Judaism
Religious Origins: From Magic to Imperial Religion
Abstract
Religious Origins 5
Better not believe in a deity at all than to cringe before gods who are worse than the worst of men. Unbelief does not so much dishonour the deity whose existence it denies.Plutarch
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999; Friday, 29 August 2008
Worship and Sacrifice
Once a god was considered as man like and given to peevish fits of anger and jealousy both towards mankind and other gods, the idea of worship arose.
The earliest form of worship of such gods was sacrifice. The fear of divine punishment required the effusion of blood to appease the anger of the god. By offering a victim their punishment was turned aside. Instead the god was placated and open to supplication for divine favours. Sacrifice began as human then animals sufficed as a token of human sacrifice and finally the sacrifice became the symbolic cannibalism of the god in perpetual commemoration of his self sacrifice—the sacrifice of the god to himself—which echoes the annual cycle of the sun and the seasons.
In the first stage, worshippers would sacrifice captives in times of warfare and slaves in peacetime. In great calamities or famines the king or his children were sacrificed, as being the highest price with which they could purchase the divine favour.
Carthage, a Phœnician foundation, was a notable place for these sacrifices. In the rites of Moloch, simply “king” in Semitic languages, virgins and children were sacrificed by being thrown into a bull shaped furnace while trumpets and flutes drowned their screams. Their mothers, obliged to look on, had to restrain their tears so as not to dishonour the god. The offering of human sacrifices to the sun in Mexico and Peru was also practised to a monstrous degree on the supposedly rational grounds that, if a little is effective, then a lot must be far more effective.
The Christian God was no different from others in these respects. The Jews seemingly had one god only, the god God who is now the god of the Christians. Surely this one good god never demanded human sacrifice. Check Exodus 13:2:
Sanctify unto me all the firstborn, whatsoever openeth the womb among the children of Israel, both of man and of beast—it is mine.
The pious might try to claim that God wanted them to be blessed not sacrificed but only sacrifice makes sense, and that is what was intended. Nor is it an aberration because it is repeated in Exodus 22:29-30 where there is also evidence that male circumcision after eight days was a substitute for an original human sacrifice.
Thou shalt not delay to offer the first of thy ripe fruits, and of thy liquors. The firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto Me. Likewise shalt thou do with thine oxen, and with thy sheep: seven days it shall be with his dam; on the eighth day thou shalt give it Me.
Abram was ordered by Yehouah to offer up his son Isaac but it was commuted to a ram, the religious justification for the change from human to animal sacrifice. The Israelites were Canaanites, in fact, as were the Phœnicians and the Carthaginians, and their common sacrificial practices show it.
Despite the supposed alternative given to Abram, human sacrifice continued to be recorded in the bible, at least if its own chronology is correct. At the foundation of Jericho, king Hiel sacrificed his sons and kings Ahaz and Manasseh both believed sacrifices would propitiate Yehouah. In Judges 11:31, if Yehouah guarantees him victory over the children of Amun, Jephthah promises to sacrifice whoever of his household comes out to meet him on his return. His one and only child, his daughter, emerges to welcome him and is duly sacrificed according to Jephthah’s promise. King David hung up seven royal princes as sacrifices to God to stop a famine (2 Samuel 21:4-9) at the beginning of the barley harvest, in other words at Passover.
Yehouah commands that “none devoted of men shall be redeemed, but shall surely be put to death” (Leviticus 27:29). Several barbarous reprisals by the worshippers of the Hebrew God on apostate Hebrews or worshippers of other gods (1 Samuel 15:32, 1 Kings 18:40, 2 Kings 10:24 and Jeremiah 7:30) are probably distortions by Ptolemaic or Maccabaean priests revising the original stories in which the Israelites were still sacrificing human beings to these gods. The human sacrifices were depicted as Yehouah’s punishment against apostates who had turned to the gods Moloch, Baal, Chemosh or Apis, the bull-god of the Egyptians, when in fact they were sacrifices to these gods by the Israelites.
Magic
The word magic actually is a much later word and applies to the practices of the Persian magi. Obviously the magic Frazer meant was not this. The word magic arose because the magi suffered mass unemployment when Alexander defeated the Persians and established a Greek hegemony. The magi of Persia were a caste of the people akin to the Brahmins of India, and not ready to take up menial work. They tried to preserve their traditions becoming travelling priests.
But there were a lot of them. Besides all of them in the service of the shah and the state, there were the ones in the state religion, and all of them employed by wealthy Persian families, for every Persian family that could afford to support another mouth, employed a family magus. Being a caste, the title magus was inherited, so the magi for generations travelled around, claiming to have supernatural skills as priests, but seen as quacks and mountebanks called goëtae, who used sleight of hand and trickery to attract an audience and a following. These allegedly supernatural tricks are what came to be called magic.
Magic now has the frivolous meaning of a stage magician’s trick, but it also has the serious meaning, from a serious consideration of the claims of the magi, of genuine supernatural skill, or the serious practices of primeval tribes that purported to be supernatural. Magic supposedly effected changes supernaturally by sympathy, and is called sympathetic magic, a belief of many primitive people. Essentially it means that like changes like. The peasant that wants his field to be fruitful takes his wife out one May morning and does the business in it—has sexual intercourse with her. The fields then knew what to do, so to speak.
Sir J G Frazer (1854-1941), an influential student of religion, followed much of E B Tylor’s findings but thought that magic preceded religion, which was derived from it or the failure of it, but both existed contemporaneously. A French authority, Solomon Reinach, thought the use of taboo was a stage earlier than magic. Primitive people do not distinguish magic and religion the way they have been made to by western interpreters of their habits. Magic developed alongside religion when practitioners tried to influence the powers of Nature. Religion was what bonded the people of the tribe together, and consisted largely of public rituals, centered at first on the totem, then the tribal god or ancestral father, whereas magic was largely personal. Religious motivation is always in the psychology of the individuals that make up any religious group. In the modern pluralistic world, people have a comprehensive choice of religions and none at all, and, when nothing appeals to them, they can start their own!
Both magic and religion are attempts to control powers, and both require appeals to spirits that are acted out in some way. For long they believed, and some people still believe, that magic worked, but those who eventually admitted it failed came to see the vegetation and the storm as wilful, because of personal powers behind them and chose instead to try to placate them through worship. The fact that the tribal magician was also often the chief meant that magic and religion were conducted by the same man, so the two overlapped in popular view.
Some degree of coercion or supplication apply to both. Maybe magic places more emphasis in our conception of it on notional coercion, but, while killing his chicken, the shaman appeals to his spirits just as the priest does. And even supposedly advanced religions like Christianity condone the coercion of God, if we are to believe that faith saves! Faith is therefore something magical that forces God’s hand. If it does not, then there is no basis for claiming that it does.
