Ştefan Borbély

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

 

Early Christianity and the Comparative Religion of Ash

 

 

Abstract: The paper investigates the anthropological roots of the symbolism of ash in the four Christian gospels, and in the early custom of the Ash Wednesday anointing ritual, as related to the archaic symbols of fire, palm tree, and the Egyptian myth of resurrection focused on the cosmological role of the Phoenix. By analyzing the ritualistic content of the old Jewish Festival of the Tents (Sukkot), whose traces appear in the Christian gospels in a few passages related to Christ’s imminent death, the paper also suggests that, in a specific anthropological context, Jesus might have been the sacrificial victim of an early harvest feast, which explains his vivid association to the ashes in the ritual of the Ash Wednesday and in the early Christian re-writings of the legends concerning the Phoenix.

Keywords: ash; Ash Wednesday; Gospels; Jewish festivals; early Christian symbols; Phoenix.

 

 

From amongst the great mythological complexes of the antiquity, ash was one of the main victims of the emerging Christianity. Beliefs like those shared by the Orphic and the Gnostics in the Mediterranean world or by the Druids in northern Europe were all related to the ritualistic resurrection through fire and ash. The Germans’ Yggdrasil, an axis mundi of the entire universe, used to be an ash tree, related to the oak, the other fire tree of the Scandinavian world. In the Celtic mythology, the dark Balor, god of the underworld and grandfather of Lug, the white god of the emerging light, used to reborn through fire and ash. From him, we got the later balaurus, the scary dragon of the Medieval world, represented as a flying serpent with raging fire in his mouth, ready to devour everyone, but also with wings, capable to fly. Our bedtime Cinderella, whose roots go back to the Gnostic stories of the third century A.C., is a beautiful ash lady, sent to a glamorous weeding by the magic of a benevolent fairy. Let also recall Phoenix, the fabulous ash bird, which used to be in ancient Egypt a cosmic shield between the Sun and the Earth, whose role was to protect the Sun from getting sick from the raising poisons emanating from the Earth. Exhausted by the difficult task, the Phoenix turned into ashes at the end of each day, in order to regain his forces in the morning.

Immortality, by the ancient Greeks, can be obtained through fire and ash, as we see in the stories related to the mourning Demeter, who tries to get revenge on the gods by transgressing a limitation, which forbids gods to turn humans into immortals. In the Orphic set of beliefs, the Titans are turned by Zeus into ashes, in order to recapture Dionysos Zagreus from the burning corpses, the ash infant. Sacrifice and fertility rites in the Antiquity are mainly constructed on the belief in the magic energies of fire and ash, as they were extensively analyzed by Frazer in The Golden Bough.

All these ancient beliefs, and other thousands related to them, are based on the association of ash with life. How come then that Christianity puts aside all these optimistic visions of resurrection and immortality, crediting ash with the only virtue of humility, nothingness and death? Already Abraham, in the Genesis, has said:

“Behold, I have taken upon myself to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes.” (18:27)

How come then that a belief in Christ, built on the idea of sacrifice and resurrection, allegedly repudiated the very mythological mechanism which could have helped it to easily succeed? Ash was everywhere in the ritualistic beliefs of the Mediterranean world, ready to be picked up and converted into a Christian symbol. Did the early Christians really avoid the topic, as to punish a strong ritualistic enemy which is to be turned into a negative religious concept, associated to humility and mortification?

