What, exactly, is Yahweh? And what, conversely, is Prometheus Lucifer?
I denigrate the former in grand, declamatory fashion, and exalt the latter's name from the rooftops--well, from my bedroom window, in hushed tones so as not to disturb the baby next door, but you know what I mean. In fact, from the way I speak of my patron and his ancient nemesis, one might be tempted to think I believe in them.
To understand my conception of Yahweh, you must first understand the meme theory of information--I presume most people who'll read this don't require any 'splaining from me on this topic, but the handful who aren't part of the skeptical or nerd spheres may not be familiar with the concept, so bear with me. A meme, in what passes for the classical sense when a word was invented in 1976, is a single datum, like a gene, but encoded in words and concepts instead of a simple protein. Like a gene, it is the simplest expression of life that is possible in the medium in question.
Yes, you read me correctly--I am going out on a limb and postulating that ideas themselves are alive in a very real, if not technical, sense of the word. Traditional definitions of life require certain qualities that preclude creatures (for lack of a better word) like viruses, prions, and gods from qualifying for the title. This is why I prefer a simpler, more inclusive definition. Life, to me, is any self-replicating pattern; any sequence which, in the proper environment, will cause itself to be copied and is thus, over time, subjected to the selective pressures intrinsic to this environment. This definition encompasses not only self-replicating proteins, but powerful ideas--and also certain kinds of rocks.
This particular lifeform, however, demonstrates some of the most advanced, not to mention alarming, behaviors of traditional, gene-based life--as I will now demonstrate by recounting a story very few have ever heard. I doubt that I am the first to put all of this together, but I have never seen anybody carry the facts as they appear to me to their full and disturbing conclusion. This will be long, heavy on the allegory, and a little disjointed, but bear with me--there are several threads of history that need to be followed to the point where they all twist together, and that point is the moment when the great engine of progress started to go thbthbththbthbthbt.
This is the story of the germ of an idea--of how poor mental hygiene and the ambition of ancient warlords wrenched a sacred neurosis out of our darkest animal psyche and made it the state religion of a string of brutal regimes dating back almost four thousand years. This is the secret history of Yahweh.
In the latter half of the second millennium BC, the pastoral people who would go on to become the Jews were living in Canaan. They were polytheistic like their neighbors, worshiping among others the abstracted godhead El, his queen Ashera, the crepuscular huntress Astarte, and the storm god Ba'al-Hadad (one of many, many Ba'als--more on this later).
South of there, in Egypt, the 18th dynasty was living it up. These were the famous ones--the ones who got all the press, the fancy tombs, and occupy an entire shelf of the two dedicated to ancient Egypt at my local library. In particular, you probably know the last few Pharaohs--the brilliant and regal Amen-Ho-Tep III, his lunatic son Akh-En-Aten, and his grandson, the Justin Bieber of the Nile, the popular but short-lived and inconsequential King Tut. But they're not terribly important to this story--you won't even get why I mentioned them at all until much, much later.
On another shore of the Mediterranean lived the ancestors of the greco-roman peoples--the Mycenaeans, Etruscans, and Latins. They, too, were polytheists, and in fact worshiped a few of the same gods as the Canaanites--including that Astarte chick, who apparently got around quite a bit. But she would be supplanted within a few centuries--in fact, it appears from the way the language evolved over time that she was replaced by two completely unrelated goddesses. Astarte-as-dawn became Aphrodite, the beautiful but petty and childish morning star. Astarte-as-huntress became Artemis, virgin goddess of the drawn bow and crescent moon--and also of bears. In fact, it appears that Artemis in particular used to be all about bears for some reason--but she became identified with Astarte over time, and became a more standard issue huntress goddess, although specifically without any of Astarte's old sexual overtones.
And she wasn't the only one who got a makeover for foreign audiences. Much like the Beatles and Lady Gaga, Zeus himself has a somewhat generic, mainstream past that he'd perhaps rather we didn't think too much about. In fact, just about all of the famous European gods are worshiped throughout western Eurasia, under various names in different languages. Zeus was called Jupiter in Rome, everyone knows that--but what isn't quite as widely known is that modern Hindus still worship him.
