The Case Against Pagan Apologism
A Review of The Jesus Mysteries and Jesus and the Lost Goddess by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy
The authors bring to the historical/mystical Jesus a background in classical studies unparalleled by other writers in the popular genre, but their case is deeply flawed because their thesis is not actually supported by the evidence they provide.
Freke and Gandy resemble clairvoyants who gain the confidence of a client by telling them things (such as you had a car accident at a certain time, you’ve been married three times, you love beagles) which are all true — all of which seems incredible (how could the psychic have known?), and seemingly verifies the skill of the clairvoyant. Then, having gained the confidence of the client in this manner, the clairvoyant goes on to spout a lot of nonsense that the client believes.
The Jesus Mysteries thesis is a hybrid of four components none of which can stand on its own, given the evidence the authors present to support their theory (or given any other evidence, as far as I know). The four components are:
1. Jews “adopted the Pagan Mysteries” and converted them into a version of Jewish Mysteries, thus resulting in the unique item they call the “initiation allegory” of the Jesus story. This implies a corollary, 1A, That the formula script of the Jesus story was taken from the Mysteries.
2. Initiates in the Mysteries expressed the process of initiation in allegorical or symbolic lessons for the non-initiated.
3. The experience undergone by initiates, which they converted into an allegory for the world at large (2), was death-and-rebirth of the soul; hence the allegory of the rape of Persephone in the Eleusinian Mysteries, the rebirth of Osiris-Dionysos.
4. Christianity offered a version of salvation hijacked from the “dying-and-resurrecting Godman” in the Mysteries.
Scholars in the fields concerned would look skeptically on these notions. Significantly, no known scholar, versed in the materials in question, has contributed a supportive blurb to F & G. Not that the approval of established scholars means anything — but the point is, they are playing an academic game, and they give the appearance of playing it by the rules, but in fact they are wildly bending the rules.
Of these points 1 and 1A are debatable. The other three can be refuted by the evidence commonly cited by scholars who specialize in these matters.
Jewish Mysteries
The best example of the groundless invention by F & G is the notion that Jews adopted the Pagan Mysteries. Note that they do not cite any direct evidence, not one single textual source, to support this notion. Their argument is inferential and circumstantial. They do not say which Jews did the adopting or when or where, except in very loose terms. They suppose it could have been so, but a mere supposition is not a hypothesis. Moreover, they misrepresent the relation of the ancient Jews to Pagan religion. The following corrections are consistent with the best consensus of scholars to date:
– The ancients Jews were drawn to Pagan popular religion, the local cults of Canaan, etc., not to the Gnostic/Pagan Mysteries. The OT is a record of their “whoring after strange gods” because the Jewish people were attracted to indigenous and regional rites. In the rare (recorded) cases where Jews were able to access the Pagan/Gnostic Mysteries, they defected completely from traditional Jahweh worship. Several cases are known.
– The notion that Jews who were initiated could then have turned around and converted the Mystery teachings into a special Jewish version (hardly distinguishable in some respects from a racial-political agenda, but F & G avoid tackling that issue) is totally absurd and contrary to what is known about the religious attitude of the Jews as well as about the well-preserved sanctity of the Mysteries.
– The best argument against this case is the well-established fact that the Jews had their own Mysteries: the mystical tradition of the Kaballa/Cabalah (totally ignored by T&G).
Finally, the radical apocalyptic sectarians within the Jewish community were intent upon creating and imposing their own visionary program, which resulted in the messianic insanity of Qumran.
The Yahweh cult was the core of “Jewish Mysteries” and the Kabbala was the mystical aura that developed around this core. Paradoxically, the mystical cult may have contained elements of an anti-Jahwist nature. (This is a huge unsolved issue. Earlier versions of NIHI describe “Jewish counterintelligence” about the Archons.) So tortured and obscure was this dualistic (mystical-militant) complex at the heart of Jewish religion, that the people were not able to penetrate its mystical aspect, and did not wish to be controlled by the militant radicals; so they were continually “backsliding” into Pagan popular cults. (Bravo for them.) Most crucially, the authors do not bother to distinguish what went on in Pagan popular cults, related to the Mysteries, from what went on in the Mysteries themselves. (More on this below.)
