A few thoughts about Polytheism

[farpinho]

So, I have been reading and thinking a lot about ancient religions lately, And, apparently I have “linked some dots”:

1. we are all originated from the same “common ancestor”
2. the Sumerians, Hebrews, Egyptians, etc. are all semites
3. We have this genealogy in the book of Genesis: Seth as the son of Adam and Eve, Ashur as the grandson of Noah, and so on…
4. Seth is an Egyptian god, Ashur is an Assyrian god
5. Abraham is on the bottom of Noah’s genealogy (Israel is also the latest of the semitic nations!)
6. The Bedwins are very precise regarding their family tree, as it’s very important to them. They remember it very well both orally and as a written tradition.
7. The Chinese is one of the oldest civilizations in the world (and maybe they are even older than the Sumers and Egyptians!), and their oldest religion seems to be the purest religion in the world: they worshipped only a single God, whom they called heavenly father, who was an all-loving, transcendental being, and we humans disobeyed God. They had similar worship rites as the Hebrews, and they had absolutely no mythology, no idols… and they revered their worthy ancestors.
8. The polytheistic cultures had statues of their deities…
9. all civilizations had a transcendental deity who created everything, and the lesser gods all had an origin (were born), and some even died… (a true God would never be born and die…)

So… considering all this, wouldn’t it be safe to assume that the ancient civilizations’ gods were in fact not gods in the sense we see them today (as a word for the strict sense of a deity wouldn’t fit), but they were literally their ancient human ancestors / founders of the cities that were mistakenly (or maybe we misinterpreted them nowadays as being gods) divinated? It seems very unlikely to me that they would create statues out of the blue and believe that their statues were divine… so my highest bet is that the ancient gods were actually their ancient human ancestors… the egyptian Seth being Adam and Eve’s son, the Assyrian Ashshur being Noah’s grandson, and so on… (?)

 

[InJesusItrust]

I’ve read up on this. It seems anthropologists are wrong when they say animism predates monotheism according to what missionaries find out.

 

[farpinho]

I’ve read up on this. It seems anthropologists are wrong when they say animism predates monotheism according to what missionaries find out.

The problem with animism is that it cannot be dated (thus they suppose erroneously that it predates monotheism); on the other hand, the first writing findings in every single culture are always some religious oracle!

 

[Taestron]

So… considering all this, wouldn’t it be safe to assume that the ancient civilizations’ gods were in fact not gods in the sense we see them today (as a word for the strict sense of a deity wouldn’t fit), but they were literally their ancient human ancestors / founders of the cities that were mistakenly (or maybe we misinterpreted them nowadays as being gods) divinated? It seems very unlikely to me that they would create statues out of the blue and believe that their statues were divine… so my highest bet is that the ancient gods were actually their ancient human ancestors… the egyptian Seth being Adam and Eve’s son, the Assyrian Ashshur being Noah’s grandson, and so on… (?)

This scenario doesn’t seem likely to me. If we are going to say that the religious texts we have represent in any fashion the beliefs of the time, then it is clear that these beings they worshiped were gods (immortal, powerful, in some cases fashioned humans). Note that the deities who created the world and humans were usually not the transcedent gods, those usually were aloof in the mythology (think of El from the Baal Cycles). So it seems just as likely that when the deities began to be worshiped, only then were the statues created. Remember that although it was a monotheistic critique that Israel’s neighbor’s worshiped the idols, then ancients believed that the idols only represented (at most was the on earth body of) the god being worshipped. Also, it seems that the ancients were well aware of who were ancestors and who were gods. Take Gilgamesh for example, even though he did some crazy stuff, he remained human.

As far as similar names, you may have a point. However, we should be careful not to commit the etymological fallacy here. The three civilizations you mentioned were actually members of three different language families. Northwest Semetic (Hebrew) is very different from East Semetic (Assyrian, Babylonian) and they both are very very different than Southwest Semetic (Egyptian). If these names go far back to the commonality between these three families, then there is a good chance that they would be altered beyond recognition in the course of the languages’ developments. However, even if we assume that these names in fact refer to the same individuals, there is still no reason to assume the ancients didn’t view them as deities. If the Bedowin practice of preserving the family line is a holdover from ancient semetic practice (a good assumption, btw), then the mythologies would reflect at some point these ancestors became divinized. This is conspicuously absent from the mythologies, the gods were always divine beings. It may be the case that the ancients themselves mistakenly ascribed a divine nature to an ancestral name, however this would just be an amalgamation of two distinct practices, ancestor worship and polytheism.

 

[Bravo_6]

“…[F]or all the gods of the gentiles are devils…” - King David

 

[Lokabrenna]

So, I have been reading and thinking a lot about ancient religions lately, And, apparently I have “linked some dots”:

The Chinese is one of the oldest civilizations in the world (and maybe they are even older than the Sumers and Egyptians!), and their oldest religion seems to be the purest religion in the world: they worshipped only a single God, whom they called heavenly father, who was an all-loving, transcendental being, and we humans disobeyed God. They had similar worship rites as the Hebrews, and they had absolutely no mythology, no idols… and they revered their worthy ancestors.

