In this edition, I will discuss another very influential anti-Catholic work. However, as opposed to the lurid Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, this work’s criticism focused more on Catholic beliefs and practices, yet it still managed to be just as sensational, incendiary, and outrageous as that Protestant hoax. The work first appeared as a pamphlet in 1853 and was expanded into a book over the next five years, while secret societies in America turned anti-Catholicism into the ascendant Know Nothing political party before promptly fading into obscurity, as covered in my recent Patreon exclusive Blindside podcast episode. But this book, The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop, would not fade away so quickly and would see multiple editions before evolving into a tract in more modern times to continue spreading its complicated yet somehow convincing claims that the Roman Catholic Church was really just pagan idolatry repackaged from its Babylonian origins. Perhaps it is not surprising that these claims found purchase among Protestants who were already disposed to identify the Roman Catholic Church with the “whore” of the apocalyptic prophecy in Revelation 17, which depicts a beast, and riding atop it, a woman, the so-called “mother of harlots,” whose name appears on her forehead as “Mystery, Babylon the Great.” To claim that the Catholic Church was actually just Babylonian paganism in disguise certainly seemed to clarify that unsettling imagery. And beyond Protestants, the claims of this book have historically appealed to condescending atheists and know-it-all agnostics as well, and have since passed into the realm of memery. As I discussed in my Christmas special, glib social media reposts claiming that certain religious practices are based on heathen traditions have proven quite popular, and those having to do with Easter seem to have their origin in Hislop’s pseudohistorical work. So what can be discerned from his dense treatise? What conclusions has it disseminated, and how did the author arrive at them?

I have been unable to find much in the way of well-sourced biographical information about the author of The Two Babylons, Alexander Hislop. More is written about his brother, Stephen, a missionary to India of some renown who drowned while crossing a swollen river. In his biography, we have a brief mention of Alexander, the eldest of three brothers, who “was educated for the ministry of the Church of Scotland…was a ripe classical scholar, was deeply read in Biblical archaeology and prophetic exposition, and…became a minister of the Free Church of Scotland in the town of Arbroath.” The fact that he sided with the Free Church in the Presbyterian schism sometimes called the Disruption of 1843, which resisted the power of government to appoint ministers in the church, already suggests he was something of an iconoclast and a church purist. And a simple perusal of his several published works before The Two Babylons further indicates the power of his convictions regarding Christian doctrine, and one in particular, 1846’s The Light of Prophecy Let In on the Dark Places of the Papacy, demonstrates the drift of his thoughts toward the thesis he would eventually express in the most well-known of his works. And the thesis of The Two Babylons is not secreted away, buried in some dense paragraph at the back of the volume, but rather appears in clear typeface upon its cover in the form of a subtitle: The Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife.

As Hislop asserts, many of the doctrinal and ritual practices of the Catholic Church—tellingly, the ones that Protestant critics of Roman Catholicism tend to take issue with, like its treatment of Mary as a co-redeemer and its reliance on images and rituals—have been derived from ancient pagan beliefs. He starts back at the very beginning, with the migration of peoples to the river valley that would come to be known as Babylonia and later as Mesopotamia, and the rise of the great hunter Nimrod who defeated the beasts that preyed upon them and protected his subjects within the secure walls of cities, such as Babel, where according to the biblical legend, a grand tower was built and languages became confused, and from which, so the story goes, all the peoples of the world dispersed, carrying with them, by Hislop’s reckoning, the pagan traditions that in Roman times would eventually be integrated with the Christian faith to create Catholic traditions. Hislop claims that after Nimrod’s death, his wife, Semiramis, lifted him up in memory as a sun god, and by extension, deified their son Tammuz as the son of god or as god reincarnate, and eventually, she came to be worshiped herself as a mother goddess. Hislop sees a direct line of descent between Semiramis and the veneration of Mary by Catholics, tracing this mother goddess tradition through numerous iterations, as Isis with her Horus in Egypt, as Shingmoo in China, Nana among Sumerians, Ceres in ancient Greece, Fortuna in Rome, and in India as Indrani or as Isi with the child Iswara or as Devaki with the child Crishna. He finds analogues in nearly every culture of antiquity, and he believes that at some point, after the Etruscans had integrated into Roman society, an Etruscan pontiff who was dedicated to the old idolatrous ways managed to get himself elected sovereign pontiff and began the corrupting the church by incorporating more and more pagan Babylonian symbols and traditions.

