Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

5

Sacrifice, Soul, Saviour: ‘the Spiritual Breakthrough’

In 1975 the British archaeologist Peter Warren excavated a small building that formed part of the Knossos complex in Crete. Knossos was the main site of the Minoan, bull-worshipping civilisation, dating to 2000 BC, which was discovered by Sir Arthur Evans in 1900. The building excavated by Warren had at some stage been the victim of an earthquake, making it more difficult than usual to ‘read’ the rubble. Despite this, he soon came across the scattered bones of four children aged between eight and twelve. Many of the bone fragments bore the tell-tale knife marks that resulted from de-fleshing of the bones. More children’s bones were found in an adjoining room, ‘one of them a vertebra bearing a knife-cut pathologists associate with slitting of the throat’.¹ Warren concluded that the remains were those of children who had been sacrificed to avert a great disaster – perhaps the very earthquake that was so soon upon them.

Of all the beliefs and practices in ancient religion, sacrifice – both animal and human, and even of kings – is the most striking, certainly from a modern standpoint. In our examination of the origins of religion, among the Palaeolithic painted caves and Venus figurines, and around the time that worship of the Great Goddess and the Bull began, we find no traces of sacrifice. However, by the time of the first great civilisations – in Sumer, Egypt, Mohenjo-Daro and China – it was widely practised and proved very durable: human sacrifice was abolished in parts of India only in the nineteenth century AD.^{4 2} Surveys of ancient texts, decorations on temple and palace walls, on pottery and mosaics, together with anthropological surveys among nineteenth- and twentieth-century tribes across the world, have confirmed the widespread variety of sacrificial practices (the difference between religious sacrifice and magical sacrifice is discussed in the notes). In Mexico children were sacrificed so that their tears would encourage rain.³ In other cultures people with physical abnormalities were selected for sacrifice. A not-uncommon form of sacrifice is for a pig to be slaughtered. This sends a message to the gods, who are deemed to have replied according to the state of the pig’s liver. (The liver is the bloodiest organ and blood was often identified with the life force.)

If we can say that the ideas of the Great Goddess, the Bull and sacred stones are the earliest core ideas of many religions, they were followed by a second constellation of beliefs that were all in place before the great faiths that are still dominant today were conceived. Sacrifice was the most striking of this second set of ideas.

A sacrifice is, at its most basic, two things. It is a gift and it is the link between man and the spiritual world. It is an attempt either to coerce the gods, so they will behave as we wish them to behave, or to propitiate them, to defuse their anger, to get, get rid of, to atone. This much is easy to understand. What requires a fuller explanation is the actual form that sacrifice takes, and has taken in the past. Why must animals or humans be killed? Why is it that blood must be shed? How did such an ostensibly cruel practice take root and become widespread? Did ancient people see sacrifice as cruel?

Sacrifice originated at a time when ancient man regarded all that he experienced – even the rocks, rivers and mountains – as a form of life. In India hair was sacred because it continued to grow after a person’s death and so was judged to have a life of its own.⁴ Vedic Aryans regarded the actual leaping fire as a living thing, swallowing oblations.⁵ Most important, perhaps, sacrifice dates from an era when the rhythms of the world were observed but not understood. It was these rhythms, the very notion of periodicity, that were the basis of religion: such patterns were the expression of mysterious forces.

As the first great civilisations developed in various parts of the world, in Sumer, Egypt and India, for example, the core symbolism – of the Great Goddess, the Bull, and sacred stones – developed and proliferated, taking on many different forms. Among early Indian gods, for example, Indra was constantly compared to a bull.⁶ In Iran the sacrifice of bulls was frequent.⁷ Bull gods were also worshipped in parts of Africa and Asia. In the Akkadian religion in early Mesopotamia the bull was a symbol of power and at Tel Khafaje (near modern Baghdad) the image of a bull was found next to that of the ‘Goddess Mother’.⁸ The main god of the early Phoenician religion was known as shor (‘bull’) and as El (‘merciful bull’). According to Mircea Eliade ‘the bull and Great Goddess was one of the elements that united all the proto-historic religions of Europe, Africa and Asia.’⁹ Among the Dravidian tribes of central India, there developed a custom whereby the heir of a man who had just died had to place by his tomb, within four days, a vast stone, nine or ten feet high. The stone was intended to ‘fasten down’ the dead man’s soul.¹⁰ In many cultures of the Pacific, stones represent either gods, heroes or ‘the petrified spirits of ancestors’. The Khasis of Assam believed that cromlechs, circular alignments, were ‘female’ stones, representing the Great Mother of the clan and that the menhirs, standing stones, were the ‘male’ variety.

Sacrifice may also have begun in a less cruel way, beginning at a time when grain was the main diet, and meat-eating still relatively rare. Animals may have been worshipped, and eating one was a way of incorporating the god’s powers. This is inferred from the Greek word thusia, which has three overlapping meanings: violent, excited motion; smoke; and sacrifice.¹¹ But sowing and reaping are the focal points of the agricultural drama, and these are invariably associated with ritual.¹² In many cultures, for example, the first seeds are not sown but thrown down alongside the furrow as an offering to the gods.¹³ By the same token, the last few fruits were never taken from the tree, a few tufts of wool were always left on the sheep and the farmer, when drawing water from a well, would always put back a few drops ‘so that it will not dry up’.¹⁴

Already, we have here the concept of self-denial, of sacrificing part of one’s share, in order to nourish, or propitiate, the gods. Elsewhere (and this is a practice that stretches from Norway to the Balkans) the last ears of wheat were fashioned into a human figure: sometimes this would be thrown into the next field to be harvested, sometimes it would be kept until the following year, when it would be burned and the ashes thrown on the ground before sowing, to ensure fertility.¹⁵ Records show that human sacrifice was offered for the harvest by certain peoples of central and north America, some parts of Africa, a few Pacific islands, and a number of Dravidian tribes of India.¹⁶ Apart from the Khonds, the Aztecs of Mexico showed the process most clearly, for a young girl was beheaded at the temple of the maize god in a ceremony performed when the crop was just ripe. Only after the ceremony was performed could the maize be reaped and eaten – before that it was sacred and couldn’t be touched. One can imagine why sacrifice, which began in holding back a few ears of corn, should grow increasingly elaborate, and seemingly cruel. Each time the harvest failed, and famine ensued, primitive peoples would have imagined the gods were displeased, unpropitiated, and so they would have redoubled their efforts, adding to their customs, increasing the amount of self-denial, in an attempt to redress the balance.¹⁷

After sacrifice, the next important addition to core beliefs, the most widespread new idea which had emerged since early Neolithic times, was the concept of the ‘sky god’. This is not hard to understand either, though many modern scholars now rather downplay this aspect. By day, the apparent movement of the sun, its constant ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’, and its role in helping shape the seasons and make things grow, would have been as self-evident as it was mysterious to everyone. By night, the sheer multitude of stars, and the even more curious behaviour of the moon, waxing and waning, disappearing and reappearing, its link with the tides and the female cycle, would have been possibly more mysterious. In Mesopotamia (where there were 3,300 names for gods), the Sumerian word for divinity, dingir, meant ‘bright, shining’; the same was true in Akkadian. Dieus, god of the light sky, was common to all Aryan tribes.¹⁸ The Indian god Dyaus, the Roman Jupiter and the Greek Zeus all evolved from a primitive sky divinity, and in several languages the word for light was also the word for divinity (as the English word ‘day’ is related to the Latin word deus). In India in Vedic times, the most important sky god was Varuna, and in Greece Uranus was the sky.¹⁹ His place was eventually taken by Zeus, which is probably the same word as Dieus and Dyaus, meaning both ‘brightness’, ‘shine’, and ‘day’. The existence of sky gods is responsible for the concept of ‘ascension’. In several ancient languages the verb ‘to die’ involved associations with climbing mountains, or taking a road into the hills.²⁰ Ethnological studies show that all across the world, heaven is a place ‘above’, reached by means of a rope, tree or ladder, and there are many ascension rites in, for example, ancient Vedic, Mithraic, and Thracian religions.²¹ Ascension plays an important part in Christianity.

