Temple
worship in Ur, from Sumerian times. Note in the lower panel people are
bringing all sort of goods to the temple represented as the abstract
structure on the right.
House
founded by An, praised by Enlil, given an oracle by mother Nintud! A
house, at its upper end a mountain, at its lower end a spring!
A house, at its upper end threefold indeed. Whose well-founded
storehouse is established as a household, whose terrace is supported by
lahama deities; whose princely great wall, the shrine of Urim! (the Kesh temple hymn, ca. 2600 BCE)
Not long ago, I found myself involved in a debate on Gaian religion convened by Erik Assadourian.
For me, it was a little strange. For the people of my generation,
religion is supposed to be a relic of the past, opium of the people, a
mishmash of superstitions, something for old women mumbling ejaculatory
prayers, things like that. But, here, a group of people who weren't
religious in the traditional sense of the word, and who included at
least two professional researchers in physics, were seriously discussing
about how to best worship the Goddess of Earth, the mighty, the
powerful, the divine, the (sometimes) benevolent Gaia, She who keeps the Earth alive.
It was not just unsettling, it was a deep rethinking of many things I had been thinking. I had been building models of how Gaia could function in terms of the physics and the biology we know. But here, no, it was not Gaia the holobiont, not Gaia the superorganism, not Gaia the homeostatic system. It was Gaia the Goddess.
And here I am, trying to explain to myself why I found this matter worth
discussing. And trying to explain it to you, readers. After all, this
is being written in a blog titled "Chimeras"
-- and the ancient Chimera was a myth about a creature that, once, must
have been a sky goddess. And I have been keeping this blog for several
years, see? There is something in religion that remains interesting even
for us, moderns. But, then, what is it, exactly?
I mulled over the question for a while and I came to the conclusion
that, yes, Erik Assadourian and the others are onto something: it may be
time for religion to return in some form. And if religion returns, it may well be in the form of some kind of cult of the Goddess Gaia. But let me try to explain
What is this thing called "religion," anyway?
Just as many other things in history that go in cycles, religion does
that too. It is because religion serves a purpose, otherwise it wouldn't
have existed and been so common in the past. So what is religion? It is
a long story but let me start from the beginning -- the very beginning, when, as the Sumerians used to say, "bread was baked for the first time in the ovens".
A constant of all ancient religions is
that they tell us that whatever humans learned to do -- from fishing to
having kings -- it was taught them by some God who took the trouble to
land down from heaven (or from wherever Gods come from) just for that
purpose. Think of when the Sumerian Sea-God called Aun (also Oannes in later times) emerged out of the Abzu (that today we call the abyss)
to teach people all the arts of civilization. It was in those ancient
times that the Gods taught humans the arts and the skills that the
ancient Sumerians called "me," a bewildering variety of
concepts, from "music" to "rejoicing of the heart." Or, in a more recent lore, how Prometheus defied
the gods by stealing fire and gave it to humankind. This story has a
twist of trickery, but it is the same concept: human civilization is a
gift from the gods.
Now, surely our ancestors were not so naive that they believed in these silly legends, right? Did people really need a Fish-God to emerge out of the Persian Gulf to teach them how to make fish hooks and fishnets? But, as usual, what looks absurd hides the meaning of complex questions.
The people who described how the me came from the Gods were not naive, not at all. They had understood the essence of civilization, which is sharing.
Nothing can be done without sharing something with others, not even
rejoicing in your heart. Think of "music," one of the Sumerian me:
can you play music by yourself and alone? Makes no sense, of course.
Music is a skill that needs to be learned. You need teachers, you need
people who can make instruments, you need a public to listen to you and
appreciate your music. And the same is for fishing, one of the skills
that Aun taught to humans. Of course, you could fish by
yourself and for your family only. Sure, and, in this way, you ensure
that you all will die of starvation as soon as you hit a bad period of
low catches. Fishing provides abundant food in good times, but fish
spoils easily and
those who live by fishing can survive only if they share their catch
with those who live by cultivating grains. You can't live of fish alone,
it is something that I and my colleague Ilaria Perissi describe in our
book, "The Empty Sea." Those who tried, such as the Vikings of Greenland during the Middle Ages, were mercilessly wiped out of history.
