Freethought Nation

Be sure to read my blog post on this subject:

ISIS IS A VIRGIN MOTHER!!!

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Why suffer from Egyptoparallelophobia, when you can read Christ in Egypt? Try it - you'll like it:

Discussed at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ANE-2/message/14799

They are oblivious on the virginity topic over there.

"The Pyramid Texts speak of "the great virgin" (Hwn.t wr.t) three times 682c, 728a, 2002a"

"In a text in the Abydos Temple of Seti I, Isis herself declares: "I am the great virgin"

- Christ in Egypt, page 152,

* Pyramid Texts are 4,400 years old


I'll just re-post some images GA had posted elsewhere in the forum:

Pyramid Texts: "Great Virgin"

Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, Volume 2, pg.338-339:

"The Pyramid Texts speak of "the great virgin" (Hwn.t wr.t) three times (682c, 728a, 2002a..."





Plate 9 "In a text in the Abydos Temple of Seti I, Isis herself declares: "I am the great virgin"

- Christ in Egypt, page 152

from this post







The glyph translations were taken from Budge's dictionary.

GA's original post

Maiden, Damsel, Pure, Chaste = synonyms for VIRGIN





GA: "Maiden in Faulkner's Pyramid Texts DOES necessarily mean virgin, as this maiden cannot copulate and only got pregnant through non-sexual supernatural means."

From GA's original post

Virgin - What does it mean? Hebrew definition and scriptures

ISIS IS A VIRGIN MOTHER!!!

Neith, Virgin Mother of the World

For what it's worth, here are some images for Isis-Meri







From here and here.

Other images here.

Below is a video clip of modern Egyptologist Dr. Bojana Mojsov admitting parallels between Osiris &/or Horus with Jesus. And, at 5:30 you'll see a stone carving of Isis as she hovers over Osiris in the form of a bird to receive the divine seed (notice there's no 'member') of Osiris. Mojsov then says, "It's a miraculous birth of the savior child."


'Osiris...begetting a son by Isis, who hovers over him in the form of a hawk.'
(Budge, On the Future Life: Egyptian Religion, 80)

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2013 Astrotheology Calendar
The Mythicist Position
Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection
Stellar House Publishing at Youtube

The questioner certainly came across as just seeking to have his/her bias affirmed. The person also didn't get the whole deal of variant traditions across history, none being any more "canonical" than the others, when asking what text refutes Isis being a virgin. There is none. There are simply versions that use sex and some that don't. They do not neutralize each other. Yet both still existed for later generations to borrow from, such as the Christians.

^Many thanks FTL, this material is excellent. I have responded as follows at the FRDB

^ Thanks to GodAlmighty (GA) for those images and a very special thanks to Acharya for performing the ridiculously difficult task of writing Christ in Egypt in the first place.

I'm reminded of these significant threads:

Tom Harper, Ward Gasque & Christ in Egypt

Rebuttal to historian Dr. Chris Forbes

Religion and the Ph.D.: A Brief History

P.S. I'm really looking forward for some new videos by GodAlmighty whenever he gets around to it. We've got nobody making videos at this time now that we've lost our dear friend Allan - Vega/Spaceagebachelor.

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2013 Astrotheology Calendar
The Mythicist Position
Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection
Stellar House Publishing at Youtube

Thanks, Robert, FTL and GA.

I'm frankly gobsmacked that grown adults cannot comprehend this issue. Do they really believe that the Jews just came up with the idea of a "virgin mother" on the spot, or that it really happened as "history?"

Such a ludicrous debate. The evidence is there: The ancients possessed the concept of the Virgin Mother Goddess eons before the motif was utilized in the gospel tale.

Let us also not forget that this motif can be found in the Mahabharata, a number of times, in fact, including as concerns the legendary author of that text.

The Virgin Mother Goddess motif represents a number of phenomena, including the parthenogenetic creation of the universe, naturally deemed to have been done via the female, since the ancients were clever enough to comprehend that it is women who give birth.

Again, the concept is not difficult to comprehend.

As I also stated in Christ in Egypt (142) - it would be much simpler if all these great minds just read my book - this motif can also be found in the myths of the Sumerians, as with the goddess Anat, who is both mother and virgin. The bottom line is that the gospel writers most assuredly did not come up with the concept of a virgin mother.


Also, we have an entire thread on this discussion of the Virgin Birth, with more evidence.

Parthenogenesis was a common mythical motif in antiquity, dating to thousands of years before the common era. It was not suddenly come up with by the writers of the gospel story; nor did it happen in reality to a historical Jewish savior 2,000 years ago.