Moon symbolism appears to be associated with early notions of time (see Genesis 1:14–19).²² The fact that the moon at times has a crescent shape induced early people to see in this an echo of the horns of the bull, so that like the sun the moon was also on occasions compared to this divinity. Finally, like the sun, the death and rebirth of the moon meant that it was associated with fertility. The existence of the menstrual cycle convinced certain early peoples that the moon was ‘the master of women’ and in some cases ‘the first mate’.²³

The sky gods also played a role in another core idea: the afterlife. We know that from Palaeolithic times early man had a rudimentary notion of the ‘afterlife’, because even then some people were buried with grave goods which, it was imagined, would be needed in the next world. Looking about them, early humans would have found plenty of evidence for an afterlife, or death and rebirth. The sun and the moon both routinely disappeared and reappeared. Many trees lost their leaves each year but grew new ones when spring came. An afterlife clearly implies some sort of post-mortem existence and this introduces a further core belief, what the historian S. G. Brandon has called humanity’s ‘most fundamental concept’: the soul. It is, he says, a relatively modern idea (compared with the afterlife) and even now is far from universal (though his colleague E. B. Tylor thought it the core to all religions).²⁴ A very common belief is that only special human beings have souls. Some primitive peoples ascribe souls to men and not to women, others the reverse. In Greenland there was a belief that only women who had died in childbirth had souls and enjoyed life thereafter. According to some peoples, the soul is contained in different parts of the body: the eye, the hair, the shadow, the stomach, the blood, the liver, the breath, above all the heart. For some primitive peoples, the soul leaves the body via the top of the head, for which reason trepanning has always been a common religious ritual.²⁵ Similarly in Hindu the soul is not the heart but, ‘being “the size of a thumb” (at death)’, it lives in the heart. The Rig Veda recognised the soul as ‘a light in the heart’. The Gnostics and the Greeks saw the soul as the ‘spark’ or ‘fire’ of life.²⁶

But there was also a widespread feeling that the soul is an alternative version of the self.²⁷ Anthropologists such as Tylor put this down to primitive man’s experience of dreams, ‘that in sleep they seemed to be able to leave their bodies and go on journeys and sometimes see those who were dead.’²⁸ Reflecting on such things, primitive peoples would naturally have concluded that a kind of inner self or soul dwelt in the body during life, departing from it temporarily during sleep and permanently at death.²⁹

For the ancient Egyptians, there were two other entities that existed besides the body, the ka and the ba. ‘The former was regarded as a kind of double of the living person and acted as a protective genius: it was represented by a hieroglyphic sign of two arms upstretching in a gesture of protection.’ Provision had to be made for it at death and the tomb was called the het ka, or ‘house of death’.³⁰ ‘Of what substance it was thought to be compounded is unknown.’³¹ The ba, the second entity, is usually described as the ‘soul’ in modern works on ancient Egyptian culture, and was depicted in art as a human-headed bird. This was almost certainly meant to suggest it was free-moving, not weighed down by the physical limitations of the body. In the illustrations to the Book of the Dead, dating from about 1450 BC, the ba is often shown perched on the door of the tomb, or watching the fateful post-mortem weighing of the heart. ‘But the concept was left somewhat vague and the ba does not seem to have been conceived as the essential self or the animating principle.’³²

The Egyptians conceived individuals as psycho-physical organisms, ‘no constituent part being more essential than the other’. The elaborate burial rites that were practised in Egypt for three millennia all reflected the fact that a person was expected to be ‘reconstituted’ after death. This explains the long process of embalmment, to prevent the decomposition of the corpse, and the subsequent ceremony of the ‘Opening of the Mouth’, designed to revivify the body’s ability to take nourishment. ‘The after-life was never etherealised in the Egyptian imagination, as it was in some quarters, but we do find that as soon as man could set down his thoughts in writing, the idea that man is more than flesh and blood is there.’³³

In Mesopotamia the situation was different. They believed that the gods had withheld immortality from humans – that’s what made them human – but man was still regarded as a psycho-physical organism. Unlike the Egyptians, however, they regarded the psychical part as a single entity. This was called the napistu, which, originally meaning ‘throat’, was extended to denote ‘breath’, ‘life’ and ‘soul’. This napistu, however, was not thought of as the inner essential self, but the animating life principle and what became of the napistu at death isn’t clear. Although they didn’t believe in immortality, the ancient Mesopotamians did believe in a kind of post-mortem survival, a contradiction in terms in a way.³⁴ Death, they believed, wrought a terrible change in a person – he was transformed into an etimmu. ‘The etimmu needed to be nourished by mortuary offerings, and it had the power to torment the living, if it were neglected . . . among the most feared of Mesopotamia’s demonology were the etimmus of those who had died unknown and received no proper burial rites. But, even when well provided for, the afterlife was grim. They dwelt in kur-nu-gi-a, the land of no return, where dust is their food and clay their substance . . . where they see no light and dwell in darkness.’³⁵

The origins of the Hindu religion are far more problematical than any of the other major faiths. After Sir William Jones, a British judge living and working in India in the late eighteenth century, first drew attention to the similarity of Sanskrit to various European languages, scholars have hypothesised the existence of an early proto-European language, from which all others evolved, and a proto-Indo-Aryan people, who spoke the ‘proto-language’ and helped in its dispersal. In its neatest form, this theory proposes that these people were the first to domesticate the horse, an advantage which helped their mobility and gave them a power over others.

Because of their link to the horse, the proto-Indo-Aryans are variously said to have come from the steppe land between the Black Sea and the Caspian, between the Caspian and the Aral Sea, or from other locations in central Asia. The most recent research locates the homeland in the Abashevo culture on the lower Volga and in the Sintashta-Arkaim culture in the southern Urals. From there, according to Asko Parpola, a Finnish professor of Indology, ‘the domesticated horse and the Indo-Aryan language seem to have entered south Asia in the Gandhara grave culture of north Pakistan around 1600 BC’. The most important aspect of their migration is held to have been in north-west India, around the Indus valley, where the great early civilisation of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro suffered a mysterious decline in the second millennium BC, for which the Indo-Aryans are held responsible. It is the Indo-Aryans who are held to have composed the Rig Veda. Their place of origin, and their migration, are said to be reflected in the fact that the Finno-Ugaric language shows a number of words borrowed from what became Sanskrit, that the Andronovo tribes of the steppes show a culture similar to that described in the Rig Veda, and that they left a trail of names, chiefly of rivers (words which are known to be very stable), as they moved across central Asia. They also introduced the chariot (and therefore the horse) into India, and iron – again, items mentioned in the Rig Veda.³⁶ Finally, the general setting of the Rig Veda is pastoral, not urban, meaning it was written down before the Indo-Aryans arrived in the mainly urban world of the Indus valley.

This view has been severely criticised in recent years, not least by Indian scholars, who argue that this ‘migrationist’ theory is ‘racist’, developed by Western academics who couldn’t believe that India generated the Rig Veda all by herself. They argue that there is no real evidence to suggest that the Indo-Aryans came from outside and they point out that the heartland of the Rig Veda more or less corresponds to the present-day Punjab. Traditionally, this presented a problem because that name, Punjab, based on the Sanskrit, panca-ap, means ‘five rivers’, whereas the Rig Veda refers to an area of ‘seven rivers’ with the Sarasvati as the most majestic.³⁷ For many years no one could identify the Sarasvati among today’s rivers, and it was therefore regarded by some as a ‘celestial’ entity. However, in 1989, archaeologists discovered the bed of a once-massive, now dried-up river, six miles wide in places, and this was subsequently confirmed by satellite photographs.³⁸ Along this dried river bed (and a major tributary, making seven rivers in all in the Punjab) are located no fewer than 300 archaeological sites. This thus confirms, for the indigenists at least, not only that the area of the Rig Veda was inside India, but that the drying-up of the river helps explain the collapse of the Indus valley civilisation.³⁹ They also point to recent research on the astronomical events in the Rig Veda which, they say, confirm that these scriptures are much older than the 1900–1200 BC date traditionally ascribed. They argue that the astronomy, and the associated mathematics, show that the Indo-Aryans were indigenous to north-west India, that that is where the Indo-European languages began, and that Indian mathematics were much in advance of those elsewhere. While this debate is inconclusive at the moment (there are serious intellectual holes in both the migrationist and the indigenous theories), it remains true that Indian mathematics was very strong historically, and that, as was discussed in the last chapter, a very old script – perhaps the oldest yet discovered – was unearthed recently in India.

