GOd, a human history

reza aslan

God is not the large powerful old man who lives in the sky. He’s not the stronger than father figure with magical powers. This is how we tend to view god when we’re all marshmallow-brained tykes, and studies show kids from anywhere have a tough time distinguishing humans and god in terms of action or agency; God is always described as a human with superhuman abilities. 

There’s really no better way to remove the barrier between human and god than by making HIIIIIMMM a human being. On commenting on the success of Christianity, the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach said “Only a being who comprises in himself the whole man can satisfy the whole man.” He was just saying that the near-universal appeal of a God is one who looks, thinks, feels and acts just like us. It’s rooted in our deep-seated need to experience the divine as a reflection of ourselves.

Even Muslims ALLAHHUAKBAR are just as likely to ascribe to god their own virtues and vices, their own feelings and flaws. In fact, the entire history of human spirituality can be viewed as one long, interconnected, ever-evolving and remarkably cohesive effort to make sense of the divine by giving it our emotions and our personalities, by ascribing it our our traits and our desires. By making god US.

Faith is ultimately a choice (one almost always made in willful ignorance). You either choose to believe there is something beyond the material realm, or you don’t. If you do, you must ask if you wish to experience this thing that’s beyond. And if you do wish to commune with what’s beyond, it may help to have a language with which to express what is fundamentally an inexpressible experience. 

Religion is little more than a language made of symbols and metaphors that allows believers to communicate - to one another and themselves - the ineffable experience of faith. This belief in humanized gods is what guided hunter-gatherers, then later groups of tens of thousands as we swapped spears for plows. Our first temples were built by people who thought of the gods as super humans, as were our first religions. 

Studies show that when the most devout believers, when forced to communicate their thoughts about god, overwhelmingly treat god as though they were talking to someone they met on the street. 

This insistence on using human emotions to describe something that’s utterly nonhuman only further demonstrates our existential need to project our humanity onto god, to bestow upon god not just all that is worthy in human nature (our capacity for love, our empathy, our compassion, our thirst for justice) but all that is vile (our aggression, greed, bias, bigotry, our penchant for extreme acts of violence). 

When we endow god with human attributes, we essentially divinize those attributes, so that everything good or bad about our religions is merely a reflection of everything that is good or bad about us. We fashion our religions, cultures, societies and governments, all according to our own human urges, all while convincing ourselves they are the urges of god.

This book was more than just a history of how we humanized god. It’s a reminder that whether you believe in one god or many gods or no god, it’s us who have fashioned god in our image, not the other way around. In that truth lies the key to a more mature primal form of spirituality. 

Chapter 1

In the beginning there were no gods, then BANG. Humans began their evolution 300-200k years ago. They crossed the Arabian peninsula in waves, fanning north across the central Asian steppes, east into the Indian subcontinent, across the sea to Australia, and west over the balkans, until they reached southern Spain and the edge of Europe. 

They made tools, and took these tools from shelter to shelter. Such things were precious to them, they set them apart from the rest of their community. When they died, these tools that are unique to them are buried with them into the ground so that the deceased may continue to enjoy them in whatever life is to come. Ubiquitously, a pre-historic culture’s dead would be buried in the fetal position, posed coiled around their tools, facing east to meet the rising sun.

The assumption is they thought the dead were merely in another realm once their body was gone, a realm the living could access through dreams and visions. The body may be gone, but something, something separate and distinct from the body, persists. The soul. 

If the soul is separate from the body, it can survive the body. If it can survive the body, then the visible world must be teeming with souls the living can’t see. These souls are the spirits that inhabit all things. Birds, trees, mountains, the sun, the moon. They all pulse with life. They are animated. A day will come when these spirits will be fully humanized, given names and mythologies, transformed into supernatural beings, and worshipped and prayed to as gods. 

It’s no leap to think what people thought of as inside of them was inside of everything else, too. All things share this, all a part of the whole. This is Animism, the belief of a spiritual attribution to everything, human or not, and it is humanity’s earliest expression of anything that could be termed religion. 

There’s no place we can come into contact with our ancestors more fully than inside the spectacularly painted caves that dot Europe and Asia like footprints marking the path of their migration. This was fundamental to belief, the earth acting as a middle ground layered between the sky and the underworld. The upper realms only accessible via dreams or Shamen, the lower by anyone, simply by burrowing deep into the earth, to sculpt belief onto a wall. 

They didn’t live in these caves. They are not cavemen. Most painted caves are hard to reach and unfit for habitation. Entering them is like a baptism, of a liminal quality. They weren’t for dwelling, they were sacred, which may explain why almost always they are placed at a great distance from a cave’s mouth. Something to be experienced only after overcoming the journey. The first temple.

Images were less painted onto the walls than they were worked out, or divined, from shapes people saw with their HADD. They’d burn animal bones, likely as a means of absorbing the animal’s essence. The aroma of bone and marrow in such a tight space acts as an incense to consecrate those gathered there. These images were a primitive sign language, like in the cave of the hands.

The common assumption is that the paintings of animals also worked as hunting magic, a charm to assist the hunter in bagging their prey. This is showcased through archeological digs showing that what was painted showed little correspondence to what that locale ate. They are often drawn surrounded by spears, but not spears impaling it, but rather emanating from it. They represent the animal’s aura, or spirit. The animals cast on the walls were not chosen because they were “good to eat” but because they were “good to think.”

A common drawing of these thinking animals was one in particular. It had the legs and feet of a man, the ears of a stag, the eyes of an owl. A beard jutting from its chin and two antlers from its head. It’s always drawn mid-dance, but facing the viewer. It is “the sorcerer,” as it was initially interpreted to be a shaman, half-man, half-god, one foot in this realm and one in the next, bridging the two with the help of the animals. After coming across several more like it, the researcher who found it, Breuil, concluded it was not a shaman, but the earliest image ever found of god.

Chapter 2

The god Breuil thought he encountered in the Volp caves is well-known amongst religious scholars as the Lord of Beasts, not only one of the oldest gods but one of the most widely transmitted. It’s found on:

- Mesopotamian stone vessels circa 4K BCE.

- Egyptian ivory/flint knife circa 3450 BCE.

- The Indus Valley, associated with Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda and Hindu deity Shiva, 

- Enkidu, from the epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world’s first written stories. 

- Hermès, and Pan.

- Even Yahweh is presented as the Lord of Beasts in the Bible (Job 39)

How did our prehistoric ancestors evolve from a state of primitive animism to the kind of sophisticated belief system mutant would result in the Lord of Beasts in the first place? In terms of timelines, it’s all happened in the upper Paleolithic.

- Lower Paleolithic (2.5m to 200k years ago)

- Middle Paleolithic - enter Homo Sapiens (200k to 40k years ago)

- Upper Paleolithic - enter religious expression (40k to 10k years ago)

There are some alters that show these as far back as 300k-176k, before even our species, but those are rare (the oldest being the Berekhat Ram Venus). That’s the hard part in relying on these digs to date religious expression: sculptures fossilize, beliefs don’t. Our ancestors didn’t have an epiphany, they had long-standing beliefs of nature and the universe for a long time before they ever etched about it. Their etching was a gradual, inherited thing, cultivated over many many generations. Everything they know is based on prior knowledge. Everything they create is the result of previous creations. 

Science has only recently involved itself in trying to date, or rather, identify the root, of religious thought. It took off in earnest recently, in the 19th century, after Darwin had already spread biological ideas of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. 

Darwin can’t really be used to explain religion (although he definitely can and will) because religious belief is so widespread it must be considered an elemental part of the human experience. We are less Homo Sapiens than we are Homo Religiosus (not in our creed or commitment to specific gods but in our existential striving toward that which lies beyond the manifest world: Transcendence. 

If religious belief is inherent to our species, it was reasoned it must be a product of human evolution. The only reason it exists is that there is an adaptive advantage to it. 

Edward Burnett Tylor was one of the first to take this angle. He thought the source of religious belief lay within humanity’s baffling belief that the soul is separate from the body, a belief that emerged in every culture and society throughout time. He hypothesized that this separation idea could only have happened while we were asleep, when we didn’t notice the distinction between what was real and what wasn’t. He says if a sleeping, pre-modern man ran into a dead relative in a dream, they would then awake and visit their grave, thinking it a sign of their continued communication. 

Few people agreed with this. 

Max Mueller believed our first religious experiences arose with contact with nature. The earth is full of so many mysteries man knows he had no role in creating, so something else must’ve. 

Robert Marett called this idea “supernaturalism,” and that ancient humans believed in a universal soul that lay just beyond the visible world. He called it “mana” an old Polynesian word for power. Marett said mana was a part of the ocean and the wind, the thing within the things. Each soul, release from a body, became a spirit. Some of those passed into inanimate objects, others into animate ones. 

