Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

3. If tears are shed to beg the god to send rain, that is regarded by anthropologists, such as J. G. Frazer, as sheer religion. If tears are shed to imitate the falling of rain, that is sympathetic magic and religion combined: humans act out what they magically induce the gods to do. See also: Eliade, Patterns, Op. cit., page 345. Miranda Aldhouse Green, Dying for the Gods: Human Sacrifice in Iron Age and Roman Europe, London: Tempus, 2001.

4. B. Washburn Hopkins, Origin and Evolution of Religion, New Haven and New York: Yale University Press, 1924, page 116. Royden Keith Kerkes, Sacrifice in Greek and Roman Religions and Early Judaism, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1953, page 31.

5. Hopkins, Op. cit., page 50.

6. Eliade, Patterns, Op. cit., page 86.

7. Ibid., page 88.

8. Ibid., page 90.

9. Ibid., page 91.

10. Ibid., page 217. For the history of the Dravidians, see A. C. Bouquet, Comparative Religion, London: Cassell, 1961, pages 116ff.

11. Eliade, Patterns, Op. cit., page 219. Kerkes, Op. cit., page 92.

12. Eliade, Patterns, Op. cit., page 332.

13. Ibid., page 334.

14. See: Michael Jordan, Gods of the Earth, London: Bantam, 1992, page 106, for ceremonies of allegorical fertilisation in Egypt.

15. Eliade, Patterns, Op. cit., page 342.

16. Ibid., page 343.

17. For the history of maize in Mesoamerica see Barry Cunliffe, Wendy Davies and Colin Renfrew (editors), Archaeology: The Widening Debate, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. And for the maize-mother see Frank B. Jevons, An Introduction to the History of Religions, London: Methuen, 1896/1904, pages 257–258.

18. C. Jouco Bleeker and Geo Widengren (editors), Historia Religionum, volume 1, Religions of the Past, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969/1988, page 116.

19. Eliade, Patterns, Op. cit., page 75.

20. Ibid., page 102.

21. Ibid., page 104.

22. The oldest Indo-Aryan root connected with heavenly bodies is the one that means ‘moon’ (me) and in Sanskrit it is transformed into a word that means ‘I measure’. Words with the same root and the same meaning exist in Old Prussian, Gothic, Greek (mene) and Latin (mensis). Consider the English words ‘commensurate’ and ‘menstruation’. Eliade, Patterns, Op. cit., page 154.

23. Ibid., page 165. See too Jevons, Op. cit., pages 228–229, and Zehren, Op. cit., pages 94–95 and 240–241 for the moon-bull.

24. Hopkins, Op. cit., page 109. E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Development of Mythology, Religion, Art, Astronomy etc., London: John Murray, 1871.

25. Ibid., pages 124–126.

26. Ibid., page 130.

27. S. G. Brandon, Religion in Ancient History, London: Allen & Unwin, 1973, pages 147ff.

28. Ibid., page 69.

29. Ibid., page 70.

30. Bleeker and Widengren (editors), Op. cit., pages 96–99.

31. Brandon, Op. cit., page 71.

32. Ibid., page 7.

33. Ibid., page 72. See Zehren, Op. cit., pages 283–284 for discussion of the crescent moon as a ‘sun ship’ sailing before daybreak to the sun and the afterlife (the aureole of the sun).

34. Brandon, Op. cit., page 72.

35. Ibid., page 73.

36. Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, pages 298–299; George Cordana and Dhanesh Jain (editors), The Indo-Aryan Languages, London: Routledge, 2003; Asko Parpola, ‘Tongues that tie a billion souls’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 8 October 2004, pages 26–27.

37. Bryant, Op. Cit., page 165.

38. Ibid., page 166.

39. Ibid.

40. Brandon, Op. cit., page 87.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid., page 86.

43. Jan N. Bremmer, The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, page 1.

44. Ibid., page 2.

45. Brandon, Op. cit., page 74.

46. Ibid., page 75.

47. Ibid., pages 31–32.

48. Ibid., page 76.

49. Bremmer, Op. cit., page 4.

50. Ibid., page 5 and ref. See Jevons, Op. cit., chapter 21, ‘The next life’, for a discussion of Hades.

51. Needing a guide on the way to Hades has suggested to some scholars that there was a growing anxiety about one’s fate after death, perhaps because of recent wars. The grandest mention of the Elysian Fields is in the Aeneid, when Aeneas visits the fields to see his father, Anchises.

52. Bremmer, Op. cit., page 7.