In Vedic thought, man’s life fell into two phases. His earthly life was seen as the more desirable. The hymns of the Rig Veda speak of a people living life to the full – valuing good health, eating and drinking, material luxuries, children.⁴⁰ But there was a post-mortem phase, the quality of which was, to an extent, determined by one’s piety on earth. However, the two phases were definitive: there was no idea whatsoever that the soul might return to live again on earth – that was a later invention. In the early stage, when Vedic bodies were buried, the dead were imagined as living in an underworld, presided over by Yama, the death-god.⁴¹ The dead were buried with personal articles and even food, though what part of a person was thought to survive is not clear.⁴² The Indo-Aryans thought of an individual as composed of three entities – the body, the asu, and the manas. The asu was in essence the ‘life principle’, equivalent to the Greek psyche, while the manas were the seat of the mind, the will and the emotions, equivalent to the Greek thymos. There appears to have been no word, and no idea, for the soul as an ‘essential self’. Why there was a change from burial to cremation isn’t clear either.

If one accepts the existence of souls, it follows that there is a need for a place where they can go, after death. This raises the question of where a whole constellation of associated ideas came from – the afterlife, resurrection, and heaven and hell.

The first thing to say is that heaven, hell and the immortal soul were relative latecomers in the ancient world.⁴³ The modern concept of the immortal soul is a Greek idea, which owes much to Pythagoras. Before that, most ancient civilisations thought that man had two kinds of soul. There was the ‘free-soul’, which represented the individual personality. And there were a number of ‘body-souls’ which endowed the body with life and consciousness.⁴⁴ For the early Greeks, for example, human nature was composed of three entities: the body, the psyche, identified with the life principle and located in the head; and the thymos, ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’, located in the phrenes, or lungs.⁴⁵ During life, the thymos was regarded as more important but it didn’t survive death, whereas the psyche became the eidolon, a shadowy form of the body.

This distinction was not maintained beyond the sixth century BC, when the psyche came to be thought of as both the essential self, the seat of consciousness and the life principle. Pindar thought the psyche was of divine origin and therefore immortal.⁴⁶ In developing the idea of the immortal soul Pythagoras was joined by Parmenides and Empedocles, other Greeks living alongside him in southern Italy and Sicily. They were associated with a mystical and puritanical sect known as the Orphics, who at times were ‘fanatical vegetarians’. This appears to have been part of a revolt over sacrifice and the sect used mind-altering drugs – hashish, hemp and cannabis (though here the scholarship is very controversial). These ideas and practices are said to have come from the Scythians, whose homeland was north of the Black Sea (and was visited by Homer). They boasted a curious cult, surrounding a number of individuals suffering a chronic physical disease, possibly haemochromatosis, and possibly brought on by rich iron deposits in the area. This condition culminates in total impotence and eunuchism. There are a number of accounts of cross-dressing in the area and these individuals may have led the funerary ceremonies in Scythia, at which ecstasy-inducing drugs were used.⁴⁷ Was this cult the foundation for Orphism and were the trances and hallucinations induced by drugs the mechanism whereby the Greeks conceived the idea of the soul and, associated with it, reincarnation? Pythagoras, Empedocles and Plato all believed in reincarnation and in metempsychosis – the idea that souls could come back in other animals and even in plants. The Orphics believed that the actual form the soul took on reincarnation was a penalty for some ‘original sin’.⁴⁸ Both Socrates and Plato shared Pindar’s idea of the divine origin of the soul and it is here that the vision took root that the soul was in fact more precious than the body. This was not, it should be said, the majority view of Athenians, who mainly thought of souls as unpleasant things who were hostile to the living. Many Greeks did not believe that there was life after death.⁵

Among those Greeks who did believe in some form of afterlife, the dead went straight to the underworld which, in the Iliad, was guarded by canine Cerberus. The soul could reach this ‘mirthless place’ only by crossing the river Styx. The underworld was called Hades, which derives from a root word meaning invisible, unseen.⁴⁹ Death seems to have been regarded then as unavoidable. Athena tells Odysseus’ son Telemachus that ‘death is common to all men, and not even the gods can keep it off a man they love . . .’⁵⁰ By the later parts of the Odyssey, however, there has been a change. For example, Proteus tells Menelaus that he will be sent ‘to the Elysian plain at the ends of the earth’. The name Elysion is pre-Greek and so this idea may have begun elsewhere. By the time of Hesiod’s Works and Days (late eighth century BC) we hear of the Islands of the Blessed, to which many heroes will be sent after their lives on earth are over. At much the same time, in epic poems, we hear for the first time of Charon, the ferryman of the dead. In the fifth century, there began in Greece the practice of burying the deceased with an obol, a small coin to pay Charon.⁵¹ Around 432 BC, on an official war monument, the souls of dead Athenians are described as being received by the aither, ‘the upper air’, though their bodies will remain on earth. In Plato and in many Greek tragedies we learn that the Athenians did not seem to believe in rewards and punishments after death. ‘In fact, they do not seem to have expected very much at all. “After death every man is earth and shadow: nothing goes to nothing”.’ (This is a character in one of Euripides’ plays.) In Plato’s Phaedo, Simmias betrays his worry that at his death his soul will be scattered ‘and this is their end’.⁵²

Paradise – the word, at least – is much better documented. It is based on an old Median word, pari = around, and daeza = wall. (The Medes were a civilisation in Iran in the sixth century BC.) The word paridaeza came variously to mean a vineyard, a grove of date palms, a place were bricks were made and even, on one occasion, the ‘red-light’ quarter of Samos. But its most probable association was with royal hunting forests, or simply the lush, shaded gardens that were the prerogative of the aristocracy. This could be allied to the belief, considered below, that only kings and aristocrats could go to paradise, and all others went to hell. There are some indications in Pythagoras’ writings that his idea of the afterlife, and the immortal soul, was reserved for the aristocracy, so this may have been an idea that was born as a way of preserving upper-class privileges at a time when that class was being marginalised, as cities (and merchants) grew more important.

For the Israelites, the soul was never developed as a sophisticated idea. The God of Israel formed Adam from the ʾadamah, the clay, and then breathed ‘the breath of life into him’, so that he became a nephesh, or ‘living soul’.⁵³ This is similar to the Akkadian word napistu, and is associated with blood, the ‘life substance’, which drains away at death.⁵⁴ The Hebrews never had a word for the ‘essential self’ that survived death. We should not forget that the entire book of Job in the Hebrew scriptures is concerned with the problem of faith and suffering and inequality in a life where there is no hereafter (all the rewards promised to the Jews by their God are worldly). Even with the advent of Messianism in Judaism, there is still no concept of the soul. There was the concept of Sheol, but this is more akin to the English word ‘grave’ than Hades, which is how it was often translated. ‘Sheol was located beneath the earth (Psalm 63.10), filled with worms and dust (Isaiah, 14.11) and impossible to escape from (Job, 7.9f.).’ It was only after the exile in Babylon that good and bad departments of Sheol were envisaged, and it became associated with Gehenna, a valley south of Jerusalem where it was at first believed that punishments would be handed out after the Last Judgement. Soon after, it became the name for the fiery hell.⁵⁵

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.

