An Essay on Violence, Tradition and Modernity

Rafael Leyre ( Rafael_Leyre@yahoo.com)       Third Edition - February 2007

Ideology

The fuel of violence

Ideology differs from science and philosophy in that it accepts theories only if they condone already defined action. Coercive religions as well as most political ‘-isms’ (capitalism, fascism, stalinism…) must be classified as ideologies. Scientific, philosophical or political speculations which are open to change do not belong to the ideological domain.

Ideologists see questions rather as introductions to their dogma's. They have no questions looking for answers, but answers looking for questions. They can only be understood from their historical genesis, leaving aside their inherent mythologies.

Civilizations need ideologies to organize their subjects. Justification myths are composed to proof righteousness. In most civilizations this proof is given by gods, oracles or pseudo-scientific theories.

Persistence myths, a special kind of justification myths, extend the own civilization with a primeval beginning and leading to the present, definitive climax of humanity. They are composed out of reshuffled fragments from various cultures, ranging from prehistory to the present day.

Tradition

One of the oldest persistence myths id tradition.

A living being dies the moment exchange with its environment stops, but to civilizations change is a threat to its structure and a disease to its institutions. The most important goal, and a matter of survival of any civilization, is to replace the anarchy of the universe with a stable past.

Tradition claims that forebears always acted in a stereotyped way, and that it is dangerous to the cosmic order to stop this ancient way. By a strange coincidence, traditions are always beneficial to clerkdom.

It makes no sense to esteem some customs more than others because they claim to be old. Everyone can perform routines fabricated from old books. Everything we do or believe has a reason in ourselves. If we adhere to (what we claim to be) old customs, this is a choice we make with a reason. ‘Meaningful old customs’ divert us from our individual responsibilities.

In recent centuries we have learnt so much about traditions from all continents, that it has become a deliberate choice to praise just one of them. Calling the own tradition the better one is admitting that we have a choice. A tradition is a wilfull decision disguised as a necessity.

Language evolved together with ideology

In the course of the New Stone Age, violence slowly distilled out of battle and dripped into society. Brutality against foreign villages evaporated and condensed into social obedience in the own cities and hamlets. Fear for raids from strangers could easily be overtaken by fear for the sovereign within.

Writing evolved to justify this violence.

For a long time writing had been just a way to record ship freight. Cargo was represented by a simplified picture, followed by marks to indicate quantity. This type of notation existed already in the Old Stone Age. In Lascaux, Pech Merle and many other prehistoric sites, representations of animals are accompanied by dots to indicate their number. As numbers became more frequently used, the dots evolved to geometrical patterns. The number three for example has been a row of three marks in all times and on all continents, and is still so in Chinese and Roman writing. It became the symbol 3 when those marks were connected with rounded strokes.160

When storehouses expanded, cargo-lists were adopted for bookkeeping, next to list of kings, and then to write down chronicles and myths. Eventually clerks registered the universe from the world beneath the earth to above the sky, as if it was a carefully administered warehouse - the freight lists of the cosmos could leave nothing out.

The basis of the prehistoric world-image remained unaltered: humans, animals, demons, forefather spirits and mother idols stood out against the cosmic turmoil. But once myths were written down, forefather ghosts and mother idols were fixed in impressive pyramids of power. Only writing allowed to impose boundaries on thoughts and territories, to devise ranks from slave to warrior god, and to claim the deepest past and the utmost future as attributes of a sacred truth. By the grace of those myths, leaders command their followers in the eternal battle between good and evil, between sacred tradition and cosmic disaster, and cry relentlessly for sacrifices on the field of honour.

For a long time books, motionless objects producing vivid words, remained sacred in some way, and writers were sacred with them. Saint Augustine used his bible for divination by opening it at random and reading the first sentence as a message from his god. Almost a millenary later Petrarca, standing on the top of the Mont Ventoux in the French Provence, did exactly the same with Saint Augustine's Confessiones.

As long as encounters with other world-images remained rare, ancient texts were divine revelations petrified at the heart of their civilization. They were sacred, god-given, and therefore more complete than reality. But as populations grew and clashed, borders fell like robes unveiling the shame of clerks amidst a manifold of cultures, and their oracles turned into fancy poetry.

Today we know some hundred different creation stories. In the Bible book Genesis already two creation stories have been clumsily mingled.161 Of course there is a logical possibility that one out of those many contradicting stories is true, and all the others are false. But in order to single out the one true story, it must stand out from all the others; it also should not hold internal contradictions; and it should not be in conflict with observed reality. Clerks constantly produce more literature to claim evidence for their particular views, but they arrive only at more clumsiness flanked by abusive language, anathemas and fatwas.

Cosmologies, king lists and myths

There is an important difference between myths of foragers, labourers, kingdoms or civilizations. In primeval society tales and legends are the carriers of values and rules. In more complex organizations, myths acquire a propaganda task and are taken over by ideology.

Animals are predominant in tales of foraging bands. Those animals can make humans and their environments, mate with humans, exchange support and protection etc.….

Myths about mother goddesses remind of periods of hunger, when birth giving became the task of one singled out woman, sufficiently fed by offerings.

Deceased forefathers, begged for assistance, evolved to male gods when forced labour engendered agriculture, bereavement and war.

Rising kingdoms recycled myths of submitted tribes and reshape them into empowering, polytheistic persistence myths. This integration of legends was often an instrument for political integration. The new mythology presents itself as a revival or renaissance of ancient imageries in order to emulate endurance.

The (ordered) cosmos and the own civilization begin at the same moment, together they constitute the universe with the powerful metropolis at its centre. Palaces and temples are built on the scale of landscapes, competing with sacred mountains and related to heavenly bodies.

Yet no civilization flourishes longer than a few generations. While agriculture destroys the land beyond repair, and wealth and power shrinks, the inevitable strokes of environmental fluctuations are felt ever harder. Then it is only a matter of time before the closing catastrophe arrives. Civilizations naturally end in chaos caused by exhaustion, materialized in all kinds of catastrophes: floods, thunderstorms, drought and so on. If eventually a new, more vigorous city takes power, new clerks must urgently provide new myths: old gods are either demonized or recuperated, ancient monuments are recycled as testimonies of a made up past, and recent calamities are rewritten as the primeval chaos out of which civilization arose.

Each time a new civilization reworks old mythologies. Forefather gods and mother goddesses reappear in different relations. A complex genealogy is devised to reflect the actual balance of regional powers. Legendary rulers, forefathers, heroes and city gods are represented in one unified genealogy. The more the world order changes – and it changes constantly -, the more continuity needs to be confirmed. Sometimes similar gods are merged into one, either listening to different local names (the many names of Astarte), or by joining their names ( ‘Amen-Ra’; ’Apollo-Mithra’). Gods are degraded to incarnations of their successor (the avatars of Vishnu; Zeus, Dionysus, Yahweh… as manifestation of Sarapis). The cosmic relation is exemplified by connecting gods with natural phenomena like sky, earth, rain, thunder and so on.

Throughout the ancient civilizations gods had their right place in society, just like animals, slaves, labourers, masters and kings. Many times the difference between gods and kings was fuzzy. This was especially the case for the Egyptians, but for the vast majority of common people in any civilization, kings and gods had more binding than dividing aspects. Amazing stories were told about both; both lived in a distant world, unreachable, even unimaginable by the commoner; both had powers that incited at once fear, amazement and hope.

Myths wherein the earth emerges out of water are typical for river civilizations, rising and falling by the dictates of catastrophic floods. Mud is the fundament of intensive farming, and in many early farming communities, myths recount how the earth was made out of mud from the bottom of the primeval waters the first element. In a legend of the North American Pima, Great Eagle sent a flood to end the world, after which Great Eagle was killed by Mud and Rock. After terrible floods the Chinese prince Yu left home to fight the water-monster Gong-Gong. He did not return to the palace before his task was completed, thirteen years later. Completely worn out, he died in 2197 BCE. In Mesopotamia, plagues, drought and floods were feared as deeds of gods who wanted to destroy humanity. One of those gods, Enlil, tipped Athrahis of the next flood. The latter stowed a boat with a variety of creatures to be saved. Equal myths are found in the bible and Greek and Indian mythology. The first has Noah, the second Deucalion and the third Manu for helmsman. Yahweh wanted to destroy all humans except his own followers, while Deucalion, Manu and Athrahis escaped because they were tipped in time. In Hinduism, the world is flooded fourteen times, every 4,320 million years. Manu is the seventh survivor.

Absolute world power requires the most unforgiving divine structure – monotheism. When the tribes of Israel submitted Canaan, Muslims submitted Persia or Christians submitted America, each of them felt to be one people with one religion and one god, glued together in one seamless monolithic nation. Their justifications were based on the assumption that their god was universal and thus wanted all people to be brought under his power. Submitted populations had to be made inferior, discriminated and ill-treated citizens. Chosen peoples do not boast about equal rights and modernity, but about spreading ‘civilization’.

