neilgodfrey wrote:In defence of D.M. Murdock's discussion in Christ in Egypt about crucified Egyptian gods I think she does an interesting job of detailing the evidence for the various deities, especially with respect to Osiris, including the function of the djed cross or pillar, and early Christian interpretations of these -- pages 336 to 352.
Yes, this is an excellent and informative chapter, and I am very pleased to see your positive comments Neil. But I should warn any cavalier readers that this chapter on Was Horus Crucified? does quote the Catholic Encyclopedia, which has been so vigorously mocked in this thread, despite its simple conservative citations of ancient sources, and it does explore the allegory of the cross, which may strain the brains of some of the more simple minded.
neilgodfrey wrote:
I think this is interesting background information that should rightly be factored into any historical and literary analyses that considers the origins of the Gospel of John's miracle of the raising of Lazarus, Secret Mark and the stories of Alexandrian provenance. But then on pages 353 to 356 it seems Murdock crashes head on into a brick wall by trying to overstate her case. Or am I missing something that she has explained elsewhere to justify her argument? We come to the heading
"Divine Man" Crucified in Space. Referring to Massey's discussion of the phrase "crucifixion in space" Murdock writes:
The crucifixion in space usually refers to that of Plato's "second God, who impressed himself on the universe in the form of the cross,"2 constituting the Greek philosopher's "world-soul" on an X, which, as we have seen, represents the sun crossing the ecliptic.. (p. 353)
I expected to see here the footnote directing me to Plato and his discussion of this "second God". But instead she takes us to Lundy, Bradshaw, Roberts, and Philo. That leaves me wondering where Plato speaks of "a second god" who made himself in the "form of a cross" at the ecliptic. My memory tells me that Plato did speak of the ecliptic being like a cross but no more. Have I forgotten crucial details? Murdock does not help me here.
Yes, you have forgotten crucial details regarding the Demiurge, which Plotinus called the Second God of Plato. And you are following Peter Kirby’s fine example of part-reading, like his omission of the sourcing word “CE” from the start of a part-sentence he quotes which he criticises for failing to cite its source, which funnily enough is a simple and sober citation of ancient authors from the dreaded Catholic Encyclopedia. Similarly, your omission here is a failure to note Murdock’s very next sentence, where she explains that the Second God is the Demiurge. And then she provides Pope Benedict’s implied comparison between Plato’s crucified ‘truly just man’ and Jesus Christ from
Republic 362. But it is great to see you reading
Christ in Egypt, which is a wonderfully informative book. Hopefully this will inspire others to also read it, as well as
Did Moses Exist? I should add, Murdock's purpose includes a paradigmatic critique of conventional theology, which explains the polemical content that gets criticised by those who are committed to conventional readings.
I have the distinct impression that some readers here are too hasty in jumping to conclusions without careful reading. I have several times answered questions in this thread which have been the topic of subsequent blithe comments from the likes of Huller and Ulan. With forty pages that is fair enough I suppose, except that you would expect people would be slightly more circumspect before making wildly false insulting and misleading errors, notably Huller’s Howler about my supposed failure to cite Biblical evidence for a stellar framework for myth.
Earlier in this thread (
page 13) I cited Plato’s
Timaeus, saying the ecliptic “has been constant against the stars for all history, equating to what Plato in the
Timaeus called “the same”." I went on to explore this 'cross in the sky' motif raised again here by Neil, saying: "The [other line in the heavens described by Plato] is the celestial equator, the line separating the north and south hemispheres, crossed by the sun at the spring and autumn equinoxes. This line moves at the rate discovered by Hipparchus of more than one degree per century, actually at one degree per 71.6 years. This line equates to what Plato in the Timaeus called “the different”, in his explanation that two great circles form an X in the heavens.”
This cross in the sky material from Plato is well worth expanding in view of Neil’s question about it, and in view of its absolute centrality to the Gnostic Hermetic origins of Christianity in Platonic astral philosophy. The source is
Timaeus 36, as discussed at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timaeus_(d ... World_Soul in which Plato provides his celebrated accurate theory of time as the moving image of eternity.
Although Plato’s descriptions are somewhat veiled, the most coherent explanation, as traditionally accepted, is that Plato defined time and eternity by the relation between the colures of the ecliptic and the equator which cross as great circles at the equinoxes to form opposite chis in the sky. These colures, to use Dante’s term in
The Paradise, form the same Logos or cosmic order upon which Christ was imaginatively crucified in the Christian Gnostic Myth of the hypostasis of time and eternity, an objective idea that was anthropomorphised into the passion and creed.
