Many gods were born on December 25th. It is an important date because the sun begins its journey back towards the light of Spring. These gods are really referring to our spiritual journey not a physical journey, but a metaphorical journey we all have to go through as we travel the highway of life. We move from darkness to light. 

It was a public holiday celebrated around December 25th in the family home. A time for feasting, goodwill, generosity to the poor, the exchange of gifts and the decoration of trees. But it wasn’t Christmas. This was Saturnalia, the pagan Roman winter solstice festival. But was Christmas, Western Christianity’s most popular festival, derived from the pagan Saturnalia?

The first-century AD poet Gaius Valerius Catullus described Saturnalia as ‘the best of times’: dress codes were relaxed, small gifts such as dolls, candles and caged birds were exchanged.

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SHIVA AND PARVATI

Ram Hindu God.

Utnapishtim , Noah,  and diffusion myths

According to one version of the Mesopotamian flood myth, Utnapishtim was the wise man who alone survived the great flood that was sent to eradicate humanity. The gods Anu, Enlil, Ninurta and Ennugi decided to destroy humankind, having grown tired of their ways. Oh, those humans, with theirways!

However, Ea, the water god, warned Utnapishtim of the conspiracy, and told him to build a great boat, and in it store the seeds of all life. He did it, and loaded it with the said seeds, his cattle, his family, and an ass-load of birds. A filthy rain came for six days and six nights, and the people despaired. On the seventh day it ceased, and all that was left of humanity was a vast heap of thick mud, and Utnapishtim’s ship. He sent out birds to look for land, and eventually a raven found some, prompting Utnapishtim to place offerings to the gods in gratitude. Utnapishtim was granted the immortality of the gods in return for his saving of humanity and appeasing of the mesopotamian pantheon. 

Later on, Gilgamesh, (ever heard of him? He’s kind of a big deal) who was a descendant of Utnapishtim, tracked him down to learn of him the secret of immortality. Long story short, he gets rejected. 

Now, if this story sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Indeed, the biblical Noah is an analog of Utnapishtim, though the Sumerian/Mesopotamian/Babylonian deluge story was written long before the Noah of the Torah. Deluge myths are found all over the world. People move, stories move, and myths morph into other myths. An argument forcultural diffusion, if you look at it that way. Or, perhaps, we’re all just coded to have similar developmental paths, prompting similar stories to crop up in global religions? That’d be the parallel development argument. Me, I’m a diffusion guy.

 "Mythology—and therefore civilization—is a poetic, supernormal image, conceived, like all poetry, in depth, but susceptible of interpretation on various levels. The shallowest minds see in it the local scenery; the deepest, the foreground of the void; and between are all the stages of the Way from the ethnic to the elementary idea, the local to the universal being, which is Everyman, as he both knows and is afraid to know. For the human mind in its polarity of the male and female modes of experience, in its passages from infancy to adulthood and old age, in its toughness and tenderness, and in its continuing dialogue with the world, is the ultimate mythogenetic zone—the creator and the destroyer, the slave and yet the master, of all the gods."