Humans are the worshipping animals. We’ve done so since the beginning. Our species—the one with the supreme intellect—has made plenty of perilous attempts to make sense out of this pitilessly whimsical nature of world. It was difficult to explain the world. After many stages, we found what we consider the most plausible—that a supreme or a divine authority intervenes in our earthly affairs and was the cause of everything that cannot be explained with our primitive logic. “Our ancestors understood origins,” once summarized the astronomer Carl Sagan, by extrapolating from their own experience. How else could they have done it? So the Universe was hatched from a cosmic egg, or conceived in the sexual congress of a mother god and a father god, or was a kind of product of the Creator’s workshop—perhaps the latest of many flawed attempts. And the Universe was not much bigger than we see, and not much older than our written or oral records, and nowhere very different from places that we know. We’ve tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we’ve not been very inventive (Sagan, ch. 4).
I believe it is healthy—indeed essential—to try to find the answers to what we do not know and that’s what we’ve been doing since the infancy of our civilization. But even though all of us started from the very same questions, we ended up with different answers. The evidence for that is apparent in today’s culture with many groups and creeds chanting their own explanations about the order of nature and the existence of the divine Creator. In the West, Heaven is placid and fluffy, and Hell is like the inside of a volcano. In many stories, both realms are governed by dominant hierarchies headed by gods or devils. Monotheists talked about the king of kings; polytheists revelled among the diverse pantheon of divinities. In every culture, we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe. But how did we come to this stage? Why are there different worldviews pertaining to God? Did those two worldviews arise independently through the passage of time? My claim is no; one of them stemmed from the other.
According to Sigmund Freud in his book Totem and Taboo, the prehistoric man, desperate for his survival and subsistence, turns towards the “totem” which “is the common ancestor of the clan; at the same time it is their guardian spirit and helper, which sends them oracles and, if dangerous to others, recognizes and spares its own children” (Freud, ch. 1). This is the initial stage of the wishful thinking of our ancestors when times were harsh and unforgiving. Powerless before nature, they invented rituals and tried to humanize nature just so they can be content with the illusion that everything is going to be fine. They projected human qualities in the animals, the rivers, the sky, the trees, and so on. They performed rituals all for the hope of being compensated with the things they lost and to make their wretched conditions more liveable. When there was no rain, they performed rain dance to the sky; when the rivers dried and crops withered, they worshiped the river god; when their gods didn’t hear them, they sacrificed animals, or in some cases, even their children. This is the first in the series of Great Delusions—down-lifting experiences, demonstrations of our apparent intellectual infancy.
Polytheistic worldview emerged from this very stage, the stage of desperation and hope. Theogony and Enuma Elish are the most accurate representations of this culture. The Greeks and the Babylonians promoted the powerful beings in the sky to Gods. They were given names and relatives, and special responsibilities for the cosmic services they were expected to perform. Ouranos and Anu were the gods of heavens, and the sky; Aphrodite and Ishtar were the goddesses of fertility and love; Gaia and Tiamat were goddesses of the Earth; Zeus and Marduk were the kings of the whole pantheon. There was a god or goddess for every human concern; Demeter and Tammuz looked after food and crops, Ares and Nergal helped in wars, Athena and Nabu provided wisdom, and so on. Gods ran Nature. Nothing could happen without their direct intervention. If Gods were happy, there was plenty of food, and humans were happy. But if something displeased the gods—and sometimes it took very little—the consequences were awesome: droughts, storms, wars, earthquakes, volcanoes, epidemics. The gods had to be propitiated, and a vast industry of priests and oracles arose to make the gods less angry. But because the gods were capricious, you could not be sure what they would do. Nature was a mystery. It was hard to understand the world.
Then came the second phase, the phase of monotheism, engulfing everything like the forest wildfire. The Genesis, or the Holy Bible in general, is the most accurate representation of such an idea. There was one God, “the supreme, utmost in goodness, mightiest and all-powerful, most merciful and most just” (Augustine, p. 23). As society progressed with more and more intellectual complexity, the people slowly turned away from the material deities, who would answer them only fifty percent of the time, towards the immaterial, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God, who is responsible for every single thing that goes on in the world. In several famous passages in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon puts this idea into context:
In modern times, a latent and even involuntary skepticism adheres to the most pious dispositions. Their admission of supernatural truths is much less an active consent than a cold and passive acquiescence. Accustomed long since to observe and to respect the invariable order of Nature, our reason, or at least our imagination, is not sufficiently prepared to sustain the visible action of the Deity. But in the first ages of Christianity the situation of mankind was extremely different. The most curious, or the most credulous, among the pagans were often persuaded to enter into a society which asserted an actual claim of miraculous powers. The primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary events. They felt, or they fancied, that on every side they were incessantly assaulted by daemons, comforted by visions, instructed by prophecy, and surprisingly delivered from danger, sickness, and from death itself, by the supplications of the church.
It was their firm persuasion that the air which they breathed was peopled with invisible enemies; with innumerable daemons, who watched every occasion, and assumed every form, to terrify, and above all to tempt, their unguarded virtue. The imagination, and even the senses, were deceived by the illusions of distempered fanaticism; and the hermit, whose midnight prayer was oppressed by involuntary slumber, might easily confound the phantoms of horror or delight which had occupied his sleeping and his waking dreams.
Like polytheism, the idea of having one God, which is monotheism, did not make any difference. The superstition stays the same. The delusion still persists. Yet the idea of having one God, instead of many, made the cultures or the sects more united. The pagan traditions of that time, like the cult of Dionysus and of Orpheus, were just too arbitrary and contributed to the division of the common people. Christianity and Judaism, with their one true God, brought them together.
In this way, the two worldviews aren’t independent to each other; they both start out as the benign explanations for the things that aren’t obvious to the human mind. Yet in this series of great delusions, totemism and polytheism constitute the first ideological installments whereas monotheism constitutes the next permutation. Each of those worldviews have their own faults and merits, and might even be used for evil goals, but the beginning of both of them was the innocent infancy of our species. We needed answers; we found some, but made the rest of it up.
References
Augustine, Saint. Confessions. Penguin Books, 1962. Print.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Second edition. Princeton University Press, 1968.
Coogan, Michael David., Marc Brettler Zvi., Carol Newsom A., and Pheme Perkins. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books: New Revised Standard Version. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. Moses And Monotheism. Translated by Katherine Jones. 1st Edition. Hogarth Press, 1939. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. Translated by James Strachey. Routledge Classics. 2001
Gibbon, Edward. History of Decline and Fall of Roman Empire. Delmarva Publications, 2013.
Hesiod. Theogony and Works and Days. Revised. Oxford University Press, 1999. Print.
Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot. A Ballantine Book. Random House, 1994. Print.