96 evolution: the ages and tomorrow 



wonder for the moon and the sun and the stars, and out of 

 the desire for power and success through magic. Early man 

 was confusedly seeking guidance and knowledge, aware 

 that he needed the cooperative communal life, aware of his 

 own weakness and limitations, and willing to follow the 

 bolder and more cunning few, the kings and the priests. 



With the advent of agriculture, ceremonial life became 

 increasingly complex as the ideas and the control of the 

 priests and kings became more and more definite. Some an- 

 thropologists have thought that planting arose quite natu- 

 rally out of the association of sowing with a burial, and that 

 the concept of special sacrifices and special sacrificial per- 

 sons, who were killed at seedtime, was an extension of this 

 association. And there is also the widely held theory that 

 agriculture and planting developed from stray seeds scuffled 

 into the dirt around campfires and living areas and that it 

 aroused the interest, and then became the concern, of 

 women. There were agricultural gods, a specially purified 

 class of people, the priests, to kill these human sacrifices, and 

 a sacramental feast in which the people ate portions of the 

 victim's body the better to share the sacrificial benefits, as 

 they still sometimes do symbolically in religious ritual. 



The greater simplicity and directness of earliest Eolithic 

 and Paleolithic men was being replaced by a welter of su- 

 pernatural answers to the problems of society in the Neo- 

 lithic age. Neolithic men killed in a sadistic orgy. They 

 killed through fear of a traditional Old Man who became a 

 tribal god and to whom were assigned fantastic attributes of 

 thirst for sacrificial blood. Under the guidance of their 

 priests they sacrificed wives and slaves at the death of a 

 chieftain; they killed to bring rain, or to stop the rains, or 

 under any adversity; they practiced infanticide, and de- 

 stroyed the aged; they practiced self-multilation; and they 

 topped each year off with elaborate ceremonies and many 

 blood victims at seedtime. They had many gods, and all 

 had to be propitiated. 



