Zoroaster taught the Magi that this celestial birth would be announced by the rising of this star, or constellation of Virgo, in the middle of which would appear the figure of a young woman, suckling an infant child, called Jesus by some nations, and Christ, or Christos,* in Greek. This was the goddess of the _year_ nursing the god of _day_. Under this beautiful symbol, the new born child is said to be feeble, weak, and obscure, which is metaphoric of the Sun below the horizon in winter; that he was brought forth in a stable, and laid in a manger, alluding to the "stabulum jovium," one of the winter constellations. At the vernal equinox, when the Sun entered the sign Aries, or the Bam, the emblem was a lamb, (the lamb of God,) and as he gained strength towards the summer solstice, he became the conqueror of the powers of darkness and evil, that is, the constellations of winter; and was figuratively said to bruise the serpent's head, that constellation being, as it were, depressed below the horizon. By a like metonymy of language, the "_Ascension_" of Christ has also allusion to the Sun at the summer solstice. * In the ancient zodiacs of India and Egypt, there is seen this virgin nursing a male child with sun rays around his head, (frown not, ye priests!) which is emblematical of the infant sun at the winter solstice, and of his being then in the sign Virgo. When he was in that sign in summer, the virgin was represented with a bunch of fruit; and when in harvest, she appropriately held out an ear of corn. These zodiacs were devised at various periods of antiquity, as the sun passed through the different signs, in the phenomena of which the learned priests always found plenty of gods and goddesses for the worship of the vulgar, as is still done in Christianism.