Krishna Born of a Virgin?
Let our Christian readers
bear in mind that the worship
of the virgin and her child was common in the East, ages before
the generally received account of Christ's
appearance in the flesh
Existence of Christ Disproved
Crishna was born of a
chaste virgin, called Devaki, who, on account of her
purity, was selected to become the "mother of God."
Doane, Bible
Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions
A recurring theme in ancient religion
revolves around the manner
of the sun
god's birth, as well as the chastity of his
mother. In a number of instances the sun god is perceived as being
born of the inviolable dawn, the virgin moon or earth, or the
constellation of Virgo.
The virgin status of the mothers of pre-Christian gods and godmen
has been asserted for centuries by numerous scholars of mythology
and ancient religion. Nevertheless, because of the motif's
similarity to a major Christian tenet, apologists attempt to
debunk it by simply stating that these Pagan
mothers were not virgins, for a variety of reasons,
including their marital status, number of children and the manner
of impregnation. Regardless, the virgin status of the ancient
goddesses or mothers of gods remains, despite their manner of
impregnation, because the fathers, like that of Jesus,
are gods themselves, as opposed to mortals who physically
penetrate the mothers. Also, the mothers are not "real
people," but goddesses themselves, who therefore do not
possess female genitalia. Thus, despite being a mother, the
goddess retains her virginity. In fact, the Virgin is one face of
the Triple Goddess
of ancient times, comprising the Maiden, Mother and Crone.
Concerning the Triple Goddess, McLean says:
The more general archetype
was often seen in mythology as threefold; thus, for example,
Aphrodite was seen as Aphrodite the Virgin, Aphrodite the Wife,
and Aphrodite the Whore. A similar triplicity is found in the
figure of Isis as Sister, Wife and Widow of Osiris.
Regarding the Great Mother Goddess, whether called by the name
Sophia, Ishtar or Isis, whose cult extended all over the
Mediterranean and beyond, Legge says:
Her most prominent
characteristics show her to be a personification of the Earth,
the mother of all living, ever bringing forth and ever a virgin
In The
Once and Future Goddess, Gadon remarks:
Many goddess were called
virgin but this did not mean that chastity was considered a
virtue in the pagan world. Some, like "Venus, Ishtar,
Astarte, and Anath, the love goddesses of the Near East and
classical mythology, are entitled virgin despite their lovers,
who die and rise again for them each year."
Concerning the Goddess, Rev. James relates:
Among the Sumerian and
Babylonians she had been known as Inanna-Ishtar, while in Syria
and Palestine she appeared as Asherah, Astarte and Anat,
corresponding to Hera, Aphrodite and Artemis of the Greeks,
representing the three main aspects of womanhood as wife and
mother, as lover and mistress, and as a chaste and beautiful
virgin full of youthful charm and vigour, often confused one
with the other.
As one example of this confusion, in spite of this mythological
theme of the triple goddess and her perpetual virginity, the
virgin status of the Egyptian
Madonna Isis is challenged because, according to one popular
legend, she fecundated herself using Osiris's severed phallus.
However, in another tradition Isis was miraculously impregnated
"by a flash of lightning or by the rays of the moon." In
The
Golden Bough, Frazer tells another version in which Isis
conceived Horus "while she fluttered in the form of a hawk
over the corpse of her dead husband." In this story, Horus is
born before Osiris is rent into pieces; hence, Isis does not use
the dead god's phallus to impregnate herself. Frazer also says:
The ritual of the
nativity, as it appears to have been celebrated in Syria and
Egypt, was remarkable. The celebrants retired into certain inner
shrines, from which at midnight they issued with a loud cry,
"The Virgin has brought forth! The light is waxing!"
The Egyptians even represented the new-born sun by the image of
an infant which on his birthday, the winter
solstice, they brought forth and exhibited to
his worshippers. No doubt the Virgin who thus conceived and bore
a son on the twenty-fifth of December was the great Oriental
goddess whom the Semites called the Heavenly Virgin or simply
the Heavenly Goddess
Thus, as is proper for goddesses, Isis retained her virginity,
maintaining her epithets of "Immaculate Virgin" and the
"uncontaminated goddess" regardless of her status also
as "Mother of God" and "Magna Mater" or Great
Mother. The same motif exists within Christianity,
in which the Virgin Mother is essentially impregnated by the
"holy ghost" but nonetheless remains a virgin. Isis is,
in reality, the virgin or new moon, receiving or being
impregnated by the light of the sun. In the mythos, the
moon gives birth monthly and annually to the sun; hence, she is
mother of many yet remains a virgin. Confirming Isis's rank as
perpetual virgin, in The Story of Religious Controversy,
Joseph McCabe, a Catholic priest for many years, writes:
Virginity in goddesses is
a relative matter.
