Anthropomorphic gods?

[arthwollipot]

Perhaps it is about being in a position where he can see everything. Back in the good old days when the Earth was flat, God could be in a central position and see what was going on all over.

You don't even need to invoke the largely false idea that people back then really thought the earth was flat (nothwithstanding a line or two in one ancient religious text) to get to the idea of a deity being in a position where they could overlook everything.

Very few people until the monotheists thought that their deities actually overlooked the entire world - just the important parts that they actually inhabited. The Greek gods were never, as far as I know, thought to have influence in China.

I'd go so far as to say that it's not so much that God overlooked the world because it was flat, but that the world was described as flat (in that ancient religious text) so that God could overlook it.

 

[David Mo]

I just figure that by default all gods are anthropomorphic. If there were a god that did not fail in the face of discovery as they all tend to, it would be so unfathomably strange we would have trouble even identifying it, much less pretending to know what it wants or intends. Even the idea of intention itself is a human one, and a presumption.

Not only by default. Always. Gods are hypostasis of the real world made by limited beings (humans).
See the ontological argument (Anselm). He begins with the assumption that humans have the concept of God as an unlimited being. False. We have the limited (human) concept of an unlimited being. This is a very different thing.

 

[HansMustermann]

Bikewer got it right. Gods evolved out of animism and shamanism. And I'd add that not everything is human shaped in either.

In animism (and you can see for example Shinto for something that survived in an advanced society), everything has a spirit. Animals, trees, etc. Even a meadow might have its own spirit, and probably does. There are no gods as such. Some spirits are greater than others -- e.g., Amaterasu, the spirit of the Sun, sometimes called the Sun Goddess in western translation, is a LOT more powerful and important than your late great-grandma's spirit -- but there isn't really a clear cut between the two. It's a continuum of spirits, so to speak, from really puny to really great and powerful, but they're all spirits.

And in shamanism, the great bear spirit is, surprisingly enough, bear shaped. Now it is a very human-centred system, but not human-shaped.

But of course they acted as humans, because I guess the only way we know how to really treat other entities is by anthropomorphising them. It's not only humans doing it either. Seems to be a built in biological function. Sort of like how your cat only knows how to treat you as if you're another cat, or like your dog only knows how to treat you as the big dog leading the pack.

Which, I guess, the anthropomorphic gods only took to the logical conclusion.

But to return to gods, my counter-example would be the goddess Nut. (Btw, read with the same kind of "u" as in "put", not like the "nut" you buy at the supermarket.) She was more often represented as a huge cow than as a human. She also WAS the sky dome. Not just the goddess of the sky dome, but actually THE thing you see when you look up.

Another counter-example would be the Norse giants. Some of them are not very human-shaped half the time. E.g., Thor's mum, Jörð or Hlóðyn, IS Earth. No, really, you can even see the ethymology if you transliterate it as Jörth. Not the goddess of Earth, but actually Earth, the planet. (Yeah, Thor's mom is so big, she has a gravity well) And yet in most representations, their world was not human shaped.

BTW, the sun and the moon were aslo giants. And at least for the moon, I'd think it would be hard not to see that it's not human shaped.

 

[HansMustermann]

You don't even need to invoke the largely false idea that people back then really thought the earth was flat (nothwithstanding a line or two in one ancient religious text) to get to the idea of a deity being in a position where they could overlook everything.

Very few people until the monotheists thought that their deities actually overlooked the entire world - just the important parts that they actually inhabited. The Greek gods were never, as far as I know, thought to have influence in China.

I'd go so far as to say that it's not so much that God overlooked the world because it was flat, but that the world was described as flat (in that ancient religious text) so that God could overlook it.

Actually, sorry, at the time gods were invented, people DID think that the Earth was flat. The first recorded notion that the Earth was a sphere only appears in the 6'th century BCE in Greece, and even then it remained a bit of a controversy until the 3'rd century BCE, when it was finally proven.

Yes, after the 3'rd century BCE, any educated man would know that the Earth is round, but that's about 3000 years too late to cover even the first recorded depictions of gods.