P.S. Note that I use PRIMARY SOURCES and the works of credentialed authorities from relevant fields, such as, in this case, Egyptologists.

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Why suffer from Egyptoparallelophobia, when you can read Christ in Egypt? Try it - you'll like it:

A quick word of caution- the "great virgin" of the Pyramid Texts specifically is an anonymous character, and James P. Allen's glossary to his translation says it is in reference to Nut, Isis & Osiris' mother.

But there are other sources for Isis already mentioned here, so we're still good. The mention of the pyramid texts just establishes that the motif did exist back then.

Also don't forget that the goddesses were often syncretized, and Nut has been surmised to have been identified with Neith, she of parthenogenetic fame who in turn was syncretized with Isis.

Hence, the inscription at the temple of Sais, of which Proclus's rendering in Greek (21E) is:


My very literal translation of this inscription is as follows:


I discuss Neith, Isis and Sais, etc., extensively in Christ in Egypt, 144ff, etc.

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Why suffer from Egyptoparallelophobia, when you can read Christ in Egypt? Try it - you'll like it:

Thanks GA, some good dry powder from Hornung. Old Tekton Jeff is digging himself quite a hole here.

Here is a comment I have just posted in response to the delightful spin. Note link to Witt.

Although somewhat hesitant to engage with this mildly splenetic response from spin, I feel obliged to defend the connection between Mary and Isis. This material touches on some deep culture wars, both ancient and modern. I hope responses can steer away from emotional diatribes that fail to engage with evidence.

The ancient culture war can be seen in the description of religious change given by Robert Graves in his Introduction to the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology. Graves argues that a recurring theme in religious politics is that the myths of conquered societies attain ongoing life in subordination to the dominant mythology of the conqueror. We can see this process in operation in the gradual emergence of Christianity to its dominant position. The mythology of Egypt persisted for thousands of years until the successive conquests from Syria, Greece and Rome destroyed it. However, one of the beauties of myth is that very old stories have an inherent power by their very durability, having stood the test of time and proved their utility.

The archetype of the virgin mother, from Neith, Hathor and Isis, provided a fertile seed bed from which the Mary cult could draw. But an important part of Christianity was its intense misogyny, linked to an alienated supernatural monotheism in which all spirituality is controlled by a single patriarchal sky father. This meant that rather than seeing Mary as equal to Jehovah, as Isis was equal to Osiris, Christianity had to find a new way to recognise feminine spirituality. Placing the Isis virgin mother trope into the historical fiction of Jesus of Nazareth was the solution, while giving a clear nod to the Egyptian antecedents in the Lazarus story, and in the queen of heaven myth with her cosmic crown of twelve stars.

In the Bible, John gives new life to Osiris by lightly concealing him as Lazarus, while also giving Mary and Martha the same role as the Egyptian Mertae, Isis and Nephthys. As Massey argued, the structure and names of the two myths are too similar to be unconnected. Christianity borrowed the myth from Egypt.

The modern culture war relates to theosophy and fascism. Gerald Massey was hostile to theosophy because he thought it was too speculative and magical and lacked the basis in evidence that he saw as central. Massey wanted to place comparative religion within a scientific framework. However, the popular appeal of Madame Blavatsky and her theosophical followers meant that Massey was crowded out of the picture. Christians had been fuming since their defeat at the hands of Charles Darwin. But theosophy, and anything associated with it, was a much easier target than the science of evolution. So the cultural war over religion saw the church suffering a strategic defeat at the hands of science, but compensating with a small tactical victory over the recrudescent hermetic magic of theosophy. In the process, writers such as Massey were crunched.

The use by theosophy of the swastika symbol, and the appropriation of this symbol by Hitler, was the last straw. Theosophy faced a suspicion of association with extreme right wing racist views from which it has not recovered. We can see how this broad cultural politics meant that academic sympathy for theosophy, in an environment dominated by the success of the hard sciences, would be seen as irrational. Even more, the Nazi link gave theosophy an odor of the illiberal, reinforcing the disdain in which such material was held in the universities.

Against this framework, the work of Massey and others like him was quietly neglected, but never answered or refuted. Mainstream Egyptology has preferred instead to pursue safer empirical topics rather than the philosophical problem of the relation between Egyptian thought and Christianity. Just as Christians say the Christ Myth Theory has been refuted, but can never say exactly where, spin says Massey is obsolete but neglects to engage with his actual information about Isis. As I quoted above, Massey asserts that “In the “discourse of Horus” to his Father at his coming forth from the sanctuary in Sekhem to see Ra, Horus says, “I have given thee thy soul, I have given thee thy strength, I have given thee thy victory, I have given thee thy two eyes (mertae), I have given thee Isis and Nephthys”, who are the two divine sisters, the Mary and Martha of Beth-Annu (Records, vol. 10, p. 163).” I have no reason to think Massey is misquoting his cited source, but assuming it is accurate, he provides here an Egyptian text in which Horus, Osiris, Isis and Nephthys have the same respective roles as Jesus, Lazarus, Mary and Martha.

