Religious Origins 2

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; Thursday, 13 October 2005

Abstract

Veneration of Ancestors

So, what is a god? The clue to the evolution of gods is the evolution of tribal organizations under chiefs. Euhemerus of Messini, about 300 BC suggested that gods were great kings or heroes of the past who had been magnified into gods by nostalgia and admiration. The word, Euhemerism, is still used for this idea. 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.

From Spirits to Gods

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.

The Rise Of Priesthoods

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, 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 personal outlook on the world promoted by small family groups, and not a tool of society at large. 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 crack-pot 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.

Initiation

Arkon Daraul (Secret Societies, 1961) explains that secret societies have an aim that anyone must agree upon who wants to be a member. To ensure that they do, they usually have a period of initiation to inculcate the object of the society and its view of the world into the minds of the novitiates by their attainment of increasingly sophisticated degrees of expertise. Initiations are training systems to indoctrinate people into the cult of believers. The system makes the new member submissive to the rules of membership, and often to the whims of a prophet or charismatic leader. So they condition the person to the defence of the community and its leader, often both physically and spiritually, and the upholding of its views as privileged above others even though the members are collectively too politically weak to impose their views openly.

Religiously inclined people, those who can see only good in their religion, have always stressed the “spiritual” aspects of these initiations rather than the more obvious conditioning aspect. Yet, Professor Rutton Webster (Primitive Secret Societies, 1908) saw that any altruistic motives and supernatural beliefs of the cult leaders were incidental to the impact of their psychological propaganda on the minds of the novices. The nervous effects of long fasts, of sleep deprivation, of constant excitement and expectation alternated with shocks and tribulations create extreme sensitivity—hyperaesthesia—which favours the permanent acceptance of the impressions meant to be perpetuated. The lessons of such schooling abides through life. Initiates believe their experiences are supernatural, yet what succeeds is psychological and physiological conditioning, and nothing else. Whether Chinese Tongs, Persian Assassins, Hindu Thugs, Moslem suicide bombers, or Christian Revivalists, the method of conversion has the same psychological basis. One initiate, cited by Daraul, said:

You have not experienced this feeling of initiation, this contact with the divine. How can you judge it?

Conditioning was discovered by accident early in human society. Much of it remains in the apparently innocent ceremonies of the world's religions, and in the public devotions of their practitioners, hinting at their origins in primitive secret rituals, even if their purpose is denied today. Conditioning and group-feeling is common today, even outside of religion. The appeal of patriotism depends upon key words associated with country or leader. Branding in advertising uses the same psychology to associate certain desired outcomes with buying particular brands. Even childhood training, such as potty training and washing, are conditioned responses. Humans are trained from infancy to obey, and religions and secret societies take advantage of it. Critical training is meant to make people realise why they do things, to question habits and assertions. Religions hate this, and secret societies will not tolerate it.

Early societies realized that anticipation of something life changing, shared experience, extremes of emotion in unusual situations, rituals which exhaust the body and overwhelm the mind constitute social training—so-called rites of passage—a mental conditioning still used by those who seek to control others. Modern psychologists know it, and governments have used it. Secret and religious societies use processes indistinguishable from those of modern brainwashers. The mechanisms which are used can be summarized as:

1. Desire to participate in the ritual, and expectancy of something happening
2. Periods of isolation, vigils, hunger or abstinence, causing debilitation and time for reflection
3. Loud noise in the ceremony, numbing thought
4. Real or symbolic potions, sometimes narcotic and hypnotic
5. Staged but menacing threats and fear
6. Symbolic death and resurrection, often with renaming
7. Signs and key words that awaken the conditioned response when needed.

The Huskenaw ceremony of the North American Indians of Carolina makes the Indian brave at puberty “obedient and respectful to their superiors”. The novices are kept in the dark and half starved in a cabin for three weeks when they are continuously taught their rights and duties. Then they are given intoxicating beverages, often made of Datura plants. They seem to have been struck dumb, or have been told they must not speak for several weeks. After all of it, they are weak and exhausted but overjoyed to be full members of the tribe, the society for which the rites are essential. The initiates into the tribe are dedicated to obedience to the elders, maintenance of principles of proper conduct, and the welfare of the tribe.

