CHRISTMAS: Somebody's Cooked Your Goose! A Study by Tricia Tillin of Banner Ministries. © 1998 Tricia Tillin. All rights reserved

This study may NOT be freely reproduced either on paper or electronically. No permission is given to transfer this document to other websites. (Applications to do so will be considered).This book is the sole property of the author. [Single copies may be downloaded from the CROSS+WORD website and stored on a computer hard disk or printed, ONLY if used for personal research.]

Further duplicates may not be made without the written permission of the author, who can be contacted here

NOTE: This study was written in 1984, in booklet form, and originally contained hundreds of illustrations and photographs which added to the information contained in the text. It has not been possible to reproduce the study as originally conceived, but nonetheless the information in the text should be sufficient in itself to provide a warning against the mythological aspects of the Christmas festival. The original illustrated study is NOT at this time available for reprint or distribution.

Introduction

It is almost impossible to be impartial about Christmas. So much of the celebration is now fixed for us by popular entertainment, commerce and the Church that the most we can do is to avoid the worst examples of bad taste and put our own particular mark on the food and decorations.

There is a kind of inevitability about the season that begins to take hold around the end of October, and we find ourselves, even if unwillingly, caught up in the fun, the excitement and also the orgy of spending and superficial jollity. Little time remains for a candid look at the truths behind the make-believe.

We are all children at heart, and have been children; all our associations with the season are good and produce good memories. We were treated extra kindly, given presents, wore new clothes, went to parties, stayed up late, were indulged and petted and made to feel special. We love to repeat old routines of this sort; it provides for many a sort of anchor to the past, to childhood, when dreams could still come true, and it seems to hold out hope for the future too, in that the better side of man might one day prevail.

This is especially true of the media. It becomes almost a crime to mention a mean or selfish act at Christmas. Hostility must be forgotten; goodness and kindness must flourish. The real world no longer seems to exist. Yet, we all know that the usual hooliganism, robbery, drunkenness and vice will soon afterwards be reported, and the figures for suicide and divorce will rocket as ordinary mortals try to reconcile the fantasy with their reality.

The enormous pressure on families to spend more than they can afford, coupled with the encouragement to ‘eat, drink and be merry’ at any price, is no part of a genuine Christian festival.

But where Christian sentiments do exist, they not only struggle against a tide of materialism in the world but also fail to find any spiritual depth in the Church. The Church’s offerings for the festival are usually trivial and worldly, amounting to little more than a nativity play for young children, which emphasises the fantasy elements and is devoid of real content.

Despite any amount of effort, the Church seems incapable of relating the goings-on of Christmas to the believer’s walk in Christ. The more secular aspects of Christmas take over the Church, instead of the other way round. Many churches have Christmas trees, and even sing in worship to them! "O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree…."!!

Why is this? Is it because there really IS no genuine Christian content in the Winter Festivals?

We Christians, who would be very nervous at the idea of letting our children dance around a Maypole, who would discourage them from dressing up as witches at Halloween, who would certainly not attend the Druidical rites of the winter solstice at Stonehenge - we are at the same time almost unthinking in our acceptance of the practises of Christmas because of the pleasure and fun they bring.

Is this not a hypocritical stand to take? We, who are generally so careful to avoid pagan practises, and who pride ourselves in being biblically accurate, somehow switch off our powers of discernment at Christmastime, and "anything goes". The time for such self-indulgence is now over. We MUST now make a stand!

Aspects of Idolatry

In this study, I hope to cover intensively the various aspects of the Christmas mythology, and to show that almost every part of the Christmas celebration is a throw-back to its pagan origins.

The only excuse offered by the Church for this festival is that Jesus was born on December 25^th. However, when we examine the biblical evidence, that fact can be disputed and even this tenuous link to the Winter solstice is broken. We really have no call at all to celebrate Christmas!

I will show that all the trappings and myths are from our idol-worshipping ancestors, not the Bible. Such things as candles, lights, the tree, mince pies, the goose, Santa, the reindeer, holly and ivy, the Yule Log and the very date of the feast itself are all rooted in paganism, and should be avoided by Christians.

Is Christmas a Christian Festival?

