(David)
I've been thinking about the deities and spirits I conversed with in my shower and then posted about last week. I've been asking, who are they?
Things might fall into place for me sensibly if I look at them in chronological order, starting with the Hebrew god Yahweh. Who is he? Where did he come from? How did he achieve such all-encompassing and absolute power? Did he achieve it, or did humans achieve it for him?
I'll start by saying that I'm not an atheist. I believe in spirits. I have met some. Communed with them. Travelled with some. There's no reason for me to doubt their existence, in this world and the Otherworld.
I believe that some spirits are gods. I don't worship them, although I'm open to the possibility that I might work with some in the future, but I do believe they are genuine beings with individual personalities and varying degrees of power and influence.
My departure from believing that Yahweh is the one and only god came from my personal experiences, from my realisation that other gods did and still do exist.
So, who is Yahweh?
He is presented to us as the Creator God. Therefore, it makes sense for me to start my search for his origin by looking at the cosmogony of the Abrahamic faith.
The creation myth of the Hebrews, which appears in the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis in all the nearly six thousand translations of the Hebrew and Christian bibles in two hundred languages, is a collection of much earlier regional creation myths that were absorbed from other cultures.
The two most recent absorptions and strong influences at the time when Genesis was being written were from the Egyptians and the Babylonians.
For thousands of years, Egypt controlled the eastern leg of the fertile crescent, all along the Nile and up to include the land of ancient Canaan, which is a region that roughly corresponds to modern day Palestine, Israel, western Jordan, southern and coastal Syria, Lebanon, and up to the southern border of Turkey. The Hebrews lived in captivity in Egypt for 430 years, calculated by scholars to have been between 1876 and 1446 BCE.
The Babylonians controlled the western leg of the fertile crescent, between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Babylonia conquered the kingdom of Judah and took the Hebrews into captivity for 59 years of exile from 597 to 538 BCE, when the Persian conqueror of Babylonia, Cyrus the Great, released them.
Modern scholars place the authorship of Genesis in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, a window that includes that period when the exiled Hebrews were absorbing Babylonian culture.
It's the Babylonian creation myth that is rehashed in Chapter 1 of Genesis, and then the Egyptian creation myth is rehashed in Chapter 2. They're not identical, obviously, but installed one after the other they pretty much cover all the bases the Genesis writers wanted. The main one being that in their re-telling of these stories, the many gods of Egypt's and Babylonia's polytheistic religions became the monotheistic god of the Hebrews.
Those creation myths from Egypt and Babylon weren't original, either. They both derived from even more ancient sources, including mainly the Sumerian creation myth. And it's reasonable to assume that the ultimately original source material had been around for long before even the Sumerians.
So those stories had existed for thousands of years before any Genesis writer put pen to papyrus. Everyone knew them. Everyone. The Genesis writers' primary task was to have readers recognise the ancient oral traditions in their opening words, and from that comfortable place take them on a different journey during which recognisable events and places and even character names cropped up in often recognisable sequences, but they were heading to an entirely new literary destination where the multiple gods of the earlier creation myths were condensed into Yahweh, the single all-powerful and all-creating god of the Hebrews.
That's how those writers positioned Yahweh, and it's fair I think to assume that their motivation was largely political, mainly, in the first instance, to achieve control and power for themselves and their peers inside their own culture.
So that's how it came to be taught that Yahweh was the one and only. And that, I think, is why those writers did it. But what about Yahweh?
Do we accept that he is a spirit, a being with intentions and agency? I do. I accept him as such, along with many other spirits. If that's the case, did he go along passively with the elevation to supremacy? Or did he inspire those writers and guide them in their work in order to achieve that huge power for himself? To rule absolutely what started quite small but would one day become a world religion, in fact three world religions?
I don't know. My instinct is that it was the latter. I'll see if looking at his earlier identity and nature might help to clarify things.
In the earliest known mention of Yahweh, in the Bronze Age between 1550 and 1200 BCE, he was one of the many sky gods, specifically in his case a weather god and a divine warrior of lands in the south. His cult followed trade routes north, eventually into Canaan. There, he was introduced to the Hebrews, who were at that time a polytheistic people worshipping a variety of Canaanite gods and goddesses, including El, El's consort Asherah, and Baal. Yahweh was added to the list.
His nature? Storm god and divine warrior. Smiting and destroying and all-conquering. The exact nature of the god-to-come of the Old Testament.
When did he become a gentle, loving, father figure? That came hundreds of years later, and involved the creation of the Jesus Christ we are taught about, the creation of the messiah cult, which I can't see any other way now than as a hugely successful political PR job by Israel's religious movers and shakers.
So, Jesus. Was he an actual living person? Respected academics who have spent their lifetimes studying this subject are divided on the question. Having absorbed much of their discourse, my instinct is that he was a useful myth. An essential one. If he was actually skin and bone for a few years, then later he was mythologised because the movers and shakers needed him to be so much more.
Was he the Son of God? Well, yes, he was, wasn't he? Because that's what he was created to be. It's precisely what he existed for in the political arena. If Yahweh can be said to exist as a powerful spirit and divine myth, then Jesus exists too regardless of whether he was ever a person drawing breath.
I'm an animist. For me, everything has a spirit. Including fictional characters in books read by many people. They become egregors, those characters, magical entities created from the thoughts and feelings of people. It requires no stretch of my imagination and understanding to accept Jesus as such, which means that for me he is a spirit.
How did the myth of him come to take over so much of the world? Because that's what he was for. That's what the human movers and shakers wanted, generations of them in the Hebrew religion followed far more successfully by many more generations of movers and shakers among the gentiles. I don't need to examine the history of the Christian churches to see this playing out.
And that, I believe, is also what Yahweh wanted. Because he's still the storm god, the divine warrior, the smiting destroyer and conqueror. That's been his nature all along, from way before he was elevated to supremacy over all other gods, and it's still his nature now. Jesus's gentleness is a master stroke of genius to balance that stormy violence.
Which brings me, finally, in my thoughts about the deities and spirits I conversed with the other day in my shower, to Anthony.
Is he a saint? Well, yes. The Roman Catholic church sanctified him, so he is undeniably a saint. But did he exist before that? Before the person who may or may not have existed in human form but upon whom the church hung an identity and a responsibility.
My instinct is that, yes, he did. That he was a spirit loved by the people of some place, known in their local folklore, a being who helped people to find things they had lost.
That's how the Christian church has operated through the ages, isn't it? Co-opting pagan spirits, making them saints. People continued communing with them, working with them, regardless of their official status. I think Anthony is one of those spirits.
In my shower, today, I was comfortable asking "the spirit who protects me" to look after me getting in and out of the shower, and then to see Anthony as a different spirit who I ask to help me find my missing pebble.
I don't know who that first spirit is. The genius loci of our valley perhaps? I don't know. I've asked them to reveal themselves to me. It's something I'll meditate upon.
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