The Urantia Book
Paper 65
The Overcontrol of Evolution
(730.2) 65:0.2 There are, then, three distinct levels of life production and evolution:
(730.3) 65:0.3 1. The physical-energy domain — mind-capacity production.(730.6) 65:0.6 The mechanical-nonteachable levels of organismal environmental response are the domains of the physical controllers. The adjutant mind-spirits activate and regulate the adaptative or nonmechanical-teachable types of mind — those response mechanisms of organisms capable of learning from experience. And as the spirit adjutants thus manipulate mind potentials, so do the Life Carriers exercise considerable discretionary control over the environmental aspects of evolutionary processes right up to the time of the appearance of human will — the ability to know God and the power of choosing to worship him.
(730.4) 65:0.4 2. The mind ministry of the adjutant spirits — impinging upon spirit capacity.
(730.5) 65:0.5 3. The spirit endowment of mortal mind — culminating in Thought Adjuster bestowal.
(730.7) 65:0.7 It is the integrated functioning of the Life Carriers, the physical controllers, and the spirit adjutants that conditions the course of organic evolution on the inhabited worlds. And this is why evolution — on Urantia or elsewhere — is always purposeful and never accidental.
1. Life Carrier Functions
(730.9) 65:1.2 Life Carriers are able to function and do function on the following three levels:
(730.10) 65:1.3 1. The physical level of electrochemistry.(731.1) 65:1.6 When the Life Carriers make ready to engage in life implantation, and after they have selected the sites for such an undertaking, they summon the archangel commission of Life Carrier transmutation. This group consists of ten orders of diverse personalities, including the physical controllers and their associates, and is presided over by the chief of archangels, who acts in this capacity by the mandate of Gabriel and with the permission of the Ancients of Days. When these beings are properly encircuited, they can effect such modifications in the Life Carriers as will enable them immediately to function on the physical levels of electrochemistry.
(730.11) 65:1.4 2. The usual mid-phase of quasi-morontial existence.
(730.12) 65:1.5 3. The advanced semispiritual level.
(731.2) 65:1.7 After the life patterns have been formulated and the material organizations have been duly completed, the supermaterial forces concerned in life propagation become forthwith active, and life is existent. Whereupon the Life Carriers are immediately returned to their normal mid-phase of personality existence, in which estate they can manipulate the living units and maneuver the evolving organisms, even though they are shorn of all ability to organize — create — new patterns of living matter.
(731.3) 65:1.8 After organic evolution has run a certain course and free will of the human type has appeared in the highest evolving organisms, the Life Carriers must either leave the planet or take renunciation vows; that is, they must pledge themselves to refrain from all attempts further to influence the course of organic evolution. And when such vows are voluntarily taken by those Life Carriers who choose to remain on the planet as future advisers to those who shall be intrusted with the fostering of the newly evolved will creatures, there is summoned a commission of twelve, presided over by the chief of the Evening Stars, acting by authority of the System Sovereign and with permission of Gabriel; and forthwith these Life Carriers are transmuted to the third phase of personality existence — the semispiritual level of being. And I have functioned on Urantia in this third phase of existence ever since the times of Andon and Fonta.
(731.4) 65:1.9 We look forward to a time when the universe may be settled in light and life, to a possible fourth stage of being wherein we shall be wholly spiritual, but it has never been revealed to us by what technique we may attain this desirable and advanced estate.
2. The Evolutionary Panorama
(731.6) 65:2.2 Very few species of the early types of marine vegetation that participated in those epochal changes which resulted in the animallike borderland organisms are in existence today. The sponges are the survivors of one of these early midway types, those organisms through which the gradual transition from the vegetable to the animal took place. These early transition forms, while not identical with modern sponges, were much like them; they were true borderline organisms — neither vegetable nor animal — but they eventually led to the development of the true animal forms of life.
(732.1) 65:2.3 The bacteria, simple vegetable organisms of a very primitive nature, are very little changed from the early dawn of life; they even exhibit a degree of retrogression in their parasitic behavior. Many of the fungi also represent a retrograde movement in evolution, being plants which have lost their chlorophyll-making ability and have become more or less parasitic. The majority of disease-causing bacteria and their auxiliary virus bodies really belong to this group of renegade parasitic fungi. During the intervening ages all of the vast kingdom of plant life has evolved from ancestors from which the bacteria have also descended.
(732.2) 65:2.4 The higher protozoan type of animal life soon appeared, and appeared suddenly. And from these far-distant times the ameba, the typical single-celled animal organism, has come on down but little modified. He disports himself today much as he did when he was the last and greatest achievement in life evolution. This minute creature and his protozoan cousins are to the animal creation what bacteria are to the plant kingdom; they represent the survival of the first early evolutionary steps in life differentiation together with failure of subsequent development.
(732.3) 65:2.5 Before long the early single-celled animal types associated themselves in communities, first on the plan of the Volvox and presently along the lines of the Hydra and jellyfish. Still later there evolved the starfish, stone lilies, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, centipedes, insects, spiders, crustaceans, and the closely related groups of earthworms and leeches, soon followed by the mollusks — the oyster, octopus, and snail. Hundreds upon hundreds of species intervened and perished; mention is made only of those which survived the long, long struggle. Such nonprogressive specimens, together with the later appearing fish family, today represent the stationary types of early and lower animals, branches of the tree of life which failed to progress.
(732.4) 65:2.6 The stage was thus set for the appearance of the first backboned animals, the fishes. From this fish family there sprang two unique modifications, the frog and the salamander. And it was the frog which began that series of progressive differentiations in animal life that finally culminated in man himself.
(732.5) 65:2.7 The frog is one of the earliest of surviving human-race ancestors, but it also failed to progress, persisting today much as in those remote times. The frog is the only species ancestor of the early dawn races now living on the face of the earth. The human race has no surviving ancestry between the frog and the Eskimo.
(732.6) 65:2.8 The frogs gave rise to the Reptilia, a great animal family which is virtually extinct, but which, before passing out of existence, gave origin to the whole bird family and the numerous orders of mammals.
(732.7) 65:2.9 Probably the greatest single leap of all prehuman evolution was executed when the reptile became a bird. The bird types of today — eagles, ducks, pigeons, and ostriches — all descended from the enormous reptiles of long, long ago.
(732.8) 65:2.10 The kingdom of reptiles, descended from the frog family, is today represented by four surviving divisions: two nonprogressive, snakes and lizards, together with their cousins, alligators and turtles; one partially progressive, the bird family, and the fourth, the ancestors of mammals and the direct line of descent of the human species. But though long departed, the massiveness of the passing Reptilia found echo in the elephant and mastodon, while their peculiar forms were perpetuated in the leaping kangaroos.
(733.1) 65:2.11 Only fourteen phyla have appeared on Urantia, the fishes being the last, and no new classes have developed since birds and mammals.
(733.2) 65:2.12 It was from an agile little reptilian dinosaur of carnivorous habits but having a comparatively large brain that the placental mammals suddenly sprang. These mammals developed rapidly and in many different ways, not only giving rise to the common modern varieties but also evolving into marine types, such as whales and seals, and into air navigators like the bat family.
(733.3) 65:2.13 Man thus evolved from the higher mammals derived principally from the western implantation of life in the ancient east-west sheltered seas. The eastern and central groups of living organisms were early progressing favorably toward the attainment of prehuman levels of animal existence. But as the ages passed, the eastern focus of life emplacement failed to attain a satisfactory level of intelligent prehuman status, having suffered such repeated and irretrievable losses of its highest types of germ plasm that it was forever shorn of the power to rehabilitate human potentialities.
(733.4) 65:2.14 Since the quality of the mind capacity for development in this eastern group was so definitely inferior to that of the other two groups, the Life Carriers, with the consent of their superiors, so manipulated the environment as further to circumscribe these inferior prehuman strains of evolving life. To all outward appearances the elimination of these inferior groups of creatures was accidental, but in reality it was altogether purposeful.
(733.5) 65:2.15 Later in the evolutionary unfolding of intelligence, the lemur ancestors of the human species were far more advanced in North America than in other regions; and they were therefore led to migrate from the arena of western life implantation over the Bering land bridge and down the coast to southwestern Asia, where they continued to evolve and to benefit by the addition of certain strains of the central life group. Man thus evolved out of certain western and central life strains but in the central to near-eastern regions.
(733.6) 65:2.16 In this way the life that was planted on Urantia evolved until the ice age, when man himself first appeared and began his eventful planetary career. And this appearance of primitive man on earth during the ice age was not just an accident; it was by design. The rigors and climatic severity of the glacial era were in every way adapted to the purpose of fostering the production of a hardy type of human being with tremendous survival endowment.
3. The Fostering of Evolution
(733.8) 65:3.2 Life Carriers may employ every possible natural resource and may utilize any and all fortuitous circumstances which will enhance the developmental progress of the life experiment, but we are not permitted mechanically to intervene in, or arbitrarily to manipulate the conduct and course of, either plant or animal evolution.
(733.9) 65:3.3 You have been informed that Urantia mortals evolved by way of primitive frog development, and that this ascending strain, carried in potential in a single frog, narrowly escaped extinction on a certain occasion. But it should not be inferred that the evolution of mankind would have been terminated by an accident at this juncture. At that very moment we were observing and fostering no less than one thousand different and remotely situated mutating strains of life which could have been directed into various different patterns of prehuman development. This particular ancestral frog represented our third selection, the two prior life strains having perished in spite of all our efforts toward their conservation.
(734.1) 65:3.4 Even the loss of Andon and Fonta before they had offspring, though delaying human evolution, would not have prevented it. Subsequent to the appearance of Andon and Fonta and before the mutating human potentials of animal life were exhausted, there evolved no less than seven thousand favorable strains which could have achieved some sort of human type of development. And many of these better stocks were subsequently assimilated by the various branches of the expanding human species.
(734.2) 65:3.5 Long before the Material Son and Daughter, the biologic uplifters, arrive on a planet, the human potentials of the evolving animal species have been exhausted. This biologic status of animal life is disclosed to the Life Carriers by the phenomenon of the third phase of adjutant spirit mobilization, which automatically occurs concomitantly with the exhaustion of the capacity of all animal life to give origin to the mutant potentials of prehuman individuals.
(734.3) 65:3.6 Mankind on Urantia must solve its problems of mortal development with the human stocks it has — no more races will evolve from prehuman sources throughout all future time. But this fact does not preclude the possibility of the attainment of vastly higher levels of human development through the intelligent fostering of the evolutionary potentials still resident in the mortal races. That which we, the Life Carriers, do toward fostering and conserving the life strains before the appearance of human will, man must do for himself after such an event and subsequent to our retirement from active participation in evolution. In a general way, man’s evolutionary destiny is in his own hands, and scientific intelligence must sooner or later supersede the random functioning of uncontrolled natural selection and chance survival.
(734.4) 65:3.7 And in discussing the fostering of evolution, it would not be amiss to point out that, in the long future ahead, when you may sometime be attached to a corps of Life Carriers, you will have abundant and ample opportunity to offer suggestions and make any possible improvements in the plans and technique of life management and transplantation. Be patient! If you have good ideas, if your minds are fertile with better methods of administration for any part of the universal domains, you are certainly going to have an opportunity to present them to your associates and fellow administrators in the ages to come.
4. The Urantia Adventure
(735.1) 65:4.2 But the establishment of life on no world is ever experimental in the sense that something untried and unknown is attempted. The evolution of life is a technique ever progressive, differential, and variable, but never haphazard, uncontrolled, nor wholly experimental, in the accidental sense.
(735.2) 65:4.3 Many features of human life afford abundant evidence that the phenomenon of mortal existence was intelligently planned, that organic evolution is not a mere cosmic accident. When a living cell is injured, it possesses the ability to elaborate certain chemical substances which are empowered so to stimulate and activate the neighboring normal cells that they immediately begin the secretion of certain substances which facilitate healing processes in the wound; and at the same time these normal and uninjured cells begin to proliferate — they actually start to work creating new cells to replace any fellow cells which may have been destroyed by the accident.
(735.3) 65:4.4 This chemical action and reaction concerned in wound healing and cell reproduction represents the choice of the Life Carriers of a formula embracing over one hundred thousand phases and features of possible chemical reactions and biologic repercussions. More than half a million specific experiments were made by the Life Carriers in their laboratories before they finally settled upon this formula for the Urantia life experiment.
(735.4) 65:4.5 When Urantia scientists know more of these healing chemicals, they will become more efficient in the treatment of injuries, and indirectly they will know more about controlling certain serious diseases.
(735.5) 65:4.6 Since life was established on Urantia, the Life Carriers have improved this healing technique as it has been introduced on another Satania world, in that it affords more pain relief and exercises better control over the proliferation capacity of the associated normal cells.
(735.6) 65:4.7 There were many unique features of the Urantia life experiment, but the two outstanding episodes were the appearance of the Andonic race prior to the evolution of the six colored peoples and the later simultaneous appearance of the Sangik mutants in a single family. Urantia is the first world in Satania where the six colored races sprang from the same human family. They ordinarily arise in diversified strains from independent mutations within the prehuman animal stock and usually appear on earth one at a time and successively over long periods of time, beginning with the red man and passing on down through the colors to indigo.
(735.7) 65:4.8 Another outstanding variation of procedure was the late arrival of the Planetary Prince. As a rule, the prince appears on a planet about the time of will development; and if such a plan had been followed, Caligastia might have come to Urantia even during the lifetimes of Andon and Fonta instead of almost five hundred thousand years later, simultaneously with the appearance of the six Sangik races.
(735.8) 65:4.9 On an ordinary inhabited world a Planetary Prince would have been granted on the request of the Life Carriers at, or sometime after, the appearance of Andon and Fonta. But Urantia having been designated a life-modification planet, it was by preagreement that the Melchizedek observers, twelve in number, were sent as advisers to the Life Carriers and as overseers of the planet until the subsequent arrival of the Planetary Prince. These Melchizedeks came at the time Andon and Fonta made the decisions which enabled Thought Adjusters to indwell their mortal minds.
(736.1) 65:4.10 On Urantia the endeavors of the Life Carriers to improve the Satania life patterns necessarily resulted in the production of many apparently useless forms of transition life. But the gains already accrued are sufficient to justify the Urantia modifications of the standard life designs.
(736.2) 65:4.11 It was our intention to produce an early manifestation of will in the evolutionary life of Urantia, and we succeeded. Ordinarily, will does not emerge until the colored races have long been in existence, usually first appearing among the superior types of the red man. Your world is the only planet in Satania where the human type of will has appeared in a precolored race.
(736.3) 65:4.12 But in our effort to provide for that combination and association of inheritance factors which finally gave rise to the mammalian ancestors of the human race, we were confronted with the necessity of permitting hundreds and thousands of other and comparatively useless combinations and associations of inheritance factors to take place. Many of these seemingly strange by-products of our efforts are certain to meet your gaze as you dig back into the planetary past, and I can well understand how puzzling some of these things must be to the limited human viewpoint.
5. Life-Evolution Vicissitudes
(736.5) 65:5.2 But throughout all of this biologic adventure our greatest disappointment grew out of the reversion of certain primitive plant life to the prechlorophyll levels of parasitic bacteria on such an extensive and unexpected scale. This eventuality in plant-life evolution caused many distressful diseases in the higher mammals, particularly in the more vulnerable human species. When we were confronted with this perplexing situation, we somewhat discounted the difficulties involved because we knew that the subsequent admixture of the Adamic life plasm would so reinforce the resisting powers of the resulting blended race as to make it practically immune to all diseases produced by the vegetable type of organism. But our hopes were doomed to disappointment owing to the misfortune of the Adamic default.
(736.6) 65:5.3 The universe of universes, including this small world called Urantia, is not being managed merely to meet our approval nor just to suit our convenience, much less to gratify our whims and satisfy our curiosity. The wise and all-powerful beings who are responsible for universe management undoubtedly know exactly what they are about; and so it becomes Life Carriers and behooves mortal minds to enlist in patient waiting and hearty co-operation with the rule of wisdom, the reign of power, and the march of progress.
(736.7) 65:5.4 There are, of course, certain compensations for tribulation, such as Michael’s bestowal on Urantia. But irrespective of all such considerations, the later celestial supervisors of this planet express complete confidence in the ultimate evolutionary triumph of the human race and in the eventual vindication of our original plans and life patterns.
6. Evolutionary Techniques of Life
(737.2) 65:6.2 There is original endowment of adaptation in living things and beings. In every living plant or animal cell, in every living organism — material or spiritual — there is an insatiable craving for the attainment of ever-increasing perfection of environmental adjustment, organismal adaptation, and augmented life realization. These interminable efforts of all living things evidence the existence within them of an innate striving for perfection.
(737.3) 65:6.3 The most important step in plant evolution was the development of chlorophyll-making ability, and the second greatest advance was the evolution of the spore into the complex seed. The spore is most efficient as a reproductive agent, but it lacks the potentials of variety and versatility inherent in the seed.
(737.4) 65:6.4 One of the most serviceable and complex episodes in the evolution of the higher types of animals consisted in the development of the ability of the iron in the circulating blood cells to perform in the double role of oxygen carrier and carbon dioxide remover. And this performance of the red blood cells illustrates how evolving organisms are able to adapt their functions to varying or changing environment. The higher animals, including man, oxygenate their tissues by the action of the iron of the red blood cells, which carries oxygen to the living cells and just as efficiently removes the carbon dioxide. But other metals can be made to serve the same purpose. The cuttlefish employs copper for this function, and the sea squirt utilizes vanadium.
(737.5) 65:6.5 The continuation of such biologic adjustments is illustrated by the evolution of teeth in the higher Urantia mammals; these attained to thirty-six in man’s remote ancestors, and then began an adaptative readjustment toward thirty-two in the dawn man and his near relatives. Now the human species is slowly gravitating toward twenty-eight. The process of evolution is still actively and adaptatively in progress on this planet.
(737.6) 65:6.6 But many seemingly mysterious adjustments of living organisms are purely chemical, wholly physical. At any moment of time, in the blood stream of any human being there exists the possibility of upward of 15,000,000 chemical reactions between the hormone output of a dozen ductless glands.
(737.7) 65:6.7 The lower forms of plant life are wholly responsive to physical, chemical, and electrical environment. But as the scale of life ascends, one by one the mind ministries of the seven adjutant spirits become operative, and the mind becomes increasingly adjustive, creative, co-ordinative, and dominative. The ability of animals to adapt themselves to air, water, and land is not a supernatural endowment, but it is a superphysical adjustment.
(738.1) 65:6.8 Physics and chemistry alone cannot explain how a human being evolved out of the primeval protoplasm of the early seas. The ability to learn, memory and differential response to environment, is the endowment of mind. The laws of physics are not responsive to training; they are immutable and unchanging. The reactions of chemistry are not modified by education; they are uniform and dependable. Aside from the presence of the Unqualified Absolute, electrical and chemical reactions are predictable. But mind can profit from experience, can learn from reactive habits of behavior in response to repetition of stimuli.
(738.2) 65:6.9 Preintelligent organisms react to environmental stimuli, but those organisms which are reactive to mind ministry can adjust and manipulate the environment itself.
(738.3) 65:6.10 The physical brain with its associated nervous system possesses innate capacity for response to mind ministry just as the developing mind of a personality possesses a certain innate capacity for spirit receptivity and therefore contains the potentials of spiritual progress and attainment. Intellectual, social, moral, and spiritual evolution are dependent on the mind ministry of the seven adjutant spirits and their superphysical associates.
7. Evolutionary Mind Levels
(738.5) 65:7.2 On an evolutionary world much, very much, depends on the work of these seven adjutants. But they are mind ministers; they are not concerned in physical evolution, the domain of the Life Carriers. Nevertheless, the perfect integration of these spirit endowments with the ordained and natural procedure of the unfolding and inherent regime of the Life Carriers is responsible for the mortal inability to discern, in the phenomenon of mind, aught but the hand of nature and the outworking of natural processes, albeit you are occasionally somewhat perplexed in explaining all of everything connected with the natural reactions of mind as it is associated with matter. And if Urantia were operating more in accordance with the original plans, you would observe even less to arrest your attention in the phenomenon of mind.
(738.6) 65:7.3 The seven adjutant spirits are more circuitlike than entitylike, and on ordinary worlds they are encircuited with other adjutant functionings throughout the local universe. On life-experiment planets, however, they are relatively isolated. And on Urantia, owing to the unique nature of the life patterns, the lower adjutants experienced far more difficulty in contacting with the evolutionary organisms than would have been the case in a more standardized type of life endowment.
(738.7) 65:7.4 Again, on an average evolutionary world the seven adjutant spirits are far better synchronized with the advancing stages of animal development than they were on Urantia. With but a single exception, the adjutants experienced the greatest difficulty in contacting with the evolving minds of Urantia organisms that they had ever had in all their functioning throughout the universe of Nebadon. On this world there developed many forms of border phenomena — confusional combinations of the mechanical-nonteachable and the nonmechanical-teachable types of organismal response.
(739.1) 65:7.5 The seven adjutant spirits do not make contact with the purely mechanical orders of organismal environmental response. Such preintelligent responses of living organisms pertain purely to the energy domains of the power centers, the physical controllers, and their associates.
(739.2) 65:7.6 The acquisition of the potential of the ability to learn from experience marks the beginning of the functioning of the adjutant spirits, and they function from the lowliest minds of primitive and invisible existences up to the highest types in the evolutionary scale of human beings. They are the source and pattern for the otherwise more or less mysterious behavior and incompletely understood quick reactions of mind to the material environment. Long must these faithful and always dependable influences carry forward their preliminary ministry before the animal mind attains the human levels of spirit receptivity.
(739.3) 65:7.7 The adjutants function exclusively in the evolution of experiencing mind up to the level of the sixth phase, the spirit of worship. At this level there occurs that inevitable overlapping of ministry — the phenomenon of the higher reaching down to co-ordinate with the lower in anticipation of subsequent attainment of advanced levels of development. And still additional spirit ministry accompanies the action of the seventh and last adjutant, the spirit of wisdom. Throughout the ministry of the spirit world the individual never experiences abrupt transitions of spirit co-operation; always are these changes gradual and reciprocal.
(739.4) 65:7.8 Always should the domains of the physical (electrochemical) and the mental response to environmental stimuli be differentiated, and in turn must they all be recognized as phenomena apart from spiritual activities. The domains of physical, mental, and spiritual gravity are distinct realms of cosmic reality, notwithstanding their intimate interrelations.
8. Evolution in Time and Space
(739.6) 65:8.2 If spending so much time in effecting the evolutionary changes of life development occasions perplexity, I would say that we cannot time the life processes to unfold any faster than the physical metamorphoses of a planet will permit. We must wait upon the natural, physical development of a planet; we have absolutely no control over geologic evolution. If the physical conditions would allow, we could arrange for the completed evolution of life in considerably less than one million years. But we are all under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Rulers of Paradise, and time is nonexistent on Paradise.
(739.7) 65:8.3 The individual’s yardstick for time measurement is the length of his life. All creatures are thus time conditioned, and therefore do they regard evolution as being a long-drawn-out process. To those of us whose life span is not limited by a temporal existence, evolution does not seem to be such a protracted transaction. On Paradise, where time is nonexistent, these things are all present in the mind of Infinity and the acts of Eternity.
(739.8) 65:8.4 As mind evolution is dependent on, and delayed by, the slow development of physical conditions, so is spiritual progress dependent on mental expansion and unfailingly delayed by intellectual retardation. But this does not mean that spiritual evolution is dependent on education, culture, or wisdom. The soul may evolve regardless of mental culture but not in the absence of mental capacity and desire — the choice of survival and the decision to achieve ever-increasing perfection — to do the will of the Father in heaven. Although survival may not depend on the possession of knowledge and wisdom, progression most certainly does.
(740.1) 65:8.5 In the cosmic evolutionary laboratories mind is always dominant over matter, and spirit is ever correlated with mind. Failure of these diverse endowments to synchronize and co-ordinate may cause time delays, but if the individual really knows God and desires to find him and become like him, then survival is assured regardless of the handicaps of time. Physical status may handicap mind, and mental perversity may delay spiritual attainment, but none of these obstacles can defeat the whole-souled choice of will.
(740.2) 65:8.6 When physical conditions are ripe, sudden mental evolutions may take place; when mind status is propitious, sudden spiritual transformations may occur; when spiritual values receive proper recognition, then cosmic meanings become discernible, and increasingly the personality is released from the handicaps of time and delivered from the limitations of space.
(740.3) 65:8.7 [Sponsored by a Life Carrier of Nebadon resident on Urantia.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 66
The Planetary Prince of Urantia
(741.2) 66:0.2 About five hundred thousand years ago and concurrent with the appearance of the six colored or Sangik races, Caligastia, the Planetary Prince, arrived on Urantia. There were almost one-half billion primitive human beings on earth at the time of the Prince’s arrival, and they were well scattered over Europe, Asia, and Africa. The Prince’s headquarters, established in Mesopotamia, was at about the center of world population.
1. Prince Caligastia
(741.4) 66:1.2 Prior to the reign of Lucifer in Satania, Caligastia had been attached to the council of the Life Carrier advisers on Jerusem. Lucifer elevated Caligastia to a position on his personal staff, and he acceptably filled five successive assignments of honor and trust.
(741.5) 66:1.3 Caligastia very early sought a commission as Planetary Prince, but repeatedly, when his request came up for approval in the constellation councils, it would fail to receive the assent of the Constellation Fathers. Caligastia seemed especially desirous of being sent as planetary ruler to a decimal or life-modification world. His petition had several times been disapproved before he was finally assigned to Urantia.
(741.6) 66:1.4 Caligastia went forth from Jerusem to his trust of world dominion with an enviable record of loyalty and devotion to the welfare of the universe of his origin and sojourn, notwithstanding a certain characteristic restlessness coupled with a tendency to disagree with the established order in certain minor matters.
(741.7) 66:1.5 I was present on Jerusem when the brilliant Caligastia departed from the system capital. No prince of the planets ever embarked upon a career of world rulership with a richer preparatory experience or with better prospects than did Caligastia on that eventful day one-half million years ago. One thing is certain: As I executed my assignment of putting the narrative of that event on the broadcasts of the local universe, I never for one moment entertained even in the slightest degree any idea that this noble Lanonandek would so shortly betray his sacred trust of planetary custody and so horribly stain the fair name of his exalted order of universe sonship. I really regarded Urantia as being among the five or six most fortunate planets in all Satania in that it was to have such an experienced, brilliant, and original mind at the helm of world affairs. I did not then comprehend that Caligastia was insidiously falling in love with himself; I did not then so fully understand the subtleties of personality pride.
2. The Prince’s Staff
(742.2) 66:2.2 At the head of this group was Daligastia, the associate-assistant of the Planetary Prince. Daligastia was also a secondary Lanonandek Son, being number 319,407 of that order. He ranked as an assistant at the time of his assignment as Caligastia’s associate.
(742.3) 66:2.3 The planetary staff included a large number of angelic co-operators and a host of other celestial beings assigned to advance the interests and promote the welfare of the human races. But from your standpoint the most interesting group of all were the corporeal members of the Prince’s staff — sometimes referred to as the Caligastia one hundred.
(742.4) 66:2.4 These one hundred rematerialized members of the Prince’s staff were chosen by Caligastia from over 785,000 ascendant citizens of Jerusem who volunteered for embarkation on the Urantia adventure. Each one of the chosen one hundred was from a different planet, and none of them were from Urantia.
(742.5) 66:2.5 These Jerusemite volunteers were brought by seraphic transport direct from the system capital to Urantia, and upon arrival they were held enseraphimed until they could be provided with personality forms of the dual nature of special planetary service, literal bodies consisting of flesh and blood but also attuned to the life circuits of the system.
(742.6) 66:2.6 Sometime before the arrival of these one hundred Jerusem citizens, the two supervising Life Carriers resident on Urantia, having previously perfected their plans, petitioned Jerusem and Edentia for permission to transplant the life plasm of one hundred selected survivors of the Andon and Fonta stock into the material bodies to be projected for the corporeal members of the Prince’s staff. The request was granted on Jerusem and approved on Edentia.
(742.7) 66:2.7 Accordingly, fifty males and fifty females of the Andon and Fonta posterity, representing the survival of the best strains of that unique race, were chosen by the Life Carriers. With one or two exceptions these Andonite contributors to the advancement of the race were strangers to one another. They were assembled from widely separated places by co-ordinated Thought Adjuster direction and seraphic guidance at the threshold of the planetary headquarters of the Prince. Here the one hundred human subjects were given into the hands of the highly skilled volunteer commission from Avalon, who directed the material extraction of a portion of the life plasm of these Andon descendants. This living material was then transferred to the material bodies constructed for the use of the one hundred Jerusemite members of the Prince’s staff. Meantime, these newly arrived citizens of the system capital were held in the sleep of seraphic transport.
(742.8) 66:2.8 These transactions, together with the literal creation of special bodies for the Caligastia one hundred, gave origin to numerous legends, many of which subsequently became confused with the later traditions concerning the planetary installation of Adam and Eve.
(743.1) 66:2.9 The entire transaction of repersonalization, from the time of the arrival of the seraphic transports bearing the one hundred Jerusem volunteers until they became conscious, threefold beings of the realm, consumed exactly ten days.
3. Dalamatia — The City of the Prince
(743.3) 66:3.2 The climate and landscape in the Mesopotamia of those times were in every way favorable to the undertakings of the Prince’s staff and their assistants, very different from conditions which have sometimes since prevailed. It was necessary to have such a favoring climate as a part of the natural environment designed to induce primitive Urantians to make certain initial advances in culture and civilization. The one great task of those ages was to transform man from a hunter to a herder, with the hope that later on he would evolve into a peace-loving, home-abiding farmer.
(743.4) 66:3.3 The headquarters of the Planetary Prince on Urantia was typical of such stations on a young and developing sphere. The nucleus of the Prince’s settlement was a very simple but beautiful city, enclosed within a wall forty feet high. This world center of culture was named Dalamatia in honor of Daligastia.
(743.5) 66:3.4 The city was laid out in ten subdivisions with the headquarters mansions of the ten councils of the corporeal staff situated at the centers of these subdivisions. Centermost in the city was the temple of the unseen Father. The administrative headquarters of the Prince and his associates was arranged in twelve chambers immediately grouped about the temple itself.
(743.6) 66:3.5 The buildings of Dalamatia were all one story except the council headquarters, which were two stories, and the central temple of the Father of all, which was small but three stories in height.
(743.7) 66:3.6 The city represented the best practices of those early days in building material — brick. Very little stone or wood was used. Home building and village architecture among the surrounding peoples were greatly improved by the Dalamatian example.
(743.8) 66:3.7 Near the Prince’s headquarters there dwelt all colors and strata of human beings. And it was from these near-by tribes that the first students of the Prince’s schools were recruited. Although these early schools of Dalamatia were crude, they provided all that could be done for the men and women of that primitive age.
(743.9) 66:3.8 The Prince’s corporeal staff continuously gathered about them the superior individuals of the surrounding tribes and, after training and inspiring these students, sent them back as teachers and leaders of their respective peoples.
4. Early Days of the One Hundred
(744.1) 66:4.2 The serious obstacle to the good influence of such extraplanetary teachers is the tendency of mortals to regard them as gods, but aside from the technique of their appearance on earth the Caligastia one hundred — fifty men and fifty women — did not resort to supernatural methods nor superhuman manipulations.
(744.2) 66:4.3 But the corporeal staff were nonetheless superhuman. They began their mission on Urantia as extraordinary threefold beings:
(744.3) 66:4.4 1. They were corporeal and relatively human, for they embodied the actual life plasm of one of the human races, the Andonic life plasm of Urantia.(745.5) 66:4.15 It should be explained in this connection that, at the time the one hundred Andonites contributed their human germ plasm to the members of the Prince’s staff, the Life Carriers introduced into their mortal bodies the complement of the system circuits; and thus were they enabled to live on concurrently with the staff, century after century, in defiance of physical death.
