The
Judeo/Christian God is of quite ancient ancestry. He emerges from the Bronze Age (circa 3,200-1,200
BC), some 5,000 years ago. In many ways,
he is typical of the several other male, Middle Eastern, Bronze Age gods. There was Horus of Egypt, Utu of the
Sumerians, Helios of the Greeks, and many others. But who were his mother and father?
For millennia, a
variety of mother goddesses flourished in the Middle East. She took many names and forms.
She is found in the Ashanti Asasa Ya; the Egyptian cat goddess, Bast;
the Roman fertility goddess, Bona Dea; the Celtic hearth goddess, Brighid; the
Greek goddess of the harvest, Demeter; and the Greek life force from which all
other beings sprang, Gaia. Freya was the
Norse goddess of abundance, fertility, and war.
The Egyptian goddess Isis was honoured, as the mother of Horus. She was the divine mother of every pharaoh of
Egypt, and ultimately of Egypt itself.
The Egyptian goddess of fertility, Hathor, is often painted nursing her
son Horus. She is taken as the
inspiration for the classic Christian portrait of the Madonna and Child. There were countless others.
1. The Venus of Hohle Fels
The 40,000-year-old mammoth bone carving of the
Venus of Hohle Fels (above) is the oldest known representation of the human
form. Its exaggerated anatomy and
massive breasts are a powerful depiction of being female, symbolizing the
fertility goddess’ characteristics of sex and reproduction.
2. The Venus of
Willendorf
The 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf (above)
is another Stone Age carving discovered in Austria. Hundreds of similar ancient female figures of
the mother goddess have over the years been discovered by archaeologists.
Study of the history of
religion through the ages reveals that the mother goddess took a variety of
different forms. Sometimes she was
represented as a snake, or a vulture, or the Moon. Each symbol represented a cycle of death,
birth, and regeneration. The snake
hibernates, and then wakes up and sheds her skin. The vulture recycles dead flesh by eating
it. The Moon dies and is reborn every 28
days, mirroring the feminine menstrual cycle.
The archaeological record shows that her veneration as the supreme god
goes back tens of thousands of years.
In the millennia before
the male god-figure rose to ascendancy in the Middle East, a variety of mother
goddesses proliferated. It is uncertain
which one of them can with accuracy be named as Yahweh’s mother. Worship of her was universal throughout
Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Her
adoration in various forms lasted for tens of thousands of years, from early
pre-history to the Iron Age. She could
have been any one of them, or all of them.
Her temples were gradually destroyed, and her cult extinguished, by the
followers of male gods Mithras, Yahweh, God, and Allah as they began their
ascent to the summit of mythology. For
the last two thousand years, these male versions of god have triumphed among
the superstitious.
Her priestesses celebrated fertility, bounty,
and life. The fertility religions which
venerated the mother goddess stood no chance of surviving once the male gods
began their inexorable spread across the western world. They could offer little opposition to the
warlike adherents of the male gods who came to overthrow them. One by one, the priestesses were sliced down,
and their temples burned. Left to lord
it over the religious battlefields were the three Abrahamic gods: Yahweh, the God of the Jews; the God of the Christians;
and Allah, the god worshipped by the followers of Mohammed. They hold sway among the superstitious of
today. Their main challenge is from
those who have come to realise they are all made up superstitions. But we can with some confidence conclude that
Yahweh’s mother was the mother goddess of antiquity.
Yahweh’s paternity is
subject to less uncertainty. The Egyptian
pharaoh Amenhotep IV (1352-1336 BC) ruled an empire that included Palestine,
Phoenicia, Nubia, and Egypt. There were
hundreds of gods of both genders worshipped throughout the empire. Amenhotep changed his name to Akhenaten when
he established a new religion that taught there was but one god, the sun god
Aten. This theory of one supreme, male
god was previously unknown.
3.
The cartouche of Akhenaten’s name
Akhenaten and his wife,
Queen Nefertiti, worshiped only the sun-god, Aten. The priests of Amun and the other ancient
gods of Egypt considered Akhenaten to be a heretic. The Heretic King is believed to be the first
person to promote a monotheistic religion, the belief in only one god.
Moses appears to have
been an Atenist priest who was forced to leave Egypt with the people who were
to become Israelites. He and his
followers took the new theory of a supreme male god with them out of
Egypt. Such an idea did not previously
exist in the Middle East. Some scholars even
theorise that Moses was none other than Akhenaten himself, fleeing the uprising
against him by the followers of the old gods.
