Anthropogony
As anthropogony (formerly Anthropogenie ; from Greek : ἄνθρωπος, anthropos, "man," and γένεσις, genesis, "becoming", "Arise") refers to a religious or philosophical doctrine or myth of the origin of the human species . Such narratives are usually embedded in cosmogonies (creation myths) about the origins of heaven and earth.
Scientific theories on human phylogeny and ontogeny were also earlier referred to as anthropogonies; today the human history is referred to as anthropogenesis (English: anthropogeny ).
Early anthropogonies
In ancient oriental and Greek mythology, but also in the Edda , anthropogony (and often also cosmogony) always presupposed a theogony , i.e. H. first the origin of the gods had to be clarified before it could be explained how they created the world and man. In the context of the Babylonian creation myth Enūma eliš, anthropogony is described as a work of the gods. The Atraḫasis epic and the more recent Gilgamesh epic describe similar courses of events as the biblical anthropogony in Genesis , for which they apparently served as a model. Clay or stone play an important role here; the creators shape man like a sculpture. Possibly this explanation serves to avoid the idea, contrary to the incest taboo , that all humanity descends from a single pair of gods. In many anthropogonies, therefore, mankind comes from the world of gods only through several intermediate stages of demigods and heroes. The aristocracy of many peoples (such as the Japanese Tenno ) is believed to have arisen directly from heaven or descended from the sun god.
The narrative in the book of Genesis eliminates for the first time the ancient oriental notion of the involvement of a large number of ancient oriental gods in anthropogenesis: here a god is no longer slaughtered in order to use his blood to awaken a person made of clay to life; rather, the divine breath is instilled into it. In the biblical narrative, anthropogeny is no longer closely linked to natural processes (such as a primordial sea or an ancient tree), but is reduced to a historical act of creation, a lonely act of Jehovah , as the natural philosopher and Schelling follower Johann Jakob Wagner first noticed.
In Greek mythology, humans come from the blood of the titans or they were created by Zeus from the ashes of the titans slain by lightning. In more recent stories, Prometheus , who comes from the Titan family, forms man out of clay and water.
In the Middle Persian Bundahishn , the first human couple emerges from a plant stem; they later parted, and Ahura Mazda poured the previously prepared soul into them. The Norse myth of Ask and Embla also describes anthropogeny as the work of the gods who created the first humans out of lifeless wood or trees, as is the case in a similar form in the mythology of other Indo-European peoples and in some myths from America, Indonesia or Australia is. For Iroquois and Mandan, as well as for many circumpolar peoples, man has sprung from the earth. In Finnish mythology, at least one source mentions Väinämöinen as the creator of humans from two tree stumps growing in the sea. In the myth of Ingermanland , Kullervo creates the first two children out of an unploughed grass hill. In the Buddhist East Asia there is no explicit report on the anthropogony. However, the Tibetans assume that humans are descended from a pair of monkeys.
In many myths of the peoples of North and East Asia, Melanesia , Micronesia and Polynesia , the birth of the first human takes place from an island or an egg or through the separation of the intimately connected first parents Rangi and Papa . Often the first people are also the ancestors or the first shamans of the clan , such as the Yakuts , where the shamans hatch from the egg in the nests of an eagle-like mother bird of prey on a fir tree. Reports on shamans also report that they experience anthropogeny more frequently in their trance states , as reported in their myths.
The Maya believed that the gods created humans to be worshiped. This story from the Popol Vuh is an interesting variant of an evolutionary anthropogony: Man is created only after several attempts with numb beings, animals that remain speechless and stammering monkeys who are unable to worship.
Dualistic and monistic concepts of anthropony
Religions that particularly emphasize body- soul dualism (and thus tend to devalue the physical world) have developed a dualistic conception of anthropogony in which the creation of the body and its “talent” are separated from the soul and also by two different entities take place. So in the mythology of the Mandaean Ptahil first creates the physical Adam, then with the help of Ruha , the mother of the earthly world, he animates him through a soul. In other Manichaean texts, however, this creation takes place in one act (monistic concept).
A devaluation of women is often associated with dualistic concepts of anthropogony. There are clear relationships between the biblical Eve as the author of the fall of man and the myth of Pandora, on the other hand, which is reflected in the more recent metaphor of the “ whore of Babylon ”. A parallel to Pandora's box can be found in the belief of the Ishmaelites , for whom the feminine principle brought calamity into the world in the form of matter in which the originally purely spiritual human soul is now trapped.
