STAËL Mme de (1817): Corinne ou l’Italie. Paris, H. Nicolle, 6e édition, revue et corrigée, 1, IV, 120; (tr. by the author)
[1] Strabo already observed a similar phenomenon in Greece: “Just as in all other respects the Athenians continue to be hospitable to things foreign, so also in their worship of the gods; for they welcomed so many of the foreign rites that they were therefore ridiculed by the comic writers …” [Strabo, 1924, 10, 3, 18]
[1b] Unless otherwise specified, all dates are BCE (before contemporary era).
[2] Symbol of the “new order,” Yahweh dictates the Tables of the Law. For the first time, a god is placed at the head of a community, instituting a hierarchy in which the divinity is at the same time king and judge. This accumulation of mandates can be explained by the fact that the Israelites, at the time, had a tribal structure without a monarch at its head.
[3] Philosophy as well as science will be practically banished from the territories that Christianity will occupy after the fall of the Roman Empire. However, Islam will not make the same mistake, and this will lead it to its apogee.
[4] The religions of the Book include Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all inspired by texts coming from a common source.
DOBRIZHOFFER Martin (1822): An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay. London, Murray, II, 77
[5] The role of prophetesses having been practically non-existent in giving shape to the religions of the Axial Age in the Middle East, we systematically use the masculine form.
[6] Whereas only kings and emperors could refer to a divine ascendancy in the polytheistic culture, everyone is now directly affiliated with the divinity. It not only points towards a process of democratization, echoing a similar development that took place earlier in the Greek city, but it also indefinitely widens the number of recipients of the divine message.
[7] Present in Persia under the Achaemenids in the sixth century, Zoroastrianism became the official religion of the Sassanid Empire (224 CE) until Islam replaced it, during the seventh century CE. This first monotheistic religion subsisted more than 1,000 years and exercised a profound influence on the formation of other monotheistic religions in the region.
[8] The fact that Yahweh stops the hand of Abraham at the last moment, just before he is going to sacrifice his son [Ge 22:2-12], shows that the motivation of its followers is what counts, the sacrifice itself being of no importance. However, this religion being in its very early stages, with polytheistic traditions still prevailing, Abraham will sacrifice a ram to his god [Ge 22:13].
[9] For convenience, we attribute here a masculine gender to Yahweh.
[10] Habiru, from which the word Hebrew comes, means “itinerant,” term used in a pejorative way by local populations. They preferred to be called Israelites.
[11] The Tahtaci, a pastoralist people of Turkey, wash a cup 40 times after a Turk has drunk from it.
PHILLIPS D.J. (2001): Peoples on the move; introducing the nomads of the world. Pasadena, William Carey Library; in Minkov, 2009, 46
[12] In 2012 in Kenya, fighting between a semi-nomadic tribe of herders and a farming community left 38 people dead. In Burkina Faso, an estimated 600 conflicts occur each year, provoking the death of pastoralists, farmers and government workers, in addition to the destruction of farms and houses, and the injury and death of animals.
[13] The antagonism between nomadic and
sedentary populations is at the source of the banishment of pork meat in the
Jewish and Muslim religions. Bred and eaten by settled populations, this animal
is completely absent from the livestock of nomadic peoples. For them, it clearly
became a symbol of impurity.
However, when Christianity is introduced in Rome, the conditions are very
different from those existing in the Middle East, since pork was the most
consumed meat in the Roman Empire. Besides, the antagonism between nomadic and
settled populations having there no grounds for being, Christianity will have
no reason whatsoever to banish pork’s meat.
[14] There are 322 references to shepherds in the Old Testament, and 73 in the New Testament.
[15] The word “nation” appears 876 times in the Old Testament, the word “people” 1902 times and the word “assembly” 246 times. Respectively, these words appear 120, 154 and 27 times in the New Testament.
[16] For an example of the way Baal and Yahweh compete, see the story of Elijah [1Ro 18:21-40] in which the prophet ends up slaughtering 450 prophets of Baal.
[17] When the Babylonians conquered Judea and Jerusalem, many exiled Israelites blamed Yahweh for their misfortune and renewed with traditional cults, as that of Ishtar.
[18] All quotes that follow are taken from Genesis. See Appendices Genesis ‘E’ and ‘J’.
[19] The inscription “To Yahweh and his Asherah” found on a jar in Kuntillet Ajrud, a site in the north of Sinai (Israel) and dating of the eighth century, indicates that Yahweh and El represented the same divinity, since Asherah was El’s consort.
