170 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



[Apeil 1, 1886. 



who recognise no Sabbath duties) would move the com- 

 munity to excommunicate, na}' even to slay, the man whose 

 soul was not duly afflicted when the sun-god was apparently 

 deserting the people. 



We can understand, again, with what alternations of fear 

 and hope men would watch in those days the gradual dimi- 

 nution of the sun's rate of retreat. The approach of the 



solstice or staying of the sun — would be a matter of no 



mere dry scientific interest, but moving all to earnest 

 anxiety. As it gradually became clear to them that the 

 sun's retreat would shortly be stayed, hope would grow 

 more and more in their breasts. But what a time of hope, 

 what a promise of salvation would there be when at last the 

 sun's down-sinking was actually stopped, and observation 

 showed that the sun-god was preparing to resume his 

 glory ! 



Three or four days after the winter solstice the new birth 

 of the sun-god would be made manifest. What in after 

 years would be selected as an appropriate day to mark the 

 "(in truth, unknown) date of the bu-th of a Saviour of 

 another kind — December 25, or thereabouts — would be 

 the time when the Sun-God of earlier times was fully 

 recognised as re-born. His birth on that morning, the 

 day-spring and the year-spring combined, would be a 

 time of peculiar solemnity, yet not to be marked either 

 by sacrifice or jiropitiation, seeing that neither would fears 

 then predominate over hope nor hope over fears. When 

 he rose in the east (I am speaking of a time 3,000 years 

 before the Christian era) the Vii-gin Constellation, with arms 

 outstretched as if to receive him, was sinking in the west. 

 As the Buddhist sun myth put it, the Vii-gin-Mother Maia 

 paled before the growing glory of her son. 



AVe can picture, too, the growing hopes with which the 

 progress of the sun-god would be watched, until at length, 

 day becoming equal to night, his triumph over the powers 

 of darkness was assured. This, with the worshippers of 

 the sun (and probably every race the world has yet known 

 has, in a certain stage of its progress and for many hundreds 

 of years, worshipped the orb which is our life as well as our 

 light), would have been the veritable Passover of their God. 

 On one side of the equator he was still shorn of his beams, 

 as Samson (whose name implies that, like Herakles, he was 

 a sun-god) was shorn of the flowing locks by which the solar 

 rays were typified. For till the vernal equinox the hours of 

 darkness are longer than the hours of light, but in crossing 

 the equator the sun may be said to break through the bonds 

 wlii<Oi have restrained him ; his power is now declared ; he 

 has at length overcome his opponents; he rises from his 

 wintry tomb. 



If any doubt could remain that the Passover, whatever 

 meaning free from Nature-worship Jewish legislators 

 subsequently assigned to it, was originally a solar 

 festival glorifying the Passover of the Sun-God, and later 

 typifying the Crossing and Resurrection of Thammuz, it 

 should be removed when we consider the significance of the 

 association of the moon's movements with those of the sun 

 in determining the time of the Passover, and with us the 

 occurrence of Good Friday and Easter Sunday. However 

 natural it may seem to the theological type of mind that 

 an angel of destruction passing by marked doors on a special 

 night should have started the remarkable observances of the 

 Paschal feast, and again, however obvious it may seem to 

 such minds that when Easter, with its Christian signifi- 

 cance, came to be established, the Jewish rules for deter- 

 mining the time of the Passover should be adopted by 

 Christian communities, it would in reality be altogether 

 perplexing to reasoning minds that Jewish and Christian 

 peoples should let the sun and moon define for them the 

 dates of then' most important feasts. It is simply incon- 



ceivable that if the slaughter of the Egyptian firstborn — 

 poor little wretches, most of them — had marked the real 

 beginning of the festival, the Jewish legislators, struggling 

 as they had to do against a constant desire on the people's 

 part to return to the worship of the sun and moon, should 

 have decided — in the midst, too, of toilsome and dangerous 

 journeyings — to fix the festival by observation of the sun 

 and moon, and to consecrate it by observances strongly sug- 

 gestive of sacrificial oflerings to the sun and moon as deities. 

 The return of the sun to power after a term of weakness, 

 his victory after defeat, and the accompanying glory of the 

 full moon, would assuredly have been regarded as very 

 appropriate occasions, alike among the Egyptians and among 

 the Babylonians,* for sacrificial observances. But such 

 events as the massacre of the firstborn of Egypt, and the 

 sparing of the firstborn of Israel, would not naturally be 

 commemorated by a movable feast at all, and assuredly 

 would not have been associated with ceremonies .so sug- 

 gestive of sun-and-moon worship. The difficulty of assign- 

 ing any actual date to the events which Good Friday and 

 Easter Sunday are intended to commemorate might perliaps 

 justify the Council of Nice in definitely ruling that they 

 should be determined Isy reference to a Jewish festival. 

 The Council of Nice consisted of theologians, and would 

 naturally enough fall into such a course, even while leaving 

 Christmas-day a fixed feast. But those who are not theolo- 

 gians may be permitted to look farther back for the real 

 origin of arrangements so specially astronomical as tho.se by 

 which Passover and Easter are determined, even if they do 

 not recognise in Christmas the birth of the Sun-God, and in 

 later festivals the modified records of the annual Crossing, 

 Return to Power (or Resurrection), and Ascension of the 

 orb worshipped at one stage of development or another by 

 every race which has passed from savagery to civilisation. 



That the progress of the sun from the equatorial crossing 

 (risingly) towards the summer solstice, was regarded as the 

 Ascension of the Sun -god, may be recognised even in the 

 use of the astronomical word Ascension. For the right 

 ascen.sion of the sun (as of other heavenly bodies) is even now 

 measured from this very crossing-place. Whether it be 

 a mere coincidence or not, the facts remain, that regarding 

 the winter half of the year (as we know some worshippers 

 did regard it) as the time of the death of the Sun-god, 

 I his resuri'cction followed his crossing of tlie equator, and 

 '' he advanced thence towards his glory and ascension (even 

 astronomically defined as such). And after all, if we thus 

 associate Christian festivals with sun-worshipping ones, 

 formerly regarded as altogether sacred, we are only recog- 

 nising in these special cases what has been recognised in 

 multitudes of others — that pagan ceremonials retain their 

 influence, their dates, their ceremonial, and even their asso- 

 ciations, ages after pagan beliefs have passed away. 



Here again, as in dealing with the morning and evening 

 sacrifices originally offered in honour of the rising and 

 setting god of day, we find that we cannot easily under- 

 stand the offerings made at the time of the Passover as 

 being seriously considered to be pleasing to Deity itself. 

 The smoke from the fire which consumed burnt offerings, 

 ri.sing into the air and losing itself in the sunlit sky, 

 might very well seem to stin-worshippers to be likely 

 to please their god, supposed to be just a little above 

 the heights to which the worshippers could themselves 

 attain. The smell of the proffered food woidd be of a 

 sweet savour to such a god. But to imagine that God, 

 regarded as the creator of the whole universe, could be 



* It is hardly necessary to say that nearly all the ceremonial 

 observances described in the Pentateuch may be regarded as pro- 

 bably, if not certainly, belonging to much later times than they are 

 associated with by the ill-informed. 