The name of the Jewish God, Yahweh, which was disclosed to Moses, appears to have originated in northern Mesopotamia. We have known this only since the 1930s, with the discovery of a set of clay texts at Nuzu, a site situated between modern Baghdad and Nimrud in Iraq. Dating from the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC, these texts do not identify any biblical individuals by name but they do outline a set of laws, and describe a society that is recognisably that to which Jacob, son of Isaac, fled (in Mesopotamia, according to the Bible) after tricking his father into blessing him, instead of his brother Esau. For example, in the Bible Jacob purchases from Esau his ‘birthright’, which means title to the position of firstborn. The Nuzu tablets make clear that inheritance prospects there are negotiable. Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham, although he was born in Ur, later spent time in Haran, which is also in northern Mesopotamia. This general area was a meeting ground of various peoples, most importantly the Amorites, Arameans and the Hurrians. The divine name Yahweh appears not infrequently in Amorite personal names.⁵⁸

However, until a relatively late period of Jewish history the Israelites had a ‘considerable’ number of divinities. ‘According to the number of thy cities are thy gods, O Judah,’ says the prophet Jeremiah, writing in the sixth century BC.⁵⁹ When Israelite religion first appears, in the Hebrew scriptures, we find no fewer than three main forms of worship. There is the worship of teraphim or family gods, the worship of sacred stones, and the worship of certain great gods, partly native, partly perhaps borrowed. Some of these gods take the form of animals, others of sky gods, the sun in particular. There are many biblical references to these gods. For example, when Jacob flees from Laban, we hear how Rachel stole her father’s teraphim: when the furious chieftain finally catches up with the fugitives, one of his first questions is to ask why they stole his domestic gods.⁶⁰ Hosea refers to teraphim as ‘stocks of wood’, while Zechariah dismisses them as ‘idols that speak lies to the people’.⁶¹ It is clear that the teraphim were preserved in each household with reverential care, that they were sacrificed to by the family at stated intervals, and that they were consulted on all occasions of doubt or difficulty by ‘a domestic priest “clad in an ephod”. In all this the Israelites were little different from the surrounding peoples.’⁶²

Stone-worship also played an important part in the primitive Semitic religion. For the early Hebrews a sacred stone was a ‘Beth-el’, a place where gods dwelt.⁶³ In the legend of Jacob’s dream we get an example where the sacred stone is anointed and a promise is made to it of a tenth of the speaker’s substance as an offering. In other places women pray to phallic-shaped stones so that they might be blessed with children.⁶⁴ Yahweh is referred to as a rock in Deuteronomy, and in the second book of Samuel. References to other great gods are equally numerous. The terms Baal and Molech are general terms in the Hebrew scriptures, referring mainly to local gods in the Semitic region, and sometimes to sacred stones. A god in the form of a young bull was worshipped at Dan and Bethel, when the Israelites made themselves a ‘golden calf’ in the wilderness at the time of the Exodus.⁶⁵ Grant Allen says explicitly that Yahweh was originally worshipped in the shape of a young bull. In other words, the Israelite religion was polytheistic for centuries, with the worship of Baal, Molech, the bull and the serpent going on side-by-side with worship of Yahweh ‘without conscious rivalry’.⁶⁶ But then it all began to change, with enormous consequences for humankind.

There are two aspects to that change. The first is that the early Yahweh was a god of increase, fruitfulness and fertility. In the Bible Yahweh promises to Abraham ‘I will multiply thee exceedingly’, ‘thou shalt be a father of many nations’, ‘I will make thee exceedingly fruitful’. He says the same thing to Isaac.⁶⁷ One of the best-known practices of Judaism, circumcision, is a fairly obvious fertility rite concerning the male principle and also confirms the dominance of male gods over female ones.

The early Yahweh was also a god of light and fire. The story of the burning bush is well known but in addition Zechariah says ‘Yahweh will make lightnings’, while Isaiah describes him this way: ‘The light of Israel shall be for a fire, And his holy one for a flame . . . His lips are full of indignation, And his tongue is as a devouring fire.’⁶⁸ It is not so very far from here to Yahweh being ‘a consuming fire, a jealous god’.⁶⁹ Several aspects of lunar worship were also incorporated into early Judaism. For example, the Sabbath (shabbatum, the ‘full-moon day’ in Babylon) was originally the unlucky day dedicated to the malign god Kewan or Saturn, when it was undesirable to do any kind of work. The division of the lunar month into four weeks of seven days, dedicated in turn to the gods of the seven planets, is self-evident in its references.

When you look for them, the biblical verses linking early Judaism to even earlier pagan religions, showing all the core beliefs we have identified, are clear-cut. Far from being an ethereal, omnipotent and omniscient presence, the God of the early Hebrew scriptures lived in an ark. Otherwise, why was it sacrosanct, why the despair when the Philistines captured it? What now needs to be explained is two things: why Yahweh emerged as one God; and why he was such a jealous God, intolerant of other deities.

First, there are the particular circumstances of the Israelites in Palestine.⁷⁰ They were a small tribe, surrounded by powerful enemies. They were continually fighting, their numbers always threatened. The ark of Yahweh (the portable altar), in its house at Shiloh, seems to have formed the general meeting-place for Hebrew patriotism. Containing the golden calf (i.e., the bull), the ark was always carried before the Hebrew army. There was thus just one god in the ark, and although Solomon (tenth century BC) built temples dedicated to other Hebrew gods, which remained in existence for some centuries, Yahweh became in this way the main deity.⁷¹ For generations the two tiny Israelite kingdoms maintained a precarious independence between the great empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Beginning in the eighth century BC, however, this balancing act broke down and they were defeated in battle, first by the Assyrians, then by the Babylonians. The very existence of Israel was at stake and, in response, ‘there broke out an ecstasy of enthusiasm’ for Yahweh. In this way was generated the ‘Age of the Prophets’, which produced the earliest masterpieces of Hebrew literature, designed to shock the sinful Israelites into compliance with the wishes of their god, Yahweh, who, by the end of this period, had become supreme. ‘Prophet’ is a Greek word, meaning one who speaks before the sacred cave of an oracle.⁷²

There are two issues here, one of which will be considered now, the other in a later chapter. These are, first, the message and impact of the prophets and, second, the compilation of the Hebrew scriptures which, far from being the divinely inspired word of God, are, like all holy writings, clearly a set of documents produced by human hands with a specific aim.⁷³

The Hebrew prophets fulfilled a role that has been called unique in the history of humanity, but if so it was not so much prophecy in itself that marked them out as their loud and repeated denunciations of an evil and hypocritical people, and their bitter predictions of the doom that must follow this continued estrangement from God. To a man, the prophets were opposed to sacrifice, idolatry and to the traditional priesthood, not so much on principle as for the fact that ‘men were going through the motions of formally honouring God while their everyday action proved they had none of the love of God that alone gives sacrifice a meaning’.⁷⁴ The prophets’ main concern was Israel’s internal spirituality. Their aim was to turn Yahweh-worship away from idolatry (the idol in the ark), so that the faithful would reflect instead on their own behaviour, their feelings and failings. This concentration on the inner life suggests that the prophets were concerned with an urban religion, that they were faced with the problem of living together in close proximity. This may explain why, in their efforts to shock the Israelites into improving their morality, the prophets built up the idea of revelation.⁷⁵

Just when ecstatic prophecy began in Israel is uncertain. Moses not only talked to God and performed miracles, but he carried out magic – rods were turned into snakes, for example. The earliest prophets wore magicians’ clothes – we read of ‘charismatic mantles’ worn by Elijah (‘the greatest wonder-worker since Moses’) and inherited by Elisha.⁷⁶ According to the book of Kings (1 Kings 18:19ff), prophecy was a practice common among the Canaanites, so the Israelites probably borrowed the idea from them.⁷⁷ The central – the dominating – role in Israelite prophecy was an insistence on the ‘interior spirit’ of religion. ‘What gives Israelite prophetism its distinctly moral tone almost if not quite from the very beginning, is the distinctly moral character of Israelitic religion. The prophets stand out in history because Israel stands out in history . . . Religion is by nature moral only if the gods are deemed moral, and this was hardly the rule among the ancients. The difference was made in Israel by the moral nature of the God who had revealed himself.’⁷⁸ The prophets also introduced a degree of rationalism into religion. As Paul Johnson has pointed out, if there is a supernatural power, why should it be confined only to certain sacred rocks, or rivers, or planets, or animals? Why should this power be expressed only in an arbitrary array of gods? Isn’t the idea of a god of limited power a contradiction in terms? ‘God is not just bigger, but infinitely bigger and therefore the idea of representing him is absurd, and to try to make an image of him is insulting.’⁷⁹

Although the prophets differed greatly in character and background, they were united in their condemnation of what they saw as the moral corruption of Israel, its turning away from Yahweh, its overzealous love of empty sacrifice, especially on the part of the priesthood. They were agreed that a time of punishment was coming, due to the widespread corruption, but that Israel would eventually be saved by a ‘remnant’ which would survive. Almost certainly, this reflected a period of great social and political change, when Israel was transformed from a tribal society to a state with a powerful king and court, where the priests were salaried and therefore dependent on the royal house, and where a new breed of wealthy merchant was emerging, keen and able to buy privileges for itself and its offspring and for whom, in all probability, religion took second place. All this at a time when the threat from outside was especially difficult.

