Posts Tagged ‘gods’
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful”*…
On the rise of organized religion in human life: our species has, for thousands of years, been affected by widespread belief in a watchful presence above us. But did moralizing Big Gods spark a surge in cooperation, or did they simply grow out of complex civilization? Brian Klaas explores….
… For most of human history, our species lived in small bands, often groups of fewer than a hundred people. Then, suddenly, around 12,000 years ago, complex civilizations began to pepper the landscape, as cooperation and coordination surged. This presents a puzzle: why the sudden shift in our behavior?
Some have argued that “Big Gods”—complete with their watchful eyes gazing down on us from above and threatening to punish us for sin—were the key component in social cooperation and the rise of civilization, moving us from our simple hunter-gatherer roots to sophisticated, sprawling empires. But is that true?…
… Intellectual historians often point to two major divergent explanations for the emergence of religion. The great philosopher David Hume argued that religion is the natural, but arbitrary, byproduct of human cognitive architecture.
Since the beginning, Homo sapiens experienced disordered events, seemingly without explanation. To order a disordered world, our ancestors began to ascribe agency to supernatural beings, to which they could offer gifts, sacrifices, and prayers to sway them to their personal whims. The uncontrollable world became controllable. The unexplainable was explained—a comforting outcome for the pattern detection machines housed in our skulls.
By contrast, thinkers like Émile Durkheim argued that religion emerged as a social glue. Rituals bond people across space and time. Religion was instrumental, not intrinsic. It emerged to serve our societies, not comfort our minds. As Voltaire put it: “If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.”
In the last two decades, a vibrant strand of scholarship has sought to reconcile these contrasting viewpoints, notably through the work of Ara Norenzayan, author of Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict.
Norenzayan’s “Big Gods” refer to deities that are omniscient, moralizing beings, careful to note our sins and punish us accordingly. Currently, roughly 77 percent of the world’s population identifies with one of just four religions (31% Christian; 24% Muslim; 15% Hindu; 7% Buddhist). In all four, moral transgressions produce consequences, some immediate, others punished in the afterlife.
Norenzayan aptly notes that the omniscience of Big Gods assumes total knowledge of everything in the universe, but that the divine is always depicted as being particularly interested in our moral behavior. If God exists, He surely could know which socks you wore yesterday, but deities focus their attentions not on such amoral trifles, but rather on whether you lie, covet, cheat, steal, or kill.
However, Norenzayan draws on anthropology evidence to argue that early supernatural beings had none of these traits and were disinterested in human affairs. They were fickle demons, tricksters and spirits, not omniscient gods who worried about whether any random human had wronged his neighbor…
… These deities may have fulfilled the conditions outlined by Hume—they explained the unexplainable as machinations of supernatural forces—but they didn’t serve much of a social deterrence function, because you wouldn’t need to fear being struck down by a lightning bolt from above if you wronged a rival.
Every social species that thrives, from wasps to humans, requires a mechanism of stopping individual members from working against the group’s interests. In complex hives, specialized “police wasps” serve as enforcers, seeking out and destroying any wasps producing larvae that may lead to an excess number of queens in the colony. When detected, any rogues are “beheaded or torn apart by the workers soon after they emerge from their cells in the brood comb,” explain Professors Francis Ratnieks and Tom Wenseleers.
Unlike wasps, early human societies didn’t have police forces. Without an enforcement mechanism, social complexity and large civilizations came with enormous risks of predatory, anti-social behavior that could undermine survival.
Over time, Norenzayan argues, divine forces shifted within these administratively weak human groupings. Thus emerged what Norenzayan calls “supernatural monitoring,” a belief in an omniscient presence that never averts His gaze from sin. Everything is tracked, monitored, then punished…
… It is now a nearly universal feature of religious belief systems that a divine presence prohibits certain behaviors—and rewards others. And that presence is always watching. In addition to the omniscient sky gods of today’s major religions, ancient Egypt was home to Horus of Two Eyes. The Incans were watched by Viracocha. Today, in modern Tibet and Nepal, Buddhist depictions of eyes are dotted across villages, reminding everyone that nothing can ever be truly hidden.