(744.4) 66:4.5 These one hundred members of the Prince’s staff were divided equally as to sex and in accordance with their previous mortal status. Each person of this group was capable of becoming coparental to some new order of physical being, but they had been carefully instructed to resort to parenthood only under certain conditions. It is customary for the corporeal staff of a Planetary Prince to procreate their successors sometime prior to retiring from special planetary service. Usually this is at, or shortly after, the time of the arrival of the Planetary Adam and Eve.
(744.5) 66:4.6 These special beings therefore had little or no idea as to what type of material creature would be produced by their sexual union. And they never did know; before the time for such a step in the prosecution of their world work the entire regime was upset by rebellion, and those who later functioned in the parental role had been isolated from the life currents of the system.
(744.6) 66:4.7 In skin color and language these materialized members of Caligastia’s staff followed the Andonic race. They partook of food as did the mortals of the realm with this difference: The re-created bodies of this group were fully satisfied by a nonflesh diet. This was one of the considerations which determined their residence in a warm region abounding in fruits and nuts. The practice of subsisting on a nonflesh diet dates from the times of the Caligastia one hundred, for this custom spread near and far to affect the eating habits of many surrounding tribes, groups of origin in the once exclusively meat-eating evolutionary races.
(744.7) 66:4.8 2. The one hundred were material but superhuman beings, having been reconstituted on Urantia as unique men and women of a high and special order.
(744.8) 66:4.9 This group, while enjoying provisional citizenship on Jerusem, were as yet unfused with their Thought Adjusters; and when they volunteered and were accepted for planetary service in liaison with the descending orders of sonship, their Adjusters were detached. But these Jerusemites were superhuman beings — they possessed souls of ascendant growth. During the mortal life in the flesh the soul is of embryonic estate; it is born (resurrected) in the morontia life and experiences growth through the successive morontia worlds. And the souls of the Caligastia one hundred had thus expanded through the progressive experiences of the seven mansion worlds to citizenship status on Jerusem.
(744.9) 66:4.10 In conformity to their instructions the staff did not engage in sexual reproduction, but they did painstakingly study their personal constitutions, and they carefully explored every imaginable phase of intellectual (mind) and morontia (soul) liaison. And it was during the thirty-third year of their sojourn in Dalamatia, long before the wall was completed, that number two and number seven of the Danite group accidentally discovered a phenomenon attendant upon the liaison of their morontia selves (supposedly nonsexual and nonmaterial); and the result of this adventure proved to be the first of the primary midway creatures. This new being was wholly visible to the planetary staff and to their celestial associates but was not visible to the men and women of the various human tribes. Upon authority of the Planetary Prince the entire corporeal staff undertook the production of similar beings, and all were successful, following the instructions of the pioneer Danite pair. Thus did the Prince’s staff eventually bring into being the original corps of 50,000 primary midwayers.
(745.1) 66:4.11 These mid-type creatures were of great service in carrying on the affairs of the world’s headquarters. They were invisible to human beings, but the primitive sojourners at Dalamatia were taught about these unseen semispirits, and for ages they constituted the sum total of the spirit world to these evolving mortals.
(745.2) 66:4.12 3. The Caligastia one hundred were personally immortal, or undying. There circulated through their material forms the antidotal complements of the life currents of the system; and had they not lost contact with the life circuits through rebellion, they would have lived on indefinitely until the arrival of a subsequent Son of God, or until their sometime later release to resume the interrupted journey to Havona and Paradise.
(745.3) 66:4.13 These antidotal complements of the Satania life currents were derived from the fruit of the tree of life, a shrub of Edentia which was sent to Urantia by the Most Highs of Norlatiadek at the time of Caligastia’s arrival. In the days of Dalamatia this tree grew in the central courtyard of the temple of the unseen Father, and it was the fruit of the tree of life that enabled the material and otherwise mortal beings of the Prince’s staff to live on indefinitely as long as they had access to it.
(745.4) 66:4.14 While of no value to the evolutionary races, this supersustenance was quite sufficient to confer continuous life upon the Caligastia one hundred and also upon the one hundred modified Andonites who were associated with them.
(745.6) 66:4.16 Eventually the one hundred Andonites were made aware of their contribution to the new forms of their superiors, and these same one hundred children of the Andon tribes were kept at headquarters as the personal attendants of the Prince’s corporeal staff.
5. Organization of the One Hundred
(745.8) 66:5.2 1. The council on food and material welfare. This group was presided over by Ang. Food, water, clothes, and the material advancement of the human species were fostered by this able corps. They taught well digging, spring control, and irrigation. They taught those from the higher altitudes and from the north improved methods of treating skins for use as clothing, and weaving was later introduced by the teachers of art and science.
(746.1) 66:5.3 Great advances were made in methods of food storage. Food was preserved by cooking, drying, and smoking; it thus became the earliest property. Man was taught to provide for the hazards of famine, which periodically decimated the world.
(746.2) 66:5.4 2. The board of animal domestication and utilization. This council was dedicated to the task of selecting and breeding those animals best adapted to help human beings in bearing burdens and transporting themselves, to supply food, and later on to be of service in the cultivation of the soil. This able corps was directed by Bon.
(746.3) 66:5.5 Several types of useful animals, now extinct, were tamed, together with some that have continued as domesticated animals to the present day. Man had long lived with the dog, and the blue man had already been successful in taming the elephant. The cow was so improved by careful breeding as to become a valuable source of food; butter and cheese became common articles of human diet. Men were taught to use oxen for burden bearing, but the horse was not domesticated until a later date. The members of this corps first taught men to use the wheel for the facilitation of traction.
(746.4) 66:5.6 It was in these days that carrier pigeons were first used, being taken on long journeys for the purpose of sending messages or calls for help. Bon’s group were successful in training the great fandors as passenger birds, but they became extinct more than thirty thousand years ago.
(746.5) 66:5.7 3. The advisers regarding the conquest of predatory animals. It was not enough that early man should try to domesticate certain animals, but he must also learn how to protect himself from destruction by the remainder of the hostile animal world. This group was captained by Dan.
(746.6) 66:5.8 The purpose of an ancient city wall was to protect against ferocious beasts as well as to prevent surprise attacks by hostile humans. Those living without the walls and in the forest were dependent on tree dwellings, stone huts, and the maintenance of night fires. It was therefore very natural that these teachers should devote much time to instructing their pupils in the improvement of human dwellings. By employing improved techniques and by the use of traps, great progress was made in animal subjugation.
(746.7) 66:5.9 4. The faculty on dissemination and conservation of knowledge. This group organized and directed the purely educational endeavors of those early ages. It was presided over by Fad. The educational methods of Fad consisted in supervision of employment accompanied by instruction in improved methods of labor. Fad formulated the first alphabet and introduced a writing system. This alphabet contained twenty-five characters. For writing material these early peoples utilized tree barks, clay tablets, stone slabs, a form of parchment made of hammered hides, and a crude form of paperlike material made from wasps’ nests. The Dalamatia library, destroyed soon after the Caligastia disaffection, comprised more than two million separate records and was known as the “house of Fad.”
(746.8) 66:5.10 The blue man was partial to alphabet writing and made the greatest progress along such lines. The red man preferred pictorial writing, while the yellow races drifted into the use of symbols for words and ideas, much like those they now employ. But the alphabet and much more was subsequently lost to the world during the confusion attendant upon rebellion. The Caligastia defection destroyed the hope of the world for a universal language, at least for untold ages.
(747.1) 66:5.11 5. The commission on industry and trade. This council was employed in fostering industry within the tribes and in promoting trade between the various peace groups. Its leader was Nod. Every form of primitive manufacture was encouraged by this corps. They contributed directly to the elevation of standards of living by providing many new commodities to attract the fancy of primitive men. They greatly expanded the trade in the improved salt produced by the council on science and art.
(747.2) 66:5.12 It was among these enlightened groups educated in the Dalamatia schools that the first commercial credit was practiced. From a central exchange of credits they secured tokens which were accepted in lieu of the actual objects of barter. The world did not improve upon these business methods for hundreds of thousands of years.
(747.3) 66:5.13 6. The college of revealed religion. This body was slow in functioning. Urantia civilization was literally forged out between the anvil of necessity and the hammers of fear. But this group had made considerable progress in their attempt to substitute Creator fear for creature fear (ghost worship) before their labors were interrupted by the later confusion attendant upon the secession upheaval. The head of this council was Hap.
(747.4) 66:5.14 None of the Prince’s staff would present revelation to complicate evolution; they presented revelation only as the climax of their exhaustion of the forces of evolution. But Hap did yield to the desire of the inhabitants of the city for the establishment of a form of religious service. His group provided the Dalamatians with the seven chants of worship and also gave them the daily praise-phrase and eventually taught them “the Father’s prayer,” which was:
(747.5) 66:5.15 “Father of all, whose Son we honor, look down upon us with favor. Deliver us from the fear of all save you. Make us a pleasure to our divine teachers and forever put truth on our lips. Deliver us from violence and anger; give us respect for our elders and that which belongs to our neighbors. Give us this season green pastures and fruitful flocks to gladden our hearts. We pray for the hastening of the coming of the promised uplifter, and we would do your will on this world as others do on worlds beyond.”
(747.6) 66:5.16 Although the Prince’s staff were limited to natural means and ordinary methods of race improvement, they held out the promise of the Adamic gift of a new race as the goal of subsequent evolutionary growth upon the attainment of the height of biologic development.
(747.7) 66:5.17 7. The guardians of health and life. This council was concerned with the introduction of sanitation and the promotion of primitive hygiene and was led by Lut.
(747.8) 66:5.18 Its members taught much that was lost during the confusion of subsequent ages, never to be rediscovered until the twentieth century. They taught mankind that cooking, boiling and roasting, was a means of avoiding sickness; also that such cooking greatly reduced infant mortality and facilitated early weaning.
(747.9) 66:5.19 Many of the early teachings of Lut’s guardians of health persisted among the tribes of earth on down to the days of Moses, even though they became much garbled and were greatly changed.
(748.1) 66:5.20 The great obstacle in the way of promoting hygiene among these ignorant peoples consisted in the fact that the real causes of many diseases were too small to be seen by the naked eye, and also because they all held fire in superstitious regard. It required thousands of years to persuade them to burn refuse. In the meantime they were urged to bury their decaying rubbish. The great sanitary advance of this epoch came from the dissemination of knowledge regarding the health-giving and disease-destroying properties of sunlight.
(748.2) 66:5.21 Before the Prince’s arrival, bathing had been an exclusively religious ceremonial. It was indeed difficult to persuade primitive men to wash their bodies as a health practice. Lut finally induced the religious teachers to include cleansing with water as a part of the purification ceremonies to be practiced in connection with the noontime devotions, once a week, in the worship of the Father of all.
(748.3) 66:5.22 These guardians of health also sought to introduce handshaking in substitution for saliva exchange or blood drinking as a seal of personal friendship and as a token of group loyalty. But when out from under the compelling pressure of the teachings of their superior leaders, these primitive peoples were not slow in reverting to their former health-destroying and disease-breeding practices of ignorance and superstition.
(748.4) 66:5.23 8. The planetary council on art and science. This corps did much to improve the industrial technique of early man and to elevate his concepts of beauty. Their leader was Mek.
(748.5) 66:5.24 Art and science were at a low ebb throughout the world, but the rudiments of physics and chemistry were taught the Dalamatians. Pottery was advanced, decorative arts were all improved, and the ideals of human beauty were greatly enhanced. But music made little progress until after the arrival of the violet race.
(748.6) 66:5.25 These primitive men would not consent to experiment with steam power, notwithstanding the repeated urgings of their teachers; never could they overcome their great fear of the explosive power of confined steam. They were, however, finally persuaded to work with metals and fire, although a piece of red-hot metal was a terrorizing object to early man.
(748.7) 66:5.26 Mek did a great deal to advance the culture of the Andonites and to improve the art of the blue man. A blend of the blue man with the Andon stock produced an artistically gifted type, and many of them became master sculptors. They did not work in stone or marble, but their works of clay, hardened by baking, adorned the gardens of Dalamatia.
(748.8) 66:5.27 Great progress was made in the home arts, most of which were lost in the long and dark ages of rebellion, never to be rediscovered until modern times.
(748.9) 66:5.28 9. The governors of advanced tribal relations. This was the group intrusted with the work of bringing human society up to the level of statehood. Their chief was Tut.
(748.10) 66:5.29 These leaders contributed much to bringing about intertribal marriages. They fostered courtship and marriage after due deliberation and full opportunity to become acquainted. The purely military war dances were refined and made to serve valuable social ends. Many competitive games were introduced, but these ancient folk were a serious people; little humor graced these early tribes. Few of these practices survived the subsequent disintegration of planetary insurrection.
(749.1) 66:5.30 Tut and his associates labored to promote group associations of a peaceful nature, to regulate and humanize warfare, to co-ordinate intertribal relations, and to improve tribal governments. In the vicinity of Dalamatia there developed a more advanced culture, and these improved social relations were very helpful in influencing more remote tribes. But the pattern of civilization prevailing at the Prince’s headquarters was quite different from the barbaric society evolving elsewhere, just as the twentieth-century society of Capetown, South Africa, is totally unlike the crude culture of the diminutive Bushmen to the north.
(749.2) 66:5.31 10. The supreme court of tribal co-ordination and racial co-operation. This supreme council was directed by Van and was the court of appeals for all of the other nine special commissions charged with the supervision of human affairs. This council was one of wide function, being intrusted with all matters of earthly concern which were not specifically assigned to the other groups. This selected corps had been approved by the Constellation Fathers of Edentia before they were authorized to assume the functions of the supreme court of Urantia.
6. The Prince’s Reign
(749.4) 66:6.2 Slavery to tradition produces stability and co-operation by sentimentally linking the past with the present, but it likewise stifles initiative and enslaves the creative powers of the personality. The whole world was caught in the stalemate of tradition-bound mores when the Caligastia one hundred arrived and began the proclamation of the new gospel of individual initiative within the social groups of that day. But this beneficent rule was so soon interrupted that the races never have been wholly liberated from the slavery of custom; fashion still unduly dominates Urantia.
(749.5) 66:6.3 The Caligastia one hundred — graduates of the Satania mansion worlds — well knew the arts and culture of Jerusem, but such knowledge is nearly valueless on a barbaric planet populated by primitive humans. These wise beings knew better than to undertake the sudden transformation, or the en masse uplifting, of the primitive races of that day. They well understood the slow evolution of the human species, and they wisely refrained from any radical attempts at modifying man’s mode of life on earth.
(749.6) 66:6.4 Each of the ten planetary commissions set about slowly and naturally to advance the interests intrusted to them. Their plan consisted in attracting the best minds of the surrounding tribes and, after training them, sending them back to their people as emissaries of social uplift.
(749.7) 66:6.5 Foreign emissaries were never sent to a race except upon the specific request of that people. Those who labored for the uplift and advancement of a given tribe or race were always natives of that tribe or race. The one hundred would not attempt to impose the habits and mores of even a superior race upon another tribe. Always they patiently worked to uplift and advance the time-tried mores of each race. The simple folk of Urantia brought their social customs to Dalamatia, not to exchange them for new and better practices, but to have them uplifted by contact with a higher culture and by association with superior minds. The process was slow but very effectual.
(750.1) 66:6.6 The Dalamatia teachers sought to add conscious social selection to the purely natural selection of biologic evolution. They did not derange human society, but they did markedly accelerate its normal and natural evolution. Their motive was progression by evolution and not revolution by revelation. The human race had spent ages in acquiring the little religion and morals it had, and these supermen knew better than to rob mankind of these few advances by the confusion and dismay which always result when enlightened and superior beings undertake to uplift the backward races by overteaching and overenlightenment.
(750.2) 66:6.7 When Christian missionaries go into the heart of Africa, where sons and daughters are supposed to remain under the control and direction of their parents throughout the lifetime of the parents, they only bring about confusion and the breakdown of all authority when they seek, in a single generation, to supplant this practice by teaching that these children should be free from all parental restraint after they have attained the age of twenty-one.
7. Life in Dalamatia
(750.4) 66:7.2 The interiors of the central temple of worship and the ten council mansions of the supervising groups of supermen were indeed beautiful works of art. And while the residential buildings were models of neatness and cleanliness, everything was very simple and altogether primitive in comparison with later-day developments. At this headquarters of culture no methods were employed which did not naturally belong on Urantia.
(750.5) 66:7.3 The Prince’s corporeal staff presided over simple and exemplary abodes which they maintained as homes designed to inspire and favorably impress the student observers sojourning at the world’s social center and educational headquarters.
(750.6) 66:7.4 The definite order of family life and the living of one family together in one residence of comparatively settled location date from these times of Dalamatia and were chiefly due to the example and teachings of the one hundred and their pupils. The home as a social unit never became a success until the supermen and superwomen of Dalamatia led mankind to love and plan for their grandchildren and their grandchildren’s children. Savage man loves his child, but civilized man loves also his grandchild.
(750.7) 66:7.5 The Prince’s staff lived together as fathers and mothers. True, they had no children of their own, but the fifty pattern homes of Dalamatia never sheltered less than five hundred adopted little ones assembled from the superior families of the Andonic and Sangik races; many of these children were orphans. They were favored with the discipline and training of these superparents; and then, after three years in the schools of the Prince (they entered from thirteen to fifteen), they were eligible for marriage and ready to receive their commissions as emissaries of the Prince to the needy tribes of their respective races.
(751.1) 66:7.6 Fad sponsored the Dalamatia plan of teaching that was carried out as an industrial school in which the pupils learned by doing, and through which they worked their way by the daily performance of useful tasks. This plan of education did not ignore thinking and feeling in the development of character; but it gave first place to manual training. The instruction was individual and collective. The pupils were taught by both men and women and by the two acting conjointly. One half of this group instruction was by sexes; the other half was coeducational. Students were taught manual dexterity as individuals and were socialized in groups or classes. They were trained to fraternize with younger groups, older groups, and adults, as well as to do teamwork with those of their own ages. They were also familiarized with such associations as family groups, play squads, and school classes.
(751.2) 66:7.7 Among the later students trained in Mesopotamia for work with their respective races were Andonites from the highlands of western India together with representatives of the red men and the blue men; still later a small number of the yellow race were also received.
(751.3) 66:7.8 Hap presented the early races with a moral law. This code was known as “The Father’s Way” and consisted of the following seven commands:
(751.4) 66:7.9 1. You shall not fear nor serve any God but the Father of all.(751.11) 66:7.16 This was the law of Dalamatia for almost three hundred thousand years. And many of the stones on which this law was inscribed now lie beneath the waters off the shores of Mesopotamia and Persia. It became the custom to hold one of these commands in mind for each day of the week, using it for salutations and mealtime thanksgiving.
(751.5) 66:7.10 2. You shall not disobey the Father’s Son, the world’s ruler, nor show disrespect to his superhuman associates.
(751.6) 66:7.11 3. You shall not speak a lie when called before the judges of the people.
(751.7) 66:7.12 4. You shall not kill men, women, or children.
(751.8) 66:7.13 5. You shall not steal your neighbor’s goods or cattle.
(751.9) 66:7.14 6. You shall not touch your friend’s wife.
(751.10) 66:7.15 7. You shall not show disrespect to your parents or to the elders of the tribe.
(751.12) 66:7.17 The time measurement of these days was the lunar month, this period being reckoned as twenty-eight days. That, with the exception of day and night, was the only time reckoning known to the early peoples. The seven-day week was introduced by the Dalamatia teachers and grew out of the fact that seven was one fourth of twenty-eight. The significance of the number seven in the superuniverse undoubtedly afforded them opportunity to introduce a spiritual reminder into the common reckoning of time. But there is no natural origin for the weekly period.
(751.13) 66:7.18 The country around the city was quite well settled within a radius of one hundred miles. Immediately surrounding the city, hundreds of graduates of the Prince’s schools engaged in animal husbandry and otherwise carried out the instruction they had received from his staff and their numerous human helpers. A few engaged in agriculture and horticulture.
(751.14) 66:7.19 Mankind was not consigned to agricultural toil as the penalty of supposed sin. “In the sweat of your face shall you eat the fruit of the fields” was not a sentence of punishment pronounced because of man’s participation in the follies of the Lucifer rebellion under the leadership of the traitorous Caligastia. The cultivation of the soil is inherent in the establishment of an advancing civilization on the evolutionary worlds, and this injunction was the center of all teaching of the Planetary Prince and his staff throughout the three hundred thousand years which intervened between their arrival on Urantia and those tragic days when Caligastia threw in his lot with the rebel Lucifer. Work with the soil is not a curse; rather is it the highest blessing to all who are thus permitted to enjoy the most human of all human activities.
(752.1) 66:7.20 At the outbreak of the rebellion, Dalamatia had a resident population of almost six thousand. This number includes the regular students but does not embrace the visitors and observers, who always numbered more than one thousand. But you can have little or no concept of the marvelous progress of those faraway times; practically all of the wonderful human gains of those days were wiped out by the horrible confusion and abject spiritual darkness which followed the Caligastia catastrophe of deception and sedition.
8. Misfortunes of Caligastia
(752.3) 66:8.2 It should be noted that both Lucifer and Caligastia had been patiently instructed and lovingly warned respecting their critical tendencies and the subtle development of their pride of self and its associated exaggeration of the feeling of self-importance. But all of these attempts to help had been misconstrued as unwarranted criticism and as unjustified interference with personal liberties. Both Caligastia and Lucifer judged their friendly advisers as being actuated by the very reprehensible motives which were beginning to dominate their own distorted thinking and misguided planning. They judged their unselfish advisers by their own evolving selfishness.
(752.4) 66:8.3 From the arrival of Prince Caligastia, planetary civilization progressed in a fairly normal manner for almost three hundred thousand years. Aside from being a life-modification sphere and therefore subject to numerous irregularities and unusual episodes of evolutionary fluctuation, Urantia progressed very satisfactorily in its planetary career up to the times of the Lucifer rebellion and the concurrent Caligastia betrayal. All subsequent history has been definitely modified by this catastrophic blunder as well as by the later failure of Adam and Eve to fulfill their planetary mission.
(752.5) 66:8.4 The Prince of Urantia went into darkness at the time of the Lucifer rebellion, thus precipitating the long confusion of the planet. He was subsequently deprived of sovereign authority by the co-ordinate action of the constellation rulers and other universe authorities. He shared the inevitable vicissitudes of isolated Urantia down to the time of Adam’s sojourn on the planet and contributed something to the miscarriage of the plan to uplift the mortal races through the infusion of the lifeblood of the new violet race — the descendants of Adam and Eve.
(753.1) 66:8.5 The power of the fallen Prince to disturb human affairs was enormously curtailed by the mortal incarnation of Machiventa Melchizedek in the days of Abraham; and subsequently, during the life of Michael in the flesh, this traitorous Prince was finally shorn of all authority on Urantia.
(753.2) 66:8.6 The doctrine of a personal devil on Urantia, though it had some foundation in the planetary presence of the traitorous and iniquitous Caligastia, was nevertheless wholly fictitious in its teachings that such a “devil” could influence the normal human mind against its free and natural choosing. Even before Michael’s bestowal on Urantia, neither Caligastia nor Daligastia was ever able to oppress mortals or to coerce any normal individual into doing anything against the human will. The free will of man is supreme in moral affairs; even the indwelling Thought Adjuster refuses to compel man to think a single thought or to perform a single act against the choosing of man’s own will.
(753.3) 66:8.7 And now this rebel of the realm, shorn of all power to harm his former subjects, awaits the final adjudication, by the Uversa Ancients of Days, of all who participated in the Lucifer rebellion.
(753.4) 66:8.8 [Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 67
The Planetary Rebellion
1. The Caligastia Betrayal
(754.3) 67:1.2 In the course of this inspection Satan informed Caligastia of Lucifer’s then proposed “Declaration of Liberty,” and as we now know, the Prince agreed to betray the planet upon the announcement of the rebellion. The loyal universe personalities look with peculiar disdain upon Prince Caligastia because of this premeditated betrayal of trust. The Creator Son voiced this contempt when he said: “You are like your leader, Lucifer, and you have sinfully perpetuated his iniquity. He was a falsifier from the beginning of his self-exaltation because he abode not in the truth.”
(754.4) 67:1.3 In all the administrative work of a local universe no high trust is deemed more sacred than that reposed in a Planetary Prince who assumes responsibility for the welfare and guidance of the evolving mortals on a newly inhabited world. And of all forms of evil, none are more destructive of personality status than betrayal of trust and disloyalty to one’s confiding friends. In committing this deliberate sin, Caligastia so completely distorted his personality that his mind has never since been able fully to regain its equilibrium.
(754.5) 67:1.4 There are many ways of looking at sin, but from the universe philosophic viewpoint sin is the attitude of a personality who is knowingly resisting cosmic reality. Error might be regarded as a misconception or distortion of reality. Evil is a partial realization of, or maladjustment to, universe realities. But sin is a purposeful resistance to divine reality — a conscious choosing to oppose spiritual progress — while iniquity consists in an open and persistent defiance of recognized reality and signifies such a degree of personality disintegration as to border on cosmic insanity.
(755.1) 67:1.5 Error suggests lack of intellectual keenness; evil, deficiency of wisdom; sin, abject spiritual poverty; but iniquity is indicative of vanishing personality control.
(755.2) 67:1.6 And when sin has so many times been chosen and so often been repeated, it may become habitual. Habitual sinners can easily become iniquitous, become wholehearted rebels against the universe and all of its divine realities. While all manner of sins may be forgiven, we doubt whether the established iniquiter would ever sincerely experience sorrow for his misdeeds or accept forgiveness for his sins.
2. The Outbreak of Rebellion
(755.4) 67:2.2 The presentation of this astounding demand was followed by the masterly appeal of Van, chairman of the supreme council of co-ordination. This distinguished administrator and able jurist branded the proposed course of Caligastia as an act bordering on planetary rebellion and appealed to his conferees to abstain from all participation until an appeal could be taken to Lucifer, the System Sovereign of Satania; and he won the support of the entire staff. Accordingly, appeal was taken to Jerusem, and forthwith came back the orders designating Caligastia as supreme sovereign on Urantia and commanding absolute and unquestioning allegiance to his mandates. And it was in reply to this amazing message that the noble Van made his memorable address of seven hours’ length in which he formally drew his indictment of Daligastia, Caligastia, and Lucifer as standing in contempt of the sovereignty of the universe of Nebadon; and he appealed to the Most Highs of Edentia for support and confirmation.
(755.5) 67:2.3 Meantime the system circuits had been severed; Urantia was isolated. Every group of celestial life on the planet found itself suddenly and without warning isolated, utterly cut off from all outside counsel and advice.
(755.6) 67:2.4 Daligastia formally proclaimed Caligastia “God of Urantia and supreme over all.” With this proclamation before them, the issues were clearly drawn; and each group drew off by itself and began deliberations, discussions destined eventually to determine the fate of every superhuman personality on the planet.
(755.7) 67:2.5 Seraphim and cherubim and other celestial beings were involved in the decisions of this bitter struggle, this long and sinful conflict. Many superhuman groups that chanced to be on Urantia at the time of its isolation were detained here and, like the seraphim and their associates, were compelled to choose between sin and righteousness — between the ways of Lucifer and the will of the unseen Father.
(756.1) 67:2.6 For more than seven years this struggle continued. Not until every personality concerned had made a final decision, would or did the authorities of Edentia interfere or intervene. Not until then did Van and his loyal associates receive vindication and release from their prolonged anxiety and intolerable suspense.
3. The Seven Crucial Years
(756.3) 67:3.2 On Urantia forty members of the corporeal staff of one hundred (including Van) refused to join the insurrection. Many of the staff’s human assistants (modified and otherwise) were also brave and noble defenders of Michael and his universe government. There was a terrible loss of personalities among seraphim and cherubim. Almost one half of the administrator and transition seraphim assigned to the planet joined their leader and Daligastia in support of the cause of Lucifer. Forty thousand one hundred and nineteen of the primary midway creatures joined hands with Caligastia, but the remainder of these beings remained true to their trust.
(756.4) 67:3.3 The traitorous Prince marshaled the disloyal midway creatures and other groups of rebel personalities and organized them to execute his bidding, while Van assembled the loyal midwayers and other faithful groups and began the great battle for the salvation of the planetary staff and other marooned celestial personalities.
(756.5) 67:3.4 During the times of this struggle the loyalists dwelt in an unwalled and poorly protected settlement a few miles to the east of Dalamatia, but their dwellings were guarded day and night by the alert and ever-watchful loyal midway creatures, and they had possession of the priceless tree of life.
(756.6) 67:3.5 Upon the outbreak of rebellion, loyal cherubim and seraphim, with the aid of three faithful midwayers, assumed the custody of the tree of life and permitted only the forty loyalists of the staff and their associated modified mortals to partake of the fruit and leaves of this energy plant. There were fifty-six of these modified Andonite associates of the staff, sixteen of the Andonite attendants of the disloyal staff refusing to go into rebellion with their masters.
(756.7) 67:3.6 Throughout the seven crucial years of the Caligastia rebellion, Van was wholly devoted to the work of ministry to his loyal army of men, midwayers, and angels. The spiritual insight and moral steadfastness which enabled Van to maintain such an unshakable attitude of loyalty to the universe government was the product of clear thinking, wise reasoning, logical judgment, sincere motivation, unselfish purpose, intelligent loyalty, experiential memory, disciplined character, and the unquestioning dedication of his personality to the doing of the will of the Father in Paradise.
(756.8) 67:3.7 This seven years of waiting was a time of heart searching and soul discipline. Such crises in the affairs of a universe demonstrate the tremendous influence of mind as a factor in spiritual choosing. Education, training, and experience are factors in most of the vital decisions of all evolutionary moral creatures. But it is entirely possible for the indwelling spirit to make direct contact with the decision-determining powers of the human personality so as to empower the fully consecrated will of the creature to perform amazing acts of loyal devotion to the will and the way of the Father in Paradise. And this is just what occurred in the experience of Amadon, the modified human associate of Van.
(757.1) 67:3.8 Amadon is the outstanding human hero of the Lucifer rebellion. This male descendant of Andon and Fonta was one of the one hundred who contributed life plasm to the Prince’s staff, and ever since that event he had been attached to Van as his associate and human assistant. Amadon elected to stand with his chief throughout the long and trying struggle. And it was an inspiring sight to behold this child of the evolutionary races standing unmoved by the sophistries of Daligastia while throughout the seven-year struggle he and his loyal associates resisted with unyielding fortitude all of the deceptive teachings of the brilliant Caligastia.
(757.2) 67:3.9 Caligastia, with a maximum of intelligence and a vast experience in universe affairs, went astray — embraced sin. Amadon, with a minimum of intelligence and utterly devoid of universe experience, remained steadfast in the service of the universe and in loyalty to his associate. Van utilized both mind and spirit in a magnificent and effective combination of intellectual determination and spiritual insight, thereby achieving an experiential level of personality realization of the highest attainable order. Mind and spirit, when fully united, are potential for the creation of superhuman values, even morontia realities.
(757.3) 67:3.10 There is no end to the recital of the stirring events of these tragic days. But at last the final decision of the last personality was made, and then, but only then, did a Most High of Edentia arrive with the emergency Melchizedeks to seize authority on Urantia. The Caligastia panoramic reign-records on Jerusem were obliterated, and the probationary era of planetary rehabilitation was inaugurated.
