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Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V |
Part II: Primitive Monotheism and the Origin of Polytheism In Sophisticated Society SOME YEARS ago Prebendary Rowe observed
that it is more sensible to start with the known and reason upon
it towards the unknown than to start with the unknown in the
hopes of being able to explain the known. We now have a body
of "knowns" which is substantial, and in some ways
the most assured data are to be found in that quite vast literature
which has been preserved from the Cradle of Civilization, Mesopotamia.
Since Langdon took the view that the Sumerians represent the oldest historic civilization, he added: 2. Langdon, Stephen H., Semitic Mythology, Mythology of All Races, vol. 5, Archaeologicl Institute of America, 1931, p.xviii.  pg
1 of 19 
Five years later in an article which appeared in The Scotsman, he wrote: (3)
To my knowledge only one person has seriously challenged Langdon's conclusion since. And this was an old professor of mine, T. J. Meek. (4) The argument that Langdon used was based on the following circumstances: The Sumerian religion in its latest development before the people disappeared as an entity swallowed up by the later Babylonians, seemed to have involved about 5000 gods. The inscriptions of circa 3000 B.C. or perhaps a millennium earlier show only 750. The 300 tablets or so known from Jamdet Nasr in 1928 when Langdon published these texts, contained only. three gods; the sky god Enlil, the earth god Enki, and the sun god Babbar. The 575 tablets from Uruk translated in 1936, which Langdon dated about 4000 B.C. but are now believed to be more accurately dated 3500 B.C., contain the names of only two deities: the sky god An and the mother goddess Innina. Meek's criticism of Langdon's essay was that the number of gods he mentions for the earlier tablets is in error. In the Jamdet Nasr text there may have been as many as six, not three. On this account Meek felt that he could accuse Langdon of gross inaccuracy and thus undermine the force of his argument. At the same time he admitted that at least one of these six is doubtful. Moreover, it is not always possible to be sure that a name which appears as someone to whom prayers are made is necessarily thought of as a deity. Praying to saints has been known even in modern days! In any case, when the forward view of history takes us from two deities to a small number � whether three or six 500 years later, to 750 a thousand years later, and to 5,000 before the picture becomes indistinct � the argument against Langdon's interpretation of the data based upon an error in counting of such small 3. Langdon, Stephen H., The
Scotsman, November 18, 1936. pg.2
of 19 proportions surely carries
no weight at all. It does not seriously challenge his basic argument.
This raises an important point; namely, the possibility that polytheism never did arise by the evolution of polydemonism, but because the attributes of a single God were differently emphasized by different people until those people in later years came to forget that they were speaking of the same Person. Thus attributes of a single deity became a plurality of deities. It is not merely that single individuals laid emphasis upon different aspects of God's nature but whole families and tribes seemed to have developed certain shared views about what was important in life and what was not, and therefore, not unnaturally, came to attribute to their god and to put special emphasis upon those characteristics which seemed to them of greatest significance. For example, a warlike people are not too likely to emphasize the gentleness of God nor a legalistic people the forgiveness of God. They will rather emphasize His power in the one case and His justice in the other. In three other Doorway Papers (6) we have explored the possibility that the sons of Noah (Shem, Ham, and Japheth) each developed a bent towards life which led them to different emphases: Shem on the spiritual quality of life, Ham on the practical concerns of life, and Japheth on the philosophical aspects of life. It is not surprising, therefore, that the God of the Semites is a 5. Frankfort, H ., Third
Preliminary Report on Excavations at Tell Asmar (Eshnunna):
quoted by P. J. Wiseman in New Discoveries in Babylonia about
Genesis, Marshall, Morgan and Scott, London, 1936,
p.24. pg.3
of 19 God of
pure spirit. The gods of the Hamites, on the other hand, were
gods of power. And the gods of the Japhethites or Indo-Europeans
were gods of light, in the sense of being gods of "understanding."