Massey goes on to explain how the association between Isis and the throne appears as Mary sitting at the feet of Christ, while Nephthys’ position as a home goddess is recapitulated in Martha’s role as servant. You can read the other parallels in my long quote from Ancient Egypt The Light of the World above. I am happy to take Massey’s text here as reliable. If anyone wants to check his source be my guest. I cannot see why he would give this reference (Records vol 10) if others could not seek to falsify it. Others who have looked into this material (Kuhn, Harpur, Murdock) have strongly backed the argument. My internet searching shows that criticism is only from Christian apologists.Perhaps it is better not to wear emotional commitments so transparently upon your sleeve spin. The description of my ideas as “shit” reflects a lack of comprehension. It reminds me of Freud’s dream of Jung as upwelling mud. Scholarship has narrow irrational boundaries, as we see in the exclusion of Christ Mythicism. The exclusion of new age cosmology through hand-waving appeals to irrelevant comparisons to excrement says more about the excluders than about the material that is excluded.

The question of what constitutes “reasonable source materials” in this field is hotly contested. Already in this thread a range of ancient sources have been cited only to be dismissed with airy ignorance. Part of the culture war here is that the Egyptians saw their gods as allegory for natural entities and forces, especially the sun and moon. Two thousand years of stony sleep have allowed the Christian rejection of natural theology to ossify into deep subconscious cultural prejudice, overlaid with a shallow empiricism, such that the hidden continuation of natural theology within Christianity is denied. ”Schlock” is another charming term. There is no schlock needed to analyse pre-Christian virgin mother myths. In terms of natural cycles, we see that the sun appears to be born anew every day from the virgin mother night. The association between purity and fertility has a deep attraction. It is simply unimaginable that the extensive age-old veneration of this trope of the virgin mother in so many ancient societies would simply vanish, to be replaced by a similar historical myth using many of the same names and stories, but with no connection between them.

Christian sources are very different from what I am presenting, since they seek to defend established traditions whose factual basis is highly dubious. By contrast, I am looking at how the Mary myth could actually have evolved from its antecedents.Scholars of the last century have largely ignored comparative mythology. The difficulty and sensitivity have made it largely too hot to handle, although scholars such as Witt belie this problem. Egyptology has simply moved on to more amenable empirical topics, after seeing with alarm the Gnostic implications of a rigorous study of the meaning of Egyptian religious texts.

Isis in the Ancient World, http://books.google.com.au/books?id=WpOTnGH6X9wC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=true by RE Witt, published by Cornell University Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, says Isis was “one of the most sublime deifications of motherhood and yet in the Osiris Hymn called the ‘Great Virgin’. Witt says Isis was known as ‘the Lady of Bread’. This name displays continuity with the Virgo motif of the star Spica, the ear of wheat.

