Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999
Sex-life does not count in the earliest form of religion. Primitive people take sex as a fact, like food. Nature worship, or the animation of Nature, is not one of the earliest stages. A belief in human spirits must have preceded spirits in Nature.
What about the solar cult or solar myth theory of religion? A popular idea is to think the sun and moon, fire and storm first impressed the primitive imagination and begat a religious feeling. The sun and moon were conspicuous, and solitary in the sky, and striking in their daily movements across it, but they were not surprising and the emergent humans must have taken them for granted.
Primitive people were incapable of abstract ideas. Their thoughts were thoroughly concrete. Because we are practiced thinkers, we imagine that early humans were also. So, we have a picture of an ape-man looking at a flint and thinking: “What can I do with this?” They did not speculate on causes of movements because they could not. A lot of thinking practice was needed first. Speculation that the visible sun, storm or fire must have an invisible cause is not the immediate response of noticing their presence. Some of these peoples later developed an awe of Nature and especially the sun and moon, fire and storm but religion as a belief in personal human spirits or doubles came first.
Perhaps the earliest abstract thought was the idea of the soul as an invisible but nonetheless material aspect of the body. Primitive people had not developed the mental sophistication to think about causes. In the taxonomy of learning, facts precede higher processes like analysis and synthesis, and we can assume fairly safely that the first human impressions would have been of obvious facts. Religion began with crude speculations of primitive people about their shadows. A shadow is not an inference, but something which can be seen walking around with you.
Our historic ancestors gave the name “shadow” to the soul and it remains a common word for soul. Their own shadows were always so near to them, so bizarre in their movements, so plainly some sort of copy of themselves, that they would be likely to be the first thing in Nature to surprise them and be speculated about. One can sometimes see a pet cat or dog surprised by its own shadow. Before any attempt was made to explain this idea, mothers would have been pointing out shadows to their children.
Having started to consider the shadow, they must then have considered its relationship with the sun, which apparently gave it life! No sun, no shadow. But they knew it was there because they could see it even on dull days when they looked into a pool. They concluded everyone was two beings—a body and a shadow.
From then on, people were predisposed by their ever present shadow to believe that they were in two parts. It became culturally accepted as a phenomenon—everyone had two parts. Later, when people began to speculate on Nature, they animated the shadow with a parallel consciousness—a spirit—to explain its movements.
Perhaps, at this stage, the shadow was associated with a dream-life—dreams seeming much more real to people who had no explanations for anything. The shadow was dark. It disappeared when the sun went in but was still there. At night, when people slept, it must have wandered free of the body. Ah, then death was when the shadow departed the body for good. Everyone died and the world must therefore be full of their shadows wandering everywhere at night! The first theologians or philosophers did not dream of asking themselves whether it lived forever, but they concluded it lived on.
Unsophisticated people have no thought for a moral law. They have few vices and men treat their wives more equally than the men of the “advanced” cultures. They live socially. Vice grows with culture. So violent and malignant shades multiply. They explained why the night was fearful. You must take care during the night.
Primitive humans regarded as supernatural whatever they could not comprehend. They saw their shadow and were afraid of it, thinking it was their ghost or soul. Egyptians and Hindus both believed that man had an invisible body, ghost, or shade—a soul—within the material body. When a person died, the physical body went but they remained as their shadow or shade, a ghost haunting their old home and lingering near the place of burial An invisible world of ghosts or spirits arose in the primitive mind. From the spirits of the dead arose ancestor worship, prayer and gods. Amongst the African Negroes, Nature deities are of less importance than deified ancestors. In Africa, sun gods and earth goddesses are secondary to ancestors. The origin of religion was possibly in the concept of ancestral spirits, the basis of Vedic religion for example.
Once the idea of other consciousness was accepted of a shadow, it could be applied to other natural objects, which become Nature spirits. Amongst the American Indians and others the Nature gods were much more important than ancestors, a later stage of religious evolution. People feared whatever was strange in appearance or behaviour as a spirit. With the development of the doctrine of ghosts, with the power of making themselves at one time visible and at another invisible, grew up an easy explanation of all those changes which the heavens and earth show by the hour.
