Treatise on the Gods

"Its [religion's] single function is to give man access to the powers which seem to control his destiny, and its single purpose is to induce those powers to be friendly to him. ...they are the only common characters that all of them show. Nothing else is essential."

"In its pure and simple form religion is not often encountered today. It is almost as rare, indeed, as pure democracy or pure reason."

"Within all great religions there arise, from time to time, cults, which seek to rid worship of formalization and artificiality. One of the most familiar of them is called mysticism. ...There were mystics among the ancient Jews, and their ideas gave pungency and glamor to the Book of Revelation."

"The essence of mysticism is that it breaks down all barriers between the devotee and his god, and thereby makes the act of worship a direct and personal matter. ...without the aid of any human agent, he comes face to face with his god, and can make his wants known directly."

"Open any treatise upon pastoral theology and you will find the author warning his sacerdotal readers against old women who pray too much and are otherwise too intimate with God."

"If all the faithful inclined to mysticism, and had a talent for it, there would be empty pews in the churches and the whole ecclesiastical structure would begin to rock. But... a downright prohibition of mysticism would be only too plainly a prohibition of religion."

"...there is really no need for the gentlemen of the cloth to be alarmed, for not too many human beings... are fit for encounters with the gods. The rest prefer to transact their business at a distance and through intermediaries."

"Protestantism itself, in its early phases, was plainly a movement toward mysticism: its purpose, at least in theory, was to remove the priestly veil separating man from the revealed Word of God. But that veil was restored almost instantly, and by the year 1522, five years after Wittenberg, Luther was damning the Anabaptists with all the ferocious certainty of a medieval Pope, and his followers were docily accepting his teaching."

"It is highly probable that the first priest appeared to the world simultaneously with the first religion; nay, that he actually invented it."

"The invention of fire-making apparatus is never ascribed to the whole tribe, nor even to a group within it, but always to a single Fire-Bringer, and usually he is felt to be so unusual that he is credited with a divine character. ...The very myths themselves are the compositions, not of the folk, but of professional artists—humble, perhaps, but gifted more than most. So with folk-songs. So with theological dramas. So with theories of government."

"Certainly religion must be granted to be one of the greatest inventions ever made on earth. It not only probably antedated all the rest... it was also more valuable to the Dawn Man than any or all of them. For it had the peculiar virtue of making his existence more endurable."

"He was afflicted by a new curse: the power to think... man suffered under the stealthy, insidious assaults of his awakening brain... It not only caused him to remember the tree that came near falling on him the previous week; it also enabled him to picture the tree that might actually fetch him tomorrow... now he was harried by a concept of danger in general, and tortured by speculations about its how and why."

"Three devices for dealing with this accumulating unpleasantness lay before him... seeking out the causes... knowledge... denying that it was unpleasant... poetry... and... trying to halt the falling of trees by appealing and protesting to the unseen but palpable powers... magic or religion. I incline to believe that the third device was adopted before either of the other two. ...All mammals, in truth, seem to have an inborn tendency to identify causation with volition. They are naturally pugnacious, and life to them consists largely of a search for something or someone to blame it on."

"The birds and insects... are highly scientific... in inventiveness they are they are far superior to all mammals save man."

"If ants and bees have any conception of religion at all, they are probably atheists. But primitive man as a mammal naturally made his first attempt to better his lot, not by adding labor to his other pains, but by seeking to placate or destroy his enemies and by courting his friends."

"...drowning, dropping sunstruck, getting killed by lightning, by wild beasts or by falling rocks and trees, dying in general. An inimical volition seemed to lurk in all of them. It was not hard to imagine some evil will throwing down the avalanche, or sending the lightning, or drawing the drowning man down to death. In fact, it was easier to imagine it than not to imagine it."

"To primitive man thinking was even more unpalatable than it is to the modern Christians. He did it badly, as they do, and his brief experience of it had taught him that it brought only woe."

