Happy Birthday Mithras!

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The True Meaning of December 25th

Happy Birthday Mithras!

By GARY LEUPP

 

The New Testament provides no specific date for the birth of Jesus.

If it occurred as the Gospel of Luke tells us, as shepherds were

watching over their fields by night, it probably wouldn't have taken

place in December. Too cold. So why do most Christians observe

December 25 as Jesus' birthday? The most plausible answer is that in

ancient Rome, as Christianity was emerging as a new faith, its

calendar was influenced by other up-and-coming belief systems

bunched together by adherents of traditional Roman religion

as "mystery religions."

 

One of these was the worship of Mithras, an Indo-Aryan deity (the

Mitra of Vedic religion, the Mithra of the Persian Avesta)

associated with the heavens and light. His cult entered the Roman

Empire in the first century BCE and during the formative decades of

the Christian movement was a formidable rival to the latter, with

temples from Syria to Britain. Given his solar associations, it made

sense to believe that he had been born on the darkest day of the

year, the winter solstice. That falls this year on December 21 but

the Romans celebrated the birth feast of Mithras on December 25,

ordered to do so by Emperor Aurelian in 274 CE. Christian texts from

325 note that the birthday of Jesus had come to be observed on that

same day, and the Roman Catholic Church has in modern times

acknowledged that the December 25 Christmas quite likely derived

from Mithraic practice.

 

Mithras, the story went, had been born of a virgin. Virgin-birth

stories were a denarius a dozen in the ancient world, so this

similarity to the gospel story isn't surprising. But Mithras was

also born in very humble circumstances in a cave, and upon his

miraculous birth found himself in immediate proximity to the bovine.

In his case, not mellow manger beasts but a wild bull. In the

Persian version of the myth, this bull had been the first creation

of Ahura Mazda, another, greater god of light. (Ahura Mazda, in the

history of Persian religion, gradually becomes conceptualized as

something like the Judeo-Christian God. But his worship in the

Zoroastrian tradition probably predates the Jewish conception of

Yahweh as universal deity. Quite likely the Zoroastrian conception

of God influenced the Jewish one.)

 

Mithras serving Ahura Mazda subdued the bull, confining it in the

cave, and later slaughteed it. The blood of the slaughtered bull

then generated vegetation and all life. This myth surely has

something to do with cattle-worship among ancient Aryan peoples,

which of course survives to this day in India. In Rome the Mithras

cult involved such rituals as drenching the Mithras devotee in bull-

blood, and having believers in secret ceremonies consume in the form

of bread and wine the flesh and blood of the fabled slaughtered

bull. A communion ceremony, if you will. Mithras died and was

entombed, but rose from the dead. In some accounts, he does so on

the third day.

 

The Mithras cult was affected by earlier religious traditions.

Anyone studying mythologies in historical perspective knows that any

particular god might have numerous connections across time and

space. The Sumerian fertility goddess Inana becomes the Babylonian

Ishtar becomes the Greek Aphrodite and the Roman Venus. Inana

grieving for her husband Tammuz, who had died after being gored in

the groin by a bull, follows him to the netherworld. There are

differing stories but in one she achieves his resurrection; in

another, the resurrection of both is accomplished by the god of

wisdom Enki, on the third day.

 

The Romans were very familiar with myths about virgin births, births

marked by celestial signs, gods born in humble circumstances,

newborn gods barely escaping death. The Mithras cult, arriving from

Persia in the first century BCE and popular among the Roman

soldiers, was accepted nonchalantly in a society which had its

devotees of Isis, who had rescued her brother-husband Osiris from

the netherworld; Attis, who immaculately conceived by Nana, was

gored by a wild boar but resurrected on March 22 (note the proximity

to Easter); and the gods of other mystery religions. When the

worship of Jesus Christ came along, spreading from Roman Palestine

to Jewish communities throughout the empire, and attracting non-Jews

as well, they added it to this exotic collection of devotional

options. The early Christians for their part were surely influenced

by beliefs and practices of other cults.

 

Many find insights and truths in myths. Joseph Campbell said

that "Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human

life." Sigmund Freud felt the stories of Oedipus and Elektra

illuminated human psychological development. But he regarded

religion as a delusion. Those suffering from the delusion see their

own myths as the definitive story, and resist any attempt to explain

those myths as derivative from or comparable to others. Thus the

Church Father Justin Martyr (ca. 100-65) in his Apologia (I, 66)

claimed that "wicked devils have imitated" the Christian communion

ceremony "in the mysteries of Mithras, commanding the same thing to

be done. For, that bread and a cup of water are placed with certain

incantations in the mystic rites of one who is being initiated, you

either know or can learn." He noted the obvious similarity between

Mithraic and Christian practice, and probably realized that the

Mithraic rite long preceded the Christian one. But he could not

acknowledge Christian borrowing. The Mithraic practice was devilish,

while the Christian sent down directly from God and bearing no

relation to previous earthly ones was holy.

