Was the cult of Great Mother exchanged with Jesus?

Originally posted by medenaywe Let us search some other elements that Christianity had borrowed from former Mother's religious cult Don! Let me post her Ankh,symbol of Life.Therefore we put this on our tombs as good luck in Dead one's afterlife?

This looks so much like a cross. It is loaded with Mother-Goddess' symbols - snakes, bird-wings/since the bird was a Mother-Goddess symbol since the paleolithic, and passed into Christianity as the Holy Ghost/; and the pharaoh looks like he is  basking in those symbols, being under their protection.
 I'll follow with some research on it tomorrow, I have to grab some rack, it's well passed midnight here. Good night, world.

That means that concept for immortality in after life in Egypt,was exchanged with Cross we use in Life&
after life without mummifications!Ankh's bow's ends just were further pressed in line!in fact Jesus carries
broken Ankh as proof of his mortality!T letter matches with it,first Roman crosses:






Edited by medenaywe - 10-Feb-2012 at 04:52

The cross is just another representation of the Tree of Life, I posted pictures following this development of symbolism earlier here. That the Ankh and the cross are the same symbol doesn't contradict that they are in the same time the tree of life, in fact is strenghtens it. As for the Bow of Time and the arrow of Cronos - this sounds very interesting, and poetic too. There is a reason why the mathematical sign for infinity is the bow

I didn't think about this before, but it goes into itself and hence is endless, a perfect illustration of the idea; this concept sounds even more poignant if I think in Bulgarian, because the Bulgarian word for infinity is a Greek calque, meaning "endlessness"; the Greek word is, AFAIK "apeiron" meaning "without bounds"; the English one is a borrowed word from Latin - "infinitus" meaning the same as the Greek one, because the Latin one was a Greek calque to start with. Did the Egyptians have a mathematical word for "infinity"?

I probably can derive "cross" from "Cronus" in less than 5 linguistic steps, but I'll do it on the Origin of Languages thread, here it's off OP. The Latin word for cross is "crux", the Greek "staupos" /that was used in the New Testament, and translated  as "cross"/ means "stake" or "pole". While there seems to have to connection between "crux" and "stauros", t seems to me that "Cronos" and "stauros" may well be connected, and I'll try to explore that later on the language thread.

 Granted, the cross became a symbol of Christianity because Christ was put on it, and the Romans were using it for quite a long time as a torture/death-tool; but, how did it come to be used as a torture/death tool on the first place, and why is the cross so important anyway, only because Jesus died on it? Only death is not enough, the meaning of life was superimposed on it, that's why it became symbol of life, not of death; and I suspect that there are more than one avenue of thought that brought to the cross being the Tree of Life, and this is not a surprise, because usually the cultural archetypes are the crosspoint of several different ideas in different times that develop one and the same, or close in meaning, main idea and image.



Edited by Don Quixote - 08-Feb-2012 at 15:31

Originally posted by Don Quixote Originally posted by medenaywe Let us search some other elements that Christianity had borrowed from former Mother's religious cult Don!Let me post her Ankh,symbol of Life.Therefore we put this on our tombs as good luck in Dead one's afterlife? This looks so much like a cross. It is loaded with Mother-Goddess' symbols - snakes, bird-wings/since the bird was a Mother-Goddess symbol since the paleolithic, and passed into Christianity as the Holy Ghost/; and the pharaoh looks like he is  basking in those symbols, being under their protection.  I'll follow with some research on it tomorrow, I have to grab some rack, it's well passed midnight here. Good night, world.

The Ankh is an important symbol in Egypt, but this picture is a piece of 21st century jewelry, with a modern artist's decoration(the uraeus of Kingship and an image of Akhenaten). Don't take it as being a true image of what an ankh would have been decorated with.

Originally posted by Sidney Dead one's afterlife? The Ankh is an important symbol in Egypt, but this picture is a piece of 21st century jewelry, with a modern artist's decoration(the uraeus of Kingship and an image of Akhenaten). Don't take it as being a true image of what an ankh would have been decorated with.

