Beans Lead to Hell!

I bet you didn’t know that! Well, they do, or at least they do according to Pythagoras, who wrote, “Eating beans is a crime equal to eating the heads of one’s parents.”

The bean-hating mathematician and philosopher was also a religious dissenter who established his own sectarian colony. Some of the notions put forward concerning diet were eccentric, to say the very least. Pythagoras believed in the transmigration of souls, which could pass from people to animals. So, animal sacrifice was out. Heated spices and herbs were altogether more suitable offering to the gods.

Yes, just as spices were the route to heaven beans took one in the opposite direction. Broad beans, were, so he said, the ladders for the souls migrating from the underworld. Beans grown in a closed pot resulted in a mass of obscene shapes, resembling sexual organs or aborted foetuses. I know it sounds just so funny but for Pythagoras and his followers diet was an important branch of ethics. Well, perhaps it is. :-))

Ave Sol Invictus-in Celebration of the Solstice

Christmas Day, the 25th of December, the day that Jesus was born in a manger, is it not? Well, actually, no, it isn’t. The Gospels make no mention of the day, or the time of year, when Christ entered the world. It was centuries after his death that the Church alighted on 25 December.

And why that specific date? For the simple reason that the church was adept at grafting its own feast days on to pre-existing pagan holidays. Late December was the very height of the Roman holiday, the time of Saturnalia, with the 25th day of the month celebrated as the birthday of the Sun God, Sol Invictus, who had originally come to Rome from the east.

The cult was first brought to the city by Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, an emperor of the Severan dynasty, who had grown up in Syria , where he served as a priest of the local sun god, El-Gabal. From this he was to be known to history as Heliogabalus or, more commonly, Elagabalus, one of the most notorious of all of the emperors. Sun worship had been growing in popularity in the years before Elagabalus’ ascent, presenting him with the opportunity to install his favoured version of the cult into the Roman Pantheon, renamed as Deus Sol Invictus, standing over Jupiter himself. The new cult did not survive Elagabalus’ downfall and death in 222AD, though emperors continued to be shown on coins wearing the sun-crown.

It was Aurelian, the great soldier-emperor, who brought it back, after his victories in the east later that same century. This was at a time when the Empire needed unity before all else. Sol Invictus was to be the premier divinity of the Empire, uniting all sections, east and west, in the worship of a single god without betraying their local cults. The birthday of the Undefeated Sun was officially given as 25 December-Dies Natalis Solis Invictus.

In a sense this was a foretaste of what was to follow under Constantine and his successors, though Christianity, in contrast, was premised on the death of all other cults.

So, please, next Christmas, each and all who may come to read this, think not of Jesus but of Sol Invictus, and shine always with the Sun!

Saints and Sinners

Saints are fairly remote figures now but not so in the Middle-Ages, oh no. They were a living and immediate presence, who often intervened in human affairs to serve the ends of justice and grace. Miracle stories reveal their intervention in the judicial system of the day, when they came to the aid of the weak and the defenceless, all those who lacked some strong earthly protector. The stories, of course, were clearly created as a form of compensation, a reassurance to the weak and defenceless in a world dominated by the strong and powerful. Justice, true justice, really only prevails in the imagination…and in Hollywood.

Eleusinian Mysteries

I’ve been looking into to this, the ancient celebrations in honour of Demeter, the goddess of crops and fruit, held in Eleusis in the province of Attica close to Athens. The various ceremonies, or mysteries, once drew thousands of believers, causing the temple complex to become ever grander over time.

The object of the various rites was to ensure that the participants would be well-placed in the afterlife. Over the course of a few days people would take part in religious processions and drams, take part in sacrifices, utter profanities of all sorts, undergoing a form of self-abasement, and finally purifying themselves by bathing in the seas. The most important rites, the core mysteries, were kept secret, with participants vowing never to discuss what they had experienced.

These most solemn rites were carried out at the sanctuary of Eleusis itself. Such was the authority of the goddess and her acolytes that the mysteries were preserved and we still have no clear idea what was involved. One suggestion is that involved a reenactment of the central myths surrounding Demeter and her daughter Persephone, queen of the underworld, the one symbolizing life and the other death. Ritual drinks were involved, that much we do know, which may possibly have contained some kind of opiates. After all, one of the symbols of Demeter is the opium poppy.

The whole festival concluded with dancing and feasting, the high point of which was the sacrifice of a bull. At the end libations were poured in honour of the dead.

The ceremonies continued on this basis for over a thousand years, popular also with the Romans, who identified Demeter with Ceres, their own corn goddess. It was finally brought to and end by the Emperor Theodosius, who abolished all pagan practices, as a new spirit of intolerance entered the world. But the mysteries have, in a sense, never really died, remaining an object of enduring fascination.