I think Matthew's Gospel was written for the descendants of Shem
and is slanted towards their way of thinking about God. Mark's
Gospel was written for the descendants of Ham and is full of
action, of doings, of service, of authority � where the characteristic
phrase is "immediately," "straightway," and
similar terms. Luke's Gospel was undoubtedly written for the
descendants of Japheth; and it may be merely coincidence, though
I doubt it very much, that the writer's name means "light."
7. Delitzsch, Friedrich, Babel
and Bible, Williams and Norgate, London, 1903, pp.144f. pg.4
of 19
A very sound argument indeed.
It was not perhaps unnatural that in order to symbolize
God's various powers it would have been taught that His vision
was as sharp as a hawk's, or He was strong as a bull, or that
He watched unseen like the crocodiles whose eyes alone are to
be seen. In time these symbols were mistaken by the common people
as being gods in themselves; so was fulfilled that which Paul
had written in Romans 1:18-23, that men turned from the worship
of God Himself to the worship of His creatures and in due course
became vain in their imaginings, and their understanding was
darkened. In the second part of this Paper we shall return to
this subject again, because it is important to see why these
grosser aspects of religious belief should have so completely
swamped those loftier aspects which ancient Egyptian texts show
clearly to have once been remarkably pure.
9. Rawlinson, George, editor,
Herodotus, appendix to Book 2, p.250. pg.5
of 19
Everywhere the pattern seems to have
been much the same, wherever we have sufficient records to establish
the historical sequence. It is not strange that a conquering
people should set their own deity at the head of the pantheon,
but it is also not strange either that for the sake of peace
and harmony they should pay lip service to the deities of the
conquered, though allotting to them inferior positions. This
kind of broad-mindedness we would tend to commend today under
the general heading of religious freedom. But the penalty of
this broad-mindedness is that the truth is very quickly blurred.
The solution is not simple: the Jesuits, as an example, have
traditionally taken the stand that only the truth should be given
complete freedom of expression and therefore religious tolerance
is equated with lack of conviction. Any man who agrees that people
may worship whatever they will is really confessing, so they
argue, that he himself is not absolutely certain that he has
the truth and therefore is willing to be broad-minded. They have
a point. The monarchs of antiquity, like Cyrus for example, allowed
complete freedom to conquered peoples to build their temples
and establish their priesthoods as suited them individually.
The consequence was that such men by their "enlightened"
policy contributed to the tremendous proliferation of deities.
As I have said, the problem is a difficult one: but ecumenism
may be a worse menace in the opposite direction by insisting
that everybody must agree to worship the same "God"
who may be no God at all. pg.6
of 19 as straightforward. Nevertheless, there is a measure of agreement that here, too, there has been a steady multiplication of deities through the centuries, until they are now like the stars in the sky for number. One of the best-known authorities in this area was Max Muller, who although he did not have the Christian convictions that many contemporary scholars had, nevertheless, reached certain conclusions that should be mentioned. Max Muller, born in Germany in 1823, studied in Paris and subsequently taught in London. He wrote many volumes among which Chips from a German Workshop is perhaps his best known. He also wrote Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, as Illustrated by the Religions of India. Finally, he edited his great monumental and life work, a series entitled The Sacred Books of the East. He did not believe that early India was monotheistic in its faith, but neither did he believe it was polytheistic � polytheism being a later stage which involved a process of degeneration. In his The Science of Language he wrote: (11)
Hence once more we see how polytheism develops subsequently. Reverting once more to Rowe's observation about arguing from the known to the unknown, it may safely be said without the slightest hesitation that monotheism never evolved out of polytheism in any part of the world's earliest history for which we have documentary evidence. As we shall see, this was true also in China. 11. Muller, Max, Lectures on the Science of Language, 1st series, Scribner's, Armstrong, New York, 1875, pp 21, 22. pg.7