Double anthropogony
The double anthropogony in the book of Genesis causes problems of interpretation: The cosmogonically oriented, presumably more recent narrative in Gen 1,1–2,3 (the priestly scripture) depicts the creation of the world and living beings from an initial state of chaos ( tohuwabohu ). The creation of the Human beings in the image of God are the climax of cosmogony (Gen 1: 26-28). The following second, but probably older, account of creation in Gen 2: 4–25 tells that Eve was created from Adam's rib. He takes up the themes of the prominent position of man towards God, his rule over animals as well as the special relationship between man and woman and transfers them to the land of Eden “on the edge of the steppe” in the paradise there. This also appears in other myths as a kind of paradise on: Many do not oriental cosmogonies move the anthropogony in a Urgarten or a Urinsel. God appears here primarily as a gardener who waters the land and preserves life.
Philo of Alexandria understands the first narrative of Genesis in the Jewish- Hellenistic tradition under the influence of the Platonic idea of a complete separation of the spiritual and sensual world as an account of the emergence of man as an image of the divine idea. The second (historically older) report is a description of the transfer of man into the sensual world.
Some anthropologists and evolutionary biologists , on the other hand, see the second creation story and the narrative of man's expulsion from paradise (which forced him, as a sedentary farmer, to make the “most radical change in behavior that any animal species on this planet has ever had to undergo”) as a time-lapse version of anthropogony in the form of a cultural evolution: It is a question of an echo of ancient oriental traditions, theologically only incompletely cleared of traces of polytheism, which deal with the painful experiences of the transition from a society of hunters and gatherers in the post-glacial Mesopotamia , which was once rich in game , to arduous agriculture. According to Henrik Pfeifer, such “two-stage anthropogonies” are typical of the ancient Orient; the second stage of anthropogony describes the laborious transition to agrarian civilization. The garden is the easiest environment for the first humans to cope with in terms of nutrition and practical life, as was pointed out by Maurus Hagel in the early 19th century , who wanted to draw conclusions about the truth of the biblical story: unlike agriculture, life in a garden does not require any special "arts and inventions".
Early agriculture, on the other hand, was actually less productive and risky than the hunter-gatherer economy. It was always threatened by drought and associated with a lack of protein and many diseases caused by the population density. The pastoral nomads, in turn, suffered from infections from animal diseases . However, it remains unclear how this experience from prehistoric times was preserved over thousands of years and conveyed to the authors of the second creation story of Genesis. Van Schaik and Michel speak of "contrast experiences" that result from the encounter of different forms of economic activity.
The evolutionary role of religion in the "second anthropogony"
With the radical break of the Neolithic Revolution , which brought individual ownership of the means of production and harvest results and patriarchal tendencies with sedentarism , many anthropologists and evolutionary biologists, following Émile Durkheim, associate the introduction of a monotheistic, morally directing and uncompromising (albeit often initially the whole Collectively and not just the sinful individual) punishing divine authority. In many religions, the wrath of the anthropomorphic gods appears completely disproportionate and unpredictable. Mosaic monotheism, however, develops numerous complex moral and behavioral rules ( Ex 34 and Lev 11-27) that make divine punishments predictable and are intended to ward off catastrophes, as well as priestly sacrificial rituals to atone for offenses (Lev 1-7). The monotheistic God watches over the observance of the complex social norms, which are necessary under the conditions of permanent residence and mediated by a powerful priesthood. In the biblical anthropogony, the memory of the participation of mother or fertility deities, which still occur in Babylonian mythology, or of the Canaanite sea goddess Aschera was buried (or carefully eliminated by the editors of the Pentateuch at the time of the Babylonian exile ). The bisexuality of the divine demiurge , an important element of many anthropogonies, does not appear here either. The preference for the youngest sons, which becomes clear in many stories in the Bible, is attributed to the preference for the youngest wife in the polygyny patriarchal society with its surplus of young unmarried men - mostly half-brothers. This situation often leads to destructive arguments between the wives and, above all, the sons, as the story of Abel's murder by Cain shows.
Evolutionary biologists see an important cultural “protective factor” in the evolutionary development of religious norms, which are influenced by disaster experiences, as factors favoring cooperation and their protective effect against epidemics and the consequences of poor hygiene. Religion with its norms proclaimed by priests offered causal explanations for otherwise inexplicable catastrophic events, namely beyond belief in unpredictable spirits, which allowed people to live more fearlessly (so-called “scheme of sufficient cause as a maxim of causal explanation”). The threat of divine punishment for exceeding the norms also forced people to behave cooperatively (so-called Supernatural Punishment Hypothesis ). According to these theories, unlike magical thinking, religious feelings are not necessarily genetically anchored; However, their development would have offered an evolutionary advantage or would itself have been the result of a culturally influenced selection process.
