This was followed by Homo habilis and Homo erectus that inhabited East Africa. From this descended Homo heidelbergensis which is the common ancestor of fully human Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. We have common ancestors with the chimpanzees, monkeys, and gorillas. However, we evolved into what we are today, while the same did not happen with the rest. Why?
Science will never find out why the human being was the only species of living being that evolved. It will never find out because the answer lies in God who thought of us as the ultimate exponent of evolution of species, ever since life appeared in the ocean in the form of a single-celled organism called Archaea.
Worldview and Self-awareness
We know that Homo sapiens acquired the same anatomical structure that we have today about 130,000 years ago. But when did it become authentically human, that is, gain awareness of itself? Most paleontologists think this began to happen about 40,000 years ago when the turning point in human creativity occurred when Homo sapiens left Africa and arrived in Europe, developing tools, first of stone, then of metal, to act on the reality around him. In a process of knowing and mastering the nature around him, man came to know himself as different from the reality around him.
In addition to tools, the abstract and symbolic thinking, typical of modern man, can also be seen in the decoration of their cave walls with cave paintings, which tell us a little about their lives and minds in splendid paintings of deer, horses, and wild bulls, as well as their funeral rituals. The same is expressed by the body ornaments they wore and the statuettes modeled in clay, exalting women’s femininity, and fertility.
In both the Stone Age (Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic) and the Metal Age (Chalcolithic or Copper – Bronze – Iron), Man did not yet have a defined worldview, because in order to have a worldview or a vision of the cosmos or the world around him, it was necessary, in some way, for him to be able to abstract from himself. Prehistoric man was still, like all animals, living mostly in symbiosis with nature. Since he did not see himself as separate from it, he could not have an idea of it.
Like the baby who at birth has its umbilical cord cut off from nature, so primitive man experienced a rupture through the process of gradually gaining self-awareness. In gaining self-awareness, the human being still saw himself in nature, but in opposition to it; nature was no longer so much a prodigal mother but more of a stepmother, because now he had to wrestle sustenance from it, as the baby must cry if he wants to drink milk.
Worldview and Science
Man sought to emancipate himself, to free himself, from the bonds and tutelage of nature, to gain independence and autonomy in relation to it. Even today these are the values on which the life of the human being as an individual being is based. In this battle for freedom, he has created increasingly more powerful tools to modify nature and adapt it to his needs. With the discovery of fire, he could combine different elements creating new ones.
He replaced hunting by domesticating animals, so that he could have meat whenever he wanted and not when nature allowed for it; he replaced fruit gathering with agriculture, so that he could store food when it was scarce and have time for other things like inventing, discovering, creating.
The worldview as a vision or conceptualization of the world around us, as a mindset or standard against which we measure and judge all things, is affected and confronted by each scientific discovery. Each new scientific conclusion forces our mind to conceptualize reality in another way, to look at the world in another way. In other words, an authentic metanoia operates in our mind, that is, a mental paradigm shift takes place.
The discovery of fire
This discovery changed people’s lives so much that fire came to be understood mythologically as having been stolen from the gods. Fire was for our ancestor like Aladdin’s lamp, which through friction would appear as if by magic, and men could do with it whatever they wanted.
Fire played an important role in the cohesion of families and communities, as everyone gathered around the campfire to warm themselves. Since no one wanted to be left out in the cold, fire acted as a deterrent to antisocial behaviours.
It allowed daylight to be extended well into the night, and since one could not work at night, the extra two or three hours of faint light served for cultural events, for sharing experiences, and for the transmission of culture from parents to children. Light at night increased the safety of humans from animals that hunted at night, as it served to scare them away.
However, the most important use of fire at this time was for food preparation. Cooked or roasted food improved human diet. Certain foods are more nutritious when cooked than raw. The increase in population and the survival of human beings are due to the discovery of fire and its use in cooking. Finally, it was precisely fire that allowed humans to move from Stone Age to Metal Age.
Egalitarian Society of Old Europe
In a time, span from upper Paleolithic period, about 50,000 years ago, to the beginning of Chalcolithic period (Copper Age), Homo sapiens left us not only the famous cave paintings, but also countless of female statues where the sexual attributes of women are accentuated and even exaggerated.
Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas believes that these statuettes are proof of the existence of a non-matriarchal, but more egalitarian society in old Europe after Homo sapiens left Africa. In these ancient societies, women and men lived as equals in practically all aspects of daily life. In addition, women were accorded a higher status because of their reproductive ability. In fact, the identity of women as life-givers was closely linked to the life-giving mother goddess who served as the focal point of the old European religion.
The role of the father in prehistoric antiquity was non-existent, like it is in animals closest to us in the evolution of species. This happened because the female body, by its physiognomy, gave evidence of maternity, while the male body gave no evidence of paternity. In the Neolithic period, as well as in the upper Paleolithic period, religion was centered on the woman’s power to generate life.
We can conclude that the first deity worshipped by human beings was a goddess, not a god. Reverence was given to the goddess Mother of all that lives, identified either as nature or earth. Earth, as a planet or as soil, nature as well as the names of all continents are feminine names.
