A Christmas Mystery: Hancock, Bauval, and the "Three Kings of Orion"

​An interesting little Christmas mystery, inspired by a recent post Graham Hancock made on social media praising his “great friend” Robert Bauval and his Orion Correlation Theory from the 1990s. Back in 1997, when Hancock and Bauval teamed up for The Message of the Sphinx (a.k.a. Keeper of Genesis), the two authors presented a variant version of the Christmas carol “We three kings” that replaced “Orient” with “Orion,” rendering the first line as “We three kings of Orion are.” They provided no source, and for a long time I wondered if they had just made it up. 

​It turns out that there was a nineteenth century strain of astronomical/astrological speculation that actually did rewrite the carol. For instance, The Bizarre: Notes and Queries for January 1888 contained a question from a man named Andrew Smith about this: “In the constellation Orion are three stare generally known as the ‘Belt of Orion’; also known by the name of the Three Kings. What three kings are alluded to?” The February 1888 edition has a paragraph answering. Here is the relevant part:

THE “THREE KINGS” OF ORION (Vol. V., p 16). The kings referred to are generally believed to be the “three shepherd-kings” who are said to have followed the Star of Bethlehem at the Nativity of Jesus the Christ. Their names are given as Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar; while the names of the three star kings are Alnitak, Anilam, and Mintaka. These three stars always point to the Pleiades or Seven Stars on one side, and to Sirius or the Dog Star on the other side In Job these stars are called the Bands of Orion (XXXVIII, 31); the ancient husbandmen called them Jacob’s Rod and sometimes the Rake. 

​Charles Hutton’s Mathematical and Philosophical Dictionary from 1796 mentions that the stars are sometimes “the Three Kings,” so it must have been known since the eighteenth century at least. A literature review finds reference to the three belt stars of Orion as the “Three Kings” was a minority view among the English and Americans, except among Freemasons, who seems to have borrowed it from Continental literature. The term appears, almost always as an alternative name for the belt rather than a primary one, from the middle 1700s to the early 1900s, but references to Orion’s belt as the “Three Kings” largely drop out of English literature after World War I.
 
But if the name is a minority view in English prose, it was, an old book assures me, a popular name for the belt stars in France, or at least was in the early eighteenth century, when Joshua Kelly’s Modern Navigator’s Compleat Tutor was published. Another volume, from the early nineteenth century, says the Dutch also called the stars the “Three Kings.”
 
Some writers who sought to turn the myth of Horus into a prototype of the Christ (usually to claim him as a plagiarized myth) also followed this line, such as the spiritualist Samuel Fales Dunlap, who wrote about Horus’s birth this way:

When the birthplace was in the sign of the Bull, the Star in the East that arose to announce the birth of the babe was Orion, which is therefore called the star of Horus. That was once, says Massey, the star of the Three Kings, for this is still the name of the three stars in Orion's belt; and in the hieroglyphics a three-looped string is a symbol of the Sahu, that is, the constellation Orion. Orion was the star of the Three Kings which rose to show the time and place of birth in heaven some 6,000 years ago, when the vernal equinox was in the sign of the Bull.

​If this seems familiar, it’s because Dunlap was one of the main sources Helena Blavatsky plagiarized.
 
I won’t belabor the point. In 2000’s The Secret Chamber, Robert Bauval revealed the source of his Christmas carol variation, Alvin Boyd Kuhn, a Theosophist and proponent of the Christ Myth hypothesis. Although Bauval declines to identify the specific source, it was Who Is This King of Glory? A Critical Study of the Christos-Messiah Tradition (1944), in which Kuhn admits that he simply made it up:

Who shall say that the term or title, Three Kings of Orient, as the Christmas hymn phrases it, is not some early zealous and jealous scribe’s work of shunting out of sight a bit of too evident and open pagan astrological symbolism from the Christian material? For from of old the Three Kings were the three conspicuous stars in the belt of Orion, the mighty Hunter, that so easily distinguish this notable constellation, making it next in prominence in all the heavens to the Great Bear itself. And their title was for long centuries the Three Kings of Orion. The three King-Stars in Orion, himself the personification of the Horus or Christos power, rise in the east on Christmas Eve and ascend to the mid-heavens on the celestial equator.

​When Kuhn repeats the claim at the end of the book, he inserts “Orion” for “Orient,” but it is obvious it is his own interpolation, one which Hancock and Bauval accepted without question. For what it’s worth, the Christmas carol was written by John Henry Hopkins, Jr. in 1857. There is no ancient scribe substituting “Orient” for “Orion” in the song, nor before the song either, since “Orient” was Hopkins’ choice to make “East” fit the rhythm. While occasionally used before him, it was a rare phrasing.