The dead and the gods

It is now more than eight months since my mother's death, yet I still sometimes have a powerful feeling that she is still "here" in some incorporeal sense, perhaps in need of my help or reassurance in some way.  I've heard that it is not unusual to keep feeling the presence of someone to whom we feel closely connected, long after the person's death.  When you know someone very well and spend a lot of time and energy interacting with them or thinking about them, this becomes one of your brain's major accustomed activities, a habit -- and when the person is no longer there, the brain, so I assume, keeps on doing what it is used to doing.

Once last week we had rain in the morning, and a cool day interrupting the August heat.  My mother used to love rainy days, especially in the summer -- they reminded her of her native England.  When I realized it was raining, I went to the room where I keep her ashes and opened the window, to let her hear the rain.  I know full well how irrational that is, yet it felt very natural.

Later, though, this set me thinking about the gods which have beset humanity throughout its history, and where they might have come from.

If it is a common thing to feel an awareness of the "presence" of the recently dead whom we knew well, and an urge to continue the interactions we had with them while they were alive, then this has probably been the case for at least as long as we've been fully human, perhaps much longer.  Primitive people would very easily interpret this feeling as the real continuing presence of the spirits of the dead, somehow still around in disembodied form and watching the living.

Because I spent the last nine years of my mother's life taking care of her or, towards the end, closely monitoring her care at the residential facility where she had to live, my sensations of her presence take the form of a feeling that she needs my help in some way -- because that was the form my actual relationship with her took for almost a decade.  But what about someone like a tribal chieftain or elder in a primitive society, one for whom others felt awe and respect, and whose judgment they feared?  If his people had a strong sensation of his presence after his death, likely they would feel the same awe and fear toward that presence, feel that he might still be watching them and passing judgment on their behavior.  People might even alter their behavior to avoid offending the dead chief's spirit, and warn others to do the same; they might offer up things or actions they knew he would like, to please and propitiate him.

In the case of an especially feared or respected leader, I can imagine such habits becoming so ingrained that people would pass them along to the next generation, those who were born after the great man's death and never personally knew him.  This would be accompanied by tales of his acts, his judgments, his power during life -- and tales, as we all know, grow in the telling.  After two or three generations the dead chief would have evolved into a being of superhuman power and wisdom, whose spirit you had damn well better avoid offending -- a primordial god.  People would no longer have the true feeling of his presence that those who had actually known him had felt, but stories and teachings would provide a compelling, if less viscerally felt, substitute.

Once the belief in such beings became established, it would tend to persist.  And as society gradually grew more complex, a few especially clever and unethical people would manage to position themselves as spokesmen for the disembodied superbeing who had evolved from tales of the long-gone chief who had seemed to live on after his death in the minds of his contemporaries.  They would issue pronouncements in the supreme spirit's name, and thus gain power over their credulous fellows -- and the essence of religion as we know it today would be fully formed.  Then, when writing and civilization arose, religions would be free to develop the kind of scope and complexity they have today.

Note that a few cultures explicitly worship ancestors rather than gods, and many cultures also believe in ghosts or other kinds of disembodied spirit beings.  I suspect that these are cases where the process I'm describing only ran partway, and beliefs are still fairly directly based on that feeling of continuing presence of the dead.

Once the concept of gods had become firmly established in the human mind, it would be a relatively easy matter for prophets con men to reveal make up entirely new religions, based on new gods or new interpretations of existing ones.  That's probably the origin of most or all of the religions we have today.  But the original concept of gods had to come from somewhere.