What all these themes have in common is that they assume religion arose in evolution to answer unanswerable questions to help humans navigate a threatening and unpredictable world. It remains popular today, and while no doubt religion today helps many make sense of a mystifying and volatile existence, how do these answers support the survival of the species. 

The argument has been made that the mind of a believer may have less fear than a non-believer, you’re just as likely to get fucked while hunting a bison if you have a god or if you don’t. It’s also not true that the emotions religions engender are unique to the religious. I feel awe and connection and am as godless as they come. I meditate and likely have more religious experiences on a regular basis than you do, if that’s what you’d want to use as a benchmark. 

Since initial religious experience isn’t explained by appealing to the quest for meaning, others began speculating it grew as from a role which construction and maintained our sense of community. 

Emile Durkheim said religion was a social thing (and he’s not wrong). He said for it to have endured as a social construct in our early development, it must’ve been planted in the real. Real are the actions of a community bound together by blood and kinship working in unison to adapt and survive hostile environments. Therefore, he said, the origin of religious impulse must be grounded in the rights and rituals of social life, the ones that help a community form a collective consciousness. 

The action of carving a spear, the gutting of hunted prey, all these things became ritualized and practiced identically, time to time. Hunters begin to maintain a mystical solidarity with their weapons, and since survival is no small thing, it makes sense that weapons gradually become regarded as sacred. Not because of any inherent power, but because of their usefulness. Durkheim said a thing becomes sacred solely through the ways in which an individual acts upon it. 

The same goes for the collective actions of a hunter. How before a hunt, hunters would stack the bones of the previous kill and focus their attention on it, a sort of prayer for good fortune. Durkheim says maybe at some point bones are replaced with a living beast, sacrificed pre-hunt in the hopes that blood will beget blood. In this way, mythology arises from the hunt, from sacrifice, from shedding blood for the appeasement of the spirits around and the spirits the sacrifice creates. So it’s hunting trip = spiritual activity, paving a way for beliefs in souls and spirits. Durkheim’s theory of religion arising as a social cohesive is the most widely held explanation today for the origin of religious impulse. 

While it makes sense that a common set of shared ritual experiences would enhance the collective viability and the chance at survival in a competitive world, there’s nothing intrinsically unifying or cohesive about religion. Religion does as much against cohesion as it does for it (although Reza shows his inexperience outside the realm of religious scholarship. His point is only taken collectively. Historically speaking, cohesion is THE power within groups, and the divider between groups). He argues kinship is a stronger and more primal tool than social cohesion within human evolution. 

These theories were all competing as psychoanalysis entered the fray. Freud and Jung had their own interpretations of religion. Freud: religion is a disorder that fosters belief in invisible, impossible things and ideas that lead to compulsive actions and obsessive conduct, all in order to “make his helplessness tolerable.”

Rene Girard thought religion arose to mitigate violence by focusing it instead on ritual sacrifice, a “scapegoat.”

Karl Marx said, “religion is the opiate of the masses.”

Freud, like with most of his shit, while pioneering, was still proven to be shit. His theory holds that religion’s purpose is to motivate altruistic behavior, to control primitive populations from tearing each other apart (again, Reza being Reza, he’s not accounting for the massive social accountability associated with immorality and the implications with a pissed off deity in the afterlife). Freud says religion is a divine lawgiver.

Cognitive psychologist Paul Bloom in study after study showed the moral effects of religion are no more or less powerful than the moral effects of any other social practice. It’s silly otherwise because belief in a divine lawgiver who determines good and bad behavior is barely 5k years old. Belief in heavenly reward for such behavior is even newer.

Not to mention all the gods these people were meant to give judge their moral standard against were anything but moral. 

- Gods of Egypt and Mesopotamia (savage and brutal) - humans as slaves to use to their whims. 

- Greek gods (vain and entitled) - toyed with humanity for sport.

- Yahweh (jealous) - demands wholesale slaughter of all men, women and children who don’t worship him alone. 

- Allah (martial law) - prescribes draconian punishments to any and all to oppose him. 

These gods are meant to divine our moral source?

Religion, and this should come as no fucking surprise, arose just like any other trait, as the accidental byproduct of other preexisting evolutionary adaptations. 

Chapter 3

Now we get down to the cognition of religious belief’s origins, namely through the hypersensitive agency detection device (HADD) and theory of mind (TOM). 

HADD is why we see sticks as snakes and not the other way around. It’s the threat detection system our brain has that makes us the best pattern recognizers on the planet, because those who could detect threats were the ones that stayed alive and passed down their genes. The world adapted us to see things where there weren’t. It really leads us to detect agency, so it’s named, so that we assign a human, or sentient cause, to any unexplained event. It’s why we assume every bump in the night is caused by a someone doing the bumping. It is the basis for god, because religion is first and foremost a neurological phenomenon. 

This isn’t necessary to say (says Reza) that knowing the neural mechanics of the religious impulse undermines the legitimacy of religious belief any more than knowing the chemical process of romantic attraction makes the feeling any less real or the object of our affection any less worthy. 

Michael Murray said, “The mere fact that we have beliefs that spring from mental tools selected for by natural selection is, all by itself, totally irrelevant to the justification of the beliefs that spring from them.”

The other neurological basis for religious impulse is TOM. TOM is an executive of the brain that activates the moment we attain the ability to view and understand other people the way we view and understand ourselves: as separate and distinct individuals who feel the same basic feelings, who think the same kinds of thoughts, who have the same essence we do. It not only obliges us to think of others in the same terms we think of ourselves, but also encourages us to use ourselves as the primary model for how we conceive of everyone else.

If the only consciousness I’m aware of is my own, then my perception of the internal states of other human beings is based on my own internal state. This process also applies to non-human and even inanimate things. That human-looking thing must be like me, must have thoughts and emotions like me.

A child may be aware a Barbie or race car is not a human, but they will still attribute life to the toy. They will give it agency. This agency and intention we give to things is essentially giving it spirit. Giving it a soul. 

The cave paintings from before were described as being released from the rock. Not painted on flat surfaces so much as painted atop shapes and contours on the walls that people already saw shapes and things in. These caves that served as the first temples saw pre-modern folks bringing offerings to the rock faces, even praying to hem. Thus, religion is born by accident. 

HADD and TOM explain how religion arose, but not how it persisted and transmitted from culture to culture, century to century. The latter is explained by the fact that our brains allow only certain types of belief to stick. We’re more likely to absorb, retain and share an idea that deviates just slightly from what’s real. A talking tree is just crazy enough to be believable, even if another being told about it didn’t hear it speak for themselves.

The change needs to be useful too. A tree that becomes invisible? No use. A tree that speaks, however, well then, tree, tell us of the nonmaterial world. How do you poop? This is an easy way to begin constructing a mythology, accompanied by rituals to help spread and reinforce it. 

The talking tree is used as an example as it was likely one of the first for early believers to do this with. It resonates throughout cultures and religions:

- Greek historian Herodotus, 400 BCE speaks of the sacred forest of Dedona, whose trees spoke with human voices and could prophecize. 

- Persian epic Shahnameh (book of kings), 100 CE tells of an encounter between Alexander the Great and a talking tree that predicts his death.

- Marco Polo, 400 CE writes of coming across the tree of sun and moon in India, one that spoke in the daytime voice of a man and one that spoke in the night voice of a woman.

- Genesis, Abraham encounters god two times at oracular trees, once near Nablus at the oak of moreh (genesis 12:6) and in Hebron at the oaks of mamre (genesis 18:1). 

- Contemporarily, they’re in the wizard of oz, the lord of the rings, and in Celtic and Druid spirituality. 

A similar transmission likely occurred with the Lord of Beasts. Take things we know - animal and human - and tweak it a little by combining them, then make it a useful aberration (a hybrid that can help you get food to survive). Suddenly you have a belief durable enough to evolve from a mental abstraction to transmit to the Sorcerer 18k years ago, to the book of genesis 2.5k years ago, all the way to neopagans today. In this way, a specific god is born and remains active in human culture across millennia. 

This becomes the basis for all gods, because the most useful religious belief conceived has always been that of the “god-man,” a being slightly altered, who exhibits heightened abilities, who may be unseen, or in all places at all times, who knows past and future, who knows all. A human being, who, in other words, is a god.

What this chapter’s focus is, though, is our possession of mental abilities that, developed over millions of years of evolution, under the right circumstances, lead us to assign agency to inanimate objects, to endow those objects with a spirit/soul, and then to successfully transmit those beliefs stemming from those objects to other cultures and generations. 

