Today is the feast day of John the Baptist, who, in Christian tradition, acted as an initiator to Christ through the sacrament of baptism. The name “John” comes from the Hebrew “Yohanen” meaning “from the waters”.

The John the Baptist story seems to be an echo of a much older, pagan story – that of Oannes, the fish-headed initiator god of the Babylonians. Nightly, Oannes would rise from the sea and, like other “communicator” gods Djehuti (“Thoth”), Hermes, Wotan, would teach arts, language and sciences. These two figures, Oannes and John the Baptist, share not only a name, but a job description (initiation by water). In the Christian story, it is Jesus who plays the “communicator god” role, but even in the early second century the gospels acknowledge;

“Now the people were filled with expectation, and all were asking in their hearts whether John might be the Messiah”

In fact many of the first “Christians” in the Middle East were baptized not in the name of Jesus, but in the name of John/Oannes.

There are more pagan eddies around the JBap figure: he is beheaded, and his iconography is centralized around the severed head. This would seem to resonate with various Middle Eastern and Celtic traditions around the veneration of the decapitated head, from Veronicas to the head of Bran the Blessed. The Knights Templar, too, were thought to worship a severed head, and ascribed to it the same properties as the Holy Grail. It’s worth noting that the word “grail” comes from the Latin word for “shallow serving dish” (not a cup), and it is in just such a platter that the head of John the Baptist is traditionally depicted (and to make matters dizzying, if John were the Messiah, then such a vessel certainly did contain the “blood of Christ”).

There is another John/Oannes in the Christian pantheon; John the Evangelist, whose feast is at Midwinter, setting up a fairly tidy dyad of the Holly King and Oak King so detailed in Robert Grave’s The White Goddess.

To be clear, I’m not talking about history here, but myth: how these stories weave and dance together, how they flirt with each other across neighbouring faiths and cultures and are reinterpreted and illustrated using familiar motifs. The perceived firewall between Paganism and Christianity is a recent revisionism, and the stories that make up western culture are as a messy, confused, juicy and magical as any other human endeavour.