In the Julian calendar the
twenty-fifth of December was reckoned the winter solstice, and it
was regarded as the Nativity of the Sun, because the day begins to
lengthen and the power of the sun to increase from that
turning-point of the year. The ritual of the nativity, as it appears
to have been celebrated in Syria and Egypt, was remarkable. The
celebrants retired into certain inner shrines, from which at
midnight they issued with a loud cry, "The Virgin has brought forth!
The light is waxing!" The Egyptians even represented the new-born
sun by the image of an infant which on his birthday, the winter
solstice, they brought forth and exhibited to his worshippers. No
doubt the Virgin who thus conceived and bore a son on the
twenty-fifth of December was the great Oriental goddess whom the
Semites called the Heavenly Virgin or simply the Heavenly Goddess;
in Semitic lands she was a form of Astarte. Now Mithra was regularly
identified by his worshippers with the Sun, the Unconquered Sun, as
they called him; hence his nativity also fell on the twenty-fifth of
December.
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