Treatise on the Gods

“The ancient and curious thing called religion, as it shows itself in the modern world, is often so overladen with excrescences and irrelevancies that its fundamental nature tends to be obscured.”

“Its [religion's] single function is to give man access to the powers which seem to control his destiny, and its single purpose is to induce those powers to be friendly to him. ...they are the only common characters that all of them show. Nothing else is essential.”

“In its pure and simple form religion is not often encountered today. It is almost as rare, indeed, as pure democracy or pure reason.”

“Within all great religions there arise, from time to time, cults, which seek to rid worship of formalization and artificiality. One of the most familiar of them is called mysticism. ...There were mystics among the ancient Jews, and their ideas gave pungency and glamor to the Book of Revelation.”

“The essence of mysticism is that it breaks down all barriers between the devotee and his god, and thereby makes the act of worship a direct and personal matter. ...without the aid of any human agent, he comes face to face with his god, and can make his wants known directly.”

“Open any treatise upon pastoral theology and you will find the author warning his sacerdotal readers against old women who pray too much and are otherwise too intimate with God.”

“If all the faithful inclined to mysticism, and had a talent for it, there would be empty pews in the churches and the whole ecclesiastical structure would begin to rock. But... a downright prohibition of mysticism would be only too plainly a prohibition of religion.”

“...there is really no need for the gentlemen of the cloth to be alarmed, for not too many human beings... are fit for encounters with the gods. The rest prefer to transact their business at a distance and through intermediaries.”

“Protestantism itself, in its early phases, was plainly a movement toward mysticism: its purpose, at least in theory, was to remove the priestly veil separating man from the revealed Word of God. But that veil was restored almost instantly, and by the year 1522, five years after Wittenberg, Luther was damning the Anabaptists with all the ferocious certainty of a medieval Pope, and his followers were docily accepting his teaching.”

“It is highly probable that the first priest appeared to the world simultaneously with the first religion; nay, that he actually invented it.”

“The invention of fire-making apparatus is never ascribed to the whole tribe, nor even to a group within it, but always to a single Fire-Bringer, and usually he is felt to be so unusual that he is credited with a divine character. ...The very myths themselves are the compositions, not of the folk, but of professional artists—humble, perhaps, but gifted more than most. So with folk-songs. So with theological dramas. So with theories of government.”

“Certainly religion must be granted to be one of the greatest inventions ever made on earth. It not only probably antedated all the rest... it was also more valuable to the Dawn Man than any or all of them. For it had the peculiar virtue of making his existence more endurable.”

“He was afflicted by a new curse: the power to think... man suffered under the stealthy, insidious assaults of his awakening brain... It not only caused him to remember the tree that came near falling on him the previous week; it also enabled him to picture the tree that might actually fetch him tomorrow... now he was harried by a concept of danger in general, and tortured by speculations about its how and why.”

“The birds and insects... are highly scientific... in inventiveness they are they are far superior to all mammals save man.”

“If ants and bees have any conception of religion at all, they are probably atheists. But primitive man as a mammal naturally made his first attempt to better his lot, not by adding labor to his other pains, but by seeking to placate or destroy his enemies and by courting his friends.”

“...drowning, dropping sunstruck, getting killed by lightning, by wild beasts or by falling rocks and trees, dying in general. An inimical volition seemed to lurk in all of them. It was not hard to imagine some evil will throwing down the avalanche, or sending the lightning, or drawing the drowning man down to death. In fact, it was easier to imagine it than not to imagine it.”

“To primitive man thinking was even more unpalatable than it is to the modern Christians. He did it badly, as they do, and his brief experience of it had taught him that it brought only woe.”

“Rivals... must have come upon the scene at a very early stage, for the new trade of priestcraft had attractions that were plainly visible... It carried an air of pleasing novelty; there was daring in it, and thrills therewith; it made for popularity and a spacious and lazy life; dignity belonged to it; above all, it seemed easy.”

“The first priest [probably]... soon grasped the fact that his monopoly could not last... he sought to dispose of his most formidable rival by admitting him as an apprentice... presently there was a whole guild of them... pooling their professional secrets and equipment, accumulating a tradition, and acquiring a definite place in society.”

“The moment one priest turned into two all these qualifications for kingship went for naught, for one was destroyed that was greater than all of them, and that was the character of a single and indivisible man.”

“The simple savages of those days had not yet formulated the concept of government by committee; they wanted to be led... They were yet close cousins to the brutes who hunted in packs, always with one leader.”

“They [primitive men] had no communal policy save that of forthright attack upon whatever seemed to menace them; they had not yet invented congresses, plebiscites, or even councils of war: their minds were still too primitive to be equal to the colossal feat—perhaps the most revolutionary, when it was achieved at last, in the whole history of man—of lifting reflection from its natural place after action, or, at best, alongside, and putting it in front.”