As late as the 4'th century BCE, the "counter-earth" was a valid counter-theory. It not only had a flat Earth, but also a flat Sun. The Sun we see is just a mirror reflecting the "central fire" around which everything revolves. Essentially the "central fire" was kinda the equivalent of the Sun in our heliocentric system, but the flat Earth revolved around it with the BACK towards that central fire. The Sun we see was just a mirror reflecting it. And we know their Earth had to be flat, because the only gravity in that system was that of the central fire. Everything fell towards that centre of their universe. The Earth's surface just happened to be perpendicular to that direction towards the central fire.

And an argument I hear often, but I'd like to nip in the bud, goes like "but they were seafaring people! surely they'd see that a ship disappears over the horizon." Well, guess what? They didn't. There was no compass, and there was no north star, so everyone would row row row their boat gently along the coast. Any ship that would actually disappear over the horizon would be lost at sea, because conversely it had just lost line of sight to the shore. So nobody did that.

"But what about eclipses?!" some would interject. Well, guess what? The "central fire" explained them well enough, when people finally started being that concerned with astronomy. In fact we know from Aristotle that the "counter-earth" / "central fire" theory appeared precisely to explain the eclipses. But even that's late. There is no indication that early man was that concerned with having a scientific non-divine explanation for what happens in the sky.

 

[arthwollipot]

I'm seeing an assertion that references to a non-flat earth didn't exist before a certain time, but not a lot of evidence that references to a flat earth did exist. Please provide at least one reference for this "counter-earth" theory of which you speak.

 

[HansMustermann]

Ascii and ye shall receive: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philolaus/#AstSys

 

[fuelair]

Oz?

No, Australia was way out of their remit!!!!!

 

[fuelair]

To me it's just a mater of survival of the fittest (or the fit enough).

When homo sapiens lost a family member they cried and went on marching with grief in their hearts, leaving the deceased to rotten or be devoured by carrion eaters.

One "day" a combination of human traits lit on the notion that death wasn't the end of a person. That hardware would decay, but software would move on and change into a new state: the ancestors, depositary of old experience and forgotten deeds, who in turn became the guardians of the proto-tribal family. Religion had emerged.

Burying or cremating them was the way to mourn and show respect. Why went this on and became increasingly elaborated? Because it provided some adaptive edge. The society had evolved into one led by tradition, with the ancestors increasingly being spiritualized and empowered. Old rules that had guaranteed survival wouldn't be broken or forgotten so easily. Each individual's behaviour was no longer exclusively controlled by the mechanics of guilt, which had emerged long before to avoid murder and endogamy. Now, there were spirits watching over you, and they eventually not only saw your acts but read your soul.

As tribes, large tribes, cities, proto-societies emerged, these spiritual beings became more complex, more powerful, more arbitrary and more personal. Kings and gods were born at the same time, cast from the notion of both living chief and dead chief, together with a general motherly spirit representing nature.

It was obvious no much time would pass from the birth of large kingdoms, empires and some sort of international circulation of luxury goods, and later cultural progress, that the notion of few or even just one omnipotent syncretic god would emerge.

The rest is just Darwinian: lots would be willing to die for Allah and fewer to do it for Ahura Mazda then, guess what direction conversions followed and who's the most adored one nowadays? What about Arnaud Amalric and his "kill all of them, God will know his own"? How many Christians and how many Albigens are there today? Not always the last standing "god" is the better one. Aten was just an ephemeral development, but intriguingly enough, its discriminative nature could have served as a model for the ethnic only-god "Jehovah".

It's just Darwin. That's why "they" hate him so much.

In all fairness, burying/cremating also served to make it less likely a curse of sickness would pass upon them due to the processes of death and the (unknown to them) microorganisms and larger life forms that the decaying corpse promoted and that could/did cause them harm!!!

 

[ahhell]

The whole sky god thing is likely just a result of the Indo-European expansion. They had a sky/thunder god, and a lot of their descendants had sky gods. There are lots off other sorts too, earth gods, sea gods, gods of various mountains, etc.

 

[Chanakya]

Is the concept of god at its most basic, most primal form that of a man literally in the sky?

If so, how might have this come about at first?

My personal hypothesis: Anatomically modern humans had been burying their dead for a while. Whenever the "Silverback", so to speak, the lead male of the family died, they would've associated him with good fortune and possibly seen visions of him or in dreams.

How that translates to him being associated with living in the sky, I dunno...

We've had all kinds of Gods.

