September 29, 2010

This book is a labor of love


03/09'09 @ 8 min, Jan Irvin) I'm here with Acharya S aka D.M. Murdock or D.M. Murdock aka Acharya S.
Welcome to Gnostic Media Research and Publishing's Podcast #21. How are you today?
DM)
Well, that is not a good question to ask me. Anybody who knows me, knows that I've been battling mightily with a physical element that I had just to get this latest book done. I thought I was gonna die, so ...
This book is a labor of love. And I am of course speaking about Christ in Egypt – The Horus-Jesus Connection which was just released, finally. Several months too late because I got nailed with some hideous element that knocked me out of the game, so I had to struggle mightily to finish it. The writing was done and I had to work like propped up to get the illustrations finished. You know, I do all this myself and I had somebody who helps with the proofing and editing. Fortunately, I had help on this time around, but the indexing – this is almost a 600-page book, and you weren't expecting that, were you?
Jan) No, I wasn't. [...]

DM)
I had dug up a sufficient amount of material like back in May of last year. I thought I was finished, and then I just could not stop it. It's like eating peanuts: I kept digging up more stuff – 'wow, this is really great!'
And a lot of that was coming from the more modern, the most modern, the most popular modern egyptologists, and also I came upon several primary sources. I used thousands of texts I went through to find all this material and different translations of them, and sometimes I actually went through the original writing and [...]
I had to teach myself hieroglyphs and Ancient Egyptian on the spot, as I was going along writing the book. And so I went back to the original text in a number of important instances like when I discuss the name "Mary", and when I discuss the title "Krst" or "Karest" or "Christ", which was appended to Osiris's name, meaning "the mummy" or "the buried thing". And he actually is called "Lord of the Funeral", and so he is called the "Karest" or "Krst" or "Christ".
There is a section in my book on that etymology. This is absolutely fascinating: I definitely found ... there were places where Osiris is called the "Karest" or the "Christ" – this is a derivation that Gerald Massey came up with.
And it's been challenged and poopooed and what not, but I found it, it's there: I grabbed the actual hieroglyphs in the book. It's fascinating! Osiris and Horus were both called "the anointed", which is what "christ" means, in "christos", in Greek.
So in many instances I went back to the original languages. I used a variety of translations for the primary sources. And I got this one text called "The Coffin Text" – it's this huge book of text that where written on coffins.
You have in the Ancient Egyptian literature the mortuary literature – most of what we have revolves around their funeral rituals or their rites. Their religion was very oriented to what: at the afterlife – to living again, to passing into a new world, to becoming born again, or resurrected, or revivified in any manner of ways. It could be bodily, it could be spiritual [...]
There was a lot of heavens and there were hells in Egyptian mythology, in fact, the Christian take on heaven and hell is very similar to the earlier mythology in Egypt, and I showed that in my book Christ in Egypt as well. Some of the more minor point – if I had going into that, there would be another 20 pages.

Some of these chapters are enormous like the Virgin-Isis/Mary chapter. I go into great detail in the virgin aspect of Isis and other goddesses in the ancient world.
It's quite fascinating that there is this in the scholarly world: they don't come right out and talk about this very much, but behind the scenes they used these terms like "parthenogenesis" which means virgin birth. And so, if you go searching around for "virgin mothers" or something like that in the more scholarly texts, you wouldn't find it all that much, but if you look up "parthenogenesis" all of the sudden there is this whole conversation going on about these virgin births that are within mythology that date back – oh, I don't know – 6 ... 7,000 years. And they're talking about it, so they know!
I know you hear this, Jan, 'cause you have a forum and people are in there, debating ... you hear like 'oh, you told us to say this and don't say that', and then you find out: actually, they do know these things. The virginity of Isis is discussed in various texts. But you have to look for them, they don't put it in dictionaries! Dictionary entries are very short, they're sanitized so they don't offend anyone. They give a core description of something. They leave off details. Very short! They don't got to go 'oh, Isis called herself in in the tomb of Seti I in Abydos: she calls herself "the great virgin".' They don't say those things in encyclopedias. You're not gonna find this information there. If you dig deeper, you can find it. It's not that easy, though, because in other instances it's been removed, deliberately censored out of the literary record. [...]
I dugged that original text up which was hard to find, I'll tell you.
Jan) Let me tell you, it was hard to find just the citation. It took me a couple of months and then, I think, I had sent it to you and asked you for your help finding it, and then you finally found it and sent me back a copy of it.
DM) That's right. So they had an one fell swoop. [...] this particular passage [...] They had absolutely removed the entire thing and jumped right to a completely different discussion. And I was able to find this in a German publication, because the German sholarship didn't censor it out. So this is what you'll get in my book, too.

There is not that many people who are doing this kind of research in French, in German, in Italian, in Latin, in Greek, in Hebrew, in Egyptian – I worked in all these languages in this book. In Coptic. Whatever it took to get this information – that's what I did. Because I can! And I do. So if I came across the German text, it didn't fraught me, it didn't scare me – I can read German if I have to. It's not the easiest language, it's not my best. [...]
Nothing stopped me from finding these things but they were hard to find. And I had to not only rely on, you know, scaring the internet – there are some really great resources there – but I had to do all kinds of interlibrary loans and digging stuff up from all over the country. I consulted with a native speaker of German for some assistances in some cases. There was nothing that was really hard to find – it was so, so interesting!
The December 25th birthday of Horus which is discussed by Plutarch ... He specifically said that Horus was born at the winter solstice. And even beyond that I have the surprise for everybody: there is absolutely no question that Horus was born on December 25th, no question at all.

Jan) Let me interject there: Some listeners will say, 'well, Jesus wasn't born on December 25th – that's a false argument.' So, what would you say to that?
DM)
That's a false argument! That's an absurd, that's a ridiculous argument. Okay, no. 1: first I'd say, Jesus wasn't born at all, so it doesn't matter, 'cause he is a mythical character. As mythical as Horus. As mythical as Hercules.
I know you don't want to hear that but I have to tell you: if you study mythology you start to see it. And it all weaks. It's like come on, these are Jewish myths! They are no different ... We have Greek myths, we have Roman myths, we have Egyptian myths, we have Indian myths, we have Peruvian myths, we have Jewish myths. These are the Jewish myths, if these are not the Jewish myths, what are the Jewish myths? You'll tell me that that's the only culture that doesn't have them? A guy who is born of a virgin, who raises people from the dead, who walks on water, who resurrects himself from the dead, [...] he is sent into heaven – if those aren't myths, I don't know what it is. And if those are not the Jewish myths, then where are the Jewish myths? Are they the only culture that doesn't have them.
Come on, people, wake up! So that's the first thing.
The second thing is that this argument ... Fact is that millions, hundreds of millions of people over the last 16-17 hundred years have celebrated "Christ Mass", Christ's birthday on December 25th. So that's a matter of opinion. Whether or not people believe that Christ was born on December 25th, the vast majority of Christians throughout history have believed that. And they still do to this day. We just celebrated Christmas or were you insensate to that? We just had a big celebration and the preachers are all () about Jesus being the reason for the season.
So I would suggest that instead of coming back with that bad, illogical fallacy/argument, that you go to these preachers and you tell them that Jesus is not the reason for the season because you'll be doing my job for me. That's what I'm trying to tell you: that it is not the birth of the Jewish Messiah, it is the birth of the Sun God, and it has been the birth of the Sun God for probably tens of thousands of years in the minds of human beings.


truth be known

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