Religion in the Heavens; Or, Mythology Unveiled in a Series of Lectures

by Logan Mitchell

* Of all the glaring blunders committed by the compiler of
Genesis, the most unfortunate was the miraculous production
of three whole days before he thought of making the sun.

Dupuis says, speaking of the astronomical origin of all religions: "The first six signs of the zodiac may be considered as forming the empire of God or Oromazdes; the remaining signs as that of the Devil or Ahrimanes (cold and darkness). After the evil principle has reigned during the six winter months, from the autumnal to the vernal equinox, the sun resumes his empire, bringing with him warmth and animation for a fresh creation; and causing the day to triumph over the night. The vernal equinox was therefore universally considered to be the time: of creation. It is then that the Persians, who call April the month of Paradise, celebrate their Neurouz or the new revolution. The Jesuit Petavius has remarked that the Rabbis, when speaking of the creation, use the word Bara, which signifies to arrange, or rather to renew."

Syncellus, Cedremus, St. Cyril, and others, agree that the word creation alludes to the vernal equinox; at which time they expect the coming of their god, who, as Cedrenus tells us, will arrive at the Lord's Passover; or the passage of the sun as he crosses the line of the equator at the vernal equinox point. Formerly, when the sun was in Taurus or the Bull, that sign presided over the vernal equinox, and it was to the Bull that the Persians attributed those ideas of regeneration, which a more recent superstition (the Christian) has naturally transferred to Aries, a sign called by the Persians 'the Lamb.'

But if the vernal equinox point be now in Pisces or the fishes, Christians have nothing more to do with the Ram, as he is the "Lamb of God" no longer; and therefore they should adopt, as of old, when the sun was in Pisces, the famous savior fish Oannes, which used to preach so prettily upon the banks of the Nile and the Euphrates. At that exceedingly remote period, say nearly 26,000 years ago, this fish must have been a principal god amongst the Egyptians and Chaldeans; and certainly, while the sun occupied the fishy sign in the zodiac at the vernal equinox, nothing could be more appropriate than that the emblem god should appear in the shape of a fish, to preach the annual salvation.* Each sign in succession has, by the slow precession of equinoxes, enjoyed a similar honor.

* The first of the nine incarnations of the Indian Redeemer,
Vishnu, was in the form of a fish.

That the Jewish priests, from not having science within themselves, were apt to be too late in borrowing their emblem gods from the more learned hierophants of Egypt, Chaldea, and Persia, appears in that unhandy mistake committed by Jeroboam (1 Kings xiii., 4), in sacrificing to the golden calf, the old representative of the sign Taurus, which was then out of date, when he ought to have been paying his respects to the "Lamb of God," the accredited envoy of the sign of the Ram, which had come into play by the Sun's having entered it some time previously. By the mouth of his messenger, "the Lord" (the Sun) seems to reproach Jeroboam in terms something like the following: "What ignorant ninnies you and your priests are, not to know that, having left my bull-house in the zodiacal town,* and taken a two thousand one hundred and fifty years' lease at the sign of the Ram, I have now nothing to do with calves: go, ye shallow novices, and learn better of your masters, my older and more scientific priests, the Magi and Chaldees, that the appropriate symbol of my worship, is now a Lamb, called the Lamb of God."**

*The New Jerusalem.
**April-fools are no doubt of vast antiquity; but Jeroboam
is perhaps the first we met with in the Bible. This reproach
was incurred by those who, like him, persisted in calf
adoration, after its archetype the Bull, or sign Taurus, had
ceased to be the "House of the Sun," at the-vernal equinox;
that is, after the Bull of April had given place to the Ram,
or Lamb of March; and, according to the Rev. Mr. Maurice,
that point could not have coincided with the first degree of
Aries, later than 1800 years before our era.

Wherever such digressions as the above are made in the course of these Lectures, they are intended to show that, although we treat the Bible according to its literal meaning, the respect we have for it, so far as it is a book of hidden science, induces us to give such explanations, as they alone do it justice according to knowledge. But since its priests and their ignorant dupes insist on adopting the outward, or sense nonsensical, the best way to expose their folly is to take them at their word..

The legend about the first man may have been taken from Apollodorus' fable of Prometheus, who made the first man and woman with clay, and afterwards animated them with fire which he had stolen from the chariot of the sun; or was the first creation in Genesis imitated from Plato's story of the androgynæ, or double homo, possessing both sexes? Such was the hermaphrodite, or first creation in Genesis; the second was purely masculine, and only one of his ribs turned into the feminine. In the ancient Persian traditions, there were two distinct fables about the creation of man, from which those in Genesis appear to have been taken: but the compiler of that book, knowing both of the stories, and being at a loss which to prefer, has foolishly mingled them together, yet still preserving the two creations. Thus it seems pretty certain that the Jewish fable about the first man and woman is of Persian origin. Henry Lord, in a book written at Surat, on the cosmogonies of India and Persia, and dedicated to the Archbishop of Canterbury, says: "In the Persian cosmogony, the name of the first man was Adamoh and of the woman Hevah. From hence come the Adam and Eve of the book of Genesis. Hevah is the name given to the woman, in an English edition of the Bible, printed in 1583."

In the Zoroastrian and Chaldean mysteries, the above supposed originals of the human race were personifications of the zodiacal signs, Bootés and Virgo; and their fall, or expulsion from the summer garden of fruits and flowers, was emblematical of the solar year, after the autumnal equinox. Anciently, in India and Chaldea, the phænomenon of the starry heavens was called Aden, or the Celestial Garden. In all probability the Jews picked up these shreds of figurative astronomy when they were slaves to the Babylonians, and, ignorantly taking them in the literal sense, foisted them into their heterogeneous miscellany. Supported by the sound knowledge of Philo, and all the learned Jews, Origen again shows his contempt for those who understood Genesis literally, and cries out: "What man can be stupid enough to believe that God, acting the part of a gardener, had planted a garden in the east; that the tree of life was a real tree, and that the fruit of it had the virtue of making those who eat of it live for ever?"* The first four chapters of that book contain parts of three, if not four distinct fables, all evidently derived from different sources. The rest of this extraordinary medley, called the Old Testament, is made up of some dramatic fragments of the Egyptians and Persians (as the plague, miracles, and the book of Job), fabulous legends plagiarized by the Jews, barbarous narrative, and the rhapsodies of vagrant minstrels, who sung of past events, seemingly in the future tense.