When the Gods Walked Among Us

Domestic Rituals in Neolithic Europe and the Near & Middle East

For February’s Free Entry, I wrote about my approach to knowledge, and how damaging it can be for the modern spiritual movement to dismiss intellectual inquiry as patriarchal, and to associate the intellect with the masculine and the intuitive with the feminine.

I offered some examples of ancient women who were both scholars and mystics (this was very much the case for male thinkers too, I just like to offer a bit of weight to the lighter side of imbalanced scales). And I suggested that in ancient times, retrieving knowledge was a matter of engaging both faculties - the intellectual and the experiential.

But in the modern western worldview rooted in the monotheistic Semitic religions, these faculties were each coupled off. The intellect was paired with the scientific - attested, reliable and true. And the experiential dismissed as speculation - fantasy, child’s play and make-believe.

The intellectual became ruler of the mundane world, and the experiential banished to the abstract divine.

This led to the separation between the sacred and the mundane.

I find the worldview of our earliest ancestors far more compelling than our rather simplistic modern notions of the divine that separate divinity from the human world.

There was initially no ontological gulf between the world of the gods and the world of men and women. When people spoke of the divine, they were usually talking about an aspect of the mundane. The very existence of the gods was inseparable from that of a storm, a sea, a river, or from those powerful human emotions - love, rage or sexual passion - that seemed momentarily to lift men and women into a different plane of existence so that they saw the world with new eyes.

Karen Armstrong

In prehistory, ritual and religion were about providing humanity with resources to better hold themselves in the world, rather than to prepare for what comes after it.

And so today I want to present some evidence for ritual behaviour within the households of prehistory to explore how the mundane was the religious setting; and there was not the differentiation between the “sacred” and the “profane” that we make today.

Reconstruction of the neolithic settlement known as Horton House, c. 3,800-3,600 BC, Berkshire, England. There are very few remnants of neolithic houses in the UK, so this discovery is particularly exciting. If we didn’t know this was the UK, it would be in Siberia or the Amazon…

Though the more contemporary monotheistic religions mark a clear separation between the sacred and the mundane, the ancient mind did not distinguish between religious and secular behaviour in quite the same way.

I think that separating the divine from the mundane, and the people from the gods, is a more modern, strategic act to ensure the empowerment of a self-selected few at the expense of the greater whole.

This worldview necessitates a middle man who claims access and contact with a removed divinity. This in turn dictates how we can and cannot access the sacred, enforcing an outside authority and control over the imagination of an entire population.

This is the history of the past five thousand years, namely: the separation between the sacred and the mundane enforced by a self-appointed elite who mediated between the people and the gods.

But if we listen to the poets, they know that the world we see is the visible face of the invisible divine known to these early ancestors. The poets have inherited the knowledge that the gods walk among us.

‘When the roses speak, I pay attention,’ wrote Mary Oliver.

This piece builds on an essay I wrote during a course I did with the continuing education department at Oxford last year. The course was part of the department of Anthropology and Archaeology, and explored the archaeological evidence for rituals and religion in prehistory.