Sharing solves the problems of the ups and downs of the supply of food and of all commodities. It
is the essence of civilization, but it is not trivial: who shares what
with whom? How do you ensure that everyone gets a fair share? How do you
take care of tricksters, thieves, and parasites? It is a fascinating
story that goes back to the very beginning of civilization, those times
that the Sumerians were fond to tell with the beautiful image of "when
bread was baked for the first time in the ovens," This is where
religion came in, with temples, priest, Gods, and all the related stuff.
Let's make a practical example: suppose
you are on an errand, it is a hot day, and you want a mug of beer.
Today, you go to a pub, pay a few dollars for your pint, you drink it,
and that's it. Now, move yourself to Sumerian times. The Sumerians had
plenty of beer, even a specific goddess related to it, called Ninkasi
(which means, as you may guess, "the lady of the beer"). But there were
no pubs selling beer for the simple reason that you couldn't pay for
it. Money hadn't been
invented, yet. Could you barter for it? With what? What could you carry
around that would be worth just one beer? No, there was a much better
solution: the temple of the local God or Goddess.
We have beautiful descriptions of the Sumerian temples in the works of
the priestess Enheduanna, among other things the first named author in
history. From her and from other sources, we can understand how in
Sumerian times, and for millennia afterward, temples were large
storehouses of goods. They were markets, schools, libraries,
manufacturing centers, and offered all sorts of services, including that
of the hierodules (karkid in Sumerian), girls who were not
especially holy, but who would engage in a very ancient profession that
didn't always have the bad reputation it has today. If you were so
inclined, you could also meet male prostitutes in the temple, probably
called "kurgarra" in Sumerian. That's one task in which temples
have been engaging for a long time, even though that looks a little
weird to us. Incidentally, the Church of England still managed prostitution in Medieval times.
So,
you go to the temple and you make an offer to the local God or Goddess.
We may assume that this offer would be proportional to both your needs
and your means. It could be a goat that we know it was roughly
proportional to the services of a high-rank hierodule.
But, if all you wanted was a beer, then you could limit your
offer to something less valuable: depending on your job you could have
offered fish, wheat, wool, metal, or whatever. Then, the God would be
pleased and as a reward the alewives of the temple would give you all
the beer you could drink. Seen as a restaurant, the temple worked on the
basis of what we call today an "all you can eat" menu (or "the
bottomless cup of coffee," as many refills as you want).
Note how the process of offering something to God was called sacrifice.
The term comes from
"sacred" which means "separated." The sacrifice is about separation. You
separate from something that you perceived as yours which then becomes
an offer to the God or to the community -- most often the same thing.
The offerings to the temple could be something very simple. As you see
in the images we have from Sumerian times, it didn't always involve the
formal procedure of killing an animal. People were just bringing the
goods they had to the temple. When animals were sacrificed to God(s) in
the sense that they were ritually killed, they were normally eaten
afterward. Only in rare cases (probably not in Sumeria) the sacrificed
entity was burnt to ashes. It was the "burnt sacrifice" called korban olah
in the Jewish tradition. In that case, the sacrifice was shared with
God alone -- but it was something exceptional.
In
any case, God was the supreme arbiter who insured that your sacrifice
was
appreciated -- actually not all sacrifices were appreciated. Some people
might try to trick by offering low quality goods, but God is not easy
to fool. In some cases, he didn't appreciate someone's sacrifices at
all: do you remember the story of Cain and Abel? God rejected Cain's
sacrifice, although we are not told exactly why. In any case, the
sacrifice was a way to attribute a certain "price" to the sacrificed
goods.
This method of commerce is not very
different than the one we use today, it is just not so exactly
quantified as when we use money to attach a value to everything. The
ancient method works more closely to the principle that the Marxists had
unsuccessfully tried to implement "from each according to his ability,
to each according to his needs." But don't think that the ancient
Sumerian were communists, it is just that the lack of method of
quantification of the commercial transaction generated a certain leeway
that could allow to the needy access to the surplus available, when it
was available. This idea is still embedded in modern religions, think of
how the holy Quran commands the believers to share the water of their
wells with the needy, once they have satisfied their needs and those of
their animals. Or the importance that the Christian tradition gives to
gleaning as a redistribution of the products of the fields. Do you
remember the story of Ruth the Moabite in the Bible? That important,
indeed.
