4.1 Type I: Pre-literate religion. The evidence for religious belief and practice before the first civilizations is thin, but suggestive. If we interpret it in terms of what we know of later Ancient religion and present-day preliterate religion outside the centers of civilization, we can make some sense of it. The earliest sign of religious belief and practice is found in prehistoric burials. These were often oriented to the East or West (presumably to the rising or setting Sun), and the body was often smeared with red ochre, and buried with what must have been significant possessions of the living person, as well as cowry shells and other images of female fertility. This suggests a rebirth and afterlife was expected. There is also evidence in prehistoric cave art of magical or religious practices, in particular, fertility rituals to increase game, and rituals to assure taking the game. Cave art was often placed in a deep, inaccessible chamber. Perhaps it was viewed as a kind of womb, or perhaps something else was in mind. In Ancient Greece, for instance, caves were sometimes viewed as roads leading to the underground dwelling of the Sun, from which it issued in the morning in the East, and to which it returned in evening in the West. The rising Sun is a potent and near universal image of rebirth, and one might seek the aid of the one who can be reborn to gain rebirth for oneself, or fertility and birth for game animals.
The evidence of anthropologists concerning modern pre-literate religion is much fuller. The central and universal belief here is that everything that happens in the world is due to the action of a personality or spirit. It is generally assumed that personality arises from breath-souls, different breaths or spirits being responsible for the different quasi-independent aspects of personality. So an individual person is often conceived to have a number of different “souls,” one responsible for its drive and will, another for its intelligence, another for its ability to command and impress other, another for its being alive, and so on.
This aspect of pre-literate thought is particularly well preserved in the ancient Egyptian religion, which assigns a multiplicity of different souls to a person, but traces of it also remain in early Greek thought, and even in the Christian distinction between mind and Spirit. The question which of these souls is most truly one’s self may be regarded as a very important one, for if the true self is one of the souls that are immortal, rather than one of the souls that break up at the death of the body, then we should identify ourselves with that soul, making it as far as we can the center of our personality, to be saved from death. In Greek thought Plato set the tone by distinguishing three parts of the soul, the rather divided part responsible for one’s bodily desires, the part that is responsible for reason and knowledge, which is immortal, and perhaps even an aspect of the soul of the universe itself, and a third part which binds the first two together, the “part that loves honor,” so-named because it seeks to be as good as it can, controlling the lower soul’s bodily impulses, and looking to the higher, rational part for an indication of what is in fact honorable and good. The soul as a whole Plato identifies with the psyche, which is mentioned in early Greek literature as a part of the soul which survives the death of the body, though it is not psyche, but nous = intellect, which is responsible in the older literature for thought and reason. It is because the highest part of psyche, nous, can carry out its activities without a body (unlike the two lower parts), that the soul survives the death of the body. Without the body one has only his love of theoretical knowledge, for the senses and bodily desires are lost with the body, and the two lower parts of the soul become inactive. So “heaven” for Plato is the pure activity of the understanding, aware of the Good Itself (the good as theoretically understood). This involves the enjoyment of the beauty of what is understood, and in this life the mathematician’s joy in the intellectual beauty of his subject is taken as an image of what we shall enjoy in the afterlife. Plato follows traditional beliefs in saying that one’s soul eventually gains a new body (after it has been punished or rewarded for the ethical quality of its last life), and so goes through an apparently endless cycle of rebirths.
The most important relations among spirits in pre-literate thought, and between human beings and spirits, are the most important relations in these societies between people, relations of kinship. Among the Australian aborigines and a number of other groups, it was conceived that the various kinship groups each have ancestral spirits who will help them, so that the turtle-spirit may be the ancestor of one group, the deer-spirit the ancestor of another, and so on. If one needs help from the deer-spirit, say, to kill a deer for food, one will prevail upon a member of the deer clan to intervene with his ancestor.
The notion that various, often half-conscious, spiritual powers enter into and make up a single human being suggested to some cultures that these various sorts of power or soul might be instinctively inimical or friendly to one another. Thus an elaborate set of notions about what is “taboo” arises, and one way of avoiding problems is to avoid bringing hostile powers into contact with one another. So a man might avoid contact with a menstruating woman, for she contains a power hostile to the spirit of the male.