Scientific criticism of anthropogonies
Since the establishment of the theory of the elements by Empedocles , the ideas of the Greeks of the process of creation have no longer been shaped by sculptural models. Greek pre-Socratic medicine developed in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. BC also the first scientific hypotheses about the ontogenesis of humans, especially the author of the De Carnibus ("About the meat") in the Corpus Hippocraticum about the origin of body parts and organs. On the other hand, anthropogonical ideas have been shaped by the story of Genesis since the Middle Ages.
At the time of the Enlightenment , the analogy between anthropogony and individual development came into focus - initially in a cultural, not in a biological sense. The analogy between the development of the human understanding from child to adult on the one hand and that of culture from the "wild" to the civilized peoples on the other hand was initially only a heuristic idea, but led to a fruitful interconnection of anthropology or psychology and cultural history.
For Kant , the Old Testament narrative served only as a basis for a representation of the moral development of the human race from the state of "brutality" of a "merely animal" creature guided by the "cart" of instinct to guide reason, from the "guardianship of nature" in the "state of freedom".
Since the end of the 18th century, research has been conducted into statements in biblical cosmogony and anthropogony that appeared to be compatible with the current state of science or at least could be interpreted as plausible metaphors for real events. Herder, for example, criticized the Kantian position that man should produce everything from himself; He considered some of the biblical anthropogeny to be true because it corresponded with the insights of the time into the historical evolvement of the fauna and flora.
“If man should be the crown of creation, he could not have a mass, a day of birth, a place and abode with the fish or the sea slime. His blood should not become water; the vital warmth of nature had to be purified so far, so finely essentiated, that it reddened human blood. All of its vessels and fibers, its structure of bones itself should be formed from the finest clay, and since the Almighty never acts without second causes, she must have worked the matter into her hand for this. [...] The Ammon's horn was there before the fish; the plant preceded the animal, which could not live without it; the crocodile and caiman sneaked along rather than the wise elephant read herbs and waved his trunk. "
.jpg)
The closer the distance between humans and apes appeared from a biological perspective, the more doubts about the biblical dating of the origin of the earth and man grew and the more dispensable the idea of a divine Creator became. Since the 1820s, more and more scientists have been looking for the origin of humans in the ape species. The advocates of a divine anthropogony, on the other hand, tried to emphasize the great distance between the animal world and (European) humans and thereby save the date of creation given by the Bible, contrary to the then new geological knowledge about the old age of the earth. However, fossil skull finds and ethnological studies soon revealed the great variance in human form. Johann Erich von Berger therefore took the view that the higher developed from the lower; the ultimate cause of life is perhaps the primordial sea. However, he does not consistently uphold this hypothesis in relation to anthropogenesis and assumes several isolated primitive tribes as the origins of the human races. He speaks of the white “light man” as the “noblest creatures” created first, while the later created races sink back “almost to the monkey” - just by “aping”.
With the reception of the work of Charles Darwin and the spread of the theory of evolution against sometimes fierce opposition, the term anthropogony fell out of use except in theological context and in the context of myth research. But Ernst Haeckel still called his description of human evolution, which includes the development of the ontogenetic "stages of formation" of the embryo in comparison with other mammals , "anthropogeny". For him, ontogenesis, that is, embryonic development, was the "recapitulation" of tribal history.
literature
- Jürgen Ebach: Anthropogonie / Kosmogonie , in: HrwG 1 (1988), pp. 476-491.
- Lucas Marco Gisi: Imagination and Mythology: The Entanglement of Anthropology and History in the 18th Century. Berlin, New York 2007.
- Friedrich Rolle: Man, his ancestry and morality, presented in the light of Darwin's theory of the origin of species and on the basis of recent geological discoveries. 2nd edition Prague 1870.
- Carel van Schaik , Kai Michel: The diary of humanity. Reinbek 2016.
Individual evidence
- ^ EJ Michael Witzel: The Origins of the World's Mythologies. Oxford University Press 2011, p. 167 ff.
- ↑ Carel van Schaik, Kai Michel 2016, p. 52.
- ↑ Johann Jakob Wagner: Ideas for a general mythology of the old world. Frankfurt / Main 1808, p. 71 f.
- ↑ Askr means ash wood . See Wilhelm Wackernagel: The anthropogony (sic!) Of the Germanic peoples. In: Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterthum , Volume 6 (1848), pp. 15-20.
- ↑ See also Friedrich Rolle 1870 on the following.
