound-shifts, resulting from the thousands of years of separation.
Yes yes of course. And there are also the people who want to believe that Christianity was a product of the Jews too.
For the very simple reason that IT WAS.
The only difference is that for centuries Christian scholars themselves have been pointing out that the principles fundamental to Christianity including ideas like "God," "angels," "the Devil," "demons," "the Messiah," "the Word Incarnate," "the Soul," "Kingdom of God," "Heaven," "Hell," "the Resurrection," and "Judgment Day" were all derived from the Aryans (Irano-Afghans) and not from the Indians or the Jews or any other non-Iranian (Aryan) source.
Only a handful of those concepts ("angels" and "demons" and "hell") are Zoroastrian, and Christianity only has them as they were filtered through the Jews.
There are few alternatives.
We have waiting 5,000 years to come to know these things.
Centuries of subjegation by cultures of conquering tribes raoming the country sides as finally allowed for objective research of the cultures that spread out from the world's furtile cresent areas.
Well, while talking to mojo I have Googled a lot of sources talking about the "Aryans", and found a lot of Hindu-chauvinist sites giving their slants. I find some good points in the websites that consider the whole "Aryan invasion" story a myth: they point out that the story has changed a lot over the years. At first, the 19th-century racialists had it that India was full of "savage darkies" who didn't know anything until the "superior Aryans" (white, and no doubt blond and blue-eyed before they got mongrelized) came in to share the blessings of civilization. But then, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were discovered, and the story got completely reversed: now it was the Dravidians who were civilized, and the Indo-European invaders were nomadic horsemen from the steppes, no better than Huns or Mongols, trashing the cities. Then, the geology of the Sarasvati came to be understood: it was a mighty river once, then an intermittent river that sank underground in places and re-emerged (hence the notion that it communicated with the otherworld, like the similarly intermittent and therefore sacred river
Alpheus in Greece) before becoming the minor stream it is now. So now the story looks like this: the Indus Valley civilization mostly fell victim to climate change, rather than violence (although there was certainly some warfare in the later more desperate stages, the cities had been losing population for a long time, not as one grand sack-and-slaughter); the Indo-Europeans migrated into the Sarasvati as that valley become unsuitable for agriculture but good for animal-herding, while the northern steppes that they were coming from were getting bad even for animal-herding. Perhaps further knowledge will alter the story further, but I think the picture is getting a little clearer now.
There are some points that the Hindu-chauvinists just don't want to grapple with. One is
the homogenization of the castes: supposedly, they don't interbreed; the fact is, it looks like they have interbred thoroughly over time. That is, trace a high-ranking Brahmin and a lowly Sudra back a thousand years or so, and in both ancestries you would find, not just a mix of high-ranking and low-ranking ancestors, but just about the same proportions of high and low rank in both cases. We can compare this to the genetic finding about Britain (there was a thread about this somewhere on this board): it turns out everybody on the island is more-or-less half-and-half Saxon and Celtic, maybe 60/40 in favor of the Saxon among "English" people and 40/60 the other way among the "Welsh" and "Scottish"; in Ireland (south of Ulster) they are almost all Celtic, but there too it is discernable that "Celtic" itself meant a mixture of the Indo-European newcomers with an "Iberian" population from before. Hardly ever do "migrations" of nations really take the form of invasion, mass slaughter, and total replacement; rather, infiltration and admixture. In India, there is a "haplotype" (genetic variant) found with double-digit percentage in the north, single-digit percentage in the south, which is common in Europe but unknown in Tibet, Burma, or further east. That would be the "Indo-European invasion": but there is no sudden drop-off in frequency at the border between Indo-European and Dravidian languages; and it is not a majority anywhere; the people now living in India are mostly the descendants of the people who lived in India before.
The second point that Hindu-chauvinists don't like to grapple with is that India was
a relative late starter. The Harappans were practicing agriculture by the third millenium BC, which is a long time ago (and certainly longer than the 19th-century racists were willing to credit India with), but that is well after Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China. On the websites I constantly find claims of absurdly early dates for this, that, or the other: and there never turns out to be any basis for these dates, except wishful thinking.
And the third point that Hindu-chauvinists don't like to grapple with is that
the Vedas really aren't all that profound. These texts have been faithfully recited for long generations by priests who often have little clue of what the words mean, like the stereotyped priest of medieval Christendom who knew no Latin and, trying to repeat exactly what his predecessor said, turned the communion bread into the body of Christ by chanting
Hocus pocus, dominocus! (it was supposed to be
hoc est corpus Domini "this is the body of the Lord") Sanskrit scholarship in India was actually in a very sorry state until the Europeans started asking their awkward questions. But now that we can recover the meanings of the earliest texts, we find that, like the oldest layers of the Old Testament, they have a lot of Bronze Age tribalism and brutality in them, mixed with some beautiful poetry and flashes of insight, but really of lesser philosophical quality than what was written in India during later periods.
