From my diary

I’ve spent this evening breaking another book.  This one is genuinely not valuable, selling for a few euros a copy on second hand site.  It’s a deeply dull exhibition catalogue in German from 1969.  I think I wanted a photograph from it or something.  Anyway it’s an inch thick, and will go to its reward.

I’ve also changed the site theme again, this time to underskeleton 1.03.  It is curious that the WordPress-supplied theme, TwentySixteen, was so very bad in so many ways.  Editing in it was a pain, because of some strange formatting in the editor.  Images were handled oddly.  Yet, as I have said before, so few of the themes made available are actually right for text-based blogging!

So … I’ve tried again.  I think I’ll need to tweak the header, but it’s getting too late now for that.

Tomorrow is New Year’s Day, 2017.  As usual I don’t use my computer on Sunday, so please let me wish you all a Happy New Year!

It’s a good time to look back, and to look forward.  A good resolution is not to grumble, but to be positive.  It’s also a good idea to plan; to think about what we want to have done, by this time next year.

If we don’t plan, then the urgent stuff will fill all our time with chores of no importance once they are done.  There’s never any time left over!

Happy New Year!

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The base of the Colossus, next to the Colosseum, in 1920

The Roma Ieri Oggi site is a vast resource of old and wonderful photographs of Rome.  It’s rather a pity that these are being embedded in an on-site “viewer”, to make it hard to download the things.  But in them we see Rome before Mussolini made his necessary but destructive changes.

Today he posted a very useful item, showing something which I have long wanted to see.  It’s a photograph of the Colosseum, from 1920, from an unusual angle:

Today much of the stuff on the right is gone, demolished by Mussolini and replaced by the Via del foro imperiali.

But notice the platform, against the wall to the right of the Colosseum:

The pedestal of the Colossus of Nero. Rome, 1920. Via Roma Ieri Oggi.

This is – this must be – the base of the colossal statue of Nero, from which the Flavian Amphitheatre drew its name of “Colosseum”.  The statue was 100 foot tall, and was erected outside of Nero’s Golden House.  Of course it is long gone – it was converted into a statue of Sol, after Nero’s fall, and resited here, and was melted down at some unknown date thereafter.

The base also is gone today, demolished by Mussolini; but there it is in the photograph; and we owe Roma Ieri Oggi a great debt for allowing us to see it!

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Low life in Cairo before the war, with Bimbashi McPherson

The passing of the British Empire has deprived the world of the memoirs of colonial officials.  Doubtless some were leaden; but many a character, who might have been lost to obscurity in Britain, bloomed under an Eastern sun.  Last night my eye fell upon A Life in Egypt by Bimbashi McPherson, and I pulled it down from my shelf and began to read it again.

McPherson joined Egyptian service before World War One, and died in 1946.  Egypt at the time was still under Ottoman rule, at least in theory, so he held the rank of “Bimbashi”, equivalent to Major.  His first role was in teaching Egyptian students; not an advanced one, and indeed he never held any official post of importance.  But he mastered Arabic so completely that he could pass for a native Egyptian with ease; and his personality meant that he loved the Egyptians and they him.  With stuffy official expatriates, on the other hand, he had less in common.

One of his friends was the Grand Mufti:

To Isabel. 21 November 1903

I propounded to him a question which was rending my servant Hagazy’s soul; whether he has broken his fast by swallowing some of my cigarette smoke accidentally. His reply strangely coincided with my argument to Hagazy: ‘Tell the boy’, he said ‘that if swallowing smoke is the breaking of one’s fast then the smelling of food is more so. Yet if he smells the best of food throughout Ramadan, he will die of starvation before the feast of Bairam, and he will die because he has not broken his fast; and here,’ he said, ‘is a suffragi (steward) who would rather thrust out his eyes than break his fast, bringing your excellencies’ coffee, lacoum, and lighted Narghilehs.’ …

Some of what went on was more seedy.  Cairo still has a reputation as “sin city”, even today.

To Jack 1902

Many of the lady visitors to Cairo are pretty hot and one wonders sometimes whether they are attracted most by the antiquities or the iniquities of Egypt. On Xmas night, when Hamid and I rode out to the Sphinx we saw in the moonlight in the sand hollow a colossal bedouin and from beneath him appeared a little feminine attire, so little that it would not have betrayed its wearer, but that a little voice said in English: ‘Mind tomorrow night’. When we called for our bikes at the Mena House Hotel a little gentleman was looking for his wife and fearing she would catch a cold through her stupid habit of wandering ‘alone’ in the moonlight.

You know how frightfully rigorously the Moslem ladies are kept, but in spite of Eunuchs and all sorts of precautions they often bribe their custodians and escape to keep assignations in apartments which are kept up for the purpose – usually over fashionable shops. The pimps who keep these ‘private houses’ either accommodate the (amateur) friends of these ladies or more often procure boys for them. Perhaps the most characteristic and worst vice of Cairo is this traffic in boys as no handsome European boy of poor circumstances is not liable to be tempted to become the lover of one of these women, for the Egyptian ladies as a rule prefer European youths and men to Arabs. (And the vice is not limited to Moslem women only but is I believe more common amongst European residents than is generally supposed.)