4. King Akhenaten and his wife
Nefertiti with three of their daughters under the rays of the sun-god (circa
1350 BC)
The date of the Exodus from
Egypt is uncertain and controversial. It
is placed by archaeologists as early as 1446 and as late as 1290 BC. The details of Moses’ life, and the accuracy
of the Hebrew Old Testament’s account of the Exodus, are mired in controversy. This is not unusual given that the books of
the Old Testament were preserved through centuries of unreliable oral
tradition. The stories of the Jewish
Bible were not written down for the first time until Ptolemy II arranged for
them to be documented in the mid-third century BC, a thousand years after they
were first made up. However, a date in
the thirteenth century for the Exodus is generally accepted. The identity of the specific pharaoh involved
remains an open question.
It is clear from the
sequence that it was this event that brought the male god, whom the Israelites subsequently
came to name Yahweh, from Egypt to Israel.
This god whom Moses and his successors syncretised out of the Aten and
the god versions of Canaan remained an essentially barbaric, murderous and
jealous Bronze Age god.
5.
Statue of Akhenaten
Akhenaten’s chosen
religion did not survive long in its original form. Once he left the scene, the worshipers of the
old gods wasted no time in tearing down the temples to Aten and chiselling away
most references to him on the monuments Akhenaten built. But the Aten’s legacy survived elsewhere. The progeny of the Aten flourished in the
deserts of the Sinai Peninsula and later in the sands of Palestine and the Arabian
Peninsula.
6. The Tetragrammaton YHWH, the name of God
written in Hebrew
During their forty
years in the desert, the Hebrew-speakers developed their theology of the male
god, Yahweh. He seems to have gradually
evolved by a merger of the Aten of Egypt and El, the supreme god of the
Mesopotamian Semites. Moses can thus be
said to have achieved the monotheism that Akhenaten sought to promote. In this way an African deity, the Aten, has a
good claim to be the one true father of Yahweh.
In the earliest
Christian writings, the concept of God was governed by the invocation of the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Since the 1st century, Christians began to call upon God with this name. By the time of the first Council of Nicaea in
AD 325, this version of the Christian God had come to receive universal
acceptance among believers.
Anxious to distinguish
their god of the New Testament from the barbaric god of the Old, and to
emphasise God’s preference for love over vengeance, the followers of Christ
made several adaptations that Christians are familiar with today. The Sermon on the Mount preached by Jesus, together
with the three virtues taught by St Paul, remain core Christian
teaching. Christianity may be said to
distinguish its adherents as sitting at a cultural peak of all religious superstition.
7. The earliest known depiction of the
Trinity, 350 AD
It is interesting to note that, in syncretising
his own version of god, the child-rapist, mass-murdering prophet of Allah, Mohammed,
preferred the more savage version of god promoted by the Hebrews. Allah, according to the teachings of Mohammed,
has not mellowed with age as the Christian god has. His followers still practise the barbaric
customs of stoning to death, cutting off limbs and heads, and child rape as
marriage, pioneered by the religious of the Bronze Age, promoted by the
followers of Yahweh, and recommended by Mohammed. He married his favourite wife, Aisha, when she was six, though he claimed not to have taken her to bed until she was nine years old.
The present-day followers of either one male god
or the other are in a majority throughout the world’s believers. Yahweh, the first son of the Aten, has a mere
15 million Jewish followers. His
half-brother, God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost is followed by 2.5 billion Christians. The third and youngest son of the Aten,
Allah, is worshipped by the followers of Mohammed who number some 2 billion.
Given that there are some 8 billion people in
the world at this point in the early twenty-first century, that leaves 3.5
billion pagans who do not claim allegiance to any of these religions. How many nominally religious persons believe
the nonsense taught by the high priests of their male dominated religion is
doubtful. It is probably no more than
fifty per cent. But that is another
story.
In conclusion, we
observe that new religions traditionally emerge from among the poor and the
oppressed. Over time they progress from
being a persecuted minority to the generally accepted code of belief. Forecasting the future is more difficult than
excavating the past. But we can
confidently anticipate that at some date in the future, when the religions of
the Christians and the Muslims begin to go the way of Baal and the Aten, a
Rastafarian Queen will ascend to the throne of England and her religion will be
the norm through the civilised world.