A possible answer says that Christianity was more related to water than to fire, through baptism and purification. Christ has walked over the water. Some of his early followers, like Simeon and Andrew were fishermen. Frédérick Tristan, in his Les premières images chrétiennes[1] has thoroughly swept together all the early Christian symbols and representations found in the catacombs: many of them, like the anchor, the fish, or the ship with the moat in form of a cross associate human life to water. In Mark’s Gospel, the earliest we know, there is no major hint to fire, except the surprising passages of Chapter 9, where Christ says that in order to gain final purification ”every one will be salted with fire” (9:42)

Again, rather surprisingly, Christ, who has traveled by boat on the Sea of Galilee in the whole Gospel of Mark, walking also on the water when his boat was struggling to reach shore in spite of the hostile winds, tells his disciples, as a final conclusion: “Have salt in yourself, and be at peace with one another.” (Ibid.) A little bit earlier, he has equaled “salt” with “faith”, suggesting that it can dim through malpractice and lack of vigilance: “Salt is good; but if the salt has lost its saltness, how will you season it?” (Ibid.) The warning goes much beyond a simple parable, which it actually is, as Christ suggests that the Last Judgment which will precede the cosmic purification through fire will be announced by the coming of the prophet Elijah, who “does come first to restore all things”. (9:12). Afterwards he will be followed by the Son of God. But only a few lines later, Jesus obscures the riddle, by putting Elijah’s arrival into the past:

“…I tell you that Elijah has come, and they did to him whatever they pleased, as it is written of him.” (9:13)

There is no other logic explanation to this chronological reversion than the desire of the author of the Gospel to link the new faith to the Hebrew Bible, by suggesting continuity, based on the belief that the Christian religion is already a post-apocalyptic reality. The association of the “fire of Hell” to “salt” confirms the logic, as it suggests that apart from the Jews, who still wait for the final cleansing, the Christians have already past through it, filling their bodies with the purifying fire.

Obviously, its force can dim due to sin and temptations, and therefore each true Christian gets the obligation of nurturing the fire within, which happens through faith and obedience to the new law. But, apart from the other believers, a Christian has the fire in himself, and must not get it from outside: Saint Augustine will say the same in his De Civitate Dei, when speaking about the difference between the worshippers of the old traditions – that is the pagans – who get the sacred from outside, through their frantic religious festivals or rituals, and the Christians, whose faith is entirely a question of personal profoundness and interiority. Therefore, Augustine suggests, earthly religions depend on a specific place (a sanctuary, a temple or a shrine), while the true Christian is “a-topos”, a person with only inner determinations.

Presumably Christianity inherited the symbolism of fire from the early Judaism, where it occurs both as a vision and a ritual of purification. The divine chariots of fire, seen by the Israelites at Mount Sinai, are the central theme of the rabbinic Merkabah vision and mysticism, analyzed by Gershom Scholem and Ira Chernus in a divergent way, as Scholem asserts that the Merkabah tradition set pace for a specific “Jewish Gnosticism” , apart from Ira Chernus, who considers

“…that Merkabah mysticism was integrated into rabbinic Judaism precisely to prevent the development of a true «Jewish Gnosticism».”[2]

Jahweh, in the story of the revelation, is related to fire: the Exodus says that when Lord gathered his chosen people lead by Moses,

“Mount Sinai was wrapped in a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire; and the smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain quaked greatly” (19:18).

Ira Chernus mentions that the Tannaitic Midrash vividly kept the tradition of the holy vision of fire, as associated to the throne of Lord. In order to get there one has to pass seven heavenly girdles, each of the having a gate with a guardian.

“When I saw him… [that is: the guardian of the first gate, says a traveler] … my hands were burned and I was standing without hands and without feet.” Furthermore „the guardians of the seventh heikal are described as having «lightning which leaps forth from their eyeballs, and balls of fire from their nostrils, and torches of hot coals from their mouths.»”[3]

When approaching the seat of God, the heat intensifies:

„The seraphim of the glory surround the throne of all four sides with walls of lightning, and the ophannim surround the throne with fiery torches.”[4]

In spite of the body mutilation suggested by the first fragment – „…my hands were burned and I was standing without hands and without feet” – the quoted visions do not speak about transfiguration: the traveler approaches the gates of Heaven, goes towards the seat of God, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that he is transformed: the outer vision does not necessarily imply an inner transformation, apart from the fear of getting too close to divinity. As we all know, fear is, in Judaism, a religious feeling, as in Exodus Jahweh defines himself as a jealous and revenging God:

„…I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation o those who hate me…” (Ex. 20:5)

Nevertheless, transfiguration through fire happens in the Old Testament too, being conceived as a technique of getting rid of sin by heavenly initiation. In the Book of Isaiah (6:1-4) the protagonist has a fiery vision of God

(„In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting up a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple …And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke.”)