A few nights after my arrival in Cairo I lost my way in an after dinner stroll and after vainly trying to get directions from Arabs, I met a gentlemanly well-dressed chap who spoke Spanish and a little French and Italian (he was half-Spanish, half-Greek). He politely conducted me back to the Hotel Bristol, and on the way and more particularly over a cafe cognac, he told me that he had a ‘lover’ who paid him well, but although she was nearly seventy, she was very exigeante and compelled him to consummate the act every night. He was barely sixteen and sometimes he said it half killed him but she would never let him go until he succeeded.

Stories of this kind go round today about western women in Egypt, and not always without foundation.

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Goodbye Harpocrates, hello Hor-pa-khered!

I’ve spent a little time looking for information about the ancient Egyptian deity who lies behind the Greek figure of Harpocrates.

The results are discouraging, because I find so very little.  Admittedly I have no access to Egyptological databases; but I can’t help feeling that if there was much more to know, that the articles that I have read would tell me so.

It’s as if we really don’t know that much about large sections of ancient Egyptian mythology. Can that be so?

It seems that the word “Harpocrates” is in fact just the ancient Egyptian word “Harpekhered”, rounded off with a Greek ending.  The actual word is without vowels, and may be transliterated variously, such as Hor pe khrod, or Har pe khered, or Heru p xrat, depending on how we vocalise the name.  It means simply “Horus the child”.[1]

Obviously we would all want to see this name engraved on a monument, attached to a statue or relief of the deity.  This would give us a clear indication of how Harpekhered was depicted.

They do seem to exist – at least, the Meeks article to which I will refer in a moment says that they do.  But I have been unable to find a photograph of any such monument.  In fact he also says that depictions of the god appear with someone else’s name on the bottom.  Someone like Rameses, for instance.  That’s not very helpful.

But I was able to find a hieroglyphic representation of the name.  In Budge’s dictionary,[2] the entries for “Harpokrates” are:

The middle one is the one we want.

Note the last glyph in the name is of a child, putting its finger to its lips.  Doing a search for “child” at http://www.hieroglyphs.net shows me:

At the start of the name is the hawk, which Wikipedia (shudder) tells me is the sign for Horus himself.

So the characteristic depiction of Harpekhered and of Harpocrates is simply derived from the hieroglyph for “child”.  So we get statues like this:

Egyptian Museum

Harpekhered appears in the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts[3] and here is one of them, taken from the pyramid of Teti at Saqqara:

RECITATION. Cobra, to the sky! Horus’s centipede, to the earth! Horus’s sandal has stepped, nãj-snake. The nãj-snake is for Horus, the young boy with his finger in his mouth. Teti is Horus, the young boy with his finger in his mouth. Since Teti is young, he has stepped on you: had Teti become experienced, he would not have stepped on you.

The best information that I could find was in an article online by Dimitri Meeks on the Egyptian iconography of Harpokrates.[4]  From this I learn that the “iconographic type is considered a depiction of the new born sun god”; that the actual name first appears late on in Egyptian history, in the 21st dynasty, ca. 1070 BC.  It first appears associated with the iconography of Harpokrates in the 22nd dynasty, in the reign of Sheshonq III (835-785 BC).  The name of Harpokrates appears for the first time in Phoenician and Aramaic in the 5th century.

But … did people worship Harpekhered?  Well, there are lots of statues around.  What did they do to worship him?  Well, I don’t know.  Do we even know?  Was there a priesthood?  I see no information on this.  Was there a mythology?  I haven’t seen any sign of one.

All we seem to have is the name… meaning Horus-the-child.  The rest appears to be modern guesswork.

Here I find myself stumped.  Possibly an Egyptologist, reading this, would guffaw and say, “Well why didn’t you consult xxxxx?”  But of course I don’t know anything about xxxxx.  The Reallexikon of Bonnet is not online, as far as I know; or I would consult that to see if it gave primary sources.

Faced with this, there is not much we can do.

If we go back to Acharya S, Christ in Egypt, and look at references to “Harpocrates”, with what knowledge we have been able to glean, we find, as usual, only secondary sources, of doubtful value.  This is asserted to “be” that, it is argued; this looks like that, so this is that, or this must be derived from that.  Unfortunately without a proper database of ancient Egyptian sources, we are no further forward.

Which is a pity.  Oh well.  We tried!

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  1. [1]E.S.Hall, “Harpocrates and other child deities in ancient Egyptian sculpture”, Journal of the American Research Centre in Egypt, 14 (1977), 55-8.  JSTOR;  C. Christea, “Egyptian, Greek, Roman Harpocrates – A protecting and savior god”,  in: Moga, Angels, Demons and representations of afterlife, 2013, 73-86; 75.
  2. [2]E. Wallis Budge, An Egyptian Hieroglyphic dictionary, 2 vols. 1920.  Vol. 1, p.501, col. b.  Index vol. 2, p.1131.  If you open both volumes from here, and have one looking at the index, and the other just enter the page number, then you can find the glyphs fairly easily.
  3. [3]James P. Allen, The ancient pyramid texts, SBL, 2005, p.88, number 248.  These are inscriptions which cover the walls of the Old Kingdom pyramids of Unas and Teti at Saqqara in Egypt.  The standard edition is apparently R.O. Faulkner, 1969: spell 378; lines 663c-664a; but I have been unable to locate a copy.
  4. [4]Iconography of deities and demons.  Electronic pre-publication. Last updated 22 Dec. 2010. Online here in the pre-publication section.  It gives a catalogue of objects and types.  Annoyingly the PDF is locked, which makes it awkward to run it through Google Translate.

