SUN-WORSHIP

In the magazine «Hayrenik», published in Boston, in the issue of 1930 (January, year VIII, no. 3 (87), p. 114), in the article «Sun-Worship» published there, M. Terpeterean dealt with sun-worship as it comes down from the most ancient times and with its manifestations in various cultures over the course of millennia.

The noteworthy article in question follows below…

SUN-WORSHIP

THE ORIGIN of religions has furnished the subject of an immense literature in every language.
Religion was born together with man. The longing to penetrate the secrets of the nature that surrounded him, the innate effort to protect himself from her disastrous blows and, above all, the dread of dangers and of death impelled primitive man to interpret those phenomena and to seek the cause of them all. Religion is the attempt to enter into relations with that cause in order to appease its wrath or to be found worthy of its favours, and the visible sign of religion is worship.
Before surrendering himself to the flights of his imagination, man long contented himself with the testimony of his eyes.
The visible cause was too strong for primitive man to be able to free himself quickly from its influence. Before attempting to grope in the unknown beyond the heavens, primitive man worshipped the nature that he saw, the sky and the stars shining upon its surface, the earth and the elements acting upon it. Before imagining an invisible light, he worshipped the visible light and its greatest furnace, the Sun.
Metaphysical subtleties are the attempts of comparatively recent ages. For all primitive peoples too, God, or the Great Cause, was nature, and its most powerful representative was the Sun. Incalculable are its benefits. No one was more worthy of worship and of reverence.

It is he who with the inexhaustible rays of his light floods the universe and gives life to nature. The blue vault of heaven is the most suitable place as a dwelling for God, and it is from its summit that he holds the rein of the world in order to direct the various motions of its vast body. Man had believed, and believes still, that everything is for his enjoyment, and that if there is anything that is not as he desires, it must be amended by prayers, by offerings or by sacrifices.
Nature-worship was the religion of antiquity.
All the ancient peoples worshipped nature in her various manifestations, and the Sun was regarded as the eye or the executive force of that nature.
Pliny, one of the greatest philosophers of antiquity, a contemporary of Jesus, says:
«The world, which contains within its sides all created things, is an eternal and infinite god, which has never been created and will never be destroyed. It is beyond human capacity to seek anything beyond it. The world is the true God, the sacred being which encloses within itself everything. There is nothing outside it. The cause of all effects is Nature, which contains within itself both the cause and the effects».

This idea prevailed in Egypt and in India before passing from thence into Judaea and Greece. One of the inscriptions of the Temple of Sais – in Lower Egypt – says,
«I am all that has been, all that is, all that shall be, and no mortal has yet lifted the veil that covers me».

That Temple was dedicated to the god Pan, who was worshipped as the representative of nature. The world and the sun were one, they completed each other, and everything was by means of them.
There have of course been audacious mortals who wished to usurp the rights of the gods. But those forced cults lasted only so long as fear and flattery compelled them.

The cult of the emperor Domitian barely lasted until Trajan. Even the emperor Augustus was soon forgotten. But Aramazd remained sovereign in the Capitol, and the aged Cronus was always revered by the inhabitants of Italy.
It is not Heracles or Vahagn who were made gods, but the sun-God who was made man in them, because man felt himself incapable of describing him worthily. The primitive religions were not the deification of men, but the incarnation of the god-nature, represented by mysteries and by images.
If it was feelings of gratitude that were to impel men to worship one of themselves, how was it possible to disregard the benefits of the Sun and of the Earth, by which alone primitive men lived? The cult of a man could not be eternal, since man is born, grows, dies and vanishes, whereas nature is eternal. Everything is weak in man; nature is great and powerful; man is born of dust and returns to dust, whereas nature knows no old age. Her force is eternal and unchangeable, and from that eternity of hers arose the idea of an eternal Godhead, incarnate in her mightiest representative, the Sun.

The Greek Zeus, the Anglo-Saxon Tiw (Tiw), the Scandinavian Tir (Туr), the Deus of the Latins, the Pav, and the Tiu of the Armenians, which signifies «Day and Light», are epithets of that Sun-God.
It is the Sun that charmed man’s first glance. It is his rays that dispel the darkness, melt the frost, make the fields blossom and revive nature. Before bowing to any metaphysical religion, man knelt to the heaven and the earth of universal nature, to the Sun and to the stars.