“When a ruler... submits gracefully to the religious ideas prevailing among his people he greatly augments his prestige and popularity. Believers are consoled and even skeptics are reassured, for skepticism commonly distrusts iconoclasm as much as it distrusts orthodoxy.”

“The clergy repay this friendly recognition of their place in society by an almost unfailing devotion to the constituted authorities. When they take part in rebellions, it is almost always against subversive usurpers, not legitimate rulers. ...Their prayers always go up for kings, not for rebels and reformers.”

“The great religious reformers have never preached the liberation of the masses. Luther, John Calvin and John Wesley were all on the side of authority. The Catholic church is for it everywhere today, and the more intransigent it is the better the church likes it.”

“The patriotism of a priest is like the patriotism of a stock-broker. When he is found questioning the established order it usually develops, upon inquiry, that he is also questioning the tenets of the church, and he is on his way to heresy.”

“It may be that there are magicians who are not also priests, but it would be hard to find a priest who is not, in some sense, a magician.”

“Only the "species," or "accidents," i.e., the outward appearances, of the bread and wine remain; otherwise, they are completely transformed into flesh and blood. Here we have all the characteristics of a magical act, as experts set them forth: the suspension of natural laws, the transmutation of material substance, the use of puissant verbal formula, and the presence of an adept.”

“Magic or religion: it is all one.”

“Theologians themselves dispose of the matter by calling everything they do an act of religion, including even such operations as bedizening themselves with high-sounding titles and dignities, superior to any ever claimed by Christ, and laying taxes upon the faithful for their own aggrandizement.”

“Their [the theologians'] earliest forerunners... were aware of no difference between magic and religion, but practiced both with easy consciences.”

“Rê and Merodach, like the Earth Mother, had their counterparts among all the ancient peoples, including the Mayas, Aztecs, and Incans of the New World,”

“Nearly all religions... show a pull toward goddesses as they decline: the case of Christianity and its mariolatry is familiar. But the sun-god... was probably the very incarnation of maleness, as the Earth Mother was of femaleness.”

“The Earth Mother was limned, and her symbols were cherished, but it was apparently a long while afterward before man began to cherish the baton that was the symbol of kings. ...the baton and phallus were one and the same ...both came into the world with the greatest single discovery ever made by man, to wit, the discovery that babies have human fathers, and are not put into their mother's bodies by the gods.”

“It appears that man, in his remote infancy, was by no means the lord of creation that he has since become. Abroad, he could barely hold his own against the dreadful beasts that roamed the fields, and at home he was no more than a compound of butler and gigolo. His wife, if his hunting failed or she espied another who struck her fancy, could turn him out at her will.”

“Primitive man... We picture him as a glorious hunter engaged daily in heroic combats with saber-toothed tigers, but it is highly probable that he clubbed a thousand rabbits to death for every tiger that he so much as tailed, and that when he came home he was not infrequently given a caustic dressing down.”

“She [Earth Mother] represented dramatically the high position of women in the world. ...Crops did not come out of the sun; they came out of the earth. Children did not issue from men; they issued from women. Man was a bystander, useful on occasions, but not a sharer in the miracle, not a contributor of his flesh. Neither, in the miracle of the fields, was the sun.”

“Man's view of the entire cosmic process changed as his view of the process of life changed. ...He must have a symbol of his own share in the great miracle of birth and growth—a divine inseminator and fructifier to stand beside the germinal Earth Mother... The obvious candidate was the sun-god. ...man saw in him, not only the symbol of fatherhood... but also a symbol of all the new dignities and prerogatives that went with it.”

“The concept of a single omnipotent god, reigning in the heavens in solitary grandeur... was probably devised, not by theologians, but by metaphysicians. They proved there could be but one god, not by bringing up any overt evidence to that effect, but simply by appealing to what they conceived to be the logical necessities. The human race, on its more refined and exalted levels, accepted these proofs with the head, but never with the heart.”

“He [the sun-god] was the special god of the now dominant and prancing male; he was the god of captains, kings, and... conquerors. ...they claimed to be his agents on earth; in widely separated regions, East, West, North, and South, they began to speak of themselves as Children of the Sun.”

“One of the chief functions of the gods, at the dawn of trustworthy history, was to give their votaries success in war. The Old Testament is full of accounts of their feats in that direction, and so are all the other ancient records.”

“The conquered knew quite well what had happened; their gods, in a fair fight, had turned out to be weaker than the gods of the other fellows. So it was probably common for them to come over to their notion...”

“Whenever a king accomplished a conquest of genuine difficulty and importance, he usually followed it with hints that he himself was a sort of god. Such hints did not fall ungratefully upon his lieges, for man has always been thirsty for heroes, and ever willing to see divine attributes in them.”

“When the Teutonic pantheon first became known to the Romans it was full of gods who were hard to distinguish from men and women. ...The lives they led were really more operatic than divine, and when the time for it came they slipped into the music-dramas of Richard Wagner as easily as the Yahweh of John Calvin slips into the incantations at a hanging.”

