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15th March 2008
Until the twelfth century, Christians took it for granted that Mary was conceived in original sin. Pope Gregory the Great said emphatically: ‘Christ alone was conceived without sin.’ Again and again, he said all human beings are sinful, even the holiest, with the sole exception of Christ.
On the eighth day of December 1854, Pope Pius IX, the first infallible Pope defined the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary in Ineffabilis Deus:
We declare, pronounce and define that the doctrine which liolds that the most blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instant of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful. This act of devotion towards the Mother of Jesus was also the most contrived political decision of any pontiff in recent times.
Later in the century H.P. Blavatsky noted the origins of Virgin Births:
HINDU
EGYPTIAN
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Litany of our Lady Nari: Virgin
Litany of our Lady Isis: Virgin
Litany of our Lady of Loretto: Virgin
Holy Nari—Mariama, Mother of perpetual fecundity
Holy Isis, Universal Mother
Holy Mary, Mother of Divine Grace
Mother of an incarnated God--Vishnu
Mother of Gods
Mother of God
Mother of Krishna
Mother of Horus
Mother of Christ
Eternal Virginity
Virgo generatrix
Virgin of Virgins
Mother—pure essence
Mother—soul of the universe
Mother of Divine Grace
Nari is conceived without sin
Isis is a Virgin Mother
Mary conceived without sin
Throughout much of its history, the Christian Church has taught that Jesus was conceived by the Virgin Mary by the action of the Holy Spirit, without sexual intercourse. This doctrine is usually called the virgin birth, although the term virgin conception would seem to be more accurate. This has long been one of the church’s foundational beliefs, along with the indisputable truth of the Bible, the atonement, resurrection, and the second coming of Jesus.
Liberal Christian churches typically teach that Jesus was conceived by Mary and Joseph normally.
• Other Protestant churches generally believe that Jesus was conceived by Mary and the Holy Spirit she and Joseph later had additional children.
• The Roman Catholic church teaches that Mary remained a virgin at the conception of Jesus, after his birth, and throughout her life. The "brothers" were in fact step-brothers fathered by Josef in a previous marriage.
• The Eastern Orthodox churches generally teach that Mary remained a virgin; Jesus’ "brothers" we in fact his cousins.
· The Baha’I World Faith and of Islam believe that Jesus
was conceived by the Holy spirit, and that Joseph and Mary had additional children later in their marriage.
· The Temple of the Christos teaches that Mary was based on the constellation of Virgo, Mother of the Universe, who births the light of the sun on December 25th . The Virgin Mary is the soul of the world diffused through all nature which Plato called, the Anima Mundi, the only vital force in the universe.
Biblical References of the Virgin Birth
· Isaiah 7:14
· ‘Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. the virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. "(NW)
· ‘Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. "(ASV) Matthew 1:23
· ‘The virgin shall be with child, and will give birth to a son, and they shall call him Immanuel which means, ‘God with us. ‘Luke 1:26-27
· In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendent of David The virgin ~ name was Mary. "(NIV)
· Now in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary. "(ASV)
Now if we logically look at the allegories and origins of Virgin Births in all myths and religions we discover that the prototypes of Mary, are the sister-wives of Sun-gods. It is in this context that we must understand certain virgin goddesses such as the Egyptian Isis, and the Greek Artemis, are both sisters of the Sun gods, Osiris and Apollo respectively.
The Virgin Mary is the Constellation of Virgo and the story of virgin births is the timeless allegory of Virgo giving birth to the Sun on the darkest night of the year, the 24th of December. If we follow the path of the sun we discover that towards the end of August the radiant Sun enters the celestial Virgo and places the seed of the new Sun in her to germinate the embryo of the new Sun, Horus, Apollo or Christ.
This phenomenon, which takes place every year in August, gave rise to Christmas, a festival which still exists, and in which it is supposed that the Mother of Christ, disregarding her earthly life, is associated with the glory of her son, and is placed by his side in the heavens. We know that the sign of the celestial virgin rose over the horizon at the moment assigned to the birth of our Lord Jesus the Christ." Christians may be reluctant to recognize Virgo as the Blessed Virgin. Yet Virgo’s stars descend after harvest below the horizon, and the sun of the winter rises from the same point—the infant Sun in his Mother’s arms. It is the birthday of the Christos who represents the Sun that is born in each and every one of us.
