CHAPTER IV
TOWARDS MONOTHEISM
Gods in evolution. Religion has formed a deeply integral part of mankind at all times. We glean from the records of early peoples the earliest gropings of the human mind in its endeavour to understand and interpret natural phenomena. At various stages of its evolution, religion rises from animism to a belief in cosmic and abstract gods. Each tribe had its local god or gods who gained or lost in power as the seats of their location rose or fell in political power. The fate of the gods fluctuated with the vicissitudes of their followers. The god who rose to power either absorbed other gods in his person or subordinated them as lesser gods or ministering angels in his own service. Some of these gods were embraced in the family of the great god as his son or consort, in case of a goddess, and formed a divine triad of father, mother, and son. When religious ideas approached abstract thinking, they were represented as the manifestations of the newly enthroned god or they were reduced to abstractions as the great god's attributes. When Babylon rose to power, its god Marduk absorbed all other gods, both of the north and the south, even his father Ea, and became the chief god of the whole of Babylonia. The legends of the earlier gods clung to his name and hymns formerly composed in their honour were now dedicated to him. Ashur, the local god of Assyria, eclipsed gods of other localities and rose to preeminence as his native city came to paramount power. When Shamash outshone his many confederate solar gods, he became the supreme god, and the other gods who were formerly on a footing of equality with him were accommodated as his satellites. Sometimes when the fighting tribes were united by peace the rival gods of each tribe formed their divine union. For example, the sun god Ra who came to Egypt from Asia formed an alliance with the popular god Amen and the dual divinities, thereafter, came to be known as Amen Ra.
The priests associated the highest attributes with the gods whom they exalted. The poet who sang the glory of his favourite god was always so deeply moved by his devotion to him that he spoke and sang of him as the most powerful and the most beautiful god. Consequently, a monotheistic vein began to appear in the utterances of sectarians, each of whom acclaimed his respective god as the one and the only god, without his like. This indiscriminate exaltation of several gods as the all-highest and allwisest evoked protest from some quarters. Human experience had taught them that a country had only one sovereign autocrat as its ruler and two or more kings of absolutely equal grade in power were unthinkable. With such ideas we notice Amenhetep IV, an adventurous king, attempting to introduce a great religious reform among his people in the fourteenth century b.c. He scoffed at the Egyptian pantheon and declared that there was only one god whose outward form was the sun. This god was Aten, the visible disk of the sun. In his zeal for reform, he changed his own name to Akhenaten or 'pleasing to the Sun-disk.' He suppressed the worship of other gods, destroyed their statues, demolished the temples that housed diem, sequestered their property and obliterated their names wherever they appeared. He consecrated temples to Aten and made the cult of the Sun-disk his state religion and commanded his subjects to offer their devotions to this one God only. Being himself a poetic genius, he composed fine hymns to the new God and addressed him as the inscrutable creator, one God, absolute in power. The revolutionary reform, however, did not survive the death of the poet-king. The old gods returned from exile and were soon reinstated.
The gods were in most cases subject to human infirmities. Ra grew old with age and became weak. Gods had their wives, who like women in human society were subordinated to their lords. But as history records instances of some women of exceptional talents and virtue who broke the social barriers raised by men against their sex and rose to pre-eminence, so some goddesses of abnormal energy rose to power. The great goddess Ishtar, for instance, absorbed all other goddesses of the Babylonian-Assyrian pantheon and became the supreme female divinity. It was at her temple that sacred prostitution became a feature. Osiris had Homs for his son by his wife Isis. His brother Set overpowered and killed him by cunning and intrigue. Some gods were ceremoniously bathed and clothed, adorned and perfumed with incense by priests every morning. The divine toilet over, they were treated with sumptuous food and drink of slaughtered animals and wine. The gods of the Greeks lived on the summit of Mount Olympus. They were, like the members of their divine fraternity elsewhere, invested with magnified human forms and traits. They loved and hated, intrigued and deceived and shared human frailties. It was for the demoralizing influence of such beliefs that Plato later forbade the tales of the frail gods in his ideal Republic, and Xenophanes poured out scorn over the anthropomorphic gods of Homer and Hesiod.
The gods were generally the personifications of nature. The solar gods, from their high position in the heavens, naturally became the overseers of men's actions upon earth and consequently they came to be regarded as the celestial judges. The solar gods Anu, Ninib, Nergal, and Shamash, at various periods of their ascendency to power, became the judges who punished wrong-doers. With the advancement of thought, the moral tone improved. The heart is the voice of God and welfare in life is gained by following its guidance, says Amenhetep. The emphasis that he lays on the adherence to truth in his inscriptions anticipates Darius the Great by several centuries. But the one god who rose to the greatest moral grandeur before the incomparably more sublime god that Zarathushtra discovered, was Varuna. A god of the sky in his origin, he rose to great ethical heights and became the upholder and guardian of the moral order upon earth. He is called omniscient and infallible. He detected man's truth and falsehood. If two men sat together and schemed some wrong, Varuna was there as the third. The winkings of man's eyes were numbered by him. The sinner laid bare his heart before him, confessed his sins, and prayed for his forgiveness, pathetically saying that he did not commit sin willingly but that he was led astray by wrath, dice, and liquor. The hymns composed in his honour are most ethical.