The Many Quaint Masks of God
And how nature outshines the symbols of our tribal identities
In our long prehistory, God was the enchanted take on nature you had when you looked at the world as a child would, guided in the shamanic and mystical cases by psychoactive plants and by meditative and ascetic practices. God was the creative depth of the unconscious that overflowed with those childlike personifications. God was the invisible friend we shared that was as close to us as our unconscious, often repressed mind.
Then God was the mascot of deified kings and emperors, a brand of cultural identity spread out across a cast of characters which dramatized the myths that sanctioned our imperial projects. The gods were the protagonists of the epic that illustrated how life should be led in a large sedentary society.
Those myths gained in literary complexity until the gods became more human than human. God became their synthesis, the sole ultra-heroic character, both saintly and monstrous, peaceful and bellicose, loving and just, merciful and vengeful, graceful and catastrophic, transcendent and immanent, personal and impersonal, the creator and the destroyer, the beginning and the end.
Then God became a philosophical abstraction, the first cause, the absolute ground of being, or the quintessential element that…
