Soundings from the Rubbish Stream: The Hindu God Indra a Virgin-Born, Crucified Savior? You're Kidding Right?

The Rubbish Stream: A wide flowing river of nonsense about comparative religion based in misunderstandings and wrong ideas Europeans had in the 18th century, before the texts and even the langages needed to understand other people's religions were available or understood. Eventually languages were learned, texts studied and old misunderstandings jettisoned and replaced with right ones, except in certain circles that just kept uncriticaly reasserting the old, long debunked misunderstandings, year after year, decade after decade, century after century.  In this post we trace the origins of something dragged up from the rubbish stream and repeated by Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong.

Indra, the great Vedic King of the Gods and Rain God, a virgin born-crucified savior? You're kidding right?  Not apparently Episcopal Bishop John Shelby in his book Born of Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), where we read that "Indra was born of a virgin in Tibet in the eighth century B.C.E. He also was said to have ascended into heaven" (p. 56). Where did the bishop come up with that idea?  Well, he copied it from a phony list of alleged crucified and virgin-born saviors that had been captivating and fooling the gullible for a very, very long time.  We'll talk more about that in a minute.

But what about Indra in particular? Where did the claim that he was a virgin-born crucified savior come from? The answer is quite straightforward, it came from a centuries-old wrong guess that later got added to the phony list I was talking about and has just kept on being uncritically repeated along with the other phony stuff on the list.  It happened in three steps.

(1) It started with the speculation of a real eighteenth-century European scholar, Augostino Antonio Georgi, who was trying to begin to make sense of one of the religions of the East, but without very much context to go by, since at the time the texts and languages of those religions were not available to nor understood by Westerners.

(2) This eighteenth-century speculation was corrected and abandoned by scholars as more and more texts became available and as Western scholars began to learn the original languages needed in order to read the texts of the Eastern religions and to correctly interpret their iconography.  In the meantime sensationalistic and relatively unlearned anti-Christian apologists, unfamiliar with this ongoing scholarly development, endlessly repeated earlier speculations that had already been corrected and abandoned by real scholars with an authentic familiarity with Eastern religions. 

(3) This same long-abandoned speculation about Indra was mindlessly repeated along with other long-debunked notions and passed along through the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries by sensationalistic writers who in the main were simply plagiarizing one another, as Bishop Spong does in this case. 

What I have described is basically the process by which the entire phony list of virgin born crucified saviors came into existence, but our interest here, as I have already said, is in the extraordinary claim about the Hindu God Indra.  I turn now to give a brief account of the story of Spong's source.

Somewhere in the background of Spong's remarkable claim is a later nineteenth-century book by Kersey Graves, entitled The World’s Sixteen Crucified Savior, Or, Christianity before Christ (4th ed., Boston, MA: Colby & Rich, 1876). Here is what Graves says on pages 112-13: 

XI.—CRUCIFIXION OF INDRA OF TIBET, 725 B.C.

The account of the crucifixion of the God and Savior Indra may be found in Georgius, Thibetinum Alphabetum, p. 230. A brief notice of the case is all we have space for here. In the work just referred to may be found plates representing this Tibetan Savior as having been nailed to the cross. There are five wounds, representing the nail-holes and the piercing of the side. The antiquity of the story is beyond dispute. 

Notice that Graves gives as his source for this story Georgius, Thibetinum Alphabetum, p. 230 (actually p. 203). Now there is no reason to suppose that Graves had actually read this Gregorius, nor even knew who he was.  His general practice as an author was to sloppy-copy claims out of earlier writers whether he really understood them or not, in other words, in much the same way as Spong has copied the statement about Indra here..  

The connection of Spong's statement with Graves's can be seen in both the identification of Indra with Tibet, and the placing of Indra in the eighth century B.C.E., both of which you simply would not say if you knew who the Hindu or Vedic deity Indra really was.  Indra’s role as chief deity of the Vedas, which date from long before the eighth-century B.C.E., is quite enough in itself to discredit Spong's claim. Still how it came about that Spong focused on the supposed virgin birth of Indra while Graves featured instead his crucifixion remains a mystery.

If Kersey Graves hadn't read Georgius himself, where did he come up with the claim about Indra?  The most likely source would have been Godfrey Higgins (1773-1833) in his massive Anacalypsis: An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil of Saitic Isis; Or, An Inquiry into the Origin of Languages, Nations, and Religions (vol. 2, London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, 1836).  A friendly reviewer commented of Higgins’s Anacalypsis: “Never was there more wildness of speculation than in this attempt to lift the veil of Isis” (see “Godfrey Higgins,” in A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors [Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott,1874]). 

On page 314 of the first volume of the Anacalypsis we read this passage, which we note is very similar to Graves's:

The celebrated Monk Georgius, in his Tibetinum Aphabetum. p. 203, has given plates…of the God Indra nailed to a cross, with five wounds.  These crosses are to be seen in Nepaul, especially at the corners of roads and on eminences.  

So who is this Georgius cited as source for this story?  He is, as we said, Augostino Antonio Georgi, a member of the Augustinian order who published his Alphabetum Tibetanum in 1762 (notice it isn’t "Tibetinum" as both Higgins and Graves misspell it).

And here is the page referred to by Graves and Higgins, the ultimate source of Spong's claim.  

Georgi never visited Tibet himself, but relied on the reports of missionaries in compiling his work. It nevertheless represented an important milestone in the infancy of Western attempts to understand the religion of Tibet.  By the nineteenth century scholars, well aware of the value of the work, were also cognizant its limitations.  We see this, for example, in the discussion of the work that appeared in the 1848 Calcutta Review and that relates directly on the matter at hand: 

Georgi’s Alphabetum Tibetanum, compiled from the MSS. of Tibetan Missionaries, gives much valuable information respecting the religion, language and geography of Tibet; tho’ he thought that Tibetan Budhism was Manichaism, that Sakya born of a Virgin was Christ, and that Indra extended on a cross was a type of Christ. ("The Portuguese in North India," Calcutta Review 5.10 [1846]: 275).

What is being said there is that although Georgi’s work was important for its time, it fell into error by interpreting Tibetan Buddhism not on its own terms but through the lens of Christianity, so that Buddhism was understood by Georgi largely as a corruption of Christianity (In other words Georgi was arguing the reverse of what Graves had attributed to him). The examples the above passage gives as Georgi’s errors are as follows: 

(1) That Tibetan Buddhism was a form of the old dualistic Christian heresy Manichaeism (to which the fourth-century Christian Father Augustine of Hippo had once belonged).

(II) That the story of the Buddha (Sakya) born of a Virgin was a corrupted version of the story of Jesus.  Actually the Buddha predated Jesus and was not born of a Virgin (See here).

(III) That Indra had been crucified, which had been based on a misunderstanding. There is simply nothing like that in the mythology of Indra.

Indra has parents, his father Tvastr(?) and mother Aditi, or simply heaven and earth.  There is a passage in the Rig Veda (Book 4, Hymn 18.2) which some take to refer to Indra’s being born, like the Buddha, from his mother’s side.  But others do not accept that reading (On the latter see, W. Norman Brown, “Indra’s Infancy according to Rg Veda 4.18,” (1950) in India and Indology, Select Articles (ed. Rosane Rocher; American Institute of Indian Studies; Delhi: Motilal: Banarsidass, 1978), 37-38.   The passage in any case is obcure.