Vedic India

Indra was the most important god in Vedic India. His title ‘king of the thirty three gods’ suggests a past of competing tribal forebear cults. Much like Hercules, Indra became popular by means of legends about his heroic and debauched adventures. When post-Vedic Brahman priests challenged his position, they attacked Indra with slander and terrible curses. In one story, Indra sent three beautiful nymphs to seduce a brahman priest. It goes without saying that the attempt failed, and the desperate Indra ends up murdering the priest. Afterwards birds shrieked ‘Indra killed a brahman! Indra killed a brahman!’. In another story a brahman curse made Indra's testicles drop on the ground, but later a sheep was slaughtered for replacement parts. Still another curse covered his body with a thousand female sex organs, xhixh is considerately concealed in his title of ‘god with a thousand eyes’.

Until the second century BCE, the Brahman movement sufficed in attacking debauched acts and propagating their view on moral conduct among gods and men, much as happened elsewhere around the same time. Vishnu became the successor of Indra, and showed his power by confiscating rivalling gods as his incarnations, ‘avatars’. Among those avatars are residues of prehistoric animism (Fish, Tortoise, Boar and the combination of a man and a lion, Narasimha), Krishna (literally ‘black-skin’, a black shepherd bringing to mind Dravidic culture) and another competitor, Buddha.

Egypt

Egyptian priests told Herodotus the names of three hundred and thirty monarchs, an intimidating succession list starting with seven gods.162 But at the time of Herodotus Egypt was in fact subjugated by the Persians, as before by Ethiopians, Libyans, Hyksos. Many rivalling dynasties originated from the Nile delta to almost two thousand kilometres deep into Africa.163 The myth of a continuing tradition was kept alive, and remained so, even when the Persians had to give in to a Macedonian Pharaoh. Until then, tens of cities had competed for power, some with success and some in vain, but none had erected a civilization that lasted more than four centuries. Worship of the hawk Horus had shifted to Seth and back, then to Ptah and Atum. Ra won prestige during the civilization of the great pyramids at Memphis, where Pharaohs for the first time named themselves Sons of the sun. But when after a few centuries this civilization reached its age of decay, the cult of Ra faded together with the centralist power of the Memphite Pharaohs, and power shifted to Osiris. In the twenty-second century BCE the city of Thebes assumed power, and its clerks revised mythology to promote their own forefather god, Amon. The Theban priests identified Amon with Ra, the ancient god of Memphis, and made him ‘Amon-Ra, king of the gods’. Astarte became worshipped as a consort of Ptah, another time as a consort of Osiris. Aton-Ra rose to power and then was replaced by Amon-Ra again. In the eight century BCE, the Sudanese Pharaoh Shabaka moved his metropolis to ancient Memphis. During an inspection of the temple of Ptah his clerks found that the last holy scroll of the Ancient Kingdom was being eaten by worms, and copied it on a stone of black granite. Scholars have long believed this story, but recent studies place the origin of the text a thousand years later.164

Even when the name of a god, a sanctuary or a city remained or was revived, it represented always different concepts to always new people.

During many centuries, the only constant in Egyptian history was the capacity of each new generation of clerks to adapt old myths and monuments to ever changing circumstances, always proving the superiority of their own god and the antiquity of the prevailing order.165 Old stones and images were recuperated to connect the very new to the beginning of time. Egyptian monumental craftsmen were submitted to strict rules defining human dimensions, proportions, position of arms and legs and so on. The reason was not that craftsmen needed this help to obtain a good result – long before, artists had made expressive, captivating works without such rules -, but to decorate temple walls in such manner that the false impression is created a tourist still captures today: that nothing has changed over thousands of years.

Sumer and Babylon

A Sumerian King List of 2115 BCE holds that five kings ruled five different cities, each for 18,600 years, before the flood swept over the land. After the flood the kingdom of Kish was rules by a succession of twelve gods and shepherds, ruling for eight thousand years in total: two of them exceed the Methuselah of the bible. Then the power passed to Eanna, the kingdom of the sun.

Uruk, the first city traceable by archeology, boomed at the beginning of the third millenary BCE. Uruk was a temple centre, a city of feast where Ishtar was worshipped. In this city the prehistoric mother goddess fell in love with Tammuz, a descendant of the ancestor gods from the underworld. Traditionally, farmers had urged the forefather god Tammuz to yield abundant crops each year, with prayers and offerings, but no offer was as powerful as a voluptuous goddess, descending in the dark and arousing life to bloom. Tammuz became the lover of Ishtar, and made his vegetation rise. Ezekiel, in the bible, found women lamenting for Tammuz in the temple of Jerusalem166, where Ashtoreth - the biblical name for Ishtar - was worshipped. This ceremonial weeping was the ritual foreplay to the union of Ashtoreth and Tammuz. A hymn celebrating this reunion has made it to the Bible as the Song of Solomon. Inspired by this myth Ezekiel foretold the resurrection of the faithful, and Jews, Christians and Muslims made this prophecy the essence of their creed. Jews still observe an annual three weeks fast of Tammuz, although the original motivation has been forgotten.

In the early second millenary BCE, calamity, warfare and famine destroyed Sumer. The old Babylonian kingdom gained power, and as a matter of course wanted to submit all conquered gods to the god of Babylon, Marduk. In the Enuma Elish, a Babylonian poem composed by the clerks of Marduk for this reason, all gods meet to discuss the catastrophe, candidly depicted as the monster Tiamat:

She hath set up vipers, and dragons, and the monster Lahamu, and hurricanes and raging hounds, and scorpion-men, and mighty tempests, and fish-men and rams...

Then the new, ambitious Marduk addresses the meeting and proposes to slay the monster:

If I, your avenger, conquer Tiamat and give you life, appoint an assembly, make my fate pre-eminent and proclaim it.

Marduk slew the monster and formed the world out of its carcass, as humans rebuild their world with the debris after a catastrophe. After a banquet, in which they deliberately got drunk for the sake of enlightenment, the gods admitted:

Irresistible shall be thy command, none among the gods shall transgress thy boundary. Abundance, the desire of the shrines of the gods, shall be established in thy sanctuary, even though they lack offerings. O Marduk, thou art our avenger! We give thee sovereignty over the whole world.

Then Marduk created humans to provide for the gods – whom he calls my fathers - with sacrifices.

The priests of Marduk had turned the ecological crisis in which Sumer was trapped into a primeval chaos, which was incorporated in a new persistence myth hailing victorious Babylon. The ancient gods – that is, their bureaucracies - had wisely submitted to his crisis management, and Marduk was given the name ‘the god with fifty names’, like Indra had been called ‘king of thirty gods’, testifying successive takeovers and seizures. Each year, the gods of the submitted cities were carried in procession to the metropolis, and kneeled before Marduk’s temple.

Burners of books

Writing books and burning books are two aspects of the same creative process. Only by carefully searching the ashes we can prevent that the impact of book burners on history surpasses the influence exerted by writers.

To write down an exhaustive list of book burnings is infeasible, because the most efficiently burned are the books we will never know. The following are a few notorious episodes.

In Ancient Athens the works of philosophers were thrown in the flames, whenever encounters with other cultures stirred them to write critical about Greek traditions. The books of Prothagoras and others have been so efficiently destroyed, that they are unknown to us. Despite the fact that he was commissioned to write laws for various Greek colonies, Plato has forever counterfeited a slanderous caricature presenting Prothagoras as a preacher of immorality.

Shih Huang-ti, the founding emperor of China in the third century BCE, responded to criticism from Confucian scholars with a decree that all classical works should be thrown in the flames. Whoever dared to mention one of these works, or possessed a copy of it, was branded and sent to labour on the Great Wall. Hundreds of protesting scholars were buried alive. Part of the ancient literature was saved by the death of the emperor five years later.

Saint Paul initiated the Christian practice of book burning already when the religion was only a few years old. The Christian rhetoric of love requires that the unbelievers offered their books voluntarily:

Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed.167

The library in the Mouseaion of Alexandria was ruined in a civil war in the third century CE. It revived in the temple of Sarapis but was again destroyed by Christian mobs in the fourth century CE, and ultimately burned down by Muslim Jihad three centuries later.

About 290 CE the Roman Emperor Diocletian passed a decree providing for the destruction of Egyptian books on alchemy.

From the fourth century CE on the Christians won power in the Roman Empire, and consequently the complete literature of Gnosticism, Hermetism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and really everything unchristian within their reach was forever annihilated.

In the sixth century CE, the Byzantine emperor Justinian I ordered the destruction of the Jewish Mishna and of all Manichean books. Heavy penalties were decreed against those who hid condemned books and against scholars who did not denounce their infected colleagues. No Manichean treatise survived: we can only guess their philosophical system from the smearing campaigns of their adversaries.

Some hundred years later the third Muslim Caliph, Uthman I, responded to the fast spread of Islam outside the Arab Peninsula by ordering that all copies of the Koran were gathered and burnt, and replaced by one official reading. It is upsetting that this story is always told – and can but be told - without a hint of resistance, conflict or repression. Since censorship of such magnitude never operates peacefully, the only conclusion possible is that the censors were ruthlessly afficient, while again a vast world of speculations and study disappeared forever.