Christmas has become big business, and undoubtedly it is a festival of self-indulgence for many, but, despite this, can Christmas still be a holy festival, full of meaning for those who celebrate it as the birth of the Lord Jesus? Can the religious undertones of crib and carols, nativity plays, candle-lit services and midnight mass raise Christmas to a higher level, above the bleep of electronic toys and the clinking of glasses? Unfortunately not; and this is nothing new, for the Church has been fighting a losing battle against the rites of the Winter Solstice for many centuries.

As we hear yet again the annual lament that the Christian aspects of the festival have taken second place, let us pause to wonder if this is because Christmas is, after all, a pagan festival.

The Spirit versus the World

For Spirit-led Christians today, attitudes have begun to polarise. We find ourselves taking sides in all sorts of strange disputes. There is coming a sharp division between the people of the world and the people of the Spirit, who worship God in Spirit and in truth (Jn 4,24). We no longer compromise so much in matters of doctrine and worship because we sense that a sprinkling of the world’s error is enough to taint quite an amount of spiritual truth. A little leaven leavens the lump.

We are beginning to separate ourselves from all that pertains to organised Religion and the anti-Christian secular world and to seek out more avidly the core truths of the Word of God. We are now anxious to walk in the truth completely; we are concerned to sift out every hidden work of the enemy. We are acutely aware that deception is growing in these last days, and we want to avoid every snare of satan. One of his hidden works is undoubtedly the religious celebration of Christmas, indeed it could be called his "natal celebration"!

It is important to educate our minds on the subject of Christmas and become sufficiently well informed to make a judgement based upon truth. Firstly, then, let us look briefly at what the Source-book of all truth has to say.

The Bible states the facts about the nativity of Jesus Christ, but never indicates a celebration of the event - indeed, no date - not even a season - is indicated in the scriptures. The Bible is silent about Christmas. There is no indication whatever of an annual festival to celebrate Jesus’ birth. The Christians of the book of Acts, Jews and Gentiles alike, were set free from their previous religious obligations and they worshipped the Lord daily in their homes.

What the Bible says about festivals usually refers to pagan or Jewish festivals, which were so attractive to some early Christians that they began to renew their attendance. Paul reprimanded the Galatians for "observing days, months and seasons" suggesting that in doing so they were turning back to bondage to "beggarly elemental spirits" (Gal 4:8-11). Paul warns believers against legalistic men who would condemn their liberty in Christ with regard to festivals (Col 2:16) and says that the old laws and rites were only a shadow of the reality to come.

Whilst directing believers to be loving and accepting towards all who continue to rely on outward observances (1 Cor 8) Paul implies that such people are "weak" (Rom 14:1,2) and not completely set free in the glorious liberty of the Spirit. However, he makes clear at the same time that this liberty is not license to sin or to act without discernment, for he warns Christians to "shun the worship of idols" (1 Cor 10:14-23) and to beware of becoming partners in the altar of "sacrifice to demons". For - as Paul says -"All things are lawful, but not all things build up" (v.23).

Personally, I don’t believe God would condemn outright those who celebrate Christmas with all its trappings, but nonetheless the Bible and spiritual discernment, with devotion to the truth, will and HAS led many to abandon Christmas. The closer we draw to God, the more we value heavenly things, and the more we abhor the world's ways. In addition, many have discovered the pagan aspects of Christmas and want to distance themselves from them. In doing so, we must be careful to allow others to find the truths and act upon them for themselves and not to make our rejection of Christmas a test of doctrinal soundness.

Remember that Paul, while considering all the old festivals and rituals a bondage, also participated in them when necessary to avoid offending others. (Acts 21:21-26; Acts 18:21).

The Early Church

Keeping the biblical teachings in mind, let us look for the origins of our Christmas festival in the days of the early Church. The fact is that no annual festival of Nativity was held at first. The date of Jesus’ birth was not known, and if anything was of recurring importance to early Christians, it was the resurrection and not the birth of Jesus.

Furthermore, a nativity festival would not have been held in mid-December for Jesus was born when the sheep were in the fields (Luke 2:8) and when it was possible for common folk to make long journeys on the country- roads, certainly not in mid-winter. (Luke 2:3,4)

By the third century after Jesus, the Eastern Church had begun to celebrate Epiphany on 6th January, and this commemorated the baptism as well as the birth of Jesus, but the festival held on 25th December which spread from Rome to the rest of the Church was originally the pagan Saturnalia and its associated festivals. This was held by the Romans in honour of the god Saturn, and it was, itself, a mixture of earlier Babylonian and Egyptian rites.