Temple of Mithras discovered at Diyarbekir in SE Turkey?

A news report in Turkish newspapers suggests that a Mithraeum may have been discovered.

DCIM100GOPRO

Dec. 27, 2016: Excavations at Zerzevan Kalesi in the Cinar district of Diyarbekir suggest that there is an underground temple of Mithras, a mysterious cult of the Roman period.

Excavations were started in 2014 at Zerzevan castle, located on a hill near the Mardin Road in the Cinar district of Diyarbekir.  The excavations conducted by the Dicle University Archaeology Faculty revealed underground churches, secret passages, shelters, soldiers’ houses, rock tombs, altars, water cisterns, jewelery, bronze coins and much military and medical equipment.

It is thought that the fortress, located on the eastern border of the Roman empire, was built to protect the trade and military route passing close by, known to the Persians as the Way of Kings and used originally by the Assyrians.  The fortress was built in the 3rd century AD and continued in use until 639 when it was taken by the Islamic armies under the leadership of Khalid bin Walid.

Zerzevan castle is the first Roman-period excavation in the region, and the excavator, Assoc. Dr. Aytac Coskun, thinks that the studies carried out over a large area will answer many questions about the Roman presence in the area…

“Zerzevan has an underground church, altar, hidden passages and cisterns, as well as a new structure which we have discovered.  We have not yet fully examined this.  We are only looking at a small section.  We think that it is very likely a Mithras temple because of its structure and some features.  Our excavation period has ended because of winter.  We will start again in February.  Then we will find out.  It will be the first temple of Mithras in this region.”

Very interesting indeed.  There is a tendency for any underground structure to be labelled a “temple of Mithras”; but Dr Coskun sounds as if he knows what he is doing.

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How can we write history or mythology when all we have is archaeology?!?

In my last post I gathered the handful of Graeco-Roman literary references to Harpocrates, the Horus-the-child deity.

But now we must venture behind the ancient world, into an area which few of us know well – ancient Egypt – and try to find some primary sources for the original Harpocrates, whatever his Egyptian name.  This leads us into unfamiliar territory, for me at least, and straight into a methodological problem.

Greek and Roman history and culture are known to us mainly from literary sources.  These reach us, because they were preserved by copying down through the Dark Ages and Middle Ages, and then by printing.  The archaeology and inscriptions supplement and correct this picture.  For mythology, we have a number of ancient handbooks of ancient myth, like the Bibliotheca of Apollodorus, whose narrative we can use as a frame for archaeology and inscriptions.  We also have sculptures, often with a label engraved on them, which tell us what we are looking at.

With ancient Egypt, the situation is very different.  We don’t have any ancient Egyptian literature transmitted like that.  We don’t have handbooks of ancient Egyptian mythology from ancient Egypt.

Before the hieroglyphics were deciphered by Champollion, our knowledge was based on shreds of knowledge that had made their way into Greek sources, such as Manetho.  It was a wretched level of knowledge, as anyone who reads literature written before the time of Champollion will quickly see.

Even so, the list of dynasties of kings that we use today is still mainly derived from Manetho.  Even shreds of literary knowledge give us something that the raw archaeology does not.  It tends to give us context.

But our real hard knowledge of ancient Egypt comes from archaeology; and from the inscriptions written upon that archaeology, supplemented by such literature as has survived on papyrus.

There are in fact some dribbling bits of literary material, recovered from tombs or rubbish dumps and preserved by the marvellous climate of Egypt.  Indeed one ancient Egyptian legend even managed to survive by copying: by being translated and adapted into Coptic as the Legend of Hilaria, a female monk!  But the literary side seems very weak.

The result of this is that descriptions of primary material for ancient Egypt quickly turn into catalogues of objects and sites, and the various ways in which the same item is depicted at various dates.  We end up with catalogues of lumps of rock.

There’s nothing at all wrong with this.  This is all good solid hard archaeology.  What it tells us, it tells us for certain.  That said, we must never forget the maxim, drummed into archaeology students, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence:  That you didn’t find it when you were digging is not evidence that it doesn’t exist.

These lumps of rock are our primary sources.

But … it is very much harder than many people suppose to write history, or mythology, when all you have is lumps of rock.  Even if these have useful inscriptions like “This is Ra, the sun god” on them, this tells you very little about Ra, or how Egyptians thought about him, or his cult.  Archaeology is often inscrutable. Men need stories; or rather, narratives.

Some may doubt that history from rocks is rather awkward.  To such honest gentlemen, allow me to recommend a perusal of the early volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History.  Those excellent, careful volumes are based solidly on the archaeology of Sumer, Akkad, and other long gone ancient societies, known to us only from the shovel; and they are hard reading, and harder to digest.