In more recent ages man’s imagination swept past the limit of the sight of his eyes and grew curious as to who had created the sun and the earth. But if the undeniable answer to that question is the real God – that is to say, if the strongest proof of the existence of God is the law of causality, according to which every effect has a cause – why not ask also who created that god? And if god could exist from the beginning, why could not the sun and the earth exist in the same manner? Which is the easier and the more logical, to accept that from the beginning there was a conscious and immaterial god who created the universe out of nothing, or to affirm that the universe, which is indestructible, cannot have been created and existed from the beginning?

For the Brahmins too the world was not created by God, but is simply a transformation of him: the world is the divine body; there is nothing more powerful than it.

The poets of antiquity, in singing of the world or in praising the universe, glorified the Eternal god. All the temples of the world too were dedicated to nature, and the members of her vast body were the objects of the reverence and the worship of the peoples. From the wisest priests of Egypt down to the sorcerers of the most backward people, all have always turned their eyes to the vault of heaven and to the stars that rule it.
What reason suggests to us is confirmed also by real history. The Osiris and the Isis of Egypt are the sun and the moon. The animals they worshipped were the representatives of the heavenly bodies upon the earth. Anubis, the Sacred dog, represented Sirius or the Dog-star.
Heliopolis was a city consecrated to the Sun, and in its temple stood the statue of the Sun-God: a golden youth who had raised his right hand in order to drive the chariot of the world with a whip; in his left hand he held a thunderbolt and ears of corn, as a declaratory sign of the power and the fruitfulness of the Sun and of the earth. The Nile too, as an object of worship, represented a member of the God-Nature.

Upon an Egyptian column the air, the sky, the sun, the moon, night and day are commemorated as gods.

The Phoenicians worshipped the Sun, the moon and the stars. The Sun was the chief god and was called Heracles.
According to the historian Diodorus, a contemporary of Jesus, the Ethiopians too worshipped the sun and the moon and, like the Incas of Peru or the Persians of Bactria, they too called themselves «sons of the sun».

In the treaty concluded between the Carthaginians and Philip of Macedon, the Sun, the moon, the earth, the rivers, the meadows and the waters are commemorated as witnesses.
The moon was the greatest God of the Arabs of the desert, and to this day it is the crescent of the moon that adorns their banners. The famous temple of the Kaaba at Mecca was dedicated to the moon before the coming of Muhammad. That black stone which to this day is the object of their worship and which is supposed to stand in the void without any support has, according to tradition, been a statue representing Saturn.

Among the ruins of Babylon there is a temple which to this day is called «Masjid esh-Shams»- «the temple of the sun», and the Bel of the Babylonians too was worshipped as the representative of the sun.
Pythagoras accepted the Ethereal Fire as the first cause of life, and the sun as its furnace.
The colossal statue of Rhodes, one of the seven wonders of the world, was dedicated to the Sun.

A proof of nature-worship is the cult of the forests of Sosiats among the Armenians in the times of Anushavan. The forests, the trees and the rivers represented nature.
The Huns worshipped the heaven and the earth, and their high priest was called «Tanjau» or «son of heaven», as the mikado of Japan is styled by his subjects to this day.

According to Clement of Alexandria, it was Nature that was the greatest god of the eastern peoples, whose eyes were the two luminaries of heaven – the sun and the moon.
Plato testifies that the early Greeks had no other god save the sun, the moon and the stars worshipped by the barbarians of the east. Orpheus accepted the Sun as «chief of the gods» and at every sunrise would go up to a high place in order to render him reverence. In the Iliad Agamemnon makes his sacrifices to the sun and says: «O Sun, who seest and hearest all things».
In Sophocles’ «Oedipus» the chorus addresses the sun as the chief of the Gods.

In Thessaly sacred ravens consecrated to the sun were kept, and it is figures of ravens that appear also upon the monuments of the Persian Mithra.
Rome too had her temples dedicated to Nature and to the Sun. Tatius, the chief of the Sabines, a contemporary of Romulus, was a sun-worshipper. Before the altar of Vesta the Vestal virgins had the duty – like the magi of the Persians – of keeping unextinguished the eternal fire, which was regarded as the earthly representative of the heavenly luminary.
In Latium there was a spring consecrated to the Sun, with two temples, in which Aeneas offered sacrifice at the time of his arrival in Italy.

