The Christ Conspiracy: Other Elements and Symbols of the Christian Myth, pt I

Due to a certain problem with Murdock's writing that has been bugging me for a while, this post got longer - again - than I had expected. There is a bit of a rant about her way of dealing with the Biblical text, which I think is fairly well justified. There is enough wrong in this chapter to justify quite a bit of text devoted to debunking it, and therefore, I split it into two, thus also maintaining even a semblance of some kind of publication frequency on this blog. One thing that really bothers me with this chapter, is that a number of sources are wrong - I figure she has simply typoed or misremembered in the references, and that other works by the same authors are intended, but this makes writing an informed critique of her work a very frustrating endeavour. 

Chapter 14  goes on to find parallels (and roots) for a variety of pericopes and elements present in the Bible and Christianity. She thinks these are significant evidence of the derivative nature of Christianity. I will agree that Christianity is relatively derivative (although I do also hold that Christianity probably by accident has some innovations of its own - however, these innovations obviously do not make it any more true anyway, and thus making a fuzz about which details are innovations and which are not may seem unnecessary. However, scholarly work never sleeps.)

Indeed, the seven archangels of Christianity are masculine remakes of the Seven Hathors of Egypt, which were female.[1, p. 216]

The source she gives for the last claim there is pages 232-233 of Barbara Walker's Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets - I did waste some effort trying to locate it elsewhere in the WEMS first. No such statement is present in it. Murdock has given the wrong book, as this claim can be found on the corresponding page in Walker's Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects. Walker does not provide any parallels between the Hathors and the intermediate stage - the Zoroastrian Amesha Spentas - and the Christian arch angels, with the exception of their number. That number also varies significantly in Christianity, by the way, and was not originally seven in Zoroastrism either. What would be helpful here would be an actual overview of their similarities, though, as something as flimsy as 'the same number' (which is, as pointed out, not even entirely right) is not quite sufficient. Walker does not even provide a source that would help in reviewing research into the similarities between the different groups, though, so this is just empty, unsupported assertion. James Hope Moulton observes - page 252 of Early Zoroastrianism - that the number of amesha spentas originally was six, and only later - under semitic influence - changed the number to seven. Seven amesha spentas only appear in the later zoroastrian works. Admittedly, Moulton wrote in the late 19th century, but the same claim appears explicitly in Skjærvø's An Introduction to Zoroastrianism (2008), pp 2, 16, and in other both more and less introductory texts about Zoroastrianism, which indicates that the idea of the Amesha Spentas originally being six and only relatively recently being extended to include a seventh has been found convincing by scholars for over a century. Considering the efforts that have gone into showing that Judaism derives many of its ideas from Zoroastrianism, the survival of such a claim for such a long time does indicate that it is pretty good.

As part of the mythos, the good and bad angels (devils or demons) actually represent the angles or aspects of the zodiac, whose influences were determined to be either benevolent or malevolent.[1, p. 232]

There is no etymological connection between angel and angle. Angel derives from Greek  ἄγγελος, messenger, whereas angle derives from Latin angulus (from proto-Indo-European *h₂engulos, which also is the origin for Greek ἀγκύλος, ankylos. As a slight aside we may note that in the greek of the bible, the preferred word for angle-like things and corners is γωνία, whereas a cognate to ankylos makes a cameo-appearance denoting the inner curve of the bent arm in Luke 2:28. The meaning of angel is well known - originally messenger, later acquiring the significance of supernatural beings dispatched by God. The similarity between angel and angle would not even be present in Hebrew, Egyptian or Babylonian, and thus  it is quite unlikely the original intent was anything like what Murdock here posits. There is no evidence that the concept of angels was meant to correlate in this fashion to the zodiac. Such evidence would be interesting and significant, but if false etymologies is all there is, she should be forthright about how baseless a claim it is. 

It is clear from biblical writings that during the first centuries of the Christian era, numerous "Christs" were running about the Roman world, jockeying for position. These individuals were such a threat to the "true" Christ's representatives that they felt the need to dispense with the competition by forging the Epistles of John sometime during the second century: "Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come." (1 Jn 2:18)

Walker relates the true meaning of "antichrist":  

 Antichrist was the Christian equivalent of the Chaldean Aciel, lord of the nether world, counterbalancing the solar god of heaven.

