When humankind first aquired consciousness it was the single most traumatic experience that a biological species had ever experienced. Before, we had merely followed the instinct of nature, the same as every other species on the planet, as one with the rest of the natural machinery of the world, which propagates and diversifies life at such a rate, with the 'why?' never arising. But when it arose in humankind withit came conscience and guilt, which could not be explained. Along with freedom, human conscience, and the feeling of guilt were direct consequences of our exile from the state of nature.
'Nature commands every animal, and the beast obeys. Man experiences the same impulsion, but he is free to comply or resist; and it is above all the awareness of this freedom that reveals the spirituality of his soul, for physics in someway explains the mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas.'
It was with the formation of one of these earliest of ideas that lead us astray. When this sense of guilt was turned in on the self we gained the need for an external factor, in regards to our new realisations. Now that humankind did not have to rely on instinct, like all other species, we came to mistrust it. With conscience we aquired freedom, but this was not seen as a blessing, it became a curse. In a sense ptimitive man was faced with one of the same dilemmas that modern man has faced, that of facing and trying to live life, without the aid of eternal values, so in his innocence this was too daunting a prospect. The only way we could deal with it was by suppressing it and placing this new found responsibility for ourselves in the hands of some other force, which was created, for our convienience, out of our first act of self-deception. But from where did we aquire the inspiration for such an act of desperation?
The answer is simple and common knowledge. Early humankind worshipped the sun. So in a way the ancients would be correct in stating that god created the Earth, as the Earth was created through a process known as ecretion, from the debris of the Sun. They would also be correct in the assertion that this 'god' created the human race, as all the matter contained in our solar system was created in the boiling furnace that is the Sun.
Whether the ancients were aware of this coincidence is not within the scope of this essay. But what it means is that between the terror of their predicament and the hostile nature of the world they inhabited, the burden of responsibility had been lifted. This solar disc was the perfect focus for worship and as the centuries passed the personification of this solar body became common place. Narratives were developed as to its movesments, monuments were erected in its alignment. It wasn't enough though. In the long run, one deity was far too little and it wasn't long before a whole pantheon of gods were created, from the movements of the other, fixed and far more distant stars. But let us not be in any doubt as to the true motive behind this desperate act of creation, and there cannot be a better example of this than in ancient Greece.
'Throughout the longest period of their history the Greeks used their gods for no purposethan to keep 'bad conscience' at bay, to be allowed to enjoy their souls... They went very far in this direction, these magnificent child-minds with the courage of lions; and no lesser authority than that of the Homeric Zeus himself on occasion gives them to understand that they are making things too easy for themselves.'
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Here we find that instead of dealing with our new realisations, we invented god, in other words, a master through which moral codes could be administered to follow. We invented good and evil, right and wrong as something to desperatly rely on so that we could live a content and cowardly existence, riding ourselves any chance to achieve our true potential as individuals. The creation of a supreme deity was no small feat, especially for our supposed earliest of ancestors, but with this humankind forgot all about its new found sense of freedom and in blissful ignorance, blundered its way onto the path to civilisation.
With observation of the stars the ancients gradually devised an entire system of worship, which differed across a vast amount of religions world wide. An essay could be filledfollowing these diversities in themselves, however that is not the point. The point I am putting across is a more general one of humankinds dependence upon these systems.
The most recent system, that revolving around the age of Pisces began in approximately 4B,C. and heralded in the Christian revolution with the image of the fish.
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So we may now understand the concept of god in a new context. Throughout the ages, ever since that fatal first act of self-deception, we have looked to the stars for inspiration on how to worship our gods. The advent of the age of Pisces was merely a prompt for a new era of worship, which turned out to be the most hostile in terms of pointless suffering yet imagined. The main instigator for the age of Pisces was undoubtedly Jesus of Nazareth, who if treated like an historical figure, as opposed to the usual mythologizing of his story, can shed some light on the madness that ensured from the perversion of his ideals, over the last 2,000 years.
So we may conclude that Jesus was a revolutionary who died for his beliefs, which after his death were used as the basis of a new religion for the means of prolonging our delusion. By this point we had matured as a species and our conception of godfollowed suite. This was no longer a mere Sun worshipping cult. This god through the centuries of development and the seeming grounding to reality with the historical figure of Jesus, had taken on a life all its own and fueled our collective delusion for a further two centuries.
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'At the beginning of the Christian era, voices were heard off the coast of Greece, out to sea, on the Mediterranean, wailing 'Pan is dead! Great Pan is dead!'
This is an account from the Epic of Gilgamesh, concerning Pan, the great pagan god. It is fitting that such a statement was proclaimed, with the advent of Christianity, just as Nietzsche's Zarathustra proclaimed the death of the Christian god at the dawn of our own era.
Now that we are leaving the Christian, Piscean era and entering that of Aquarius, we see the rational for my quest for the origins of god. Relience on the Christian notion of god and of all gods is something which was relevant to the past and so we may surmise, is now obsolete. Now that we have looked into how gods first came about we see that they have no further relevance to the age of today.
Following on fromthis understanding of our past reliance on gods, we see the true motive of such belief systems. They are designed for self preservation not truth. They take away freedom and replace it with security. It traps the believer within a limited shere of solvable problems from which he is to content himself on, like a well trained animal, who only realises a limited amount of needs and desires which society can provide for - and no more. When early humankind first looked up to the Sun in desperate need of a master and subordination it was an act which plunged us into eternal irresponsibility. It freed us from the very real and daunting realisation that there are no eternal values to cling to. In short, this way was far easier on the conscience, as freedom and the subsequent self-realisation, are far more dangerous emotionally as they are a thought process based on objective reality and not a fantasy, which acts as an excuse for laziness. Many people consider theories, such as this, to be bleak, but I am putting them forward as a positive. People do not like to have their comfort in god or fate taken away as it leaves them with the very real realisation that they are responsible for themselves and their actions.
If we come to terms with this we will make this new age of Aquarius one in which we shall be freed from our Christian disgust with ourselves and be freed from our need of any beyond. We will be returned as it should have been in that first fateful hour of humankind, to freedom from all illusions and self deceit and above all to have returned to a world now seen as 'innocent' rather than flawed by original guilt.