Yeah, I double-taked too when I realized it. Before I can tell you the rest of this story, I guess have to tell you that story. Be warned, there's about one spit-take-worthy thing every paragraph or so. In fact, I think I'll keep track with a little bell to save time that would otherwise be spent on incredulity and yes-I-swear-this-is-real type reassurances. Ready? Drinks down? Sharp objects away from your eyes? Groovy--let's get to it.
Six thousand years ago, the majority of the modern world's dominant memes were cultivated in and around what is now Kazakhstan. (ding!) The people who lived there are the cultural ancestors of the Greeks, Romans, Celts, Germans, Norse, Balts, Slavs, Persians, and Indians--and they're just the direct descendants. Proper scientists--as opposed to untrained history nerds with two dozen open Wikipedia tabs--call these people the Proto-Indo-Europeans, and they're the reason we all have so much in common when we aren't shooting each other. The apple was originally from this region (ding!), and it's believed that sheep and horses were both domesticated here around this time--which, again, is why they show up in myth and symbol just about everywhere between the Gobi and the Sahara. The Proto-Indo-Europeans (who I'll be referring to simply as the Borat from now on, because it's important you remember I'm not a proper scientist) spoke a language that endures in different forms everywhere from France to Nepal--and they also worshiped gods that you may find familiar.
As best the people who know what they're doing can reconstruct, the Borat worshiped a dozen or so major deities, whose names, along with much of the Borat language, are known mostly from careful comparative analysis of the way later languages diverged over the millennia. Thus, the exact pronunciation of most of these names is an educated guess--but it's close enough to be revealing.
The head of this pantheon was Sky-Father, or High-Father--a literal translation of a name that probably sounded something like Deiwos Piter or possibly Dzious Piter. You can probably already see where this is going (ding!). He had a female counterpart named, approximately, Pthwih Mehter--Earth-Mother or Mother Plenty. Again, you can probably see it already, but if you haven't, these are the same beings the Greeks worshipped as Father Zeus and Demeter--and they're still around today in the Hindu pantheon as Dyaus, the sky, and Prithvi, the earth.
They had a thunder-god, Perkwunnos the Striker--his role was filled by Zeus in Greece, but half the towns in the Balkans have their own versions of him, and his name lives on in the modern word percussion. Hausos or Eus was Dawn, the painted lady who probably became the Greek Eos, as well as the Vedic Ushas, and the Germanic Ostara, or Eostre (ding!)--though notably, despite some pop culture ideas to the contrary, she doesn't seem to be any relation to our old friend Astarte. Phrihe was the goddess of love--and occasionally subbed for Eus throughout much of early Greek history, which is why her persona as Aphrodite is as much about sunrises as sex. There were gods governing rivers and seas--Dehnu, whose name turns up in the names of the Don and Danube rivers, and Hepom Nepot, Nephew-Sea, whose Latin descendant should be pretty easy to guess, and who's also in charge of all the fresh water in India as Apam Napat.
And then there are the divine twins--likely more than one set, who overlap with each other and swap characteristics so often that, like certain particularly easygoing genera of flower which cross-pollinate so regularly that botanists gave up on giving them species names, they may simply be impossible to classify beyond a certain level. I started trying, but I realized two paragraphs in that this would turn my Zombie Jesus Day blog post into an April Fools' Day anthropology paper. This may happen anyway, but I'm not going down without a fight. A very pedantic and silly fight.
Anyway, this pantheon spread as the Borat spread--and boy, did they spread. Over the next two thousand years, one Indo-European people or another invaded or migrated into every corner of Eurasia. They crossed the Balkans, they herded sheep through Palestine, they conquered India--in fact, when Hitler was ranting about how awesome the Aryans were, he was really talking about these guys. All that Nazi racial phylogeny and pseudohistory that would be hilarious if they had just stuck to jumping on tables and wearing impeccably tailored fetish gear is a distorted version of real events that we now know happened in about the same time period as the other horrible stuff that's about to go down back in Canaan.
...
Remember Canaan?
...
I should really get back to Canaan, shouldn't I?