, but steps back in panic when he realizes that he is unworthy for the mighty vision:

„And I said: «Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts».” (Is., 6:5)

At that moment, a miracle happens:

„Then flew one of the seraphim to me, having in his hand a burning coal which he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth, and said: «Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin forgiven.»” (Ibid.)

The ritual of purification clearly suggests that the basic state of the visionary is sin, acquired by the protagonist purely in a metaphysical way, as the true follower of Adam, the first great sinner. It also says that transfiguration – which is the final state of the cosmic „vision”, or apocalypse – has fire as a substance of transformation. So to say, the people of Israel have to “prepare” the final fire, in order to cleanse the universe – and also history, as epiphany of God – from their sins. As such, true revelation is a post-apocalyptic reality, as it will be asserted when the first Christians will set in the deep core of their faith revelations, or images, derived from the vision of an absent body and that of its secret ascension to Heaven.

We have already seen that for Jesus faith is a technique of dealing with fire, as it is written in Mark’s Gospel: by the end of the world ”every one will be salted with fire” (9:42). The words uttered by Jesus also explain the confusion with Elijah, which also appears in Mark 8:27-28, when the followers confess that Jesus could also be Elijah, as well as John the Baptist or one of the prophets. Apart from the disciples, who believe that the prophet will come in an unspoken future, “to restore all things”, Jesus suggests that he has already come in a near past:

“…I tell you that Elijah has come, and they did to him whatever they pleased, as it is written of him.” (Mark, 9:13)

Talking about John the Baptist in the Gospel of Matthew (11: 7-14), Jesus identifies him with Elijah:

“…if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who has to come. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

As we all know, Elijah is one the main witnesses in Jesus’ transfiguration (Mark, 9:2-13), but his linkage to John the Baptist does not necessarily mean that Jesus speaks about the superposition of two persons. He rather suggests that Lord has started the apocalyptic mechanism of redemption and purification, which supposes the prior presence of the prophet, who will precede the Son in order to “restore all things”.

One of the strangest keywords in the early Christian texts is “madness”. Paul is particularly fond of it:

“the foolishness of God – he writes to the Corinthians – is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (I. Cor., 1:25)

For Paul, Christianity is nothing more than a divine, metaphysical “foolishness”, chosen by God to act out his will to purify the universe:

“For consider your call, brethren; not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.” (Ibid., 26-30)

The intentional confusion between John the Baptist and Elijah is part of this divine “foolishness”, but it also raises a few unavoidable questions. Did the Baptist’s water become a ritual substitution for the divine apocalyptic fire, which was depicted in the visions of Ezekiel and Isaiah? How come that Jesus goes through water, accepting to be baptized, and has almost nothing to do with fire, except his remark that by the end of the world everybody will be “salted with fire”? How come that the Son of a Lord who expresses himself through flames and ignition has almost nothing to do with his father’s divine epiphany, and looks for fishermen to stroll over the seas of his homeland?

It is really difficult to answer these questions, especially because the ancients did not make a clear difference between the characteristics of fire and water. Philology plays also its role in the confusion, because of the transition from the Aramaic of Jesus to the Greek of the Gospels; in between them we have the popular Greek (koiné) of the Septuaginta, which also plays a major role in the transposition.

