Abstract

Religious Origins 4

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999; Thursday, 7 August 2008

What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from men’s imagination.

Joseph Campbell, The Way of the Myth

Totem Society

When a stage of totemism is arrived at, and a clan adopts the leopard as its totem, they call themseves the leopard people, and it does not seem strange that they should have something of the leopard about them. If they imagine themselves as leopards, we think they are mad, or maybe believe something supernatural is happening—somehow they are changing into leopards, as if they were wereleopards. It is mysterious to us, but to them it is natural. They have a concept of the natural that allows people to become leopards in a sense that they understand, though we do not. They have a metaphorical concept of the mysterious that we have lost because we no longer need it. That is the basis of their mythopoetic thinking that to us confuses reality and the supernatural, but it is actually our metaphorical way of thinking at an earlier stage when metaphors were more transparent than they are now—what we call poetic.

Social groups developed their habits which became customs, traditions, and some became rituals, and myths were invented to explain them. Their original custom of frolicking on fixed occasions in a prescribed area, a sacred space, became a more serious ritual, and, when the myths introduced a sacred spirit responsible for the security of the tribe, these—originally purely social occasions—turned into religion, but worshipping the power of the totem or the tribal god still affirmed tribal cohesion and loyalty. The social power of ritual became like a physical force, and ritual power turned to magical power in the myths, and to miracles in the received religions.

What is sacred is a matter to do with the basic identity of the tribe—what distinguishes them. People who were admitted to the sacred places, objects and events were accepted as being in the community. They were allowed to congregate with the rest of the tribe, and so were in the congregation—in the church! Sacred things were those that concerned the welfare of the people of that particular tribe, and no one else. Profane matters were particular and personal ones.

The division into sacred and profane differs from that of good and evil, though the axes were not precisely orthogonal. Thus an apotropeic goat was a sacred animal because it belonged only to the tribe, but it carried off their sins. Any profane contact would stop it from being sacred and would spoil its efficacy. Many profane things were good things, and many others were bad. One poisonous snake might have been the tribal totem, and so was sacred, while another equally poisonous one was a profane animal. Neither were good, if you came across them in your daily gathering, but the profane creature you could kill to protect yourself, while the sacred one you had to show respect towards by greeting it humbly, then retreating from it slowly like a vassal leaving the presence of a capricious monarch.

A tribe, in primitive times, was made up of several clans or family groups each of which usually lived communally in one large hut. Each of the clans had a totem, most commonly an animal with which they were associated, though it could be a plant and occasionally something else. The word “totem” is from the Algonquin Indian “ote”, the possessive case being “otem”, and the initial “t” apparently being from a preceding emphatic possessive pronoun, “to” or “do”. “Ote” means “mark” or “sign”, so “totem” means “our” “mark” or “sign”. It was the sign by which the family or clan denoted itself, the sign of “cosa nostra”, the surname, or the coat of arms, as it became in medieval Europe. The primeval tribe was only a few people, not more than a few hundred, so each did not have many clans in it, perhaps three to ten. When the tribe gathered on its communal occasions, the ritual games were between the different families, each denoting their champion by their totem. But the most important use of totemism was in the vital principle of exogamic marriage whereby people married outside their own clan, considered an early appreciation of the problems of close inbreeding.

The totem animal was always sacred to the clan that bore it as its mark, so it was taboo to kill and eat it, except eventually on particular occasions, sacred occasions! The totem object could not be touched except ceremonially. On the prescribed ritual occasions, often an intiation, tha animal could be eaten or a brew made of it drunk, and through it the power of the totem creature was ritually transfered to the person. Only the tribe or clan could participate in these rituals and it was highly offensive if others were to interfere in, or even view the proceedings, except as an honoured guest.

Several scholars (Durkheim, Freud) considered totemism to be the origin of religion in primitive societies. But C Levi-Strauss (Totemism, 1962) thought otherwise, and so is a favourite of all of those who still believe religion is supernatural. Of course, Levi-Strauss is right that, originally, it did have nothing to do with religion. But studies of the totemism of the Australian Aboriginals shows an intermediate stage between being simply a social identifier and a religion. So Levi-Strauss’s objections are invalid.

Culture and Dancing in Circles

A society can neither create nor recreate itself without at the same time creating an ideal.

E Durkheim

Religious emotions arise in the communal ceremonies of initiation and passage of the tribe. These rituals bond people to the totem, culture and god—to the tribe. The word “culture” is from the same root as cult, the postulated Indo-European root “quel”[†]Indo-European root. The root words of the ancient Indo-European language are not known from written sources, because they preceded writing. So the roots are worked out by scholars from the languages that came out of the original one like Sanskrit, Latin and German. Now this root word meant “to move around” or “to turn” from which we get the word cycle and circle and wheel, and its derivatives headed into two main directions, to worship (cult, culture, and kirk, church, though Christians deny it) and to occupy land (colony, cultivate, agriculture), both with the subsidiary meaning of “to attend to”—attending to the god, and attending to the land.

It seems likely that the earliest ritual of primeval Indo-Europeans, if no one else, was to turn around in a sacred space, and it is easy to imagine that emerging human beings could have had a sort of hokey cokey game in which they held on to each other and went around in circles. It is also easy to see that as soon as a totem or fetish had been set up, the game would be one of circling the pole. Curiously, the word “pole” comes from the same Indo-European root, “quel”!

Dancing round a pole or tree always was popular, and remains a popular habit still—the maypole being the obvious example, but much country and traditional dancing is in circles. The earliest permanent monuments were circles of poles and then stones. Worshippers were probably meant to walk or dance around them. Pilgrims to Mecca still march en masse several times around the Kaaba, and witches were supposed to have been fond of dancing in circles.

Of course, no society is perfect, but the ideal society is what everyone craves. Society offers security, protection, comfort and companionship, but cannot indemnify against every contingency nor every injustice. Primitive people believed that the totemic energy was strengthened through their dancing in circles, their ecstatic whirling and wheeling, and their feeling of mutual unity and personal power it induced. Energies, passions and sensations are excited to the point of effervescence, then a transformation happens. This power was to become, once identified with a founding ancestor, a god, and the idealized society that the god represented became the kingdom of god. It was an ideal society but it was their society perfected. It was an earthly society but one to become perfect to match the ideal, and thus acting as a moral force itself. But as perfection is unattainable, so the ideal eventually was thought of as a spiritual place. In a similar way, in historic times, the actual city of Jerusalem has become a heavenly Jerusalem and a city of God.

The effervescence that excited people in communal play and dancing is, to their way of thinking, a manifestation of totemic power. Though it is a mental state it was considered a sacred power passed on to them. It was to become a power from a world beyond, from the ideal society, the heavenly Jerusalem where the good spirits lived, and it was easily personified as the spirit of the tribal ancestor, the tribal god himself awakening a new life in the body of the participant. The assembly and concentration of the tribe on this one activity exhilerated the mind in such a way as to feed the notion of a renewal or even a rebirth.

The sacred unifying activity is an act of recreation, a word that is very much still with us and showing the close relationship between religion and play. The games and contests that were held were rituals like the Greek agon. The circular dance unified the tribe in a sacred activity, and particular days, when taboos were emphasised or lifted, were set aside for it. Sacred days are holy days and became holidays. They were not given up to personal leisure but to communal celebration. In the ANE, the Babylonians, under Persian occupation, had a sacred day every seven days, and their conquerors, the Persians adopted the same habit, passing it on to the Jews when they founded the Jewish temple state of Yehud. That is why we have a holiday once a week. The measure of a week really came from the use of the quarters of the moon as a clock, the most accurate clock Nature provided, it being a week between quarters.

