There was a lot of beauty infused into the mythology of pre-Christian Antiquity, but at the same time there was one thing missing. Although there was a goddess of romantic love - Aphrodite - and also a godling of Desire – Eros - and whilst there were gods and goddesses who displayed mercy, there was not one who stood purely for compassion itself, for Love of the unconditional kind. This is what Jesus represents. A son of god? Well, most of the ancient heroes of Greece were sons of gods. Perseus and Hercules were sons of Zeus; Theseus was a son of Poseidon.
As far as ancient stories go, the fact that something may not be exactly accurate historically does not need to diminish the power of its myth. Like great art – which itself often takes the old myths as its subject matter - myths themselves can have a living power, a beauty that lifts us out of the mundane world. The birth of Christ expresses the idea of an influx of peace and love onto the planet, just as the resurrection and ascension stories portray this as an inextinguishable love which touches Eternity. As such the Nativity has long been considered a worthy subject for expression by great artists.
A PANTHEONISTIC RETELLING OF THE NATIVITY STORY
One day a Persian wise man named Balthazar, a magus, was lying on an embroidered carpet by the pool in his garden reading a book about alchemy. Incense rose from a sensor, peacocks strutted around, and huge golden carp moved slowly to and fro amid the lotuses in the pool. Suddenly he heard a flapping and cooing up above him and looked up to see that a flock of seven doves had alighted in the branches of the plane tree under which he had found shade. After a while an afternoon feeling of sleepiness came over him and he rested the book on his chest and started to doze a little. He forgot about what he’d been reading, and instead started to focus on the cooing of the doves. And gradually he noticed that the sounds they were making seemed to form into words as he listened:-
“Follow us, come with us into the West, for a child is to be born, a Prince of Peace.”
Balthazar rushed round to the houses of his two neighbours, Casper and Melchior, who were also magi, and brought them round to listen to the doves. At first they heard only cooing, without words, so Balthazar had them lie down on rugs next to the pool, telling them to relax and focus on the sounds. And as they meditated, watching incense swirl and rise and hearing the occasional “plop” sound of a fish stirring the water in the pool, Casper and Melchior found that they too were able to hear the message from the speaking birds.
Meanwhile, off in the west, a good lady called Mary had indeed become pregnant with a wonderful child. It was in fact the child of two fathers, one of whom was a carpenter of good heart and strong soul, while the other was no other then the great father god of the sky, called Zeus by the Greeks.
Mary began to wonder if she had imagined that there were two fathers for the child, but Zeus himself, sitting enthroned up in the palace of the gods in Olympus, came to hear about her doubts, and immediately wanted to remind her about it, in accordance with the plan of the Archangels of the Love-Light that the child would be born so that people in the future could add a new story to the body of myth, one that furnished the pantheon of gods, goddesses and heroes with a figure who represented pure, unconditional love. So Zeus called to him the messenger of the gods, swift Hermes, and sent him down to speak with Mary.
Hermes lost no time but straight away strapped his magical winged sandals onto his feet and then flew down from Olympus and over the crests of the sea’s waves until he came to the place where Mary was washing up her pots and pans in the little house she shared with Joseph. Hermes didn’t want to shock her too much, so he took on the appearance of a merchant and knocked on the door. At first he pretended to try to sell some jewellery, but then suddenly he looked into her eyes and spoke in a different voice, that of an Olympian, reminding her that she was pregnant with the child of a god. Then, to make sure she believed him, he changed back into his normal form and flew off into the sky. Mary was very surprised, but also felt honoured.
Off to the East in Persia the three magi had begun a great journey. Each time they caught up with the flock of doves they had heard speaking in the tree the birds took off again, flew to a new perch a little further on, and waited for the magi to follow. In this way the magi made their way bit by bit towards the West.
While Mary was still pregnant, the king of that land decreed that everybody would have to go back to their own towns to be counted, so that they’d have a record of how many people there were in the land. Mary and Joseph were worried that they were going to get in trouble with the authorities because they had a long way to walk to get to Joseph’s hometown of Bethlehem, and with Mary in her state of pregnancy they couldn’t see how they would be able to make it in time.
