Contents Updated: Thursday, March 02, 2000
The earliest societies had no written laws—there was no writing! Symbols with meaning on tiny clay disks were first used as accounts—numbers of commodities owned or exchanged. Writing and formal grammar arose as a secret of the patriarchal priesthood and was probably kept as a sacred secret for centuries before escaping into the world at large.
Language was sacred and change was seen as corruption… This threat was countered by making grammatical rules which would petrify language. So sacred was the language of the religious texts, Sanskrit, that the grammar itself acquired a central and almost sacrosanct place in the education system of the Indus Valley Aryans.Dr Tariq Rahman
Formal religion, like that of the first Greeks, was a way of protecting the tribe against evil. The priesthood were diviners who had to decide what measures were needed to placate the gods and ensure that the tribe had good fortune. The Romans had a College of Augurs right into historic times to teach diviners how to decide what divine beings were doing that might affect the tribe.
The diviners prescribed what was needed for good fortune and if anyone deliberately or inadvertently did something which might bring ill-luck on to the tribe the culprit did the noble thing, the moral thing, the right thing—suicide in serious cases, and they arrived at this moral decision, immense sacrifice as it was, with no assistance from the God of the Christians, the Jews or the Moslems. They had been taught what was the right thing to do. The root of the word religion being the Latin expression rem legere meaning to choose a thing—the diviners having to choose whatever might obtain divine favour.
In these times, when a primitive monarchy was held by a king devoted to the Goddess of Wisdom, morals were entirely an individual responsibility but once writing was invented, gradually the growing body of laws took away an individual's ability to choose to do the right thing. The word law has the same root as religion in legere. It is a chosen word, a religious pronouncement, originally of ephemeral or local application. But some were found to be written often and and became laws. In the Greek New Testament, a Jewish expert in the law (the Mosaic law) is described as a grammateus or a nomikos—an expert in writing or an expert in law. So, even then writing and law were so close as to be identical. The written laws were attributed to God and were therefore binding, so were thought, in popular etymology, to be derived from the word ligare meaning to bind.
The actions of the king were restricted by taboos. He had to choose a thing, rem legere, not anything, but the right thing and he had twelve Lictores, or priestly advisors, one for each month, to explain what was the right thing to do, on any occasion. In Roman Republican times the duties of the king passed to the priest of Jupiter and the position of his advisers passed to the consuls, while the Lictores became a guard of honour to the consuls.
The movement from personal responsibility for doing right, inculcated by social or religious mores, to an obligation enforced by law, accompanied the move from goddess orientation to patriarchal society. The goddess society began based on personal morality and intuitive decisions but under the patriarchs evolved into one based on fixed laws. The Goddess drew on the inner person through social and psychological responsibility—awareness of the right thing to do. Patriarchal gods prescribed external laws that often made no sense to individuals, who were therefore inclined to ignore them or deliberately defy them by breaking them.
The Persians, under the infuence of Zoroaster, their prophet of the monotheistic god, Ormuzd, first introduced an extensive list of laws into religion in the form of questions put by the prophet to God. The list produced for the Yehudim by Ezra—who the Persians sent from Babylon to set up an outpost and buffer state in the Palestinian hills to guard the empire against the frequent seditions in Egypt—was no less extensive and identical in many significant ways, but were written as direct commandments rather than answers to endless questions.
Christianity apparently eschewed such lists except that it incorporated the Jewish scriptures into its own and made a principle of obedience to the laws of the secular state, initially Rome, irrespective of their justice. In practice therefore it has hardly been any less legalistic than Judaism, and religious legalism is really the point of all patriarchal religions. It is perfectly moral to respect and obey a caring father, but quite another matter to pretend that some patriarchal "father" in heaven has handed down a long list of dos and don'ts to benefit some "father" on the throne who is in reality a tyrant.
A return to self-sacrifice for others—to a sense of personal duty—would be the right thing for us. Young people must be taught to choose the right thing, and the right thing must be right for all—in other words, based on natural or instinctive feelings of what is good in general. Admittedly, not everyone has a finely honed sense of intuition and guidelines are needed—the duty of parents and teachers—but not endless laws that command no respect and that anyone with a deep enough wallet can pervert anyway.
Serious problems often cannot be solved by appeal to precedent but should be approached completely intuitively. If precedents are used at all they should be merely as historical illustrations of intuitive principles at work. When disputes involve different parties, the arbiters must ask the contending parties to consider the intuitive situation of their opponents. Entrenched positions prevent the intuitive principle from working freely by setting forbidden territory for each party. Intuition must be freed of these constraints.
Politicians might be chosen for loyalty to the whips of a particular party, but they, above all, must do the right thing according to the dictates of the salvation of Nature, and should be commended not castigated for it.
Neither law nor the universal availability of Christian salvation in the last 2000 years has stopped crime. Despite the threat of hell fire and eternal torture, Christians soon realised they had to have soldiers and police to maintain order, and secular punishments, usually death, to prevent crime. Modern Christians besotted with their desire to meet Jesus, cannot see that religion has never made any society moral, probably least of all the Christian religion with its appalling history of cruelty and depravity.
Morality is not imposed on people or societies, it is within them. The societies of the Goddess were moral not because they worshipped a goddess but because that goddess was the world in which they lived. When every thing and person in the world is sacred because it is part of the Goddess, then it merits respect, and inculcates the desire to do the right thing.