triple crosses
In an oral culture — one that is not written down — mythology evolves in an organic manner as it is passed from storyteller to storyteller. The Jesus myth was created in exactly this way, pasted together from earlier sources. This process is called ‘syncretisation.’
There is no fixed record of an oral tradition, by definition. This is difficult for us to grasp sometimes because we are so used to having a written standard by which tales can be measured. In an oral culture or tradition, this is not available so instead, myths grow and develop to reflect the lived experiences and cultures of the people telling them. It was only when writing was invented that these traditions could be codified and by that time, they have been evolving for many thousands of years. This means that there are many versions of the same myth, as different peoples have carried it forward.
The result of this is that we cannot say that, because detail differences exist between two similar myths, they are different or have different origins. In fact the strong likelihood is that they are indeed the very same but have organically evolved differences through generations of storytelling. What we have to do is to look at the threads of commonality, the points of similarity. This is exactly as a biologist does when trying to identify an unknown species; in biology, the traditional method is called ‘Linnaean Taxonomy’ where we find points of reference that allow us to identify to which other species our subject is related. We do something very similar in mythology.
This is the reality of mythology and all mythologists and serious historians recognise the influence of syncretisation.
Religious apologists, especially fundamentalist Christians, are horrified by this and attempt to deny it, but it is not necessary to take their point of view seriously. Their protestations, which verge on the ridiculous, that the detail differences between the Jesus myth and earlier ones are simply a rhetorical device used to confuse the argument. These people have no interest in the truth, only in promulgating a cult belief for which there is no evidence. They represent a vested interest: religious control over society and the continuing flow of money into their own coffers.
So let’s look at the original source from which the Jesus myth was syncretised.
Writing was invented by the Sumerians, some 6500 years ago, and in the material they left there are already a number of myths that are clearly syncretised from an original common source. The best known and most complete of these are those of Inanna.
Inanna is an anthropomorphic deity, which is to say she had a human form — superhuman in fact. Previous deities were the Mother Sea, Nammu to the Sumerians and the Mother Earth, Ki. These were distant and remote and could not be communicated with directly. We call these transcendent deities; Inanna on the other hand has a human form and lives, at least partly, amongst humans.
So here we have the first obvious point of commonality between Inanna and Jesus: they are both anthropomorphic — that is, human form — iterations of a transcendent or non-human deity.
On commonality, however, is not enough to prove the relationship. When we look into the myth of Inanna, however, we find many more. The most significant of these is the story of Inanna’s descent into the Underworld, which we discuss in some detail in Why Men Made God.
In this, Inanna decides to enter the Underworld, or in other words, to die. She puts on her finest clothes and jewellery and, accompanied by a servant, goes to the Palace Ganzer, the entrance to this dread place. There she hammers on the door until it is opened.
The doorward demands to know who desires entrance and why and Inanna says she has come to visit her sister, Ereshkigal. This information is relayed to Ereshkigal who, though deeply troubled by it, commands that Inanna should be allowed to enter. However, at each of the seven gates she must pass through, an item of her clothing and jewellery is to be removed.
Inanna explains to her servant that she will enter the Underworld. The servant must wait for three days, and then seek help. She is to ask for this from three other deities but only one, Inanna’s uncle Enki, the Lord of Wisdom and Sweet Water, will help.
Inanna enters the dread Underworld and at each gate an item of finery is removed so that she is naked when she appears before Ereshkigal. Inanna then does something strange: she causes Ereshkigal to rise from her throne and sits there herself.
The Anuna, the judges, see this and judge her; they look at her ‘with the look of death’ and Inanna dies. Her body is hung on a hook on the wall to rot.
Inanna’s servant waits the prerequisite three days, lamenting and ‘lacerating her eyes and buttocks’ and then sets off for help. As Inanna has predicted, the first two deities that she visits refuse to help, saying that no-one may recover from death and that this is all Inanna’s fault; she must bear the consequences.
The third, Enki, however, is prepared to assist his niece. He takes the dirt from under his fingernails and creates two tiny spirits. He tells them to enter the Underworld in secret and go to the royal chamber where they will find Ereshkigal in agony. They are to say that they will relieve her pain if she will release Inanna. They are to ask for nothing else. Enki tells them that Ereshkigal will at first refuse and offer many other things and great riches but they are to refuse until she agrees. They are then to use two magical devices Enki gives them, the life-giving plant and the life-giving water, and to place these on Inanna and in her mouth; she will then come back to life.