Spirits became omnipresent. Clouds that gather and vanish, shooting stars, sudden darkening of the water’s surface by a breeze, storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and so on, were attributed to departed souls, probably acting as officials for an angered deity. The Hindu Rakshasas, of our Aryan ancestors—the dark and evil clouds personified whose formless shapes were imagined in every form of grotesque and horrible manifestations—are the models of ghosts and demons. Demons were wicked spirits, the cause of personal troubles.
Besides the major spirits were legions of spirits of dreaded animals, of fire and river, forest and harvest, disease and child-birth. Some of these spirits rose up to become gods. Relics, animals, plants, trees, fire and lightning, water, thunder, planets, and the generative powers of Nature with stones as phallic symbols all had their spirits and all have been objects of worship by mankind.
The Nature gods gradually rose above glorified ancestors. The inferior spirits were relegated to the underworld or goblins in mountain holes. Ultimately, one great spirit, commonly the sky or storm god, predominated.
The main gods were often sun gods or were given a sun aspect. In contrast, whatever was fearful or detrimental was thought to lurk in the absence of light. In many cases attributes were shared between ancestors and Nature gods. Osiris might well have been a pre-historic king of the Egyptians who was deified, attracted many legends associated with unifying the land and ultimately received many attributes of Ra, the sun god. Simple shrines to a chief’s remains or fetishes grew into carved temples. Priesthoods gained power, wealth and organization.
Quite naturally people everywhere looked up to the sun with special veneration because the benefits received by mankind from Nature—heat, fruit, crops and life itself—came from sunshine. Yet, the hunters of the last glacial period who decorated caves with images of their prey, never made an image of a solar disk, or indeed, moon or stars or the heavens.
They were interested in the mystery of birth and drew pictures and carved figurines of women with powerful thighs, swollen breasts and stomachs distended in pregnancy. They were fascinated by woman’s ability to bring into existence new life and the puzzle of how it happened. Their god was female. She was the Great Mother and dominated mankind’s religious thoughts for millennia.
Of course we are not to know that, though primitive, these early artists did not wish to depict the sun in a cave—the proper domain of the Great Mother Goddess because the cave is a womb and a place to which shadows return. Solar rites will have been practised in the open at dawn with symbols drawn on the sand or perhaps on rocks where they have weathered away. These people were hunter-gatherers and all hunting cultures have venerated the sun as a hunter.
The daily rising and setting of the sun must have been an earliest mystery of human consciousness. When it set, primitive people were fearful and when it glowed again in the east at dawn, they must have been greatly relieved. As thought and language evolved, one of the first metaphors must have been that of light and dark for good and evil.
At some stage as the climate ameliorated and the possibility of settlement improved, the hunter-gatherers began to reoccupy the same seasonal camps to which the men brought back their game and the women and children took back the grain, roots and berries they had foraged. They returned, seasonally to the same camps and found that seeds dropped around the camps for centuries were giving better quality grain next to home than that further afield. They domesticated some of the animals they hunted and became pastoralists. Pastoralists migrated with the seasons to find the best grazing, so they followed some of the lifestyle of their hunting predecessors. In their journeys, they were impressed by the sky and its moods, thunder and lightening, stars and the sun and moon.
Some sage eventually realised that the nutritious wild grass growing around the camp must have been from the dropped seeds. They appreciated that the miracle of fertility extended to the plants they used as food. They experimented with sowing and discovered agriculture and the Great Mother became an Earth Mother. For thousands more years this goddess dominated the minds of the first farmers, but things were about to change. Farming introduced annual toil to mankind but provided a reliable economy and populations grew quickly. Eventually surpluses were being produced and new categories of people arose to take them from those who produced them—the classes of princes and priests.