Our first belief as a species, though, was likely the belief in a soul. To assign agency to see thing else, you have to recognize your own and name it. After all, belief in the soul is what lead to the belief in god. The origin of the religious impulse isn’t rooted in our quest for meaning or our fear of the unknown. It’s not born of our involvuntary reactions to the natural world. It’s the result of some more primal: our ingrained, intuitive, and wholly experiential belief that we are, whatever else we are, embodied souls. 

Chapter 4

People in Turkey think that’s where the garden of eden used to be. There is no actual garden of eden, obviously, but just as it is with most of our ancient scriptures, the story is meant to be read as myth. That’s not to say myths are false, not in the way we understand the word today. 

The significance of a myth doesn’t rest in the truth claims it makes but in its ability to convey a particular perception of the world. The function of a myth isn’t then to explain how things are, but why things are the way they are. Hebrews didn’t organize themselves into 7-day weeks with the 7th day for rest because that was how long it took god to create the world, but because they claimed god took 6 days to create the world and the following day to rest according to how they already organized time. 

Garden, flood, and resurrection narratives of the ancient near east represent a special class of myth called “folk memory,” tales passed down orally generation to generation that can be found in almost every religion and culture. 

The reason Turks claim eden must’ve been there is because in fact the oldest known religious temple was recently unearthed there: Gobekli Tepe/Potbellied Hill. It’s a temple complex surrounding t-shaped pillars engraved with images of ferocious beasts (caped with blocks that identify them as humanoid figures), very unlike the docile animals painted on the caves in the Paleolithic era. What makes it extraordinary, is that it was built 14k-12k years ago. That’s 6k years before Stonehenge and 7k years before pyramids. It even predates agriculture. It’s been proven not to be a place where people ate or lived. Simply a temple.

These t-pillars were intentionally abstract to represent the god-man, supreme beings in human form, we’re just not yet sure which.

What we do know is why the central pillars in Göbekli Tepe are humanoid. It’s because we are, as we have seen, evolutionarily adapted to implant our own beliefs and desires, our own mental and psychological states, our own souls, our own personal experiences, in other beings, whether they’re human or not. In doing so, we not only humanize the world, we humanize the gods we think created it, something with both positive and negative consequences. 

The more we think of the gods in human terms, the more we will project our human attributes upon them. Eventually, we’ll make the heavenly realm a mirror reflecting the earth, so that the gods who take on our personalities will also take on our politics, even our bureaucracies. We’ll construct entire spiritual systems based on the only thing we can truly know: ourselves.

The gods need food, because we need food; and so we will offer them sacrifices. The gods need shelter, because we need shelter; and so we will build them temples. The gods need names, so we will name them. They need personalities, so we will give them ours. They need mythic histories to ground them in our reality, formalized rituals so they can be experienced in our world, servants and attendants who can fulfill their wishes (which are nothing more than our wishes), rules and regulations to keep them happy, prayers and petitions to ward off their anger. What they need, in short, are religions. And so we will invent them.

It’s the conceptualization of personal gods in human form, and the institutionalized myths and rituals that accompany such a process, that will push us out of the Paleolithic era, that will compel us to stop wandering and to settle down, that will give us the impetus to alter the earth to our advantage by inventing agriculture. In transforming the gods of heaven into humans, we will transform humans into the gods of the earth

Our gods, such as they were, were the gods of the hunt. Our rites and rituals, our myths and legends, our subterranean sanctuaries, our very conception of the cosmos were powered by the mystical solidarity that existed between hunter and hunted.

Our reliance on the weapons we used to hunt and survive transformed them from mere objects into simulacra of the spirit world.

While hunting made us human, farming altered what being human meant. Hunting let us master space, but farming let us master time. Farming forced us to master time, to synchronize the movements of the stars and the sun with the agricultural cycle. The mystical solidarity we enjoyed with the animals with whom we shared the earth was transferred to the earth itself. We stopped praying for help with the hunt and prayed instead for help with the harvest. Our spiritual focus shifted from the sky—traditionally associated with fatherly, male deities—to the earth as Mother Goddess, thus elevating the position of women in society.

It was around this time that the concept of the “immolated deity” first arose—the god who dies and is dismembered and from whose body creation springs. Think Phan Ku, the creator god of China, whose skull became the dome of the sky, whose blood became the rivers and seas, and whose bones became the mountains and rocks; or the god Osiris, who taught the ancient Egyptians how to cultivate the earth before being killed and cut to pieces by his fiendish brother, Seth, who scattered the pieces of his body along the fertile Nile valley.

Not only did such mythologies better coincide with the birth, death, and rebirth of our crops, they let us have a more intimate relationship with the divine. If the crops we plant in the earth are believed to arise from a god’s dismembered body, then when we partake of those plants, we are in fact consuming the body of the god—a concept that will have a long life in the religious practices of the Ancient Near East, including the Christian ritual of the Eucharist.

Settling required rules and laws to enforce them (thus the birth of organized society). Temples require priests, and so we designated others to regulate worship and speak to the gods on our behalf (thus the birth of organized religion

As food became more readily available, populations soared. The congregation of large communities into public spaces allowed ideas to be more rapidly exchanged and technologies to be more seamlessly adopted. Art flourished, technology was shared, civilization was born, all because of the fateful decision to stop hunting and gathering and start farming and domesticating.

Only a few types of grain were suitable for early farming and an even smaller number of animal species were suited to domestication. Our diets and lifestyles suffered because of it. It is no wonder that in most ancient agricultural societies, at least one out of every three children died before the age of twenty. In fact, skeletons unearthed in and around the Ancient Near East indicate that in the first few thousand years of the Neolithic Revolution, humans lost an average of six inches in height, largely as a result of their inadequate diet.

As the earth warmed and the glaciers retreated, climatic pressures forced populations to squeeze into a few favorable geographical zones, where they experimented with collecting and planting certain varieties of cereals and legumes.

The discovery of these ancient pre-agrarian temples across the Levant has turned this idea on its head. We now know that permanent settlements came first, and then, many years later, farming arose. We were living in villages with booming populations, building giant temples, creating great works of art, sharing our technology for centuries before it occurred to us to grow our food.

What was it that spurred the transition from hunting to farming? The discovery of Göbekli Tepe and similar devotional sites across the Ancient Near East suggests that it was the birth of organized religion. For our Paleolithic ancestors, that revolution came in the form of an institutionalized religious system dominated by belief in humanized gods.

After all, to conceive of the gods in human form, to claim that we share the same physical and psychic qualities as the gods themselves, is to view humanity as somehow distinct from the rest of the natural world. For the first time in our evolution we began to imagine ourselves not as a part of the universe, but as its center. Gone is the animistic worldview that had bound us in soul and spirit to the natural world. And if we’re no longer bound in essence to the animals and the earth, then why not exploit them? Why not intervene in nature to dominate and domesticate it, to transform it to our advantage?

What followed this shift from animism to organized religion—in Mesopotamia and Egypt, in Europe and Greece, in Iran and India, China, and beyond—was the formation of entire pantheons of personalized humanized gods, each embodying a particular human attribute, until there was a unique god for every good and bad quality we possess.

Thus what began as an unconscious cognitive impulse to fashion the divine in our image—to give it our soul—gradually became, over the next ten thousand years of spiritual development, a conscious effort to make the gods more and more humanlike—until, at last, God became literally human.

Chapter 5

Reza retells the first written flood narrative from Sumer, of Atrahasis and the gods wanting to wipe the world after their first 12 children overpopulated in the next 1200 years and kept the gods from being able to sleep at night. 

Tales of a world-ending deluge that destroys all of humanity save for a fortunate few are among the oldest and most widely spread in human history. The myth is, in some ways, the quintessential “folk memory,” as most scholars believe it is based on an actual catastrophic flood that took place some time in the distant past. Indigenous versions of a flood epic can be found in Egypt, Babylon, Greece, India, Europe, East Asia, North and South America, and Australia, each reworked to reflect the particular culture and religion of the storyteller.

Most can be traced back to the Sumer. Wedged between the legendary rivers of creation, the Tigris and the Euphrates, in what is today known as Iraq and Syria, Mesopotamia (meaning “between two rivers” in Greek) benefited from a temperate climate and periodic flooding, which created a mineral-rich environment ripe for agricultural growth.

By 9000 B.C.E. there were large, dry farming zones throughout the region, particularly in the south, where small fishing villages clustered against the two great rivers as they met and discharged into the Persian Gulf. By 7000 B.C.E., most common species of plants and animals, with the exception of horses and camels, had been domesticated in Mesopotamia. The next two thousand years saw widespread agricultural expansion stretching west into Egypt and east to the Iranian plateau.

At Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia, between the years 7000 and 6500 B.C.E., nearly a thousand households lived together in a large agricultural settlement boasting elaborately painted shrines dedicated to a fertility goddess.

Halaf, an advanced culture known for their mastery of pottery. After about a thousand years, the Halaf ceded their cultural domain of the region to the Ubaid, whose reach extended deep into southern Mesopotamia, all the way to modern Bahrain and Oman.

No one knows exactly when these inhabitants of southern Mesopotamia came to be known as Sumerians, or whether the Sumerians and Ubaidis were even related. The word Sumer is actually Akkadian—a Semitic language that was the most widely spoken in Mesopotamia. It means, “land of civilized kings.” Yet wherever they came from and however they arose, by 4500 B.C.E., the Sumerians had cemented their dominance over Mesopotamia by founding what is regarded as the first major city in the world, Uruk. They invented the wheel and the sailboat. They expanded irrigation channels to allow for year-round farming on an immense scale, flowering Sumerian culture and religion, the achievement of great works of art and architecture, the creation of complex mythologies such as the Atrahasis epic, and, most earth-shattering of all, the invention of writing.

It’s known as the Cradle of Civilization because some time in the fourth millennium B.C.E., the Sumerians began to press blunt reed styluses onto wet clay to make the distinctive wedge-shaped lines we call cuneiform, allowing human beings, for the first time in history, to record their most abstract thoughts.

Cuneiform would then be adopted by the other local languages of Mesopotamia, including Akkadian and its two principal dialects: Babylonian in the south, which became the language of literary works and inscriptions, and Assyrian in the north, which was used mostly for economic and political documents until it faded away with the collapse of the Assyrian empire in the seventh century. Cuneiform was used throughout the Middle East for three thousand years, until it was fully displaced by Aramaic in the first century B.C.E.

Most spectacularly out of Mesopotamia, we have a veritable library of sprawling, unforgettable myths and legends that offers nearly unfettered access to what is arguably the earliest and most influential advanced religious system ever devised.

The Sumerians were not the only Neolithic civilization to create a sophisticated religion, but they were the first to write about it, and that made all the difference, not only because it allowed their religious ideas to spread across the region, but because, with the invention of writing, the compulsion to humanize the divine—a compulsion rooted in our cognitive processes and crudely expressed at Göbekli Tepe—became actualized. It made conscious and explicit our unconscious and implicit desire to make the gods in our own image.

The very words we choose to describe the gods affect how we understand their nature, their personality, even their physical form. For example, the word for “god” in Sumerian is ilu, which means something like “lofty person,” elevated beings who had human bodies and wore human clothes, who expressed human emotions and exhibited human personalities.

The gods of Sumer were born to mothers who suckled them when they were young. They had fathers with whom they clashed as they grew older. They fell in love and got married. They had sex and birthed children. They lived in houses with their families, and had relatives with whom they formed giant celestial clans. They ate and drank and complained about work. They argued and fought with one another. Occasionally they were wounded and died. They were, in the most meaningful sense, human.

They flowered in the religious systems of the Egyptians and the Greeks, the Indians and the Persians. They fully bloomed in the pages of the Bible and the Quran, where the Sumerian word ilu became transliterated as Elohim in Hebrew and Allah in Arabic.

Enki the wise, who together with Enlil, “the decreer of fates,” and An (or Anu), the sky god, made up the three most important deities of the thousands in the early Mesopotamian pantheon.

The nine-thousand-year spiritual journey that took humanity from the faceless, humanoid pillars at Göbekli Tepe to the vibrant, personalized deities of Mesopotamia is obscured by a dearth of material evidence. However, a remarkable series of finds in Jericho, one of the most ancient cities on earth and the prelude to the great city-states of Mesopotamia, has shed some light on this intermediate stage of human spirituality.

We can look to private household shrines that may indicate the emergence early in the Neolithic Era of manism—a belief popularly referred to as “ancestor worship.”

It is the result of the animistic belief that the souls of the dead continue to exist as spirits in the world. Yet with the birth of agriculture, ancestor worship became more complex and pronounced, now the spirits were in soil from which our sustenance grew. It therefore made sense to focus our spiritual efforts on the recently dead in the hope that they would intercede with the forces of nature on behalf of the living, whether to help preserve the crops or maintain the health and viability of the herd. With the passage of time, some of these deceased ancestors evolved into deities—the better to intercede with the natural forces—until the middleman, as it were, was removed and the forces of nature themselves became deified.

This theory is supported by the fact that many of Mesopotamia’s gods began their existence as little more than the deification of the natural elements. An was both the sky god and the sky itself. Shamash was both the sun god and the sun. It may have been partly the need to better manage these natural forces, to maintain power and influence over them, that spurred the Mesopotamians to personalize these gods, to gradually transform them into a pantheon of individual deities, each with a specific sphere of influence. It was simply a matter of giving each god a personality, a set of human traits, and a distinct form, and the “lofty persons” were born.

Most of the major gods in Mesopotamia were connected to a particular city-state, and while each city-state had its own temple, these were not primarily places of worship; they were, rather, the earthly residences of the gods. Yet unlike the later Egyptian pyramids, Mesopotamian temples were solid structures, completely filled in, layered in successively receding stories, like staircases that the gods could use to move back and forth between heaven and earth, and capped with a small chamber at the top where the gods could dwell in repose.

Like the veneration of ancestors, the carving of idols to represent spirits or gods can be traced to the Paleolithic era. In Mesopotamia, however, efficiencies in sculpting and molding made the use of idols in public devotion far more common and widespread. Each day a priest or priestess—depending on the gender of the god—would enter a temple’s chamber, wash, dress, and feed the idol, anoint it with perfumes and incense, embellish it with cosmetics, and, on special occasions, take it out for a stroll so it could visit its fellow gods in neighboring temples. It was only then that the masses would set eyes upon their gods; the laity was not allowed into the temples and thus had no direct access to the deities residing within

However, the consequence of such a belief is that when the spirit of one of these “lofty persons” entered an idol, the idol became the spirit’s body. This is a complex yet exceedingly important point. In the same way that when we write about a god we instinctively attribute to that god human emotions and motivations, when we visualize a god—when we expertly carve an idol in the god’s image or paint the god on a stained-glass window—we instinctively conjure the human form.

Attenuate these supernatural flourishes slightly, and what remains is not an ethereal force of nature, but a human being with superhuman powers.

Early in Egyptian history, during what is known as the Pre-Dynastic Period (c. 5000–3000 B.C.E.), the Egyptians were pure animists; they believed that all beings were animated by a single, divine force that permeated the universe. However, with the invention of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing sometime around 3300 B.C.E.—not long after and probably under the influence of Sumerian cuneiform—there arose a need to make this abstract force more concrete. It had to be visualized so that it could be etched onto the walls of temples or inked onto strips of papyrus. And so, as happened in Mesopotamia, this abstract divine force eventually became realized in human form. 

Thus, Hathor, the Egyptian goddess of music, dance, and fertility, could be a cow wearing a woman’s necklace, a cow/woman hybrid, or a woman with the furry ears of a cow protruding from the sides of her head. Likewise, Anubis, the god of mummification and protector of the dead, could be a jackal, or a man with a jackal’s head. 

Anubis was depicted as a Jackal-headed man because the jackal is a scavenging animal known for occasionally digging up and devouring corpses buried in the desert. By depicting the protector of the dead as a human jackal, Egyptians sought to control what was a widely feared force of nature with the power to disrupt funerary practices that were so vital to ancient Egyptian spirituality. 

This is the spiritual landscape into which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam arose. 

The Indo-European pantheons were constructed with the help of their predecessors, staring with many and whittling down. The first time the Indian gods were writing in the Rig Veda (oldest sacred text in India written in Sanskrit 1500 BC), they all shed their airy natures and took on specific human qualities and appearances. They took on complete human form when Indians began to actualize these entities into idols. 

The more the idols were paraded around, the more the people heard the stories and legends, the more easily they could personalize the abstract forces of nature their ancestors once worshipped. Just like the printing press made ideas more available to the masses, the production of personified idols made the gods seem more recognizably human - until, in Ancient Greece, they became too human to be taken seriously as gods. 

Greek history really begins in 1600 BCE, the middle Bronze Age, with the seafaring civilization known as the Mycenaeans. They were the first great colonizers of the Aegean. They gave the Greek most of their gods, whose pantheon used to be topped with Poseidon ‘Earth’s Husband.’

Whereas the Mycenaean gods personified the forces of nature, when the Greeks repurposed them, Athena from the solar god to the goddes of wisdom. Hera from the sky god to the goddess of maternal love. Instead of nature they represented human attributes. They all eventually got whittled down into the 12 gods (apostles) The Olympians, and framed as members of a family. 

