This Hugh Nibley paper serves as background for a paper written by Anthony Larson titled: Temple Symbols and Christmas. Hopefully you find it informative and thought provoking. Anthony does a nice job elaborating on Nibley's statement while tracing many of our Christmas traditions and symbolism all the way back to the beginning of time.
The Christmas Quest by Hugh Nibley ...
Temple Symbols and Christmas by Anthony Larson...Long before the Christian Church was ever heard of, people throughout the ancient world celebrated one great festival that far overshadowed all other social activities in importance. That was the great Year Rite, the celebration of the creation of the world and the dramatization of a plan for overcoming the bondage of death. It took place at the turn of the year when the sun, having reached its lowest point on the meridian, was found on a joyful day to be miraculously mounting again in its course; it was a day of promise and reassurance, heralding a new creation and a new age. Everywhere the great year festival was regarded as the birthday of the whole human race and was a time of divination and prophecy, marked by a feast of abundance in which all gave and received gifts as an earnest hope of good things to come.
Much has been written on the shifting of Christ's birthday celebration to make it coincide with the day of Sol Invictus, a late Romanized version of an oriental midwinter rite. In other parts of the world, people had no difficulty identifying the Lord’s birthday with the greatest of popular festivals. When Pope Zacharias rebuked the Germans on the Rhine for their pagan festival at midwinter, Boniface could answer him back, that if he objected to heathen feasts and games, all he had to do was look around him at Rome, where he would see the same feasting, drinking, and games on the same ancient holy days to celebrate the same blessed event—he was referring, of course, to the Saturnalia, the great prehistoric festival of the Romans. Our own Yule, carols, lights, greenery, gifts, and games are evidence enough that a northern Christmas is no importation from the East in Christian times but something far older.
Now, there is no law of the mind that requires all men everywhere to put just one peculiar interpretation on the descent and return of the sun in its course. This complex and specialized festival, which follows so closely the same elaborate pattern in Babylonia, Egypt, Iceland, and Rome, is now recognized to be no spontaneous invention of untutored minds but the remnant of a single tradition ultimately traceable to one common lost source. The essential feature of this great world festival everywhere is that it aims, if but for a few short days, to recapture the freedom, love, equality, abundance, joy, and light of a Golden Age, a dimly remembered but blessed time in the beginning when all creatures lived together in innocence without fear or enmity, when the heavens poured forth ceaseless bounty, and all men were brothers under the loving rule of the King and Creator of all. Is it at all surprising that the Christian world’s celebration of the Savior’s birth should fall easily and naturally into the pattern of the older rites? In the end they are really the same thing—both are recollections of forgotten dispensations of the Gospel; both are attempts to recall an age of lost innocence and lost blessings.
Lost? Who can doubt it? There is a nostalgic sadness about Christmas, as there is about the Middle Ages, with their everlasting quest of something that has been lost. Christmas is a small light in a great darkness; it is evidence of things not seen. It is not the real thing but the expression of a wish, for like the great year rites of the ancients, it merely dramatizes what once was and what men feel they can still hope for. -Hugh Nibley, The Christmas Quest, 1950
http://mormonprophecy.blogspot.com/2008 ... stmas.html
If you follow many of our Christmas traditions as far back as you can go you will tap into what Nibley calls "the remnant of a single tradition ultimately traceable to one common lost source." This single cultural tradition filled with strange imagery and ritual based on the ancient order of the heavens is often called the “one universal story” and “the greatest story ever told”. As Nibley noted above,... throughout the entire ancient world there was one great festival which trumps all others in importance, the great Year Rite.
What few folks know is NO ONE understood the year rite like Joseph Smith. The Pearl of Great Price is “centered” and revolves around this ancient festival while taking us further back than any book of scripture, to the beginning.. But even before the POGP, Joseph gave us five incredible examples of this great assembly. The best one I believe is the king coronation of King Mosiah, which explicitly states that it told took place at “the beginning” of a “new age” when the people are given a “new name”. In other words, King Mosiah coronation and the Year rite share a common origin.
A few interesting tidbits on The Great Year festival
-The great Year festival is universal, common among all ancient societies including the hebrews.