The first prophets, Elijah and Elisha, introduced the idea of the individual conscience. Elijah was critical of the royal household because some of its members were corrupt and worshipped Baal.⁸⁰ God spoke to him, he famously said, in ‘a still, small voice’. Amos was appalled at the bribery he saw around him, and at temple prostitution, a relic of ancient fertility rites.⁸¹ It was he who developed the concept of ‘election’, that Israel had been selected by Yahweh, to be his chosen people, that he would protect them provided they abided by their covenant with him, to worship him and only him (but see here). For Amos, if Israel failed in this sacred marriage with Yahweh, Yahweh would intervene in history and ‘settle accounts’.⁸² Hosea refined the covenant still further. He believed in a Yahweh who was master of all history, who had ‘irresistible designs’ for all the world. He too opposed corrupt kingship and the cult of the temple, expressly branding as idolatry the worship of the golden bulls which had been instituted in the royal sanctuaries (1 Kings 12:25–30); he also conceived the idea of a messiah who would redeem Israel.⁸³ It was Hosea who first introduced a religion of the heart, divorced from place. This was reinforced when Jerusalem survived a siege by the Assyrian King Sennacherib, in 701 BC. The Israelites triumphed thanks to bubonic plague, transmitted by mice, but to them this only confirmed that their fate was linked to Yahweh and their own moral behaviour.⁸⁴

Isaiah, without question the most skilful wordsmith and the most moving writer among the prophets (and indeed of the entire Hebrew canon), began his mission, according to his own account, in the year that King Uzziah died – around 740 BC. By tradition he was the nephew of King Amaziah of Judah and was well-connected to the politicians of his day.⁸⁵ But he got out among the people and had a sizeable following – a popularity that endured, as may be gauged from the fact that among the texts found at Qumran after the Second World War was a leather scroll, twenty-three feet long, giving the whole of Isaiah in fifty columns of Hebrew. As a result of his pressure on Hezekiah, the king at the time, the Temple in Jerusalem turned back to Yahweh-worship and the sanctuaries in the provinces were closed and public worship centralised in the capital.⁸⁶ Isaiah condemned Judah as a land of unbridled, irresponsible luxury, a sensual society without concern for the spirit, divine or human.⁸⁷ He explicitly singled out for condemnation the monopoly in land that had ‘borne such evil fruit in Judah’.⁸⁸ Isaiah was pushing the Israelite religion to a new spirituality and a new interiority, still more divorced from time and place than Hosea had imagined, more and more a religion of conscience, when men are thrown back on themselves as the only way to achieve social justice. Men and women, he was saying, must turn away from the pursuit of wealth as the chief aim in life. ‘Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place.’⁸⁹

But there was another side to Isaiah, and equally important. In his religion, sacrifice is not enough but repentance is always possible, the Lord is always forgiving and, if enough people repent, he foresees an age of peace, when men and women ‘shall beat swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’. This, as many scholars have noted, for the first time gives history a linear quality. God gives history a direction and here Isaiah introduces an even more radical idea: ‘Behold a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.’ This special son shall advance the age of peace: ‘The wolf shall also dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.’ But he will also be a great ruler: ‘For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.’ Christians attach more to this passage than Jews do. Matthew saw this as a prophecy of Jesus; Jews do not interpret Isaiah messianically.⁹⁰ The book of Isaiah is above all concerned with the individual soul – though that is not the right word. For Isaiah, each of us has the ‘still small voice’ of conscience, and that marks out Judaism. The Jews had no real belief in the afterlife, so the nearest they could come to a soul was the conscience.

In the last days before Jerusalem finally fell, Isaiah was followed by Jeremiah, who could not have been more different. Equally critical of the establishment, equally blunt and perhaps even more acid, Jeremiah became an outcast, forbidden to enter – or even to go near – the Temple. He was probably as unstable as he was unpopular: his family turned against him and no woman would marry him.⁹¹ (He did, however, have and keep a secretary. When others went into exile he remained for a while in Mizpah, a modest town north of Jerusalem.) Yet his writings were preserved – for his prophecies of doom came true. In 597 BC and again in 586 BC, the Babylonians besieged Jerusalem, and after the second siege the Temple and the walls of the city were destroyed and most of the rest of the city was set ablaze. Jeremiah was among those who fled but thousands of Israelites were carried off into exile in Babylon. Traumatic as it was, exile would prove invigorating for the transformation of Judaism.

The Israelites remained in exile in Babylon from 586 BC to 539 BC. While they were there, they found that their captors practised Zoroastrianism, which was the major belief system in the Middle East before Islam. The origins of this faith are obscure. According to Zoroastrian tradition, Zarathustra made his first conversion ‘258 years before Alexander’, which would put it at 588 BC, and therefore right in the middle of the Axial Age. But this cannot be correct. One reason is that the language of Zoroastrian scriptures, the Gathas, the liturgical hymns which make up the Avesta, the Zoroastrian canon, is very similar to the oldest layer of Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas, the sacred texts of the Hindus (see here). The two languages are so close that they are ‘little more than dialects of one tongue’, and not many centuries can have separated them from their common origins.⁹² Since the Vedas date to between 1900 and 1200 BC, at least, the Gathas cannot be very much younger.

However, while the Vedas were still set in the heroic age, with many gods, often acting ‘with the same nature as men’, and sometimes with great cruelty, Zoroastrianism was very different.⁹³ Zoroastrianism has one origin in the third millennium BC with the migration of the peoples known to archaeologists, pre-historians and philologists as the Indo-Aryans. As was mentioned above, there has been much debate as to where these people originated: from the region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, between the Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea, in the lands around the Oxus river, north of Persia, as Iran then was, the so-called BMAC complex (Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex, essentially northern Afghanistan), even the Indus valley. What seems more certain is that they split into two groups, one – further east – giving rise to the Vedic religion, which developed into Hinduism (see here); and the second, further west, giving rise to Zoroastrianism.

Certain aspects of Zoroastrianism appear to have developed from the cult of Mithras. Mithras, said to have been born out of a rock and often associated with bull sacrifice, appears first in the historical record on an inscription found at Boghazköy in eastern Anatolia, and dating from the fourteenth century BC. The inscription commemorates a treaty between the Hittites (whom we have already encountered, in an earlier chapter) and the Mitanni (a tribe with Aryan chiefs, across the Euphrates from what is now Syria) and mentions a number of deities who later appear in the Rig Veda, the Hindu scriptures. These deities include Mithra, Varuna and Indra.⁹⁴ Mithra, be it noted, is the old Persian word for contract, which is interesting for at least three reasons. One, and this is speculative, a god of contract recalls the Israelite idea of the covenant, which is essentially a contract with God – is this where the idea originally came from? Two, a god of contract also suggests an urban, or urbanising, culture, with a growing merchant class; but third, and arguably the most important reason, is that contract stood for fairness, and therefore justice.⁹⁵ And here, for the first time, we have a god who is an abstract concept – this was Zarathustra’s achievement. He broke with the tradition of a pantheon of gods.

Tradition variously puts Zarathustra’s birthplace in Rhages, the ancient town of Rayy, now on the outskirts of Tehran, or in Afghanistan or even as far away as Kazakhstan. By the time he was about thirty, however, Zarathustra had found his way to the court of King Gushtasp, the ruler of a tribe of people in the north of Iran, possibly the ancient site north-west of Kabul known as Balkh. There, he won over the king, and then the people, and his beliefs became the official religion.

The crucial importance – and the mystery – of Zoroastrianism lies partly in its introduction of abstract concepts as gods, and partly in its other features, some of which find echoes in Buddhism and Confucianism, and some of which appear to have helped form Judaism, and therefore Christianity and Islam. According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra was the source of the ‘profoundest error in human history – namely the invention of morality’.⁹⁶ Zarathustra envisaged three types of soul: the urvany, that part of the individual which survived the body’s death; fravashi, who ‘live the earth since the time of their death’; and daena, the conscience.⁹⁷ Either way, Zoroastrianism may well have been the fundamental set of ideas that helped shape the world’s major faiths as we know them today.