All over the world, the Winter Solstice (around 21st December) was celebrated as the death and rebirth of the sun god, and when the Church of Christ began to lose its zeal and power, wavering half-convinced believers yielded to the temptations of these wild, merry-making feasts which formerly brought a little jollity and license to their lives. Some even went so far as to sacrifice again to the pagan gods and goddesses. Faced with this danger, the elders of the Church decided, not as you might suppose, to redouble their warfare against the infiltration of the enemy into their camp, but to incorporate the pagan festivals into the Church and "christianise" them in the hopes of attracting believers back into the Church.

When the Emperor of Rome in AD300 began to tolerate Christianity as a state religion, he opened the way for sun-worship to be established within the Church, for he himself was reputed to be a member of the ‘Sol Invictus’ cult and acted as its chief priest all his life.(1)

It seemed convenient and attractive for Christians at that time to combine many pagan rites with Christian doctrines, and Constantine supported them by declaring in 321 AD that the ‘venerable day of the sun’ (Sunday) was henceforth to be the day of rest and worship, and by aligning the Nativity festival with the festival of Natalis Solis Invicti (the birth of the Unconquered Sun) on December 25th.

This brought the Church into line not only with the sun worship of the Romans, but with the Persian cult of Mithras, the Babylonian worship of Ishtar and Tammuz and the Egyptian rites for Isis, Osiris and Horus. In effect, Christianity had begun to get into step with the source of all pagan religion - satan himself, who represents himself not as the SON of God but as the SUN-GOD, the centre of the universe (so he believes).

Throughout all recorded history, in every culture and nation, the death and rebirth of the sun-god has been celebrated as a pivotal moment in religion. Naturally, this celebration occurs when the sun reaches its furthest distance from the equator and thus appears to "die away", and can it be a coincidence that this happens around 21^st/22^nd December, when Christmas-time begins?

Without fully understanding the effect of their action, the early church leaders merged Christian ideas with pagan celebrations in an effort to make Christianity more appealing to pagans. This was the first move towards "creating a church for the unchurched" and then, as today, the effect is to water down the gospel and detract from its essential purity.

Opposition

At first, godly men tried to suppress the incoming paganism. As early as 230 AD, we see Tertullian (2) bitterly lamenting that, "By us, who are strangers to sabbaths, new moons and festivals, the Saturnalia, the feasts of January, the Brumalia and the Matronalia are now frequented; gifts are carried to and fro, new year’s day presents are made with din, and sports and banquets are celebrated with uproar."

However, such men were like King Canute on the shores of the sea. The tide of satanic worship could not be stopped. The Church authorities and theologians were busy allegorising and christianising the pagan rites. This is stated with frankness by an early Syrian writer who says,

"The reason why the Fathers transferred the celebration of 6th January to 25th December was this: it was the custom of the heathen to celebrate on the same 25th the birthday of the sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity. In these solemnities and festivals, the Christians also took part. Accordingly, when the Doctors of the Church perceived that the Christians has a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnised on that day... Accordingly, along with this custom, the practise has prevailed of kindling lights until the 6th..."

---

SATURNALIA - The Roman Christmas

The Roman festival of Saturnalia began on 17th December and lasted about seven days, until the 25th. It was a time of unrestrained gaiety and noisy revelry, when slaves were liberated for the season and all sorts of crime and foolishness was overlooked. The people indulged in feasting, drinking and the mad pursuit of every kind of sensual pleasure. Houses were decked with evergreens, and presents were given; a special mid-winter candle was burned, and the people exchanged candles as gifts.

In very ancient times, human sacrifice was an integral part of this celebration. Each manifestation of the god - Osiris of Egypt, Dionysus of the Greeks, Odin and Freya of the Scandinavians - was entreated and placated by human sacrifice. A far distant echo reaches us today in the form of the Yule Log blazing in the hearth.

The god of Saturnalia was Saturn (or the Greek god Cronos) who was celebrated as the king of the Golden Age when all was abundance, harmony and equality. There was at that time, it was said, no slavery, and want was unknown. (This is a counterfeit of the King of Peace - Jesus the Messiah - who will reign over the world in the Millennium.)