Few societies, by the archaic period of religious evolution, broadly the Bronze Age period, did not have a long annual festival in which their mythical creation was recreated in religious renewal and in social celebration. In ancient Babylon it took a full week, six days of activity and one of rest. The explanatory myth was that god took one week to create the world, resting on the seventh day, so that society could celebrate his work for six days of feasting, followed by a necessary day of rest. The festival was recreational in both senses, the six days of celebration being followed by the day of rest, then the festival resuming for another five days which included the hieros gamos, as the Greeks called it, the holy wedding that would ensure the fertility of fields and animals.

The “kingdom of god” or idealized society of primitive tribes was their tribal self image, and the force of tribal morality. So the ideal of society, though imaginary, was real in its moral force. Trying to achieve the ideal was a question of tribal honor, and flouting it was to invite tribal justice. Culture was all that was needed for the tribe to impress its ideal on to any putative member. The very idea of an ideal came from the tribes notions of it passed on to its youth. It happens as part and parcel of being brought up in the tribe. So it is that collective ideals and beliefs emerge in individuals as if they were their own original conceptions. That type of gestalt realization is itself considered religious, but also is how thinking progresses:

The sacred is to be treated with a certain specific attitude of respect, which Durkheim identified with the appropriate attitude towards moral obligations and authority.

Talcott Parsons

What goes up can come down, and society could get worse as well as better. There was a flip side to the coin of the ideal society, of utopia. It is dystopia, a wicked and corrupt society. The realization that things had opposites is another distinction made in the primitive mind, as Levi-Strauss has shown, so the idea of wicked gods arose too, the spirits of evil people, those who did not have the society at their hearts, were greedy, crooks or rebels, and would take society downwards towards dystopia. Society had not progressed too far before its citizens appreciated that good is opposed by bad, and that neglect of the proper rites could send society towards a kingdom of the devil.

Culture

Once the idea of gods had arrived, they had to be served by the people hoping for their favour. The dependence of man and god is reciprocal, just as society depends on its members and the members on society. “Cult” and “culture” both at first meant “attending to the god”, which involved the ritual of dancing in a circle round the cult object. Then culture changed to mean all the accoutrements for attending to the god. Interestingly, Americans now often use our word “culture” which originally meant “worship” (see Caxton’s Golden Legend, 1483), as a euphemism for “society”, the word “society” reminding them too much of “socialism” which they cannot abide. The primeval cult or culture was the set of customs and rituals that bonded the tribe together, evidently springing from the habit of dancing around the totem.

Talcott Parsons thinks culture controlled society, and society controlled the person. Yet the person is obviously primary, in that there can be no culture or society without people. Before people even became human, they were social animals, perhaps with a most rudimentary culture for advanced culture requires the full mental complexity of human beings. Culture must lie between society and the person, not above them both, implying that culture must have preceded society. Culture is the way that society and the person know each other and interact together, and in practice, Parsons treats culture as being between society and the person, not above them, and capable of being analyzed separately.

Culture is symbolic behaviour, the multifarious ways that members of a society are conditioned to behave and therefore recognize each other as being one of the group—words, gestures, arts, crafts, techniques, music, objects, myth, rituals, and so on. Clifford Geertz developed the idea into symbolic anthropology. The trouble with it is that the anthropologist might not know what a symbol means, and they might not be able to find out either, through the cultural barrier of language, or because the people being observed cannot themselves explain what a symbol means, or both and others! A ritual say, can be carefully described and compared with similar rituals elsewhere, but their meaning to the participants might differ, assuming that the anthropolgist can elicit their meanings, yet in history they had a common origin.

It is just this tying together historically of practises in different religions that makes scientific sense, but that the practitioners of the different religions resent deeply from their own convictions that their practices are somehow unique. Religious apologists call it reductionism, a word always meant to be in insult by those who use it. Scientists in any field have no need to worry that they are accused of being reductionist. Science is reductionist. It is the practice of taking something to pieces, so that the functioning parts can be identified. Science then proceeds to discover how something functions, and they can explain it, and often synthesise it. That is the opposite of reductionism, and it is the stage of science that science’s attackers ignore.

Christian apologists, for example, are fond of saying that their rituals like the eucharist are quite different from ritual meals in other religions. Of course, the ritual itself has evolved, as things do, but their argument is not that. It is that the eucharist means something different from the ritual meal of, say, a worshipper of Mithras. Historically, a religious meal is a common practice, but Christians want to believe their myth that the ritual was initiated by Christ at the Last Supper. It is the duty of the scientist to get behind the myths and find the common threads. The eucharist is a Christian version of a common ritual meal in ancient cultures. It has been given a new meaning in a myth probably invented by Paul, because Christ was expecting the end of the world and could have had no purpose in instituting a ritual. The bible explains that Paul gave the meal its meaning, and the words used to describe it, and this myth was then written into the life of Christ at a later date.

The greatest set of symbols any culture has are its verbal symbols—its language—and it plays the greatest part of all in transmitting meaning from generation to generation in the tribe. What the person gets as they grow in a society is an objective view of the world to compare, contrast and control their individual subjective view. Consequently, the singular view is always conditioned by the collective one they received from others in society as the grow up from infancy. To the individual it never feels anything other than the natural background to living—part of Nature.

There seems to be no other way of seeing the world other than the one they grow up with. Yet it is an external collective view, the social view of the tribe, the view those in the tribe want to pass off as objective. There is no such thing as an exclusively subjective view. Everyone is socialized, and they cannot be human without it. Every gathering of the community and every collective ritual continues to socialize them, to reinforce their socialization, throughout their lives. The tribe therefore has a collective unconscious, and much of it was generated by rituals described as religion by anthropologists, and which certainely evolved into religion.

What generates the tribal unconscious is acculturation, the reason why cult and culture began with the same meaning. As Durkheim pointed out, humans are not born with a religious instinct, whatever that might be, they are born with a social instinct. Acculturation was the means successful societies upheld the social instinct, and much of it consisted of communal ceremonial which developed into religion. If primitive socialization is to be considered religion, then primitive society was the original church. The church was the tribe, and its sacred place was a bounded off area, often circular because it was the place where evertyone moved or turned around—the cycle, circle, circuit, circus, ciric (Celtic), kirk, church!

Culture means something to those brought up in it, because myths are invented to answer the curiosity of the young as they grow up in any society, but a society’s practices were not necessarily devised for any particular purpose. Many grew as habits, and the perpetuation of a habit became the cultural norm, and indeed often became something that was necessary to prevent some terrible disaster. Primitive people have primitive ways of thinking, and it is often like that of modern children at a certain age. Children sometimes play games that can become obsessions, such as not treading on the joints in the paving slabs. The rituals of early civilizations seem to have been the same. People learnt to do certain things, carve wood, make a musical sound, signal to each other, and use certain sounds to each other. They became habitual and were taught to the young becoming an element of the culture.

The infant of a future generation asks, “Why must I do that?”. There is no valid reason. It is a habit, or at some stage maybe an imported custom, but someone will offer a tentative explanation which will circle around the tribe and eventually become elaborated into a myth. Dawkins, in a parallel with the gene of biology, coined the term “meme” for such verbal cultural elements, and obviously the original meme will have mutated as it spread, and become elaborated until it settled down in a form that the tribespeople liked, fitted their self image, and the rest of their culture. Then it would have stabilized and passed on from generation to generation barely changing at all. Why must Christians participate in the Holy Communion? The gospel myth explains it, but previous religions and contemporary ones, including Judaism, had a ritual meal, so Christianity adopted the same habit. Paul simply painted it in a different set of colours to distinguish it from the Jewish Passover.

