The Early Iron Age

How a people became monotheist: the historical religion of Iron Age Israel and Judah before the exile, reconstructed from archaeology and inscriptions — Israel's emergence within Canaan, Yahweh merged with El and paired with Asherah, the folk religion of high places and figurines, the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah, and the long road from many gods to one.

The gods before the philosophers: Zeus and the Olympians already named on Bronze Age Linear B tablets, a religion with no scripture but with Homer and Hesiod as its canon, the succession myth borrowed from the Near East, sacrifice and oracles and the grim house of Hades — and the mystery cults of Eleusis and Orpheus that first promised the soul something better.

The Iranian prophet who reduced the old pantheon to one Wise Lord, Ahura Mazda, and recast existence as a moral war of truth against the Lie: the Gathas and the Avesta, the cosmic dualism, fire and the Towers of Silence, and the fiercely debated inheritance the West may owe it — the devil, angels, heaven and hell, judgment, resurrection, and the apocalypse.

Ancestors, oracle bones, and the Mandate of Heaven: the Shang kings divining by fire-cracked bone to the high god Di and the royal dead, the ritual bronzes cast to feed the ancestors, and the Zhou revolution that made Heaven a moral judge who grants and revokes the right to rule — the religion in which Chinese writing itself was born.

The gods the Bible fought — recovered from their own words at Ugarit. The pantheon of El the aged father-god, Asherah, and Baal the storm-god, and the Baal Cycle (Baal defeats the Sea, is swallowed by Death, and returns); the decisive fact that Israelite religion grew up within Canaanite religion (Yahweh inheriting El’s titles and Baal’s cloud-riding imagery, Asherah as his consort); the Phoenician city-gods (Melqart of Tyre, Eshmun of Sidon, Astarte) and Carthage’s Baal Hammon and Tanit; the tophet and the genuinely unsettled child-sacrifice debate; and the Phoenician gift of the alphabet, ancestor of all Western scripts. A symbology of the standing stone (massebah/Bethel), the Asherah pole, the sign of Tanit, and the letters born from pictures.

Egypt’s southern twin: the great mounds and retainer burials of Kerma; Amun in the ‘Pure Mountain’ of Jebel Barkal; the Kushite pharaohs of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, Piye’s Victory Stela and the revival of the pyramid; Meroë’s own gods, the lion-headed Apedemak above all, and its ruling queens, the Kandake of Acts 8; the Nubian pilgrims who kept Isis’s temple at Philae open until the sixth century; and Christian Nubia and the paintings of Faras. A symbology of the uraeus mountain, the ram and the lion, and the Meroitic script, whose signs can be read but whose language still cannot.

The people Rome called the most devoted to religion: the ‘Etruscan discipline’ revealed by the child-sage Tages and the prophetess Vegoia; the bronze Liver of Piacenza, a sheep’s liver mapped as the sixteen regions of the sky; lightning lore and the sacred templum; Tinia, Uni and Menrva, forerunners of Rome’s Capitoline gods; the gold Pyrgi tablets that make Uni and Astarte one goddess; the linen ritual book that ended up wrapping an Egyptian mummy; painted tombs of banquets and death demons; and the ten ages allotted to their nation. With ancient DNA settling the origins debate and ‘decipherments’ weighed against the evidence.

Why nearly every people who kept records remembers the world ending in water — the Mesopotamian lineage from Ziusudra to Utnapishtim, its relationship to Genesis, and what the archaeology will and won't support.

How the world began, told side by side: the watery chaos of Tiamat, Nun, and tehom; the combat myth (chaoskampf) in which Marduk, Baal, and Zeus win order by battle — and Genesis's pointed refusal of the fight; the world built from a slain primordial body (Ymir, Purusha) and the contested Indo-European 'cosmic giant'; creation by word from Ptah to 'let there be'; the later doctrine of creation from nothing and the Genesis 1:1 translation debate; and the astonishing Nasadiya Sukta, the ancient hymn that looks at the beginning and admits it cannot be sure. With a symbology of the cosmic egg, sacred number, the dividing line, and the creative word.

The descent to the land of the dead — one of the oldest and most widespread of all sacred stories — and what a civilization reveals when it weighs its dead. Inanna stripped at the seven gates; the Greek katabasis (Odysseus, Orpheus, Aeneas, Persephone); Egypt’s Duat and the Weighing of the Heart against the feather of Maat; the judged afterlives (Zoroastrian Chinvat bridge, the Tibetan bardo, Chinese Diyu) set against the un-judged pits of Sheol and Norse Hel; the god who goes down (Izanagi, Baldr, the Harrowing of Hell); and a symbology of the gate, the ferryman, the scale, and the guidebook written for the dead.

The divine feminine — and the modern myth built on top of it. The goddesses we can actually document (Inanna/Ishtar, Isis, Asherah and the ‘Yahweh and his Asherah’ inscriptions, Cybele, Demeter, the living Mahādevī of India, Guanyin, Amaterasu); the ancient temptation to unify them into one; and Marija Gimbutas’s Great Goddess of a peaceful Neolithic matriarchy, reported honestly as largely rejected by mainstream archaeology. The sublimation of the goddess into Wisdom/Sophia and the Virgin Mary; the 20th-century Goddess movement and thealogy; and a symbology of the figurine, the triple moon, and the Black Madonna — a study in keeping what is revered separate from what is proven.

The ruler as a holy figure between heaven and earth — god, god’s son, god’s chosen, or god’s hostage. Frazer’s priest of Nemi and the dying-king thesis; the king as god (the Egyptian pharaoh, the Sapa Inca son of the Sun, the Japanese emperor, the deified Roman emperor); the king answerable to Heaven (the Chinese Mandate of Heaven, the prophet-checked king of Israel); the documented dying-king rites (the Shilluk reth, the Mesopotamian substitute king); and anointed kingship in Christendom (divine right, the royal touch, messiah/Christ). A symbology of regalia, anointing oil, and the king’s two bodies — with Frazer’s grand unifying thesis flagged honestly as rejected even where the specific cases hold.

How the world ends — and the deep divide between the line and the wheel. The Qumran War Scroll and the apocalyptic mind; the Persian blueprint (Zoroastrian dualism, the Saoshyant, resurrection, and Frashokereti, the ‘making wonderful’); the apocalyptic turn in Second Temple Judaism (Daniel, Enoch) and the contested question of Zoroastrian influence; the Book of Revelation, the Antichrist, and the millennium; the Islamic Day of Resurrection, the Mahdi, and the Dajjal; and the cyclical counter-vision — Norse Ragnarök, the Hindu Kali Yuga and Kalki, Buddhist Maitreya, the Aztec Fifth Sun — where destruction is one turn of an eternal wheel. A symbology of 666, Armageddon, and the world made new.

The gift of blood — one of the most universal and most troubling of religious acts. What sacrifice was (korban, ‘drawing near’; yajna into fire; thysia, ‘making smoke’; do ut des) and the gift/communion/feeding theories; blood on the altar; the substitution of animal for human (the Aqedah, the Passover lamb); human sacrifice reported honestly (Aztec, the contested Carthaginian tophet, Shang retainers); the scapegoat of Leviticus and the Greek pharmakos; Girard’s mimetic scapegoat mechanism and Burkert’s Homo Necans (flagged as contested); and the sacrifice that ends sacrifice — the Lamb of God and the Eucharist, the bloodless turns of Judaism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. A symbology of altar, smoke, substitute, and shared meal.