Walking on Water
How Egyptian Sun Worship Shaped Christianity
Death and rebirth are central themes of Christianity, both in its mythology—the story of Jesus is about coming back from the dead—and in its actual history. Christianity resurrected dead and dying older traditions and carried them forward into the Middle Ages and beyond.
Three major examples—all readily allegorized by death and rebirth—are debt forgiveness, astronomical cycles, and ego death. These are the three main layers of Christian source material.
Daily and annual astronomical cycles cause alternating day and night and the rhythms of the agricultural growing seasons. Because early Neolithic farmers so obviously owed their lives to the sun's comings and goings, they understandably worshipped it as their daily and annual savior.
Symbols of sun worship were incorporated into Christianity because they were broadly recognizable to the pagan world into which Christianity was born. The Babylonian and Egyptian religions were both based on astronomy, and early Christians borrowed heavily from them. That’s how astronomical cycles shaped Christianity as we recognize it today.
Egyptian Trinities
The ancient Egyptians, history’s most famous sun worshippers, clustered their many gods and goddesses into triads, or groups of three. Dynastic Egypt's mythology has many layers, as its history spans 3,000 years. Though the stories and characters evolved considerably over that period, certain themes remained consistent.
The Egyptian affinity for triads is revealed by their conception of the sun as three distinct gods. This triad was often centered around a father figure, Ra, the great god of the midday sun. His son, Horus, was frequently conceptualized as the morning sun. While Set, the dark god of chaos, sometimes personified the setting sun.
It may be an etymological coincidence that the Proto-Indo-European word sed (meaning to sit, set, or place) sounds like Set, but the word sed eventually became the set in our word sunset. Similarly, it may be that our words hour, horoscope, and horizon are unrelated to Horus, the Egyptian god of the morning sun. But it would have to be another giant coincidence.
Dynastic Egypt was a cultural force in the Mediterranean Basin for almost three millennia—from about 3,000 BC to the 3rd century BC—when Alexander finally wiped it off the map. Inevitably, a version of their trinity found its way into Christianity as it sprang up inside the Roman Empire, along with many other borrowings from the Nile Delta.
St. Peter’s Obelisk
Though the sands of time long ago swallowed up the kingdoms of Dynastic Egypt, their architecture is still evident worldwide. The Washington Monument soaring over the US Capitol is a prime example. It’s an Egyptian obelisk of modern construction.
Obelisks are shaped like narrow stone columns that taper to a point. They’re designed to announce the arrival of Ra, the god of the midday sun. Because these columns stand vertically, the presence of any shadow shows that the sun isn’t directly overhead. But when an obelisk’s shadow disappears, the briefest glance reveals the awe-inspiring presence of the great god Ra at high noon.
Another prominent obelisk, the one standing before St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, is an example of an obelisk that survived through the ages rather than being of modern construction like the Washington Monument. It was originally quarried in Heliopolis, Egypt, during the reign of Pharaoh Amenemhat II in the 20th century BC.
In the 1st century AD, the Roman Emperor Caligula ordered the obelisk transported from Egypt to Rome. It was erected in the Circus of Caligula, which later expanded into the Circus of Nero, where St. Peter's Basilica stands today. That circus was infamous as a site where early Christians, including Saint Peter, were martyred. Because of this, St. Peter’s Obelisk is sometimes poetically called a witness to St. Peter’s death.
In 1586, Pope Sixtus V moved it to the center of St. Peter's Square. At its peak, a cross replaced a bronze orb thought to hold the ashes of Julius Caesar. It still serves as the gnomon—or shadow-casting stylus—of a sundial mosaic laid out on the pavement stones of the square. St. Peter's Obelisk illustrates how obelisks are a surprisingly prominent but often overlooked symbol in Christianity, especially within Catholicism.
Christianity
Early Christians rapidly spread their new faith by using existing allegories to make it as comprehensible as possible to the populations of the Mediterranean basin. Trinities and obelisks are far from the only features of Egyptian sun worship they baked into Christianity.
The cross is another prime example. A circle sliced into four equal quadrants is a near-universal symbol for a calendar year divided into four seasons. It’s too obvious. From the Native American medicine wheel to Stonehenge to dynastic Egypt, this shape has long symbolized the sun's annual cycle.
Many Christian traditions still represent their faith with a circle and cross, unaware of its pagan origins. The Christian cross merely has an elongated shaft to distinguish it. Presbyterian Crosses and Celtic Crosses are two common examples, and the title card of this essay also bears that familiar arrangement.
