Ancient World Review

The Early History Of The Christian Fish Symbol

"The Greek word for fish is 'ichthys.' As early as the first century [see below], Christians made an acrostic from this word: Iesous Christos Theou Yios Soter, i.e. Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior." Source: Christianity Today. "...Greeks, Romans, and many other pagans used the fish symbol before Christians. Hence the fish, unlike, say, the cross, attracted little suspicion, making it a perfect secret symbol for persecuted believers."

Note:  There's some uncertainty about when Christians first started using the ichthys or fish symbol. For example, the video above and the Christianity Today article state that the Christian use of the symbol goes back to the first century AD, but Wikipedia makes it sound like it didn't become popular until much later:

"The first appearances of the ichthys symbol in Christian art and literature date to the 2nd century AD. The symbol's use among Christians had become popular by the late 2nd century, and its use spread widely in the 3rd and 4th centuries."

Fish symbols and other Christian art have been found in Roman catacombs used as burial places by early Christians. Most sources date these finds to the third or fourth century. Fish symbols from the first century have supposedly been discovered, but I haven't been able to verify this.

"According to art historian Clara Erskine Clement, 'The paintings of the catacombs date from the third and fourth centuries after Christ. The catacombs, or burial-places of the early Christians, consist of long, narrow, subterranean passages, cut with regularity, and crossing each other like streets in a city ... The reason for their being in these underground places was that Christians were so persecuted under the Romans, that they were obliged to do secretly all that they did as Christians, so that no attention should be attracted to them." Source: History of Painters. Note: This same article also states that "The Fish is a very early Christian symbol found inscribed upon the walls of the Catacombs from the first century."

According to church tradition, early Christians used the fish symbol as a clandestine recognition-sign during the first-century persecutions under Nero, but it's possible that this persecution never actually happened. The story that Nero blamed the Christians for the Great Fire of Rome (64 AD) is based almost entirely on two sources - Tacitus and Suetonius -- and the authenticity of the relevant passages is still a matter of contention. Even if the martyr stories set in the first-century aren't true, however, there's no doubt that the fish symbol was later used by Christians in the centuries leading up to their official recognition.

As mentioned above, the fish symbol predates Christianity. It was being used by the pagans for hundreds of years before the new religion appeared, but it has surprisingly Christian overtones:

"The symbolism of the fish itself may have its origins in pre-Christian religious imagery. For example, Orpheus was described as a 'fisher of men' as early as the 3rd or 4th century BC. The fish was used as a symbol in a number of other near-eastern religions as well, often as a sacred (or taboo) food. The fish was sacred to the goddess Atargatis, for example, who was said to cause tumors in those who ate them. Fish were only allowed to be eaten by priests during rituals devoted to Atargatis, in the belief that they represented her body." (Wikipedia)

The pre-Christian ichthys is a very old symbol with roots in ancient fertility religions:

"Well before Christianity, the fish symbol was known as 'the Great Mother,' a pointed oval sign, the 'vesica piscis' or Vessel of the Fish. 'Fish' and 'womb' were synonymous terms in ancient Greek,'delphos.' Its link to fertility, birth, feminine sexuality and the natural force of women was acknowledged also by the Celts, as well as pagan cultures throughout northern Europe. Eleanor Gaddon traces a 'Cult of the Fish Mother' as far back as the hunting and fishing people of the Danube River Basin in the sixth millennium B.C.E." Source (admittedly biased): GodlessGeeks.com.

Demonizing The Gods In Jewish & Christian Thought

"Polytheistic deities had started to be perceived as demons already from the Second Temple Period, well before the establishment of Christianity as the chief religion of the Roman Empire. This is what Polish independent scholar Aleksander Michalak suggests in his ongoing new study The demonization of the Gentile Religion in Jewish and Christian Thought." Source: Archaeology News Network (2013).

Note: The argument here is based on the study of "several Second Temple Jewish works (1 Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, Joseph and Asenath, Testament of Job) as well as Christian texts of both canonical and non-canonical character (Paul's 1st Epistle to the Corinthians, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs)." According to Michalak, these writings suggest that some Jewish and early Christian writers saw the pagan, i.e. Gentile, gods as either demons or the outward representations of demons.