So … how do we proceed?  How do we learn about the mythology of Harpocrates, as he actually was in ancient Egypt?

Well, we cannot work with the ancient data in the same way that we did for classical sources.  We are, perforce, obliged to rely on the publications of specialists.  But … this does not mean that we forget what we just read.  We must read intelligently, always asking ourselves, “On what piece of data is this based, or can it be based?”

For the problem with writing history with rocks, is that you have to fill the gaps somehow.  “Maybe” is a powerful word.  Imagination you will have to use, for imagination is your only way to connect the rocks together.  This is not wrong; but it can mislead.

One way in which 19th century writers tend to misread ancient Egyptian material is by thinking with their 19th century church-going Victorian hats on.  If a temple is a religious site, they reason, then maybe we can compare it to a 19th century church or chapel, in order to obtain some enlightenment.  If the inscriptions say that the temples own land and farms, is this perhaps analogous to medieval monastic farming, or priories?  In consequence, everywhere in older books on ancient Egypt, there are attempts to understand ancient Egypt as if it was like Christianity.

The authors must have known this was not likely to be so; but they worked with the tools that they had.

But in reality the term “religion” can blind, rather than illuminate.  In our own day, we are told that “all religions are the same”.  This is, of course, grotesquely untrue.[1] The consequences of our modern falsehood can be silly, or wicked; or merely amusing, as seen in the tax-efficient career of professional science fiction writer-turned-prophet, L. Ron Hubbard.

Failure to recognise this inevitably creates problems.  Some religions define their boundaries by their teaching.  Accept this and that, and you are in; reject it, and you are out.  So Christianity, and Islam.  But others define their boundaries by race, or a class, or a social group; if you are born one of us, you will always be one of us, and never mind what you think; if you are a foreigner, you will always be a dirty foreigner. So Hinduism.  And some which ought to be teaching-based insensibly slip into being class- or nation-based; so Ulster protestantism and catholicism.  Others again define their boundaries by what you do; do the rituals, and you are in; fail to do so, and you are out.

I once saw this point made as follows.

An ancient temple is not like a church.  If you worship the sun, your primary concern is that the sun comes up each morning, and that the drought does not kill everyone this year.  You carry out the rituals for a precise, practical purpose.  You are a priest: your job is to make sure that Ra comes over the horizon on schedule.  In a sense, you are like an engineer in a nuclear power station, rather than a preacher addressing a crowd.  Whether you believe in what you are doing is of no importance.  And obviously you don’t need a lot of space in which to do your deed.  You don’t need a load of peasants underfoot – you have work to do.

Now how accurate that view is, I cannot say.  But it does fit a lot of what we see, when we look at ancient temple monuments.  Obviously it involves a very different idea of “religion”.

We have to remember what we do not know; and look for evidence before we claim it.  And that may be hard to come by, when our evidence consists of rocks.  Let us not say, what we do not know.  Let us mark our speculation – which may be a very necessary way to tie the rocks together in some human-intelligible way – as being speculation.

None of this is intended as disparagement of archaeology.  It is a fine science.  Rather it is intended to highlight pitfalls into which we are certain to fall, unless we take steps to avoid them.  For us, the rocks are a means to an end.  The end is to learn about the myth of Harpocrates.

Enough, then, about the problems of archaeology as a source for mythology.  In my next post, I will see what I can determine, as best I can, about the ancient Egyptian Harpocrates.  It should be an interesting experience.

Seated figure of Harpocrates. Bronze, Egypt, Late Period, 664-323 BC. Brooklyn Museum 37.686E, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund. From here.
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  1. [1]It is a distortion of a true observation, that all the sects of Christianity are much the same from a practical, legislative point of view.  The falsehood was to forget that this was not a statement about their nature, but only a pragmatic observation about their ability to function safely in the community.

Who the heck is Harpocrates and why is he “really” Jesus?

Let’s start looking at Acharya S, Christ in Egypt. In my last post, I discussed how you create a false story about some ancient person or event. With this in mind, I now want to look at Harpocrates, who appears as a key player in Acharya’s book.

The central contention of Acharya’s book is that Jesus is really a rebranding of Horus. The rambling nature of her book means that she never comes out and says so, but there you are.[1]  And Horus is also Harpocrates, it seems (as well as Osiris, etc; but let’s not get distracted).

Who is this Harpocrates? Well, let’s have the primary ancient literary sources:[2]

Varro, De Lingua Latina 5.57 (1st century BC) [3]:

These gods [Sky and Earth] are the same as those who in Egypt are called Serapis and Isis, though Harpocrates with his finger makes a sign to me to be silent.

Ps.Hyginus, Fabulae 277 (1st c. AD?):

Isis first invented sails, for while seeking her son Harpocrates, she sailed on a ship.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 9, 684 f. (early 1st c. AD):

… beside her [Isis] stood the dog Anubis, and Bubastis, there the sacred, dappled Apis, and the God of silence with pressed finger on his lips; …

Catullus, Poems, 102 (1st c. AD):

If anything was ever entrusted by a friend to a silent sure one, whose loyalty of spirit is deeply known, you’ll find I’m equally bound by that sacred rite, Cornelius, and turned into a pure Harpocrates.