Back in negative-14th-century Canaan, another pastoral people called the Midianites lived in what seems to have been relative peace with the other peoples in the region. By that, I mean everybody took turns committing war crimes against everybody else, and passed the time reciting oral histories that, by the time they got around to writing them down, would read like the prosecution's opening arguments at the Hague. The Midianites lived in or near a land usually called Edom--which is why it's hard to tell the difference between these people and the ones who actually called themselves Edomites. In fact, the name Midian is taken from the Torah--one of the aforementioned compiled oral histories--so it's entirely likely that this is just an ancient ethnic slur for some or all of the Edomites, whose name does show up in literature and on art from other cultures. But whether these are two peoples or one, they had one thing in common: they worshiped a deity of thunder and war who, at this point, lived nowhere else in the entire world.
And his name was Yahweh. (ding!)
By now, if you've read your bible, or just know your Cecil B. DeMille, you know who we're going to meet next. Enter Moses--or somebody much like him, or several somebodies, all of whose names we don't know. So let's just call him Moses. The name can mean a lot of things, and if it's actually his, it gives us some clues to his background. It can be read in Hebrew, so it's possible he was a Jew. The same syllables can mean something relevant in ancient Egyptian, so it's possible he was either from Egypt--a general, a refugee, or maybe even an actual displaced prince--or just invented by somebody who happened to know the language. But we definitely know that he wasn't the man who led the Jews out of captivity in Egypt. How do we know this?
Because the Jews were never captive in Egypt in the first place. (ding!)
Not a fringe theory. Not my personal conjecture. Not something I read in a Christopher Hitchens book. This is the historical consensus--the simple facts of the matter. There were never any Jewish slaves in Egypt. There weren't really that many slaves in Egypt at all, period--they weren't a slaver society, like Rome or the antebellum American south. Rich people had slaves, and they were bought and sold on the open market, but they never had the vast armies of them that later civilizations would use to build their impressive stuff--they just used regular working stiffs, who didn't have anything better to do during the flood months when their fields were underwater. The Exodus narrative of vast numbers of Hebrew slaves fleeing into the desert is, flatly, a lie. Not an exaggeration. Not a distortion. Somebody, thousands of years ago, decided to make something up completely out of whole cloth, something they knew wasn't true, and tell it to others as fact.
Well... maybe not completely out of whole cloth.
There's one other possibility, and it's intriguing. The 18th dynasty (remember the 18th dynasty?) was founded a good century or so earlier, by a warrior king named Ahmose, which simply means Moonchild, or Child of Jah. No, no little bell this time, it seems to just be a coincidence--but I'm just getting started. He didn't found the 18th dynasty by ending the 17th--that is, by driving out or killing the previous king. In fact, the last king of the 17th was his own brother--he earned his own dynasty by being the Pharaoh who drove out the 15th dynasty.
See, at this point, Egypt was divided between the 15th and 17th dynasties. Yes, they happened at the same time--the Egyptians were big on pretending they had an unbroken line of kings stretching back to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, so when they got taken over, they'd dutifully write everything down, and when they kicked them out, they'd just slap a number on them and act like it was their idea to be ruled by a foreign power all along. In this case, the 15th Dynasty was made up of a people we call the Hyksos--which, like "Midianite," and for that matter "German," "Welsh," and "Mohawk," is a name that only means anything in the language of their enemies. The Hyksos were a godawful scary fusion of Canaanite and Borat, both culturally and religiously. They used chariots and bronze weapons, and they buried their honored dead with their favorite horses, like the Mongols--because if you're six feet tall, wear untanned animal skins, and carry a large bronze axe, you don't lose any appreciable man-cred for admitting you're a brony.
They worshiped a mixture of gods from both cultures, and by the time they lost their hold on power, they'd also taken a shine to some of the meaner local ones--one of the Pharaohs of the 15th dynasty named himself after the sun-swallowing demon snake, Apep, but only worshiped Set, a god of chaos and destruction who reminded the Hyksos of their original storm god. The thing is, nobody seems to know what this storm god's name was--the only name I could find is Ba'al, which isn't that helpful. While it sounds like we may have bumped into our old pal Ba'al-Hadad, Ba'al isn't actually a name--it's a title, a word that Canaanites used rather than refer to any of their their gods by name, which was taboo.