Comment: It's not too surprising that early Christians already viewed the pagan gods as demons. This outlook didn't suddenly come into existence when Christianity became the official religion of Rome. It should be pointed out, though, that the early Christians believed in demons (as do a lot of modern Christians). In other words, they believed that these demons were real. In fact, an argument can be made that Christianity in all of its various forms is itself a polytheistic religion since it believes in a hierarchy of supernatural deities ranging from Satan to demons and angels and a tripartite god, not to mention all of its miracle-performing semi-divine figures like the saints and the Virgin Mary.

As for Judaism, it was originally a polytheistic and animistic religion itself, according to the Jewish Virtual Library. The early Jews practiced animal sacrifice and magic, for instance, and worshiped "graven images" like the Golden Calf in the Bible. These tribes were pagan themselves until the rise of the Yahweh Cult and in the beginning Yahweh was still in competition with foreign gods until after the Babylonian exile. That's the traditional history, anyway, and it's not surprising at all that Christianity, which is presumed to have originated as a Jewish sect, would have inherited the Jewish hostility towards other gods. This intolerance led inevitably to the Christian war against paganism which destroyed the classical world once the Christians got their hands on secular power.

Human Sacrifice In Iron Age Europe

Notes: "Around a hundred bodies have been found in ... Irish bogs to date, some male, some female, and those of children too. Some were thought to be there by accident, perhaps as a result of falling into the bog and drowning. Others were considered to be formal (and some not so formal) burials, and others appear to be rather more sinister." Source: Irish Central.

The ritual sacrifice dramatized in this video shows the execution of Old Croghnan Man, a bog body currently on display in the National Museum of Ireland, which, among other things, has an exhibit called Kingship & Sacrifice. According to the museum's website, "The exhibition is centred on a new theory that connects human sacrifice with sovereignty and kingship rituals during the Iron Age. Research has indicated that other material connected with these rituals include: items of regalia; items associated with equestrian [horse] procession; weapons; feasting utensils; boundary markers; items associated with corn and milk production, such as quern stones and butter deposits known as ‘bog butter’."

One possible human sacrifice from this period is known as Tollund Man, "a naturally mummified corpse of a man who lived during the 4th century BC, during the period characterised in Scandinavia as the Pre-Roman Iron Age. He was found in 1950, preserved as a bog body, on the Jutland peninsula. The man's physical features were so well-preserved that he was mistaken at the time of discovery for a recent murder victim. Twelve years before Tollund Man's discovery, another bog body, Elling Woman, had been found in the same bog." (Wikipedia)

I think this describes Tollund Man, but I'm not sure.

"Scholars tend to agree that Tollund Man’s killing was some kind of ritual sacrifice to the gods—perhaps a fertility offering. To the people who put him there, a bog was a special place. While most of Northern Europe lay under a thick canopy of forest, bogs did not. Half earth, half water and open to the heavens, they were borderlands to the beyond. To these people, will-o’-the-wisps—flickering ghostly lights that recede when approached—weren’t the effects of swamp gas caused by rotting vegetation. They were fairies. The thinking goes that Tollund Man’s tomb may have been meant to ensure a kind of soggy immortality for the sacrificial object." Source: Smithsonian.

"'At an appointed time all tribes meet ….. in a forest consecrated by their ancestors, surrounded by fear, sacred from the dawn of time. There, on behalf of those assembled, they celebrate the commencement of their barbaric cult with a human sacrifice.'

"This is how the Roman historian Tacitus described the situation among the Semnones, a Germanic tribe, in the 1st century AD. This could provide the explanation of what happened to the woman from Huldremose, Tollund Man and Grauballe Man. More than a hundred bog bodies have been found in Denmark, which date from the period 800 BC to 200 AD. The cause of death has only been established in a small number of cases, where people have been strangled, hung or had their throats cut. Like the woman from Huldremose, the bodies were carefully placed in a bog afterwards, which points toward a sacrifice or another ritual act rather than an attack." Source: National Museum of Denmark.

Closed captions helpful.

"For Europeans dating as far back as the Neolithic period 6,000 years ago, bogs were both resources and possibly ominous supernatural portals, according to Ulla Mannering, an expert in ancient textiles at the National Museum of Denmark." Source: National Geographic (2014).

"The bogs' peat, which could be burned for heating homes, was valuable in tree-scarce Denmark, and an ore called bog iron was made into tools and weapons.