- ↑ Jonas Balys: Götter und Mythen im Alten Europa (= dictionary of mythology. Department 1: The old cultural peoples. Ed. By Hans Wilhelm Haussig), Volume 1, Stuttgart 1973, p. 283.
- ^ EJ Michael Witzel: The Origins of the World's Mythologies . Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 126-129 .
- ↑ Rolf Kranewitter: Dynamics of Religion: Shamanism, Confucianism, Buddhism and Christianity in the History of Korea from the Stone Age settlement of the country to the end of the 20th century. Münster 2005, p. 50.
- ↑ Rolf Kranewitter: Dynamics of Religion: Shamanism, Confucianism, Buddhism and Christianity in the History of Korea from the Stone Age settlement of the country to the end of the 20th century. Münster 2005, p. 50.
- ^ Hélène Dubois-Aubin: L'esprit des fleurs. Éditions Cheminements, 2002, p. 26.
- ^ Kurt Rudolph: Theogony, cosmogony and anthropogony in the Mandaean writings. An investigation into literary criticism and the history of tradition. Göttingen 1965, p. 248 ff.
- ↑ Christina Leisering: Susanna and the Fall of Man of the Elders: a comparative study on the gender constructions of the Septuagint and Theodotion versions of Dan 13 and their intertextual references. Lit Verlag, Münster 208, p. 206 ff.
- ^ Volkmar Cheap: Islands. Approaches to a topos and its modern fascination. Dissertation, HU Berlin 2005, p. 29, 40. Online: [1] (pdf)
- ^ So Carel van Schaik, Kai Michel 2016, p. 37 ff.
- ↑ van Schaik, Michel 2016, p. 477 f.
- ↑ Henrik Pfeifer: The tree in the middle of the garden. To the traditional origin of the paradise story. Part II. In: Journal for Old Testament Science , 113 (2001), pp. 2-16.
- ↑ Maurus Hagel: Apology of Moses. Sulzbach 1828, p. 36.
- ^ Samuel Bowles: Cultivation of Cereals by the First Farmers Was Not More Productive than Foraging. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 108 (2011), pp. 4760-4765.
- ↑ Jared Diamond: Rich and poor. The fates of human societies. Frankfurt 2005, p. 233.
- ↑ Carel van Schaik, Kai Michel 2016, p. 61.
- ↑ See e.g. B. the story of the Flood , Gen 6, which is not justified by any specific, namable guilt of the people, or the Iliad , which reports (A 8–11) that Apollo brought the plague into the as punishment for kidnapping Chryses' daughter Greek camp sends.
- ↑ Carel van Schaik, Kai Michel 2016, p. 100 ff .; 477 f.
- ↑ So z. B. Plato's myth of the spherical man disintegrating in two halves in Symposium 189–193. In large parts of the ancient world up to Polynesia the idea of an original couple was also present, the Heavenly Father and Mother Earth , through whose separation humanity only developed.
- ↑ Carel van Schaik, Kai Michel 2016, p. 78 ff.
- ↑ Cf. the article by HW Bierhoff under this title in: Zeitschrift für Sozialpsychologie , 22 (1991), pp. 112-122, and Carel van Schaik, Kai Michel 2016, pp. 120 f. and 251 ff.
- ^ DD Johnson: God's punishment and public goods: A test of the supernatural punishment hypothesis in 186 world cultures. In: Human Nature , 16 (2005) 4, pp 410-446.
- ↑ Jesse Bering: The Invention of God. How evolution made faith. Munich 2011.
- ↑ David P. Clark: Germs, Genes, and Civilization: How Epidemics Shaped Who We Are Today. Upper Saddle River, NJ 2010.
- ↑ Carolin M. Oser-Grote: Aristoteles and the Corpus Hippocraticum: the anatomy and physiology of man. Stuttgart 2004, p. 27.
- ↑ Lucas Marco Gisi 2007, p. 5 ff.
- ^ I. Kant: Probable beginning of human history (1786), quoted in. OH von der Gablentz (ed.): Immanuel Kant. Classic of politics. 1965, eBook: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden.
- ↑ JG Herder: Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–1791) , Berlin, Weimar 1965, Vol. 1, p. 383 on zeno.org.
- ↑ For example, Maurus Hagel 1828, p. 35 f.
- ↑ Basics of anthropology and psychology with special regard to the theory of knowledge and thought. (= General Principles of Science, Volume 3.) Altona 1824, p. 293 f. See also the review of the work in: Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung from 1825, fourth volume, supplementary sheets 97, p. 770 ff.
- ↑ Ernst Haeckel: Anthropogeny or human development history. Leipzig 1874.