Plutarch, “Isis and Osiris”, from his Moralia, ca. 100 AD:

Chapter 19 (358E): Typhon formally accused Horus of being an illegitimate child … Osiris consorted with Isis after his death, and she became the mother of Harpocrates, untimely born and weak in his lower limbs.

Ch. 65. (377B): … about the time of the winter solstice she [Isis] gave birth to Harpocrates, imperfect and premature, amid the early flowers and shoots. For this reason they bring to him as an offering the first-fruits of growing lentils, and the days of his birth they celebrate after the spring equinox.

Ch. 68. (378C): And Harpocrates is not to be regarded as an imperfect and an infant god, nor some deity or other that protects legumes, but as the representative and corrector of unseasoned, imperfect, and inarticulate reasoning about the gods among mankind. For this reason he keeps his finger on his lips in token of restrained speech or silence. In the month of Mesorê they bring to him an offering of legumes and say, “The tongue is luck, the tongue is god.”

Epiphanius, Panarion, 4th century.[4]:

11, 3. … For instance, the cult of Harpocrates near Buticus, or the little town of Butus itself [is equally silly]. They are already elders in years, < but are children in behavior* >, and are compelled by the daemon to enact the imaginary frenzies of Horus at the sacred month. (4) But each citizen—even an elder already far along in years, together with young women of the same persuasion, and other ages from youth up—are supposedly priests of this Horus, and of Harpocrates. Their heads are shaved and they shamelessly carry the slavish, as well as accursed and childish emblem, willingly taking part in the games of the daemon’s initiates laughing madly and foolishly, and cast off all restraint. (5) First they smear their faces with porridge, flour and other vulgarities, and then they dip their faces in a boiling cauldron and deceitfully madden the crowds with their faces, for a supposed miracle; and they wipe the stuff off their faces with their hands, and give some to anyone who asks, to partake of for their health’s sake and as a remedy for their ills.

Augustine, City of God, book 18, chapter 5, (late 4th century) mentioning the statue of Harpocrates with a finger at his lips:

… since in every temple where Isis and Serapis were worshipped there was also an image which, with finger pressed on the lips, seemed to warn men to keep silence, Varro thinks this signifies that it should be kept secret that they had been human.

Ausonius, Epistles 29[5]:

You, as though you were a mute citizen of Oebalian Amyclae, or Egyptian Sigalion [=Harpocrates], were sealing your lips, stubbornly keeping silence, Paulinus.

There are also items in the spell books in the Greek Magical Papyri, although they tell us little.[6]

PGM III, ll.633-731:

Recite often . . . written down . . . to learn something, it is told to you by the god. And if you . . . write . . . and wrap in linen from head to foot . . . , and on the ground draw Harpocrates holding [his finger] to his mouth, and in his left hand clutching a flail and a crook . . . then “ABLANATHANALBA” in wing . . . “ABRASAX”: near the back, “OEAUA” . . . and set the child on it, and write the 5th formula . . .

PGM IV, 930-1114:

Godbringing spell to be spoken three times with your eyes open: “I call upon you, the greatest god, sovereign HOROS HARPOKRATES ALKIB HARSAMOSI IOAI DAGENNOUTH RARACHARAI ABRAIAOTH, you who enlighten the universe and by your own power illumine the whole world, god of gods, benefactor …

Phylactery for the rite, which you must wear for the protection of your whole body: On [a strip] from a linen cloth taken from a marble statue of Harpokrates in any temple [whatever] I write with myrrh these things: “I am HOROS ALKIB HARSAMOSIS …

PGM LXI, l.30-35 = Demotic papyrus PDM lxi, l.175.:

And whenever you perform this spell, have an iron ring with yourself, on which has been engraved Harpokrates sitting on a lotus, and his name is ABRASAX.

And… that’s our lot.

From this material, which is entirely Graeco-Roman, we learn that Harpocrates is a child deity, depicted with a finger to his lips, son of Osiris and Isis, who is born at the winter solstice.  There is a relationship of some sort to Horus, but it is left indefinite, whether these are two separate gods, or two aspects of the same.

However any google search will reveal what the RealEncyclopadie states, that “Harpocrates” is merely a Greek form of an ancient Egyptian deity of the late dynastic period.  Will this perhaps give us more?  In my next post, I shall look into this.

First-century AD wall painting from the Temple of Isis in Pompeii depicts a statue of Harpocrates (son of Isis) in a niche, with a priest with two silver candle holders. (VRoma: National Archaeological Museum, Naples: Barbara McManus). From here.
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  1. [1]This may not be an accident. Such omissions are not uncommon in these kinds of fake histories. Earl Doherty, before publishing his Jesus Puzzle in book form, released chapters online as web pages. The chapters often got severely pummelled. So when he edited the book, he removed the explicit claims, which had been roundly refuted, preferring to let the reader infer them from his build-up (which he did not remove). This gave him deniability and at the same time made it much harder for opponents to pin him down. It is never a good sign, in my experience, when an author fails to articulate his controversial claim concisely and explicitly. The aim may be to hamper others from testing its truth.
  2. [2]My thanks to theoi.com for the list of sources here. The old RealEncyclopadie can be good for listing sources. But in this case we only find this:

    Harpokrates. 1) Aegypt. etwa: Har-pe-chrod = Horus, das Kind, besondere Form des Gottes Horus. Wann sie zuerst vorkommt, ist nicht sicher festzustellen, seit der 26 Dynastie wird sie ziemlich häufig und besondere Verbreitung erhielt die Verehrung des Gottes seit der Einrichtung des Serapiskultes durch die Ptolemaeer in Alexandria. Da die verschiedenen Formen des Gottes Horus schwer ausemanderzubalten sind, werden alle zusammen unter Horus behandelt werden.