At the commencement of the feast, a man was chosen to represent Saturn during all the festivities. He was allowed to take whatever liberties he chose, to enter any building and to play the fool with anyone, high or low. The giving of absolute authority to this chosen one was meant to represent the authority of the King. (Some representations of this figure appear today in a deck of cards as the Joker, and as the Mediaeval Court Fool.). However, in olden days, many years before the time of Emperor Constantine, this chosen ‘king’ would have been slain as a human sacrifice at the end of the revels, for the ancients perceived (by satanic wisdom) that a man must die for the people.

Sacrifices

The theme of human sacrifice (or later substitutes for it) runs through all the winter festivals of the world. When it became inappropriate to use a human representative of the god, an animal substitute was sacrificed instead. Later still the practise continued with effigies of various sorts.

The animal sacrificed by and for Mithras (the god who most rivalled Jesus in early years) was a bull for the word meant ‘prince’. That the pagan priests understood its hidden meaning is clearly shown by the ghastly practise of baptising worshippers in the bull’s blood, which was supposed to cleanse them from their sins.

Some sacrifices are associated with trees. For example Attis, a beautiful shepherd of Phrygia, was supposed to have died under a fir tree, and was transformed into that tree. Thus, to honour him, annually a man was tied to a tree and slain. In later time an effigy was used, which today has become the "angel" that we impale on the top of our Christmas tree.

The Greek counterpart of Attis was Apollo, (the beautiful shepherd and sun-god) and in the legend of Apollo it is his challenger who was tied to the pine tree and flayed. He was later revered in a cave nearby, from which the river of his name gushed forth. There is deep meaning here which will be followed up in later chapters.

For and Against

Since the beginning of the Church, there has been a sharp division of opinion on the subject of pagan customs, including the festival of ‘Christmas’. On one side were those who wanted to ‘christianise’ the practises in order more easily to win over the heathen as converts, and on the other side were those who abhorred idolatry in all its forms and sought to eliminate the customs root and branch.

For example, Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (339-397) says of December 25th, the Roman Birthday of the Unconquered Sun, "Well do Christian people call this holy day on which our Lord was born, the day of the new sun".

Augustine, the Roman Catholic missionary to this country around AD 600 received detailed instructions from his Pope, Gregory the Great, which led to the nominal conversion of the greater part of the island, not without the opposition of the British Church which had been established here since the first century AD. He says,

"Do not pull down the fanes (idol temples).. .purify them with holy water, set relics there and let them become the temples of the true God... Because they are accustomed to slay many oxen in sacrifice to demons, they may make for themselves bowers of branches of trees around those (former) heathen temples ---nor let them now sacrifice animals to the Devil but to the praise of God kill animals and eat --- for from obdurate minds it is undoubtedly impossible to cut off everything at once..."

However, at the same time as this, Bishop Martin of Bracea decreed that it was "unlawful for the faithful to observe the heathen festivals and to adorn their houses with laurels and green trees" and Caesararius of Arles in the 5th century wrote, "the heathen, and what is worse, some who have been baptised, put on counterfeit forms and monstrous faces - some are clothed in the hides of cattle; others put on the heads of beasts..."

On the same subject, Archbishop Theodore prescribed penances for anyone who "at the Kalends of January (New Year) goes about as a stag or a bull, .putting on the heads of beasts, because this is devilish".

The Protests of the Protestants

With the sanction of the Church, the Twelve Days of Christmas became the major national holiday, and they were days (as Wycliffe, the early Reformer, said) "of gluttony, all manner of harlotry and lechery", as was the Roman Saturnalia in its time.

Perhaps it is significant that the suppression of these excesses came with the Reformation. John Knox put a stop to the festivities during the revival in Scotland. The Puritans were so opposed to the feast and all its pagan associations that by 1647 it was decreed that all festivals "heretofore superstitiously used" were no longer to be kept.

In 1652, the "Terrible Remonstrance against Christmas Day grounded upon divine scriptures" was presented to Parliament, which decreed that "no observation shall be had, nor any solemnity used or exercised in churches upon that day in respect thereof".

This, of course, only drove the celebrations underground for a time, and as soon as the King was restored to the throne, the people continued to enjoy the season as much as they wished.

The Dissenters who tried to suppress the Christmas customs did so because they recognised and deplored not only the idolatrous nature of the rites, but the way the Roman Church had made use of them to deceive and ensnare its members. They knew that the customs of Christmas had little or nothing to do with Jesus Christ, but that the Church system - far from eliminating idol worship - had upheld and encouraged it under the guise of religious ceremonies.

