Gunnar Heinsohns landmark study, The Creation of the Gods - Sacrifice as the Origin of Religion is now available in English translation for the first time -- and is featured in its entirety (or so it appears) on DeGrazias Q-mag (in a series of 6 pdfs): Humans and animals who were robbed of their lives in blood rituals as impersonators of godly beings - as representations of something still that remains to be defined - confront the science of religion with its most vexing challenges. Because in the great rituals of the Bronze Age such beings are ritually put to death, rather then being themselves the recipients of sacrifices, our understanding of the gods becomes ever more blurred. ... The massive indications of overwhelming natural catastrophes which are so clearly to be seen in geological and archaeological layers (albeit only investigated in recent times), as well as in the written documents of the early high cultures, were packed into implausible constructs, turned into enigmas and allegories, ignored, ridiculed or at best - since the beginning of the 20th century - psychoanalyzed as the discharge of confused souls. In the course of this book we will show that the soft evolutionism of the Lyell-Darwin school has succeeded in blocking scientific research and reflection in its depth for now well over a century and a half. In the 800-page final version of van der Leeuws Phenomenology of Religion (1956), which had its last edition in 1970, the terms “catastrophe,” or “cataclysm” simply do not occur at all. In this work, religious-historical Darwinism attained its summit. Practically everything which was fundamental for the understanding of ancient religions was passed over without a word. The elucidation of myth, ritual and religion must now begin almost anew. For this we will need to take seriously once more especially the most shocking contents of the early religious texts. We will be holding them up therefore next to the no less catastrophically stamped finds of archaeology and estimate them anew in the light of the latter. It is well known that one advances often with the solution of an enigma - in this case, the sacrifice of celestial deities - only when one addresses it together with other enigmas from adjacent fields - in this case the geological and archaeological destruction layers, as well as the myths of cosmic revolutions of the ancient peoples.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 15:30:12 +0000