When Gregory I ascended the chair of the Roman bishop in 590 CE and geared up to centralize the Catholic Church, he forbade the teaching of ‘profane letters’ and grammar in general, and had burned down libraries on the Capitoline and Paladine mountains of Rome.168 He was not only the architect of Medieval papacy, but also the architect of Medieval illiteracy.

Around 1000 CE the Vizier al-Mansur, despite his reputation as a supporter of science and poetry, set on fire the fabulous library of the Córdoban caliphate to appease revolting religious fanatics.

Dominican monks regularly confiscated and burned copies of the Jewish Talmud. This happened for the first time at the demand of King Louis IX of France, who later became a crusader and was beatified. His directive was readily repeated by the popes Gregory IX, Innocent IV, Honorius IV, John XXII, Benedict XIII… As a phoenix the Talmud always again arose from the ashes. Ironically, in Poland at the end of the eighteenth century CE, the same legalist Jews who had faced the flames so many times, burned books of the new Jewish Hasidic movement in their turn.

The Dutch publisher Ketel was burned alive in 1542 CE for publishing pamphlets written by Hendrik Niclaes,169 a follower of the prophet David Jorisz, a glass painter. Jorisz was also sentenced to the stake in 1536 CE, but since he was already dead for three years by then, his remains were dug up and burned together with his books. Hendrik Niclaes founded a secret mystical circle, the Family of Love, in Antwerp. This circle influenced the lives of Christopher Plantin, Pieter Bruegel, Abraham Ortelius, John Dee and other thinkers, and thus had an important part in the spread of humanism.170

In 1559 CE Pope Paul IV ruled the publication of the first official index of forbidden books.171 Until today, censors all over the world examine these extensive lists to either allow or forbid publications, and, until the eighteenth century, any printer ignoring the rules was in danger of falling to the same flames as their goods.

In 1562 CE, Friar Diego De Landa, the Franciscan Provincial of Yucatán, set up an auto-da-fé of native South-American books at the town of Mani. The missionaries were convinced that the bizarre signs they were unable to read were the work of the devil, and threw the books in the flames while torturing natives and singing Latin hymns all along. The Mayas were chased and tortured by thousands while they tried to hide as much books as possible in caves and holes. Many died in the process, or committed suicide out of humiliation after they were driven around with cut off hair and high pointed caps painted with flames, devils and the like.172 Yet no sacrifice could prevent that the hidden books, made of sheets of bark, were consumed by humidity in their shelters. De Landa resumed:

We found a large number of these books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there was not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree and which caused them great affliction.173

Unexpectedly three Mayan works were discovered, centuries later, in archives in Dresden, Paris and Madrid. Nobody knows how they arrived there, and they are all what is left of the invaluable culural treasure and testimony. Thanks to Diego De Landa and his fellows, nobody today can decipher them. Ten years after the burning, De Landa was promoted Bishop of Yucatan.

In March 1933 CE, students of Wilhelm Humboldt University in Berlin were ordered by Josef Goebbels to seize ‘alien’ and ‘decadent’ books from their libraries, and threw them by thousands in an enormous bonfire while singing Nazi lieder. This auto-da-fé was the starting signal for a whole series of book burnings, organized by the German Student Association, throughout Germany.

In the twentieth century CE, books were burned in Australia (Robert Close) and the USA (Wilhelm Reich). The most recent book burners are the Reverend John Birmingham of Kansas City, who burned books related to homosexuality, and the Ayatollah Khomeini who organised bonfires of The Satanic Verses written by Salman Rushdie.174

Still in 2006 CE a poster of The Da Vinci Code, a book written by Dan Brown and accusing the Catholic church of crimes, was burned by Orthodox priests in Central Moscow. In one Indian town, Mumbai , Catholics burned an effigy of Brown and in another, Imphal, the book was burned by a group of Baptists. In Ceccano (Italy) two members of the town council burned The Da Vinci Code in public. The Iranian government forbid the book on the request of Iranian Catholic Bishops. But the Internet has made book burnings ineffective: millions of copies of The Da Vinci Code have travelled around the globe at the speed of light, and no border could stop them.175

And finally we should be aware that the flames are still nourished by contemporary scholars who maintain that only surviving books are relevant to history.

Natural religion or natural atheism

First we must ask what made gods conceivable, because without this concept there would be nothing to discuss. Yet, if the question is considered at all – by Feuerbach, Spencer, Tylor, Frazer – it is rather an investigation of the roots of religion than of the imagery of gods. The reason for this lack of interest is either a thoughtful hesitation to upset believers, or a spiritistic overrating of our minds. In the spiritist imagery, human thoughts are unrestrained, because ideas are simply injected (‘inspired’). If we do not make our thoughts ourselves, but receive them from elsewhere, then the limit of what can be thought depends solely on the power of the sender, not on the receiver.

But if thoughts do not come from up high, but are produced one at a time by vulnerable living beings, they have to become possible through an experienced history. Before clay pottery was invented, gods creating men out of clay were inconceivable. The Egyptian sun god had to wait for humans to invent boating before he could sail towards the evening. No all mighty, all knowing god was conceivable before the entire known world was submitted to one immense bureaucracy, and no pure reason was imaginable before an all knowing god had prospered and faltered.

Primeval atheism

Ancient foragers did not imagine gods, but believed that reality and remarkable events were caused by exceptional animals and other magical beings. Their myths recount, often with humour, how visions or dreams by accident poured out in reality. It would be Platonic philosophy if the ideas were less vivid.

A myth of the Australian Aboriginals recounts that iguana twins travelled across the desert, creating with their sweeping tails waterholes, trees, plants, insects, birds, animals and humans. In one version, the iguanas saw a group of women being raped by moon. They killed moon, which remained white ever since. Then the iguana twins became the stars of Gemini, and the women became the Pleiades.

In some variants of this myths, the iguana twins are replaced by dingoes or kangaroos. In prehistory twins were more frequent than today. As an image of reproduction, they had special creation power.

In the absence of twins a creator needs a second, and in animism this second is found within someone's guts. In the Bible book of Genesis Eve is cut out of Adam, and in Plato’s Symposion Aristophanes recounts a similar myth about a man and wife forming one being to be cut in two by Zeus:

the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members…’.

This is about what happens in the older Indian Brihadaranyaka Upanishad:

A man who is lonely feels no delight. He wished for a second. He was so large as man and wife together. He then made this his Self to fall in two, and thence arose husband and wife. Therefore Yagnavalkya said: ‘We two are thus like half a shell. ‘ Therefore the void which was there, is filled by the wife.

Now that a couple has come into being, animistic creation can continue by mating as if the world depends on it. The Upanishad above continues:

She thought, “How can he embrace me, after having produced me from himself? I shall hide myself.” She then became a cow, the other became a bull and embraced her, and hence cows were born. The one became a mare, the other a stallion; the one a male ass, the other a female ass. He embraced her, and hence one-hoofed animals were born. The one became a she-goat, the other a he-goat; the one became an ewe, the other a ram. He embraced her, and hence goats and sheep were born. And thus he created everything that exists in pairs, down to the ants.176

The North-American Algonkin say Hare created all plants and animals, and mated with Muskrat to create the Algonkin. A Tibetan myth asserts that Tibetans are the offspring of a monkey mating a giant rock. The Dalai Lama is a reincarnation of this monkey. The Ngombe of Africa relate that the first daughter of man was craving for sex, and finally escaped to the bush and mated with all sorts of animals, thus bringing a variety of life in existence.

Creation by animals has been recycled in most persistence myths of civilizations. Forefathers and gods turn into animals for a short while, in order to perform an act of creation, as if borrowing the animal’s creation capacity. The Chinese were created when Fu Xi and his sister turned into snakes and mated. Fu Xi became the first Chinese Emperor, and died in 2737 BCE. Dionysus was born when Zeus mated with his daughter Persephone in the shape of a snake. A Vedic myth recounts that, before earth existed, Vishnu (in later times Brahma) saw a lotus flower on the water. He swam down to find its origin and discovered mud, deep below the ocean. Not strong enough himself, he transformed into a boar and heaved the earth above the ocean with his tusks.177

Europe

Until the eighteenth century CE, most Europeans were convinced that primitives knew no gods at all. Their ignorance was even one of the reasons they were primitives. Many travellers confirmed this. The first time Christopher Columbus met American Indians he wrote in his diary:

It appears to me, that the people are ingenious, and would be good servants and I am of opinion that they would very readily become Christians, as they appear to have no religion.