But there is more. In the case of a burnt sacrifices, the value attributed to the goods was "infinite"
-- the goods consumed by the flames just couldn't be used again by
human beings. It is the concept of Taboo used in Pacific cultures for something that cannot be touched, eaten, or used. We have no equivalent thing in the "market," where we instead suppose that everything has a price.
And then, there came money (the triumph of evil)
The world of the temples of the first 2-3 millennia of human
civilizations in the Near East was in some ways alien to ours, and in others
perfectly equivalent. But things keep changing and the temples were
soon to face a competition in a new method of attributing value to
goods: money. Coinage is a relatively modern invention, it goes back to
mid 1st millennium BCE. But in very ancient times, people did exchange
metals by weight -- mainly gold and silver. And these exchanges were
normally carried out in temples -- the local God(s) ensured honest
weighing. In more than one sense, in ancient times temples were banks and it is no coincidence that our modern banks look like temples. They are temples to a God called "money." By the way, you surely read in the Gospels how Jesus chased the money changers -- the trapezitai
-- out of the temple of Jerusalem. Everyone knows that story, but what
were the money changers doing in the temple? They were in the
traditional place where they were expected to be, where they had been
from when bread was baked in ovens for the first time.
So, religion and money evolved in parallel -- sometimes complementing
each other, sometimes in competition with each other. But, in the long
run, the temples seem to have been the losers in the competition. As
currency became more and more commonplace, people started thinking that
they didn't really need the cumbersome apparatus of religion, with its
temples, priests, and hierodules (the last ones were still appreciated,
but now were paid in cash). A coin is a coin is a coin, it is guaranteed by
the gold it is made of -- gold is gold is gold. And if you want a good
beer, you don't need to make an offer to some weird God or Goddess. Just
pay a few coppers for it, and that's done.
The
Roman state was among the first in history to be based nearly 100% on
money. With the Romans, temples and priests had mainly a decorative
role, let's say that they had to find a new market for their services.
Temples couldn't be anymore commercial centers, so they reinvented
themselves as lofty place for the celebration of the greatness of the
Roman empires. There remained also a diffuse kind of religion in the
countryside that had to do with fertility rites, curing sickness, and
occasional cursing on one's enemies. That was the "pagan" religion, with
the name "pagan" meaning, basically, "peasant."
Paganism
would acquire a bad fame in Christian times, but already in Roman times
peasant rites were seen with great suspicion. The Romans burned
witches, oh, yes, they loved to burn witches -- they burned many more
than would ever be burned in medieval times. And the victims were most
likely countryside enchanters and enchantresses. They were considered
dangerous because the real deity that the Romans worshiped was money. An
evil deity, perhaps, but it surely brought mighty power to the Romans,
but their doom as well, as it is traditional for evil deities. Roman
money was in the form of precious metals and when they ran out of gold
and silver from their mines, the state just couldn't exist anymore: it
vanished. No gold, no empire. It was as simple as that.
The disappearance of the Roman state saw a return of religion, this time in the form of Christianity. It is a long story that
would need a lot of space to be written. Let's just say that the Middle
Ages in Europe saw the rise of monasteries to play a role similar to
that of temples in Sumerian times. Monasteries were storehouses,
manufacturing centers, schools, libraries, and more -- they even had something to do with hierodules. During certain
periods, Christian nuns did seem to have played that role,
although this is a controversial point. Commercial exchanging and
sharing of goods again took a religious aspect, with the Catholic Church
in Western Europe playing the role of a bank by guaranteeing that, for
instance, ancient relics were authentic.
In part, relics played the role that money had played during the Roman
Empire, although they couldn't be exchanged for other kinds of goods.
The miracle of the Middle Ages in Europe was that this arrangement
worked, and worked very well. That is, until someone started excavating
silver from mines in Eastern Europe and another imperial cycle started.
It is not over to this date, although it is clearly declining.
So,
where do we stand now? Religion has clearly abandoned the role it had
during medieval times and has re-invented itself as a support for the
national state, just as the pagan temples had done in Roman times. One of the
most tragic events of Western history is when in 1914, for some
mysterious reasons, young Europeans found themselves killing each other
by the millions while staying in humid trenches. On both sides of the trenches, Christian priests were
blessing the soldiers of "their" side, exhorting them to kill those of
the other side. How Christianity could reduce itself to such a low level
is one of the mysteries of the Universe, but there
are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our
philosophy. And it is here that we stand. Money rules the world and
that's it.