Plato says in this sublime text that “the whole plan of the eternal God put the soul in the centre and made the universe a circle moving in a circle, one and solitary.” This is indeed what we can see if we look, applying Plato’s Parmenidian scientific logic of the one, seeing that the consistency of physics means space-time is unitary. Plato calls the Chi the ‘world soul’, a concept which Yeats in his famous poem
The Second Coming was to liken to the sphinx slouching towards Bethlehem, where Yeats calls the man-lion a ‘vast image out of Spiritus Mundi’. Yeats here expands on the precessional cosmology he presented in
A Vision, with the image of Aquarius the Man and Leo the Lion as the axis of the world which the equinoxes will reach to mark the Second Coming of Jesus Christ at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius.
Continuing with this material from
Timaeus, Plato says God “divided the universe lengthways into two parts, which he joined to one another at the centre like the letter X, and bent them into a circular form, connecting them with themselves and each other at the point opposite to their original meeting-point, with a uniform revolution upon the same axis, he made the one the outer and the other the inner circle.” This is an obscure and difficult image, but it actually matches well to reality. The main theory (Bury, Cornford) of what Plato means is that the outer circle is the ecliptic while the inner circle is the celestial equator. Another theory (George Latura) is that the X in the sky is formed by the intersecting paths of the sun and the Milky Way Galaxy in Gemini and Sagittarius, and this is the celestial cross which Constantine made his conquering sign. While Latura’s theory is plausible, I support the traditional view, given its elegant match to how the ancients could see precession as marking the dawn of the new age of Pisces when the equator crossed the fish and formed the exact image in the sky of the Chi Rho Cross.
Plato says "God called the motion of the outer circle the same" (likely reflecting that the fixed stars always look the same), and "the motion of the inner circle the different." In terms of understanding of precession this means that Plato was aware that the equator moves against the background stars. This is completely plausible given how Timaeus recognises that Greek thought learned from the East, a humble learning that was somewhat lost sight of in later times when Greek superiority became the dominant cultural idea.
Plato then explains, in another profound but complex passage, that “The soul began a divine beginning of perpetual rational life. The body of heaven is visible, but the soul is invisible, and partakes of reason and harmony, and being made by the best of intellectual and everlasting natures, is the best of things created. And when reason, which works with equal truth, whether she be in the circle of the different or of the same--in voiceless silence holding her onward course in the sphere of the self-moved--when reason, I say, is hovering around the sensible world and when the circle of the different also moving truly imparts the intimations of sense to the whole soul, then arise opinions and beliefs sure and certain.”
This text contains a wonderful affirmation of the centrality of precession to understanding the nature of time. The movement of the equator, traditionally the sign of the different, is said here by Plato to “impart sense to the whole”, giving rise to “certain belief”. This movement is nothing else but precession of the equinox, as observable in the astronomy of Plato’s day in Babylon, marking the difference between the ages of time in human history.
Platonic philosophy recognised the great difficulty of understanding and explaining this material, and therefore placed objective astronomy as the real context of the “certain belief” in the ‘sense of the whole’, ie the zodiac ages. This "certain belief" in the sense of the whole as based on observation of the shift of the heavens became the Gnostic basis of the Apocalypse 15 description of Christ as King of Ages, in my view.
This sense of the whole helps to explain Plato's next comment: “But when reason is concerned with the rational, and the circle of the same moving smoothly declares it, then intelligence and knowledge are necessarily perfected.” The rational is here equated to the visible movement of the stars, with reason uncovering its hidden order. “And if any one affirms that in which these two are found to be other than the soul, he will say the very opposite of the truth.” The positive statement here from Plato is that intelligence and knowledge are primarily perfected in the observation of the unchanging regularity of nature. Astronomy is at the foundation of science, philosophy and theology.
Continuing with the Timaeus origin of Christian natural cosmology, Plato says “When the father and creator saw the creature which he had made moving and living, the created image of the eternal gods, he rejoiced, and in his joy determined to make the copy still more like the original; and as this was eternal, he sought to make the universe eternal, so far as might be. Now the nature of the ideal being was everlasting, but to bestow this attribute in its fulness upon a creature was impossible. Wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity; and this image we call time.”
The Gnostic God of Time was called Aion, and was depicted as a man-lion with eagle wings encircled by a snake, standing upon a globe marked by the X. This esoteric image of time, the moving image of eternity, provides the template we should focus on to explore the evolution of the Christ myth, including how the cross myth emerged from the snake on the pole of Moses according to John 3. Both Plato and the Gospels contain this basic scientific observation of the structure of time as the framework of myth. We see here the sublime depth of the Hermetic origins of Christianity in the as above so below hermeneutic of the Lord’s Prayer, with Plato imagining the copy (ie what later became the Gospel story of Jesus) as modeled on the original, ie the actual movement of the cross of heaven observed by astronomy in the precession of the equinoxes.
By the way, there is quite a bit of interesting speculation around the equinox eclipse today, followed by the Easter Blood Moon in two weeks time.