This was still confirmed in the nineteenth century CE by Charles Darwin and others:

there is ample evidence, derived not from hasty travellers, but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed, and still exist, who have no idea of one or more gods, and who have no words in their languages to express such an idea.178

But in 1724 CE a French Jesuit missionary, Joseph F. Lafitau, leader of a Jesuit mission in New France that seized almost a million fertile acres from the Indians and was intensely involved in fur trade, proclaimed that the Indians had simply forgotten their true faith because they were degenerated. The Supreme Being he attributed to them was none other than the Christian god:

I have seen with great pain in many reports written about the barbarian peoples, how they are depicted as folks without religion or god. [..] One of the strongest proofs that we have against [atheists] of the necessity and existence of a religion, is the unanimous consentment of all peoples to recognize a Supreme Being.179

Skepticism against ‘the necessity and existence of religion’ could now be countered with the proof that all humans had some remembrance of divine creation. Unbelieving savages were really defectors, debased 'nature worshippers', in the eyes of the followers of St. Augustine a crime worse than murder. They deserved to be driven from their idols, out of paradise, as God had ordained, and into labour in honour of Christ.180

Lafitau had both critics and supporters. Thomas Jefferson, whose parents had lived in good understanding with Indians and regularly entertained Indian chiefs in their home, wrote in 1812 CE:

[Lafitau] adopts all the falsehoods which favour his theory, and very gravely retails such absurdities as zeal for a theory could alone swallow. He was a man of much classical and scriptural reading, and has rendered his book not unentertaining. He resided five years among the Northern Indians, as a Missionary, but collects his matter much more from the writings of others, than from his own observation.

And the famous nineteenth century anthropologist Edward B. Tylor complained that

The whole class of spirits or demons, known to the Carib by the name of cemi, in Algonkin as manitou, in Huron as oki, Lafitau now spells with capital letters, and converts them each into a supreme being.

The Catholic anthropologist Father Wilhelm Schmidt promoted Lafiteau's doctrine to a serious element of academic science still appreciated today. Schmidt published, from 1912 CE on, twelve volumes to expose scientifically how divine revelation at the time of creation had for effect that degenerated savages on all continents are still vaguely aware of an hoghgott (high, read Christian, god, associated with the sky) and urmonotheism.181

Such forgeries still belong to the contemporary corpus of academic literature, albeit – as many religious constructs – in the form of a serious but undecided alternative. Ironically, descendants of natives trying to revive their ancient culture often are lured to accept and adapt this fiction when they find that all real traces of their past have been wiped out.

Steller, who visited the Siberian Itelmen tribe in 1774 CE, did not doubt that they knew a hoghgott, but at the same time found their mythology so rude and indecent that he qualified them as degraded ‘born blasphemers’.182

The indigenous word for ‘sky’ was frequently translated by missionaries with ‘God’. This happened for example with Kwoth of the Nuer. Afterwards primordial monotheism was easily demonstrated by pointing out that the savages used the same word for both ‘sky’ and ‘god’. The South American Guarani believed thunder was the splashing paddle of a spirit called Tupan sailing the sky, and missionaries swiftly promoted Tupan to hoghgott.

The Mende of Sierra Leone were interrogated by missionaries eager to demonstrate that Ngewowa, their retreated maker, was a hoghgott. The annoyed Mende told them without a blink that Ngewowa was all around talking with deceiving spirits, of which the white ones with beards, who wanted to command everyone, were the worst. Of course the story was meticulously recorded.183

The Dutch doctor Paul Julien travelled across Central Africa throughout the first half of the twentieth century CE, gathering measurements of skulls and noses of isolated bands of natives. When he realized that only racists were interested in his endless lists of numbers, he engaged with undaunted zeal in blood group testing. But all the time he also pursued an other goal: his ‘most valuable African hours’ were when he ‘found’ evidence that the natives knew a hoghgott:

I still remember the self-evident gesture of my friend the Bakah-pygmy Nkom, when, after long and fatiguing interrogations, at last the shyness started to wither and Nkom told me the name of the Supreme Being as it was known to the Bakah. It was as if something of the unlimited greatness of creation shone around those simple brown people…184

But the Pygmies had been in contact with missions before and even knew about hell-fire Many times the answer was made up in an agitated discussion before it was translated into French. Knowing what Julien wanted to hear, and assisted by an interpreter who was experienced in such sessions, they tried to please him while begging for tobacco, the award for cooperation of which Julien took two hundred kilo on each voyage. As a rule of thumb, the 'simple' one is the one left with no tobacco.

Kaang of the Khoisan was also promoted to hoghgott. The following amusing tale features Kaang disguised as a hartebeest carcass, stumbled across by a bunch of young girls. The tale wants to stress to children to leave corpses alone. The sexual behaviour of Kaang is quite unexpected for a hoghgott:

They say to the child: “Carry the hartebeest’s head, that father may put it to roast for you.” The child slung on the hartebeest’s head, she called to her sisters “Taking hold help me up; this hartebeest’s head is not light.” Her sisters taking hold of her help her up. They go away, they return. The hartebeest’s head slips downwards, because [it] wishes to stand on the ground. The child lifts it up, the hartebeest’s head removes the thong from the hartebeest’s eye. The hartebeest’s head was whispering, it whispering said to the child: “O child! the thong is standing in front of my eye. Take away for me the thong; the thong is shutting my eye.” The child looked behind her; the head winked at the child…185

Sir Peter Buck, a physician, son of a Maori mother and one of the world’s leading scholars on Polynesia, was appalled by such forgeries and resentfully noted that ‘the discovery of a supreme God named Lo in New Zealand was a surprise to Maori and Pakeha alike’. He demonstrated that Christian missionaries had indeed introduced the ‘tradition’ themselves, only a few years earlier. 186

The chase for urmonotheism was not limited to primitive societies. In 1839 CE, Jacques Champollion-Figeac blatantly wrote that ‘the Egyptian religion is a pure monotheism, which manifested itself externally by a symbolic polytheism.’187 Within a few years this farce had spread all over the still fresh science of Egyptology, and in 1860 CE Emmanuel de Rougé recapitulated:

The unity of a supreme and self-existent being, his eternity, his almightiness, and external reproduction thereby as God; the attributing of the creation of the world and of all living beings to this supreme God; the immortality of the soul, completed by the dogma of punishments and rewards: such is the sublime and persistent base which, notwithstanding all deviations and all mythological embellishments, must secure for the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians a most honourable place among the religions of antiquity.188

How unfortunate that this smart scientific insight was not known to the burning and murdering monks of Alexandria.

monotheism and atheism

Religion varies from personal and intimate on the one hand, to public and repressive on the other hand. Many old images have grown into our everyday lives, and to many people the feeling to be guarded by a greater power is essential to uphold their personality and even to continue their lives. It is needless and cruel to attack those people. But intimate believers rather need a being with compassion than an almighty, autocratic godhead. They hope for consolation and happiness in order to live with the setbacks of life.

On the other end of the scale are the coercive religions, which use unrelenting violence whenever history provides the occasion. The defenders of those religions are involved in ideology and politics, which becomes apparent in the ridiculous claim of universal truth and in the intimidation of disbelievers. Monotheists vilify all gods (possibly redesignated as Satan or other demons and devils) except one.

The strongest case against the existence of one almighty godhead is that it is subject to discussion. The existence of such a godhead could not possibly be a matter of disagreement among human beings, because the existence of this argument alone already spoils any claim of universal control.

The only possible answer to this standpoint would be that the almighty godhead is purposedly testing his subjects, but since his subjects have failed this test in the most bloody way, they can hardly be admitted as a worthy witness. To claim that God tries us by voluntarily loosening control, is really saying that God himself decided not to be the only power in the universe. Then to belief in one almighty god is a sin of disobedience.

Monotheist clerkdom maintains a godhead which completes and sanctifies their hierarchic civilization, and which claims universal jurisdiction. But a godhead governing the universe would not favour one particular people, population or organization, on one particular planet.

An almighty god can judge nothing besides itself, because nothings can happen besides his decrees – even the free will of sinners is one of those decrees. To the master of the whole universe a person can only offer something stolen from him first. It is clear that nobody believes in such a god, and consequently, monotheist religions does not exist in the real world. The reason for monotheism lies in its instrumental benefit, which is nothing else but the most absolute demand for submission possible. Monotheism is politics. It is not a philosophy, but and ideology.

Monotheism is still today an instrument for human suffering, and it is one of the tragedies of our time that this irrationality is hidden behind rational discourses: while religion is still the most bloody factor of human life, and we are all held hostage by it, we act as if society is managed in a democratic, informed and rational way; as if we dealt with superstition a long time ago.

Arnold Toynbee wrote about the origin of monotheism, the creed that there exists one, and only one god ‘far above and beyond the community’:

In the barren and land-locked highlands of Israel there was immanent a divine inspiration which made this wild and unnoticed country a means of grace to those who settled there, and a crucible for the forging of one of mankind’s greatest spiritual treasures.189

But just as those highlands were neither wild nor unnoticed before the confederation lead by Joshua destroyed its thriving cities and slaughtered those who had toiled the land for ages, monotheism is not invented there, nor by the Israelites, and as a matter of fact it is not even a spiritual treasure. By his applause the Western historian really acclaims his own civilization. The god of the Israelites was an ordinary war god like any other tribal god. Yahweh hears prayers and accepts offers, and sometimes is persuaded to help and sometimes isn’t, and at will punishes or forgives. It is unfortunate that Toynbee never uttered towards the primacy of religions the same doubt as he has uttered towards the primacy of nations.