Whatever we make of the
original myth Isis seems to have been originally a virgin (or,
perhaps, sexless) goddess, and in the later period of Egyptian
religion she was again considered a virgin goddess, demanding
very strict abstinence from her devotees. It is at this period,
apparently, that the birthday of Horus was annually celebrated,
about December 25th, in the temples. As both Macrobius and the
Christian writer [of the "Paschal Chronicle"] say, a
figure of Horus as a baby was laid in a manger, in a scenic
reconstruction of a stable, and a statue of Isis was placed
beside it. Horus was, in a sense, the Savior of mankind. He was
their avenger against the powers of darkness; he was the light
of the world. His birth-festival was a real Christmas before
Christ.
The Chronicon Paschale, or Paschal Chronicle, is a
compilation finalized in the 7th century ce
that seeks to establish a Christian chronology from
"creation" to the year 628 ce,
focusing on the date of Easter. In establishing Easter, the
Christian authors naturally discussed astronomy/astrology, since
such is the basis of the celebration of Easter, a pre-Christian
festival founded upon the vernal equinox, or spring, when the
"sun of God" is resurrected in full from his
winter death. The vernal equinox during the current Ages of Pisces
has fallen in March, specifically beginning on March 21st,
lasting three days, when the sun overcomes the darkness, and the
days begin to become longer than the night. In the solar mythos,
the sun god starts his growth towards "manhood," when he
is the strongest, at the summer solstice. Hence, Easter is the
resurrection of the sun. As does Macrobius, the Paschal
Chronicle relates that the sun (Horus) was presented every year at
winter solstice (c. 12/25), as a babe born in a manger.
Concerning the Paschal Chronicle, Dupuis relates:
"the author of the
Chronicle of Alexandria expresses himself in the following
words: 'The Egyptians have consecrated up to this day the
child-birth of a virgin and the nativity of her son, who is
exposed in a "crib" to the adoration of the
people'"
Another important source who cites the Paschal Chronicle and
mentions Isis's virginity is James Bonwick in Egyptian
Belief and Modern Thought:
In an ancient Christian
work, called the "Chronicle of Alexandria,"
occurs the following: "Watch how Egypt has consecrated the
childbirth of a virgin, and the birth of her son, who was
exposed in a crib to the adoration of her people"
CMU cites the "most ancient chronicles of Alexandria, which
"testify as follows":
"To this day, Egypt
has consecrated the pregnancy of a virgin, and the nativity of
her son, whom they annually present in a cradle, to the
adoration of the people; and when king Ptolemy, three hundred
and fifty years before our Christian era, demanded of the
priests the significance of this religious ceremony, they told
him it was a mystery."
CMU further states, "According to Eratosthenes [276-194 bce],
the celestial Virgin was supposed to be Isis, that is, the symbol
of the returning year."
Interestingly, all sources cited herein relate a different
translation of the Chronicle, which would indicate that they used
the original Latin text and that it contained the word
"virgin."
Regarding Isis's baby, Count Volney remarks:
It is the sun which, under
the name of Horus, was born, like your [Christian] God, at the
winter solstice, in the arms of the celestial virgin, and who
passed a childhood of obscurity, indigence, and want, answering
to the season of cold and frost.
The virginity of Isis was quite clearly a tenet held by her
devotees. By Budge's assessment, Isis is also "the deity of
the dawn," which, as we will see, would make her
"inviolable" and "eternal," i.e., a perpetual
virgin.
The worship of the Virgin Isis was eventually turned into that of
the Virgin Mary. As Legge says:
The worship of the Virgin
as the Theotokos or Mother of God which was introduced into the
Catholic Church about the time of the destruction of the
Serapeum, enabled the devotees of Isis to continue unchecked
their worship of the mother goddess by merely changing the name
of the object of their adoration, and Prof. Drexler gives a long
list of the statues of Isis which thereafter were used,
sometimes with unaltered attributes, as those of the Virgin
Mary.
