Caveman Christmas?

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It’s a poor kind of memory that works only backwards, said the White Queen to Alice , but of course the religious mind is always looking to build some sort of case for the reality of things that aren’t, and so when we find evidence that some story has been cribbed from some other story, perhaps in a chain of custody that goes back many, many thousands of years, we evoke that mystical facility we all have and suggest that later events are so cosmic that they cause apparitions in previous epochs. So if we find that the story of Sargon the Great set afloat in a basket mirrors the much later story of Moses, we might go all foggy in the head and suggest that the earlier story was caused by the later. We see it so often when embarrassed mythology defends itself.

This is the season, or one of them, for the semiannual pandering to the Christians and CBS News gives us a story of a “nativity scene” found in an egyptian rock cave that dates to about 3000 BCE and suggests that it has something to do in some mystical way with the Christian mythology and iconographic art of the late Roman Empire: the birth of “Christ” as he’s so ungrammatically called today. Merry Christmas. It gives us a chance to use the heavily laden word “nativity” for birth as well as to assume that’s what is being depicted here. For all we know it’s a human sacrifice to follow the sacrifice of a headless animal floating above. Is it a dead “bull of heaven” from Sumerian myth or is it a constellation? We don’t know, but with enough hammering and spiritual lubrication we can make it fit.

Of course there never have been any other reasons to depict a man and woman holding up a child, right? A dot of paint off to one side is a “star in the east” and the headless beast? Well, it doesn’t fit the story we’re forcing, so ignore it.

Any student of mythology can find other well documented “nativity” myths like Mithras (born in a grotto like this one and who like Gilgamesh, and Enkidu also killed the bull of heaven) Krishna, Horus, or even Hercules ( and yes, Sargon the great and Moses) that inform the birth of Jesus as the Christmas story developed long afterward. Only the religious would suggest that neolithic Egyptians were predicting it 3000 years hence. But again, Merry Christmas, let’s get out the tinsel and pretend we’re not celebrating Thor and Odin and Mithras and that all of history and all the heavens do proclaim the accuracy and that we’re not all insane.

To be continued at Easter. . .