We're cleaning up today

All religions - dutifully arranged in my old three drawers chest

I will not tell you what to believe.

If you think you already know that, then you don't need to read any further.

I would like to present you with a highly simplified model of how people in earlier times found their many different religions. To this end, I will give you a look into three fundamentally different drawers of the human idea of ​​superordinate forces that I have tinkered with. In the course of the development of religions, all the contents of the drawer have repeatedly influenced each other and thus created religions of the most varied forms.
In research there is the extremely simplified model of a distinction between the three cultures: hunter-gatherers, sedentary tillers and herding nomads. According to my simplified interpretation, all three can be understood as the originators of three different forms of religion.

Drawer 1:
In the first group (seen simply) people, animals, conspicuous natural phenomena and landscape forms (the latter, insofar as they change, i.e. appear to be alive) are viewed as having a soul, as permeated with vitality and thus their own will. The hunter must kill an animal to give the tribe vital energy to survive. Shamans have probably asked the animal for its consent to this killing since the Stone Age. Therefore, of course, all usable parts of the game are treated with the utmost respect. The hunter may also have to kill members of other tribes or predators that are dangerous to his tribe.
Anyone who has ever looked a dying large animal in the eye knows how much it actually burdens us. In many primitive peoples, the animal and its death, which one is responsible for, is/was actually experienced as murder. Humans live with a constant bad conscience towards the killed animals and also the deceased people who could not be helped. He dreams of the dead and sees these intangible images as a manifestation of the continued existence of an animal or dead soul. The unusable remains of larger animals, predators such as bones, are often returned to nature in caves or in exposed places (as in the Mansi bear cult in Siberia) to allow the rebirth of game from these remains.
The belief in a rebirth of man arises analogously from the return of the bones and the "guilty conscience" when killing a larger animal "brother". The Neanderthals gave the deceased red ocher pigment (the "birth" blood of the landscape) and objects for life after death with them in the pit dug for the burial. Ancestor worship also plays an important role in many peoples, even in the sphere of influence of the major religions, which goes far beyond the loving memory of the deceased.
Many of the animal deities in Hinduism or the animal mummifications of the Egyptian religion could be derived from this drawer. The extent to which special landscape forms were revered as having a soul and in some cases also gained importance in new religions can also be seen in the Catholic pilgrimage system, which took over old places of power very early on.

Drawer 2:
After man became sedentary in order not only to collect grain, but also to be able to sow and harvest with foresight, the changes in the annually constantly changing climate of the annual cycles must have taken the most important part of his thinking. The primary goal was to keep these changes as consistent as possible in the rhythm necessary for planning, and this was given a religious and cultic framework. The earth, which reliably produced the fruits of the soil again and again, was the all-creating superior divine mother, who often took the form of three different human life phases (youth-seed, maturity-harvest, old-age-winter or drought - as with Perchta, Persephone , Hecate) was worshipped. The phase of the mature woman (harvest) was of course the most important and was deposited in the Neolithic Age in the form of countless small, rounded, full idol sculptures as votive offerings to Mother Earth (in her lap or as guardians over the harvested grain). The moon, which determines the rhythm of the stellar universe and the tides as ebbs and flows as the rule of the month determines the woman, as well as the fertile rain and springs, was an important embodiment of the female deity.
In the early phase of the Neolithic farming cultures in the fertile crescent (Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Turkey), one could use the rich resources of huntable game in addition to farming, which some members of the tribe (probably mainly young men who could hunt particularly quickly) but until had to follow to the Zagros mountains in marches lasting several days. Women, children and infirm old men stayed in the villages. The same applies to the further settlement of Southeastern Europe, which was able to offer enough arable land along the Danube and its large tributaries and enough game to hunt in the hinterland of the mountain ranges.
Men were mostly forbidden from free access to the village simply because of the distance from the hunting grounds to the village and later from the large herds of cattle (aurochs, horses, reindeer) kept at a distance from the village and, it seems, only possible at ritualized fertility festivals. From the interpretation of mythological contexts and later texts, the most athletic of the men was determined for the priestesses of the mother goddess in competitions (bull leaps - Crete, Spain etc.) and spoiled as king and husband of the representatives of the mother goddess for a time. If the old king lost his strength, he was killed, his body distributed to the mother goddess in the fields, and a new young king was chosen (Osiris, Dionysus, etc.).
The organization of this Neolithic matriarchal community was, of course, in the hands of intelligent collectives of women. Cult acts, the worship of Mother Nature and the observance of the all-superior principle of a natural cycle of birth, life and death, which was transparent to everyone and therefore acceptable, were entrusted to the hands of these women collectives. From the Cucuteni-Tripolje culture, find complexes with female figures sitting in a circle around a center have become known - (depictions of such democratic collective administration? ).
The residential architecture consists of round or cubic individual rooms with access via a roof hatch, which are simply piled up on top of each other to form the village complex, like in children's construction kits or with colony-forming insects. The dead were given back to Mother Earth in the center of village life under the hearth, the granary, under the doorstep or in the common yard. In a collective there is no question of individual rebirth. One comes from Mother Nature, goes back into her, and under completely different conditions a child is then born again from the sum of the life energy. Religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism start here with an individual understanding of rebirth.

