God: the unauthorized biography

New Internationalist, August, 2004

1 In the beginning ...

Creating gods is something humans have probably always done. The human search for 'God' began long before the invention of writing. We know this because archaeologists have recovered artefacts from Palaeolithic times--35,000-10,000 BCE*--that resemble objects of later periods identified as sacred in surviving texts.

2 A question of sex ...

The history of God begins, some experts claim, not with god at all--but with Goddess. The deity was first imagined as female for at least the first 200,000 years of human life on earth. To prove this, archaeologists cite the very common occurrence of what they call 'Venuses'--female figures and cave paintings which emphasize breasts, the pregnant womb and the vagina, those parts of women most obviously associated with the production and nourishment of new life. In the early settlement of Catal Huyuk in present-day Turkey (6500-5500 BCE) only goddesses are shown in paintings and reliefs. It is thought that goddess-worshipping cultures were overtaken by patrilineal, semi-nomadic invaders from the steppes of Russia. These were militaristic and brought with them a religion based on male gods. A similar process occurred in India, when the Aryan invaders of the Indus Valley (from around 1500 BCE) introduced a masculine conception of deity.

3 Sacred nature

'Walking with care' is the Native American way of speaking of the sacred nature of the world. The Sioux addressed the earth as 'Mother': 'Every step that we can take upon you should be done in sacred manner: each step should be as prayer.' Hunting must be done with care and involve communication with the animal spirits.

Similar attitudes appear in indigenous cultures around the globe. Common fundamental themes include kinship with nature and the belief that the material and physical world contain the spiritual and are not separate from it.

Even in religions that now seem far removed from this kind of spirituality, prevalent symbols from the natural world--the tree, for example--have survived. And even if God is believed to be distinct from the natural order it is still common for nature to be perceived as a divine gift to be read as a revelation alongside scripture.

4 Gods galore

Most belief systems are polytheistic--containing more than one deity. New gods and goddesses can be added provided they do not threaten traditional deities and their cults. In polytheistic traditions such deities often have distinct characters and roles. Tara, the Tibetan Buddhist goddess, for example, is a protector, always willing to help the weakest. Yama, meanwhile, the god of death for both Buddhists and Hindus, is fierce and uncompromising (see right). The Greek Zeus was a libidinous god who did not draw the line at sex with humans and went for people of either sex. The Mexican god Quetzalcoatl was more preoccupied with bloodthirsty demands for human sacrifice (see far right).

Relying too much on gods already had early critics. The Buddha taught that to attain Nirvana--the state of bliss that was higher than any god--was a possibility to be achieved through human means such as meditation, not by appealing to any supreme power. Save yourselves, Buddha taught his disciples.

5 One God?

It's often assumed that the religions derived from Abraham--Judaism, Christianity and Islam--were always based on a monotheistic belief in only one god. This was not the case: the deity known as 'God' has a complex ancestry. The people of the eastern shores of the Mediterranean at the beginning of the Iron Age had several gods--or Elohim ('the gods'). According to pre-biblical Ugaritic texts, there was El, the son of a father god called El'eb, who was possibly the creator of the world. El lived with his wife, the goddess Asherah, alongside other Canaanite and Semitic gods such as Baal, the god of thunder and rains, and Yaam, god of floods and destruction. Asherah and Baal both make guest appearances in the Bible. It seems that, for some tribes, either Elohim became conflated into a single god, El, or that El emerged as the top god.

Moreover we can't assume that the patriarchs of Israel--Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses--even worshipped the same god. While the god of Abraham was most probably El, the god of Moses was one called Yahweh--or 'the god without a name'--who had come with a second wave of Semitic immigration. Unlike the comparatively mild El, Yahweh was jealous, partial, brutal--and highly effective.

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6 Yahweh alone

It was Yahweh who made a covenant with Moses demanding that the Israelites ignore all other deities and worship him alone. The worship of a single deity was almost unprecedented: the Egyptian pharaoh Aknaten had attempted it but his policies were immediately reversed by his successor. It seems that El and Yahweh co-existed for a time, perhaps as gods of different Hebrew tribes. But between the 8th and 5th centuries BCE the tribes coalesced into the nation of Israel. Facing external and internal attacks, the Israelites attempted to bring their different traditions into a single narrative. The new story (that related in Genesis and Exodus) tells us that although Abraham called his god El, this was only because he did not know the name of Yahweh (Jehovah in English and 'The LORD' in the Bible). The two gods, readers are assured, are really one. 'With a piece of early scriptural spin-doctoring,' as David Boulton puts it, the writers of the Bible cunningly wove the El and Yahweh traditions into a new myth of one God for a chosen people.