-Always took place at a sacred location, most often a temple or sacred mountain or high place. Always symbolic of the “center.’’“The great year rite in one form or another, is found throughout the ancient world. What we are talking about is what the Greeks called, “the panegyris, the great assembly of the entire race to participate in solemn rites essential to the continuance of its corporate and individual well being.” -Hugh Nibley, One Eternal Round
- The great Year celebration brought nations together. The Book of Abraham explicitly states that the great festival was a joint Egyptian and Canaanite undertaking, with the four great gods ( also found in the prophecies of Ezekiel, Daniel, John the revelator, and the BOA) of the religion joining with “the god of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. ( Abr. 1:6) It was truly a world celebration…
-The celebration and re-enactment of the creation of the cosmos, the heavens was an integral part of the year rite.
(As it is with the New Year Ritual, so it is with the BOA and the temple.)“The New Year ritual reenacts the mythical beginning of the cosmos.” -Mircea Eliade; The Myth of Eternal Return
-King Coronation...
-The dramatic representation of the death and resurrection of the ancient sun god. Descent and ascension.
-An atoning sacrifice of the KIng in which the people were cleansed of their sins. (Abraham and Isaac)
-A ritual combat in which the triumph of the sun [hero] god over his enemies was depicted.
-The atonement... was an integral part of all ancient festivals. Atonement = re-conciliation, re-demption, re-surection, re-store, re-lease, salvation, and so on, all refer to a return to [God] a former state.“There were common elements to this ceremony: the dramatic representation of the death and resurrection of the god, a portrayal of the creation, a ritual combat in which the triumph of the god over his enemies was depicted, a triumphal procession where the king or leader played the part of the god followed by a train of lesser gods, an atoning sacrifice by which the people were cleansed of their sins, and festivities and games that recalled a previous Golden Age, now lost.” -Hugh Nibley, One Eternal Round.
"I refer to that handbook of the archaic world called the book of Moses, and call attention to the great assembly at Adam-ondi-Ahman for the presentation of the original model (D&C 107:53-57). "Adam [Man] in the presence of God is the quintessential atonement."
Who is the King and Creator of the Golden Age?The essential feature of this great world festival everywhere is that it aims, if but for a few short days, to recapture the freedom, love, equality, abundance, joy, and light of a Golden Age, a dimly remembered but blessed time in the beginning when all creatures lived together in innocence without fear or enmity, when the heavens poured forth ceaseless bounty, and all men were brothers under the loving rule of the King and Creator of all. -Hugh Nibley
From Temple and Cosmos… (“cosmos=mythology”)
"The aim of archaic cultic activities not only in Egypt but also everywhere else was, according to Karl Albert,, the goal [of the ancient civilizations was always] to restore the primal community of Gods and men, or as we would say, to achieve atonement; and the ordinances were inseparable from the doctrines that went with them, Everywhere, we find myth and legends about how the prima bond that existed between heaven and earth in the Golden Age was broken by the wickedness of men" (Temple and Cosmos; pg.399-401)
The Myth of Eternal Return:“Almost always when the plan is mentioned something is said about its glad reception, 'when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy' (Job 38:7). The great year-rites, common to all ancient societies, are a rehearsal of the Creation, usually presented in dramatic form; invariably the rites end with a great and joyful acclamation: so all the gods and all the spirits came together to hail God upon his throne.and they rejoiced before him in his temple, the source of all good things. The word poema, meaning literally creation, owes its prominence, as Walter Otto has shown, to the circumstance that the first poets were all inspired people who sang one and the same song, namely the Song of Creation."
The whole purpose of the book of Jubilees is to show that the great rites of Israel, centering about the temple and the throne, are a celebration 'which had been observed in heaven since the creation'.The thing to notice here is that man shares fully in these heavenly jubilations; the poet is simply intoxicated with the assurance that man, a mere speck of 'wet dust,' is allowed not only to know about the secret councils of the beginning, but actually to share in them, not only as a participant but as one of the directors!” -(Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment; pg. 287)
-Hugh Niblley“Every celebration of a New Year starts the world out on a new dispensation, the “unimaginably mighty works” of the creator Goethe reminds us, with everything, “herrlich wie am ersten Tag” (as glorious as on the day of creation), so the angel chorus sang a New Hymn of the creation. This calls for a “new” garden of Eden. To launch the new age of the world.”
This quote is from David Talbott (Electric Universe, Thunderbolt Project, The Saturn Myth) in a paper titled: The Origins of Myth, Ritual, Symbolism, and Religious History. He gives a great summery of the things discussed above..
"The study of ancient religion starts with mythology enthroned as its true source" - Hugh Nibley, One Eternal Round pg. 96-97How old, then, is this ancient memory of a lost paradise? In their myths, rites and hymns the ancient Sumerians contrasted their own time to the earliest remembered age--what they called "the days of old," or "that day," when the gods "gave man abundance, the day when vegetation flourished." This was when the supreme god An "engendered the year of abundance." To this primeval age, every Sumerian priest looked back as the reference for the preferred order of things, which
was lost through later conflict and deluge.
In the city of Eridu at the mouth of the Euphrates, the priests recalled a Golden Age prior to familiar history. The predecessors of their race, it was claimed, had formerly reposed in the paradise of Dilmun, called the "Pure Place" of man's genesis. This lost paradise of Dilmun, about which scholars have debated for decades, is strangely reminiscent of the paradise of Eden.
"That place was pure, that place was clean. In Dilmun...the lion mangled not. The wolf ravaged not the lambs," the Sumerian texts read. The inhabitants of this paradise lived in a state of near perfection, in communion with the gods, drinking the waters of life and enjoying unbounded prosperity.
Ancient Egypt, an acknowledged cradle of civilization, preserved a remarkably similar memory. Not just in their religious and mythical texts, but in every sacred activity, the Egyptians incessantly looked backwards, to events of the Zep Tepi. The phrase means the "First Time," a time of perfection "before rage or clamor or strife or uproar had come about," as the texts themselves put it. This was the paradise of Ra, and the memories of that time echoed through centuries of Egyptian thought. "The land was in abundance," the texts say. "There was no year of hunger. . .Walls did not fall; thorns did not pierce in the time of the Primeval Gods."
Or from another text: "there was no unrighteousness in the land, no crocodile seized, no snake bit in the time of the First Gods."
Cosmic harmony, abundance, paradise on earth. To this paradisal, according to the great nineteenth century scholar Francois Lenormant, the Egyptians "continually looked back with regret and envy." The golden age of Ra was, for the Egyptians, the great "example" setting a standard for all later ages.
The legend of the Golden Age or ancient paradise is as old as civilization. And the implications are well worth pondering. A coherent set of ideas has survived all of the twists and turns of cultural evolution for at least five thousand years--and on every continent. Now that's an astonishing verification of the durability of myth! Many of us had always thought of myth as the outcome of reckless invention--illiterate savages entertaining themselves by contriving magical stories out of nothing. Imagine such a process going on for thousands of years, and ask yourself if any possibility of a universal memory would remain.
Bear in mind that the myth-makers did not just recount a charming tale; they strove desperately to recover what was lost. In the infancy of civilization collective activity reflects a singular reference to the age of the gods--the honoring of the gods through celebration, representation, reenactment, codification, and massive construction activity. In fact, there are numerous grounds for saying that civilization itself was the outcome of this fundamentally religious activity.
Perhaps the most accomplished analyst of mythology in modern times was the late Mircea Eliade, chairman of the Department of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion. From his meticulous, lifelong survey of the subject, professor Eliade drew a stunning conclusion: literally every component of early civilizations--from religion to art and architecture--expressed symbolically the desire to recover and to re-live the lost Golden Age. That which symbolically transported the participant back to the First Time, the Golden Age, was sacred. That which did not was transient and mundane, of no interest.
The role of this memory in the ancient cultures carries vast implications for our understanding of the events that provoked human imagination in the myth-making epoch. Early man yearned for a return to paradise. Every coronation of a king, every New Year's festival, monumental construction, every recitation of temple hymns and prayers, every holy war, every sacrifice to the gods was motivated by a desire to recapture some aspect of the Golden Age, to live, if only for a symbolic moment, in that enchanted, opening chapter in the book of gods and wonders.
Through festivals and symbolic rites, the entire ancient world remembered the lives of the gods, who are identified as the planets currently residing withing our solar system. (Joseph' explains this in his explanations of the facsimiles, the Egyptian gods were the planets/stars. and sun. All one and the same to the ancient world.) EVERY CORONATION OF A KING, EVERY NEW YEAR FESTIVAL, EVERY MONUMENT, EVERY TEMPLE, EVERY TEXT, EVERY SACRIFICE, EVERY HARVEST, EVERY MARRIAGE, EVERY RECITATION OF TEMPLE HYMNS AND PRAYERS, ALL expressed symbolically the desire to recover, recapture and to re-live the lost Golden Age. It was all commemorative, it was always looking back to the golden age (Paradise, Garden of Eden), to the age of gods and wonders. If you remove the events that I am referring to you wouldn’t have any content of early civilization left.
"Mythology is the history of the solar system." (-David Talbott)
"Mythology is Cosmology" -Hugh Nibley
"The Pearl of great price restores cosmism with vengeance." -Hugh Nibley
Sacred Time and the Temple:
"Myth is essentially cosmological. As heaven in the cosmos is so vastly more important than our earth, it should not be surprising to find the main functions deriving from heaven" (Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission through Myth (Boston: Godine, 1977)
Sacred time is the first time, the archetypal time, the time at which all things received meaning and life through divine creation and decree. Its cyclical nature offered to man a means whereby the actual activity that was evident in those primordial moments could be reexperienced.
Significantly, ancient temple worship is replete with this pattern of an eternal return to sacred time.
"Much of our understanding of sacred time is due to mythology, which served as a type of sanctuary in which was housed the secrets of the universe. Myths contained the creation stories as they took place in illo tempore, or at the first instance, wherein primordial time was recovered into a mythical present. Interestingly, archaic man returned to sacred time through rites and ceremonies that reenacted primal myths of the creation. Accordingly, "for archaic man, myth is a matter of primary importance that have constituted him existentially.”(Eliade)
It was an obligation on the part of the ancients not only “to remember mythical history but also to reenact a large part of it periodically.”8 “This faithful repetition of divine models has a two-fold result:
(1) by imitating the gods, man remains in the sacred, hence in reality;
(2) by the continuous reactualization of the paradigmatic divine gestures, the world is sanctified. Men’s religious behavior contributes to the maintaining the sanctity of the world.”
Experiencing sacred time through these reenactment rites projected man into the divine presence. Hence, ancient man would, in essence, be contemporary with the gods. Why? Being with the gods meant residing in the same place as the gods in a cosmological purity untainted by the coarser existence in which man then lived. And it was there that the gods could be apprehended in a degree to actually learn who they were and how they exercised their power of creation, in order that it might be imitated. Once the knowledge of the origin of things was
understood, one received power to create at will. “Knowledge of the origin and exemplary history of things confers a sort of magical mastery over them.”
"Myth, like the temple, served as a means whereby man could go back to the sacred time in which all things were created and participate with the gods through rites and ceremonies depicting those creative acts. Thus, by being contemporary with these divine beings, archaic man learned and received regenerative powers to control or renew his environment to create order out of chaos. This power could be manifested over plants, animals, and even time itself. Hence, the reenactment of ancient myths was a significant setting for the return to sacred time, whereby man could become more like the gods and secure divine powers."
Creation myths portrayed in temples fulfilled a longing of ancient man to experience divineness through contact with the time that existed in the first creative moments.
Sacred time, for ancient man, evidenced a spiritual need to recapture the pureness and holiness that existed in the realm of the gods as embodied by temples. “Religious man’s profound nostalgia is to inhabit a ‘divine world,’ [it] is his desire that his house shall be like the house of the gods, as it was later represented in temples and sanctuaries. In short, this religious nostalgia expresses the desire to live in a pure and holy cosmos, as it was in the beginning, when it came fresh from the Creator’s hands.“12 The temple, as a repository for sacred time, retains the original creative atmosphere first exhibited by the Creator and becomes at once a “divine world” innately infused with a sanctifying power to re-create and regenerate. This power of renewal is the ultimate aim of the eternal return to sacred time. -FARMS; Temples of the Ancient World
Ancient New Year festivals aptly illustrate three concepts that are associated with sacred time: the abolishing of past time, a return to a primordial chaos, and a repetition of the creative acts to recover order in the universe. In these festivals, the world was renewed annually, and even chronological time itself could be re-created through contact with the regenerative powers of the gods existing in sacred time. Note the direct correlation of this festival to the temple. Mircea Eliade explains..