Zeus himself wasn’t happy about the mother of his wonderful child walking that distance, and so he called together three of his other sons, Apollo, Hermes and Dionysos, and told them the problem. Apollo suggested if they went down to the coast he could change into a dolphin and carry them on his back, and Hermes even offered to lend his magical sandals, but Zeus thought these options were both a bit dangerous for a pregnant mother. He preferred the suggestion of the wine god, Dionsysos, who offered to lend the donkey that had once helped him across a marsh when he’d been trying to get to the oracle at Dodona.
So now Dionysos knocked on the door, in the disguise of an old man, and said to Mary and Joseph that he was going away to another land by ship, and wasn’t going to be able to take his donkey with him, and so needed someone to look after the animal. Mary and Joseph were delighted that they now had a way to get to Bethlehem. And so they set off, Mary on the donkey and Joseph walking alongside.
It was a very long trek, but eventually they arrived in Bethlehem feeling dusty and tired. However, their journey was far from over, because they had to find somewhere to stay. They tried tavern after tavern but everywhere was full. At this point their patience began to be greatly tested. They felt an irritation such as might have caused them to bicker and shout, but the Olympians watching over them felt this would be unfitting at such a time. Aphrodite herself, the beautiful goddess, put her presence among them, stirring up in their hearts the love, appreciation and desire they felt for each other, and amplifying the glow of love in their eyes. The surf-born goddess placed unseen kisses on their foreheads and filled the air with a subtle aroma of jasmine and rose. Looking at each other with this renewed love, gazing soul to soul, they soon forgot their anger and felt only tender feelings, and this gave them strength to continue.
Eventually they found a tavern keeper who had a suggestion. He said that although he didn’t have any spare rooms, if they were really desperate they could bed down in his stable along with the animals. Lacking a better option, Joseph and Mary decided to take up this offer. At least it solved the problem of where to put the donkey.
In fact this was the very night that the baby was going to be born. Zeus himself wanted to attend the birth, and he dreamt up a way to do this unseen. He changed into the same white ox whose form he had assumed once before, and went to stand in the stable as if he had been there all along.
Eventually the baby was born, and the stable was filled with a divine light, and choirs of heavenly angels, which filled the hearts of Joseph and Mary with amazement. Even so they were by now absolutely exhausted. Not only had they travelled all the way to Bethlehem, and then wandered all over town looking for a place to stay, but they had been through the ordeal of childbirth as well. It had been a very long day, and even though they were filled with wonder at the birth of this child, it wasn’t long before they both drifted off to sleep. They were so sleepy in fact that when the baby woke up and started crying for milk they slept right through it. Zeus as the white ox witnessed them slipping into slumber, but he didn’t want to wake up the weary pair, so, remembering how he himself had been fed on the milk of the little she-goat Capella when he was an infant in the cave on Crete, he changed back into his normal form and carefully carried the baby over to where a sheep was suckling her lambs, and put the baby to the sheep’s teats. This is why Jesus, the child, is known as the Lamb. By this time it was almost morning.
Outside the town on a hillside some country folk were just waking up with the dawn. There were four shepherds named Menalcus, Mopsus, Hercules and Bootes, and four shepherdesses named Phyllis, Daphne, Chloe and Thestylis. After they had eaten some cheese and olives with bread for their breakfast, and poured some goat’s milk on the ground as an offering to Pan, goat-legged rustic god of pastoralists, they went down to top up their water bottles at a nearby spring, driving their sheep and goats before them, one of the shepherds playing a rustic tune on his pipes as they went.