The Egyptians did the same, because what better way to relate to the gods. They understand our trials and tribulations, as they’re apart of a family just like we are. It was one thing to ascribe human traits to a god, but something else entirely to give them a full range of human emotions. The gods were really just adulterous, thieving, jealous, lustful, easily tricked, utterly corruptible beings who just happened to be immortal?

It was how well the Greeks painted the greek gods as humanoid in greek literature and sculpture that created the wedge of doubt about the nature and existence of the whole pantheon. After all, could gods really look exactly like humans? How could the creators be just like the stately fishmonger from Crete. 

Ironic, that the uber successful process of humanizing the gods would expose the logical fallacy embedded in our innate desire to make them in our image. Greek skeptics who thought this wanted a religion framed by the idea of god as utterly nonhuman, as one. As singular. 

In striving for one, the greek thinkers were trying to redefine god, one that the people of the time had no interest in worshipping. 

Chapter 6

The high god is a concept we all know. The move from polytheism to henotheism, to monolatry, to the eventual.... monotheism. 

We start with the first recorded attempt at monotheism in recorded history. Amenhotep, who named himself Akhenaten after the god he was so rock-hard over, was an Egyptian pharaoh who decided to use his power to change the way his people believed. 

This was not that long ago (1353 BCE). Akhen had a womanish appearance, and an even stupider philosophy. Egypt had already engaged in solar worship as it was central to their spirituality. Like the Mesopotamians before them and the Indo-Europeans after, ancient Egyptians deified the sun, one among the nine original gods. Re (ray) or Shu. 

Around this time the sun god Re and the moon god Amun merged, to form the national Deity Amun-Re. By the time, about 200 years later, when Akhen became pharaoh, Amun-Re had ascended to king of the gods, not just in Egypt but in all its vassal states and colonized territories. Akhen, however, worshipped the sun in a different way. He worshipped the ancient but obscure Aten, or sun disc (pretentious prick).  Aten was already an important figure in Akhen’s life as his father was associated with it both before and after his death. 

He was described as engaging in theophany, the visible manifestation of god, in this case which Akhen spoke directly to Aten and received direction from it. Akhen would devote his reign to making Aten the most worshipped, and even solely worshipped, god of Egypt. He was the first monotheist, since monotheism’s main tenet is that you must worship one god while denouncing the power of others. 

Obviously, it wasn’t unusual for a pharaoh to favor one god or another, but exclusive worship was unprecedented, and the denial of the existence of other gods was unfathomable. After changing his name from Amenhotep IV, he abandoned his traditional seat of power in Thebes and moved the imperial capital to an uninhabited and barely developed region of Egypt revealed to him by Aten, where he then begun a massive Aten temple-building project, and although he neglected the upkeep of other god’s temples, he wasn’t actively persecuting those who worshipped other gods. Not yet.

In his 5th year of reign is when he went into full-scale religious repression. He had a military force disband all other non-Aten temples, from Nubia to Sinai, where they would smash the idols of other gods and erase their names from written record. Ancient Egyptians thought a name reflected the essence of a thing and so erasing a god’s name meant wiping it from existence. 

After his death the people retaliated by doing the same to his god as he had done to theirs. They chiseled the face from all his Aten idols and even hacked his sarcophagus to pieces. Akhen’s son (Tutankhaten, who changed his name to Tutankhamum aka King Tut) labeled monotheism heresy. And that was that. 

200 years later, Iran experienced the world’s second recorded attempt at monotheism, through the worlds first prophet, Zarathustra Spitama (the one who the Greeks know as zoroaster). He was Indo-Iranian (Aryan), a tribe that had branched from the Indo-European tree to settle across the central Asian steppes. 

Aryan society, like Indian society would be, was stratified into 3 distinct classes: Warrior, Farmer, Priest (Magi), who presided over its highly ritualistic system. 

Their pantheon was just the Iranian version of the Vedic deities (Indra, Varuna, Soma, Mithra), except that when they were given origins, they were origins of abstract notions (truth, virtue, justice) instead of natural elements. Zarathustra was of the preistly class (A hereditary position), and the priests often were on retainer to noble families to perform their daily rituals and sacrifices on their behalf. 

His life was one filled with the memorization of the yashts (sacred hymns and texts) which when uttered would please the gods and encourage them to shower their favors upon the people. 

The story goes Z went to a river for water and was struck by a blinding white light, at least that’s what was written in the Gathas, the oldest Zoroastrian scriptures. This was the one god,  “the first and the last.” It was unique because it wasn’t a tribal deity who’d climbed to the top of a pantheon of other gods. There were no others. It existed everywhere. It was “Ahura Mazda,” the wise lord, because it didn’t actually have a name. It could only be known through the 6 divine evocations (wisdom, truth, power, love, unity, immortality). 

This encounter was pivotal in religious history not just as the second recorded attempt at monotheism, but because it augured a new kind of relationship between god and human beings. Mazda spoke to Z, Z wrote shit down. He was the world’s first prophet. For all the good it did, seeing as he only converted his one cousin in his 10 years of preaching. 

People were reluctant to accept all of what they knew of all the gods could be contained in a single entity. Z’s solution was to argue the two most opposing things, good and evil, we’re really just by-products of each other. Good and non-good. He termed the good spirit of god Spenta Mainya, the bad Angra Mainya. The twin children of Mazda that were also Mazda itself. So not only was Z the first prophet, but the first to preserve his monotheism within the supplement of a dualistic cosmology. 

Unlike Atenism, Zoroastrianism was unexpectedly revived in the 6th century BCE by the Achaemenid Empire, the world-conquering dynasty founded by Cyrus the great. But even Cyrus’s Magi couldn’t contend with the mono-nature Z proposed. They took the 6 evocations and made them into 6 beings, who along with Mazda became the “Holy Immortals,” and also took the good and bad Mainya spirits and turned them into deities. Spenta => Ohrmazd, Angra => Ahriman. And so Zoroastrian monotheism became dualism. 

It’s crazy that hundreds of thousands of years of expression of man’s religious impulse:

- Belief in the soul

- Ancestor worship

- Creation of spirits

- Formation of gods and pantheons

- Construction of temples/shrines

- Establishments of myths/rituals

...and monotheism has only been around 3k years. Atenism and Zoroastrianism are proof it eventually came around, but when it did, it was violently rejected. And why? Because it asks people to forsake the belief of all things except the one. It rejects the possibility of subjective truth, which is why they must be brutally enforced in order to overcome people’s natural beliefs and assumptions. 

Akhen attempted to erase the plural form of the word “god.” Z didn’t have the military might to try such a thing. Up until these coups the world accepted being dead was just a continuum of being alive. Warrior in life, fight different battles after death. Farmer in life, plow fields in the underworld. Morality played no part in how one experienced the afterlife. Z flipped this on its head saying one’s ethical actions (judged exclusively by his god alone) would carry consequences in the next life in the form of eternal reward or eternal punishment. 

The main reason monotheism failed to take root in the religious imagination for so long has to do with the ways in which the concept of one god conflicts with our universal compulsion to humanize the divine. 

In Mesopotamia, Egypt, Iran, Greece, our innate desire to project our attributes onto the gods could be distributed among a host of divine beings until there was one for every virtue or vice. the notion that one god could encompass all that didn’t make sense to the ancient mind. The liked having their gods neatly compartmentalized according to those attributes, all the better to beseech them for particular favors/needs. 

The trick was in dehumanizing god. Akhen said, to justify how he was replacing so many gods with one, “you overflow, and of yourself you make millions of forms.” 

Z did this by creating angels and demons, lumping good human attributes in with one and the bad with the other. What ancient minds could content with was henotheism, accepting one god to oversee all the others, because that’s just like how society was set up. We can conceive of any divine in human terms, it compels us to imagine the world of the gods as an exalted reflection of our own. The heavens become a mirror of the earth and its social/political institutions.

- As we organized in small, wandering hunter-gatherer packs, united by blood and kinship, we envisioned the world beyond ours to be a dreamlike version of our own, bursting with hordes of tame animals, shepherded by the lord of beasts for our spirit ancestors to stalk with ease.

- As we settled down in small villages and farmed instead of hunted, the Lord of Beasts surrendered to Mother Earth, and the celestial realm was reimagined as a place ruled by a host of fertility gods who maintained an eternal harvest.

- When those villages grew into city-states, each with its own tribal deity, in perpetual conflict with each other, the heavens made room for pantheons of martial deities, each a divine protector of its respective city back on earth. 

- When those city-states merged into massive empires ruled by all-powerful kings, the gods were re-arranged into hierarchies reflecting the new political order on earth. 

This is call politicomorphism (the divinization of earthly politics), a central feature to every religious system in the world. 

