In a Vedic school in Varanasi (India), I've seen boys chanting late-Bronze Age Sanskrit; in Yazd (Iran), I've sat with Zoroastrians before the sacred fire; recently, I joined a million people at a farmers' festival in Henan (China) celebrating the goddess Nüwa, who created humankind "from the mud of the Yellow River". All testimony to the endless variety of the religious experience, these rituals enable the filmmaker to reach into the past and see the ways we humans have handed down our deepest beliefs.
But how did religion arise? How did humanity come to believe in gods - in a transcendent world with a supernatural, white-bearded father in heaven, like Zeus or Jupiter, or the great goddesses Aphrodite, Ishtar or Isis? Or the moralising high gods of the Abrahamic religions, Jehovah and Allah? How did we come to believe that they judge us, and actually intervene in human affairs? And even - most tellingly that they made us in their image?
This story is from the October 2022 edition of BBC History UK.
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This story is from the October 2022 edition of BBC History UK.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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