Happy Birthday Mithras!

December 24/25, 2005
The True Meaning of December 25th
Happy Birthday Mithras!

By GARY LEUPP

The New Testament provides no specific date for the birth of Jesus. If it occurred as the Gospel of Luke tells us, as shepherds were watching over their fields by
night, it probably wouldn't have taken place in December. Too cold. So why do most
Christians observe December 25 as Jesus' birthday?

The most plausible answer is that
in ancient Rome, as Christianity was emerging as a new faith, its calendar was
influenced by other up-and-coming belief systems bunched together by adherents of
traditional Roman religion as "mystery religions."

One of these was the worship of Mithras, an Indo-Aryan deity (the Mitra of Vedic
religion, the Mithra of the Persian Avesta) associated with the heavens and light.

His cult entered the Roman Empire in the first century BCE and during the formative
decades of the Christian movement was a formidable rival to the latter, with temples
from Syria to Britain.

Given his solar associations, it made sense to believe that
he had been born on the darkest day of the year, the winter solstice. That falls
this year on December 21 but the Romans celebrated the birth feast of Mithras on
December 25, ordered to do so by Emperor Aurelian in 274 CE. Christian texts from
325 note that the birthday of Jesus had come to be observed on that same day, and
the Roman Catholic Church has in modern times acknowledged that the December 25
Christmas quite likely derived from Mithraic practice.

Mithras, the story went, had been born of a virgin. Virgin-birth stories were a
denarius a dozen in the ancient world, so this similarity to the gospel story isn't
surprising. But Mithras was also born in very humble circumstances in a cave, and
upon his miraculous birth found himself in immediate proximity to the bovine. In his
case, not mellow manger beasts but a wild bull. In the Persian version of the myth,
this bull had been the first creation of Ahura Mazda, another, greater god of light.
(Ahura Mazda, in the history of Persian religion, gradually becomes conceptualized
as something like the Judeo-Christian God. But his worship in the Zoroastrian
tradition probably predates the Jewish conception of Yahweh as universal deity.
Quite likely the Zoroastrian conception of God influenced the Jewish one.)

Mithras serving Ahura Mazda subdued the bull, confining it in the cave, and later
slaughteed it. The blood of the slaughtered bull then generated vegetation and all
life. This myth surely has something to do with cattle-worship among ancient Aryan
peoples, which of course survives to this day in India. In Rome the Mithras cult
involved such rituals as drenching the Mithras devotee in bull-blood, and having
believers in secret ceremonies consume in the form of bread and wine the flesh and
blood of the fabled slaughtered bull. A communion ceremony, if you will. Mithras
died and was entombed, but rose from the dead. In some accounts, he does so on the
third day.

The Mithras cult was affected by earlier religious traditions. Anyone studying
mythologies in historical perspective knows that any particular god might have
numerous connections across time and space. The Sumerian fertility goddess Inana
becomes the Babylonian Ishtar becomes the Greek Aphrodite and the Roman Venus. Inana
grieving for her husband Tammuz, who had died after being gored in the groin by a
bull, follows him to the netherworld. There are differing stories but in one she
achieves his resurrection; in another, the resurrection of both is accomplished by
the god of wisdom Enki, on the third day.

The Romans were very familiar with myths about virgin births, births marked by
celestial signs, gods born in humble circumstances, newborn gods barely escaping
death. The Mithras cult, arriving from Persia in the first century BCE and popular
among the Roman soldiers, was accepted nonchalantly in a society which had its
devotees of Isis, who had rescued her brother-husband Osiris from the netherworld;
Attis, who immaculately conceived by Nana, was gored by a wild boar but resurrected
on March 22 (note the proximity to Easter); and the gods of other mystery religions.
When the worship of Jesus Christ came along, spreading from Roman Palestine to
Jewish communities throughout the empire, and attracting non-Jews as well, they
added it to this exotic collection of devotional options. The early Christians for
their part were surely influenced by beliefs and practices of other cults.

Many find insights and truths in myths. Joseph Campbell said that "Myths are clues
to the spiritual potentialities of the human life." Sigmund Freud felt the stories
of Oedipus and Elektra illuminated human psychological development. But he regarded
religion as a delusion. Those suffering from the delusion see their own myths as the
definitive story, and resist any attempt to explain those myths as derivative from
or comparable to others. Thus the Church Father Justin Martyr (ca. 100-65) in his
Apologia (I, 66) claimed that "wicked devils have imitated" the Christian communion
ceremony "in the mysteries of Mithras, commanding the same thing to be done. For,
that bread and a cup of water are placed with certain incantations in the mystic
rites of one who is being initiated, you either know or can learn." He noted the
obvious similarity between Mithraic and Christian practice, and probably realized
that the Mithraic rite long preceded the Christian one. But he could not acknowledge
Christian borrowing. The Mithraic practice was devilish, while the Christian sent
down directly from God and bearing no relation to previous earthly ones was holy.

