A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries

by Mircea Eliade

How certain is the cultural unity of pre-agricultural societies? Why is it not reflected in modern hunting-gathering societies? Was it reflected in a common language?

Which seems plausible, but which can be neither confirmed nor denied by any actual evidence I know of.

See previous and add: never mind.

I wonder what Eliade would make of Gobeke Tepe and other indicia that the first urban and religious centers were formed by “affluent hunter-gatherers” rather than by pastoralists. It supports his idea that there was religious continuity from the Paleolithic into the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras. It is also contradictory to his view of how hunters merged into early agricultural societies.

I feel that in the book 1178 about the end of the Late Bronze Age the author, whose name I have forgotten, likewise noted that many of the tactics used by earlier charioteers in their conflicts with the sedentary farmers of the levant mirrored the tactics that the same groups used to hunt wild prey on the steppes of central Eurasia.

Arguably, the same instinct persists among non "primitive" peoples. The American tendency to link hunting and masculinity, and to continue hunting despite the absence of economic need may, to some extent, embody the same idea that the life of a hunter is somehow more ideal than that of a farmer and craftsman. To the extent that hunting and warfare are linked this may provide some explanation of the desire to hunt using state of the art weaponry when less devastating technology could suffice. It could also explain some of the iconography used among soldiers in modern armies, who often deploy images of wolves, eagle, tigers, and other predators as common icons.

The relatively modest advance in technology over a span of 2000 years is a bit staggering to a modern reader who is consuming this book on an IPad that was not even conceptualized when they began reading books some 27 or 28 years ago. From 1989 until 2016 technology has danced at a staggering rate, one which makes the world of the 1980s a place that can barely be recognized from my current perspective. Apparently the modest technological change that led from sedentary hunting to subsistence farming took some 100 times as many years.

It makes sense that the invention of effective storage containers would follow, rather than precede, the invention of techniques that produced things that needed storing.

How so?

It was only by the death of their god that they moved from a society of hunters and gatherers to a society of farmers. Was this the reward for sacrificing a goddess, or the punishment for her murder?

These theologies would seem to represent a certain ambivalence about the transition from a hunting society to a farming society. The myths tend to imply something lost and something destroyed leading to the way things now exist.

How would a society's culture be altered by believing that the food people rely on for life was stolen from the gods, as opposed to believing that it was the result of the death of a god? Both myths place the beginning of the society's way of life in the context of a crime against nature, but the crimes seem very different (at least to me). One can be characterized as a "prank" which leaves the divine world whole, annoyed perhaps, but still in tact. The other is a crime that not only bestows food on man, but also fundamentally reduces the divine world. I have no idea how these different ideas would condition a growth of a specific culture in the long run. It might be an interesting study if somebody figured out which societies shared which paradigm, and sought to see if there were any common elements among and within each group.

Is matrilocation a common trait in agricultural societies. Most historical agricultural societies have been patriarchies.

If nothing else, it is a good line.

By what logic is the seed seen as dying in creating plants? Does the seeds internment imply its death?

It’s not the plants themselves that are important, but the way that they seem to mirror the cycles of our lives.

So, the idea preceded the agricultural revolution. Is the idea also central to how religions develops after the rise of agriculture?

Does this common theme represent the radiation of an idea outwards from a central source, or the convergent effect of similarly equipped creatures puzzling out the causes of similar phenomena?

I had never associated either idea specifically with an agricultural society, but the connection makes sense now that I see it made by one smarter than I.

Jesus does carry within him a bit of Baldr / Dionysuss.

So this group, at least, spanning from Mongolia through Tibet, envisioned the universe as a cosmic mirror of their own homes.

Saying “there’s no reason why one region should be different” sounds a lot like admitting that there is no evidence indicating that it is the same.

Does a separation always imply a conflict or confrontation?

