As paganism spread after the Tower of Babel fiasco, it took its many ceremonies and practices with it. Here are a few of them…
Weeping for Tammuz/Lent/Easter
In Babylon the goddess and her son appear as Rhea the great goddess “Mother” (aka Semiramis, Nimrod’s widow) and her son Tammuz (the reincarnated Nimrod). Tammuz is also known as Bacchus that is “the Lamented one”, the one for whom the pagans celebrated 40 days of weeping each year to remember Tammuz’s death when he was gored by a wild boar at age 40 – hence one day for each year of his life.
In Christianity before the Roman Catholic church, no observance of 40 days of Lent existed and Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection were celebrated at the biblical Passover dates.
In his book “The Two Babylons” Alexander Hislop states:
“Whence, then, came this observance? The forty days abstinence of Lent was directly borrowed from the worshippers of the Babylonian goddess (Astarte/Ishtar). Such a Lent of forty days, ‘in the spring of the year,’ is still observed by the Yezidis or Pagan Devil-worshippers of Koordistan, who have inherited it from their early masters, the Babylonians.
Such a Lent of forty days was held in spring by the Pagan Mexicans, for thus we read in Humboldt, where he gives account of Mexican observances: ‘Three days after the vernal equinox …. began a solemn fast of forty days in the honour of the sun.’
Such a Lent of forty days was observed in Egypt, as may be seen on consulting Wilkinson’s Egyptians.
Among the Pagans this Lent seems to have been an indispensible preliminary to the great annual festival in commemoration of the death and resurrection of Tammuz, which was celebrated by alternate weeping and rejoicing, and which, in many countries, was considerably later than the Christian festival, being observed in Palestine and Assyria in June, therefore called the ‘month of Tammuz;’ in Egypt, about the middle of May, and in Britain, sometime in April. To conciliate the Pagans to nominal Christianity, Rome, pursuing its usual policy, took measures to get the Christian and Pagan festivals amalgamated, and, by a complicated but skillful adjustment of the calendar, it was found no difficult matter, in general, to get Paganism and Christianity — now far sunk in idolatry — in this as in so many other things, to shake hands.
Originally, even in Rome, Lent, with the preceding revelries of the Carnival, was entirely unknown; and even when fasting before the Christian Pasch (Passover) was held to be necessary, it was by slow steps that, in this respect, it came to conform with the ritual of Paganism. What may have been the period of fasting in the Roman Church before the sitting of the Nicene Council does not very clearly appear, but for a considerable period after that Council, we have distinct evidence that it did not exceed three weeks. The words of Socrates, writing on this very subject, about A.D. 450, are these: ‘Those who inhabit the princely city of Rome fast together before Easter three weeks, excepting the Saturday and Lord’s day.’ But at last, when the worship of Astarte was rising into the ascendant, steps were taken to get the whole Chaldean Lent of six weeks, or forty days, made imperative on all within the Roman empire of the West. The way was prepared for this by a Council held at Aurelia in the time of Hormisdas, Bishop of Rome [514-523], about the year 519, which decreed that Lent should be solemnly kept before Easter. It was with the view, no doubt, of carrying out this decree that the calendar was, a few days after, readjusted by Dionysius.
This decree could not be carried out all at once. About the end of the sixth century, the first decisive attempt was made to enforce the observance of the new calendar. It was in Britain that the first attempt was made in this way; and here the attempt met with vigorous resistance. The difference in point of time between the Christian Pasch, as observed in Britain by the native Christians, and the Pagan Easter enforced by Rome, at the time of its enforcement was a whole month; and it was only by violence and bloodshed, at last that the Festival of the Anglo-Saxon or Chaldean goddess (Astarte or as the Britons called her Eastre) came to supersede that which had been held in honour of Christ. Such is the history of Easter.”
Source: The Two Babylons, by Alexander Hislop, second American edition, 1959, published in America by Loizeaux Brothers, pages 104, 106, 107. – Italics mine
So Lent and Easter celebrate the death and resurrection of Nimrod/Tammuz, not Jesus. It is therefore not surprising that God calls Lent an abomination in Ezk 8:13-14:
And He said to me, “Turn again, and you will see greater abominations that they are doing.” So He brought me to the door of the north gate of the Lord’s house; and to my dismay, women were sitting there weeping for Tammuz.
The Sign of the Cross
Tammuz symbol was the cross. The same sign of the cross that Catholicism worships was used in the Babylonian Mysteries. It was applied by paganism to the same magic purposes and was honoured with the same honours. It is the mystic Tau of the Chaldeans (Babylonians) and Egyptians, the true original form of the letter T – the first letter of the name Tammuz!
Whilst there are pagan tribes all across the planet where the cross is found, the cross was never used as a symbol by the early Christian church. Egypt appears to have taken the lead in bringing this pagan symbol into Christianity. The first form of that which is called the “Christian” cross is found on monuments in Egypt and they have the unequivocal pagan Tau or Egyptian “Sign of Life.”
The Madonna and Child Again, the “Madonna and Child” did not become a “Christian” symbol until Egyptian “Christians” forced it through at the Nicene Council in AD325. The Madonna and Child actually came from Egypt and was previously known as Isis and Osiris (the Egyptian’s version of the Babylonian gods Rhea and Tammuz). When Constantine announced the state religion was now Christianity and turned the pagan temples into churches, the locals sought ways to keep their old gods in the new religion. So the Egyptians renamed Isis and Osiris, Mary and Jesus, an easy switch really. The Egyptians were now following the official religious party line and yet were still worshipping their old gods. Of course it wasn’t long before the Egyptian “Christians” wanted their gods to get top billing. Their opportunity came at the Nicene Council of 325AD, and as they say the rest is history.