Charles Francois Dupuis was born near Chaumont, in France, the 16th Oct,
1742, died 29th Sept, 1809. He played a prominent part in the great
revolutionary movement, and was Secretary to the National Convention.
His famous work, “L’Origine de tous les Cultes,” is one of the grand
heresy marks of the eighteenth century. Himself a Pantheist, he searched
through the mythic traditions of the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Hindus,
and the Hebrews, and as a result, sought to demonstrate a common origin
for all religions. Dr. John Pye Smith classes Dupuis as an Atheist, but
this is most certainly an incorrect classification. He did not believe
in creation, nor could he go outside the universe to search for its
cause, but he regarded God as _“la force universelle et eternellement
active,_ ” which permeated and animated everything. Dupuis was an
example of a new and rapidly increasing class of Freethinking
writers—i.e., those who, not content with doubting the divine origin of
the religions they attacked, sought to explain the source and progress
of the various systems. He urges that all religions find their base in
the attempts at personification of some one or other, or of the whole of
the forces of the universe, and shows what an important part the sun and
moon have been made to play in the Egyptian, Greek, and Hindu
mythologies. He argues that the fabulous biographies of Hercules,
Bacchus, Osiris, Mithra, and Jesus, find their common origin in the
sun-worship, thus cloaked and hidden from the vulgar in each country. He
does not attack the Hebrew Records as simply inaccurate, but endeavors
to show clear Sabaistic foundation for many of the most important
narratives. The works of Dupuis and Dulaure should be read together;
they contain the most complete amongst the many attempts to trace out
the common origins of the various mythologies of the world. In the ninth
chapter of Dupuis’ great work, he deals with the “fable made upon the
sun adored under the name of Christ,” “_un dieu qui ait mangé autrefois
sur la terre, et qu’on y mange aujourd’hui_” and unquestionably urges
strange points of coincidence. It is only astrologically that the 25th
of December can be fixed, he argues, as the birthday of Mithra and of
Jesus, then born of the celestial Virgin. Our Easter festivities for the
resurrection of Jesus are but another form of the more ancient rejoicing
at that season for Adonis, the sun-God, restored to the world after his
descent into the lower regions. He recalls that the ancient Druidic
worship recognised the Virgin suckling the child, and gathers together
many illustrations favorable to his theory. Here we do no more than
point out that while reason was rapidly releasing itself from priestly
thraldom, heretics were not content to deny the divine origin of
Christianity, but sought to trace its mundane or celestial source, and
strip it of its fabulous plumage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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