Much pseudo-theological and theological speculation is simply the coining of new words to reiterate old ideas. Mircea Eliade and John Hick coin new words for a universal spirit that we all vaguely sense though not in a measurable way. This universal feeling, as it is at best, is, of course, divinity, God, Allah, the Great Spirit, and all the other manifestations of “the Sacred” for Eliade and “the Real” for Hick. Geertz reinvented culture as “historical patterns of meaning” that people experience through society, and no one notices that there is little new in it other than a certain inevitable personal subjectivity of observation.

Plato told us 2500 years ago that reality was imaginary and ideas were real, turning everything we experience on its head, and so it has remained ever since for those people who consider themselves religious believers. The embittered materialist takes all the magic out of life by asserting that reality is actually real, and ideas are, strange to say, imaginary!

Pierre Bourdieu reinvents culture again as “habitus”, and sociologists amaze themselves at their inventiveness. Habitus consists of principles which organize practices and representations. No doubt culture is a plastic enough a concept to allow it to take on different shapes when pressed at the edges, but nothing new is being discovered by such manipulation except a new symbol. Many humans, even sociologists, cannot distinguish the symbol from a common reality, it seems. At best, it offers a new perspective which might be beneficial.

Religion’s purpose always was social, even when it purported to offer explanations of natural things. Once science could do that much better, religion had no need to claim any explanatory purpose. It can be accepted as what it is—everyone’s bonding to the community of its members. Where the old rituals are considered inappropriate, new ones can be invented with a similar purpose. The Church “sacrament” of marriage is falling out of fashion, but civil unions, devoid of the supernatural content of marriage, are getting more popular, and do not have to be artificially restricted to people of opposite sex. It becomes what marriage was originally, a social contract.

Life long atheists have their lives celebrated after death with a secular ceremony not a memorial service before an imaginary god. People like ritual, even when they are not religious, as long as it makes sense to them, and serves an acceptable social function. The community indeed matters but now it is global, and that too needs to be recognized. Unfounded beliefs are disposable, and should be! Needless to say, the dominant cult today, just when a sensible one is desperately needed, is the cult of the irrational. Beliefs have been made sacrosanct when they should be binned.

The Primeval Theory of Spirits

E B Tylor was among the first anthropologists, and he thought that, to explain religion, the whole culture of any people had to be carefully studied, and he tried to do it, albeit mainly not in the field. Rather he concluded, as Eliade did later, that human beings everywhere had a lot in common, so parallels could be drawn from different cultures. In an imperialist age, it was fashionable to distinguish people as being fundamentally different—white races were superior to black, brown and yellow ones—but Tylor thought otherwise. They were remarkably alike.

Later it was to become fashionable to preserve the racialism and yet explain the similarities by “diffusion”—the superior races thought of the good ideas and the lesser ones then slowly took them on board, and the ideas diffused from the originating center. Now the diffusion theories are largely discarded. It is curious how human thought tends to concentrate on the poles of any idea. Here the poles are “diffusion”, and “independent invention”, but the truth is often somewhere between the two poles. Some ideas diffused but many others were separated invented in more than one place. It is reminiscent of Hegel’s theory of the way thought evolves, his dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

Tylor concluded that different cultures had invented similar ideas and had then presented them in their own way, conditioned by their own culture. The rate of emergence and subsequent development of the ideas varied according to circumstances and opportunities. It is the difference in the rate of emergence of ideas that casts some people as superior to others synchronically in history, but diachronically, the order varied greatly.

Then again, when something new emerged, not everyone adopted it as soon as they had the chance. Some rejected it. Habit is strong, and it sometimes takes a new generation to adopt a newly available practice. After a good many generations, Christians and Moslems seem determined to resist the adoption of science as a superior world view. But it is true even in science, though usually the delay is only by one generation. Just as an evolving city leaves behind traces of its old plans and buildings, so does social evolution leave behind vestiges of discarded beliefs.

A popular idea is to think the sun and moon, fire and storm first impressed the primitive imagination and begat a religious feeling. The sun and moon were conspicuous, and solitary in the sky, and striking in their daily movements across it, but they were not surprising and the emergent humans must have taken them for granted.

Tylor in Primitive Culture, 1871, proposed the idea of animism. Perhaps the earliest abstract thought was the idea of the soul as an invisible but nonetheless material aspect of the body. Tylor thought the idea of a personal soul, spirit or ghost was the first way primitive people explained causation. We imagine that early humans were practised thinkers because we are. Emergent people did not think in abstract ideas. Their thoughts were thoroughly tangible. In the taxonomy of learning, facts precede higher processes like analysis and synthesis, and we can assume fairly safely that the first human impressions would have been of obvious facts. The first people had not developed the mental sophistication to think about causes scientifically.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) assumed primitive people were rational but limited by their lack of knowledge. We have a cartoon image of an ape man looking at a flint and thinking, “What can I do with this? I think I’ll invent a hand axe.” They did not speculate on causes or movements because they could not. Speculation that the visible sun, storm or fire must have an invisible cause is not the immediate response of noticing their presence. A lot of thinking practice was needed first. But from observing the sun and moon, the clouds and stars, coming and going, they get an early idea of presence and absence—of duality. A person’s reflexion in water and their shadow were similarly present sometimes and absent others.

In their everyday lives, they noticed the shadow that sometimes accompanied them and decided that it was the animated self. A shadow is not an inference, but something which can be seen walking around with you. Their own shadows were always so near to them, so bizarre in their movements, so plainly some sort of copy of themselves, that they would be likely to be the first thing in Nature to surprise them and be speculated about. One can sometimes see a pet cat or dog surprised by its own shadow. Before any attempt was made to explain this idea, mothers would have been pointing out shadows to their children. They will have noticed it related to the sun. No sun, no shadow. But they knew it was there because they could see it even on dull days when they looked into a pool.

At this stage, the shadow was associated with a dream life—dreams seeming much more real to people who had no explanations for anything. The shadow was dark. It disappeared when the sun went in but was still there. Spencer surmised that they deduced the self in the dream was the same as the shadow. At night, when people slept, the shadow must have wandered free of the body. An Australian aboriginal was reported as explaining why he believed in a soul that could leave the body:

It must be so, for when I sleep I go to distant places, I see distant people, I even see and speak to those who are dead.

J Anthropological Inst

As social creatures they were close to others in their social group, made friends and obeyed a leader, but sometimes friends and the leader died. The primeval people realised that sometimes dead people appeared in their dreams, so their shadows must live on though they themselves are dead, at least for as long as amyone remembered them enough to dream about them. They animated the shadow with a parallel consciousness—a spirit—to explain its movements. Thus other people’s shadows became their spirits and ghosts. Ghosts preceded fetishes and were more widespread. Sir James Frazer reported the same:

When the images of people whom he know to be dead appear to him in a dream, he naturally infers that these people still exist somewhere… How could he see dead people, he asks, if they did not exist?… He thinks the appearances of dreams just as real as the appearances of his waking hours.

A factor necessary for the development of religion was a belief that the shadow survived the death of the body. When a person died, the physical body went but they remained as their shadow or shade, a ghost haunting their old home and lingering near the place of burial. From then on, people were predisposed by their ever present shadow to believe that they were in two parts. They concluded everyone was two beings—a body and a shadow. It became culturally accepted as a phenomenon. Primitive humans saw their shadow and were afraid of it, thinking it was their ghost or soul.

The abstract idea of the soul and the duality of body and soul came from direct knowledge of shadows, dreams and death. Our ancestors gave the name “shadow” or “shade” to the ghost or soul and it remains a common word for it. Egyptians and Hindus both believed that man had an invisible body, ghost, or shade—a soul—within the material body. An invisible world of ghosts or spirits arose in the primitive mind. The supernatural in religion began with crude speculations of primitive people about their shadows.