Until the Cyrus the Great sent allies to Jerusalem to build a temple in honour of the god who ‘hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth’,190 the religion of the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah had been similar to the religions of other nations in the Middle East. Solomon built his temple with a Phoenician architect on the spot where Abraham sacrificed his son. Anath, Baal (Semitic El, Arab Allah), Astarte and Tammuz were worshipped in this temple for centuries, and conflicts between palace and temple popped up regularly, as they did in other kingdoms. Like elsewhere, from the last millennium BCE on, the decay of temple economies engendered criticism towards the traditional offering feasts.

Shamanistic ecstasy and seers played an important role, although the phenomenon was recuperated in differing degrees at different times. Prophet schools, illiterate at first, instructed novice prophets in their own perception of wisdom and revelation. Whenever prophets saw decline or danger – they usually did - they revived the imagery of the ancient war god and blamed the people to ignore their saviour in time of need. However, in Judea and Israel Yahweh remained a tribal war god among other gods, until the concept of a mighty lord of the universe, who promised cosmic victory after nine thousand years, was introduced with Persian Zoroastrianism. The biblical prophet Isaiah, for example, believed in other gods: he bullied them and asserted that his Lord was going to chase them some time later:

And the idols he shall utterly abolish. And they shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves of the earth, for fear of the Lord, and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth.191

In the Books of Ezra the exiles, after their return to Palestine, feared the power of Baal, excerted by his propher Balaam. To be chosen by Yahweh obviously did not offer sufficient protection:

On that day they read in the book of Moses in the audience of the people; and therein was found written, that the Ammonites and the Moabites should not come into the congregation of God for ever, because they met not the children of Israel with bread and with water, but hired Balaam against them, that he should curse them.192

Unfortunately monotheism is not a major step in human progress, nor is it the end of barbarism. It has not increased tolerance towards other people or incited modesty among believers. It has not diminished violence, but created new justifications for manslaughter. If there is only one almighty and jealous dictator above all, then it is necessary to fight to death every disbeliever or heretic. The old biblical theme of fratricide is the most striking trait of monotheism, ever since Cain slew Abel.193 This fratricide is the real torch passed on to Israel, Christianity and Islam.

A divine communication problem

We are not equipped to understand divine revelation. Descartes accepted, without much proof, that God would not be so cruel as to fool us all the time. But if a supreme being wants to communicate with creatures as incompatible with it as we are, creatures from a very different category and with a very different world-image, it really has no other choice.

If the bible is God’s word, God has written about himself: ‘he has fixed the earth firm, immovable’.194 When Galilei observed that the earth moved he must swallow his words in order to escape the burning stake, after which, in 1633 CE, the Inquisition convicted him to life imprisonment. Today biblical scholars agree that the earth moves, but blame the unfortunate mistake on God’s poor vocabulary. The only word for ‘earth’ at his disposal when he dictated the Bible was eh’-rets, which means ‘flat ground’. Yet he dictated this fallacy knowing that honest people would once be prosecuted for doubting this divine fraud. Prophets and priests claim to translate God’s dictates, but unfortunately a go-between is of little help in this matter: if a message is left unaltered, we still would not understand it, and if it was altered, we would not receive the original message - we would be fooled either way.

To believe something we can not imagine is impossible. We could imagine something resembling it, for example a white male, yet non-human, yet endowed with human thoughts and words, yet unfathomable, yet showing feelings like its creatures have, yet unimaginable. Then we could keep this image in mind but stay aware that our dedication is meant for something different, because we can not imagine a perfect, all knowing god:

Were the appearance of Allah conceivable, heaven and earth would fall to ruin.195

.Since no one can imagine what must be believed, someone claiming to believe it is talking air. Believers confront atheists constantly with logical arguments, but note of them came ever to faith by reasoning. One untired crusader for Christianity, Dr. Phil Fernandez, summarizes his arguments as follows:

if the atheist does admit to an immaterial reality, universal truths, the possibility of human knowledge, and the existence of universal moral values, then I think he has given the theist enough rope to hang the atheistic world view.196

But immaterial reality has no relevance regarding religion. One can believe in the immaterial reality of gravity or light and yet not believe in angels. Universal truths are only useful to ideologists. Other people they remind of the burning of skeptics. And finally, coercive religions, including the religion of Dr. Fernandez, have not been known to support the advance of human knowledge or moral values (the end of slavery, executions, illiteracy, superstition...) before those rights became irrevocable.

The question is not if a god exists

In ideologies there is no reasoning to be discovered, but there is a reason to be investigated. The question is not if God exists, because it is too confused an entity to be discussed reasonably. The real issue is why the assertion exists that gods exist.

In order to fight coercive religions not gods must be criticized, but their defenders. To believe in something unknown is to believe in nothing in particular. Such a person is not misguided, but misguides with evident absurdities; such a person does not follow a set of ideas, but an unscrupulous gang or institute stumbled upon by birth or other coincidence, or chosen freely for doubtful reasons like power, fear, vanity, relieve or rancour.

Monotheism can not be regarded a just system because its god can condemn people, or accept offerings and prayers uneven-handed. In archaic communities it is the prerogative of the king to administer justice to his liking, and trying to lure him is good practice. Where modernity rises, a judge does not accept gifts and is not influenced by flattery.

Neither is monotheism a reasonable philosophy, because it can not adequately explain the dynamics of the world without accepting that God is either unreliable or countered by a matching party. And if he is both unreliable and inadequate, why waste time on him? This fundamental criticism is never answered by reason. Whenever reason turns out inadequate, the apologist turns to moral arguments, and accuses the skeptic of big-headed arrogance, a sinner who should better bow before god's superiority.

In a debate about the existence of God Frederic Copleston asked Bertrand Russell:

Perhaps you would tell me if your position is that of agnosticism or of atheism. I mean, would you say that the non-existence of God can be proved?197

This question is tricked. The taking of an agnostic or atheistic position does not depend on the logical demonstration of god. Russell answers that he considers himself agnostic. At first sight this seems a reasonable answer from a skeptic, but it is not. Each time philosophers take the seemingly moderate position of agnosticism, ideologists interpret their caution as a halfway surrender. As a consequence the real question, which is not the existence of God but the programme of his advocates, is overlooked. Elsewhere Russell has unwittingly shone some light on his answer:

There is exactly the same degree of possibility and likelihood of the existence of the Christian God as there is of the existence of the Homeric God. I cannot prove that either the Christian God or the Homeric gods do not exist, but I do not think that their existence is an alternative that is sufficiently probable to be worth serious consideration.198

The burden of proof is not with the disbelievers. Skeptics should not ‘methodically doubt’ the existence of mermaids, the respectability of injustice or the claim of a trapped burglar that he mistook your house for his'. A skeptic is not compelled to doubt any ridiculous proposition that is thrown in the air, and certainly not when such propositions are created and maintained with a wicked agenda. God is not a mysterious virus in the African rain forest - it is the biggest, most permanent thing ever, with no reason to hide at all. He is of the same order as a White Elephant hiding in Central Park. It is better to stay clear on this matter, or someday ‘methodical doubt’ might be rewarded by violent people claiming to be sent by this White Elephant (and proof it logically).

Skepticism, the way of thinking that enabled all scientific blessings of our age, is to believe that something is true or not and at once to realize that all truths can fall for the ravages of time. It is ideology to claim absolute and definitive certainty about anything. And a viewpoint that knows it might not be forever, is more convincing than a viewpoint that claims eternity. All in all, skepticism has no choice but atheism.

The legend of the fat goddess

Cultures that assign different natures to men and women, did not created gods and goddesses under the same historical circumstances. Female gods are much older than male gods, and even stem from the Old Stone Age.

When a woman has enough to eat, a bit of semen is sufficient for her to become pregnant. When food is lacking and semen is abundant, food can become the immediate cause of pregnancy. It is a feasible theory that children are fathered through her mouth, when not semen, but calories are the missing element.199 An African myth speaks of a cow, impregnated by eating magical grass. All three daughters of king Rama gave birth to Vishnu – each a part of him -, after drinking Soma. The semen of the Mesopotamian creator Enki was stolen and planted, and yielded the very first harvest. In Egypt, Atum impregnating himself by ejaculating in his mouth. The white sap of lettuce was the semen of Horus, and it sometimes changed into a flock of finches, flying up from the fields to greet him.

Climatic fluctuations have frequently jeopardized bands of humans as any other species. In worsening climates, as happened at intervals throughout the Ice Age, some bands - fifty people at most - started to revere fat women, and to offer them victuals, regardless of how little was gathered. If food was equally shared, none of the women would get enough edibles to become pregnant, and the band would die out in misery. Now sexual temptation by one voluptuous woman lead to childbirth, unexpected at first, but enough to keep a band of fifty in existence.

For the first time humans were confronted with a god. Offering victuals became magical rituals, and the woman grew so fat that she could barely stand. Her appearance must have been bewildering: she was clearly not of the same sort, of the same nature as the others. In an underfed band she was a miracle of fat; in a frozen landscape she was a radiating source of warmth.

