It’s often said that religion began as a way for human beings to address their fear of death by envisioning a happy, even blissful afterlife for the common man (or woman). This view, though popular, is not well supported by the evidence.

True, many gravesites dating back to prehistoric times include personal possessions belonging to the deceased, which may indicate a belief in life after death – the idea being that the deceased would need these prized items in the next world. On the other hand, such items might have been interred with the dead for some other reason. Maybe they were considered to have been contaminated by whatever misfortune caused the person's demise. Maybe their inclusion was simply a sentimental gesture.

At least some of the evidence cited for a prehistoric belief in life after death has been discredited. It was once thought that a Neanderthal burial plot in the recess of the cave had been festooned with flowers as part of an interment ritual. Though the flowers had long since disintegrated, pollen remained. Jean Auel made much of this discovery in her popular novel The Clan of the Cave Bear. More recent research, however, suggests that the pollen was deposited by burrowing rodents.

In any event, even if flowers were deliberately strewn over the body, it doesn't necessarily follow that the mourners believed in postmortem survival — and if they did, they may not have imagined it as anything to look forward to. When dealing with preliterate societies, we can only surmise what people may have been thinking.

The situation is different when we look at early literate societies, where religious beliefs are preserved in writing. Here we can see for ourselves what the priests and mythmakers really thought. From what I've seen, the earliest codified religious belief systems promise only the most limited and disappointing afterlife for most people.

The Sumerians’ best-known literary work, the Epic of Gilgamesh, centers on the hero’s desperate search for immortality on earth. His ultimate failure is the story's tragic climax. His disappointment can be well understood. As one website puts it, the Sumerian view of the afterlife

was definitely gloomy. It was not a pleasant realm of existence, a dark, dusty land, where the bread did not taste good, their garments were only feathers to protect them from the cold and water to drink was brackish.

Similar sentiments applied in Babylon and Assyria. Kings and nobles might fare somewhat better, but no one in these cultures saw death as the doorway to a better world.

Part of the Epic of Gilgamesh; this tablet, anticipating Noah, tells the story of a great flood

The ancient Hebrews conceived of an afterlife in only the vaguest terms, as Sheol, a shadowy realm of bloodless, half-alive spirits. The same same holds true for the ancient Greeks (and later, the Romans) who imagined a dark and desolate Hades for most people, even kings and heroes. In The Iliad, we read ad nauseam that one or another hero is struck down in battle, and with a ghastly wail his shade descends to Hades. In The Odyssey, Odysseus ventures to the entrance to Hades and encounters withered, mindless shades who are briefly revived by an offering of blood, before reverting to their former zombie-like state.

In a later refinement, which appears as a very obvious interpolation in The Odyssey, hellish torments were envisioned for a few especially unlucky souls. Sisyphus ceaselessly rolling his rock uphill, and Tantalus tortured by food and water he cannot reach, were two of the tortured spirits who appeared in this phase of Greco-Roman mythology.

If a joyful, fear-dispelling afterlife was not the point of religion in its early stages, then what purpose did religion serve? Surprisingly enough, primitive religion (in literate societies, at least) appears to have been essentially a ”scientific" undertaking, one that attempted to provide explanations of natural phenomena. How was the universe created? How did the human race come into existence? Why are there different kinds of animals? What lies beyond the limits of the known world?

Admittedly, the answers given were purely mythological and not at all scientific in the modern sense of the empirical investigation of testable hypotheses. But the motivation – to make sense of things; to develop a logically consistent, emotionally satisfying worldview – was arguably no different from the motivation of any other intellectual explorer.

How about ethics? The truth is, there wasn’t much moral instruction in the earliest religions. Despite the inclusion of hell as something of an afterthought in its later iterations of the afterlife, Greco-Roman paganism never embraced morality in any serious way; the gods themselves were notoriously promiscuous, deceitful, and unjust. Pagan religions typically focused on rituals rather than personal behavior. For the most part, it didn't matter a great deal how you lived your own life, as long as you made the proper offerings to the gods.

Although law codes, such as the famous Code of Hammurabi, were devised and enforced in the ancient world, their purpose was to maintain order, not to ensure personal salvation. This was true even of Judaism, which eventually developed into a highly moralistic faith. Primitive Judaism centered on ritual sacrifices carried out in various "high places" (mountaintops, thought to be closer to the deity) and eventually centered exclusively in the Temple of Jerusalem, a man-made "high place," where thousands of birds and livestock animals were immolated throughout the year. It was the Hebrew prophets, examples of a later and decidedly anti-establishment trend, who stressed the importance of living a moral life as opposed to simply offering animal victims to the Temple priests. Hosea, speaking for Yahweh, declared: "For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings." This, at the time, was a revolutionary view.