Primordial Structures

Nor did Tylor claim his animism was the first stage. He thought the belief in definite spiritual persons, souls and gods, must have been preceded by vaguer and more nebulous beliefs. The vaguer and earlier stage was man’s awe in the presence of the mighty and mysterious movements surrounding him in Nature, and his own instincts—powers! Awe means fear. The emerging humans were scared of Nature. That is what panic is—a power. Primeval people did not at first personify these powers, or think of a general animation of Nature, or world soul. Nature as a force or power will have been a general fear of the unknown, and a lot of it was unknown then!

Each clan or tribe was largely sovereign—they made their own decisions independently of influences beyond the tribe, and developed their own customs.The earliest humans were unaware of how their relations with others in the clan or tribe influenced their motivation and behaviour. They were raised in a society with established customs which commended some acts and reprimanded others. By the time the primeval human was an adult, these customs were so much a part of their personality that the group was not needed to enforce them. They were a primordial morality. Customs arose spontaneously out of instincts, and social experience.

The ubiquitous presence within tribes of clans or extended families suggest that human socialization had begun when some proto human mother started to tolerate the kids hanging around longer than usual. In solitary species, the mother will shoo off her offspring when they are at a certain age, but proto human mothers had been keeping their kids longer, and eventually they did not shoo them off at all, and a family group formed. The vestige of the shooing off was exogamic marriage. The sons were shooed off to get married, but the daughters stuck around with mum. Thus both exogamy and a reverence for the mother were instincts brought into humanity at the outset. If they were not brought in from the outset, they evolved quickly after we had become human.

Either way, there were certain instincts or unconscious customs concerning mating and motherhood, among others, already present in primeval humans. They were effectively a ready made primeval morality or even legality. G E Swanson called them primordial constitutional structures which guided human social behaviour without any perceptible means. They were immanent in the psyche of primeval people through custom and instinct, yet transcended their individuality in their continuity from generation to generation. To any modern religious person, they were God given, but really they had evolved naturally or socially. Swanson thought these primordial structures were the basis of the idea of spirits:

Like the supernatural, these structures pervade the inner life and outer experience of men, directing and limiting human behaviour as invisible, immortal, inescapable, and vaguely understood forces…

G E Swanson, The Birth of Gods (1960)

Then, because these forces seemed to have purpose in controlling behaviour, the primeval people associated a human purpose with them, and thus a human personality. Spirits became superhuman people. And all of it, it should be emphasized, was not thought out by any primeval philosopher, but happened quite naturally and unconsciously. In a sentence, early humans felt inexplicably constrained in certain of their social relationships, and they attributed it to powers that they then personalized.

Lowie says we objectify feeling and primeval people were no different. When Bill Gates says, “That’s cool”, he is objectifying something that he likes as the quality of coolness. It is fashionable metaphor, though not one that is more informative than saying, “I like it”. Metaphors to us are pretty matter of fact ways of talking, only assuming significance in poetry, but to primeval people whose language and concepts were still developing, they were significant, and impressions were far more often objectified. They were made into spirits, and when they arose through communal activity such as ritually, were called sacred.

All of man’s cultural possessions are the gift of society.

R H Lowie, Primitive Religion (1948)

The whole tribal culture was becoming a cognitive experience, and the theory of spirits became a great stimulus to its development. Malinowski realized that the emotional stress of death made funerary rites of particular significance in forging the unity of early societies. A terrible sudden death left a sense of frustration—the struggle with which must have been another incentive for personal reflexion—and an emotional need for composure which the solidarity of the tribe provided. Then, just as now, the puzzle about sudden and accidental death was why it had to happen. The tribal culture had to cope with grief and try to find meaning in sudden death. Spirit theory offered an answer.

If dead friends and relatives seemed alive, then they were alive, and it was the apparent death that had to be explained. Death was in some way abnormal, and though the first theologians or philosophers did not ask themselves whether the shadow lived forever, they concluded it lived on. Stories that humans were really immortal, or had originally been immortal, came from such reasoning. Death was when the shadow departed the body for good. Everyone died and the world must therefore be full of their shadows wandering everywhere at night! Unsophisticated people have no thought for a moral law. They have few vices and men treat their wives more equally than the men of the “advanced” cultures. They live socially. Vice grows with culture. So violent and malignant shades multiply. They explained why the night was fearful, and offered the beginning of theodicy. The natural instinct to fear predators in the dark of night gave way to a fear of malignant spirits.

When primeval people began to speculate on Nature, having identified the shadow with the spirit and conceived the notion of a personal soul, they passed the concept on to other things, animate and inanimate, which become Nature spirits. However, it is certain that primeval people were aware of powers of Nature before they attached any sort of consciousness to them. Powers were unknown and impersonal causes before spirits personalized them. People recognized the power of a totem without thinking of it as having a human like personality.

Tylor was right that spirits explained the powers. The primeval people decided that, if they had an animating spirit, then so did other animals, so did trees, so did rivers, the sky, and so on, explaining why the acted as they did. The sky spirit moved the clouds and the sun, and the river spirit made the river flow. The spirit within or behind everything made it change and move—made it live. Spirits became the causes. Causes became gods. Separate and definite personalities emerged, the gods and goddesses of sky and sun and moon, of fire and water, the spirits of the trees, the fountains, the animals, and so on.

The primeval human’s theory of spirits (TOS) was the first TOE—theory of everything, and, like everything, it evolved. The notion of a spirit in an entity or object transferred to the notion of an abstract spirit, which eventually became the god of the Jews, Moslems and Christians. As human society settled into agriculture and became more tiered and complicated, so too did the spirit world. The spirit of a particular tree became the subject of the king of tree spirits, the spirit of the woods, then the spirit of the wild, a god, Pan, responsible for the feeling of dread anyone can get when left alone in the wild—panic.

We are little different still. Do modern people know what a force field is? Mostly they explain it in terms of the phenomena it is meant to explain. It is a mystery to them, in fact, but they use the concept quite freely. The primeval humans were like us in this respect. Their myths of spirits or magical beings explained mysteries to them. A shadow, a reflexion in a pool of water, and a dream of a dead member of the tribe were mysteries to them that made them wonder, in both senses of the word. The concept of a shade, a ghost or a spirit unified the three and so explained them. It gave objects life and when it left so did life. It is life!

Simple people must have collected things they liked such as coloured stones, shells and simulacra, and sometimes come to feel they were lucky. Such charms or fetishes brought luck because of their spirit. When an idol or totem was set up, its spirit explained its power. Christians, always ready to demean other beliefs, made out that “savages” worship the image, but it is certain they did not, and it is unlikely that they ever did unless they were mentally deficient. It was the spirit or power that dwelt in the image they worshipped. That is no different from the Catholic praying to the image of a man dying in agony nailed to a cross, or to a benign looking woman described as a blessed virgin even though she is his mother.

From Totem Spirit to God

It is true that the totem in primitive societies is not itself considered venerable, though it must always have been treated with honour just as any kinship or blood tie usually is. Evans-Pritchard (Nuer Religion) emphasised that the totem animal simply stood for the totem spirit. They respected the spirit of the animal not the animal for what it was itself. For the Nuer, these are low level earthbound spirits quite distinct from the air spirits, and all of them are considered to be aspects of the high god—the hierarchy of spirits reflected the class hierarchy of Nuer society.

So, the crow clan did not worship the crow, but it was sacred to them, exclusive to them, and they will have paid close attention to crows, noticing what they did, attributing human motivations to the animal, and coming to believe that they, “as crows”, had the same characteristics—loyalty to the family and cunning, perhaps. Whatever qualities they saw in crows and attributed to themselves was the “power of crowness”. This impersonal power was what unified the family and united them—to our way of thinking, supernaturally—with the crow. They, of course, thought it entirely natural. It is rather as we use the metaphor “magnetic” of people. So-and-so has a magnetic personality.

