Sidhartha Gautama lies dead before emerging in triumph to find Nirvana and become the Buddha. Photo/FILE
Why is the English term “Easter” known in the Afro-Asiatic world by a word — Passover — that means to limp or to hobble?
By the term “Afro-Asiatic,” linguistic anthropologists mean all languages once spoken throughout northeastern Africa and southwestern Asia.
They are otherwise known as “Hamito-Semitic” languages.
Even in a non-Hamito-Semitic language like Dholuo, the word is pasaka.
But Dholuo borrowed it from Kiswahili, which, although also non-Hamito-Semitic in its basis, has an overriding Semitic thought content.
Kiswahili speakers borrowed pasaka from the Arabs of the Hejaz.
The western Semites (the Arabs, Aramaeans and Israelites) had adopted it from the Edomites of Sinai’s Shara Mountains and the Canaanites of neighbouring Palestine, both of whose roots lay in the Nile valley and who thus belonged to what culturo-linguistic anthropologists call Nilotic or Nilo-Hamitic.
The Canaanito-Edomite noun pesach and verb pesah or pasah, which meant “to limp” (from a pelvic or heel deformation), entered Hebrew and Syriac (Aramaic) as pesakh.
Among the Nilotic Cushites — who were its ultimate source — the tribal hero was always depicted as walking with difficulty.
For by his time, the Canaanite word pesach, which meant “hobbling,” had come to mean something else.
Upon the end of his term, Dionysus had tried to escape the death that always awaited the sacred king when his timed tenure ended.
Dionysus thus provoked a diehard of the system to push him down a steep mountain, as was often the practice.
Probably it was during one of those “beer orgies” at the Olympus palace that the fanatic, perhaps drunk with the stuff, pushed him to his near-death.
In his case, however, he did not perish but merely broke one leg, which never cured very gracefully.
It is probably the same story as the smith god’s.
For, one day, after Imhotep (the Coptic factotum) had been adopted and deified by the Hellenic Greeks as Hephaestus, Zeus, the Hellenic tyrant of Olympus, hurled the smith god down to the Grecian plain, causing him terrible injuries.
“Thereafter,” writes Robert Graves (in The Greek Myths), Hephaestus “…hobbled like a partridge — as in the Canaanite Spring Festival called Pesach (‘hobbling’)…”
This took place after Semito-Aryan patriarchy had overthrown the Nilo-Hamitic Goddess throughout the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the second millennium BC.
Thereafter, Graves explains, “…the smith [hero] is elevated to godhead… [and] hobbles … a tradition found in regions as far apart as West Africa and Scandinavia…”
The glaring question is: Why did ancient society seek to deform their heroes?
The answer is that, in primitive society, the inventor is a person of life-and-death importance to his tribe.
In Graves’s words, “…smiths may have been purposely lamed to prevent them from running off and joining enemy tribes…”
“But,” he goes on, “a hobbling partridge-dance was also performed in erotic orgies connected with the mysteries of smith-craft ... and, since Hephaestus had married Aphrodite, he hobbled only once a year: at the Spring festival…”
It took place at a spring weekend celebrated throughout the Mediterranean world.
Why that weekend?
Because that was the northern solstice, when the sun god reaches his destination in his annual pilgrimage from solstice to solstice.
After the manner of Cush, Egypt, Edom and Canaan, the whole Mediterranean basin came to celebrate it as the sun god’s conquest of death.
It is not fortuitous that, precisely during that same weekend, in quite another epoch, the evil god Seth murders his “brother” Osiris, who immediately descends to the dead and then rises again after three days.
During the same weekend, in still another time and country, King Pentheus arrests and imprisons the Eleusian god-man Dionysus, leading to his death and resurrection.
During it, too, in faraway India, a Bihari called Sidhartha Gautama goes through all his deathly trials before emerging in triumph to find Nirvana and become the Buddha.
In other times and climes, Bakkhos (“Bacchus”) of the Greco-Romans, Odomankoma of the Akan (of Ghana), Mithras of Syria, Ormazd (Ahura Mazda) of Persia, Orpheus of Hellas, Quetzalcoatl of the Aztecs and Sol Invictus of the Italics — and hundreds of others the world over — were thus sacrificed and re-emerged in victory, but with one defect — as “hobblers.”
The myths
Achilles (“the lipless one” of Trojan War fame) never survived the ordeal.
He had been made immortal except in one of his heels, which — as fate had it — was precisely where a missile hit and killed him.
That is why we still speak of one’s “Achilles heel” to mean one’s fatally weak point.
But Graves points out that the Achilles tradition was an Afro-Asian borrowing that later spread throughout Europe.
He writes that a number of other heroes “...were killed by a heel wound, and not only in Greek, but in Egyptian, Celtic, Lydian, Indian and Norse mythology...”
The Achilles myth was probably the earliest source of the tradition found among all concerned communities that the god-man always hobbled.
“Hobbling,” then, was the original meaning of the word pesach.
