Note 8 — Chapter I · THE BEGINNINGS

The Christist cult gained ground not because there was anything new either in its dogma or in its promise, but on the contrary because these were so closely paralleled in many pagan cults: its growth was in fact by way of assimilation of new details from these. Step by step it is seen to have adopted the mysteries, the miracles, and the myths of the popular Gentile religions. The resurrection of Jesus is made to take place like that of Mithra, from a rock tomb; and to the sacred banquet of twelve represented by the Last Supper there is added, in the fourth gospel, an episode which embodies the common pagan usage of a sacred banquet of seven.8 In the way of miracle the Christ is made to turn water into wine, as Dionysos had been immemorially held to do; he walks on the water like Poseidon; like Osiris and Phœbus Apollo he wields the scourge; like the solar Dionysos, he rides on two asses and feeds multitudes in the desert; like Æsculapius, he raises men from the dead, gives sight to the blind, and heals the sick; and like Attis and Adonis he is mourned over and rejoiced over by women. Where the parallel is not exact we still find pagan myth giving rise to Christian; for the fable of the temptation is but a new story told of the oft-copied ancient Babylonian astronomical symbol in which the Goat-God (the sign of Capricorn) stands beside the Sun-God—a scene turned by the Greeks into the myths of Pan leading Jupiter to the mountain-top, of Pan or Marsyas competing with Apollo, and of Silenus instructing Dionysos.9 Above all, the Christ had to be born in the manner of the ever-cherished Child-God of the ancient world; he must have a virgin for mother, and he must be pictured in swaddling-clothes in the basket-manger, preserved from immemorial antiquity in the myth of Ion and in the cult of Dionysos, in which the image of the Child-God was carried in procession on Christmas day. Like Horos he must be born in a stable—the stable-temple of the sacred cow, the symbol of the Virgin Goddess Isis, queen of heaven; and the apocryphal gospels completed the pagan parallel by making the stable a cave, the birthplace of Zeus and Mithra and Dionysos and Adonis and Hermes and Horos.10 Prudence excluded the last detail from the canonical gospels, but it became part of the popular faith; and the Christ’s birthday had been naïvely assimilated by the populace to the solstitial birth-day of the Sun-God, December 25, long before the Church ventured to endorse the usage.