"Among prehistoric people, 'when you take things, you also offer things,' said Mannering.

"This may be why the Danish villagers would deposit 'gifts' of clothes, old shoes, slaughtered animals, battered weapons, and, for a period of 500 years, people into the black abyss of the bogs. (Related: 'Medieval Christian Book Discovered in Ireland Bog.')"

Bring Back The Medieval Witch Hunts

"Researchers at the University of Dundee have recreated the face of an 18th-century 'witch' who died in jail before she could be burned for her 'crimes'." Source: Archaeology News Network (2017).

"Lilias Adie, from Torryburn, Fife, died in 1704 while held in prison for her 'confessed' crimes of being a witch and having sex with the devil."

Comment: This isn't ancient or medieval history, but I can't resist posting stories involving sex with the devil. If this reconstruction is accurate, Lilias Adie looks like she was a sweet old grandma, which just makes the wicked old trollop's behavior all the more shocking. But never mind that. Reading her tragic story made me think, in my usual roundabout way, that it's about time to bring back the medieval witch hunts.

Witchcraft, at least in a watered-down, New Age, politically-correct and feminazified form, is alive and well in the modern world. Witchcraft is now a brand, according to Buzzfeed (2017) in an article about how "entrepreneurs [have blended] a passion for the occult with an understanding of e-commerce to capture a share of the new economic activity surrounding witchcraft." Magic, it seems, is a hot market these days:

"The owner of one such business, Goddess Provisions, said her customer base has grown from 300 subscribers to almost 6,000 in the last year and a half."

The goddess who runs this online store sells everything from crystals to aromatherapy, superfood snacks and spiritual growth tools, and her customers are undoubtedly a pack of rabid Third-Wave feminists who see themselves as being oppressed by the non-existent patriarchy. I have no evidence to back this up, but I imagine that the majority of them are -- among other things -- suffering from extreme forms of Post Trump Stress Disorder.

Video from Feb. 2017.

"'Witches are everywhere these days,' says the introduction to Basic Witches, 'a cheeky how-to book about witchcraft published in August [2017]. At Catland [an occult boutique in Brooklyn], along with candles, pheasant feet and little jars of mouse bones, you can buy the beautifully produced feminist witchcraft magazine Sabat, whose covers feature black-and-white photos of gorgeous girls looking like pensive pop stars. There are a surprising number of magical paraphernalia subscription boxes. 'Why the Witch Is the Pop-Culture Heroine We Need Right Now,' said the headline of a recent piece on New York Magazine’s Vulture site, part of its Witch Week Halloween series." Source: New York Times (2017).

May the Great Cthulhu save us all from this plague of modern witches and neopagans in general.

It's amazing that in the 313 years since Lilias Adie died in a Scottish prison after her confession -- three centuries that saw the rise of modern science and technology -- witchcraft has become a widespread, public, relentlessly left-wing and completely legal subculture with a thriving market for witchy products like mouse bones and pentagram pins. These feminist witches and white-magic practitioners are kind of boring, though. Maybe some of them dabble in curse spells and the like, but you'd be hard pressed to find any modern equivalents of Wizard Whateley in The Dunwich Horror or the evil sorceress Queen Taramis in Conan the Destroyer. As far as I can tell, modern witchcraft is more of a pose and a fashion statement than anything else.

Back in Lilias Adie's time, people took witchcraft seriously. Guilty or not, that's why she was in prison. The modern witchcraft brand, if nothing else, shows how much Christianity has degenerated over the centuries. Many modern Christians still believe that witches are real, but they're not inclined to do anything concrete about it. These days, even the most fundamentalist congregations have succumbed to creeping liberalism. For instance, they would never even think of actually going out and burning one of their local goddesses at the stake. That's too bad, if you ask me. Granted, it's hard to take these modern witches very seriously, but considering how obnoxious they are a revival of the medieval witch hunts would not only be a positive benefit to society, but highly entertaining.