I think this might be bringing us close to the end of the prehistory of religion. Maybe this is the end of the beginning, as Churchill said. The first part was fascinating, but it is also pure speculation. There is next to no empirical data about the spiritual life of early man. I suspect that as I read on I will find this history to have been back-filled based on what Eliade believes about modern religiosity. I do not know that the plotting backwards from what we have now is necessarily a bad idea. Presumably there is a track that ran from somewhere, and looking at the part we have found will do at least some work in showing where the line began.

Are the innovations directly related? Does a new crop come with a new myth about crops? Is it more complicated? Maybe our religious impulses mirror our world. The change of the latter affects the former. Does changing the former affect the latter?

Why? Is it because they both appear to be present in the same Neolithic sites.

It is wonderfully bizarre, if nothing else.

I am reasonably certain that the agricultural revolution had reached both Australia and Patagonia long before the era of colonization.

Implying that these developments were arrived at separately in Crete, and associated with a separate religious significance than in the Near East.

It would be like recreating Christianity out of the discovery of an altar, except without any of what we know about altars and their pre-Christian uses. “All these religions are just centered on big tables. What did they do with a big table? Did they worship food?”

Is there any reason to conclude that the Paleolithic and early Neolithic documents were not similarly reinterpreted over time, but that the nuances and details of belief where such changes would be visible are not apparent in the "documents" that survive? In other word: Eliade describes a continuity in religious belief demonstrated by cave paintings and other durable records which seem to have remained in use for thousands and tens of thousands of years. Similarly, similar, but albeit fairly simple, statues are left over long spans of time. Does this guarantee a continuity of belief? It seems possible, if not likely, that the last people to use those caves invested the cave paintings with a vastly different meaning than the first people to use those caves. The idea of Zeus seems to have persisted from ancient cave sites found on Crete worshipping a bull-god who died and was reborn like a typical fertility god, through the archaic era where Zeus became identified with might, authority and rule, and into the classical and Hellenistic eras when Zeus as Jove became increasingly bound to the ideas of Platonism.

Whatever its significance, the name Sky-Fire is definitely kind of cool.

Is it fundamentally different to smelt iron from ore than to smelt copper / bronze?

It’s certainly a plausible construct, but is it actually taken from any ancient sources?

I guess this is answering my above question.

They’re the manifestation of the earth’s divinity? Maybe its protectors? Intelligence altered by constant contact with the divine? All of the above?

Presumably this is why Vulcan is both a smith and a god of fire.

Is this possibly related to the unique character of divine smiths, who are often deformed, crippled, or deficient in some manner? Like the human smiths they are different, and do not necessarily fit in.

I like the idea of an artisan/piet

Can the search for technological mastery be summarized so simply as saying that is an effort by man to supplant the role of time? I think the answer may be yes.

Tens of thousands of years of belief. More men had lived to interpret and re-interpret their religious beliefs before those beliefs were first written down in Sumer than have lived since by an order of several magnitudes.

I thought Sumerian was a Semitic language. Is Eliade wrong, or out dated? Am I wrong? Apparently it was I who erred. Sumerian was originally not a Semitic language, but appears to be an isolate. As Eliade indicates, the original language cannot be tied to any other language groups. However, the close relationship between Sumerian and Akkadian speakers living together in the Tigris Euphrates valley led to a great deal of convergence between the isolate Sumerian and Semitic Akkadian. By around 2,000 BCE Akkadian, albeit with a number of features borrowed from Sumerian, replaced Sumerian and became the common language of Lower Mesopotamia.

This seems to skirt a little too close to racial determinism for comfort. Then again, it was written at a time when most people assumed a biological basis to racial distinctions. It was also written by a man whose political awakening came during the birth of Romanian Fascism.

So, all Sumerian gods were sky gods.

An "idle god," one which has largely withdrawn from the world.

Is this divine water related to the waters of genesis?

A sexual ritual representing the marriage and sexual union of a god and a goddess.

Unless the Sumerians adopted an older Near Eastern tradition?

Was eye-disease a particular problem in the ancient Near East? Why is it singled out in paradise?

I thought that it was usually man who screwed up paradise, not one of the gods.