At first, as suggested above, this must have been of the vaguest sort of contemplation: the great Outside kept doing almost everything, so that the little humans could hardly think of themselves as separate from its huge, overshadowing presence. It flowed around and through them by day and by night, bringing good or ill fortune, making them see this or that in their dreams, smell this smell or think this thought, so that it was often hard to know where the Outside left off and their insides began.
Little by little, however, they were able to step back just a few centimeters, and a new kind of contemplation emerged: the formerly undifferentiated Outside came to be examined piece by piece, and with this the relationship of one piece of the outside world with another. Such relationships could involve actors of any sort—the waves at a bend in the river could be connected to the newborn black cormorants and both of these to the leaves of a certain grayish bush, since all belong to the “enchanted world,”28 in which almost anything is possible: rocks, trees, or ordinary-looking plots of ground are all potentially extraordinary, potentially numinous. But the magical was actually a close friend of primitive science, the “science of the concrete,” and if the work of modern anthropologists is any guide, investigating the slight similarities and differences of various plants and animals was an activity of potentially great complexity and sophistication.29
One particular sort of relationship was that of causality—apparently it had been there even before humanity’s emergence.30 It starts with a basic awareness of what psychologists call “launching events”: first this happens, and then that happens as a result. To move from this to more complicated forms of causality requires a cognitive leap, but when it took place is not obvious, since, once again, such a change was probably not immediately documented in stones or pigments; in fact, “leap” is misleading, since it likely did not happen all at once, and certainly not as a generalized, all-purpose ability. At some point, however, speculation about causality must inevitably have led to noticing (or hypothesizing) temporally or physically remote launching events: the thing that happened five minutes ago, or last week, is responsible for what just happened now. In the enchanted world, of course, this was one possibility among many. It might also be that some happenings were simply mysterious, magical, or altogether causeless; or their causes might somehow be hidden from view.
To be sure, there was a lot for early humans to think about besides launching events, but it is equally important to recognize that speculating about causality was not exactly an idle pastime. How could one not seek to understand those things on which life itself most depends—especially those things that had no evident cause, like the sudden availability or disappearance of edible foods; abundant rain or sustained drought; the sudden death of one or perhaps many members of the group; and similar mysteries. Surely something was making these things happen. Moreover, there were all those observable events that seem to follow a regular pattern: the path of the sun moving through the sky, the seasons that succeed each other in an established sequence. So long as such things were, if even contemplated, simply chalked up to that huge, uninvestigated cause—the great Outside—further speculation was not a concern. With time, however, thinking about hidden causes offered a different perspective. Things such as these cannot keep happening on their own: there must be some invisible cause behind them—in fact, the very multiplicity and diversity of these different events suggested a multiplicity of causes, or rather, causers, animate beings, who were making these things happen.31
At first they were not remote at all; they were those human-sized, humanlike, shadowy figures glimpsed now and again at the back of the forest, flitting in and out of the light under the trees. They must be the ones who were responsible. Here was a potentially troubling thought, precisely since these causers were hidden, and their influence might thus extend well beyond the obvious; paranoia reigned. At the same time, however, the existence of hidden causers explained virtually everything for which the human beings could not identify an evident cause. Humanity was now ready to meet the gods.
An Obvious Conclusion
Before we leave the Garden and the great Outside, however, one further observation imposes itself—indeed, it is an observation that should be obvious by now.
It was said earlier that there is no default sense of self, no one, natural way of conceiving of what a person’s I consists of and how it fits into the rest of the world. This is undeniably true today: people in Philadelphia or Paris share this planet with the Dinka of south Sudan, but their senses of self could not be more different, and this is true as well of the Yąnomamö32 of the Amazon and the Mbuti33 of the Congo, as well as of millions of others who belong neither with the Philadelphians nor the Forest dwellers, the Pashtun tribes of western Pakistan or the Marathi of neighboring India. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz was cited earlier as saying that for the inhabitants of “Java, Bali, and Morocco, at least, [the sense of self] differs markedly not only from our own but, no less dramatically and no less instructively, from one to the other.”
And yet, if one were to look for a common origin of all these different ways of construing the self, the search would seem inevitably to lead back to the Garden. The great “not-us” that surrounded the first humans, this undifferentiated Outside that did almost everything, overshadowing the little band of people, rustling all around them and through them, left an (almost) indelible mark on humanity. It is clearly visible in the semipermeable mind of biblical times, along with the fundamentally small sense of self on which it is postulated. The selves that developed elsewhere in different locations across the globe were all variations on this basic theme; indeed, the theme’s continuation is visible even with us modern, Western humans, although the harsh cultural conditions into which we have been born have for the most part turned our originally open, semipermeable selves into oddly stunted and closed-off organs, which today are scarcely aware of their tiny opening to the Outside.