This can all be applied to the central problem of cosmic evil in a number of ways. First off, the fact of death can be denied, by claiming that one’s spirit migrates elsewhere to continue its life, in a spirit-world, or in a new body. It is often thought that some spirits, those of more powerful people or the spirits of people who have been murdered, are capable of hanging around and causing trouble, or helping the community. Often, it is thought that the departed spirits should be supported by regular small sacrifices by their descendants, and that they may return once a year, when they feast with their families. To alienate the ancestral spirits would lead to all kinds of trouble. The spirit-world is assumed to exist because we visit it, our souls traveling abroad, in dreams and trances, and some religious specialists train themselves to serve as emissaries to the spirit-world, so they can go there and intervene with powerful spirits on behalf of human beings.
In the second place, it is assumed that any evil that arises for us is due to the actions of other spirits inimical to us. Such spirits presumably benefit, and so nothing that happens in the world is simply senseless. Rather, it is a matter of conflicting interests among the spirits that live in the world. This suggests a way of dealing with evil, namely, learning to get along with the spirits. Thus interpersonal relationships become the key, and the craft of dealing with other people, showing them respect, negotiating, pleading, and so forth, all enter into the profession of the Shaman, whose job is to deal with the spirits. It is generally assumed that there are wise spirits who are older and more powerful, who perhaps gave birth to the other spirits, and whose help can be invoked. There are generally stories about the origins of death and other evils, all rooted in the notion that stupidity, jealousy and the like among the spirits underlies evil in the world. Such stories survive in the myths of ancient civilizations. It should be noted that it is not assumed that the world is as perfect as it could be, or free of unjustifiable evil. Spirits bring evil on themselves and others which need not occur. Wisdom is considered a matter of knowing how to get along with people and avoid conflict, while getting (most of) what you want. Wisdom does not envision higher, unworldly aims, but simply success as success is ordinarily viewed in this life.
A Shaman, that is, a religious specialist, would seek to get to know the spirits, generally with the help of one special friendly spirit in particular, in dreams and perhaps trances. He would employ persuasion, for the most part, since he has much less power than the spirits he wants to deal with, but might sometimes use magic to force spirits to do what he wanted. Most scholars consider such magic as non-religious. One does not force a god to do something, and the thought that one could do that seems to involve a failure to recognize the problem of evil. Our weakness demands explanation, but it is not a very good religious move simply to deny it. But it is probably more reasonable to regard magic as an integral part of Type I and II religion, even if it is considered immature in ‘higher’ religions of Types III through IX. If one cannot force a god to do something, then we should perhaps classify Type I and some Type II religions as atheistic—they believe in powerful spirits, but not gods.
A Shaman would often be emotionally unstable, and so subject to the meaningful sort of dreams required, and would go through an initiation and training period involving ascetic practices and the cultivation of trance. In the course of training, he would experience (or at least pretend to experience) a crisis and then a reintegration of his personality, interpreted as death and rebirth. That is, the Shaman was the original “twice-born” individual. The wisdom he acquired in this process might be seen as the deliberate result of his special friend-spirit’s training. The first task of a Shaman is often to acquire a guiding spirit who will lead him to wisdom and introduce him into the spirit world. This wisdom would reconcile the Shaman to the evil in the world by suggesting to him that other people count too, and we must suffer some evil ourselves in order that others may get along in the world. It recommends ethical behavior on pragmatic grounds—an ethical person lives a better life (in worldly terms, the only terms recognized) because he does not come into conflict with his fellows. A life in isolation from others is not a good life, and a life together with others requires sacrifice on everyone’s part. Shamanism seems to have arisen first in central Asia, and to have spread from there, most significantly, with those settling America, so that it is the basis of American Indian religion, and into India and China, the Near East and the Mediterranean. The Shaman is the ancestor of the religious ascetic, the Saint who communicates with God and his angels, and the meditating sages who seek enlightenment of various sorts in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist traditions. Shamans are often thought to be able to heal the sick by going into a trance- or dream-state in which their soul travels to the spirit realm and finds the soul of the patient, which has left its body for some reason, defending it against attacks from the spirits in the spirit-realm, and guiding it back to its body. If one does not have the training of a Shaman, it is very dangerous and confusing to wander about in the spirit realm. (Of course, a patient might well recall being in the spirit realm and being helped by a Shaman or the Shaman’s friend-spirit, since that will be the shape his fever dreams take, particularly if the Shaman is present when he experiences the dreams, performing his dances and other rituals to communicate with and aid the spirit of the ailing man.)
