Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The final – and conceivably the most important – aspect of this constellation of core beliefs is the simple fact that, around the time of the rise of the first great civilisations, the main gods changed sex, as the Great Goddess, or a raft of smaller goddesses, were demoted and male gods took their place. Once again, it is not hard to see why this transformation occurred. Predominantly agricultural societies, grouped around the home, were at the very least egalitarian and very probably matriarchal societies, with the mother at the centre of most activities. City life, on the other hand, as was discussed in the previous chapter, was much more male-orientated. The greater need for standing armies favoured men, who could leave home. The greater career specialities – potters, smiths, soldiers, scribes, and not least priests – also favoured men, for women were left at home to look after the children. And with men fulfilling several occupations, they would have had a greater range of self-interest than housewives, and therefore felt a more urgent need to partake in politics. In such a background, it was only natural for the leaders to be males too, so that kings took precedence over queens. Male priests ran the temples and, in certain cases, conferred godlike status on their kings. The effect that this change has had on history has been incalculable. It was first pointed out in the nineteenth century by Johann Jakob Bachofen in The Law of the Mothers, or Mother Right.

Analysis of early religions can seem at times like numerology. There are so many of them, and they are so varied, that they can be made to fit any theory. Nevertheless, insofar as the world’s religions can be reduced to core elements, then those elements are: a belief in the Great Goddess, in the Bull, in the main sky gods (the sun and the moon), in sacred stones, in the efficacy of sacrifice, in an afterlife, and in a soul of some sort which survives death and inhabits a blessed spot. These elements describe many religions in some of the less developed parts of the world even today. Among the great civilisations, however, this picture is no longer true and the reason for that state of affairs is without question one of the greatest mysteries in the history of ideas. For during the period 750–350 BC, the world underwent a great intellectual sea-change. In that relatively short time, most of the world’s great faiths came into being.

The first man to point this out was the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, in 1949, in his book The Origin and Goal of History. He called this period the ‘Axial Age’ and he characterised it as a time when ‘we meet with the most deep cut dividing line in history. Man, as we know him today, came into being . . . The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this period. Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Leh-tsu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to scepticism, to materialism, sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers – Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato – of the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West, without any one of these regions knowing of the others.’⁵⁶

Jaspers saw man as somehow becoming ‘more human’ at this time. He says that reflection and philosophy appeared, that there was a ‘spiritual breakthrough’ and that the Chinese, Indians, Iranians, Jews and Greeks between them created modern psychology, in which man’s relation to God is as an individual seeking an ‘inner’ goal rather than having a relationship with a number of gods ‘out there’, in the skies, in the landscape around, or among our ancestors. Not all the faiths created were, strictly speaking, monotheisms, but they did all centre around one individual, whether that man (always a man) was a god, or the person through whom god spoke, or else someone who had a particular vision or approach to life which appealed to vast numbers of people. Arguably, this is the most momentous change in the history of ideas.

We start with the religion of Israel, not because it came first (it didn’t, as we shall see), but because, as Grant Allen says, ‘It is the peculiar glory of Israel to have evolved God.’⁵⁷ In Israel’s case, this evolution is especially clear.