Magic and ritual depend upon some wider theory of the world, of agency, of man, etc, but ethical, cosmological and eschatological beliefs are normally embedded in behaviour, not abstractly formulated.P Worsley
The reason is the mundane origins of religion. It began as particular social responses, expressed through activity, play, dancing, competing, acting. The activities had myths attached to them by way of explanation, and the myths themselves then became a theoretical core for religion and theology, but religion first demanded a personal commitment to communal behaviour. Knowing that religions have this in common does not obviate the need for the anthropologist or sociologist to study every different situation empirically.
The tribe’s magician was the shaman. He could change things and people, and it is well known now that knowing a spell has been cast can induce a response by psychology, by autosuggestion. People who think themselves cursed can even die from the anxiety it causes. The shaman was also a witch doctor. They cured wounds and diseases partly by folk medicine, often based on the rule of similarity, and partly by the psychologal use of autosuggestion, all helped by the fact that most wounds and illnesses cure themselves, or rather the body’s own immune system cures them. Anyway, the shaman or witch doctor of the tribe was often a powerful and feared man who often became the chief.
Religion was concerned with the sacred, what was allowed and forbidden for members of the tribe, its taboos being a kind of law and moral code binding upon its members. One root of the word religion is the Latin religare meaning “to bind again”. Classicist, R Graves, questions this derivation, however, on the grounds that the word we have then ought to be “religation” not religion. But rightly or wrongly derived, the meaning of “binding” is just what religion is, the rites and taboos that constituted much of tribal culture being the ligatures that tied the people together. When the totem was replaced by a divinity, it, seen now as a person, served the same purpose.
Primitive religion was purely a group thing. The individual could enjoy it and feel secure in the midst of the group, but it did nothing for personal concerns like ill health. The tribal shaman had that role. He performed his magic in the name of certain spirits, once spirits were accepted as universal. A shaman who was unusually successful could get a reputation beyond the tribe, patronage and a wider following. In some cases, this following formed a quasi religious community outside the tribe, elevating the shaman into a mystagogue, and the practices he urged into a sort of primitive mystery religion. It is distinguished from tribal religion by its concern with individual suffering, and achieving psychological relief from it—salvation—by collective activity. Naturally, these parallel collectives grew as the suffering of the lowe classes became more severe. It was the disadvantaged classes that needed “saving” because society was failing them.
Of course, by this stage of religious evolution, syncretism between the tribal collective religion and the personal collective religion was inevitable, and each took from the other in an hybridization. It offered a big advantage for the priest come shaman. What had been an embarrassing problem for the magicians, the fact that their magic often did not work—implying their control of the totem powers, and any others thought to be relevant to magic and healing, was imperfect—was explained now by the same men wearing their other hat of priest of the tribal god.
The priests of the tribal religion found that the factors that caused personal suffering were failures to follow the prescribed ritual properly, offending the totem spirit that was by now a god. These offences were “sins”, and the sins had to be accepted and confessed to be cured[†]Confession. The basis of Catholicism, psychoanalysis and scientology. . The god had not favoured the magic because the beneficiaries had not had enough righteousness, piety, or faith! The shaman-priest was insulated from the righteous anger of the tribe when his magic or medicine failed to cure anyone it loved. It was all together safer to hide behind the god. Advice on how to eliminate personal sin became an important function of the priest, who was therefore in a position to psychologically manipulate his flock in his own interests.
Frazer found that magic and religion were inseparably intertwined in many tribal cultures he had data on. Many religious rituals seem based on sympathetic magic, such as the annual renewal, or new year ceremonies which enact Nature myths apparently with the aim of reminding the gods of their duties. Kings too, who often were shamans in tribal times, were long afterwards thought to have had magical powers, or to have even been divine.
The Rise Of Priesthoods
Now the basis of all religions is a belief that there are gods who control natural phenomena and can be persuaded to use their power for the benefit of their votaries when placated by rituals and prayers. Thoughts which seem to come to the conscious mind from a source outside itself are ideas put there by a god. But gods, or rather their priests, for purposes of their own, might deceive, for wrong hunches are implanted as well as right ones. What happens when the approved channels prove wrong? Any respectable theologian can conjure up plausible explanations why some god does not perform as expected, and worshippers no more than gamblers, are discouraged by a few failures, since they hope they will hit the divine jackpot soon. But constant disappointment leads polytheist worshippers to transfer their supplications from an obdurate god to one untried, and when accumulated experience engenders doubts about the goodwill of several gods, they welcome new ones more amenable to persuasion.
Religion was initially a factual outlook on the world promoted by small family groups or tribes. But when agriculture was introduced and some clever people realised that surpluses could be bullied or tricked out of farmers and gardeners, we soon find them taking over religion for their own ends. Moreover, agriculture made the correct reading of the seasonal changes a matter of grave anxiety. Will the rain fall in due season? Will the spirits of the trees and the corn bring forth their usual abundance? City dwelling arose at the same time and with it disease, which were duly attributed to evil spirits. Indeed, spirits were everywhere giving people a lot of unseen enemies and some unseen friends to concern themselves about. The start of the history of religious deception, skulduggery and fraud was the claim of a professional priesthood had they had the supernatural ability to know and communicate the wishes of spiritual beings whose will controlled Nature. Someone had to specialise and so medicine-men, rain-makers, wizards and priests arose.
Religion had a cache of respectability, once it was accepted, that meant no one questioned the motives and abilities of the professionals. Consequently, the prosperity of the caste of priests was always thereafter assured. Priests would never be uneployed, except in times of social turmoil, so long as enough of their potential customers were convinced of the reliability of their invisible goods.
Aboriginals have no priests, but the women and children are excluded from the important ceremonies, and the elders, handle the mysteries of the spirits. The Melanesians have experts, though not a professional caste. Anyone could notionally acquire or buy the art of making the sacrifices and placating the spirits, and become a wizard or priest, living on his art. Polynesians have distinct priests that commune with the gods as convulsions and contortions prove. They induce the god to speak to the worshipper by putting out of sight an assistant to play the part of the god, and demand presents in the name of the god. Priestcraft is as old as priesthood.
In West Africa, the little spirits were less important and greater spirits occupied the attention of the Negroes. Mawu, the god of sky and rain, is the greatest spirit but is not feared. He is a good natured father in heaven—a familiar concept. The god of lightning is more important because he causes damage, and his priests and priestesses, who are “wives of the god”, dominate. When a hut has been destroyed by lightning, the priests or priestesses examine the ruin. As clever conjurers, they slip a flint arrow into the heap, and they then produce it to the gullible believers as proof that the god had struck with his arrow.
The priests also emphasied the importance of the phallus and introduced phallic gods. Doubtless they saw it as a way of extending sacrificial food favours to sexual favours—priests always found ways of getting the best out of society, often even dominating the professional bullies, the princes. Since people often had erotic dreams, there plainly were sexual spirits. It is interestingly similar to the many people that apparently seriously believe that they are being abducted to spacecraft, often for sexual examinations, while they sleep. It proves how truly primitive we are psychologically.