The emperor Augustus, having images of the sun and of the moon brought from Egypt, had them placed in the temples of Rome in memory of the victories he had won over Antony and Cleopatra.

I have deliberately kept for the last the cult of the Persian Mithra – the Mihr of the Armenians – which was the greatest and most universal divinity of antiquity. Who was Mihr? What did the eternal fire preserved by the hands of the magi in the sacred fire-temples represent? Assuredly the sun is the foundation of the religion of Zoroaster, and since Mithra is far more ancient than the like Egyptian and Greek divinities – Osiris and Isis, Heracles and Bacchus – Mazdeism is the prototype of all sun-worshipping religions, as we shall see by degrees.
The cult of Mihr has struck far deeper roots among the Armenians than even Christianity.

The vast variety of the variants of the name «Mihr» is a manifest proof of the heaven-wide diffusion of his cult.
Mihr had his own temple at Bagarij, near Mamakhatun, where his traces are visible to this day. In the village of Tordan-Mitrodan in the province of Daranaghi too there was a temple whose name recalls Mihr. According to M. Emin the word «mehean» already signifies «mihrean», and the seventh of the Armenian months was called «mehekan» and was probably dedicated to him.

According to Avdalbegian, variants or derivatives of Mihr are Mir, Mihrdat, Mihran, Mirh, Mirhean, Mirhavan, Miran, Amir, Meher, Mher, Meruzhan, Mehrunik, Mahevan and so forth, as well as, according to Hübschmann, mithr, mither, thor and so forth.
No name among the Armenian heroes has had so frequent and so varied expressions among us. A name is not only the index of a particular culture; having also a religious and magical sense, it is the immediate expression of worship. And these numerous variants are an incontestable proof that the worship of the sun and of fire penetrated far more deeply into the folds of Armenian civilization than is commonly accepted.

If in the Armenian Christian environment we meet with so ardent a love for the name Mihr, which has lasted for centuries and for millennia, then it is possible to imagine how great the charm of Mihr must have been in pre-Christian times.
The cult of Mihr has undoubtedly been one of the chief axes of the development of the Armenian religion, having its primitive centre in the province of Vaspurakan, according to Kanayants.

What was the form of the Armenian worship of Mihr? The Armenian writers give us no direct information concerning the concrete character of that faith; but supposing that it was the same as that among our Persian neighbours, we see the following…

Mihr is the god of the sun and of fire. He fights against Ahriman, against dragons and against demons. In the last days of the world a virgin shall conceive and shall bear the Messiah-Mihr, who shall raise the dead.
Now that man-Mihr was born upon December 25. He is the mediator between man and Ahura-Mazda – Aramazd. He is a divinity that has taken flesh, Astfaderta, according to Brekner.
The legend of Artavazd too is probably another variant of Mihr, according to linguistic etymology. The name Artavazd, the Asavazdanh or Asawazd of the Avesta, signifies, according to Justi and Hübschmann, art – «one who renders pure (fervent) veneration», like Prometheus. And if we accept Atravazd instead of Artavazd, «Atr» signifies «fire» and «Atravazd» «one who renders veneration to fire». (It is interesting to note Avdalbegian’s supposition that, just as «Hithra» was changed into
«Misa», according to Justi, so «Atravazd» could be changed into «Asawaz» – God).

According to Yeznik, Artavazd was carried off by the dragons and imprisoned in the caverns of Masis. The Varalez dogs that raised up Ara the Beautiful lick his chains, so that he may be freed and may save mankind. According to Khorenatsi every Sunday, while according to other historians «on the first of Navasard» – therefore once a year, at the autumn equinox – the smiths strike their anvils, and «he is alive until now, and he is to come forth and to possess this world». (Yeznik, I. 74).
This popular belief probably has no political foundation and, according to Gr. Khalatian, «Artavazd is the luminous principle, the Armenian Mihr, a new transformation of him».
The cult of Mihr was spread also in neighbouring Georgia. Amiran is the Mihr of the Georgians. His tale too is simply a legend of a fight with demons or of the slaying of a dragon. If «Amira» is not the word «Mihr», it may, according to Prof. Marr, be the Abkhaz word «a-mra», which signifies «the sun».

