As the first great civilisations developed in various parts of the world, in Sumer, Egypt and India, for example, the core symbolism-of the Great Goddess, the Bull, and sacred stones-developed and proliferated, taking on many different forms. Among early Indian gods, for example, Indra was constantly compared to a bull.6 In Iran the sacrifice of bulls was frequent.7 Bull gods were also worshipped in parts of Africa and Asia. In the Akkadian religion in early Mesopotamia the bull was a symbol of power and at Tel Khafaje (near modern Baghdad) the image of a bull was found next to that of the 'Goddess Mother'.8 The main god of the early Phoenician religion was known as shor ('bull') and as El ('merciful bull'). According to Mircea Eliade 'the bull and Great Goddess was one of the elements that united all the proto-historic religions of Europe, Africa and Asia.'9 Among the Dravidian tribes of central India, there developed a custom whereby the heir of a man who had just died had to place by his tomb, within four days, a vast stone, nine or ten feet high. The stone was intended to 'fasten down' the dead man's soul.10 In many cultures of the Pacific, stones represent either gods, heroes or 'the petrified spirits of ancestors'. The Khasis of Assam believed that cromlechs, circular alignments, were 'female' stones, representing the Great Mother of the clan and that the menhirs, standing stones, were the 'male' variety. Sacrifice may also have begun in a less cruel way, beginning at a time when grain was the main diet, and meat-eating still relatively rare. Animals may have been worshipped, and eating one was a way of incorporating the god's powers. This is inferred from the Greek word thusia , which has three overlapping meanings: violent, excited motion; smoke; and sacrifice.11 But sowing and reaping are the focal points of the agricultural drama, and these are invariably associated with ritual.12 In many cultures, for example, the first seeds are not sown but thrown down alongside the furrow as an offering to the gods.13 By the same token, the last few fruits were never taken from the tree, a few tufts of wool were always left on the sheep and the farmer, when drawing water from a well, would always put back a few drops 'so that it will not dry up'.14 Already, we have here the concept of self-denial, of sacrificing part of one's share, in order to nourish, or propitiate, the gods. Elsewhere (and this is a practice that stretches from Norway to the Balkans) the last ears of wheat were fashioned into a human figure: sometimes this would be thrown into the next field to be harvested, sometimes it would be kept until the following year, when it would be burned and the ashes thrown on the ground before sowing, to ensure fertility.15 Records show that human sacrifice was offered for the harvest by certain peoples of central and north America, some parts of Africa, a few Pacific islands, and a number of Dravidian tribes of India.16 Apart from the Khonds, the Aztecs of Mexico showed the process most clearly, for a young girl was beheaded at the temple of the maize god in a ceremony performed when the crop was just ripe. Only after the ceremony was performed could the maize be reaped and eaten-before that it was sacred and couldn't be touched. One can imagine why sacrifice, which began in holding back a few ears of corn, should grow increasingly elaborate, and seemingly cruel. Each time the harvest failed, and famine ensued, primitive peoples would have imagined the gods were displeased, unpropitiated, and so they would have redoubled their efforts, adding to their customs, increasing the amount of self-denial, in an attempt to redress the balance.17 After sacrifice, the next important addition to core beliefs, the most widespread new idea which had emerged since early Neolithic times, was the concept of the 'sky god'. This is not hard to understand either, though many modern scholars now rather downplay this aspect. By day, the apparent movement of the sun, its constant 'death' and 'rebirth', and its role in helping shape the seasons and make things grow, would have been as self-evident as it was mysterious to everyone. By night, the sheer multitude of stars, and the even more curious behaviour of the moon, waxing and waning, disappearing and reappearing, its link with the tides and the female cycle, would have been possibly more mysterious. In Mesopotamia (where there were 3,300 names for gods), the Sumerian word for divinity, dingir , meant 'bright, shining'; the same was true in Akkadian. Dieus, god of the light sky, was common to all Aryan tribes.18 The Indian god Dyaus, the Roman Jupiter and the Greek Zeus all evolved from a primitive sky divinity, and in several languages the word for light was also the word for divinity (as the English word 'day' is related to the Latin word deus ). In India in Vedic times, the most important sky god was Varuna, and in Greece