4. The Caligastia One Hundred after Rebellion
(757.5) 67:4.2 The sixty members of the planetary staff who went into rebellion chose Nod as their leader. They worked wholeheartedly for the rebel Prince but soon discovered that they were deprived of the sustenance of the system life circuits. They awakened to the fact that they had been degraded to the status of mortal beings. They were indeed superhuman but, at the same time, material and mortal. In an effort to increase their numbers, Daligastia ordered immediate resort to sexual reproduction, knowing full well that the original sixty and their forty-four modified Andonite associates were doomed to suffer extinction by death, sooner or later. After the fall of Dalamatia the disloyal staff migrated to the north and the east. Their descendants were long known as the Nodites, and their dwelling place as “the land of Nod.”
(758.1) 67:4.3 The presence of these extraordinary supermen and superwomen, stranded by rebellion and presently mating with the sons and daughters of earth, easily gave origin to those traditional stories of the gods coming down to mate with mortals. And thus originated the thousand and one legends of a mythical nature, but founded on the facts of the postrebellion days, which later found a place in the folk tales and traditions of the various peoples whose ancestors had participated in these contacts with the Nodites and their descendants.
(758.2) 67:4.4 The staff rebels, deprived of spiritual sustenance, eventually died a natural death. And much of the subsequent idolatry of the human races grew out of the desire to perpetuate the memory of these highly honored beings of the days of Caligastia.
(758.3) 67:4.5 When the staff of one hundred came to Urantia, they were temporarily detached from their Thought Adjusters. Immediately upon the arrival of the Melchizedek receivers the loyal personalities (except Van) were returned to Jerusem and were reunited with their waiting Adjusters. We know not the fate of the sixty staff rebels; their Adjusters still tarry on Jerusem. Matters will undoubtedly rest as they now are until the entire Lucifer rebellion is finally adjudicated and the fate of all participants decreed.
(758.4) 67:4.6 It was very difficult for such beings as angels and midwayers to conceive of brilliant and trusted rulers like Caligastia and Daligastia going astray — committing traitorous sin. Those beings who fell into sin — they did not deliberately or premeditatedly enter upon rebellion — were misled by their superiors, deceived by their trusted leaders. It was likewise easy to win the support of the primitive-minded evolutionary mortals.
(758.5) 67:4.7 The vast majority of all human and superhuman beings who were victims of the Lucifer rebellion on Jerusem and the various misled planets have long since heartily repented of their folly; and we truly believe that all such sincere penitents will in some manner be rehabilitated and restored to some phase of universe service when the Ancients of Days finally complete the adjudication of the affairs of the Satania rebellion, which they have so recently begun.
5. Immediate Results of Rebellion
(758.7) 67:5.2 Very soon after the rebellion the entire staff of sedition were engaged in energetic defense of the city against the hordes of semisavages who besieged its walls as a result of the doctrines of liberty which had been prematurely taught them. And years before the beautiful headquarters went down beneath the southern waves, the misled and mistaught tribes of the Dalamatia hinterland had already swept down in semisavage assault on the splendid city, driving the secession staff and their associates northward.
(759.1) 67:5.3 The Caligastia scheme for the immediate reconstruction of human society in accordance with his ideas of individual freedom and group liberties, proved a swift and more or less complete failure. Society quickly sank back to its old biologic level, and the forward struggle began all over, starting not very far in advance of where it was at the beginning of the Caligastia regime, this upheaval having left the world in confusion worse confounded.
(759.2) 67:5.4 One hundred and sixty-two years after the rebellion a tidal wave swept up over Dalamatia, and the planetary headquarters sank beneath the waters of the sea, and this land did not again emerge until almost every vestige of the noble culture of those splendid ages had been obliterated.
(759.3) 67:5.5 When the first capital of the world was engulfed, it harbored only the lowest types of the Sangik races of Urantia, renegades who had already converted the Father’s temple into a shrine dedicated to Nog, the false god of light and fire.
6. Van — The Steadfast
(759.5) 67:6.2 Before the arrival of the Melchizedek receivers, Van placed the administration of human affairs in the hands of ten commissions of four each, groups identical with those of the Prince’s regime. The senior resident Life Carriers assumed temporary leadership of this council of forty, which functioned throughout the seven years of waiting. Similar groups of Amadonites assumed these responsibilities when the thirty-nine loyal staff members returned to Jerusem.
(759.6) 67:6.3 These Amadonites were derived from the group of 144 loyal Andonites to which Amadon belonged, and who have become known by his name. This group comprised thirty-nine men and one hundred and five women. Fifty-six of this number were of immortality status, and all (except Amadon) were translated along with the loyal members of the staff. The remainder of this noble band continued on earth to the end of their mortal days under the leadership of Van and Amadon. They were the biologic leaven which multiplied and continued to furnish leadership for the world down through the long dark ages of the postrebellion era.
(759.7) 67:6.4 Van was left on Urantia until the time of Adam, remaining as titular head of all superhuman personalities functioning on the planet. He and Amadon were sustained by the technique of the tree of life in conjunction with the specialized life ministry of the Melchizedeks for over one hundred and fifty thousand years.
(759.8) 67:6.5 The affairs of Urantia were for a long time administered by a council of planetary receivers, twelve Melchizedeks, confirmed by the mandate of the senior constellation ruler, the Most High Father of Norlatiadek. Associated with the Melchizedek receivers was an advisory council consisting of: one of the loyal aids of the fallen Prince, the two resident Life Carriers, a Trinitized Son in apprenticeship training, a volunteer Teacher Son, a Brilliant Evening Star of Avalon (periodically), the chiefs of seraphim and cherubim, advisers from two neighboring planets, the director general of subordinate angelic life, and Van, the commander in chief of the midway creatures. And thus was Urantia governed and administered until the arrival of Adam. It is not strange that the courageous and loyal Van was assigned a place on the council of planetary receivers which for so long administered the affairs of Urantia.
(760.1) 67:6.6 The twelve Melchizedek receivers of Urantia did heroic work. They preserved the remnants of civilization, and their planetary policies were faithfully executed by Van. Within one thousand years after the rebellion he had more than three hundred and fifty advanced groups scattered abroad in the world. These outposts of civilization consisted largely of the descendants of the loyal Andonites slightly admixed with the Sangik races, particularly the blue men, and with the Nodites.
(760.2) 67:6.7 Notwithstanding the terrible setback of rebellion there were many good strains of biologic promise on earth. Under the supervision of the Melchizedek receivers, Van and Amadon continued the work of fostering the natural evolution of the human race, carrying forward the physical evolution of man until it reached that culminating attainment which warranted the dispatch of a Material Son and Daughter to Urantia.
(760.3) 67:6.8 Van and Amadon remained on earth until shortly after the arrival of Adam and Eve. Some years thereafter they were translated to Jerusem, where Van was reunited with his waiting Adjuster. Van now serves in behalf of Urantia while awaiting the order to go forward on the long, long trail to Paradise perfection and the unrevealed destiny of the assembling Corps of Mortal Finality.
(760.4) 67:6.9 It should be recorded that, when Van appealed to the Most Highs of Edentia after Lucifer had sustained Caligastia on Urantia, the Constellation Fathers dispatched an immediate decision sustaining Van on every point of his contention. This verdict failed to reach him because the planetary circuits of communication were severed while it was in transit. Only recently was this actual ruling discovered lodged in the possession of a relay energy transmitter where it had been marooned ever since the isolation of Urantia. Without this discovery, made as the result of the investigations of the Urantia midwayers, the release of this decision would have awaited the restoration of Urantia to the constellation circuits. And this apparent accident of interplanetary communication was possible because energy transmitters can receive and transmit intelligence, but they cannot initiate communication.
(760.5) 67:6.10 The technical status of Van on the legal records of Satania was not actually and finally settled until this ruling of the Edentia Fathers was recorded on Jerusem.
7. Remote Repercussions of Sin
(761.1) 67:7.2 But not so with the external repercussions of sin: The impersonal (centrifugal) consequences of embraced sin are both inevitable and collective, being of concern to every creature functioning within the affect-range of such events.
(761.2) 67:7.3 By fifty thousand years after the collapse of the planetary administration, earthly affairs were so disorganized and retarded that the human race had gained very little over the general evolutionary status existing at the time of Caligastia’s arrival three hundred and fifty thousand years previously. In certain respects progress had been made; in other directions much ground had been lost.
(761.3) 67:7.4 Sin is never purely local in its effects. The administrative sectors of the universes are organismal; the plight of one personality must to a certain extent be shared by all. Sin, being an attitude of the person toward reality, is destined to exhibit its inherent negativistic harvest upon any and all related levels of universe values. But the full consequences of erroneous thinking, evil-doing, or sinful planning are experienced only on the level of actual performance. The transgression of universe law may be fatal in the physical realm without seriously involving the mind or impairing the spiritual experience. Sin is fraught with fatal consequences to personality survival only when it is the attitude of the whole being, when it stands for the choosing of the mind and the willing of the soul.
(761.4) 67:7.5 Evil and sin visit their consequences in material and social realms and may sometimes even retard spiritual progress on certain levels of universe reality, but never does the sin of any being rob another of the realization of the divine right of personality survival. Eternal survival can be jeopardized only by the decisions of the mind and the choice of the soul of the individual himself.
(761.5) 67:7.6 Sin on Urantia did very little to delay biologic evolution, but it did operate to deprive the mortal races of the full benefit of the Adamic inheritance. Sin enormously retards intellectual development, moral growth, social progress, and mass spiritual attainment. But it does not prevent the highest spiritual achievement by any individual who chooses to know God and sincerely do his divine will.
(761.6) 67:7.7 Caligastia rebelled, Adam and Eve did default, but no mortal subsequently born on Urantia has suffered in his personal spiritual experience because of these blunders. Every mortal born on Urantia since Caligastia’s rebellion has been in some manner time-penalized, but the future welfare of such souls has never been in the least eternity-jeopardized. No person is ever made to suffer vital spiritual deprivation because of the sin of another. Sin is wholly personal as to moral guilt or spiritual consequences, notwithstanding its far-flung repercussions in administrative, intellectual, and social domains.
(761.7) 67:7.8 While we cannot fathom the wisdom that permits such catastrophes, we can always discern the beneficial outworking of these local disturbances as they are reflected out upon the universe at large.
8. The Human Hero of the Rebellion
(762.1) 67:8.2 At the time of these momentous transactions I was stationed on Edentia, and I am still conscious of the exhilaration I experienced as I perused the Salvington broadcasts which told from day to day of the unbelievable steadfastness, the transcendent devotion, and the exquisite loyalty of this onetime semisavage springing from the experimental and original stock of the Andonic race.
(762.2) 67:8.3 From Edentia up through Salvington and even on to Uversa, for seven long years the first inquiry of all subordinate celestial life regarding the Satania rebellion, ever and always, was: “What of Amadon of Urantia, does he still stand unmoved?”
(762.3) 67:8.4 If the Lucifer rebellion has handicapped the local system and its fallen worlds, if the loss of this Son and his misled associates has temporarily hampered the progress of the constellation of Norlatiadek, then weigh the effect of the far-flung presentation of the inspiring performance of this one child of nature and his determined band of 143 comrades in standing steadfast for the higher concepts of universe management and administration in the face of such tremendous and adverse pressure exerted by his disloyal superiors. And let me assure you, this has already done more good in the universe of Nebadon and the superuniverse of Orvonton than can ever be outweighed by the sum total of all the evil and sorrow of the Lucifer rebellion.
(762.4) 67:8.5 And all this is a beautifully touching and superbly magnificent illumination of the wisdom of the Father’s universal plan for mobilizing the Corps of Mortal Finality on Paradise and for recruiting this vast group of mysterious servants of the future largely from the common clay of the mortals of ascending progression — just such mortals as the impregnable Amadon.
(762.5) 67:8.6 [Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 68
The Dawn of Civilization
(763.2) 68:0.2 Civilization is a racial acquirement; it is not biologically inherent; hence must all children be reared in an environment of culture, while each succeeding generation of youth must receive anew its education. The superior qualities of civilization — scientific, philosophic, and religious — are not transmitted from one generation to another by direct inheritance. These cultural achievements are preserved only by the enlightened conservation of social inheritance.
(763.3) 68:0.3 Social evolution of the co-operative order was initiated by the Dalamatia teachers, and for three hundred thousand years mankind was nurtured in the idea of group activities. The blue man most of all profited by these early social teachings, the red man to some extent, and the black man least of all. In more recent times the yellow race and the white race have presented the most advanced social development on Urantia.
1. Protective Socialization
(763.5) 68:1.2 Association early became the price of survival. The lone man was helpless unless he bore a tribal mark which testified that he belonged to a group which would certainly avenge any assault made upon him. Even in the days of Cain it was fatal to go abroad alone without some mark of group association. Civilization has become man’s insurance against violent death, while the premiums are paid by submission to society’s numerous law demands.
(763.6) 68:1.3 Primitive society was thus founded on the reciprocity of necessity and on the enhanced safety of association. And human society has evolved in agelong cycles as a result of this isolation fear and by means of reluctant co-operation.
(763.7) 68:1.4 Primitive human beings early learned that groups are vastly greater and stronger than the mere sum of their individual units. One hundred men united and working in unison can move a great stone; a score of well-trained guardians of the peace can restrain an angry mob. And so society was born, not of mere association of numbers, but rather as a result of the organization of intelligent co-operators. But co-operation is not a natural trait of man; he learns to co-operate first through fear and then later because he discovers it is most beneficial in meeting the difficulties of time and guarding against the supposed perils of eternity.
(764.1) 68:1.5 The peoples who thus early organized themselves into a primitive society became more successful in their attacks on nature as well as in defense against their fellows; they possessed greater survival possibilities; hence has civilization steadily progressed on Urantia, notwithstanding its many setbacks. And it is only because of the enhancement of survival value in association that man’s many blunders have thus far failed to stop or destroy human civilization.
(764.2) 68:1.6 That contemporary cultural society is a rather recent phenomenon is well shown by the present-day survival of such primitive social conditions as characterize the Australian natives and the Bushmen and Pygmies of Africa. Among these backward peoples may be observed something of the early group hostility, personal suspicion, and other highly antisocial traits which were so characteristic of all primitive races. These miserable remnants of the nonsocial peoples of ancient times bear eloquent testimony to the fact that the natural individualistic tendency of man cannot successfully compete with the more potent and powerful organizations and associations of social progression. These backward and suspicious antisocial races that speak a different dialect every forty or fifty miles illustrate what a world you might now be living in but for the combined teaching of the corporeal staff of the Planetary Prince and the later labors of the Adamic group of racial uplifters.
(764.3) 68:1.7 The modern phrase, “back to nature,” is a delusion of ignorance, a belief in the reality of the onetime fictitious “golden age.” The only basis for the legend of the golden age is the historic fact of Dalamatia and Eden. But these improved societies were far from the realization of utopian dreams.
2. Factors in Social Progression
(764.5) 68:2.2 While the level of intelligence has contributed considerably to the rate of cultural progress, society is essentially designed to lessen the risk element in the individual’s mode of living, and it has progressed just as fast as it has succeeded in lessening pain and increasing the pleasure element in life. Thus does the whole social body push on slowly toward the goal of destiny — extinction or survival — depending on whether that goal is self-maintenance or self-gratification. Self-maintenance originates society, while excessive self-gratification destroys civilization.
(764.6) 68:2.3 Society is concerned with self-perpetuation, self-maintenance, and self-gratification, but human self-realization is worthy of becoming the immediate goal of many cultural groups.
(765.1) 68:2.4 The herd instinct in natural man is hardly sufficient to account for the development of such a social organization as now exists on Urantia. Though this innate gregarious propensity lies at the bottom of human society, much of man’s sociability is an acquirement. Two great influences which contributed to the early association of human beings were food hunger and sex love; these instinctive urges man shares with the animal world. Two other emotions which drove human beings together and held them together were vanity and fear, more particularly ghost fear.
(765.2) 68:2.5 History is but the record of man’s agelong food struggle. Primitive man only thought when he was hungry; food saving was his first self-denial, self-discipline. With the growth of society, food hunger ceased to be the only incentive for mutual association. Numerous other sorts of hunger, the realization of various needs, all led to the closer association of mankind. But today society is top-heavy with the overgrowth of supposed human needs. Occidental civilization of the twentieth century groans wearily under the tremendous overload of luxury and the inordinate multiplication of human desires and longings. Modern society is enduring the strain of one of its most dangerous phases of far-flung interassociation and highly complicated interdependence.
(765.3) 68:2.6 Hunger, vanity, and ghost fear were continuous in their social pressure, but sex gratification was transient and spasmodic. The sex urge alone did not impel primitive men and women to assume the heavy burdens of home maintenance. The early home was founded upon the sex restlessness of the male when deprived of frequent gratification and upon that devoted mother love of the human female, which in measure she shares with the females of all the higher animals. The presence of a helpless baby determined the early differentiation of male and female activities; the woman had to maintain a settled residence where she could cultivate the soil. And from earliest times, where woman was has always been regarded as the home.
(765.4) 68:2.7 Woman thus early became indispensable to the evolving social scheme, not so much because of the fleeting sex passion as in consequence of food requirement; she was an essential partner in self-maintenance. She was a food provider, a beast of burden, and a companion who would stand great abuse without violent resentment, and in addition to all of these desirable traits, she was an ever-present means of sex gratification.
(765.5) 68:2.8 Almost everything of lasting value in civilization has its roots in the family. The family was the first successful peace group, the man and woman learning how to adjust their antagonisms while at the same time teaching the pursuits of peace to their children.
(765.6) 68:2.9 The function of marriage in evolution is the insurance of race survival, not merely the realization of personal happiness; self-maintenance and self-perpetuation are the real objects of the home. Self-gratification is incidental and not essential except as an incentive insuring sex association. Nature demands survival, but the arts of civilization continue to increase the pleasures of marriage and the satisfactions of family life.
(765.7) 68:2.10 If vanity be enlarged to cover pride, ambition, and honor, then we may discern not only how these propensities contribute to the formation of human associations, but how they also hold men together, since such emotions are futile without an audience to parade before. Soon vanity associated with itself other emotions and impulses which required a social arena wherein they might exhibit and gratify themselves. This group of emotions gave origin to the early beginnings of all art, ceremonial, and all forms of sportive games and contests.
(766.1) 68:2.11 Vanity contributed mightily to the birth of society; but at the time of these revelations the devious strivings of a vainglorious generation threaten to swamp and submerge the whole complicated structure of a highly specialized civilization. Pleasure-want has long since superseded hunger-want; the legitimate social aims of self-maintenance are rapidly translating themselves into base and threatening forms of self-gratification. Self-maintenance builds society; unbridled self-gratification unfailingly destroys civilization.
3. Socializing Influence of Ghost Fear
(766.3) 68:3.2 Probably the greatest single factor in the evolution of human society was the ghost dream. Although most dreams greatly perturbed the primitive mind, the ghost dream actually terrorized early men, driving these superstitious dreamers into each other’s arms in willing and earnest association for mutual protection against the vague and unseen imaginary dangers of the spirit world. The ghost dream was one of the earliest appearing differences between the animal and human types of mind. Animals do not visualize survival after death.
(766.4) 68:3.3 Except for this ghost factor, all society was founded on fundamental needs and basic biologic urges. But ghost fear introduced a new factor in civilization, a fear which reaches out and away from the elemental needs of the individual, and which rises far above even the struggles to maintain the group. The dread of the departed spirits of the dead brought to light a new and amazing form of fear, an appalling and powerful terror, which contributed to whipping the loose social orders of early ages into the more thoroughly disciplined and better controlled primitive groups of ancient times. This senseless superstition, some of which still persists, prepared the minds of men, through superstitious fear of the unreal and the supernatural, for the later discovery of “the fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom.” The baseless fears of evolution are designed to be supplanted by the awe for Deity inspired by revelation. The early cult of ghost fear became a powerful social bond, and ever since that far-distant day mankind has been striving more or less for the attainment of spirituality.
(766.5) 68:3.4 Hunger and love drove men together; vanity and ghost fear held them together. But these emotions alone, without the influence of peace-promoting revelations, are unable to endure the strain of the suspicions and irritations of human interassociations. Without help from superhuman sources the strain of society breaks down upon reaching certain limits, and these very influences of social mobilization — hunger, love, vanity, and fear — conspire to plunge mankind into war and bloodshed.
(766.6) 68:3.5 The peace tendency of the human race is not a natural endowment; it is derived from the teachings of revealed religion, from the accumulated experience of the progressive races, but more especially from the teachings of Jesus, the Prince of Peace.
4. Evolution of the Mores
(767.2) 68:4.2 It must be borne in mind that the mores originated in an effort to adjust group living to the conditions of mass existence; the mores were man’s first social institution. And all of these tribal reactions grew out of the effort to avoid pain and humiliation while at the same time seeking to enjoy pleasure and power. The origin of folkways, like the origin of languages, is always unconscious and unintentional and therefore always shrouded in mystery.
(767.3) 68:4.3 Ghost fear drove primitive man to envision the supernatural and thus securely laid the foundations for those powerful social influences of ethics and religion which in turn preserved inviolate the mores and customs of society from generation to generation. The one thing which early established and crystallized the mores was the belief that the dead were jealous of the ways by which they had lived and died; therefore would they visit dire punishment upon those living mortals who dared to treat with careless disdain the rules of living which they had honored when in the flesh. All this is best illustrated by the present reverence of the yellow race for their ancestors. Later developing primitive religion greatly reinforced ghost fear in stabilizing the mores, but advancing civilization has increasingly liberated mankind from the bondage of fear and the slavery of superstition.
(767.4) 68:4.4 Prior to the liberating and liberalizing instruction of the Dalamatia teachers, ancient man was held a helpless victim of the ritual of the mores; the primitive savage was hedged about by an endless ceremonial. Everything he did from the time of awakening in the morning to the moment he fell asleep in his cave at night had to be done just so — in accordance with the folkways of the tribe. He was a slave to the tyranny of usage; his life contained nothing free, spontaneous, or original. There was no natural progress toward a higher mental, moral, or social existence.
(767.5) 68:4.5 Early man was mightily gripped by custom; the savage was a veritable slave to usage; but there have arisen ever and anon those variations from type who have dared to inaugurate new ways of thinking and improved methods of living. Nevertheless, the inertia of primitive man constitutes the biologic safety brake against precipitation too suddenly into the ruinous maladjustment of a too rapidly advancing civilization.
(767.6) 68:4.6 But these customs are not an unmitigated evil; their evolution should continue. It is nearly fatal to the continuance of civilization to undertake their wholesale modification by radical revolution. Custom has been the thread of continuity which has held civilization together. The path of human history is strewn with the remnants of discarded customs and obsolete social practices; but no civilization has endured which abandoned its mores except for the adoption of better and more fit customs.
(767.7) 68:4.7 The survival of a society depends chiefly on the progressive evolution of its mores. The process of custom evolution grows out of the desire for experimentation; new ideas are put forward — competition ensues. A progressing civilization embraces the progressive idea and endures; time and circumstance finally select the fitter group for survival. But this does not mean that each separate and isolated change in the composition of human society has been for the better. No! indeed no! for there have been many, many retrogressions in the long forward struggle of Urantia civilization.
5. Land Techniques — Maintenance Arts
(768.2) 68:5.2 The earliest human cultures arose along the rivers of the Eastern Hemisphere, and there were four great steps in the forward march of civilization. They were:
(768.3) 68:5.3 1. The collection stage. Food coercion, hunger, led to the first form of industrial organization, the primitive food-gathering lines. Sometimes such a line of hunger march would be ten miles long as it passed over the land gleaning food. This was the primitive nomadic stage of culture and is the mode of life now followed by the African Bushmen.(769.4) 68:5.12 Human society has evolved from the hunting stage through that of the herders to the territorial stage of agriculture. And each stage of this progressive civilization was accompanied by less and less of nomadism; more and more man began to live at home.
(768.4) 68:5.4 2. The hunting stage. The invention of weapon tools enabled man to become a hunter and thus to gain considerable freedom from food slavery. A thoughtful Andonite who had severely bruised his fist in a serious combat rediscovered the idea of using a long stick for his arm and a piece of hard flint, bound on the end with sinews, for his fist. Many tribes made independent discoveries of this sort, and these various forms of hammers represented one of the great forward steps in human civilization. Today some Australian natives have progressed little beyond this stage.
(768.5) 68:5.5 The blue men became expert hunters and trappers; by fencing the rivers they caught fish in great numbers, drying the surplus for winter use. Many forms of ingenious snares and traps were employed in catching game, but the more primitive races did not hunt the larger animals.
(768.6) 68:5.6 3. The pastoral stage. This phase of civilization was made possible by the domestication of animals. The Arabs and the natives of Africa are among the more recent pastoral peoples.
(768.7) 68:5.7 Pastoral living afforded further relief from food slavery; man learned to live on the interest of his capital, the increase in his flocks; and this provided more leisure for culture and progress.
(768.8) 68:5.8 Prepastoral society was one of sex co-operation, but the spread of animal husbandry reduced women to the depths of social slavery. In earlier times it was man’s duty to secure the animal food, woman’s business to provide the vegetable edibles. Therefore, when man entered the pastoral era of his existence, woman’s dignity fell greatly. She must still toil to produce the vegetable necessities of life, whereas the man need only go to his herds to provide an abundance of animal food. Man thus became relatively independent of woman; throughout the entire pastoral age woman’s status steadily declined. By the close of this era she had become scarcely more than a human animal, consigned to work and to bear human offspring, much as the animals of the herd were expected to labor and bring forth young. The men of the pastoral ages had great love for their cattle; all the more pity they could not have developed a deeper affection for their wives.
(769.1) 68:5.9 4. The agricultural stage. This era was brought about by the domestication of plants, and it represents the highest type of material civilization. Both Caligastia and Adam endeavored to teach horticulture and agriculture. Adam and Eve were gardeners, not shepherds, and gardening was an advanced culture in those days. The growing of plants exerts an ennobling influence on all races of mankind.
(769.2) 68:5.10 Agriculture more than quadrupled the land-man ratio of the world. It may be combined with the pastoral pursuits of the former cultural stage. When the three stages overlap, men hunt and women till the soil.
(769.3) 68:5.11 There has always been friction between the herders and the tillers of the soil. The hunter and herder were militant, warlike; the agriculturist is a more peace-loving type. Association with animals suggests struggle and force; association with plants instills patience, quiet, and peace. Agriculture and industrialism are the activities of peace. But the weakness of both, as world social activities, is that they lack excitement and adventure.
(769.5) 68:5.13 And now is industry supplementing agriculture, with consequently increased urbanization and multiplication of nonagricultural groups of citizenship classes. But an industrial era cannot hope to survive if its leaders fail to recognize that even the highest social developments must ever rest upon a sound agricultural basis.
6. Evolution of Culture
(769.7) 68:6.2 Man’s intelligence, by means of the arts and sciences, increased the land yield; at the same time the natural increase in offspring was somewhat brought under control, and thus was provided the sustenance and leisure to build a cultural civilization.
(769.8) 68:6.3 Human society is controlled by a law which decrees that the population must vary directly in accordance with the land arts and inversely with a given standard of living. Throughout these early ages, even more than at present, the law of supply and demand as concerned men and land determined the estimated value of both. During the times of plentiful land — unoccupied territory — the need for men was great, and therefore the value of human life was much enhanced; hence the loss of life was more horrifying. During periods of land scarcity and associated overpopulation, human life became comparatively cheapened so that war, famine, and pestilence were regarded with less concern.
(770.1) 68:6.4 When the land yield is reduced or the population is increased, the inevitable struggle is renewed; the very worst traits of human nature are brought to the surface. The improvement of the land yield, the extension of the mechanical arts, and the reduction of population all tend to foster the development of the better side of human nature.
(770.2) 68:6.5 Frontier society develops the unskilled side of humanity; the fine arts and true scientific progress, together with spiritual culture, have all thrived best in the larger centers of life when supported by an agricultural and industrial population slightly under the land-man ratio. Cities always multiply the power of their inhabitants for either good or evil.
(770.3) 68:6.6 The size of the family has always been influenced by the standards of living. The higher the standard the smaller the family, up to the point of established status or gradual extinction.
(770.4) 68:6.7 All down through the ages the standards of living have determined the quality of a surviving population in contrast with mere quantity. Local class standards of living give origin to new social castes, new mores. When standards of living become too complicated or too highly luxurious, they speedily become suicidal. Caste is the direct result of the high social pressure of keen competition produced by dense populations.
(770.5) 68:6.8 The early races often resorted to practices designed to restrict population; all primitive tribes killed deformed and sickly children. Girl babies were frequently killed before the times of wife purchase. Children were sometimes strangled at birth, but the favorite method was exposure. The father of twins usually insisted that one be killed since multiple births were believed to be caused either by magic or by infidelity. As a rule, however, twins of the same sex were spared. While these taboos on twins were once well-nigh universal, they were never a part of the Andonite mores; these peoples always regarded twins as omens of good luck.
(770.6) 68:6.9 Many races learned the technique of abortion, and this practice became very common after the establishment of the taboo on childbirth among the unmarried. It was long the custom for a maiden to kill her offspring, but among more civilized groups these illegitimate children became the wards of the girl’s mother. Many primitive clans were virtually exterminated by the practice of both abortion and infanticide. But regardless of the dictates of the mores, very few children were ever destroyed after having once been suckled — maternal affection is too strong.
(770.7) 68:6.10 Even in the twentieth century there persist remnants of these primitive population controls. There is a tribe in Australia whose mothers refuse to rear more than two or three children. Not long since, one cannibalistic tribe ate every fifth child born. In Madagascar some tribes still destroy all children born on certain unlucky days, resulting in the death of about twenty-five per cent of all babies.
(770.8) 68:6.11 From a world standpoint, overpopulation has never been a serious problem in the past, but if war is lessened and science increasingly controls human diseases, it may become a serious problem in the near future. At such a time the great test of the wisdom of world leadership will present itself. Will Urantia rulers have the insight and courage to foster the multiplication of the average or stabilized human being instead of the extremes of the supernormal and the enormously increasing groups of the subnormal? The normal man should be fostered; he is the backbone of civilization and the source of the mutant geniuses of the race. The subnormal man should be kept under society’s control; no more should be produced than are required to administer the lower levels of industry, those tasks requiring intelligence above the animal level but making such low-grade demands as to prove veritable slavery and bondage for the higher types of mankind.
(771.1) 68:6.12 [Presented by a Melchizedek sometime stationed on Urantia.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 69
Primitive Human Institutions
(772.2) 69:0.2 When human beings long maintain social groups, such aggregations always result in the creation of certain activity trends which culminate in institutionalization. Most of man’s institutions have proved to be laborsaving while at the same time contributing something to the enhancement of group security.
(772.3) 69:0.3 Civilized man takes great pride in the character, stability, and continuity of his established institutions, but all human institutions are merely the accumulated mores of the past as they have been conserved by taboos and dignified by religion. Such legacies become traditions, and traditions ultimately metamorphose into conventions.
1. Basic Human Institutions
(772.5) 69:1.2 Human institutions are of three general classes:
(772.6) 69:1.3 1. The institutions of self-maintenance. These institutions embrace those practices growing out of food hunger and its associated instincts of self-preservation. They include industry, property, war for gain, and all the regulative machinery of society. Sooner or later the fear instinct fosters the establishment of these institutions of survival by means of taboo, convention, and religious sanction. But fear, ignorance, and superstition have played a prominent part in the early origin and subsequent development of all human institutions.(773.1) 69:1.6 These three groups of social practices are intimately interrelated and minutely interdependent the one upon the other. On Urantia they represent a complex organization which functions as a single social mechanism.
(772.7) 69:1.4 2. The institutions of self-perpetuation. These are the establishments of society growing out of sex hunger, maternal instinct, and the higher tender emotions of the races. They embrace the social safeguards of the home and the school, of family life, education, ethics, and religion. They include marriage customs, war for defense, and home building.
