Mermaid Sightings Claimed in Israel

August 19, 2009 By Daniel Florien 26 Comments

MermaidIt seems some landlubbers think they’ve seen them a mermaid in Israel:

An alleged mermaid, said to resemble a cross between a fish and a young girl, only appears at sunset. It performs a few tricks for onlookers before disappearing for the night.

One of the first people to see the mermaid, Shlomo Cohen, said, “I was with friends when suddenly we saw a woman laying on the sand in a weird way. At first I thought she was just another sunbather, but when we approached she jumped into the water and disappeared. We were all in shock because we saw she had a tail.”

The sightings apparently began several months ago.

The town’s tourism board is of course delighted with their newfound fame and local mystery fauna. Taking a cue from the town of Inverness, Scotland (on the shore of Loch Ness), the Kiryat Yam government has offered a $1 million reward for the first person to photograph the creature. Town spokesman Natti Zilberman thinks the reward money is well-spent. “I believe if there really is a mermaid then so many people will come to Kiryat Yam, a lot more money will be made than $1 million.”

Their government is pretty smart to offer a reward — though it will also encourage more fakes.

Like miracles, this is an event people swear to have seen with their own eyes, yet no evidence has been produced. Skeptics are, well, skeptical, and just saying you saw a mermaid isn’t enough. You have to prove it, or we’re going to assume you had too much to drink or experienced an optical illusion (which is common with water).

But if you have real proof, we’ll be happy to believe it.

Until then, we’ll laugh at you.

Filed Under: Myth, Oh the Stupidity!, Superstition 26 Comments

10 Christ-like Figures Who Pre-Date Jesus

June 5, 2009 By Daniel Florien 38 Comments

ishtarListverse has a list of 10 Christ-like figures who pre-date Jesus:

  1. Buddha
  2. Krishna
  3. Odysseus
  4. Romulus
  5. Dionysus
  6. Heracles
  7. Glycon
  8. Zoroaster
  9. Attis of Phrygia
  10. Horus

(But they left out Ishtar!)

Filed Under: Christianity, History, Myth 38 Comments

An Original Story?

May 17, 2009 By Daniel Florien 33 Comments

I guess Harry Potter isn’t so original after all…

harry-potter-star-wars

(via)

Filed Under: Humor, Myth 33 Comments

Ancient Sumerian Origins of the Easter Story

April 12, 2009 By Daniel Florien 138 Comments

ishtarOver at the Huffington Post, Valerie Tarico interviews Dr. Tony Nugen about the ancient Sumerian origins of the Easter story. Here are the parallels with Sumerian story of Inanna:

Inanna and Jesus both travel to a big city, where they are arrested by soldiers, put on trial, convicted, sentenced to death, stripped of their clothes, tortured, hung up on a stake, and die. And then, after 3 days, they are resurrected from the dead.

Now there are, to be sure, a number of significant differences between the stories. For one thing, one story is about a goddess and the other is about a divine man. But this is a specific pattern, a mythic template. When you are dealing with the question of whether these things actually happened, you have to deal with the fact that there is a mythic template here.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that there wasn’t a real person, Jesus, who was crucified, but rather that, if there was, the story about it is structured and embellished in accordance with a pattern that was very ancient and widespread.

People were telling this story almost four thousand years before the death and resurrection of Jesus.

They also discuss the similarities between Jesus and Inanna’s husband, Dumuzi:

Dumuzi is the prototype of the non-aggressive, non-heroic male; he cries easily; he is the opposite of the warrior-god in the ancient pantheon. The summer month which corresponds to our month of July is named after him in both the Babylonian and Hebrew calendars, and during this month each year his followers, mostly women, mourn his death. From this myth we are talking about, and from a few other references, we also know that he is resurrected. But unlike Jesus, who dies and is resurrected once, he is imagined to die and be resurrected over and over, each year.

There are other major differences. However, there really are a lot of similarities between the personalities and the stories of Jesus and Dumuzi. They both are tortured and die violent deaths after being betrayed by a close friend, who accepts a bribe from his enemies. They both have a father who is a god and a mother who is human. Dumuzi’s father, the god Enki, also has many similarities to Yahweh, the father of Jesus.

What I find most interesting is that Dr. Tony Nugen is a Presbyterian minister and considers himself a Christian, even though he realizes the resurrection of Jesus is bunk:

I consider myself to be a Christian in a spiritual sense, not in a doctrinal sense. This means my Christianity is defined by values, spiritual practices, and faith rather than belief in a specific set of doctrinal agreements….