The Eucharist is one thing. It is mentioned in the gospels and in Paul's first
letter to the Corinthians, where it's referred to as "the Lord's supper." So even if
it reflects Mithraic borrowing, it at least has scriptural authority. It's based,
the believer knows, on God's Word dictated down through the power of the Holy Spirit
into the pen of the inspired scribe. But Christmas celebrated on December 25 is a
completely non-Biblical tradition, and realizing that, various Christians over the
centuries have actively opposed its observance. The Puritans controlling the English
Parliament in the 1650s outlawed it, ordering churches closed and shops open this
day. In Plymouth, Massachusetts, a law passed in 1659 stated, "Whoever shall be
found observing any such day as Christmas and the like, either by forbearing labor,
feasting, or any other way upon such account as aforesaid, every such person so
offending shall pay for each offense five shillings as a fine to the country."

The use of Christmas trees to mark the occasion has often come under attack. What
does a pine tree have to do with the birth of Jesus? Nothing, but it has a lot to do
with Attis, into whose temple in Rome each March 22 a pine tree would be carried and
decorated with flowers and carvings. Its entry into Christian practice probably
comes from Celtic and Germanic pagan customs; the Druids in Britain, for example,
used evergreens in connection with winter solstice rituals. The Norse god Odin
hanged himself on the yew tree named Yggdrasil, pierced by his own spear, to acquire
wisdom. There is a legend that in the eighth century St. Boniface, who converted the
Germans to Christianity, found pagans worshipping an oak tree sacred to Thor, and
when he had it cut down there sprouted in its place a fir tree that he took as a
sign from God. But the practice of bringing such trees into the home only began in
Germany during the Reformation in the sixteenth century, with encouragement,
according to legend from Martin Luther. German Hessians brought the custom to
America during the Revolution, but it did not become popular until the nineteenth
century and even by 1900, only one in five U.S. families had one. The majority came
to do so during the next two decades.

Holly? Used in Druid and Germanic winter solstice rituals. Yule log? More Druidism.
Christmas stockings? Well, no paganism there. Legend is St. Nicholas (Santa Claus is
from the Dutch Sint Niklaas), bishop of Myrna (in what's now Turkey) in the fourth
century and a very kindly man, discretely dropped pouches of coins down the chimney
of an impoverished nobleman's home. They miraculously dropped into stockings hung
there to dry by his several daughters who needed dowries to marry. The point is, all
these customs are the products of an explainable human history.

So too, the beliefs that produce the holiday. The babe born of a virgin, in a
stable, heralded by an angelic host, visited by Magi (Persian Zoroastrian
astrologers) following a star, targeted for death by an evil king. None of this
would have struck the average Roman as entirely original, but the vague familiarity
of the stories may have lent them credibility. It appears that the Christian
movement, highly diverse in the first few centuries, was able to incorporate
narratives and practices from other traditions into itself that gave it a
comparative advantage by the early fourth century. In 313 Emperor Constantine
legalized and patronized the faith. Soon thereafter an already formidable empire-
wide administrative apparatus merged with state power, and heresies and paganisms
were outlawed and largely suppressed. But Christianity continued to incorporate new
influences such as the above-mentioned Christmas practices. Few Christians (or
others) nowadays know of Mithras, but today much of the world unwittingly celebrates
his birth.

My wife and kids and I as usual have up a beautiful tree, honoring not only what's
allegorically worthwhile in the Jesus story but in the host of innocent paganisms
that fell victim to official Christianity. I've always seen the tree, intruding as
it does into the inner sanctum of the Christian home, as paganism's quiet revenge.
So here's a glass of wine, raised in honor of the hero of the day, transforming
eucharistically even as I partake. Happy birthday, Mithras! As the days grow longer
and the nights grow shorter, we thank you, Sun God, for the miracle of
photosynthesis you performed to bring us this sacred tree. We thank you for the
promise of springtime, which we have faith will arrive without fail, as the
landscape predictably dies and resurrects year after year. And we thank you for
shining century after century over our delusional imaginations.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of
Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the
Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa
Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900.
He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq,
Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.

He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu