Talk:Acharya S

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December 25 as Horus’ birthday “can [not] be substantiated by ancient sources”

This is completely embarassing, clear evidence that the people who have written this article have not done the minimum amount of research. In “Sons of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled” (positively reviewed by famous mythicist Dr. Richard M. Price) she correctly cites Plutarch’s Moralia, published in 100 CE, in the section on Isis and Osiris. The quote is as follows: ”and about the time of the winter solstice [Isis] gave birth to Harpocrates, imperfect and premature,​ amid the early flowers and shoots. For this reason they bring to him as an offering the first-fruits of growing lentils, and the days of his birth they celebrate after the spring equinox.” Note also the mention of the spring equinox, the time of Christ’s alleged resurrection or “rebirth”. Harpocrates, as even wikipedia knows, is the greek translation of Horus’ name. You can see the quote for yourselves here: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Isis_and_Osiris*/D.html (377c) I’m honestly extremely disappointed. I expected better from this wiki, considering you’re actually pro-Christ myth, not Bart Errorman tier slander. It seems as though some people here simply dismiss others by association, not bothering to fact check. Murdock was a source for the conspiracist Zeitgeist documentary and she has some new age-y spiritual beliefs, so obviously what she says can not possibly be true! Nevermind that both Doherty and Price have spoken highly of her work. Apparently the idea that Christian mythology was not uninfluenced by other mythologies is pure parallelomania and a crazy conspiracy theory, even though the church fathers themselves recognized the many parallels between christianity and the “pagan” faiths such as Mithraism, as Justin Martyr said. 2A02:2F0F:B00C:CC00:1413:23D1:C8C5:C18F (talk) 14:00, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

This article is a stub and unsourced. As the header says, it is problematic.

That said, anyone who makes a "December 25" claim to try and equate Egyptian culture and Christianity would have to answer:

A) Why December 25 per say? Why not January 7 (Eastern Orthodox Christmas?)

B) If we're trying to shoehorn the winter solstice into the modern calendar, why December 25 and not December 21 or 22 (actual start of solstice via the modern calendar?)

From Googling, the answers are, well, more from later civilizations than ancient Egypt. As far as I can tell, a brief summary: the Romans celebrated the winter solstice (Saturnalia) in late December. For kind of unknown reasons (probably connected to the solstice in some way though, and possibly connected to Saturnalia too), the birth date of that new fangled Christian religion when it began to be accepted and spread through the Roman empire was placed around this time (though not exactly on the dates of the Saturnalia, again I don't think we know why). A calendar conflict (Gregorian vs. Julian) created the difference between Orthodox vs. Roman based Christmas dates. Because the association is "loose" it's not the exact modern solstice date, which in modern times can be pinpointed with even greater accuracy (though ancient cultures got reasonably close, of course).

The Bible says nothing about when Jesus was born; the winter solstice connection seems to have been established by 3rd century Romans alone.

As far as I can tell, from modern historical understanding, ancient Egyptians celebrated the birth of many gods (including Horus) during the so called "epagomenal days" [1]. This happened after the 4 months of the Season of the Harvest. It's probably hard to exactly equate a looser ancient times solar and/or lunar calendar to the modern Gregorian one (and I don't see anything giving exact dates out there), but traditional end of harvest festivals fall between August and October. In the current Coptic liturgical calendar, the epagomenal days are September 6-10 in the Gregorian equivalent. So at this time I'm not seeing the connection; you can't just plop Greek mythology here (by one source alone) and try to shoehorn everything else using that. With religious myth, lots of things are "subject to change" over time and culture.

That being said, rather than connecting Christmas to one specific deity from one specific religious culture, I think it's easy enough to connect Christmas to winter solstice celebrations in general, which are very common in the world. BobJohnson (talk) 17:50, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

