Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

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