What we need is a New Inquisition. The Catholic Church has become a squalid viper's nest of corruption. pederasty and Cultural Marxism, so the responsibility would fall on the shoulders of fundamentalist congregations around the world. Modern witches aren't hard to locate; most of them have Facebook and Twitter pages and so on. Once the New Inquisition Intelligence Service identifies them, it could dispatch howling mobs with torches to burn down every upscale witchcraft boutique they could find and round up all the Goddesses and Pop-Culture Heroines they could get their hands on. Teenage girls with a pack of Tarot cards, Goth chicks wearing pentagram necklaces, shady characters like this little girl -- no one would be immune from prosecution except for Elvira. They would all have to stand trial, preferably by ordeal:

The guilty could then be disposed of humanely, just like they were in the Middle Ages:

"In England and New England Witches were hanged; elsewhere the most common form of execution was burning. Burning, by the way, didn't mean being burned alive. If you recanted (admitted you'd made a mistake and were sorry), you were killed beforehand, and then your body was consigned to the flames. Nobles were beheaded, commoners were hanged -- being burned alive was an extreme and unusual punishment except in Spain and Italy where the Inquisition did regularly burn people alive." Source: Summerlands. (Firefox is giving me an Untrusted Certificate warning about this site, but it's probably OK.)

Witches weren't always executed. Sometimes they were banished, imprisoned or forced to do penance. The executions, when they occurred, were usually public because they were thought to be valuable "teaching tools," which I'm sure they were. The religious courts handed the condemned over to the secular authorities in order to keep the church's hands clean, but in the modern world I suppose the New Inquisition would have to do the dirty work itself. I imagine a lot of people out there would object to this, but look at it this way: The executions would not only rid us of all these LARPING New Age witches, but they would be good for the tourist economy wherever they took place:

"Executions were popular events. The largest had thousands of attendees, who often traveled many miles to see the deaths. Crowds were so large that the Inquisition would sometimes erect bleachers, so that everyone could see and hear." (Summerland)

Bring back the medieval witch hunts. It's just a suggestion.

Sanctuary To Mithra Discovered In Corsica (2017)

"Archaeologists working in the ancient Roman city of Mariana on the French island of Corsica have unearthed the ruins of a sanctuary of a cult of Mithra. This is a surprising find as it is the first example of the mysterious religion known as Mithraism having been practiced on the island." Source: Ancient Origins (2017).

"IB Times reports that the discovery was made by French archaeologists in November 2016. The team from the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) was called in to check the site before roadwork began."

Related: The Cult of Mithras (BBC4 documentary).

Is It Possible To Live An Iron Age Life In The Modern World?

Comment: Many groups including experimental archaeologists have tried to replicate the lifestyles of prehistoric and medieval cultures. Some of these groups, like the one in the 1978 BBC documentary, Living In The Past, have spent various lengths of time living under past conditions, but they always ended up returning to the modern world with its undeniable conveniences and labor-saving devices. And who can blame them? After all, these were just temporary experiments. But what if a group of modern "neopagans" actually tried to do this for real? What would happen?

Most people living in the modern West would die like flies if they were suddenly transported back to the Iron Age and couldn't return after a few weeks or months. Just staying alive back then was a full-time job in itself, at least for most of the population, and it must have been precarious, but despite all the hardships life couldn't have been too harsh, at least not all the time, or no one would have survived.

Let's say that a group of modern "pagans" decided to start living like this full-time. They could band together, form an agricultural co-op or something, buy some land and return to an Iron Age way of life, building their own shelters, making their own clothes and tools, growing and hunting their own food. To be truly authentic, their community should be based on solid archaeological evidence, which means, for one thing, that they would have to dispense with their idiotic and ahistorical New Age "religions." 

Real pagans were agrarian and they practiced blood sacrifice. They didn't live in cities and drive out to Stonehenge a couple times a year to get loaded and dance around like Hollywood Apaches to the beat of drum circles while the cops kept an eye out for drunks and dope dealers. I've written several posts on this site mocking the "pagans, Druids and pantheists" who swarm over Stonehenge for every solstice and equinox, but I can understand their alienation from Christianity and the modern world.

Modern pagans have a serious problem. There's very little evidence about how people lived back then and what they believed, so the modern pagan has to make it all up and the result is usually ludicrous. This got me thinking about what an authentic neopagan movement would look like and two basic requirements came to mind. First of all, as I've already said, real neopagans should toss out everything that isn't backed by solid archaeological evidence. Second, they should drop out of the modern world and go back to living in the Iron Age like the people in this video did. Note: They couldn't recreate a Stone Age hunting and gathering existence for obvious reasons.