(772.8) 69:1.5 3. The institutions of self-gratification. These are the practices growing out of vanity proclivities and pride emotions; and they embrace customs in dress and personal adornment, social usages, war for glory, dancing, amusement, games, and other phases of sensual gratification. But civilization has never evolved distinctive institutions of self-gratification.
2. The Dawn of Industry
(773.3) 69:2.2 Before the dawn of early frugality and primitive industry the lot of the average tribe was one of destitution and real suffering. Early man had to compete with the whole animal world for his food. Competition-gravity ever pulls man down toward the beast level; poverty is his natural and tyrannical estate. Wealth is not a natural gift; it results from labor, knowledge, and organization.
(773.4) 69:2.3 Primitive man was not slow to recognize the advantages of association. Association led to organization, and the first result of organization was division of labor, with its immediate saving of time and materials. These specializations of labor arose by adaptation to pressure — pursuing the paths of lessened resistance. Primitive savages never did any real work cheerfully or willingly. With them conformity was due to the coercion of necessity.
(773.5) 69:2.4 Primitive man disliked hard work, and he would not hurry unless confronted by grave danger. The time element in labor, the idea of doing a given task within a certain time limit, is entirely a modern notion. The ancients were never rushed. It was the double demands of the intense struggle for existence and of the ever-advancing standards of living that drove the naturally inactive races of early man into avenues of industry.
(773.6) 69:2.5 Labor, the efforts of design, distinguishes man from the beast, whose exertions are largely instinctive. The necessity for labor is man’s paramount blessing. The Prince’s staff all worked; they did much to ennoble physical labor on Urantia. Adam was a gardener; the God of the Hebrews labored — he was the creator and upholder of all things. The Hebrews were the first tribe to put a supreme premium on industry; they were the first people to decree that “he who does not work shall not eat.” But many of the religions of the world reverted to the early ideal of idleness. Jupiter was a reveler, and Buddha became a reflective devotee of leisure.
(773.7) 69:2.6 The Sangik tribes were fairly industrious when residing away from the tropics. But there was a long, long struggle between the lazy devotees of magic and the apostles of work — those who exercised foresight.
(773.8) 69:2.7 The first human foresight was directed toward the preservation of fire, water, and food. But primitive man was a natural-born gambler; he always wanted to get something for nothing, and all too often during these early times the success which accrued from patient practice was attributed to charms. Magic was slow to give way before foresight, self-denial, and industry.
3. The Specialization of Labor
(774.1) 69:3.2 1. Specialization based on sex. Woman’s work was derived from the selective presence of the child; women naturally love babies more than men do. Thus woman became the routine worker, while man became the hunter and fighter, engaging in accentuated periods of work and rest.(774.8) 69:3.9 The early specialists in industry were the flint flakers and stone masons; next came the smiths. Subsequently group specialization developed; whole families and clans dedicated themselves to certain sorts of labor. The origin of one of the earliest castes of priests, apart from the tribal medicine men, was due to the superstitious exaltation of a family of expert swordmakers.*
(774.2) 69:3.3 All down through the ages the taboos have operated to keep woman strictly in her own field. Man has most selfishly chosen the more agreeable work, leaving the routine drudgery to woman. Man has always been ashamed to do woman’s work, but woman has never shown any reluctance to doing man’s work. But strange to record, both men and women have always worked together in building and furnishing the home.
(774.3) 69:3.4 2. Modification consequent upon age and disease. These differences determined the next division of labor. The old men and cripples were early set to work making tools and weapons. They were later assigned to building irrigation works.
(774.4) 69:3.5 3. Differentiation based on religion. The medicine men were the first human beings to be exempted from physical toil; they were the pioneer professional class. The smiths were a small group who competed with the medicine men as magicians. Their skill in working with metals made the people afraid of them. The “white smiths” and the “black smiths” gave origin to the early beliefs in white and black magic. And this belief later became involved in the superstition of good and bad ghosts, good and bad spirits.
(774.5) 69:3.6 Smiths were the first nonreligious group to enjoy special privileges. They were regarded as neutrals during war, and this extra leisure led to their becoming, as a class, the politicians of primitive society. But through gross abuse of these privileges the smiths became universally hated, and the medicine men lost no time in fostering hatred for their competitors. In this first contest between science and religion, religion (superstition) won. After being driven out of the villages, the smiths maintained the first inns, public lodginghouses, on the outskirts of the settlements.
(774.6) 69:3.7 4. Master and slave. The next differentiation of labor grew out of the relations of the conqueror to the conquered, and that meant the beginning of human slavery.
(774.7) 69:3.8 5. Differentiation based on diverse physical and mental endowments. Further divisions of labor were favored by the inherent differences in men; all human beings are not born equal.
(774.9) 69:3.10 The first group specialists in industry were rock salt exporters and potters. Women made the plain pottery and men the fancy. Among some tribes sewing and weaving were done by women, in others by the men.
(774.10) 69:3.11 The early traders were women; they were employed as spies, carrying on commerce as a side line. Presently trade expanded, the women acting as intermediaries — jobbers. Then came the merchant class, charging a commission, profit, for their services. Growth of group barter developed into commerce; and following the exchange of commodities came the exchange of skilled labor.
4. The Beginnings of Trade
(775.2) 69:4.2 The first barter was conducted by armed traders who would leave their goods on a neutral spot. Women held the first markets; they were the earliest traders, and this was because they were the burden bearers; the men were warriors. Very early the trading counter was developed, a wall wide enough to prevent the traders reaching each other with weapons.
(775.3) 69:4.3 A fetish was used to stand guard over the deposits of goods for silent barter. Such market places were secure against theft; nothing would be removed except by barter or purchase; with a fetish on guard the goods were always safe. The early traders were scrupulously honest within their own tribes but regarded it as all right to cheat distant strangers. Even the early Hebrews recognized a separate code of ethics in their dealings with the gentiles.
(775.4) 69:4.4 For ages silent barter continued before men would meet, unarmed, on the sacred market place. These same market squares became the first places of sanctuary and in some countries were later known as “cities of refuge.” Any fugitive reaching the market place was safe and secure against attack.
(775.5) 69:4.5 The first weights were grains of wheat and other cereals. The first medium of exchange was a fish or a goat. Later the cow became a unit of barter.
(775.6) 69:4.6 Modern writing originated in the early trade records; the first literature of man was a trade-promotion document, a salt advertisement. Many of the earlier wars were fought over natural deposits, such as flint, salt, and metals. The first formal tribal treaty concerned the intertribalizing of a salt deposit. These treaty spots afforded opportunity for friendly and peaceful interchange of ideas and the intermingling of various tribes.
(775.7) 69:4.7 Writing progressed up through the stages of the “message stick,” knotted cords, picture writing, hieroglyphics, and wampum belts, to the early symbolic alphabets. Message sending evolved from the primitive smoke signal up through runners, animal riders, railroads, and airplanes, as well as telegraph, telephone, and wireless communication.
(775.8) 69:4.8 New ideas and better methods were carried around the inhabited world by the ancient traders. Commerce, linked with adventure, led to exploration and discovery. And all of these gave birth to transportation. Commerce has been the great civilizer through promoting the cross-fertilization of culture.
5. The Beginnings of Capital
(775.10) 69:5.2 The early banker was the valorous man of the tribe. He held the group treasures on deposit, while the entire clan would defend his hut in event of attack. Thus the accumulation of individual capital and group wealth immediately led to military organization. At first such precautions were designed to defend property against foreign raiders, but later on it became the custom to keep the military organization in practice by inaugurating raids on the property and wealth of neighboring tribes.
(776.1) 69:5.3 The basic urges which led to the accumulation of capital were:
(776.2) 69:5.4 1. Hunger — associated with foresight. Food saving and preservation meant power and comfort for those who possessed sufficient foresight thus to provide for future needs. Food storage was adequate insurance against famine and disaster. And the entire body of primitive mores was really designed to help man subordinate the present to the future.(776.10) 69:5.12 As civilization developed, men acquired new incentives for saving; new wants were rapidly added to the original food hunger. Poverty became so abhorred that only the rich were supposed to go direct to heaven when they died. Property became so highly valued that to give a pretentious feast would wipe a dishonor from one’s name.
(776.3) 69:5.5 2. Love of family — desire to provide for their wants. Capital represents the saving of property in spite of the pressure of the wants of today in order to insure against the demands of the future. A part of this future need may have to do with one’s posterity.
(776.4) 69:5.6 3. Vanity — longing to display one’s property accumulations. Extra clothing was one of the first badges of distinction. Collection vanity early appealed to the pride of man.
(776.5) 69:5.7 4. Position — eagerness to buy social and political prestige. There early sprang up a commercialized nobility, admission to which depended on the performance of some special service to royalty or was granted frankly for the payment of money.
(776.6) 69:5.8 5. Power — the craving to be master. Treasure lending was carried on as a means of enslavement, one hundred per cent a year being the loan rate of these ancient times. The moneylenders made themselves kings by creating a standing army of debtors. Bond servants were among the earliest form of property to be accumulated, and in olden days debt slavery extended even to the control of the body after death.
(776.7) 69:5.9 6. Fear of the ghosts of the dead — priest fees for protection. Men early began to give death presents to the priests with a view to having their property used to facilitate their progress through the next life. The priesthoods thus became very rich; they were chief among ancient capitalists.
(776.8) 69:5.10 7. Sex urge — the desire to buy one or more wives. Man’s first form of trading was woman exchange; it long preceded horse trading. But never did the barter in sex slaves advance society; such traffic was and is a racial disgrace, for at one and the same time it hindered the development of family life and polluted the biologic fitness of superior peoples.
(776.9) 69:5.11 8. Numerous forms of self-gratification. Some sought wealth because it conferred power; others toiled for property because it meant ease. Early man (and some later-day ones) tended to squander his resources on luxury. Intoxicants and drugs intrigued the primitive races.
(777.1) 69:5.13 Accumulations of wealth early became the badge of social distinction. Individuals in certain tribes would accumulate property for years just to create an impression by burning it up on some holiday or by freely distributing it to fellow tribesmen. This made them great men. Even modern peoples revel in the lavish distribution of Christmas gifts, while rich men endow great institutions of philanthropy and learning. Man’s technique varies, but his disposition remains quite unchanged.
(777.2) 69:5.14 But it is only fair to record that many an ancient rich man distributed much of his fortune because of the fear of being killed by those who coveted his treasures. Wealthy men commonly sacrificed scores of slaves to show disdain for wealth.
(777.3) 69:5.15 Though capital has tended to liberate man, it has greatly complicated his social and industrial organization. The abuse of capital by unfair capitalists does not destroy the fact that it is the basis of modern industrial society. Through capital and invention the present generation enjoys a higher degree of freedom than any that ever preceded it on earth. This is placed on record as a fact and not in justification of the many misuses of capital by thoughtless and selfish custodians.
6. Fire in Relation to Civilization
(777.5) 69:6.2 Fire building, by a single bound, forever separated man from animal; it is the basic human invention, or discovery. Fire enabled man to stay on the ground at night as all animals are afraid of it. Fire encouraged eventide social intercourse; it not only protected against cold and wild beasts but was also employed as security against ghosts. It was at first used more for light than heat; many backward tribes refuse to sleep unless a flame burns all night.
(777.6) 69:6.3 Fire was a great civilizer, providing man with his first means of being altruistic without loss by enabling him to give live coals to a neighbor without depriving himself. The household fire, which was attended by the mother or eldest daughter, was the first educator, requiring watchfulness and dependability. The early home was not a building but the family gathered about the fire, the family hearth. When a son founded a new home, he carried a firebrand from the family hearth.
(777.7) 69:6.4 Though Andon, the discoverer of fire, avoided treating it as an object of worship, many of his descendants regarded the flame as a fetish or as a spirit. They failed to reap the sanitary benefits of fire because they would not burn refuse. Primitive man feared fire and always sought to keep it in good humor, hence the sprinkling of incense. Under no circumstances would the ancients spit in a fire, nor would they ever pass between anyone and a burning fire. Even the iron pyrites and flints used in striking fire were held sacred by early mankind.
(777.8) 69:6.5 It was a sin to extinguish a flame; if a hut caught fire, it was allowed to burn. The fires of the temples and shrines were sacred and were never permitted to go out except that it was the custom to kindle new flames annually or after some calamity. Women were selected as priests because they were custodians of the home fires.
(778.1) 69:6.6 The early myths about how fire came down from the gods grew out of the observations of fire caused by lightning. These ideas of supernatural origin led directly to fire worship, and fire worship led to the custom of “passing through fire,” a practice carried on up to the times of Moses. And there still persists the idea of passing through fire after death. The fire myth was a great bond in early times and still persists in the symbolism of the Parsees.
(778.2) 69:6.7 Fire led to cooking, and “raw eaters” became a term of derision. And cooking lessened the expenditure of vital energy necessary for the digestion of food and so left early man some strength for social culture, while animal husbandry, by reducing the effort necessary to secure food, provided time for social activities.
(778.3) 69:6.8 It should be remembered that fire opened the doors to metalwork and led to the subsequent discovery of steam power and the present-day uses of electricity.
7. The Utilization of Animals
(778.5) 69:7.2 The domestication of animals came about accidentally. The savage would hunt herds much as the American Indians hunted the bison. By surrounding the herd they could keep control of the animals, thus being able to kill them as they were required for food. Later, corrals were constructed, and entire herds would be captured.
(778.6) 69:7.3 It was easy to tame some animals, but like the elephant, many of them would not reproduce in captivity. Still further on it was discovered that certain species of animals would submit to man’s presence, and that they would reproduce in captivity. The domestication of animals was thus promoted by selective breeding, an art which has made great progress since the days of Dalamatia.
(778.7) 69:7.4 The dog was the first animal to be domesticated, and the difficult experience of taming it began when a certain dog, after following a hunter around all day, actually went home with him. For ages dogs were used for food, hunting, transportation, and companionship. At first dogs only howled, but later on they learned to bark. The dog’s keen sense of smell led to the notion it could see spirits, and thus arose the dog-fetish cults. The employment of watchdogs made it first possible for the whole clan to sleep at night. It then became the custom to employ watchdogs to protect the home against spirits as well as material enemies. When the dog barked, man or beast approached, but when the dog howled, spirits were near. Even now many still believe that a dog’s howling at night betokens death.
(778.8) 69:7.5 When man was a hunter, he was fairly kind to woman, but after the domestication of animals, coupled with the Caligastia confusion, many tribes shamefully treated their women. They treated them altogether too much as they treated their animals. Man’s brutal treatment of woman constitutes one of the darkest chapters of human history.
8. Slavery as a Factor in Civilization
(779.1) 69:8.2 Not long ago enslavement was the lot of those military captives who refused to accept the conqueror’s religion. In earlier times captives were either eaten, tortured to death, set to fighting each other, sacrificed to spirits, or enslaved. Slavery was a great advancement over massacre and cannibalism.
(779.2) 69:8.3 Enslavement was a forward step in the merciful treatment of war captives. The ambush of Ai, with the wholesale slaughter of men, women, and children, only the king being saved to gratify the conqueror’s vanity, is a faithful picture of the barbaric slaughter practiced by even supposedly civilized peoples. The raid upon Og, the king of Bashan, was equally brutal and effective. The Hebrews “utterly destroyed” their enemies, taking all their property as spoils. They put all cities under tribute on pain of the “destruction of all males.” But many of the contemporary tribes, those having less tribal egotism, had long since begun to practice the adoption of superior captives.
(779.3) 69:8.4 The hunter, like the American red man, did not enslave. He either adopted or killed his captives. Slavery was not prevalent among the pastoral peoples, for they needed few laborers. In war the herders made a practice of killing all men captives and taking as slaves only the women and children. The Mosaic code contained specific directions for making wives of these women captives. If not satisfactory, they could be sent away, but the Hebrews were not allowed to sell such rejected consorts as slaves — that was at least one advance in civilization. Though the social standards of the Hebrews were crude, they were far above those of the surrounding tribes.
(779.4) 69:8.5 The herders were the first capitalists; their herds represented capital, and they lived on the interest — the natural increase. And they were disinclined to trust this wealth to the keeping of either slaves or women. But later on they took male prisoners and forced them to cultivate the soil. This is the early origin of serfdom — man attached to the land. The Africans could easily be taught to till the soil; hence they became the great slave race.
(779.5) 69:8.6 Slavery was an indispensable link in the chain of human civilization. It was the bridge over which society passed from chaos and indolence to order and civilized activities; it compelled backward and lazy peoples to work and thus provide wealth and leisure for the social advancement of their superiors.
(779.6) 69:8.7 The institution of slavery compelled man to invent the regulative mechanism of primitive society; it gave origin to the beginnings of government. Slavery demands strong regulation and during the European Middle Ages virtually disappeared because the feudal lords could not control the slaves. The backward tribes of ancient times, like the native Australians of today, never had slaves.
(779.7) 69:8.8 True, slavery was oppressive, but it was in the schools of oppression that man learned industry. Eventually the slaves shared the blessings of a higher society which they had so unwillingly helped create. Slavery creates an organization of culture and social achievement but soon insidiously attacks society internally as the gravest of all destructive social maladies.
(779.8) 69:8.9 Modern mechanical invention rendered the slave obsolete. Slavery, like polygamy, is passing because it does not pay. But it has always proved disastrous suddenly to liberate great numbers of slaves; less trouble ensues when they are gradually emancipated.
(780.1) 69:8.10 Today, men are not social slaves, but thousands allow ambition to enslave them to debt. Involuntary slavery has given way to a new and improved form of modified industrial servitude.
(780.2) 69:8.11 While the ideal of society is universal freedom, idleness should never be tolerated. All able-bodied persons should be compelled to do at least a self-sustaining amount of work.
(780.3) 69:8.12 Modern society is in reverse. Slavery has nearly disappeared; domesticated animals are passing. Civilization is reaching back to fire — the inorganic world — for power. Man came up from savagery by way of fire, animals, and slavery; today he reaches back, discarding the help of slaves and the assistance of animals, while he seeks to wrest new secrets and sources of wealth and power from the elemental storehouse of nature.
9. Private Property
(780.5) 69:9.2 Primitive communism did not especially level men down, nor did it exalt mediocrity, but it did put a premium on inactivity and idleness, and it did stifle industry and destroy ambition. Communism was indispensable scaffolding in the growth of primitive society, but it gave way to the evolution of a higher social order because it ran counter to four strong human proclivities:
(780.6) 69:9.3 1. The family. Man not only craves to accumulate property; he desires to bequeath his capital goods to his progeny. But in early communal society a man’s capital was either immediately consumed or distributed among the group at his death. There was no inheritance of property — the inheritance tax was one hundred per cent. The later capital-accumulation and property-inheritance mores were a distinct social advance. And this is true notwithstanding the subsequent gross abuses attendant upon the misuse of capital.(781.1) 69:9.7 In earliest times women were the property of the community, and the mother dominated the family. The early chiefs owned all the land and were proprietors of all the women; marriage required the consent of the tribal ruler. With the passing of communism, women were held individually, and the father gradually assumed domestic control. Thus the home had its beginning, and the prevailing polygamous customs were gradually displaced by monogamy. (Polygamy is the survival of the female-slavery element in marriage. Monogamy is the slave-free ideal of the matchless association of one man and one woman in the exquisite enterprise of home building, offspring rearing, mutual culture, and self-improvement.)
(780.7) 69:9.4 2. Religious tendencies. Primitive man also wanted to save up property as a nucleus for starting life in the next existence. This motive explains why it was so long the custom to bury a man’s personal belongings with him. The ancients believed that only the rich survived death with any immediate pleasure and dignity. The teachers of revealed religion, more especially the Christian teachers, were the first to proclaim that the poor could have salvation on equal terms with the rich.
(780.8) 69:9.5 3. The desire for liberty and leisure. In the earlier days of social evolution the apportionment of individual earnings among the group was virtually a form of slavery; the worker was made slave to the idler. This was the suicidal weakness of communism: The improvident habitually lived off the thrifty. Even in modern times the improvident depend on the state (thrifty taxpayers) to take care of them. Those who have no capital still expect those who have to feed them.
(780.9) 69:9.6 4. The urge for security and power. Communism was finally destroyed by the deceptive practices of progressive and successful individuals who resorted to diverse subterfuges in an effort to escape enslavement to the shiftless idlers of their tribes. But at first all hoarding was secret; primitive insecurity prevented the outward accumulation of capital. And even at a later time it was most dangerous to amass too much wealth; the king would be sure to trump up some charge for confiscating a rich man’s property, and when a wealthy man died, the funeral was held up until the family donated a large sum to public welfare or to the king, an inheritance tax.
(781.2) 69:9.8 At first, all property, including tools and weapons, was the common possession of the tribe. Private property first consisted of all things personally touched. If a stranger drank from a cup, the cup was henceforth his. Next, any place where blood was shed became the property of the injured person or group.
(781.3) 69:9.9 Private property was thus originally respected because it was supposed to be charged with some part of the owner’s personality. Property honesty rested safely on this type of superstition; no police were needed to guard personal belongings. There was no stealing within the group, though men did not hesitate to appropriate the goods of other tribes. Property relations did not end with death; early, personal effects were burned, then buried with the dead, and later, inherited by the surviving family or by the tribe.
(781.4) 69:9.10 The ornamental type of personal effects originated in the wearing of charms. Vanity plus ghost fear led early man to resist all attempts to relieve him of his favorite charms, such property being valued above necessities.
(781.5) 69:9.11 Sleeping space was one of man’s earliest properties. Later, homesites were assigned by the tribal chiefs, who held all real estate in trust for the group. Presently a fire site conferred ownership; and still later, a well constituted title to the adjacent land.
(781.6) 69:9.12 Water holes and wells were among the first private possessions. The whole fetish practice was utilized to guard water holes, wells, trees, crops, and honey. Following the loss of faith in the fetish, laws were evolved to protect private belongings. But game laws, the right to hunt, long preceded land laws. The American red man never understood private ownership of land; he could not comprehend the white man’s view.
(781.7) 69:9.13 Private property was early marked by family insignia, and this is the early origin of family crests. Real estate could also be put under the watchcare of spirits. The priests would “consecrate” a piece of land, and it would then rest under the protection of the magic taboos erected thereon. Owners thereof were said to have a “priest’s title.” The Hebrews had great respect for these family landmarks: “Cursed be he who removes his neighbor’s landmark.” These stone markers bore the priest’s initials. Even trees, when initialed, became private property.
(782.1) 69:9.14 In early days only the crops were private, but successive crops conferred title; agriculture was thus the genesis of the private ownership of land. Individuals were first given only a life tenureship; at death land reverted to the tribe. The very first land titles granted by tribes to individuals were graves — family burying grounds. In later times land belonged to those who fenced it. But the cities always reserved certain lands for public pasturage and for use in case of siege; these “commons” represent the survival of the earlier form of collective ownership.
(782.2) 69:9.15 Eventually the state assigned property to the individual, reserving the right of taxation. Having made secure their titles, landlords could collect rents, and land became a source of income — capital. Finally land became truly negotiable, with sales, transfers, mortgages, and foreclosures.
(782.3) 69:9.16 Private ownership brought increased liberty and enhanced stability; but private ownership of land was given social sanction only after communal control and direction had failed, and it was soon followed by a succession of slaves, serfs, and landless classes. But improved machinery is gradually setting men free from slavish toil.
(782.4) 69:9.17 The right to property is not absolute; it is purely social. But all government, law, order, civil rights, social liberties, conventions, peace, and happiness, as they are enjoyed by modern peoples, have grown up around the private ownership of property.
(782.5) 69:9.18 The present social order is not necessarily right — not divine or sacred — but mankind will do well to move slowly in making changes. That which you have is vastly better than any system known to your ancestors. Make certain that when you change the social order you change for the better. Do not be persuaded to experiment with the discarded formulas of your forefathers. Go forward, not backward! Let evolution proceed! Do not take a backward step.
(782.6) 69:9.19 [Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 70
The Evolution of Human Government
(783.2) 70:0.2 On an evolutionary world, antagonisms are natural; peace is secured only by some sort of social regulative system. Social regulation is inseparable from social organization; association implies some controlling authority. Government compels the co-ordination of the antagonisms of the tribes, clans, families, and individuals.
(783.3) 70:0.3 Government is an unconscious development; it evolves by trial and error. It does have survival value; therefore it becomes traditional. Anarchy augmented misery; therefore government, comparative law and order, slowly emerged or is emerging. The coercive demands of the struggle for existence literally drove the human race along the progressive road to civilization.
1. The Genesis of War
(783.5) 70:1.2 War is an animalistic reaction to misunderstandings and irritations; peace attends upon the civilized solution of all such problems and difficulties. The Sangik races, together with the later deteriorated Adamites and Nodites, were all belligerent. The Andonites were early taught the golden rule, and, even today, their Eskimo descendants live very much by that code; custom is strong among them, and they are fairly free from violent antagonisms.
(783.6) 70:1.3 Andon taught his children to settle disputes by each beating a tree with a stick, meanwhile cursing the tree; the one whose stick broke first was the victor. The later Andonites used to settle disputes by holding a public show at which the disputants made fun of and ridiculed each other, while the audience decided the winner by its applause.
(783.7) 70:1.4 But there could be no such phenomenon as war until society had evolved sufficiently far to actually experience periods of peace and to sanction warlike practices. The very concept of war implies some degree of organization.
(784.1) 70:1.5 With the emergence of social groupings, individual irritations began to be submerged in the group feelings, and this promoted intratribal tranquillity but at the expense of intertribal peace. Peace was thus first enjoyed by the in-group, or tribe, who always disliked and hated the out-group, foreigners. Early man regarded it a virtue to shed alien blood.
(784.2) 70:1.6 But even this did not work at first. When the early chiefs would try to iron out misunderstandings, they often found it necessary, at least once a year, to permit the tribal stone fights. The clan would divide up into two groups and engage in an all-day battle. And this for no other reason than just the fun of it; they really enjoyed fighting.
(784.3) 70:1.7 Warfare persists because man is human, evolved from an animal, and all animals are bellicose. Among the early causes of war were:
(784.4) 70:1.8 1. Hunger, which led to food raids. Scarcity of land has always brought on war, and during these struggles the early peace tribes were practically exterminated.(784.11) 70:1.15 Always these olden tribes made war at the bidding of their gods, at the behest of their chiefs or medicine men. The Hebrews believed in such a “God of battles”; and the narrative of their raid on the Midianites is a typical recital of the atrocious cruelty of the ancient tribal wars; this assault, with its slaughter of all the males and the later killing of all male children and all women who were not virgins, would have done honor to the mores of a tribal chieftain of two hundred thousand years ago. And all this was executed in the “name of the Lord God of Israel.”
(784.5) 70:1.9 2. Woman scarcity — an attempt to relieve a shortage of domestic help. Woman stealing has always caused war.
(784.6) 70:1.10 3. Vanity — the desire to exhibit tribal prowess. Superior groups would fight to impose their mode of life upon inferior peoples.
(784.7) 70:1.11 4. Slaves — need of recruits for the labor ranks.
(784.8) 70:1.12 5. Revenge was the motive for war when one tribe believed that a neighboring tribe had caused the death of a fellow tribesman. Mourning was continued until a head was brought home. The war for vengeance was in good standing right on down to comparatively modern times.
(784.9) 70:1.13 6. Recreation — war was looked upon as recreation by the young men of these early times. If no good and sufficient pretext for war arose, when peace became oppressive, neighboring tribes were accustomed to go out in semifriendly combat to engage in a foray as a holiday, to enjoy a sham battle.
(784.10) 70:1.14 7. Religion — the desire to make converts to the cult. The primitive religions all sanctioned war. Only in recent times has religion begun to frown upon war. The early priesthoods were, unfortunately, usually allied with the military power. One of the great peace moves of the ages has been the attempt to separate church and state.
(784.12) 70:1.16 This is a narrative of the evolution of society — the natural outworking of the problems of the races — man working out his own destiny on earth. Such atrocities are not instigated by Deity, notwithstanding the tendency of man to place the responsibility on his gods.
(784.13) 70:1.17 Military mercy has been slow in coming to mankind. Even when a woman, Deborah, ruled the Hebrews, the same wholesale cruelty persisted. Her general in his victory over the gentiles caused “all the host to fall upon the sword; there was not one left.”
(785.1) 70:1.18 Very early in the history of the race, poisoned weapons were used. All sorts of mutilations were practiced. Saul did not hesitate to require one hundred Philistine foreskins as the dowry David should pay for his daughter Michal.
(785.2) 70:1.19 Early wars were fought between tribes as a whole, but in later times, when two individuals in different tribes had a dispute, instead of both tribes fighting, the two disputants engaged in a duel. It also became a custom for two armies to stake all on the outcome of a contest between a representative chosen from each side, as in the instance of David and Goliath.
(785.3) 70:1.20 The first refinement of war was the taking of prisoners. Next, women were exempted from hostilities, and then came the recognition of noncombatants. Military castes and standing armies soon developed to keep pace with the increasing complexity of combat. Such warriors were early prohibited from associating with women, and women long ago ceased to fight, though they have always fed and nursed the soldiers and urged them on to battle.
(785.4) 70:1.21 The practice of declaring war represented great progress. Such declarations of intention to fight betokened the arrival of a sense of fairness, and this was followed by the gradual development of the rules of “civilized” warfare. Very early it became the custom not to fight near religious sites and, still later, not to fight on certain holy days. Next came the general recognition of the right of asylum; political fugitives received protection.
(785.5) 70:1.22 Thus did warfare gradually evolve from the primitive man hunt to the somewhat more orderly system of the later-day “civilized” nations. But only slowly does the social attitude of amity displace that of enmity.
2. The Social Value of War
(785.7) 70:2.2 The constant necessity for national defense creates many new and advanced social adjustments. Society, today, enjoys the benefit of a long list of useful innovations which were at first wholly military and is even indebted to war for the dance, one of the early forms of which was a military drill.
(785.8) 70:2.3 War has had a social value to past civilizations because it:
(785.9) 70:2.4 1. Imposed discipline, enforced co-operation.(785.14) 70:2.9 War has had a certain evolutionary and selective value, but like slavery, it must sometime be abandoned as civilization slowly advances. Olden wars promoted travel and cultural intercourse; these ends are now better served by modern methods of transport and communication. Olden wars strengthened nations, but modern struggles disrupt civilized culture. Ancient warfare resulted in the decimation of inferior peoples; the net result of modern conflict is the selective destruction of the best human stocks. Early wars promoted organization and efficiency, but these have now become the aims of modern industry. During past ages war was a social ferment which pushed civilization forward; this result is now better attained by ambition and invention. Ancient warfare supported the concept of a God of battles, but modern man has been told that God is love. War has served many valuable purposes in the past, it has been an indispensable scaffolding in the building of civilization, but it is rapidly becoming culturally bankrupt — incapable of producing dividends of social gain in any way commensurate with the terrible losses attendant upon its invocation.
(785.10) 70:2.5 2. Put a premium on fortitude and courage.
(785.11) 70:2.6 3. Fostered and solidified nationalism.
(785.12) 70:2.7 4. Destroyed weak and unfit peoples.
(785.13) 70:2.8 5. Dissolved the illusion of primitive equality and selectively stratified society.
(786.1) 70:2.10 At one time physicians believed in bloodletting as a cure for many diseases, but they have since discovered better remedies for most of these disorders. And so must the international bloodletting of war certainly give place to the discovery of better methods for curing the ills of nations.
(786.2) 70:2.11 The nations of Urantia have already entered upon the gigantic struggle between nationalistic militarism and industrialism, and in many ways this conflict is analogous to the agelong struggle between the herder-hunter and the farmer. But if industrialism is to triumph over militarism, it must avoid the dangers which beset it. The perils of budding industry on Urantia are:
(786.3) 70:2.12 1. The strong drift toward materialism, spiritual blindness.(786.9) 70:2.18 Militarism is autocratic and cruel — savage. It promotes social organization among the conquerors but disintegrates the vanquished. Industrialism is more civilized and should be so carried on as to promote initiative and to encourage individualism. Society should in every way possible foster originality.
