DUPUIS, CHARLES-FRANÇOIS. – French scholar and politician, born at Trie-Château (Oise) on 16 October 1742, died at Is-sur-Tille (Côte d’Or) on 29 September 1809. Professor of Latin eloquence at the Collège de France (1787), the following year he joined the Académie des Inscriptions. He was a deputy to the Convention; in 1802 he withdrew into private life in Burgundy, devoting himself entirely to his studies.
Among his works based on learned astronomy, the following deserves particular mention: L'origine de tous les cultes ou la religion universelle (3 vols., Paris 1794), in which he explains all mythology through the key of astralism and makes the great figures of the ancient religions—Osiris, Bacchus, Mithra—personifications of the sun, in the manner of the solar theology in vogue at the end of paganism. The very Founder of Christianity does not escape the rule: in fact, he was born in December, at the winter solstice, inside a cave like Mithra; he rose again at the spring equinox; in the zodiacal sign of Aries (the Lamb of the Apocalypse), he had twelve Apostles in his following, as many as the signs of the Zodiac. These superficial, naïve, and at times grotesque comparisons provoked abundant refutations. The work is on the Index (decree of 27 July 1818).
More than a century later, the astral myth applied to Jesus was taken up again by H. Drews, a monist philosopher, in Die Christus Mythe (1910), which he associated with the apocalyptic speculations of pre-Christian Judaism of Gnostic inspiration, provoking the reaction of all historians of Christian origins. P. L. Couchoud, Le mystère de Jésus (1924), who likewise denies the historical existence of Jesus, rejects astral mythology, insisting instead on the Jewish tradition of a messianic orientation.