Are you
interested in the history of the Catholic Church and
want to learn more about its practices and beliefs, and
where they came from?
Understand
about the origin of:
The Mother and Child
The Mass
The Wafer (Eucharist)
Purgatory
The Sovereign Pontiff
Prayers for the Dead
The Rosary
The Sign of the Cross
The Confessional
Clothing and Crowning
of Images
Priests, Monks, and
Nuns
Relic Worship
Worship of the Sacred
Heart
Extreme Unction
This CD contains The
Two Babylons, by Alexander Hislop.
The Two Babylons, subtitled The Papal Worship Proved to
Be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife is a religious
pamphlet published in 1853 by the Presbyterian Free
Church of Scotland theologian Alexander Hislop
(1807–65).
Its central theme is its allegation that the Catholic
Church is a veiled continuation of the pagan religion of
Babylon, the product of a millennia-old secret
conspiracy founded by the Biblical king Nimrod and the
Assyrian queen Semiramis, whom Hislop claimed was
Nimrod's wife. It claims that modern holidays, including
Christmas and Easter, were actually festivals
established by Semiramis and that all of the customs
associated with them are secretly pagan rituals. All of
the book's major claims have been thoroughly refuted by
modern scholars, but variations of them continue to
remain popular among some groups of evangelical
Protestants. The pamphlet's claims, though disproven,
continue to be promoted in Chick tracts and on the
internet, and its central ideas have influenced
Jehovah's Witnesses, racist groups such as The Covenant,
The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, and the conspiracy
theories of David Icke.
Hislop builds on the Panbabylonian school of
Hyperdiffusionism, which was common in the 19th century,
to argue that Classical and Ancient Near Eastern
civilization took all its inspiration from Babylon. From
this, he derives the argument that the mystery religions
of Late Antiquity were actually offshoots of one ancient
religion founded at the Tower of Babel. Panbabylonism
has since been relegated to pseudohistory by
20th-century scholars.
Much of Hislop's work centers on his association of the
legendary Ninus and his semi-historical wife Semiramis
with the Biblical Nimrod. Hellenistic histories of the
Ancient Near East tended to conflate their faint
recollections of the deeds of ancient kings into
legendary figures who exerted far more power than any
ancient king ever did. In Assyria, they invented an
eponymous founder of Nineveh named Ninus, who supposedly
ruled 52 years over an empire comparable to the Persian
Empire at its greatest extent. Ninus's wife Semiramis
was in turn a corruption of the historical figure
Shammuramat, regent of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 811
BC. Hislop takes Ninus as a historical figure, and
associates him with the Biblical figure Nimrod, though
he was not the first to do so. The Clementine literature
made the association in the 4th Century AD. An
influential belief throughout the Middle Ages was that
Ninus was the inventor of Idolatry, a concept that
Hislop clearly drew upon. However, Hislop wrote before
the historical records of the ancient near east had been
thoroughly decoded and studied, and it became apparent
in the decades after he wrote that there never was any
such figure as Ninus, and that the Greek authors whom he
quotes were without credibility on the subject.
Relief of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, whose name
Hislop falsely claimed to be the root behind the English
word Easter
The Two Babylons heavily relies on Austen Henry Layard's
publications of his excavations at Nineveh, which had
only been just discovered in 1851. This gave his work an
appearance of being well-researched at the time of its
publication. For example, Hislop linked the name of
Easter with Astarte, the Phoenician fertility goddess by
citing Layard's recent discovery of Astarte's Assyrian
name, Ishtar, which Hislop took to be "identical" to
Easter.
What means the term Easter itself? It is not a Christian
name. It bears its Chaldean origin on its very forehead.
Easter is nothing else than Astarte, one of the titles
of Beltis, the queen of heaven, whose name, as
pronounced by the people Nineveh, was evidently
identical with that now in common use in this country.
That name, as found by Layard on the Assyrian monuments,
is Ishtar.
— Hislop, The Two Babylons, Chapter 3, Section 2, Easter
The claim that Easter is derived from Ishtar is now
regarded as incorrect. Modern etymologists derive the
word Easter from the Proto-Indo-European root *aus-,
meaning "dawn," potentially by way of *h₂ewsṓs. Ishtar
is a Semitic name of uncertain etymology, possibly taken
from the same root as Assyria, or from a semitic word
meaning "to irrigate."
Hislop ultimately traces Catholic doctrines back to the
worship of Nimrod, claiming that the Roman Catholic
Church is the Whore of Babylon of the Book of Revelation
and that "the Pope himself is truly and properly the
lineal representative of Belshazzar". He claims that the
Christogram IHS, the first three Greek letters in the
name of Jesus, are really Latin characters standing for
Isis, Horus and Seth.
This CD-ROM contains this title in
PDF format, for viewing only in your computer. This CD cannot
be played on the CD player hooked up to your TV or stereo.
Hard cover versions of these works
have sold for 10 times or more the cost of this disk. With
our CD, you can read, study, and print out the pages as many
times as you want.
