In the 4 months since I posted comments while reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, I’ve been reading his follow-up book, Homo Deus. Again I’ll only comment here about his reflections on the 7,000-year religious development of homo sapiens.
Harari had an intriguing idea about the strange religious development called polytheism. He speculated that it began as an attempt to deal with the massive cultural shock caused by the Agricultural Revolution. He claimed that polytheist religions were an “agricultural enterprise.” What he couldn’t explain, however, was why it happened the way it did. He merely pointed out that the various practices of polytheism seemed to help large numbers of humans deal with the vast disruptions when agriculture and animal domestication changed everything.
There seemed to have been a profound reluctance to face what they were doing during the growing change from hunter/gatherers to agriculturalists/domesticators. During that vast disruption in the explosively expanding populations, people were reluctant to admit that there was something terribly wrong with those vast disruptions caused by the development of agriculture and animal domestication. One of the profound disruptions caused most humans to start believing they were separate from the rest of the natural world. So they needed to justify that strange change in basic belief. That justification process produced the many forms of polytheist religions.
BUT… WHY did it happen? What was there about polytheist beliefs that made them change from animistic beliefs? Why did the belief in being separate seem so satisfying to those rapidly expanding populations?
Even though I agree with his speculation, in my attempt to fill in the gaps of Harari’s theory, I have come up with the idea that there was another form of theology that was developing at the same time and was extremely different than polytheism. Harari and most other historians seem incapable of even admitting the existence of that alternative theology.
For lack of a better name, let’s call the alternative “mysticism.” That name seems to fit because the people who formulated that alternative are called “mystics,” or as Albert Einstein called them, “spiritual geniuses.” During the centuries of the last 7,000 years there have been many mystics who were trying to warn people of the dangers of polytheism, but there was so much resistance against them that very few ever became named in historical records. And the warnings of those who have been named were so threatening to the dominant polytheists that the warnings were not only ignored but were actually warped into the polytheistic religions. But I would record in the list of those named mystics such names as Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Loa-Tzu, the Hebrew prophets (especially Elijah, Jeremiah, and Isaiah), Jesus, Muhammad, Harith al-Muhasihi and other Sufi leaders. Just to name a few.
So my conclusion from all that history is the warning that the spiritual development of the human race was hindered by the production of polytheistic religions. I think human history would have turned out to be very less destructive if the general spiritual development would have been from animism to mysticism; instead of from animism to polytheism. The evidence of that conclusion is shown by the many small pockets of mysticism that were able to escape the warping and destruction of polytheistic forces. And so I join with the many people today who are trying to show that the way out of the massive problems of the modern world is through turning to mysticism.
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