In other words, it was the night sky. [1, p. 216]

 So it was the night sky, but it was also other messianic claimants? I can dig both - but there is an interesting problem with this. Murdock's understanding hinges on a literal reading of selected verses of a few books of the NT, c.f. how 1 John speaks about God:

1 John 1 5: This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. 6: If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth; 7: but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. 1 John 2 9: He who says he is in the light and hates his brother is in the darkness still. 10: He who loves his brother abides in the light, and in it there is no cause for stumbling. 11: But he who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes. [...] 18: Children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come; therefore we know that it is the last hour.

Now, Murdock has several times throughout the book maintained steadfastly that the Bible is full of metaphor - and she is correct - but her way of finding this metaphor is to read the text as literally as possible. If Murdock is to be believed, when the author of 1 John speaks of light and darkness he means real tangible light and darkness - nighttime and daytime, he is not using the words metaphorically to signify some kind of religious notion distinct from night and day - Murdock understands 'dark and light' metaphorically to signify 'dark and light'. And finally, it is the last hour (before sunset), because several sunsets have already arrived? But several sunsets have already arrived even when it is morning, and thus by counting past sunsets, we have no idea which hour of the day we are in. Clearly, the metaphor here is on a more grand scale than dusks and dawns, nighttimes and daytimes. It gets even better, though, as apparently, these nighttime skies have gone out from the Christian congregations:

1 John 2:19 They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out, that it might be plain that they all are not of us.

Interpreting antichrist in this (or other positions) as referring to the night sky gives really weird meanings to the text, meanings that do not fit the context, and seem very useless in the context they are given - the author of John is essentially writing word salad if Murdock is right. This is a problem that generally occurs with Murdock's interpretation of elements in religious texts in general: she really has a love for saying X is Y, where X is any element from Christianity, and Y is a constellation, an ancient god or goddess, etc. Doing so, she seldom takes context into consideration, and makes the texts she is interpreting lack every significance - as if their authors did not intend for there to be a meaning in their text whatsoever.

Ultimately, she at times reads the Bible as though it was just a list of X₁, X₂, X₃... corresponding to Y₁, Y₂, Y₃..., interspersed with a superfluous and meaningless storyline. Her approach removes the coherence from the text, she treats it as a fundamentally contentless, anarrative list of mythological beings - she does not read the Bible as a narrative or in the case of the Epistles and the later prophets, as a collection of arguments - the gospels are just a set of allusions referring to the goddess, the pleiades, etc, and the actual narration around these references is just there to give structure to the thing or are the results of a conspiracy to historicize it - the important thing, to her, in the text are the pleiades and the goddess and so on, not the text actually saying anything about whatever it is saying things about. In her interpretation of the text, it alludes to a lot of things, but almost never says anything about them. She reads the Bible as an enumeration with little information, like a phone book with the numbers curiously missing. Thus, she can speculate freely as to what content the authors really had in mind, and that is great if you do not have even a scrap of evidence to base such speculation on.

More clear problems in the text will appear in the next post.

[1] Murdock, D.M., The Christ Conspiracy

[2] Walker, Barbara, The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects

[3] Moulton, James Hope. Early Zoroastrism.

Quality of Sources: Karl Anderson, The Astrology of the Old Testament

With 20 references, Karl Anderson is not a contender for the leading position among Murdock's sources, but he does provide some rather central claims of hers. It is a decidedly unscholarly work, where few sources are given for any claim, and claims seldom are justified by explanation or evidence.