The change to agriculture gave even more importance to the seasonal cycle. As hunters, the tribes had to intercept the migrating animals, but migrations took time, were determined by the animals and within wide limits did not require humans to measure time perfectly. Agriculture was not quite so relaxed. Through rueful experience, the farmers must have come to learn that they ought not sow too early or too late. This applied even where more than one annual crop was possible, as in Egypt. The successful farmer discovered how to get in two crops, perhaps three.
Sitting watching the crops grow, they had time to work out how to reckon time from the diurnal movement of the sun and how to reckon seasons by its annual movement through the heavens. The sun began to have divine powers as the regulator of order through its reliable daily journey. It also seemed to be like an eye in the sky, its rays touching everything to prove that it could see everything that happened. So it was seen as a heavenly all-seeing watchman.
They also began to realise the importance of the sun to the growth of their crops. Shady places were unsuitable for good growth. Plants needed good well watered soil and the warmth of the sun to germinate and grow successfully. They needed Mother Earth but they also needed the Great Father in the heavens. The sun became the consort of the Great Mother. Naturally, this also required an awareness of the male role in fertility and this discovery was made at about the same time.
Necessarily there is a lot of guesswork in these reconstructions because some details have been lost forever, but it is a hypothesis based on many observations. It can hardly be claimed to be fully scientific, because it cannot be properly tested but inasmuch as it is a hypothesis based on natural evidence and from which we can deduce explanations, it is scientific.
So, what is a god? The clue to the evolution of gods is the evolution of tribal organizations under chiefs. ’Kung is to the Bushmen a great man of long ago. They never worship him. These peoples have no tribal organization and no chiefs. The spirits of the dead were equal as the living are.
The talent of extraordinary people came from their spirit and thence it was a short step to seeing them too as gods and deifying them after death. When people became aggressive, the strong or cunning man was chosen as leader. He becomes a chief. The leadership becomes hereditary. As the spirit-world is a duplicate of the living world, matching chief spirits arose in the world of the shadows. Famous ancestors or former members of the tribe rise in the memory above all the ordinary spirits, who are individually forgotten. They are on the way to becoming gods.
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. One form of religion is ancestor worship, and the founders of successful families, clans and dynasties are often elevated into gods in the imagination of their descendants. It seems also true that the reverse happens, when tribal gods are reduced to patriarchs, perhaps under the influence of the syncretism that accompanies political growth.
Aboriginals were until recently living fossils, living a stone age culture. Most of them are now no longer living, having been decimated by the Whites. 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.
Aboriginals 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. In an earlier age their ancestors 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.
The great ancestors, now great spirits, are simply facts. They have no priests and no temples but there are sacred places which might be the germ of temples. Some tribes pick out one amongst the ancestral spirits—Bungil, Baiame, Altjira, etc—as a very 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 the start of 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 of the current theories 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 very far from primitive. Their ideas confirm the line of evolution suggested here.
Among the Sudanese races, gods are common, and they are the spirits of glorified ancestors. An early missionaries 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.
The priests of the various Egyptian gods each sought to show their own god as the creator of all things.
The god of the Christians is the creator of the universe.
Ho hum! All these 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.
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. 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.
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.
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 funeral 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’s gospel, many people who had been dead had “risen from their graves” and been seen “walking abou”t 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.
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 duly attributed to evil spirits. Indeed, spirits were everywhere giving people a lot of unseen enemies and some unseen friends to concern themselves about. Someone had to specialise and so medicine-men, rain-makers, wizards and priests arose.
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.
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. Nevertheless human sacrifice continued. 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 the returning priests of Babylon of original stories in which the Hebrews were 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.
The sexual act is not only the acme of physical bliss, it is necessary for the continuation of life. It is not surprising that magical formulae and then religion should accrete to this function. So it did among the Buddhists in India, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Phoenicians, the Assyrians and the ancient Hebrews. As they personified the sun and planets, air, water, fire, and other objects, so they personified sexual power. The ancients worshipped not so much the sexual organs but the fertilizing principle, but they would swear by their sexual organs as representing divine energy and so the most sacred thing, just as Christians now swear by their Bible.