"The concept of the supernatural... must have come much later. To primitive man all things were natural. He did not think of lightnings, winds and avalanches as differing in essence from tigers and wolves; he thought of them as substantially identical to tigers and wolves. ...Thus the earliest imaginable religion, in the strict sense, had no gods; it simply had powers of extraordinary potency, to be dealt with as ordinary powers are dealt with, but with a certain exaggeration of effort."

"Rivals... must have come upon the scene at a very early stage, for the new trade of priestcraft had attractions that were plainly visible... It carried an air of pleasing novelty; there was daring in it, and thrills therewith; it made for popularity and a spacious and lazy life; dignity belonged to it; above all, it seemed easy."

"We may assume that the first practitioner [of priestcraft] hastened to spread the word that there was vastly more to it than appeared on the surface—that under his facile whoops and gyrations glowed a peculiar inward illumination, highly refined in its nature and hard to achieve. Hints of the same sort still come from holy men: it is... their own singular state of grace, partly engendered by the apostolic laying on of hands, and partly the fruit of an inborn gift for holiness."

"The first priest [probably]... soon grasped the fact that his monopoly could not last... he sought to dispose of his most formidable rival by admitting him as an apprentice... presently there was a whole guild of them... pooling their professional secrets and equipment, accumulating a tradition, and acquiring a definite place in society."

"The moment one priest turned into two all these qualifications for kingship went for naught, for one was destroyed that was greater than all of them, and that was the character of a single and indivisible man."

"The simple savages of those days had not yet formulated the concept of government by committee; they wanted to be led... They were yet close cousins to the brutes who hunted in packs, always with one leader."

"They [primitive men] had no communal policy save that of forthright attack upon whatever seemed to menace them; they had not yet invented congresses, plebiscites, or even councils of war: their minds were still too primitive to be equal to the colossal feat—perhaps the most revolutionary, when it was achieved at last, in the whole history of man—of lifting reflection from its natural place after action, or, at best, alongside, and putting it in front."

"When a ruler... submits gracefully to the religious ideas prevailing among his people he greatly augments his prestige and popularity. Believers are consoled and even skeptics are reassured, for skepticism commonly distrusts iconoclasm as much as it distrusts orthodoxy."

"The clergy repay this friendly recognition of their place in society by an almost unfailing devotion to the constituted authorities. When they take part in rebellions, it is almost always against subversive usurpers, not legitimate rulers. ...Their prayers always go up for kings, not for rebels and reformers."

"The great religious reformers have never preached the liberation of the masses. Luther, John Calvin and John Wesley were all on the side of authority. The Catholic church is for it everywhere today, and the more intransigent it is the better the church likes it."

"The patriotism of a priest is like the patriotism of a stock-broker. When he is found questioning the established order it usually develops, upon inquiry, that he is also questioning the tenets of the church, and he is on his way to heresy."

"It may be that there are magicians who are not also priests, but it would be hard to find a priest who is not, in some sense, a magician."

"Only the "species," or "accidents," i.e., the outward appearances, of the bread and wine remain; otherwise, they are completely transformed into flesh and blood. Here we have all the characteristics of a magical act, as experts set them forth: the suspension of natural laws, the transmutation of material substance, the use of puissant verbal formula, and the presence of an adept."

"Magic or religion: it is all one."

"Theologians themselves dispose of the matter by calling everything they do an act of religion, including even such operations as bedizening themselves with high-sounding titles and dignities, superior to any ever claimed by Christ, and laying taxes upon the faithful for their own aggrandizement."

"Their [the theologians'] earliest forerunners... were aware of no difference between magic and religion, but practiced both with easy consciences."

"Early man... sought to identify himself with the animals he especially admired, and when he ate their flesh it was not alone to nourish his body but also to enrich his psyche with their virtues. ...That aspiration... was to lead... to the physical horrors of cannibalism on the one hand and to the intellectual horrors of transubstantiation on the other. At a much earlier period it was to set up the curious institution of the totem... The falcon-god Horus, of the Egyptians, probably began as such a totem, and so did the cow Hathor and the serpent Neith."