The objective of his book is plainly stated in its preface,

In this volume, the author will show the meaning of the "Word" which became flesh and dwelt among men, and explain the enigmas and allegories of the Old and New Testaments, proving conclusively by the Bible that astrology is that Word, and written from the beginning; the meaning of the miracles of the Teacher, his birth and death; the city of the New Jerusalem, and the ordination of Freemasonry, the tabernacle of Moses, and the divine revelation by astrology to the formation of the Roman Catholic religion. Everything will be especially and plainly explained, and hundreds of things never mentioned in any astrological work extant. It will show astrology, or that "which is written" from the beginning, to be unalterable and under fixed and immutable law, and that everything and all things emanate from one Almighty Father, the only God; that by means of this study, or divine science, the life of men, or beasts, or duration of things and all their vicissitudes, as well as the fate of nations, the changes of the weather, the rise and fall of stocks, and every affair of life may be surely prognosticated or predicted. It proves all prophecy to be astrology. It will be purged of all nonsensical claims to anything supernatural, or claim to anything but that which is an exact science, sublime and holy, which has existed longer than we have at present any history, and handed down by the great and wise of the past, those builders of the temples of the sun, or universe, until in its old age its ashes are buried in Roman Catholicism but yet burn in Freemasonry, symbolic of the two opposing forces -- the positive and the negative, heat and cold -- the Sun and Saturn, or good and evil. [...] that by their movements and aspects to each other, and especially the☽ (moon), every incident of the dwellers upon the earth may be known, and that no deviation is possible; [...] In this work will be explained how to read and judge accurately any one's nativity; to calculate all manner of questions; to diagnose disease; to tell a person of the composition of his business; to know what best to pursue, and where best to seek either wealth, health, or fortune. [1, pp iii-v]

This is an explicit statement that the book teaches astrology. The irony is he fails to realize this requires supernatural phenomena if it is to work, yet claims to have done away with everything supernatural. (He does, of course, use his naive understanding of magnetism to account for it, although that is but pseudoscience - using scientific words does not make science of a claim. It is intriguing just how often "magnetism" is spoken of in the book, but just as intriguing how seldom he actually showcases any understanding of the phenomenon. By the time he wrote the book, James Clerk Maxwell already had provided a fairly good mathematical basis for understanding the effects of the phenomenon quite some time earlier. I am pretty certain Anderson kept referring to it exactly because so few in his readership would understand it, but defer to his pretend-understanding of it.)

Already in the preface we find a really telling instance of eisegesis:

The entire work will be devoted to the elucidation of astrology as practised by the ancient people, explain the "mystery of the serpent," so as to enable one if so desired to do as the Teacher did when ascertaining if the woman should be adjuged guilty by the Pharisees when he stooped and wrote upon the ground with his finger (i.e., cast a horoscope or horary question), and saw the answer. [1, p. v]

In a similar way, Anderson keeps using his own assumptions, inserting them into the text as evidence of these self-same assumptions.

Anderson provides a fanciful history of the origin of astrology:

Yet did they carefully note the effects of different configurations, and noticed magnetic changes take place upon the earth as the sun and moon were aspected differently by the planets, and through them passed this magnetism to each other as well as upon the earth and the inhabitants thereof, as well as all things upon it [...]As the earth revolved, every degree and minute and second of degree was carefully noted for year after year, till the planets had gone through all their multitudinous changes, and then they were able to say what would happen to a person born at such an hour and minute, with such and such configurations or magnetic rays affecting him, or would produce for the future; [1. p. 4]

For the planets to go through all their changes in relation to each other for every second of a degree, the size of the records that would have to be kept rival the surface size of the north American continent. Surely, such records would have left some trace - even the industry required to obtain material for such records in ancient times would have left quite obvious and clear remains.

Any number of claims Anderson made can be rejected without further investigation - his confusion as to linguistics, the Hebrew language, history and so on are all impressively obvious. Let me point to one more example:

It is plainly shown by the writer of Genesis that not only the period of caloric or heated cycle, when the earth was not yet cool enough to precipitate rain, and human life was not yet existent, was meant in this description, but also that a tropical region in a tropical climate was the first abode of man. To digress: our Old Testaments are exceedingly incorrect in much of their rendering of the Hebrew, and therein lies much false reasoning occasioned by such errors. Probably one of the most important of omissions is that of the following: -

 GEN ii. 3: "And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made."

 Now, a very important omission is here at the end, it is this: "which God created, and made to create by evolution," this omission being לעשות, or laassass; my authority for this being the Rev. Fleurlicht, doctor of divinity and a celebrated Hebrew scholar.[1, p. 120-121]

His failure to provide any sources for his claims reduces his quality as a source even further, and his failure to explain his conclusions using realistic, feasible scenarios or reasoning makes him come off as almost religiously ignorant. It should come as no surprise that this author also believed in Atlantis, in the ancients having incredible knowledge of science and technology, and so on.

