God: A Human History

by Reza Aslan

No one doubts that the temple’s builders could have carved the central pillars into more well-defined human beings if they had wanted to do so. But they chose to represent them in a deliberately abstract fashion, which suggests they did not intend the pillars to represent actual humans, but rather supreme beings in human form.

Our Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device makes us susceptible to perceiving agency in natural phenomena. Our Theory of Mind makes us inherently biased toward “humanizing” whatever phenomena we encounter. So then, how else would we picture the gods except in human form? We are the lens through which we understand the universe and everything in it. We apply our personal experience to all that we encounter, whether human or not. In doing so, we not only humanize the world; we humanize the gods we think created it.

To get to know the gods better, we will construct entire spiritual systems based on the only thing we can truly know: ourselves. The gods need food, because we need food; and so we will offer them sacrifices. The gods need shelter, because we need shelter; and so we will build them temples. The gods need names, so we will name them. They need personalities, so we will give them ours.

But arguably one of the most significant consequences of our compulsion to humanize the divine is what seems to have occurred as a direct result of the building of Göbekli Tepe: the birth of agriculture. For it is the conceptualization of personal gods in human form, and the institutionalized myths and rituals that accompany such a process, that will push us out of the Paleolithic era, that will compel us to stop wandering and to settle down, that will give us the impetus to alter the earth to our advantage by inventing agriculture. Simply put, in transforming the gods of heaven into humans, we will transform humans into the gods of the earth.

Hunting may have made us human, but farming forever altered what being human meant. If hunting gave us mastery over space, farming forced us to master time, to synchronize the movements of the stars and the sun with the agricultural cycle. The mystical solidarity we enjoyed with the animals with whom we shared the earth was transferred to the earth itself.

Once we started farming, it is generally assumed, we stopped moving. We settled down and built villages and temples. Villages require rules, and so we privileged some among us to make laws and enforce them (thus the birth of organized society). Temples require priests, and so we designated others to regulate worship and speak to the gods on our behalf (thus the birth of organized religion).

Yet the more we learn about the rise of agriculture, the more we realize that it may have cost our ancestors more trouble than it was worth. To begin with, the backbreaking process of spending almost every waking hour— from sunrise to sunset—clearing the land, plowing the earth, collecting and sowing seeds, irrigating the fields by hand, and then guarding the crops day and night against locusts and thieves, was far more time-consuming and labor-intensive than simply going out into the wild and hunting for animals that were still everywhere in abundance.

As the Israeli historian Yuval Harari observes, the bodies of Homo sapiens were adapted to running after game, not to clearing land and plowing fields. Surveys of ancient human skeletons show just how brutal the transition to agriculture was. Farmers were more susceptible than hunters to anemia and vitamin deficiency. They caught more infectious diseases and died younger. They had worse teeth and more broken bones, and they suffered from a host of what were fairly novel ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis, and hernias. In fact, skeletons unearthed in and around the Ancient Near East indicate that in the first few thousand years of the Neolithic Revolution, humans lost an average of six inches in height, largely as a result of their inadequate diet. In light of all this, the transition from hunting to farming seems not only to have been a bad bet on humanity’s part; it was, in Harari’s words, “history’s biggest fraud.”

We suppose that our ancient ancestors ceased their nomadic ways because they started planting seeds and therefore had no choice but to settle down in order to care for their crops. However, the discovery of Göbekli Tepe and other ancient sites built by hunter-gatherers across the Levant has turned this idea on its head. We now know that permanent settlements came first, and then, many years later, farming arose. We were living in villages with booming populations, building giant temples, creating great works of art, sharing our technology for centuries before it occurred to us to grow our food.

The physical act of building the temple may have necessitated the planting of crops and the domestication of animals to feed the workers and worshippers gathered there. But to permanently settle, form, and modify the earth, to exert our will upon animals and utterly disrupt the way they are born, bred, and raised, to create artificial environments that mimic the natural world—all of this would have required a giant psychological leap in the way we think about the relationship between humans and animals, between people and the earth.

After all, to conceive of the gods in human form, to claim that we share the same physical and psychic qualities as the gods themselves, is to view humanity as somehow distinct from the rest of the natural world. For the first time in our evolution we began to imagine ourselves not as a part of the universe, but as its center. Gone is the animistic worldview that had bound us in soul and spirit to the natural world. And if we’re no longer bound in essence to the animals and the earth, then why not exploit them? Why not intervene in nature to dominate and domesticate it, to transform it to our advantage?

what began as an unconscious cognitive impulse to fashion the divine in our image—to give it our soul—gradually became, over the next ten thousand years of spiritual development, a conscious effort to make the gods more and more humanlike—until, at last, God became literally human.

