A search for the origin of religions
HORUS, AN ANCIENT Egyptian sky god, was often depicted as a sharp-eyed falcon. Lord Buddha’s eyes are supposed to be able to look in four directions at once. The god of Abraham sees everything, always. A “Big God” of this sort—a supernatural “eye in the sky” who cares whether people do right by others—is a feature of most of the world’s top religions. But it was not always so.
In previous research, the group identified 51 highly correlated variables that gauge a society’s complexity, such as population size, the presence of bureaucrats or paper money. They have now asked how this composite indicator of social complexity relates to the presence, or absence, of moralising gods.
That suggests Big Gods are a consequence of big societies, not a cause of them. But interrogation of Seshat revealed another religious phenomenon that played a role in driving societies towards greater complexity: frequent, collective rituals such as daily food offerings to gods. These rituals predate Big Gods in nine of the 12 regions by long periods of time, around 1,100 years on average.
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