From the feast of the dead in November, re-named All Souls, to Candlemas in February, which kept alight the fires of the Celtic festival of Imbolc, the Church has preserved almost every pagan feast and activity only thinly disguised and christianised.

Antichrist Exposed

The Winter Solstice was considered to be the birthday of many gods, including Mithras, Apollo, Dionysius, Odin and Attis. However, we can trace back all these various legends to the one demonic lie, that the god of light dies and is reborn for the good of mankind. For this reason I believe that the Antichrist will have his birthday celebration or epiphany (appearance) at or near Christmas Day.

Nimrod of Chaldea (Gen 10:8-9) was the first "antichrist", the embodiment of all that was satanic, the chief propagator of sorcery, astrology and devil worship, and the foremost of all the mortals to be deified. His name (Saturn) was written STUR in the Chaldee language, which has a numerical value of 666 (S=60;T=400;U=6;R=200).

In Nimrod, satan found his own counterfeit Messiah who was to bring "salvation" to the world after the Flood, to a people who knew themselves to be under the curse of God. Genesis tells us that Nimrod was the first to be called a ‘Mighty One’; he was a real hero who took charge of a chaotic situation, trained men for war, built and fortified cities, taught the people agriculture and gave them a focal point of rebellion against God. Nimrod was the one who spread the false ‘enlightenment’ of Lucifer, who taught the people magic arts and encouraged them to make sacrifices to demons. For all this he was immortalised as the god Marduk (or Merodach) who became the chief god of that region (Hebrew Ni-marad) and whose name meant That Great Rebel. (5)

Nimrod’s wife was not unlike Jezebel - she was powerful, wilful, strong and very captivating: the first liberated woman! She shared in her husband’s schemes and became equally famous as a huntress, prophetess and the co-builder of fortifications. Because of this, she is often shown with a turreted crown. In her honour, Diana of Ephesus and Cybele of Rome are shown crowned with cities.

When Nimrod was eventually brought to justice and killed, (possibly by Shem, who may have divided the body into pieces and distributed them around the land as a warning, as did the Levite with his murdered concubine in Judges 19:29)(6) then there was great mourning in the land, for the saviour of mankind was dead.

The Story Told Today

It may seem incredible, but even in England today the story most dear to satan’s heart is re-told in an unconscious and garbled form in the Christmas Mummer’s Plays so common in former times and now being revived.

While the characters, words and actions vary from place to place, the basic story remains the same: a character called the Turkish Knight, the King of Egypt or the Bold Slasher, (who is usually the son of another character) has a fight and is killed. There is lamenting for his death, often expressed by the Father, and then Bold Slasher or the Egyptian King (or whoever) is raised to life again to great rejoicing. In Gloucestershire, the father of Bold Slasher says these words:

"Horrible, terrible, what hast thou done? Thou hast killed my only, dearly beloved son"

The jealousy of satan is such that he has taken all the elements of the truth and twisted them into his own idolatrous system, for in certain regions, so reports Philo of Byblus, the son of Cronos was called Jeoud, which means ‘the only begotten’ and this son was supposed to have been dressed in royal robes and sacrificed at a time of great crisis to the nation.

The Winter Festivals and their Gods

The three festivals which we know as All Hallows Eve, (ie Halloween) on October 31^st and All Hallows Day or All Saints Day on November 1^st are, in fact, the christianised versions of earlier pagan festivals celebrating the beginning of winter and the new sun-cycle. [The word "hallow" means sacred, holy, blessed, and is a reference to the souls of the dead.]

They are the Church's version of Samhain, which was the Celtic New Year celebration. At that time the Celtic god entered the realm of the dead and released the spirits there, aided by the blood of a human sacrifice. (Clearly, this is a parody of the gospel story in which the Son of God shed his blood, entered the realm of the righteous dead, and released those who awaited the Day of Redemption. (Acts 2:22-32;.Eph 4:8-9; 1 Pet 3:18-20;1 Pet 4:6)

The new Samhain fire would be lit from the embers of the old to ensure continued good luck, fertility and the blessing of their gods. Fire worship is a central theme of all pagan idolatry, for satan is called Lucifer, the Shiner, the Enlightener of men, and the sacrifices made to him by fire were made to rival those given to the true God which were consumed by His fire from Heaven.