Even the simplest of people, in this primeval age, probably did not see the crow, the bear or the beaver as being a spirit, perhaps because they had not conceived of the idea of spirits yet, but they sensed they had common qualities with a crow and so on, and so had what we might call a power or force in common with the animal. It was this force that exerted its unifying power over the clan, and it was this abstract power that the clan and tribe came to revere. R H Codrington (The Melanesians, 1891) showed that the Melanesians had developed the idea of an abstract power that they called mana which brought good or bad luck. The North American Indians had similar ideas of powers behind their totem animals.

The power of the totem is a sort of gravity that kept the tribe in touch with its surroundings, with its environment—attached to it, attached to Nature. It kept the clans attached to the tribe, and the tribes attached to other tribes in the land, the nation. All of them, all of society, were part of Nature. It offered a world view, and that is a function religion has too. Christians are fond of saying things like communism is so-and-so’s religion, and atheism is someone else’s. Well, they are right, if anyone’s world view is defined as their religion, and certainly one of religion’s important functions, perhaps its most important function, is to give people a world view.

So, the totem came to stand for the force behind it, and it was this force that came to be worshipped, though every tribal member, except maybe for children, knew the totem represented the clan or tribe. In the same way US children are taught everyday that the flag is America. Equally, foreigners offended by US machinations against them know it too, and make a ritual of burning the US flag. The ancient Egyptians made the mark of some enemy on a piece of clay, baked it and then smashed it. These “execration texts” were a symbolic magic way to destroy the enemy, their power being in their name or mark! The totem symbolized the clan or tribe and eventually the power behind it assumed the status of its god:

The god of the clan, the totemic principle, can be nothing else than the clan itself, personified and represented to the imagination under the visible form of the animal or vegetable which serves as the totem.

E Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1915

Though the members of the clan were, by now, seeing the totem as a force, a spirit or a god, its practical value was as the glue bonding tribal society, obliging individuals to commit themselves to the tribe as personified by the tribal spirit, and done by regular communal rites which the whole tribe practised together. On these occasions the separate individuals became the body of the god—the tribe. Their individuality was subsumed by the assembled throng, herd instinct takes over, and powerful emotions could be released. Naturally such emotional releases cannot have gone unnoticed by the chiefs who conducted the rites, and, like revivalist preachers, must have sought to hone their skills in this area.

Even so, these occasions were not really solemn, and those participating as spectators treated it as a festival, indeed some seemed utterly bored, according to anthropologists who have reported on them. Those participating, especially, leave their workaday selves and feel the power of the totem animal or plant grasping them, and the enthusiasm of the onlookers. All of it emphasised to them the sense of sacredness in the occasion. The same primitive feelings are still felt by worshippers in Christian churches today, and, more than ever, they think it is a sign of the presence of God! Yet the enthusiasts of such mass spectator sports as football report similar feelings, and many behave in typically primitive tribal ways.

The totem force engulfs the membership and each of them enjoys a little of it. The commitment to the culture and morals of the tribe affects everyone brought up in it, so each person is a chip off the tribal block in a real sense. Their honour is the tribal honour, active within each individual in the tribe. Their consciousness was the same, and all came from the power of the totems of the tribe. Each participant felt they were part of the totem, it activated their spirit and gave them the characteristics of the clan. It is thus related to the Gnostic view that everyone has a spark of the divine within them, and their duty was to cleave to God, making perfect sense when God is seen as their society. And as tribal ceremonies were repeated with little or no change for a lifetime, they conveyed a sense of permanence that substantiated an impression of immortality. The totem was immortal. The tribe was immortal.

Once the notion of spirit had developed, the spark or chip off the central power became identified with the internal spirit. The power of the tribe was the tribal spirit and each person had a spark of it, their own spirit or soul, identifiable with their own personality, which, consequently, reflected the tribal spirit. As a part of the tribal spirit, the soul itself was sacred, but the person’s body was profane. It was no more than selfish desires, not the communal ones of the tribe. The religious distinction between body or flesh and soul is just what emerges from the tribal god being the tribe itself, from a society’s god being society. People were selfish. They were inclined to put themselves first, before the welfare of the tribe, but everyone was instinctively social too. They had tribal welfare inscribed somewhere within, perhaps in their heart, and this was their sacred soul. Individuals die but the tribe lives on. The body dies but the spark within, the soul, lives on because that represents the tribe. The person is mortal, but in comparison the tribe—and so the soul—is immortal.

From the spirits of the dead arose ancestor worship, prayer and gods. Amongst the African Negroes, Nature deities are of less importance than deified ancestors. In Africa, sun gods and earth goddesses are secondary to ancestors. So another factor in the origin of religion was the concept of ancestral spirits, the basis of Vedic religion for example. The ghosts of prominent ancestors and chiefs were specially honoured and became gods, the chief remaining a chief or ruler even in the world of shades. Food and drink offered to dead people eventually transfigured into sacrifices to the gods. An important root of religion is ancestor worship.

The dead ancestor of the tribe could still exert his will on the tribe as the totem spirit or through it. Thus the tribal father together with the power of the totem could become a tribal god. Naturally, other tribes had their own gods too. There were automatically more than one god in a world with many tribes. And the nation that the tribes comprised had its own god too—the high god, the common ancestor of all the tribes. The most ancient literate societies always had any social contract overlooked by the representatives of the parties—covenants and treaties were supervised by the relevant gods.

A widespread, perhaps world wide, phenomenon, Sir James Frazer thought he had found, was that the tribal king had to be killed before he ailed or weakened through age lest his magical powers fade too. So a new vigorous king had to be crowned, and the old one killed to transfer his power intact to the new one. Consequently kings often had only a fixed term, like modern presidents, after which they had to be killed. The death of the king was perhaps seen as an extension of the ritual killing and eating of the totem animal in tribal days.

The totem object or image of the totem animal symbolic of the power of the totem became the idol of the tribal god. The totemic power was anthropomorphed into the personal power of the ancestral father, the god. The king always exercised the totemic power in the tribe, and continued to do so when the power was seen as that of the god. Having been the human image of the totem animal, the king was seen as the image of the god, the incarnation of the god as his son. Like the totem animal, the king had to die for the good of the tribe, and the death of the totem animal became the apotropaic death of the king. But kings were usually smart people, and the clever ones arranged for the death of some stooge instead, and this became the tradition. What had been a necessity to save the totemic power of the ailing king, became an apotropaic death of a substitute king. Frazer thought the crucifixion of Jesus was a case of such an apotropaic death.

Annually, the totem was renewed amidst a complex of ceremonies one of which was a ritual meal in which the taboo of not killing and eating the totem plant or animal was lifted and it was ritually consumed thereby imparting the power of the totem, then the god, to the tribal members. From this ceremony came the notion of sacrifice. What was most dear to the tribe was killed for the power it would confer, but later it came to be understood as being to serve or placate the god. Christians, at the instigation of Paul, continue the ancient practice by eating the body of Christ, thereby acquring his power over death. The religious meal was the annual renewal of the tribe, the annual renewal of each person’s commitment to it.

The totem gradually became a tribal god, then a national god and eventually an imperial god, giving us our modern imperial religions, but many of their rituals are very ancient indeed—they are primitive. In the myths attached to it, the tribal father initiated the ceremony, and the Christian myth was similarly initiated by Paul, the father of the Christian tribe, as Josephus called them, and was then incorporated into the god’s life.

We can now see the real reason why the god cannot do without their worshippers any more than these can do without their gods. It is because society, of which the gods are only a symbolic expression, cannot do witjhout individuals, any more than these can do without society.