The only question is the extent of conscious fraud and deception in all religions. Clergymen are often inferior or inadequate people in one way or another. They admire those who are physically powerful and able to kill deer or fight battles as warriors, because they are weak people, and envious of those with strength and courage. Priests are not attractive to women for their virility and power so, when they have the intelligence, they make up for it in cunning and psychological manipulation. If society admires qualities they do not possess, they will obtain powers that society will admire. And so they do. They discover they have supernatural powers that even the mightiest prince can be made to respect. They cannot do it without deliberate fraud because there are no supernatural powers, and when forced to demonstrate them, they never can, although they always can in the myths they circulate to explain the powers they have. They take advantage of the grief of the bereaved. they exploit the credulity of the simple minded. They feed people’s insatiable appetite for mystery through sleight of hand and conjuring tricks. Time and again they are shown to be tricksters, and professional stage magicians show how they do their tricks, but gullible crowds still believe. That belief is the same as the belief in religion.
Being a professional religionizer is a career choice. Keeping a religion going is a career. Some, though a few only, do it out of a singular desire to improve the lot of their fellow men. Most, however, are hard nosed enough, even if the first is true, to realize that they need to make a living themselves, and they have a great opportunity to make themselves a comfortable one, and sometimes a magnificent one. Of course, the success of the religious professionals variously called priests, ministers, clergymen, and so on, depends on the group or community to be evangelized having a low level of education and intelligence. To produce the religious fake that will impress the audience requires demanding and careful work, but the thoughtful cleric only does what is necessary. It is sufficient for the congregation merely to make it seem exhausting. The real point about evangelism, is that the evangelists gets his audience to bring his next audience to him. That is what evangelism is.
An American crackpot evangelist, Oral Roberts, interviewed Jesus(!) in 1980. The Christian God confessed he was really nine hundred feet tall, explaining, perhaps, why his followers had to kiss his feet. Modern American Christians were so impressed that they sent an extra $5,000,000 to add to the $45,000,000 they normally give annually. No less impressive is Don Stewart who exceeded $10,000,000 income as an evangelist by distributing bits of his holy underwear to put under Christian pillows, thereby transmitting to the sleeping believer his evangelical holiness.
Among the first of them, according to R Oliver, recorded in any detail was Pythagoras. Pythagoras was born on the Aegean island of Samos, early in the sixth century BC, with all the requirements of a god. He was born of a human virgin with the god Apollo as a father, and the rest of the paraphernalia the incarnate god needs to come to the salvation of huuman sheep who keep losing the secret of immortality that the incarnate gods keep giving them. His cult was an exclusive one necessitating a long and arduous period of training before they had to take their exams in the secret docrine the God had brought to their attention only, as particularly perceptive of the human kind, so that they were admitted to an elite society, the mysteries of which they swore never to reveal. The elite could then go about whispering to likely recruits that they had the secret of life for a fee, and the monies would roll in.
The Neopythagoreans at Rome divised a scheme to disseminate their faith. Two stone coffins, about eight feet long and four feet wide, were carefully made, sealed with molten lead, incised with inscriptions in both Latin and Greek, and buried in a spot where a farmer ploughing the field of a Roman clerk would find them. One of the coffins was inscribed, Numa Pompilius, the legendary successor of Romulus and second king of Rome, the traditional founder of the Roman religion. Numa’s apparent coffin was empty. After all, Numa, according to the Roman bible had ascended to heaven to join Romulus and Remus, and the other saints of ancient Rome.
In the other coffin were seven books in Latin and seven in Greek, which described the true facts of the world and its holy order. Their author was none other than Numa, who, according to a popular myth, wrote everything down inspired by Pythagoras. The revelation was that the old religion was all corrupt, and could be seen to be inferior to the original religion now visible again through divine providence directing the farmer’s plough in the field on the Janiculum he had ploughed for decades without noticing any coffins looming up from the soil.
The books were taken in 181 BC to Q. Petilius, urban praetor who informed the Roman leaders, members of the class of patricians or aristocrats (Patres) who ruled the Roman republic. The Roman rulers new quite well that Numa was a myth, and that human people did not bodily ascend to heaven leaving empty coffins, and that books were unlikely to have survived, even in a lead sealed coffin for half a millennium. Had the books been shown to the plebeian classes first, the uneducated and emotional people that religious forgers ought to aim their works at, they might have made an impact, especially if they were presented by a prophet with suitable credentials, appearance and eloquence. As it was educated Romans did not have a high regard for religion except for state occasions meant to keep the people quiet, and, although Rome had its own state ceremonial, Roman rulers knew that any would have done. Religious fanaticism was easily instigated among the plebeans and the bar room pundits of the day, so the aristocrats wasted no time in ordering the discoveries to be burnt unread.
In fact, the response of those dealing with the find was strangely unanimous from the outset, suggesting that they were colluding in the discovery themselves. Even the discoverer, offered compensation for his loss, refused it. Erich S Gruen, a history professor in California, smells a rat, and opines that the whole of it was staged by the patres to demolish once and for all any movements to reform Roman religion, which suited them fine as it was. Effectively they were declaring that it was too late for Rome to change, even for Numa Pompilius! Greek religions and schools were coming west, after the Macedonian wars. The Roman ruling class were willing to accept the degree of Hellenization that Rome had, but wanted it to go no further and so deliberately destroyed, even if in effigy really, the evidence that Rome depended upon Greece for its culture. Thereafter what was Roman was Roman, and there were no prospects of bringing forth evidence that it should have been different. Whichever view is taken, religion was being manipulated for the gain of some faction.
What is curious is that some religious hoaxers believe they are sincere. They know they are doing tricks, but somehow come to believe their own propaganda. Today, people who do that, people who lie quite blatantly, yet believe in what they are saying are called sociopaths, and psychologists have shown that it is a defect that nevertheless leads people to the very top! Politicians and priests both persuade themselves of their utter sincerity, and carry with them admiring crowds, while others see them for whzt they are—outright liars. Religious conviction ought not to convince anyone other than the pwerson who holds them, that the convinced person is true. They might be sure they are offering a uniqe and pious service to their disciples, but they are actually leading them into loss, whether financial or physical. Deceit can accompany sincere faith, but that is all the more reason why the wise course is to be skeptical.
One who thought he was sincere while perpetrating infantile and idiotic frauds was the Reverend William D Mahan. Around 1880, this clergyman published Acta Pilati. A Correct Transcript of Pilate’s Court, then many other amazing documents that had remained unknown for almost 2000 years including Jonathan’s Interview with the Bethlehem Shepherds, Gamaliel’s Interview with Joseph and Mary, and various additional fantasies such as reports of Caiaphas about the crucifixion and resurrection, and volumes of confirmatory letters from unknown scholars. Christian publishers, including Eerdmans, published fourteen editions of them all as bone fide in the years up to 1942!