5
The Fog of Divine Beings
WORSHIPING BA‘AL; A TWO-TIERED WORLD; SCIENTIFIC APPROACHES TO RELIGION; ANCIENT DEMONS; THE FLUIDITY OF DIVINE BEINGS
The existence of the gods brings us close to historic times, and the gap between idea and artifact necessarily shrinks. Still, it is difficult to fill in the blanks between then and now. The “absence of evidence” problem prevents us from knowing anything which may have existed in the minds of our early ancestors but which left no material remains. We can, however, discover something more about the divine-human encounter in what we do have—ancient artifacts and texts from Mesopotamia and ancient Canaan in which the gods were manifest, and the various reflections of this reality in a number of biblical texts.
The prophet Hosea lived in the eighth century BCE, a time of political upheaval. The kingdom of Israel was under threat from the mighty Assyrian Empire, and Hosea, as God’s earthly spokesman (that is what a prophet in Israel was), was charged with reporting to the Israelites God’s words of warning:
Rebuke your mother, rebuke her (since she’s no longer My wife, and I’m her husband no more),
To get her to stop her whoring and push her lovers from off of her breasts.
Or else I’ll strip her naked, show her just as she was
on the day that she was born;
I’ll turn her into a desert, a parched land, dying of thirst. (Hos 2:4–5; some Bibles 2:2–3)
The image was certainly meant to shock. God here is presented as an outraged husband, or rather, ex-husband, and He is saying to the Israelites that their current difficulties are not His fault, but their mother’s (that is, the female embodiment of the people of Israel): she’s a whore. This, in the broader context, is a reference to the Israelites’ worship of other gods. She should have been faithful, Hosea says, to her true husband, the God called YHWH*—but instead she’s been keeping company with other deities. If she doesn’t stop, this God says, she will be stripped naked and humiliated.
Hosea Versus Ba‘al
&nbs
p; To Hosea’s listeners, the message was clear: the prophet was reproving them for offering sacrifices and prayers to another god well known in Canaan, Ba‘al, whose particular responsibility in Canaanite religion was agriculture. He was the storm god who came riding in on the clouds to fertilize the parched ground. In fact, that is the reason for the name Ba‘al. Officially, his name was Hadad, but he is usually referred to by the Hebrew word Ba‘al, which meant “master” or “lord,” but also “husband”; he was the earth’s spouse, whose rainwater fertilized the soil and made the crops grow.
In this context, God’s threat to strip Israel’s mother naked acquires a more concrete, and ominous, meaning. It is made explicit in the last words quoted: “I’ll turn her into a desert, a parched land, dying of thirst.” Stripping Israel’s mother naked meant taking away her green and yellow dress, the ripening plants and grains that usually covered her “body,” Israel’s land. When this happened, as it sometimes did in Canaan’s chronically water-short climate, the crops couldn’t ripen and people went hungry.
This was a striking image, but in a sense, Israel’s mistake was understandable. After all, Ba‘al was known everywhere in Canaan for his role as the storm god. This fact was brought home in a hoard of ancient texts discovered by archaeologists at a site in northern coastal Syria, nowadays called Ras Shamra. These texts, part of the royal library of the ancient city-state of Ugarit that went back to the fourteenth century BCE, included lengthy passages of the epic poetry of northern Canaan, in which Ba‘al prominently figures as a dynamic, youthful deity, deferred to by lesser powers:
I tell you, O Prince Ba‘al, and I repeat, O rider of clouds!
Crush your enemy, Ba‘al, crush him now and defeat your foe!
Then take on unending kingship, your everlasting dominion.
Ba‘al was indeed the “rider of clouds,”1 and as such worthy of ruling on high. Among the gods he was specifically “Mr. Rain,” the go-to deity to put an end to drought. If so, and if rain was once again an issue of survival, who could blame Israel’s embodiment, its “mother,” for turning worshipfully to the powerful rainfall specialist? Nevertheless, Hosea is unsparing in his indictment of Israel’s female persona:
So their mother went a-whoring, she who bore them went astray.
She said, “I’ll go after my lovers, who gave me my bread and my water,
my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.”
But however hard she pursued them, she never caught up with a one;
however much she tried, she never took hold of her lovers.2 Then she said, “I’ll go back to my husband; I was better off then than now.”
But she still had no idea: it was I who gave her the grain;
the wine and the oil [were from Me];
I gave her bountiful silver—and the gold that they then gave to Ba‘al.
So now I’m taking My grain back, and My new wine that’s just now in season.