4.2 Type II: Ancient Polytheism. The early civilizations made the assumptions of Type I religion, but they considered the spirits to be organized politically in the same way they themselves were. So the kinship structures of the spirits, emphasizing the authority of the elders, is replaced by a strongly hierarchical organization with a King, commander of the armies, and so forth, and the most important of the spirits, now gods, for any particular person is that one who owns the city in which he lives. The king is assumed to be the consort of the goddess, or a deity’s viceroy, and so the gods become the source of law and order in the community, and take on a martial aspect.
Moreover, the gods are worshiped, that is, approached in roughly the same way that those human beings with high political authority might be approached by a commoner—one approaches a high official through intermediaries, well-favored individuals generally representing a group, bearing gifts and formal petitions full of flattery, expecting that the official will attend to the affairs of a city or town much more readily than to those of an individual of low status, and one puts on one’s best clothing and most deferential behavior to do it. Similarly, a high god must be approached through a priest, in connection with a sacrifice or offering, through formal petitionary prayers praising and exalting the god, generally on behalf of the community or some group within it rather than a particular individual, and one puts on one’s best clothing and most deferential behavior to do it. In general, people approach the spirits in the way they approach upper caste members of their own community when making a request, and the status of the god will, of course, influence how one approaches him as well—one’s offering at breakfast to the family spirits who protect the farmstead is a very different matter from an offering to a high god who rules the nation. Worship as we democratic egalitarians now think of it is a holdover from an earlier time when even human beings of high status were treated as we now treat God, and we cannot help but suspect that God, if he is reasonable and good, cannot really require all that flattery, ceremony and priestly and institutional intervention. For us, the awe felt before God has become a strange emotion that it is unsuitable to feel before anything other than God. But in the days when Kingship and aristocracy were the norm, such awe, such fear and trembling, such an exaggerated response of “identification with the aggressor,” was not unfamiliar outside religious affairs. The nobility expected such emotions from commoners, and took care to elicit them by their display and behavior. They lived in a different world, a world of palaces, privilege and art that could only seem to a commoner a fairyland. And this world was physically cut off from the commoners, in remote fortified places with the entrances guarded by fierce guards. The high gods of the public cult, likewise, lived in remote heights inaccessible to human beings, under magnificently luxurious conditions. And all of this is true of the high gods of people’s with aristocratic, class-structured societies, but not of the spirits or even the highest gods of preliterate cultures. American Indians, for instance, Australian Aborigines, and such groups conceived even their highest gods as living more or less like their most respected human associates. The highest god would have his authority because he was the grandfather of all the rest, and would receive the deference grandfathers deserve, not the awe and elaborate groveling a king might demand. He would live in a nice grandfather’s hut, looked after, perhaps, by granddaughters with his aged wife. We really do conceive the spirits and our gods as we conceive ourselves.
The current ruling gods, so the myths ran in these aristocratic cultures, were late-comers, who had conquered this world in a pitched battle with the earlier gods, their parents. The Mesopotamian story has it that the earlier gods were killed and the world was made from their bodies. This is all due to the fact that these civilized states were held together by military force, and were in the habit of conquering one another, so that the later states, at least, were all of them the results of conquest of earlier states. The nobles were military specialists who lived off the labor of the peasants, and full citizenship, even in the most democratic states, required that one serve as a soldier.
