Was the cult of Great Mother exchanged with Jesus?

There are no "random symbols",  all symbols are there for a reason.
The word "Easter" came from the word "Ester" which is equal to "Astarte" - the Babylonian Mother-Goddess. For millenia a fest was celebrated before harvest - and eggs and buns were made and brought to Astarte, so the harvest be fruitful. Those eggs and buns were in fact sacrifice - a sacrifice of what one wants to be multiplied - this is the very reason for every sacrifice. The word "ester" and "astarte" mean "woman", and this is only logical because women give birth, this was observed before humans realized that men also had a part in the story, so it's normal the Mother-Goddess to be the archetypal female, even her name to mean "woman". "Eve", another Mother-goddess, was called this, because "eve" means "life".

So, Easter, the Christian holiday that signifies the self-sacrifice of Christ, started as a pagan fest with sacrifice of eggs and buns that was supposed to secure plentiful harvest; and it's name is the name of the Mother-Goddess in one of her aspects. It's interesting that teh consept of sacrifice according to Joseph Campbell, became the prime symbol when the human society settled down and became agricultural; in the hunting-gathering societies representations of the animals the tribe wants to catch was supposed to attract the animals and make them let themselves caught. So, magic to attract those animals was the thinking at the time, not giving up from what you have to get more of it, which is what sacrifice is.

I have to admit that I know next to nothing about the Egyptian views on sacrifice, so I have to read some info on it before I can participate here. So, give me couple of days to pull an act together..

"Hebrews" approach about same question is here:
http://bible.cc/hebrews/13-15.htm 

Edited by medenaywe - 10-Feb-2012 at 10:51

Thanks for the links, bro, I'm going to read them during the weekend and hopefully will be able to pull up something useful for Sunday posting.
I'm also rummaging in Budge's "Osiris and the Egyptian Ressurection" vol. 1 which I have, and parts of which can be accessed here http://books.google.com/books?id=ArwV9KNeTIYC&pg=PA197&lpg=PA197&dq=egyptian+sacrifice+budge&source=bl&ots=c2fW7M5EAt&sig=rDCoT2RdG6n5I46TFXfb3CnjtgI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=OgE2T4CdGcixiQLEgv3HCg&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=egyptian%20sacrifice%20budge&f=false
Also for prime sourcing I'm going to take a look at "Legends of The Egyptian Gods" by Budge, which can be found here  http://www.sacred-texts.com/egy/leg/index.htm; and this link has a wealth of primary sources and historical research on the Egyptian religion and it's effects of Christianity  http://www.sacred-texts.com/egy/index.htm  . This book in particular, "Egyptian Mythology and Egyptian Christianity" seems to be promising for info-scooping for the needs of our discussion here  http://www.sacred-texts.com/egy/emec  ./index.htm  .


Edited by Don Quixote - 11-Feb-2012 at 01:10

His position has been taken with remarriage of his Wife!Traces of Religious heretic Akhenaten had been buried in coffin with Tut's body inside.

Was Akhenaten only heretic in Ancient Egyptian culture?Look on it from different angle:Heretics are always popular&famous!Leadership have been always question of populism.It is still basic rule of commercials.

Edited by medenaywe - 12-Feb-2012 at 12:04

My net connection is super-slow-and-unstable today and I can't get anything done!
Anyway, I'm not able to find any info on the said Egyptian view that everyone is a veictime, medenaywe, if you can throw a link or two on that it would be great. This is a very philosophical POV, and I can sure appreciate it - we are all victims of life, and death comes for everyone, so I want to read more on it.

Budge in hi "Osiris"http://books.google.com/books?id=ArwV9KNeTIYC&pg=PA197&lpg=PA197&dq=egyptian+sacrifice+budge&source=bl&ots=c2fW7M5EAt&sig=rDCoT2RdG6n5I46TFXfb3CnjtgI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=OgE2T4CdGcixiQLEgv3HCg&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=egyptian%20sacrifice%20budge&f=false talks a lot about human sacrifice in Egypt - which was done as a sacrifice of an enemy during a war, and as funeral sacrifices on the death of a pharaoh. Budge supports this opinion with numerous prime sources, pictures of Egyptian artifacts, etc. which can be found in his book, I cannot copy any of them here.

