Early Religion
I want to sketch out a story about religion through which we can enter into learning about the first of
the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism.
Let’ start here: Human beings have been around for quite a while. (This is actually fairly new knowledge!
Not far back humans reasonably thought that it all started out of nowhere, about 7-8 thousand years
ago. We go as far back as the Garden of Eden or some other short term explanation.) Then we learned,
invented, or discovered with science that we can detect evidence that strongly suggests that humans go
back much longer. Since is also in favor of shock of all shocks, humans evolved from other animals.
(I know this idea is controversial for many people. If it’s bothersome, take it as an “as if” explanation for
the sake of the story.) Imagine you are assigned a book to read for this class. You open it up and begin,
“In a world, exactly like ours, but a world in which instead of God creating Adam and Eve and putting
them in a garden, all this happened, kind of automatically, over an incredibly long time. (I mean it’s hard
for me to imagine that length of time since I experience the teeny tiniest of lengths of time as my
entire life! This is billions, then millions of years. It’s the difference between the computing power we
had in our $400 four function calculators first on the market in the 1970s, and the computing power
we can buy with $1,472.44 today. (It’s what $400 1970s dollars adjusted for inflation is equal to in
today’s dollars.)
Life started somehow and somewhere on earth. Then one thing became the next thing (plants first, then
animals in the sea) Then, one large type of animal began to emerge there were animals with just the
right stuff to not only act like the rest of the animals. No, these animals somehow created their own
inner worlds: each animal had a world of sensations and emotions, in sort of an inner thing like a cave,
filled, eventually, with objects we call ideas and thoughts. All predators develop a rudimentary form of
this occurring.
The must ignore the self to focus on the other. The prey creatures pay attention to all of the their
senses, the attack could come from anywhere at any time. {Think of a bunny’s life. Get up, hot to a
place to eat grass. Eat that grass, poop, find water if the grass wasn’t moist enough and so on. All the
while keeping look out for coyotes, hawks, weasels. Think if it was you. Danger is literally everywhere.
(Too bad there is not a word spelled Litereally: it’s the closest a story can get to touching reality.)} We would be
stressed out. Why aren’t they? Sapolsky writes on this topic in his book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.
It’s quite fascinating. They shake off the attacks and get on with things. It presents a practice for us:
an attack of the bad thoughts, like a lion descending on a Zebra at the watering hole? Escape its jaws
and claws, live to fight another day, and have a good shake: and drop attachment of the thought,}
The thoughts appear in consciousness. Someone is aware of the thoughts. We know this because we can
all watch ourselves from a semi-third person perspective. Right? If you write down a description of
exactly what you are experiencing right now, when you later read the description you will, in a sense, reenter that thought. This time you might alter details: you don’t say or do something which led to an
undesired outcome, in your imagination – the Walter Mitty story.
These Human animals shared a physical world with each other, as well as they shared all of
manifestation – the world in which they lived. Compared to other animals, Humans came with a
different set of the basics. Nature tried out this model to see if it would work.
Most animals arrive with a set of instincts for survival. Some animal species leave their young to fend for
themselves when the babies break out of the shells encasing them. Some turtles lay their eggs near the
ocean. When the babies hatch, they know to run to the ocean. How? Instinct! It’s in their brains taking
up a lot of memory space. Why do the babies run? To survive, to live: the little body desires to reach
safety.
Predators, however, await the babies’ dash from the beach to the ocean’s relatively better place to
survive condition, because the little turtles arrive like clock-work every year. (Maybe the birds, who wait
to grab and eat the babies who are motoring to the sea and their safety from their nests on the beach,
have something akin to a Holy Day when the feast of the turtles takes place each year because God loves
us birds!)
The Adult turtles, knowing that only a couple of their offspring will survive after running the gauntlet of
birds, lay hundreds of eggs in the hope that some will make it. (Maybe turtles have scary dreams from
their birth. It’s the reverse of the usual of D-Day imagery. They are soldiers trying to get to their boats
and the enemy is waiting to kill them as they run across the beach heading towards the water. Maybe
we remember such races for life in some collected memory. The Hero’s journey is the echo of all such
battles for survival.)
Mammals raise their young differently. Wild mammals largely have offspring which can get up and move
on day one. Horses are a good example. The foal cannot only stand on the first day, it can trot: the next
day it can gallop! It has to. It’s a prey animal. It doesn’t have the luxury of not fearing others. It wants to
stay alive. Being able to run away means it stays alive. Then it can eventually reproduce.