They would have to live like this all the time, though. There would be no going back. They would essentially have to live like Iron Age farmers and, given enough time, some of them might actually figure out how to survive as clans, living in many ways like the modern Amish. Even if they did, though, they would still be surrounded by the modern world and there would be no way to escape it entirely. They would have to pay taxes on their land, for instance, so they would need to set up small businesses or something.

And that's the catch. There's no way to escape the overpoliced total state in the modern world. Not completely. These neopagans would be anachronisms, psychologically modern humans living an Iron Age life in the center of a decaying, post-industrial civilization. Keeping their communities going at that point would probably be even harder than learning how to feed themselves and stay warm in the winter.

It could be done, but the first generations would be in for a shock and a lot of them would drop out very quickly. Living without electricity is one thing, raising your own food another, but to be truly authentic, they couldn't use modern medicines or hospitals and the women would have to give birth naturally out there in the woods. There would be sickness, malnutrition, deaths. Their children couldn't go to modern schools. The dead would have to be buried right there on the land--something that could be done here in the States as recently as the the middle of the 20th Century, but which is probably illegal now. The list of problems goes on and on, but this biggest problem is this:

The modern state would never allow people to live like this. An authentic Iron Age life is impossible in the modern world because we have lost too much freedom.

Note: The rest of this documentary can be found here.

2018 Stonehenge Winter Solstice Celebrations

Comment: I've written a lot of scathing posts about these mobs of so-called pagans who swarm all over Stonehenge for the equinoxes and solstices, but I'm too apathetic this year to crank out another long screed mocking them for their improvised rituals, costumes, drum circles, and all the other New Age anachronisms they indulge themselves in during these gatherings. What the hell. I guess they're not doing any harm as long as they don't completely trash out the site like they've done in the past. (More here.) After all, Stonehenge may have been, among other things, an ancient cemetery.

These winter-solstice events should include feasts, however. According to English Heritage, "[t]he winter solstice may have been more important than the summer solstice for the people who built and used Stonehenge. Excavations at Durrington Walls suggest that people held huge feasts around this time of year."

The events should probably include sacrifices as well, both animal and human, though the evidence for sacrificial rituals at Stonehenge is apparently still kind of sketchy. According to The Daily Mail (2015), "animal sacrifice, feasting, dancing, and religious rituals" were conducted on the Salisbury Plain around the monument, and National Geographic reported in 2009 that "evidence that Druids possibly committed cannibalism and ritual human sacrifice—perhaps on a massive scale—add weight to ancient Roman accounts of Druidic savagery."

According to Caesar, "the Gauls are extremely superstitious; and so persons suffering from serious diseases, as well as those who are exposed to the perils of battle, offer, or vow to offer, human sacrifices, for the performance of which they employ Druids. They believe that the only way of saving a man's life is to propitiate the god's wrath by rendering another life in its place, and they have regular state sacrifices of the same kind." -- Caesar, The Conquest of Gaul [VI.16].

Modern neopagans are too civilized for that kind of thing, however, which is the main reason they can never be real pagans. I have a feeling that most of the people in these gatherings would run away screaming if they ever found themselves in the presence of the ancient gods of Stonehenge.

Why Was This Man Sacrificed At Stonehenge?

Video from 2014.

Both Julius Caesar and Strabo recorded instances of human sacrifice conducted by the Celts and Druids.

According to Strabo, "the Romans put a stop [to the customs] connected with sacrifice and divination, as they were in conflict with our own ways: for example, they [the Celts] would strike a man who had been consecrated for sacrifice in the back with a sword, and make prophecies based on his death-spasms; and they would not sacrifice without the presence of the Druids. Other kinds of human sacrifices have been reported as well: some men they would shoot dead with arrows and impale in the temples; or they would construct a huge figure of straw and wood, and having thrown cattle and all manner of wild animals and humans into it, they would make a burnt offering of the whole thing..." Source: Celtic Studies Resources.

Caesar reported that "those [the Gauls] who are greatly affected by diseases and in the dangers of battle either sacrifice human victims or vow to do so using the Druids as administrators to these sacrifices, since it is judged that unless for a man’s life a man’s life is given back, the will of the immortal gods cannot be placated." (Ibid) Caesar also described how the Celts would burn human sacrifices in giant wicker effigies, the apparent origin of the Wicker Man legend. Whether this actually happened or not is a matter of debate. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he main evidence for this practice is one sentence in Julius Caesar's Commentary on the Gallic war, which modern scholarship has linked to an earlier writer, Poseidonius."

