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Three centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Christ’s followers had multiplied exponentially. Christians and pagans began warring, and the conflict grew to such proportions that it threatened to rend Rome in two. In Constantine’s day, Rome’s official religion was sun worship – the cult of Sol Invictus, or the Invincible Sun – and Constantine was its head priest. Unfortunately for him, a growing religious turmoil was gripping Rome. Constantine decided something had to be done. In 325 AD, he decided to unify Rome under a single religion. Christianity. Historians still marvel at the brilliance with which Constantine converted the sun-worshipping pagans to Christianity.

The New Bible

To rewrite the history books, Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion – Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John among them. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned. Any gospels that described earthly aspects of Jesus’ life were omitted from the Bible.

As part of the Vatican’s campaign to eradicate pagan religions and convert the masses to Christianity, the Church launched a smear campaign against the pagan gods and goddesses, recasting their divine symbols as evil. The newly emerging power took over the existing symbols and degraded them over time in an attempt to erase their meaning. In the battle between the pagan symbols and Christian symbols, the pagans lost; Poseidon’s trident became the devil’s pitchfork, the wise crone’s pointed hat became the symbol of a witch, and Venus’s pentacle became a sign of the devil. The symbolism of the pentacle has been distorted over the millennia through bloodshed.

Nothing in Christianity is original. By fusing pagan symbols, dates, and rituals into the growing Christian tradition, he created a kind of hybrid religion that was acceptable to both parties. The pre-Christian God Mithras – called the Son of God and the Light of the World – was born on December 25, died, and buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days. December 25 is also the birthday of Osiris, Adonis, and Dionysus. The newborn Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Even Christianity’s weekly holy day was stolen from the pagans. Originally Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the sun – Sunday.

Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Catholic saints. Pictograms of Isis nursing her miraculously conceived son Horus became the blueprint for our modern images of the Virgin Mary nursing Baby Jesus. And virtually all the elements of the Catholic ritual – the miter, the altar, the doxology, and communion, the act of “God-eating” – were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions.

So strong was the Church’s fear of those who lived in the rural villes that the once innocuous word for “villager” – villain – came to mean a wicked soul. The term pagan became synonymous with devil worship – a gross misconception.

Catholic Clergy Demonize Women

The Vatican tried to bury the secret in the fourth century. Magdalene was recast as whore in order to erase evidence of her powerful family ties. Magdalene was no prostitute. That misconception is the legacy of a smear campaign launched by the early Church. That’s part of what the Crusades were about, gathering and destroying information. The threat Mary Magdalene posed to the men of the early Church was potentially ruinous. Not only was she the woman to whom Jesus had assigned the task of founding the Church, but she also had physical proof that the Church’s newly proclaimed deity had spawned a mortal bloodline. The Church perpetuated her image as a whore and buried evidence of Christ’s marriage to her, thereby defusing any potential claims that Christ had a surviving bloodline and was a mortal prophet.

For the early Church, mankind’s use of sex to commune directly with God posed a serious threat to the Catholic power base. It left the Church out of the loop, undermining their self-proclaimed status as the sole conduit to God. For obvious reasons, they worked hard to demonize sex and recast it as a disgusting and sinful act.

The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history. Mallleus Maleficarum – or The Witche’s Hammer – indoctrinated the world to “the dangers of freethinking women’ and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture, and destroy them. Those deemed “witches” by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women “suspiciously attuned to the natural world.” Midwives also were killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth – a suffering, the Church claimed, that was God’s rightful punishment for Eve’s partaking of the Apple of Knowledge, thus giving birth to the idea of Original Sin. During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women.

Women, once celebrated as an essential half of spiritual enlightenment, have been banished from the temples of the world. There are no female Orthodox rabbis, Catholic priests, nor Islamic clerics. Holy men who had once required sexual union with their female counterparts to commune with God have feared their natural sexual urges as the work of the devil, collaborating with his favorite accomplice … woman.

Not even the feminine association with the left-hand side could escape the Church’s defamation. In France and Italy, the words for “left” gauche and sinistra – came to have deeply negative overtones, while their right-hand counterparts rang of righteousness, dexterity, and correctness. To this day, radical thought was considered left wing; irrational thought was left brain, and anything evil, sinister.