myDirootsofreligions NOW after all it is more easy to see how important the woman and man of knowledge and experience, the ones who knew about the blood sacrifice and the stars, became in our early neolithic world?
the fear of uncleanness and pollution and the methods of cleansing that were advisable constituted another source of power for the knowledgeable men & women for there have always been witches as well as wizards and priestesses as well as priests
the early priest was really not so much a religious man as a man of applied science his science was generally empirical and often bad
he kept it secret from the generality of men very jealously but that does not alter the fact that his primary function was knowledge and that his primary use was a practical use
more than 10,000 years ago in all the warm and fairly well-watered parts of the old world these neolithic communities with their class and tradition of priests and priestesses and their cultivated fields and their development of villages and little walled cities were spreading
age by age a drift and exchange of ideas went on between these communities we could use the term heliolithic culture for the culture of these first agricultural peoples 'sun & stone' is not perhaps the best possible word to use for this but until scientific men give us a better one we can use it
originating somewhere in the mediterranean and western asiatic area it spread age by age eastward and from island to island across the pacific until it may even have reached america and mingled with the more primitive ways of living of the mongoloid immigrants coming down from the north
wherever the brownish people with the heliolithic culture went they took with them all or most of a certain group of curious ideas and practices some of them are such queer ideas that they call for the explanation of a mental expert
they made pyramids and great mounds and set up great circles of big stones perhaps to facilitate the astronomical observation of the priests they made mummies of some or all of their dead they tattooed and circumcised they had the old custom known as couvade or sending the fatherto bed and rest when a child was born and they had as a luck symbol the well-known and by now detested swastika
if we were to make a map of the world with dots to show how far these grouped practices have left their traces we should make a belt along the temperate and subtropical coasts of the world from stonehenge and spain across the world to mexico and peru but africa below the equator north central europe and north asia would show none of these dottings there lived races who were developing along practically independent lines and even though 'worldculture' is spreading out almost everywhere today we can still find remnants of such different attitudes among some fiercely independent peoples all around the world old & young bask irish albanian hungarian finish jewish berber nepalese tibetan japanese to name a few depending on which criteria we use as far a 'religion' language culture etcetera are concerned? and what about the remaining amazonian 'indian' tribes papuas and aboriginals pygmee & bushmen? ... after all doesn't every group and individual sometimes {?} like to distinguish him- or herself from 'the rest' we the dutch jewish black brown yellow red green blue and white? we 'americans' 'wasp' & 'latin' we 'christians' 'moslims' africans asians women & men dumb & devious stupid & clever disgusting & holy enemies and friends? and what are we going to do about this once we start deciding about who has power and who doesn't: in palace or prison heaven or hell well I'm still at the beginning without the end being in sight at all!? OR we'll see {or we won't} I'm very curious & longing for the answers