The two Church festivals mentioned above were conceived to redirect pagan beliefs into Church rituals - in this case people were commanded to pray for the souls of the dead in Purgatory. In the North of England the fields formerly used for Halloween bonfires are called Purgatory Fields.

Halloween Rituals

In Egypt, these customs were more distinctly a religious ceremony for the god Osiris who, like Tammuz and Nimrod before him, was greatly lamented at his death and very much looked for as the one who would return from the Underworld. A great feature of the winter solstice festival in Egypt was the illumination of the outside of the houses by lamps which burnt all night to guide Osiris home from his death journey, and it was also - by extension of this idea - a commemoration of the dead in general.

In olden days, the people believed that the souls of the dead revisited their homes, and fires, torches and candles were lit to guide them on their way. A candle was placed in the window to guide the dead soul back to his/her home for the night, and food and treats were placed on the doorsteps. It was believed that the souls, if offended and rejected, would bring a curse upon their houses - this is the origin of today's "trick-or-treat" nonsense.

In Lancashire, even today, a ‘religious’ procession takes place with a candle lit for each person present, and it is thought very unlucky for that person if the candle blows out. In Knutsford, ‘soul cakes’ are still eaten at All Hallows at a candle-lit feast.

Some Other Winter Festivals

Other church festivals of the Christmas season which incorporate the practises of the past are Martinmas (mid November, the Teutonic New Year) when in Ireland, for example, the blood of a slaughtered animal was sprinkled all around the house and smeared in the sign of the cross on the door and on the foreheads of the family members.

Plough Monday with its religious ‘blessing of the plough’ ceremony recalls the Roman feast to the god of the plough, Dionysus.

Candlemas replaces the Celtic feast of Imbolc, (February 1^st) which was the festival of light to honour the goddess Brighid.

Although the gods and goddesses of olden times were numerous, and their rites varied, there is evidence (3) that they were all manifestations of a handful of historical biblical men and women, and in particular of Ninus, first king of Babylon and Ninevah, and his wife Semiramis. (4) Ninus is said to be none other than the Nimrod of Genesis chapter 10, verse 8, the son of Cush (who became immortalised as the god Hermes - that is, Ham-mes, son of Ham). Nimrod’s father, Cush seems to have been the ringleader in the attempt to build the tower of Babel.

The worship of the unholy trinity (8) of Ninus, Semiramus and their son spread throughout Babylon, Assyria, Egypt and Greece, through Rome and Europe and eventually to every corner of the world.

There was naturally some confusion over the particular identity of the father and son, for these were (as Jesus and His Father) seen as one; in time the brutish, dark character of Nimrod was forsaken for the beautiful golden-haired mother-and-son image incorporating the deeds and characteristics of the three. [However, homage to the dark-skinned god Nimrod survives all over the world where people blacken their faces on festival days.]

The Horned God

There are many indications in mythology that the gods have a common origin. One hint is the mystery symbol of the horn. In his position as false Messiah, Nimrod (and, of course, his son) was known as the ‘Mighty One’ (See Deut 10:17 and Is 9:6) and the horn was a multiple symbol meaning at the same time power and authority, sexual prowess, the rays of the sun, and the crescent moon. Images of horned gods abound, and in time the horns became golden circlets of the sun and the moon, or what we call "crowns". Gods are shown with the sun around their heads in a kind of halo, and crowned with the horned moon, or the ram's horns of power and authority.

This brings us full circle back to the god of Christmas, Saturn, who is reputedly "the first to wear a crown". (From his name, Cronos -‘Horned One’ - we get our ‘crown’,’coronet’and’corona’) The first real crown seems to have been merely a band set with horns.

Another Link

The connection between the many gods and goddesses can also be made by tracing the usage of the title ‘Lord’ and ‘Lady’, for Nimrod, as the ‘saviour’, was known as the Lord, or Husband, and his mother (later known as his lover or wife) therefore had the title of the Lady, i.e. Madonna. The earliest name for the lord was ‘Baal’. Adonis was named from the Hebrew version of lord, i.e. Adon, and so our Norse version became Odin or Woden. Now, all these gods are involved in the Christmas celebrations.