In early nineteenth century Bulgaria, young boys were taken by the priests to undergo the test of fitness to serve the Lord Jesus Christ. The candidates were packed into a large special house with no lights for forty days. They slept on planks and ate only thin gruel. Their drink contained henbane to make them thirsty! In the whole time, the priests ceaselessly urged them to repent, to reform, to be loyal, submissive and dedicated. When they emerged it was to run through files of priests beating drums and shouting, “Dumb, dumb!” at them. They were not allowed to speak but only to make signs. In a month, uncouth, disrespectful peasant lads only in the seminary for the food were transformed into solemn, fearful and submissive men suitable for priestly training.

The two separate accounts from societies half a world apart agree almost entirely, and the motives for the training are the same—to make surly youths into submissive citizens. Initiaton rites are practised most often at puberty, when the youth needs training and discipline, and, above all, is impressionable. The radical effect seen by the rituals must seem to be supernatural to primitive people, but today they ought not to be. The trainee is conditioned to blind obedience and loyalty to the “tribe” as represented by its totem, god or spirit. The initiate may believe they have experienced a divine power which henceforth will be a constant guide.

God the Creator

The god of the Christians is the creator of the universe.

Ho hum! The priests of the various Egyptian gods each sought to show their own god as the creator of all things. All religious systems took it for granted that their own god was the primordial entity or primum agens who created the world, humanity and human inventions. Christian theologians tell us there is only one true religion, thereby declaring Christianity to be no different from every previous religion that had been devised by human cunning. All of them are “the one true religion”.

“Ah! But other religions are the work of demons,” says the Christian. Groan. In the first ecumenical movement during the Egyptian Old Kingdom, the god, Ptah, was shown as starting all the other gods by deliberately setting up temples to them. How do Christians know that Ptah did not set up theirs and is not still setting up religions?

In the Babylonian systems, it was the human race that had been specifically created—to build temples to the gods and to feed them with offerings. This religion was defined as “service”—the service of the gods being the very purpose of human existence. Since the gods have never been shown to eat the offerings made to them, or spend the money collected for them in more sophisticated times, our only conclusion is that god’s attendants, the priests, in fact, consume the sacrifices and spend the money!

Xenophanes pointed out that horses would draw the gods to look like horses, if they could draw. They cannot, but humans can and African gods are black and snub-nosed whereas European gods are red-cheeked and fair-haired. These simple observations should be enough to make anyone who can think at all realise that gods are made in the image of man and not man in the image of gods. Anaxagoras was banished for impiety. He had declared the sun and moon to be heavenly masses not deities. 2000 years before Galileo, the Religious Right were being outraged. The fact that they are still being outraged and are still fighting Truth in the USA just shows how primitive, indeed backward, religion is, and its defenders are. Just like the Athenian conservatives of two and a half millennia earlier, Christians appeal to the prejudices of the mob—prejudices that they have inculcated in them.

For centuries Greek intellectuals had to make token references to “the gods” for the sake of a peaceful life though their own discoveries showed that they did not believe in any gods. The Indo-Europeans had the notion of a cosmic “Order” that became the foundation of Zoroastrianism, so that contemporary Greek philosophers, hearing about the teachings of their rivals, the Persians, called this “Order” “God”. God was an alternative name for the universal “Order” that regulated the universe. They did not see this God as a disembodied super-consciousness with a personal interest in every ant in the field as modern Christians do.

Epicurus (340-270 BC) was considered by Lucretius to have been the saviour of mankind for showing that religion enslaved people. Lucretius in On the Nature of Things, wrote that, if there were any gods, they had no effect on the world we live in. He saw that humans had been baffled by certain phenomena such as the cycle of the seasons, the heavenly bodies and abstract concepts like beauty, and had invented gods to explain them:

O unhappy race of mankind, to ascribe such doings to the gods and add thereto bitter wrath! What groans did they then create for themselves, what wounds for us, what tears for generations to come!

Rudolf Otto thought that religion came from mystical experiences, what he calls a sense of the “numinous”. The “numinous” is a feeling of oneness with the cosmos, a standing outside of self and within Nature that people interpret as having sight of god, or seeing with God’s eyes. In such ways does the natural become the supernatural.

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 coruption 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 spentas have no will and hence no personality of their own, it being explicitly stated that their will is always Ahuramazda’s.

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 the hallucinatory drugs mentioned before.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Jesus is a Myth | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History

Page Tags: Theories Of Religious Origin, Origins Meaning, Roots Of Religion, Origins Tradition, How Gods Were Made, Ghosts and Spirits, Future Life and Resurrection, Heaven and Hell, Phallus Worship, Nature Spirits and Gods, Worship and Sacrifice, Christian, God, Gods, Greek, Heaven, Human, Nature, Priests, Religion, Spirits

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