At a time when Joseph Smith was forging a whole new religion, called the Latter Day Saints, perhaps Mahan can be excused for his feeble forgeries, but how can the college educated Christians in charge of the publishing houses be excused. They were clever and well educated, and could see profit in the silly fakes. They were right, and they should be a warning to all Christians that their own kind continue to gull them, fool them and rob them in the name of their God. In the twenty first century they ought to know better but rather are getting worse.
One popular trick of holy men in ancient times was to offer his customers an hallucinatory drug. The haoma of the Persians and the soma of the Indians was probably the Amanita muscaria mushroom—the one that fairies are often shown sitting on in children’s books. Of course, the make up of the hallucinatory food or drink was a trade secret of the clerguymen, but its effect was to give people a glimpse of heaven and hell. It meant that a sacred bun and a sacred cup became a standard of the professional religious man’s offerings. Anyone who has experienced such drugs knows that, with a little practice, and the reassurance of someone trusted nearby, the mind is able to control what it experiences. The religious tricksters knew this and prepared their audience with ehortations and preparatory harangues that put them in the right frame of mind for the revelation. It is the origin of the revivalist style of address to the faithful. The person who then drank the sacred liquid then would expereince what they were led to expect, heaven or hell, angels or demons, bliss or torment. These were the revelations of the beyond the priest had on offer. Quite possibly the shaman himself was just as convinced the images were real, but he did not care too much about that. what mattered to him is that he controlled the experience and beliefs of others. what is remarkable about psychology is that the clergy eventually realised that the drug was not necessary. The belief itself was sufficient, and so it remains.
The effects of the psychodelic and hallucinogenic drugs is akin to certain forms of madness like schizophrenia, and some people who are clinically mad, or would have been so diagnosed today, are considered by their hearers as prophets, or in some societies as gods incarnate. So, it is true to say that many holy men were either insane or were intentionally deceitful. Today, the latter are the more common, though their followers have infinite capacity for forgiveness and they do in fact forgive their prophets any sin they commit. Completely insane prophets are today rare because they are usually selected out as insane by society at an earlier stage than they would have been in ancient times, but in those times many of the prophets who founded religions or at least a following might well have been crazy.
It does not surprise us to read that Enoch was conducted around the universe or that John, the supposed author of Revelation was too. But Emmanuel Swedenborg, an immensely able polymath, the Swedish Newron, in 1745, after Newton had been dead almost twenty years, suddenly announced that he had been on a similar trip to John of the Apocalypse and Enoch, and had seen the whole universe with God enthroned, then had been divinely commissioned to cure the world of sectarianism. The outcome was that he founded another Christian sect! Swedenborg must fall into the category of mad prophets rather than swindling ones, but the swindlers are more common.
Many ingenious inventers of former times were employed in making mechanical miracles to gull hoi polloi. Various temples had devices that did amazing things, at least for the time, and Hero of Alexandria wrote an account of how some of them were done. Images were made to talk and to drink. Divices like that in the book The Wizard of Oz really existed in “primitive” times. A silhouette of a god was made and projected on to a cloud of smoke or steam by using a bright light behind it, just as a lamp projects a shadow on to a shade. The billowing of the cloud of smokey steam made the image seem to be alive! A famous mechanical device did the very miracle attributed to Jesus in John—it made the water gushing from a fountain in the temple turn into wine.
Future Life and Resurrection
The belief in a future life for man was almost universal among nations of antiquity, and is apparently confirmed by the appearance of the dead in dreams. Before the sun set, primitive people sought a secure place to be and sleep, a state he identified with death. Each night the sun died but was restored each morning. These early humans came to think that actual death was just a long sleep from which people would be eventually awoken to be resurrected in this world.
In expectation of this, loved ones supplied the dead with the necessities of life, food, drink and clothing, and sometimes culled live-stock, murdered slaves, and wives even killed themselves to accompany the departed soul. Powerful kings had their cattle, horses, dogs, wives, slaves, and, money buried with them, women, their domestic appliances, and children, their toys.
Egypt was the first place where the immortality of the soul was taught and believed.T R Glover
The Egyptians spoke of the dead as gone to Osiris. On a monument, dated long before Abram, is found the epitaph:
May thy soul attain to the creator of all mankind.
Sculptures and paintings in the tombs of the dead represent the deceased ushered into the world of spirits by funerary deities who declare, “a soul arrived”. At death souls were weighed in a balance, the good spirits entering Elysium or Paradise, where men became gods, the bad suffering in Hell or Tartarus. Doubtful cases went to an intermediate place to be purified by wind, water, or fire, a belief coming to us in the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory.
The place of resurrection had receded. At first the expectation was that the life one experienced on wakening from death was not some distant fanciful place but was simply this world. Whether the next life was one of resurrection or reincarnation, it was into this world. That was the expectation of the first Christians who thought that their Christ would return within forty years of his crucifixion and inaugurate a kingdom of God on earth—or “in earth” as the Lord’s prayer puts it.
In Matthew, many people who had been dead had “risen from their graves” and been seen “walking about” after the death of Jesus, but Matthew records nothing about their experience of the spiritual world they had visited. Everyone must have been agog to question all these risen saints—but Matthew remains silent.
Matthew’s fantasy was an allusion to the general resurrection of the saints (Hosea 6:2) which the Nazarenes, an Essene sect, believed had started when the body of Jesus disappeared. It was not real history but Matthew’s expectation so he records it as if it had actually happened. It is a lie, but a pious lie, intended to glorify God and his son, so it is acceptable to Christians who quickly became incapable of distinguishing truth and invention.
When nothing further transpired after forty years, the bishops had to revise their views, and claimed either that the kingdom of God was not in earth but in a future, a spiritual or a transcendental heaven, or that, for the believer, the kingdom of God existed in the Christian community.
Heaven and Hell
Heaven and hell, as residences of gods, angels, and devils, are very ancient myths. The ancients conceived the ideas of heaven and Hell from the sky, because the sun went down each night from the firmament into darkness, leaving heaven to enter Hell.
Ideas of heaven varied with each country, according to the likes and dislikes of each. As all nations have made a god, and that god has resembled the persons who made it, so have all nations made a heaven, and that heaven corresponds to the fancies of the people who created it. Heaven was by some placed in the clouds, by others in the moon, by others in the far-off isles. Everything there was lovely and beautiful, and all was enjoyment, with music, dancing, and singing. Paradise, a Persian name for a beautiful park, became an Eastern name for heaven and had the additional benefit for men of all women existing there for men’s pleasure. Angels were divine messengers, avatars or messiahs.
When shades eventually realized they were dead, originally they went to Sheol for Jews or Hades for the Greeks where they wandered to and fro mindlessly, neither happy nor unhappy but not knowing God. There were no places like heaven and Hell. During the ages when torture was a standard form of punishment by lords and princes, and when gods were supernatural tyrants with infinite resources of vengeance, priests converted Hades into Hell, a place of diabolical torture, Gehenna to the Jews. Priests could make people their slaves by playing on their superstitious fears and fancies of servitude to gods and devils and threatening them with the tortures of Hell. Then, to relieve the god of his responsibility for the existence of evil, clever priests invented the devil to account for evil and to take those who succumbed to sin into Hell for punishment.