In his seminal work Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period[5], Erwin R. Goodenough says that fire was conceived as a sort a magic liquid (purigenés) by the Greeks, as it appears in the rites of Dionysos. Divine wine, by the ancients Jews, had also been an energetic and mysterious substance of exuberance, associated to fire. It is probably time to remember that the ancient beliefs make a difference between two hypostases of fire: the first one comes from the sky, being associated with the lightning, while the second one is the nurturing fire of the underworld, which can be found in the plants, tree – generally in vegetation. As Frazer has shown it in The Golden Bough, the second type of fire is related to death and resurrection, because it follows the biannual rhythm of the seed, which “dies” by going down into the earth, in order to spring to life the coming year. It is also known that the ancient fertility rituals (the rites of Dionysos, Demeter and Cybele; the druidic rite of the mistletoe in Northern Europe; the ritual of the dying Sun in the Roman world etc.) were concentrated at the end of the yearly vegetation cycle (in Autumn of early Winter – by all means, after harvest), because they expressed the anxiety that the dying vegetation will lose its powers for ever, and it will not help the seed to resurrect the next year. Therefore, many communities used to “help” the vegetation to “survive”, by keeping seeds, branches and leaves in the temples during the winter, in order to “fix” the energy of the rich harvest, and transmit it to the next generation of vegetation.

It might be possible that early Christian communities preserved the archaic belief in resurrection through death, identifying Jesus with the dying cosmic energy of the harvest. Gradually this belief will fade, by leaving behind some old ritualistic remnants, which will go into the liturgical practice, and people will lose their original meaning. In order to illustrate the assumption, we have to analyze the Ash Wednesday ritual and the way Christianity has reconverted the old Egyptian Phoenix myth into an analogy to Christ’s resurrection. Both stories lead us to ash, and furthermore to a rather strange detail of questionable chronology, found in the Gospels.

In the Sacred Origins of Profound Things[6], Charles Panati says that Ash Wednesday, as the first day of Lent, derives from a ritualized painting with ashes, which has been for a long time a symbol for repentance.

“Early Christians approached the church altar to have the ashes of blessed palm leaves scored on their forehead in the shape of a cross.”[7]

Extensively, ash was not used only by Ash Wednesday to paint the sign of the cross of the forehead: we can assume that it was generally used along with oil, since Saint John Chrysostom says that

“each day people carry around the sign formed on their foreheads as if it were a trophy on a column. Anyone could see a whole chorus of these signs of the cross in houses, in the marketplaces, in bridal chambers.”[8]

Wednesday, when the feast of anointing with ash occurs, used to be a “Dies Mercurii”, dedicated to the God Mercur, who is the Roman correspondent of Hermes psychopompos, the Greek God of the threshold between the upper and the underworld. In association with a rather strange, teenager and less gruesome Heracles, Hermes was the god whose pillar – or xoanon – guarded in Ancient Greece the samples of the previous harvest, brought into the temple in order to preserve their energy until spring[9]. Therefore, in Themis, Jane Ellen Harrison presents a few unusual representations of Heracles, seen as a vegetation god with a cornucopia and a klados (a magic bough) in his hands[10]. The same representations occur with Apollo and Artemis[11] guarding an omphalos adorned with a mantic bird. Both deities have wreaths in their hands, in order to capture the fire emanated by the omphalos, which is, of course, not the fire of the torments and of lightning, but the nurturing fluid of the underworld. While Apollo’s bough is represented with green leaves at its top, Artemis holds a nartex (Prometheus’s secret recipient of the “green fire” transmitted to the humans), which is clearly depicted as a blazing torch.

Referring to Ash Wednesday, Charles Panati also mentions that

“The blessed palm leaves that are burned [on the altar] to make the ashes are, in fact, «leftovers» from the previous year’s Palm Sunday”[12].

According to the ritual, branches and leaves of the palm wreaths used on Palm Sunday are preserved in the church, in order to be burned on Ash Wednesday. Obviously, the custom suggested a transmission of energy, related to Christ’s arrival in Jerusalem, where he was greeted by the people with palm wreaths and songs. Therefore, Ash Wednesday used to be a fertility ritual, and not only a time for mourning, related to the nothingness of the human condition.