Concerning this usurpation, which simply
constituted the changing of the goddess from one ethnicity to
another, apologist Sir Weigall remarks:
while the story of the
death and resurrection of Osiris may have influenced the thought
of the earliest Christians in regard to the death and
resurrection of our Lord, there can be no doubt that the myths
of Isis had a direct bearing upon the elevation of Mary, the
mother of Jesus, to her celestial position in the Roman Catholic
theology In her aspect as the mother of Horus, Isis was
represented in tens of thousands of statuettes and paintings,
holding the divine child in her arms; and when Christianity
triumphed these paintings and figures became those of the
Madonna and Child without any break in continuity: no
archaeologist, in fact, can now tell whether some of these
objects represent the one or the other.
As noted, the tri-fold nature of the Goddess in general reflects,
or is reflected in, the moon. In Greek mythology, the "triple
moon" is represented by Selene; other goddesses also are
lunar, such as Artemis, who was the "virgin" moon, and
Hera, Zeus's wife and mother of several children. Hera, however,
despite being portrayed as having relations with Zeus, remains a
virgin, or, rather, becomes a "born-again virgin," by
virtue of ritualistic bathing. As McLean says:
Hera's three facets link
her to the three Seasons and the three phases of the Moon. In
her earliest appearance in myth she is associated with the cow,
showing her connection with fecundity and birth, especially
associated by the Greeks with this animal. She renewed her
virginity each year by bathing in the stream Canathos near
Argos, a place especially sacred to her.
Like Hera, Artemis too renews her virginity annually by bathing
nude in a "sacred fountain." Even a promiscuous male
god such as Zeus was both "Father" and "Eternal
Virgin."
In reality, the virgin-mother motif is common enough in
pre-Christian cultures to demonstrate its unoriginality in
Christianity. In Pagan
and Christian Creeds, Carpenter recites a long list of
virgin mothers:
Zeus, Father of the gods,
visited Semele in the form of a thunderstorm; and she gave birth
to the great saviour and deliverer Dionysus. Zeus, again,
impregnated Danae in a shower of gold; and the child was Perseus
Devaki, the radiant Virgin of the Hindu mythology, became the
wife of the god Vishnu and bore Krishna, the beloved hero and
prototype of Christ. With regard to Buddha, St. Jerome says
"It is handed down among the Gymnosophists of India that
Buddha, the founder of their system, was brought forth by a
Virgin from her side." The Egyptian Isis, with the child
Horus on her knee, was honored centuries before the Christian
era, and worshipped under the names of "Our Lady,"
"Queen of Heaven," "Star
of the Sea," "Mother of God," and so forth.
Before her, Neith, the Virgin of the World, whose figure bends
from the sky over the earthly plains and the children of men,
was acclaimed as mother of the great god Osiris. The saviour
Mithra, too, was born of a Virgin, as we have had occasion to
notice before; and on Mithraist monuments the mother suckling
her child is not an uncommon figure.
The old Teutonic goddess
Hertha (the Earth) was a Virgin, but was impregnated by the
heavenly Spirit (the Sky); and her image with a child in her
arms was to be seen in the sacred groves of Germany. The
Scandinavian Frigga, in much the same way, being caught in the
embraces of Odin, the All-father, conceived and bore a son, the
blessed Balder, healer and saviour of mankind. Quetzalcoatl, the
(crucified) saviour of the Aztecs, was the son of Chimalman, the
Virgin
Queen of Heaven. Even the Chinese had a mother-goddess and
virgin with child in her arms; and the ancient Etruscans the
same
Carpenter also mentions the black virgin mothers found all over
the Mediterranean and especially in Italian churches, representing
not only Isis but also Mary, having been refigured or
"baptized anew" as the "Jewish" Mother of God.
As stated, the theme of the virgin-born god can be found in the
Americas as well, including in the story of Quetzalcoatl, but also
in Brazil, among the Manicacas. It can likewise be found in India,
where natives have revered for eons "Devi" or "Maha-Devi,"
"The One Great Goddess," in whose name temples have been
built. Doane relates that a researcher named Gonzales found an
Indian temple dedicated to the "Pariturae Virginisthe
Virgin about to bring forth."