"Missionaries, I suppose, followed the traders, then as now, for it is a peculiarity of homo sapiens that he is a teaching animal, and longs always to instruct and improve his fellows. And if there were no actual missionaries, it may be safely assumed that the traders themselves were not lacking in the common zeal. If nothing else urged them to preach their gods, then they must have been inspired by mere boastfulness. Their very presence in far places was proof enough that the gods at home had the power to aid and protect them, and the will to do it. ...This naive pride in the home gods, more than any revealed command from them, is responsible for the missionary effort in our own day."

"The custom arose of importing outlander gods... The number of gods... threatened to become enormous, for every returning traveler had news of a new one. ...most tribes had endless hierarchies, some borrowed and some bred on the spot. ...The semi-civilized Hindus have thousands. But in the presence of such multitudes, the less potent tend to be disposed for incompetence, or to be forgotten as trivial and unnecessary, or to be reduced to the rank of mere domestic divinities. Whenever a really potent new god is introduced, he clears off shoals of lesser rivals."

"The whole history of religion in Egypt is the history of the absorption and destruction of rivals by Rê, the sun-god; in the end... he was himself challenged and badly damaged by the great goddess Isis. Similarly the air-god of the Aztecs, Tezcatlipoca... The Catholic saints... have their heyday and decline. ...Among the Protestants, there is a like combat between the ferocious Yahweh, of Old Testament, and the gentle Jesus of the New, with Yahweh, of late, usually victorious."

"When primitive man began to practice agriculture his need of gods greatly increased... now exposed to new and very serious hazards. ...birds ...insects ...rain ...sun ...wind-storms ...Out of the fertility cults that were thus set up there gradually arose the concept of a god specially devoted to the care of the fields, and in the course of time this god began to be thought of as a woman, for it was women who brought forth children... in the way the earth brought forth food. Moreover, it was women who did most of the field labor... Thus a goddess called the Earth Mother, the Corn Mother, or something of the sort began to be heard of... and in the course of time she became a divinity of the highest rank, and had her following throughout the vast region stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Baltic. In Greece she was Gaia, in Babylon she was Ninlil, and in the wilds of the north she was Freya."

"The earliest records of all the historical peoples, from the Sumerians to the Celts, are full of references to this Earth Mother, and she survives among the savages today, and even in Christendom. The Virgin Mary, in all probability, descends from her, for in very remote times she was already looked upon as the mother of the other gods. She gradually assimilated the special powers and prerogatives of various rivals, and even came to be identified with them."

"Earth Mother... was never without the challenge of competitors. ...These gods were so numerous that even the priests could scarcely call the names of all of them, just as a Catholic archbishop of today would be stumped if he were asked to recite a roster of the saints. The Celts alone seem to have had thousands. ...the lesser gods were often put into groups for convenience, and their individuality tended to disappear. Thus there were the oak-spirits; the niskai, who were water-spirits; and the quadriviae, who were goddesses of the cross-roads. The early Greeks, as everyone knows, had multitudes of subordinate gods and goddesses who were similarly classified... These mediatized and regimented divinities survive today as fairies, gnomes, jinns, sylphs, trolls, fays, nixies, and kobolds. Every civilized race has its battalions of them."

"It was not, however, the competition of such hordes of standardized godkins that menaced and finally dethroned the Earth Mother, nor that of the thousands of divine lions, wolves, goats, cats, serpents, dragons, and basilisks who raged everywhere, nor even the great predecessors, Rain, Fire, and Wind, but that of an old-timer suddenly clothed with a new dignity and power... the sun-god... the special god of kings, and the pharaohs pretended to be his children, as their colleagues of Babylonia pretended to be descended from Merodach, another sun-god."