There’s also the Crown of Thorns. The Egyptians depicted their sun god Ra with a large red sun disk over his head. The Greek version of Ra, Helios, wore a radiant crown evoking the sun’s rays. The Colossus of Rhodes was a giant bronze statue of Helios, complete with a spiked crown. Because the Statue of Liberty was based on the Colossus, she’s also wearing the same solar crown. Today, the outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere is still called the corona (Latin for crown).
Christians incorporated the best of both worlds into their faith; they adapted the sun discs of dynastic Egypt into the round halos of Christian iconography, while the radiant crown of Helios became the horrific crown of spiky thorns placed upon the head of the Christian savior.
A final, less gruesome piece of solar imagery lives on in the walking-on-water legend. Sun gods were thought to linger on water because the sun’s rays reflected off its surface. Anyone who’s ever enjoyed a sunrise or sunset over water can appreciate the beautiful effect. Where the Egyptian sun god Ra was believed to have crossed the sky in a boat daily, Jesus preferred walking.
Resurrection
Another consistent theme in Egyptian religion was the allegorization of the sun's daily death and rebirth as successive generations of fathers and sons. As with the etymology of words like set and horizon, it may be another linguistic coincidence that the words son and sun have identical pronunciations. Where Egyptians worshipped the sun, Christians worshipped the Son.
As the Egyptian religion evolved over three millenia, the figure of Horus evolved along with it. Older conceptions of Horus are called “Horus, the Elder”, while newer versions go by “Horus, the Younger”. The newer version was the son of the resurrected god Osiris.
In this version of the tale, Osiris, the god of the afterlife, is murdered and dismembered by his brother Set. His wife, Isis, reassembles his body and, through magic, conceives Horus, Osiris’s posthumous son. Together, Osiris, Isis, and Horus form another Egyptian trinity. Osiris was the opposite of the noonday sun; he personified the invisible midnight sun. His position in the underworld made Osiris instrumental in the sun’s nightly journey from death to rebirth.
The pharaoh was considered the living Horus and, upon death, became associated with Osiris. The two gods had a cyclical relationship: the son (Horus) replaced the father (Osiris), ensuring the continuity of divine kingship. Horus was seen as a rebirth or continuation of Osiris.
On a visceral level, ancient Egyptians understood that their livelihoods depended on the sun's daily and annual return. Before the geometry of the solar system was understood, the sun's apparent resurrection each morning and spring represented a deliverance from certain death.
When Christianity arrived in the Mediterreanean theater, it naturally used the existing religious milieu dominating that region to appeal to new converts. That’s how, in the early days of Christianity, the features of Egyptian sun worship merged with Babylonian and other influences to shape the new religion. Christians today still celebrate the resurrection of the Son as their salvation. Many are unaware that this concept predates Christianity by thousands of years, and has its roots in astronomy.
Further Materials
Written history is at least six thousand years old. During half of this period the center of human affairs, so far as they are now known to us, was in the Near East. By this vague term we shall mean here all southwestern Asia south of Russia and the Black Sea, and west of India and Afghanistan; still more loosely, we shall include within it Egypt, too, as anciently bound up with the Near East in one vast web and communicating complex of Oriental civilization. In this rough theatre of teeming peoples and conflicting cultures were developed the agriculture and commerce, the horse and wagon, the coinage and letters of credit, the crafts and industries, the law and government, the mathematics and medicine, the enemas and drainage systems, the geometry and astronomy, the calendar and clock and zodiac, the alphabet and writing, the paper and ink, the books and libraries and schools, the literature and music, the sculpture and architecture, the glazed pottery and fine furniture, the monotheism and monogamy, the cosmetics and jewelry, the checkers and dice, the ten-pins and income-tax, the wet-nurses and beer, from which our own European and American culture derive by a continuous succession through the mediation of Crete and Greece and Rome. The “Aryans” did not establish civilization—they took it from Babylonia and Egypt. Greece did not begin civilization—it inherited far more civilization than it began; it was the spoiled heir of three millenniums of arts and sciences brought to its cities from the Near East by the fortunes of trade and war. In studying and honoring the Near East we shall be acknowledging a debt long due to the real founders of European and American civilization.
Will & Ariel Durant, Our Oriental Heritage, 1935, page 116