Psalms 89:49 has been bowdlerized for the masses. It does not say:
Lord, where are thy former lovingkindnesses, which thou swarest unto David in thy truth?
It says:
O my Adonis, where are thy endearments of old, which thou swearedst for the sake of love, by the phallus, O Amun?
This might refer to the violent death of Osiris who was torn to pieces but reassembled by his wife and sister, Isis. But Isis could not find Osiris’s penis and had to make a phallus so that the god could impregnate her and conceive the infant Horus. Osiris was identified with Adonis and Amun.
The two sexual powers of Nature were symbolized respectively by an upright, the Ashera or Phallus, the Priapus of the Jews, the Hebrew letter for which was a cross—T—and an oval or sometimes a crescent or circle—O, the Linga and Yoni of India, sometimes represented as the mountain of Venus or mons veneris. The former was a representation of the sun god in his majesty and glory, the restorer of the powers of Nature after the long sleep or death of winter. The latter was a representation of the earth, who yields her fruit under the fertilizing power and warmth of the sun, and when placed upon the Tau, T, or Phallus, formed the crux ansata, or conjunction of the sun and earth, male and female.
The Phallus placed erect as a tree, cross, or pole, above a crescent or on a mons veneris, signified the marriage of heaven and earth. In the form of a serpent, it represented life and healing, being still so used as the sign of a physician, and was so worshipped by the Egyptians and Jews. The emblems of the cross and serpent, the quiescent and energizing Phallus, are united in the brazen serpent of the Pentateuch
The conjunction of the two sexual emblems was represented in the Temple by the circular altar of Baal-Peor, on which stood the Ashera, and for which the Jewish women wove hangings and under whose protective influence Jacob, on his journey to Laban, slept. It is innocently reproduced in our modern May-pole around which maidens dance as maidens always did. The Catholic priest little dreams that he wears a Phallic vestment at Mass, for upon it is the crux ansata, his head passing through the oval or yoni, the Tau, or cross, falling from the chest in front. The design was that of a Phallic surplice.
The word Ashera, is deliberately mistranslated in the Bible. Literally rendered, it is a pole or trunk of a tree and represents a Phallus but Bowdlerizers translate it as “grove”.
In Ezekiel 16:17 the Jewish women made silver and golden dildos or Phalli.
The “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”, in Genesis, is the “tree of life” or Phallic pole denoting sexual awareness. The symbol of life, in cuneiform writing, was the conjoined emblem—the crux ansata. Many of the Egyptian gods are represented with this cross hanging from the hand, which is passed through the oval. Some authorities have wrongly called it a key.
It was customary to set up a stone, or “Hermes”, symbolizing a Phallus, on the road-side, and each traveller as he passed paid his homage to the deity by either throwing a stone on the heap, or by anointing the upright stone with oil. Jacob “rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had for a pillow, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it”. There is scarcely a nation of antiquity that did not set up these stones, as emblems of the reproductive power of Nature, and worship them. The custom is found among the ancient Druids of Britain. The Greek historian, Pausanias, says:
The Hermiac statue, which they Venerate in Cyllene above other symbols, is an erect Phallus on a pedestal.
In connection with Phallic worship arose the idea of offering the virginity of maidens to certain gods or goddesses. The Babylonian women were compelled to offer themselves once in their lifetime to the goddess Astarte or Mylitta, the Assyrian for Venus. Sitting in the Temple, they waited till some passer-by of the opposite sex threw money into their laps, when they prostituted themselves “for the sake of Mylitta”. No man was ever refused. Many women, not so inviting in appearance as others, would thus remain waiting for years their turn. The primitive Christians did a similar thing, only worse, at their Agapes or Love Feasts, the immoralities of which were probably the real cause of the persecutions by the Roman emperors who allowed great freedom of religious opinion. The perversions practised at these assemblies are mentioned by the church historian Eusebius.
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.