I’ve been reading about religion recently, from several different sources. What I love, and find fascinating about religion, is how many stories essentially appear again and again, in culture after culture.
Death and resurrection: often for three days. Cashford, Moon in Myth and Image, notes that three days is the same as the dark of the moon, and suggests that’s where the myth finds its root. The moon dies each month, but returns again to its full light: why can’t humans? Gods certainly do: Mithras, Osiris, Jesus, Demeter, Inanna…some explaining the wintertime, others to save mankind, some…just for kicks?
Self-sacrifice, too: a god sacrificing himself to himself. Perusha, Odin, Brahma, Mithras, Jesus. Where does it come from? Reverence of the animal the society relied on for survival, and its sacrifice so we may live - and then the concept becomes deified?
Enheduanna has Inanna destroy a mountain whose description sounds very like the garden of Eden. The translator suggests it represents the dawn of mankind feeling they can tame and control nature - and Enheduanna’s against it. The biblical story’s the flip side of the coin - spirit has been divorced from nature and Eden is perfection. The myths came into being at roughly the same place and period in history.
What other myths are there like this, archetypal stories that we see in culture after culture? Is there something deep in the human psyche where they take root, is it some historic stage or event in our past, or is it coincidence and cultural osmosis that they take such similar forms?
Resurrection also crops up (get it?) in agricultural cultures. You literally plant your god in the ground and He or She comes up again to be harvested.
Since all religion begins as myth, it makes sense that societies facing similar challenges (famine, war, death) wrote similar stories to try to contain and control them. Our story is science.
If it does not derail the discussion, can anyone speculate on the transition from polytheistic beliefs (ancient Greece, later Rome) where gods were certainly powerful but still vulnerable (in other words, not omnipotent), to the more recent model of monotheism where god is all-powerful and all-knowing and does not appear to have vulnerability in the face of man. What is that evolution attributed to?
Abstraction. Polytheism is rooted in animism – there is a spirit in *that *tree, or *that *mountain. As we intellectualize through language, myth doubles back on itself: what do all these spirits have in common? *The *spirit. Nous. God. Eventually the enchanted world is winnowed down to Manichean dualism: good vs evil. The final step is there is only good, or its absence or distance from it.
Monotheistic gods are more resistant to advances in knowledge.
God(s) are used to explain a gap in knowledge, among other purposes. Societies that didn’t know how the solar system work, or how weather worked, invented sun gods and rain gods. The sun god pushed the sun across the sky, the weather god pissed on the farms, or however it’s supposed to work.
But what happens when you come to realize what the sun is, and why it goes across the sky? Now there’s no need for a sun god, and in fact it contradicts what you now know. Can your religion casually dismiss gods as we learn more about the world and still maintain credibility?
Compare this to a monotheistic god. This god can be anything and everything. He can be whatever you want him to be. You learn how the sun works? Great, god did it. God created the earth and the sun and set them in motion. Figure out how rain clouds form? Great, god created the earth like it was as a harmonious system, etc.
If your god is amorphous like this, then he can elegantly slide in and out of explanations as you learn more about the world without toppling the whole house of cards.
As I understand it, even the ancient Hebrews didn’t initially reject polytheism, they started out with the belief in the one god that was more powerful than all other gods. I’m not sure exactly how they switched to monotheism, IIRC it followed the fall of the First Temple, but it seems logical at some point to reject other gods when you are worshipping the only one that is all powerful.
I’m just guessing here, but perhaps a nomadic people, as the Israelites were assumed to have been initially, would have a preference for a single god that would be with them where ever they traveled, as opposed to a god who lived on a particular mountain or in the water. But perhaps thats an oversimplification of the concept.
I would assume they have a basis somewhere, yes. Some mixture between accurate observation of the world and interpretations thereof, and human psychology. I think religious myths both come from somewhere and tell us something important about ourselves, as humans.
Self immolation has grabbed my attention recently. Do people agree with the hypothesis in the OP, or are there other explanations?
Is there any actual evidence that any character other than Jesus was actually believed to have died and resurrected after three days? And likewise for the idea of “a god sacrificing himself to himself”?