Lions are predators; they can take their time to nurse their young. One lion nurses the cubs, and the
other get the food. No one is going to suggest to mama-lion that she will do anything other than take
care of her little ones. Annoy her and wait until Papa comes home! He is king. Does that make sense?
Depending on the animal, it must either have a lot of brain space devoted to instinctual reactions to stay
safe, while the other arrives kind of safe, and can learn more skills. In the prey animals, their sensory
awareness is diffused to sense danger. While the predator focuses awareness on a single target. Their
two eyes work together to triangulate and measure distance efficiently. The predator’s eyes, like the
prey’s eyes, detect movement. The predator’s eyes must lock in on target and thus they lose visual
awareness outside of the narrow tunnel focusing their energy. They can’t literally see behind them, but
we all know what is meant, it’s litereal, when we say it’s like having eyes on the back of your head kind
of thing: we kind of believe it might be true. We have our suspicions.
As a result we are the animals who are born with few instincts – our brains are not full of the
information other animals need to have in order to survive at and following birth. It’s as if Nature
decided to try an animal with a bigger, emptier brain: more “hardware.” Nature sacrificed space in a
human’s brain which in animals normally goes to encoding the information, “software”, for physical
survival of the animal, and left much more room for the encoding and manipulating ideas for the
survival of, for lack of better words, the animal’s ego.
That means, when we are born, there is less space required already loaded into our brains, and more
room for the defense against the psychic threat to our idea of ourselves, our name/our ego, which we
form because we are conscious beings trying to make sense of it all.
[Compare us to computers. Our operating system is relatively simple compared to the complexity needed to
produce the operating software of a modern computer. We could not run today’s software on early computers,
because those computers simply didn’t have enough memory; also the circuitry wasn’t it nimble and quick enough.
But to achieve our abilities today with computing, we need enormous amounts of memory to store the code. Does
the comparison I’m trying to show make sense? Read the next paragraph only if you are a little fuzzy.
In one sense, we talk about the brain as one thing. And it is useful to think of the brain in this way most of the
time. What I have been trying to describe is how animals evolved into more and more complex system of
information storage and analysis. One helpful, but technically inaccurate model is the Triune brain.
The triune model of the mammalian brain is seen as an oversimplified organizing theme by some in the field of
comparative neuroscience[8] It continues to hold public interest because of its simplicity. While technically
inaccurate in many respects as an explanation for brain activity, it remains one of very few approximations of the
truth we have to work with: the "neocortex" represents that cluster of brain structures involved in advanced
cognition, including planning, modeling and simulation; the "limbic brain" refers to those brain structures, wherever
located, associated with social and nurturing behaviors, mutual reciprocity, and other behaviors and affects that
arose during the age of the mammals; and the "reptilian brain" refers to those brain structures related to
territoriality, ritual behavior and other "reptile" behaviors. The broad explanatory value makes this approximation
very engaging and is a useful level of complexity for high school students to begin engaging with brain research.”
(Wiki)
Nature sought to allow the operating system of humans to have maximum space for new programs for each
machine once it’s born. My family group got me to grow bigger, and more fully mature (which take on average 24
years complete brain maturation) by providing for my physical, emotional, and spiritual health. I learned as a child
how to control my machine to some extent. Then I learned ways to comprehend, and gain some control over the
inner world I discover: self-consciousness. They navigate me through a way to account for my dreams. They had
stories to explain why things happened as they did. Later I learn how things happen. I now live in a world where I
can explain, predict, and then test whether my understanding of the world, the world I seem to share with you,
behaves not only as God tells us, but as we can prove scientifically, and most of the time down to the mathematics
as well. Right?)
In other words, we have big brains, and we have an external source of culture which allows us to
augment, or add to what nature did not provide. Language is the “net” of knowledge we gain which
nature doesn’t provide. Early humans, since their brains are like ours, probably experienced wonder and
awe about life. They probably had questions, perhaps dread, about mortality. Humans performed
burials, some estimate, 100,000 years ago! That means when our ancestors had a friend die, they buried
the body in a ceremony however they understood what their actions meant or were trying to do. There
are Cave Paintings made 40,000 years ago in France and Spain. Someone like me in a lot of ways went
purposefully into a cave and performed this act because he thought it made sense of what he knew and
understood. Maybe it just gave him joy. But I would side for something else. He thought, perhaps, the
cave represented his mind. You can’t see the things painted until you shine a light of awareness on it.