Uranus was the sky.19 His place was eventually taken by Zeus, which is probably the same word as Dieus and Dyaus, meaning both 'brightness', 'shine', and 'day'. The existence of sky gods is responsible for the concept of 'ascension'. In several ancient languages the verb 'to die' involved associations with climbing mountains, or taking a road into the hills.20 Ethnological studies show that all across the world, heaven is a place 'above', reached by means of a rope, tree or ladder, and there are many ascension rites in, for example, ancient Vedic, Mithraic, and Thracian religions.21 Ascension plays an important part in Christianity. Moon symbolism appears to be associated with early notions of time (see Genesis 1:14-19).22 The fact that the moon at times has a crescent shape induced early people to see in this an echo of the horns of the bull, so that like the sun the moon was also on occasions compared to this divinity. Finally, like the sun, the death and rebirth of the moon meant that it was associated with fertility. The existence of the menstrual cycle convinced certain early peoples that the moon was 'the master of women' and in some cases 'the first mate'.23 The sky gods also played a role in another core idea: the afterlife. We know that from Palaeolithic times early man had a rudimentary notion of the 'afterlife', because even then some people were buried with grave goods which, it was imagined, would be needed in the next world. Looking about them, early humans would have found plenty of evidence for an afterlife, or death and rebirth. The sun and the moon both routinely disappeared and reappeared. Many trees lost their leaves each year but grew new ones when spring came. An afterlife clearly implies some sort of post-mortem existence and this introduces a further core belief, what the historian S. G. Brandon has called humanity's 'most fundamental concept': the soul. It is, he says, a relatively modern idea (compared with the afterlife) and even now is far from universal (though his colleague E. B. Tylor thought it the core to all religions).24 A very common belief is that only special human beings have souls. Some primitive peoples ascribe souls to men and not to women, others the reverse. In Greenland there was a belief that only women who had died in childbirth had souls and enjoyed life thereafter. According to some peoples, the soul is contained in different parts of the body: the eye, the hair, the shadow, the stomach, the blood, the liver, the breath, above all the heart. For some primitive peoples, the soul leaves the body via the top of the head, for which reason trepanning has always been a common religious ritual.25 Similarly in Hindu the soul is not the heart but, 'being "the size of a thumb" (at death)', it lives in the heart. The Rig Veda recognised the soul as 'a light in the heart'. The Gnostics and the Greeks saw the soul as the 'spark' or 'fire' of life.26 But there was also a widespread feeling that the soul is an alternative version of the self.27 Anthropologists such as Tylor put this down to primitive man's experience of dreams, 'that in sleep they seemed to be able to leave their bodies and go on journeys and sometimes see those who were dead.'28 Reflecting on such things, primitive peoples would naturally have concluded that a kind of inner self or soul dwelt in the body during life, departing from it temporarily during sleep and permanently at death.29 For the ancient Egyptians, there were two other entities that existed besides the body, the ka and the ba . 'The former was regarded as a kind of double of the living person and acted as a protective genius: it was represented by a hieroglyphic sign of two arms upstretching in a gesture of protection.' Provision had to be made for it at death and the tomb was called the het ka , or 'house of death'.30 'Of what substance it was thought to be compounded is unknown.'31 The ba , the second entity, is usually described as the 'soul' in modern works on ancient Egyptian culture, and was depicted in art as a human-headed bird. This was almost certainly meant to suggest it was free-moving, not weighed down by the physical limitations of the body. In the illustrations to the Book of the Dead , dating from about 1450 BC, the ba is often shown perched on the door of the tomb, or watching the fateful post-mortem weighing of the heart. 'But the concept was left somewhat vague and the ba does not seem to have been conceived as the essential self or the animating principle.'32 The Egyptians conceived individuals as psycho-physical organisms, 'no constituent part being more essential than the other'. The elaborate burial rites that were practised in Egypt for three millennia all reflected the fact that a person was expected to be 'reconstituted' after death. This explains the long