United States or Armenia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
This story is primarily that of the descent of the Logos into matter, and the Sun-God is aptly His symbol, since the Sun is His body, and He is often described as "He that dwelleth in the Sun." In one aspect, the Christ of the Mysteries is the Logos descending into matter, and the great Sun-Myth is the popular teaching of this sublime truth.
But it couldn't fool him. He was not that sun-myth that the mob was worshipping and sacrificing dinners to. He knew better. He read the magazines about himself, and pored over portraits of himself published therein until he was unable to associate his identity with those portraits.
Senart in his Essai sur la légende du Buddha, and Kern in his Het Buddhisme in Indie, both hold that we have here to do with a sun-myth, and interpret the various features of the legend in a very ingenious way in accordance with that theory. This view has made few converts.
The Logos, "the Son of God," descending into matter, has as shadow the annual course of the Sun, and the Sun-Myth tells it. Hence, again, an incarnation of the Logos, or one of His high ambassadors, will also represent that activity, shadow-like, in His body as a man. Thus will necessarily arise identities in the life-histories of these ambassadors.
This we regarded as a sun-myth, or some other form of aboriginal superstition, until we were informed by several of the gravest and most trustworthy gentlemen of several different localities on the mountains that there really is a creature infesting these streams supposed by them to be a young alligator, reaching a length of twelve inches, and doubtless subsisting on fish.
In short, "the time-honoured rhyme really wants but one thing to prove it a sun-myth, that one thing being a proof by some argument more valid than analogy." The character of the argument which is lacking may be illustrated by a reference to the rhyme about Jack and Jill, explained some time since in the paper on "The Origins of Folk Lore."
Here is clearly a Sun-myth, which is like those of ancient Hindu and Greek legend: the blue-grey Filly is the Dawn, on which the new day, the maiden and her lover, speed away. The great Giant, whose breath burns the maiden's back, is the morning Sun, whose progress is stopped by the thick shade of the trees.
"I am come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly." Jesus. Pre-Buddhistic India. Does the name of Gautama, the Buddha, stand for a sun-myth or for a historic personage? One set of scholars and writers, represented by Professor Kern, of Leyden, thinks the Buddha a mythical personage.
You do not hesitate to read them the story of William Tell, although there are woven into it the elements of a very old and wide-spread sun-myth. These mythic elements have been woven around some real historic hero, and the spirit of his heroism breathes through every fold of the drapery. How charmingly Kingsley tells the tales of the Grecian heroes!
It is not reasonable to suppose that Jesus would lead a multitude up a mountain to speak to them for a few minutes. The mountain is an old sun-myth of the Sun God on his hill, and the twelve apostles are another sun-myth, and represent the signs of the Zodiac. There is nothing in the alleged sermon that was new at the time of its alleged utterance.
Word Of The Day