If the resurrection of Christ didn’t literally happen, that shouldn’t have any bearing on whether life now is worth living or how we live. From my vantage point, where values and practices are the heart of Christianity, the contradiction lies in people like our recent president who think it’s ok to practice torture and yet call themselves Christians….

From the standpoint of my Christianity, right-wing evangelical fundamentalism is really the opposite of what Christ was about. Those who subscribe to an intolerant, arrogant, inhumane form of Christianity are following a religion that is literally antichrist.

I wish there were more Christians like Dr. Nugen! I think we’d get along quite well.

Filed Under: Christianity, History, Jesus, Miracles, Myth, Superstition 138 Comments

Categories, Crustaceans & Cyclic Time

April 8, 2009 By vorjack 49 Comments

By Vorjack

shrimpA month ago I wrote a piece discussing Cyclical Time and the way it affected the ancients’ understanding of history. Let’s look at that concept again, but this time focus on how it shaped the everyday lives of the ancients. Along the way we can attempt to answer one of those vexing questions from biblical studies: why exactly does God Hate Shrimp?

Ritual and Myth

Pullquote: To remember is to re-live.
Jewish Saying

Everybody who was once a Christian or Jew should recognize the importance ritual play in religion. The central rituals  — communion, Passover Seder — each invoke the sacred myths of the faith. By reenacting the sacred scenes of the Last Supper or Exodus, believers become participants in these holy myths.

In the ancient world, one of the most popular myths to invoke was the cosmogony, or the creation of the cosmos. For example, ancient Mesopotamian weddings were reenactments of the union of sky god and earth goddess. The binding of the participants became a recapitulation of the act of creation. Being monotheists, the ancient Jewish creation myth was a little more complicated.

Here the universe is described as chaos “without form and void,” a seething mass of undifferentiated matter envisioned as deep and roiling waters. The purpose of the creator god is to separate this formless void into meaningful categories. In other religions, this takes the mythic form of the God defeating chaos in the form of a monster: Ba’al defeating the sea-dragon Tiamat in the Canaanite myths, or Odin defeating the ice giant Ymir in Norse myths.

In these myths, the god generally separated the slain monster into component parts and used them to form the world: a skull for the dome of the sky, blood becomes rivers and streams, etc. The creature of chaos gets partitioned and defined into component categories: order from chaos. The Hebrew myth in Genesis 1:1 seems to be later and a bit more advanced, so we jump straight to the division without the slaughter: God “separated light from darkness,” and gave them the names night and day. God separated the water with the firmament, creating the oceans and land.

Categories

Pullquote: Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.
Leviticus 11:12

God then caused the earth to bring forth creatures to populate these various regions: fish for the oceans, birds for the skies and animals for the land “according to their kinds.” These “kinds” became the focus of some of the ancient Jewish priests. They established categories of animals, with each category based around same ideal characteristics. Fish, for example, should live in the water, have fins and have scales. Winged insects should fly, not walk. Hoofed animals should have cloven hooves and chew a cud.

Creatures that fulfilled these definitions were clean, creatures that didn’t became unclean. Cleanliness was therefore a function of purity: things that were purely within one category were clean, while things that straddled the line between categories were an abomination — a confusion of categories, and were thus unclean. So the ancient Jews ate fish, a category that had been established at creation, but shunned shrimp, which lacked fins and scales yet lived in the water. They stayed pure by staying within the categories.

By staying within the lines of these categories and not coming into contact with anything unclean, the ancient might participate in the process of creation. They were imitating or reenacting the process of division and ordering that brought the universe into being. This is what Eliade called Eternal Return, a way by which the ancient participant might return to the mythical age.

In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time. (Mircea Eliade, “Myths, Dreams and Mysteries”)

I’ve heard this theory from a number of sources, but it does leave a few questions unanswered. Mainly, if God brought forth clean animals, where did all these unclean animals come from? Christians would likely blame the Fall, but this doesn’t seem to be an important Jewish concept. It was only much later in Jewish history that Satan become a major figure, so he’s out. Does this point to some lost elements of polytheism?

Vorjack is a librarian/archivist and a public historian, living with his wife in history-soaked Albany, New York.

Filed Under: Bible, Christianity, History, Myth 49 Comments
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