Among the ruins of Persepolis there is a sculpture of a king who kneels to the sun, and beside whom blazes the perpetual fire of the magi.
To this day too the Parsees of India, as offshoots of the believers of Zoroaster, direct their prayers to the Sun, to the moon, to the stars and to the fire deemed their representative upon earth, which is the purest and the subtlest of the elements.

Vagharshak set up in Armavir the statues of the Sun and of the Moon. The same divinities were worshipped also by the Albanians and in Colchis. Throughout Asia Minor the temples were dedicated to the sun, to the moon or to the stars. The moon was worshipped as Diana-Artemis at Ephesus, and the sun as Apollo in the Troad.

We have already proofs strong enough that the religion of antiquity was sun-worship.
Let us now attempt to prove that, as Osiris and Isis, Bacchus and Heracles, so too Christ are legends copied upon the legend of Mihr.
In order to make our task easier, let us recall here that astronomy is one of the most ancient of the sciences and had been cultivated in a fairly profound manner by the Chaldeans and the Egyptians. They were acquainted with the seven chief heavenly bodies – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Moon and the Sun. They knew the twelve signs of the Zodiac, as twelve constellations through which the sun passed in the course of its apparent annual revolution.

Those constellations are, in the order of the sun’s course: the Ram or the Lamb, the Bull, the Twins, the Crab, the Lion, the Virgin, the Balance, the Scorpion, the Archer, the Goat-horn, the Water-pourer and the Fish.
Of these the first three correspond to the season of spring, the second three to summer, the third three to autumn and the last three to winter.
These numbers seven and twelve have acquired a sacred character in Christianity as well as in the ancient religions. Let us recall the 12 sons of the patriarch Jacob, the 12 tribes of Israel, the 12 temples of Janus, the 12 labours of Heracles, the 12 shields of Mars, the city with 12 gates of the Revelation and so forth and so forth, as well as the lamps with seven branches of the temple of Solomon, the seven walls of the temple of Ecbatana, the seven gates of the cave of Mithra, the seven storeys of the tower of Babylon, the seven wonders of the world and the seven sages, the seven deadly sins, the seven sacraments and so forth and so forth.
In the Revelation the number seven is mentioned 24 times, and the number 12 is mentioned 14 times.
The feasts of all these religions too are bound to the chief stages of the sun’s revolution – the solstices, December 21-22 and June 21-22, and the equinoxes, March 21-22 and September 21-22.
Upon September 22 the Sun is upon the equator. From that day it begins to descend towards the southern hemisphere and the days grow shorter, until the solstice of December 21-22 as the final limit, and we have the longest night and the shortest day of the year. From that day the sun begins to turn back, and behold, upon December 24-25, when the shortening of the night is already evident, all the gods are born – Mithra, Christ, the Shang-Ti god of the Chinese and so forth.

The sun, advancing by degrees, reaches upon March 21-22 the vernal equinox, when night and day are again equal. Within one or two days the victory of the days over the night, or allegorically the victory of light over darkness, is already distinctly seen; that is to say, the god is revived: Christ rises again… From that day the Romans and the Persians begin their new year.
Before passing to the analysis of the ancient mythological works, let us see whether our forefathers worshipped nature as a rational and living being, or simply as a blind force.

Primitive man had not yet vanity enough to attribute life and soul to himself alone. He did not rank himself higher than nature… Analysing the works of all the ancient philosophers and teachers of religion, it is possible to arrive at the conclusion that nature was supposed to be a living and wise being whose soul was fire.

Pythagoras, the founder of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, explains the nature and the origin of the soul thus:
«The heaven and the earth, the sea and the moon, together with all the stars, move by an inward force which is the great soul of the vast body of the universe. That soul is the source of the souls of men and of animals. When any living creature dies, that particle of the universal soul returns to the mother soul, after completing its earthly course».

Plato believes in a soul of the world which, under the name of Aramazd and with thousands of variants and forms, is worshipped everywhere.
Cleanthes accepts the universe as God, while Cicero says that it is impossible that Man, a particle in the great All, should have feeling and wisdom while the universe should be lifeless. «One and the same spirit is distributed to all living creatures,- says Marcus Aurelius,- and one and the same wise spirit to all rational beings. Just as all created things are made of one and the same earth, which breathe the same air and see the same light of the sun, so too the life of the universe is one».