This spring was in fact a haunt of some nymphs, and while the shepherds and shepherdesses were listening to the singing of the water one of the nymphs made herself seen to them. The nymph explained to them that a child of Zeus had been born down in the town, and that he was born so that we might have a story about a figure representing pure Love. The nymph even gave exact directions to the stable. It would be several years before the child would be recognized by his deeds for who he was, but the shepherds, said the nymph, had an important role to play. By heeding the prophesy and going to that place and finding the child and making it known that they had been guided there to find such a wonderful child they would plant the seeds of an idea. This idea would eventually be proven by the child’s amazing deeds and wisdom. Prophesies coming true make good stories, and so they would do their bit to help make sure the tale of Jesus was one that would get told and told.
The nymph told how she and her sisters had many-a-time listened to the shepherds and shepherdesses as they composed and swapped their pastoral poems, singing their songs to each other as they sheltered from the midday Sun under some spreading ilex or bay tree while their flocks too sheltered from the Sun or nibbled tender shoots. It was because these pastoralists of Arcadian stock were prized above all others in song that they had been chosen to be the first to hear the prophesy, so that they might use their skills to add the story to the matter of classical myth.
The shepherds and shepherdesses were amazed to hear this, but they reasoned amongst themselves that if they followed these directions and found that a child had indeed been newly born in a stable there then perhaps the nymph’s story was to be trusted.
When they eventually came to the stable the baby Jesus was still being suckled by the sheep, while Mary and Joseph were hidden fast asleep under the straw. It seemed to the shepherds exactly like one of those old myths where a divine or royal foundling is discovered while it is being suckled by some kindly animal, and so seeing this auspicious scene they were even more disposed to believe the nymph’s prophesy. They then started to search around in the straw because they knew from the old myths that such a foundling was bound to have been left with royal treasures as a token of his identity. Such treasures had not been left with the baby yet, although they were on the way. What the shepherds did find was Mary and Joseph huddled fast asleep under the covering of straw.
The shepherds deliberated amongst themselves about what they should do. Should they wake up the pair, or let them sleep on? They decided to remove to a safe distance where they could let their sheep graze and continue their deliberations.
Now at this same time, over the hills but in the same land, another wonderful child was born, a little girl called Madeleine. The circumstances of Madeleine’s birth were somewhat similar to those of Jesus. By various twists of fate she had come to be placed in a cave of the nymphs and was suckled by a she-goat, and she would grow up to be as loving and wise as Jesus himself. But we won’t hear any more about her in this part of the story.
It wasn’t until evening that the shepherds went back into the stable, and then they found Mary awake and gazing gently down into the manger which was being used as a make-shift crib for the baby. The boldest of the shepherds, the one called Bootes, went forward and explained about the prophesy, while another of them who went by the name of Hercules knelt down in a pose of adoration before the mother and child. The rest of the shepherds hovered around the entrance looking on in awe.
Soon after there was to be heard the strange call of a camel outside the stable, and then the three magi from the East dressed in the finest robes entered, bearing gifts. They told how they had heard the message from the doves, and followed them westward with their tribute gifts to acknowledge him. As well as gold they also gave precious gums and resins of Arabia to be burnt as sacred incense, such as frankincense and myrrh.
The shepherds and the magi exchanged their stories about how they had been guided to that place to see the baby, the former group by a nymph and the latter by the doves, and both parties were greatly reassured to know they weren’t the only ones. Everyone agreed that there really must be something wonderful about this birth, if both groups had independently been guided there by separate prophesies, and so stories started to be told about this amazing coincidence. And of course this was the reason the prophesies had been told to the shepherds and magi in the first place – so that the story would be told.
All the same, when word got around that a new Prince of Peace had been born it sounded like he was a royal child, and the king expressed anger at the appearance of this apparent rival for the throne. He sent soldiers out to find the baby, and at one point they came dangerously close, but Pan made a herd of goats run out and stop on the track before them, and eventually the soldiers got so bored of waiting for the road to clear that they decided to turn off and take a different route.
Joseph and Mary were worried about the king’s anger, but then Hermes appeared to Joseph in a dream telling him to take Mary and the baby into hiding in Egypt. They set off with their trusty donkey all the way to Egypt, until they came to a secluded island hidden in the midst of the papyrus marshes of the Nile delta. And that is much as we hear in this part of the story.