pposed birth of the previous Sungods. (3) From that
fact alone we may fairly conclude that by the year 530 or earlier the
existing Nature-worships had become largely fused into Christianity. In
fact the dates of the main pagan religious festivals had by that time
become so popular that Christianity was OBLIGED to accommodate itself to
them. (1)

(1) As, for instance, the festival of John the Baptist in June
took the place of the pagan midsummer festival of water and bathing;
the Assumption of the Virgin in August the place of that of Diana in the
same month; and the festival of All Souls early in November, that of the
world-wide pagan feasts of the dead and their ghosts at the same season.

(2) See Encycl. Brit. art. "Chronology."

(3) "There is however a difficulty in accepting the 25th December
as the real date of the Nativity, December being the height of the rainy
season in Judaea, when neither flocks nor shepherds could have been at
night in the fields of Bethlehem" (!). Encycl. Brit. art. "Christmas
Day." According to Hastings's Encyclopaedia, art. "Christmas," "Usener
says that the Feast of the Nativity was held originally on the 6th
January (the Epiphany), but in 353-4 the Pope Liberius displaced it to
the 25th December... but there is no evidence of a Feast of the Nativity
taking place at all, before the fourth century A.D." It was not till 534
A.D. that Christmas Day and Epiphany were reckoned by the law-courts as
dies non.

This brings us to the second point mentioned a few pages back--the
analogy between the Christian festivals and the yearly phenomena of
Nature in the Sun and the Vegetation.

Let us take Christmas Day first. Mithra, as we have seen, was reported
to have been born on the 25th December (which in the Julian Calendar was
reckoned as the day of the Winter Solstice AND of the Nativity of the
Sun); Plutarch says (Isis and Osiris, c. 12) that Osiris was born on
the 361st day of the year, when a Voice rang out proclaiming the Lord of
All. Horus, he says, was born on the 362nd day. Apollo on the same.

Why was all this? Why did the Druids at Yule Tide light roaring fires?
Why was the cock supposed to crow all Christmas Eve ("The bird of
dawning singeth all night long")? Why was Apollo born with only one hair
(the young Sun with only one feeble ray)? Why did Samson (name derived
from Shemesh, the sun) lose all his strength when he lost his hair? Why
were so many of these gods--Mithra, Apoll