NMR ISSUE 8

Astrological Forecast 8
Book of Troth
Coyote, Flicker & Sturgeon
Editorial
Futhark Edred Thorsson
Gimli
Here We Go Again
Holaf Festival Lammas
Invocation to Artemis
Invocation to the Goddess
Lady of the Moon
Lazaris: A Question on Magick and Wicca
Letters 8
Rune Might Edred Thorsson
Support a Hebrew Pantheon
The Alchemy of Basic Ritual
The Magic of Chocolate
The Oldest Magick
The Witches' God
The Zodiac Star
Was Jesus A Pagan?

Articles
Authors
Rituals
Book Reviews
NMR Issues
NMR Covers

Was Jesus A Pagan?

By Diana Haronis

In many ways, the life of Jesus personifies the very essence of pagan beliefs. The ancient druids, adept at astrology and other means of prophecy, foresaw the coming of Christ. They saw Him as an incarnation of their own deity.

In His teachings and His life, Jesus expressed the very highest principles of the Old Religion. He taught of the oneness of all life, love, equality and the fruitfulness of the spirit. His teachings and parables centered on nature and agriculture, as did pagan religions.

As pagans saw it, Jesus practiced magick. His actions showed Him to be a god of fertility and nature. He changed water into wine, healed the sick, manifested bread and wine from the ethers to feed the multitudes, brought forth the bounty of the sea and exerted power over the elements.

Mary's conception, in which God overshadowed her, was not something new to the people of the Old Religion. The idea of the Goddess and the God overshadowing mortals in order to bring forth divine descendants was a firm part of their religious beliefs. This was also the symbolism behind the Sacred Marriage, as performed by the leaders of the Old Religion to insure the fertility of the land. In such ceremonies the Goddess and God were thought to overshadow the participants, and any child born of such a union was thus considered to be of divine descent. In Her life, Mary was a perfect representation of the triple Goddess in Her roles as Virgin, Mother and Wise Woman.

The events surrounding the death of Jesus, the fact that it was prophesied, and that He faced His fate willingly, went hand in hand with the ancient idea of the divine sacrifice. In the Old Religion, a great leader or king would undergo a ceremony in which he became one with the land, and pledged to sacrifice himself for the people. As he prospered, so did the land. At the end of his reign, through his sacrifice, his divine essence returned to the land in order to insure its continued bounty.

The story of what Jesus underwent after His death is another matter to consider. His descent into Hell before He could be born again and enter Heaven is similar to the story of Aradia, in which She confronts and eventually befriends the Lord of the Underworld. Facing the Lord of Darkness (or one's own dark nature) and conquering it, is inherent in most initiation ceremonies. The initiate faces death and the Lord of Darkness in order to be cleansed and reborn spiritually. This prepares him to enter into a sacred order. Having confronted and overcome death, he has nothing left to fear. Some ancient initiatory ceremonies even called for the initiate to be entombed within the earth for three days. On the third day he is exhumed and considered to be reborn. [Some claim that such a rite was the true nature of the death and raising of Lazarus. —S.R.]

In addition there are many parallels between the Old Religion and the teachings of Jesus. Love, life, reverence for nature, equality, brotherhood and the fruitfulness of the spirit are the same, as is much of the ancient symbolism. The cross itself has a symbolism far older than Christianity. The cross represented the union of spirit and matter, with the vertical bar of the cross ascending to Heaven while the horizontal bar signifies the Earth. The center of the cross represents the point of unity. Similarly, the vertical bar represents the male positive principle and the horizontal bar represents the female negative principle. The center of the cross was the point where the two merge into one. The four arms of the cross signified the four directions or the four seasons of the year.

The Jesus who performed magick, healed the sick, controlled the forces of nature, reproached dogmatic religion and material greed is in perfect harmony with many pagan belief systems. True, the female element is seriously lacking (with the possible exception of the Virgin Mary) but we must remember that this was true of His whole society [and of those responsible for His extant chronicles —S.R.].

Since the days of this great master, churches have twisted much of what He taught to fit their various doctrines—or worse, to justify bloody religious wars and