    Harpocrates. 1) Egyptian. I.e. Har-pe-chrod = Horus, the child, a special form of the god Horus. It is not certain when he first appears, but from the 26th dynasty he becomes quite frequent, and the worship of the god receives special encouragment after the establishment of the cult of Serapis in Alexandria by the Ptolemies. Since the various forms of the god Horus are difficult to separate, they will be treated all together under “Horus”.

    In fact there is no entry for “Horus” in the succeeding volume or any of the supplements.

  3. [3]Loeb vol.1, p.55
  4. [4]This is from the last section, De Fide, which appears in vol. 2, p.669 of the revised translation by F. Williams.
  5. [5]Loeb vol. 2, p.115.
  6. [6]H. Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri in translation, p.291. On p.334 we find the following note which might be useful to look into further: Harpocrates: Harpokrates (“Horus the child”) typically is portrayed with a finger of his right hand to his mouth, and he also may hold a crook and flail in his left hand. Harpokrates is the son of Isis and Osiris and is identified with the rising sun. See H. Bonnet, Reallexikon der ägyptischen Religionsgeschitche, Berlin 1952, 273-75, s.v. “Harpokrates”; D. Meek, “Harpokrates,” in: W. Helck and E. Otto, Lexikon der Ägyptologie 2 (1977) : 1003-11.

How to create your own crank theory about Christian Origins (or any other ancient event)

I’m going to start looking at Acharya S, Christ in Egypt, a crank volume which I found myself turning into PDF a couple of days ago.  But first, a few words about how I always approach such things.

Every Christmas the internet is full of stories which rewrite Christian origins to show that (a) the Christians and their bible are wrong and (b) Jesus was really a <insert idea here>.

The replacement story varies wildly.  If you look at the archives of newspaper reviews of books, you will find many, many “real Jesus” stories; Jesus the spaceman, Jesus the revolutionary, non-existent Jesus, and many, many more.  Once you know how many different versions there are, you rate each example very low.

Now the ancient data is what it is.  So all these narratives are fabricated in the same way.  The authors invent a story.  Then they look at the bible, and early Christian writers, and maybe ancient data in general.  They do so with a scalpel.  They find excuses to ignore whichever portions of the narrative may be inconvenient – sometimes to ignore the entire data base! – leaving only scattered snippets of information that can be made to fit into their imaginary, pre-determined narrative.  And … once the data has been mutilated to fit, they claim that this is the “real” story.

As a teenager I remember reading Chariots of the Gods.  It had a cosmic-looking cover, and a friendly, relaxed, chatty writing style.  I was too young to see what was wrong with it.  But really it was quite convincing.  It did dismiss “experts”. All these books tend to do that, unless they are written by academics peddling some theory.  However it did so in a mild and unaggressive way.  But it did the same trick; selected pieces of data, that could be made to fit a theory, and ignore everything that contradicted it.

On Christmas Eve, I created a PDF of Acharya S’ Christ in Egypt.  Then, as I often do, I created a set of bookmarks for the chapters, so that these 600 pages were not just one intimidating wodge of text.  The chapter titles make her aim clear – to assert that Jesus is really … drum-roll … Horus (?!).

I’m sure that Egyptologically-minded people will have burst into laughter.  But that’s the object of this fussy, obsessive book.  I already know, as you see, how she will do this.

How do we respond to this kind of falsification?

Well, before we decide that some novel idea actually is a falsification, it’s a very good idea to actually find out whether it is actually wrong!  We’re not in the business of mindless rote repetition of whatever ideas about antiquity were current when we were receiving our education.

Usually the best thing to do is to assemble all the ancient data about the person in question, read it; and then, and only then, go to the article or book peddling a theory, and see what it has to say.

So if we hear certain strange people in the USA claiming, for instance, that “Cleopatra was black”, what we do is to assemble every reference in ancient literature to Cleopatra.  Once we have that, we look through it to see if there is anything that supports this claim.  Once we know that it does not arise from the data base, we are justified in rejecting it as a modern invention; whatever clever trickery may be used to advance it.

But before we do this, there is a snare.  We must first work out what the claim being made is.  We must get it, phrased as a sentence, in our own words, which we can then test in this manner.

For some of these writers can be very convincing, if you read their prose.  There was an amateur atheist named Earl Doherty – I suspect he was probably an American, rather than an Irish peer – who wrote a now forgotten book called The Jesus Puzzle, aimed at showing that … I don’t even recall now.  It was canvassed quite energetically by atheists around 2000.  I came across it because it made claims about Minucius Felix, which I happened to see.  His writing style was terribly convincing; if you allowed him to lead you through his argument, the sound of the words would lull your critical senses to sleep.  The thought that this was wise, the urge to sound wise yourself by agreement, is a trap for the enquirer.

