From: The Pagan origins of Ash Wednesday & Lent by Peter Salemi

This ritual of Ash Wednesday and Lent has solidified its place in the Catholic Church and many of the protestant daughters of the Catholic Church like the Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, some Baptists, etc.…This Apostate Church committed fornication with the pagan gods of the people-spiritual adultery. She took up pagan practices and made them her own calling it “Christian.” Incorporated them into her system of religious worship; but are really the Babylonian Mystery Religion and not the religion of Christianity.

In his book The Two Babylon’s, Alexander Hislop discovered this about Lent: “Whence, then, came this observance?  The forty days abstinence of Lent was directly borrowed from the worshippers of the Babylonian goddess [Ishtar who became eventually Easter the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring]…Such a Lent of forty days was observed in Egypt… This Egyptian Lent of forty days, we are informed by Landseer, in his Sabean Researches, was held expressly in commemoration of Adonis [Nimrod or Tammuz] or Osiris, the great mediatorial god….Among the Pagans this Lent seems to have been an indispensable preliminary to the great annual festival in commemoration of the death and resurrection of Tammuz, which was celebrated by alternate weeping and rejoicing, and which, in many countries, was considerably later than the Christian festival, being observed in Palestine and Assyria in June, therefore called the ‘month of Tammuz;’ in Egypt, about the middle of May, and in Britain, sometime in April. To conciliate the Pagans to nominal Christianity, Rome, pursuing its usual policy, took measures to get the Christian and Pagan festivals amalgamated, and, by a complicated but skilful adjustment of the calendar, it was found no difficult matter, in general, to get Paganism and Christianity now far sunk in idolatry in this as in so many other things, to shake hands….” (pp.104-105, emphasis added).

“Christianity DID NOT destroy paganism- it ADOPTED IT.” ~ Will Durant