Gods that are like plants (herbi-morphic? herbo-morphic?), gods that are like animals, gods that represent natural phenomena, gods that are wholly formless. And, yes, along with all of those, gods that are fashioned on humans as well, your anthropomorphic gods. So it's not as if we as a species have an exclusive yen for anthropomorphic gods alone.

In fact, "at its most basic, most primal form", gods would probably be nature-gods : pantheistic gods, fire-gods, storm-gods, disease-gods, death-gods. (That some of these latter are also represented in human forms would, I imagine, be a later development. It seems most likely to me that when primitive man encountered a storm, he'd simply worship -- try to appease -- that storm, thinking of it as a spirit, a god. The anthropomorphic representation of those primitive gods, like Thor the god of thunder, would probably have been a later development, after primitive man had spent a good many evenings at the fire sharing stories and fantasies.)

This last -- what I said about nature-spirits/gods starting out as "pure" gods, fire god represented by just fire, thunder god represented by just thunder, etc -- and only later represented in anthropomorphic form -- this isn't based on research at all, just plain unsupported opinion. But should actual research along those lines exist, it would be interesting to see what they say!

 

[Red Baron Farms]

And an argument I hear often, but I'd like to nip in the bud, goes like "but they were seafaring people! surely they'd see that a ship disappears over the horizon." Well, guess what? They didn't. There was no compass, and there was no north star, so everyone would row row row their boat gently along the coast. Any ship that would actually disappear over the horizon would be lost at sea, because conversely it had just lost line of sight to the shore. So nobody did that.

Actually that's not entirely true. We know for example the Polynesian expansion started ~5,000+/- years ago and that they certainly used stars to navigate beyond the horizon.

But actually we have even much earlier evidence of boat use even by Neanderthals that would have been completely over the horizon depending on the dates one accepts for Neanderthal colonization of certain islands like Crete. I don't think anyone believes Neanderthals swam those 40 kilometers to an Island they couldn't have even known existed. And what of the later colonization of Crete by modern humans?

 

[aleCcowaN]

In all fairness, burying/cremating also served to make it less likely a curse of sickness would pass upon them due to the processes of death and the (unknown to them) microorganisms and larger life forms that the decaying corpse promoted and that could/did cause them harm!!!

It is true but, how did they know it before starting those ritual? In fact, manipulating the otherwise to be left corpses made contagion more probable.

Somehow, human beings acquired the ability to overcome their natural aversion for corpses and retain human traits pegged to them. And this went on to present times. I live in the kind of country where people consider to be normal the fact that millions worldwide pray to and feel comforted by the representation of a corpse nailed to a wooden apparatus. In other countries, like India and the United States, they're far more advanced: they went beyond the corpsy thing and concentrated in the promises regarding the afterlife and/or rebirth, some social mechanism, like it is laugh, to cover present unbalances, in this case by saying "pay now, get it thousandfold later"

 

[arthwollipot]

Ascii and ye shall receive: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philolaus/#AstSys

Thanks - I will check this later.

 

[Venom]

You don't even need to invoke the largely false idea that people back then really thought the earth was flat (nothwithstanding a line or two in one ancient religious text) to get to the idea of a deity being in a position where they could overlook everything.

Very few people until the monotheists thought that their deities actually overlooked the entire world - just the important parts that they actually inhabited. The Greek gods were never, as far as I know, thought to have influence in China.

I'd go so far as to say that it's not so much that God overlooked the world because it was flat, but that the world was described as flat (in that ancient religious text) so that God could overlook it.

Despite the Greek discovery of the "true shape" of the Earth, I'm sure, as indicated by the Near East cosmological model, that many still believed in the flat Earth.

 

[arthwollipot]

Despite the Greek discovery of the "true shape" of the Earth, I'm sure, as indicated by the Near East cosmological model, that many still believed in the flat Earth.

Notwithstanding the link that Hans posted above, which I still haven't had a chance to absorb, I'm sure that many people didn't even consider the shape of the earth. Their consciousness extended to their local region alone, and beyond that area that they could realistically travel to, all they had were the vaguest of stories, most of which didn't mention the shape of the earth. For most people, the shape of the earth wasn't even an idea. Especially since we're now looking back into the time of the origin of the idea of gods, which is likely neolithic.

By the time people started actually writing things down, which was about 4,000 years BCE, those people who actually stopped to consider the shape of the earth would probably have realised that it wasn't flat, even before Eratosthenes. And even if they didn't, it was a pretty small slice of human history.

