It baffles me how ancient people were able to come up with such detailed stories, characters, myths, rituals, etc. It’s one thing to look at lighting and assumes a god is controlling it, it’s another thing to come up with that god’s entire life story and an entire pantheon with hundreds of gods interacting with one another. How were the ancient people able to come up with such claims without any shred of evidence? Even modern day writers struggle to come up with such detailed and complex stories. Can someone explain to me how myths, religions came to be and how the ancient people were able to come up with all of that and how it became popular and why the people at the time believe such insane claims without questioning them?
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Because that’s not how it started. What we intend today as “god” is not the same as they did. Same goes for “spirit” or “soul” or other complicated concepts. It started way simpler than that.
Just as today, they were dealing with “forces”. Storms, heat, cold, grief, love, desire, animals, whatever. These forces were out there, in their world, conditioning them. But differently from other animals, they didn’t simply react by istinct. Humans not only percieved that forces but could consider them independently from their actual presence. They had cognitive abilities and the urge to describe their surroundings to others, just as much as we have today. So, maybe, they saw lightining coming from the sky, and they were scary. But also sun came from the sky and that was good. Or rain, and that could be both good and bad. One thing for sure, they should have considered the sky as a huge “force”, right? They probably talked a lot about the sky, and the indo-european word for sky was “djews”. Wich MAYBE is the root for the world Deus.
Or maybe it took a different route. Maybe there were some farmers, and someday one of them killed a goat on his field, spilled its blood on the ground and the same year that field gave him an unbelievable harvest. He told his story, and who listened than told it again and again. After a while, slaying goats became a ritual, and the indo-european word for it, “tyein” MAYBE became “theus” in ancient greek, and spilling (gheu-) MAYBE became gott in germanic and later god in english
The point is it wasn’t our same concept of “god” as a super-human. At first It was just the perception of something keeping things together instead of total randomness. Once the concept was established, Myths were build starting from that and used to describe the world according to this perception, that we have and animals don’t. They just had to be intellegible and meaningful enough to be usable. They didn’t have to be “true”. Trueness itself is a different concept today than it was 2500 years ago, and even back then it was quite a novelty due to greek philosopher that started talking about the “logos”.
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