Freethought Nation

Dionysus, son of Zeus, is born of a mortal virgin, Semele, who later became immortalised through the intervention of her divine son; Jesus, son of God, is born of a mortal virgin, Mary, who...; such stories can be duplicated over and over again.

--Cambridge professor and anthropologist Sir Dr. Edmund Ronald Leach, "The Essential Edmund Leach," p. 108.

...[Osiris's] parts were collected by Isis, and his body was duly resurrected by her, although the phallus was missing. This obliged the goddess to resort to parthenogenesis in order to conceive and bring forth Horus.

--Dr. James S. Curl, "The Egyptian Revival," p. 15.

PARTHENOGENESIS. The myth that certain divine beings or culture-heroes have owed their birth to a mother without the co-operation of a father has been found to be widespread. For example, Isis, Cybele, Leto, Demeter, and Venus are all represented as "virgin" mothers. The Chinese culture-hero Hon Chi was born of a mother who conceived by treading in the footprint of God. The principal deity of the Uapes Indians of Brazil, Jurupari, was born of a virgin who conceived after drinking a draught of native beer....

--Maurice Arthur Canney, An Encyclopaedia of Religions, 278.

...During the Golden Age and the greater portion of the Silver Age all men and women are, what Christians call, virgin-born. The fuss that is made about this immaculate conception succeeds only to excite a smile of pity in the Shastra-enlightened Hindoo - a smile of pity for the ignorance of the facts in the past history of the human race of which they seem to know so little and care less to know more. This fact about the Golden and Silver Ages, this generally prevailing immaculate conception, ought to open their eyes. If they require any authority for this statement, I refer them to the study of the Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata.

--Baba Premanand Bharati, "Sree Krishna: The Lord of Love," p. 136

To come to the Gymnosophists of India, the opinion is authoratively handed down that Budda, the founder of their religion, had his birth through the side of a virgin.

--Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum (1, 42)

In his essay on the zodiacal sign of Virgo (ch. 9), under the heading of "Parthenos," the author includes the goddess Isis, among others, such as Demeter, Atagartis and Tyche, as identified with and as the constellation of the Virgin. In Star Myths of the Greeks and Romans, Dr. Theony Condos of the American University of Armenia translates the pertinent passage from the chapter "Virgo" by Pseudo-Eratosthenes thus:

Hesiod in the Theogony says this figure is Dike, the daughter of Zeus [Dios] and Themis… Some say it is Demeter because of the sheaf of grain she holds, others say it is Isis, others Atagartis, others Tyche…and for that reason they represent her as headless.

--Pseudo-Eratosthenes, The Katasterismoi, tr. Dr. Theony Condos, Star Myths of the Greeks and Romans, p. 205.

...He was said to have been conceived by a shooting star and to have been born from his mother's side (see Virgin Birth).

--Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut, Dr. David Leeming, A Dictionary of Asian Mythology, 106.

...The mother goddess was often viewed as both mother and virgin, like her Indian counterpart, Aphrodite, for example, was both mother and virgin...and Hera renewed her virginity every year by bathing... The cult of the goddess was associated with complex mystery religions whose secrets were accessible only to initiates....

--Dr. Gananath Obeyesekere, professor emeritus of Anthropology at Princeton University, The Cult of the Goddess Pattini, 474.

Sometimes Ganesa [Ganesha] is considered to be a parthenogenetic child of just Siva or of just Devi.

--Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls, Sanskrit Poetry from Vidyakara's Treasury, 68.

I do not profess to be an expert but I have heard that the virgin birth was inspired by a passage in Isaiah in the Septuagint (Greek) translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. However the Septuagint mistranslated the Hebrew word for 'young woman' which was 'almah' by the Greek word for 'virgin' which was 'parthenos'.

I am not sure how the evangelists could have been influenced by myths if they got the idea of a virgin birth from Isaiah (Septuagint version). Unless the Septuagint translator was influenced by these myths.

34 "How will this be," Mary asked the angel, "since I am a virgin?"

But the deeper issue here is the question of what a 'young woman' means?

Does 'young woman' mean sexually active female or young virgin girl waiting to be married?

In the Jewish culture, of course, a young unmarried female is supposed to be a VIRGIN by law. An older woman, of course, is generally considered a sexually experience female.

Thou Art That: transforming religious metaphor

"A Mythology may be understood as an organization of metaphorical figures connotative of states of mind that are not finally of this or that location or historical period, even though the figures themselves seem on their surface to suggest such a concrete localization. The metaphorical languages of both mythology and metaphysics are not denotative of actual worlds or gods, but rather connote levels and entities within the person touched by them. Metaphors only seem to describe the outer world of time and place. Their real universe is the spiritual realm of the inner life. The Kingdom of God is within you.

The problem, as have noted many times, is that these metaphors, which concern that which cannot in any other way be told, are misread prosaically as referring to tangible facts and historical occurrences. The denotation - that is, the reference in time and space: a particular Virgin Birth, the End of the World - is taken as the message, and the connotation, the rich aura of the metaphor in which its spiritual significance may be detected, is ignored altogether. The result is that we are left with the particular "ethnic" inflection of the metaphor, the historical vesture, rather than the living spiritual core.

Inevitably, therefore, the popular understanding is focused on the rituals and legends of the local system, and the sense of the symbols is reduced to the concrete goals of a particular political system of socialization. When the language of metaphor is misunderstood and its surface structures become brittle, it evokes merely the current time-and-place-bound order of things and its spiritual signal, if transmitted at all, becomes ever fainter.

It has puzzled me greatly that the emphasis in the professional exegesis of the entire Judeo-Christian-Islamic mythology has been on the denotative rather than on the connotative meaning of the metaphoric imagery that it is active language. The Virgin Birth, as I have mentioned, has been presented as an historical fact, fashioned into a concrete article of faith over which theologians have argued for hundreds of years, often with grave and disruptive consequences. Practically every mythology in the world has used the "elementary" or co-natural idea of a virgin birth to refer to a spiritual rather than historical reality. The same, as I have suggested, is true of the metaphor of the promised land, which in its denotation plots nothing but a piece of geography to be taken by force. Its connotation - that is, its real meaning - however, is of a spiritual place in the heart that can only be entered by contemplation.

There can be no real progress in understanding how myths function until we understand and allow metaphoric symbols to address, in their own unmodified way, the inner levels of our consciousness. The continuing confusion about the nature and function of metaphor is one of the major obstacles - often placed in our path by ORGANIZED RELIGIONS that focus shortsightedly on concrete times and places - to our capacity to experience mystery. A system of mythological symbols only works if it operates in the field of a community of people who have essentially analogous experiences, or to put it another way, if they share the same realm of life experience.

How in the contemporary period, can we evoke the imagery that communicates the most profound and most richly developed sense of experiencing life? These images must point past themselves to that ultimate truth which must be told: that life does not have any one absolutely fixed meaning. These images must point past all meanings given, beyond all definitions and relationships, to the really ineffable mystery that is just the EXISTENCE, the being of ourselves and of our world. If we give that mystery an exact meaning we diminish the experience of its real 'depth'. But when a poet carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one knows that marvelous rapture that comes from going past all categories of definition. Here we sense the function of metaphor that allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make, past all categories of definition." (Joseph Campbell)