Okay...
Originally posted by serbsta
Hmm. What do you make of the following, though?
The historian S. H. Hooke tells in detail of the ancient Sumerian trinity: Anu was the primary god of heaven, the ‘Father’, and the ‘King of
the Gods’; Enlil, the ‘wind-god’ was the god of the earth, and a creator god; and Enki was the god of waters and the ‘lord of wisdom’
(15-18). The historian, H. W. F. Saggs, explains that the Babylonian triad consisted of ‘three gods of roughly equal rank... whose
inter-relationship is of the essence of their natures’ (316).
www.heraldmag.org...
In checking the magazine, I find that it's a Christian (Jehovah's Witness) magazine... so right there I would say it's a biased source.
Furthermore, Jehovah's Witnesses are NOT known for good scholarly research, so that's two marks against it to start.
His founding statements, that " the triads of paganism which were eventually absorbed into Catholic Church dogmas" is not correct (though
iconography did borrow the Isis-Horus concept to rework to Mary-Jesus in some cases.) He also states a JW belief:
there is no question that ancient man believed in ‘one infinite and Almighty Creator, supreme over all’ (Hislop 14); and in a multitude of
gods at a later point.
...which is not correct. The first beliefs are animism (spirits everywhere) then multiple gods. When the group develops a structure with a single
leader, then we see the rise of Leader Gods.
He then continues with:
Hislop devotes the first 128 pages of his book The Two Babylons to proving that the Christian Trinity is directly descended from the ancient
Babylonian trinity. In particular, he convincingly proves that the origin of the Babylonian trinity was the triad of Cush (the grandson of Noah),
Semiramis (his wife), and Nimrod (their son). At the death of Cush, Semiramis married her son, Nimrod, and thus began the confusion between the father
and son so prevalent in early paganism.
Alas for Hislop (he wrote in the 1800's), there are earlier versions of Noah's Flood. The Semiramus-Nimrod link is not a believable one.
en.wikipedia.org...
His identification of the "three gods sequences" is not entirely correct:
From ancient Sumeria’s Anu, Enlil, and Enki and Egypt’s dual trinities of Amun-Re-Ptah and Isis, Osiris, and Horus to Rome’s Jupiter, Juno, and
Minerva the whole concept of paganism revolved around the magic number of three.
Amun, Re, and Ptah are three separate gods (originally) that arose at different times and were sometimes "kit bashed" into one god (and not one with
3 parts. Ditto Anu, Enlil, and Enki. Jupiter/Juno/Minerva were never really a big deal (Minerva isn't Juno's child, for one thing) --
Jupiter/Mars/Venus were an important trio, but not seen as a triad.
The concept of the Trinity finds its roots in Pagan theology and Greek philosophy
Actually, I tend to agree with that and in particular with its identification with Greek Mystery Schools. There's no doubt of the borrowing there.
But the Greeks didn't get that from Egypt or from Sumeria.
