Precocious Ancient Gods

The gods of the ancient Greeks, the gods of the Egyptians, the gods of the lost and forgotten cultures of whom we know nothing, were not the random fictions of human imagination. Study indicates that the Cro-Magnons had the same intellectual capacities as Moderns. With their limited knowledge of the way the universe is put together what were they to make of those aspects of reality that were utterly beyond the limits of knowledge. What were they to make of fire, for instance? Of love? Of good? Of evil?

In the religious structures of ancient cultures we find a catalogue of forces, psychic and physical, that are utterly resistant to the simple powers of person hood. What is the creature which is man to make of overpowering emotion, or of the rising sun, of death, of life? These things exist and therefore must have cause: ergo, ipso facto....the gods. In every case the ancient gods are a poetic intellectualization of the real which lies beyond human understanding, and the ancient gods have a remarkable congruence to the prosaic real when considered in this way.

If, as I suspect, awareness is somehow the stuff of which the universe is woven (why should a mere stack of atoms possess conscious awareness?) then the antique religious formulations were not naive, or wrong, or misguided: they were precocious.