(786.4) 70:2.13 2. The worship of wealth-power, value distortion.
(786.5) 70:2.14 3. The vices of luxury, cultural immaturity.
(786.6) 70:2.15 4. The increasing dangers of indolence, service insensitivity.
(786.7) 70:2.16 5. The growth of undesirable racial softness, biologic deterioration.
(786.8) 70:2.17 6. The threat of standardized industrial slavery, personality stagnation. Labor is ennobling but drudgery is benumbing.
(786.10) 70:2.19 Do not make the mistake of glorifying war; rather discern what it has done for society so that you may the more accurately visualize what its substitutes must provide in order to continue the advancement of civilization. And if such adequate substitutes are not provided, then you may be sure that war will long continue.
(786.11) 70:2.20 Man will never accept peace as a normal mode of living until he has been thoroughly and repeatedly convinced that peace is best for his material welfare, and until society has wisely provided peaceful substitutes for the gratification of that inherent tendency periodically to let loose a collective drive designed to liberate those ever-accumulating emotions and energies belonging to the self-preservation reactions of the human species.
(786.12) 70:2.21 But even in passing, war should be honored as the school of experience which compelled a race of arrogant individualists to submit themselves to highly concentrated authority — a chief executive. Old-fashioned war did select the innately great men for leadership, but modern war no longer does this. To discover leaders society must now turn to the conquests of peace: industry, science, and social achievement.
3. Early Human Associations
(787.2) 70:3.2 Sex hunger and mother love establish the family. But real government does not appear until superfamily groups have begun to form. In the prefamily days of the horde, leadership was provided by informally chosen individuals. The African Bushmen have never progressed beyond this primitive stage; they do not have chiefs in the horde.
(787.3) 70:3.3 Families became united by blood ties in clans, aggregations of kinsmen; and these subsequently evolved into tribes, territorial communities. Warfare and external pressure forced the tribal organization upon the kinship clans, but it was commerce and trade that held these early and primitive groups together with some degree of internal peace.
(787.4) 70:3.4 The peace of Urantia will be promoted far more by international trade organizations than by all the sentimental sophistry of visionary peace planning. Trade relations have been facilitated by development of language and by improved methods of communication as well as by better transportation.
(787.5) 70:3.5 The absence of a common language has always impeded the growth of peace groups, but money has become the universal language of modern trade. Modern society is largely held together by the industrial market. The gain motive is a mighty civilizer when augmented by the desire to serve.
(787.6) 70:3.6 In the early ages each tribe was surrounded by concentric circles of increasing fear and suspicion; hence it was once the custom to kill all strangers, later on, to enslave them. The old idea of friendship meant adoption into the clan; and clan membership was believed to survive death — one of the earliest concepts of eternal life.
(787.7) 70:3.7 The ceremony of adoption consisted in drinking each other’s blood. In some groups saliva was exchanged in the place of blood drinking, this being the ancient origin of the practice of social kissing. And all ceremonies of association, whether marriage or adoption, were always terminated by feasting.
(787.8) 70:3.8 In later times, blood diluted with red wine was used, and eventually wine alone was drunk to seal the adoption ceremony, which was signified in the touching of the wine cups and consummated by the swallowing of the beverage. The Hebrews employed a modified form of this adoption ceremony. Their Arab ancestors made use of the oath taken while the hand of the candidate rested upon the generative organ of the tribal native. The Hebrews treated adopted aliens kindly and fraternally. “The stranger that dwells with you shall be as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself.”
(787.9) 70:3.9 “Guest friendship” was a relation of temporary hospitality. When visiting guests departed, a dish would be broken in half, one piece being given the departing friend so that it would serve as a suitable introduction for a third party who might arrive on a later visit. It was customary for guests to pay their way by telling tales of their travels and adventures. The storytellers of olden times became so popular that the mores eventually forbade their functioning during either the hunting or harvest seasons.
(788.1) 70:3.10 The first treaties of peace were the “blood bonds.” The peace ambassadors of two warring tribes would meet, pay their respects, and then proceed to prick the skin until it bled; whereupon they would suck each other’s blood and declare peace.
(788.2) 70:3.11 The earliest peace missions consisted of delegations of men bringing their choice maidens for the sex gratification of their onetime enemies, the sex appetite being utilized in combating the war urge. The tribe so honored would pay a return visit, with its offering of maidens; whereupon peace would be firmly established. And soon intermarriages between the families of the chiefs were sanctioned.
4. Clans and Tribes
(788.4) 70:4.2 The clans were blood-tie groups within the tribe, and they owed their existence to certain common interests, such as:
(788.5) 70:4.3 1. Tracing origin back to a common ancestor.(788.11) 70:4.9 The clan headmen were always subordinate to the tribal chief, the early tribal governments being a loose confederation of clans. The native Australians never developed a tribal form of government.
(788.6) 70:4.4 2. Allegiance to a common religious totem.
(788.7) 70:4.5 3. Speaking the same dialect.
(788.8) 70:4.6 4. Sharing a common dwelling place.
(788.9) 70:4.7 5. Fearing the same enemies.
(788.10) 70:4.8 6. Having had a common military experience.
(788.12) 70:4.10 The clan peace chiefs usually ruled through the mother line; the tribal war chiefs established the father line. The courts of the tribal chiefs and early kings consisted of the headmen of the clans, whom it was customary to invite into the king’s presence several times a year. This enabled him to watch them and the better secure their co-operation. The clans served a valuable purpose in local self-government, but they greatly delayed the growth of large and strong nations.
5. The Beginnings of Government
(788.14) 70:5.2 With the gradual emergence of the family units the foundations of government were established in the clan organization, the grouping of consanguineous families. The first real governmental body was the council of the elders. This regulative group was composed of old men who had distinguished themselves in some efficient manner. Wisdom and experience were early appreciated even by barbaric man, and there ensued a long age of the domination of the elders. This reign of the oligarchy of age gradually grew into the patriarchal idea.
(789.1) 70:5.3 In the early council of the elders there resided the potential of all governmental functions: executive, legislative, and judicial. When the council interpreted the current mores, it was a court; when establishing new modes of social usage, it was a legislature; to the extent that such decrees and enactments were enforced, it was the executive. The chairman of the council was one of the forerunners of the later tribal chief.
(789.2) 70:5.4 Some tribes had female councils, and from time to time many tribes had women rulers. Certain tribes of the red man preserved the teaching of Onamonalonton in following the unanimous rule of the “council of seven.”
(789.3) 70:5.5 It has been hard for mankind to learn that neither peace nor war can be run by a debating society. The primitive “palavers” were seldom useful. The race early learned that an army commanded by a group of clan heads had no chance against a strong one-man army. War has always been a kingmaker.
(789.4) 70:5.6 At first the war chiefs were chosen only for military service, and they would relinquish some of their authority during peacetimes, when their duties were of a more social nature. But gradually they began to encroach upon the peace intervals, tending to continue to rule from one war on through to the next. They often saw to it that one war was not too long in following another. These early war lords were not fond of peace.
(789.5) 70:5.7 In later times some chiefs were chosen for other than military service, being selected because of unusual physique or outstanding personal abilities. The red men often had two sets of chiefs — the sachems, or peace chiefs, and the hereditary war chiefs. The peace rulers were also judges and teachers.
(789.6) 70:5.8 Some early communities were ruled by medicine men, who often acted as chiefs. One man would act as priest, physician, and chief executive. Quite often the early royal insignias had originally been the symbols or emblems of priestly dress.
(789.7) 70:5.9 And it was by these steps that the executive branch of government gradually came into existence. The clan and tribal councils continued in an advisory capacity and as forerunners of the later appearing legislative and judicial branches. In Africa, today, all these forms of primitive government are in actual existence among the various tribes.
6. Monarchial Government
(789.9) 70:6.2 Rulership grew out of the idea of family authority or wealth. When a patriarchal kinglet became a real king, he was sometimes called “father of his people.” Later on, kings were thought to have sprung from heroes. And still further on, rulership became hereditary, due to belief in the divine origin of kings.
(789.10) 70:6.3 Hereditary kingship avoided the anarchy which had previously wrought such havoc between the death of a king and the election of a successor. The family had a biologic head; the clan, a selected natural leader; the tribe and later state had no natural leader, and this was an additional reason for making the chief-kings hereditary. The idea of royal families and aristocracy was also based on the mores of “name ownership” in the clans.
(790.1) 70:6.4 The succession of kings was eventually regarded as supernatural, the royal blood being thought to extend back to the times of the materialized staff of Prince Caligastia. Thus kings became fetish personalities and were inordinately feared, a special form of speech being adopted for court usage. Even in recent times it was believed that the touch of kings would cure disease, and some Urantia peoples still regard their rulers as having had a divine origin.
(790.2) 70:6.5 The early fetish king was often kept in seclusion; he was regarded as too sacred to be viewed except on feast days and holy days. Ordinarily a representative was chosen to impersonate him, and this is the origin of prime ministers. The first cabinet officer was a food administrator; others shortly followed. Rulers soon appointed representatives to be in charge of commerce and religion; and the development of a cabinet was a direct step toward depersonalization of executive authority. These assistants of the early kings became the accepted nobility, and the king’s wife gradually rose to the dignity of queen as women came to be held in higher esteem.
(790.3) 70:6.6 Unscrupulous rulers gained great power by the discovery of poison. Early court magic was diabolical; the king’s enemies soon died. But even the most despotic tyrant was subject to some restrictions; he was at least restrained by the ever-present fear of assassination. The medicine men, witch doctors, and priests have always been a powerful check on the kings. Subsequently, the landowners, the aristocracy, exerted a restraining influence. And ever and anon the clans and tribes would simply rise up and overthrow their despots and tyrants. Deposed rulers, when sentenced to death, were often given the option of committing suicide, which gave origin to the ancient social vogue of suicide in certain circumstances.
7. Primitive Clubs and Secret Societies
(790.5) 70:7.2 There were many reasons for the secrecy of these societies, such as:
(790.6) 70:7.3 1. Fear of incurring the displeasure of the rulers because of the violation of some taboo.(790.10) 70:7.7 The very secrecy of these societies conferred on all members the power of mystery over the rest of the tribe. Secrecy also appeals to vanity; the initiates were the social aristocracy of their day. After initiation the boys hunted with the men; whereas before they had gathered vegetables with the women. And it was the supreme humiliation, a tribal disgrace, to fail to pass the puberty tests and thus be compelled to remain outside the men’s abode with the women and children, to be considered effeminate. Besides, noninitiates were not allowed to marry.
(790.7) sup>70:7.4 2. In order to practice minority religious rites.
(790.8) 70:7.5 3. For the purpose of preserving valuable “spirit” or trade secrets.
(790.9) 70:7.6 4. For the enjoyment of some special charm or magic.
(791.1) 70:7.8 Primitive people very early taught their adolescent youths sex control. It became the custom to take boys away from parents from puberty to marriage, their education and training being intrusted to the men’s secret societies. And one of the chief functions of these clubs was to keep control of adolescent young men, thus preventing illegitimate children.
(791.2) 70:7.9 Commercialized prostitution began when these men’s clubs paid money for the use of women from other tribes. But the earlier groups were remarkably free from sex laxity.
(791.3) 70:7.10 The puberty initiation ceremony usually extended over a period of five years. Much self-torture and painful cutting entered into these ceremonies. Circumcision was first practiced as a rite of initiation into one of these secret fraternities. The tribal marks were cut on the body as a part of the puberty initiation; the tattoo originated as such a badge of membership. Such torture, together with much privation, was designed to harden these youths, to impress them with the reality of life and its inevitable hardships. This purpose is better accomplished by the later appearing athletic games and physical contests.
(791.4) 70:7.11 But the secret societies did aim at the improvement of adolescent morals; one of the chief purposes of the puberty ceremonies was to impress upon the boy that he must leave other men’s wives alone.
(791.5) 70:7.12 Following these years of rigorous discipline and training and just before marriage, the young men were usually released for a short period of leisure and freedom, after which they returned to marry and to submit to lifelong subjection to the tribal taboos. And this ancient custom has continued down to modern times as the foolish notion of “sowing wild oats.”
(791.6) 70:7.13 Many later tribes sanctioned the formation of women’s secret clubs, the purpose of which was to prepare adolescent girls for wifehood and motherhood. After initiation girls were eligible for marriage and were permitted to attend the “bride show,” the coming-out party of those days. Women’s orders pledged against marriage early came into existence.
(791.7) 70:7.14 Presently nonsecret clubs made their appearance when groups of unmarried men and groups of unattached women formed their separate organizations. These associations were really the first schools. And while men’s and women’s clubs were often given to persecuting each other, some advanced tribes, after contact with the Dalamatia teachers, experimented with coeducation, having boarding schools for both sexes.
(791.8) 70:7.15 Secret societies contributed to the building up of social castes chiefly by the mysterious character of their initiations. The members of these societies first wore masks to frighten the curious away from their mourning rites — ancestor worship. Later this ritual developed into a pseudo seance at which ghosts were reputed to have appeared. The ancient societies of the “new birth” used signs and employed a special secret language; they also forswore certain foods and drinks. They acted as night police and otherwise functioned in a wide range of social activities.
(792.1) 70:7.16 All secret associations imposed an oath, enjoined confidence, and taught the keeping of secrets. These orders awed and controlled the mobs; they also acted as vigilance societies, thus practicing lynch law. They were the first spies when the tribes were at war and the first secret police during times of peace. Best of all they kept unscrupulous kings on the anxious seat. To offset them, the kings fostered their own secret police.
(792.2) 70:7.17 These societies gave rise to the first political parties. The first party government was “the strong” vs. “the weak.” In ancient times a change of administration only followed civil war, abundant proof that the weak had become strong.
(792.3) 70:7.18 These clubs were employed by merchants to collect debts and by rulers to collect taxes. Taxation has been a long struggle, one of the earliest forms being the tithe, one tenth of the hunt or spoils. Taxes were originally levied to keep up the king’s house, but it was found that they were easier to collect when disguised as an offering for the support of the temple service.
(792.4) 70:7.19 By and by these secret associations grew into the first charitable organizations and later evolved into the earlier religious societies — the forerunners of churches. Finally some of these societies became intertribal, the first international fraternities.
8. Social Classes
(792.6) 70:8.2 As society emerged from savagery to barbarism, its human components tended to become grouped in classes for the following general reasons:
(792.7) 70:8.3 1. Natural — contact, kinship, and marriage; the first social distinctions were based on sex, age, and blood — kinship to the chief.(793.5) 70:8.13 Flexible and shifting social classes are indispensable to an evolving civilization, but when class becomes caste, when social levels petrify, the enhancement of social stability is purchased by diminishment of personal initiative. Social caste solves the problem of finding one’s place in industry, but it also sharply curtails individual development and virtually prevents social co-operation.
(792.8) 70:8.4 2. Personal — the recognition of ability, endurance, skill, and fortitude; soon followed by the recognition of language mastery, knowledge, and general intelligence.
(792.9) 70:8.5 3. Chance — war and emigration resulted in the separating of human groups. Class evolution was powerfully influenced by conquest, the relation of the victor to the vanquished, while slavery brought about the first general division of society into free and bond.
(792.10) 70:8.6 4. Economic — rich and poor. Wealth and the possession of slaves was a genetic basis for one class of society.
(792.11) 70:8.7 5. Geographic — classes arose consequent upon urban or rural settlement. City and country have respectively contributed to the differentiation of the herder-agriculturist and the trader-industrialist, with their divergent viewpoints and reactions.
(792.12) 70:8.8 6. Social — classes have gradually formed according to popular estimate of the social worth of different groups. Among the earliest divisions of this sort were the demarcations between priest-teachers, ruler-warriors, capitalist-traders, common laborers, and slaves. The slave could never become a capitalist, though sometimes the wage earner could elect to join the capitalistic ranks.
(793.1) 70:8.9 7. Vocational — as vocations multiplied, they tended to establish castes and guilds. Workers divided into three groups: the professional classes, including the medicine men, then the skilled workers, followed by the unskilled laborers.
(793.2) 70:8.10 8. Religious — the early cult clubs produced their own classes within the clans and tribes, and the piety and mysticism of the priests have long perpetuated them as a separate social group.
(793.3) 70:8.11 9. Racial — the presence of two or more races within a given nation or territorial unit usually produces color castes. The original caste system of India was based on color, as was that of early Egypt.
(793.4) 70:8.12 10. Age — youth and maturity. Among the tribes the boy remained under the watchcare of his father as long as the father lived, while the girl was left in the care of her mother until married.
(793.6) 70:8.14 Classes in society, having naturally formed, will persist until man gradually achieves their evolutionary obliteration through intelligent manipulation of the biologic, intellectual, and spiritual resources of a progressing civilization, such as:
(793.7) 70:8.15 1. Biologic renovation of the racial stocks — the selective elimination of inferior human strains. This will tend to eradicate many mortal inequalities.(793.10) 70:8.18 But these measures can bear their true fruits only in the distant millenniums of the future, although much social improvement will immediately result from the intelligent, wise, and patient manipulation of these acceleration factors of cultural progress. Religion is the mighty lever that lifts civilization from chaos, but it is powerless apart from the fulcrum of sound and normal mind resting securely on sound and normal heredity.
(793.8) 70:8.16 2. Educational training of the increased brain power which will arise out of such biologic improvement.
(793.9) 70:8.17 3. Religious quickening of the feelings of mortal kinship and brotherhood.
9. Human Rights
(793.12) 70:9.2 Gradually society asserted its rights and, at the present time, they are:
(793.13) 70:9.3 1. Assurance of food supply.(794.8) 70:9.13 When rights are old beyond knowledge of origin, they are often called natural rights. But human rights are not really natural; they are entirely social. They are relative and ever changing, being no more than the rules of the game — recognized adjustments of relations governing the ever-changing phenomena of human competition.
(793.14) 70:9.4 2. Military defense — security through preparedness.
(793.15) 70:9.5 3. Internal peace preservation — prevention of personal violence and social disorder.
(794.1) 70:9.6 4. Sex control — marriage, the family institution.
(794.2) 70:9.7 5. Property — the right to own.
(794.3) 70:9.8 6. Fostering of individual and group competition.
(794.4) 70:9.9 7. Provision for educating and training youth.
(794.5) 70:9.10 8. Promotion of trade and commerce — industrial development.
(794.6) 70:9.11 9. Improvement of labor conditions and rewards.
(794.7) 70:9.12 10. The guarantee of the freedom of religious practices to the end that all of these other social activities may be exalted by becoming spiritually motivated.
(794.9) 70:9.14 What may be regarded as right in one age may not be so regarded in another. The survival of large numbers of defectives and degenerates is not because they have any natural right thus to encumber twentieth-century civilization, but simply because the society of the age, the mores, thus decrees.
(794.10) 70:9.15 Few human rights were recognized in the European Middle Ages; then every man belonged to someone else, and rights were only privileges or favors granted by state or church. And the revolt from this error was equally erroneous in that it led to the belief that all men are born equal.
(794.11) 70:9.16 The weak and the inferior have always contended for equal rights; they have always insisted that the state compel the strong and superior to supply their wants and otherwise make good those deficiencies which all too often are the natural result of their own indifference and indolence.
(794.12) 70:9.17 But this equality ideal is the child of civilization; it is not found in nature. Even culture itself demonstrates conclusively the inherent inequality of men by their very unequal capacity therefor. The sudden and nonevolutionary realization of supposed natural equality would quickly throw civilized man back to the crude usages of primitive ages. Society cannot offer equal rights to all, but it can promise to administer the varying rights of each with fairness and equity. It is the business and duty of society to provide the child of nature with a fair and peaceful opportunity to pursue self-maintenance, participate in self-perpetuation, while at the same time enjoying some measure of self-gratification, the sum of all three constituting human happiness.
10. Evolution of Justice
(794.14) 70:10.2 Justice, as conceived by man, means getting one’s rights and has, therefore, been a matter of progressive evolution. The concept of justice may well be constitutive in a spirit-endowed mind, but it does not spring full-fledgedly into existence on the worlds of space.
(794.15) 70:10.3 Primitive man assigned all phenomena to a person. In case of death the savage asked, not what killed him, but who? Accidental murder was not therefore recognized, and in the punishment of crime the motive of the criminal was wholly disregarded; judgment was rendered in accordance with the injury done.
(795.1) 70:10.4 In the earliest primitive society public opinion operated directly; officers of law were not needed. There was no privacy in primitive life. A man’s neighbors were responsible for his conduct; therefore their right to pry into his personal affairs. Society was regulated on the theory that the group membership should have an interest in, and some degree of control over, the behavior of each individual.
(795.2) 70:10.5 It was very early believed that ghosts administered justice through the medicine men and priests; this constituted these orders the first crime detectors and officers of the law. Their early methods of detecting crime consisted in conducting ordeals of poison, fire, and pain. These savage ordeals were nothing more than crude techniques of arbitration; they did not necessarily settle a dispute justly. For example: When poison was administered, if the accused vomited, he was innocent.
(795.3) 70:10.6 The Old Testament records one of these ordeals, a marital guilt test: If a man suspected his wife of being untrue to him, he took her to the priest and stated his suspicions, after which the priest would prepare a concoction consisting of holy water and sweepings from the temple floor. After due ceremony, including threatening curses, the accused wife was made to drink the nasty potion. If she was guilty, “the water that causes the curse shall enter into her and become bitter, and her belly shall swell, and her thighs shall rot, and the woman shall be accursed among her people.” If, by any chance, any woman could quaff this filthy draught and not show symptoms of physical illness, she was acquitted of the charges made by her jealous husband.
(795.4) 70:10.7 These atrocious methods of crime detection were practiced by almost all the evolving tribes at one time or another. Dueling is a modern survival of the trial by ordeal.
(795.5) 70:10.8 It is not to be wondered that the Hebrews and other semicivilized tribes practiced such primitive techniques of justice administration three thousand years ago, but it is most amazing that thinking men would subsequently retain such a relic of barbarism within the pages of a collection of sacred writings. Reflective thinking should make it clear that no divine being ever gave mortal man such unfair instructions regarding the detection and adjudication of suspected marital unfaithfulness.
(795.6) 70:10.9 Society early adopted the paying-back attitude of retaliation: an eye for an eye, a life for a life. The evolving tribes all recognized this right of blood vengeance. Vengeance became the aim of primitive life, but religion has since greatly modified these early tribal practices. The teachers of revealed religion have always proclaimed, “‘Vengeance is mine,’ says the Lord.” Vengeance killing in early times was not altogether unlike present-day murders under the pretense of the unwritten law.
(795.7) 70:10.10 Suicide was a common mode of retaliation. If one were unable to avenge himself in life, he died entertaining the belief that, as a ghost, he could return and visit wrath upon his enemy. And since this belief was very general, the threat of suicide on an enemy’s doorstep was usually sufficient to bring him to terms. Primitive man did not hold life very dear; suicide over trifles was common, but the teachings of the Dalamatians greatly lessened this custom, while in more recent times leisure, comforts, religion, and philosophy have united to make life sweeter and more desirable. Hunger strikes are, however, a modern analogue of this old-time method of retaliation.
(796.1) 70:10.11 One of the earliest formulations of advanced tribal law had to do with the taking over of the blood feud as a tribal affair. But strange to relate, even then a man could kill his wife without punishment provided he had fully paid for her. The Eskimos of today, however, still leave the penalty for a crime, even for murder, to be decreed and administered by the family wronged.
(796.2) 70:10.12 Another advance was the imposition of fines for taboo violations, the provision of penalties. These fines constituted the first public revenue. The practice of paying “blood money” also came into vogue as a substitute for blood vengeance. Such damages were usually paid in women or cattle; it was a long time before actual fines, monetary compensation, were assessed as punishment for crime. And since the idea of punishment was essentially compensation, everything, including human life, eventually came to have a price which could be paid as damages. The Hebrews were the first to abolish the practice of paying blood money. Moses taught that they should “take no satisfaction for the life of a murderer, who is guilty of death; he shall surely be put to death.”
(796.3) 70:10.13 Justice was thus first meted out by the family, then by the clan, and later on by the tribe. The administration of true justice dates from the taking of revenge from private and kin groups and lodging it in the hands of the social group, the state.
(796.4) 70:10.14 Punishment by burning alive was once a common practice. It was recognized by many ancient rulers, including Hammurabi and Moses, the latter directing that many crimes, particularly those of a grave sex nature, should be punished by burning at the stake. If “the daughter of a priest” or other leading citizen turned to public prostitution, it was the Hebrew custom to “burn her with fire.”
(796.5) 70:10.15 Treason — the “selling out” or betrayal of one’s tribal associates — was the first capital crime. Cattle stealing was universally punished by summary death, and even recently horse stealing has been similarly punished. But as time passed, it was learned that the severity of the punishment was not so valuable a deterrent to crime as was its certainty and swiftness.
(796.6) 70:10.16 When society fails to punish crimes, group resentment usually asserts itself as lynch law; the provision of sanctuary was a means of escaping this sudden group anger. Lynching and dueling represent the unwillingness of the individual to surrender private redress to the state.
11. Laws and Courts
(796.8) 70:11.2 Law is always at first negative and prohibitive; in advancing civilizations it becomes increasingly positive and directive. Early society operated negatively, granting the individual the right to live by imposing upon all others the command, “you shall not kill.” Every grant of rights or liberty to the individual involves curtailment of the liberties of all others, and this is effected by the taboo, primitive law. The whole idea of the taboo is inherently negative, for primitive society was wholly negative in its organization, and the early administration of justice consisted in the enforcement of the taboos. But originally these laws applied only to fellow tribesmen, as is illustrated by the later-day Hebrews, who had a different code of ethics for dealing with the gentiles.
(797.1) 70:11.3 The oath originated in the days of Dalamatia in an effort to render testimony more truthful. Such oaths consisted in pronouncing a curse upon oneself. Formerly no individual would testify against his native group.
(797.2) 70:11.4 Crime was an assault upon the tribal mores, sin was the transgression of those taboos which enjoyed ghost sanction, and there was long confusion due to the failure to segregate crime and sin.
(797.3) 70:11.5 Self-interest established the taboo on killing, society sanctified it as traditional mores, while religion consecrated the custom as moral law, and thus did all three conspire in rendering human life more safe and sacred. Society could not have held together during early times had not rights had the sanction of religion; superstition was the moral and social police force of the long evolutionary ages. The ancients all claimed that their olden laws, the taboos, had been given to their ancestors by the gods.
(797.4) 70:11.6 Law is a codified record of long human experience, public opinion crystallized and legalized. The mores were the raw material of accumulated experience out of which later ruling minds formulated the written laws. The ancient judge had no laws. When he handed down a decision, he simply said, “It is the custom.”
(797.5) 70:11.7 Reference to precedent in court decisions represents the effort of judges to adapt written laws to the changing conditions of society. This provides for progressive adaptation to altering social conditions combined with the impressiveness of traditional continuity.
(797.6) 70:11.8 Property disputes were handled in many ways, such as:
(797.7) 70:11.9 1. By destroying the disputed property.(797.11) 70:11.13 The first courts were regulated fistic encounters; the judges were merely umpires or referees. They saw to it that the fight was carried on according to approved rules. On entering a court combat, each party made a deposit with the judge to pay the costs and fine after one had been defeated by the other. “Might was still right.” Later on, verbal arguments were substituted for physical blows.
(797.8) 70:11.10 2. By force — the contestants fought it out.
(797.9) 70:11.11 3. By arbitration — a third party decided.
(797.10) 70:11.12 4. By appeal to the elders — later to the courts.
(797.12) 70:11.14 The whole idea of primitive justice was not so much to be fair as to dispose of the contest and thus prevent public disorder and private violence. But primitive man did not so much resent what would now be regarded as an injustice; it was taken for granted that those who had power would use it selfishly. Nevertheless, the status of any civilization may be very accurately determined by the thoroughness and equity of its courts and by the integrity of its judges.
12. Allocation of Civil Authority
(798.1) 70:12.2 While primitive authority was based on strength, physical power, the ideal government is the representative system wherein leadership is based on ability, but in the days of barbarism there was entirely too much war to permit representative government to function effectively. In the long struggle between division of authority and unity of command, the dictator won. The early and diffuse powers of the primitive council of elders were gradually concentrated in the person of the absolute monarch. After the arrival of real kings the groups of elders persisted as quasi-legislative-judicial advisory bodies; later on, legislatures of co-ordinate status made their appearance, and eventually supreme courts of adjudication were established separate from the legislatures.
(798.2) 70:12.3 The king was the executor of the mores, the original or unwritten law. Later he enforced the legislative enactments, the crystallization of public opinion. A popular assembly as an expression of public opinion, though slow in appearing, marked a great social advance.
(798.3) 70:12.4 The early kings were greatly restricted by the mores — by tradition or public opinion. In recent times some Urantia nations have codified these mores into documentary bases for government.
(798.4) 70:12.5 Urantia mortals are entitled to liberty; they should create their systems of government; they should adopt their constitutions or other charters of civil authority and administrative procedure. And having done this, they should select their most competent and worthy fellows as chief executives. For representatives in the legislative branch they should elect only those who are qualified intellectually and morally to fulfill such sacred responsibilities. As judges of their high and supreme tribunals only those who are endowed with natural ability and who have been made wise by replete experience should be chosen.
(798.5) 70:12.6 If men would maintain their freedom, they must, after having chosen their charter of liberty, provide for its wise, intelligent, and fearless interpretation to the end that there may be prevented:
(798.6) 70:12.7 1. Usurpation of unwarranted power by either the executive or legislative branches.(798.18) 70:12.19 These are the purposes and aims of constitutional tribunals acting as governors upon the engines of representative government on an evolutionary world.
(798.7) 70:12.8 2. Machinations of ignorant and superstitious agitators.
(798.8) 70:12.9 3. Retardation of scientific progress.
(798.9) 70:12.10 4. Stalemate of the dominance of mediocrity.
(798.10) 70:12.11 5. Domination by vicious minorities.
(798.11) 70:12.12 6. Control by ambitious and clever would-be dictators.
(798.12) 70:12.13 7. Disastrous disruption of panics.
(798.13) 70:12.14 8. Exploitation by the unscrupulous.
(798.14) 70:12.15 9. Taxation enslavement of the citizenry by the state.
(798.15) a>70:12.16 10. Failure of social and economic fairness.
(798.16) 70:12.17 11. Union of church and state.
(798.17) 70:12.18 12. Loss of personal liberty.
(799.1) 70:12.20 Mankind’s struggle to perfect government on Urantia has to do with perfecting channels of administration, with adapting them to ever-changing current needs, with improving power distribution within government, and then with selecting such administrative leaders as are truly wise. While there is a divine and ideal form of government, such cannot be revealed but must be slowly and laboriously discovered by the men and women of each planet throughout the universes of time and space.
(799.2) 70:12.21 [Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 71
Development of the State
(800.2) 71:0.2 The modern state is the institution which survived in the long struggle for group power. Superior power eventually prevailed, and it produced a creature of fact — the state — together with the moral myth of the absolute obligation of the citizen to live and die for the state. But the state is not of divine genesis; it was not even produced by volitionally intelligent human action; it is purely an evolutionary institution and was wholly automatic in origin.
1. The Embryonic State
(800.4) 71:1.2 The early states were small and were all the result of conquest. They did not originate in voluntary associations. Many were founded by conquering nomads, who would swoop down on peaceful herders or settled agriculturists to overpower and enslave them. Such states, resulting from conquest, were, perforce, stratified; classes were inevitable, and class struggles have ever been selective.