Finally, F & G fail to cite convincing and already established evidence for a Jewish borrowing from the Mysteries: the co-option of motifs from the Osirian Cult, assimilated by the Jews during the period in Egypt. Many books have argued the Osirian/Egyptian origin of Jewish religion. F & G cite none of them. Also they do not cite comparative mythologist, Lewis Spence, who established already in the 20s that every single element of the so-called Abrahamic/Mosaic tradition, and every single element of the Christian Jesus story grafted onto it, can be found literally stated in Osirian religious texts. Although they devote several passages to the Mysteries of Osiris, absorbed by the Jews in Alexandria, the best textual proof for a borrowing/adaptation of “Mysteries” has been ignored by these authors. (This may have been an oversight, or a deliberate choice to enhance the look of originality in their thesis. More on this “originality” below.)
Allegorical Lessons
Even so, it must be pointed out that Osirian religion was an exoteric rite, the outstanding example of state or popular Mysteries. Osirian ceremonies did not reflect what the temple initiates underwent in initiation. It was a dramatic event created by the initiates to involve the pharaohs (whom they stage-managed rather in the way a Hollywood agent cum director would manage a star) in a moral drama to be projected into the collective mind. This spectacle says nothing about what the priesthood experienced in initiation.
F&G do not really distinguish the popular Mysteries from the hidden Mysteries, although they appear to do so. They claim that the Outer Mysteries represented in allegorical lessons what the initiates underwent in the inner (secret, initiated) Mysteries. At the same time they claim that the experience of the inner Mysteries was the mystical experience of the death and rebirth of the human soul, represented in the myth of the dying and resurrecting godman. How are we to assess these notions?
There are two kinds of evidence regarding the inner Mysteries. One is the testimony of initiates who state that they are observing a solemn vow never to tell what happens in the initiation process to the outside world. (Scholars like Milonos finally throw up their hands in despair, admitting we can never know what was never disclosed. Other scholars like Albert Hoffman, discoverer of LSD, intuit what the initiates might have experienced, based on a comparative study of indigenous initiatic methods, the “archaic techniques of ecstasy” described in depth by Eliade (Shamanism, Yoga – Immortality and Freedom.) Let’s assume that this testimony means that the actual experience of initiation was never disclosed even in allegorical or symbolic form.
Next is the evidence of certain classical authors who offer their opinions on what happened in the Mysteries. Such as Sallust, Olympiodorus, Proclus, Clement of Alexandria and others cited by F & G. There are perhaps a dozen or so specific sources in antiquity who advance their views about what went on in initiation. The question is, Are these views correct? Are these initiates who are speaking, and thereby violating the vow that was known to be rigorously observed? Or are they wannabe initiates and non-initiated observers who offer an interpretation of what might have gone on in initiation? F & G assume that they are genuine initiates telling us what happened in initiation. And what they say is that initiation was a ritual/ dramatic enactment of the pattern of the dying and resurrecting godman, representing the birth of the immortal self (Christ in you) in the mortal soul.
This is a judgment call. One can either believe the testimony that says the experience undergone in the process of initiation was never disclosed, or one can believe the opinions/interpretations of those who claimed to know what it was.
However, there is a hitch. Evidence from elsewhere in the history of religions shows that the formula-drama of the dying and resurrecting godman was not a paradigm in the Greater Mysteries at all, but a feature of the rites of theocracy. Lord Raglan (The Hero) showed that the formula-scripts cited by F& G on the godman-drama belong to an inventory of ritual narrative used for the institution of divine (anointed) kings. In these rites, the king was identified with the dying-and-resurrecting godman because that figure (Attis, Tammuz, etc) was the consort of the Goddess or her priestess, and originally sacred kings were empowered by the Goddess.
In Mesopotamia, kingship was conferred by Ishtar. Theocracy was based on theogamy, heiros gamos, the mating of the king with the Goddess or her stand-in (lay-in, if you will). The Epic of Etana says, “There was no royal direction of the people of the Goddess — then kingship descended from heaven.” In other words, the institution of sacred kingship was brought to earth by the Goddess for the purpose of orienting her people (natives) to a noble and ennobling way of life. The evidence for this tradition is huge. (See Barbara Walker, The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, entry: Kingship.)