of 19 Many of his contemporaries disagreed with Muller's interpretation of the evidence, Andrew Lang being one of them. And since his time there has been wide acceptance of the idea that the history of religious beliefs in India has been characterized by the personification, often in gross physical forms and in increasing multiplicity, of a few concepts of the nature of God which at first saw Him as invisible and made Him so remote that He became virtually impersonal. Such lofty concepts do not appeal to ordinary men and what happened in the Middle East appears to have been repeated in India, except that the process proceeded much further because of the cultural continuity that circumstances allowed in that country. In the course of this, they reached the point where their gods were numbered not by the thousands as in Sumeria but by the tens of thousands. No doubt if Egypt had retained its original culture likewise it, too, might have ended up worshiping 50,000 deities where once they worshiped perhaps only one. Edward McCrady, writing about Indian religious beliefs observed that even the Rig Veda (Book 1, p.l64) shows us that in the early days the gods were regarded simply as diverse manifestations of a single Divine Being. He quoted: (12)
Scholars in the West incline to the opinion that the earliest of the hymns in the Rig Veda date from between 1500 to 1200 B.C. (13) Indian tradition, on the other hand, claims for them a much earlier antiquity. Whatever its date and however little Muller shared the Christian view of man's spiritual history, he nevertheless admitted freely: (14)
When we come to China, the situation is even more confused, for the Chinese seem to have had a peculiar aversion to the worship of personal deities. Some of the older writers, nevertheless, were confident that they could discern evidence of a once pure monotheistic faith, which however was early lost sight of because of the extreme 12. McCrady, Edward, "Genesis
and Pagan Cosmogonies," Transactions of the Victoria
Institute, vol.72, 1940, p.55. pg.8
of 19 practicality of the Chinese mind. Such a pure faith, as we have already seen, is not "useful," because one cannot hope to bribe, cajole, or in any way persuade to one's own advantage a Supreme Being who is absolutely pure and above bribery or cajoling. And therefore from a practical point of view one seeks the ear of lesser powers and forgets the Higher One. A notable work in this respect was written by John Ross of the United Free Church of Scotland entitled The Original Religion of China (15) (published in New York, no date), in which the author examined the underlying concepts of early Chinese religion as judged by their names or words for God by special reference to the hyphenated title, Shang-Ti. He interpreted these two words to mean "above" or "superior to" and "ruler," i.e., "Supreme Ruler." He said that the name "bursts suddenly upon us without a note of warning . . . with the completeness of a Minerva." More recently a flood of fresh light on early Chinese faith has resulted from the discovery of the so-called "Oracle Bones." Chinese scholars have divided their ancient times into three separate periods: first, the primal-ancient; second, the mid-ancient; and third, the near-ancient. The first period stretches roughly from the 21st to the 12th century B.C. According to Ron Williams, who could read Chinese fluently, each of these periods possessed its own distinctive religious characteristics. The first was purely monotheistic. The second was dualistic with a tendency towards materialism but still retaining a flavour of the ancient monotheism. The third was completely materialistic. Professor Williams observed: (16)
15. Ross, John, The Original
Religion of China: p.25: quoted by Samuel Zwemer, ref.1,
p.86. pg.9
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Williams pointed out in his paper that the Book of History in its opening sentence states that the ruler, Shun, on his accession in 2255 B.C. "offered the customary sacrifice to God." This statement, made without introduction or explanation, implies an unknown series of antecedent events running back into the remoteness of antiquity. Habitual practice had made them so familiar that they needed no details of the ceremonies involved. Their authority was so unquestioned that there was no place for a preface. Williams continued:
Subsequently Williams noted that neither in the
Book of History nor in the Odes can any reference
to idols be traced. No representation to anything in the heavens
above or in the earth beneath has ever been made in China to
typify God. And He may be worshipped anywhere at any time, being
everywhere present. pg.10
of 19 of the Shang dynasty.
The bones are inscribed with questions asked by the king of his
priest on the one hand and the answer which the priest received
by divination on the other. They contain the name of God, Shang
Ti, and in spite of their number no reference is made to any
other deities whatsoever. 1. 2. 3. 4. The form 17 Schafer, Edward H., Ancient China, in the series, The Great Ages of Man, Time-Life Inc., New York, 1967, p.58. pg.11
of 19
So once again, therefore, where we
can work from written records, we have evidence of the degeneration
of religious faith, not its evolution upwards.
