At first traces of the old spirit-religions blended with the new god-religions. As I have suggested above, the early goddesses may have been a kind of intermediary stage between spirits and male gods, since the female psyche was more closely linked to the nature, and possessed the same nurturing and caring characteristics. As scholars like Gimbutas and Eisler tell us, the Goddess—and goddesses—was a symbol of the one-ness, the fecundity and the benevolence of nature. The idea of spirit-force was not completely forgotten by the early Egyptians either, who referred to Akh and Ba (the former referring to the universal soul, the latter the animating spirit which flows from Akh and pervades the whole of nature). Even in Greece, there was a pre-theistic stage of religion, Eue theia, when there was, in Cassirer’s words, ‘a natural kinship, a consanguinity that connects man with plants and animals’ (1970, p.91). It was only later, when this connection was broken, that gods came into being.
Siit.
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