This business about scripts may seem a niggling point but it is tremendously important. No scholar of the history of religions or comparative mythology would confuse a Mystery rite with a ritual of statecraft. The formula-drama of the dying-and-resurrecting godman, upon which F & G base their entire thesis, belongs to the category of political agendas, not genuine mystical experience. The ritual drama was the production of priests in the Mysteries, so we must surmise, but not the representation of their own experience in initiation. At first, in oral matrifocal societies (see Walker in extenso) the ritual drama of renewing the king involved the entire community. The holy matrimony of king and Goddess/priestess was largely a public spectacle that served to assure the populace of the continuing connection between the social order (king) and the natural order (Goddess) Later, after 1800 BCE, the male-appropriated rites of kingship were formalized into standard dramas of investiture mounted by the priesthood who anointed the king. The skeletal version or prototype of the Jesus myth is thus a text written by men to legitimate male domination.
By the time theocracy becomes historically evident (i.e., through the earliest surviving records) representatives of the Goddess remained behind the scenes, not longer directly involved in the investiture spectacle. Male priests were the power behind the thrones, advisors of the royal court, etc. Why did these initiates choose to devise and perpetuate a theocratic program using a divine/appointed king as a figurehead? Either because it suited them as a benevolently inspired social experiment (in Egypt), or as a game of power (in Mesopotamia and elsewhere), or both…
In any case, the scheme was effective in organizing agricultural/urban society along hierarchal lines. Moreover, the same ritual-drama of the dying-resurrecting godman was experienced vicariously in the Outer or popular Mysteries, thus creating an equilibrium between ruler and ruled. At seasonal moments when taboo was lifted, common people could identify with the godman who was personified in a special, exclusive way in the appointed king. All this concerns outer rites, external spectacle and collective catharsis, the institution of theocracy, a big production number invented by the initiates. What happened to the initiates in the inner Mysteries was another matter.
So, F & G mistake the scripting formula for divine kinship for an initiation pattern. This error would not go unnoticed by any scholar of ancient religion. Its development can be sketched as follows:
Goddess societies \ Patriarchy / Dominator Model \ break
Theogamy ——————— Theocracy ————— Kingship script
(JEWS: Samuel) ————-> Jesus story \ Osirian Mysteries /
With the break from Goddess-based societies, patriarchy emerges in parallel with the technology of secular writing, and so scripts are written to indemnify the new model of social/spiritual power, the regent or divinized king in the one-gender scenario: male priests writing for male theocrats. Theocracy was adapted by the Jews in the era of Samuel. (Among the Gnostics, one of the names for the Lord Archon was Samael, “god of the blind,” and Samuel was blind in the OT.) Eliade emphasized that the adoption of sacred kingship by the Jews amounted to an anomaly, the imposition of a foreign institution. Due to the absorption of Egyptian elements from the Osiris cult, the patriarchal script among the Jews became infused with the quasi-mystical elements noted by F & G. Lord Raglan gives over 150 examples of the twenty-two motifs in this scripting formula. J. M. Robertson (Pagan Christs, 1903) was probably the first to inventory dozens of cross-cultural examples of the formula-script for sacred kingship. It contains all the elements listed by F & G for the Jesus story, applied with a much wider sampling of cross-cultural examples.
In short the Palestinian version of the Jesus story that came to be adapted by the Evangelists, is a hybrid of the standard theocratic ritual script dosed with a strong infusion of Egyptian/Osirian mysticism. (Essential reading on the development of this item through the figure of John the Baptist is The Templar Revelation by Picknell and Prince.)
Finally, there is one more essential factor that weighs significantly against the Jesus Mysteries thesis of Freke and Gandy. The little that is known about initiation in the Greater Mysteries indicates that the culminating experience was the encounter with a living light that instructed the initiate. F & G do not cite the ancient testimony on this crucial element. Even without speculating on what happened in this encounter, it is plausible to assume the illuminist nature of initiation. Do the “initiation allegories” supposedly invented by initiates to explain to the external world what they went through in initiation, reveal anything about this encounter with the Light? Apparently not.