But again, I haven't looked at Hans' link yet. That might demonstrate me wrong about this.

 

[HansMustermann]

Actually, the people who stopped to think and WRITE about things were, perhaps unfortunately, the same religious people whose writings you discount. So what we do have from them are descriptions like a flat disc surrounded by ocean, which is present both in Old Kingdom Egypt and Mesopotamia at the time you mention. Another lesser known model was actually that of a ziggurat, also Middle-East.

Even much later in Greece, both Hessiod and Homer describe a flat Earth. So, you know, 8'th to 7'th century BCE, and still flat. Thales, circa 6'th century BCE, believed that the Earth floated in water like a log, though some would argue that it's not clear if it's flat or actually, you know, log shaped. Democritus believed in a flat earth as late as the 4'th century BCE, according to Aristotle. Etc, etc, etc.

Perhaps the one most notable model that was NOT a disk, was that of Xenophanes of Colophon. See, he believed the world to be an infinitely tall cylinder. That is, infinite downwards. It still had a flat top where we are, but it went to infinity downwards.

 

[HansMustermann]

Actually that's not entirely true. We know for example the Polynesian expansion started ~5,000+/- years ago and that they certainly used stars to navigate beyond the horizon.

Mea culpa. I should have made it clearer what I'm talking about.

I was talking about the Mediterranean civilizations, so, you know, north hemisphere. Also in the time frame of written records in the area. Southern hemisphere is something entirely different, as star configurations go.

As for what happened in the time of Neanderthals, well, sky precession has a period of 26,000 years. So the most trivial implication is that 26,000 years ago we would have had Polaris in the same place as today. But in the meantime other stars may have been there and usable for navigation. All I was saying is that at the time of ancient Greeks they didn't have a North Star. At other times, though, things may have been different.

But again, my bad. I should have made it clearer.

 

[Darat]

It is true but, how did they know it before starting those ritual? In fact, manipulating the otherwise to be left corpses made contagion more probable.

Somehow, human beings acquired the ability to overcome their natural aversion for corpses and retain human traits pegged to them. And this went on to present times. I live in the kind of country where people consider to be normal the fact that millions worldwide pray to and feel comforted by the representation of a corpse nailed to a wooden apparatus. In other countries, like India and the United States, they're far more advanced: they went beyond the corpsy thing and concentrated in the promises regarding the afterlife and/or rebirth, some social mechanism, like it is laugh, to cover present unbalances, in this case by saying "pay now, get it thousandfold later"

What natural aversion? Yeah dead bodies go stinky and the like but that's not an aversion to the corpse that's an aversion to the smell etc.

 

[aleCcowaN]

What natural aversion?

The instinct evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago among who would eventually become modern humans.

Hominids developed social and hygienic traits -by natural selection-. The social ones allowed to read others and be read by others, to curb personal aggressiveness, and to allow communal living even with social imbalance. Take modern laugh, tears and blushing, together with a part of the mechanics of guilt as examples of that.

On the other hand, the hygienic traits included rejection, repetitive behaviour and, again, guilty feelings (when rejection and desire struggled). That is: don't procreate with your mother, father or siblings; don't play with **** nor eat where you ****, clean yourself and what you're gonna eat when possible, avoid decaying things, and avoid corpses. Yet plastic, the notion of taboo had emerged.

Religion and what the constructs of "god" or "gods" are, were born from those instincts and evolved as culture. That's why I regard the topic of "anthropomorphic gods" as obviousness.

Years ago, I participated in an on-line polling related to research regarding the ideological leaning and its relation with the rejection of modern institutions like gay marriage. The extensive questionnaire was the best designed and laid out I've seen so far. It addressed the obvious (what do you say you think about politics, economics, racism, gays and whatnot), the not so obvious (what do you really think about the same topics, hidden in an exquisite way) and your instincts. The typical question had a shade of possible answers with seven steps from "a lot/very much" to "not/nothing at all". I remember one question in particular. It went like this "Imagine you see a thick, fat, huge, gelatinous worm moving slowly, and imagine yourself deliberately stepping on it barefoot. How repugnant would that feel for you?".

