Did the 3 Magi Represent a Break From Judaism?

[mojobadshah]

That was an interesting post, Mo. It seems quite plausible to me.

I have no idea what the World Egg is or originates. I will do some searches.

Mardi Gras seems to have come from ancient Romans Their mid-February festival known as Lupercalia honored the god Lupercus, alternately known as the god of fertility and the god of agriculture and pastoral shepherds.

In my ancestral Celtic lands it comes near the time we called Imbolc. IMBOLC is celebrated February 1-2 (later transformed into CANDLEMAS by the church, and popular now as Groundhog Day). IMBOLC marked the beginning of spring, the beginning of new life (in Britain the beginning of lambing season). Dedicated to the ancient mother goddess in her maiden aspect, it was later transformed into a feast day for the Irish saint of the same name (and attributes), St. Brigid. This precedes Easter which in Christianity and Celtic Paganism is a Fertility Festival.

BEALTAINE (BEALLTAINN in Scots Gaelic, meaning May Day), celebrated April 30-May 1. This is the third festival of the agricultural year. The myth surrounding this festival is common to many ancient pagan religions. The god, BEL (or CERNUNOS, the horned god of Ireland) dies but is reborn as the goddess' son. He then impregnates her ensuring the never-ending cycle of rebirth. This is very basic FERTILITY worship. May Day traditions includes young people picking flowers in the woods (and spending the night there), and the dance around the May Pole, weaving red (for the god) and white (for the goddess) streamers round and round. A great bonfire celebrates the return of the sun. In Ireland, the first bonfire was lit on Tara by the High King followed by all the others. On May Day itself, the Highland tradition has the entire community leading the cattle to summer pasturage, not to return until Samhain.

I think Christians may have invented Easter from pagan origins but made it a celebration of the death of the Christian God Jesus and his rebirth in 36 hours. The rebirth of Jesus does have a fertility aspect. The natural world that died in Winter is resurrected by the third Spring festival.

That would make sense. According to M.L. West in Indo-European Poetry and Myth (pg. 329) "The number nine, or by augmentation thrice nine, occurs often enough in Indo-European religious contexts to suggest that it was a traditional sacral quantity."

The Cosmic Egg or World Egg is at least a Greco-Aryan concept. Hellen of Troy was born in a Goose Egg. The Indo-Iranians believed the world was shaped like an egg. (see Geiger)

There's no doubt it also celebrated fertility. 9 months after the Vernal Equinox or around the Winter Solstice is how long it would have taken a child to be born. If that helps.

But I can't shake the whole Dae Mah "Creator Month" phenomenon. I'll explain why: there are 6 main festivals or Jashans in Zoroastrianism (I figure regardless of how the months fell these festivals would have been celebrated around the same time each year).

The first Jashan, Farvardinagan celebrated the Fravashis and would have fell during a Farvardin Month of about 30 days around the Vernal Equinox. If I'm not mistaken the words Farvardinagan and Fravashis "souls" are akin to words like Sun and Sol (which begs the question is the word Soul akin to the word Sol), but I do see the February and fever connection too.

Two months of around 30 days Ardwahisht and Hordad fell next.

The second Jashan, Tirigan, celebrated Tishtrya "the rain" a variation of the deity Sirius. The Egyptians attributed the Dog Days of Summer, the hottest days of the year, around the Summer Solstice to their version of this deity the "Dog Star." Tirigan must have also fallen during a Tir Month of about 30 days on the Summer Solstice.

Two months of around 30 day Amurdad, Shahrewar, fell next.

The third Jashan, Mehrigan celebrated "Mithra", and must have fallen during a Mihr Month of about 30 days around the Fall Equinox, because Mithra "sun" and Mihr "sacred fire" was important during this dark time of the year.

Two months of around 30 days Aban, Adar fell next.

And the fourth Jashan, Dadvah or Dae celebrated the creator and would have fallen during a Dae Mah of 30 days around the Winter Solstice.

That's probably where the Cult of Deo Soli Invictus and Mithraists got the birthday for their creator, and in turn Christmas its.

 

[mojobadshah]

No on 1: a loving God is a concept found elsewhere also.

Where else is this concept found?

And are you sure angels are a Zoroastrian derived? What about the angels that appeared to Abraham and Moses and the cherubim and seraphim?

 

[bob x]

I accept that religions diverged from common origins.

Sometimes there is gradual evolution; sometimes there is abrupt creation. Mormonism did not "diverge" from Christianity: its novel books and ideas were all the creation of Joseph Smith.

Iranian Proto-Zoroastrianism tended to separate itself from Hinduism by regarding Hindu gods as evil.

Zoroaster created a totally new religion, despising the old.

It is still a common practice in Christianity and Judaism to demonise older gods when new gods were invented, especially after military conquests. Christians made Satan/Lucifer into a de facto evil God as a way of invalidating Angra Maingu, Ariman, Lir, Poseidon, Manannan, and Balor.