 

The Eucharist is one thing. It is mentioned in the gospels and in

Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, where it's referred to

as "the Lord's supper." So even if it reflects Mithraic borrowing,

it at least has scriptural authority. It's based, the believer

knows, on God's Word dictated down through the power of the Holy

Spirit into the pen of the inspired scribe. But Christmas celebrated

on December 25 is a completely non-Biblical tradition, and realizing

that, various Christians over the centuries have actively opposed

its observance. The Puritans controlling the English Parliament in

the 1650s outlawed it, ordering churches closed and shops open this

day. In Plymouth, Massachusetts, a law passed in 1659

stated, "Whoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas

and the like, either by forbearing labor, feasting, or any other way

upon such account as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall

pay for each offense five shillings as a fine to the country."

 

The use of Christmas trees to mark the occasion has often come under

attack. What does a pine tree have to do with the birth of Jesus?

Nothing, but it has a lot to do with Attis, into whose temple in

Rome each March 22 a pine tree would be carried and decorated with

flowers and carvings. Its entry into Christian practice probably

comes from Celtic and Germanic pagan customs; the Druids in Britain,

for example, used evergreens in connection with winter solstice

rituals. The Norse god Odin hanged himself on the yew tree named

Yggdrasil, pierced by his own spear, to acquire wisdom. There is a

legend that in the eighth century St. Boniface, who converted the

Germans to Christianity, found pagans worshipping an oak tree sacred

to Thor, and when he had it cut down there sprouted in its place a

fir tree that he took as a sign from God. But the practice of

bringing such trees into the home only began in Germany during the

Reformation in the sixteenth century, with encouragement, according

to legend from Martin Luther. German Hessians brought the custom to

America during the Revolution, but it did not become popular until

the nineteenth century and even by 1900, only one in five U.S.

families had one. The majority came to do so during the next two

decades.

 

Holly? Used in Druid and Germanic winter solstice rituals. Yule log?

More Druidism. Christmas stockings? Well, no paganism there. Legend

is St. Nicholas (Santa Claus is from the Dutch Sint Niklaas), bishop

of Myrna (in what's now Turkey) in the fourth century and a very

kindly man, discretely dropped pouches of coins down the chimney of

an impoverished nobleman's home. They miraculously dropped into

stockings hung there to dry by his several daughters who needed

dowries to marry. The point is, all these customs are the products

of an explainable human history.

 

So too, the beliefs that produce the holiday. The babe born of a

virgin, in a stable, heralded by an angelic host, visited by Magi

(Persian Zoroastrian astrologers) following a star, targeted for

death by an evil king. None of this would have struck the average

Roman as entirely original, but the vague familiarity of the stories

may have lent them credibility. It appears that the Christian

movement, highly diverse in the first few centuries, was able to

incorporate narratives and practices from other traditions into

itself that gave it a comparative advantage by the early fourth

century. In 313 Emperor Constantine legalized and patronized the

faith. Soon thereafter an already formidable empire-wide

administrative apparatus merged with state power, and heresies and

paganisms were outlawed and largely suppressed. But Christianity

continued to incorporate new influences such as the above-mentioned

Christmas practices. Few Christians (or others) nowadays know of

Mithras, but today much of the world unwittingly celebrates his

birth.

 

My wife and kids and I as usual have up a beautiful tree, honoring

not only what's allegorically worthwhile in the Jesus story but in

the host of innocent paganisms that fell victim to official

Christianity. I've always seen the tree, intruding as it does into

the inner sanctum of the Christian home, as paganism's quiet

revenge. So here's a glass of wine, raised in honor of the hero of

the day, transforming eucharistically even as I partake. Happy

birthday, Mithras! As the days grow longer and the nights grow

shorter, we thank you, Sun God, for the miracle of photosynthesis

you performed to bring us this sacred tree. We thank you for the

promise of springtime, which we have faith will arrive without fail,

as the landscape predictably dies and resurrects year after year.

And we thank you for shining century after century over our

delusional imaginations.

 

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct

Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants,

Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male

Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and

Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-

1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle

of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.

 

He can be reached at: gleupp

http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp12242005.html