Things I Learned From Junk Sci Fi

Sometimes you learn the coolest stuff from junk scifi. I was watching this episode of Stargate with a big green scaly Unas, and there’s this bit where it catches and eats one of the Go’auld “Gods” in the show, a kind of parasitic water lizard.

Anyway, turns out this is based on an ancient Egyptian legend concerning Unas, a Pharoah of the Fifth Dynasty who began the custom of inscribing funerary texts within the chambers of the pyramids.

But what’s really cool is an Egyptian religious quest myth with Unas hunting down and killing the Gods and then ingesting their dead bodies to gain their wisdom and powers.

This is so strikingly similar to the Christian ritual of communion, where some sects similarly ingest their actual god (in the various Catholic rites), other sects ritually commerorate an ancient ingestation by the original Nazarenes, while yet other sects participate in the metaphor of communion to enable them to become receptive to messages or inspiration from the Sky God.

I wonder did a private sect of Essenes maintain this God-Ingestion rite within ancient Judaism and then bequeath it to the Nazarenes right at the beginning of the Christian era and the migration of African mythforms northward into Europe.

This is nothing new. After all, much of the Christ myth already borrows major elements from Horus, and Mithras.