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If we wish to find the gods and goddesses of the ancestors of our race, we must look to the sun, the moon, the stars, and the sky, the earth, the sea, the dawn, the clouds, the wind, etc., which they personified and glorified. That these have been the gods and the goddesses of all nations of antiquity, is an established fact. They are better understood as being called "Solar Gods".
The words which had denoted the sun and the moon would denote not merely living things but living persons. From personification to deification the steps would be but few; and the process of disintegration would at once furnish the materials for a vast fabric of mythology. Every word would become an attribute, and all ideas, once grouped around a simple object, would branch off into distinct personifications. These attributes of nature and the Sun and stars would gradually be converted into incidents of their mystical careers. Later each would receive a local habitation with a corresponding name unique to each area. These would remain as genuine history, when the origin and meaning of the words had been either wholly or in part forgotten.
The Aryans are said to have entered India through the fabled Khyber pass, around 1500 BC. They intermingled with the local populace, and assimilated themselves into the social framework. They adopted the settled agricultural life-style of their predecessors, and established small agrarian communities across the state of Punjab. The Aryans are believed to have brought with them the horse, developed the Sanskrit language and made significant inroads in to the religion of the times. All three factors were to play a fundamental role in the shaping of Indian culture. Cavalry warfare facilitated the rapid spread of Aryan culture across North India, and allowed the emergence of large empires. Sanskrit is the basis and the unifying factor of the vast majority of Indian languages. The religion, that took root during the Vedic era, with its rich pantheon of Gods and Goddesses, and its storehouse of myths and legends, became the foundation of the Hindu religion, arguably the single most important common denominator of Indian culture. The Aryans did not have a script, but they developed a rich tradition. They composed the hymns of the four vedas, the great philosophic poems that are at the heart of Hindu thought. "Veda" means knowledge, vedic culture means the spiritually aware society. And "dharma", as the meaning of life, the way to live the existance on Earth.
For the proofs of these assertions, the Vedic poems furnish indisputable evidence, that such as this was the origin and growth of the Greek and Teutonic mythology. In these poems, the names of many, perhaps most, of the Greek gods, indicate natural objects which, if endued with life, took on human personality. Such mythologies haven been grouped around the sun; grounded on those expressions which describe the recurrence of day and night; on the great tragedy of nature, in the alteration of summer and winter. Simply said it was "nature religion" with the Sun at the center.
Of the vast mass of solar myths, some have emerged into independent legends, others have furnished the groundwork of whole epics, others have remained simply as floating tales (Aryan Myths., vol. ii. pp. 51-53).
The results obtained from the examination of languages in its several forms leaves no room for doubt that the general system of mythology can be traced to its fountain head. We can no longer shut our eyes to the fact. For the comparison of legends current in different countries it is not necessary to carry the search further back than the worship of nature along with the Sun. With the origin of earliest man we find a common language know by all; a language without words. I am speaking about a common language as man interpreted his environment as speaking to him. We have before us a stage of language corresponding to a stage in the history of the human mind in which all sensible objects were regarded as instinct with a conscious life. The varying phases of that life were therefore described as truthfully as they described their own feelings or sufferings; and therefore every phase became for them a picture. Early man described the things he saw, felt, or heard in his world from his point of view. Man's language was the result of an observation of what his senses perceived. In this way, man could not fail to note the changes of days and years, of growth and decay, of calm and storm; but the objects which so changed were to them living things, and the rising and setting of the sun, the return of winter and summer, became a drama in which the actors were their enemies and friends. These myths, from the personification of nature and the sun, exhibit in their germs the myths which afterwards became the legends of gods and heroes with human forms, and furnished the groundwork of the religious epics, poems, whether of the eastern or the western world. It was only a short step from this personification of the sun and nature to human epics in which such forces or nature became deified in every nations' myths and heroes.