Erwin R. Goodenough[13] considers that „the palm tree was identified with the tree of life in early Christianity”[14], since his significance goes back to the fertility rituals governed by goddess Ishtar in Babylon, or by Isis in Egypt. As such, the cross appears to be a „tree of life” (xylon, not dendron)[15], but Goodenough also mentions the famous passage from the Deuteronomy (21:22-23), which says that a criminal hung on a tree after he had been sentenced to death „is accused by God”, and his body must be removed and buried before sunset. We may assume that the Romans who punished Jesus knew about this belief, and so did the Jews who gathered around the cross. Nevertheless, in the first decades of Christianity, those who observed the new faith reconverted the symbol of the cursed tree, turning it towards the palm tree and its ashes, which meant life through resurrection.

According to R. Van Den Broek (The Myth of the Phoenix according to Classical and Early Christian Traditions[16] Phoenix is, by name, „the purple bird of the palm tree”. The name is clearly associated to Phoenicia (Syria), where the bird flies back before dying. M.C. Astour[17] says that phoinix – which also appears in the Mycenaean Linear B as po-ni-ki-pi[18] – resembles to the equivalent of the Arabic or Hebrew term for madder, which is a red paint extracted from the roots of a plant named Rubis tinctorum. It was the color of the sunny fire encapsulated in plant in the ancient times, also associated with the Hebrew bird chôl, the flying equivalent of Phoenix.

The bird was identified, of course, with the Egyptian bennu (or benu), an epiphany of Atum, the ancient deity of Heliopolis, a bird which preceded Sun at the gates of the morning. Jean Hubaux and Maxime Leroy (Le mythe du phénix dans les littératures grecque et latine[19]) refer to a detail from Psalm 78 (27), where God is praised for feeding his people („he rained flesh upon them like dust, winged birds like the sand of the seas”), mentioning that in Hebrew the word chôl signifies both sand and Phoenix, as it happens in Greek, where phoinix is also a bird and the palm tree. The homonymy is also present in the Exodus (15:27), in the description of the country of Elim, where the Jews encounter a typical locus amoenus: „Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve springs and seventy palm trees” (translation equally good for „Phoenix”).

In the archaic mythological tradition Phoenix’s immolation by the Sun represented a male sacrifice on the top of a palm tree, apart from Ovid’s intentional misinterpretation, where the bird is female. St. Clement of Rome, at the end of the 1st century A.D., was probably the first known Christian who associated Jesus to Phoenix, speaking about a resurrected bird who takes the ashes of his father to Egypt. The association is also present in the Physiologus (2^nd century A.D.), but Mary Cletus Fitzpatrick[20] also mentions some Roman coins issued in the time of Constantine the Great, which represent the wide-winged bird Phoenix as a symbol of Aeternitas, appearing as glory above the image of the emperor who keeps in his hands the earth represented as a globe.

Lactantius’s De Ave Phoenice – Mary Cletus Fitzpatrick says – „is clearly that of a Christian, since it treats the pagan legend of the Phoenix in an entirely new religious spirit”.[21] The author probably took the legend from Saint Clement of Rome, from Plutarch and the Physiologus, presenting it to Constantine – whose son he used to teach – in a purely Christian interpretation, based of the mechanism of resurrection.[22] The story tells about a solar grove, inhabited by a fantastic bird living on the top of a solar tree near a fountain, which used to greet the rising sun with a divine song. When the bird feels that death is approaching, it flies back to its homeland in Syria, gathers aromatic plants in a nest, and turns into ashes through a fantastic ignition. The ashes are mould in a form like a seed, which gives birth to a white worm with no legs. Furthermore the worm transforms into an egg, and finally into a brilliant solar bird, which is so fascinating, that it becomes immediately a subject of popular praise and veneration.