This "Devi" is apparently the same as Krishna's mother,
Devaki, and, as was the case with these many ancient gods, Krishna
has also been considered to have been "born of a
virgin." Indeed, Carpenter repeats the assertion, also made
by Rev. Cox, that Krishna's father was Vishnu, not the mortal
Basudev, a sensible notion in light of Krishna's status as a sun
god and incarnation of Vishnu. Regarding Krishna, Doane also
states:
According to the religion
of the Hindoos, Crishnawas the Son of God,
and the Holy Virgin Devaki
The ex-priest McCabe also reports Krishna's mother as a virgin,
with Vishnu as his father:
Thus one of the familiar
religious emblems of India was the statue of the virgin mother
(as the Hindus repute her) Devaki and her divine son Krishna, an
incarnation of the great god Vishnu. Christian writers have held
that this model was borrowed from Christianity, butthe Hindus
had far earlier been in communication with Egypt and were more
likely to borrow the model of Isis and Horus. One does not see
why they should borrow any model. In nearly all religions with a
divine mother and son a very popular image was that of the
divine infant at his mother's breast or in her arms.
None of these writers originated this contention, as, moving back
in time, we find reference to Devaki's virgin status in the
writings of the esteemed Christian authority Sir William Jones
from 1784:
"The Indian incarnate
God Chrishna, the Hindoos believe, had a virgin mother of the
royal race, who was sought to be destroyed in his infancy about
nine hundred years before Christ. It appears that he passed his
life in working miracles, and preaching, and was so humble as to
wash his friends' feet; at length, dying, but rising from the
dead, he ascended into heaven in the presence of a
multitude."
Regarding Krishna and Jones, the anonymous author of Christian
Mythology Unveiled ("CMU"), who wrote around 1840,
possibly 1842, states:
It has been admitted by
most of the learned that the Shastras and Vedas, or scriptures
of the Hindoos, were in existence 1400 years before the alleged
time of Moses Sir William Jones, of pious and orthodox memory,
confesses that, "the name of Chrishna, and the general
outline of his story, was long anterior to the birth of our
Saviour, and, to the time of Homer, we know very
certainly. I am persuaded also (continues he) that a
connection existed between the old idolatrous nations of Egypt,
India, Greece, and Italy, long before the time of Moses.
In the Sanscrit Dictionary, compiled more than two thousand
years ago, we have the whole story of the incarnate Deity, Born
of a Virgin,
and miraculously escaping in his infancy from the reigning
tyrant of his country." This tyrant, alarmed at some
prophecy, sought the infant's life; and, to make sure work, he
ordered all the male children under two years of age to be put
to death. Here is the true origin of the horrid story about
Herod, of which no Greek or Roman historian says a single word.
That the Christian story was taken from the Indian allegory, is
traceable in every circumstance the reputed father of Chrisna
was a carpentera new star appeared at the child's birthhe was
laid in a manger(celestial)he underwent many incarnations to
redeem the world from sin and mental darkness, (ignorance and
winter) and was, therefore, called Saviourhe was put to
death between two thieves he arose from the dead, and returned
to his heavenly seat in Vaicontha.
In this paragraph is a significant portion of disputed information
found in Kersey Graves's The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors:
To wit, Krishna's virgin birth, his father as a carpenter, and his
death between two thieves. Yet, CMU's book was written decades before
Graves (1875), which means that Graves may finally be absolved
from the illegitimate charges of fabrication slung his way for the
past century....
Entering into this important debate is the erudite and pious
Christian Rev. Dr. Lundy (1889), who makes the following
remarkable comments:
Just as the story of
Krishna does not occur in the Vedas, so there is no account of
Orpheus in the works of Homer or Hesiod. And yet, if we may
believe so good an authority as Edward
Moor, both the name of Krishna, and the general outline of
his story, were long anterior to the birth of our Saviour, as
very certain things, and probably extend to the time of Homer,
nearly 900 years b.c.,
or more than a hundred years before Isaiah lived and prophesied;
that same Edward Moor, who deprecates "the attempts at
bending so many of the events of Krishna's life to tally with
those, real or typical, of Jesus Christ;" and yet has
nothing to say of such events as do bear a striking resemblance
to our Lord's life. Krishna's childhood and absurd miracles may
be, as some affirm with Sir Wm. Jones, interpolations from the
Apocryphal Gospels into the original story; but the fact remains
of the Eighth Incarnation of Vishnu in the Hindu religion and
literature long before the Apocryphal or genuine Gospels were
written.
