Sol Invictus Quotes

Mithras is a Persian light and warrior god adopted by the Roman army as their tutelary deity.  His name means “Friend”.  Mithras was the emissary of Ahura Mazda, the supreme power of good, who battled Ahriman, the supreme evil.  Mithras slew the divine bull to release its life-giving blood into the earth, and creatures that served Ahriman like scorpions and serpents tried to stop this happening. Mithras was often depicted with a pointed cap, and a number of reliefs show him in the act of slaying the bull.  As a solar god he was directly equated to Sol Invictus by the Romans, as can be seen from inscriptions.[469]  Twelve inscriptions to him have been found to date.[470] There were seven grades in the Mithraic mysteries, which were only open to free men.  The Mithraic cult was highly tolerant of other deities, as is evidences by depictions of other gods in the shrines.  Also as the soldier god, priesthoods were known to bring their statues to the Mithraea (temples) for protection when danger threatened. The Mithraea were usually small, and have preserved their mysteries to an extent as little writing remains from them.  A relief from Housesteads (Northumberland) shows Mithras bearing a sword and spear rising from an egg, surrounded by a hoop depicting the signs of the zodiac.  A silver amulet found at St Albans similarly depicts Mithras rising from a pile of stones.  More commonly images on altars showed him sacrificing a bull, such as at Rudchester (Northumberland), Carrawburgh (Northumberland) and the London Mithraeum.  There are now five known Mithraea in Britain, those at Caernarvon, Carrawburgh, Housesteads, London and Rudchester.  Of these all were purely military apart from the London Mithraea. 

It’s odd. Sol Invictus—he’s such a contrast to the cool thinking of the theists.

Nevertheless, some surviving evidence indicates that Constantine himself was originally devoted to Apollo, supported by the fact that the god Sol Invictus continued to show up on the reverse types of Constantinian coinage until the mid-320s,

The birth of the Lord began to be commemorated (on an annual basis) somewhere in the third or fourth centuries a.d. It is commonly argued that this was a “takeover” of a pagan holiday, celebrating the winter solstice. But it just as likely, in my view, that this was actually the other way around. Sol Invictus was established as a holiday by Aurelian in a.d. 274, when the Christians were already a major force. So who was copying whom? And Saturnalia, another popular candidate suggested as being an “ancestor” of Christmas, actually occurred on December 17.

Akhenaten sought out materialism, for that the upper clocking of the heavens did not serve him. This is when the Sun replaced the Completion of the Tidings in ancient Egypt. A Roman story in retrospect; when the Sol Invictus in the later Roman Empire replaced the Aquila. This explains exactly the heresy of giving the Sphinx name to the Sun by ancient Egyptians.

Where your justice finds no answer upon the earth, O Sun, someone must take up the just cause. Look upon me in your rising and your setting, O Sun, and throw down your midday strength to me, because today I will step forward and I will never step back.

Now Constantine revealed himself as a Christian sympathizer. Even though the sect’s absolute moral certainties ruled out compromise with the Roman pantheon, Constantine moved slowly, building new churches on the site of the tomb of St Peter and a splendid, still-standing basilica at the Lateran. Yet his triumphal arch featured Sol Invictus, Companion of Unconquered Constantine. But victory is always the most persuasive religious argument: Constantine believed Christ had won his battles for him.

Brilliant. And how do you know he’s a saint?” “He’s got a halo?” “Excellent, and does that golden halo remind you of anything?” Hitzrot broke into a smile. “Yeah! Those Egyptian things we studied last term. Those . . . um . . . sun disks!” “Thank you, Hitzrot. Go back to sleep.” Langdon turned back to the class. “Halos, like much of Christian symbology, were borrowed from the ancient Egyptian religion of sun worship. Christianity is filled with examples of sun worship.” “Excuse me?” the girl in front said. “I go to church all the time, and I don’t see much sun worshiping going on!” “Really? What do you celebrate on December twenty-fifth?” “Christmas. The birth of Jesus Christ.” “And yet according to the Bible, Christ was born in March, so what are we doing celebrating in late December?” Silence. Langdon smiled. “December twenty-fifth, my friends, is the ancient pagan holiday of sol invictus—Unconquered Sun—coinciding with the winter solstice. It’s that wonderful time of year when the sun returns, and the days start getting longer.” Langdon took another bite of apple. “Conquering religions,” he continued, “often adopt existing holidays to make conversion less shocking. It’s called transmutation. It helps people acclimatize to the new faith. Worshipers keep the same holy dates, pray in the same sacred locations, use a similar symbology . . . and they simply substitute a different god.” Now the girl in front looked furious. “You’re implying Christianity is just some kind of . . . repackaged sun worship!” “Not at all. Christianity did not borrow only from sun worship. The ritual of Christian canonization is taken from the ancient ‘god-making’ rite of Euhemerus. The practice of ‘god-eating’—that is, Holy Communion—was borrowed from the Aztecs. Even the concept of Christ dying for our sins is arguably not exclusively Christian; the self-sacrifice of a young man to absolve the sins of his people appears in the earliest tradition of the Quetzalcoatl.” The girl glared. “So, is anything in Christianity original?” “Very little in any organized faith is truly original. Religions are not born from scratch. They grow from one another. Modern religion is a collage . . . an assimilated historical record of man’s quest to understand the divine.

Aurelian consecrated the cult of the 'Invincible Sun' (Sol Invictus) in a gigantic temple, embellished with the spoils of Palmyra. He gave it a special college of pontiffs, and instituted fouryearly games. We know nothing of the special rituals applied to this Sol Invictus. The new sanctuary followed an eastern tradition, with its tholos, or dome, in the centre of a closed courtyard isolating the sacred area from the profane world.

she keeps a shrine to Sol Invictus in her room, performs the pratahsamdhya ceremony, the salute to the sun, every morning