E Durkheim, op cit

Spenser and Tylor did not examine the differences between primitive people but simply took what evidence they needed for their ideas. Their ideas are not, for that reason wrong, but lack corroboration. Frazer’s work makes fascinating reading still as a vast catalogue of religious lore but magic is an unlikely source of religion, although Frazer did satisfactorily prove that magicians or priests are rulers in primitive tribes uncommonly often, so magic and religion were always related in fact, without being mutually dependent.

These ideas seem reasonable but are not particularly well founded in anthropological studies where primitive tribes do not seem to associate dreams and spirits. Nor is their any even remotely universal attitude toward death among primitive people, yet if these theories were valid, much unity would be expected. Necessarily there is a lot of guesswork in these primeval reconstructions because some details have been lost forever, but it is a hypothesis based on many observations. It can hardly be claimed to be fully scientific, because it cannot be properly tested but inasmuch as it is a hypothesis based on natural evidence and from which we can deduce explanations, it is scientific. Religious apologists are fond of picking holes in such reconstruction but all they have in their place is revelation, and that has negligible evidence for it and certainly is not scientific!

Veneration of Ancestors

An early form of religion was ancestor worship, in which the founders of successful families, clans and dynasties were raised to gods by their descendants. These famous members of the tribe rose in the memory above all the ordinary spirits, who were individually forgotten. They were on the way to becoming gods, though, sometimes the reverse happened, tribal gods who were never ancenstors were reduced to patriarchs, perhaps because the tribe, through political growth, was absorbed into a larger group under a larger God.

Aboriginals were until recently living fossils, living a stone age culture. Most of them are now no longer living, having been destroyed by the white colonists. Some say they have no belief in a supreme being, and, if religion is worship of a god, they can have no religion. Others say that some tribes have a supreme being, a huge red-haired man with large feet. There is no sort of Nature worship or animism. They believe firmly in a spirit in man and in the reincarnation, or successive embodiment, of this undying part. They believe in magic with the same intensity, and we have no reason to suppose that one preceded the other.

’Kung is, to the Bushmen, a great man of long ago. They never worship him. These hunter gatherer people have no tribal organization and no chiefs. Such small self-sufficient groups of people are naturally essentially equal. The spirits of the dead are equal, as the living are. Then, growth of society necessitates a strong or cunning man to be chosen as leader. He becomes a chief. Then the leadership becomes hereditary. As every man has his spirit, the spirit world is a duplicate of the living world. The talent of extraordinary people came from their spirit, so, matching chief spirits arose in the world of the shadows. Thence it was a short step to seeing these extraordinary leaders in material life as gods, and deifying them after death.

In an earlier age, the ancestors of Aboriginals were beings of marvelous power and could make a river or a range of mountains, just as the Bushman thinks some of his marvelous ancestors could make sun and moon by throwing shoes into the sky. Some of these powerful ancestors remain powerful in the spirit world, but they never pray to, or supplicate, or worship these beings, and they have no moral code presided over by them. Great ancestors, great spirits, are simply facts. They have no priests and no temples but there are sacred places which might be embryonic temples. Some tribes pick out one amongst the ancestral spirits—Bungil, Baiame, Altjira—as a special and powerful spirit.

At the stage of the stone age Aboriginals, humans had no doubts about spirits. The idea had been generally accepted and become part of general belief. Since societies are organised into tribes that have chiefs, the parallel world of spirits also has chiefs or headmen. In time, one spirit became the chief of them all, a Most High spirit—a god.

Melanesians have a word for a spirit that reflects its origin in the idea of a shadow but have no firm views on a future life. They put weapons in a warrior’s grave but deny that they think his spirit will use them. In many of the islands powerful spirits are venerated who are the spirits of dead humans, sometimes chiefs. Sacrifices are offered to them, their help is invoked, and little houses built over their supposed remains are also embryonic temples.

At this point, proto-priests appear. The wizard or the chief has to offer the propitiatory sacrifices, and he gains a quasi-sacred character. The Melanesians believe in an impersonal supernatural influence diffused through Nature which they call mana, a concept perhaps best translated as “virtue”. A good knife, a shark, a curious stone, or a tree may have mana. A man wants it and believes he gets it by eating a strong man. One theory of the origin of religion is that it began in a belief in some such vague force in Nature generally, and those who hold the theory illustrate it from the Melanesian mana. But the Melanesians are not primitive. Their ideas confirm the line of evolution suggested here from ancestors.

Among the Sudanese races, gods are common, and they are the spirits of glorified ancestors. An early missionary said:

The spirits of the dead are the gods of the living.

Whereas the belief in spirits is a natural personal experience like that of the abducting aliens, the extension of this type of thought to chief spirits, aka gods, is promoted by the priests who extend their influence by declaring their preferred spirit more important than anyone else’s. Naturally the gullible followers like to hear this just as much as the followers of the New York Yankees like to hear that they have the top team, or the followers of Manchester United or Arsenal. Then those who achieved success by warfare or economic expertise were plainly backing the winning god and lots more supporters started to wear the same colours.

Nature Spirits and Gods

So, primitive religion was belief in spirits. Amongst the American Indians and others the Nature gods were much more important than ancestors, a later stage of religious evolution. People feared whatever was strange in appearance or behaviour as a spirit. With the development of the doctrine of ghosts, with the power of making themselves at one time visible and at another invisible, grew up an easy explanation of all those changes which the heavens and earth show by the hour.

Spirits became omnipresent. Clouds that gather and vanish, shooting stars, sudden darkening of the water’s surface by a breeze, storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and so on, were attributed to departed souls, probably acting as officials for an angered deity. The Hindu Rakshasas, of our Aryan ancestors—the dark and evil clouds personified whose formless shapes were imagined in every form of grotesque and horrible manifestations—are the models of ghosts and demons. Demons were wicked spirits, the cause of personal troubles.

Besides the major spirits were legions of spirits of dreaded animals, of fire and river, forest and harvest, disease and childbirth. Some of these spirits rose up to become gods. Relics, animals, plants, trees, fire and lightning, water, thunder, planets, and the generative powers of Nature with stones as phallic symbols all had their spirits and all have been objects of worship by mankind.

The inferior spirits were relegated to the underworld or goblins in mountain holes. Ultimately, one great spirit, commonly the sky or storm god, predominated. The main gods were often sun gods or were given a sun aspect. In contrast, whatever was fearful or detrimental was thought to lurk in the absence of light. In many cases attributes were shared between ancestors and Nature gods. Osiris might well have been a prehistoric king of the Egyptians who was deified, attracted many legends associated with unifying the land and ultimately received many attributes of Ra, the sun god. Simple shrines to a chief’s remains or fetishes grew into carved temples. Priesthoods gained power, wealth and organization.

Quite naturally, people everywhere looked up to the sun with special veneration because the benefits received by mankind from Nature—heat, fruit, crops and life itself—came from sunshine. Yet, the hunters of the last glacial period who decorated caves with images of their prey, never made an image of a solar disk, or indeed, moon or stars or the heavens. They were interested in the mystery of birth and drew pictures and carved figurines of women with powerful thighs, swollen breasts and stomachs distended in pregnancy. They were fascinated by woman’s ability to bring into existence new life and the puzzle of how it happened. Their god was female. She was the Great Mother and dominated mankind’s religious thoughts for millennia.

Of course we are not to know that, though primitive, these early artists did not wish to depict the sun in a cave—the proper domain of the Great Mother Goddess because the cave is a womb and a place to which shadows return. Solar rites will have been practised in the open at dawn with symbols drawn on the sand or perhaps on rocks where they have weathered away. These people were hunter gatherers and all hunting cultures have venerated the sun as a hunter.