The high God was taken to be just, and to have provided the legal code under which people live. This God, very often a Sun or Sky God, will punish a bad king who does not care for his people properly, but will punish even more anyone who rebels against the king. He regulates his subordinates but expects obedience to them. When a palace revolution succeeded, it was generally explained as a matter of the God shifting his favor from the old king to the new because the old king was not just, whereas the new one was.
Equally important to the community was the worship of gods and goddesses responsible for fertility of the crops, a custom that had begun around 6000 bce with the beginning of agriculture. Here a typical story was that a goddess associated with sex and springtime for some reason descended into the underworld, and was held there by the god or goddess of that region. When all things withered and it began to appear that winter would never end, a bargain was struck with the underworld powers, to the effect that the goddess must remain in the underworld half the year, but is free to return to her parents and relations above ground for the other half. Her departure from the underworld represents a rebirth of nature in the spring. In Egypt, the god Osiris was supposed to have been killed by his brother, but then magically resurrected from the soil by his wife and sister, Isis. Rituals to insure the fertility of the fields typically involved sex, and the temple of the relevant goddess often maintained a corps of sacred prostitutes. In Babylonia, as in many other places, the annual spring festival ran on for more than a week, and the myths of the beginning of the world were re-enacted, for spring is a repetition of the birth of the world, the whole thing culminating in intercourse between the king and the goddess of the city. Sacrifices, sometimes of animals, sometimes of flowers or honey cakes, or libations of wine or honey poured into the ground for underworld deities, were part of every ritual. When animals were sacrificed, the god was given only a small portion—that is, a small portion was burned at the altar so the smoke could carry it to the god. The rest was eaten by the priests and those offering the sacrifice. So a sacrifice involved a meal with the god. In the big temples where many sacrifices were performed, the excess meat was sold, and most of the meat eaten in the cities may have come from the temples.
The great gods of the state were worshiped in public ceremonial, but each family had its own household gods, to which they made small sacrifices daily. So there was a goddess of the hearth to which each Roman family sacrificed every morning in their homes, local minor gods of the fields, and so on. Often the state ritual was reproduced at the family level. The King would sleep in the New Year’s Festival with the Goddess in the great temple, and the peasant would sleep in the field with his wife. In every contingency there was some minor god whose help could be sought out, and outside the official priestly order supported by the government there were many healers and soothsayers that made a living serving the common folk. So the old Shamanistic practices, and the Shamans, lived on at the edges of the established religion.
The festivals and sacrifices to the gods were only part of a religious specialist’s work. They also served as healers (the Ancient hospital was a temple to the god of healing, to Asklepios in the Greek tradition), and undertook to the determine the will of the gods, through oracles and prophecy. Thus the temple of Apollo, the god of prophecy, at Delphi, was the chief oracle among the Greeks. Among the Mesopotamians, astrology developed, since the gods were identified with the planets, and so one could divine what the gods had in mind by observing the movements of the planets and the stars. The small fry also performed a lot of oracular prediction and prophecy, and one could make a living as a soothsayer.
4.2.1 The Epic of Gilgamesh. The religion provided justification and support for the social and political order, then, and the state practiced an elaborate and impressive public cult as part of its propaganda to keep the peasants in line, while the older, Type I religion persisted in the practices of sooth-sayers, healers and the like. A very fine document expressing this ancient pattern of religious thinking is the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story that was preserved and repeated from well before 2000 bce to around 800 bce in Ancient Mesopotamia.
