Part One: Faith

Chapter Two:  Deity

2.2 The First Gods

Deity as Feminine

Do you recall the clay female figurines from Chapter one? She represents the oldest form, for which we have a record, of ritualized worship to what can clearly be recognized as representing a deity figure. A female figure - or Mother Goddess - that has been associated with Fertility, crops, and life not only for the early European and middle east cultures, but for a number of cultures around the world. That the first deity may have been represented by a woman, is probably disconcerting to the traditional faiths where Monotheistic deity is always represented as decidedly male! My father had to leave his church of choice when a new minister came to the congregation insisting that God be referred to in the feminine. This was too much for my dad who had known God to be a masculine form all his life. And yet, in its roots, the notion of God may very well have started out in the feminine.

This feminine deity survived for thousands of years and was probably the inspiration for later deities in Egyptian, Greek, and Roman mythologies, and with the worship of the Virgin Mary receives at least honorable mention within the Catholic sect of Christianity. The older and more traditional Jewish practices of worship are not so kind to female representation. To this day the more traditional Jews promote a very sexist attitude towards women.  Not to mention the treatment of women within the Islamic world.

In the Eunumi Elish, one of the first original three gods to appear, Tiamat, was female but, as the wife of Apsu, was not autonomous. She was his wife and as above so below (or in this case the reverse) was subordinate to the will of the husband.

The Sun God

Many of the earliest religions were focused on the heavens. In the same way that our early ancestors recognized woman as a source of fertility and life, the sun, a source of warmth and life enabling energy, was often seen, and worshipped, as (a) God. This is particularly ironic in light of current knowledge of astral-physics. We now understand that all of the original matter in the universe was of the simplest order: hydrogen (with just a smidgen of the next simplest atom: helium.) All of the complex atoms were created by the massive nuclear forces within stars; fusing them into increasingly heavier atoms. Our solar system and its planets, with all its abundance of heavy elements, was once part of some distant sun. Suns which long ago blew themselves apart. Scattering the newly created larger atoms of oxygen, iron, carbon, and all the rest out into space. These atoms would later congeal into our solar system and it's planets. And us. So in this way, the inspiration of the sun as God, as creator, was a greater truth than our ancestors could have ever realized!

It has been proposed¹ that before the pagan gods of early civilizations there existed a monotheistic religion in which our most distant grandparents worshipped one god, often referred to as the Sky God. He was not worshipped in elaborate rituals the way that later cults would come to worship their gods. He was sort of a bare bones, down to earth sort of god who was behind all things but beyond the grasp of the meager human mind. So people lost interest in Him in favor of the pagan Gods, who were perhaps more exciting. Anthropologists suspect that He became so far removed and exalted in the heavens, that he lost out to more abundant and accessible deities. Even today there are African tribes who still believe in a Sky God. But His presence is oddly lacking in their daily life. There are no temples or statues, no groups or cults. The tribesmen believe that he is beyond expression and can only be minimized by human consideration.

Egyptian God Ra

Monotheism has historically been thought of as the sole invention of the Israelites courtesy of Moses.  It was not until the time² of Moses and the ten commandments that Yahweh and Yahweh alone would be worshiped.  Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob shared the pagan beliefs of the native population of Canaan and knew their mentor deity as El Shaddai, not Yahweh.  (see next section) It was tradition in those days to pay respects to the local Gods when traveling from one town to another - something a tribe whose wealth came from herding was a constant way of life..

But the first instance of Monotheism occurred much earlier in Egypt under the rule of pharaoh Ikhnaton (Amenhotep IV, 1387-1366 BC).  Ra, the Sun God and creator of everything (in his persona of Atum, also called Ra-Tem, or Ra-Atem) was the central deity of the Egyptians and all other Gods were considered to be an aspect of Ra - similar to how the Holy Trinity would later be defined by the Christians.  Ra had many attributes and was often merged with other deities to form "hybrid" dieties.  One particularly popular hybrid was the combination of Ra with Amen, the local god of Thebes, and became known as Amen-Ra.  One attribute of Ra, which represented the solar disk itself and was the vehicle in which Ra rode across the sky, would come to be worshiped itself as a merger of Ra and his visible presence (the sun) called Aton (or Aten).  Amenhotep would make Aton the only God worthy of worship and initiated persecution of other forms of worship including the worship of Amen-Ra. The first Monotheism replete with persecution of non-conformists.

The pharaohs all claimed to be direct descendents of Ra and it was this direct lineage to the Gods that was their birthright to rule as divine beings.  Amenhotep in his fervor to promote Aton as the One True God would change his name to Ikhnation - which means "It is well with Aton" - and moved the counties capital from Thebes to a location 200 miles to the north called Akhetaton - which means "the Horizon of Aton".  From there he would seek to remove all other traces of the former Gods - and make a good many enemies.  For this reason, and the inattention to matters of state as a result of his obsession with religion and the creation of the first monotheism, his new religion was short lived.  Upon his death, his son the boy king Tutankhamen, would return the capital to Thebes and put an end to the worlds first monotheism.

Further Reading:  http://www.touregypt.net/gods1.htm,

Canaanite High God El

Israel. Elohim (designation of God in Hebrew scriptures) E author of the Pentateuch.

The Greek Gods

Probably the most familiar of the polytheistic religions, the Greek Gods are known to most of us.

The Roman Gods

Adopted from the Greeks for the most part,

Anthropomorphism