Kept and guarded in a carefully isolated cabin she became a sort of breeding stove, resembling the selected village women in the French Cevennes who used to remain in bed for weeks to breed silkworms. Sometimes Indian village women in Jillelamud and elsewhere are recognised as living goddesses. Suddenly the humble house of such a woman becomes a shrine. Villagers wait in line at her window to catch a glimpse of her face, bring gifts and hope one time to be touched by the blessing Grama Devata. As the rumour spreads, worshippers travel for days to her house, seeking healing, consolation or a bit of luck. Villagers write letters to relatives abroad to tell the discovery of a new goddess, of the miracles she caused to happen, and how everybody is full of hope, how omens have indicated that she will stay on earth forever. Their heart is warmed with emotion; in tears they contemplate the joy that has come in their lives.200

At the fat goddess’ breast not only her children one after the other were pampered: suckling taken from killed game, eggs of birds and cold blooded reptiles, nests of insects loaded with nymphs were offered to her by foragers returning to the camp-site In the moist and warm atmosphere of her cabin was the constant fussiness of crawling beasts and fluttering birds, while every moment of silence was drowned with insect humming. Snails drew slime tracks over the pale curbs of her sweated skin; shivering rodents searched nest warmth in the glowing fissures of her flesh; caterpillars carefully felt her lips, unconscious of the immanent danger. What she did not eat, lived and grew to become food for the other offerings or, occasionally, for the hunters. In some societies her cabin was set on fire by the foretold moon. In this fire the goddess was sacrificed and devoured in her turn. At the pinnacle of fat economics, the mother of the band became the highest gift in her own ritual feast.

When the climate changed for the better again, the fat goddess became a legend. Throughout many succeeding cultures, in Europe, Africa and Asia small figurines representing her silhouette were cut and planted near the fireplace. She was given a bit of each cooked meal to invoke her assistance. Some of those figurines have made it to our museums to testify of the first worship of a god. The oldest pieces – the Venus of Willendorf in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the Venus of Laussel in the Musée d’ Aquitaine at Bordeaux - are surprisingly realistic creations: one can almost spot the cellulite on their thighs. Later the statues no longer represent a real life person, but become schematic symbols of the power to bear and ease.

This primeval goddess evolved to many different goddesses of desire, sex and affluence. Her image has played a role in Eurasian Stone Age cultures, many of which all other traces have been lost. In the oldest farmer villages, images of the female goddesses are still abundant. In the Middle Eastern Çatal Hüyük of the seventh millennium BCE, she was depicted on a wall with legs spread wide open, giving birth. The image reminds of the verses of the Indian Rig Veda where Aditi bears the earth ‘squatted with spreaded thighs.’201 J. Finnegan connects Aditi with the Harappan civilization, where the female goddess is seen in the company of leopards.202 Harappan seals from Mohenje-Daro, made in the third millennium BCE, show her with a tiger, even changing into one.

The most encountered descendant of this goddess is Middle Eastern Astarte (Babylonian Ishtar, Sumerian Inanna). As elsewhere, her temples hosted orgies and prostitution. The Greeks adopted Astarte under the name of Aphrodite (Latin Venus). The Israelites worshipped Astarte as Ashtoreth. In the vast world of Vedic India, the goddess evolved to Maha-Devi (‘great goddess’), but also to Uma, Gauri, Parvati, the beautiful Durga and the frightening Kali, and in Japan to Amaterasu.

To the Nubians she became the goddess we know only by her Egyptian name, Hathor. Hathor is represented as a cow, and during the New Kingdom seven Hathor by a cradle brought good luck to the newborn.203 The biblical Joseph saw those seven cows in a dream.

To the Phrygians the primeval goddess became Cybele, to the Syrians Atargate, to the Egyptians Aset. The Greek and Romans knew Aset as Isis. After she merged with Hathor, Isis was depicted as a black woman, sitting on a throne with a baby child on her lap. In this image she was revered in many Roman military encampments. When the Roman Empire turned to the Christian creed, the Holy Virgin Mary took her place, but the worship of Isis can still be traced by the distribution of her black Nubian skin on statuettes in former Roman camp-sites throughout Europe.

Forefathers and the religions of fear

Social patterns changed wherever forced labour was put in practice. More fortunate basic families evolved to households, organizing and controlling workforce. This workforce consisted of Households were the new molecules of society.

The primeval household is the prehistoric farm, dwelled by the husband, - a word meaning ‘master of the house’ - women, children, slaves and animals. Those households were the forebears of villages, townships, palaces, temples and monasteries. Ancient kingdoms and civilizations were built on households, rather than on territories. Households are organized around the wife’s labour, but is owned by the husband,. A master is not necessarily restricted to one household: the prophet Muhammad for instance slept each day of the week in another household, organized around another wife.

In more humble households live unmarried kith and kin, servants, labourers, children made, found or bought, and the elderly. People stranded in households in various ways. Courting could lead to one leaving or another entering for some span of time. Poor devils, retarded buggers and hobos with no roof of their own, passed by when an extra hand was needed. They gladly accepted a meal for pay, and might stay around for shelter and live on leftovers as stray dogs, waiting for another stroke of luck. In the centre of the house are the fireplace and the pantry, often built in stone or mud, while the rest of the building largely depends on wealth. E. Le Roy Ladurie described a household in medieval South of France, with paltry cottages and shelters for animals and people, leaning onto the central lodge.204 In nineteenth century Salzburg a twenty-two years old girl was found living in a pig shed for years, her deformed legs never to walk again. In the same century, European ‘welfare’ foundations auctioned homeless children, exposed on tables in pubs soaked with tobacco and alcohol.

Prosperous households have patios with colonnades, ponds and refreshing fountains, servants, musicians and poets, and a large atrium where daily life goes on and visitors are received. Such households found all required personnel at the slave market or among dependants. Even house priests are hired or bought: wealthy Hindus today still hire Brahman priests for chef, to make sure dinner is made following religious prescription. Ancient households are linked to their masters in birth, life and death, in guilt and in honour. For that reason Orestes murdered his mother who had dishonoured his father. After the battle of Jericho one of the besiegers named Achan held back some of the spoil from the destroyed city. His household paid for it as a whole:

Joshua, and all Israel with him, took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver, and the garment, and the wedge of gold, and his sons, and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had: and they brought them unto the valley of Achor. [And they] burned them with fire, after they had stoned them with stones.205

Pakistan village women are sentenced to rape for the offence committed by a male family member. For the same reason 'honour killings claim an estimated 5,000 women worldwide every year in overwhelmingly patriarchal cultures. Family honour is a tangible value in these societies, and women are considered family property.'206 For that reason also, Saint Paul admonished the Christians of Corinth:

A man indeed ought not to cover his head, inasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman: but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man. 207

The Sumerians called a household é, followed by the name of the master (é-Ba’u was the temple of the god Ba’u). The Akkadians called it bîtum, the Egyptians Pr (Pr-Wsir was the temple of Osiris; Pr-Ao was ‘the Great Household’, and became the Hebrew ‘pharaoh’), the Hebrews called it Bêth (Bêth-Shemesh was the household of the sun,208 Heliopolis); the Greeks oikos, the Romans domus.

The basic family only survived in hamlets and in dispersed cabins, among slaves, serfs and labourers emerging from hunter-gatherers. It was only to spread again in industrial society, among day-labourers and industrial workers.

Households often have their own gods or guardian spirits, related to forefather worshipping, and call upon them for day-to-day prosperity. In ancient Rome, the master of the household was priest to those gods, the Penates (the name is related to ‘pantry’). In Egypt the dwarf Bes hid in the house and scared bad demons off with rattles and tambourines. In Slavic countries demons (Domovoi, Kaukas, Majahaldas, Majasgars) wandered about in the woods by day but, lured by a piece of bread and salt near the fireplace, entered for the night and hid behind the fire. Many households in India and eastern Asia have little shrines to honour their favourite house god.

In times of recession part of the households shrink or disappear, and slums along the cities’ fissures and margins grow to become ready cannon fodder for the labour market. Sometimes apartment blocks are erected to cleanse those slums: in ancient Roman cities, blocks up to eight floors provided room to sleep, while the streets below were the places to defecate and haggle a meal. After the French revolution, many European households had to lay off members, which caused the subsequent rise of restaurants and caterers. Since technology today allows to supply apartments with a cooking fire and sanitary fittings, even those can act as classical household: Naipaul describes small apartments in crowded Bombay, renting sleeping seats to single persons in search of a roof.209

Hierarchical societies are lead by masters of households, the real citizens, who constitute only a very small portion of the population. It was the master of the household who studied the Upanishads in India (where he was called grihastha), or discussed politics in Greece. In smaller societies those masters gather to make decisions, as happened in ancient Athens and contemporary Punjabi villages; in larger societies only a selected group of masters – often the wealthier - had the right to speak up, as frequently came about in European history. The power of household masters was not at risk before the twentieth century, when the first women secured their right to vote.

