God: A Human History

by Reza Aslan

Conceiving the divine in human terms compels us to imagine the world of the gods as an exalted reflection of our own. The heavenly realm becomes a mirror of the earth and its social and political institutions. And as our earthly institutions change, so, too, do those in heaven. When we organized ourselves in small, wandering packs of hunter-gatherers united by blood and kinship, we envisioned the world beyond ours to be a dreamlike version of our own, bursting with hordes of tame animals, shepherded by the Lord of Beasts for our spirit ancestors to stalk with ease. When we settled down in small villages and began growing our food instead of hunting for it, the Lord of Beasts surrendered to Mother Earth, and the celestial realm was reimagined as a place ruled by a host of fertility gods who maintained an eternal harvest. When those small villages expanded into independent city-states, each with its own tribal deity, in perpetual conflict with each other, the heavens made room for a pantheon of distinct martial deities, each a divine protector of its respective city back on earth. And when those city-states merged into massive empires ruled by all-powerful kings, the gods were rearranged into hierarchies reflecting the new political order on earth. There is a term for this phenomenon—politicomorphism, or “the divinization of earthly politics”—and it is, to this day, one of the central features of nearly every religious system in the world.