The same basic process is apparent
in early Italy. Rosenzweig, (19) writing about the Iguvine Tablets,
the date of which is not certain but probably belonging within
early Etruscan times, remarked upon "the curious flexibility"
of the pantheon revealed in these tablets, in which "deities
are distinguished by adjectives, which in their turn emerge as
independent divine powers. . . ." The author considers this
to be perhaps the most striking feature of these tablets. 18. Persson, Axel, The
Religion of Greece in Prehistoric Times, University of
California Press, 1942, p.124. pg.12
of 19 We have no written records to cover
the original beliefs of primitive people, but a tremendous number
of detailed and sympathetic studies of their beliefs have been
made during the past hundred years and collected, notably by
Wilhelm Schmidt. The evidence by inference allows us to say with
confidence that the course of their religious history was precisely
the same as that of the higher civilizations of antiquity with
this difference, that whereas in the civilized countries a pure
faith was corrupted by faulty reasoning due to the sinfulness
of human nature, among primitive people a pure faith was corrupted
through ignorance and superstition, again reinforced by the sinfulness
of human nature. If we are to follow Lyell's principle of interpreting
the past in the light only of things happening within historic
times, then we have no right whatever to make the assumption
that man started by groping in the dark and has only now begun
to approach the Light. The evidence shows that he began with
the true Light and now has his understanding increasingly darkened.
The evidence for this among primitive people is to be found in
every corner of the world where such people now exist or have
existed within recent times. And paradoxically, the more primitive
they are, the simpler and the purer is their faith often found
to be. We shall look very briefly at a few pieces of evidence,
which are merely representative of a vast compendium of information
now available in such volumes as are listed in the bibliography
of this Paper. 21. Schmidt, Wilhelm, The Origin and Growth of Religion: Facts and Theories, translated by H. J. Rose, Methuen, London, 1931, xvi and 302 pp. pg.13
of 19 may
be worth noting also, in passing, that Tennyson wrote In Memoriam,
with its erroneous description of Nature as "red in tooth
and claw," ten years before Darwin's Origin appeared.
Schmidt observed that Spencer made no effort whatever to employ
genuinely historical methods to establish his thesis. (22)
On the basis of present evidence it is now apparent that Spencer
was completely wrong. Spencer held that primitive people began
by worshipping ancestors, and that as civilization developed,
ancestors "naturally" were formed into hierarchies,
and hierarchies in turn led to rank, the highest ranks becoming
deities. 22. Ibid., p.63. pg.14
of 19
Schmidt then treated of a second alternative
view of the origin of religion, the animistic concept proposed
by E. B. Tylor. Tylor's view assumed that primitive man used
his own existence as a measure of all other existences and came
to think of everything, beasts and plants at first but even inanimate
things in the end, as consisting of body and soul like himself.
It was assumed that primitive man would soon discern by introspection
that he had a soul, some kind of spiritual inner reality which
could, for example, travel in dreams, or in ecstasy, or in hallucinations.
He attributed to all forces of nature a soul life similar to
his own, which could not be seen, but was assumed. From this
animistic concept he moved "naturally" to the view
that this spirit world was personal. Thus arose polydemonism.
In due time as society became stratified socially, so did the
"demon" world, until we arrive at a stage of polytheism
in which many of the demons have been elevated into deities.
The final stage was the acknowledgment of one spiritual being
who became Chief, i.e., God, and to whom all other demons and
lesser deities were subservient and in a lower category. Even
after this rationalization had supposedly given rise to a monotheistic
faith, Tylor maintained that such a Being would be too high,
too exalted, too remote, to need human worship, "too indifferent
to concern himself with the petty race of men." (24)
So He was simply ignored. Thus a monotheistic faith which resulted
from a process of rationalization became by a further process
of rationalization a faith so removed from the exigencies of
life that it came to be irrelevant.