The “Big Gods” hypothesis argues that divine gazes provided a far more effective form of deterring anti-social behavior than any mortal police force…
Did the watchful gaze of moralizing gods produce the rise of complex civilizations? “Big Gods and the Origin of Human Cooperation,” from @brianklaas.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Seneca the Younger
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As we brood on belief, we might recall that on this date in 1349 a group of Christian guilds, fearful of the Black Death, carried out the Basel Massacre…
… an anti-Semitic massacre in Basel, which occurred in 1349 in connection with alleged well poisoning as part of the Black Death persecutions, carried out against the Jews in Europe at the time of the Black Death. A number of Jews, variously given as between 300 and 600 (according to contemporary Medieval chronicles) or 50 to 70 (according to some modern historians) were burned alive, after being locked in a wooden structure built on a nearby island in the Rhine. Jewish children were apparently spared, but forcibly baptized and sent to monasteries…
…Contemporary chronicler Matthias of Neuenburg describes the event with these words:
Therefore all the Jews of Basel, without a legal sentence [being passed] and because of the clamor of the people, were burned on an island in the Rhine River in a new house” (Cremati sunt igitur absque sentencia ad clamorem populi omnes Judei Basilienses in una insula Rheni in domo nova).
Similar pogroms took place in Freiburg on 30 January, and in Strasbourg on 14 February. The massacre had notably taken place before the Black Death had even reached the city. When it finally broke out in April to May 1349, the converted Jews were still blamed for well poisoning. The officials of Basel placed judgement on some baptized Jews, and on 4 July four of them were tortured on the wheel, “confessing” that they had poisoned Basel’s fountains (Juden … Offenlich vor gerichte verjahen und seiten, das sie die brunnen ze unserre state etlich vergift hettent).[4] The remaining converted Jews were partly executed, partly expulsed. By the end of 1349, the Jews of Basel had been murdered, their cemetery destroyed and all debts to Jews declared settled.
– source
“The gods do not visit you to remind you what you know already”*…
Or do they? As the estimable Emily Watson explains, one woman– Edith Hamilton— had a great deal to do with our acquaintance with the mythology of ancient Greece and Rome, and in a way that had as much to do with the present as the past…
The discipline of “classical” literature has long been associated with social gatekeeping. The mastery of Latin and ancient Greek—or at least enough of an acquaintance to be able to trot out a well-worn tag from Horace and prompt knowing chuckles over the brandy—has often provided a useful qualification for passing as a gentleman and keeping out the plebs (Latin for “common people”) or hoi polloi (ancient Greek for “the many”). It is understandable that George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver eagerly whizzes through the Latin textbooks neglected by her idle brother Tom, or that Thomas Hardy’s Jude, hoping in vain to escape the obscurity of provincial poverty, slogs through his Greek dictionary until late into the night. For these fictional characters, like many of their real-life equivalents, ancient languages and literature provided the most visible bar against entry into a “higher” social class.
Even in the 20th and 21st centuries, the subject has maintained a close association with systems of exclusion based on income, education, race, and gender…
Over the past century, there have been numerous attempts to provide wider access to the supposed treasures of Greek and Roman antiquity to those once excluded from its riches. In the early 20th century, translations of ancient texts became more widely available, ranging from Gilbert Murray’s wonderfully ornate and virtuosic renditions of Euripides to Hilda Doolittle’s much starker modernist free verse. The Loeb Classical Library was founded in 1911 and featured fairly inexpensive editions of these ancient texts in their original languages, with an English translation on the facing page. These translations heralded a new age in which once-inaccessible works of classical literature became more accessible to a far wider range of people. As Virginia Woolf noted in 1917, it was the Loeb Library editions that helped make it “respectable” for the “amateur” (including female ones) to muddle through Aeschylus.
After the First World War, an ever-larger number of colleges and universities in the United States began to offer classes on ancient texts studied in translation, with no expectation that students would be able to read even a little of the originals. By the early 20th century, the study of ancient literature and history was often considered a prerequisite for understanding contemporary issues in Europe and the United States—regions that were now often lumped together under the term “the West.” The Columbia Core, the first such course in the United States, was developed in 1919 with the explicit goal of showing students the “unique features of the western world,” a world that apparently had begun in ancient Greece and that had now reached its apex in the American present.