From that candid and
cautious Bampton Lecturer of 1809, the Rev. J.B.S. Carwithen,
also the author of an excellent history of the Church of
England, I cite the following passages on this subject, viz.:
"From some passages in the Puranas, which are thought to be
of modern insertion, and especially from a similarity which has
been discovered in the Bhagavat Purana, between the life of
Krishna the Indian Apollo, and the life of Christ, a similarity
which has caused a modern infidel to draw an impious parallel
between them, it has been conjectured, not without some
appearance of probability, that the Apocryphal Gospels, which
abounded in the first ages of the Christian Church, might have
found their way into India; and that the Hindus had engrafted
the wildest part of them on the adventures of their own
divinities. Any coincidence, therefore, which may be discovered
between the Sanscrit records, and the Mosiacal and Evangelical
histories, is more likely to proceed from a communication
through this channel, than from ancient and universal
tradition."
"On this opinion (sic)
it may be remarked that both the name of Krishna and the general
outline of his story are long anterior to the birth of our
Saviour; and this we know, not on the presumed antiquity of the
Hindu records alone. Both Arrian and Strabo assert that the God
Krishna was worshipped at Mathura on the river Jumna, where
he is worshipped to this day. But the emblems and attributes
essential to this deity are also transplanted into the mythology
of the west." (pp. 98-99.) Hence the similarity between
Krishna and Apollo and Orpheus.
In any event, the pious Lundy synopsizes the Krishna tale thus:
Krishna, then, is an
incarnate god and a shepherd-god, long anterior to Christianity.
He is exposed like Moses [and Jesus] to the fury of a tyrant;
like Moses he lived among cattle and flocks, and their keepers;
or like David he rises from a low condition among his father's
sheep to be a king; or like David's Lord, he becomes the
shepherd of his people, feeding them in a green pasture, and
leading them forth besides the waters of comfort.
The Virgin Goddess
The virgin goddess motif is prevalent in the ancient world because
it is astrotheological, representing not only the moon but also
the earth, Venus, Virgo and the dawn. As the Roman poet Virgil
described or "prophesied" in his Eclogues in 37 bce,
the "return of the virgin," i.e., Virgo would, along
with other astrotheological events, bring about "a new breed
of men sent down from heaven," as well as the birth of a boy
"in whomthe golden race [shall] arise."
The virgin-born "golden boy" is the sun. As Hackwood
states:
The Virgin Mary is called
not only the Mother of God, but the Queen of Heaven. This
connects her directly with astronomic lore. The
ornamentation of many continental churches often includes a
representation of the Sun and Moon "in conjunction,"
the Moon being therein emblematical of the Virgin and Child.
As the Moon is the symbol
of Mary,
Queen of Heaven, so also a bright Star sometimes symbolizes
him whose star was seen over Jerusalem by the Wise Men from the
East.
Regarding the astrotheological nature of the gospel story,
including the virgin birth/immaculate conception, the famous
Christian theologian and saint Albertus Magnus, or Albert the
Great, (1193?-1280) admitted:
"We know that the
sign of the celestial Virgin did come to the horizon at the
moment where we have fixed the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ.
All the mysteries of the incarnation of our Saviour Christ; and
all the circumstances of his marvellous life, from his
conception to his ascension, are to be traced out in the
constellations, and are figured in the stars."
...As Albert the Great acknowledged, the virgin-birth motif is
astrotheological, referring to the hour of midnight, December 25th,
when the constellation of Virgo rises on the horizon. The
Assumption of the Virgin, celebrated in Catholicism on August 15th,
represents the summer sun's brightness blotting out Virgo. Mary's
Nativity, celebrated on September 8th, occurs when the
constellation is visible again. Such is what these
"Christian" motifs and holidays represent, as has
obviously been known by the more erudite of the Catholic clergy.
Hence, the virgin who will conceive and bring forth is Virgo, and
her son is the sun....
In vain do apologists attempt to debunk the virgin status of
Krishna's mother, because, even if she were not considered as such
although she certainly was the other virgin birth stories
preceding Christianity are abundant enough to demonstrate that
this important aspect of Christian doctrine is of Pagan origin. In
addition to the virgin-born deities and heroes already named were
a number of others, which is to be expected since we know the
astrotheological meaning behind the motif, as it applies to the
sun god, who was worshipped all over the world by a wide variety
of names and epithets. Concerning these miraculous births, Dr.
Inman comments:
Jupiter had Bacchus and
Minerva without Juno's aid, and Juno retaliated by bearing Ares
without conversation with her consort. We deride these tales,
and yet think, that because we laugh at a hundred such we will
be pardoned for believing one.
Again, the Christian virgin birth is no more historical or
believable than that of these numerous other gods. Moreover, as
Robertson says, "The idea of a Virgin-Mother-Goddess is
practically universal." The list of Pagan virgin mothers
includes the following:
