Another precursor to Christmas was the birth of Mithra, the god of light of Persian extraction. Like Christians, the followers of Mithra believed their god was conceived without sex and born in late December. (Although this conception involved coming out of a rock.) Other virgin birth stories have been part of belief systems on every continent, from the Aztec earth mother goddess Coatlicue (who conceived her son Huitzilopochtli, a war god, when a ball of feathers fell from heaven) to the Yellow Emperor of China (whose mother supposedly got pregnant when she was exposed to a lightning bolt from
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