DUPUIS, CHARLES-FRANÇOIS. - French scholar and politician, b. at Trie-Château (Oise) on 16 Oct. 1742, d. at Is-sur-Tille (Côte d'Or) on 29 Sept. 1809. Professor of Latin eloquence at the Collège de France (1787), the following year he became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions. He was a deputy to the Convention; in 1802 he retired to private life in Burgundy, devoting himself entirely to his studies.
Of his works based on learned astronomy, special mention should be made of: L'origine de tous les cultes ou la religion universelle (3 vols., Paris 1794), in which he explains all mythology with the key of astralism and turns the great figures of the ancient religions — Osiris, Bacchus, Mithra — into personifications of the sun, in the manner of the solar theology in vogue at the end of paganism. The Founder of Christianity himself does not escape the rule: indeed he was born in December, at the winter solstice, in a cave like Mithra, he rose again at the spring equinox, in the zodiacal sign of Aries (the Lamb of the Apocalypse) he had in his following twelve Apostles, as many as the signs of the Zodiac. These superficial, naive and at times grotesque comparisons provoked copious confutations. 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, Die Christus Mythe (1910), who associated with it 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, discards astral mythology, insisting rather on the Jewish tradition of messianic orientation.