According to the story, Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, had a mortal father but a goddess for his mother. Perhaps his father, the King, impregnated the goddess owning the city, who would have taken him as her consort. But even though only partly mortal, Gilgamesh must eventually die, something he was forced to accept in end. He was a bad ruler, sleeping with all the women and taking children away from their families, perhaps as soldiers, so his subjects asked the gods for help. In response a goddess (his mother?) created Enkidu, a wild man almost Gilgamesh’s equal. Enkidu appeared in the wilderness, living with the animals as one of them. A frightened trapper asked his father what to do when Enkidu began to free animals from the traps. On his father’s advice he went to Uruk and told Gilgamesh of the wild man. (It was customary to seek help from the local aristocracy whenever trouble was being caused by a wild animal.) The King asked a harlot from the temple to return with the young man and seduce Enkidu, so that the wild animals would reject him. She did just that, and then taught Enkidu some of the ways of civilization—wearing clothing, eating bread and drinking wine. (One can compare the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in Genesis, which seems a remote descendent of this tale.) Then she told him of the strength of Gilgamesh and how Gilgamesh was sleeping with all the women of Uruk, and Enkidu was shocked. He challenged Gilgamesh to a contest of strength, hoping to overcome him and force him to behave properly. They struggled like equals in a wrestling match, but finally the King threw Enkidu, who then recognized him as a true king. They embrace and become best friends. This was perhaps the goddess’s plan all along—to provided her son with a playmate of his own stature to keep him busy and out of trouble.
But that was hard to do—Rather, Gilgamesh got Enkidu into trouble. He longed to perform great deeds so his name would be remembered, and so undertook to go to the cedar forest with Enkidu and slay its guardian monster, Humbaba. Enkidu was terrified because he knew Humbaba, but Gilgamesh insisted, and they prepared for the journey. Enkidu's hand was paralyzed when he touched the cedar forest gate, but Gilgamesh helped him to continue. They had disturbing dreams, but nonetheless cut down a cedar tree. Humbaba approached to defend his forest, they fought, and the friends won, cutting off Humbaba’s head. This story seems to reflect a war in which the King of Uruk gained control of cedar forests to the northwest, so that he could import cedar, which did not grow in his own country.
After the victory, Gilgamesh cleaned himself up and put on his crown, and was so handsome that Ishtar, the goddess of love, wanted to marry him. Perhaps she thought to tame him as the prostitute tamed Enkidu. But he rudely refused, pointing out how she had ruined the lives of her previous husbands. Ishtar, furious, went to her father, Anu, demanding that he send the Bull of Heaven to punish Gilgamesh. She threatened to destroy the gates to the underworld if her father did not comply, literally setting all Hell loose on the world. Anu sent the Bull of Heaven, but Enkidu caught it by the horns, and Gilgamesh killed it. The refusal to sleep with the Goddess may represent a political revolt, which would certainly be out of his place for a mortal like Gilgamesh, but then Gilgamesh did not seem to accept that he was a mortal.
Enkidu then discovered in a dream that the gods were holding council to determine who should die for all this, Gilgamesh or Enkidu. Since Gilgamesh is part divine and part human, while Enkidu is part human and part animal, the judgment fell on Enkidu, who sickened and died, at first cursing the harlot who led him to civilization, Gilgamesh and death itself, but then blessing the harlot for his friendship with Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh in his grief, and presumably his unfamiliarity with death, refused to relinquish Enkidu’s body for burial, but after a week it became wormy. So he had him buried, and wandered a while in the wilderness as a wild hunter, dressed in animal skins. Gilgamesh despaired for the loss of Enkidu, but also for his own death, which he now understood must some day come. Seeking to avoid death, Gilgamesh decided to seek out Utnapishtim, the only human being who was ever granted eternal life by the gods.
The King set out, and eventually came to the entry to the land of the gods, under a mountain, and guarded by a Man-scorpion and his mate. He gained entrance, and traveled in the dark until he came to the jeweled garden of the gods. There a divine wine-maker, Siduri, gave him shelter and advised him to accept his human fate and enjoy life while he can. But he insisted that he must find Utnapishtim, so she told him that the boatman Urshanabi could take him across the Sea of Death to the place where Utnapishtim lives with his wife. After a complicated boat-trip, Gilgamesh met Utnapishtim, who told his story. It is the story of the Flood, remarkably similar to the Flood story in Genesis, with Utnapishtim in the place of Noah. The Flood will never occur again, and the only reason Utnapishtim and his wife are now immortal is that the gods chose to make them so after they survived the flood. Gilgamesh continued to pester Utnaphishtim nonetheless, so he promised to help if the King could stay awake, watching, for seven days and nights. Accepting the challenge, Gilgamesh immediately fell asleep. At the end of the time he claimed he had been awake, but Utnapishtim pointed out to him the seven loaves of bread his wife had made, one on each day that Gilgamesh slept. The oldest loaf is moldy and corrupt, like the wormy body of Enkidu in an earlier vigil. He could not even stay awake for seven days; how could he ever hope to live forever?