Now we come to the crux of the matter: If the allegorical lessons given out by the initiates did not reflect in a veiled mythical language what they experienced in initiation, what did they reflect? I would propose that these allegories reflected what the initiates learned through initiation, not what they underwent in the process of initiation itself. If initiation was truly a path to higher knowledge, and if the initiates did really encounter a living Light that taught them certain things (as Gnostic texts attest), then they would have had a vast treasure of knowledge to communicate. Any allegorical or symbolic teachings they might have circulated outside the Mystery Schools would have been devised to teach humanity about its own long-term experience, the overarching view of lessons, tests and trials. Rather than talking about how they came to acquire that knowledge, they would have been dedicated, I believe, to transmitting what they knew, what they had learned. The telos (aim, purpose) of initiation was the spiritual guidance of humanity, including education in matters both practical (the lively arts and survival arts) and sublime (fabulous tales of power a la Castaneda, star-world plots, etc).
This supposition about what the telestes would have taught in allegorical form expresses the informed view that initiation was about higher intelligence rather than about the attainment of an immortal soul-life, a divinized identity, etc. The “divinized identity” complex represents a late, decadent outgrowth of the Mysteries, even a betrayal of their original premises. It is consistent with the false attribution to divinity or godhood to tyrants and decadent theocrats, and finally to the Jewish saviour… With Alexander the Great the notion that any mortal could achieve a divinized identity was planted in the collective mind. He was the true precursor of JC. (This point has been argued recently by several historians.)
Then, with the disclosure (not discovery) of precession and the wildfire rumor that the fated pattern of the stars was not permanently fixed, the general populace became infected with the desire for personal deliverance, another factor that set up the Messiah complex for universal acceptance. (Subject of another memo on what CC calls the position of personal concern.) Through JC “divinized identity” was acquired by everyone in an act of vicarious identification. The pagan theocratic system mutated oddly: Jesus Christ became the godman/kind who delivered his subjects to immortal life, something the pagan theocrat never claimed to do, and never needed to do, because the thirst for unity with the divine was satisfied in the popular Mysteries…
Christian Gnosis
The majority of the motley texts from Nag Hammadi exhibit pre-Christian, non-Christian and anti-Christian elements. What has been called “Gnostic Christianity” was an attempted synthesis between pre-existing Gnostic doctrines and newly emergent Christian doctrines. Between 150 and 350 AD numerous anonymous scribes translated Greek Gnostic texts into Coptic and modified those texts with the aim to reconcile or align them with notions then spreading among the Christian converts. By far the most successful innovation of Gnostic Christianity was the inclusion of Mary Magdalene as co-revealer with Jesus Christ, but if this modification is accepted, it refutes the doctrine of the Incarnation, which makes Jesus Christ the sole embodied representative on divinity on earth. Gnostic Christianity was a precarious and temporary measure, a shaky attempt at rapprochement between conflicting, and in some respects irreconcilable, doctrines. F & G argue not so much for Gnostic Christianity as for Christian Gnosis — that is, an authentic form of Christianity that existed in the Mysteries prior to emergence of the Jewish/Christian Jesus myth. For their main authority on this notion they lean heavily on Clement of Alexandria — a classical source whose testimony misrepresents the Mysteries. Once again, this a judgment call. If one believes that Clement understood the Mysteries, one will assume that what he said about them is true.
Likewise, anyone who likes can believe that authors Freke and Gandy understand the Mysteries. As “lifelong students of experiential mysticism,” they may well know what they are talking about. On the other hand, to use their own analogy, they may be writing a travelogue for a country they never visited.
When F & G refer to the “Inner Mysteries of Christianity that the Gnostics taught,” they make it sound as if there is a glowing treasure of lost Gnostic lore in the canonical body of Christian doctrines. This is a bogus notion based on an incomplete and erroneous conception of the Mysteries, both inner and outer. Its effect is to inflate Christianity with secret meaning.
