Title: Zeitgeist - The Movie
Release: 2007
Genre: Documentary
Run Time: 116 Minutes
Author: Peter Joseph
URL: http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/ (watch online)
After an excessively long introduction, Zeitgeist launches into a dissection of religion (titled “The Greatest Story Ever Told”), and by religion the film-makers mean Christianity.
A brief summary of astrology gives way to a comparison of earlier Middle-Eastern mythologies to the mythology which predated all of them. Indeed there are many coincidences to between the Egyptian Sun God Horus and the central figures of later faiths:
Horus was born December 25th to the virgin Isis
He was adorned by three “kings” who followed an eastern star
He was deemed a prodigy at 12 and was baptized at the Age of 30
He traveled with 12 disciples and traveled around performing miracles like healing the sick and walking on water
His alternate names included “Lamb of God”, “The truth, the light”
He was betrayed, crucified, buried from the dead and rose three days later
Anyone who paid attention during Sunday school or at least made an effort to read a bible (a group encompassing fewer Christians that one would think) should be a bit uneasy, as the Story of Jesus Christ is nearly identical – only the names differ.
Strangely (or perhaps not) the same general sequence of events can be found many other mythologies across the world. The film then attempts to link common attributes of these stories to astrological symbolism and does a fairly convincing job of it.
None of this information (or at least the discussion of its legitimacy) should be new to armchair theologians, but it was not initially clear why Christianity was singled out above all others for astrological plagiarism – it was not the first, last or worst offender among the emerging faiths. Eventually, the answer is provided – the Romans apparently invented the myth of Jesus Christ solely to exercise social and economic control over Europe.
Never mind Karl Marx’s Opiate of the Masses attack – the Zeitgeist narrator directly refers to Christianity and similar faiths as “the fraud of the age”.
Alas, Zeitgeist is a film about conspiracy theories – an emphatic diatribe of how small groups of shadowy figures conspire to control the masses.
DVD only