Ba'al means "Lord." (ding?)
Noooot quite. Fortunately for everyone concerned, the Hyksos were kicked out, and they did so way before anyone had ever heard of Yahweh--though a few generations down the line, Akh-En-Aten would pick up the monotheism ball and run with it. Where did they go? Most of them integrated into Egyptian society, but it's possible some just packed up and headed back to the Levant--where their ideas and stories likely soaked into the population, perhaps with a little tweaking to cast the whole thing in a better light. This is pure speculation on my part, but really, how else does such a specific story wind up in the oral histories if it wasn't just made up?
Well, now we know the Jews didn't come from Egypt. (Remember the Jews?) So where did they come from? Well, let's crack open our bibles...
(DINGDINGDINGDINGDING! AWOOGA!)
Ahem. Yup, Moses met Yahweh in Edom. Or the people who first brought Yahweh worship to the Jews came from Edom. We're not sure exactly how these guys got ahold of him, but it's easy to guess how he got ahold of them. Divinity, sacredness, is a powerful, powerful idea that warps everything around it--and the more primitive a society is, the more sway the people who control access to it have. In every society until the modern age, priests have held status second only to kings--and usually wielded a kind of de facto veto power over even them. The problem is, most ancient societies were polytheistic--and it was possible to divide the priestly caste and diminish their power. Throughout the history of ancient Egypt, for example, the identity of the godhead shifted as various cities gained and lost clout--Amen, Thoth, and Ptah were all local gods before they hit the big time, and each new civilization that whupped Egypt added new deific mashups to the pantheon, including some that will be really important later down the line. This phenomenon is called syncretism, and it's how the Borat gods got mixed in with all the other gods that sprang up in various corners of the world.
But monotheism changes the equation completely--it allows the priests to consolidate their power and totally monopolize access to the divine. Well, the priests, or whoever else can push the One True God--remember Akh-En-Aten? He used the divine sun, Aten, as a weapon against the priests of Amen-Ra, and tried to strip them of their power--but it didn't work terribly well. After he kicked it, his son Tut-Ankh-Aten changed his name, and he and his wife's tombs were ritually desecrated--all that's left of the nutty bastard is a pulverized skeleton that we only identified by his genes. Things went a little better for Moses.
The Torah describes a long conflict between Yahweh and the rest of the old Canaanite pantheon, and between the Israelites and the other Canaanite states--albeit very garbled and told by utterly credulous narrators. This is why a lot of Semitic and Indo-European deities also turn up in books of demonology a few thousand years down the road--Astarte, Asherah, Moloch, and various Ba'als coexisted with Yahweh for a time, probably generations. In fact, odds are Yahweh was also honored as Ba'al--he would have been closely associated with Ba'al-Hadad, just like Set was for the Hyksos. But then something changed. Either the Yahweh cult figured out what they could do if they edged out the competition, or maybe they genuinely went nuts and decided that theirs was the One True God. Whatever the reason, something went terribly wrong in the Canaanite pantheon, with consequences that would echo down all the way to the present.
Yahweh became a cannibal.
It started with Ba'al-Hadad. The two gods overlapped, so it was more or less inevitable that they would collide violently--tolerance and coexistence were alien notions to these people, and when conflict began, it usually only ended when one side had built dinettes out of the other. And these gods were often worshiped side by side, in the same temples--they were essentially the same god. The priests would have known each other, probably even grown up together, and learned the same myths, the same rituals, the same sleight-of-hand tricks and stage magic. So when it came time for the first bite, Ba'al probably never saw it coming.
Then the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench.
And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, The Lord, he is the God; the Lord, he is the God.
And Elijah said unto them, Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape. And they took them: and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there.
- 1 Kings 18:38-40
Yahweh seems to have absorbed Ba'al-Hadad completely between 1200 and 1000 BC, co-opting his cult and divine portfolio, and taking his place in the pantheon. It's hard to tell, because this part of Jewish history is muddy and poorly documented, but what little the Torah can tell us of the period implies a struggle for the soul of Jewry that was prolonged, brutal, and filled with "miracles" recounted to us by people who think a double-blinded study is when you gouge out a dude's eyes and watch him flop around for awhile.