Skim the book.  Read the conclusion first.  Work out what the claim is; and then how to test it.  Once you have mastery of the data base, then you may read the book; and you will quickly see the way in which the author honestly presents the data; or softly leads you off into the bushes.

In the case of the Doherty book, I learned that one of his claims was that nobody before 200 thought that Jesus was God.  Argument from silence, of course; but was it even correct in the data?  What I did was to find an e-text of all the 2nd century writers, and search them for mentions of “Jesus”, “Christ”, “God”, using ctrl-F in my browser.  There are only ten.  At the end of this, I had a set of quotes; and definite evidence to the contrary.

Doherty wasn’t very clever, tho.  Like many of these people, he was taken in by his own supposed cleverness, to the point of blindness.  So he claimed that Minucius Felix wrote around 150; in order to claim that what Felix did not say was evidence.  As it happens opinion among scholars is that he wrote around 230, based on his use of Tertullian.  But Doherty wouldn’t have that, whatever he was told!

Returning to Acharya S, her book is a version of the “pagan Christs” theory, put forward by ignorant people sporadically over the last 150 years, and propped up by whatever careless quotes they can find.  The theory claims that Christianity is copied from paganism.  They claim this out of spite, knowing that it will enrage modern Christians who all reject taking doctrine from anyone but Christ.  Few, one discovers, have any real interest in ancient history.

As with much atheist invective, it is in fact a bastardised version of 19th century protestant anti-Catholic argument.

The early church certainly was very careful to avoid anything pagan.  But the medieval church, in its position of enormous power and intellectual strength, took a different approach towards the primitive paganisms that it encountered in its march to the modern world.

To ancient and modern Christians, conversion is about individuals.  But in the medieval period, men were merely parts of tribes.  Kings might be converted; but the community was all.

So the medieval church sought to convert whole communities, and accepted that this might be ragged at the edges.  St Augustine of Canterbury, going to pagan England, was advised to build his church on the site of a pagan temple, so that the people’s habit would tend to take them to the temple.  Likewise festivals might be repurposed, and saints’ days created to overlie older celebrations.  The clergy were important, and the church made more effort to ensure they thought correctly; the mass of the people much less so, and doing the right thing mattered more than doctrine.  So there are indeed signs with popular catholicism in some countries of observances that may have originally had some now-forgotten pagan significance.  And it does not matter.  They really did blot out the old paganism.

Anti-Catholic literature in the 19th century made great play of how Catholicism was “really pagan”, making use of such items as these.  Atheist literature of the 20th century simply made the same assertions about protestant Christianity, ignoring the enormous differences.

With all this in mind, I shall start looking in my next post at Christ in Egypt.

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Acharya S, One year on.

It is Christmas Eve.  Tomorrow is Christmas Day, which by chance falls upon a Sunday, when I do give myself a break from my PC.  So let me now wish all my readers a very merry Christmas!

December 25th, 2016, is also the first anniversary of the death of anti-Christian writer Dorothy Murdock, better known as Acharya S.   She was a venomous controversialist, as many will remember, but I usually felt sorry for her.

Last year I wrote an obituary, as best I could, which is here.  I learn from her executor, Nick Barker, at FreeThoughtNation, that her Facebook page has been locked out, and that her Twitter account has been closed.  So that site is probably the best one for news.  Barker himself has been seriously ill, and unable to post many updates.

It all has a sad look.  She was a maverick in her life; and without her motivating force, what she has left behind looks like leaves wilting on a dead tree.  How important it is for all of us to meet Christ!  Without Him, our lives are vain, and our deaths in vain.  But with Him, we may all hope to meet again.

By coincidence this evening I have been working with her Christ in Egypt.  This is a mighty tome – self-published – running to nearly 600 pages of text.  I don’t need to retain my copy now.  I found it unreadable; and I suspect that few will ever read the work or use it.  Nevertheless I wanted to keep a copy in PDF form, in case I ever needed to refer to it.  So I stripped off the cover and spine, and spent the evening creating a PDF from the pages (for my own use only, I should add; Acharya’s family are poor, and need whatever small sums may be raised from sales of her books).

In the process, I glanced at various pages.  I often gained impetus to write, from her works, even though they were very foolish.  So I may write a couple of posts around the work.

Happy Christmas to you all!

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From my diary

‘Twas Christmas Eve in the workhouse,
And the snow was raining fast.
When a barefoot boy with clogs on,
Went slowly speeding past.

It’s Christmas, and all of us start to recall the Christmases of days gone by.  Not all of these may be positive. But the memories of gladness from childhood shine through.

The nonsense verse with which I started is one such.  It came to mind today, as I saw a post on Twitter from some strange person asking, “Can you reject belief in the virgin birth and the resurrection and still be a Christian?”  Erm, no: that’s what the word “Christian” means.  But why would you want to?  What does the word mean, if anything, if you don’t actually want what it means?

In reality, we all know what such a man has in mind.  Some kind of social system, rather like paganism, where you all do the usual things, and play along, without believing any of it much.  I remember school assemblies where we all sang hymns, and prayers were read.  The idea that any of us believed any of it never even crossed my mind.

