When did the idea of anthropomorphic "gods" arise?

[Marty_d]

The Greeks had a god made in my image - Dionysus. (Later called Bacchus by the Romans).  Pass the amphora!

[nomadpete]

Wow. Not sure OME intended this thread to be confessional, Marty.

 

Wiki says:-

"Dionysos) is the god of wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre.

Often shown as a effeminate young man."

 

A side of you that I hadn't seen before.....

[Marty_d]

15 minutes ago, nomadpete said:

Are your cat heads similar to 'three corner jacks"?

They always land with a slender sharp spike pointing straight up. Go right through your thong or tyre.

 

Probably invented by a bad tempered diety to torment people.

If you start talking to anyone except Aussies about pricks going straight through thongs, they might think you're being rude...

[red750]

From my high school days, cats head thorns would puncture you bicycle tyres.

[Marty_d]

9 minutes ago, nomadpete said:

Wow. Not sure OME intended this thread to be confessional, Marty.

 

Wiki says:-

"Dionysos) is the god of wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre.

Often shown as a effeminate young man."

 

A side of you that I hadn't seen before.....

He can't have been too effeminate,  apparently he had at least 8 kids - including Priapus and Hymen (probably a good idea to keep those siblings apart!)

But obviously much younger and skinnier than me, if the statue pictured in Wiki is accurate. 

Edited July 17, 2023 by Marty_d

[nomadpete]

Were the Greeks to blame for anthropo -ising gods?

They did have whole families of human-like gods. Although most of them had super powers of some kind, at least they all suffered from the usual seven deady character flaws.

[Marty_d]

I reckon they thought of their gods more as a layer of aristocracy rather than omniscient and omnipotent, like the upstart new religions thought.

And like aristocracy everywhere, they were kind of inbred, bored, capricious, and played games with the lives of normal people. 

[willedoo]

1 hour ago, red750 said:

From my high school days, cats head thorns would puncture you bicycle tyres.

Thorn is a rarely used word in Queensland, if ever used at all. Everything is prickles up here. But I do remember being a kid when bike tyres marketed as 'thorn proof tyres' were a new thing. I think they probably had extra plys. The 3 pronged bull heads could still puncture them, but they were better than the bike tyres that came before them.

[old man emu]

13 hours ago, willedoo said:

I wonder which ones are cat head thorns.

The cat head is known botanically as Rumex hypogaeus, also known as: doublegee, prickly jacks, three-cornered jacks. It can be identified by the often reddish colour of the base.

 

   

 

Another similar nasty is caltrop, Tribulus terrestris. They are usually prostrate, forming flat patches, though they may grow more upwards in shade or among taller plants.

 

   

 

You can see from the shape of the seed capsule  why these two different plants would be called by the same common names. The plants are easily distinguished from each other by the shape of the leaf.

[old man emu]

11 hours ago, nomadpete said:

Were the Greeks to blame for anthropo -ising gods?

No. The cognitive capacity for religion likely first emerged in Homo sapiens sapiens, or anatomically modern humans, although some scholars suggest the existence of Neanderthal religion based on sparse evidence for earlier ritual practice associated with burials. 

 

That idea of anthropomorphic gods started way, way back with the rise of Sumer in the 4th millennium BC. The Neolithic Revolution, which established agriculture as the dominant lifestyle, occurred around 12,000 BC and ushered in the Neolithic. The adoption of  intensive year-round agriculture led to the rise of the first dense urban settlements and the development of many familiar institutions of civilization, such as social stratification, centralized government and empires, organized religion and organized warfare. Neolithic society grew hierarchical and inegalitarian compared to its Paleolithic forebears, and their religious practices likely changed to suit. Many religions of the ancient near East and their offshoots can be traced to Proto-Semitic religion. 

 

 

[facthunter]

Organised religion is a method of control. IF not, when wasn't it?  GOD always resembles (a)  the SUN  and then forms related to those we know on earth as we have to relate to recognisable "earth" things or combinations of their features.. Always Earth centric with US as the supreme living being. Well, the MEN that is.   Grim Fairy tales, to SCARE people. Nev

[old man emu]

1 hour ago, facthunter said:

Organised religion is a method of control.

That's a topic for another discussion. My original point basically questions when did animism get supplanted by the anthropomorphic beliefs of the people of Europe and the Near East.

 

Animism is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence. Animism is used in anthropology of religion as a term for the belief system of many Indigenous peoples in contrast to the relatively more recent development of organized religions. Animism is said to describe the most common, foundational thread of indigenous peoples' "spiritual" or "supernatural" perspectives. The animistic perspective is so widely held and inherent to most indigenous peoples that they often do not even have a word in their languages that corresponds to "animism" (or even "religion").

 

One first step towards the creation of anthropomorphic gods could have been the rise of the shaman. A shaman is a person regarded as having access to, and influence in, the world of Spirits, who typically enters into a trance state during a ritual, and practices divination and healing. You can imagine that the knowledge of the shaman was guarded by them and only passed down the generations to select members of the group. This gave the shamans a different sort of power within the group than, say, the hunter/warriors  whose power and prestige came from more basic skills useful to the group.