The two spirits set off and find everything as Enki has predicted: Ereshkigal is writing on the floor of her chamber, her hair ‘like leeks’ and in agony. At first she refuses to release Inanna but eventually she gives up; she agrees and the spirits give the life-giving water and plant to Inanna, who is brought back to life and, in the company of the demonic guardians of the Underworld, rises up to life. However, there is a catch: Inanna may only spend 6 months of the year in the world above, and the other six months in the Underworld.
So let’s deconstruct this a bit. You recall that I said the Goddess Earth was called ‘Ki’. Ereshkigal means ‘Lady of the Goddess Earth’. In other words, she is the anthropomorphic representation of the older Goddess, the Earth.
This tale comes from the temperate zone, where the year has seasons. So, half the year is plentiful and crops will grow, and half the year they will not. Sumer even then, though not as arid as today — it lies in what is not Iraq — had a long dry season when the ground was parched. The reference to Inanna spending 6 months underground and 6 above is directly related to this.
Inanna and Ereshkigal are actually two facets of the same Goddess, the Earth, one, Inanna in her bountiful summer and the other, Ereshkigal in winter. This is why Inanna becomes Ereshkigal and sits on her throne, and then is reborn from herself. The goddess of light dies to become the goddess of darkness, and then is reborn from herself. The reference to Inanna being divested of her finery is a metaphor for the dying back of the vegetation as the year cycle progresses. Then she dies and goes under the ground — the Underworld. But next spring she will be reborn.
Ereshkigal’s agony is the suffering of giving birth, as she brings Inanna once again into life. Then Inanna goes up out of the Underworld. To the Sumerians, the living world sand heaven were the same place: deities and many other spirits inhabited the same physical space as humans, but were invisible. Inanna is ‘the Queen of Heaven’ but she lives on Earth. So when she rises from the Underworld, she is rising into Heaven, as the Sumerians understood it.
We know from the surviving mythology and the artefacts left behind that prior to the establishment of patriarchal rule in Sumer in the third millennium BCE, a matriarchy was in operation. We have clues as to how this was run from surviving, later texts and these show a slow and deliberate divestment of powers from women and the Goddess to men and gods. So we should not be surprised that a myth that originally featured a woman should have been altered to make the central character a man.
To establish a chain of syncretisation we need to find several points of commonality between the two tales and preferably other myths which also show similarities. Compare this with another famous Biblical myth, that of Noah and the Flood. This is a straight copy of the Sumerian tale of Atrahasis, with only a few names and details changed. This is not so much syncretisation as direct plagiarism. The Jesus myth is a far more subtle case.
So what are the points of commonality? Well in the first place, the main character is an anthropomorphic version of a transcendent deity. Inanna is the human form of the Earth Mother, while Jesus is the human form of the Sky father. This is a strong correlation.
Then, the core issue is that the central character dies and then is reborn. This places both the original and its derivative, the Jesus myth, into the category of ‘dying and rising deities’ stories, of which there are a very great many from all over the world. As we explained in Why Men Made God the annual regeneration of the Goddess, the Earth, was and remains central to the survival of human life in the temperate zones and these tales are expressions of this.
Both Inanna and Christ are hung on a high place for their bodies to corrupt. For Inanna this was a hook on the wall and for Jesus a stake called a ‘crucifix’. (The Romans did not kill people on crosses at this time; they invented this form of execution later to mock Christians. We shall discuss that another article.)
Then, both Inanna and Jesus physically enter the Underworld, which is a metaphor for the reality of death. For a Sumerian this was literally the earth beneath our feet so the Palace Ganzer, where Inanna dies and is reborn, is under the ground. This is because inside the Earth, under the ground in this understanding, is within the Goddess’ body, inside her womb.
In the Jesus myth, the hero’s body is placed under the ground in a tomb, which is then blocked with a stone; the tomb is a metaphor for the womb of the Goddess and both Inanna and Jesus are reborn from it.. Both characters are in the Earth, inside the womb of the Goddess where regeneration occurs for the three days that they are dead.