The society into which Zarathustra addressed his ideas was a people who venerated fire and worshipped the familiar gods of earth and sky, plus a host of daevas, spirits and demons.⁹⁸ Zoroastrians believe that Zarathustra received a revelation direct from the one true god, Ahura Mazda. In accepting the revelation, he imitated the primordial act of god – the choice of good. This is a crucial aspect of Zoroastrianism: man is invited to follow the path of the Lord, but he is free in that choice – he is not a slave or a servant.⁹⁹ Ahura Mazda was also the father of a set of twins, Spenta Mainyu, the Good Spirit, and Angra Mainyu, the Destroying Spirit. These twins respectively choose Asha, justice, and Druj, deceit.¹⁰⁰

Zarathustra referred to himself several times as a ‘saviour’ and this helped to shape his idea of heaven and the soul. In the religion of the day, which Zarathustra was born into, only priests and aristocrats were understood to have immortal souls, only they could go to heaven, whereas the laity were consigned to hell.¹⁰¹ He changed all that. He condemned the sacrifice of cattle as cruel and denounced the priestly cult of Haoma, which may have been a hallucinogenic plant related to the Soma mentioned in Hindu scriptures, and possibly cannabis or hemp, which Herodotus records as being used in rituals by the steppe nomads.¹⁰² At the same time, there is some evidence that early Zoroastrianism was itself an ecstatic religion, with even Zarathustra using bhang (hemp).¹⁰³ The name of paradise in the new religion was garo demana, or ‘House of Song’, and there are ancient accounts of shamans reaching ecstasy by singing for long periods of time. The House of Song was in theory open to all in Zoroastrianism, but only the righteous actually got there. The road to the beyond passed over the Cinvat Bridge where the just and the wicked were divided, sinners remaining for ever in the House of Evil.¹⁰⁴ The idea of a river dividing this world from the next is found in many faiths, while the idea of a Judgement became a major feature of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In fact, life after death, resurrection, judgement, heaven and paradise were all Zoroastrian ideas first, as were hell and the devil.¹⁰⁵ One verse of the Gathas says that the soul remains close to a person’s body after death, but after three days a wind arises. For the righteous it is a perfumed wind which quickly transports the soul to ‘the lights without beginning, paradise’, but for others it is a cold north wind, which drives the sinner to the zone of darkness.¹⁰⁶ Note the delay of three days.

The Israelites had been taken into captivity in 586 BC, by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzer. In 539, however, Babylon was captured by Cyrus, a Persian king who had also defeated the Medes and the Lydians. He and his followers spread Zoroastrianism throughout the Middle East. Cyrus freed the Jews and allowed them back to their homeland. It is no accident, therefore, that he is one of only two foreign kings to be treated with respect in the Hebrew scriptures (the other is Abimelech, in Genesis 21). It is no accident that Judaism, and therefore Christianity and Islam, share many features of Zoroastrianism.

The Buddha was not a god and he was not really a prophet. But the way of life that he came to advocate was the result of his dissatisfaction with the development of a new merchant class in the towns, their materialism and greed, and with the local priesthood, their obsession with sacrifice and tradition. His answer was to ask men to look deep inside themselves to find a higher purpose in life. In that, conditions in India in the sixth–fifth century BC paralleled those in Israel.

Siddhartha Gautama was by all accounts a pessimist anyway, constitutionally inclined to look on the grimmer side of life. Nevertheless, the social and religious ideas in India were changing fundamentally at the time he was alive. Hinduism is a Muslim word for the traditional religion of India, and dates only from 1200 AD, when the Islamic invaders wished to distinguish the Indian faith from their own. (Hindu is in fact the Persian word for Indian – see Chapter 33) Traditional Hinduism has been described as more a way of living than a way of thought.¹⁰⁷ It has no founder, no prophet, no creed and no ecclesiastical structure. Instead, Hindus speak of ‘eternal teaching’ or ‘eternal law’. The first record of these beliefs come from excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, the twin capitals of the civilisation, about 400 miles apart, on the banks of the Indus river and dating to about 2300–1750 BC. A ritual purity appears to have been one of the central rites (as it is today), with prominent places for ceremonial ablutions.¹⁰⁸ In addition there were many figurines of the mother goddess, which either showed her pregnant, or emphasised her breasts. Each village had its own goddess, embodiments of the female principle, though there was also a male god, with horns and three faces, known as Trimurti, which later found expression in Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Fertility symbols were also found, in particular the lingam and the yoni, representing, again, the female and male sex organs. Besides purification, the holy men of Harappa and the Indus valley practised yoga and renunciation of the world.

The first change Hinduism went through occurred around 1700 BC, when India was invaded by the Aryan peoples. The Aryans arrived from Iran, as their name implies, but their exact origins have been one of the great mysteries of archaeology.⁶ The Aryan impact on India was profound. Even today, northern Indians are taller and paler than their Dravidian compatriots in the southern part of the subcontinent. The Aryan language developed in India into what is now called Sanskrit, related to Greek, Latin and the other Indo-European languages which were discussed in Chapter 2. Their religion may have had links with that of Homer’s Greece, insofar as there are parallels among the gods, which are mainly forces of nature. They practised sacrifice and performed their ceremonies around the fire, where they cast butter, grain and spice into the flames. They also are known to have used the drug, soma, which induced trances, by means of which the Vedas were ‘revealed’ to them. The fact that sacred fire was so important in their religion hints that they originally came from a northern (cold) region. Unlike the proto-Hindus, the Aryans did have a sacred text. This, written down about 800 BC, is known as the Rig Veda (‘Songs of Knowledge’; vid = ‘knowledge’ or ‘wisdom’). Many of these religious hymns may have been composed before the Aryans arrived in India, though by later times they were considered to be a revelation from Brahman, the ultimate source of all being.¹⁰⁹ More than a thousand hymns (20,000 verses) make up the Rig Veda, and they are addressed to scores of different deities. The most important gods, however, are Indra, conceived as a warrior who overcomes evil and brings everything into being; Agni, who personifies the sacred fire (Latin = ignis), which links heaven and earth by carrying the sacrifice upwards; and Varuna (the Greek god Uranus), a sky god but also the chief of the gods, and the guardian of cosmic order.

As it developed, the Veda posited a world soul. This is a mystical entity, quite unlike anything else: it is envisaged both as a sacrifice and as a form of body, which gives the world order. The creator brought the world into existence by sacrifice – even the gods, their very existence, depended on continued sacrifice. The mouth of the world soul is made up of the priests (called Brahmans, to reflect their relationship to the fundamental source, Brahman: before the Vedas were written down, it was the Brahmans’ responsibility to memorise and preserve them, father to son); the arms comprised the rulers, the thighs make up the commercial classes – landowners, farmers, bankers and merchants – and the feet are the artisans and peasants. To begin with, the four different classes were not hereditary but in time they became so, probably led by the Brahmans, whose task of memorising the Vedas was more easily achieved if fathers could begin teaching their sons early on. It was the Brahmans too who knew how to perform the elaborate sacrificial rites by means of which the whole world was kept in existence.¹¹⁰ The kings and nobles funded the sacrifices and the landowners bred the cattle that were killed. Thus three of the four classes had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

This is the traditional picture. By the time of Gautama, however, there was widespread change in India, both social and spiritual. Towns and cities were on the increase and the power partnership of king and temple was breaking down as merchants and a market economy undermined the status quo. A new urban class was emerging which was ambitious for itself and impatient with the old ways. The new Iron Age technology played a role here, too, in helping farmers clear the dense forests.¹¹¹ This opened up more and more land to cultivation and changed the economy from stockbreeding to agricultural crops. Though this helped expand population, it also changed attitudes to sacrifice, now seen as more and more out of place.

Kapilavatthu, where Gautama lived, typified these changes. In any case shortly before his birth there was a religious rebellion in India. Dissatisfied with the old Vedic faith, the sages of the day began to compose a new series of texts which they passed secretly between themselves. These new texts became known as the Upanishads, which derived from a Sanskrit term, apa-ni-sad, which means ‘to sit near’, and reflected the unorthodox way that these new, reinterpreted verses, were begun. In a way the Upanishads had parallels with the teaching of the Israeli prophets, in that they made the old Vedas more spiritual and gave them an interiorised aspect.¹¹² By dint of the Upanishad disciplines, a practitioner would find that Brahman was present in the core of his own being. ‘Salvation lay not in sacrifice but in the realisation that absolute, eternal reality that is higher even than the gods, was identical to one’s own deepest self (atman).’ In the Upanishads, salvation is not just salvation from sin, but from the human condition itself.¹¹³ This really marked the beginning of the religion that we now call Hinduism, and the parallels with the Judaism of the prophets are clear.