The Miraculous Child

At Christmastime we celebrate above all the birth of a Child. For the Church, this festival is about the birth of the Messiah, but long before the birth of Jesus there had been yearly celebrations of the birth of the holy child, the saviour of the world. Satan tried to pervert mankind into accepting his false gods as miraculous saviours, and his myths as redeeming truths.

The myth of the god who was murdered, then raised to life again, became for generations of pagan worshippers a cycle of death and rebirth in which a baby typified new life returning to the earth. The sun-god entered into the underworld for the Winter, then was reborn in Spring. All new life, hope and faith was wrapped up in the reappearance of the saviour-child, who would end the dark, cold, barren days of the world's "winter" and bring fertility and comfort once more.

So it is that Christmastime is still called YULE-tide, for that word is just the Chaldean name for a little child (Chaldee Eol, Hebrew UL).

The Anglo-Saxons knew Yuletide as ‘Child-day’ and what we call Christmas Eve was to them ‘Mother-night’ long before they came into contact with Christianity. (10)

Although sun-worship was almost universal, evidence remains that the ancients understood the true meaning of Yuletide, for in places where the moon, not the sun, was the favourite object of devotion, the same period was observed as the birth festival.

If the winter festivals were simply and solely about fertility and the death of the sun, (as some commentators say) then how can we explain the fact that the dying god was not in all places the SUN, but sometimes the MOON?

The Arabian "Lord Moon" was born on 24th December. The Saxons also worshipped the sun as a female divinity and the moon as male so it must have been the MOON that was born to them on 25th December.

Remarkably, we retain a trace of this today in the name of the Scottish winter celebration, Hogmanay, for the name of the moon in the East was Meni (that is, the Numberer) and Hog-manay just means the "Feast of the Numberer". (See Is 65,11). This title, the Numberer, especially referred to Nimrod as the one who formulated and propagated astrology, and used the sun and the moon to predict events. (11)

Mother of God

Not only was the child-saviour the son of Nimrod, deified, but his mother also came to be seen as the great Mother of the Gods, and was worshipped in her own right. It may be that the very first woman to be deified in this way was Eve, who received the promise of God regarding the Seed which was to bruise the serpent's head, and who believed herself to be the mother of that Seed when she bore Cain. On that occasion, she said (literally) "I have gotten a man, the Lord" (See Gen 3:15 &4,1) Indeed, Semele - the mother of Bacchus by the ‘father of the gods’ in the form of a snake - was called by some Hue, which is the Hebrew for Eve.

However, powerful and beautiful Semiramus came to be known as the Mother of the Seed (and for this reason is shown bearing a branch) and as time went by she began to eclipse her child as the favourite object of adoration. All over the world, the mother goddess was portrayed as the epitome of female beauty- and fertility.

So it is that early representations of Mary were not - as one might expect - dark and Jewish looking, but fair-haired and blue-eyed, as were the goddesses. The halo shown around her head is the disc of the sun.

The Virgin Mother

Amazingly enough, though the rites of Astarte and the other like goddesses reached the very depths of sexual degradation - as they do in witchcraft today -and her attendants were cult prostitutes, the hidden mystery of her true nature was preserved in that she was known as the ‘Holy Virgin’.

Satan knew that the promised Seed was to be born of a virgin, and he lost no time in arranging for his counterfeits to be worshipped as such. The very word used by Isaiah in prophesying the birth of Jesus (Is 7:14. Almah = unmarried woman) is applied to Venus, for she was called Alma Mater, Virgin Mother. This term has come into our language, and is now used to mean a University or School; and the dictionary gives its meaning as ‘bounteous mother’ but this, of course, is a corruption.

Our Scandinavian ancestors called one of their gods Heindal, who was the "son of the virgin of salvation". Jesuit missionaries were amazed to discover in China a mother and child worshipped exactly as in their Church, the mother being called "Virgo Deipara" or the Virgin Mother of God. Minerva, the Roman version of Athena, the Lady, was represented as a virgin, yet in Crete she was known to be the wife of Helios, the Sun, and the mother of Corybantes. And Proserpine was addressed thus in the Orphic Hymns:

"Associate of the season, essence bright,
All ruling Virgin, bearing heavenly light"

The Roman Catholic Virgin’s title - Madonna - gives us another clue to her origins, for all over the world the goddess was known as the Lady. Just as Baal meant the Lord, so Baaltis meant the Lady; As Adonis meant Lord, so Athena meant Lady, from the same root word. Juno, the Roman Queen of Heaven was in Greek called Hera (Lady) and the title of Cybele or Rhea in Rome was Domina (Lady).