The Persian Zend Avesta says that Ahriman threw the universe into disorder by raising an army against Ormuzd, and, after fighting against him for ninety days, was at length vanquished by the Divine Word. The myth of the war in heaven is held by nearly every religion. The Egyptian legend told of a revolt against the God Ra. Similar wars are found in the Talmud and in the Christian New Testament in Revelation 11:7 and the apocryphal book of Nicodemus. It is even found in the Hindu Aitareya Brahmana, written seven or eight centuries BC. For Gnostics, Jews, Moslems and Christians it provides the mythical basis for the fallen angel, Satan, who, with his armies of demons, becomes the adversary of God.
Just as God created heaven and hell, He must have created Nature good and bad. Nature is fair and foul. She blesses and curses. She does not keep one mood long. If God created Nature, then all of this is His fault. It is far better to imagine Nature as a queen bee. She gives birth constantly but is unaware of the products of her creation. There is no point in praying to Nature. She cannot hear. There is no point in blaming Her for earthquakes or accidents. She didn’t do it on purpose. None of this can be said of the Christian God because he is supposed to have known exactly what He was doing—though he did keep changing His mind. We can rightly blame Him, but nobody ever does.
Imperial Religions
The imperial religions of today have many similarities. Bouquet (Comparative Religion) notices the “parallels” between Greek, Indian and Chinese thought, attributing it to spontaneous independent discovery, or to diffusion, though he does not say where from. It is true that diffusion, once the answer to everything, has fallen out of fashion, largely because of modern dating methods like 14C and dendrochronology, but that does not mean it never happened. What favours diffusion in this case is the simultaneity of the eruption of great thinkers in these very different places. Original thinkers, the Greek philosophers and the founders of Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism and Confucianism, all appeared in these places in the century from 550 to 450 BC, suggesting some trigger.
Now a very original thinker preceded all of these. It was Zoroaster, who lived in the previous century according to those who base their views on the historicity of the myths told about him, and hundreds of years sooner according to those who think his writing is comparable with the Rig Veda of India. It does not matter a great deal when Zoroaster himself lived because it was not his life that caused his teaching to spread just in this very century of 550 to 450 BC. It was the rise of the Persians under the biblical Cyrus (c 580-529 BC) whose family had adopted Zoroaster’s new teaching. After Cyrus died in 529 BC, the Persian empire lasted another 200 years until it was destroyed by Alexander, and it was this very period when original thinking erupted upon Europe and Asia.
The empire built by Cyrus linked Greece directly with India, and the Chinese link came via the silk road which led through the Persian conquests to get from the east to the west. Persia links in the three necessary directions, and Persia had the stunningly original Zoroastrian system to stimulated others into fresh thinking. The impact of Zoroastrianism propagated by the huge new superpower that straddled the very center of Asia gave birth to Greek philosophizing, Indian Buddhism, and Chinese Confucianism and Taoism. As the Persians were also responsible for Judaism and the pseudepigraphs of Judaism called “The Prophets”, they were the source of all the modern large religious systems, as well as secular philosophy, yet scholarship almost entirely ignores them.
Greek philosophy and Indian speculation have amazing similarities, described by Bouquet as inexplicable. Iamblichus, who wrote a life of Pythagoras (582-507 BC), said he had travelled widely, certainly to Egypt and Babylon, but, as he is also said to have learned from the Brahmins, he might have travelled to India, or met Indians in Babylon or Egypt. Most of his adult life was after the Persian empire had been established. The doctrine of the Upanishads has points of similarity with that of the Eleatics, Xenophanes and Parmenides, who believed that change was an illusion, and that of the Samkhya is like the ideas of Anaxagoras and Empedocles. There is no doubt that Indians knew about the Greeks, and they called them Ionians (Yavanas, where “v” = “oo”).
Any connexions between them must have been via Persia, an empire that stretched from one country to the other. But after only a little over 200 years, the Persian empire was taken over by the Macedonian prince, Alexander the Great. He tried to destroy Persian culture by torching the Persian city of Persepolis, and with it the Zoroastrian books, The Nards. Of the 21 constituents of The Nards, all that now remains is in the Zend Avesta, fragments of just a few of them. What was destroyed will explain the similarities of Greek and Indian thinking in precisely the two centuries that the Persian empire existed.
The empire that Alexander marched through ensuring its loyalty to its new master, broke up when he died, the two biggest chunks being Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucidic Syria and Babylon. The further eastern provinces next to India were lost and incorporated into the kingdom of a rising Iranian tribe called Parthians. In India itself, king Chandragupta (321-297 BC) had met Alexander, and his grandson, Asoka (268-232 BC), ruled a large empire across the northern Indian plain from the Indus to the mouths of the Ganges. He had adopted a new religion founded just a few hundred years before, at the time that Cyrus had conquered north west India, and impressed Indians with Persian scholarship. It was Buddhism, founded by Siddharta Gautama. Gautama proposed an “eightfold way” to overcome the vicissitudes of life, which it is hard to believe was not influenced by the Zoroastrian “threefold way” of thoughts, words and deeds, for these are explicitly three of the eight, and others seem derived from these three.
It is a schoolboy error to think they Persians and Greeks hated each other so much they would have nothing to do with each other. Medes and Persians were Indo-European tribes related to the Greeks, as the Greek myths show, so they had much in common, and the more creative Greeks of Ionia had already been absorbed into the Persian empire. The Persians employed people of all nations in their cosmopolitan main cities, Babylon, Persepolis, Susa and Ecbatana, and among them were many Greeks. Greeks were opportunists, and the Persians gave them opportunities to make money out of the skills they had, primarily soldiering, craftsmanship, and merchandizing. Hecataeus was a Greek doctor in Susa, and men like him obviously knew Persian culture well. Greeks, like Hecataeus, must have met Indians, and all of them absorbed the culture of Zoroastrianism. They all took back home the new ideas they had while in Persia, and Persian missionaries will have been sent to India.
Bouquet attributes to Alexander and Hellenization the idea of proselytizing, thus ignoring the Persians as ever. Zoroastrians argue still about whether proselytizing is allowed in their religion, but passages in the Avesta undoubtedly suggest it is, and how could Zoroaster have propagated his religion at the outset without it? Medes and Persians converted, that is certain, but whether they were then keen to convert conquered people might be the point of division. They might have wanted to keep Zoroastrianism as the religion of the ruling class, and they evidently set up Judaism as a sort of Noahide[†]Noahide. Or Noachide. A minimal Judaism for converts unwilling to take the step of full Judaism. Judaism itself was a partial Zoroastrianism, as these pages explain. Zoroastrianism, for their conquered subjects. In an amazing paradox, it is the derived religion of the subjects and not that of the conquerors that has survived.
