Amergin:

I think you could probably do better than Kersey Graves' text as it is pretty antiquated by now.. His conclusions don't really muster up to today's standards of scholarship:

"The book's accuracy has been questioned by both Christian and atheist scholars, with the general consensus being that the book is unscholarly and unreliable."

See the wiki:

The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

- Art

__________________
"it benefits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God."
- Johannes Kepler

Here is what Acharya has to say on Graves:

Beddru is Beddou is Buddha

I would agree, but even most of the better educated scholars have said the Gospels are not really a biography or historical accounting. That said, if we are to use the Gospels, the first thing we have to try to determine is when they were written. Despite the conventional view, there is no good proof they are from the era apologists would like them to be (60-110 CE). Further, we do not know the authors, we do not know which one was written first, we do not know if the ones we have were even the first versions. For example, there is a theory that Marcion's Gospel of the Lord preceded the Gospels we have today, as well as theories about an Ur-Markus and Ur-Lukas.

That said, I think concluding there is not a personal theistic God is a reasonable conclusion, but I would hate to limit possible conceptions of God to that particular conception.

-TC

So we're back to the Archarya..well she republished Graves book nicht war?

I'll provide an example from his text so you'll maybe see where I'm coming from:

"The history of Chrishna Zeus (or Jeseus, as some writers spell it) is contained principally in the Baghavat Gita, the episode portion of the Mahabaret bible."

If you've ever read the Bhagavad Gita you know it does not contain the "history" of Krishna..It contains a dialogue between Arjuna and Lord Krishna at the battle of Kurukshetra and is a small section of the great Hindu epic Mahabharata.

The term "Chrishna Zeus" is a hodge podge mix of Christian and Greek mythos but has nothing to do with the Krishna legend which is well known to Hindus.

Krishna was not crucified.. He died according to the Mahabharata from an arrow shot by hunter who mistook Krishna's heel for game a deer.

So I have a lot of reservations about this book and feel it's hopelessly outdated in terms of scholarship.

- Art

__________________
"it benefits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God."
- Johannes Kepler

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert in Hindu mythology, my purpose was to present the counter-argument to your claim fromthose who have studied it. So, I will try to address your concerns you raise:


This is a bit misleading, because he is not referring to the Bhagavad Gita in particular, but a specific portion here:



Not only that, but almost every site I visited about the life of Krishna said the same thing: "the history of Krishna". So it seems a bit unfair to disparage Graves just because he puts something the way the majority of Westerners who write and study this mythology in the same scope.


How do you know this? How can you possibly say with any certainty the level of cross-culturalization that occurred? The Indian and European language are linked at their root "Indo-European", especially with regard to the Vedas. I think part of the problem with what is well known to the Hindus is the same thing as what s well known to the Christians. There were lots of stories circulating about "Jesus", and some got chosen to be the "official ones", while others not so much. There are other stories about Krishna (the Harivamsa, the Bhagavata Purana and the Vishnu Puran) that flesh out Krishna's background, probably more that have been lost, if not supressed. Are you claiming these aspects are not part of Krishna's "history":

born of the virgin Devaki
birth attended by cowherds and angels
pursued by a tyrant who ordered deaths of children
escaped out of the province
baptised in the river Ganges
known for miracles and casting out demons
annointed with oil
transfigured

I mean, that's a lot of parallel between godmen isn't it?


Yet, we have images of him in crucifrom "arrowed" to a tree. Are we just splitting hairs a bit here? Obviously, the cruciform and being pinned to a cross or tree is prevelant. I'm not saying you don't have good reasons to be skeptical, I'm just saying that if you want to be informed about your skepticism, you should read the other side's point of view. That's all.

Krishna Crucified? Part 1

We're straying away I think from the original topic Travis but let me make a few comments off the cuff here..

You admit you're not an expert on Hindu mythology.. What I'm saying is that the text of Kersey Grave's book which was written around what 1870's is out of date in terms of scholarship and I provided the example of what he wrote about Krishna. It's pretty clear what he wrote:

"The history of Chrishna Zeus (or Jeseus, as some writers spell it) is contained principally in the Baghavat Gita"

and my reply was that the Bhagavad Gita is actually a dialogue mostly between Krishna and Arjuna.. It doesn't deal hardly at all with the history of Krishna.


I would wager that Kersey was not a sanskrit scholar..His knowledge was set in the nineteenth century when Westerners were just learning about Eastern religions.

In the list you have things like

"born of the virgin Devaki"

You don't know the story.. She was not a virgin there was no virgin birth of Krishna in Hindu legend.. so Kersey is imposing his own Christian perspective on this. Here is brief is the story and read it for yourself:

Devaki - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Here's another one..

"baptised in the river Ganges"

There's nothing really parallel to the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist in the Krishna story.. Anothhr example of Kersey projecting his own Christian background on what little he knew..

There's also nothing like the crucifixion of Jesus in Hindu iconography of Krishna.. It's not the same...

