This Is the Sun?: Zeitgeist and Religion

In 2007, the film Zeitgeist became an instant sensation on the internet claiming, among other things, the figure of Jesus was based upon a pervasive mythology whereby crucified saviors died and rose three days later to celebrate the rising of the sun after a three day lull at its lowest point in the sky. All of the New Testament, it was asserted, was a metaphor for the sun's travels through the zodiac and the same story had been told in Egypt with Horus, Persian with Mithra, Phrygia with Attis, and India with Krishna among others. In This is the Zeitgeist and Religion, Albert McIlhenny critiques the ideas on religion presented in Zeitgeist and demonstrates they have no historical validity. In this first of a planned two volume critique, he traces the history of what Zeitgeist supporters call "astrotheology" to the cumulative errors of authors in early modernity that culminated in the work of Charles Francois Dupuis at the end of the eighteenth century. His ideas were repeatedly debunked by scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but still retained a loyal audience among those following pseudoscholars supporting occultic and anti-religious themes. All but dead by the late twentieth century, the theory has been revived in the popular imagination as an offshoot of the conspiracy theorist subculture.By the end of this first volume, "astrotheology" has been exposed as historically untenable and its sources as either pseudoscholarship or the misrepresentation of real scholarship. Its current visibility is not attributable to a reappraisal of the evidence but rather the growing popularity of conspiracy theories.