In India, Buddhism began at the time of the Persian empire, and must have spread by proselytism. In the century after Alexander, Asoka adopted Buddhism as his imperial religion, and sent missionaries outside of India to places like Alexandria in Egypt to spread the new gospel. It was just the time that the Ptolemies were interested in religion, and had sponsored the cult of Serapis, and were in the act of favouring Judaism, not just by publishing the Jewish sacred books, but in large measure writing them. What was primarily a law book, mostly Deuteronomy with some of the legal parts of the other Pentateuchal books, was expanded into a narrative that put the origin of the Jews in Egypt. Despite the fact that Buddhism in India, Taoism and Confucianism in China, Judaism in the near east, and Greek metaphysical speculation, all arose just when the Persians—with an utterly novel and theologically complete religion—made themselves the dominant presence in Asia, the west continues to ignore it. It was just something religiously creative accidentally passing on the breeze, and whatever it was, it was Alexander, they say, who allowed it to spread, so the Persians had nothing to do with it.
Persian Religion
According to the Gospel of James, when Jesus was born, time stopped. Everything on earth was therefore suspended in action, the sun was motionless and even birds were fixed in flight. Then time started again. This looks like a fairy tale until it is related to Zoroastrian cosmogony in which the perfect world of the Good Creation is timeless. It is the interference of the Evil Spirit in God’s Good Creation that causes it to change—indeed that causes time to appear allowing change and corruption. Change is necessary for corruption. The perfect world is static! Time is therefore symptomatic of Evil, if not identical to it.
Though Persia was the enemy of Greece, and came near to ending Greek freedom, enlightened Greeks—the philosophers and intellectuals—saw much to value in the Persians. Herodotus, Xenophon, and Alexander the Great admired them, not surprisingly considering Persian achievements and what we owe to them. Gardens—the Persians were lovers of flowers, of the rose particularly, but the lilac (a Persian word) too, and so too the tulip—from the same root as turban—think how they look. The peach is Persian, the word being a corruption of the word “Persis”, and, oranges and lemons reached Europe from Persia, the orange originally being a “Median apple”. A Persian noble had a “paradise”, a hunting park where wild animals roamed.
Greeks heard Persian names aspirated at the end and said they all ended in “s”, though the Persians had not noticed. Xerxes and Ahasuerus shows how difficult it was for a Greek to transliterate a Persian name, Khshayarsha being a better attempt and showing the relationship between the two. For Persians, it was dishonourable to be in debt because anyone in debt would tells lies, and the appeal of Mithras was as a god of contracts. The Greeks noted that the Persians at first drank only water, but subject to Babylonian comforts, they lost their pure habits. Persians were highly disciplined and loyal, and Greeks admired them as men. Greek victories against the odds were surely remarkable, but the Greeks were heavily armoured hoplites whereas most Persian soldiers were unarmoured or only lightly so, yet they threw themselves bravely against the Greeks to be slaughtered.
The extensive translations of the principal Zoroastrian scriptures and theological works into Greek, which had been made to satisfy the enlightened curiosity of Alexandrian scholars in the time of the Ptolemies, did not survive the final destruction of the great library at Alexandria by mobs of ignorant Christians in 389 or 391 AD. The Christian rabble, led by Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria, destroyed the Serapeum, where the central part of the great library was housed. The destruction of most of the rest of the copious writings of the Magi was achieved when Persia was conquered by the Moslems, but there was probably nothing much left for the Moslems to destroy when Amr took the city in 640 AD. The story of the Arab commander’s destruction of the library was apparently invented by Bar Hebraeus, a Christian bishop, around 1270 AD.
The loss of the writings attributed to Saena, a successor of Zoroaster mentioned in the Avesta and said to have trained a hundred disciples, and of the works of the theologian Ostanes, who was a companion of Xerxes and is credited with a work entitled Oktateuchos in its Greek translation, were most serious. Ostanes is cited with approval by one of the earliest Christian writers, Minucius Felix (26:11). Next to Zoroaster, he was the most celebrated Zoroastrian sage, and the many references to him in Greek and Latin are given by Bidez and Cumont in Les Mages Hellenises.
The Christians in Persia were Nestorians, whom Khusrau’s principal enemy, Justinian, the crooked Christian emperor in Constantinople, was eager to exterminate. Many Nestorians were caught in an unsuccessful conspiracy to replace Khusrau with his son but the king still protected them, presumably to recruit them as allies, indebted to him for his mercy, against Justinian. In 529 AD, Justinian closed the final Pagan school in Athens to eliminate the last vestiges of Greek scholarship. Its seven Neoplatonist teachers, deprived of a living, went to Persia during the ascendancy of the Mazdakites in 531 AD. Khusrau welcomed them. When Justinian in 533 AD negotiated with Khusrau a treaty for “eternal” peace, Khusrau insisted on a clause which provided that the seven Neoplatonists were to be permitted to return home and live thereafter without molestation by Christians. One of them was Simplicius, who later wrote commentaries on Aristotle and Epictetus that have preserved for us important fragments of Greek philosophers whose works were subsequently lost. A Zoroastrian king left us this scholarly example and heritage.
The amesha spentas have no will and hence no personality of their own, it being explicitly stated that their will is always Ahuramazda’s. They were aspects of the God, seven holy spirits.
The effective use of religion as a political instrument to enforce stability required a doctrine that would promise to individuals after death the justice that was absent in reality. The Greeks realized this in the sixth century when the Persians first loomed on their horizon with their relligion of post mortem rewards and punishments. Though they were not fond of Persian might, they saw the power of the idea, and Greek philosophers began political philosophy with it.
The Greeks before then had thought the dead were phantoms, and indeed, most Greeks continued to think the same way, so that when the Jewish scriptures were written down in Greek in the third century BC, the ideas of the dead it contained were largely those of the ruling Greek elite, who had still not accepted the Persian ideas, even 300 years after the Greek philosophers had begun playing with them. The dead were doomed forever to live as shades, shadows, mourning the life they had known and could never know again. The place of the dead was Hades, a gloomy, wintery, underground world, the same world as Sheol of the Jewish scriptures. Sheol was the Greek Hades by another name.
The promise of post mortem comfort was made to those who had come directly within the Persian ambit, in the west, in Anatolia, Syria and Yehud. These are the places where Christianity took root. A post mortem life required the idea of something of the person not dying when the body does, and this was the soul, effectively the human personality or psyche in Greek. Once that is accepted, it can be considered that the soul can re-infest another body, and, if heaven is the ultimate aim, perhaps it is sent back repeatedly until it became perfect enough to enter heaven. That is reincarnation, or metempsychosis, as Greeks called it. Platonists and the mystery cults of the east mainly took that view and it evolved into Gnosis and the Christian heresies of the Middle Ages. The mystae, candidates for salvation, had to be free of moral violations, be coached in the divine mysteries by the hierophants—professional holy men—had to be initiated into the cult, eventually after all this were declared to be “born again”. A year after thus being saved, the mystes became an epoptes—they saw the god or goddess and felt enthusiasm—a state of euphoria and rapture of being possessed by a god. The food or drink, the ambrosia and nectar that brought this about were hallucinatory drugs.