The daily rising and setting of the sun must have been an earliest mystery of human consciousness. When it set, primitive people were fearful and when it glowed again in the east at dawn, they must have been greatly relieved. As thought and language evolved, one of the first metaphors must have been that of light and dark for good and evil.

At some stage as the climate ameliorated and the possibility of settlement improved, the hunter gatherers began to reoccupy the same seasonal camps to which the men brought back their game and the women and children took back the grain, roots and berries they had foraged. They returned, seasonally to the same camps and found that seeds dropped around the camps for centuries were giving better quality grain next to home than that further afield. They domesticated some of the animals they hunted and became pastoralists. Pastoralists migrated with the seasons to find the best grazing, so they followed some of the lifestyle of their hunting predecessors. In their journeys, they were impressed by the sky and its moods, thunder and lightning, stars and the sun and moon.

Some sage, surely a woman as they did the gathering, eventually realised that the nutritious wild grass growing around the camp must have been from the dropped seeds. They appreciated that the miracle of fertility extended to the plants they used as food. They experimented with sowing and discovered agriculture and the Great Mother became an Earth Mother. For thousands more years this goddess dominated the minds of the first farmers, but things were about to change. Farming introduced annual toil to mankind but provided a reliable economy and populations grew quickly. Eventually surpluses were being produced and new categories of people arose to take them from those who produced them—the classes of princes and priests.

The change to agriculture gave even more importance to the seasonal cycle. As hunters, the tribes had to intercept the migrating animals, but migrations took time, were determined by the animals and within wide limits did not require humans to measure time perfectly. Agriculture was not quite so relaxed. Through rueful experience, the farmers must have come to learn that they ought not sow too early or too late. This applied even where more than one annual crop was possible, as in Egypt. The successful farmer discovered how to get in two crops, perhaps three.

Sitting watching the crops grow, they had time to work out how to reckon time from the diurnal movement of the sun and how to reckon seasons by its annual movement through the heavens. The sun began to have divine powers as the regulator of order through its reliable daily journey. It also seemed to be like an eye in the sky, its rays touching everything to prove that it could see everything that happened. So it was seen as a heavenly all seeing watchman. They also began to realise the importance of the sun to the growth of their crops. Shady places were unsuitable for good growth. Plants needed good well watered soil and the warmth of the sun to germinate and grow successfully. They needed Mother Earth but they also needed the Great Father in the heavens. The sun became the consort of the Great Mother. Naturally, this also required an awareness of the male role in fertility and this discovery was made at about the same time.

So these simple agriculturalists became familiar with—the growth, maturing, decline and death of vegetation in the seasonal cycle. Each year the same events occurred and were explained by the life of the vegetation spirit who had died and was resurrected. The resurrection of the vegetation god corresponded with the resurrection of the vegetation from its annual death to live again—a metaphor for the seasonal cycle. Eventually, priests were to extend the metaphor to give sick, dying and generally suffering humans a mainly false hope for which they were grateful, although with it came some stimulus to recover, as we know now from the placebo and TLC effects.

The dying and rising god promised good fortune in the world, or, failing that happiness in a future life after death. Not that a future life had had any significance for many millennia of primitive belief. Like the return of the vegetation, the promise of sinlessness, of following the tribal ritual properly, supposed to have been instituted by the tribal father in some myth was a reward in this life—prosperity, health and good luck. These were promised in all the ancient national and imperial religions from Egypt to China and Germany to India. Even with the promotion of other worldly belief, having erased sin—all the habits the god abhorred—practitioners expected some psychological feeling in the here and now, an emotional intoxication of self congratulation in somehow uniting with the god, but, whether brought on by self denial or orgiastically, the ecstasy was called a manifestation of the holy!

Eventually the power of the different spirits constituted an hierarchy with the mightiest power on top. Almost everywhere it is the sky, or the main feature of it, the sun. The next step is to monotheism in which all the spirits are subject to the supreme spirit. Monotheism has never meant there was only one god. P Hayman wrote an article in 1991, appropriately called “Monotheism—A Misused Word in Jewish Studies?” and later Larry W Hurtado, in an article in the Dictionary of Early Judaism (2009) continued. What he had to say might come as a surprise to those who understand words by their obviously intended meaning. Monotheism, from the Greek, plainly pertains to “One God”. But Hurtado explains:

As typically defined in textbooks on religion, the term refers to the belief that one deity is the creator and ruler of all things, in distinction from “polytheism”, belief-systems involving multiple deities with their individual roles and powers.

So far so good. That is what it does mean. Take care! Hurtado continues:

Monotheism does not involve denying the existence of such beings, only that they properly cannot be compared with the one deity in status and significance, and even in nature.

So the so called monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, of which Christians consider their own the only one of importance, are not monotheistic at all. They are actually polytheistic in recognizing that other gods exist, but simply claim their own god is the biggest and the best. It is easy to see why these are called patriarchal religions, and are dominated by men! The patriarchal monotheistic religions are not monotheistic except by the sleight of hand of defining all the other gods out of consideration. All three are full of gods besides God, but they are not called gods. Clever, eh?

Hurtado goes on to say that the Judaism of the second temple period is historically the earliest popular form of genuine monotheism, and monotheism is really henotheism, a type of hierarchical polytheism, and not genuine monotheism at all, but Judaism is the genuine form of it!

Now all of it can be seen as folly. Things do not have spirits, and so there are no kings of spirits called gods. The place of spirits today has been taken by energy. Energy moves and changes things, and gives them life—everything, including ourselves. Without a supply of energy nothing grows or progresses, everything decays or at best remains static. Without a supply of energy we could not even think, so the notion of a universal consciousness necessitates a universal supply of energy to drive it. Our needs are supplied by the sun, and everything we see alive is alive because of the sun. The sun is our ruling spirit, if we must use spirit as a metaphor. That perhaps is why so many of the ancients ended up being sun worshippers. But the sun has negligible influence beyond the solar system and cannot therefore energize consciousness far from it. What then could energize a universal consciousness? The universal consciousness sounds like an apologetic device for believers to have a universal god, but it is no more sense than the universal god is. The same applies to any notion of a God existing somehow outside of space time.

The whole idea of spirits and gods is an out of date theory like phlogiston. It is time to discard it. It belongs to the childhood of the human race. Put a child in charge of a motor vehicle, and no one could be surprised if the child ends up dead, just as the child allowed to drive a quad bike died. The human race is in that stage now. We are driving far more dangerous technologies than a motor car, yet children who still believe in spirits are driving the vehicle. Some of them seriously want an atomic war believing God will give them a grandstand seat, like the devout Carl McIntire, an influential Christian until he got his wish to go to heaven. The fear is that people as pious as George Bush might have the same degree of insanity. He is the driver, and has the mentality of an infant.

From Spirits to Gods

So, what is a god? Early chroniclers of the customs of the nations including what we call religion were Herodotus (481 BC), Plutarch, Berosus, Manetho, Strabo, Verro, and Tacitus. In Christian times there were Augustine, Saxo, Snorri, and Roger Bacon. Elsewhere, the Persian Moslem, Sharastani (1153 AD), contributed. Criticism came into Christianity in historical form with Erasmus highlighting elements of paganism taken into the Catholic Christianity as it adopted to Roman ways. Tolund did the same in 1696 (Christianity not Mysterious). The critics of belief started to use sound reason with D Hume (Natural History of Religion, 1757), followed by Voltaire (Essay, 1780). Ernest Renan (1822-1892) and Max Müller (1823-1900) brought the scientific study of religion into modern times.

Herodotus (484-425 BC) writing in Greek for the Greeks had to explain foreign gods to his readers, and so began the habit of saying they were essentially the same as the familiar Greek gods. Amun Ra in Egypt was Zeus in Greece. Horus in Egypt was Apollo in Greece. In this universalizing the nature of the gods, Herodotus was presenting a theory of religion. Everyone had the same pantheon of god but they had local names.