Early on city states weren’t know vested in the king. People settled shit on their own. That’s why all Mesopotamian civilization was perfectly reflected in the renderings of its celestial order. 

It wasn’t until the middle of the third millennium BCE (The Early Dynastic Period) that large despotic powers emerged across Mesopotamia. The legendary king Sargon of Akkad conquered most of the Sumerian city-states in the south to construct Mesopotamia’s first empire. The collapse of this empire set up the rise of the Babylonian empire in the south and the Assyrian empire in the north. 

The tales of babylon, like Enuma Elish in the middle of the second millennium BCE was about a very different celestial order, one dominated by a Babylonian god who in Sumerian times was barely known and utterly unimportant. It was the young god Marduk, who offered to fight off the sea monster Tiamat in exchange for the other gods crowning him king and giving him complete authority of the earth and heavens. and so it was.

And so it was again in the Assyrian empire with Asher instead of Marduk. And so it was in the city of Nippur in the Isin kingdom with the god An. 

each case, every empire, as the politics on the ground changed, the politics in the clouds did too. Theology shifted to conform to reality, and the heavens became an amplified projection of the earth. 

In this way, it makes sense that people could be slowly weened off the tit of polytheism into the clutches of henotheism, and further into monolatry, and then, too late to go back, finally into monotheism. But again, the closer one god got to ascending to the top, to overtaking and even purging from existence the other gods, was that each eventually rose to a tipping point of contradictions and inconsistencies having absorbed the roles of so many. The tipping point is why monotheism hardly grew from henotheism. Its one thing for a high god to assume attributes of others it essentially consumes. It’s another for it to maintain all of them at once. 

And again, we circle back to the solution. A god that no longer looks human needs to be completely divested of its humanity. If a god has no human form, though, how are people supposed to connect and commune with it? 

The very notion of a dehumanized god contradicts the cognitive process whereby the conception of god arose in the first place. I feel like you know where I’m going with this. 

JEWS! 600 years after Z, a small Semitic tribe from the land of Canaan that called itself Israel would forge history’s first successful experiment with monotheism. 

Chapter 7

It’s 600 BCE and King Nebuchadnezzar II is ruling the Babylon empire, whose High God Marduk helps him break the walls of Jerusalem and burn Israel and the jewish temple to the ground.

The few who survived were exiled in an attempt to snuff their people, and their god Yahweh, from existence. It’s no surprise now that a tribe and its god were considered a single entity (tribes cared for their god through worship/sacrifice, and god returned the favor through protection from flood, famine or foreign invasion). It’s why warfare was considered less a battle of armies and more a contest between gods. The Babylonians conquered for Marduk, not Nebuchadnezzar. 

Yahweh did a shit job of keeping the Israelites from harm’s way, and most of the early books of the Bible are framed as a [losing] fight between Yahweh and foreign gods. He was often charged with planning, commanding and executing battles on Israel’s behalf. This was really just almighty territorialism, because when Yahweh helped the isrealites defeat, say, the philistines, it proved Yahweh was more powerful than Dagon. 

When Yahweh got his ass kicked by Babylon, though, it proved Marduk was strongest. When their temple was burned up, it meant an end to their religion, because they were cut off from the rites and rituals that had been central to their religious devotion and thus their identity as a people. They adopted Babylonian names, studied their scriptures, worshipped their gods.

Among the defeated, though, was a small band of religious reformers who didn’t accept the defeat and instead thought of it as part of Yahweh’s plan. Perhaps it was punishment for believing in Marduk at all. It was this moment of spiritual distress when Israel had been laid to waste that a new identity had been forged, and with it a new way of thinking about the divine. 

Yahweh breaks into the god game atop mount Sinai by talking to Moses. Biblically, he was fleeing an Egyptian Pharoah because “the Israelites had become too numerous,” so numerous they were stripped and enslaved so they wouldn’t take over, so fearing were the Egyptians that the pharoah deemed every Israelite child be drowned in the river Nile. 

Moses, son of Levite priests, put him in a papyrus basket at 3 months old and sent him floating down the riverbank, where he was found by the pharaohs daughter and raised as Egyptian royalty. He saw for himself what had become of his people: slavery. He is filled with rage and kills an Egyptian slaver, fleeing thereafter to the land of Midian. There he met a priest, whose daughter, Zipporah, Moses married. He lives on there, one day tending to a flock and apparently is introduced to Yahweh. 

Where is this place they meet? A Medianite place known as the mountain of god

- In Exodus - located in southeastern Sinai. 

- In Deuteronomy - located near Seir, in southern Transjordan. 

Either way, the “medianites” are just a loose federation of non-Semitic desert dwellers residing in northwestern Arabia, far from Sinai and Seir. 

Moses’ father-in-law has two names in as many verses (Reuel, Jethro) and what’s weirder is there is no indication Israelites were ever in ancient Egypt, not to mention the way Egyptians stratified slaves (slaves of war, slaves in debt, slaves duty bound to the state) didn’t fit the Israelites at all (that they were enslaved for their growing power in the area when Egypt was the most military potent power the world had ever known).  

The most confusing part of Moses is the god he claims to have encountered (Yahweh wasn’t known to any god list in the ancient near east). Akhenaten’s father had a reference to him in 1500 BCE, as did Ramses II, referencing the land of midian, that just south of Canaan. Strange, then, that this medianite god immediately tasks Moses with freeing the israelite slaves from Egyptian bondage and return them to Canaan. 

He says (or rather, it is said that he said) “I am Yahweh, god of your fathers, god of Abraham, go of Isaac, god of Jacob.” Bizarre, as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob did not worship a Medianite desert deity called Yahweh. They worshipped a Canaanite god called El. 

Scholars have known for centuries there were two gods the Israelites worshipped in the Bible, different in name, origins, traits. The Pentateuch (1st 5 books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) is a composite work stitched together from various sources over the course of hundreds of years. 

There are two different creation stories:

- Genesis Chapter 1 - a man and woman created together.

- Genesis Chapter 2 - the Adam and Eve story where eve is made from adam’s rib.

There are two different flood stories, though these are woven together to create a contradictory account.

- the flood lasts 40 days, or 150 days.

- the animals are brought aboard the ark in 7 male/female pairs, or one pair of every kind.

- the flood begins 7 days after Noah enters the ark, or right after he boards with his kin.

By meticulously tracing these separate narrative threads, biblical scholars have been able to identify at least 4 differed written sources that make up the early books of the Hebrew bible.

- Yahwist (J) - dates to 10th or 9th century BCE and runs through large parts of Genesis, Exodus and Numbers.

- Elohist (E) - dates to 8th or 7th century BCE and is mostly confined to Genesis and Exodus.

- Priestly (P) - written during and right after Babylonian Exile circa 586 BCE and is primarily a reworking of J and E.

- Deuteronomist (D) - dated from 7th to 5th century BCE and runs from book of Deuteronomy through First and Second Kings.

So, the differences. E written by a northern Israeli priest, refers to Sinai as Horeb, the Canaanites as Amorites, god is revealed in dreams/visions. J portrays god in uncannily anthropomorphic ways: 

- creates a world thru trial and error, forgetting to craft a mate for adam.

- strolls the garden of eden, enjoying the evening breeze.

- loses track of Adam and Eve as they hide in the trees. 

The primary capital P difference between E and J is that they call god by different names. E, and so it is thereafter named, refers to god as El or Elohim (plural of El) which is rendered in most English translations as God, capital G. J calls god Yahweh, translated as the Lord, spelled in ALL CAPS. P interchange the two, which makes sense as it is mainly a rewrite of E and J as an effort to merge these two gods into one. 

While we don’t know much of Yahweh, El is one of the best known and well-documented deities in the ancient near east. Fatherly deity depicted as a bearded king or bull/calf, El was the high god of Canaan and also one of their fertility gods. His primary role was as celestial kings to earthly kings of Canaan. He presided over a council of gods (as the Hebrew bible attests to when using the plural form Elohim):

- Asherah, mother goddess and el’s consort.

- Baal, young storm god, rider of the clouds.

- Anat, warrior god.

- Astarte/Ishtar.

The point was that El was unquestionably the original god of Israel. Israel literally means “El perseveres.” El goes by many surnames in the scriptures, and while it many seem incongruous that the Canaan-dwelling Israelites would’ve adopted a Canaanite god as their own, the influence of Canaanite theology runs so deep in the Bible it’s often hard to tell - ethnically, culturally, religiously - where the canaanites end and the Israelites begin.