Greek mythology is a theocratic republic, and every part of the universe is under the administration of its own chief.
Poseidon rules the waters, Pluto hell, Hephaestus is the god of iron, Diana of the hunt, Ceres occupies herself with the harvests, Bacchus with the vintage, Minerva watches over the arts and the Naiads over the springs, and so forth..
The living and wise universe was divided between two great forces – the active and the passive, the male and the female. The heaven is the active force, the earth and the elements the passive. In the words of Plutarch, the heaven is the father and the earth the mother, as the singer of Goghtn too sang: «Heaven was in travail, earth was in travail».

Virgil describes this immaculate marriage of Nature with the following allegory…
«In spring the earth opens in order to receive the seed of fecundation; the ether descends into the bosom of its spouse and with the rains pours forth its seed, which fecundates the earth».

It is in the same season of the beginning of spring, upon March 25, that Mary the Mother of God conceives of the angel.
The Sun is the masculine spirit, while the earth or the moon is the feminine. Among the Armenians it is Vahagn and Anahit who are worshipped as male and female gods, and in the temple of Ashtishat the statues of the two divinities stood side by side.
The root «vah» of the word Vahagn is the Zend word «vah or veh», which signifies «sublime, exalted, supreme». Anahit or Anaitis, on the other hand, was the goddess of love, the feminine principle, the moist and fecundable matter, being at the same time the representative of the moon, like the Ana, the Ishtar and the Melita of Babylonia and of Asia Minor.
The cult of Anahit was very ancient among the Armenians and perhaps even earlier than the coming of the Armens to Armenia. According to Agathangelos, Anahit was the glory and the providence of Armenia, and in the provinces of Taron and Yekeghiats Trdat met with great difficulties in abolishing her faith.

As a natural consequence of the male and female principles there arises the idea of good and of evil. The Sun is the male god who fecundates the earth, vanquishing the darkness and the frost. Darkness and frost are the greatest enemies of primitive man, who is not yet in a condition to defend himself strongly against them. It is the Sun that rends the darkness; therefore it is the good that vanquishes the evil. And behold, with the doctrine of the male and the female is coupled the doctrine of good and evil also.
Euripides says that the harmony of the world lies in the synthesis of these opposing forces and, according to Plutarch, this doctrine of duality prevailed among the most intelligent peoples of the world and, in particular, in Egypt, in Persia and in India.

In «the book of Genesis» God creates the earth and sees «that it was good»; but Satan comes and, deceiving Eve, spreads sin and death over the world. Man is subjected, therefore, to the influence of the destroying evil Satan as well as to that of the creating good god.

The Ormizd and Ahriman of the Mazdean religion, the Osiris and Typhon of the Egyptians, are these two opposing forces. The evil is often manifested under the form of a serpent or of a dragon, and for that reason those who fight against the evil are called «dragon-slayers» or «serpent-fighters».

The Armenians had the spirits «ayk» and «Kajk», which were the agents of evil and of good upon the earth. The Yezidis to this day worship the evil principle, because God is good by nature, they say, and it is man’s duty to appease the heart of Satan in order to restrain the evil.

In the third century of Christ Manes, following Zoroaster, founded the Manichaean sect, whose fundamental doctrine was the principle of good and evil and which in the days of king Shapuh was the cause of great upheavals throughout the whole East.

Returning to our proper subject, we must say also that all the allegorical or mythological poems of ancient classical literature are dedicated to the Sun. Without a knowledge of the zodiac and of the stars it is impossible to understand and to interpret the Heraclean, Dionysiac and Thesean myths, as well as the Revelation of John.

In all of them too it is the sun and the stars that act, sometimes in a very easily intelligible and simple manner and sometimes with complex allegorical turns of phrase. It is above all the revolution of the sun about the earth and the changes of the seasons proceeding therefrom that form the foundation of those tales.
A cursory comparison, for example, between the legends of Heracles and of Osiris and the signs of the Zodiac will fully establish that that allegory is dedicated to the Sun.

