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A couple of weeks ago, Brian drew our attention to the film Zeitgeist
which hasn't (so far as I know) had a cinema reliease but is currently
circulating on the Internet. Describing it as "confronting"
film, Brian suggested that it "raises issues on a huge scale",
and that "young people will be watching this film in their hundreds
of millions".
I confess that I haven't watched the film yet, but I have visited the
associated website at www.zeitgeistmovie.com
to which Brian helpfully directed us, to see what it was all about.
The film seems to be basically an extended lecture and, conveniently,
a transcript of much of the lecture is available on the website. From
the transcript, it seems that Zeitgeist,
at least in the section of the movie that concerns us most, is challenging
the historicity of much of the Christian story, and suggesting that Christ
and Christianity are basically constructs formed from an assembly of pagan
and astrological mythologies.
Reading the transcript is, to my mind, the right way to try to get to
grips with the film, since it is packed with factual assertions and claims,
and they come so thick and fast that you wouldn't have time to consider
or digest them or, frankly, to remember many of them while watching the
movie. For instance:
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Image
of the 12 Apostles from the electronic facsimile of the Theodore
Psalter produced by Professor Charles Barber of Notre Dame University,
as published by the University of Illinois Press. Click image for
further information.
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- The cross is a zodiacal symbol.
- The figure of Jesus is a synthesis of Horus Krishna,
Mithra and other pagan deities, and is basically a sun-god.
- The Twelve Apostles are not historical figures, but
personifications of the twelve houses of the zodiac.
- The gospels are replete with astrological symbolism.
All references to fish in the gospels, for instance - and there are
many - are actually refernces to the astrological sign of pisces.
- And so forth.
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Reading the transcript, you can deal with these claims at a more measured
pace than you could watching the movie.
There are so many claims and connections made in the film that investigating
and assessing them all would be the work of many weeks. Frankly, I'm not
inclined to devote many weeks to the task. So let's look at just a couple.
The Horus Connection
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The
Egyptian deity Horus.
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According to Zeitgest, the
Egyptian deity Horus was born on December 25th, the offspring of
the virgin Isis-Meri. His birth was accompanied by a star and three
kings, at the age of twelve he was a child prodigy as a teacher, and at
the age of 30 he was baptised by a figure called Anup, and began
a ministry of teaching and signs accompanied by twelve disciples. He was
betrayed, crucified, buried for three days, and resurrected. Spotting
anything familiar here, are we?
I must admit that I'm suspicious from the outset. The very first claim
is that Horus was born on 25 December. I'm no Egyptologist, but
even I know that the the Egyptians didn't use the Julian calendar developed
by the Romans, and it seems very unlikely that any event from Egyptian
mythology can be fixed in the Julian calendar in this way.
What about the next claim, that Horus was born of the virgin Isis-Meri,
the star, the three kings and so forth? Well, I did a bit of reading around,
and the story of the birth of Horus seems to be this:
- Isis is a well-known figure from Greek mythology,
but I can't find any reference (outside of Zeitgeist
and sources which are clearly copying from it) which call her Isis-Meri,
or anything like it.
- Far from being a virgin, Isis was the wife,
and later widow, of Osiris. (She was also his sister, but we
will pass discreetly over that point.)
- Osiris and Isis were king and queen of
Egypt.
- Osiris was constantly at war with his brother
Set, who was denied the kingship because he lacked a testicle.
Set was understandably ticked off, both at missing a testicle
and missing a throne.
- At one point in the saga Set murders Osiris
by shutting him in a box, drowning him in the Nile, cutting up his body
and scattering the pieces of his corpse all over Egypt.
- Isis travels all over the country and succeeds
in recovering all the pieces of Osiris (except, in some accounts,
his penis.)
- She reassembles his cadaver and, by an act of magic,
has sex with it, the possible absence of a penis notwithstanding. She
then dismembers the corpse again, and buries the parts in the various
locations where she found them. This explains to later generations of
Egyptians why there are so many temples marking the burial place of
Osiris.
- The offspring resulting from this union is Horus,
who is a man with a falcon's head.
All of which leads to two observations. First, how very unlike the home
life of our own dear queen. Secondly, if you can find in that story a
meaningful parallel to the Christian accounts of the Annunciation and
the Nativity, you've a more creative mind than I.