The clue to the evolution of gods is the evolution of tribal organizations under chiefs. So, a hundred and fifty years later, Euhemerus of Messini (330-260 BC) offered another theory. The gods had once been famous figures in their lifetimes, great kings or heroes of the past, who had been magnified by nostalgia and admiration and had been deified after their deaths. The word, Euhemerism, is still used for this idea. Another idea held by the Stoics was that gods had the characteritics of natural phenomena like the sun (Apollo, Horus), the moon (Hecate, Isis), the sea (Neptune, Prometheus), and so on.

We are brought up in a religious mythology in which we imagine a creator god made the whole world, He preceding it because He is eternal. There is a strong strand in ancient mythology, certainly of the Indo-Europeans, that gods were made with the cosmos. Gods dwell in a universe they did not create. It is most clearly seen in the later Zoroastrianism when, according to one sub cult, the twin gods of Good and of Evil were made by a pre-existing god greater than them both. It gives a perfect explanation of theodicy without needing to have the supposedly good God having to be made to create evil, and then explaining why a good God should want to do it.

Dualism has two gods both equal like the heads and tails of coins, and everything can come down one way or the other, as a result of action by the good God or the evil one. Who then was the creater of these two and the cosmic laws that even control what they can do. It is Eternal Time, Zurvan, the eternal god who appeared in western mythology as Chronos. Time not God is the eternal unchanging basis of all things, and the cosmic laws that time made with the original cosmos are binding even on the gods. Many experts think this was merely a heresy of Zoroastrianism, but it makes sense that it went before it, and evidenctly emerged early into the west doubtless though the Hurrian invaders or the Mitanni.

Moreover, the Rig Veda says “the gods are later than the creation of the world”, which was perhaps made, not ex nihilo but by ordering chaos. That was the Babylonian view, and despite every contrary statement by Jewish and Christian religionists, that is what the bible says God did! On this view, gods are subject to something more fundamental than themselves—the primal Order (Arta, Rita) of the created cosmos. Chaos is ordered and then the gods appear in it, and then they get the jobs they are given in controlling the forces of Nature. What the gods do, and humans then copy, is re-enact the primal creation of order, and they must do it annually to recreate a fresh year, thus keeping creation ritually renewed. Marduk demonstrated to human beings what they were supposed to do ceremonially every year. They had to kill the chaos monster before any creation could begin, and that was what people had the duty to continue to do, as the slaves of the gods. The gods themselves were subject to the laws of Nature, to Order, and humans had to preserve it through their rituals.

The Persians seem not to have personified the power that even gods were subject to, but other Indo-Europeans, like the Greeks and Norse did. Fate controlled even them, and appeared as three women—three of them because they were aspects of the eternal god, and true creator of all, Time—the past, the present and the future. For the Persians, they were an impersonal, inexorable, automatic force inherent in the structure of the universe and which even Ahuramazda could not alter or deflect—Moros, Fatum, Wyrd, Destiny. Behind the capricious Greek gods, the half mighty Persian ones, and the almighty Jewish one, was the implacable law of Nature—cause and effect.

If gods exist, polytheism is the most reasonable religion. At least it corresponds with Nature, and does not suffer the problem of theodicy. Nature requires many gods, each one a personification of a facet of Nature. Counting the minor and local deities who preside over gentle breezes, glints of sunlight, a fountain that gushes or barely trickles, a river that overflows its banks or dries up, or are the spirits of the heath and wildwood that inspire awe and panic in the traveller, they are innumerable. Each one acts independently of other gods, within its own domain.

Men create their gods by imagining them in their own image, and the gods, although endowed with supernatural powers, remain human in the way they think and behave. For example, moralizers whine about the “immorality” of the gods. They want something better, something more divorced from humanity because more morally perfect, more incredible. Needless to say, their god has these qualities. Warrior races, like the Indo-Europeans who conquered europe and India from the plains of Asia, did not want whimpish gods. They wanted full blown warriors, brave, strong, and ruthless in the face of their enemies. What do you find? their gods have qualities like this, and even their goddesses! Moreover, the ruthlessness of these gods is often the moral opposite of the gods desired by the moralists. warrior gods are often cunning and treacherous, because cunning and treachery give victory in battle. It makes no difference to the moralizers once they get power because they simply rewrite the warrior god of old into the ethical god they want. So the gods are made in the image of their devotees.

People picture thinking creatures like themselves, and so the gods or spirits of Nature are anthropomorphized into types of men—immortal men with superhuman powers but men nevertheless with human character and emotions. People cannot imagine thinking things without such characteristics, so the gods of Nature have them, and, therefore, people can hope and expect to understand how Nature behaves by accounting for how the gods behave. Once gods are thought of as supermen, they can be pictured as supermen, and so they are! They appear in sacred imagery as men, even though they might be given what seem to us now to be bizarre, non-human characteristics too. Indeed, the bizarreness of the particular features of the god serve to distinguish it to the guileless and undeducated population that sacred imagery is aimed at.

Gods that have emerged from Nature as particular aspects of her, cannot be all powerful. They begin restricted to a domain of Nature, and remain confined. Nor are they equal. The different aspects of Nature are not equal, but some are powerful under some conditions and times, and others at others. And aspects of Nature can conspire together so that apprarently weaker gods can conspire to defeat apparently superior ones. But because they are anthropomorphized they come to have a society andall societies have a chief, so one god becomes the high god of a court of gods, a divine aristocracy reflecting the human world. The high god might be a sort of divine father, like Dyaus Pitar, but he is the “first among equals”—the function of them all is equally essential to Nature, even the insignificant mistletoe, in Norse mythology—and he leads the gods because they have elected him into the role. The host of gods and spirits that the high god directs are voluntarily under his guidance. they are not forced into it. Each of the gods has authority over some force of Nature, and can use it for revenge against humans who displease him.

Natural forces are neither good nor evil, and so Nature gods ought to be the same. Generally they are indifferent to the convenience and wishes of people. It allows us to explain why some human beings seem blessed, and others seem cursed, while the majority are neither one nor the other. It is a question of those who the gods favour or dislike. Sometimes, a god will favour a mortal, but another god is jealous and works to undermine the previous one’s gifts. Thus some humans do very well for a while then come crashing down. It offers a rational explantion of exceptional fortune or ill-luck.

The Goddess is never evil. She may act, as the forces of Nature do, with no regard of the convenience or safety of individuals or nations, but she is never malevolent. Pan, the model for Satan in Christian iconography, does excite panics in those who have found themselves alone in a desert, moorland, or a forest. Pan is the psychological effect on us of the Goddess’s might and our helplessness. This fear is an evolutionary development that keeps us on guard ready to fight or for flight when the situation seems potentially dangerous. But we sense it as some power that abides in the place, a hostile spirit in the sense that a hurricane or an earthquake is hostile for having no regard for us. They are not malevolent, and have no conscious purpose to harm us. We simply happen to be there and nothing can stop the coming storm. The Great God Pan is our sense of the awesome power of nature. Pan is a pastoral deity whose name is of uncertain derivation, but has nothing to do with the word “pan,” which means “all,” so that the god’s name was misunderstood to mean everything, the whole universe.

Greek has no concept of a malevolent spirit. A man is “kakodaimon” because his own character, or sometimes, chance, has made him, unfortunate. He is unlucky, or he brings it onto himself. But a malevolent god has some plausibility because we always imagine our gods as anthropomorphic and malevolence is an exclusively human trait. Whereas all other mammals kill only because they are hungry or have to defend themselves, and never inflict pain gratuitously, the human species kill and torture for the oy of it, and even enjoy seeing others do it. Sadism is exclusively human.

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