"Rê and Merodach, like the Earth Mother, had their counterparts among all the ancient peoples, including the Mayas, Aztecs, and Incans of the New World,"

"The old Persian devotion to the sun developed, in the course of time, into a highly intellectualized monotheism, and its prophets predicted the coming of a messiah. It was Persian priests, or magi, who came to Bethlehem to worship the infant Jesus, as Mathew records. The Parsees of India... are the descendants of Old Believers who refused to yield to when the Calif Omar conquered Persia in the year 641 and ordered the whole population to turn Moslem. ...so late as the Seventeenth Century, after a thousand years of Islam, a Persian reformer, Akbar by name, proposed formally that it be revived. ...every Moslem, facing Mecca when he prays, recalls the days when his ancestors faced the East and the risen sun, just as every Christian goes to church on Sun-day, celebrates Christmas on the dies natalis solis invictus or birthday of Mithra, and employs symbols and ceremonials borrowed from the ancient sun-worship at Easter, the time of the vernal equinox."

"A form of sun-worship little different from that of ancient Egypt survives in Japan as Shinto, the state religion. The queen of its pantheon is Ama-terasu no Ohokami, a sun-goddess, and the mikado is her chief priest and prophet. ...it is the Land of the Rising Sun. The sun-disk is the official emblem of the country... Shintoism has room for many other gods or kami, including sea-gods, mountain-gods, animal-gods, tree-gods, house-gods, a moon-god, a fire-god, and several heirs of the Earth Mother—some of the last named, curiously enough, being male. There are also gods who are deified human beings... But the sun-goddess is above all the rest."

"In the Sixth Century of our era the infiltration of Buddhism into Japan corrupted her [sun-goddess Ama-terasu no Ohokami's] cult, but twelve centuries later there was a Shinto revival, and at the time of the revolution of 1865-68 an appeal to the ancient faith of the people helped to depose the shoguns and restore the mikados. Since then Shintoism has been the established religion of the country... It is, of course, too idiotic to be taken seriously by a people to be pretending to be civilized; hence most Japanese... toy with more plausible faiths, including especially Buddhism and Confucianism. They are not, indeed, a religious folk."

"Nearly all religions... show a pull toward goddesses as they decline: the case of Christianity and its mariolatry is familiar. But the sun-god... was probably the very incarnation of maleness, as the Earth Mother was of femaleness."

"He [the sun-god] had existed long before the first peasant turned the first sod, but it was only as one among many: the rain-god and the wind-god, to name no more, were his equals and rivals. But with the beginning of orderly sowing and reaping it must have been evident to early man that the kiss of the sun was more important to their success than anything else... not even excepting the kiss of the rain. ...it was spectacular, lordly in mien, dramatic, brilliant, overwhelming. ...It arose in the morning with the air of a king condescending to expose himself to his lieges, and it went down in the evening to the accompaniment of incomparable fireworks. ...when it was withdrawn, life was bleak and unpleasant. At night, when it was gone, men shivered, for the air grew damp and cold, and all sorts of evil shapes were abroad. Thus it is no wonder that the early kings called the sun their father, and tried to emulate its blinding splendors."

"The Earth Mother was limned, and her symbols were cherished, but it was apparently a long while afterward before man began to cherish the baton that was the symbol of kings. ...the baton and phallus were one and the same ...both came into the world with the greatest single discovery ever made by man, to wit, the discovery that babies have human fathers, and are not put into their mother's bodies by the gods."

"Primitive society... was probably strictly matriarchal. ...What masculine authority there was resided in the mother's brother. ...Their father, at best, was simply a pleasant friend who fed them and played with them; at worst, he was an indecent loafer who sponged on the mother. ....Briffault, demonstrated its high probability in three immense volumes [The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions (1927)]... concepts inseparable from a matriarchate color every custom and every idea: they show also that those primeval concepts still condition our own ways of thinking and doing things, so that "the societal characters of the human mind" all seem to go back "to the functions of the female and not to those of the male.""

"The ancient and curious thing called religion, as it shows itself in the modern world, is often so overladen with excrescences and irrelevancies that its fundamental nature tends to be obscured."