Gill Harley
10 April 2006, 09:05 AM
Is Agnus Dei derived from Agni Deva?
You may have heard of Agnus Dei. It is part of the Christian Catholic mass and it commemorates the Lamb of God (Agnus = Latin for Lamb, Dei = God) who sacrificed himself to redeem the sins of the world.
The Christians got the idea of the “sacrificial lamb” from the Jews, who sacrifice a lamb every Passover to commemorate their exodus from slavery in Egypt. The time of Passover coincides with the vernal equinox, when the Canaanities, (who the Jews transplanted in Palestine) would have been holding fire sacrifices.
Jesus said that he would be sacrificial lamb and that therefore, from then on, no actual lambs should be slaughtered. It is one of the big bones of contentions between the Jews and the Christians.
But if we look in the Online Etymological Dictionary http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=fire&searchmode=none (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=fire&searchmode=none)
for the source of the word ‘fire’, we read this:
…PIE apparently had two roots for fire: *paewr- and *egni- (cf. L. ignis). The former was "inanimate," referring to fire as a substance, and the latter was "animate," referring to it as a living force (see water (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=water)). Fire applied in Eng. to passions, feelings, from c.1340.
The Greek for ‘fire’ is ‘igneous’….
PIE is Proto Indo European, the proto language that is imagined to be the root of Greek, Sanskrit and Latin, to name but a few. My view, however, is that that all these languages came from Sanskrit.
So I think that the Greeks got their word for ‘animate’ fire (igneous) from the Rig-Vedic Agni, and the Jews changed this into a lamb, an animal, to separate themselves from the ‘pagan’ Canaanites.( It wouldn’t be the first time a conquering peoples transplanted their own gods or ideas on existing religious festivals. It also happened here in England with the Romans.)
This would mean that the Agnus Dei of the Christian Catholic mass is really Agni Deva in disguise!
You may have heard of Agnus Dei. It is part of the Christian Catholic mass and it commemorates the Lamb of God (Agnus = Latin for Lamb, Dei = God) who sacrificed himself to redeem the sins of the world.
The Christians got the idea of the “sacrificial lamb” from the Jews, who sacrifice a lamb every Passover to commemorate their exodus from slavery in Egypt. The time of Passover coincides with the vernal equinox, when the Canaanities, (who the Jews transplanted in Palestine) would have been holding fire sacrifices.
Jesus said that he would be sacrificial lamb and that therefore, from then on, no actual lambs should be slaughtered. It is one of the big bones of contentions between the Jews and the Christians.
But if we look in the Online Etymological Dictionary http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=fire&searchmode=none (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=fire&searchmode=none)
for the source of the word ‘fire’, we read this:
…PIE apparently had two roots for fire: *paewr- and *egni- (cf. L. ignis). The former was "inanimate," referring to fire as a substance, and the latter was "animate," referring to it as a living force (see water (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=water)). Fire applied in Eng. to passions, feelings, from c.1340.
The Greek for ‘fire’ is ‘igneous’….
PIE is Proto Indo European, the proto language that is imagined to be the root of Greek, Sanskrit and Latin, to name but a few. My view, however, is that that all these languages came from Sanskrit.
So I think that the Greeks got their word for ‘animate’ fire (igneous) from the Rig-Vedic Agni, and the Jews changed this into a lamb, an animal, to separate themselves from the ‘pagan’ Canaanites.( It wouldn’t be the first time a conquering peoples transplanted their own gods or ideas on existing religious festivals. It also happened here in England with the Romans.)
This would mean that the Agnus Dei of the Christian Catholic mass is really Agni Deva in disguise!