A few years ago, speaking at Leiden University, Professor Peter Akkermans reminded us how King Nabonidus (556-539 BCE [1]), after having plotted his way to the throne of Babylon, forged for himself a mythical past worthy of his status, and came to believe in it. This story does not only refer to an epoch and a personage, but also implies that the scheme conceived by this monarch impregnated the reality of his people and of his time, acquiring, as a result, a historical dimension.
Such phenomena abound throughout history, sometimes provoked by a traumatic event, but mostly surfacing during dictatorships, as Nazi Germany has shown. The myths it supported were accepted by whole populations who came to believe in the propaganda imposed on them. Affecting their perception of reality, it marked their judgments and opinions, and, ultimately, left its imprint on history. It is only when the deception collapses that people finally realize to what point they have been mystified, possibly triggering a collective trauma.
Eventually, the passing of time ineluctably relegates past interpretations into obsolescence, leaving as only accepted reading of the past the one bestowed by the present. The way historical events were perceived by the ones who have lived those events, who have been marked by them, is generally discarded as archaic and irrelevant. Manifest of this idea is the acknowledgment that societies and civilizations are to be appraised in the light of the “progress” they have achieved, regarding therefore most bygone cultures as “barbarian,” or even “savage” [2]. And though the savagery of two world wars has somewhat toned down this point of view, the notion of progress appearing not as inexorable, we continue to support the idea that the knowledge and technology gathered by our industrialized civilization represents an apogee that no other culture has ever matched, even less surpassed. As a result, we tend to forget that choices were made every step of the way, choices that were influenced by the way contemporaries perceived their present, every trodden path leaving behind alternatives that are now lost in time, obsolete.
On the tree of human history, the diversity of cultures represents as many branches sharing a similar vein, fed by the same sap. It would therefore be beneficial for all of us to delineate the common denominators that reconcile all these impetuses born from an identical core that form the different facets of our humanity. In the words of Mircea Eliade, we should never lose sight “of the profound and indivisible unity of the history of the human mind.” [Eliade, 1976]
To recognize our human nature in the way other populations lived and interpreted their present – whether they preceded or paralleled our time – could help us understand our present in a manner closer to our nature, every explored path adding to our accumulated experience. These principles remain even more valid today as our relationship to nature must be urgently reevaluated.
I propose we retrace here a path that was taken a long time ago, the path that led to the advent of the “masculine civilization.” Some of the choices made at the time were so decisive that they have alienated parts of our intrinsic human nature. Still today, despite all our progress, their consequences weigh heavily on our lives, our decisions, our goals.
There was a time when men and women did not know what the purpose of sex was. While physiological evidence made women’s procreative responsibility indisputable, it was impossible to attribute any reproductive function to men, as long as the role of sex was not understood. There was thus a time when fatherhood did not exist.
The world before fatherhood was characterized by an all-encompassing nature, source of all life. The fact that the feminine, with its obvious fertile attributes, was nature’s representative remained a source of frustration for men who thought of their role as being a secondary if not a redundant one.
In an initial attempt to control nature, men will use the spirits to explain most of its mysterious manifestations. One of their main functions will be to provide pregnancy with its first comprehensive explanation, while endowing men with a primordial role in its process. The spiritualization of nature will eventually lead to the holistic conception of the universe that characterizes the primitive world.
Sedentarization and animal domestication will offer the likelihood to observe the consequences of the sexual act. However, the full integration of fatherhood will only come into effect after the collapse of the Neolithic society and the disappearance of its millennial traditions. From its ashes, new social and economic structures will emerge that in a very short time see villages become cities, kingdoms, and empires, while divinities replace the spirits that have lost most of their functions. In the new society, men occupy all key positions, their patriarchal principles implemented through ancestor cults at the household level and tables of law at the collective level.
In the Middle East, the masculine civilization will find its ideological climax during the Axial Age, with the precepts of the prophets and the advent of Levantine monotheism. The new divinity mirrors the position man has forged for himself in the universe, nature and woman both subjected to him. Replacing Mother Nature as source of all life, the Divine Father sits now at the summit of the creation.
This book is divided into four parts.
In the first part, we see why the spirits were invented and which roles were assigned to them. Their omnipresence and the functions they fulfilled allow us to reconstruct the way humans saw the world and the role they played in it.
The second part describes how the first sedentarized communities, despite the profound transformations brought by the Neolithic Revolution, kept most of their ancestral customs and values during the new era. Women remained the main contributor to the economy by playing a crucial role in the process of sedentarization and in the production of food (agriculture). Men, for their part, went on hunting, providing the community with meat while keeping nomadic and shamanic traditions alive.
In the third part, we see that the climatic and environmental deterioration at the end of the Neolithic era, combined with the discovery of fatherhood and the bull’s domestication, precipitates a complete transformation of the society. The egalitarian tribal structure gives way to a hierarchized society in which men occupy all key economic and administrative positions, relegating women to a secondary role. Deprived of their main functions, the spirits are replaced by divinities that are organized in pantheons, mimicking the hierarchical structure in force in the urban society.
The last part depicts the introduction of Yahweh, a new divinity in the landscape of the Middle East. The functionality of its first manifestations, in full concordance with the prevailing polytheistic context, gradually becomes more abstract, influenced by the ideologies of the Axial Age. We see how the prophets adapt their divinity to the people they represent, a tribal community of nomadic pastoralists without religious or political organization. It is their oral tradition that the prophets use as background for their narrative of the creation: a people longing for a time before the revolution, for a paradise that has been lost.
The conclusion proposes a new division of human history in which the introduction of fatherhood serves as pivotal element to mark the start of the masculine civilization. Having dominated for the last 7,000 years, its ideology is confronted today with a major challenge, the resurgence of women’s economic role and the notion that, for the first time ever, nature has to be protected from our own deeds. Both plead for the resumption of a more holistic vision of the universe.
Considering the extended period over which the events I relate are spread out, it has not been possible to take into account the numerous variations, the multiple exceptions, and the innumerable nuances that characterize human history. Constrained by the objective of this work, my purpose is to refer to a general behavior and to retrace the well-trodden path.
Another fundamental bias of this work is that it sees history through the eyes of a male Westerner, voluntarily disregarding all other interpretations of the sources, for the simple reason that this narration is the result of a quest, whose resolution resides in the world that created it, in the world to which it belongs.