Angra Mainyu, from which Ahriman is the eroded form in later Persian, means "evil-tempered spirit" (angry mind gives the English cognates of the two roots here); he was never an "older god" but a new invention by Zoroaster, as the antagonist to the good god, and never anything else. Why you are listing completely irrelevant sea gods in connection with Satan/Lucifer is a mystery to me: the medieval picture of Satan/Lucifer was, indeed, as you say, largely intended to invalidate a still-popular older god, but the god in question was the Horned God Cernunno whom you left off your list.

I do not claim that western Indo-Europeans were into the Zodiac Myths. I do not think that the Celts were.

They divided the year into 8 parts, rather than 12 (equinoxes and solstices plus the mid-points Beltane, Lughnasa, Samhain, Imbolg).

Yes, Indo-europeans did not build Stonehenge, Newgrange, Skara Brae, the dolmens, the standing stone circles, and other burial mounds that incorporated alignment of light openings to correspond to solstices. Molecular Biologist Genetic scientists have shown that we Irish and Scots are genetically not very Indo-European. We are most closely related by DNA to the non-Indo-European Basques.

Here, you are giving correct information.

Your ignorance surprizes me.Aed Álainn (Aed means fire, álainn means beautiful or divine)...
Dagda is indeed the main "Father of the Gods" but in some regions Aed Alainn is a different name for the Father of the Gods. They are the same god by a different name. The origin of Aed Alainn is interesting because he was originally the God of Fire (Divine Fire or Aed Alainn.) Tir Alainn is the old word for Heaven.

Try Googling "Aed Alainn" and see if you can find anything. It looks very much to me as if you have derived it from some book whose author coined the name himself. Mind you, it appears to be a well-formed Gaelic phrase (although, like Avestan, Irish is not one of my languages): aed is "ritual bonfire"; al- is a very ancient root for "up" (going back before Indo-European to the distant common ancestor of Indo-European, Semitic, and other "Nostratic" groups, see Hebrew 'al "[preposition] on top of; [adverb] up", root of 'elyon "supreme; uppermost" as a divine title); and [vowel]nn is a common genitive-case ending as in Dail Eireann "Parliament of Ireland"; but I just can't find that anyone ever used that phrase "fire of above", let alone personalized it as a deity-name. Neither was Tir Alainn "country of above?" the Celtic notion of where paradise lay: that was Tir nan Og "country toward the west" (Og as in Latin occident "sunset; west"). The notion that blessed dead go "up to the sky" was never part of the Celtic ideology; as in many other cultures, the blessed dead went instead to where the sun disappears.

I find that interesting and coincidental that Moses believed that Yaweh was a burning bush and archaeologists have said that Yahweh was originally a Semitic God of Fire.

A god of metal-workers; of course metal-workers need hot fires, but it is not quite the same idea.

You are confusing the Arthurian Legend of the 11th Century. Lyonesse was a fictional place.

Quite the contrary, the place was real enough; the land between Brittany and Cornwall indeed was above water well after human occupation. The stories set in Lyonesse are not likely to contain much valid information, to be sure, but the former existence of the place was an accurate memory.

Celts were not there at the end of the Ice Age.

But, as you said above, the Celts didn't move in and slaughter all the natives to replace them completely; rather, they were a conquering aristocracy absorbed into a larger pre-existing population, and the information which the previous inhabitants retained was not all lost either.

I agree on Dis Pater which is Greek.

The name, at least, is a Greek borrowing; the concept, however, that the "first man" equals the "king of the dead" is not.

Cernunnos was the antlered god of the Celts also called Cern or Hern in Britain. I think he was the god of the sacred forests and protector of nature from man's fouling it up.

Cairn means ROCK PILE. He was the god of the mountainous country.

Some regarded him as a messenger god

He was a protector of travellers, which could include messengers, but I don't think "messenger god" is a very good description.

but Lir was the major messenger god or Holy Ghost. The god of the sea equivalent to Poseidon or Neptune was Manannan Mac Lir (Manannan the son of the god Lir.)

Lir and Mannanan were both sea gods, of separate origins; so they were given a genealogical connection. I have no idea whatsoever where you get this notion that Lir was ever a "messenger" or "holy spirit" of any kind.

I must correct you. Lugh or Lug was the Sun God and "father" of humanity.

No, he was not at all the father of humanity. Where do you get this?

He was part of a Trinity that included the Earth Goddess Brigit and the Moon goddess Danu.

??? The word brig means FORT; with the suffix it is "she of the forts". The root dan means "river", all the way from Ireland to India. And your "trinity" here is just another example of your habit of grabbing three names at random.

Obviously, Lugh had a father too.

Whose name was Cian, the son of Dian Cecht.

True, but for some reason human superstition seems to be obsessed with magic numbers and for whatever reason likes 3, 7, and 12.

"3" only occurs because it is a small number; sets of "2" (sacred pairs) occur more often, "4" about at the same frequency, "5" fairly often as well.
"7" is the approximate number of days in the quarter-phase of the moon. "12" is the approximate number of lunar months in the seasonal year.

Crikey, you are way off base on this. Brigit was the Earth Mother and fertility goddess. Natural springs and rivers came from her and her springs heal people. Later Christians replaced her with the Virgin Mary.

No, they did something much simpler: there was an early Christian convert of that name, so they proclaimed her "Saint Brigit" despite not knowing much of anything about her life, and transferred the cult of the old goddess to the cult of the saint. There are many similar cases.