“Every religion, if it survives long enough, changes its ceremonials, and every one of them borrows constantly from the others.”

“It would be hard to discover any act of a Christian priest, of whatever rite, that is not matched in the rituals of a hundred other religions, and there is scarcely a non-Christian usage or solemnity, however barbarous it may appear at first glance, that has no parallel in the operations of Christianity.”

“Everything the Holy Church cherishes as peculiarly it own, from pedo-baptism to auricular confession and from holy communion to the monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, was hoary with age before Peter ever saw Rome.”

“The prodigious ages of the patriarchs, as given in Genesis v... show Babylonian influence, though here the Jews seem to have tempered imitation with a considerable moderation. To match Methusaleh, who lived 969 years, there were kings of Ur who reigned for 28,800, 36,000 and even 43,200 years!”

“Christianity leans upon supernaturalism more heavily than any of its principal rivals, and there is in it, even in its more refined forms, a great deal that is irrational and incredible.”

“It would probably shock Him [Jesus] profoundly to find Catholics doomed to Hell for neglecting their Easter duty and Protestants damned for drinking wine, for He held a cynical opinion of all priestly jurisprudence and wine to Him was a more natural drink than water.”

“The simple fact is that the New Testament, as we know it, is a helter-skelter accumulation of more or less discordant documents, some of them probably of respectable origin but others palpably apocryphal, and that most of them, the good along with the bad, show unmistakable signs of being tampered with.”

“No Biblical scholar of any standing today," says Weigall, "whether he be a clergyman or a layman, accepts the entire New Testament as authentic; all admit that many errors, misunderstandings and absurdities have crept into the story of Christ's life and other matters.”

“The earliest part of the canon, in the opinion of all competent authorities, are the Epistles of Paul, and those of I Thessalonians... In it, as in all other Pauline Epistles, there is a complete lack of any reference... to the four Gospels, so it is a fair inference that they did not exist in Paul's lifetime...”

“There is no reason to believe that Luke ever saw Jesus. All the evidence indicates that he was converted to the new faith by Paul, who made a companion of him. and took him on various missionary journeys. ...He also wrote the Acts of the Apostles, again in the form of a letter to Theophilus...”

“The Gospel of Matthew belongs to a somewhat later date—possibly to the closing years of the First Century. That it was written by the Apostle Matthew is next to impossible, for he must have been older that Jesus and by the year 90... a centenarian. But it is not unlikely that the author... made use of memoranda left by the Apostle, and these... may have constituted the Q document.”

“The Gospel of John is still later: it was probably not written until the end of the First Century... not later than 125. The identity of the author remains in doubt. He was apparently the same who wrote the two Epistles of John... but not the John who wrote Revelation, which is earlier. The remaining books of the New Testament are of varying dates, and show varying degrees of authenticity.”

“Parallels to the New Testament, and especially to the Epistles, are to be found in the belles lettres of both Greece and Rome, but to find anything resembling the Old Testament one must go to such completely oriental documents as the Code of Manu, the Persian Avesta, the Indian Vedas, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.”

“The [Protestant] Reformers were men of courage, but not many of them were intelligent. ...Few of them seem to have noticed that in rejecting the authority of the popes and setting up the Bible as the sole guide to faith and conduct they were setting up something that bore the mark of the popes on almost every page.”

“It was in... the Eighteenth [century], that Christian theology finally disappeared from the intellectual baggage of all really civilized men. On both sides of the Reformation fence the Christian church fought for its life, and nearly everywhere it had the support of the universities, which is to say, of official learning, which is to say, of organized ignorance.”

“In one respect, at least, Christianity is vastly superior to every other religion in being today, and, indeed, to all save one of the past: it is full of lush and lovely poetry. The Bible is unquestionably the most beautiful book in the world. ...Nearly all of it comes from the Jews, and their making of it constitutes one of the most astounding phenomena in human history.”

“The story of Jesus, as it is told in the Synoptic Gospels, and especially in Luke, is touching beyond compare. It is, indeed, the most lovely story that the human mind has ever devised... The story of Jesus is the sempiternal Cinderella story, lifted to cosmic dimensions. Beside it the best that you will find in the sacred literature of Moslem and Brahman, Parsee and Buddhist, seems flat, stale and unprofitable.”

“Among Christians themselves there is a growing tendency, when they throw off Christian theology, to salvage Christian poetry. This is plainly visible in the organized lovey-dovey that began with the Rotary movement and has since proliferated...”

“The grandiose imbecility called Christian Science is... certainly not a science, not even in the lame sense that spiritualism and psychotherapy are, and no Christian theologian save a hopeless dipsomaniac would venture to call it Christianity. It is simply a kind of poetry—an organized and unquestioning belief in the palpably not true.”

“In "Religion in the Making," by A. N. Whitehead... the approach is philosophical, and there are many interesting and valuable observations. But Dr. Whitehead occasionally indulges himself, like all metaphysicians, in what has a suspicious resemblance to nonsense.”