As well as the incidences of history, history is also about our thoughts and our relationship with the world. In pre-history this relationship was a simple one.
The Earth was a world of physicality supervised by a supernatural realm of spirits. Known as animism, these spirits existed in the trees, in the rivers, on the mountains and even in the celestial objects above our heads. They could be benevolent, providing food to keep us alive, or they could be harmful, pounding us with winds, with rain and even with earthquakes and floods.
EARLY RELIGION
Man devised an intermediary to relate the wishes of the spirits to his fellow man. Contacting the spirits in trance-states, this was the shaman, or tribal witch doctor. Possessing divine powers, he could heal, be possessed by the spirits and prophecy that which was to be.
Through him, man learnt respect for the supernatural and began customs designed to keep the spirits benevolent. In this way man became one with his society, his society became one with the world, and the world became one with the supernatural.
In many ways this was an ideal state. History was not yet existent. The whole of life revolved around the dictats of the spirits, devising a culture based on the supernatural.
MYTHOLOGY
Related by the shaman in the form of stories, great questions were answered: who are we, what are we, why are we, how did we come to be, and what is our purpose? The answers formed the first mythologies, providing meaning in a way a particular culture could understand.
Seeing these mythologies answered all these questions to the satisfaction of all concerned, there was no reason to force change. If change did occur, it was due to environmental factors, such as a drought forcing a tribe to move on; usually because they felt they had angered the gods.
Hence, life appeared unchanging, a neverending cycle of birth, life and then death, forever going onwards to a new, repetitive beginning.
ORGANISING SOCIETY
These early peoples were hunter/gatherers. Following the great migrating herds on their neverending cycles, the men hunted while the women gathered fruits and berries. Politics, when it occurred, was simply a form of decision making to guarantee survival.
It had nothing to do with organising society – the gods did that, and it had nothing to do with owning or conquering land – the concept of ownership was unknown. Then, about 10,000 years ago, something happened to change our way of life.
This was the discovery of agriculture, and it had great implications for man. Most prominent of all, cultivation required a static society. Hence, man left his hunter/gatherer ways and settled by his primitive fields.
This led to a number of innovations. First of all, man needed a roof over his head. This led to the building of the first villages. Suddenly, skills were required to keep the fields, to harvest, to bake, to make tools, to keep the buildings in good repair.
GETTING BIGGER
As man no longer wore the skins of his slain beasts, clothes makers were required. But most important of all, the land they had settled had suddenly gained value. And as the land had become valuable to the particular tribe, it soon became apparent that it was also of value to other tribes, who were all too ready to try to take it.
Hence, to protect the land, the soldier was required to guard it, and to fight to keep it.
As the soldier advanced into the militia and eventually the army, it was realised that greater strength laid in numbers, causing the coming together of many villages into a rudimentary country.
TRADE AND CONSTRUCTION
Alongside this march towards a wider community was trade. The products of agriculture needed to be dispersed amongst the people, forming the market, commerce and the introduction of money.
Suddenly the traditional shaman could no longer answer all the needs of this wider community, and the first form of professional middleclass came into being. The fledgling country was taking form, with decisions being made more and more by a council of elders rather than gods. Politics had entered the world of man.
As building skills advanced and society became more complicated a seat of power was created in these fledgling countries. Most likely created in a particular village, the buildings here suddenly became grander, and within no time at all, it became a city.
And as it was realised that such a complicated social structure needed a leader, the most powerful man of the community would become king.
PRIESTHOOD
The shaman still had a role in this new, revolutionary community – two, infact. Society was still enthralled by the spirits, and the king relied on divine prophecy to advise him. Also, the farmers needed to know when to plant their crops, and the shaman had learnt how to read the stars to define the seasons. They had become astrologer-priests to the king.
However, politics realised great benefit could be had from these all-powerful gods to whom the priest spoke. It was reasoned that, seeing the gods assisted man and his society in decision making, then when a society chose a king, he was actually chosen through the benevolence of the gods.
