Why, when human culture developed with the advent of farming and we began to build permanent well-crafted dwellings, did we not then automatically become rational people?
Instead, every society for around the first 9000 years of urban life was obsessed with death cults and barbarous sacrifices.
Today we marvel at the Egyptians' fine craft skills, but they employed them in the service of grandiose and hopeless oblations to the afterlife by way of slavish adherence to trammelling tribal rituals and death-cult prostrations
Even in Homer,
around 3000 years ago, we recognise modernity in the dignity, humour, wiliness, love and loyalty, the fondness for fine clothes and food. But we also still find the incessant bloody sacrifices of animals and the omnipresent louring presence of those supposed gods for whom human beings were merely puppets dangled at their whim.
But we have moved on, how and why?
The tribal death cults and the Greeks deferring to their numerous Gods was an apparently necessary stage between the gene-led rote behaviour of apes and our modern universality.
Instead, every society for around the first 9000 years of urban life was obsessed with death cults and barbarous sacrifices.
Today we marvel at the Egyptians' fine craft skills, but they employed them in the service of grandiose and hopeless oblations to the afterlife by way of slavish adherence to trammelling tribal rituals and death-cult prostrationsEven in Homer,
But we have moved on, how and why?
The tribal death cults and the Greeks deferring to their numerous Gods was an apparently necessary stage between the gene-led rote behaviour of apes and our modern universality.
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