The twelve labours of Heracles are the description of the twelve signs of the zodiac – the Lion, the Bull, the Ram, the Crab and so forth. According to the Egyptian legend, Osiris is slain by his adversary Typhon with the participation of an Ethiopian queen. Now the Sun, after passing the sign of the Scorpion of the southern solstice, approaches the constellation of Cassiopeia, and Cassiopeia is the name of an Ethiopian queen.
Naturally the astronomer priests could not explain the signs of the Zodiac and the course of the sun in a simple manner to the common people, and were compelled to give them a human form. In order not to make the deception evident they were compelled even to prepare tombs upon earth for those heavenly bodies: one of the pyramids was supposedly the tomb of Osiris, but it is of course useless to look for bones beneath it.

Antony had instructed the Egyptian courtiers to call him «Osiris» and queen Cleopatra «Isis». Herodotus says indefinitely that the Osiris of Egypt is the Bacchus of the Greeks. Diodorus of Sicily, on the other hand, relates how the Egyptian priests called the Greeks deceivers for affirming that Bacchus was born in Thebes like Osiris. That falsehood, said the Egyptians, was framed by Orpheus, who had studied the mysteries of the Egyptian cult and introduced them into Greece, adapting them to local conditions.
The tale of the Argonauts too is a eulogy of the Sun, related by the Thessalians. Jason’s victory over the golden-fleeced ram of the east is the vernal equinox; the Dragon and the Bull are the guardians of the fleece of the Ram, and Castor and Pollux (the Twins) are the chief actors of the tale.
It is superfluous to prolong this parallel. All those who are interested may compare all those tales with the signs of the zodiac and with the other constellations, and they will realize that, as Apollo, Bacchus, Heracles, Osiris, Mihr and so forth, so too Jesus is nothing other than legends of the sun and of the moon.

For Greek, Egyptian or Roman heroes we can easily accept a fabulous character, but we find it difficult to give the same character to the hero of the Jewish tale.
This hesitation is natural. A cult of two thousand years cannot easily be effaced from the mind of the common man from one day to the next. As a slave finds difficulty in the first days of freedom, or as a subterranean worm is made uneasy under the influence of the rays of light, in the same manner the benighted bigot too shrinks from the light of science…

In a previous article we nearly succeeded in proving that proofs strong enough do not exist in favour of the historicity of Jesus, that is to say of his having lived and acted as a philosopher, as a teacher of religion or as a deceiving neuropath. The aim of this article too is to show the identity of the legends of Bacchus, of Mithra and of Jesus, elaborated in different environments.

The dates of the conception, the birth and the resurrection of Jesus are like the corresponding stages of the sun. Jesus is surrounded by twelve apostles and, like Mithra, vanquishes the princes of darkness, that is to say the months of winter.

What is the essence of the Christian religion?
A serpent deceives the first woman, who eats the forbidden fruit.
Because of this dreadful original sin the whole of mankind –
on condition that those not yet born be included in it – is condemned by the Most High.
After a certain time the heart of the Most High is appeased, and he sends his only-begotten child to the earth, that it may expiate with its blood that sin of mankind. It is impossible to separate the doctrine of salvation from the doctrine of original sin.
If sin did not exist, there would be no need of salvation; if there were no guilty one, the need of a saviour would not be felt. Now the subjection of the good creature created by the good to the dominion of the evil, and its being led back once more towards the good by the grace of that same good principle, is the universal faith in the principles of good and evil, whose primitive form is the religion of Zoroaster with his gods Ormizd and Ahriman. According to the Bundahishn – the Mazdean book of genesis – half of the world belongs to Ormezd, who is the god of good and of light, and half to Ahriman, who is the god of evil and of darkness.
It is at the autumn equinox that the evil begins with cold, long nights, snow, wind and so forth (as also the apple ripens and the serpent deceives Eve with the apple), and it lasts until the vernal equinox.
The gardens wither, paradise is closed before Adam and Eve – and Ahriman places in the river of the garden of Eren (in the Jewish, «Eden?») the great serpent, which is the mother of winter.