The early concept of rule by divine right was instigated. Coming at the time of elaborate monument building to the gods, a subtle transition was made by which the king came to be accepted as a god himself.
EVOLVED RELIGION
This was expressed in the monuments he had built, and mythology was subtly changed, expressing the early kings as supernatural superbeings with god-like powers. Hence, the shaman evolved into the prophet, holding a position of importance second only to the king.
From this process, history was forged. And that history was a bloody one. From earliest times man had looked to the sky and noticed light and goodness in the sun, and dark and evil in the moon.
Through a daily cycle a war raged in heaven between these forces of light and dark. And now the god-king was to use this concept to great political advantage, always portraying himself as the good, fighting the forces of evil.
GOOD AND EVIL
Such a concept allowed the god-king to forever wage war against evil by subjugating his neighbours, who were forever seen as evil enemies. This process led to early empires, but enshrined in man the value of advancement and change due to man’s endeavours and not simply due to the gods.
Life had begun to change from a cyclical way of life to the linear concept of advancement, locking man into a need to advance, forever unhappy with what he presently had.
This unhappiness with the contemporary state of man was most obvious in the new shaman, who, by about 600BC, began to ask deep questions that began to challenge the primacy of his gods.
HOMER
Beginning a rational search for knowledge, this was aided by the development of more complex language and writing techniques, which allowed him to theorise and set down his thoughts in written form.
This process of change is seen, first, in Homer, who’s ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ transcended mere mythology and set down for the first time the recording of history. Although his characters were virtual super beings, we now know that much of what he wrote was, in a vague sense, historically true, with the long fabled Troy now holding the possibility of actually existing.
Homer brought the shadows of history to a definite end, and soon the shaman-priest transformed into more of a philosopher than a purely supernatural interpreter. This, too, was seen in Homer’s ancient Greece with the admittedly sketchy knowledge we have of Pythagoras.
BIRTH OF REASON
Although thought to have been the organiser of a religious movement known as the
Pythagoreans, Pythagoras is also credited with the discovery of mathematics, realising that the world was answerable to numbers.
Homer and Pythagoras were part of a movement that challenged the authority of the gods, showing how human genius and reason could be employed instead. This mood centred upon Athens, which, for 2 centuries, used human reason as the process of government.
Although excluding most of its population, about 35,000 Athenians were seen as citizens, and every one of them participated in the process of decision making. The first form of pure democracy, this freedom from the dictats of gods led to the greatest flowering of rational philosophy in history.
THREE WISE MEN
Throughout this experiment in democracy, dictatorial Sparta had been a thorn in the side, and in 404BC Athens lost to them, instigating dictatorial rule over Athens. The leading philosopher of the time was Socrates, and in 399BC he was ordered to drink hemlock for his audacity of challenging the gods.
This death sentence could have ended rational thought but for his pupil, Plato, and later Aristotle. As the Macedonians began to gain political rule over the Aegean, resulting in the empire building of Alexander the Great, Plato and Aristotle defined Classical knowledge born of reason, observation and, most importantly, human intellect.
A MODERN WORLD?
Aristotle tutored Alexander, who’s empire spread far, creating the Hellenic world. Though often brutal, this new world was one of commerce and reason, creating intricate trading links and politics and a tradition of learning that was crowned with the great library of Alexandria and the rational cosmology of Ptolomy in the 2nd century AD.
As the Hellenic world went into political decline, its rational inheritors were the Romans, who took advantage of architectural, social and engineering skills to produce a rational empire that would last over four centuries. However, social pressures were to rise that would sound the death knell for Rome and the rational knowledge it inherited from the Greeks.
There are two central reasons for this decline. First of all, barbarian Germanic migrations began hammering on the doors of the Roman Empire. And in Jerusalem a new monotheistic religion spread to encompass the Roman Empire based not on rational thought, but on belief in the renewed power of the supernatural. This religion was Christianity.
© Anthony North, July 2007
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