If this is so, then the understanding of death as a sacrifice is only around the corner - a human dies as a sacrifice to the gods, his death is a sacrifice; but, even if he wasn't sacrificed, he would die anyway, because everyone dies sooner or later, and the life expectations for Egypt were, If I remember right, quite low, something like 25-30 for males, and 20-25 for females, dues to the very high mortality rate of women giving birth. Granted, some lucky persons live/d quite long, but in any case, human life is short. So, if a sacrificial death is a sacrifice, why not a death by "natural causes" be seen as sacrifice - the result is the same in  both cases.


Edited by Don Quixote - 12-Feb-2012 at 18:07

Well, the other possibility was the pictures Budge interprets as human sacrifice to be war pictures about people killing each other, or victors killing prisoners of war. But human sacrifice was a part of quite a few ancient cultures, Romans, Greeks, Thracians, Phoenicians, Celts, etc, so it wouldn't be out of place in ancient Egypt. This site says that the evidence of human sacrifice was mostly from the pre-Dynastic period, and in Naqada II, so if it happened it was in the very beginning of the developing of the Egyptian civilization:
"...Human sacrifice is not generally connected with ancient Egypt. There is little evidence of human sacrifice during most of the dynastic period of ancient Egypt... but there is some evidence that it may have been practiced in the Nile Valley during the 1st Dynasty and possibly also Predynastic Egypt...."
http://www.thekeep.org/~kunoichi/kunoichi/themestream/egypt_humansacrifice.html

Anyway, whatever the case is is, I haven't found much about animal sacrifice in Egypt, not in the way it was done and documented in the Leviticus anyway - there every occasion and little problem had it's animal to be sacrificed, it Greece it was pretty much the same thing. In Egypt I mostly read about feeding the statue of the whatever god it's taken care of, lots of fruit, flowers, flour cakes, etc.

No, the female fertility cultes are documented from the Paleolothic, and there weren't any male deities there at this time. On Gobecli Tepe, the first human religious site, in 10,000 BC there aren't any male figures, only bull and the Mother-Goddess.The male gods started to come up later, when the human societies shifter to patriarchal organization,  before that point the genders were equal, like they are equal in all aboriginal cultures I know of; some of those cultures are matriarchal. Religions develop with the societies they develop in - and the fertility cults were the first to be developed; because humans observed that women give birth, hence they saw creation as a female function, and nature as a female.

Later when the societies became agricultural and richer, they became patriarchal, and the Mother-Goddess image was split to aspects - like Hera, Demeter, Hekate, Artemis in the Greek Olympic myth are aspects of the Mother-Goddess, each of them taking one of her roles. They became wives, and "subordinate" to the male deities because the societies they evolved in changed to patriarchal. But this doesn't mean that the Mother-Goddess vanished, not at all - she just split in many images in many cultures and religions.

Was there an "universal" cult to Mother-Goddess - probably not, since the human societies were less connected in say, 10,000 BC than now; but the oldest cults in any given point in any culture was a female fertility cult - Inanna, Ishtar, etc, up to the Virgin Mary, are Mother-Goddess cults. There is enough data and sources on this thread on that; since the thread is doing a serious academic research.


Edited by Don Quixote - 13-Feb-2012 at 03:08

That did not prove all people of Ptolemy worship Statue!There were many of them that had worshiped old
Earth like Goddess and script wants to make a some kind of balance among them but they are all / also they are all Danayans."Others" also existed in Egypt!Main religions today have many of churches that worship the same God.

As you can see above they had had male gods but as images&presentations of main Goddess which reminds me so much on Hindu religious cults where God has many presentations on Earth's surface.Who did start it first this way of presentation(they were images!)?

Edited by medenaywe - 13-Feb-2012 at 09:09