The birth of love

It has been almost universal in religious mythologies that love brought truth out of falsehood…light out of darkness…order out of chaos. In Egyptian literature is the concept of love being divine and overcoming all things. In Babylonian literature love is always stronger than death and overcomes all things. “The inability to give love…or receive love…is insanity” wrote Dr. Karl Menninger of the world famous Menninger psychiatric center.

Where…when…how did this sublime experience enter the human heart?

Thousands and thousands of years before Jesus was born or the bible was written, love filled human hearts and dreamed of immortality. Maybe even a million or more years ago, perhaps on an African savannah at the dawn of humanity, an ancestor stood, staring into space past a new grave…and a first tear filled eyes.
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Easter…the goddess

The word “Easter” does not appear in the entire bible. The word was not Christian, and was not even used in church literature until late in the church’s history. “Easter” is the name of the goddess of the spring. Hundreds of years before Jesus was born, the spring festival was celebrated honoring “Easter”, the goddess. The church borrowed the festival and kept the goddess’ name.

Even older than Easter as the goddess of the spring was a much wider worship and adoration of her as the goddess of the dawn. In our language the root of “Easter” is “East”, the place of the dawn. In nearly all the languages of Northern Europe the words for Easter come from a root meaning the dawn.

Three thousand years before Jesus was born, poetic and pious Hindus kindled their morning fires, made their morning sacrifices, and sang their morning song of praise to the goddess of the dawn in ancient India. Many scholars consider the “hymn to the dawn” as among the finest of the Vedas. How they praised her, reborn in beauty in every dawn, coming with radiant face to drive away the darkness and its dangers and arouse all creatures to the joys of another day.
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Mythological continuity

Anthropologists and religious historians estimate that in the last 150,000 years, since Neanderthal times, there have been at least 100,000 distinctly different religious traditions. Religions do not just pop into existence. They are a spin off from preceding cultures and they borrow, steal and plagiarize from the preceding culture and reuse the material to suit their own purposes. For instance, scholars know today that the Old Testament names of the Hebrew patriarchs had been around for 1000 years prior to Hebrew Old Testament times. Scholars know today that nothing in the Gospels is historical or biographical but is legend and folklore and a perfect example of mythological diffusion or mythological continuity. None of the writers of the Gospels knew Jesus personally. No biblical scholar in any major university would deny this.

As Carl Jung writes: “The Osiris myth was clearly superseded by the Christ myth. This is one of the finest examples of mythological continuity.” The Osiris myth, in the beautiful trinity of Isis and Horus, lasted for 4500 years in Egypt. Even 500 years after the death of Jesus, Christians used to worship in Alexandria before statues of the virgin mother Isis suckling her divine child in a stable.
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