The Evolution of Myth: Emergence of the High God

Our earliest ancestors must have marveled at the world around them, reveling in its bounties and delights, but also keenly aware of its mortal dangers. In a way, not much has changed — though today, our mortal dangers are more likely to appear as existential crises online.

But imagine being the first human to watch the sun vanish behind the horizon, or to see the glowing moon rise above the sea. Imagine tasting a ripe berry straight off a branch, or feeling cold water fall from above onto warm skin. And then — looking up at the night sky, brimming with stars as far as the eye could see, surrounded by an ocean of darkness beyond. The unknown, the unseen, the untold.

I wonder what they thought of it all. The only way to answer that is to better understand when our ancestors first became capable of such thoughts. We have no written record for over 95% of human history, so we must rely on archaeological artifacts — the fingerprints of ancient minds.

We know hominins — our two-footed ancestors — emerged 6–7 million years ago, and the earliest stone tools date back to 3.3 million years ago in East Africa. Humans who looked like us, homo sapiens, first appeared around 300,000 years ago. Whether these beings evolved gradually from older hominins or were created by a supernatural force, as some mythic traditions claim, is a matter of worldview — but what we do know is that something remarkable happened with them.

They began assigning meaning to objects and actions. They engaged in symbolism!

We see this in ancient paintings on stones and cave walls, the creation of jewelry from pierced shell beads, and ritual burials dated back to ~100,000–120,000 years ago. Pigment use, especially red ochre, appears earlier at sites in Africa, up to ~200,000–300,000 years ago. Even Neanderthals, our distant cousins once unfairly dismissed as brutish, show hints of symbolic behavior.

It gets even more interesting when myth begins to dance with genetics. Modern population genetics shows that all living humans can trace their maternal lineage back to a woman known as “Mitochondrial Eve” and our paternal lineage back to a man known as “Y-chromosomal Adam”, both of whom lived ~150,000–300,000 years ago in East Africa. It’s unclear if they were a literal couple, and they were not the only people alive at the time, but it makes a mythic Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden — fabled to have existed in East Africa — all the more fascinating.

So, what were our ancestors doing with symbolic ornaments, pigments, and burials? Burial offerings imply belief in an afterlife. Beads suggest identity and social status. Engravings imply memory, teaching, and narrative. They were assigning meaning to their social world. And with that, they engaged in what I consider to be the most quintessential element of being human: storytelling.

And with story, they introduced the first myths into the world.

As we discussed in the last chapter, myth is a shared cultural story that explains truths about the world. Early myths were shaped by survival, understandably. Where do the plants and animals come from? Where does the sun go at night? Why does lightning shake the sky? These are simple questions not because they have easy answers, but because early answers did not need to be tested. The sun always returned. The rains eventually stopped. And the animals were plentiful.

The harder questions are the ones we still ask today about purpose, morality, and mortality. Why are we here? How should we live? What happens when we die? These answers are difficult to understand and shrouded in uncertainty, and uncertainty breeds anxiety. One way to manage that anxiety — as people still do today — is to externalize that burden onto someone else, like a creator deity, one who could hold those answers along with the traits that came with them.

Across Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, we see a recurring pattern anthropologists call the withdrawn high god. In these traditions, a powerful creator forms the world, then withdraws, becoming too distant and unknowable. We know this deity as Ngai, Onyame, Chukwu, and Unkulunkulu across Africa; Atum in Egypt; An in Sumer; El in Canaan; Prajāpati in South Asia; Itzamna among the Maya; Io in Polynesia; Ometeotl among the Aztecs; and Maheo, Apistotoke, Taiowa, and the Great Spirit or Great Mystery among Native American nations.

In the Bible, after God finished his work of creation, he then rested. Even in pre-Islamic Arabia, Allah was understood to be the supreme creator deity, but was not the primary focus of daily ritual, as he seemed too distant.

The wide distribution of this motif suggests the withdrawn high god is one of humanity’s oldest theological patterns. Early humans needed to make sense of the world around them. They wanted to believe there was order behind the chaos of life and were surely curious about their purpose and existence. Unable to answer the unfathomable questions, they assigned them to the ultimate stopgap they could imagine: a high god.

But what did the high god do after creating the world? How did people commune with this being, and how could they know what the great spirit wanted? The answers to these questions were just as vague, overwhelming, and abstract as the high god themselves. So, the high god remained withdrawn, distant and largely uninvolved — like an unanswered question pushed to the back of the mind.

Instead, early humans turned to more accessible figures who could aid them in their daily maintenance of life. We see the development of intermediary beings that our ancestors could make more sense of, such as fertility mothers and nature spirits. But over time, they added additional subordinate divine beings — functional gods, holy people, emanations of the one god, and yes, even angels — to help govern aspects of life that became more important as society evolved.

This created a divine bureaucracy of sorts, and eventually a divine hierarchy, but these figures were not constant. They were continuously evolved, reimagined, split apart, merged, dethroned, or forgotten altogether, depending on shifts in our social, economic, political, and cultural structures.

Myths change whenever life changes, as we will explore in this series. Our initial awe of the world gave us a creator deity. Observing the cycle of life birthed a mother goddess. As we moved from foraging to farming, father gods rose. When we built cities, war and storm gods took power. And as empires conquered, pantheons formed to create cohesion around different cultural beliefs.

Myth was never static — it has always been adaptive, evolving alongside us because it is simply a means to make sense of the world we live in. As long as we continue searching for meaning, myth will continue to change. In truth, we are still telling the same ancient story — only with new questions, new fears, and new interpretations.

Sources

• Brunet, M. et al. (2002). A new hominid from the Upper Miocene of Chad. Nature, 418
• Senut, B. et al. (2001). First hominid from the Miocene (Lukeino Formation, Kenya). Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, 332
• Harmand, S. et al. (2015). 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya. Nature, 521
• Hublin, J.-J. et al. (2017). New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens. Nature, 546
• McBrearty, S. & Brooks, A. (2000). The revolution that wasn’t: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior. Journal of Human Evolution, 39
• Henshilwood, C. S. et al. (2002). Emergence of modern human behavior: Middle Stone Age engravings from South Africa. Science, 295
• Vanhaeren, M. et al. (2006). Middle Paleolithic shell beads in Algeria. Science, 312