Traditionally, Israelites view themselves as strict monotheists, surrounded on all sides by polytheistic canaanites with false gods. It’s too bad this stands up to neither historical or archeological scrutiny. Canaanite is as loose a term as Medianite; it’s a general designation for the various groups inhabiting the highlands, valleys, and coastal regions of the land of Canaan (the southern Levant: modern day Syria, Lebenon, Jordan, and Israel-Palestine).

Many scholars now agree Israelites were of a Canaanite stock, a sect that retreated to the highlands, expressing a distinct identity that nevertheless remained rooted in Canaanite culture and religion. They shared everything, including their god, or rather, gods. Israelites cant be said to be monotheistic. They were monolatrous. They worshipped Baal and Asherah, but P is replete with passages condemning these gods, only proving that these gods were indeed worshipped by the Israelites. 

The first king of Israel, Saul, named two of his sons, Eshbaal and Meribaal, after Baal, and another, Yehonatan (Jonathan) after Yahweh. 

All this is to say Israelites viewed El the same way Canaanites did: a chief deity presiding over a divine assembly of lower deities, just as Enlil did, just as Amun-Re did, just as Marduk, Zeus, or any other high god would. 

It was El whom Abraham made a covenant with in exchange for the promise of fertility. It was El who asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to test his loyalty. El who renewed the covenant with Isaacs son Jacob. El who Jacob passed the covenant onto his own son, Joseph, who the Bible tells us was the first of the Israelites to leave Canaan and settle in Egypt, where generations later his descendants would come into contact with another unknown god altogether, the Medianite deity who called himself Yahweh. 

How Monotheism finally took root in human spirituality is the story of how the god of Abraham, El, and the god of Moses, Yahweh, gradually merged into the sole, singular deity we  now know as God. 

So Moses went back to Egypt with a message for the Israelites. El, of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, was really just Yahweh all along, but the Israelites were unfamiliar with wtf he was talking about. Moses had heard his 10 commandments from Yahweh, but the Israelites had already fashioned themselves around El, even giving him an idol in the form of a golden calf. 

P, hundreds of years later, tries to reconcile these two Israeli realities by saying Yahweh said he was El from the beginning, which really only serves to highlight that they had no idea who Yahweh was. The reason Yahweh was able to break in to the Canaanite pantheon was because these Israeli polytheists were already adept at worshiping multiple gods, and so adding another to the mix wasn’t a huge stretch. 

The Song of Moses in Deuteronomy calls this out, because not only does it affirm other gods under El’s rule for Israeli’s, it establishes Yahweh as one of those gods. Just as we saw in Zealot, time is a great reinventer of events, and even gods. As it was with Jon the baptist slowly being phases out of the testaments, as it was with Pontius Pilate being slowly converted to a sympathist in much the same way, so too does Yahweh dismantle El. 

In this case, in the Song of Moses, Yahweh’s gift to Canaan is the nation of Israel. When the nation of Israel became the Kingdom of Israel around 1500 BCE, the Yahweh/El merger was reinforced, so much so that their names were blended in several instances as Yahweh-Elohim, Lord God. 

Israel’s consolidation into kingdom was in response to increased outside threats. To preserve its independence and viability, it centralized its power and transformed itself from a theocratic tribe ruled by prophets and judges into a monarchy ruled by kings.

As was the case with Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, and many other places, as the nature of the rule of men on earth changed, so, too, did the rule of the gods in heaven to match. The politicomorphism mandated that with Israel’s burgeoning monarchy, a national deity needed to match it. A divine king. It was only natural that Yahweh would fulfill that role. He essentially became the the patron god of Israelite Kings. As the capital of Israel in Judea, Jeruselam became the location where Yahweh’s temple was built in the form of the Ark of the Covenant, the ark of Moses. He usurps El’s position on the biblical council of gods. He consumed the rest of the gods in the pantheon, like baal and the others, just as Marduk, Amum-Re and all the other high gods had done. 

Even at this point, though, Israelites were not commanded to disbelieve other gods. 

There is some evidence for a Yahweh only sect in Jeresalem, but the monarchy itself neither discouraged/encouraged worship of other gods. He was viewed as the god of gods, not the sole god. That was, until, remember, a stronger god, Marduk, came along and wiped the floor with Yahweh’s sorry ass. 

It is as THIS point in Israeli history that we begin to see the first expressions of monotheism in the Bible. Monotheism was a means of rationalizing Israel’s catastrophic and embarrassing defeat at the hands of the Babylonians. The dissonance created by the exile required a dramatic, new religious framework to make sense of the experience. It was easier to maintain a contradictory god rather than all form that had come before, where one god disappears when it is defeated by another country’s. 

This is the birth of Judaism. Not the covenant with Abraham. Not the exodus from Egypt. In the ashes of a razed temple and the refusal of a defeated people to accept the possibility of a defeated god. 

The testament of faith in Judaism, the Hebrew bible/Old testament, came from this single event. So it was that J and E were reworked in P and D to reflect this newly found vision of ONE GOD. A solitary god with no human form who nevertheless made humans in his image. 

It’s an extraordinary development in the history of religions, made even more so by the fact that it would again be crushed and replaced by its successor. Christianity. 

Chapter 8

The dividing line between Christianity and Judaism started with the first line of john. Matt, Mark and Luke are called the Synoptic Gospels because they’re mostly derived from the same source material and more or less tell the same sort of the itinerant Jewish peasant preacher from Nazareth named Yeshua. Performed miracles, preached the kingdom of god, declared himself messiah and savior, executed by romans. Yada yada yada, Yahweh Yahweh Yahweh. 

John relies on its own stories and offers a different timeline of Jesus’s activities, including the days of his death and resurrection. Synoptics start when Jesus’s ministry or birth does, John’s starts at the beginning of time. The main difference, though, is that John is the only to declare that Jesus is god incarnate. 

Whoever this dummy was, it wasn’t john as john was dead about 100 years before this was written. It was some other greek-speaking Roman citizen steeped in this revisionist Hellenistic philosophy. 

John claims the dude who turned the lights on spent 30 years in the backwoods Yankee Doodle lands Galilee as a jewish peasant. He says god entered the womb of a woman and was born of her. He says god suckled at this woman’s titties, ate, slept and shit himself while the universe simply went on without him. John says god was reared, and then then later murdered, by the men he made. Nice, john. 

God-man shit wasn’t new in the ancient near east, mind you. Romans regularly deified their emperors after death (Caesar). Actually, over half the emperors of Rome were deified in death, with altars and temples and everything. 

They were influenced by the Greeks they conquered, because duh, because imperialism. The Greeks teemed with demigods and heroes whose life is often seeing as the prelude to their post-life divinity. Alexander and Philip of Macedon were considered gods in life, and were welcomed among the olympians. 

The Greeks, for there part, picked this up from the Egyptians, whose pharaohs were divine. Living pharaoh were most closely associated with the falcon-headed Horus. 

The Egyptians, were influenced by the Mesopotamians, who conceived of the concept of a divine king with Sargon the great, the Akkadian ruler who briefly United Mesopotamia under his rule from 2340-2284 BC. The god-man is the most successful minimally counterintuitive concept in religious history. 

The only religion in the near east without a firm tradition in doing so was the religion of Jesus himself: Judaism. 

It shouldn’t come as a surprise by now that the humanization of the divine and the divinization of the human are two sides to the same coin. It’s only natural that as gods took on human attributes that they would take on our impulses too: namely the desire for power. 

The more this relationship was attributed to the gods the more their relationship with humanity changed, so the divine was no longer seen as nature deified. Now the divine was king. Now the gods didn’t just do the elements but they also did justice. And since the gods have no mouths to speak with, no eyes to see with, no hands to smite with, because these are human and not divine features, it was left to gods reps to speak for him.

This role of human mediator to the gods has fallen, throughout time, to kings, pharaohs, priests, emperors, prophets, mystics, messiahs. 

We watched this initial shift with the Mesopotamian consolidation into the hands of the autocratic few. The path is easy to see, since once a human is accepted as mediator, its a short step to deify them. It makes a certain kind of sense for the human bridge to the divine to also be at least semi divine. 

What made bajeesus’s deification different was less to do with him than it was with the divinity he was said to embody, since he was considered the sole human manifestation of the sole god in the universe. Wow, lucky you jeebs. 

No surprise that the first few centuries of Christians had a hard time swallowing this universal load. In the polarized debate that emerged as a result of people argued over whether Jesus was a man or a second god, and in an absence of compromise, which would be reached until Constantine sat everyone down in 398 CE, a great many in the early Christian church accepted the view that not only were there two gods in the universe, one named Yahweh and one named Jesus, and the two were enemies. 

The most famous proponent of this ditheism ideas was a scholar from Asia Minor named Marcion. His wealth afforded him the time to think about the world. He couldn’t ever seem to reconcile this thing, where Jesus called Yahweh father. This Yahweh after all was the same god who once had forty-two children mauled to death by bears just for teasing one of their prophets for being bald. What kind of god would be so wretched and make such a wretched world. 