The story of the Virgin Mother Isis, giving birth to the Sun-god, Horus, which Christianity has so faithfully preserved, is a reminder of the inscription concerning Mary’s Egyptian prototype, Isis, which appeared on the Temple of Sais: The inscription reads "The fruit which I have brought forth is the Sun, Horus, son of Osiris, the Sun-god, was conceived of even though his phallus had been cut off by his brother Set, the dark, twin, aspect of Osiris. The cult of Isis became enormously popular in the Roman Empire. Romans called her the "eternal savior of the race of men. The transfer of part of the Isis myth undoubtedly took place in the 1st century A.D. "The image of Isis suckling her child Horus under the sacred tree of Hathor at Denderah," became the archetypal model for images of the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus.
lshtar is the Babylonian Mary, called Mother of the Fruitful Breast, Queen of Heaven, Creator of People, Guide of Humanity. lshtar was worshiped in Jerusalem where priests staged the time honored death and resurrection of her Sun-god lover Tammuz, Innana and Dammuzzi in Sumerian, whose Syrian name was Adonis. Ezekiel 8:14 Her breast offering pose suggested her function as the goddess of all nourishment. Eventually Christian writers belittled her Holy sexual character by calling her the ‘Whore of Babylon and Mother of Harlots (Revelation 17:5)
In mythology, Mary is a development of the goddesses: Isis, Hathor, lshtar, Aphrodite among others as depicted in the works of Plutarch. Her left the foot on land and the other in water to show her dominion over earth and sea. She is shown as the naked goddess with all her usual halo of stars, one breast was a moon, which figure was repeated on her pubis. Her right breast was a star, or sun pouring blessings on the world.
Isis and Hathor were the two major goddesses in Egypt. Hathor was called the mother of all gods and goddesses, who brought forth herself, never having been created. She was Queen of Heaven and her name was on every royal list in the earliest dynasties. Isis also existed from the beginning. She was goddess from whom all becoming arose. Both were said to have given birth to the Sun, Hathor as the Nile Goose, Mother of the Golden Egg, and Isis as the womb of Horus.
Aphrodite is Virgin of the Sea," Mare is Latin for sea is the root name of Mary, the Greek Goddess of ultimate sexual consummation, Aphrodite, whose primary sacred symbol is the dove, rose naked from chaos and danced on the sea, is worshiped in Syria and Palestine as lshtar or Ashtaroth. The dove was the primary symbol of female sexuality in India, the name of the Dove-goddess meant "lust." So vital was the dove symbol that patriarchal cults were constrained to absorb it, in many different ways. The holy Seven Sisters, called the Pleiades, or Doves, were originally born from Aphrodite, the goddess of Love, as "Queen of the Sea."
In a dream vision Mary sees a white dove descending from heaven and entering her body. The white dove was taken over by writers of the Gospels as a symbol of the Holy Spirit. They were assimilated by the Christian image of the Holy Ghost, a dove with seven rays emanating from it. Seven was the number of the goddess Sophia, the original Gnostic conception of the female Holy Ghost who descended on Mary at her impregnation. Sophia was shamelessly made masculine early in the Christian era but her dove, and all doves, were always called "she" even in Christian writings. Christian souls of saints flying to heaven were represented in the canonization ceremony.
The dove symbolizes the perfect purity of the Holy Spirit which the Church calls the "Immaculate" so that it was thought that the Holy spirit was incarnated in Mary’s body at the moment of the Annunciation. In this role, the dove was nearly always was shown in a way whose significance could not be mistaken. From the beginning of Christianity, this concept of the femininity of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin as one of its earthly manifestations was found in certain Gnostic sects; and this theme is explicitly stated in the apocryphal Gospel to the Hebrews. Speaking of Jesus’ temptation in the desert, this ancient work gives as Christ’s words:..."My Mother, who is the Holy Spirit, lifted me by my hair and took me from the desert to the high mountain in Tabor."