In conclusion, Karl Anderson's The Astrology of the Old Testament can only really serve as a source if we want to know what 19th century astrologists believed. D.M. Murdock accepting him as a source on the beliefs of ancient Israelites and early Christians is a strong indicator that she is not a credible scholar.

I may return to this work to point out even more of its flaws in the future, once I have familiarized myself more with it.

[1] Anderson, Karl; The Astrology of the Old Testament.

Acharya, Higgins and Drummond: Etymological fun, again

In chapter 10 of The Christ Conspiracy, Acharya repeats a claim that is worth investigating closer.

In reality, virtually all Hebrew place-names have astronomical meanings. [1, p. 132]

She does provide sources for this statement, viz. Higgins' Anacalypsis, vol 1, p. 423 and vol 2, p. 136. Tracing these sources down we find two very similar statements, so similar that I will only type one of them here:

... We must not forget that Sir William Drummond proved that all the Hebrew names of places in the holy land were astronomical. I have no doubt that these names were given by Joshua when he conquered, settled, and divided it among his twelve tribes, and that all those names had a reference to the solar mythos. [2, p. 136, c.f. 3, p. 432]

The work in which Drummond mostly sets forth this is his Oedipus Judaicus, which sometimes does manage to get etymologies right, but a lot of the time Drummond's work seems to be tortuous guesswork. At least I must admit Drummond is thorough - he goes through long lists of names, and tries coming up with - sometimes quite fanciful - explanations as to what they mean and how they have an astrological significance. Examples include:

ענב, Anab, signifies a grape in Hebrew, and why would a mountain not be called a grape? Let us observe, that the season for gathering grapes was when the sun was in the sign of Leo, the emblem of Judah.[4, p. 174]

בית ישמות, Bith Jeshimoth,  Mr Hutchinson has written at great length on these words. I cannot follow him in all his whimsical though ingenious notions. I understand generally that Bith Jeshimoth signifies "the temple of the Heavens."[4, p 178-179] 

This is but a sample. Some of his etymologies are likely to be correct - I will readily admit that much - but a lot of the time, they offer nothing but goropism - not the kind that tries to derive every word from some specific language, but one that is ready to find an astrological root in any language in the ancient mid east,  by far-fetched derivations like the example above with Leo and grapes. In the case of Jeshimoth, most experts seem to think it means something like 'desolation', especially as forms of the same word appear with that clear meaning even in parallel constructions:

בְּכֹל מֹושְׁבֹותֵיכֶם הֶעָרִים תֶּחֱרַבְנָה וְהַבָּמֹות תִּישָׁמְנָה לְמַעַן יֶחֶרְבוּ וְיֶאְשְׁמוּ מִזְבְּחֹֽותֵיכֶם וְנִשְׁבְּרוּ וְנִשְׁבְּתוּ גִּלּוּלֵיכֶם וְנִגְדְּעוּ חַמָּנֵיכֶם וְנִמְחוּ מַעֲשֵׂיכֶֽם׃

[Ezekiel, 6:6]

KJV translation:

 In all your dwellingplaces the cities shall be laid waste, and the high places shall be desolate; that your altars may be laid waste and made desolate, and your idols may be broken and cease, and your images may be cut down, and your works may be abolished. 

It seems rather unlikely Ezekiel would say something like 'in all your dwellingplaces the cities shall be laid waste, and the high places shall be of heaven' or anything along those lines.

If the entire argument is based on far-fetched ad hoc explanations, probably mistaken etymologies and so on, we must keep rejecting it. If there is good evidence for it, let that evidence be produced. Accepting this interpretation as proof of an hidden astrological message in the bible fails on account of petitio principii. 

William Drummond lived and did his research in the 18th and early 19th centuries, which were times before a proper understanding of linguistic evolution had been achieved. I would be much less suspicious if someone with neogrammarian precision were to make claims such as these.

I may make a post sometime in the future where I document some shoddy etymologies of Drummond's. Don't wait for it, though, as it will probably be far into the future.

Sources:
[1] Acharya S; The Christ Conspiracy
[2] Higgins, Godfrey; Anacalypsis, volume 2, available at archive.org
[3] Higgins, Godfrey; Anacalypsis, volume 1, available at archive.org
[4] Drummond, William; The Oedipus Judaicus, available at http://books.google.fi/books?id=xezmySsKM9oC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false.