The man observes with fascination how from the bosom of the earth comes the life of plants which are the life of animals, and to the bosom of the earth this life returns when plants and animals die. He also observes the similarity between the image of the earth and the woman, since she alone generates life. Given the rudimentary intelligence of human beings at that time, the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth had not yet been established, because cause and effect were separated by nine months.
In a time when humans would have no more intelligence than a mouse has today, let us think that if a mouse eats a poison and dies, immediately the other mice will never touch that poison again, because they establish a connection between the death of their counterpart and the powder it ate. However, if the poison is an anticoagulant by which the mouse does not die right after ingesting it, but on the next occasion it injures itself in a fight or an accident and bleeds to death, the connection between death and the anticoagulant is not established, which makes the anticoagulant the best poison.
While paternity was not established, the women of the tribe held a certain power and high esteem, being respected by the males, even though the latter by nature possessed greater physical strength. Alternatively, we can look at living beings closer to us in the evolution of species, to see similar situations.
Let us look at dogs, how the males revere the females, especially when the latter have just given birth (life givers): the males do not go near them and, although physically they are stronger, the males do not use physical violence against the females, even showing them a certain "reverence". In case of conflict, the female prevails, not only because it becomes very aggressive, drawing strength from weakness, but also because the male moves away as a sign of respect and does not confront the female, although it could do so because it has a superior physical strength.
In all cultures, divinity is a generator of life. On the other hand, also in Rudolf Otto’s view, divinity is identified in all cultures as a "misterium tremedum et fascinans", which we can translate as the love and fear of God. When God is represented as a woman, immediately all women are an image of this God, so they will be as respected as God is.
There has never been and we can say that there will never be a society that is purely matriarchal, as long as man has greater physical strength than woman. However, matrilineal or egalitarian societies have existed and may still exist.
When the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth was established, man's status began to rise. He then began to be seen as crucial to the reproductive process that guaranteed life. The original goddess of Mother Earth came to be complemented by a consort, first thought of as the god Father Sky. The rain falling from the sky was the divine semen sent to impregnate Mother Earth so that life could emerge.
Herbert W. Richardson in his book, Nun, Witch and Playmate, writes that this maternal understanding of God and human life prevailed until the dawn of self-consciousness, when a division appeared in human life between the natural instinct and the emerging ego that dared to face and confront that instinct.
When this happened, there was a turning point in the human worldview, that is, a new definition of all aspects of life. When human life is defined in a new way, the God worshipped because of human life is also defined in a new way. Anthropologists understand that this happened around 7,000 BC.
Genesis of the Andro-centric Worldview in the Bible
The Protestant bishop John Shelby Spong in his book, Living in Sin? describes very well how the Bible echoes the process of transition from the feminine conceptualization (goddess Asherah) to the masculine conceptualization (Yahweh) of divinity. This process did not happen overnight, it was a lengthy and painful process, with numerous relapses. The first book of Kings (18:40) gives us an example of the persecution that the followers of Yahweh brought against the followers of the fertility gods, in the episode of the confrontation between the prophets of Baal and Elijah, the prophet of Yahweh.
In the 7th century BC, there were still small shrines dedicated to the fertility goddess Asherah and her consort Baal, in which liturgies explicitly sexual were held that included sacred prostitution, both male and female. Neither the reformation of Deuteronomy nor that of Ezra in the 5th century BC were able to completely extinguish these practices.
Yahweh was a solitary male God, who created everything by means of the spoken Word, without needing a female partner. The older cult of Baal started from the observation of the sexual power of reproduction.
John Shelby Spong sees in the story of Abraham a biblical echo of the moment when the human being gained self-consciousness. He broke with nature, as Abraham broke with his homeland of Ur, in fertile Mesopotamia, to pilgrimage through the desert, discovering himself. The gods of fertility demanded human sacrifices; Abraham broke with this tradition, by not sacrificing his son out of an inner impulse.
With the emergence of consciousness and thought, human survival no longer depended so much on nature taking its course, but on human thought knowing, discovering, and mastering nature.
The successful suppression of the fertility cult, with its female deity, is part of the historical context of the creation of Yahwism, in which the goddess Eve, mother of all living beings, coexists with evil and is banished forever from paradise by the superior male god.
From there follows the biblical insistence on the all-male nature of God and the corresponding attribution of divine (i.e., masculine) prerogatives to men, who alone, the myth argues, were created in the image of this God.
Thus was born the andro-centric worldview of life, the dominance of the male over the female that extends to our days. With the appearance of fatherhood, not only was the value of motherhood overshadowed, but women were deprived of their place in society. As fatherhood is not as patent as motherhood, establishing fatherhood became the cornerstone of patriarchal society that insisted on controlling women's reproductive behavior. Thus was born the value or countervalue of virginity and other forms of domination of women.
Conclusion – While God was conceptualized as Mother, women were respected, admired, and lived on an equal footing with men. With the conceptualization of God as Father, women were deprived of their dignity, dominated, tortured, vituperated, vexed, and outraged to this day in all cultures and civilizations.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