[20] For many people around the world, the one who names acquires a certain power on the object or on the person named. The Hittite code of laws, describing a ritual of black magic (section 170), recounts that when someone kills a snake while pronouncing a person's name, the person in question will undergo the same fate as the snake. For several tribes of North America, whoever mentions the name of a deceased can be asked to pay a heavy fine to the deceased's family. In Australia and Tasmania during the nineteenth century CE, if a deceased carried the same name as an animal or a plant, the name had to be abolished and replaced by a new name. In a short period of time, tigers had three times their name changed. As for the Arunta, every individual possesses a secret name that relates this person to its totemic ancestor. Only the eldest know that name. Adding a level of complexity to this organization, each person possesses several ancestors among whom some might not be named. Finally, Genesis clearly marks this relation of dependence on the one who names when Yahweh renames Abram and Sarai [17:5; 17:15], and when Adam names Eve [3:20].
[21] Jean Perrot notes that around 4,000, “small groups of herders with sheep and goats settle in the region of Beersheva (Israel), until then uninhabited.” They lived in subterranean dwellings, their communities organized in domestic units or clans around egalitarian values, and though traces of specialization can be clearly noticed, one cannot speak of chiefdoms but of a tribal organization. [Perrot, 2003]
[22] ‘J' uses elements of the Mesopotamian creation in which humans are created by the divinities to work in their place.
[23] Remarkably, Adam is at that moment alone [3:23], Eve being probably already considered as subjected to him. Her absence here mirrors the absence of Adam during the scene between Eve and the snake, absence that can yet be explained by the fact that in the hierarchized universe of ‘J’, Adam is considered as second to the divinity. By letting a “subordinate” carry the responsibility for the events, ‘J’ can commute the punishment, death, that was destined for Adam.
[24] Establishing what Lacan called “the primacy of the phallus.”
[25] Anthropologists often qualify hunters-gatherers living in regions well provided with food as being the idlest people in the world.
[26] Introducing pain during childbirth as punishment implies that this people had mythicized the time before the discovery of fatherhood, the time when spirits were the procreative elements.
[28] Furthermore, in a recent article over his study on the origin of languages, Mark Pagel concluded that human beings “have this ability to transmit highly complicated and precise information from mouth to ear over tens of thousands of years.” [Sample, 2013]
CLEMENT Catherine & KRISTEVA Julia (1998): Le féminin et le sacré. Paris, Stock, 52 (tr. by the author)
The Laws of Manu, IX, 29-30; in Georg Bühler, translator (1886). The Sacred Books of the East, vol. XXV. Oxford, Clarendon Press
[30] During the Song period, neo-Confucianism
will bring women's servitude to a culminating point. The bandaging of their
feet will be extremely popular: required by the prevailing aesthetic norms,
women, not being able to walk, will be confined to their domicile.
More recently, the “one-child” policy combined with the depreciation attached
to girls will have for effect the death of numerous little girls, creating
thirty years later a serious gender imbalance. In 2013, the country counted on
average 119 boys for 100 girls, some regions having even reached the alarming
proportion of 130 boys for 100 girls. India has a similar problem [see Part
Two, endnote 2].
MOOR Nienke, ULTEE Wout, NEED Ariana (2009): Analogical Reasoning and the Content of Creation Stories: Quantitative Comparisons of Preindustrial Societies. Cross-Cultural Research, Volume 43, 2, 91-122
ELIADE Mircea (1976): Histoire des croyances et des idées religieuses. I. De l’âge de la pierre aux mystères d’Eleusis. Paris, Payot, 7 (tr. by the author)
[31] In recent times, the tendency has been to broaden the notion of sacrality to a number of things and people. Not only is nature about to be – again – consecrated, but sacralization is also applied to individuals (human rights, women’s and children’s rights, democratization, etc.), to animals (banishment of bullfights in Spain, political parties taking the defense of animals in The Netherlands, etc.), to the arts, to work, to sex, etc.
Rather than a “transfer of sacrality” as some have defined this process, we rather witness here the rejection of a restrictive definition of the sacred that could up to now be only applied to a divinity. This rejection could prefigure the return to a more holistic vision of the universe in which the realm of the profane will contract, and finally disappear.
[32] Protestantism, a religion of the Book born in recent times within a more illuminated society applies a similar principle of exclusion. In The Netherlands, an official census on religions practiced in 2006 counts 48 various Protestant factions. An identical partitioning is found in Islam where one sees every day different factions killing one another.
[33] In the Epilogue all dates are CE.
CYRULNIK Boris (2001): Sous le signe du lien. Une histoire naturelle de l’attachement. Paris, Hachette (1989), coll. Pluriel, 103