Early Jewish law codes, such as that found in Deuteronomy, were primarily intended to preserve the distinction between Jewish culture and the surrounding cultures that threatened to assimilate it – hence the dietary restrictions, requirement of circumcision, ritual purification, and other rules of conduct that made the Jews different from other Semitic tribes. Even the Ten Commandments, which do have a moral component, are largely concerned with ensuring that the Jewish people do not stray from the worship of Yahweh and fall prey to the siren songs of competing gods.

Though it is something of an aside, it may be worth pointing out that those other gods were "false" in the sense that they were unworthy of worship, but not in the sense that they were purely fictional. The early Hebrews seem to have believed that there were, in fact, other gods besides Yahweh, but that these gods should be spurned. In other words, at this stage of its history, Judaism was probably more henotheistic than monotheistic. Some of the earliest parts of the Hebrew Bible refer to God as Elohim, a plural term properly translated gods, but construed as singular in modern translations. There are is also at least one reference in the Bible to Yahweh presiding over councils of other gods, and there are several statements to the effect that Yahweh is superior to rival gods.* True monotheism seems to been a relatively late development.

The same is probably true of the so-called Amarna revolution during the 18th dynasty in Egypt. Akhenaton, a heretic pharaoh, attempted to supplant the main pantheon of Egyptian gods with a single god, the Aten or solar disk, but he continued to allow worship of various minor deities who were not seen as a threat to the Aten.

Akhenaten worshiping the Aten

The mention of Egypt helps us segue back to our main point, because it is probably in Egypt that we see the most clearly defined evolution of a doctrine of personal salvation. In her book Nefertiti, Joyce Tyldesley observes:

During the Old Kingdom his semi-divine status made the king very different from his subjects, and only he could look forward to an afterlife in the presence of his fellow gods. Mere mortals could continue to exist beyond death, but they were confined to the precincts of the tomb. By the Middle Kingdom, however, the afterlife beyond the grave had been opened to all. In consequence the king’s perceived divinity on earth was weakened, although he still held sole responsibility for the preservation of maat. [p. 72]

Maat is a virtually untranslatable word that means something like natural order, harmony, and stability – similar, I think, to what Ulysses means by “degree” in his famous speech in Troilus and Cressida:

The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre

Observe degree, priority and place,

Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,

Office and custom, in all line of order;

And therefore is the glorious planet Sol

In noble eminence enthroned and sphered

Amidst the other ...but when the planets

In evil mixture to disorder wander,

What plagues and what portents! what mutiny!

What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!

Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors,

Divert and crack, rend and deracinate

The unity and married calm of states

Quite from their fixure! …

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And, hark, what discord follows!

Maat, like degree, might uncharitably be described as the status quo. It's the ultimate conservative doctrine – any change is dangerously disruptive, so it's better to keep things just the way they are. Egypt, very much married to this concept, remained largely static in its culture and political system for more than 3,000 years.

Still, even in ultraconservative Egypt, there were changes, as Tyldesley’s quote makes clear. The Old Kingdom pharaohs, ruling prior to 2000 BC, envisioned an afterlife for themselves as gods cavorting among the other gods in perfect freedom. Their subjects, however, would continue to exist in only the most tenuous fashion, as shades tethered to their tombs, nourished by ritualistic offerings of food and drink and kept alive by the memory of their name; and when the offerings inevitably ran out and the name was forgotten, presumably they would suffer the dreaded "second death" of total oblivion. In short, for most Egyptians, the afterlife was nothing better than Hades was for the Greeks or Sheol for the Jews. But the king would fare better.

We find a similar viewpoint in a relatively late stage of Greco-Roman society, when the Elysian Fields were imagined as a paradisiacal sporting ground for departed heroes and kings, even as the common folk remained relegated to the misty confines of Hades. (Valhalla, home of chieftains and other military heroes, played a similar role in Norse religion.) Likewise, at the time of the Maccabean revolt (167–160 BC), some Hebrew thinkers imagined a glorious, albeit sketchily defined, afterlife for martyred rebels, who would perhaps be transformed into stars perpetually shining in the heavens; still, most Jews could look forward only to only the shadows of Sheol.