Utnapishtim's wife, however, took pity on Gilgamesh and asked her husband to tell him about the plant that can make him young again, even if it cannot make him immortal. Gilgamesh dove to the bottom of the sea to pick the plant, but lost it later, while bathing, because a snake slithered up and eats it. Thus snakes can become young again by shedding their skins. This is perhaps the original of the serpent in Eden. Gilgamesh returns to Uruk with the boatman Urshanabi, and points out to him the mighty walls; this is the proper work of a human being, not the search for eternal life.
So Gilgamesh was taught by the gods how to live. First he was provided with a friend, an equal, so that he can come to learn something of the value of social relations, and then his friend dies, and so he becomes acquainted with the way in which one becomes vulnerable, as well as being enriched, when one has a friend. Gilgamesh, seeing that death is his lot as well, seeks out immortality, but discovers that even when he is given the means to be restored to his youth, he has not the wisdom to use it properly, and so he at last becomes reconciled to his place in the world, and seeks henceforth to live his life as best as he can, given his mortal lot. He becomes a good king, and perhaps the political message is that the King must recognize his own humanity, and so, seeing himself and his subjects as sharing a common lot, treat his subjects with respect and work for their welfare.
In this style of religion piety and wisdom consist above all in recognizing our limitations, avoiding the pride that would lead us to claim privileges unsuited to our place. Just as a peasant should not claim a right to great wealth, so a human being must not claim immortality. It just isn’t our place, and so it isn’t our just right. But if we observe our place and are suitably humble, we will find that a good life can be lived, and that those higher than us may even be generous and helpful, at least up to a point. This is a social wisdom suitable for most people in a strongly hierarchical society, applied to the general problem of getting on in the world. The suggestion is that it is not unjust that we suffer the evils we do. Some of them are simply our lot, the result of our place in life, and others, the worst, are due to our rebellion against our just lot. So Zeus suggests in Homer’s Iliad that mortals claim their evils come from the gods, but by far most of them come from our own bad behavior and lack of wisdom. Someone is occasionally just luckless and miserable, but most of us can lead a decent life if we set our minds to it and don’t demand more than is our lot. Sometimes it is suggested that our lot is just simply because we are born into it, but there are also myths explaining how human being came to be in the position they are, sometimes involving actual incompetence and conflict among the gods who made human beings, and sometimes involving bad or threatening behavior on the part of human beings that led the gods to limit us as much as they could. Particularly in the Mesopotamian myths, it is often suggested that human beings were a threat to the gods. One sees this in some of the tales in Genesis, for instance, the stories of the tower of Babel and the Garden of Eden.
A somewhat different notion of fairness or justice than we have nowadays is at work here. The important thing was to prevent the state from falling into disorder, from returning to the pre-civilized chaos in which each individual or small group sought its own aims independently. One must respect the laws of civilized society, and accept one’s assigned place within it. This style of religion may seem inadequate to us, for we are heirs of the Jewish tradition, which postulates an ideally just arrangement intended by God but often ignored by the existing state. So we ask first whether it is just that we should be assigned to the place we are. Type II religion, at least in its earlier forms, does not do this.
4.2.2 The Afterlife and Egyptian Religion. Death was viewed throughout the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia as involving one of one’s souls or a portion of the soul descending into the underworld, where it lived a half conscious life as a powerless shade. A shade could be brought back temporarily by providing it with the blood and missing spirit elements it needs to become conscious and active again, through a sacrifice. Sacrifices to the ancestors (as well as underworld deities) were generally “libations,” in which something, blood, wine, honey, was poured into the ground, often at the grave of the deceased. It was perhaps thought that the liquid in question provided consciousness and power temporarily to the deceased. Those ancestors thought to continue as powerful, conscious beings in this world were generally regarded as half-gods, “demigods,” that is, the result of the union of a god and a mortal—the word for someone half-god in Greek is “Hero.” This picture of the afterlife (without Heroes) was characteristic of the ancient Hebrews, and the notion that people are resurrected, which makes its first appearance in Ezekiel, was adopted from Zoroastrianism.