(800.5) 71:1.3 The northern tribes of the American red men never attained real statehood. They never progressed beyond a loose confederation of tribes, a very primitive form of state. Their nearest approach was the Iroquois federation, but this group of six nations never quite functioned as a state and failed to survive because of the absence of certain essentials to modern national life, such as:
(800.6) 71:1.4 1. Acquirement and inheritance of private property.(800.14) 71:1.12 The red men were too democratic; they had a good government, but it failed. Eventually they would have evolved a state had they not prematurely encountered the more advanced civilization of the white man, who was pursuing the governmental methods of the Greeks and the Romans.
(800.7) 71:1.5 2. Cities plus agriculture and industry.
(800.8) 71:1.6 3. Helpful domestic animals.
(800.9) 71:1.7 4. Practical family organization. These red men clung to the mother-family and nephew inheritance.
(800.10) 71:1.8 5. Definite territory.
(800.11) 71:1.9 6. A strong executive head.
(800.12) 71:1.10 7. Enslavement of captives — they either adopted or massacred them.
(800.13) 71:1.11 8. Decisive conquests.
(801.1) 71:1.13 The successful Roman state was based on:
(801.2) 71:1.14 1. The father-family.(801.10) 71:1.22 The great weakness in Roman civilization, and a factor in the ultimate collapse of the empire, was the supposed liberal and advanced provision for the emancipation of the boy at twenty-one and the unconditional release of the girl so that she was at liberty to marry a man of her own choosing or to go abroad in the land to become immoral. The harm to society consisted not in these reforms themselves but rather in the sudden and extensive manner of their adoption. The collapse of Rome indicates what may be expected when a state undergoes too rapid extension associated with internal degeneration.
(801.3) 71:1.15 2. Agriculture and the domestication of animals.
(801.4) 71:1.16 3. Condensation of population — cities.
(801.5) 71:1.17 4. Private property and land.
(801.6) 71:1.18 5. Slavery — classes of citizenship.
(801.7) 71:1.19 6. Conquest and reorganization of weak and backward peoples.
(801.8) 71:1.20 7. Definite territory with roads.
(801.9) 71:1.21 8. Personal and strong rulers.
(801.11) 71:1.23 The embryonic state was made possible by the decline of the blood bond in favor of the territorial, and such tribal federations were usually firmly cemented by conquest. While a sovereignty that transcends all minor struggles and group differences is the characteristic of the true state, still, many classes and castes persist in the later state organizations as remnants of the clans and tribes of former days. The later and larger territorial states had a long and bitter struggle with these smaller consanguineous clan groups, the tribal government proving a valuable transition from family to state authority. During later times many clans grew out of trades and other industrial associations.
(801.12) 71:1.24 Failure of state integration results in retrogression to prestate conditions of governmental techniques, such as the feudalism of the European Middle Ages. During these dark ages the territorial state collapsed, and there was a reversion to the small castle groups, the reappearance of the clan and tribal stages of development. Similar semistates even now exist in Asia and Africa, but not all of them are evolutionary reversions; many are the embryonic nucleuses of states of the future.
2. The Evolution of Representative Government
(801.14) 71:2.2 1. Glorification of mediocrity.(802.1) 71:2.7 Public opinion, common opinion, has always delayed society; nevertheless, it is valuable, for, while retarding social evolution, it does preserve civilization. Education of public opinion is the only safe and true method of accelerating civilization; force is only a temporary expedient, and cultural growth will increasingly accelerate as bullets give way to ballots. Public opinion, the mores, is the basic and elemental energy in social evolution and state development, but to be of state value it must be nonviolent in expression.
(801.15) 71:2.3 2. Choice of base and ignorant rulers.
(801.16) 71:2.4 3. Failure to recognize the basic facts of social evolution.
(801.17) 71:2.5 4. Danger of universal suffrage in the hands of uneducated and indolent majorities.
(801.18) 71:2.6 5. Slavery to public opinion; the majority is not always right.
(802.2) 71:2.8 The measure of the advance of society is directly determined by the degree to which public opinion can control personal behavior and state regulation through nonviolent expression. The really civilized government had arrived when public opinion was clothed with the powers of personal franchise. Popular elections may not always decide things rightly, but they represent the right way even to do a wrong thing. Evolution does not at once produce superlative perfection but rather comparative and advancing practical adjustment.
(802.3) 71:2.9 There are ten steps, or stages, to the evolution of a practical and efficient form of representative government, and these are:
(802.4) 71:2.10 1. Freedom of the person. Slavery, serfdom, and all forms of human bondage must disappear.
(802.5) 71:2.11 2. Freedom of the mind. Unless a free people are educated — taught to think intelligently and plan wisely — freedom usually does more harm than good.
(802.6) 71:2.12 3. The reign of law. Liberty can be enjoyed only when the will and whims of human rulers are replaced by legislative enactments in accordance with accepted fundamental law.
(802.7) 71:2.13 4. Freedom of speech. Representative government is unthinkable without freedom of all forms of expression for human aspirations and opinions.
(802.8) 71:2.14 5. Security of property. No government can long endure if it fails to provide for the right to enjoy personal property in some form. Man craves the right to use, control, bestow, sell, lease, and bequeath his personal property.
(802.9) 71:2.15 6. The right of petition. Representative government assumes the right of citizens to be heard. The privilege of petition is inherent in free citizenship.
(802.10) 71:2.16 7. The right to rule. It is not enough to be heard; the power of petition must progress to the actual management of the government.
(802.11) 71:2.17 8. Universal suffrage. Representative government presupposes an intelligent, efficient, and universal electorate. The character of such a government will ever be determined by the character and caliber of those who compose it. As civilization progresses, suffrage, while remaining universal for both sexes, will be effectively modified, regrouped, and otherwise differentiated.
(802.12) 71:2.18 9. Control of public servants. No civil government will be serviceable and effective unless the citizenry possess and use wise techniques of guiding and controlling officeholders and public servants.
(802.13) 71:2.19 10. Intelligent and trained representation. The survival of democracy is dependent on successful representative government; and that is conditioned upon the practice of electing to public offices only those individuals who are technically trained, intellectually competent, socially loyal, and morally fit. Only by such provisions can government of the people, by the people, and for the people be preserved.
3. The Ideals of Statehood
(803.2) 71:3.2 Much as it is to be regretted, national egotism has been essential to social survival. The chosen people doctrine has been a prime factor in tribal welding and nation building right on down to modern times. But no state can attain ideal levels of functioning until every form of intolerance is mastered; it is everlastingly inimical to human progress. And intolerance is best combated by the co-ordination of science, commerce, play, and religion.
(803.3) 71:3.3 The ideal state functions under the impulse of three mighty and co-ordinated drives:
(803.4) 71:3.4 1. Love loyalty derived from the realization of human brotherhood.(803.7) 71:3.7 The laws of the ideal state are few in number, and they have passed out of the negativistic taboo age into the era of the positive progress of individual liberty consequent upon enhanced self-control. The exalted state not only compels its citizens to work but also entices them into profitable and uplifting utilization of the increasing leisure which results from toil liberation by the advancing machine age. Leisure must produce as well as consume.
(803.5) 71:3.5 2. Intelligent patriotism based on wise ideals.
(803.6) 71:3.6 3. Cosmic insight interpreted in terms of planetary facts, needs, and goals.
(803.8) 71:3.8 No society has progressed very far when it permits idleness or tolerates poverty. But poverty and dependence can never be eliminated if the defective and degenerate stocks are freely supported and permitted to reproduce without restraint.
(803.9) 71:3.9 A moral society should aim to preserve the self-respect of its citizenry and afford every normal individual adequate opportunity for self-realization. Such a plan of social achievement would yield a cultural society of the highest order. Social evolution should be encouraged by governmental supervision which exercises a minimum of regulative control. That state is best which co-ordinates most while governing least.
(803.10) 71:3.10 The ideals of statehood must be attained by evolution, by the slow growth of civic consciousness, the recognition of the obligation and privilege of social service. At first men assume the burdens of government as a duty, following the end of the administration of political spoilsmen, but later on they seek such ministry as a privilege, as the greatest honor. The status of any level of civilization is faithfully portrayed by the caliber of its citizens who volunteer to accept the responsibilities of statehood.
(803.11) 71:3.11 In a real commonwealth the business of governing cities and provinces is conducted by experts and is managed just as are all other forms of economic and commercial associations of people.
(803.12) 71:3.12 In advanced states, political service is esteemed as the highest devotion of the citizenry. The greatest ambition of the wisest and noblest of citizens is to gain civil recognition, to be elected or appointed to some position of governmental trust, and such governments confer their highest honors of recognition for service upon their civil and social servants. Honors are next bestowed in the order named upon philosophers, educators, scientists, industrialists, and militarists. Parents are duly rewarded by the excellency of their children, and purely religious leaders, being ambassadors of a spiritual kingdom, receive their real rewards in another world.
4. Progressive Civilization
(804.2) 71:4.2 The progressive program of an expanding civilization embraces:
(804.3) 71:4.3 1. Preservation of individual liberties.(804.15) 71:4.15 And this progress in the arts of civilization leads directly to the realization of the highest human and divine goals of mortal endeavor — the social achievement of the brotherhood of man and the personal status of God-consciousness, which becomes revealed in the supreme desire of every individual to do the will of the Father in heaven.
(804.4) 71:4.4 2. Protection of the home.
(804.5) 71:4.5 3. Promotion of economic security.
(804.6) 71:4.6 4. Prevention of disease.
(804.7) 71:4.7 5. Compulsory education.
(804.8) 71:4.8 6. Compulsory employment.
(804.9) 71:4.9 7. Profitable utilization of leisure.
(804.10) 71:4.10 8. Care of the unfortunate.
(804.11) 71:4.11 9. Race improvement.
(804.12) 71:4.12 10. Promotion of science and art.
(804.13) 71:4.13 11. Promotion of philosophy — wisdom.
(804.14) 71:4.14 12. Augmentation of cosmic insight — spirituality.
(804.16) 71:4.16 The appearance of genuine brotherhood signifies that a social order has arrived in which all men delight in bearing one another’s burdens; they actually desire to practice the golden rule. But such an ideal society cannot be realized when either the weak or the wicked lie in wait to take unfair and unholy advantage of those who are chiefly actuated by devotion to the service of truth, beauty, and goodness. In such a situation only one course is practical: The “golden rulers” may establish a progressive society in which they live according to their ideals while maintaining an adequate defense against their benighted fellows who might seek either to exploit their pacific predilections or to destroy their advancing civilization.
(804.17) 71:4.17 Idealism can never survive on an evolving planet if the idealists in each generation permit themselves to be exterminated by the baser orders of humanity. And here is the great test of idealism: Can an advanced society maintain that military preparedness which renders it secure from all attack by its war-loving neighbors without yielding to the temptation to employ this military strength in offensive operations against other peoples for purposes of selfish gain or national aggrandizement? National survival demands preparedness, and religious idealism alone can prevent the prostitution of preparedness into aggression. Only love, brotherhood, can prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.
5. The Evolution of Competition
(805.2) 71:5.2 The ideal state undertakes to regulate social conduct only enough to take violence out of individual competition and to prevent unfairness in personal initiative. Here is a great problem in statehood: How can you guarantee peace and quiet in industry, pay the taxes to support state power, and at the same time prevent taxation from handicapping industry and keep the state from becoming parasitical or tyrannical?
(805.3) 71:5.3 Throughout the earlier ages of any world, competition is essential to progressive civilization. As the evolution of man progresses, co-operation becomes increasingly effective. In advanced civilizations co-operation is more efficient than competition. Early man is stimulated by competition. Early evolution is characterized by the survival of the biologically fit, but later civilizations are the better promoted by intelligent co-operation, understanding fraternity, and spiritual brotherhood.
(805.4) 71:5.4 True, competition in industry is exceedingly wasteful and highly ineffective, but no attempt to eliminate this economic lost motion should be countenanced if such adjustments entail even the slightest abrogation of any of the basic liberties of the individual.
6. The Profit Motive
(805.6) 71:6.2 In economics, profit motivation is to service motivation what fear is to love in religion. But the profit motive must not be suddenly destroyed or removed; it keeps many otherwise slothful mortals hard at work. It is not necessary, however, that this social energy arouser be forever selfish in its objectives.
(805.7) 71:6.3 The profit motive of economic activities is altogether base and wholly unworthy of an advanced order of society; nevertheless, it is an indispensable factor throughout the earlier phases of civilization. Profit motivation must not be taken away from men until they have firmly possessed themselves of superior types of nonprofit motives for economic striving and social serving — the transcendent urges of superlative wisdom, intriguing brotherhood, and excellency of spiritual attainment.
7. Education
(806.2) 71:7.2 In the ideal state, education continues throughout life, and philosophy sometime becomes the chief pursuit of its citizens. The citizens of such a commonwealth pursue wisdom as an enhancement of insight into the significance of human relations, the meanings of reality, the nobility of values, the goals of living, and the glories of cosmic destiny.
(806.3) 71:7.3 Urantians should get a vision of a new and higher cultural society. Education will jump to new levels of value with the passing of the purely profit-motivated system of economics. Education has too long been localistic, militaristic, ego exalting, and success seeking; it must eventually become world-wide, idealistic, self-realizing, and cosmic grasping.
(806.4) 71:7.4 Education recently passed from the control of the clergy to that of lawyers and businessmen. Eventually it must be given over to the philosophers and the scientists. Teachers must be free beings, real leaders, to the end that philosophy, the search for wisdom, may become the chief educational pursuit.
(806.5) 71:7.5 Education is the business of living; it must continue throughout a lifetime so that mankind may gradually experience the ascending levels of mortal wisdom, which are:
(806.6) 71:7.6 1. The knowledge of things.(806.13) 71:7.13 And then, by means of these achievements, many will ascend to the mortal ultimate of mind attainment, God-consciousness.
(806.7) 71:7.7 2. The realization of meanings.
(806.8) 71:7.8 3. The appreciation of values.
(806.9) 71:7.9 4. The nobility of work — duty.
(806.10) 71:7.10 5. The motivation of goals — morality.
(806.11) 71:7.11 6. The love of service — character.
(806.12) 71:7.12 7. Cosmic insight — spiritual discernment.
8. The Character of Statehood
(806.15) 71:8.2 The evolution of statehood entails progress from level to level, as follows:
(806.16) 71:8.3 1. The creation of a threefold government of executive, legislative, and judicial branches.(807.11) 71:8.15 These are the prerequisites of progressive government and the earmarks of ideal statehood. Urantia is far from the realization of these exalted ideals, but the civilized races have made a beginning — mankind is on the march toward higher evolutionary destinies.
(806.17) 71:8.4 2. The freedom of social, political, and religious activities.
(807.1) 71:8.5 3. The abolition of all forms of slavery and human bondage.
(807.2) 71:8.6 4. The ability of the citizenry to control the levying of taxes.
(807.3) 71:8.7 5. The establishment of universal education — learning extended from the cradle to the grave.
(807.4) 71:8.8 6. The proper adjustment between local and national governments.
(807.5) 71:8.9 7. The fostering of science and the conquest of disease.
(807.6) 71:8.10 8. The due recognition of sex equality and the co-ordinated functioning of men and women in the home, school, and church, with specialized service of women in industry and government.
(807.7) 71:8.11 9. The elimination of toiling slavery by machine invention and the subsequent mastery of the machine age.
(807.8) 71:8.12 10. The conquest of dialects — the triumph of a universal language.
(807.9) 71:8.13 11. The ending of war — international adjudication of national and racial differences by continental courts of nations presided over by a supreme planetary tribunal automatically recruited from the periodically retiring heads of the continental courts. The continental courts are authoritative; the world court is advisory — moral.
(807.10) 71:8.14 12. The world-wide vogue of the pursuit of wisdom — the exaltation of philosophy. The evolution of a world religion, which will presage the entrance of the planet upon the earlier phases of settlement in light and life.
(807.12) 71:8.16 [Sponsored by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 72
Government on a Neighboring Planet
(808.2) 72:0.2 Of all the Satania worlds which became isolated because of participation in the Lucifer rebellion, this planet has experienced a history most like that of Urantia. The similarity of the two spheres undoubtedly explains why permission to make this extraordinary presentation was granted, for it is most unusual for the system rulers to consent to the narration on one planet of the affairs of another.
(808.3) 72:0.3 This planet, like Urantia, was led astray by the disloyalty of its Planetary Prince in connection with the Lucifer rebellion. It received a Material Son shortly after Adam came to Urantia, and this Son also defaulted, leaving the sphere isolated, since a Magisterial Son has never been bestowed upon its mortal races.
1. The Continental Nation
(808.5) 72:1.2 The industrial mechanism of this nation enjoys a certain great advantage derived from the unique topography of the continent. The high mountains, on which heavy rains fall eight months in the year, are situated at the very center of the country. This natural arrangement favors the utilization of water power and greatly facilitates the irrigation of the more arid western quarter of the continent.
(808.6) 72:1.3 These people are self-sustaining, that is, they can live indefinitely without importing anything from the surrounding nations. Their natural resources are replete, and by scientific techniques they have learned how to compensate for their deficiencies in the essentials of life. They enjoy a brisk domestic commerce but have little foreign trade owing to the universal hostility of their less progressive neighbors.
(808.7) 72:1.4 This continental nation, in general, followed the evolutionary trend of the planet: The development from the tribal stage to the appearance of strong rulers and kings occupied thousands of years. The unconditional monarchs were succeeded by many different orders of government — abortive republics, communal states, and dictators came and went in endless profusion. This growth continued until about five hundred years ago when, during a politically fermenting period, one of the nation’s powerful dictator-triumvirs had a change of heart. He volunteered to abdicate upon condition that one of the other rulers, the baser of the remaining two, also vacate his dictatorship. Thus was the sovereignty of the continent placed in the hands of one ruler. The unified state progressed under strong monarchial rule for over one hundred years, during which there evolved a masterful charter of liberty.
(809.1) 72:1.5 The subsequent transition from monarchy to a representative form of government was gradual, the kings remaining as mere social or sentimental figureheads, finally disappearing when the male line of descent ran out. The present republic has now been in existence just two hundred years, during which time there has been a continuous progression toward the governmental techniques about to be narrated, the last developments in industrial and political realms having been made within the past decade.
2. Political Organization
(809.3) 72:2.2 There are five different types of metropolitan government, depending on the size of the city, but no city is permitted to have more than one million inhabitants. On the whole, these municipal governing schemes are very simple, direct, and economical. The few offices of city administration are keenly sought by the highest types of citizens.
(809.4) 72:2.3 The federal government embraces three co-ordinate divisions: executive, legislative, and judicial. The federal chief executive is elected every six years by universal territorial suffrage. He is not eligible for re-election except upon the petition of at least seventy-five state legislatures concurred in by the respective state governors, and then but for one term. He is advised by a supercabinet composed of all living ex-chief executives.
(809.5) 72:2.4 The legislative division embraces three houses:
(809.6) 72:2.5 1. The upper house is elected by industrial, professional, agricultural, and other groups of workers, balloting in accordance with economic function.(810.1) 72:2.8 Very much of the federal administrative work is carried on by the ten regional (subfederal) authorities, each consisting of the association of ten states. These regional divisions are wholly executive and administrative, having neither legislative nor judicial functions. The ten regional executives are the personal appointees of the federal chief executive, and their term of office is concurrent with his — six years. The federal supreme tribunal approves the appointment of these ten regional executives, and while they may not be reappointed, the retiring executive automatically becomes the associate and adviser of his successor. Otherwise, these regional chiefs choose their own cabinets of administrative officials.
(809.7) 72:2.6 2. The lower house is elected by certain organizations of society embracing the social, political, and philosophic groups not included in industry or the professions. All citizens in good standing participate in the election of both classes of representatives, but they are differently grouped, depending on whether the election pertains to the upper or lower house.
(809.8) 72:2.7 3. The third house — the elder statesmen — embraces the veterans of civic service and includes many distinguished persons nominated by the chief executive, by the regional (subfederal) executives, by the chief of the supreme tribunal, and by the presiding officers of either of the other legislative houses. This group is limited to one hundred, and its members are elected by the majority action of the elder statesmen themselves. Membership is for life, and when vacancies occur, the person receiving the largest ballot among the list of nominees is thereby duly elected. The scope of this body is purely advisory, but it is a mighty regulator of public opinion and exerts a powerful influence upon all branches of the government.
(810.2) 72:2.9 This nation is adjudicated by two major court systems — the law courts and the socioeconomic courts. The law courts function on the following three levels:
(810.3) 72:2.10 1. Minor courts of municipal and local jurisdiction, whose decisions may be appealed to the high state tribunals.(810.6) 72:2.13 The socioeconomic courts function in the following three divisions:
(810.4) 72:2.11 2. State supreme courts, whose decisions are final in all matters not involving the federal government or jeopardy of citizenship rights and liberties. The regional executives are empowered to bring any case at once to the bar of the federal supreme court.
(810.5) 72:2.12 3. Federal supreme court — the high tribunal for the adjudication of national contentions and the appellate cases coming up from the state courts. This supreme tribunal consists of twelve men over forty and under seventy-five years of age who have served two or more years on some state tribunal, and who have been appointed to this high position by the chief executive with the majority approval of the supercabinet and the third house of the legislative assembly. All decisions of this supreme judicial body are by at least a two-thirds vote.
(810.7) 72:2.14 1. Parental courts, associated with the legislative and executive divisions of the home and social system.(810.10) 72:2.17 The federal supreme court does not pass upon socioeconomic cases except upon the three-quarters vote of the third legislative branch of the national government, the house of elder statesmen. Otherwise, all decisions of the parental, educational, and industrial high courts are final.
(810.8) 72:2.15 2. Educational courts — the juridical bodies connected with the state and regional school systems and associated with the executive and legislative branches of the educational administrative mechanism.
(810.9) 72:2.16 3. Industrial courts — the jurisdictional tribunals vested with full authority for the settlement of all economic misunderstandings.
3. The Home Life
(811.2) 72:3.2 The home life of this people has greatly improved during the last century. Attendance of parents, both fathers and mothers, at the parental schools of child culture is compulsory. Even the agriculturists who reside in small country settlements carry on this work by correspondence, going to the near-by centers for oral instruction once in ten days — every two weeks, for they maintain a five-day week.
(811.3) 72:3.3 The average number of children in each family is five, and they are under the full control of their parents or, in case of the demise of one or both, under that of the guardians designated by the parental courts. It is considered a great honor for any family to be awarded the guardianship of a full orphan. Competitive examinations are held among parents, and the orphan is awarded to the home of those displaying the best parental qualifications.
(811.4) 72:3.4 These people regard the home as the basic institution of their civilization. It is expected that the most valuable part of a child’s education and character training will be secured from his parents and at home, and fathers devote almost as much attention to child culture as do mothers.
(811.5) 72:3.5 All sex instruction is administered in the home by parents or by legal guardians. Moral instruction is offered by teachers during the rest periods in the school shops, but not so with religious training, which is deemed to be the exclusive privilege of parents, religion being looked upon as an integral part of home life. Purely religious instruction is given publicly only in the temples of philosophy, no such exclusively religious institutions as the Urantia churches having developed among this people. In their philosophy, religion is the striving to know God and to manifest love for one’s fellows through service for them, but this is not typical of the religious status of the other nations on this planet. Religion is so entirely a family matter among these people that there are no public places devoted exclusively to religious assembly. Politically, church and state, as Urantians are wont to say, are entirely separate, but there is a strange overlapping of religion and philosophy.
(811.6) 72:3.6 Until twenty years ago the spiritual teachers (comparable to Urantia pastors), who visit each family periodically to examine the children to ascertain if they have been properly instructed by their parents, were under governmental supervision. These spiritual advisers and examiners are now under the direction of the newly created Foundation of Spiritual Progress, an institution supported by voluntary contributions. Possibly this institution may not further evolve until after the arrival of a Paradise Magisterial Son.
(811.7) 72:3.7 Children remain legally subject to their parents until they are fifteen, when the first initiation into civic responsibility is held. Thereafter, every five years for five successive periods similar public exercises are held for such age groups at which their obligations to parents are lessened, while new civic and social responsibilities to the state are assumed. Suffrage is conferred at twenty, the right to marry without parental consent is not bestowed until twenty-five, and children must leave home on reaching the age of thirty.
(812.1) 72:3.8 Marriage and divorce laws are uniform throughout the nation. Marriage before twenty — the age of civil enfranchisement — is not permitted. Permission to marry is only granted after one year’s notice of intention, and after both bride and groom present certificates showing that they have been duly instructed in the parental schools regarding the responsibilities of married life.
(812.2) 72:3.9 Divorce regulations are somewhat lax, but decrees of separation, issued by the parental courts, may not be had until one year after application therefor has been recorded, and the year on this planet is considerably longer than on Urantia. Notwithstanding their easy divorce laws, the present rate of divorces is only one tenth that of the civilized races of Urantia.
4. The Educational System
(812.4) 72:4.2 The feeble-minded are trained only in agriculture and animal husbandry, and are committed for life to special custodial colonies where they are segregated by sex to prevent parenthood, which is denied all subnormals. These restrictive measures have been in operation for seventy-five years; the commitment decrees are handed down by the parental courts.
(812.5) 72:4.3 Everyone takes one month’s vacation each year. The precollege schools are conducted for nine months out of the year of ten, the vacation being spent with parents or friends in travel. This travel is a part of the adult-education program and is continued throughout a lifetime, the funds for meeting such expenses being accumulated by the same methods as those employed in old-age insurance.
(812.6) 72:4.4 One quarter of the school time is devoted to play — competitive athletics — the pupils progressing in these contests from the local, through the state and regional, and on to the national trials of skill and prowess. Likewise, the oratorical and musical contests, as well as those in science and philosophy, occupy the attention of students from the lower social divisions on up to the contests for national honors.
(812.7) 72:4.5 The school government is a replica of the national government with its three correlated branches, the teaching staff functioning as the third or advisory legislative division. The chief object of education on this continent is to make every pupil a self-supporting citizen.
(813.1) 72:4.6 Every child graduating from the precollege school system at eighteen is a skilled artisan. Then begins the study of books and the pursuit of special knowledge, either in the adult schools or in the colleges. When a brilliant student completes his work ahead of schedule, he is granted an award of time and means wherewith he may execute some pet project of his own devising. The entire educational system is designed to adequately train the individual.
5. Industrial Organization
(813.3) 72:5.2 Social antagonisms are lessening, and good will is growing apace. No grave economic problems have arisen out of the abolition of slavery (over one hundred years ago) since this adjustment was effected gradually by the liberation of two per cent each year. Those slaves who satisfactorily passed mental, moral, and physical tests were granted citizenship; many of these superior slaves were war captives or children of such captives. Some fifty years ago they deported the last of their inferior slaves, and still more recently they are addressing themselves to the task of reducing the numbers of their degenerate and vicious classes.
(813.4) 72:5.3 These people have recently developed new techniques for the adjustment of industrial misunderstandings and for the correction of economic abuses which are marked improvements over their older methods of settling such problems. Violence has been outlawed as a procedure in adjusting either personal or industrial differences. Wages, profits, and other economic problems are not rigidly regulated, but they are in general controlled by the industrial legislatures, while all disputes arising out of industry are passed upon by the industrial courts.
(813.5) 72:5.4 The industrial courts are only thirty years old but are functioning very satisfactorily. The most recent development provides that hereafter the industrial courts shall recognize legal compensation as falling in three divisions:
(813.6) 72:5.5 1. Legal rates of interest on invested capital.(813.9) 72:5.8 These shall first be met in accordance with contract, or in the face of decreased earnings they shall share proportionally in transient reduction. And thereafter all earnings in excess of these fixed charges shall be regarded as dividends and shall be prorated to all three divisions: capital, skill, and labor.
(813.7) 72:5.6 2. Reasonable salary for skill employed in industrial operations.
(813.8) 72:5.7 3. Fair and equitable wages for labor.
(813.10) 72:5.9 Every ten years the regional executives adjust and decree the lawful hours of daily gainful toil. Industry now operates on a five-day week, working four and playing one. These people labor six hours each working day and, like students, nine months in the year of ten. Vacation is usually spent in travel, and new methods of transportation having been so recently developed, the whole nation is travel bent. The climate favors travel about eight months in the year, and they are making the most of their opportunities.
(813.11) 72:5.10 Two hundred years ago the profit motive was wholly dominant in industry, but today it is being rapidly displaced by other and higher driving forces. Competition is keen on this continent, but much of it has been transferred from industry to play, skill, scientific achievement, and intellectual attainment. It is most active in social service and governmental loyalty. Among this people public service is rapidly becoming the chief goal of ambition. The richest man on the continent works six hours a day in the office of his machine shop and then hastens over to the local branch of the school of statesmanship, where he seeks to qualify for public service.
(814.1) 72:5.11 Labor is becoming more honorable on this continent, and all able-bodied citizens over eighteen work either at home and on farms, at some recognized industry, on the public works where the temporarily unemployed are absorbed, or else in the corps of compulsory laborers in the mines.
(814.2) 72:5.12 These people are also beginning to foster a new form of social disgust — disgust for both idleness and unearned wealth. Slowly but certainly they are conquering their machines. Once they, too, struggled for political liberty and subsequently for economic freedom. Now are they entering upon the enjoyment of both while in addition they are beginning to appreciate their well-earned leisure, which can be devoted to increased self-realization.
6. Old-Age Insurance
(814.4) 72:6.2 Among this people all persons must retire from gainful pursuit at sixty-five unless they secure a permit from the state labor commissioner which will entitle them to remain at work until the age of seventy. This age limit does not apply to government servants or philosophers. The physically disabled or permanently crippled can be placed on the retired list at any age by court order countersigned by the pension commissioner of the regional government.
(814.5) 72:6.3 The funds for old-age pensions are derived from four sources:
(814.6) 72:6.4 1. One day’s earnings each month are requisitioned by the federal government for this purpose, and in this country everybody works.(814.10) 72:6.8 Although state and regional actuarial foundations supply many forms of protective insurance, old-age pensions are solely administered by the federal government through the ten regional departments.
(814.7) 72:6.5 2. Bequests — many wealthy citizens leave funds for this purpose.
(814.8) 72:6.6 3. The earnings of compulsory labor in the state mines. After the conscript workers support themselves and set aside their own retirement contributions, all excess profits on their labor are turned over to this pension fund.
(814.9) 72:6.7 4. The income from natural resources. All natural wealth on the continent is held as a social trust by the federal government, and the income therefrom is utilized for social purposes, such as disease prevention, education of geniuses, and expenses of especially promising individuals in the statesmanship schools. One half of the income from natural resources goes to the old-age pension fund.
(814.11) 72:6.9 These government funds have long been honestly administered. Next to treason and murder, the heaviest penalties meted out by the courts are attached to betrayal of public trust. Social and political disloyalty are now looked upon as being the most heinous of all crimes.
7. Taxation
(815.2) 72:7.2 In all industry first attention is paid to health; certain phases of physical well-being are regarded as industrial and community prerogatives, but individual and family health problems are matters of personal concern only. In medicine, as in all other purely personal matters, it is increasingly the plan of government to refrain from interfering.
(815.3) 72:7.3 Cities have no taxing power, neither can they go in debt. They receive per capita allowances from the state treasury and must supplement such revenue from the earnings of their socialistic enterprises and by licensing various commercial activities.
(815.4) 72:7.4 The rapid-transit facilities, which make it practical greatly to extend the city boundaries, are under municipal control. The city fire departments are supported by the fire-prevention and insurance foundations, and all buildings, in city or country, are fireproof — have been for over seventy-five years.
(815.5) 72:7.5 There are no municipally appointed peace officers; the police forces are maintained by the state governments. This department is recruited almost entirely from the unmarried men between twenty-five and fifty. Most of the states assess a rather heavy bachelor tax, which is remitted to all men joining the state police. In the average state the police force is now only one tenth as large as it was fifty years ago.
