There’s a tremendous amount of disinfo in play regarding the Biblical story of the three Magi and how it relates to Horus, the Egyptian sky god, who incorporated the sun, moon and stars into one supreme supernatural entity long before the arrival of the Christian mythology.
The Jesus story began as the Judaic interpretation of Buddhism after Persia became a Greco-Buddhist empire bordering on Judea. Alexander the Great conquered Bactria, birthplace of Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, and embraced Buddhism along with most of his army. The Jesus movement was also a revival of some elements of Zoroastrianism, built on top of a Mithras myth, which is why three Zoroastrian priests attend the birth of Jesus. The Scythians likely had a role in introducing the concept of one god to replace the pagan pantheons.
The first Buddhists in Bactria invented the halo as a sun symbol, and you can follow and date the migration of this symbol east and west along the Silk Road. At this time, almost everyone believed the earth was flat and at the center of the universe. Now we know better. But the ancient mythologies remain clouded by false beliefs.
On the winter solstice, the sun reaches its most southern point in the sky and strangely hovers for three three days in the exact same trajectory before veering back to the north, a voyage that will end on the summer solstice (which is also the day Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, becomes visible above the horizon).
The story of the Magi as handed down in the Bible has been tinkered with, but I can interpret the real story using common sense as my guide. According to the Bible, the Magi brought gold, frankincense and myrrh to celebrate the birth of the son. This seems unlikely, and I’d suggest the Zoroastrian priests from the East brought the three greatest medicines of their time, cannabis, frankincense and myrrh, the most fragrant terpene-rich plant oils, although opium seems like a possible replacement for myrrh. Someday the real medicinal value of these plants will re-emerge.
According to Plutarch, the Temple of Isis burned three different incenses, one at dawn, one at noon, and one at sunset. He identified these as: frankincense, myrrh and kyphi. Doesn’t it seem reasonable to assume these are the gifts brought by the Three Kings to celebrate the birth of the son? So not only do they switch kyphi with gold, but then they bury the identity of kyphi. I say kyphi is cannabis, and maybe even an early version of wax and/or shatter.
Rather than keep our major religions clouded by dogma and superstition, I prefer to help them evolve and grow into the new millennium. Cannabis played a major role in the development of Christianity and most other religions, but was strangely removed as a sacrament and replaced with alcohol along the way. This terrible injustice needs to be rectified. We can honor the rituals, ceremonies and myths of fundamentalist religion, while rejecting their dogmas and superstitions, and fixing their problems.
The Bible says nothing about the Magi bringing their gifts to “celebrate the annual re-birth of the sun.” Any such reference, if it ever existed, would have been purged by the early church fathers when they were deciding what to censor in the New Testament.
Technically, yes, but I merely speak of the myth reenacted around the world of three wise men from the east bringing gifts to the new born Jesus. Not that anyone realized Jesus was a reincarnation of the Sky God.
I fixed it by changing “rebirth of the sun” to “birth of the Son.”