At this point I stopped pursuing the Horus connection. If the makers
of Zeitgeist can see parallels
to the Christian story in that, they can seem them anywhere, but I'm not
sure the parallels they see will be of great interest to me. So testing
the remaining parallels claimed by Zeitgeist is left as an exercise for
the student. I turned instead to a different claim
The Astronomical Claim
"The star in the east [referred to in the gospels
in connection with the birth of Jesus] is Sirius, the brightest
star in the night sky, which, on December 24th, aligns with the 3 brightest
stars in Orion's Belt. These 3 bright stars are called today what they
were called in ancient times: The Three Kings. The Three Kings
and the brightest star, Sirius, all point to the place of the sunrise
on December 25th. This is why the Three Kings 'follow' the star in the
east, in order to locate the sunrise -- the birth of the sun."
The claim here is that the gospel "three kings" are not three
people, but the three central stars in Orion's belt which, it is said,
are still called the "three kings" today. I've never heard them
called that, but let that pass; it could be true. But, as we all know,
they are not called the "three kings" in the gospels. The gospels
mention neither kings, nor the number three; just some wise men from the
East. So already the connection made in Zeitgeist
is looking a bit thin.
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The
position of the starts in the sky relative to one another is fixed.
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It looks even thinner when we are told that Sirius aligns
with the three stars in Orion's belt on 24 December. Look,
people, the position of the stars in the sky relative to one another is
fixed. That's how we get constellations. If Sirius is aligned with the
three stars in Orion's belt and it is, more or less then
it is aligned with them every night, not just on 24 December.
As for "pointing to the place of sunrise", well, because of
the earth's rotation the stars appear to rotate around the celestial north
pole (in the northern hemisphere) or the celestial south pole (in the
southern hemisphere). Every primary school child knows this. It follows
that, if you construct an imaginary line through any two or more stars
and project it to the horizon, the point at which it touches the horizon
will traverse as the night progresses. In a twelve-hour night, it will
traverse exactly half the horizon. On any night of this year, therefore,
the odds are fifty per cent that the point of intersection of any given
line will traverse through the point at which the sun will rise the next
morning.
In fact, the odds are greater than that, since our imaginary line can
be projected in both directions and will intersect the horizon at two
points, both of which will traverse through the night.
In short, it may be true that at some pont on the night of 24 December
a line constructed through the stars of Orion's belt and Sirius intersects
the horizon at the point where the sun will rise the next morning. But
exactly the same is true of more than half the nights of the year, and
it is also true of many other possible lines which could be constructed
through stars, so there is nothing at all remarkable about it. It certainly
does not serve to identify 24 December as a night of special significance.
But the clincher which shows that this is a bunch of nonsense is that
the whole thing is an elaborate explanation to show why December 25 was
chosen as the birthday of a mythical Jesus by the gospel writers
who constructed the myth. But the gospels, as
we all know, do not mention 25 December. 25 December was chosen
a couple of centuries later for the celebration of the Nativity. Yes,
it was chosen for basically astrological/astronomical reasons, but reasons
completely unrelated to the nonsense trotted out here it was around
the time of the winter solstice.
The gospel writers could not possibly have known that this would happen,
and the idea that their accounts of wise men coming from the East are
actually a pointer to the state of the night sky on 25 December, apart
from all the holes that I have pointed to, falls on this ground alone.
Conclusion
At this point I stopped trying to test the specific claims made in Zeitgeist.
If you're trying to debunk the historicity of the gospels, you might start
by reading the gospels, and they show no sign of having done this. Their
claims to find parallels between Jesus and Horus are, as
far as I have tested them, bogus; so completely bogus, in fact, that I
am really not motivated to test their claims to find parallels with other
pagan deities.
I had already reached this conclusion before I discovered that the next
section of the film moves on from Christianity, and attempt to show that
the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre were perpetrated by the US
government, and were the result of bombs detonated within the target buildings,
not aircraft flying into them from outside. They're not the only people
making this claim, but most of the others are obvious fruitcakes and what
I've looked at in the first part of the film gives me no reason to think
that the rest of it carries much credibility.
Is there a lesson in all of this? Yes. First, as a society we have to
educate ourselves and our young people to test the information and beliefs
we are offered, rather than to accept them uncritically. By all accounts
Zeitgeist is polished and
powerful, but it is nonsense, and if we are not to be taken in by nonsense
we must learn to look beyond polished and powerful presentation, and think
critically about what we are being offered.
Link:
www.zeitgeistmovie.com
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Peregrinus
is a lawyer who migrated to Australia from Ireland just a few years
ago. He has a seemingly encyclopaedic knowledge of Catholic church
history and the ability at short notice to put his finger on the
facts that are needed in the many controversies that erupt on internet
discussion forums. He is based in Perth, Western Australia.
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discussion in our forum.
Peregrinus can be contacted at: Peregrinus
<peregrinus@catholica.com.au>
©2007
Peregrinus
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