IF THE ANCIENT Sumerian epic of Atrahasis and the flood, composed more than four thousand years ago, sounds familiar, it should. Tales of a world-ending deluge that destroys all of humanity save for a fortunate few are among the oldest and most widely spread in human history. The myth is, in some ways, the quintessential “folk memory,” as most scholars believe it is based on an actual catastrophic flood that took place some time in the distant past.

The hero Atrahasis is known by many names. In the twelfth-century B.C.E. Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, he is called Utnapishtim. In the Greek Babyloniaka of Berossus, composed in the third century B.C.E., his name is Xisuthros, and the Sumerian god Enki is replaced with the Greek god Kronos. In the Bible, Atrahasis is called Noah, while Enki becomes the Hebrew god Yahweh. In the Quran it is Nuh and Allah.

The agricultural revolution that took hold around 10,000 B.C.E. spread rapidly through the Fertile Crescent, reaching its zenith in the lush alluvial plains of ancient Mesopotamia. Wedged between the legendary rivers of creation, the Tigris and the Euphrates, in what is today known as Iraq and Syria, Mesopotamia (meaning “between two rivers” in Greek) benefited from a temperate climate and periodic flooding, which created a mineral-rich environment ripe for agricultural growth.

It was the Ubaid, and not the gods, who sometime around 5000 B.C.E. drained the marshes and drew canals from the Tigris and Euphrates, establishing the world’s first irrigation system.

wherever they came from and however they arose, by 4500 B.C.E., the Sumerians had cemented their dominance over Mesopotamia by founding what is regarded as the first major city in the world, Uruk.

Writing changes everything. Its development marks the dividing line between prehistory and history. The entire reason why Mesopotamia is known as the Cradle of Civilization is because some time in the fourth millennium B.C.E., the Sumerians began to press blunt reed styluses onto wet clay to make the distinctive wedge-shaped lines we call cuneiform, allowing human beings, for the first time in history, to record their most abstract thoughts.

The Sumerians were not the only Neolithic civilization to create a sophisticated religion; they were probably not even the first to do so. But they were the first to write about it, and that made all the difference, not only because it allowed their religious ideas to spread across the region, but because, with the invention of writing, the compulsion to humanize the divine—a compulsion rooted in our cognitive processes and crudely expressed at Göbekli Tepe—became actualized. The act of writing about the gods, of being forced to describe in words what the gods are like, not only transformed how we envision the gods; it made conscious and explicit our unconscious and implicit desire to make the gods in our own image.

The very words we choose to describe the gods affect how we understand their nature, their personality, even their physical form.

As the widespread adoption of the Atrahasis story demonstrates, the myths that germinated in the land between two rivers quickly grew shoots in Europe and North Africa. They blossomed across the Caucasus mountains and over the Aegean Sea. They flowered in the religious systems of the Egyptians and the Greeks, the Indians and the Persians. They fully bloomed in the pages of the Bible and the Quran, where the Sumerian word ilu became transliterated as Elohim in Hebrew and Allah in Arabic. And, not surprisingly, everywhere the myths of Mesopotamia spread, so, too, did the Mesopotamian perception of the gods as “lofty persons.”

The nine-thousand-year spiritual journey that took humanity from the faceless, humanoid pillars at Göbekli Tepe to the vibrant, personalized deities of Mesopotamia is obscured by a dearth of material evidence.

We know that Neolithic peoples considered the head (or, rather, the brain) to be the seat of the soul, which is why they so often collected and preserved human skulls. But the presence of these large caches buried under homes in what, for all intents and purposes, look like private household shrines may indicate the emergence early in the Neolithic Era of manism—a belief popularly referred to as “ancestor worship.”

The earth in which the dead were buried was now the soil from which our sustenance grew. It therefore made sense to focus our spiritual efforts on the recently dead in the hope that they would intercede with the forces of nature on behalf of the living, whether to help preserve the crops or maintain the health and viability of the herd.