In no way was she a warrior. Danu was the Moon Goddess and her festivals were associated with Moon cycles. The warrior goddess was a third Trinity of goddesses, Babd Catha, Morrigan, and Anu. She was the Battle Raven, the beautiful seductress, and the Old Hag.

Anu the Maiden, Dana the Mother, and Babd the Hag do indeed form a set of three, which you can justly call a "trinity" (that is, those three were definitely associated with, and sometimes identified with, each other, not just three names chosen at random). But THESE are the goddesses associated with rivers, well-watered country, fertility etc. (not Brigit, who was a defensive warrior-goddess). Morgan was from the set of FOUR deities associated to the cardinal points: the name is cognate to German Morgen, English morning, and she was the "east" deity, along with Samhir of the west (compare German Sif of the harvest season, Greek Zephyr the west wind) and Bolg of the north (German Buri, Greek Boreas), and I forget the Celtic form of the "south" deity (German Surt, Greek Sirius, Indic S'urya).

Bollocks and rubbish! I know we had religions many hundreds of millennia before Moses, Zoroaster, or Paul invented the current idiotic gods you worship.

What do you mean "you"??? I'm an atheist, if you haven't noticed.

I never agreed with the Tea Baggers saying that the Constitution was based on the bloody Bible.

But your pretence that every ancient religion was essentially identical to Christianity is the same kind of anachronistic back-projection.

WRONG AGAINThe Mithraic bishops wore a mithra, or miter, as their badge of office which was also adopted by early Christian bishops. During a mass, Mithraists commemorated the
ascension of the sun-god by eating a mizd, a sun shaped bun
with the sword (cross) of Mithra. The mass and the communion
wafer were likewise adapted to Christianity. The Roman
Catholic mass wafer has maintained this sun shape for over a
thousand years
The Pagan Origins Of Christian Mythology | RM.com

It amazes me how you people hang on to discredited superstitions for so long despite being clearly idiotic.

Amergin

This is all PUREST FABRICATION, derived from a site which doesn't even PRETEND to have any sources other than the author's fertile imagination of how things "must" have been. I have criticized mojobadshah for using a mix of scholarly and raving-lunatic sources, and not having the sense to distinguish which are which-- but you use raving-lunatic sources exclusively. Since the romantics of the 18th century, there has been a thriving cottage industry in making up "paganisms" which pretend to have derived from ancient Celts (or wherever) but have no relationship to anything that existed prior to modern times; you swallow all this stuff completely uncritically. And here, you are swallowing a made-up version of Mithraism which doesn't even trace back to Cumont's 19th-century invented version, but apparently was made up just the day before yesterday.

 

[bob x]

And are you sure angels are a Zoroastrian derived? What about the angels that appeared to Abraham and Moses and the cherubim and seraphim?

The text doesn't have "angels" appearing to Abraham and Moses, but rather "men of God". It is more reasonable to interpret them as "prophets"; in the post-Persian period, the interpretation that these were spiritual creatures of some kind became common, but I think that is an innovation in response to the Zoroastrian conceptions, and not faithful to the original underlying tradition.

The kherubiym and seraphiym were "griffins" (Greek gruphon, Latin griffin are from Aramaic kheruviyn with the plural ending -iyn misinterpreted as part of the root) and "dragons" (root s-r-p is "to burn", especially of a snake's venom) respectively. When Mesopotamian astrology was first established ~2000 BC, the equinoxes and solstices were not Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn but rather Taurus (the bull), Leo (the lion), Scorpio (perceived as a bird of prey rather than a scorpion in some parts of the Mideast), and Aquarius (the servant), so the "kherub" animal (from an old root k-r-b "to regulate the calendar" as in makrab "high priest" in Sheba, and Makoraba, later broken up as Makkah Rabbah "Mecca the great", the solstice observatory in Arabia) had the hind-parts of a bull, the fore-parts of a lion, an eagle's wings, and the face of a man. The Egyptian "sphinx" was a variant with a falcon's beak in place of the eagle-wings (the Great Sphinx is probably missing its nose because it was cantilevered too far out and broke off early). The North Pole at that time was not in Ursa Minor, but in the constellation Draco (the dragon): thus the "kherub" represented the Zodiac and seasonal changes, and the "seraph" the unchanging circumpolar stars.

 

[mojobadshah]

The root k-r-b meant something like "to regulate the calendar": found in Hebrew keruwbiym rendered "cherubim" in English but these creatures were not cute bare-butt baby boys, rather the same as Aramaic kruwviyn source of Greek/Latin griffin, a compound animal of bull, lion, eagle, and man representing the four corners of the Zodiac and thus the yearly cycle of seasons; also in Makoraba (as Ptolemy spells it), the sacred well on the Tropic of Cancer where the sun is straight overhead (so that it shines all the way to the bottom of the well) only at the summer solstice, the name being re-parsed in Arabic as Makkah Rabbah "Mecca the Great", also called al-Mukarima.

If Ptolemy called this anomaly Makoraba and -koraba is rooted in k-r-b then what does the ma- prefix mean?