The doctrine of salvation by crucifixion had, like many of the ancient forms of religious faith, an astronomical origin. The sun is hung on a cross or crucified when it passes through the equinoxes. People in northern climates were saved by the sun’s crucifixion when it crossed over the equatorial line into the season of spring, at the vernal equinox at Easter, and thereby gave out a saving heat and light to the world and stimulated the generative organs of animal and vegetable life. The sun that is crucified is the dark winter sun, lacking the warmth and brightness of the summer. It is resurrected as, or supplanted by, its twin, the bright warm fertilizing summer sun that continues on to ascend into heaven.

When the dark sun is the undesirable one that is crucified, it shows that the myth is appropriate to northern climates. The legend is read as the salvific death of the evil winter sun to resurrect the summer sun. This seems to have been the Persian new year ceremony when it was the wicked Haman who was crucified. The Persians coming from the north and settled on the cooler Iranian plateau will have had the northern view originally, but changed it when they adapted to hot Babylonian conditions, and changed their calendar, as historians know they did.

In the hot climates of the ancient near east, the summer sun is undesirable because it burns up the landscape, so the myth was read as the unjust death of the desirable winter sun having nourished the land, leaving the people forlorn until he came again in the autumn. The cool winter sun that had brought the rains, the bounteous sun, made the sacrifice, and his death was bewailed. He had done nothing but kindness, but still had to die at the hands of his cruel adversaries. In Ezekiel, the women outside the temple gates bewailed the death of Tammuz, suggesting the latter interpretation.

The date of Jesus’s resurrection is the position of the sun at the time of the vernal equinox when the priests could declare that the winter sun was dead—the day was now longer than the night. March 25th was considered the end of the sun’s passing through the vernal equinox. Christ is plainly the loved sun god not the hated one, so he is the dark winter sun of the ancient near east, like Krishna, and is depicted as dark skinned in some pictures. Moreover, the “black but comely” lover of the Song of Songs was said to mean Jesus.

At a later part of the year the autumn equinox sees the bright summer sun transform into the dark winter sun. The ancients in the near east must once have celebrated the death of the blazing summer sun and the arrival of the stormy sun at the autumn equinox, when they carved or painted sexual organs on the walls of their holy temples with fertilization in mind. This was certainly the case with the temple at Jerusalem, the symbolism of which is purely sexual, the temple being the womb of the land, fertilized by Yehouah at the autumn equinox when its rays shone directly into the holy of holies from the Mount of Olives.