The Problem With Money
Our society is perhaps the most monetized of
history -- money pervades every aspect of life for everyone. The US is
perhaps the most monetized society ever: for Europeans it is a shock to
discover that many American families pay their children
for doing household chores. For a European, it is like if your spouse
were asking you to pay for his/her sexual services. But different epochs have
different uses and surely it would be shocking for a Sumerian to see
that we can get a beer at the pub by just giving the alewives a curious
flat object, a "card," that they then give back to us. Surely that card
is a powerful amulet from a high-ranking God.
So,
everything may be well in the best of worlds, notoriously represented
by the Western version of liberal democracy. Powerful market forces,
operated by the God (or perhaps Goddess) called Money or, sometimes,
"the almighty dollar," ensure that exchanges are efficient, that scarce
resources are optimally allocated, and that everyone has a chance in the
search for maximizing his/her utility function.
Maybe.
But it may also be that something is rotten in the Great Columned
Temple of Washington D.C. What's rotten, exactly? Why can't this
wonderful deity we call "money" work the way we would it like to, now
that we even managed to decouple it from the precious metals it was made
of in ancient times?
Well, there is a problem. A big problem. A gigantic problem. It is simply that money is evil. This
is another complex story, but let's just say that the problem with evil
and good is that evil knows no limits, while good does. In other words,
evil is equivalent to chaos, good to order. It has something to do with
the definition of "obscenity." There is nothing wrong in human sex, but an excess of sex in some forms becomes
obscene. Money can become obscene for exactly this reason: too much of it
overwhelms everything else. Nothing is so expensive that it cannot be
bought; that's the result of the simple fact that you can attribute a
price to everything.
Instead, God is good
because She has limits: She is benevolent and merciful. You could see
that as a limitation and theologians might discuss why a being that's
all-powerful and all-encompassing cannot be also wicked and
cruel. But there cannot be any good without an order of things. And
order implies limits of some kind. God can do everything but He cannot
do evil. That's a no-no. God cannot be evil. Period.
And
here is why money is evil: it has no limits, it keeps accumulating. You
know that accumulated money is called "capital," and it seems that many
people realize that there is something wrong with that idea because
"capitalism" is supposed to be something bad. Which may be but, really, capital
is one of those polymorphic words that can describe many things, not all of them necessarily bad. In
itself, capital is simply the accumulation of resources for future use
-- and that has limits, of course. You can't accumulate more things than
the things you have. But once you give a monetary value to this
accumulated capital, things change. If money has no limits, capital
doesn't, either.
Call it capital or call
it money, it is shapeless, limitless, a blob that keeps growing and
never shrinks.
Especially nowadays that money has been decoupled from material goods
(at least in part, you might argue that money is linked to crude
oil). You could say that money is a disease: it affects everything.
Everything can be associated with a number, and that makes that thing
part of the entity we call market. If destroying that thing can raise
that number, somewhere, that thing will be destroyed. Think of a tree:
for a modern economist, it has no monetary value until it is felled and
the wood sold on the market. And that accumulates more money, somewhere.
Monetary capital actually destroys natural capital. You may have heard
of "Natural Capitalism" that's supposed to solve the problem by giving a price to trees even before they are felled. It could
be a good idea, but it is still based on money so it may be the wrong
tool to use even though for a good purpose..
The
accumulation of money in the form of monetary capital has created
something enormously different than something that was once supposed to
help you get a good beer at a pub. Money is not evil just in a
metaphysical sense. Money is destroying everything. It is destroying the
very thing that makes humankind survive: the Earth's ecosystem. We call
it "overexploitation," but it means simply killing and destroying
everything as long as that can bring a monetary profit to someone.
Re-Sacralizing The Ecosystem (why some goods must have infinite prices)
There
have been several proposals on how to reform the monetary system, from
"local money" to "expiring money," and some have proposed to simply get
rid of it. None of these schemes has worked, so far, and getting rid of
money seems to be simply impossible in a society that's as complex as
ours: how do you pay the hierodules if money does not exist? But from what I have been discussing so far, we could avoid the
disaster that the evil deity calling money is bring to us simply by
putting a limit to it. It is, after all, what the Almighty did with the
devil: She didn't kill him, but confined him in a specific area that we
call "Hell" -- maybe there is a need for hell to exist, we don't know.