This 1973 classic is available on Amazon.

Happy Yule, Saturnalia & (Maybe) Mithra's Birthday From The Ancient World Review

Christmas is a classic example of how the early church Christianized the pagan West by taking over its traditions.

"The Christian ecclesiastical calendar contains many remnants of pre-Christian festivals. Christmas includes elements of the Roman feast of the Saturnalia and the birthday of Mithra. The Chronography of 354 AD contains early evidence of the celebration on December 25 of a Christian liturgical feast of the birth of Jesus. This was in Rome, while in Eastern Christianity the birth of Jesus was already celebrated in connection with the Epiphany on January 6." Source: Wikipedia.

Christmas traditions have deep roots in the ancient pagan world. Take the Christmas tree, for instance. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "The use of evergreen trees, wreaths, and garlands to symbolize eternal life was a custom of the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, and Hebrews. Tree worship was common among the pagan Europeans and survived their conversion to Christianity in the Scandinavian customs of decorating the house and barn with evergreens at the New Year to scare away the Devil and of setting up a tree for the birds during Christmastime. It survived further in the custom, also observed in Germany, of placing a Yule (1) tree at an entrance or inside the house during the midwinter holidays."

(1) "... the word Yule has several suggested origins from the Old English word, geõla, the Old Norse word jõl, a pagan festival celebrated at the winter solstice, or the Anglo-Saxon word for the festival of the Winter Solstice, 'Iul' meaning 'wheel'. In old almanacs Yule was represented by the symbol of a wheel, conveying the idea of the year turning like a wheel, The Great Wheel of the Zodiac, The Wheel of Life. The spokes of the wheel, were the old festivals of the year, the solstices and equinoxes. " Source: The White Goddess

 Also see The Symbols of Yule.

In Rome, the period of the winter solstice brought the seven days of the Saturnalia. "Saturn’s great festival, the Saturnalia, became the most popular of Roman festivals, and its influence is still felt in the celebration of Christmas and the Western world’s New Year." (Encyclopedia Britannica).

"The Saturnalia was the most popular holiday of the Roman year,"  according to the University of Chicago. Catullus describes it as 'the best of days' ... and Seneca complains that the 'whole mob has let itself go in pleasures" ... Pliny the Younger writes that he retired to his room while the rest of the household celebrated ... It was an occasion for celebration, visits to friends, and the presentation of gifts, particularly wax candles ... perhaps to signify the returning light after the solstice, and sigillaria."

Everything in Rome came to a stop during the Saturnalia, a festival of licentiousness and role reversals, among other things. According to History Extra, "We say that during Christmas today the whole world shuts down – the same thing happened during the Saturnalia. There were sometimes plots to overthrow the government, because people were distracted – the famous conspirator Cataline had planned to murder the Senate and set the city on fire during the holiday, but his plan was uncovered and stopped by Cicero in 63 BC."

Some Christians see the Saturnalia (and, by extension, Christmas itself) as satanic, which isn't too surprising since Christianity demonized all of the old pagan gods while simultaneously hijacking many of their traditions for their own purposes. In one case, that of Mithra (Mithras) -- the early church's main competitor -- the Christians may have appropriated a pagan god so completely that some have argued that Christ is Mithra in another form.

The identification of Mithra's birthday with Christmas is sketchy. While many sources claim that the god was born on Dec. 25, other sources say that this isn't true and the story seems to be a much later invention. For instance, according to Wikipedia, "It is often stated that Mithras was thought to have been born on December 25. But Beck states that this is not the case. In fact he calls this assertion 'that hoariest of 'facts'. He continues: 'In truth, the only evidence for it is the celebration of the birthday of Invictus on that date in the Calendar of Philocalus. Invictus is of course Sol Invictus, Aurelian's sun god. It does not follow that a different, earlier, and unofficial sun god, Sol Invictus Mithras, was necessarily or even probably, born on that day too.'" 