There were no Inner Mysteries of Christianity. This is purely a fabrication the authors have dreamed up, but they are not the first. In fact they stand squarely in the tradition of a half dozen of well-known esoteric teachers (whom they do not cite): Max Heindel, Rudolf Steiner, Edouard Schure, Manley Palmer Hall, Eleanor C. Merry, Heline Corinne, and others. From around 1900 following the Occult Revival in Europe it was fashionable to see in Christianity the culmination of the ancient Mysteries. Schure’s The Great Initiates is the epitome of this hypothesis. Steiner’s Christianity as Mystical Fact makes the deeds attributed to Jesus Christ into literal, historical acts through which the ultimate secret of the Mysteries was dramatized in the world. Manley Palmer Hall argues (in Secret Teachings of All Ages and The Mystical Christ) that every single anecdote about Jesus and every nuance of the absurd doctrines expounded by Paul and John are veiled teachings from the Mystery Schools. This is tantamount to F & G’s claim that “the Jesus story is a consciously crafted vehicle for encoded spiritual teachings.”
While these authors (F & G and those who preceded them, whom they do not cite, probably because they are barely marginal by academic criteria, or perhaps because to do so would diminish the originality of their thesis) appear to legitimate Christianity, they are really involved in an effort to legitimate the Mysteries for a world in which Christian spirituality is the only true religion. Call this Pagan apologetics, contrasted to Christian apologetics, the attempt to explain how everything in the OT and NT makes sense and proves that the absolute good will of God rules the world.
Pagan apologetics attempts to prove that Pagan/Gnostic Mysteries must have been deeply significant because even in their hijacked form they have produced the most powerful religion in the world. But what if the strength and universal appeal of Christianity has nothing to do with the incorporation of genuine Mystery elements…? That would be really scary, wouldn’t it?
Pagan apologetics has a long history. It began probably in a formal sense with Clement of Alexandria, but certainly it was established as a mode of discourse by the last great Roman poet, Claudian, who argued that the Mysteries were to be discussed in symbolic and allegorical terms — because that is the only way for people who don’t understand them to talk about them. Other classical authors like Sallustius, who state outright that the myth of the Eleusinian Mysteries is an allegory of the psyche’s descent into incarnation, are not questioned by the authors F & G. As classical scholars, they assume that all classical testimony is unimpeachable, i.e. correct. From about 400 CE on, the only way to discuss what remained of the Mysteries was to transpose them into allegory, but this does not mean that they were originally allegories — or at least not allegories for the death and rebirth of the soul, as these classical sources would lead us to believe.
The tradition represented by F & G emerged in the 15th century in the Ovid Moralisé, a tremendously influential work that treats Pagan myths as moral allegories. (See Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, in the TMF library). According to Jesuit scholars who ardently promote this view, “[Pagan] mythology is not a jumble of absurd or shocking tales, it is a body of moral precepts, cunningly hidden under the mask of fiction.” (Seznec p 276). And so there is no reason for the decent, church-going person to be alarmed by rape and orgies in Greek myth, for it all carries an edifying lesson that can be reconciled with Christian morals. Likewise, the atrocities of Jehovah in the OT are allegories having nothing to do with actual acts of genocide, torture, territorial aggression, etc.
Likewise, authors F & G propose that the teachings of the Mysteries can be reconciled with the Pauline declaration of “Christ in you,” the current formula for personal divinization — current now for 2000 years. Thus the Mysteries get the Christian seal of good housekeeping, although it seems that Christianity is being legitimated by retrieving and revalorizing the hidden core of Mystery teachings on which it is based. The mainspring of this argument is Clement who is quoted as having said that all Gnostics are true Christians. One would then have to ask, What was Clement’s notion of a Christian? The answer is, Someone who has found God in their own self. The implication here is, Gnostics initiated in the Mysteries experienced God in their own selves. Close study of the evidence, combined with “experiential mysticism” that approximates to the Mysteries, indicates that the requisite loss of personal identity in initiation induces a momentary sense of unity with God — or with nature, or with a waterfall, or with a June beetle — but the God/self equation was not the aim (telos) of initiation. More likely, deification was a predictable and perhaps risk-fraught side-effect of heightened awareness. It was the result of initiation (one of the results) but not the purpose, not the ultimate aim. (Analogy: the result of training for the Olympics is a body fit for peak performance, but that is not the aim of the training, is it?) Had it been so, the Mysteries would have been nothing more than incubation tanks for self-aggrandizement.
Initiation in the Mysteries was about divine intelligence, not divinized identity. Gnostics taught that what is divine in us is the capacity to know, including the capacity to know ourselves — but not our selves.