The Cathars of the Middle Ages thought that people might have to be reincarnated up to seven times before they achieved perfection, an idea that can be traced back to Pindar, who stated in his second Olympian in Sicily about 476 BC, that when anyone had passed through three or six successive mortal lives of perfect integrity, they are relieved of the cycles of mortality. The soul then passes the Tower of Cronus to a beautiful land unreachable by land or sea. There the sun was always at the vernal equinox and gentle winds from a placid ocean breezed in forever over the fields of lilies, the flower of the happy dead.
Buddhist Influence
From now onwards, purely ethnic religion begins to be supplanted by religion organized internationally, and opening its fellowship to all and sundry without regard to race or station.A C Bouquet
The founder of Jainism, Vardhamana, was born about 570 BC, so must have flourished when Cyrus was building the Persian empire, and made contact with India via Sind and Punjab.
The founder of Buddhism, Siddartha Gautama or Gotama, was born about 560 BC, so the Persian empire was well established by the time he undertook his mission. His ancestors were Sakyas, an Indo-European tribe that might have been a branch of the Saxons. These Iranian people split, some going south into Iran and perhaps India, and others continuing westwards into Europe, and eventually Britain. The resemblences in the myths of Christ and Buddha are notable.
Professor Bouquet offers this list. His mother was a virgin. Devas (angels) announced his birth to his father, and sang at it. His future greatness was predicted. He fasted 49 days. He was tempted by an evil spirit. He performed healing miracles. He was transfigured. He had twelve disciples. He fed 500 people with one biscuit. Not he, but a disciple walked on water, but then sank. He opposed temple ritual. A traitor tried to have him killed. He entered his own town in triumph. The earth shook when he died.
The question is “Which tradition came first, that of Christ or of Buddha?”. Buddha certainly lived much earlier, but the Pali Buddhist texts only appeared about 80 BC. Even so, they precede Christ, but no one can be sure that they then included all of these miracles. They could have been added later, so a Christian influence cannot be excluded. Asoka had sent his missionaries to Alexandria, and they were active there in the century before Christ, so the possibility of direct influence of Buddhism on Christ, the Essenes being in contact with Egypt, let alone Christianity, is anything but excluded. Moreover, the Christian New Testament itself, with the gospels about Jesus, only appeared in about the middle of the second century, though Christians date Mark to about 70 AD. So, Buddhist inspired stories could have been added spuriously when the gospels were set down in writing. The overall timing favours Buddhism. It seems to have had priority by over 200 years over the time when the Christian stories emerged for public scrutiny, and no one can be sure that the gospels were not altered even after they first appeared.
In fact, both were derived—both inspired by Zorastrianism, which preceded them. Myths of both religions had already appeared in Persian works, and Persia was perfectly placed to influence both east and west. Christ’s central teachings, completely ignored by Christians in favour of the mysticism introduced by Paul, were practical ways of living united and peaceful lives together until the world ended, which was he expected to be soon. Then his followers were to join the side of the saints and angels standing against evil. Buddha was even more practical, because he had no notion that saints and angels were ready to do anything, so practical teaching was all there was.
Christ was an Essene, a poor man in that he chose to own little, his possessions being held in common by his community, of whom Judas was the treasurer. But he was not an ascetic. He did not deny himself clothing and sustenance, but he lived frugally. Buddha was the same. His principle was moderation in everything. Aristotle also believed it. Both Christ and Buddha taught a way of life (“The Way”) guided by moral and practical principles, love of other people, even your enemies for Christ, and the eightfold way for Buddha. Both emphasized other rather than self in practical terms, but Christians inverted Christ’s self effacement after his death, making him into the “Big I Am” in John, and emphasizing, in their notion of salvation, pure selfishness approved by God.
Buddha, though deified by some of his later followers, was misinterpreted as a sort of extreme ascetic. Religious believers always seem to want extremes, when the greatest teachers advocate moderation. Buddha utterly opposed empty speculation about gods and spirits. He did not say there were none, but he was sure they did not bother anybody in life. So whenever he was faced with a question inviting speculation, he was noncommittal. People’s goal was Nirvana, or “waning away”—obviously death in fact! In life, suffering was caused by desire. Those who desire something, whether material or otherwise, but have no way of attaining it, will suffer and make others suffer too. Christian desire for eternal life is exactly like that. Control of one’s passions and desires makes the suffering they bring wane away. It does not require the erasing of the personality to do it, though that is how many have taken it to be, the point being to express your personality by serving others not by trying to get your own selfish desires fulfilled.
The Indian notion of soul is Atman. All the souls together become a Great Soul, the Atman. Plainly, this is what happened in primitive tribes. The tribe was the Great Soul made up of all the lesser souls, the members of the tribe. For society to succeed, no one should desire more than they can realistically have. Siddharta had been a prince, utterly insulated from the suffering and poverty of the average Indian. He thought that was wrong, and caused by some wanting more than others. Death eventually takes away everyone personally into Nirvana, but society lives on as the Great Soul and as that improves, the prospects for everyone incarnated into it improve too when everyone is attending to others rather than themselves. If society does not improve, then it gets worse, and eventually destroys itself either by rebellion or conquest.
Meister Eckhart, speaking of death, says, “God absorbs the soul leaving no trace”, and leaving no trace of the Christian spiritualist notion of a heaven where dead people are cultivating their heavenly gardens and eating heavenly BBQs with their wives and families forever. But he also relates the individual soul—personified as female according to the Gnostic convention—to the collective of souls that constitute God:
In dying to her own nature and her being and her life, the soul is born in her divinity. That is her becoming. She becomes so wholly one that there is no distinction except that He stays God and she stays soul.
The feeling expressed is precisely that of India, souls comprise a Great Soul, a society is made up of its members. People must find their fulfilment through others if they are to join the Great Soul—that is becoming—identifying oneself with the unity of society, but not losing one’s own identity in it. For Buddhists and Meister Eckhart, Nirvana, heaven, is not survival of the personality in the childish spirtualist way Christians think of it, it is the preservation of your personality through society, through what you have done to improve it for others.
The idea of reincarnation, which became central to much Indian belief is not in the Rig Veda though it is in the Zoroastrian Bahram Yasht, doubtless the reason why it appears also in Gnostic religions like Catharism. The Bahram Yasht speaks of the god, Verethragna (Vrthragan, Vrttahan), being incarnated as a camel. Vishnu, in the Indian version, appears as a lion. The Chineses Taoist god, Wen Chiang, originally a star god but later associated with literary gifts and scholarship, also incarnated at intervals, explaining why some people were born exceptionally gifted. It suggests that the originally Persian idea of reincarnation seems to have spread west, east and south. It became fashionable in India from about 200 BC, when the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the two great epic poems of Krishna, the charioteer and Rama, the prince, were being composed. The Bhagavadgita is an expansion of discourses made by Krishna in the Mahabharata published separately.