Just where the idea of reincarnation came from is not so clear. However, in the Asʾvalayana-Grkyasutra, one of the Vedas, there is an idea that ‘The eye must enter the sun, the soul the wind; go into the heaven and go into the earth according to destiny; or go into the water, if that be assigned to thee, or dwell with thy limbs in the plants.’¹¹⁴ Though primitive, this passage in many ways heralds the idea, in the Upanishads, that, after cremation, the dead, according to their life on earth, would go ‘the way of God’ (devayana), which led to Brahman, or to ‘the way of the fathers’ (pitrayana) which went via darkness and gloom to the abode of the ancestors and then back to earth for a new cycle.¹¹⁵ It was in the Upanishads that the twin doctrines of samsara and karma appear. Samsara is rebirth, karma is the life force but its character determines the form of someone’s next incarnation. The subject of the twin processes was the atman, the soul, a word derived from an, to breathe, meaning that for Hindus too the soul was equivalent to the animating principle.¹¹⁶ In order to be at one with Brahman and achieve moksa, and to succeed to the ‘way of the gods’, salvation, the atman had to overcome avidya, a profound ignorance, of which the most important aspect was maya, taking the phenomenal world for reality and regarding the self as a separate entity. The overlap here between Hinduism on the one hand, and Plato on the other, is apparent and will become more so.

This then was the background out of which Siddhartha Gautama – the Buddha – appeared. His life is nowhere near as well documented as the Israelite prophets, say, or that of Jesus. Narrative biographies have been written, but the earliest dates from the third century AD, and though they were based on an earlier account, written down around a hundred years after his death in 483 BC, that text has been lost, and we can have little idea of the accuracy of the extant biographies. But it would appear that Gautama was about twenty-nine when, c. 538 BC, he suddenly left his wife, child and very well-to-do family and embarked on his search for enlightenment. It is said that he sneaked upstairs for one last look at his sleeping wife and son, but then left without saying goodbye. Part of him at least was not sorry to go: he had nicknamed the little boy Rahula, which means ‘fetter’, and the baby certainly symbolised the fact that Gautama felt shackled to a way of life he found abhorrent. He had a yearning for what he saw as a cleaner, more spiritual life, and so he did what many holy men did in India at the time: he turned his back on his family and possessions, put on the yellow robe of an itinerant, and lived by begging, which was an accepted form of life in India at the time.

For six years he listened to what other sages had to say, but it was not until he put himself into a trance one night that his world was changed. ‘The whole cosmos rejoiced, the earth rocked, flowers fell from heaven, fragrant breezes blew and the gods in their various heavens rejoiced . . . There was a new hope of liberation from suffering and the attainment of nirvana, the end of pain. Gautama had become the Buddha, the Enlightened One.’¹¹⁷ Buddha ‘believed’ in the gods that were familiar to him. But he shared with the Israelite prophets the idea that the ultimate reality lay beyond these gods. From his experience of them, or his understanding of them, according to Hinduism, they too were caught up in the vicissitudes of pain and change, in the cycle of birth and rebirth. Instead, Gautama believed that all life was dukkha – suffering, flux – and that dharma, ‘the truth about right living’, brought one to nirvana, the ultimate reality, freedom from pain.¹¹⁸ Buddha’s insight was that, in fact, this state had nothing to do with the gods – it was ‘beyond them’. The state of nirvana was natural to humanity, if people only knew how to look. Gautama claimed not to have ‘invented’ his approach but to have ‘discovered’ it, and therefore other people could too, if they looked within themselves. As with the Israelites in the age of the prophets, the truth lay within. More specifically, the Buddha believed that man’s first step was to realise that something was wrong. In the pagan world this realisation had led to ideas of heaven and paradise, but Buddha’s idea was that we can gain release from dukkha on this earth by ‘living a life of compassion for all living beings, speaking and behaving gently, kindly and accurately and by refraining from anything like drugs or intoxicants that cloud the mind.’¹¹⁹ The Buddha had no conception of heaven. He thought such questions were ‘inappropriate’. He thought that language was ill-equipped to deal with these ideas, that they could only be experienced.

But Buddhism, as we shall see, did develop notions of salvation very similar to Christianity (so similar that early missionaries thought that Buddhism was a counterfeit faith created by the devil). Buddhism developed a concept (and a word, parimucyeran) for being set free from life’s ills, and three names for saviour, Avalokitresvara, Tara and Amitabha, who all belonged to the same family.

The Greeks are generally known for their rationalism, but this tends to obscure the fact that Plato (427–346 BC), one of their greatest thinkers, was also a confirmed mystic. The main influences on him were Socrates, who had questioned the old myths and festivals of the traditional religion, and Pythagoras, who, as we have seen, had decided ideas about the soul, and who, in addition, may have been influenced by ideas from India, by way of Egypt and Persia.

Pythagoras believed that souls were fallen, defiled gods, now imprisoned in the body ‘as in a tomb and doomed to a perpetual cycle of rebirth’.¹²⁰ Pythagoras, and the Orphics, thought that the soul could only be liberated through ritual purification, but Plato went further. To him there was another level of reality, an unchanging realm of the divine, which was beyond the senses. He accepted that the soul was a fallen divinity but believed that it could be liberated and even regain its divine status through his own form of purification – reason. He thought that, in this higher unchanging plane, there were eternal realities – forms or ideas, as he put it – fuller, more permanent and more effective than anything we find on earth, and they could only be fully understood or apprehended in the mind. For Plato there was an ideal form which corresponded to every general idea we have – justice, say, or love. The most important of the forms were Beauty and Good. He didn’t dwell much on god, or the nature of god. The world of the forms was unchanging and static and these forms were not ‘out there’, as the traditional gods were, but could only be found within the self.¹²¹

His own ideas, outlined in The Symposium and elsewhere, were to show how love of a particular beautiful body, for example, could be ‘purified and transformed’ into an ecstatic contemplation (theoria) of ideal Beauty. Plato thought that the ideal forms were somehow hidden in the mind and that it was the task of thinking to discover and reveal these forms, that they could be recollected or apprehended if one considered them long enough. Human beings, remember, were fallen divinities (an idea resurrected by Christianity in the Middle Ages) and so the divine was within them in some way, if only it could be ‘touched’ by reason, reason understood as an intuitive grasp of the eternal realm within. Plato didn’t use the word nirvana but his pattern of belief is recognisably similar to that of the Buddha, leading men back within themselves. Like Zarathustra, for Plato the object of the spiritual life was concentration on abstract entities. Some have called this the birth of the very idea of abstraction.

The ideas of Aristotle (384–322 BC) were no less mystical, even though he was a much harder-headed scientist and natural philosopher (aspects of his thought which will be considered in the next chapter). He realised there was an emotional basis of religious belief, even though he thought of himself as a rationalist. This is why, for example, Greek theatre, in particular its tragedies, started life as part of religious festivals: theatrical tragedy was for Aristotle a form of purification (he called it katharsis) whereby the emotions of terror and pity were experienced and controlled. Whereas Plato had proposed a single divine realm, to which we have access via contemplation, Aristotle thought there was a hierarchy of realities, at the top of which was the Unmoved Mover – immortal, immobile, in essence pure thought though he was at one and the same time the thinker and the thought.¹²² He caused all the change and flux in the universe, all of which stemmed from a single source. Under this scheme, human beings were privileged, in that the human soul has the gift of intellect, a divine entity, which puts man above the animals and plants. The object of thought, for Aristotle, was immortality, a kind of salvation. As with Plato, thought was itself a form of purification but again theoria, contemplation, did not consist only of logical reasoning, but of ‘disciplined intuition resulting in an ecstatic self-transcendence’.¹²³

Confucius (Kongfuzi, 551–479 BC) was by far the least mystical of all the prophets/religious teachers/moral philosophers to emerge in the Axial Age. He was deeply religious in a traditional sense, showing reverence toward heaven and an omnipresent spiritual world, but he was cool towards the supernatural and does not seem to have believed in either a personal god or the afterlife. The creed he developed was in reality an adaptation of traditional ideas and practices, and was very worldly, addressed to the problems of his own times. That said, there are uncanny parallels between the teachings of Confucius, Buddha, Plato and the Israelite prophets. They stem from a similarity in the wider social and political context.