For sure, we don't want hell to grow and expand everywhere.
What
does it mean a limit to money? It means that some things must
be placed outside the monetary realm -- outside the market. If you want
to use a metaphor based on economics, some goods must be declared to
have an "infinite" monetary price -- nobody can buy them, not
billionaires, not even trillionaires or any even more obscene levels of
monetary accumulation. If you prefer, you may use the old Hawai'ian
word: Taboo. Or, simply, you decide that some things are sacred, holy, they are beloved by the Goddess and even thinking of touching them is evil.
Once
something is sacred, it cannot be destroyed in the name of profit. That
could mean setting aside some areas of the planet, declaring them not
open for human exploitation. Or setting limits to the exploitation, not
with the idea of maximizing the output of the system for human use, but
with the idea to optimize the biodiversity of the area. These ideas are
not farfetched. As an example, some areas of the sea have been declared
"whale sanctuaries" -- places where whales cannot be hunted. That's not
necessarily an all/zero choice. Some sanctuaries might allow human
presence and a moderate exploitation of the resources of the system. The
point is that as long as we monetize the exploitation, the we are back
to monetary capitalism and the resource will be destroyed.
Do
we need a religion to do that? Maybe there are other ways but, surely,
we know that it is a task that religion is especially suitable for.
Religion is a form of communication that uses rituals as speech.
Rituals are all about sacralization: they define what's sacred by means
of sacrifice. These concepts form the backbone of all religions,
everything is neatly arranged under to concept of "sacredness" -- what's
sacred is nobody's property. We know that it works. It has worked in
the past. It still works today. You may be a trillionaire, but you are
not allowed to do everything you want just because you can pay for it.
You can't buy the right of killing people, for instance. Nor to destroy
humankind's heritage. (So far, at least).
Then, do we need a new religion for that purpose? A Gaian religion?
Possibly
yes, taking into account that Gaia is not "God" in the theological
sense. Gaia is not all-powerful, she didn't create the world, she is
mortal. She is akin to the Demiurgoi, the Daimonoi, the Djinn,
and other similar figures that play a role in the Christian, Islamic
and Indian mythologies. The point is that you don't necessarily need the
intervention of the Almighty to sacralize something. Even just a lowly
priest can do that, and surely it is possible for one of Her Daimonoi, and Gaia is one.
Supposing
we could do something like that, then we would have the intellectual and
cultural tools needed to re-sacralize the Earth. Then, whatever is
declared sacred or taboo is spared by the destruction
wrecked by the money based process: forests, lands, seas, creatures
large and small. We could see this a as a
new alliance between humans and Gaia. Maybe we could use an old fashioned term "a New Covenant with Gaia." In the end, it doesn't matter. All the Earth is sacred to
Gaia, we may just decide that some parts of it are especially sacred and cannot be touched by money. And not just the Earth, the poor,
the weak, and the dispossessed among humans, they are just as sacred and
must be respected.
All that is not just a
question of "saving the
Earth" -- it is a homage to the power of the Holy Creation that belongs
to
the Almighty, and to the power of maintenance of the Holy Creation that
belongs to the Almighty's faithful servant, the holy Gaia, mistress of
the ecosystem. And humans, as the ancient Sumerians had already
understood, are left with the task of respecting, admiring and
appreciating what God has created. We do not worship Gaia, that would
silly, besides being blasphemous. But through her, we worship the higher
power of God.
Is it possible? If history tells us something is that money tends to beat
religion when conflict arises. Gaia is powerful, sure, but can she slay
the money dragon in single combat? Difficult, yes, but we should
remember that some 2000 years ago in Europe, a group of madmen fought
and won against an evil empire in the name of an idea that most thought
not just subversive at that time, but even beyond the thinkable. And
they believed so much in that idea that they accepted to die for it
In
the end, there is more to religion than just fixing a broken economic
system. There is a fundamental reason why people do what they do:
sometimes we call it with the anodyne name of "communication," sometimes
we use the more sophisticated term of "empathy," but when we really
understand what we are talking about we may not afraid to use the world
"love" which, according to our Medieval ancestors, was the ultimate
force that moves the universe. And when we deal with Gaia the Goddess,
we may have this feeling of communication, empathy, and love. She may be
defined as a planetary homeostatic system, but she is way more than
that: it is a power of love that has no equals on this planet. But there
are things that mere words cannot express.