What we might call the democratization of the afterlife follows, in the cases I know of, only after a period in which kings and warlords have been assured of their reward. As Tyldesley notes, by the Middle Kingdom, post-2000 BC, every Egyptian could hope for the happy and productive afterlife formerly promised only to the semi-divine pharaoh and other elites. At this point, in order to preserve the all-important distinction between the ruling class and the masses, pharaohs began to insist on their divinity on earth.

The same trend is observable in the later stages of the Roman era, when the Eleusian Mysteries held out the promise of a fulfilling afterlife to all initiates, regardless of social status. Even so, this approach was still not truly egalitarian. Very few people had the opportunity to participate in the lengthy initiation process, and the cult’s doctrines were a closely held secret never shared with outsiders. In fact, revealing these sacred secrets was a crime punishable by death. Apuleius, author of the famous satirical novel The Golden Ass, and himself an initiate into the Mysteries, successfully defended himself against exactly this charge. So well concealed were the secrets of the Rites of Eleusis that to this day, we aren't exactly sure what the initiation consisted of or what doctrines were imparted.

The sanctuary of Demeter and Kore in Eleusis (near Athens) was a center of the Eleusinian Mysteries

It is clear, however, that, personal immortality was assured. Plato writes in the Phaedo, “Our mysteries had a very real meaning: he that has been purified and initiated shall dwell with the gods.” Plutarch, consoling his wife after the death of their young daughter, writes,

Because of those sacred and faithful promises given in the mysteries ... we hold it firmly for an undoubted truth that our soul is incorruptible and immortal. ... When a man dies he is like those who are initiated into the mysteries. Our whole life is a journey by tortuous ways without outlet. At the moment of quitting it come terrors, shuddering fear, amazement. Then a light that moves to meet you, pure meadows that receive you, songs and dances and holy apparitions.

(Both quotes are taken from this website.)

Judaism has never placed much stress on postmortem survival, preferring to focus on the kind of immortality guaranteed by having children who will carry on one's name. But Christianity, originally an offshoot of Judaism, embraced personal immortality wholeheartedly and in just about the most democratic fashion possible. Anyone who converted to Christianity, a process as simple as declaring one's personal belief in Jesus as one’s savior, would be assured of a blissful eternity. It didn't matter if the person was highborn or lowborn, free or slave, male or female, Jewish or gentile, circumcised or not, or even if he was an out-and-out reprobate, so long as he repented before breathing his last. You can't get much more egalitarian than that. No doubt the promise of a glorious future life open to everyone willing to recite a simple creed largely accounts for Christianity's explosive growth in its first two centuries.

This short survey covers only a small part of the world. Trends may have been different in Mesoamerica, Africa (south of Egypt), and Asia. I don't know enough about those cultures to comment. But from what I've seen, the idea of an afterlife for the average person — one that's actually worth looking forward to — took a very long time to develop, as did monotheism and religiously grounded ethics. In historical terms, "going into the light" and finding heaven is not a primitive idea, but the result of a lengthy process of intellectual and spiritual evolution – a process that most likely is not finished, even today.

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*Regarding Yahweh as the chief god among many gods, an evangelical website tells us:

The Divine Council is the view that Yahweh, The God of Israel, is the Master of a pantheon, if you will, consisting of lesser gods who serve Him, carry out His will, and even deliberate with Him in decision making. ... In several biblical passages throughout the Old Testament, we find phrases from the biblical authors exalting Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, above the gods of their pagan neighbors. ... Psalm 97:9 says “For thou Lord art high above the Earth. Thou art exalted far above all gods.” ... Exodus 15:11 says “Who is like unto these O Lord among the gods? Who is like thee glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders!?” ... 1 Kings 8:23 says “And he said ‘Lord God of Israel, there is no god like thee in heaven above or on earth beneath who keep thy covenant with thy servants that walk before thee with all thy heart.” ... Psalm 86:8 says “There is no one like You among the gods, O Lord, Nor are there any works like Yours.”

Psalm 82 is the source of the so-called Divine Council:

God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods.

How long will ye judge unjustly, and accept the persons of the wicked? Selah.

Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy.

Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked.

They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course.

I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.

But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.

Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations. Will

[King James Version]

Some modern translations, such as the New International Version and the Tree of Life Version, put the word gods in quotes, or call them the so-called gods (The Voice), but these are purely face-saving measures.