How about this one, it's supposed to be authentic - and it's made out of lapis lazuli just like the staff of Inanna that was taken from her when she passed the first door to the underworld

http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/ankh.htm
This one is supposed to have the Pharaoh cartush on it

Also, to support my not-buying the sexual meaning of it
"...In fact, guides in Egypt today like to tell tourists that the circle at the top represents the female sexual organ, while the stump at the bottom the male organ and the crossed line, the children of the union. However, while this interpretation may have a long tradition, there is no scholarly research that would suggest such an exact meaning...." Ibid.

I had seen a fair deal of pictures sexual symbolic male-female representations, like in India, and they are very precise, no shoulders on them of any kind. Besides, to represent children of the union as a line going across the penis is too long of a stretch for me.

Here a Egyptian image from the Valley of the Kings, that has been broken to symbols and I can see a line of ankhs near the the bottom  of it, plus one in the hands of Hathor and Horus - the mother of Horus and manifestation one of the aspects of the Egyptian Mother-Goddess. So, the ankh was a Mother Goddess symbol, not a sexual union one per se, since the Mother-Goddess don't need a husband to conceive.

Hathor was considered at the same time mother and daughter and a wife of Ra; and later Isis was identified with her, so Horus was son of this Hathor/Isis, but in the same time he was the Sky, containing Sun and the Moon; so he is as complex as Hathor is. His head is a bird's one, and since the bird is a symbol of the Mother-Goddess since the Paleolithic., it's possible that he is a symbol of the Mother-Goddess, Hathor/Isis, since he was her son and her husband too, just like Hathor was mother-,daughter and wife of Ra. His cult was very old, dating from the Predynastic time, his is as old as Isis' cult.

Hathor's complexity came from her being Mother-Goddess who was self-sufficient, and not needing a husband to conceive, and in fact while Isis has a husband, Hathor doesn't /being in the same time mother and daughter and wife of Ra meant that she was in fact the feminine principle, talking all possible roles a woman may have in a male's life, not a real wife, even the Ancient Egyptians weren't so incestuous/, exactly because she was the Mother-Goddess-who-is-enough-by-herself.

http://buffaloah.com/a/archsty/egypt/illus/sign.html

Edited by Don Quixote - 08-Feb-2012 at 20:22

Frozen Arrow of Life - I like that, then the shoulders on the ankh make sense as the fletching on it.
Btw, "arrow" in Bulgarian is "strela", and I can probably derive "strela" from "Hristo" in less than 5 linguistic steps, on the lingustic thread. Anyway, I was trying to find the root "hri/e" in Proto-Indo-European vocabs but had no luck, it's possible that the words came from other linguistic traditions, not from the Proto-Indo-European; which may mean that it may have came from an Egyptian/Asia Minor root.

As for ankh as a predecessor of the cross I absolutely agree, the cross became imbued with all the meanings of the ankh, because those meanings were developed long before Christianity came about. Besides, the Christianity as philosophy and as religion became developed in Egypt, the Early Church Fathers /a.k.a. Greko-Egyptian School of Alexandria/who built Christianity  pouring in it Greek philosophy, were all living in Egypt, and were naturally embracing Egyptian angles of philosophical thinking and symbolism because it was all around them, even if they didn't realize that. Even when mobs of Christians were destroying Egyptian temples and religious art they couldn't help themselves but to repeat many of what they were so anxious to destroy in their own symbolic art.

P.S.You come up with some very good poetic images, I'm so tempted to steal them ...but don't worry, I won't do that, I'm a bastard, but not such a big one.


Edited by Don Quixote - 09-Feb-2012 at 02:32

That's very true, we live in our language, we are literally immersed in it, and language is like an archeological dig - thousands of thin layers one over another, layered down along the centuries, and every important historical or cultural event left a sign of itself there, we can try to find those signs and restore a picture of what was what, and happened when and why. And as an emigrant I can appreciate your expression of language being homeland...on many levels.

Where did the "hri/e" root in "Hristos" came anyway, you have any idea? It seem to be a very important root in Greek, there are pages of words with it in the Ancient Greek dictionary I'm using. It's not much used in Slavic languages, AFAIK, the words in Bulgarian and Russian I can think with it are very few. mostly connected with Christianity, so they came late in those languages.
I have to go to bed, good night, world.