The religion of the Egyptians, who were somewhat isolated from the rest of the Mediterranean world, differed in important respects from that of the Mesopotamians and the Greeks. For one thing, the Egyptians came to believe that a positive afterlife, living in a paradise with the Sun-God, was possible if one went through the right ceremonies at death and preserved the person’s body as a mummy. (The body is needed to provide the elements of life that keep the departed soul conscious and active.) This happened because they thought of their Pharaoh (the king) as a god himself, not merely the consort of a god—indeed, he was an incarnation of the Sun-God. When the Pharaoh died he went to join his father, Osiris, the re-born Sun-God, and it was thought he might take some of his favorites with him. Over time the privilege of re-birth in the realm of the Sun-god (below the earth, where the Sun goes at night to rest) was extended to more and more people, until finally it was available to anyone who could pay the priests for the appropriate ceremonial. The basic notion here, that the resurrected divinity of the grain, who comes back from underworld every year in the Spring, can somehow adopt a person and enable them to share in his resurrection, took on many forms in private cults throughout the Mediterranean. Typically one would become an “initiate” by paying a fee and going through a certain ceremonial, and thus would be identified with the resurrected god, or brought under his or her protection. It was not generally conceived that an ethical requirement had to be met for a favorable resurrection. It was a matter of the right ceremonial, of magic. In Egypt, people had to swear to their upright behavior, and would be destroyed if they swore falsely, but even here there were apparently ways around the requirement. The requirement held, by the way, because Osiris had a personal fondness for upright behavior, not for any other reason, and even among the gods it was conceived that one could employ bribery or take advantage of personal favoritism, at least if one’s infractions were relatively minor.
One point very clear in Egyptian beliefs is that the gods were conceived as present wherever their peculiar powers were present. So any clever act, for instance, might be attributed to the presence of the god of wisdom, Ptah. This means that the gods tended to merge and separate, and go through multiple lives and incarnations, in a way disconcerting to us. The king was Horus, the son of Osiris, and himself became Osiris (or, sometimes, an Osiris) when he died. The lower gods were often seen as pieces of the higher gods, so that any power or even thought that a higher god enjoyed might become a god in its own right, as it took on the power characteristic of the god in the world. So a kind of monotheism emerged in Egypt, in which all the gods were merely aspects of Amon, the “hidden one,” or, in the brief heresy of Akhenaton, aspects of Aton, the Sun-disk. This means that it was possible for a philosophical thinker in a polytheistic environment to adopt monotheistic views. One finds the same thing in Indian polytheism. In the Upanishads one character asks repeatedly how many gods there are, and is told that there are thousands, or hundreds, or 30, or 3, and finally that there is really only one, Brahman. Note, however, that the gods were conceived in naturalistic terms. They embodied natural forces and did not stand outside the world. So this type of religion is consistent with a naturalistic approach to the world, and was actually combined with such an approach in some schools of Greek philosophy.
4.2.3 Homer and Ancient Greek Religion. The Gods in Type II religion are not so much loved as respected and feared. Many gods are recognized to be rather unpleasant, for every natural force has a god behind it, including aggression and violence, lust, and so forth. (Here Type II religion is like Type I religion, for many of the spirits in Type I religion are quite unpleasant to deal with.) So the Greeks had a god of war, Ares, who was not much liked by anyone, and a goddess of sex, Aphrodite, who was widely recognized to be something of a whore (her temples employed sacred prostitutes). Interestingly, the two were paramours. Even the gods who are admired, such as Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom, were not loved, not even by their favorites, such as Odysseus. A Goddess is so far above us that if she takes an interest in our welfare and seems to like us we should be grateful and respectful, but it would be entirely out of place to show anything like affection.