24. Ibid., p.77. pg.15
of 19
Schmidt considered one further view,
that of Max Muller, who developed a complex theory which argues
that the attempt to rationalize the natural forces at work in
the world, the sun, moon, rain, thunder, earth, sky, fire, water,
led to stories attempting to explain these forces which took
the form of nature myths. The terms which were paramount in these
myths, the word for fire for example or the sky, came to be viewed
by the less intelligent as the names of deities and these gave
rise to the pantheons of classical antiquity. As Schmidt pointed
out, however, in spite of his fame and his great learning Max
Muller lived too long, long enough in fact to see his ideas gradually
abandoned completely. 26. Ibid., p.284. pg.16
of 19
Many
writers on this subject have singled out these particular primitive
tribes for a good reason. They are all people who have been in
a sense isolated either by reason of island residence (such as
the Andamanese or Madagascans), inhospitable forests (such as
the Tierra del Fuegians), desert regions (such as the Australian
aborigines or the Bushmen), inhospitable climate (such as the
Eskimo or other Arctic people), or because of their frank hostility
toward the white man (such as the Zulu in Africa or many American
Indian tribes). 28. Lang, Andrew, The Making
of Religion, Longmans Green, London, 1909, pp.175-182, 196. pg.17
of 19 which
he maintained is "clear even to a cursory examination."
(30) In his paper, he was not merely reiterating what
others have observed, namely, that all these primitive peoples
have knowledge of a Supreme Deity, but rather that the Supreme
Deity they recognize is everywhere essentially the same figure
with the same attributes.
The same writer some years later,
speaking of Lang's view that polytheism did not precede and lead
to monotheism, remarked, "his intuitive insight has been
abundantly corroborated." (34) 30. Zwemer, Samuel, "The
Origin of Religion: By Evolution or by Revelation," Transactions
of the Victoria Institute, vol.67, 1935, p.189. pg.18
of 19 Anthropological Institute by 1950 was prepared to publish a paper by E. O. James in which the writer spoke as follows: (35)
From high cultures and low cultures the same picture emerges. It is a picture of a remarkably pure concept of the nature of God and His relation to man being gradually corrupted on the one hand by rationalizations which resulted from the gradual substitution of man's own thinking in place of revelation and on the other hand by superstition which stemmed from ignorance and forgetfulness of the original revelation. As we shall see, briefly, in the following part of this Paper, there is little to choose between rationalization and superstition. The end result in both cases is the same � man's foolish heart is darkened. 35. James, E. O., "Religion and Reality," Journal of the Royal Archaeological Institute, vol.70, 1950, p.28. pg.19
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Ti'en,
or "heaven," occurring with great frequency in the Classics.
It consists of two radicals, 
jen,
"man," and 
shang, "above." That is to say, the sign for heaven,
which is now an abstract idea, originated out of two signs meaning "The
man above." In later times the Emperor was referred to as the 
Ti'en Tzu, or "The Son of Heaven." This reflects views generally
held in the ancient world regarding the divine origin of kings. The
other name, which is the current one in use today in China, is (as mentioned
by Dr. Ross), 
Shang Ti. In the oldest inscriptions which we
possess (this was written in 1938), these two characters are combined
into a single pictograph, 
which is composed of three elements. The first
is 
,
which is the original
, mu,
meaning "wood" and is a picture of three sticks or
a faggot. The second, 
, is the earlier representation of 
, shu,
meaning "to bind." Above this bound faggot is placed
,
which is the ancient 
, shang, meaning "above." The
character 
is the archaic form of 
meaning "to burn a faggot of wood."
We therefore find the sign 
to mean "the burning faggot of a wood
offering to the One Above," but also the "One Above
to whom the burning faggot of wood is offered."
thus
appears in these earliest of records as the only symbol for God,
and it is completely free of all anthropomorphism.