There then must be two gods, the vengeful fuck Yahweh, and the merficul other, the logos, manifested in the form of Jesus the Christ. He wasn’t just trying to explain a flawed and sinful world at odds with a flawless and sinless creator. It was an attempt to absolve Jesus of the acts with which Yahweh is credited in the Hebrew bible. 

These arguments were at the root of Christianity trying to break free from its jewish mother. In 140 Marcion traveled to Rome, donated millions to stay as a revered guest in Rome. He began collecting Jesus’ teachings into two manuscripts (one outlining his theology and lost to history, the other becoming the first attempt at putting together the New Testament). 

Marcion is not as well known because in compiling V1 of T2, he said Jesus was not the god known as Yahweh, but a new god before now unknown to humanity, describing Christ’s very descent as a move to set humanity free from the evil creator god of the Bible. Christians needed to separate themselves from the obsolete Hebrew Scriptures. They needed a new bible. 

Marcion’s petition was not well met, so he went back to preach in Asia Minor. The ditheistic church of Marcion became one of the largest in all of Christianity, thriving in large parts of Syria and turkey until the 5th century CE. 

Even early on, though, Christianity didnt resemble Judaism. It demonized the jews as the killers of Christ, composed its texts in greek rather than Hebrew, and imposed divinity upon Jesus. 

The church argued that if Jesus was the embodiment of the one god, then as polymorphism dictates, there needed to be one mediator. “One God, One Bishop,” said church elder Ignatius of Antioch, and to obey the bishop as if he were god. The first bishop, and thus the first pope, was Clement I, anyone rebelling against him was rebelling against god and should be put to death (a little more Yahweh in him than Christ, eh, eh) 

The church also had to face down the issue that there needed to be an explanation of how a jewish peasant from the low hills of Galilee could also be god. 

By end of 2nd century AD, the church had spread too far to ignore, even so much that it began converting romans, who blamed the political and economic instability on people turning their backs on old gods. 

Emperor Diocletian (284 CE) made it his personal mission to rid the empire of Christianity. Churches were burned (nice!) sacred texts were confiscated (sacred in what way?) and Christians were slaughtered (because thats what good Christians do, one of these days a Christian will slaughter you). It was known as the great Persecution. 

Civil war ensued until Constantine claimed the throne in 312. Constantine apparently had a vision, whoopdie do. It made him see the Chi Rho - a cross made from the first two Greek letters of the name Christ. 

Constantine legalized Christianity, even though he knew so little about it he thought it was a Sun Cult, but he didnt care of the particulars, only that these Christians had only one god “one god, one bishop.” He recognized the political advantage of adopting a monotheistic religion “one god, one emperor.”

He quickly realized these dumbs fucks didnt even have their own fiction straight. The Gnostics and the Church of Alexandria stressed the divinity of Jesus and some even denied his humanity entirely (Docetism).

Ebionites (Jewish Christians who represent the earliest form of Christianity) thought Jesus spoke of the divine but wasn’t divine himself. 

Some sects believed he was born human but became divine (Dynamism). Others claimed he was a man adopted by god as his son (Adoptionism). 

Constantine, a soldier, not a theologian, didnt give a shit or have the patience, which is why he demanded a once and for all answer at the Nicean Creed. He oversaw a council and wanted to hash everything out, so long as what was hashed out was that there was a oneness of god. They based god’s oneness on the ideas of a Christian Theologan named Tertullian of Carthage, who saw god as 3 things. The trinitas, or trinity. 

When all was said and done the one who would shape western Christianity most was Augustine of Hippo, who in his work On the Trinity, said god is one. God is three and god is one, and he encouraged anyone facing a logical dilemma with that definition to accept it as a mystery and move on. Cool. Fucking dipshit. 

Chapter 9

For 300 years the Christian Sassanians and Zoroastrian Byzantines had battled to control the Near East. It was also a clash of the Christian Trinitarianism and the Zoroastrian Dualism, something which drained both empires. 

When it was over, though, King Khosrow handed the jews back Jerusalem. After the peace deal, emissaries were sent to the emperors. One was the prophet Muhammad Rasulullah. 

The emperors laughed at this emissary claiming he came on behalf of allah, the god of all, but eventually his followers would swallow the Sassanian empire and end Zoroastrianism. 

The armies of this new religion, Islam, wanted to root out the dual and tri beliefs of the others from the known world, and replace them again with the god of one, the jewish god. 

Muhammad Ibn Abdullah Ibn Abd Almuttalib was born in Mecca around 600 CE in the Arabian penninsula. 

He was an orphan in a society where orphans were treated like shit. An uncle helped him earn by doing trade runs to Syria and Yemen. He married an older merchant, Khadija, and took over her caravan business.

He always thought there was something wrong with a society riddled with slavery and despair, a society so easily exploited by the powerful and affluent. 

The legend goes... he was meditating in a cave on Mount Hira when a presence commanded him to “Recite.” What followed was 22 years of nearly uninterrupted prophetic revelations from a god he called Allah that would be collected into the Quran (The Recitation). 

Arabs already knew Allah. He was conceived as the Arabian equivalent of the Indo-European deity Dyeus, or its Greek counterpart Zues. He was a sky god who steadily rose through the ranks of the Arab pantheon to become the high god. 

Allah is an Arabic contraction al-ilah, “the god.” He was never represented by an idol, and yet he produced children. Allat, associated with the greek Athena, Manat, associated with the Mesopotamian Ishtar. Al-Uzza, the Arab equivalent of Aphrodite. 

The point was the Arabian pantheon was the same as all the others, and so the introduction of this bodiless entity held little initial appeal for people. The Arabs practiced a highly evolved form of polytheism where they freely absorbed the deities of other religions, even of Judaism and Christianity. 

The jewish Abraham had his own idol in the Kaaba, as did Jesus and Mary. The thing was they all thought all the gods were different manifestations of Allah. 

This is why Muhammad’s revelations didn't arouse that much resistance. What Muhammad did a little differently, though, was to embrace the exclusivist connotations of the monotheistic system. It wasn’t enough for people to believe in Allah, they had to denounce all the other things. It became a direct attack on the established order. What he also did was identify Allah with Yahweh, god of the jews. 

Jews had been in the Arabian peninsula for centuries, since the Babylonian exile, and so when Muhammad said it was really Allah who’d made the covenant with Abraham, and came to Moses, and devisated the world with a flood save Noah, who sent an angel to Mary and birthed Jesus, it was a little provocative. He wasn’t replacing Yahweh with Allah. He was saying they were the same being. 

It’s clear Muhammad had a deep familiarity with Judaism, from the myths to the prophets to jerusalem and it’s dietary and purity laws. It’s not a stretch to see that Islam, like Christianity, formed out of a small Jewish sect that branched off to become its own independent religion. Nowhere is that familiarity more obvious than his acceptance of the jewish understanding of god as one. 

The reassertion of god as one between the dualists and trinitarianists resulted in the creation of a brand-new global religion. Islam was founded on a complex theological idea called tawhid, boiling down to the notion that Allah is all things. It rejects the belief that god created man in his image because god has no image. No surprise then that Muhammad hated idols. His first act conquering Mecca was to destroy them all. 

The problem with all the metaphors within the quran is that all the Islamist laws teach to read the Quran literally, so we see another sacred text fall to infighting due to contradictions as the Quran says literally “allah has a face” with the tawhid which says god has no physical form. If god is all things how that there be such division between creator and creation. Aren’t they one in the same?

A number of Muslim thinkers publicly wrestled with how to reconcile gods unity with gods creative power. These thinkers not only revitalized Islamic theology in the face of orthodox rigidity but they created a wholly new branch of Islamic mysticism called Sufism. 

Sufism surrounds the scholar Rumi, a member of the turbaned class in Konya/Turkey. He is succeeded by Bayazid, an Iranian son of Zoroastrian priests who converted to islam after the Arab invasion of Persia and the fall of the Sassanian empire around 651 CE. He called himself god. 

This new group of mystics propelled by their adherence to a strict monotheism made radical propositions: the only way to make sense of the unity of the creator is to accept the unity of all creation. In other words, if god is one then god is all. They must share the same essence. God must be the sum total of all existence.

This brings us to the end point of the monotheistic experiment. The climax of the fairly recent belief in a single, singular, nonhuman creator, god, defined by postexilic Judaism, renounced by zoroastarian dualists and Christian trinitarianists, and revived in the Sufi interpretation of tawhid. God is not the creator of everything that exists, god is everything that exists.

Conclusion:

We are all god.