I’ll take back My wool and My flax, which before used to cover her shame. (Hos 2:7–10; some Bibles 5–9)
Modern scholars are not sure how much, if any, of our current book of Hosea was actually spoken by a prophet bearing that name, or even if there ever was such a prophet. But if one takes Hosea’s words at face value, his message here is an indictment of Israel for turning to Ba‘al for help. The reason is not, according to what he says, because the Israelites have failed to be faithful monotheists, adhering to the belief that there is only one true God. (Monotheism is still a few centuries away.) Rather, it seems that their fault lies in their failure to recognize that the bounty they attributed to Ba‘al had actually come from another deity, YHWH (that is, the LORD)—that’s why they were being punished. In fact, perhaps the most interesting part of Hosea’s speech comes at the end, when he looks forward to a time when Mother Israel will finally realize her mistake:
And it shall be at that time—says the LORD—that you [Israel] will call [Me] “my husband” and no longer call Me “my Ba‘al.” (Hos 2:18; some Bibles, 16)
As already mentioned, the Hebrew word ba‘al itself means “husband.” But here God is telling the Israelites not to keep calling Him ba‘ali, “my ba‘al,” but to use another word, ishi (literally, “my man”) instead. What this suggests to scholars is a rejection of a classic case of syncretism, the practice of identifying one god with another (just as Greek Zeus and Hera came to be identified by Romans with their own deities Jupiter and Juno). Much as Hosea didn’t approve, some Israelites were still in the habit of referring to the God YHWH as “my Ba‘al,” as if the two names belonged to the same divine person.3
The Upper Shelf
All this should help us to consider what it meant to live in the world of the gods. They were “up there,” existing on a kind of upper shelf, while we humans were “down here,” on earth.4 They controlled almost all the things that were vital to our existence—the grain, the wine, and the oil, in fact, how long we live, how many children we have, and what our lives are actually like: prosperity or hardship, peace or war, feast or famine. All these things were in the hands of those mysterious beings on the upper shelf. By the time ancient Israel came along, people had been perceiving reality in terms of these beings for so many millennia that they were simply an irrefutable fact of life. The ones “up there” were as real as the “down here” things that they controlled, as real as the fruit in the trees or the rainwater in the cisterns.
The most basic aspect of this arrangement was clearly left over from the undifferentiated Outside: humans were still very small. It was just that now, in this second phase, the great, looming Outside had been divided up: the multiplicity of things that happen on earth was now attributed to a multiplicity of unseen causers. We little humans were in the hands of powerful beings whom we couldn’t really see, but who were obviously doing the things that had the greatest impact on our lives. The question this poses is: How did all this come about? How did humans move from contemplating the undifferentiated Outside to worshiping the sacred beings known to us from later times?
As suggested in the previous chapter, the early human interest in causality seems to form part of the overall picture. It may be that anthropomorphic statues and paintings from Upper Paleolithic times (starting perhaps thirty thousand years ago) give evidence of such a belief in divine causers, supernatural beings in human form. It seems unlikely to most scholars that these humanlike representations are the work of an ancient Grandma Moses or Norman Rockwell bent simply on memorializing their friends and neighbors or the humdrum details of daily life in their societies. Similarly, carved representations of big-breasted, wide-hipped women, such as the Venus of Dolní Věstonice (ca. 29,000–25,000 BCE) or the Venus of Willendorf (ca. 24,000–22,000 BCE), may well have been worshiped as Great Mother goddesses or the bringers of fertility (although, once again, the evidence is not unequivocal).5 The cave paintings at Lascaux (seventeen thousand years ago) include some strange creatures—half man, half bird, or half man, half lion—which are obviously not representations from nature; these have been more confidently connected to the early worship of divine beings. But these still leave unanswered the fundamental question: What was it in people’s minds that moved them to do the sorts of things that seem to characterize the earliest stages of religious behavior—not only bringing offerings to divine causers connected to the natural world,6 but perhaps even earlier, revering certain places and objects identified as special, numinous or sacred; worshiping an animal totem or “spirit being” associated with a particular tribe or group; venerating dead ancestors; and perhaps yet other forms of ancient religious behavior?
Until recently, the earliest worship of such divine beings was frequently connected to the practical needs of civilization:7 people had to be coerced into behaving in ways that ensured their collective survival, and to that end gods were invented to establish the rules (“Thou shalt not kill,” “Thou shalt not steal,” etc.) and demand that they be obeyed. (Presumably, societies that failed to invent gods were at an evolutio
nary disadvantage and did not survive.) The trouble with such an explanation is the absence of any evidence that this is how things began; in fact, this explanation seems to derive from the projection of later reality—the rule-giving gods or God from the religions that we do know—onto religion’s unknown, oldest ancestor.8 What is more, this picture is rather slanted toward the religions that are closest to us in thought; anthropologists have studied societies that have nothing resembling divine rule-givers or even deities of any recognizable kind. Along with such “social good” explanations, it was also sometimes alleged that religions were first invented in order to provide answers to mankind’s great, unanswerable questions, or to allay the common human fear of death, or of the unknown. Here again, however, the problem is the absence of any evidence to support these contentions, as well as another recognizable tilt toward things that are still on our mind today: great, unanswerable questions, the fear of death, and so forth.
Neuroscience and Hidden Causers
Starting two or three decades ago, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, psychologists, and philosophers began reexamining the question of religion’s origins, seeking new answers through the insights of their own disciplines.9 Probably the best known of these are the “learned naysayers,” scholars who have tacitly or openly denied any reality to religious phenomena and have therefore sought to explain religion’s existence as the result of some other feature of early human development.
The Great Shift Page 10