The physical light in the cave represents the man, or woman’s mind trying to express how it feels inside
here. It’s as if I’m in the dark and then a light and I see an antelope. Or I see someone ready with a spear
to kill and antelope. Or maybe these images were wishes offered in the dark to be seen by the power
which allows for the antelope to be there. Who knows? But they did go into the cave. Maybe they heard
the call of God.
They are beautiful in a raw, unformed way. If you are ever traveling and it’s convenient, I
recommend doing it. The Caves at Lascaux in France are wonderful. But our ancestors not only
made paintings, they carved stone. Imagine the mind of the person who carved this.
Sculpture (22-24,000 B.C.E.) Venus of Willendorf
The person had an idea and wanted to make it manifest. This wasn’t doodling. Remember that
our bodies are essentially the same as those of our ancestors from 40,000 years ago. The
differences in culture, between us and them, have developed over time.
Julian Jaynes wrote a book entitled The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the BiCameral Mind. Jaynes proposes the thesis that there was a time before our ancestors
experienced self-consciousness as we do today. Animals somewhere back in the trees perhaps,
were not self-aware like we are. Then one or more of them started becoming self-aware.
Eventually this innovation helped those who had it to survive at greater rates.
The initial instances and expressions of self- consciousness would be unusual experiences. When
self-consciousness first emerged, it must have been disturbing. It’s like hearing a voice or
“voices” in one’s head. (See Robert Sapolsky’s article on Religion and OCD: it’s fabulous. So is his
article on the biological roots of monotheism and polytheism. It offers explanations which may
be of interest to anyone studying world religions.)
If you are a person who is just for the first time experiencing self-awareness you might ask: “Where did
the voice come from? Did it come from “outside?” “It sure seems like I heard it. But I didn’t see a
speaker like when I talk to a friend. It was an invisible person. I didn’t want to think the thought, it
almost took me over. Wait a minute that same voice is saying all this!” Probably not the last bit. It might
have been irritation, like a mental itch. Something inside of the human knows that things could be
better. It feels like a voice explaining it. (Does that make any sense? It does to me. Please let me know.)
Humans have always tried to understand and explain their reality. Each of us explains the world in terms
of the frameworks we have – our worldviews. It’s what is the glue holding us together.
We also experience three States of consciousness each day: the waking state, the dream state, and the
deep, dreamless sleep. (This fact will become of importance later in the story. File it away. See if you can
detect where it will naturally return to make a bridge to a yet other idea.)
At some point Humans developed a deeper awareness of time.
You must comprehend lengths of time in order to domesticate plants and animals. {Jared Diamond’s
Guns, Germs and Steel, both the book and documentary, explain why civilization occurred when and
why it did. It also explains why one corner of the world’s ideas dominate the planet today; in my
opinion, unfortunately, Diamond’s conclusions points to the reasonable likelihood that we are in dire
peril. (I know. I get it. It sounds like typical liberal talking points. I bet that if you read the book, you
would be convinced as I am, and that as a conservative, one would act to preserve what we have.})
We believe that at some point humans understood, consciously, how pregnancy occurred. (There is a big
gap between conception and birth. It takes an idea to unify all the details since our senses only provide
immediate data which is processed by the mind in the present. Right? And thank goodness. If I see a
bear, I run. I want all that data processed immediately: our senses tell us what’s happening right now.
Then our mind can think about what happened later. When the adrenaline kicks in, our body stops any
digestion, sexual activity, and all energy goes to evade and escape: heart rate elevated, etc.
When I think I understand or comprehend something it gets a name. I name what appear to be unified
things, like rocks or trees, with nouns, and what I perceive as causal relations of events, I either name it
–that’s a river, or describe some action like hitting with a verb. Once the ideas are in the mind (how
ideas existed in our ancestors is hard to imagine precisely: did they have words?) the person can impose
a different arrangement of the words and then try it out in the outer world. I can have the thought to
move a rock, and I can move the rock. I can wish the weather were different, but I can’t make it rain.
Since I can move the rock, someone like me must be able to cause the rain. Natural processes need to
be personified to be comprehended – it’s my world view. Now the people tell each other stories about
all this. Those ideas, via natural selection of the stories people retell and thus solidify in their own mind
gardens, help the people be more efficient in controlling what’s in front of them.
They figure out pregnancy along the way. Mostly likely it’s the women first: sex around ovulation leads
to pregnancy. But then the men reasonably notice that just as they plant seeds in the earth and plants
grow, it’s kind of like implanting semen in the woman, and like the earth, she grows life from MY seed.