The goal of connecting US citizens to a long, largely fabricated notion of “Western civilization” seemed increasingly urgent in the aftermath of a war that had torn the nations of Europe apart. The fantasy of a common “Western” heritage shared by white Europeans and North Americans appeared as a prophylactic against future wars, at least between those who could qualify as “Westerners.” But it also did something else. By excluding the numerous surviving ancient texts and cultural artifacts from the rest of the world, these new courses on “Western civilization” suggested that premodern “civilization” was the exclusive property of the “West”—enabling a kind of mythical/historical justification for continued domination of those peoples deemed to have come from outside this exclusive group, whether it was Black and Asian Americans in the United States or the millions still living under imperial and colonial rule in Asia and Africa.
By the 1920s, a sizable market for popular classics books and translations had emerged in the United States. A new publishing firm, W.W. Norton, decided to seize on it and signed up a recently retired Latin teacher and private school headmistress named Edith Hamilton to translate a trio of Greek tragedies and write two surveys of ancient literature, The Greek Way and The Roman Way. Published in quick succession in the 1930s, these volumes proved to be an immediate success. Along with Mythology, her retelling of the Greco-Roman legends, the books made Hamilton a household name. Mythology has never been out of print since then and has remained an extraordinary commercial success, enriching her heirs and publishers to this day. Probably no other single person has had such an impact in shaping the perceptions of classical literature and mythology in the United States for almost a century.
How did a retired Latin schoolteacher (Hamilton was 62 when The Greek Way was published), with limited formal education and almost no scholarly credentials, come to be one of the most influential “classicists” of the 20th century? Victoria Houseman’s annalistic new biography, American Classicist, does not quite see this question as the puzzle it is, in part because Houseman has so much admiration for her subject that Hamilton’s successes are largely taken for granted. But the book still makes for gripping reading, as we trace the trajectory of Hamilton’s life from her activist youth (she was a member of the Baltimore Equal Suffrage League), through her various travels in Europe and Asia, her health troubles (she was a breast cancer survivor), her fascinating romantic partnerships with other women, to her second career as a popularizer of the ancient world and as a public intellectual who became closely associated with wealthy and powerful conservative groups in the US…
Read on for more of Hamilton’s remarkable– and cautionary– story: “Ancient Worlds,” from @EmilyRCWilson (@emilyrcwilson.bsky.social) in @thenation.
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As we contemplate classics, we might send aquatic birthday greetings to Squidward Tentacles; today is his (fictional) birthday. A main characters of the SpongeBob SquarePants franchise, he is SpongeBob’s and Patrick’s grumpy neighbor and the former’s coworker at the Krusty Krab who lives in an Easter Island head. He is a mostly unpleasant artist and musician, and his favorite hobbies are painting self-portraits and playing the clarinet.
Though Squidward’s name contains the word “squid,” he is an octopus.
“Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts”*…
Julius Caesar, who was deified by the Roman Senate this week in 42 BCE
At least, most of mankind. Anna Della Subin on men turned divine…
In the beginning, it was the serpent who first proposed that mankind might become divine. Ye shall be as gods, he advised, as the fruit waited…
The idea that a man might turn divine, even without intending or willing it, was to ancient Greece a natural and perfectly rational occurrence. Traffic flowed between earth and the dwelling place of the gods in the sky. In his Theogony, the poet Hesiod sang of the births of gods in a genealogy often crossed with that of humans. He told of mortals who became daemons, or deific spirits; of the half-gods, born of mixed parentage; of the man-gods, or heroes, venerated for their deeds. The theorist Euhemerus claimed he found, on a desert island, a golden pillar inscribed with the birth and death dates of the immortal Olympians. According to his hypothesis, all gods were originally men who had once lived on earth, yet their roots did not impinge upon their cosmic authority, nor make them any less divine. The ranks of the gods swelled with warriors and thinkers, from the Spartan general Lysander to the materialist philosopher Epicurus, deified after his death. In his Parallel Lives, the biographer Plutarch recorded that someone among the older, established gods was evidently displeased by the newcomer, Demetrius. A whirlwind tore apart Demetrius’s robe, severe frost disrupted his procession, and tendrils of hemlock, unusual in the region, sprouted up around the man’s altars, menacingly encircling them.