The mythical or mythmaking language of mankind had no partialities; and the Sun occupies the largest extent of the myths of these nations. Mankind did not fail to put into words their thoughts and emotions roused in them by the varying phases of the Sun and nature of their world on which we, not less than they, feel that our life depends, although today we know a great something more than they about its nature.
Thus grew up a multitude of expressions which described the sun as the child of the night, as the destroyer of the darkness, as the lover of the dawn and the dew. Such phrases would go on to speak of the sun as killing the dew with his spears, and of forsaking the dawn as he rose in the heaven. The feeling that the fruits of the earth were called forth by his warmth would find utterance in words which spoke of him as the friend and the benefactor of man; which the constant recurrence of his work would lead them to describe him as a being constrained to toil for others, as doomed to travel over many lands, and as finding everywhere things on which he could bestow his love or which he might destroy by his power. His journey might be across cloudless skies, or amid alterations of storm and calm; his light might break fitfully through the clouds, or be hidden from many a weary hour, to burst forth at last with dazzling splendor as he sank down in the western sky. He would be described as facing many dangers and many enemies, none of whom, however, may arrest his course; as sullen, or capricious, or resentful; as grieving for the loss of the dawn whom he had loved, or as nursing his great wrath and vowing a pitiless vengeance. Then as the veil was rent at eventide, they would speak of the chief, who had long remained still, girding on his armor; or of the wanderer throwing off his disguise, and seizing his bow or spear to smite his enemies; of the invincible warrior whose face gleams with the flush of victory when the fight is over, as he greets the fair-haired Dawn who closes, as she had begun, the day. To the wealth of images thus lavished on the daily life and death of the Sun there would be no limit. He was the child of the morning, or her husband, or her destroyer; he forsook her and he returned to her, either in calm serenity or only to sink presently in deeper gloom.
So with other sights and sounds. The darkness of night brought with it a feeling of vague horror and dread; the return of daylight cheered them with a sense of unspeakable gladness; and thus the Sun who scattered the black shade of night would be the mighty champion doing battle with the biting snake which lurked in its dreary hiding-place. But as the Sun accomplished his journey day by day through the heaven, the character of the seasons is changed. The buds and blossoms of spring-time expand in flowers and fruits of summer, and the leaves fall and wither on the approach of winter. Thus the daughter of the earth would be spoken of as dying or as dead, as severed from her mother for five or six weary months, not to be restored to her again until the time for here return from the dark land should once more arrive. But as no other power than that of the Sun can recall vegetation to life, this child of the earth would be represented as buried in a sleep from which the touch of the Sun alone could arouse her, when he slays the frost and cold which lie like snakes around her motionless form.
That these phrases would furnish the germs of myths or legends teeming with human feeling, as soon as the meaning of the phrases were in part or wholly forgotten, was as inevitable as that in the infancy of our race men should attribute to all sensible objects the same kind of life which they were conscious of possessing themselves.
By now you understand how the forces of nature and the sun could be understood by early man. These impressions were woven into various tales reflecting the crude understanding of mother nature as well as the Sun. Simply said, early man did not possess the knowledge to relate such events he encountered in scientific terms as we had today. Crude stories and myths based on his limited knowledge would have to do. Later such events were as stated personified, glorified, and finally deified. Such expressions have been handed down to us and many of them are carried over into the life of Jesus the Jew. The irony is that the Jewish people were called to be a light of knowledge and correction to such men and their myths. We have lost a lot in our attempt to be a follower of Yeshua; in fact the hard reality as I now plan to show you is that 2.5 billions good people who call themselves Christians are little better off than primitive man because they hold dear the same myths. The only difference is that the historical Yeshua has become the Christ of faith; such an object of faith as expressed in the New Testament is almost a carbon copy of what the earliest Sun-worshippers believed and taught. Let me see if I can prove it to you as we make comparisons between the Christian Savior and the various Sun Myths. After we are through then you can make an intelligent decision once you see the evidence for yourself. It is to that quest we now turn.