“And the four and twenty elders, who sit before God on their thrones, fell upon their faces and worshiped God…” —Revelations 11:16
Strange Greece and Italy would absorb a religion created in Judea, but the fertile crescent is where much of the action took place at the dawn of civilization, and it’s where written language appeared 3,000 years before Christianity. The West has always maintained their fascination with Eastern spirituality.
The Scythians are the most overlooked culture in this story. They traveled in hemp-covered wagons pulled by oxen and were ardent explorers, traders, and warriors, and they built the silk road.
King Darius went to war against them because they were the only people other than the Greeks he’d failed to subjugate. Even more amazing, the Scythians were the first knight culture and covered their bodies with psychedelic tattoos of griffins and dragons.
They are likely overlooked because of the affection and use of cannabis. They threw the flowers on hot coals in tipis in order to inhale the smoke, a ritual described by Herodotus, who witnessed it first-hand.
The arrival of the written word could be compared with the invention of the Internet. Suddenly, ideas could be sent to all corners of the world. The Phoenicians brought written language to the Greeks after it had already been established in the fertile crescent, and some say Homer was a Phoenician.
Despite being over 10,000 lines of poetry, the Iliad was an oral tradition for centuries, recited at festivals and games. Any child with a prodigious memory would have likely been recruited by the nearest temple. Even in the fertile crescent, the altar boys were the ones who recited the sacred words with accuracy. The Iliad is the bible of Greece, and established a pantheon of gods and goddesses who ruled the universe from a nearby mountain top. The Greeks triumphed over Persia largely because of their democracy. Free men were more committed than slaves when it came to combat, especially as they had families to protect and were defending their homeland.
Several hundred years later, Rome built its culture on top of Greek tradition, and Virgil wrote the Aeneid establishing Rome’s divine right to rule. Epic poems were designed to enchant and entertain with allegory and parable, but also to keep the population in place by anointing the oligarchy with divine connections. I’m sure there were many aspiring poets in all cultures who never made it into the history books, while others who pleased the rulers got recited at games and festivals.
In ancient times, slavery was a fact of life, and cultures with the most slaves built the biggest temples. It was not unknown for poor people to sell their children into slavery.
Just about everything in the Jesus myth has origins in some previous culture. His birth and death are based largely on Zoroastrian sun worship, which is why the Magi attend his birth, and parts of his early years were lifted from the bio of Mani, a real living avatar who tried to foment world peace, but ended up crucified around 270 AD.
Mani’s murder only made his hybrid synthesis of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Christianity and Judaism more popular than ever, something that greatly alarmed Emperor Constantine. This is likely why Mani was erased from history, and cannabis was erased along with him.
The word “Christ” originally meant “anointed” and was a reference to anyone treated with the sacred oil of Moses. But hundreds of years after the fact, the words Jesus and Christ were fused together, and could have had their origins in Zeus Krishna.