In ancient Rome, the borders between heaven and earth fell under Senate control, as deification by official decree became a way to legitimize political power. Building upon Greek traditions of apotheosis, the Romans added a new preoccupation with protocol, the rites and rituals that could effect a divine status change. For his conquests, Julius Caesar was divinized, while still alive, by a series of Senate measures that bestowed upon him rights as a living god, including a state temple and license to wear Jupiter’s purple cloak. Yet if it seemed like a gift of absolute power, it was also a way of checking it, as Caesar knew. One could constrain a powerful man by turning him into a god: in divinizing Julius, the Senate also laid down what the virtues and characteristics of a god should be…
The century that reset time began with a man perhaps inadvertently turned divine. It is hard to see him, for the earliest gospels were composed decades after his death at Golgotha, and the light only reaches so far into the dark tombs of the past. The scholars who search for the man-in-history find him embedded in the politics of his day: a Jewish dissident preacher who posed a radical challenge to the gods and governors of Rome. They find him by the banks of the Jordan with John the Baptist. He practices the rite of baptism as liberation, from sin and from the bondage of the empire that occupied Jerusalem…
In the decades after the crucifixion, just as the gospels were being composed and circulated, the apotheosis of Roman emperors had become so routine that Vespasian, as he lay on his deathbed in 79 CE, could quip, ‘Oh dear, I think I’m becoming a god.’…
In 325 CE, the emperor Constantine gathered together two thousand bishops at the Council of Nicaea to officially define the nature of Jesus’s divinity for the first time. Against those who maintained he had been created by God as a son, perfect but still to some extent human, the bishops pronounced Jesus as Word Incarnate on earth, equal to and made of the same substance as God the Father, whatever it may be. Other notions of Jesus’s essence were branded as heresies and suppressed, and gospels deemed unorthodox were destroyed. Through the mandates of the Nicene Creed, the idea of divinity itself became severed from its old proximities to ordinary mortal life. In the work of theologians such as Augustine, who shaped Christian orthodoxy for centuries to come, the chasm between humankind and divinity grew ever more impassable.
Though mystics might strive for union with the godhead, veiled in metaphors, the idea that a man could transform into an actual deity became absurd. God is absolutely different from us, the theologians maintained; the line between Creator and His creation clearly drawn.
Eminently worth reading in full: “First Rites,” a fascinating excerpt from Accidental Gods, by @annadella in @GrantaMag.
* Plotinus
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As we delve into the divine, we might recall that it was on this date in 1953 that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered in Paris. The English-language version premiered in London in 1955. In a poll conducted by the British Royal National Theatre in 1998/99, it was voted the “most significant English-language play of the 20th century.”
Waiting for Godot, Theatre de Babylone–the first performance (source)
You say “to-may-to,” I say “to-mat-to”…
From Godchecker (“your guide to the gods”): the fully searchable Holy Database Of All Known Gods— over 2,850 and counting (over 3,700, including spirits, demons and saints)…
As we marvel at the miraculousness of it all, we might recall that it was on this date in 1769 that the La Brea Tar Pits were first noticed by Spanish explorers in what is now known as Los Angeles. Juan Crespi, a Franciscan friar with the expedition of Gaspar de Portola (the first Spanish governor of the Californias) reported: “The 3rd, we proceeded for three hours on a good road; to the right were extensive swamps of bitumen which is called chapapote. We debated whether this substance, which flows melted from underneath the earth, could occasion so many earthquakes.” (The English name of the site is redundant, as “La Brea” comes from the Spanish word for “tar.”)
While evidence suggests that prehistoric native Americans used and traded the asphalt, the site is now noted for the fossils found there (first by Professor William Denton in 1875).
A “re-creation” at the La Brea Site (source)
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