Not surprisingly -once I learned about the research and the subject in general- people on the political left were more concerned with instincts related to equality while people on the political right were more concerned with hygiene. For the poll, I came to be on the centre slightly towards the left (no surprise there, that means in a not Usian way I'm on the centre slightly to the right, what is exactly where I stand), and my concerns about equality and hygiene are similar, but without being a total fanatic of any group of them.

Imagine you step barefoot on a decaying corpse. How would you feel about it? Would it be more because of the rotting thing or the corpsy thing? That may give a personal touch to the "what instinct?" bit, and their possible modification via acculturation.

 

[Delvo]

Especially since we're now looking back into the time of the origin of the idea of gods, which is likely neolithic.

Paleolithic, actually. Neolithic goes back about 10000 years in the parts of the world that reached this stage the earliest. It's when farms and permanent artificial structures appear, followed by wheels and the mining & casting of the easily meltable metals. By this time, people had already inhabited every non-Antarctican continent for dozens of millennia, as a result of Paleolithic migrations. And myths involving gods are known everywhere.

On both Paleolithic and Neolithic ideas of the world's shape, the simplest and most straightforward and obvious impression the world makes on most people is that it's flat, based not only on the principle of "just look around", but also on what we know people thought in various places before being told otherwise.

There's no sense in hypothesizing & supposing about what people might/would/could have thought before modern times when we already have records of at least a sample of what they actually did think. The Old Testament clearly depicts a flat Earth. A related but non-Biblical version of the flood story treats the "ark" not as a boat but as a replica of the world, with a specified size & shape: a flat circle (covered by a dome roof, but that was just a roof, not a part you would walk on or in). At about the same time, Greeks wrote about the different shadow lengths in different cities and their implication that the world must be round as something new that they hadn't had any proof of before (and had studiously gone out of their way to make that particular observation because it was a question for which they had more than one option to take seriously). And Greek myths, from before that study was conducted, are clearly based on flat-earth concepts, from Atlas holding it up and the Atlas Mountains being his fingertips, to Apollo hauling the sun around above it, to Icaraus and Daedalus needing to be careful how high they flew. Old Germanic myths depict a flat world with four supernaturally strong dudes named Nordi, Sudri, Ostri, and Vestri standing at its corners holding up the sky (which was a solid dome, the same as in the Bible). The "turtles all the way down" joke is based on one that has a flat world on some giant elephants' backs on an even gianter turtle's back, which not only specifies a flat Earth to start with but also clearly shows that they're thinking of the whole universe that contains it in a way that involves a consistent up and down and everything being pulled downward and needing to rest on something below it, not empty space in which spheres float freely and gravity is local to a specific sphere. At least one myth in the New World (I think California) has a flat world with giant animals laying at its rim, whose occasional movements cause earthquakes. One from the Puget Sound region has the gods creating the world progressively from east to west and the west coast being where they stopped, which is why there's nothing west of there. Both Germanic and Babylonian creation myths have the world assembled from parts of an enormous slain monster/giant in ways that end up indirectly describing a flat world, such as not only that those beings had bodies that only make sense having once stood on a larger flat surface with a consistent downward gravity themselves, but also that the sky was made from only half-enclosing parts (top of Ymir's cranium, half of Tiamat's ribcage) instead of fully enclosing the world. The Egyptian description of the sun's daily path has it going underground instead of flying over other lands.

Maybe there are mythical world-descriptions out there which feature a round world, but I'm not aware of one. If so, it would only establish that ancient people's thoughts on the subject were mixed at most. (And without contrary examples it's not even mixed, just different versions of a flat world from everybody we know of.)

* * * * *

26,000 years ago we would have had Polaris in the same place as today. But in the meantime other stars may have been there and usable for navigation.

Polaris is Alpha Ursae Minoris. The Greeks called Ursa Minor "Helikē", which is related to "helix" and was given to that constellation because its path during the year tightly circled around the celestial north pole. That kind of movement identifies a central point around which everything else rotates even if that point has no star.

Whatever star is closest to that point in the sky, making its path the smallest circle that any star traces, can end up being called a polar star even if it isn't precisely in the center and non-moving. There's a story of a king in India growing up hearing that everything revolves around a particular star, but, upon getting old enough and having the right equipment to observe things himself, finding out that that star actually does make a little circle throughout the year. He then summoned an astronomer/astrologer and angrily demanded to be told why the poems he'd been taught as a child were false. The star he's talking about appears to be Alpha Draconis!