NB: Long Read.
If you’ve never studied history, you’ve allowed yourself to be ignorant of how we got to where we are as a species. You will be frightened and confused by the occurrences around the world. You won’t know why conflicts arose, nor how to solve them. You will be angry and frustrated. You will be a bystander, never taking an active part in life.
THE AGE OF GODS
In this phase, man is primitive, thus beastly. He has limited consciousness, an impaired rationale, and is closer to animal than human. This Age can be correlated with Jaynes’ theory of bicameralism, where humanity was only just beginning to develop self-awareness. It was in the early phases of shedding its bicameral brain, and had to adjust to the world without the voices of the “right-brain God.”
The first major breakthrough of this Age comes in the form of establishing family states. The family is all-important, and people live in small, tightly-knit groups (much like monkeys). They are wary of other families and are fiercely territorial. As Hegel would later show, the arrival of consciousness onto the scene also gives rise to suspicion of others (what are their intents? Are they friend, or foe? Can they be subdued?). That suspicion always leads to violence, segregation, and mistrust (this is the phase right wingers are stuck in to this day, demonstrating just how backward and retarded they are).
Because humanity’s consciousness was severely limited and impaired at this point, superstition is the main driving force during this phase. Humanity did not understand the workings of the natural world, so they took acts of nature to be signs from spirits, or Gods. This is especially true of thunder. Thunderstorms were terrifying phenomena to the primitive man, and we can see that in most early cultures the dominant God is one of thunder (Zeus, Jove, Marduk, Perun, Thor, Indra, etc). Thunder Gods held pride of place in most pantheons and had to be appeased to keep them from punishing us. Fear and irrational beliefs go hand in hand (and most of humanity still hasn’t outgrown this childish way of thinking). A superstitious mind is a fearful mind (just look at Abrahamists!) - it sees threats everywhere and seeks to stay safe from them. Because of this need for safety, it’s not long before such moronic beliefs gave rise to entire structured systems (i.e., religions) based on morality. These religions invent behavioural codes so that people may avoid punishment from the divine. They never seek to actually explain the world because the world is deemed to be operating via supernatural forces, so the point of man was to merely behave “correctly,” and he would be rewarded (or at the very least, not punished).
Due to mankind not having developed any kind of reason at this point, feelings led the way. Whatever felt bad was deemed to be evil, and whatever felt good was deemed to be good. This is why ancient religions, such as Abrahamism, are laughable. A religion which is rooted in reason gives a totally different religious experience than a religion rooted in feelings (such as Abrahamism). What a religion is based on is directly correlated to how true it is. Abrahamism is based on fear (a feeling), so has exactly zero truth content. A religion based on intuition (such as Eastern faiths) has some truth content, but without rigorous analysis and explanation, it ends up being just as retarded as Abrahamism. Such religions are more focused on rituals and traditions than rational thought. A religion based on senses (scientism) is useful for tinkering with the material world, but absolutely useless when it comes to explaining anything higher.
During the Age of the Gods (because feelings reigned supreme), humanity was still in the thrall of primitive nonsense such as “alpha males.” An alpha of a pack seeks to have complete and total control of those under him. To such a primordial creature, a loss of control means a loss of power. He must control everything. Having such absolute power in a society leads others to believe that he is “divinely inspired,” and he is revered as a demigod by society. This is the beginning of the formation of a patriarchy. Men, being physically stronger and able to dominate women, viewed them as “possessions,” so a woman was expected to stay loyal to her partner. Promiscuous sex was now deemed evil because it “displeased the Gods” (in fact, it displeased the alphas, so they outlawed it). Here, the concept of marriage first arose, binding two people together until death. Straying from that pact had terrible consequences.
With marriage came laws, outlining what one can and cannot do. Priests, an elite caste supporting the ruler(s) began dictating their doctrines to the people under them. They were never questioned, since to question them would bring the wrath of the Gods on the population. Augury, which is the reading of signs, was a popular method for divining the future during this Age. People based their entire lives around signs and omens, developing sacred places and events to mark out special days. Certain tribes would only go to war, perform marriages, or coming-of-age rites when omens favoured it.
Perhaps most importantly, this phase also gives rise to burying the dead, which introduces property “rights.” If a revered ancestor was buried in a certain area, it meant that a tribe has “marked” that territory as their own. It becomes their sacred ground, and incursions upon that ground meant nothing other than a declaration of war. This is the where the dead began to control the living (and we still haven’t broken free of this primitive idiocy).
The defining aspects of this Age are the rise of religion, introduction of marriage and patriarchy, and burial of the dead (which by extension led to property “rights”). The mentality of this era is crude, primitive, and feelings-based.
cc @Eng’iti @Atheismo @Nefertities @culture @uwesmake @FieldMarshal CouchP @Cogito ergo sum @Luther12
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