This idea leads to a natural dominance. (All this kind of stuff I read in Leonard Shlain’s book, Sex, Time
and Power)
Shlain has a delightful video on this topic. I highly recommend it. If you like this idea, and him because
he is a crazy smart guy, then watch this one too! The Alphabet v. the Goddess.
So recap: Hunter gatherers probably did not understand the relationship between sex and childbirth.
Maybe women were revered – they make new people after all - just as the Earth brings forth new life,
plants, from herself- she’s magic. Each woman is intricately linked to our Mother Goddess!
Historical fact: the last Ice Age ended 12,000 years ago. Many large mammals -like wooly mammoths died off by the end of the ice age, so new food sources were needed the humans who survived. As
always they were creative and resourceful.
In a complicated story which Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel tells. The ideal plants and animals were
found in what we now know as the Fertile Crescent. Those facts relate to where civilizations began. (You
need a combination of the right type of large-seeded grasses and domesticate able animals for an ideal
mix. Under such situations, complex ideas emerge to organize the data. [Complicated, but thoroughly
reasonable based on archeological evidence. It makes sense of what we find. It tells a good story.])
Women probably figured out the connections between seeds and plants. With this knowledge the
society slowly transitions to becoming horticulturalists that use digging sticks and such. In such a society
both Men and Women can grow food. Plants are domesticated first – then animals: although the dog
seems to be hanging around, man’s best friend and all. (Notice too that diamonds are a girls’ best friend.
Shower thought.) You must domesticate plants to have enough food to domesticated animals.
Domesticating animals then allows for innovations in farming – the plow. (This reduces women’s
involvement in food production and thus power in society.) More meat is consumed which may have
had significant influences in the human mind developing. We needed to be carnivores for our brains to
have developed as they did.
When you grow food you are not only less nomadic, the increased and steady food supply means you
can grow more people. (Higher fat % on females = more times of the year for fertility.)
Mo’ people = Mo’ problems
In order for this larger entity to survive as a unity it needed to organize the group under some authority.
We get the arrival of two ideas: Government – Religion.
Shlain argues that women first understood the sex and pregnancy concept was understood; at some
point later men also realized their involvement. That realization coincided in some important way with
the development of better defenses against outsiders, which included better weapons to defend the
group against outside attack, and instead take the attack to the enemy.(When you are in one place
growing crops and animals, you are vulnerable to attacks by people on the move. The pastoralists, ever
roaming, are a threat to stable power.) Power in war entails taking leadership, and man-splaining to the
ladies, that it’s God’s will since it’s my seed which I actively place in your passive bodies which is the
capital T Truth as to the source of life. The phrase “Can a brother get some love up in here!” suddenly
takes on subtle shade of meaning.
Men put new prohibitions on sex. When the Goddess ruled, there is evidence that there were
priestesses of the Matriarchal religion who incorporated sexuality, sexual intercourse as part of the
ritual. There were women known as temple concubines. It’s probably described somewhere in academic
literature as the source of the world’s oldest profession, prostitution. Perhaps the temple concubines
provided a means for harmony in the community. It’s good for society to pair off to efficiently raise
children. But there is a biological drive in the majority of males to spread his seed. But he also has the
problem of wanting to know when his seed meets fertile ground because the child is his property. (This
need for property related reasons also requires that his wife and daughters remain unmolested so he
can ensure the gardens are pure: for his own sake and for better bride price on his fatted calf. Can a
brother get an Amen?! I hope this drips of the sarcasm I am feeling.)
As the men took control over more of the society’s functions, Sky Gods became all the rage. There is a
complicated story here too. Marija Gimbutas, Merlin Stone, Riane Eisler, Carol Christ, Mary Daly (to a
degree) and so on tell stories of why the Earth Goddesses, over time, lose out to the Sky Gods. When
that happens, as it always seems to do, new Mythologies arrive and usurp the former mythology’s
power: in this instance male’s denigrating the goddess’s power. (Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael tells a story in
this vein.)
We all know the story of Adam and Eve. Eve, and then Adam, are each deceived by the
serpent. (“It’s been tough on serpents” as Joseph Campbell said.) Serpents (which are seen being held
by the goddess in the statue below) were symbols of her power. Like the snake sheds its skin, women
shed the lining of their wombs each month. New life is connected to menstrual blood. It’s connected to
why blood is shed in sacrifice – in farming communities there was a ritual, back in the day, of offering a
sacrifice to ensure a good harvest. The old high school English essay staple, The Lottery was a modern
instantiation of the phenomenon. (If you are reading intently and liking how this story unfolds, and
especially if you had a strong emotional reaction to thinking about the story of the lottery, then by all
means read the wiki link for The Lottery. It will take you down Alice’s rabbit hole further. Join me.)
