25 Christ and the Sun

The  sun comes up and goes down in an eternal cycle. And just like the sun, humans  go to sleep at night to rise again in the morning. Seeds are put in the ground, seemingly dead, but the heat of the sun brings them to life. The sun rules the rhythm of life on earth, the cycle of nature as well as the cycle of mankind. Because the light of the sun is energy, pure energy, nothing could possibly exist without it. No wonder that the Sun was a major deity in ancient times, the light of the world. Maybe ‘deity’ is a wrong word, since they considered their deities as ‘manifestations’ of the ‘unknown’ behind everything outside and inside us. Hence the light of the sun shining in the dark is also a symbol of the light of consciousness shining in our mind.

The ancient Sun deities were the path of the sun through the sky captured in myths, and these myths became more elaborated over time. Both Christ and the Egyptian god Horus were called “the light of the world”, an obvious reference to the sun. The Persian god Mithra (Mithras in Greek), who spread all over the Roman Empire, was also given this ‘title’ (and Christ and Mithras have more in common). Mithras was born on December 25th as an offspring of the Sun and called “the invincible Sun”. It’s clear that we have to do here with a mythical astro-theology, echoing the Sun as the giver of life on its path through the sky.

When reading the passion of Christ lately, I became puzzled by the ‘three days’ between his death and resurrection. Why three days? I think the answer lies in the Sun as a religious symbol, and more specifically in the winter solstice symbolism. The first Christians didn’t celebrate the resurrection of Christ. Their main festival was the birth of Christ, celebrated in Spring. In the year 345 AD, pope Julius (337-352) ordained that the birth of Christ should be celebrated on the same day as the birth of Mithras, on December 25th. Thirty years later, in 375, the Vatican was built on top of the old Mithraic temple in Rome. It seems that the Roman Church chose December 25th so the Pagan celebrations of the Sun observed by the Romans on that date would be forgotten. A simple study of the tactics of the Roman Church and the texts of the different Councils reveals that in every case, the church absorbed the customs, traditions and general paganism of every culture and nation they converted in their efforts to increase the number of people under their control.

What’s so special about December 25th? It’s the time of the winter solstice, a crucial period for sun worshippers. It’s the day when the Sun is the lowest in the southern sky, the longest night of the year, and the shortest day of the year. During the short winter days the Sun does not rise exactly in the east, but instead rises just south of east and it sets south of west. Each day after the winter solstice, which occurs on December 21st, the Sun's path becomes a little higher in the southern sky after having remained motionless for 3 days. The ancients thought that the Sun had actually died. So the lowest point is the Sun’s death, the three days of standstill represent a stay in the grave, and the re-ascending is the resurrection of the Sun, just like Christ stayed for three days in the grave before his resurrection.