It may have been partly the need to better manage these natural forces, to maintain power and influence over them, that spurred the Mesopotamians to personalize these gods, to gradually transform them into a pantheon of individual deities, each with a specific sphere of influence—whether earthly, cultural, or cosmic—and each with a specific function in the lives of their worshippers. From there, it was simply a matter of giving each god a personality, a set of human traits, and a distinct form, and the “lofty persons” were born.

The appearance of a god inside one of these chambers was signified by the presence of an idol carved in the god’s image. The use of idols was not a Mesopotamian innovation. Like the veneration of ancestors, the carving of idols to represent spirits or gods can be traced to the Paleolithic era.

In Mesopotamia, however, efficiencies in sculpting and molding made the use of idols in public devotion far more common and widespread.

Ancient peoples did not worship slabs of stone; they worshiped the spirits that resided within them. The idol was not itself a god; it was imbued with the god. The god was thought to take form within the idol.

Attenuate these supernatural flourishes slightly, and what remains is not an ethereal force of nature, but a human being with superhuman powers.

Unlike in Mesopotamia, however, the gods of Egypt were often depicted in multifarious ways—rendered as human or animal or, more often than not, a combination of the two.

These flourishes not only provided the minimally counterintuitive properties necessary to make the gods more memorable; they allowed Egyptians to manage and, more important, manipulate the god’s symbolic function. Anubis was depicted as a jackal-headed man because the jackal is a scavenging animal known for occasionally digging up and devouring corpses buried in the desert. By depicting the protector of graves as a jackal in human form, the Egyptians sought to control what was a widely feared force of nature with the power to disrupt the funerary practices that were so vital to ancient Egyptian spirituality.

Even when the gods were portrayed as animals in Egyptian art and literature, they were still given human traits and behavior; they were still depicted as taking part in human activities.

In each of these civilizations, the more accustomed people became to seeing images of their gods displayed in public temples and shrines—the more they heard their stories and legends during public festivals and ceremonies—the more easily they could personalize the abstract forces of nature their ancestors once worshiped.

In the Greek imagination, Mount Olympus was not just the abode of the gods who ruled over humanity; it was the home of a highly dysfunctional divine family engaged with one another in the same cosmic drama, like characters in a long-running soap opera who are constantly interacting in each other’s storylines. There was Zeus, the patriarch, father of gods and men; Hera, whom the Greeks transformed into Zeus’s sister and wife; and their firstborn son, Ares, the god of war. There were also Zeus’s two brothers: Poseidon, demoted from his perch at the height of the Mycenaean pantheon, and Hades, god of the underworld, as well as his second sister, Demeter, goddess of agriculture. Add to these Zeus’s other son, Hermes, whom he bore with the goddess Maia; his twin children Apollo and Artemis, both born from his tryst with the goddess Leto; Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy, whom he sired with a mortal woman; Athena, who in her evolution from Mycenaean to Greek goddess became Zeus’s daughter, born directly out of his head after he had swallowed his pregnant wife, Metis; and Zeus’s favorite child, Aphrodite, goddess of love and sex.

Pushed to its logical extreme, the impulse to depict the gods in increasingly human terms can quickly seem foolish. It is one thing to ascribe human traits to a deity. It is something else altogether to endow the gods with the full range of human emotions through which they come so vibrantly alive in Greek literature.

As with the elaborate depiction of the gods in Greek literature, it was precisely the advanced artistry of Greek sculptors, and the skill they had mastered in rendering the gods so realistically in human form, that created the wedge of doubt about the nature—and indeed the very existence—of the entire Greek pantheon.

It was not unusual for a pharaoh to favor one god over the others by, for instance, diverting resources to that god’s temple or employing more priests to tend to the god’s needs. But the exclusive worship of one god was unprecedented in Egypt, and the denial of the other gods’ existence was unfathomable. Yet that is precisely what Akhenaten proposed with his worship of the Aten. As a result, the young pharaoh from the Eighteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom in ancient Egypt became the first monotheist in all of recorded history.

Almost immediately after Akhenaten’s death, his religion died with him. The zeal with which the pharaoh had destroyed the idols of other gods was directed back at the pharaoh’s own god. Monotheism was labeled a heresy, a sacrilege forced upon an unwilling people. The Aten’s temples were demolished and thousands of new statues depicting Amun-Re commissioned across the empire.