Masters in ancient civilizations appear in the artworks of their times as beautiful, athletic people. Papyri however mention midget slaves holding up fat bellies and supporting head, and their corpulence made it fashionable as well as convenient to be carried around in sedan beds by a sufficient number of slaves, and to lie down at banquets. Reading about such banquets, we can only imagine that classical artworks show us the bodies of slaves with the heads of masters – which after all was the real relationship.

As households differentiated, various kinds of relations arose, and women could become master of their own household, though remaining dependent on the household of their husband. Occasionally such women even reached the highest ranks, but it is significant that female Pharaohs had to wear a fake beard in order to assume royal dignity.

Sometimes a master managed to assume wider power, and turn his peers into his vassals. Depending on the magnitude of the territory and the mass of submitted labourers, households could grow to places of perplexing size and luxury, surpassing the human scale in order to display the unlimited power of the ruler. Architects were pressed to build ever-wider arches, up to atriums impossible to live in, and harems grew above the capacity of a mortal man; every human scale was transcended to prove the super human properties of the sovereign, and transcendental religion became conceivable.

The social value of persons, based on the status of their place in a household, is summarized as follows in a Persian Zoroastrian ruling:

A healer shall heal a priest for a holy blessing; he shall heal the master of a house for the value of an ox of low value; [..] he shall heal the wife of the master of a house for the value of a she-ass; [..] he shall heal an ox of high value for the value of an ox of average value; he shall heal an ox of average value for that of an ox of low value; he shall heal an ox of low value for the value of a sheep; he shall heal a sheep for the value of a meal of meat. If several healers offer themselves together, O Spitama Zarathustra! Namely, one who heals with the knife, one who heals with herbs, and one who heals with the holy word, it is this one who will best drive away sickness from the body of the faithful. 210

Ancestor worship

Until only a few centuries ago, worship of deceased household masters was the paramount religious expression on earth. Ancestor worship is found only in labouring communities, and where the transition to labour is relatively recent, it is the oldest or even the only religious expression. Fear among humans is crucial to communities based on forced labour, and the most feared are the intangible, restive spirits of deceased masters. We feed on the harvest they sowed and inhabit the dwellings they built. James Frazer, thinking of primitive farmers, wrote that

The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron. 211

Forefathers are worshipped ever since primitive labour became organized around households. It was the most widespread and persistent religion ever, and enabled all male-god religions.

Ancestor worship often include celebrations on graveyards with food, drinks and music. The celebrated dead belong to the same ordinary world as living humans and demons. Hidden most of the time, they suggest secret power, and are prayed for help while never entirely trusted. Ancestor worship was the natural enemy of every centralizing religion.

The Christian Churches repeatedly condemned celebrations on graves, because ancestor worship was a major competitor. Saint Augustine was horrified when his Berber mother - yet a Catholic - went to the graveyards to celebrate with her forefathers. The Council of Hippo, in 393 CE, ordained that

No one may give the Eucharist to the bodies of the dead; for it is written “Take and eat.” But the bodies of the dead can neither “take” nor “eat.” 212

Not before the ninth century CE, the ‘Day of the Dead’ was instated as a Christian feast to supplant the forefather cults of the European Iron Age. Yet, even later than the European Middle Ages, churchyards remained the scenery of the danse macabre or Totentanz. Ecstatic people danced, ate and drank in the company of the dead. Guy Marchand and Hans Holbain made engravings of the subject. Marchand reproduced the danse macabre, a decoration on the walls of the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris, demolished in the eighteenth century CE.

In early farming tribes, deceased chiefs were venerated as ancestors by the whole community, and sometimes entered the mythical world. As in all cultures, sacrifices and celebrations were organized to obtain their assistance. A graveyard prayer from the Ba-kongo, noted down by the Reverend Van Wing, goes:

I breed some chicken, the ferret takes it; I let a goat graze, the leopard lies in wait for it; and you want honours! How shall we pay this? Do you want us to go stealing? People will talk about you. Make things fruitful for all of us…

Following Hindu hymn is another instance of the bargaining nature of ancient religion. It starts with flattering Indra, but soon turns to business directly:

His power is matchless, matchless is his wisdom; chief, through their work, be some who drink the Soma,
Those, Indra, who increase the lordly power, the firm heroic strength of thee the Giver.

Therefore for thee are these abundant beakers Indra’s drink, stone-pressed juices held in ladles.
Quaff them and satisfy therewith thy longing; then fix thy mind upon bestowing treasure. 213

If reasonable sacrifices and flattering pleas turned out unconvincing, people tried to get assistance the hard way. In India, obstinate rain gods were carried outside the temple and into the downpour, until they made it stop. European farmers threw over worshipped statuettes along the fields, and Japanese farmers flogged their gods, if labour yielded poorly.

In a village community, the forefather needed his offspring as much as the offspring hoped for the support of the forefather. In the Mahabharata the mighty gods sometimes give away their precarious forefather nature:

the Vedas have been afflicted in the world of men by covetousness and error! For this, we have been struck with fear [..] we are about to descend to the level of human beings! In consequence of the cessation of all the rites of pious men, great distress will be our lot…214

Sometimes dreams or hallucinations allow a glance at the dark abode where the dead remain until their shade disappears behind the hundred-years horizon – their second and final death. To the North American Wishram they dwelled in a secret valley, sleeping during the day but dancing and singing at night. Frog, upholding moon for lantern, was their guard. One day Coyote killed Frog and blew out moon, but the dead refused to follow him to the valley of the living. In many myths, there is an island besides earth floating on the primeval ocean. This is the island where the sun rests at night, and invites some fortunate deceased to disembark. However, the most common abode for the shades of the dead to dwell is a gloomy labyrinth under the surface of the earth.

Although difficult to reach, those abodes are as real as other strange and hostile places. The ancient Greeks believed the entrance of Hades was in the little town of Levadhia, where the sources of Lethe and Mnemosyne were pointed out to curious tourists. The Japanese Izanagi and the Greek Orpheus travelled to the underworld through dark and steep passages to rescue their beloved. Neither succeeded, but Orpheus almost made it with his beloved Euridice, who limped along because she had died from a snakebite.

Dante also travelled an exhausting and dangerous path to arrive at the doors of Inferno, but remained an uninvolved witness. The fallen Achilles sent the message to Hercules that he would ‘rather be a paid servant in a poor man’s house and be above ground, than king of kings among the dead’. In the four thousand years old Gilgamesh epos, Enkidu was punished for slaying the Bull of Heaven and thrown in the Akkadian underworld:

The house where the dead dwell in total darkness,

Where they drink dirt and eat stone,

Where they wear feathers like birds,

Where no light ever invades their everlasting darkness,

Where the door and the lock of Hell is coated with thick dust.

When I entered the House of Dust,

On every side the crowns of kings were heaped…

A Zoroastrian text warns that tears slow down the deceased on his path to afterlife:

it is not proper for others that they should utter an outcry, maintain grief, and make lamentation and weeping, because every tear that issues from the eyes becomes one drop of that river before the Chinwad bridge, and then the soul of that dead person remains at that place; it is difficult for it to make a passage there, and it is not able to pass over the Chinwad bridge.215

Corpses of departed Aztec kings were laid to rest in labyrinths beneath the temples. Pallid shades wandered amid their bones: some had sneaked into this underworld to commit a painless kind of suicide; others had managed to hide here from a gruesome death on the altar of the Sun.

But in all underworlds, dwellers silently await the oblivion that lies behind the hundred-years horizon.

Gods

A number of forefathers, often emigration leaders, evolved to mythical founders and – in pace with the growing ambitions of their community - to world creators. In this manner powerful ancestors could evolve to male godheads, the religious doctrine prevailing until our times.

Rising kingdoms endowed their forefathers with growing power, while the worship of conquered populations was either destroyed, encapsulated it in the own mythology or driven back to the confinement of the houses. Ancestors of the powerful were revered more than others, and the remembrance of some traversed the hundred-years horizon to become the first male gods. The more society grew centralized, the more the deity was approached with awe. Eventually religions became essentially based on fear.

Forefathers of Chinese sovereigns, such as the Yellow and the Jade Emperor, turned into gods. Japanese emperors were descendants of the gods, until Hirohito renounced this claim in the aftermath of the Second World War. In Japanese Shinto religion, village deities are referred to as clan-ancestor (Uji-gami). In the Melanesian Bismarck Archipelago, the skull of the last deceased master of the household is placed above the door for protection. When the next master dies, the old skull is discarded and replaced by the more recent one.

The Polynesian gods are mythical forebears, like many gods elsewhere. In ancient Rome, the Lares, gods of the fields, were originally worshipped ancestors. In Harappan and Vedic culture, forefather heroes killed in battle became worshipped gods. In Hinduism the forebears, called Pitri, joined the gods to share immortality and offerings. The king of those forefathers is Yama, child of the union of a sun ray and the shadow of a beautiful woman, the first mortal on earth, Pitra-raja. Hindus, Romans, Christians and many others call their main gods ‘father’.

When a powerful and wealthy master died his possessions suddenly remained unprotected. To grab those assets (powers, tools, land, slaves, wives, children) was tempting but dangerous, because the deceased was still around in dreams and remembrance. To bury his possessions together with him probably reconciled the deceased, but also transferred power to his clerks, the guardians of the grave.