It should also be remembered that, in the Bible, (Jer 7:18) the Assyrian version of the goddess was titled Queen of Heaven", a title now given to the Virgin Mary.

This mother-and-child duo is seen everywhere in Catholic churches and shrines, and particularly so at Christmas. However, at Christmas when we would expect the focus to be upon Jesus Christ the Messiah, often the attention is upon the Virgin Mother. The media (in the UK at least) speak rather sneeringly of "the christ-child" or "little baby Jesus" reducing Him to a helpless infant while Mary is worshipped as perfect and adorable.

God from the Pit

There is something else that draws the pagan and Christian nativity even closer together, and this is the way in which the birth of Jesus is portrayed in the Eastern Church.

Instead of the stall, the crib, the cattle or anything else in the biblical account, the mother and child are shown at the mouth of a cave. It might be argued that this picture is taken from the Apocryphal Gospel of James, which gives the following account of the birth of Jesus:

"And they came to the midst of the way, and Mary said unto him: Take me down from the ass, for that which is within me presseth me, to come forth. And he took her down from the ass and said unto her: Whither shall I take thee to hide thy shame? for the place is desert. And he found a cave there and brought her into it, and set his sons by her, and he went forth and sought for a midwife of the Hebrews in the county of Bethlehem" (Chap 17:3- 18:1) (The midwife’s name was said to be Maia)

This alone would have been deviation enough, but when the various birth narratives of the satanic messiahs are examined, a strange coincidence arises, for they were often born from the earth, or in a cavern.

The closest rival to Jesus was Mithras. He became a chief god of the Romans, who brought his worship to this country after their invasion. Mithras was said to have been born in a cave, and his birth was witnessed by shepherds who sacrificed a lamb to the infant.

The worship of Mithras almost always took place in an underground sanctuary. Worthy of note is that his birth was attended by two men holding torches, and this perhaps accounts for the strange fact in the apocryphal Gospel of James that "Joseph left Mary in the charge of his sons".

Hermes, likewise, was born in a cave, and the name of his mother was that of Mary’s supposed midwife, Maia.

The Greek god Zeus, the father of Dionysus, was born and raised in a cave to protect him from the wrath of his father who was fearful of being deposed by his son.

At Eleusis, there was an annual re-enactement of the marriage of Zeus and Demeter when her priestess and a man chosen to play the part of Zeus would descend into a cavern while the throng of worshippers waited in anxious suspense for the result of their mystic intercourse on which they believed their salvation depended. After a time, the man would reappear to exhibit to them an ear of corn (the Seed), proclaiming, "The Mighty One has brought forth the Mighty".

In Egypt and Syria the priests would retire to an inner shrine until midnight at which time they would come forth showing a new-born baby and crying, "The Virgin has brought forth! The light is waxing!" Does this not in some ways mimic the traditional Christmas Church service, Midnight Mass? In Yorkshire, a tradition was kept up until the 17th century of crying YOLE (child) at the end of the Christmas service. Here again we can see the overlapping of pagan and Christian feasts.

For a Christian the cavern or underground cave symbolises the tomb and underworld. Our Lord did not originate from the darkness below, but descended from the glory of heaven! He was not born from the Pit, but came to conquer the forces of death! But the false christ of the Christmas celebration comes from a hole in the earth, and this speaks of his ascent as a god from the pit.

In Revelation 13:11, we read: "I saw another beast coming up out of the earth..." This, of course, is the False Prophet, the third member of the satanic trinity who corresponds to the Holy Spirit. So, when we know that the Egyptian god Nub or Nun was born out of a hole in the earth, we understand why he worshipped as a prophet, a wonderworker and an adept in magic.

Incidentally, this god was called NEBO in Babylon (12) and he was reputedly the son of Marduk whom we have already established is Nimrod. Nebo was the scribe and messenger of the gods, the guide and counsellor and the "opener of secrets". He was the source of wisdom, and his temple was the chief centre of astrology. His wife was a goddess of love and supplication, one who interceded with the gods on behalf of men. How similar are these pagan idolatries to the myths and teachings of the Roman Catholic Church which would have us go to Mary for her intercession to Jesus!

Continue to Part Two