Even by the time of Confucius’ birth, the Chinese were already an ancient people. From the middle of the second millennium BC, the Shang dynasty was firmly established and, according to excavations, appears to have comprised a supreme king, an upper ruling class of related families, and a lower level of people tied to the land. It was a very violent society, characterised, according to one historian, by ‘sacrifice, warfare and hunting’. As with ancient Hindu ideas, sacrifice underlay all beliefs in early China. ‘Hunting provided sacrificial animals, warfare sacrificial captives.’¹²⁴ Warfare was itself considered a religious activity and before battle there took place a ritual of divination, prayers and oaths.

In early China there were two kinds of deities – ancestors and sky gods. Everyone worshipped their ancestors, whose souls were believed to animate living humans. But the aristocracy also worshipped Shang Di, the supreme god who ruled from on high, together with the gods of the sun, moon, stars, rain and thunder. Shang Di was identified with the founder-ancestor of the race and all noble families traced their descent from him.¹²⁵ The hallmark was eating meat. There were three forms of religious functionary: the shih, or priest-scribes, whose duty was to record and interpret significant events, which were regarded as omens for government; the chu, or ‘invokers’, scholars who composed the prayers used in the sacrificial ceremonies – they became ‘masters of ritual’, making sure that the correct form of sacrifice was preserved (just like the Brahmans in the Buddha’s India); the third group of religious figures were the experts in divination, the wu, whose duty was to communicate with the ancestor spirits, usually by way of the so-called ‘Dragon bones’.¹²⁶ This practice – ‘scapu-limancy’ – was not discovered until the end of the nineteenth century, but some 100,000 bones have now been collected. The wu would apply a hot metal point to the shoulder blades (scapulae) of a variety of animals, and interpret the resulting cracks as advice from the ancestors. The soul was represented on these bones either by kuei, a man with a large head, or a cicada, which became the accepted symbol of immortality and rebirth. Around the time of Confucius, the idea developed that everything there is, is the product of two eternal and alternating principles, yin and yang, and that within each person there are two souls, the yin-soul and the yang-soul, one deriving from heaven, the other from earth.¹²⁷ The yin was identified with kuei, in other words the body; the yang was the life principle and the personality. The aim of Chinese philosophy was to reconcile the two.

Confucius was born near Shantung at a time of great warfare but also of great social change, and he was shaped by both processes. Cities were growing in size (up to 100,000 inhabitants, according to some sources), coinage had been introduced, and commercial progress was so marked that certain areas were already well known for particular products (silk and lacquer in Shantung, iron mining in Szechuan). Most particular to China was the class known as shih (inflected differently from the shih, priest-scribes, mentioned above): these were families of noble descent who had slipped down the social scale and become commoners. They were not merchants but scholars, educated but dispossessed of their former cachet. Confucius was of this class.

Bright enough to be educated at a school for the aristocracy, his first job was as a clerk in the state granaries. He was married at nineteen but little is known about his wife and family.¹²⁸ He was greatly influenced by Zi Zhaan, the prime minister of Cheng, who died in 522 BC, when Confucius was twenty-nine. Zi Zhaan introduced the first law code in China, the text for which he ordered to be inscribed on bronzes and displayed publicly, so that all would know what rules they were expected to obey.¹²⁹ A final influence on Confucius was the prevalent scepticism which the Chinese then felt towards religion. There had been so much war that no one any longer believed in the power of the gods to aid kings, with the result that many temples – historically the most prominent buildings in the cities – had been destroyed. The fact that prayer and sacrifice had failed so dismally created circumstances for a rise in rationalism, of which Confucius was the finest fruit.

He and his most important followers, Motzu (c. 480–390 BC) and Mengtzu (Mencius, 372–289 BC), were members of an important group of thinkers, the so-called ‘hundred schools’ (= a great many). Confucius’ learning gradually established him a reputation, and he was given a government job, along with several of his students. But he resigned, and journeyed on the road for ten years, after which he set up a school – the first in Chinese history – taking students from all classes of society, and where he could begin to broadcast his ideas more effectively. His main concern was an ethical life, facing the problem of how men can live together. This reflected China’s transition to an urban society. Like the Buddha, like Plato and like Aristotle, he looked beyond the gods, and taught that the answer to an ethical life lies within man himself, that universal order and harmony can only be achieved if people show a wider sense of community and obligation than their own and their family’s self-interest.¹³⁰ He thought that scholarship and learning were the surest way to harmony and order and that the natural aristocrats in the sort of society he wanted were the sages.

There were three key elements in his thought. The first was tao, The Way. He never defined this too closely – like Plato he believed that intuition served a role here. But the Chinese character tao originally meant a path or a road, the way to a destination. Confucius meant to emphasise that there is a path which one ought to follow in life, to produce wisdom, harmony and ‘right conduct’. He implied that we intuitively know what this is, but often, for narrow, selfish reasons, pretend we don’t. The second concept was jen. This is a form of goodness (again, echoes of Plato’s ideal forms), the highest perfection normally only achieved by mythical heroes. Confucius believed that an individual’s nature was pre-ordained by heaven (a word he used widely in place of an anthropomorphised god) but, importantly, he thought that man can work on his nature, to improve himself: he can cultivate morality, hard work, love towards others, the continued effort to be good.¹³¹ One should be (as the Buddha also said) gentle, polite, considerate always, in conformity with li, the mores of polite society. This inner harmony of mind, he thought, could be helped by the study of music. The third concept was I, righteousness or justice. Again, Confucius was wary of defining this idea too closely, but he affirmed that men can learn to recognise justice from everyday experience (as Plato said we can learn to recognise Beauty and Goodness), and that this should always be their guide.

The Taoist religion is in many ways the opposite of Confucianism, though it still shares many similarities with Aristotle and the Buddha. Some believe that the founder of Taoism, Laotzu, was an older contemporary of Confucius. Others contend that he never existed: the words lao tzu mean ‘old man’ and, say the doubters, the Lao tzu, the book – the most-frequently translated work in Chinese – is an anthology compiled by various authors. Whatever the truth of this, whereas Confucianism seeks to perfect men and women within the world, Taoism is a turning away from the world, its aim being to transcend the (limited) conditions of human existence in an effort to attain immortality, salvation, the perpetual union of several different soul-elements. Underlying Taoism is a search for freedom – from the world, from the body, from the mind, from nature. It fostered the so-called ‘mystical arts’: alchemy, yoga, drugs and even levitation. Its main concern is tao, the way, though that name is not really applicable because language is not adequate for such a purpose (as with nirvana in Buddhism). The tao is conceived of as responsible both for the creation of the universe and its continued support (as with the primal sacrifice in the Vedas). The way can only be apprehended by intuition. Submission is preferable to action, ignorance to knowledge. Tao is the sum of all things that change, and this ceaseless flux of life is its unifying idea. Taoism stands against the very idea of civilisation; its view of God, as the Greeks said, was that he was essentially unknowable, ‘except by the via negativa, by what he is not’.¹³² To think one can improve on nature is a profanity. Desire is hell.¹³³ God cannot be understood, only experienced. ‘The aim is to be like a drop of water in the ocean, complete and at one with the larger significant entity.’ Laotzu speaks of sages who have attained immortality and, like the Greeks, inhabit the Isles of the Blessed. Later, these ideas were ridiculed by Zhuangtzu, a great rationalist.¹³⁴

In all cases, then, we have, centring on the sixth century BC, but extending 150 years either side, a turning away from a pantheon of many traditional ‘little’ gods, and a great turning inward, the emphasis put on man himself, his own psychology, his moral sense or conscience, his intuition and his individuality. Now that large cities were a fact of life, men and women were more concerned with living together in close proximity, and realised that the traditional gods of an agricultural world had not proved adequate to this task. Not only was this a major divorce from what had gone before, separating late antiquity from ‘deep’ antiquity, it also marked the first split that would, in centuries to come, divide the West from the East. In all the new ethical systems of the Axial Age, the Israelite solution stands out. They, as we shall see, developed the idea of one true God, and that history has a direction, whereas with the Greeks and in particular with Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism, the gods stood in a different relation to humans as compared with the West. In the East the divine and the human came much closer together, the Eastern religions being commonly more inclined to mysticism than Western ones are. In the West, more than the East, the yearning to become divine is sacrilege.