 

Getting to be the leading shaman would have taken years of study and experience, so by the time a person became to be the best, doing things like hunting and gathering food might have been too hard on the body. Therefore the shaman could trade knowledge for day-to-day needs: payment for service. It wouldn't take much for a shaman to start making rules that could be backed up by unpleasant consequences.

 

This 1911 book  https://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/sbf/sbf01.htm SPECIMENS OF BUSHMAN FOLKLORE COLLECTED BY THE LATE W. H. I. BLEEK, PH.D. AND L. C. LLOYD contains this little anecdote that illustrates the need to respect the Spirits:

I brought a splendid red fungus home from a wood in the neighbourhood of the Camp Ground, in order to ascertain its native name. After several days, fearing lest it should decay, I asked |hang#kass'o, (the name of the native person) who was then with us, to throw it away. Shortly afterwards, some unusually violent storms of wind and rain occurred. Something was said to him about the weather; and |hang#kass'o asked me If I did not remember telling him to throw the fungus away. He said, he had not done so, but had "put it gently down". He explained that the fungus was "a rain's thing"; and evidently ascribed the very bad weather, we were then having, to my having told him to "throw it away".

[facthunter]

Like deciding Which WITCH Doctor?  It's STILL about Control. How would a rain system be  produced by a fungus?. Nev

[nomadpete]

3 hours ago, old man emu said:

The cognitive capacity for religion likely first emerged in Homo sapiens sapiens, or anatomically modern humans

I think the cognitive capacity  for religion  is a totally different  issue, from the question of when did mankind start viewing religious diets as anthropogenic.

 

Primitive religious beliefs appear to be more related to disembodied spirits that lived in rocks, volcanoes,  trees, oceans, etc.

 

At some time  humans started to attribute personalities and maybe then someone ascribed human form to a god/s. (It might have been good advertising  for a belief?). Then folk such as the Greeks, etc started making lovely human-looking statues of their god/s.

I think that evolution is what the original question  asked.

[nomadpete]

Unfortunately  very few religious texts have survived from 12,000 BC. So we are left to guess a lot about it.

[facthunter]

How do I know? The BIBLE tells me so. Problem fixed. The world started 6300 ears ago. Fossils were created OLD All by Intelligent design. Evolution, which we can observe all around us particularly with Bacteria and Viruses is not real. . By the way I've got a mate with a good condition Harbour Bridge for  sale. Get in early before others find out about it and you'll make a real killing.  Nev

[nomadpete]

OME mentioned  animism changing into anthropomorphism.

 

My superficial understanding is that all of these belief structures overlap in erratic ways.

 

For instance we still have monotheistic anthropomorphic churches that are happy to carry out exorcism of unwanted evil spirits.

 

How can one claim that our religion is anthropomorphic (regardless  whether are made in the image of God- or vice versa.)

 

My answer is that there is no hard and fast moment in history where it all changed, because humans don't really commit to either.

 

Think of the holy trinity - Father, Son & holy ghost.

 

Two possibly human shapes and a spook.

Ghosts can be any shape.

As can gods

[facthunter]

We are too Important to JUST Die. Surely that's the ultimate Vanity. I reckon IF there was NO God. WE would invent one.  BTW an atheist is someone with NO invisible Means of support .Nev

[willedoo]

Leave my elevator alone.

[Old Koreelah]

1 hour ago, nomadpete said:

Primitive religious beliefs appear to be more related to disembodied spirits that lived in rocks, volcanoes,  trees, oceans, etc.

The word “primitive” needs reviewing, having for too long been used by arrogant westerners to dismiss the ideas of peoples living closer to nature. 
We are slowly starting to gain new respect for many ideas that were formerly called primitive.

 

 

[old man emu]

3 hours ago, Old Koreelah said:

The word “primitive” needs reviewing,

When you put it like that, it does seem woke to call the religions associated with the First World "primitive". I was thinking of making the argument that "primitive" could mean "ancient", but primitive can stand on its own strengths. "Primitive" comes to us from the Latin primitivus "first or earliest of its kind".  The meaning "aboriginal person in a land visited by Europeans" is from 1779, hence the sense "uncivilized person." If arrogant Westerners choose to give the word another meaning, then on their heads be it. Isn't it accurate to call the Wright Flyer a primitive aeroplane?

 

 

[Bruce Tuncks]

What nonsense they  were all propagating.....  as if the sun would respond to being worshiped!  WELL i guess the response of nothing would be equal to the fresh air the european missionaries all were selling.

[Bruce Tuncks]

was the holy ghost male or female?

I reckon he has got it in for me, sending bad weather when i need good etc. And I reckon he was male, cos the whole rest of the religion was so misogynistic.

 

[onetrack]

I guess you all realise that the very first hand-made idols were nearly always of the female form? Get a look at the tits on these! Nothing's changed in 30,000 years!

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurine

 

 

[nomadpete]

12 hours ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

What nonsense they  were all propagating.....  as if the sun would respond to being worshiped!  WELL i guess the response of nothing would be equal to the fresh air the european missionaries all were selling.

Hey, at least the sun undeniably appears every day, and everybody can see it there. So far the only people who claim to have seen  god  all sound like suspect witnesses.