“Shoehorning” greek mythology? The British Museum states quite clearly that Harpocrates is a “manifestation of Horus”. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG53587 Is the British Museum “shoehorning” greek mythology? The source I quoted, an ancient source, clearly links Horus’ (Harpocrates) birth to the winter solstice. Yes, this isn’t an ancient egyptian source. It really isn’t important for her thesis if egyptians worshipped Horus’ birth on December 25th. But it does show that around the supposed time of Jesus’ birth there was a child-god born at the winter solstice who was worshipped. Murdock at no point claims that the Christ myth derives purely from a single god: she points out similaries to many other gods of the near east and south Asia (Buddhists sent missionaries to the Roman empire and recently a statue of the buddha made from mediterranean marble was discovered on a roman-era site in egypt, so buddhist influence is nowhere near as implausible as it may superficially appear).2A02:2F0F:B00C:CC00:1413:23D1:C8C5:C18F (talk) 18:16, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

So what the hell is this book about then? BobJohnson (talk) 21:21, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

Horus and the 12 disciples

The article implies that Murdock simply invented the association of Horus with twelve disciples. This is simply false: she cites E. A. Wallis Budge’s The Egyptian Heaven and Hell, who was a prominent egyptologist of the early 20th century who was even knighted. On page 153 of the third volume of this book (you can see for yourself at https://archive.org/details/the-egyptian-heaven-and-hell-vol-3/page/153/mode/2up) he mentions the “twelve gods of the hours” and the “twelve goddesses of the hours”. I’m not an egyptologist so perhaps some of this research is dated. But in the first volume, on pages 154-159 he reproduces and translates the hieroglyphs discussing these gods and the accompanying murals. I doubt that he was making all of this up. The point of this is to show that the motif of twelve helpers/gods occurs frecquently throughout the ancient world, likely refering to the 12 months, signs of the zodiac (yes, the number of zodiacal signs has varied accross cultures and it is ambiguous if ancient egypt had 12 signs), or, if Budge’s translation is accurate, hours. The fact that the gospels contradict themselves as to the names of some of the disciples but agrees on their numbers suggest that it attempted to fit them into an older, pre-existent, non-historical tradition. The connection between the twelve disciples and the signs of the zodiac dates back to the gnostics (it was attacked by some of the church fathers) and is not an invention of Murdock’s. And Murdock doesn’t claim that the gospel story was inspired necessarily directly by egyptian mythology, only that the egyptian myths lead, via syncretism, to a gradual evolution culminating in the Christ myth. 2A02:2F0F:B00C:CC00:B490:6784:75C1:F317 (talk) 09:16, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

I suspect that 12 occurs in a lot of humanity simply because it can be neatly divided so well (into 2, 3, 4, and 6), not to mention that it is the number of lunar cycles in a solar year. So relationships between the disciple count and the zodiac count (possibly the 12 tribes as well) probably boil down to these fundamentals.

While I've seen some criticisms of other 12-based claims etc. I'm not finding anywhere where Acharya specifically said that Horus had 12 disciples (which seems wrong), so I'd need a reference to that quote. It seems to be a certain part of Christ myth theory ethos somewhere because Richard Dawkins wanted actual evidence for this claim and the BBC brought up something about it. One reply in the Dawkins thread (a "Gina Smith", #116) posts a claim where supposedly Acharya S made the statement at truthbeknown.com and a "Richard Price" (probably this poster meant Robert M. Price) countered the claim. But truthbeknown.com has undergone considerable "web rot" over the years and it is very difficult to find articles on that now.

I'll note #116 also criticized (via Price) Acharya's use of dated sources who were "eccentrics, freethinkers, and theosophists", Budge not being completely an exception to this (had an interest in paranormal). That being said, without the actual quotation where all this came, you can't say much more other than note this as a possible concern (even though this doesn't mean the book you referenced is false at all per se). BobJohnson (talk) 19:38, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

Budge had an interest in the paranormal, but this was really not uncommon during that era. Marie Curie and Thomas Edison also had such an interest, among others. Either way, he was a mainstream scholar, not a “fringe” element. Also that bethinking source is a Christian apologoist site which makes the typical trite argument that no other ancient god besides Jesus resurrected. This is a ridiculous argument: somehow, just because they are not identical in every respect to the Christian resurrection myth it means that there is no influence. This is similar to the ridiculous “missing link” contention of IDiots. It also completely ignores the indisputable virgin birth of Hercules. Most of the article just consists of quotes from authorities that the author had allegedly contacted, so there is a possibility of quote mining or outright lying for Jesus.86.121.89.162 (talk) 20:38, 10 June 2023 (UTC)