Genealogy of Religion

Exploring the Origins, History and Future of Religion

Entries Tagged as 'Mesopotamia'

Mesopotamian Religion: Prelude to Axial Age

August 31st, 2011 · 12 Comments · Axial Age, History, Morality

Between 800 and 200 BCE, a remarkable series of sages, mystics, and thinkers gave rise to the transcendental traditions that are known today as “world religions.” In 1949, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers identified several themes common to these traditions and described this  six hundred year period as the Axial Age: “These movements were ‘axial’ [...]

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Ghostbusting with Gozer

May 31st, 2011 · 3 Comments · Economy, History, Neolithic, Power

According to the Ghostbusters Wiki, Gozer the Gozerian (known also as Gozer the Destructor, Volguus Zildrohar, and Lord of the Sebouillia) is an ancient entity who “was originally worshiped as a god by the Hittites, Mesopotamians, and the Sumerians around 6000 BC.” When not visiting retribution on New York in the form of the Stay [...]

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Early Complex Societies & Early Organized Religions

February 4th, 2011 · 2 Comments · Archaeology, History, Neolithic, Power

Historians have long known that the shelf life of complex societies throughout human history has been rather limited. Archaeologists are aware of this also. But how to explain it?
In a recent (open access) paper, “Cycling in the Complexity of Early Societies,” Sergey Gavrilets and colleagues mathematically modeled early complex societies using a number of variables [...]

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Reconstructing Earliest Amerindian Shamanisms

October 1st, 2010 · No Comments · Archaeology, Ecology, History, Hunter-Gatherers, Neolithic, Shamanism

In The Religions of the American Indians, Ake Hultkrantz is clearly interested in reconstructing the supernatural beliefs and practices that the First Americans would have carried with them to the New World.  Because Hultkrantz wrote the majority of the book (in Swedish) in 1967 and updated it for the English translation in 1979, the “Clovis [...]

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Religious Ritual & Pathogen Resistance

September 23rd, 2010 · No Comments · Ecology, Evolution, Neolithic, Ritual

In a recent study published in Biology Letters, Tobler and colleagues found that an indigenous religious ritual has caused genetic change in a local fish population.  During an annual fertility ritual, the Zoque people of Mexico use a plant poison to stun and harvest fish from a section of nearby river; unsurprisingly, the fish in [...]

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Stephen Hawking on Religion: “Science Will Win”

July 19th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Archaeology, Axial Age, Cognition, Cultural Evolution, History, Hunter-Gatherers, Neolithic, Power

Over at ABC News, Ki Mae Heussner reports on a Diane Sawyer interview of the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking with this contentious headline: “Stephen Hawking on Religion: Science Will Win.”  This is an unfortunate banner.  During the interview, Sawyer asked if religion and science could be reconciled.  Hawking’s response was profoundly unhelpful:
“There is a fundamental [...]

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The “Sin” of Sodomy and Demographic Imperatives

July 13th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Ecology, Economy, Evolutionary Adaptation, History, Morality, Power, Ritual

When attempting to determine whether something is “natural ” (vis-a-vis yesterday’s post on Catholicism and homosexuality) one good way of investigating the issue is to use the genealogical method.  So far as I can tell, there are no hunter-gatherer or pre-Neolithic societies that had taboos against homosexuality.  We can therefore trace the history of the [...]

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Non-Religious Chimpanzees Cooperate and War for Territory

June 28th, 2010 · No Comments · Cultural Evolution, Ecology, Economy, Evolution, Evolutionary Adaptation, Evolutionary Byproduct, History, Hunter-Gatherers, Neolithic, Power, Shamanism

There have been many articles over the past week reporting that an unusually large group (150 members) of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda has been engaging in systematic territorial expansion by attacking and killing neighboring groups.  The Nature article notes that this is “cooperative behavior” and then quotes from the New York Times story:
These [...]

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Sumerian Spiritualism: The Earliest Organized Religion

June 27th, 2010 · 4 Comments · Archaeology, Cultural Evolution, Ecology, Economy, History, Neolithic, Pagans, Power

It was with great sadness that I read a recent article in the New York Times documenting the pillaging and destruction of Mesopotamian archaeological sites in Iraq.  Although these Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian sites — and previous excavations — receive scant attention outside small groups of antiquities scholars, they are of critical importance to our [...]

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Fourth Kind Encounters with Ancient Astronauts — The Origin of Religions?

April 21st, 2010 · 7 Comments · Archaeology, Cultural Evolution, Daily Devolutions, History, Shamanism

A few weeks ago, I watched “The Fourth Kind,” which fortuitously features Milla Jovavich as the main character.  Although supposedly based on “actual events” in small-town Alaska, my research turned up little by way of fact to support that assertion.  What intrigued me about the movie, however, was the Sumerian aspect (I won’t say more [...]

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