The man the Greeks knew as Zoroaster was born in the fertile plains of northeastern Iran to one of a number of Indo-Iranian, or Aryan, tribes that had branched off the Indo-European tree to settle across the Central Asian steppes. Aryan society at the time of Zarathustra was strictly stratified into three distinct classes. There were the warriors who protected the tribe from attack, the farmers and herders who fed the population, and the priests—generally known as the Magi—who presided over its highly ritualistic religious system.

According to Zarathustra’s account of this experience written in the Gathas—the oldest of the ancient scriptures of Zoroastrianism, the religion he would ultimately found— this obscure deity revealed itself to be the sole god in the universe: “the very First and the Last.”

This god was unique in that it was not a tribal deity who had climbed to the top of a pantheon of other gods; there were no other gods. It was not connected to a particular tribe or city-state. It did not live inside a temple; it existed everywhere, in all creation, and beyond time and space. Although Zarathustra would come to call this god Ahura Mazda, meaning “the Wise Lord,” that was merely an epithet; this god had no name.

The encounter between Zarathustra and Ahura Mazda marked a pivotal moment in religious history, not just because this was only the second recorded attempt to introduce a monotheistic system but because it augured a new kind of relationship between god and human beings. That’s because Zarathustra did not merely encounter Mazda; he brought forth a revelation from this god. Mazda spoke to Zarathustra, and then Zarathustra wrote down those words for others to read. In doing so, Zarathustra Spitama became the very first human being in history to be characterized as what we now term a prophet.

Unlike Atenism, however, Zoroastrianism was unexpectedly revived centuries later, when it became the imperial religion of the Achaemenid Empire—the world-conquering dynasty founded by Cyrus the Great in the sixth century B.C.E. Yet the Magi of Cyrus’s royal court who revived Zarathustra’s theology completely reimagined it, first by transforming Ahura Mazda’s six divine evocations into six divine beings who, along with Mazda, became known as the Amesha Spentas, or “Holy Immortals,” and second, and most dramatically, by transforming Zarathustra’s two primordial spirits—Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu—into two primordial deities: a good god named Ohrmazd (a contraction of Ahura Mazda), and an evil god named Ahriman. Zarathustran monotheism became Zoroastrian dualism. Belief in one god that inhered both good and evil in itself became belief in two gods—one good, one evil—battling against each other for the souls of humanity. And once again the experiment with monotheism failed.

Partly it has to do with its exclusivist connotations. Monotheism, it must be understood, is not defined as the sole worship of one god: that is called monolatry, and it is a fairly common phenomenon in the history of religions. Monotheism means the sole worship of one god and the negation of all other gods. It requires one to believe that all other gods are false. And if all other gods are false, any truth based on belief in those gods is also false. Indeed, monotheism rejects the very possibility of subjective truth, which explains why, as we saw with Akhenaten, monotheistic systems must often be brutally enforced in order to overcome people’s natural beliefs and assumptions.

Zarathustra did not have the military might of the pharaoh and so could not physically coerce people into accepting his exclusive claim to truth. But he did present his god as the sole source of human morality—“the veritable Creator of Truth and Right.” He vowed that Ahura Mazda would judge every individual on earth by their thoughts, words, and deeds, and then either reward or punish them accordingly after they died. This was an extraordinary idea. The concept of a heaven and hell—for that is what Zarathustra was essentially promoting—was without precedent in human spirituality.

the primary reason monotheism failed to take root in our religious imagination for millennia has to do with the ways in which the concept of one god conflicts with our universal compulsion to humanize the divine.

However, the notion of a single god who encompasses within itself all of our virtues and vices, all of our qualities and attributes at once, simply made no sense to the ancient mind. How could one god be both mother and father? How could one god create both darkness and light? The ancients were perfectly willing to acknowledge the presence of such conflicting qualities in human beings. But they seemed to have preferred their gods to be neatly compartmentalized according to their distinctive attributes; all the better to beseech them for particular favors or needs.

Zarathustra constructed a more creative solution to this problem by transforming the ancient gods of polytheistic Iran into religious history’s first expression of “angels” and “demons.” Those gods who reflected humanity’s virtuous attributes became angels, while those who reflected our negative attributes became demons.

What the ancient mind seemed willing to accept was the existence of one all-powerful, all-encompassing “High God” who acted as the chief deity over a pantheon of lower gods who were equally worthy of worship. This belief is called henotheism, and it quickly became the dominant form of spiritual expression, not only in the Ancient Near East but in nearly every civilization in the world.

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.