Why three days? This is one of the most ancient mythological references we know. It gives rise to the concept of ‘triplism’ and we find this all over the ancient world from triple goddesses to three-headed dogs like Cerberus, who guarded the gate of the Greek version of the underworld. It derives from natural observation. The moon has three phases of light, waning, full and waxing; the temperate Earth has three seasons of life, Spring, Summer and Autumn; and perhaps most crucially, at the solstices, there are three days when, even to an observer using a modern sextant, the sun appears to rise to the same height in the sky at midday. On the third day after the winder solstice it can be observed to begin to rise again: this is why Jesus mythical ‘birthday’ is the 25th, a date he shares with nearly all other agrarian deities that are derived from a solar-observing culture. The 25th is the first day that an observer can see the change in declination of the sun and so know for certain that spring will return.
(We should note here that our ancestors were not sun-worshippers. In all but one culture, the short-lived Amarna culture of Egypt, invented by the Pharaoh Akhenaten and rejected after his death, the sun, in all the cultures of the near east and Mediterranean, was associated with a minor deity. The sun was seen as being under the control of the Goddess Earth. The deity being worshipped was the Goddess but the sun was the indicator that she would regenerate. So monuments like Stonehenge are principally solar observatories and not sun-worshipping temples. They undoubteldly had a religious function, but the deity being celebrated would have been The Goddess.)
This three day hiatus, which also happens at the summer solstice, is the main reason why Inanna remains dead for three days and it is also why Jesus does. After their ritual rebirth from the womb of the Earth Mother, both deities rise into Heaven — which in the time that Inanna was invented was a plane contiguous with the one humans live on, but which, by the time Jesus was, had syncretised into being in the sky; but here again we have a wealth of material that clearly shows this evolution.
Once again, it should be noted that not one but three crosses are placed on Calvary for Jesus ‘execution’; simply another iteration of triplism and the Goddess mythology that informs the Jesus mythology.
Syncretism, just by these points, has already been established, but there are more commonalities. Inanna’s rebirth is facilitated by a woman. In Jesus’ myth, it is women who open his tomb and allow him to rise again. These women represent the cadre of priestesses who officiated and celebrated the regeneration of the Goddess in the early solstices. They are the midwives of the Goddess who, in the Jesus myth, perform the same role for the male deity.
The other useful tool to establish syncretism is the existence of similar myths from the same region which allow a mythological timeline to be established between the earliest that we know of to the latest. So do these exist? Can we establish such a timeline? The answer is an overwhelming ‘yes’. The Middle and Near East, the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean are replete with tales of this order from other Sumerian versions, such as that of the Goddess Sul, to the Eleusian Mystery cults, to the Greek tradition of Orpheus and Eurydice. In fact this meme is so common that is has its own name, katabasis. This is derived from the Greek and means ‘going downhill’ or ‘descending’ and mythologists use it to describe the huge number of such myths that exist. When we look at the Jesus myth in the context of these others, we begin to see that there is nothing at all remarkable or strange about it; it is just one of many variations on a theme.
Christian apologists have long been aware of the catastrophic threat that an understanding of syncretisation presents to their claims. If Jesus could be shown to be just another iteration of a standard ideography, then religious claims for him to be ‘unique’ would be completely torpedoed. This was understood as early as the first century CE when the Christian apologist Justin Martyr claimed that the earlier stories has been ‘planted be the devil’ to introduce doubt. Surely a mature and educated person must see the convenient disingenuousness of such a claim; and then perhaps remark that for Justin to say that was odd, while in other letters he was actually claiming that Jesus was ‘no different’ to earlier deities like Perseus. As ever, the apologist will use any ruse, no matter how preposterous, to press the claim for his (or, unfortunately, her) ridiculous claims.
The fact that Jesus is just another syncretised ‘dying and rising’ or ‘katabatic’ deity has been established beyond any question since the nineteenth century; but such is the power of religion to strip money from the deluded and channel it into the hands of charlatans that this fact — and it is one — is repeatedly denied. To believe in such things today is obviously to live in a state of ignorance and denial and one should ask oneself whose interests are best served by keeping so many people in such a state; the answer, of course, is the wealthy and the powerful. They invented the patriarchy and the religions that
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