At least one author on the Mysteries, Walter Burkett— an author cited by F & G — emphasizes that ecstatic deliverance from self attained by momentary catharsis in the popular Mysteries, and selfless immersion in the Light in the greater Mysteries, was not the person-centered salvation celebrated in Christianity. Burkett warns against seeing the Pagan view of salvation through the filter of Christian prejudices and expectations. Much to his credit, ultra-conservative Gnostic scholar Kurt Rudolf advances a similar caution.
Pagan salvation was an experience of ego-loss, while Christian salvation links the personal ego to the divine/saviour/king/scapegoat, preserves it by an eternal contract. The difference between loss and link says it all.
Conclusions
F & G are gifted researchers, exceptionally informed in classical literature, but they are seemingly unable to evaluate their sources. They are simply too credulous with their evidence. Both books contain many misleading remarks, throwing a huge distortion field around the Mysteries. Errors occur when they are dealing with classical sources and when they are simply stating notions to support the Jesus Mysteries Hypothesis.
For instance, they cite Augustine who complained that the Mysteries promise eternal life to anybody. (JM, p72) First of all this is not what the Mysteries offered, only what Augustine thought they offered. He protested that the Mysteries offered what Christianity offers but without demanding adherence to the doctrines or the institution of the faith. F & G correct the protest by noting that “the Mysteries only promised eternal salvation to the initiated,” not to everyone, as Christianity claims to do, thus proving that they could follow Augustine’s drift — yet in saying this, they assert something which cannot be proven and is, in my view, not true: the Mysteries do not promise anything like eternal salvation, at least not in the sense understood by Christians then and now. The failure of the authors to distinguish between Pagan and Christian notions of salvation is one of the deepest flaws in their books.
In other places, they make statements that are out-and-out incorrect, simply to advance their thesis: “the four New Testament Gospels are variations on the Jesus myth originally used by different Schools of Christian Gnosticism.” Used how? In which schools? Cite the Gnostic texts that exemplify this usage! This statement is extremely misleading because it gives the impression that the four Gospels so revered by Christians today were viewed as legitimate initiatic material by Gnostics.
Finally, it is most significant that authors T & G choose largely to ignore the Dead Sea Scrolls evidence that the “Jesus myth,” which they claim was deliberately adapted by Jewish Gnostics from Mystery teachings, was a political-racial agenda infused with the world-hating mysticism of the Qumran cult. They are blithely unconcerned about the political profile of “Jesus of Palestine”(a proposed name for the Qumranic composite), yet seeing the “Jesus initiation allegory” as a formula-script for sacred kingship (consistent with the vast weight of expert opinion) explains its adaptation by Jewish revolutionaries better than its co-option by “Jewish Gnostics,” whoever they were.
Many, many misleading remarks occur throughout the two books. Despite their charming plea for originality, the basis of their argument was given in Pagan Christs (1903) by J. M. Robertson and Lord Raglan’s thesis on the hero in the 30s. Both authors list dozens of examples of the Jesus formula-script but in no case do they do not claim it was lifted from the Mystery School curriculum. Robertson (in Ch. 4, Origins of the Gospel Myth) uses the term “mystery play” for the ritual drama enacted on the pattern of the dying-and-resurrecting godman. He is right (as far as I know) in calling this a rite of paganism, i.e., pagan Mystery-religions in the popular mode, and not a model of initiation in the Mystery Schools.
All in all, F & G misrepresent the Mysteries by finding “allegorical lessons” invented by the initiates in the hidden core of Christianity. It can be argued that Christianity, along with Judaism and Islam, has no hidden core. Fundamentalism of all three brands is exactly, literally what it appears to be: a 3-D alien agenda of domination of division, deceit, and domination disguised in religious rhetoric.
As for what the mythical allegories like the rape of Persephone were intended to teach — if not the death and rebirth of the soul, then what? What if they were teachings about nature and the cosmos, the tragic rupture of the human bond with nature, our links to other star systems, tales of power, and many marvelous adventures in this and other worlds, rather than about the melodrama of the psyche, the narcissistic quest of the personal soul for immortality?
JLL: 8 January 2002 Oudenaken