Funeral gifts could vary from a minimal symbolic gesture to the most rich and horrid sacrifices, in pace with the growing social inequity. In megalithic graves traces have been found of food, offered to the departed – an inexpensive gesture altogether – while in Egypt each new pharaoh was urged by his clerks to start, as soon as he accessed to the throne, with the building of a gigantic funeral temple, packed with riches to spend during afterlife. Long after the pharaoh had died, such palaces and temples would remain a political centre, a safe haven and something for a rainy day for those clerks.216

Temples

Gods are very powerful but lazy by nature, and need to be flattered constantly. Their tasks are therefore taken up by humble clerks. Next to the usual business, like administrating properties and directing labour and commerce, a temple economy includes offerings to be accepted from the desperate poor as well as from victorious kings. Gifts are stored and redistributed. A symbolic part of the offering goes to the godhead, a predefined part goes to the priests and the bulk goes to the people during ritual festivals. Those feasts were linked to seasonal, natural and mythical events, and became the most effective propaganda for the clerkdom. To the labouring multitudes, they offered a too simple choice between praying and starving.

Accidental conditions and urgent pleas bestowed some forefather gods with a reputation in war (Krishna, Ares), other in abundance of crops (Dumuzi, Tammuz, Adonis), and still others started a career as an adventurous hero (Indra, Hercules). Whenever early civilizations spanned various cities, male and female gods entered in a mixture of associations, and political powers decided their status and character. Ares, Dionysus and Hermes all fell for the attractive Aphrodite; The dying Tammuz was aroused to life by Ishtar, and when Isis tried to resuscitate the murdered Osiris, she only managed to revive his penis, and became pregnant with Horus.

The invention of afterlife

Clerks are the counterparts of soldiers. Since no army can do without an ideological backup, clerks and soldiers cooperate in violent confrontations with the outer world.

Anticipation of unlimited loot and orgies was a major motivation for warriors, and fantastic stories about legendary victories and the ensuing bacchanals brought about myths of a great ordeal ending in the final victory. After this victory, no warrior would ever be short of gold, food, drinks or sex. Tempted by this prospect, famous warriors from the past would rise up from the dead and take part in the action.

This dream was for masters only. Of course, wives, children, servants and the whole retinue hoped to share in the benefits, as they had always been subject to the vicissitudes of the household they belonged to. But knowing too well that their chances depended on the prosperity and kindness of their master, they would patiently wait, and be grateful for whatever favour came about.

Before the seventh dynasty of Egypt few people doubted the most obvious: that it was sad to die and that everybody in due time vanishes. Life and death were accepted as a barter done. The deceased was a shadow under the surface of the earth, vanishing in time after the hundred-years horizon, with nothing to do in the mean time but haunting dreams in envy. In many primitive cultures, the decomposed body is buried a second time to proclaim the end of this phase.

The gatekeepers of the underworld protected the living from the dead, not the other way around. No matter how much the deceased was missed at first, after a short time his return would mean a catastrophic disruption of a society which had filled the gaps and redistributed the possessions he left behind. In the Sumerian myth of Ishtars descent, the goddess, at the door of the underworld, utters a very clear threat:

“I will smash the door, I will shatter the bolt, I will smash the doorpost, I will move the doors, I will raise up the dead eating the living, so that the dead will outnumber the living.”

Lifetime was the same below as above the soil, because people in the underworld remained only as long as their nearest remembered them. The hostile nation of the dead did not outnumber the living – yet. The fear for vengeance is nonetheless reasonable and widespread. In one Psalm is written that God ‘has set a bound that they may not pass over; that they turn not again to cover the earth’.217 Origenes and Evagrius both taught that the psalmist referred to subterranean demons. They were denounced at the Council of Constantinople of 553 CE, and today scholars prefer to interpret the text as a reference to the primeval ocean or chaos.

Pleasing gifts could make the time below the earth less tiresome, even appease anger, or express wilting but still tender love. The custom started out with everyday necessities, but gifts grew as masters became ever more enriched and honoured. In time they were completed with weaponry. In the Iron Age swords were often left near the body of the deceased, but were broken first to make sure that they should not be raised against their offspring. As kings became more powerful, the offers became more abhorrent. Ibn Fadlan, a traveler of the eighth century CE, noted how during the funeral of a German chief near the Volga River, a slave girl was drugged, raped by the company, then stabbed to dead and thrown in the burial ship. Mesopotamian graves testify of killings and burials of entire households. In Egyptian graves on the other hand all kinds of servants and labourers were present as statuettes called ushabti.

Repugnant paradise

Brave warriors were the first to be compensated with a cheerful afterlife, the cheapest incentive for heroes. No reasonable person would go to war just to crawl in mud with acute diarrhoea; be mutilated in different degrees, at stupid random; after much deprivation conquer a crutch or two; and finally be dumped together with all his chances, dreams and expectations. If war had to become more than a quarrel between a handful of enraged men, a completely new imagery was to be created. Stories were made up about exceptional brave soldiers, and kings with superhuman allure, getting away with every brutality. Fallen heroes were promised a separate, delightful hereafter, a brothel with unlimited free drinks and women.

Celtic warriors threw their severely wounded comrades in a lake, and after some ritual sayings, the gods supposedly admitted them fully recovered to the endless orgy in Tir Na Nog. Fallen Germanic heroes entered Valhalla, where golden-haired Valkyries sang, danced, poured sweet wine and provided sexual pleasure, and Welsh warriors fallen in battle entered Anwnn with equal expectations. In Anwnn the Cauldron of Plenty, the mug of pleasure, would be stolen by king Arthur and become the Holy Grail. The Indic Vedas promised the virtuous a heaven in the company of swan maidens (Apsaras), and even Zoroastrianism promised to the righteous an encounter with religion in the form of a beautiful woman. The Koran says that there

will wait on them youths who will not age, carrying goblets and ewers and cups filled out of a flowing spring - no headache will they get there from. In this paradise they will get as companion fair maidens with wide, lovely eyes, like pearls well preserved, as a reward for what they did.218

In the Meccan sutra 78.33 those maidens are ‘round bosomed’, but in various English translations – for example those by Malik Ghulam Farid and Abduallah Yusuf Ali - the direct sexual hint is omitted.

Towards the end of the second millennium BCE, the old world civilizations collapsed under the pressure of invigorating migrations. Epic works as the Mahabharata and the Iliad testify of those catastrophes, which involved Chinese An-Yang, Vedic India, Mycene, Assyria and the Hittites. When uprooted populations went further south, even Egyptian Thebes fell.219

As the great temple economies could no longer organize feasts to hand out offerings as they had done for centuries, the common people had to survive on the minimal diet of daily bread. At this time clerks invented a new concept of offering: suffering itself was the real sacrifice now. After the way of soldiers, the real feast was postponed to the hereafter – and disbelievers would get nothing. In the new ideology, to get anything, one must desire nothing.

Now that the gods could no longer be persuaded with meat or other sacrifices, clerks declared that they had started to dislike worldly things. Clearly one of the worldly things the gods came to dislike most was humanity as such.

The Bhagavad Gita illustrates this where Arjuna, tired of the endless killing on the battlefield, is encouraged by Krishna:

Who, unto friend and foe keeping an equal heart, with equal mind bears shame and glory; with an equal peace takes heat and cold, pleasure and pain; abides quit of desires, hears praise or calumny in passionless restraint, unmoved by each; linked by no ties to earth, steadfast in me, that man I love!220

Clement of Alexandria wrote that ‘what is superfluous, Scripture declares to be of the devil’ .221 And not so long ago Thomas a Kempis gave this upsetting message:

When you shall have come to the point where suffering is sweet and acceptable for the sake of Christ, then consider yourself fortunate, for you have found paradise on earth.222

Life on earth started to look like the perils of the battlefield, and like soldiers before, people were promised participation in the affluent life hereafter, as a reward for deprivation and faith. While life on earth got worse each generation, the sombre after-life improved, and a paradisical afterlife became the hope of the many that suffered daily life.

Only a violent society can make deprivation an ideal, and affluence a sin.

Prophets of misery appear as true idealists preaching sobriety as the only way to help the poor of which they sell postcards and posters. But while they claim to be moved emotionally by so much poverty, it would be their loss if there came ever and end to it, and they refrain from a serious investigation into the causes. They don’t see poverty and misery as aberrations to be countered, but as inevitable reality. They brand thinking otherwise as utopianism and as a cause of suffering in itself. At the same time welfare and aid have grown into institutes with rewarding careers, and an excuse for bureaucracies eager to control distribution of natural resources.

Nobody anywhere should give up the claim of an enjoyable life, material and otherwise – it is irresponsible towards yourself, your kin and humanity. And it is the most absurd thing to do. Ideologies should never succeed in submitting the whole human population to morally approved poverty. It is fair that every human being desires comfort and health, and the most important obstruction to this goal is a population driven by aggressive ideologies beyond the availability of resources to provide such comfort and health.