Edited by Don Quixote - 09-Feb-2012 at 03:24

Bow is twisted in ear of needle so arrow does not hit ankh's carrier!String&arrow stay alone but frozen.

If there has not been Mother's religion so popular,Christianity could have been devastated!Till this days St.Mary ,his real mother in early church on which cult he has raised helps the Jesus,his first connection on Earth's surface.Am I hurting anyone?Insulting?Truth relieves Alani!All religions&churches have been built on elder one,that's the law.


Edited by medenaywe - 10-Feb-2012 at 09:14

The fist on the hand of Ramehotep is not a sign for sexual union, as the thumb is sticking out, and I posted description that the thumb is supposed to be in the hand when the "clenched fist" a sexual symbol is made. Further, full breasts don't necessarily mean pregnancy.

For the mask and the face of Tut - he was reconstructed, an on the pictures I posted it's clearly seen that he looked nothing like his mother  - he had a receding chin, and a cleft palate, while Nefertiti didn't have such; besides she wasn't his biological mother. So, the face on Tut's coffin is not the face of the restored Tut, this can clearly be seen.

On the symbols - when a person cancels his father's religion and the symbols that went with it, it;s not very likely that he would want to be buried with the very symbols he canceled; especially if this person believed in afterlife, he wouldn't want to be stuck for eternity with the symbols he canceled.

The Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene are not mixed up, rather they both are aspects for the mother -goddess - the virgin and the whore; in teh same way in which the Egyptian Mother Goddess was split on Isis /life/ and Sekhmet /destruction/. For the Christian morality whoring was the worst thing a woman could do, the complete opposite of the purity of the virgin; and because the Mother-Goddess needed her other part, Mary Magdalene was vilified as to take the opposite of the virgin. Both the virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene make one Mother-Goddess.

The split of the female personality to "pure" and "filthy" is a very deep rift that occurred with the advent of Christianity, before this is didn't exist. Female sexuality wasn't seen as something bad or destructive in the pagan religions, in fact, it was the opposite, since sexuality was seen as sacred, as the act of creation of life is. Christianity inherited from Judaism it's sexophobia, his rantings against the "whoring" cults and the sacred prostitution, the latter being completely misunderstood under the strict Jewish mores and seen as something filthy instead as the worshiping with one's body, as it really was - putting women in the sacred space, that's why every woman had to do it once in her life, as a religious homily. Christianity inherited this sexophobia and turned sexual abstinence in a cult, making the mother of Jesus virgin; so it needed it's opposite to complete the image of the Mother Goddess.

Most unfortunately, this archetypal thinking sank in the modern  thinking, and now one cannot convince many Christians that the real Mary of Magdala wasn't a prostitute, and there is a reason for that - people need to complete the archetype in there heads /because we think with archetypes, even when we don't know that/, so they fight against any notion that Mary wasn't a prostitute, but a disciple and maybe even an apostle.

 Further, this moral rift imposed on our moral values a double standard for the both sexes, and the separation of women into "motherly, pure" and "dirty, whorish" is very much alive in most countries today - if a woman is a tad more passionate, she is ultimately branded "dirty", and as such an opposite of what is pure and deserves love. In fact, this vilifying of sexuality is the reason for it's profanization, and creating a lingustic jargon/slang to cover the part of sexuality that is considered "dirty", this slang seeps into the part that is not supposed to be "filthy" also and as a result the holistic and healthy sexual experience is broken to pieces - this is one of the biggest psychological tradegies of the fragmented psyche of the modern humans.

 This modern double standard is there is such resistance to the accepting of  Mary of Magdala for her own self, because if she is not the whore, then the image of the Mother-Goddess is not completed, so she has to be "dirty" for the mother of Christ to be a virgin. I have been fighting this for like 3 weeks on another forum so I see this thinking all over the place. Until this moral rift is eliminated, and sexuality regains its place as an elated human function, and the mother of Jesus is allowed to have been a normal human, not 'pure virgin', she will never be a holistic Mother-Goddess, and Christianity will need a vilified female image to fulfill the picture of the whole Mother-Goddess. But this is off OP.


Edited by Don Quixote - 09-Feb-2012 at 22:53