One central text in Greek religion was the Odyssey of Homer, a Greek work in many ways parallel to the Gilgamesh. The main plot concerns Odysseus’s loss of self-restraint and justice in the course of the fighting at Troy. This leads him to an act of piracy which is punished by a storm from Zeus, driving his ships from their course. Further piratical attempts entangle him with the cyclops, Polyphemus, who calls down a curse on him from his father, Poseidon, god of the sea, when Odysseus pridefully, and foolishly, reveals his name in a boast of victory over the one-eyed giant. Even after he has relearned justice and self-restraint, Odysseus’s dependence on his crew, who do not learn their lesson so readily, creates yet more trouble for him. He is provided with help by the God of the winds, who ties up all the winds in a bag for him, except the one favorable for reaching home. Odysseus does not tell his crew what is going on (a case of pride, again), and they, thinking there is treasure in the bag, open it, and are blown hopelessly off course. Even when everyone seems to have learned their lessons, the ship is cast up on a coast where the cattle of the Sun graze, and despite Odysseus’s warnings, his crew, overcome by hunger, slaughter one of the animals to eat. Human wisdom, it seems, can be overcome by need, and knowing this is a part of human wisdom. The god retaliates, the ship is sunk, and Odysseus alone survives, cast up on an island where he dwells for a while with a Goddess who falls in love with him. She finally releases him when she sees that he cannot stop pining for his wife, Penelope. He ventures out on a raft, and is cast up alone and naked on the island of the Phaeaceans, to find his way home once more to Ithaca. He has finally fully recognized his vulnerability and dependence on others, and learned genuinely to mourn the deaths of the heroes at Troy, both Trojan and Greek, and so he is finally brought back home by Athena, Goddess of wisdom.
Not only Odysseus suffers from an overweening sense of his own prowess in Homer. In the Iliad Achilles, the most powerful warrior in the Greek army, overreaches himself when he refuses to make up a quarrel with Agamemnon after that leader offers amends for the insult he has inflicted on the Hero. Unlike Odysseus, Achilles is invulnerable to direct damage, but he suffers even so, because of his attachment to his friend, Patroclus, who is killed by the Trojan Hero, Hector. Achilles’s anger now exceeds all bounds and he kills Hector, mutilates his body, and refuses it burial. In the climactic scene of the epic Priam, the father of Hector, comes to Achilles’s tent to beg for the body of his son. Achilles, reminded of his own father, finally forgets his anger and recognizes the perilous contingency of human life. Even the invincible warrior is vulnerable, for he must have friends to lead a good life, and he cannot always protect his friends. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey concern the problem of the war veteran, unsuited by the brutality of his experience for civilian life, who must learn to be human again. Of course, at the end, his humanity is much more fully established by the experiences he has gone through. He now appreciates and understands what before he took for granted.
Another theme in the Odyssey is the hostility of nature, as represented by the sea and its god, Poseidon. It is the self-assertion of man that brings about this hostility. Odysseus represents that human self-assertion and knowledge—his patron goddess is Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and he is known as the wiliest of the Greeks. Odysseus is repeatedly tempted to become like an animal, as in the land of the Lotus Eaters, or when living with one or another Goddess (and consider the story of Circe, who turns his men into pigs), but always chooses to be a man, opposing himself to the natural world and using his craft and knowledge to win his way. This has its drawbacks, but it is admirable and even the Phaeacians, the favorites of Poseidon, give honor to Odysseus and aid him in getting home (which earns them punishment from Poseidon). The gods include in their number those inimical to man, Poseidon, Hades and the like, and those who favor man, above all the gods of wisdom and the crafts, such as Athena and Apollo, and the high gods of Justice, such as Zeus. Human beings have a place in the world, but it is one which puts them, due to their knowledge of themselves, into conflict with others, even with gods. Human beings can only exist if they enter into this sort of conflict with nature and one another, and from this conflict arises the evils they are subject to. Compare here our own view of society, which runs on conflict (the free enterprise economic system, democratic institutions), and assigns honor and position to the fellow who can compete well. We assume that the evils of the free enterprise system are worth the trouble. Our views here actually go back historically to the Ancient Greeks.