Isis suckling Horus, via Wikimedia Commons

Among these symbols are the keys of heaven given over to Peter and symbolically entrusted to the Pope as representative of papal authority. To Hislop, it can be no coincidence that two pagan gods, Janus and Cybele, are also pictured with keys. Then there is the gaudy throne on which the Pope sits, the Chair of Saint Peter, which Hislop says must have previously been the throne of the pagan Pontifex Maximus because of some panels on it that depict the labors of Hercules. And the Pope’s mitre he says corresponds with the fish head of another pagan god, Dagon. Then there’s the Eucharist. The church’s insistence that sacramental wafers be round is telling, per Hislop, since disks of bread were also consumed at altars in Egypt, in symbolism of the sun! Even something as simple as a ritual burning of candles can be painted a shade of sinister, for as Hislop notes, candles were also burned by worshippers of the sun god Zoroaster, who was yet another iteration of Nimrod according to Hislop’s view of history. And his revelation of paganism’s deep embedding within the church would not be complete without taking the central symbol of the faith down a peg or two. The cross, Hislop declares, is a pagan symbol used throughout the many traditions descended from Babylonian idolatry, and it represents the mystic letter Tau, which stands for Tammuz, son of Nimrod and Semiramis. Thus even the innocent treat of hot-cross buns eaten on Good Friday is tainted, but further still Hislop takes it, for he claims this treat and the very word that we have for it, “bun,” derives from an ancient sacred bread consumed in worship of another goddess, whom the holiday Easter celebrates.

So we come to perhaps the most well-known and widely spread of Hislop’s contentions, that the church holiday of Easter is really a pagan celebration. He makes similar arguments about Christmas, most of which I have wrestled with already in my recent holiday special. And like those claims, you’ve likely read or heard these as well: the traditions of Easter are derived from the worship of Astarte or Ishtar, a fertility goddess, and the eggs and bunnies of the holiday are mere symbols of sex and apt for the bursting forth of life at springtime. Hislop sees a pure precursor to Easter in the Jewish Passover, which occurred around the same time of year, and he grants that its intended purpose was to commemorate Christ’s death and resurrection, said to have happened around that time of year as well. But the fasting period of Lent he says was borrowed from the pagan tradition of a forty days’ abstinence in the spring that can be observed in many cultures. Of bunnies, Hislop is entirely silent, but as for the eggs, he looks far and wide for their precedence, marking the ancient Greek consecration of eggs to Baachus, the Hindustani tales that attach importance to eggs and their color, the Japanese sacralization of a brazen egg, and the practices among the Egyptians of hanging eggs in temples and among the Chinese of painting and dying eggs for festivals. His final coup de grace, however, is the myth of the Phoenician goddess Astarte falling to earth in an egg. Case closed, or at least that’s how Hislop presents it—eggs appear in different cultural traditions, so they must all be tied to a single earlier tradition, and the goddess Astarte is said to have emerged from an egg, so surely all instances of sacred egg traditions must really be instances of Astarte worship. And if Astarte is not close enough sounding to Easter for you, there is Ishtar, Mesopotamian counterpart. So there you are. Easter must be Ishtar.

But let’s look more closely at these assertions. While it is very true that Astarte is identified across cultural lines with Ishtar, as she is also one and the same with the Semitic mother goddess Ashtoreth, the connection Hislop makes to Easter appears to be based on nothing more than how the names strike his ear. Astarte/Ashtoreth/Ishtar was a goddess of sex and fertility but also of war and vengeance; she appears greatly simplified here in order to cement her association with Easter. The problem is, most of the world doesn’t celebrate a holiday called Easter, but rather one called Pasqua in Italy, Pâques in France, Paaske in Denmark, Paskha in Bulgaria, and Pasen in the Netherlands, all derived from the latinate Pascha, itself from the Hebrew Pesach or Passover. So who’s using the name Easter? English speakers and Germans, who celebrate Ostern. Hislop’s myopia really shows here, as does his ignorance of folklore that had origins far closer to home, for most scholars accept that the name Easter is derived from the name of the Germanic goddess Ēostre or Ostara, a goddess of the dawn, with whom rabbits were symbolically associated (Billson 447). As for the eggs, there is no shortage of pagan traditions involving this most common of foodstuffs, several of which seem to accord well with the Easter themes of rebirth, such as the egg from which the phoenix is reborn, but the simplest and therefore most likely explanation for the inclusion of eggs in Easter traditions is the prominence of roasted eggs in the Passover Seder meal (Newall 16).