The Persian Eren – paradise – is described far more beautifully than the Jewish Eden, which is simply a copy of it: no place in the world, says the Bundahishn, equals the garden of Ormazd…
That garden, laid waste by the hand of Ahriman’s serpent, is revived once more – the world is saved from the dominion of the evil at the vernal equinox, when the sun passes out of the constellation of the Ram or the Lamb. Behold the «Lamb of God» of the Christians. In no other way is it possible to interpret the likeness of Jesus to a lamb, if the Lamb sign of the Zodiac and the stage of the vernal equinox were not known…

The Persian designation Eren is perhaps a variant of the word «Iran» or «Ari», but the Jewish word «Eden» is not Hebrew and is probably a faulty reading of the Persian one.
The identity of the theologies of Zoroaster and of Moses is evident. Both of them settle man in a marvellous garden, into which the evil is introduced in the form of a serpent. In the one the actors are Ahuramazda and Ahriman, in the other Jehovah and Satan.
Both saviours too are born of a virgin, precisely at the time when the sun, passing at the winter solstice out of the constellation of the Virgin, turns towards the northern hemisphere.
The child Mihr described by the magi of Zoroaster too had, like the child Jesus, been exposed to various dangers and had fled in order not to fall into the hands of the hostile king who persecuted him. Mihr too, like Jesus, had been subjected to temptation by Satan, and so forth.
It is of course in order to give satisfaction to Jewish ambition that the authors of the legend of Jesus bring magi from the east to the manger of the Child Jesus…

The variants of the same tale related in different countries are in direct proportion to the conditions of the different environments. In one place the representative of the sun vanquishes giants, in another he slays dragons, while in Judaea he preaches Roman humility among a people crushed by the iron arms of Rome and with the mentality of the austere Essene sectaries.

Tertullian, who is a father of the church enjoying great authority, of the second-third century of Christ, writes that the religion of Mihr too had its mysteries – baptism, communion and so forth – and that his believers too made a mark with a pencil upon their foreheads in order to recognize one another; even their priests too must not be the husbands of two wives…
According to the same Tertullian, when Christianity made its entry into Greece and Rome, enlightened minds expressed the suspicion that it was a modification of Mithraism, and it is for that reason that Christians turn towards the east in order to pray.

The miracle is the greatest mainspring of all religions. All the founders of religions too have worked miracles, and there is always a vast multitude which not only believes in them and follows them, but also bears witness everywhere.
Bacchus too healed the sick, and even turned water into wine for the three sacred pitchers of his temple.

The common man believes the incredible more readily than simple events, because it is the incredible that excites his imagination and gives flight to his soul.
In the religious and mystical field the duration of centuries proves nothing.
Great errors spread more widely than great truths, because it is easier to believe than to reason.

From the most ancient ages countless stories and tales of satans, of demons and of jinn have been written and related; yet today no sensible man believes them any longer. Credulity is a disease, a deep-rooted epidemic, thanks to which men are divided into two distinct classes – leading deceivers and following dolts.
Credulity is a bottomless abyss, capable of swallowing whatever is poured into it, without any selection. The bounds of reason are very narrow, unfortunately.
When any unfettered and unprejudiced mind studies impartially the martyrology of the first three centuries of Christ and the descriptions of the miracles, it blushes for shame at seeing, on the one hand, so much credulity and blind conformity and, on the other hand, so much shameless falsehood among its fellows. And it is upon foundations so unstable that the existence of the god-man has been established, whom no one of his contemporaries saw, knew or mentioned for a hundred years.

The monotheistic principle too has no Jewish origin. That idea is the natural consequence of the unity of the world. All the ancient heathen philosophers too accepted and preached it. Even the polytheistic religions give the presidency to a chief, whom the others obey.
The satans and the angels of the Holy Scriptures too give us the right, upon that ground, to rank the Judaic religion among the polytheistic ones.
Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor, wrote long before the spread of Christianity that «there is a single world which encloses everything; there is a single god who is everywhere, and there is a single eternal substance which is the same for all».

The idea of the Trinity too is not a Christian peculiarity. The Indian Vishnu (the second person of the Trinity) had taken flesh under the name of «Krishnu», under the shelter of the Lamb and Ram sign of the month of March.

To sum up this article, I repeat that, according to all probability, like all the great religions of antiquity, Christianity too is simply the worship of the Sun, and Nerses Shnorhali was quite right to identify the Sun with Christ in his immortal hymn:
Morning of light
O righteous Sun
upon me light hath dawned.

P. S. – In answer to my article «Jesus of Nazareth», published in the magazine «Hayrenik», I have thus far seen only one reply
in an Armenian-American paper, in which a simple-minded Armenian priest, instead of refuting what I have written with proofs, asks what right I have to write thus. The question, however, is not one of having the right or of not having it: it must be proved whether Jesus really lived as a man. But that, I think, is already beyond the capacity of the priest who wrote the article.