This is such a distortion of traditional Chinese religion I don’t even know where to start. The Chinese never worshiped a single god until Christian missionaries came along and decided they were so civilized they should adopt monotheism. Heaven/Sky (tian) was always paired with Earth (di). The Emperor offered to Heaven and the Empress offered to Earth. Missionaries liked the idea of offering to Heaven, but not Earth. Besides that, there are a number of Chinese deities on record (wiki gives a helpful list: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_folk_religion#The_Chinese_Deities_.28Gods_and_goddesses.29). Some are still worshiped today. Mazu is so popular in Malaysia that even Muslims give her offerings. Why? Because if they don’t, she’ll sink their ships!

Also see: The Spirits are Drunk: Comparative Approaches to Chinese Religion and Through the Earth Darkly: Female Spirituality in Comparative Perspective by Jordan Paper

Sources of Chinese Tradition, Vol. 1 by William Theodore De Bary, Irene Bloom, and Joseph Adler

And here are some rather extensive bibliographies on the subject:

www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln270/links270.htm
website.leidenuniv.nl/~haarbjter/bibliographies.htm
hua.umf.maine.edu/China/religion.html
www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln270/popular-religion.htm

 

[colmywaykurtz]

G.K. Chesterton spoke at length about the phenomenon of a subtle monotheism underlying polytheistic religions. He uses the example of Greek polytheism in one passage from The Everlasting Man:

“For them what was truly divine was very distant, so distant that they dismissed it more and more from their minds. It had less and less to do with the mere mythology…Yet even in this there was a sort of tacit admission of its intangible purity, when we consider what most of the mythology is like. As the Jews would not degrade it by images, so the Greeks did not degrade it even by imaginations. When the gods were more and more remembered only by pranks and profligacy’s, it was relatively a moment of reverence. It was an act of piety to forget God. In other words, there is something in the whole tone of the time suggesting that men had accepted a lower level, and still were half conscious that it was a lower level…These men were conscious of the Fall if they were conscious of nothing else; and the same is true of all heathen humanity.”

 

[tafan]

So, I have been reading and thinking a lot about ancient religions lately, And, apparently I have “linked some dots”:

1. we are all originated from the same “common ancestor”
2. the Sumerians, Hebrews, Egyptians, etc. are all semites
3. We have this genealogy in the book of Genesis: Seth as the son of Adam and Eve, Ashur as the grandson of Noah, and so on…
4. Seth is an Egyptian god, Ashur is an Assyrian god
5. Abraham is on the bottom of Noah’s genealogy (Israel is also the latest of the semitic nations!)
6. The Bedwins are very precise regarding their family tree, as it’s very important to them. They remember it very well both orally and as a written tradition.
7. The Chinese is one of the oldest civilizations in the world (and maybe they are even older than the Sumers and Egyptians!), and their oldest religion seems to be the purest religion in the world: they worshipped only a single God, whom they called heavenly father, who was an all-loving, transcendental being, and we humans disobeyed God. They had similar worship rites as the Hebrews, and they had absolutely no mythology, no idols… and they revered their worthy ancestors.
8. The polytheistic cultures had statues of their deities…
9. all civilizations had a transcendental deity who created everything, and the lesser gods all had an origin (were born), and some even died… (a true God would never be born and die…)

So… considering all this, wouldn’t it be safe to assume that the ancient civilizations’ gods were in fact not gods in the sense we see them today (as a word for the strict sense of a deity wouldn’t fit), but they were literally their ancient human ancestors / founders of the cities that were mistakenly (or maybe we misinterpreted them nowadays as being gods) divinated? It seems very unlikely to me that they would create statues out of the blue and believe that their statues were divine… so my highest bet is that the ancient gods were actually their ancient human ancestors… the egyptian Seth being Adam and Eve’s son, the Assyrian Ashshur being Noah’s grandson, and so on… (?)

Go back and find other sources to read, then continue with your thinking.

• Neither ancient Egyptions nor Sumeriens were semitic.
• Set was an ancient egyption God, is not associated with Seth, the Son of Adam (which I think you are implying)
• likewise: I know of no relationship between Asher, son of Jacob; and the assyrian God Ashur

-Your equation of semetic people with Noah’s decendents is strange to say the least. I am skeptical of your emphatic claim that Isreal was the latest of the semetic nations. If we use a tranditional date of date of 1800BC for Abraham’s life as the start of Israel and we use the Assyrian exile of Israel as the start of the Samarian people, it immediately becomes questionable.

-Finally, the claim that all civilizations had a transcendental deity who created everything is questionable, can you back this up?

-As to the history of China, I will defer to others who are more knowledgeable

 

[farpinho]

Thank you all
I’ll do some more research with the Bibliography you posted and then re-formulate my thinking.