(815.6) 72:7.6 There is little or no uniformity among the taxation schemes of the one hundred comparatively free and sovereign states as economic and other conditions vary greatly in different sections of the continent. Every state has ten basic constitutional provisions which cannot be modified except by consent of the federal supreme court, and one of these articles prevents levying a tax of more than one per cent on the value of any property in any one year, homesites, whether in city or country, being exempted.
(815.7) 72:7.7 The federal government cannot go in debt, and a three-fourths referendum is required before any state can borrow except for purposes of war. Since the federal government cannot incur debt, in the event of war the National Council of Defense is empowered to assess the states for money, as well as for men and materials, as it may be required. But no debt may run for more than twenty-five years.
(815.8) 72:7.8 Income to support the federal government is derived from the following five sources:
(815.9) 72:7.9 1. Import duties. All imports are subject to a tariff designed to protect the standard of living on this continent, which is far above that of any other nation on the planet. These tariffs are set by the highest industrial court after both houses of the industrial congress have ratified the recommendations of the chief executive of economic affairs, who is the joint appointee of these two legislative bodies. The upper industrial house is elected by labor, the lower by capital.(816.5) 72:7.14 Federal appropriations, except war funds assessed by the National Council of Defense, are originated in the upper legislative house, concurred in by the lower house, approved by the chief executive, and finally validated by the federal budget commission of one hundred. The members of this commission are nominated by the state governors and elected by the state legislatures to serve for twenty-four years, one quarter being elected every six years. Every six years this body, by a three-fourths ballot, chooses one of its number as chief, and he thereby becomes director-controller of the federal treasury.
(816.1) 72:7.10 2. Royalties. The federal government encourages invention and original creations in the ten regional laboratories, assisting all types of geniuses — artists, authors, and scientists — and protecting their patents. In return the government takes one half the profits realized from all such inventions and creations, whether pertaining to machines, books, artistry, plants, or animals.
(816.2) 72:7.11 3. Inheritance tax. The federal government levies a graduated inheritance tax ranging from one to fifty per cent, depending on the size of an estate as well as on other conditions.
(816.3) 72:7.12 4. Military equipment. The government earns a considerable sum from the leasing of military and naval equipment for commercial and recreational usages.
(816.4) 72:7.13 5. Natural resources. The income from natural resources, when not fully required for the specific purposes designated in the charter of federal statehood, is turned into the national treasury.
8. The Special Colleges
(816.7) 72:8.2 1. Statesmanship schools. These schools are of three classes: national, regional, and state. The public offices of the nation are grouped in four divisions. The first division of public trust pertains principally to the national administration, and all officeholders of this group must be graduates of both regional and national schools of statesmanship. Individuals may accept political, elective, or appointive office in the second division upon graduating from any one of the ten regional schools of statesmanship; their trusts concern responsibilities in the regional administration and the state governments. Division three includes state responsibilities, and such officials are only required to have state degrees of statesmanship. The fourth and last division of officeholders are not required to hold statesmanship degrees, such offices being wholly appointive. They represent minor positions of assistantship, secretaryships, and technical trusts which are discharged by the various learned professions functioning in governmental administrative capacities.
(816.8) 72:8.3 Judges of the minor and state courts hold degrees from the state schools of statesmanship. Judges of the jurisdictional tribunals of social, educational, and industrial matters hold degrees from the regional schools. Judges of the federal supreme court must hold degrees from all these schools of statesmanship.
(817.1) 72:8.4 2. Schools of philosophy. These schools are affiliated with the temples of philosophy and are more or less associated with religion as a public function.
(817.2) 72:8.5 3. Institutions of science. These technical schools are co-ordinated with industry rather than with the educational system and are administered under fifteen divisions.
(817.3) 72:8.6 4. Professional training schools. These special institutions provide the technical training for the various learned professions, twelve in number.
(817.4) 72:8.7 5. Military and naval schools. Near the national headquarters and at the twenty-five coastal military centers are maintained those institutions devoted to the military training of volunteer citizens from eighteen to thirty years of age. Parental consent is required before twenty-five in order to gain entrance to these schools.
9. The Plan of Universal Suffrage
(817.6) 72:9.2 1. Every man and woman of twenty years and over has one vote. Upon attaining this age, all citizens must accept membership in two voting groups: They will join the first in accordance with their economic function — industrial, professional, agricultural, or trade; they will enter the second group according to their political, philosophic, and social inclinations. All workers thus belong to some economic franchise group, and these guilds, like the noneconomic associations, are regulated much as is the national government with its threefold division of powers. Registration in these groups cannot be changed for twelve years.(818.2) 72:9.7 Thus, except in the election of the chief executive, suffrage is exercised by economic, professional, intellectual, and social groupings of the citizenry. The ideal state is organic, and every free and intelligent group of citizens represents a vital and functioning organ within the larger governmental organism.
(817.7) 72:9.3 2. Upon nomination by the state governors or by the regional executives and by the mandate of the regional supreme councils, individuals who have rendered great service to society, or who have demonstrated extraordinary wisdom in government service, may have additional votes conferred upon them not oftener than every five years and not to exceed nine such superfranchises. The maximum suffrage of any multiple voter is ten. Scientists, inventors, teachers, philosophers, and spiritual leaders are also thus recognized and honored with augmented political power. These advanced civic privileges are conferred by the state and regional supreme councils much as degrees are bestowed by the special colleges, and the recipients are proud to attach the symbols of such civic recognition, along with their other degrees, to their lists of personal achievements.
(817.8) 72:9.4 3. All individuals sentenced to compulsory labor in the mines and all governmental servants supported by tax funds are, for the periods of such services, disenfranchised. This does not apply to aged persons who may be retired on pensions at sixty-five.
(817.9) 72:9.5 4. There are five brackets of suffrage reflecting the average yearly taxes paid for each half-decade period. Heavy taxpayers are permitted extra votes up to five. This grant is independent of all other recognition, but in no case can any person cast over ten ballots.
(818.1) 72:9.6 5. At the time this franchise plan was adopted, the territorial method of voting was abandoned in favor of the economic or functional system. All citizens now vote as members of industrial, social, or professional groups, regardless of their residence. Thus the electorate consists of solidified, unified, and intelligent groups who elect only their best members to positions of governmental trust and responsibility. There is one exception to this scheme of functional or group suffrage: The election of a federal chief executive every six years is by nation-wide ballot, and no citizen casts over one vote.
(818.3) 72:9.8 The schools of statesmanship have power to start proceedings in the state courts looking toward the disenfranchisement of any defective, idle, indifferent, or criminal individual. These people recognize that, when fifty per cent of a nation is inferior or defective and possesses the ballot, such a nation is doomed. They believe the dominance of mediocrity spells the downfall of any nation. Voting is compulsory, heavy fines being assessed against all who fail to cast their ballots.
10. Dealing with Crime
(818.5) 72:10.2 These people are passing out of the negative into the positive era of law. Recently they have gone so far as to attempt the prevention of crime by sentencing those who are believed to be potential murderers and major criminals to life service in the detention colonies. If such convicts subsequently demonstrate that they have become more normal, they may be either paroled or pardoned. The homicide rate on this continent is only one per cent of that among the other nations.
(818.6) 72:10.3 Efforts to prevent the breeding of criminals and defectives were begun over one hundred years ago and have already yielded gratifying results. There are no prisons or hospitals for the insane. For one reason, there are only about ten per cent as many of these groups as are found on Urantia.
11. Military Preparedness
(819.1) 72:11.2 The courses pursued by such commissioned officers are four years in length and are invariably correlated with the mastery of some trade or profession. Military training is never given without this associated industrial, scientific, or professional schooling. When military training is finished, the individual has, during his four years’ course, received one half of the education imparted in any of the special schools where the courses are likewise four years in length. In this way the creation of a professional military class is avoided by providing this opportunity for a large number of men to support themselves while securing the first half of a technical or professional training.
(819.2) 72:11.3 Military service during peacetime is purely voluntary, and the enlistments in all branches of the service are for four years, during which every man pursues some special line of study in addition to the mastery of military tactics. Training in music is one of the chief pursuits of the central military schools and of the twenty-five training camps distributed about the periphery of the continent. During periods of industrial slackness many thousands of unemployed are automatically utilized in upbuilding the military defenses of the continent on land and sea and in the air.
(819.3) 72:11.4 Although these people maintain a powerful war establishment as a defense against invasion by the surrounding hostile peoples, it may be recorded to their credit that they have not in over one hundred years employed these military resources in an offensive war. They have become civilized to that point where they can vigorously defend civilization without yielding to the temptation to utilize their war powers in aggression. There have been no civil wars since the establishment of the united continental state, but during the last two centuries these people have been called upon to wage nine fierce defensive conflicts, three of which were against mighty confederations of world powers. Although this nation maintains adequate defense against attack by hostile neighbors, it pays far more attention to the training of statesmen, scientists, and philosophers.
(819.4) 72:11.5 When at peace with the world, all mobile defense mechanisms are quite fully employed in trade, commerce, and recreation. When war is declared, the entire nation is mobilized. Throughout the period of hostilities military pay obtains in all industries, and the chiefs of all military departments become members of the chief executive’s cabinet.
12. The Other Nations
(819.6) 72:12.2 Just now this superior government is planning to establish ambassadorial relations with the inferior peoples, and for the first time a great religious leader has arisen who advocates the sending of missionaries to these surrounding nations. We fear they are about to make the mistake that so many others have made when they have endeavored to force a superior culture and religion upon other races. What a wonderful thing could be done on this world if this continental nation of advanced culture would only go out and bring to itself the best of the neighboring peoples and then, after educating them, send them back as emissaries of culture to their benighted brethren! Of course, if a Magisterial Son should soon come to this advanced nation, great things could quickly happen on this world.
(820.1) 72:12.3 This recital of the affairs of a neighboring planet is made by special permission with the intent of advancing civilization and augmenting governmental evolution on Urantia. Much more could be narrated that would no doubt interest and intrigue Urantians, but this disclosure covers the limits of our permissive mandate.
(820.2) 72:12.4 Urantians should, however, take note that their sister sphere in the Satania family has benefited by neither magisterial nor bestowal missions of the Paradise Sons. Neither are the various peoples of Urantia set off from each other by such disparity of culture as separates the continental nation from its planetary fellows.
(820.3) 72:12.5 The pouring out of the Spirit of Truth provides the spiritual foundation for the realization of great achievements in the interests of the human race of the bestowal world. Urantia is therefore far better prepared for the more immediate realization of a planetary government with its laws, mechanisms, symbols, conventions, and language — all of which could contribute so mightily to the establishment of world-wide peace under law and could lead to the sometime dawning of a real age of spiritual striving; and such an age is the planetary threshold to the utopian ages of light and life.
(820.4) 72:12.6 [Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 73
The Garden of Eden
(821.2) 73:0.2 This request was addressed to the Most Highs of Edentia because they had exercised direct jurisdiction over many of Urantia’s affairs ever since Caligastia’s downfall and the temporary vacation of authority on Jerusem.
(821.3) 73:0.3 Tabamantia, sovereign supervisor of the series of decimal or experimental worlds, came to inspect the planet and, after his survey of racial progress, duly recommended that Urantia be granted Material Sons. In a little less than one hundred years from the time of this inspection, Adam and Eve, a Material Son and Daughter of the local system, arrived and began the difficult task of attempting to untangle the confused affairs of a planet retarded by rebellion and resting under the ban of spiritual isolation.
1. The Nodites and the Amadonites
(821.5) 73:1.2 Ten thousand years after the rebellion practically all the gains of the Prince’s administration had been effaced; the races of the world were little better off than if this misguided Son had never come to Urantia. Only among the Nodites and the Amadonites was there persistence of the traditions of Dalamatia and the culture of the Planetary Prince.
(821.6) 73:1.3 The Nodites were the descendants of the rebel members of the Prince’s staff, their name deriving from their first leader, Nod, onetime chairman of the Dalamatia commission on industry and trade. The Amadonites were the descendants of those Andonites who chose to remain loyal with Van and Amadon. “Amadonite” is more of a cultural and religious designation than a racial term; racially considered the Amadonites were essentially Andonites. “Nodite” is both a cultural and racial term, for the Nodites themselves constituted the eighth race of Urantia.
(822.1) 73:1.4 There existed a traditional enmity between the Nodites and the Amadonites. This feud was constantly coming to the surface whenever the offspring of these two groups would try to engage in some common enterprise. Even later, in the affairs of Eden, it was exceedingly difficult for them to work together in peace.
(822.2) 73:1.5 Shortly after the destruction of Dalamatia the followers of Nod became divided into three major groups. The central group remained in the immediate vicinity of their original home near the headwaters of the Persian Gulf. The eastern group migrated to the highland regions of Elam just east of the Euphrates valley. The western group was situated on the northeastern Syrian shores of the Mediterranean and in adjacent territory.
(822.3) 73:1.6 These Nodites had freely mated with the Sangik races and had left behind an able progeny. And some of the descendants of the rebellious Dalamatians subsequently joined Van and his loyal followers in the lands north of Mesopotamia. Here, in the vicinity of Lake Van and the southern Caspian Sea region, the Nodites mingled and mixed with the Amadonites, and they were numbered among the “mighty men of old.”
(822.4) 73:1.7 Prior to the arrival of Adam and Eve these groups — Nodites and Amadonites — were the most advanced and cultured races on earth.
2. Planning for the Garden
(822.6) 73:2.2 Van told his nearest associates the story of the Material Sons on Jerusem; what he had known of them before ever he came to Urantia. He well knew that these Adamic Sons always lived in simple but charming garden homes and proposed, eighty-three years before the arrival of Adam and Eve, that they devote themselves to the proclamation of their advent and to the preparation of a garden home for their reception.
(822.7) 73:2.3 From their highland headquarters and from sixty-one far-scattered settlements, Van and Amadon recruited a corps of over three thousand willing and enthusiastic workers who, in solemn assembly, dedicated themselves to this mission of preparing for the promised — at least expected — Son.
(822.8) 73:2.4 Van divided his volunteers into one hundred companies with a captain over each and an associate who served on his personal staff as a liaison officer, keeping Amadon as his own associate. These commissions all began in earnest their preliminary work, and the committee on location for the Garden sallied forth in search of the ideal spot.
(822.9) 73:2.5 Although Caligastia and Daligastia had been deprived of much of their power for evil, they did everything possible to frustrate and hamper the work of preparing the Garden. But their evil machinations were largely offset by the faithful activities of the almost ten thousand loyal midway creatures who so tirelessly labored to advance the enterprise.
3. The Garden Site
(823.2) 73:3.2 The committee almost unanimously favored the third selection. This site was chosen, and two years were occupied in transferring the world’s cultural headquarters, including the tree of life, to this Mediterranean peninsula. All but a single group of the peninsula dwellers peaceably vacated when Van and his company arrived.
(823.3) 73:3.3 This Mediterranean peninsula had a salubrious climate and an equable temperature; this stabilized weather was due to the encircling mountains and to the fact that this area was virtually an island in an inland sea. While it rained copiously on the surrounding highlands, it seldom rained in Eden proper. But each night, from the extensive network of artificial irrigation channels, a “mist would go up” to refresh the vegetation of the Garden.
(823.4) 73:3.4 The coast line of this land mass was considerably elevated, and the neck connecting with the mainland was only twenty-seven miles wide at the narrowest point. The great river that watered the Garden came down from the higher lands of the peninsula and flowed east through the peninsular neck to the mainland and thence across the lowlands of Mesopotamia to the sea beyond. It was fed by four tributaries which took origin in the coastal hills of the Edenic peninsula, and these are the “four heads” of the river which “went out of Eden,” and which later became confused with the branches of the rivers surrounding the second garden.
(823.5) 73:3.5 The mountains surrounding the Garden abounded in precious stones and metals, though these received very little attention. The dominant idea was to be the glorification of horticulture and the exaltation of agriculture.
(823.6) 73:3.6 The site chosen for the Garden was probably the most beautiful spot of its kind in all the world, and the climate was then ideal. Nowhere else was there a location which could have lent itself so perfectly to becoming such a paradise of botanic expression. In this rendezvous the cream of the civilization of Urantia was forgathering. Without and beyond, the world lay in darkness, ignorance, and savagery. Eden was the one bright spot on Urantia; it was naturally a dream of loveliness, and it soon became a poem of exquisite and perfected landscape glory.
4. Establishing the Garden
(824.1) 73:4.2 The first task was the building of the brick wall across the neck of the peninsula. This once completed, the real work of landscape beautification and home building could proceed unhindered.
(824.2) 73:4.3 A zoological garden was created by building a smaller wall just outside the main wall; the intervening space, occupied by all manner of wild beasts, served as an additional defense against hostile attacks. This menagerie was organized in twelve grand divisions, and walled paths led between these groups to the twelve gates of the Garden, the river and its adjacent pastures occupying the central area.
(824.3) 73:4.4 In the preparation of the Garden only volunteer laborers were employed; no hirelings were ever used. They cultivated the Garden and tended their herds for support; contributions of food were also received from near-by believers. And this great enterprise was carried through to completion in spite of the difficulties attendant upon the confused status of the world during these troublous times.
(824.4) 73:4.5 But it was a cause for great disappointment when Van, not knowing how soon the expected Son and Daughter might come, suggested that the younger generation also be trained in the work of carrying on the enterprise in case their arrival should be delayed. This seemed like an admission of lack of faith on Van’s part and made considerable trouble, caused many desertions; but Van went forward with his plan of preparedness, meantime filling the places of the deserters with younger volunteers.
5. The Garden Home
(824.6) 73:5.2 At the time of Adam’s arrival, though the Garden was only one-fourth finished, it had thousands of miles of irrigation ditches and more than twelve thousand miles of paved paths and roads. There were a trifle over five thousand brick buildings in the various sectors, and the trees and plants were almost beyond number. Seven was the largest number of houses composing any one cluster in the park. And though the structures of the Garden were simple, they were most artistic. The roads and paths were well built, and the landscaping was exquisite.
(824.7) 73:5.3 The sanitary arrangements of the Garden were far in advance of anything that had been attempted theretofore on Urantia. The drinking water of Eden was kept wholesome by the strict observance of the sanitary regulations designed to conserve its purity. During these early times much trouble came about from neglect of these rules, but Van gradually impressed upon his associates the importance of allowing nothing to fall into the water supply of the Garden.
(825.1) 73:5.4 Before the later establishment of a sewage-disposal system the Edenites practiced the scrupulous burial of all waste or decomposing material. Amadon’s inspectors made their rounds each day in search for possible causes of sickness. Urantians did not again awaken to the importance of the prevention of human diseases until the later times of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before the disruption of the Adamic regime a covered brick-conduit disposal system had been constructed which ran beneath the walls and emptied into the river of Eden almost a mile beyond the outer or lesser wall of the Garden.
(825.2) 73:5.5 By the time of Adam’s arrival most of the plants of that section of the world were growing in Eden. Already had many of the fruits, cereals, and nuts been greatly improved. Many modern vegetables and cereals were first cultivated here, but scores of varieties of food plants were subsequently lost to the world.
(825.3) 73:5.6 About five per cent of the Garden was under high artificial cultivation, fifteen per cent partially cultivated, the remainder being left in a more or less natural state pending the arrival of Adam, it being thought best to finish the park in accordance with his ideas.
(825.4) 73:5.7 And so was the Garden of Eden made ready for the reception of the promised Adam and his consort. And this Garden would have done honor to a world under perfected administration and normal control. Adam and Eve were well pleased with the general plan of Eden, though they made many changes in the furnishings of their own personal dwelling.
(825.5) 73:5.8 Although the work of embellishment was hardly finished at the time of Adam’s arrival, the place was already a gem of botanic beauty; and during the early days of his sojourn in Eden the whole Garden took on new form and assumed new proportions of beauty and grandeur. Never before this time nor after has Urantia harbored such a beautiful and replete exhibition of horticulture and agriculture.
6. The Tree of Life
(825.7) 73:6.2 The Material Sons on the system capitals do not require the tree of life for sustenance. Only in the planetary repersonalization are they dependent on this adjunct to physical immortality.
(825.8) 73:6.3 The “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” may be a figure of speech, a symbolic designation covering a multitude of human experiences, but the “tree of life” was not a myth; it was real and for a long time was present on Urantia. When the Most Highs of Edentia approved the commission of Caligastia as Planetary Prince of Urantia and those of the one hundred Jerusem citizens as his administrative staff, they sent to the planet, by the Melchizedeks, a shrub of Edentia, and this plant grew to be the tree of life on Urantia. This form of nonintelligent life is native to the constellation headquarters spheres, being also found on the headquarters worlds of the local and superuniverses as well as on the Havona spheres, but not on the system capitals.
(826.1) 73:6.4 This superplant stored up certain space-energies which were antidotal to the age-producing elements of animal existence. The fruit of the tree of life was like a superchemical storage battery, mysteriously releasing the life-extension force of the universe when eaten. This form of sustenance was wholly useless to the ordinary evolutionary beings on Urantia, but specifically it was serviceable to the one hundred materialized members of Caligastia’s staff and to the one hundred modified Andonites who had contributed of their life plasm to the Prince’s staff, and who, in return, were made possessors of that complement of life which made it possible for them to utilize the fruit of the tree of life for an indefinite extension of their otherwise mortal existence.
(826.2) 73:6.5 During the days of the Prince’s rule the tree was growing from the earth in the central and circular courtyard of the Father’s temple. Upon the outbreak of the rebellion it was regrown from the central core by Van and his associates in their temporary camp. This Edentia shrub was subsequently taken to their highland retreat, where it served both Van and Amadon for more than one hundred and fifty thousand years.
(826.3) 73:6.6 When Van and his associates made ready the Garden for Adam and Eve, they transplanted the Edentia tree to the Garden of Eden, where, once again, it grew in a central, circular courtyard of another temple to the Father. And Adam and Eve periodically partook of its fruit for the maintenance of their dual form of physical life.
(826.4) 73:6.7 When the plans of the Material Son went astray, Adam and his family were not permitted to carry the core of the tree away from the Garden. When the Nodites invaded Eden, they were told that they would become as “gods if they partook of the fruit of the tree.” Much to their surprise they found it unguarded. They ate freely of the fruit for years, but it did nothing for them; they were all material mortals of the realm; they lacked that endowment which acted as a complement to the fruit of the tree. They became enraged at their inability to benefit from the tree of life, and in connection with one of their internal wars, the temple and the tree were both destroyed by fire; only the stone wall stood until the Garden was subsequently submerged. This was the second temple of the Father to perish.
(826.5) 73:6.8 And now must all flesh on Urantia take the natural course of life and death. Adam, Eve, their children, and their children’s children, together with their associates, all perished in the course of time, thus becoming subject to the ascension scheme of the local universe wherein mansion world resurrection follows material death.
7. The Fate of Eden
(827.1) 73:7.2 We cannot regard this disappearance of the Garden as being in any way a result of the miscarriage of the divine plans or as a result of the mistakes of Adam and Eve. We do not regard the submergence of Eden as anything but a natural occurrence, but it does seem to us that the sinking of the Garden was timed to occur at just about the date of the accumulation of the reserves of the violet race for undertaking the work of rehabilitating the world peoples.
(827.2) 73:7.3 The Melchizedeks counseled Adam not to initiate the program of racial uplift and blending until his own family had numbered one-half million. It was never intended that the Garden should be the permanent home of the Adamites. They were to become emissaries of a new life to all the world; they were to mobilize for unselfish bestowal upon the needy races of earth.
(827.3) 73:7.4 The instructions given Adam by the Melchizedeks implied that he was to establish racial, continental, and divisional headquarters to be in charge of his immediate sons and daughters, while he and Eve were to divide their time between these various world capitals as advisers and co-ordinators of the world-wide ministry of biologic uplift, intellectual advancement, and moral rehabilitation.
(827.4) 73:7.5 [Presented by Solonia, the seraphic “voice in the Garden.”]
The Urantia Book
Paper 74
Adam and Eve
1. Adam and Eve on Jerusem
(828.3) 74:1.2 At the time Adam was chosen to come to Urantia, he was employed, with his mate, in the trial-and-testing physical laboratories of Jerusem. For more than fifteen thousand years they had been directors of the division of experimental energy as applied to the modification of living forms. Long before this they had been teachers in the citizenship schools for new arrivals on Jerusem. And all this should be borne in mind in connection with the narration of their subsequent conduct on Urantia.
(828.4) 74:1.3 When the proclamation was issued calling for volunteers for the mission of Adamic adventure on Urantia, the entire senior corps of Material Sons and Daughters volunteered. The Melchizedek examiners, with the approval of Lanaforge and the Most Highs of Edentia, finally selected the Adam and Eve who subsequently came to function as the biologic uplifters of Urantia.
(828.5) 74:1.4 Adam and Eve had remained loyal to Michael during the Lucifer rebellion; nevertheless, the pair were called before the System Sovereign and his entire cabinet for examination and instruction. The details of Urantia affairs were fully presented; they were exhaustively instructed as to the plans to be pursued in accepting the responsibilities of rulership on such a strife-torn world. They were put under joint oaths of allegiance to the Most Highs of Edentia and to Michael of Salvington. And they were duly advised to regard themselves as subject to the Urantia corps of Melchizedek receivers until that governing body should see fit to relinquish rule on the world of their assignment.
(829.1) 74:1.5 This Jerusem pair left behind them on the capital of Satania and elsewhere, one hundred offspring — fifty sons and fifty daughters — magnificent creatures who had escaped the pitfalls of progression, and who were all in commission as faithful stewards of universe trust at the time of their parents’ departure for Urantia. And they were all present in the beautiful temple of the Material Sons attendant upon the farewell exercises associated with the last ceremonies of the bestowal acceptance. These children accompanied their parents to the dematerialization headquarters of their order and were the last to bid them farewell and divine speed as they fell asleep in the personality lapse of consciousness which precedes the preparation for seraphic transport. The children spent some time together at the family rendezvous rejoicing that their parents were soon to become the visible heads, in reality the sole rulers, of planet 606 in the system of Satania.
(829.2) 74:1.6 And thus did Adam and Eve leave Jerusem amidst the acclaim and well-wishing of its citizens. They went forth to their new responsibilities adequately equipped and fully instructed concerning every duty and danger to be encountered on Urantia.
2. Arrival of Adam and Eve
(829.4) 74:2.2 The tongue of Eden was an Andonic dialect as spoken by Amadon. Van and Amadon had markedly improved this language by creating a new alphabet of twenty-four letters, and they had hoped to see it become the tongue of Urantia as the Edenic culture would spread throughout the world. Adam and Eve had fully mastered this human dialect before they departed from Jerusem so that this son of Andon heard the exalted ruler of his world address him in his own tongue.
(829.5) 74:2.3 And on that day there was great excitement and joy throughout Eden as the runners went in great haste to the rendezvous of the carrier pigeons assembled from near and far, shouting: “Let loose the birds; let them carry the word that the promised Son has come.” Hundreds of believer settlements had faithfully, year after year, kept up the supply of these home-reared pigeons for just such an occasion.
(829.6) 74:2.4 As the news of Adam’s arrival spread abroad, thousands of the near-by tribesmen accepted the teachings of Van and Amadon, while for months and months pilgrims continued to pour into Eden to welcome Adam and Eve and to do homage to their unseen Father.
(829.7) 74:2.5 Soon after their awakening, Adam and Eve were escorted to the formal reception on the great mound to the north of the temple. This natural hill had been enlarged and made ready for the installation of the world’s new rulers. Here, at noon, the Urantia reception committee welcomed this Son and Daughter of the system of Satania. Amadon was chairman of this committee, which consisted of twelve members embracing a representative of each of the six Sangik races; the acting chief of the midwayers; Annan, a loyal daughter and spokesman for the Nodites; Noah, the son of the architect and builder of the Garden and executive of his deceased father’s plans; and the two resident Life Carriers.
(830.1) 74:2.6 The next act was the delivery of the charge of planetary custody to Adam and Eve by the senior Melchizedek, chief of the council of receivership on Urantia. The Material Son and Daughter took the oath of allegiance to the Most Highs of Norlatiadek and to Michael of Nebadon and were proclaimed rulers of Urantia by Van, who thereby relinquished the titular authority which for over one hundred and fifty thousand years he had held by virtue of the action of the Melchizedek receivers.
(830.2) 74:2.7 And Adam and Eve were invested with kingly robes on this occasion, the time of their formal induction into world rulership. Not all of the arts of Dalamatia had been lost to the world; weaving was still practiced in the days of Eden.
(830.3) 74:2.8 Then was heard the archangels’ proclamation, and the broadcast voice of Gabriel decreed the second judgment roll call of Urantia and the resurrection of the sleeping survivors of the second dispensation of grace and mercy on 606 of Satania. The dispensation of the Prince has passed; the age of Adam, the third planetary epoch, opens amidst scenes of simple grandeur; and the new rulers of Urantia start their reign under seemingly favorable conditions, notwithstanding the world-wide confusion occasioned by lack of the co-operation of their predecessor in authority on the planet.*
3. Adam and Eve Learn About the Planet
(830.5) 74:3.2 Thus ended the first day of Adam and Eve on isolated Urantia, the confused planet of the Caligastia betrayal; and they walked and talked far into the night, their first night on earth — and it was so lonely.
(830.6) 74:3.3 Adam’s second day on earth was spent in session with the planetary receivers and the advisory council. From the Melchizedeks, and their associates, Adam and Eve learned more about the details of the Caligastia rebellion and the result of that upheaval upon the world’s progress. And it was, on the whole, a disheartening story, this long recital of the mismanagement of world affairs. They learned all the facts regarding the utter collapse of the Caligastia scheme for accelerating the process of social evolution. They also arrived at a full realization of the folly of attempting to achieve planetary advancement independently of the divine plan of progression. And thus ended a sad but enlightening day — their second on Urantia.
(831.1) 74:3.4 The third day was devoted to an inspection of the Garden. From the large passenger birds — the fandors — Adam and Eve looked down upon the vast stretches of the Garden while being carried through the air over this, the most beautiful spot on earth. This day of inspection ended with an enormous banquet in honor of all who had labored to create this garden of Edenic beauty and grandeur. And again, late into the night of their third day, the Son and his mate walked in the Garden and talked about the immensity of their problems.
(831.2) 74:3.5 On the fourth day Adam and Eve addressed the Garden assembly. From the inaugural mount they spoke to the people concerning their plans for the rehabilitation of the world and outlined the methods whereby they would seek to redeem the social culture of Urantia from the low levels to which it had fallen as a result of sin and rebellion. This was a great day, and it closed with a feast for the council of men and women who had been selected to assume responsibilities in the new administration of world affairs. Take note! women as well as men were in this group, and that was the first time such a thing had occurred on earth since the days of Dalamatia. It was an astounding innovation to behold Eve, a woman, sharing the honors and responsibilities of world affairs with a man. And thus ended the fourth day on earth.
(831.3) 74:3.6 The fifth day was occupied with the organization of the temporary government, the administration which was to function until the Melchizedek receivers should leave Urantia.
(831.4) 74:3.7 The sixth day was devoted to an inspection of the numerous types of men and animals. Along the walls eastward in Eden, Adam and Eve were escorted all day, viewing the animal life of the planet and arriving at a better understanding as to what must be done to bring order out of the confusion of a world inhabited by such a variety of living creatures.
(831.5) 74:3.8 It greatly surprised those who accompanied Adam on this trip to observe how fully he understood the nature and function of the thousands upon thousands of animals shown him. The instant he glanced at an animal, he would indicate its nature and behavior. Adam could give names descriptive of the origin, nature, and function of all material creatures on sight. Those who conducted him on this tour of inspection did not know that the world’s new ruler was one of the most expert anatomists of all Satania; and Eve was equally proficient. Adam amazed his associates by describing hosts of living things too small to be seen by human eyes.