Drawer 3:
The dwindling hunting resources once led to the domestication of larger livestock such as cows and horses. Here, too, the shepherds (mostly young men) had to look for pastures away from the village. In fact, the primary focus on herding also created a very different style of society. The men moved with the herds from pasture to pasture, the women and children had to travel behind with the train and the living yurts. Mainly the herd animals served as food, the reproduction of which was the primary goal. Possessions are increased more quickly than by breeding by attacking neighboring tribes or, if it makes sense to shake off pursuers, also distant tribes.
For the selection of the destination, a democratically brought about decision would be too laborious, "leaders" prevailed. In ancestor worship, large burial mounds, so-called kurgans, were dedicated to outstanding personalities, while the foot soldiers were buried in simple pits all around. The patriarchy of these times (perhaps also today) is always laid out in the form of a pyramid running upwards towards only one person, the lower positions are only used for supplies. Warlike men try to fight their way up with brutality or merit to slowly get close to the absolute ruler.
The same applies to religious orientations: if one were to worship many gods and goddesses, everyone could claim to have a different (also correct) solution in exercising the will of their deity. Only monotheism or at least the pyramid of sovereignty of the gods (as in patriarchal society is tiered) legitimize the autocrat, who has had his orders pre-formulated from the very top. Only the sole ruler or supreme group leader is therefore entitled to convey his laws or commands as divine laws without the participation of the people.
For the first cattle nomads of the wide grass plains north between the Black and Caspian Seas and the later horse peoples north of the Himalayas, it was less the seasonal change that made it necessary to move on to new pasture areas than the influence of the often unexpectedly glowing sun. Sudden periods of drought caused by her showed that everything seemed to depend on her favour. The worship of the sun god and his secular mouthpiece of the supreme ruler, and the observance of his precisely defined laws, most of which have been handed down in writing in stone, have top priority. Cattle, at times the most important cultivated herd animal, wear their horns in a large round on their heads, as if they were carrying the sun disc (Aton disc).
The sun travels across the sky in a steady rhythm like the shepherds. In the evening she descends into the underworld, into the realm of the dead under the earth, and returns, hopefully reliably, back to the starting point the next day. A day in the life of this sun giant corresponds to the rhythm of a short human life. Here, too, the belief in life after death is given. The sun reappears unchanged, which gives hope for a rebirth with individual integrity... but not necessarily for everyone, only for special minions of the sun, which she is just about ready to lead on the way through the realm of the dead and back again.
The less lofty remainder will have to remain in the realm of the shadows (Greek Hades) without memory and without orientation. In all monotheistic religions that emerged from this sun cult of the early nomadic peoples, the descent of the divine hero into the underworld and his resurrection is always the model for all brothers and sisters in faith.
The desire to curiously approach the entrance to the underworld in the west was probably not so much the only factor as the ever longer periods of drought (punishment of the sun god) in the grassy steppes of the northern countries, which led to expansion and land conquests to the west , but also to the south and east made necessary. This probably began in the Neolithic Age, especially from 3000 BC. with the invasion of the chariot/cavalry peoples and in spurts up to the Indo-European migration from these areas around 1000 BC.
In addition to the achievements of fast chariots, these peoples from the plains north of the Caucasus were favored by the possession and manufacture of copper and later bronze weapons. Copper was everywhere, plentiful in the Zagros Mountains, tin only in Kyrgyzstan and later on Cyprus. The planting cultures, especially those in the quiet Danube area, did not have any combat weapons, only hoes and digging sticks for field work. In spite of this, or even because of it, this culturing was not always bloodthirsty and repressive, but rather an infiltration of the patriarchal cultures into the existing matriarchy over a period of time.
One sees excavations of the already mentioned culture from Cucuteni (Rep. Moldova) - Tripolje (South Ukraine) in the northern part suddenly instead of the modular cubic or igloo-shaped complex building method (made up of nothing but individual apartments) suddenly large long houses made of wood. As is known from medieval church buildings, a nave is always oriented towards the highest-ranking person in the community (the God of Christians and, in contrast, his secular mouthpiece, the emperor). All families in Tripolje now lived next to each other under one roof with an adoring view of the chieftain's place.