Verethragna means “the Victorious One”, and it is a title of the Zoroastrian Saoshyant—Saviour—called the “Lord of the Last Judgement”, and a reincarnation of Zoroaster. Oddly, Jesus is a title meaning “Saviour”, and “Nazarene” is a title meaning “Victorious One”! An old Latin commentary on Matthew explicitly says the Magi came looking for the Saoshyant or the Vrthragan. This ancient Latin scholar knew that Jesus was being clearly pictured in the gospel as the Persian Saviour. It shows the close relationship that Judaism had with Persian religion, certainly among the Essene brotherhood, but possibly in Judaism generally at the time. The rabbis purged the religion of much of its Persion base.
Judaism
Bouquet wondered how the Hebrew prophets arose and when and where they did. He notes the “tension” between the prophets from Moses onwards giving God’s word to the Chosen People and them ignoring it! 800 years after Moses, they returned from “exile” in Persia and suddenly they got it! The “tension” is that the whole story is incredible. What is credible is that for those 800 years the Israelites were a tribe of Canaanites following native Canaanite religions, and only when colonists were sent in by the Persian chancellery to build a new temple for the worship of a new god did the Israelites become Jews, those who worshipped the god Yehouah (pronounced something like “you” or “yahoo”). These colonists were to present themselves as a “remnant” that had finally, in exile, got the message that they had to be obedient to be successful. This was not a message from anyone called Moses, but from the king of Persia via his minister, Ezra (Ezra = Zara, probably Zarubabel, a Zarathustrian priest or magus acting as a minister in the chancellery). Only the conviction for 2000 years that the bible cannot be false has blinded clever people like Bouquet to the obvious. The Persians founded Judaism.
The teaching of Judaism is summarized thus:
A life of habitually right conduct, affectionately devoted to the observance of the divinely appointed moral law, and the practice of a neighbourly spirit of good will towards one’s fellow men.A C Bouquet, Comparative Religion
Bouquet notes, citing also Th Reinach, that there is no way of accounting for the enomrmous growth of the Jewish population in Egypt, Asia Minor, Syria and Babylon. It has been fobbed off as intensive proselytizing, but no such incredible rate of conversion is realistic without a force behind it. From, the distribution of the Jewish population, the force could only have been the Persians.
The transition to monotheism from an earlier polytheism is impossible by evolution. It requires force. In Egypt, about the time of the mythical Moses, Akhenaten was able to enforce the change while he lived, but it was reversed as soon as he died. Zoroaster had no luck in spreading his monotheistic idea until he converted a king who could enforce the change on his people. Buddhism spread over northern India because Asoka enforced it. Now it is not to be found there because the people reverted to Hinduism or were forced into Islam. The change in Palestine was effected by the Persians who substituted a new elite class committed to the change as a condition for their privileged position in society as a nation of priests.
The new god, Yehouah, was not just an elevated old god, Yehouah, he was a different kind of god! He was no longer anthropomorphic, though Christians have not noticed that in anything other than image, and even then they are fond of picturing him as an old bearded man to contrast him with his young bearded son, who is also God! The new God was in no way human, he formlessly epitomized goodness and universality. The Moslems have understood it far better than Christians, and even they still treat Allah as if he were an invisible human of royal rank. The change from the old polytheistic god to this new formless, invisible God could not just evolve. Zoroaster, whose concept this new god seemed to be, also met him and addressed him as a man himself though, through an ability to appear in different forms. He was formless but protean—he could take on any form, but had those seven main ones.
It seems though, that Ahuramazda was himself subject to the rule of arta, the cosmic law of truth, and people like the Stoics therefore took it that this was the true God. In fact, even in Persian religion, it seems Ahuramazda was not the first God. That was time, Zurvan. Note the appearance of the consonants ZRV, “Zoro”, again.
Totemism in Judaism and Christianity
In totem religions, the totem—usually an animal—is sacred, so may not be eaten, except under ritual circumstances. On those ritual occasions, the totem animal was necessarily eaten, thereby imbuing its people with the special qualities of the totem. The totem was very often considered as a brother to the people, the reason usually recorded in some myth. At some stage, the tribe was personified in the totem as an heroic ancestor, a legendary leader and effectively a founding father. The people who ritually ate some of the totem animal found themselves ritually eating their founding father or ancestral hero. As this mythical father eventually became the tribal god, the people inadvertently invented theophagy.
When the Persian colonists set up the temple state, they were required to consume a sheep as their ritual animal. Persians wanted them to be docile and obedient. It seems, however, that many of the colonists had come from a region where the pig was their totem, so they were forbidden to eat them. Pigs require water, being quasi aquatic in habit, and shade, to protect their bare skin, for them to live comfortably, so are suited to lightly wooded river valleys not to desiccated hillsides, so the ban on eating pig was practical in the Palestinian hills, but it shows pigs could not have been the totem of the supposed local ancestors of the Jews. It suggests, though, that the Persian colonists came from lightly wooded river valleys, like the ones in upper Syria around Harran and Urfa. As the Jewish scriptures imply, the Persian colonists came from the valleys of the upper Euphrates river and several of its large tributaries including the Khabur. It was what was once called Beth Eden.
Prior to the Persians, as the myth of Abraham and Isaac confirms, the Palestinian Canaanites had sacrificed children, and the Persians, who themselves had an ethical God, Ahuramazda, were keen on stopping such savagery. They may have introduced circumcision as a symbolic knife attack on the child, and the sacrifice of a sheep as a substitute for the child sacrifice. So, the sheep was both a symbol of the God, Yehouah, and a symbolic son, being sacrificed according to the ancient Phœnician custom. The imposed sacrificial changes of a pig for a sheep by the colonists, and of a child for a sheep by the colonized left all of the people of Yehud feeling religious guilt, to some degree, a guilt exacerbated by the the God the colonists were to impose being “a jealous God”. The theme of the Deuteronomic historian that the Jews were habitual apostates only ever saved by a righteous remnant perpetuated the angst of each generation into the next.
Paul’s invention of Christianity as a new version of the dying and rising gods popular in Asia Minor and Syria was an expression of this chain of guilt felt by Jews at Passover. They sacrificed a sheep who was, in a totem sense, God, and was, in another sense, a substitute for the traditional sacrifice of a son. God died as his own son! The Pauline version of Christianity was therefore attractive to many Jews, maybe notably those in the diaspora who felt the additional guilt that they did not live in the country that had been marketed by Persia as the home of all Jews wherever they had been born. The existential angst they had concerning differing aspects of an ancient guilt at Passover could be relieved by the new idea, familiar to diaspora Jews in Syria and Asia, that God had sacrificed himself—in this case, to relieve their guilt! God had atoned for the guilt of improper sacrifice by sacrificing Himself as His own son.