The great Christian doctrine of the virgin birth, if looked at logically, is similar to a series of divine births of both Hindu, Egyptian, Persian, Greek and Old Testament gods. In the Hebrew scriptures we have stories of the "wondrous births" in connection with Isaac, Samson and Samual. The Talmudic Moses has a virgin mother; Samuels mother became pregnant after receiving the divine seed.
Impregnation by angels was deemed holy and desirable. The Immaculate Conception represents such a union. Among the offspring of such human beings are: Buddha, Dionysus, Hercules,Christna, Theseus, Melchizedek, Plato, Apollonius of Tyanna, and Merlin the Magician. On the Greek side not only were the heroes of legend, Hercules, Theseus, Perseus, Jason and others believed to be the sons of divine fathers and human mothers, but the same legend reached down to more historical figures like Pythagoras and Plato, both of whom were sons of the sun-god Apollo.
Buddhists revived the ancient view that gods came down to earth from time to time in human or animal form. Indians call such an incarnation of an Avatar. Just as Buddha is said to have spent time in heaven before descending to earth, the Gospel according to St.John (8:58) speaks in its very first sentence of Jesus being an incarnation of the Word.. .the Word being God. Later according to this Gospel, Jesus himself maintains: Before Abraham was, I am.
The genealogical trees of Buddha and Jesus both point to royal origins. Joseph father of Jesus, had been Moses, and in an earlier lifetime the other Joseph son of Jacob. He was also David, so when the angel called David the Father of Jesus, he was quite accurate, for Joseph had been David.
Even the immaculate conception, and virgin birth are foreshadowed in Buddhism. Maya, the wife of King Suddhodana, father of Buddha, had a strange dream. A white elephant with six tusks and a lotus blossom in its trunk descended from heaven and slipped into her womb. Thus according to the legend, did Buddha consciously enter Maya’s body. The idea that virgin birth harmony with moral and spiritual purity, with the absence of sin, was thus already present in Buddhism. The elephant would have been abhorrent to the West if taken literally, so the elephant was transformed into a white dove. In the story of Hanna, Mary’s conception is described in a similar fashion to that of Buddha. Maya’s virgin state is treated in great detail in Buddhist texts.
Another Egyptian god, Ra (the Sun), was said to have been born of a virgin mother, Net (or Neith), and to have had no father.
In many other countries besides Egypt similar stories of the virgin birth of gods were told.
Attis, the Phrygian god, was said to be the son of the virgin Nana, who conceived him by putting in her bosom a ripe almond or pomegranate.
Dionysos, the Grecian God, was said in one version of the myth concerning him to be the son of Zeus out of the virgin goddess Persephone, and in another version to be the miraculously begotten son of Zeus out of the mortal woman Semele. He, according to this story, was taken from his mother's womb before the full period of gestation had expired, and completed his embryonic life in Zeus's thigh. Dionysos was thus half human and half divine, born of a woman and also of a god.
His myth, which was current long before the Christian era, is a remarkable example of the kind of story which could be, and was, invented about a man-god. He was said to have been persecuted by Pentheus, :King of Thebes, the home of his mother; to have been rejected in his own country; and, when bound, to have asserted that his father, God, would set him free whenever he chose to appeal to him. He disappears from earth, but re-appears as a light shining more brightly than the sun, and speaks to his trembling disciples; and he subsequently visits Hades. The story of his birth is alluded to, and the story of his persecution related, in "The Bacchae," which Euripides wrote about 410 B.C., when the myth was already very old and very well known.
Jason, who was slain by Zeus, was said to have been another son of the virgin Persephone, and to have had no father, either human or divine.
Perseus was also said to have been born of a virgin; and it is this story which Justin Martyr, the second-century Christian "Father of the Church," stigmatizes as an invention of the Devil, who, knowing that Christ would subsequently be born of a virgin, counterfeited the miracle before it really took place. |