If you want to dig deeper, then
“The Alphabet vs. the Goddess,” by
Leonard Shlain, argues that one of the reasons that led to the patriarchal take-over of religion was the
development of a written, alphabetic language. It’s a complicated story, but I think he is onto something
here – it feels like it’s part of the story somehow. Here’s his talk again. (And if you like it, his book and
talk entitled Art and Physics is terrific to dig in through the angle of art. We lost a very creative mind
when he died recently. His daughter made a fascinating documentary entitled Connected. {Tiffany Shlain
has made a beautiful film. I don’t agree with 100% of it, but she is raising great idea in a wonderful way. This short clip, it’s
about a minute, shows part of how her dad fits into the story of her film. )
Early humans had questions about how the world worked. They used mythology to answer their
questions. Myths are stories which give meaning to people’s lives. Later, a tradition which has a
beginning in Greece, takes a new tack to explain things. Answers given to the questions: What is it all
about? and How can we understand the world? are open to criticism unlike mythology. (This is the
introduction of what becomes Philosophy. I give a short explanation of how the story of philosophy fits
in here. Skip ahead if you want.)
Philosophy questions received answers: sure it gives answers to questions, just like religion, but
philosophy is a dialogue. In other words it’s a long conversation in which each person’s ideas are run
through the gauntlet of other minds. (If the argument a philosopher gives to defend some claim as
true is reasonable, then, like a healthy seed, it can grow in another philosopher’s mind garden.) A
philosopher presents an argument. Others try to find flaws: they show why it won’t grow in their
minds. Those criticisms are incorporated into a revised seed.
Religions, for the most part, do not readily accept modification even with the advent of new data. It’s
the ultimate conservative philosophy. What we would call science, at times in history, was called
natural Philosophy. It was only later that new terms came to designate certain endeavors, like
Chemisty, to explain how something worked. We use to have alchemists who searched for the magic
which could turn base metals into precious metals. Lead to gold kind of thing. The Natural
Philosopher, A.K.A. the scientist, can’t explain why the chemicals exist on the planet earth because no
one knows, but she sure as shoot’n knows HOW it works with mathematical precision. (Imagine gunshot
sounds, like in cartoons with cowboys like Yosemite Sam.) She
knows HOW it works so well, she knows that the same
reaction can be repeated if needed: you know, how a car keeps using gas the same old way like it’s
magic! (Imagine someone from 1000 years ago in a fish out of water scene in a movie. Look at your
life. You would be a god. You command a chariot which takes you places faster than hardly be
imagined! You speak to other Gods on your little God-communication-devices. You show me other
worlds on a tiny flat mirror. But this mirror doesn’t reflect my face; it reflects other faces, of other
people, of whom I have only heard rumors!
I place religions in the category of myth (stories we tell which explain why we are here) because they
are based on stories which they say ought not to be changed in any substantial way. (For the
fundamentalist of any stripe, they believe the text literally describes reality: Noah’s Ark is factually
correct.) No new discoveries challenging the fact that the entire surface of the planet was covered
underwater to the height of Mt. Everest.
Anyone with just a little science might ask where did the water go? Where all water goes, it sank into
the earth, or it evaporated. Well if the entire planet is covered, there’s no lower place for the water to
seek and fill, that happened when it was raining right? The place only floods after all than can be
absorbed has been absorbed. If the water was covering Mt Everest, it couldn’t seep in.
We still have evaporation. Where does water go when it evaporates? That’s right clouds. Check the
meteorology. I would bet that there would not be dry land it such a flood occurred. (Check out this
rather detailed scientific assessment: but beware it’s government propaganda.)
But a fundamentalist can say with complete certainty, that may be true, but God made the universe.
God made the water disappear just like he made it appear. The believer always has an escape hatch
when theoretical or actual questions to the answers are asked. Religion is rarely willing to make change
because they want a static answer, once and for all. The changing pace of reality is uncomfortable.
Okay, the destination of our journey.
The oldest of the three “Abrahamic” Faiths is Judaism. After we finish the last part of “The Power of
Myth” we will start on Judaism.
Cheers.