The underlying meaning of all these facts seems to be the following: for religious man of the archaic cultures, the world is renewed annually; in other words, with each new year it recovers its original sanctity, the sanctity that it possessed when it came from the creator’s hands. This symbolism is clearly indicated in the architectonic structure of sanctuaries. Since the temple is at once the holy place par excellence and the image of the world, it sanctifies cosmic life. This cosmic life was imagined in the form of a circular course; it was identified with the year. The year was a closed circle; it had a beginning and an end, but it also had the peculiarity that it could be reborn in the form of a new year. With each New Year, a time that was “new,” “pure,” “holy”—because not yet worn—came into existence.
According to Hugh Nibley, “the boldest and clearest recent statement embracing the world landscape of culture and religion is in the works of M. Eliade, and he brings it all back to the Temple.” Nibley adds, “Before Eliade your humble informant was bringing out much of the picture in a doctoral thesis which disturbed and puzzled his committee in the 1930s” (Truman G. Madsen, ed., The Temple in Antiquity, [Provo: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1984], 45).
*-Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, 69; see also KG, 313–20, for an excellent discussion of the akitu ceremony in relation to the coronation of the king. Creation drama is a widespread concept in archaic societies, particularly in he New Year festivals. See Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, 62–73, for an examination of several ancient societies that reenacted myths. For a discussion of ritual combat that was also
acted out, see Hugh Nibley’s insightful remarks in Temple and Cosmos, in CWHN, 10:73–77.
Origins of Kingship...
A central feature of nearly every ancient and medieval society was kingship—rule by divinely appointed kings—an institution whose origins are lost in the mists of time. In the view of the ancient Egyptians, kingship was coextensive in time with the world itself;1 to the Sumerians, kingship was a gift of the gods. Indeed, as one scholar has recently noted, “Chronicles of kingship from Egypt, to Mesopotamia, to Persia, to China, to Italy, to northern Europe, to pre-Columbian Mexico all trace the line of kings to the first king, a supreme cosmic deity who founded the kingship rites. . . . The accounts [of the creation] speak of a creator, a first man, and a first king—all referring to the same cosmic figure.” . . . The Heart Star, Kolob, the planet Saturn. Thus, The Hebrew Sabbath, the seventh day of the week, was the day of Saturn, and they named the Sun accordingly. So was the seventh and most sacred day of the Babylonian and Phoenician weeks. For the Romans this commemorative day was Saturni dies, "Saturn's day." The same day passed into the Anglo-Saxon calendar as the "day of Seater [Saturn]," which, became our own Saturday.
At one point the Hebrews regarded their race as having been "Saturnian" in the beginning, when they lived under the rule of the creator El. That is, the Hebrews honored the same ancestral tie to Saturn as did the Romans. According to the great jewish Scholar Immanuel Velikovsky, even the name "Israel" means "the people of Saturn."
IS (Isis, Egyptian goddess) RA (Egytian sun god) EL (Canaanite/Chaldeans sun god) ISRAEL.
The Egyptians called their God Ra, the creator-king, for the Sumerians it was the high god An, from whom kingship descended. Similarly, the Hindu Brahma, the Chinese Huang-ti, Mexican Quetzalcoatl, Mayan Itzam Na and numerous counterparts among other nations, all preside over a paradisal epoch, while establishing the ideals and principles of kingship. Chaldeans called Saturn/God 'El'. This is where Abraham received it, yet Abraham knew who truly deserved the name (type and shadow). Abraham was then told by God to go teach the Egyptians who Kolob (Saturn configuration) was a type for (Jesus Christ), thus worshipping the hosts of heaven is an abomination, but the greatest of all the stars is like God, this is who we worship, the creator, not the creation.