I'm not saying there are NO parallels between Krishna and Christ.. I'm saying Kersey was simply was outdated in his scholarship.. and there's a lot better material out there today.

You know Travis Archarya S is republishing Kersey book...well and good.. but as the publisher now don't you think she could be a little biased.. Wouldn't you expect her to promote the book?

- Art

__________________
"it benefits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God."
- Johannes Kepler

Oh, I'm sure she's biased, I just don't think she or Graves is fabricating things. I think the difference for us is that when you say "modern" I hear "sanitized". As any investigator knows, not all information is just layed out in front of you, sometimes you have to go out and dig into it as some things are hidden, remote, or concealed. If you read the link provided at the end, you will see there were many pious Christian researchers who came to the same conclusions. So, are we saying 19th century scholarship is flawed? True, it doesn't have the same standards as scholarship today, but today's scholarship may not have access to some of the source material the earlier people did. My point, is that if you begin to look at these godmen not as "real people" but as symbols for broad theological/mystical ideas, you understand most of the differences are cultural. Just like the Zodiac, different cultures see it with different figures and sometimes use it in different ways, but they all use the same division of 12, are all looking at the effect of precession.

So it doesn't matter whether one culture emphasizes the "perpetual divineness" of the mother of the godman and another emphasizes her "earthly virginity". These are cultural differences for what leaves a more impressionable sense of awe to the culture. The similarities are that God has created himself as human through child birth, and that the birth mother is represented in the constellation of Virgo where the sun/son is "born". This is because the Sun was considered the visible proxy of God because of its life giving qualities. Some understood this relationship as a mystical allegory, most undestood in terms of mythologcal literalism. But there is no need for a "real person" to invent these allegories/stories. The inspiration was always in the celestial dome (heaven) and its characters were always the heavenly bodies. That's why there are parallels. The basic story is in the heavens for everyone to observe, the details (differences) are given to the translators.

-TC

"..the birth mother is represented in the constellation of Virgo where the sun/son is "born". This is because the Sun was considered the visible proxy of God because of its life giving qualities."

So this is the astro theology?

I just don't see that republishing Kersey Graves book is going to be a service.

There's better much material out there.. Joseph Campbell, Robert Graves ...

Check out this wiki..

Comparative religion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and

Comparative mythology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

__________________
"it benefits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God."
- Johannes Kepler

I think her point was to clear the air a bit about the attacks on the book, which is why she wrote a forward for it. Here's the problem, is some of the scholarship suspect? Yes. Does that discredit the entire book? Not necessarily, but the game that is played is to take a few of the quotes that are shaky at best and then use them to call everything in it trash. That doesn't mean he didn't go to India and study them, it doesn't mean he was malicious in what he thought he found, it doesn't mean that aspects of what he said don't have truth to them. It means he didn't footnote well, he didn't have some of the advances of modern publishing (photos) to compliment what he found. It would be one thing to say all this if he was the only one who found these similarities. He was not. The problem is, he wrote in a more interpretive style, expressing the connections he sees, rather than in an archiving style, that let's the reader decide if the connections he sees are valid.

As for who to choose for content, I believe those other authors are under the auspices of certain publishing houses. She just can't republish someone who is the property of someone else. The reason she chose Graves' work was because when her first book came out, that was the book that received the most critique. So I imagine, she is defending why some of the material in that book is worth citing.

As for the astrotheology question, yes, in part. The main theory behind it is that the heavenly bodies are the main source of inspiration for the myths of the Northern Hemisphere. These myths, in turn, are used to express mystical ideas that don't have a ready empirical symbol to help express them. Without any distinction between a mystical and a mythical expression, the distinction becomes blurred as to what the speaker or author is trying to relate. In Integral theory we call this "pre/trans fallacy". If we use the rational level of comprehension (empirical/hypothetical/deductive) as the balance point, magical and mythical interpretations of the divine fall on the pre-rational side whereas mystical and contemplative interpretations fall on the trans-rational side. One could look at this as the difference between believing literally "what is said" and understanding allegorically "what is being approximated". But without that distinction, mythicists will raise every pre-rational concept to some divine glory while rationalists will downgrade every contemplative insight to some wishful thinking.

So, in my view, astrotheology is NOT about proving all religious traditions as charades in storytelling. It's about understanding what inspires the general outline of these stories so that you don't confuse the "finger pointing at the moon" for "the moon itself". The stories have value not because they historically happened, they have value because of the human insight it attempts to relate. And, in my opinion, that insight is tarnished because literal attachment to these stories as history overshadows attempts to understand the spiritual insight they want to relate. Unfortunately, because of the weight the literal stores now hold, the only way to shake that is to present the actual inspiration for the stories as stark contrasts to biographies and histories.

-TC

It's weird, sometimes, how a subject will come up, and then you notice it in other areas. Of course, rationally speaking, it's probably not that "weird", but it sure seems that way sometimes. I got this post notice from Acharya's blog about her book, Suns of God:

Truth Be Known News | Blog of Acharya S: Indians Praise "Suns of God"