In Turkey, the chariot cultures that had invaded there developed with the belief in a pyramid of gods as great combative opponents to the polytheism of Egypt. In the fertile crescent, warlike cultures now alternated with one another. In the Levant there is a tendency towards the monotheistic cult of the bull (Baal), which is then supplanted there by the anti-image, purely legal religion with a patriarchal Father God (Judaism).
As the sole leader of the tribe, Moses led the "chosen" people from southern Egypt to Palestine and legitimized himself and the tribal laws with stone divine tablets of law. Because the sole God without human-like depiction clearly fiercely and punishing even the smallest deviation only as an invisible, terrible mental image, as an abstract threat, triggers strong fears of persecution, the role of the human mediator, the leader, is of course in pure legal religions based on the model of Judaism and Islam particularly predestined.
In the wake of the old nomadic cultures and their sole (sun), sometimes also (storm/lightning) or fire god worship, some religions based purely on instructions, especially in China, have just as strongly relied on the code of law handed down directly from the monotheistic god (e.g. Con-futse, even Buddhism too) manifested.
Akhenaton not only takes over the chariots from the Hittites, but also declares the sun god Aten to be the sole authority over himself. The statues and places of worship of the Egyptian polytheism under the ram god Amon are destroyed and only restored after the rule of his son Tut-ench-amon reinstalled.
Against a grim old authoritarian God Yahweh and his tablets of the law, many sects developed around Christ's birth, which want to give back rights and the prospect of a rebirth to the human being as an individual. Among other things, the Anabaptists around John the Baptist and the religious ideas of Jesus of Nazareth and his group of disciples made up of men and women want to mitigate the patriarchal oppressive legacy of original sin (because of disobedience in paradise) by adopting ideas from earlier religions. The journey through the underworld and rebirth derives from the nomadic heritage, the inclusion of women in the strictly patriarchal order and the love for the collective probably derives from the matriarchal remnants of earlier forms of religion.
The fact that, after 2000 years of history, these old matriarchal approaches are only being discussed again in today's Christianity is of course due to the fact that the patriarchal class society, which is based on the power pyramid, has cleaned up Christianity for its own purposes and used it as a means of coercion with the threat of heaven and hell. Threats of hell are of course also found in other religions, including Buddhism, when the subjects of the Chinese empire have to be reversed from an attitude of individual utility that is naturally for the moment to an attitude that sacrifices themselves for the ruler and the aristocracy.
In these patriarchal-monotheistic father religions, in addition to the reform with the introduction of a trinity (as in Christianity as a male pyramid), there is also in the Persian culture the revaluation of the fiercely judging god to a loving (still male) god of light and polarization to a god of darkness and Evil (feminine traits). Here, too, the patriarchal power state is strengthened.

I'm noticing my last drawer, into which all these patriarchal forms of religion have to be stuffed, slowly overflowing. But you certainly know that from those old buffets, where the bottom, the last drawer is always so full that it jams terribly. I don't think I have too much furniture in my room either. At least there is order in this room again and everything is clear again and so refreshingly empty. Buddhism teaches us that you have to be able to let go and do without everything that you don't need.

It was dark outside the window while I was writing this text. Stars in the sky telling me about the infinity of the universe. Everyone so brightly alien and yet friendly, as if they wanted to tell me about a completely different, much more open world view that is lived as a religion on one of their planets. Genesis stories billions of years old, the content of which is based on the cleansing paths of the light that we are only seeing here on earth today, of all the old petrified mythology and yellowed, long outdated law-abiding scriptures that our religions have been dealing with for a few thousand years to burden, to have rid of.

Pulsating light changing into matter and vice versa, an expanding and contracting universe. The knowledge of knowing so little... I can live with that and then die in peace.

.