16/11/2025
Did you know that Egyptian baptism was meant to prepare the recipient to enter into the presence of the god or …to prepare the recipient to receive the god within him? Thus, through baptism, one was “reborn” or made god-like, or made worthy of union with the god.
Most Christians generally believe that baptism is necessary to purify the recipient from sin. Still, Jesus, who himself was supposedly without sin, insisted on visiting John the Baptist before he could begin his ministry. The Gospel of Matthew 3:16 relates:
And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him.
So again we see that baptism is used to prepare the candidate for the reception of divinity, and this story of Matthew is quite possibly a reference to earlier Egyptian rites in order to show his contemporaries that Jesus was truly a manifestation of god, as were the Pharaohs.
The early Christian writer Cyril of Jerusalem makes this concept of rebirth into godhood plain in his Catechetical Lecture 20 (On the Mysteries Of Baptism):
4. After these things, you were led to the holy pool of Divine Baptism, as Christ was carried from the Cross to the Sepulchre which is before our eyes. …And at the same moment, you were both dying and being born; and that Water of salvation was at once your grave and your mother.
6. Let no one then suppose that Baptism is merely the grace of remission of sins …we know full well, that as it purges our sins, and ministers to us the gift of the Holy Ghost, so also it is the counterpart of the sufferings of Christ.
In other words, baptism in the Christian tradition is both a purification and a symbolic re-enactment of the mysteries of death & rebirth to allow the divine to enter into the candidate, just as it was to the Egyptians.
This rite of baptism was so important that early Christians would baptise new members in local springs and streams, frequently those which may have been previously considered sacred springs by pagan worshippers; but as churches became larger and more stable this custom was replaced by the construction of baptismal fonts – from the Latin word fons (fontis) meaning a fountain. It should thus be remembered that a font is symbolically a spring or fountain within the church, i.e., living flowing water, not static water – hence why it is normally a fixed pedestal, whence the sacred spring flows forth. (TW)
