1.4 Creation Myths as Mirrors

The ancestral conception of the world in which everything that belongs to nature is eternally recycled implied that nature had no beginning, while its end was inconceivable. This cyclical and all-encompassing vision of the universe did not allow anything to exist outside the…

2.4 The Polytheistic Culture

Territorial expansion and the edification of new empires required a constant adaptation of the political…

2.1 Of Temporal and Spiritual Powers

In Mesopotamia, every city is associated with a god or a goddess. The king is its only…

Bibliography

ACKERMAN Diane (1994): A Natural History of Love. New York, Random House

AESCHYLUS (1920): The Oresteia… with an English verse translation by R. C. Trevelyan. Cambridge, Bowes & Bowes

1.6 Masculine Fertility Divinities

However, with time, the representation of fertility in the polytheistic universe changes: man appears more and more frequently as its instigator, gradually taking over the last procreative domain controlled by women. In one of the oldest recorded myths, Dumuzi, the…

2. The Birth of Religion

In the traces of the political institutions, polytheism is first characterized by its territorial specificity, since the divinity is attached to the place over which the monarch who represents the divinity reigns. The temple symbolizes a still more specific localized phenomenon, since…

1.8 Conclusion

The world of divinities begins where the world of humans ends, just like the world of spirits did. But unlike spirits, divinities interact much more with humans, allowing individuals like Dumuzi to become semi-divine. Jesus Christ will serve as one of the highest expressions of this fusion. This has…

2.3 Relating to the Divine

The formalization of rituals will have a profound influence on the relationship with the divinities and the functions they will play. The shaman exercised his task in a definite context: he had to deal with precise problems, requiring the involvement of specific spirits and…