Mithra was said to have been born from a rock (in one version of the story) According to The Mysteries of Mithra, by Franz Cumont (p 131), "the tradition ran that the 'Generative Rock,' of which a standing image was worshiped in the temples, had given birth to Mithra on the banks of a river, under the shade of a sacred tree, and that shepherds alone, ensconced in a neighboring mountain, had witnessed the miracle of his entrance into the world." Like the story of Jesus's birth, the presence of shepherds in the fields suggests that Mithra was born in the spring or summer, not in the dead of winter. Whatever the case, however, the Jesus/Mithra connection is persistent in popular culture:

Related: Sol Invictus and Christmas

One interesting fact about Mithraism is that it appeared (in the Roman empire) around the same time that Christianity appeared and seems to have dropped out of sight around the same time that Nicene Christianity became the official state religion of Rome. "The Roman deity Mithras appears in the historical record in the late 1st century A.D., and disappears from it in the late 4th century A.D.," according to The Tertullian Project. It's tempting to see this as circumstantial evidence that Christianity evolved out of Mithraism, but the truth is that all forms of pagan religion began to fade out after the church consolidated its power in the 4th century. Besides, very little is actually known about the teachings of Mithraism, an "organization of cells," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised), whose beliefs have to be reconstructed mostly from inscriptions.

None of this really matters, though. Mithras probably wasn't born on Dec. 25, but then neither was Jesus so what difference does it make? The connections between Christmas, ancient Yuletide celebrations and the Roman Saturnalia are clear, so if you're a pagan you might as well go ahead and celebrate Mithra's birthday today as well. Of course, this assumes that you see Christmas as a religious holiday in the first place. A lot of people don't:

"Most Americans celebrate Christmas, but its importance to people as a religious event continues to wane, according to a new survey by Pew Research." (News & Observer, 2017).

"The poll found that while 90 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas, only 55 percent regard it as a religious holiday. Further, the survey found, a decreasing majority of Americans believe in the main elements of the Christmas story as told in the Bible: that Jesus was born of a virgin mother; that three magi came to visit, bearing gifts; that an angel announced the baby’s birth; and that the infant was cradled in a manger."

Christmas has become secularized and increasingly commercial, to say the least. The holiday has degenerated into a month-long orgy of rabid consumerism and mass insanity, a typical example of the decline of the modern world. (Video from 2018)

Personally I have mixed feelings about Christmas. I'm not a Christian, for one thing, and I can't stand what the holiday has become, but traditions are important, especially now that all of our western traditions are under relentless attack by the Cultural Marxists. 

So Merry Christmas and if that offends you I couldn't care less.

There Are More Witches Than Presbyterians In America

"Witchcraft is thriving in the US, with an estimated 1.5 million Americans now identifying as witches - more than the total number of Presbyterians. As Christianity declines across the country, paganism [1] has swung to the mainstream, with witchcraft paraphernalia for sale on every high street and practises normalised across popular culture. In the past two years, it has also become darkly politicised." Source: The Telegraph.

[1] Modern witchcraft isn't real paganism, of course. It doesn't even come close. That's obvious when you look at who these witches are.

"...Witchcraft is powerful," according to Dakota Bracciale, a "29-year-old transgender/queer witch," because of the 'intersectionality of feminism, sexuality, gender, the fight for freedom, eschewing the patriarchy and having sort of a vitriolic response towards it'".  I'm not quite sure what that means or what it has to do with witchcraft, but it's the kind of thing I'd expect to hear from somebody who recently tried to put a hex on Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh.

We've come a long way from the days of the witch Circe, who changed Odysseus's men into wild animals, and the river hag Jenny Greenteeth, who "would pull children or the elderly into the water and drown them," just for the fun of it, apparently. The ancient and medieval worlds had all sorts of fantastic witches, proper witches with dark powers, witches you could actually be scared of. All we have is Dakota Bracciale and a bunch of LARPing SJW types who prattle on about heterosexism and positive healing energies. That's a symptom of social decay right there.

The fact that there are now more of these so-called witches than Presbyterians in the US must be particularly embarrassing for the Presbyterians, but it isn't very surprising. The denomination has gone through a bewildering number of schisms over the years and its membership has been in decline for a long time, mostly due to its liberalism. In general, liberal churches are dying and conservative churches are thriving.

This is all a symptom of the collapse of the West into the Third World.

Related: Ancient Witchcraft in the Modern World (AWR)