The goddess Ēostre or Ostara, by Johannes Gehrts, 1901, via Wikimedia Commons

Now some might object that this still shows Christian traditions having their origins in pagan goddess traditions or in other non-Christian ceremonies, and this is absolutely true. One would be hard-pressed to make a tenable argument that there exist no such influences in Christian traditions. But what Hislop argues is far different. He argues that nearly every goddess tradition can be traced back to Semiramis, that the worship of her and her husband and son were purposely integrated, through some far-reaching conspiracy, into the pure and true form of Christianity as a means of poisoning it into apostasy. Now it’s quite true that pagan deities were often conflated across cultures; for example, Ishtar/Astarte/Ashtoreth have also been identified with the goddess Aphrodite. Much of this conflation can be blamed on the ancient Greeks, who believed their pantheon of gods to be universal, meaning that they assumed all cultures worshipped the same deities but merely had different names for them (Budin 98). Today, scholars of antiquity take a different view, but Hislop, relying on his scripture-based understanding of the dispersion and migration of peoples and cultures, takes a decidedly Grecian syncretistic approach to world history, skipping from civilization to civilization, presuming that each must have their Nimrod, Semiramis, and Tammuz figures because his theory depends on it. In his estimation, Semiramis is Astarte, is Aphrodite, is Diana, is Artemis, is Ceres, is Juno, is Minerva, is Athena, is Venus, etc. etc. And likewise Nimrod is Osiris, is Zoroaster, is Mithra, is Odin, is Saturn, is Bacchus, is Cupid, is Apollo, is Mars, is Adonis, is Hercules, is Beelzebub, is Lucifer and on and on and on and on and on and on…..

He does, however, sometimes claim there is evidence for his profligate syncretism, often referencing the contemporary work of Austen Henry Layard. In fact, at the time of The Two Babylon’s publication, citing the archaeological finds of Layard at the site he believed was Nineveh lent seeming authenticity and academic rigor to Hislop’s treatise. But Layard’s findings have since been challenged and in some cases discredited. For example, his book was titled Nineveh and Its Remains, but the site he was excavating would eventually be identified as Nimrud, called Calah in Genesis, while Nineveh, it was discovered, was actually elsewhere. And much of what Layard claimed in his hastily written book cannot be given much weight, as he may have been embellishing his findings to secure better funding. One of his advisors even suggested he “[w]rite a whopper” and “[f]ish up old legends and anecdotes,” saying “if you can by any means humbug people into the belief that you have established any points in the Bible, you are a made man.” Then, beyond citing Layard and other scholars whose work could not be called reliable today, Hislop relies a lot on what might be described as armchair etymology as proof of his claims. In fact his identification of several goddesses with Semiramis relies on such questionable evidence, for he sees in Astarte and Ashtoreth’s names Greek and Hebrew cognates for the word “tower,” and behold Diana had a second name that meant “tower-maker” and everyone knows Semiramis, or at least her husband Nimrod, was renowned as a builder of cities. Therefore, by his logic, these far-flung deities were the same mythical being. Even contemporary critics excoriated him for his fast and loose play with pseudo-etymology, such as the Saturday Review of September 17, 1859, which pointed out that “[h]e always acts upon the principle, common to all dabblers in etymology, of ignoring the obvious derivation, and going a-mare’s-nesting among the roots of some wholly alien dialect.”

The final line of the Saturday Review’s evaluation of Hislop’s work perfectly encapsulates the academic community’s critical response to his research: “we never before quite knew the folly of which ignorant or half-learrned bigotry is capable.” Yet despite this decidedly forceful challenge to the quality of his scholarship, the book was embraced, perhaps not surprisingly in that era of anti-Catholicism, by Protestants of every stripe, regardless of the fact that many of Hislop’s claims about Catholicism would logically recast all of Christianity as a pagan apostasy. Historians have never really taken his work seriously, and for good reason, but an academic consensus has never proven to be a deterrent to the spreading of baloney. It gets repackaged for wider consumption and becomes harder and harder to quash. In this case, one Ralph Edward Woodrow transformed Hislop’s dense work into a simplified and easy to digest illustrated little book called Babylon Mystery Religion: Ancient and Modern, and evangelical Christian ministry groups bought and circulated it by the thousands. Never mind that years later Woodrow realized the errors of Hislop’s methodology, noting first and most outrageously that Nimrod and Semiramis don’t even appear to have lived during the same time period, let alone have been married. As a mea culpa for his part in disseminating the nonsense, he wrote a follow-up essentially pointing out what historians had known for decades: that Hislop’s argument was built on superficial similarities, by misquoting authorities and making up fictions out of whole cloth. But by then, Hislop’s academic-sounding drivel had been even further repackaged into a cartoon tract by famously anti-Catholic pamphleteer Jack Chick, and there was just no stopping its propagation. And to this day, if you Google the origin of Easter or questions about Mary worship, you’ll find memes and webpages of varying quality that earnestly recycle Hislop’s claims as though they are gospel.

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Blind Spot: A Tale of Two Babylons

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