But being a Christian is not about how you dress, or what race or class you belong to – you can be any of those, so Christianity is very broad and accepting in that respect.  Everything has a boundary, beyond which it ceases to exist.   The boundary for Christianity is not class; it’s whether you submit to His teaching; to what our Lord taught, the disciples heard, the apostles preached and the scriptures record.  If you accept that teaching, no matter who you are, you are in; and if you reject it, then you are out, however many ecclesiastical honours you may possess.

In English nonsense questions like this are perfectly syntactically possible.  Nonsense verse is a genre.  It does not mean that every sentence has meaning.

Meanwhile Christmas is upon us.   I have put up and decorated a plastic Christmas tree myself, although there is none but me to see it.  However, I have found by experience that if I do not do so, then it feels as if it is always winter, but never Christmas.  That’s not good for your health.  Tomorrow I shall go off to spent the day with relatives.  But as everything is now done, I have some free time.  And I continue with the task of reducing the clutter in my study.

Last night I was busy in scanning an Ancient Christian Writers volume, to create a PDF for personal use.  I did this so that I could dispose of the paper book and free up some shelf-space.  I’ve been purging my shelves, and with good effect.  But I still have too many books.

I would have gladly spared myself the effort of scanning the book, had it been possible to buy a PDF.  But it isn’t.  So … it’s scan scan scan.

Next up is a volume by the late Acharya S.  Again, this is a “reduction of clutter” move. I bought it in case I needed to rebut the claims within it; but now that she is dead, it seems unlikely that they will circulate widely.  In this case, tho, I think I might chop the spine off and use a sheet-fed scanner.

I have found myself wondering whether we actually need paper translations of ancient texts at all.  What purpose do they serve?  Does anyone actually read through them, end-to-end? I suppose it does happen; but surely very rarely.  Most of the time we’re looking for things within them.  So an electronic copy is far more useful.

Novels, of course, one reads end-to-end.  But I’ve been buying novels on my Amazon kindle account, and reading them on my Samsung Galaxy S7 (which gets very hot sometimes when charging while turned on, I notice).  I’ve managed perfectly well; and I have not felt any urge to buy paper copies.

I notice that I treat a novel much less seriously when reading it on my phone, however.  It’s less of an event; more like tissue paper.  You read, and forget about it.  I have a lot of fantasy novels on my shelves, and I only keep the ones that I have reread.  Such novels are friends when I am ill.  The massive lumps that make up the Space Captain Smith series, with their splendid covers, are a pleasure to read, and to handle.  But I would certainly think them disposable, had I obtained them on kindle.  So … there is an issue here that I have not seen elsewhere.  Books dissolve into just data, once they are electronic.  Which of us does not have books that are dear to our hearts?  But will any of us feel such emotion towards a book in eBook form?  The format degrades the work.

I have another ACW volume to dispose of here, which is some 300 pages long.  I.e. 150 swipes of the flat-bed scanner.  That will take a while to scan.  I’d rather not… except that I bought it for a reason.

Looking online, I find that one may own all the 70-odd ACW volumes in electronic form, for a mere $700, if you get them as an add-on to the Logos bible software.  That’s a very reasonable $10 each.  I would buy them, at that price!  But you can’t buy them individually.  You can buy individual eBooks of the CUA series, Fathers of the Church.  These are thoughtfully priced at exactly the same price as the paperback; meaning that either the print and mail process costs pretty much nothing, or else that the CUA are taking the chance to charge more.  You can again get the whole 120 volumes as a Logos add-on, for a trifling $1,300.  I’m sure that all of us are so dashed rich that we can do that.  The Loeb volumes are likewise available as some “complete set”.

It’s a bit sad really.  I think I’d pay $10 a go, when I am chasing something down, for a text.  I could afford that.  But otherwise I am dependent on whatever I can acquire by other means.

This situation must be temporary, however.  I think the evident uselessness of paper copies, and the equally evident utility of electronic ones, will force this situation to change.  Human nature won’t put up with this nonsense for long.  And, once paper copies are  gone, the exaggerated prices should drop too.  The publishers pay nothing for the books, and the costs will be minimal.

Let me end this ramble with a bit of Christmas good news.  It seems that German universities have had enough of the academic journal rip-off.  Sixty universities are refusing to renew their subscriptions with Elsevier at the end of the year.  The reason?  Elsevier just wanted too much money, as blackmail, in return for granting permission to university staff to post the material written by themselves, and edited by themselves, onto the web.

The offer made by Elsevier to DEAL would “not comply with the principles of open access,” the librarians of the University of Goettingen wrote in a message to their users, and “despite its current profit margin of 40 percent, the publisher is still intent on pursuing even higher price increases.”

This is excellent news.  Likewise in Finland:

Over 16,000 scientists followed the call of renowned mathematician Tim Gowers in 2012 not to further publish or peer-review for Elsevier.

The traditional model of journal publishing is obsolete.  The actions of Elsevier, once an honest servant of learning, now in acting in a predatory way, are simply hastening the end of that model.  It may take a while; but freedom for research is on the way!

In case I forget to say it later, Merry Christmas!!

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