THE RELIGIOUS SOCIETY

II. The Religious Society

With plant and animal domestication giving humans the idea that they were meant to control nature, most of the functions that were attributed to the spirits have now disappeared, and at the end of the Neolithic, their existence have become obsolete.

1. The Birth of the Divine

The transformations that occur in the status and functions of the spirits accurately mirror the newly-acquired perception of the place that humans occupy in the universe.

Plant and animal domestication — especially that of the auroch bull (Bos primigenius)…

1.1 From Natural to Divine Spirits

Freed from the manifestations of nature that defined the spirits, the divinities acquire a new independence that gives them the possibility to be conceptualized without the support of any representation and, as a consequence, to be in different places simultaneously.

1.2 Human, all too Human

Parallel to the features defining the divine, the world of divinities will use the very elements that characterize the new human society:

Genealogy

Just like ancestor cults imprint the patrilineal genealogy in the social fabric…

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…

1.5 The Goddess-Mother

Finally, the growing role of the masculine creative principle will not diminish the importance of female fertility in the mentalities of the new era in any way. In Egypt, the power of Isis, sometimes represented nursing, will surpass that of all other divinities, and she will be worshiped…

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…

1.7 Evicting the Feminine

A similar shift from the feminine to the masculine is also found at the summit of the pantheons. Characteristically, in most if not all proto-historical pantheons, a mother-goddess was the most important divinity. Nonetheless, towards the end of Antiquity, the supreme authority was…

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. 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…

2.1 Of Temporal and Spiritual Powers

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

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…