Now, you may be wondering what our old pals the Midianites thought about all this cultural appropriation. Well, we don't know, because there aren't any Midianites anymore. It's not as much that they vanish from history as that they were never part of it in the first place--like I've pointed out, the name only ever appears in the bible, and it's probably just a name for some Edomite tribe that happened to coexist with the Jews, and introduced them to the Yahweh cult before passing peacefully out of the historical narrative.
No, I'm just kidding. The Jews killed everyone.
I think I've broken my dinger.
We aren't sure why this happened--the reasons given in the bible (idolatry, corruption, whoredoms and abominations, et cetera...) are a little ridiculous given that they were more or less the same people at this point. But the account itself gives us some clues. The story of the split between Israelite and Midianite Yahwists is part of a bigger, cyclical narrative that spans several books of the Torah, basically hamfisted propaganda about all the awful things that happen when the Master Race--er, I mean the Chosen People--defiles themselves with low-down, dirty goyim.
In each iteration, the post-Exodus Israelites would stop rampaging around the Levant, and settle down with some friendly local tribe. But in time, they would become corrupted, worshipping heathen gods and taking exotic shiksa wives, and would be punished by all manner of horrible things, from diseases to famines to conquering foreign powers. Then some prophet or another would show up and remind everybody of the true meaning of Passover--that Jews were better than everyone else, and the only way to get back in touch with their spiritual side was with some good old-fashioned ethnic cleansing. So all of the Midianites, and everyone else in their position, clearly had to go.
Well... maybe not all of the Midianites.
And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive?
Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord.
Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
- Numbers 31:15-18
Then, presumably, he threw back his head and went "Muahahahaha!"
So, why this sudden craziness? Why all the violence and xenophobia? The ancients were a pretty hardcore bunch, yes--but why does this particular part of the bible read like the bronze age Mein Kampf? Well, when I said that Yahweh's ascent was a long struggle, I meant a long struggle. The seven hundred years kind of long--and that last century is a real doozy.
By the 7th century BC, Yahweh had devoured the head of his new pantheon, El, and the two names were considered synonymous. Asherah and all the rest were long gone, and though Yahweh wasn't all-powerful, his place at the center of Jewish religion was fairly stable. Which is a good thing, because the geopolitical situation wasn't. The Neo-Assyrians, who had been pretty reliably whupping tuchus since the turn of the millennium, had up and imploded without so much as a goodbye sacking--leaving a very weakened and thoroughly defeated Israel caught between the new superpowers in the region, Egypt and Babylon. Babylon won--so they got to add Israel to their empire. and ensured that the Jews would be team players by taking the high-ranking priests and their families back to Babylon as hostages.
So here we are. It's 500 BC. The Babylonian Captivity has begun. The rabbis will spend this extended timeout bitching about how cruel and unfair it is that they're not quite as privileged as they used to be. In between kvetching sessions, they'll also write down what will become the Old Testament, combining eight hundred years of chinese whispers and wartime propaganda with a vast body of post-hoc rationalizations for how they could have wound up in this only-moderately-decadent hellhole, with a nice dose of bitter genocidal fantasies thrown in for good measure. The end result will be a monstrous new Yahweh that barely resembles his humble roots--but is still not quite the one we know.
Meanwhile, in Italy, the distant descendants of the Borat are writing a mythology of their own--the Romans have just expelled a line of Etruscan kings and founded a tiny republic on the banks of the Tiber, and they need some revered ancestors, stat. Their pantheon is a hand-me-down--but their culture is the one that will grow to dominate the entire Mediterranean, and shape the form of gods to come.
But these stories are both for another day. This post is ridiculously long already, and the divine free-for-all that's about to break out from Britain to Tehran more than merits its own. So we're going to leave these two peoples to their own devices for now, and take our leave--trust me, it'll be worth the wait.
In the next Letters from Amenti: Europe erupts in pandemonium! Entire religions go at it like katana-wielding scotsmen! Goose-stepping Jews restart the war over Gaza again! Loopy gurus! Transgendered mole people! And I might even cite sources! All this and more, in The Nature of the Plague, Part II! Happy Zombie Jesus Day!