With the Nilotic Osiris as their archetype, all the dying-and-rising gods hobbled in some way — perhaps not always literally, but only to satisfy in mythography a certain universal theo-numinous exigency.
Although the Bible imputes all these sacrificial circumstances to Jesus, it gives no hint whatsoever that the Euro-Christian hero ever limped.
But, even if he did, it would only make him more manifest as the “Suffering Servant” and “Man of Sorrows” of whom the Prophet Isaiah speaks.
Isaiah is probably referring to Joshua (Latin: Jesus), the man whom Phinehas transfixed with a javelin when, just before the Exodus began, he tried to reconcile Moses’s newly proclaimed Aten monotheon with the deity Amun favoured by the Egyptian priests.
The probable reason the Judaeo-Christian scriptures say nothing about hobbling is that, by Joshua-Jesus’s time, his biographers would no longer have been aware of the numinous significance of a hero’s sacrifice by deformation or death.
But it was probably how the Canaanito-Edomite Pesach Festival came to be identified with the Jewish Passover.
By Jesus’s time, the Canaanite verb pesah had long acquired the metaphorical meaning of “to pass over” that is to say, to spare, to exempt a person from a particularly heavy burden or punishment — just as the Olympian council of gods had given Hephaestus a reprieve after his quarrel with Zeus over African goddess Aburudati (borrowed by the Hellenes as “Aphrodite”).
Profoundly influenced by Canaanite “idolatry,” as the Bible itself admits, Jewish mythology — put in writing only in King Josiah’s court in seventh-century Judah, many centuries after the Exodus — came to tie this concept to a pharaoh’s alleged refusal a millennium earlier to free the Israelite slaves to Moses.
Whereupon Israel’s tribal god-in-the-making killed all first-born sons of that African country, sparing only those of the Israelite slaves.
In other words, the god had “passed over” Israel’s children.
That was the origin of the annual eight-day Jewish festival called Yom Kippur (“The Passover”) — celebrated to commemorate that “miraculous” event.
On the first day of every Passover season, the practice was to kill and eat a lamb in memory of the “miracle” of Israel’s “narrow escape” from the pharaoh’s hangmen.
By Jesus’s time, Jewry had banned human sacrifice and lambs had come to be slaughtered instead.
Such had come to be regarded as the sacrificial lamb.
This reality was what Euro-Christianity would metaphorise as the “lamb of God” and transfer back to the dying-and-resurrecting god-man, namely, the Son of God who — in Shakespeare’s phrase (in King Henry IV Part I) — had voluntarily assumed “frail flesh” and “…died for our advantage on the bitter cross…”
In his plays, the bard from Stratford-Upon-Avon clearly recognises Dionysus-Jesus — for dionysos is the Greek name that translates as “son of god.”
Yet, although Christian England almost worships Shakespeare, in none of his vast work does he make even a single mention of Jehovah, the son’s said father.
But this is not surprising. Shakespeare belonged to an underground hermetic European movement (which included the Rosicrucians, the Knights Templar and the Freemasons) that worshipped an African pantheon led by God the Mother (Isis), God the Father (Osiris) and God the Son (Horus).
The pesakh idea of the Nilotes, then, was what travelled northwestwards to produce, in English, the Euro-Christian term “paschal Lamb” in reference specifically to the hobbler Jesus.
It was thus that the adjective paschal — crossing the English Channel from the Latin pascalis and the French pascal — began to be used synonymously with the adjective sacrificial.
That the entire tradition — of a god who sacrifices himself to ensure human salvation — is of African provenance is corroborated by the word “Easter” itself. It comes from the Old English eastre – derived from the pagan northern European Goddess Eostre.
But Eostre was only the European corruption of Astarte or Asherah (Canaanite), whom the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians called Ishtar and the Israelites borrowed both as Esther or Asteroth, the Hellenes as Aster or Asteris and the Vedic Indians as Iswara, Isi or Usha, but whose native root was Aster or Ast of the Nile valley.
Widespread use
This Nilotic name — still known to the Kalenjin as Asiis or Asiista (“the sun disc”) — was what the Hellenic Greeks corrupted both as Isis (for the Goddess) and as Asteris (for her visible self in the sky).
This Creator Goddess of the Nilotes was the very Mother of the dying-and-resurrecting god Osiris.
She was what the Nilo-Hamitic Etruscans of Etruria took to the Italian Peninsula as Venus — the Morning Star.
The word “star” itself (like the Teutonic steorro and the modern German Sterne) has been derived from the Nilotic Asiista, Ast, Aset and Asteris, the last one of which has also given us the word asterisk.
The Trinity of Isis, Osiris and Horus is the archetype of the Christian trinity.
The only difference is that, in that misogynistic religion, God the Mother has been transformed into a male Holy Ghost in order to achieve an all-male “monotheon.”
But the sacrificial Son of God remains its quintessence. During the Easter weekend, the Euro-Christian movement visibly pays far deeper attention and reverence to him than to Jehovah, his father.