Scholars, like R. Van Der Broek[23], insist on the symbolism of the three phases of the metamorphosis, as associated to the trinity. Apart from the direct Christian message, which makes from Phoenix’s death an analogy to the resurrection of Christ, we may also presume that some Orphic and Gnostic details slipped into plot, with the transformation of the egg into the white worm with no legs. The basic Christian symbolism – as it has been also confirmed by the Physiologus – deals with the capacity of ash to resurrect and give place to transfiguration, which is congruent to the basic symbolism of Ash Wednesday

Let’s finish with the logic of the sacred chronology we can find in the Gospels. Our customary chronology concerning Eastern was fixed at the Council of Nicea (325 A.D.), when Constantine decreed that Eastern should be celebrated in the first Sunday after the first full moon which comes after the equinox. Since the Roman calendar started on the 1^st of March, spring used to be a period of rebirth at that time, following the death frenzy of February, when the whole world decomposed ritually, in order to renew itself with the coming year. (We owe to the ancient death rituals performed in February the modern timing of the Carnival, which is also a ritual of social and cosmic de-structuring, marked by skeletons, creepy bones and dead men masks walking on the streets.)

A rather intriguing detail obscures the chronology of the Gospels in their final section, which starts with Christ’s transfiguration. In Mark’s Gospel, where the transfiguration is assisted by Moses and Elijah, up on a high mountain (9:2),

“Peter said to Jesus: «Master, it is well that we are here; let us make three booths, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.»”

The scene is repeated in the Gospel of Matthew (17:4) and in that of Luke (9:33), but it misses from the non-synoptic Gospel of John, who presents, instead, a tension between Jesus and his disciples concerning the sacred Feast of the Tabernacles (John, 7:7 sq.)

Arriving in Galilee by the time of the harvest festival, Jesus urges his disciples to go to the Feast of the Tabernacles (called also Sukkot) without him:

“Go to the feast yourselves; I am not going up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come. So saying, he remained in Galilee.” (John, 7:8-9)

Nevertheless, after the disciples’ departure, Jesus joins the festival, “not publicly, but in private” (Ibid., 7: 9-10) – that is hiding his real identity, just because to announce his imminent death.

In the Leviticus (23:33-43) we read that the Feast of Sukkah (plural: Sukkot) celebrates the tents – or booths – the Jews were obliged to live during the 40 years of wandering in the desert, after the exodus from Egypt. The deep significance of the festival is but related to fertility, since the tents are adorned with raisins and leaves, and the participants are celebrating the rain. In an anthropological sense, the Sukkot is a feast dedicated to the “death” (or: occultation) of nature, and to the active hope that its energies will “survive” until the next Spring. Therefore, is not at all surprisingly that Jesus chooses this moment to announce his death, although the participants do not realize that he – and no one else – will become the sacrificial victim.

If one counts the following time until Jesus’ death and resurrection in the synoptic gospels, it becomes possible to sum up four or five months which separate the harvest feast of mid October from Passover in April or May. In the early Gospel of Mark, Jesus goes to Capernaum, then crosses the Jordan, enters Jerusalem cleansing of the temple, then reaches Jericho and the Mount of Olives, in order to get to the strange episode with the fig tree, by Bethany:

“On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs.” (Mark, 12:12-13)

The episode is repeated in the Gospel of Matthew (21:18-20), but in the Gospel of Luke (21: 29-30) the fig tree has no leaves, and becomes just a pretext for a parable on the strength of the faith.

If the time was really Spring in the first two Gospels (as it will certainly be in the Gospel of Luke), there would be no logic for Jesus to approach the fig tree, as he could have taken for granted that the tree does not bear fruit. Thus, by linking the feast of Sukkah as moment of death to the re-birth ritual celebrated with Passover, Jesus appears to be the delayed sacrificial victim of the harvest feast, which also explains his later vivid association to the ashes, in the ritual of the Ash Wednesday or in the Christian legend about the Phoenix.

 

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