I would have more respect for that argument if anything you had said in this thread amounted to more that the automatic gainsaying of the material I have cited, a la the John Cleese method. The ‘antiquarian’ canard simply reflects the cultural politics of ancient studies, and the fact that once the astrotheological content of Egyptian religion was revealed by writers like Massey, and Dupuis and others before him, it was quietly placed in the academic ‘too hard’ basket. The assertion that so-called antiquarian works should not be cited is evidence-free. I am not talking about Massey’s opinions, I am talking about the facts he cites from old Egyptian sources showing myths about Isis in the same story line as appears for Mary in the Lazarus story in the Gospel of John.If you can refer me to good recent work that analyses the archetypal relation between Isis and Mary I would be happy to read it. Witt is excellent. Unfortunately, Murdock’s Christ in Egypt falls victim to the ‘no true Egyptologist’ fallacy, such that an interest in this topic excludes a researcher from the guild. Murdock is rigorous, but her research falls under the taboos of the culture wars. So you accept there is a migration of tropes. I imagine that admission would be enough to give conniptions to Jeffrey Gibson. In this case the migration of tropes is rather exact, with Egyptian figures having the same names and roles as their Christian counterparts. Yes it is a complex topic, but this example is simple, and hardly facile. Shamanism would take us into a broader field. From the summary I have read of Allegro, I understand he does actually have an interest in how ancient religion sought to connect the earth to the heavens. Allegro was shunned because of the illegal status of hallucinogenic drugs. Rather like Graham Hancock, Allegro’s efforts to respect ancient use of such natural substances elicited a hostile reaction. It bears comparison to astrotheology, because both assert the existence and value of significant lost traditions. I am not talking about easy solutions. Ancient mystery schools used oral teaching, and most of their ideas have been lost, or preserved only in distorted reflections in extant sources. But it is entirely possible and legitimate to look at the cracked mirror of the gospels to ask what ancient myths it actually reflects. The authors were working under profound political constraints, required to produce a text that would be historically believable and spiritually authentic. This meant the subordinated source deities had to be acknowledged in veiled form. That reminds me of the real ten commandments in Exodus 34, where the first command of God is to destroy the sacred groves of Asherah, the queen of heaven. Asherah bears comparison to Isis. Opposition to astrotheology is at the foundation of the Judeo-Christian cosmology. Ah, you are so subtle spin! There is no question that astrotheology has a higher respect for Buddhist and Hindu religion than Christianity does. The intent here appears to be to imply that Indian religion is a byword for irrationality. Again, the extremely ancient origins of Indian myth gives its stories an archetypal power, as in Egypt. The exclusive limits of modern western rationality often like to point to an excluded other as a symbol of the irrational. Such summary dismissal of the myth of Isis is a shallow and inadequate response to material that deserves proper study.

As far as an explicit Bible nod to an Isis myth is concerned, beyond the broad virgin mother archetype it gets harder to disentangle possible intentions other than in the rather explicit reference to the Egyptian Gods in the Lazarus resurrection story and those linked to it.

I do not think the original virgin birth stories were added to Mark's gospel in order to assert actual belief that a man Jesus Christ was born of a virgin mother. This idea, separating the holy from the material through virgin birth, is so widespread from India to Babylon to Egypt to Greece that it really is an indispensible attribute of a universal god-man. The Gospel authors were aware of a range of myths in these neighbouring societies, all colouring the central theme of realized prophecy from the Jewish scriptures.

'Warmed up' is not quite how I see the continuity between Egypt and the Bible. If Isis was last night's roast potatoes, Mary is not just today's bubble and squeak. Mary is by no means the end of the story. Rather, the link with Isis points forward to a final reconciliation, an eschatological unity in which the 'resurrection of the saints' is understood as the spiritual recognition of the true meaning of myth, and the continuity is seen between the Christian stories and their pagan ancestors. Lazarus and Mary are parables for the resurrection of Osiris and Isis, understood as ongoing celebration and veneration of their myths in a new form.

All these stories have to be assessed against what is physically possible. Considering Christian theology as memetic evolution, parsimony requires that a more probable explanation of any idea is that it builds on precedent, not that it sprang into existence fully formed. Isis is a major part of the precedent for the evolution of the Mary myth, together with other goddesses such as Demeter, Innana and Asherah. But the politics of patriarchy conceals these sources.

The Big Lie of the Historical Jesus is designed to enable the patriarchal power of the church. This sexist model of social control is obsolete. To overthrow the sexist delusions of the church we need to understand the true mythical origins of faith, including respecting the sacred autonomy of the female through the Isis Mary tradition.

LOL, I knew that user "spin" over at freeratio would eventually slip up with what s/he just did in that latest post, essentially committing the same double standard I exposed years ago in my "differences vs. similarities" vids. "Spin" invoked the example of the divine birth of Samson as an influence on the gospels.

Spin tried to bust Robert's balls over there time & again by demanding nothing short of an outright explicit statement, from a gospel author or such, that Isis was absolutely an influence on Mary. Just noting the conspicuous similarities will not do!

And yet...

the ONLY thing there is to draw a connection between Samson's & Christ's births are THE SIMILARITIES.

Yet no one ever has a problem drawing that connection. And they shouldn't. So many other fields of study (e.g. evolution) and areas of life justifiably employ the sin of "pattern seeking," and with great success. And now even "spin" has done the same. Welcome to the human race.

Robert, you ought to take spin to task, posing to spin all of the exact same demands, verbatim, that s/he used to dismiss your posts, merely replacing Isis with Samson now. It'll be interesting to see what responses you get.

The gospels no where ever mention Samson, nor do they ever quote or even reference the book of Judges.

Moreover, when spin asks why invoke more beyond the example of Samson- #1, the example of Isis is older than the Old Testament itself and thus the Old Testament is not exempt from Egyptian influence, especially when it admits that it's own origins and "first" author came out of Egypt; #2 the similarities are stronger to the Isis example than Samson.