Brain fried and seeing suns

We flew to Atlanta, four hours, and then to Rome, ten hours. We arrived here at 8:30 AM Rome time, 12:30 AM Denver time. We decided to deal with jet lag all at once, and so had a full day today. We found our hotel, and then headed over to Vatican City for the grand tour.

It is wise not to see all of that stuff while jet lagged. It is overwhelming! The Church has miles of long rooms lined with statues from the Roman era. Just one room must have 200 statues and busts. Some of them are of mythical beings, many of real historical figures such as Augustus Caesar and Trajan. Add to that identical long rooms filled with tapestries and maps, and several rooms painted Sistine-style by Raphael, and then the Sistine itself, and even a non-fried brain is overwhelmed.

Add to that more current art work (there is one by Dali – I swear he was making fun of them. His Madonnas and Jesus haver no faces.) There is lots of that as well, and then St. Peter Basilica – a statement of the power of the Catholic Church in medieval times. The Church still has moral suasion, but commands no armies besides its silly Swiss guards. But there are flocks of oddly dressed groups all over Rome – brothers in robes, priests in long flowing gowns, nuns of all stripes, and assorted groups from all over the word wearing t-shirts to memorialize their trip to the Vatican. As we viewed the Star Wars-like canopy* that stands seven stories over the alleged tomb of St. Peter there were groups around us praying the rosary. Creepy. But then there were happy and carefree groups like the young people from Guatemala, having the time of their lives.

A word to the wise – after seeing all of those statues today, I would advise young men to wear a catcher’s cup – those penises that had not been covered with fig leaves were mutilated. Only the really tiny ones were left alone. Catholics seem to have a little angst about the that organ.

My fried brain took it all in, but perhaps I was hallucinating as I realized tyhat Christianity is am amalgamation of pagan religions, most centered around the Sun. The array of gods was reduced to three by the Catholics, who later added a fourth, Mary. It made sense – to primitive people, the sun was the giver of life. It traveled through the sky during the course of a year, and ancients divided that journey into twelve parts, which became in literature twelve tribes and twelve apostles and is still with us today as astrology. Jesus, one of many ‘sons’ sent down to visit, was ‘born’ on the fourth day after the solstice – it takes three days for the earth to begin to tilt back the other way after solstice – get it? Dead three days and then rises?

I was struck today by solar imagery – the halos around the heads of saints, the ‘crown of thorns’ representing the fire of the sun – the golden ring during a total eclipse. Apollo has a round face completely surrounded by his hair, resembling the sun. Surely all of this religion from China to Salt Lake City to Rome has but one origin – the sun and moon and stars.

Someone will have to check me on this, but as we walked through all the antiquities, I was looking for extant references to Jesus. There are none in all of the roman statues and architecture. No symbols, no references. He doesn’t really turn up in any literature until the gospels, four accounts from the first or second century, each in disagreement with the others on important facts.

The image of the man Jesus does not turn up at all until the 16th century in what we saw today – that’s when da Vinci and Raphael personified him as a European. I wonder if Jesus-centric faith is even more current than the second century. Was he even the center of the religion before that time?
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*Designed by Bernini, the sewing machine guy.