(831.6) 74:3.9 When the sixth day of their sojourn on earth was over, Adam and Eve rested for the first time in their new home in “the east of Eden.” The first six days of the Urantia adventure had been very busy, and they looked forward with great pleasure to an entire day of freedom from all activities.
(831.7) 74:3.10 But circumstances dictated otherwise. The experience of the day just past in which Adam had so intelligently and so exhaustively discussed the animal life of Urantia, together with his masterly inaugural address and his charming manner, had so won the hearts and overcome the intellects of the Garden dwellers that they were not only wholeheartedly disposed to accept the newly arrived Son and Daughter of Jerusem as rulers, but the majority were about ready to fall down and worship them as gods.
4. The First Upheaval
(832.2) 74:4.2 The amazing events of the first six days of Adam and Eve on earth were entirely too much for the unprepared minds of even the world’s best men; their heads were in a whirl; they were swept along with the proposal to bring the noble pair up to the Father’s temple at high noon in order that everyone might bow down in respectful worship and prostrate themselves in humble submission. And the Garden dwellers were really sincere in all of this.
(832.3) 74:4.3 Van protested. Amadon was absent, being in charge of the guard of honor which had remained behind with Adam and Eve overnight. But Van’s protest was swept aside. He was told that he was likewise too modest, too unassuming; that he was not far from a god himself, else how had he lived so long on earth, and how had he brought about such a great event as the advent of Adam? And as the excited Edenites were about to seize him and carry him up to the mount for adoration, Van made his way out through the throng and, being able to communicate with the midwayers, sent their leader in great haste to Adam.
(832.4) 74:4.4 It was near the dawn of their seventh day on earth that Adam and Eve heard the startling news of the proposal of these well-meaning but misguided mortals; and then, even while the passenger birds were swiftly winging to bring them to the temple, the midwayers, being able to do such things, transported Adam and Eve to the Father’s temple. It was early on the morning of this seventh day and from the mount of their so recent reception that Adam held forth in explanation of the orders of divine sonship and made clear to these earth minds that only the Father and those whom he designates may be worshiped. Adam made it plain that he would accept any honor and receive all respect, but worship never!
(832.5) 74:4.5 It was a momentous day, and just before noon, about the time of the arrival of the seraphic messenger bearing the Jerusem acknowledgment of the installation of the world’s rulers, Adam and Eve, moving apart from the throng, pointed to the Father’s temple and said: “Go you now to the material emblem of the Father’s invisible presence and bow down in worship of him who made us all and who keeps us living. And let this act be the sincere pledge that you never will again be tempted to worship anyone but God.” They all did as Adam directed. The Material Son and Daughter stood alone on the mount with bowed heads while the people prostrated themselves about the temple.
(832.6) 74:4.6 And this was the origin of the Sabbath-day tradition. Always in Eden the seventh day was devoted to the noontide assembly at the temple; long it was the custom to devote this day to self-culture. The forenoon was devoted to physical improvement, the noontime to spiritual worship, the afternoon to mind culture, while the evening was spent in social rejoicing. This was never the law in Eden, but it was the custom as long as the Adamic administration held sway on earth.
5. Adam’s Administration
(833.2) 74:5.2 The farewell of the receivers occupied the whole of a day, and during the evening the individual Melchizedeks gave Adam and Eve their parting advice and best wishes. Adam had several times requested his advisers to remain on earth with him, but always were these petitions denied. The time had come when the Material Sons must assume full responsibility for the conduct of world affairs. And so, at midnight, the seraphic transports of Satania left the planet with fourteen beings for Jerusem, the translation of Van and Amadon occurring simultaneously with the departure of the twelve Melchizedeks.
(833.3) 74:5.3 All went fairly well for a time on Urantia, and it appeared that Adam would, eventually, be able to develop some plan for promoting the gradual extension of the Edenic civilization. Pursuant to the advice of the Melchizedeks, he began to foster the arts of manufacture with the idea of developing trade relations with the outside world. When Eden was disrupted, there were over one hundred primitive manufacturing plants in operation, and extensive trade relations with the near-by tribes had been established.
(833.4) 74:5.4 For ages Adam and Eve had been instructed in the technique of improving a world in readiness for their specialized contributions to the advancement of evolutionary civilization; but now they were face to face with pressing problems, such as the establishment of law and order in a world of savages, barbarians, and semicivilized human beings. Aside from the cream of the earth’s population, assembled in the Garden, only a few groups, here and there, were at all ready for the reception of the Adamic culture.
(833.5) 74:5.5 Adam made a heroic and determined effort to establish a world government, but he met with stubborn resistance at every turn. Adam had already put in operation a system of group control throughout Eden and had federated all of these companies into the Edenic league. But trouble, serious trouble, ensued when he went outside the Garden and sought to apply these ideas to the outlying tribes. The moment Adam’s associates began to work outside the Garden, they met the direct and well-planned resistance of Caligastia and Daligastia. The fallen Prince had been deposed as world ruler, but he had not been removed from the planet. He was still present on earth and able, at least to some extent, to resist all of Adam’s plans for the rehabilitation of human society. Adam tried to warn the races against Caligastia, but the task was made very difficult because his archenemy was invisible to the eyes of mortals.
(833.6) 74:5.6 Even among the Edenites there were those confused minds that leaned toward the Caligastia teaching of unbridled personal liberty; and they caused Adam no end of trouble; always were they upsetting the best-laid plans for orderly progression and substantial development. He was finally compelled to withdraw his program for immediate socialization; he fell back on Van’s method of organization, dividing the Edenites into companies of one hundred with captains over each and with lieutenants in charge of groups of ten.
(834.1) 74:5.7 Adam and Eve had come to institute representative government in the place of monarchial, but they found no government worthy of the name on the face of the whole earth. For the time being Adam abandoned all effort to establish representative government, and before the collapse of the Edenic regime he succeeded in establishing almost one hundred outlying trade and social centers where strong individuals ruled in his name. Most of these centers had been organized aforetime by Van and Amadon.
(834.2) 74:5.8 The sending of ambassadors from one tribe to another dates from the times of Adam. This was a great forward step in the evolution of government.
6. Home Life of Adam and Eve
(834.4) 74:6.2 Adamson was the first-born of the violet race of Urantia, being followed by his sister and Eveson, the second son of Adam and Eve. Eve was the mother of five children before the Melchizedeks left — three sons and two daughters. The next two were twins. She bore sixty-three children, thirty-two daughters and thirty-one sons, before the default. When Adam and Eve left the Garden, their family consisted of four generations numbering 1,647 pure-line descendants. They had forty-two children after leaving the Garden besides the two offspring of joint parentage with the mortal stock of earth. And this does not include the Adamic parentage to the Nodite and evolutionary races.
(834.5) 74:6.3 The Adamic children did not take milk from animals when they ceased to nurse the mother’s breast at one year of age. Eve had access to the milk of a great variety of nuts and to the juices of many fruits, and knowing full well the chemistry and energy of these foods, she suitably combined them for the nourishment of her children until the appearance of teeth.
(834.6) 74:6.4 While cooking was universally employed outside of the immediate Adamic sector of Eden, there was no cooking in Adam’s household. They found their foods — fruits, nuts, and cereals — ready prepared as they ripened. They ate once a day, shortly after noontime. Adam and Eve also imbibed “light and energy” direct from certain space emanations in conjunction with the ministry of the tree of life.
(834.7) 74:6.5 The bodies of Adam and Eve gave forth a shimmer of light, but they always wore clothing in conformity with the custom of their associates. Though wearing very little during the day, at eventide they donned night wraps. The origin of the traditional halo encircling the heads of supposed pious and holy men dates back to the days of Adam and Eve. Since the light emanations of their bodies were so largely obscured by clothing, only the radiating glow from their heads was discernible. The descendants of Adamson always thus portrayed their concept of individuals believed to be extraordinary in spiritual development.
(834.8) 74:6.6 Adam and Eve could communicate with each other and with their immediate children over a distance of about fifty miles. This thought exchange was effected by means of the delicate gas chambers located in close proximity to their brain structures. By this mechanism they could send and receive thought oscillations. But this power was instantly suspended upon the mind’s surrender to the discord and disruption of evil.
(835.1) 74:6.7 The Adamic children attended their own schools until they were sixteen, the younger being taught by the elder. The little folks changed activities every thirty minutes, the older every hour. And it was certainly a new sight on Urantia to observe these children of Adam and Eve at play, joyous and exhilarating activity just for the sheer fun of it. The play and humor of the present-day races are largely derived from the Adamic stock. The Adamites all had a great appreciation of music as well as a keen sense of humor.
(835.2) 74:6.8 The average age of betrothal was eighteen, and these youths then entered upon a two years’ course of instruction in preparation for the assumption of marital responsibilities. At twenty they were eligible for marriage; and after marriage they began their lifework or entered upon special preparation therefor.
(835.3) 74:6.9 The practice of some subsequent nations of permitting the royal families, supposedly descended from the gods, to marry brother to sister, dates from the traditions of the Adamic offspring — mating, as they must needs, with one another. The marriage ceremonies of the first and second generations of the Garden were always performed by Adam and Eve.
7. Life in the Garden
(835.5) 74:7.2 The entire purpose of the western school system of the Garden was socialization. The forenoon periods of recess were devoted to practical horticulture and agriculture, the afternoon periods to competitive play. The evenings were employed in social intercourse and the cultivation of personal friendships. Religious and sexual training were regarded as the province of the home, the duty of parents.
(835.6) 74:7.3 The teaching in these schools included instruction regarding:
(835.7) 74:7.4 1. Health and the care of the body.(835.14) 74:7.11 The schools, in fact every activity of the Garden, were always open to visitors. Unarmed observers were freely admitted to Eden for short visits. To sojourn in the Garden a Urantian had to be “adopted.” He received instructions in the plan and purpose of the Adamic bestowal, signified his intention to adhere to this mission, and then made declaration of loyalty to the social rule of Adam and the spiritual sovereignty of the Universal Father.
(835.8) 74:7.5 2. The golden rule, the standard of social intercourse.
(835.9) 74:7.6 3. The relation of individual rights to group rights and community obligations.
(835.10) 74:7.7 4. History and culture of the various earth races.
(835.11) 74:7.8 5. Methods of advancing and improving world trade.
(835.12) 74:7.9 6. Co-ordination of conflicting duties and emotions.
(835.13) 74:7.10 7. The cultivation of play, humor, and competitive substitutes for physical fighting.
(836.1) 74:7.12 The laws of the Garden were based on the older codes of Dalamatia and were promulgated under seven heads:
(836.2) 74:7.13 1. The laws of health and sanitation.(836.9) 74:7.20 The moral law of Eden was little different from the seven commandments of Dalamatia. But the Adamites taught many additional reasons for these commands; for instance, regarding the injunction against murder, the indwelling of the Thought Adjuster was presented as an additional reason for not destroying human life. They taught that “whoso sheds man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God made he man.”
(836.3) 74:7.14 2. The social regulations of the Garden.
(836.4) 74:7.15 3. The code of trade and commerce.
(836.5) 74:7.16 4. The laws of fair play and competition.
(836.6) 74:7.17 5. The laws of home life.
(836.7) 74:7.18 6. The civil codes of the golden rule.
(836.8) 74:7.19 7. The seven commands of supreme moral rule.
(836.10) 74:7.21 The public worship hour of Eden was noon; sunset was the hour of family worship. Adam did his best to discourage the use of set prayers, teaching that effective prayer must be wholly individual, that it must be the “desire of the soul”; but the Edenites continued to use the prayers and forms handed down from the times of Dalamatia. Adam also endeavored to substitute the offerings of the fruit of the land for the blood sacrifices in the religious ceremonies but had made little progress before the disruption of the Garden.
(836.11) 74:7.22 Adam endeavored to teach the races sex equality. The way Eve worked by the side of her husband made a profound impression upon all dwellers in the Garden. Adam definitely taught them that the woman, equally with the man, contributes those life factors which unite to form a new being. Theretofore, mankind had presumed that all procreation resided in the “loins of the father.” They had looked upon the mother as being merely a provision for nurturing the unborn and nursing the newborn.
(836.12) 74:7.23 Adam taught his contemporaries all they could comprehend, but that was not very much, comparatively speaking. Nevertheless, the more intelligent of the races of earth looked forward eagerly to the time when they would be permitted to intermarry with the superior children of the violet race. And what a different world Urantia would have become if this great plan of uplifting the races had been carried out! Even as it was, tremendous gains resulted from the small amount of the blood of this imported race which the evolutionary peoples incidentally secured.
(836.13) 74:7.24 And thus did Adam work for the welfare and uplift of the world of his sojourn. But it was a difficult task to lead these mixed and mongrel peoples in the better way.
8. The Legend of Creation
(837.1) 74:8.2 The legend of the making of the world in six days was an afterthought, in fact, more than thirty thousand years afterwards. One feature of the narrative, the sudden appearance of the sun and moon, may have taken origin in the traditions of the onetime sudden emergence of the world from a dense space cloud of minute matter which had long obscured both sun and moon.
(837.2) 74:8.3 The story of creating Eve out of Adam’s rib is a confused condensation of the Adamic arrival and the celestial surgery connected with the interchange of living substances associated with the coming of the corporeal staff of the Planetary Prince more than four hundred and fifty thousand years previously.
(837.3) 74:8.4 The majority of the world’s peoples have been influenced by the tradition that Adam and Eve had physical forms created for them upon their arrival on Urantia. The belief in man’s having been created from clay was well-nigh universal in the Eastern Hemisphere; this tradition can be traced from the Philippine Islands around the world to Africa. And many groups accepted this story of man’s clay origin by some form of special creation in the place of the earlier beliefs in progressive creation — evolution.
(837.4) 74:8.5 Away from the influences of Dalamatia and Eden, mankind tended toward the belief in the gradual ascent of the human race. The fact of evolution is not a modern discovery; the ancients understood the slow and evolutionary character of human progress. The early Greeks had clear ideas of this despite their proximity to Mesopotamia. Although the various races of earth became sadly mixed up in their notions of evolution, nevertheless, many of the primitive tribes believed and taught that they were the descendants of various animals. Primitive peoples made a practice of selecting for their “totems” the animals of their supposed ancestry. Certain North American Indian tribes believed they originated from beavers and coyotes. Certain African tribes teach that they are descended from the hyena, a Malay tribe from the lemur, a New Guinea group from the parrot.
(837.5) 74:8.6 The Babylonians, because of immediate contact with the remnants of the civilization of the Adamites, enlarged and embellished the story of man’s creation; they taught that he had descended directly from the gods. They held to an aristocratic origin for the race which was incompatible with even the doctrine of creation out of clay.
(837.6) 74:8.7 The Old Testament account of creation dates from long after the time of Moses; he never taught the Hebrews such a distorted story. But he did present a simple and condensed narrative of creation to the Israelites, hoping thereby to augment his appeal to worship the Creator, the Universal Father, whom he called the Lord God of Israel.
(837.7) 74:8.8 In his early teachings, Moses very wisely did not attempt to go back of Adam’s time, and since Moses was the supreme teacher of the Hebrews, the stories of Adam became intimately associated with those of creation. That the earlier traditions recognized pre-Adamic civilization is clearly shown by the fact that later editors, intending to eradicate all reference to human affairs before Adam’s time, neglected to remove the telltale reference to Cain’s emigration to the “land of Nod,” where he took himself a wife.
(838.1) 74:8.9 The Hebrews had no written language in general usage for a long time after they reached Palestine. They learned the use of an alphabet from the neighboring Philistines, who were political refugees from the higher civilization of Crete. The Hebrews did little writing until about 900 B.C., and having no written language until such a late date, they had several different stories of creation in circulation, but after the Babylonian captivity they inclined more toward accepting a modified Mesopotamian version.
(838.2) 74:8.10 Jewish tradition became crystallized about Moses, and because he endeavored to trace the lineage of Abraham back to Adam, the Jews assumed that Adam was the first of all mankind. Yahweh was the creator, and since Adam was supposed to be the first man, he must have made the world just prior to making Adam. And then the tradition of Adam’s six days got woven into the story, with the result that almost a thousand years after Moses’ sojourn on earth the tradition of creation in six days was written out and subsequently credited to him.
(838.3) 74:8.11 When the Jewish priests returned to Jerusalem, they had already completed the writing of their narrative of the beginning of things. Soon they made claims that this recital was a recently discovered story of creation written by Moses. But the contemporary Hebrews of around 500 B.C. did not consider these writings to be divine revelations; they looked upon them much as later peoples regard mythological narratives.
(838.4) 74:8.12 This spurious document, reputed to be the teachings of Moses, was brought to the attention of Ptolemy, the Greek king of Egypt, who had it translated into Greek by a commission of seventy scholars for his new library at Alexandria. And so this account found its place among those writings which subsequently became a part of the later collections of the “sacred scriptures” of the Hebrew and Christian religions. And through identification with these theological systems, such concepts for a long time profoundly influenced the philosophy of many Occidental peoples.
(838.5) 74:8.13 The Christian teachers perpetuated the belief in the fiat creation of the human race, and all this led directly to the formation of the hypothesis of a onetime golden age of utopian bliss and the theory of the fall of man or superman which accounted for the nonutopian condition of society. These outlooks on life and man’s place in the universe were at best discouraging since they were predicated upon a belief in retrogression rather than progression, as well as implying a vengeful Deity, who had vented wrath upon the human race in retribution for the errors of certain onetime planetary administrators.
(838.6) 74:8.14 The “golden age” is a myth, but Eden was a fact, and the Garden civilization was actually overthrown. Adam and Eve carried on in the Garden for one hundred and seventeen years when, through the impatience of Eve and the errors of judgment of Adam, they presumed to turn aside from the ordained way, speedily bringing disaster upon themselves and ruinous retardation upon the developmental progression of all Urantia.
(838.7) 74:8.15 [Narrated by Solonia, the seraphic “voice in the Garden.”]
The Urantia Book
Paper 75
The Default of Adam and Eve
1. The Urantia Problem
(839.3) 75:1.2 Under normal conditions the first work of a Planetary Adam and Eve would be the co-ordination and blending of the races. But on Urantia such a project seemed just about hopeless, for the races, while biologically fit, had never been purged of their retarded and defective strains.
(839.4) 75:1.3 Adam and Eve found themselves on a sphere wholly unprepared for the proclamation of the brotherhood of man, a world groping about in abject spiritual darkness and cursed with confusion worse confounded by the miscarriage of the mission of the preceding administration. Mind and morals were at a low level, and instead of beginning the task of effecting religious unity, they must begin all anew the work of converting the inhabitants to the most simple forms of religious belief. Instead of finding one language ready for adoption, they were confronted by the world-wide confusion of hundreds upon hundreds of local dialects. No Adam of the planetary service was ever set down on a more difficult world; the obstacles seemed insuperable and the problems beyond creature solution.
(839.5) 75:1.4 They were isolated, and the tremendous sense of loneliness which bore down upon them was all the more heightened by the early departure of the Melchizedek receivers. Only indirectly, by means of the angelic orders, could they communicate with any being off the planet. Slowly their courage weakened, their spirits drooped, and sometimes their faith almost faltered.
(840.1) 75:1.5 And this is the true picture of the consternation of these two noble souls as they pondered the tasks which confronted them. They were both keenly aware of the enormous undertaking involved in the execution of their planetary assignment.
(840.2) 75:1.6 Probably no Material Sons of Nebadon were ever faced with such a difficult and seemingly hopeless task as confronted Adam and Eve in the sorry plight of Urantia. But they would have sometime met with success had they been more farseeing and patient. Both of them, especially Eve, were altogether too impatient; they were not willing to settle down to the long, long endurance test. They wanted to see some immediate results, and they did, but the results thus secured proved most disastrous both to themselves and to their world.
2. Caligastia’s Plot
(840.4) 75:2.2 It must be remembered that Caligastia was still the titular Planetary Prince of Urantia, a misguided but nevertheless high Son of the local universe. He was not finally deposed until the times of Christ Michael on Urantia.
(840.5) 75:2.3 But the fallen Prince was persistent and determined. He soon gave up working on Adam and decided to try a wily flank attack on Eve. The evil one concluded that the only hope for success lay in the adroit employment of suitable persons belonging to the upper strata of the Nodite group, the descendants of his onetime corporeal-staff associates. And the plans were accordingly laid for entrapping the mother of the violet race.
(840.6) 75:2.4 It was farthest from Eve’s intention ever to do anything which would militate against Adam’s plans or jeopardize their planetary trust. Knowing the tendency of woman to look upon immediate results rather than to plan farsightedly for more remote effects, the Melchizedeks, before departing, had especially enjoined Eve as to the peculiar dangers besetting their isolated position on the planet and had in particular warned her never to stray from the side of her mate, that is, to attempt no personal or secret methods of furthering their mutual undertakings. Eve had most scrupulously carried out these instructions for more than one hundred years, and it did not occur to her that any danger would attach to the increasingly private and confidential visits she was enjoying with a certain Nodite leader named Serapatatia. The whole affair developed so gradually and naturally that she was taken unawares.
(840.7) 75:2.5 The Garden dwellers had been in contact with the Nodites since the early days of Eden. From these mixed descendants of the defaulting members of Caligastia’s staff they had received much valuable help and co-operation, and through them the Edenic regime was now to meet its complete undoing and final overthrow.
3. The Temptation of Eve
(841.2) 75:3.2 Serapatatia had made several visits to the Garden and had become deeply impressed with the righteousness of Adam’s cause. And shortly after assuming the leadership of the Syrian Nodites, he announced his intention of establishing an affiliation with the work of Adam and Eve in the Garden. The majority of his people joined him in this program, and Adam was cheered by the news that the most powerful and the most intelligent of all the neighboring tribes had swung over almost bodily to the support of the program for world improvement; it was decidedly heartening. And shortly after this great event, Serapatatia and his new staff were entertained by Adam and Eve in their own home.
(841.3) 75:3.3 Serapatatia became one of the most able and efficient of all of Adam’s lieutenants. He was entirely honest and thoroughly sincere in all of his activities; he was never conscious, even later on, that he was being used as a circumstantial tool of the wily Caligastia.
(841.4) 75:3.4 Presently, Serapatatia became the associate chairman of the Edenic commission on tribal relations, and many plans were laid for the more vigorous prosecution of the work of winning the remote tribes to the cause of the Garden.
(841.5) 75:3.5 He held many conferences with Adam and Eve — especially with Eve — and they talked over many plans for improving their methods. One day, during a talk with Eve, it occurred to Serapatatia that it would be very helpful if, while awaiting the recruiting of large numbers of the violet race, something could be done in the meantime immediately to advance the needy waiting tribes. Serapatatia contended that, if the Nodites, as the most progressive and co-operative race, could have a leader born to them of part origin in the violet stock, it would constitute a powerful tie binding these peoples more closely to the Garden. And all of this was soberly and honestly considered to be for the good of the world since this child, to be reared and educated in the Garden, would exert a great influence for good over his father’s people.
(841.6) 75:3.6 It should again be emphasized that Serapatatia was altogether honest and wholly sincere in all that he proposed. He never once suspected that he was playing into the hands of Caligastia and Daligastia. Serapatatia was entirely loyal to the plan of building up a strong reserve of the violet race before attempting the world-wide upstepping of the confused peoples of Urantia. But this would require hundreds of years to consummate, and he was impatient; he wanted to see some immediate results — something in his own lifetime. He made it clear to Eve that Adam was oftentimes discouraged by the little that had been accomplished toward uplifting the world.
(841.7) 75:3.7 For more than five years these plans were secretly matured. At last they had developed to the point where Eve consented to have a secret conference with Cano, the most brilliant mind and active leader of the near-by colony of friendly Nodites. Cano was very sympathetic with the Adamic regime; in fact, he was the sincere spiritual leader of those neighboring Nodites who favored friendly relations with the Garden.
(842.1) 75:3.8 The fateful meeting occurred during the twilight hours of the autumn evening, not far from the home of Adam. Eve had never before met the beautiful and enthusiastic Cano — and he was a magnificent specimen of the survival of the superior physique and outstanding intellect of his remote progenitors of the Prince’s staff. And Cano also thoroughly believed in the righteousness of the Serapatatia project. (Outside of the Garden, multiple mating was a common practice.)
(842.2) 75:3.9 Influenced by flattery, enthusiasm, and great personal persuasion, Eve then and there consented to embark upon the much-discussed enterprise, to add her own little scheme of world saving to the larger and more far-reaching divine plan. Before she quite realized what was transpiring, the fatal step had been taken. It was done.
4. The Realization of Default
(842.4) 75:4.2 And as the Material Son and Daughter thus communed in the moonlit Garden, “the voice in the Garden” reproved them for disobedience. And that voice was none other than my own announcement to the Edenic pair that they had transgressed the Garden covenant; that they had disobeyed the instructions of the Melchizedeks; that they had defaulted in the execution of their oaths of trust to the sovereign of the universe.
(842.5) 75:4.3 Eve had consented to participate in the practice of good and evil. Good is the carrying out of the divine plans; sin is a deliberate transgression of the divine will; evil is the misadaptation of plans and the maladjustment of techniques resulting in universe disharmony and planetary confusion.
(842.6) 75:4.4 Every time the Garden pair had partaken of the fruit of the tree of life, they had been warned by the archangel custodian to refrain from yielding to the suggestions of Caligastia to combine good and evil. They had been thus admonished: “In the day that you commingle good and evil, you shall surely become as the mortals of the realm; you shall surely die.”
(842.7) 75:4.5 Eve had told Cano of this oft-repeated warning on the fateful occasion of their secret meeting, but Cano, not knowing the import or significance of such admonitions, had assured her that men and women with good motives and true intentions could do no evil; that she should surely not die but rather live anew in the person of their offspring, who would grow up to bless and stabilize the world.
(842.8) 75:4.6 Even though this project of modifying the divine plan had been conceived and executed with entire sincerity and with only the highest motives concerning the welfare of the world, it constituted evil because it represented the wrong way to achieve righteous ends, because it departed from the right way, the divine plan.
(843.1) 75:4.7 True, Eve had found Cano pleasant to the eyes, and she realized all that her seducer promised by way of “new and increased knowledge of human affairs and quickened understanding of human nature as supplemental to the comprehension of the Adamic nature.”
(843.2) 75:4.8 I talked to the father and mother of the violet race that night in the Garden as became my duty under the sorrowful circumstances. I listened fully to the recital of all that led up to the default of Mother Eve and gave both of them advice and counsel concerning the immediate situation. Some of this advice they followed; some they disregarded. This conference appears in your records as “the Lord God calling to Adam and Eve in the Garden and asking, ‘Where are you?’” It was the practice of later generations to attribute everything unusual and extraordinary, whether natural or spiritual, directly to the personal intervention of the Gods.
5. Repercussions of Default
(843.4) 75:5.2 It was in the despair of the realization of failure that Adam, the day after Eve’s misstep, sought out Laotta, the brilliant Nodite woman who was head of the western schools of the Garden, and with premeditation committed the folly of Eve. But do not misunderstand; Adam was not beguiled; he knew exactly what he was about; he deliberately chose to share the fate of Eve. He loved his mate with a supermortal affection, and the thought of the possibility of a lonely vigil on Urantia without her was more than he could endure.
(843.5) 75:5.3 When they learned what had happened to Eve, the infuriated inhabitants of the Garden became unmanageable; they declared war on the near-by Nodite settlement. They swept out through the gates of Eden and down upon these unprepared people, utterly destroying them — not a man, woman, or child was spared. And Cano, the father of Cain yet unborn, also perished.
(843.6) 75:5.4 Upon the realization of what had happened, Serapatatia was overcome with consternation and beside himself with fear and remorse. The next day he drowned himself in the great river.
(843.7) 75:5.5 The children of Adam sought to comfort their distracted mother while their father wandered in solitude for thirty days. At the end of that time judgment asserted itself, and Adam returned to his home and began to plan for their future course of action.
(843.8) 75:5.6 The consequences of the follies of misguided parents are so often shared by their innocent children. The upright and noble sons and daughters of Adam and Eve were overwhelmed by the inexplicable sorrow of the unbelievable tragedy which had been so suddenly and so ruthlessly thrust upon them. Not in fifty years did the older of these children recover from the sorrow and sadness of those tragic days, especially the terror of that period of thirty days during which their father was absent from home while their distracted mother was in complete ignorance of his whereabouts or fate.
(843.9) 75:5.7 And those same thirty days were as long years of sorrow and suffering to Eve. Never did this noble soul fully recover from the effects of that excruciating period of mental suffering and spiritual sorrow. No feature of their subsequent deprivations and material hardships ever began to compare in Eve’s memory with those terrible days and awful nights of loneliness and unbearable uncertainty. She learned of the rash act of Serapatatia and did not know whether her mate had in sorrow destroyed himself or had been removed from the world in retribution for her misstep. And when Adam returned, Eve experienced a satisfaction of joy and gratitude that never was effaced by their long and difficult life partnership of toiling service.
(844.1) 75:5.8 Time passed, but Adam was not certain of the nature of their offense until seventy days after the default of Eve, when the Melchizedek receivers returned to Urantia and assumed jurisdiction over world affairs. And then he knew they had failed.
(844.2) 75:5.9 But still more trouble was brewing: The news of the annihilation of the Nodite settlement near Eden was not slow in reaching the home tribes of Serapatatia to the north, and presently a great host was assembling to march on the Garden. And this was the beginning of a long and bitter warfare between the Adamites and the Nodites, for these hostilities kept up long after Adam and his followers emigrated to the second garden in the Euphrates valley. There was intense and lasting “enmity between that man and the woman, between his seed and her seed.”
6. Adam and Eve Leave the Garden
(844.4) 75:6.2 Adam knew that he and Eve had failed; the presence of the Melchizedek receivers told him that, though he still knew nothing of their personal status or future fate. He held an all-night conference with some twelve hundred loyal followers who pledged themselves to follow their leader, and the next day at noon these pilgrims went forth from Eden in quest of new homes. Adam had no liking for war and accordingly elected to leave the first garden to the Nodites unopposed.
(844.5) 75:6.3 The Edenic caravan was halted on the third day out from the Garden by the arrival of the seraphic transports from Jerusem. And for the first time Adam and Eve were informed of what was to become of their children. While the transports stood by, those children who had arrived at the age of choice (twenty years) were given the option of remaining on Urantia with their parents or of becoming wards of the Most Highs of Norlatiadek. Two thirds chose to go to Edentia; about one third elected to remain with their parents. All children of prechoice age were taken to Edentia. No one could have beheld the sorrowful parting of this Material Son and Daughter and their children without realizing that the way of the transgressor is hard. These offspring of Adam and Eve are now on Edentia; we do not know what disposition is to be made of them.
(844.6) 75:6.4 It was a sad, sad caravan that prepared to journey on. Could anything have been more tragic! To have come to a world in such high hopes, to have been so auspiciously received, and then to go forth in disgrace from Eden, only to lose more than three fourths of their children even before finding a new abiding place!
7. Degradation of Adam and Eve
(845.2) 75:7.2 While downcast by the sense of guilt, Adam and Eve were greatly cheered by the announcement that their judges on Salvington had absolved them from all charges of standing in “contempt of the universe government.” They had not been held guilty of rebellion.
(845.3) 75:7.3 The Edenic pair were informed that they had degraded themselves to the status of the mortals of the realm; that they must henceforth conduct themselves as man and woman of Urantia, looking to the future of the world races for their future.
(845.4) 75:7.4 Long before Adam and Eve left Jerusem, their instructors had fully explained to them the consequences of any vital departure from the divine plans. I had personally and repeatedly warned them, both before and after they arrived on Urantia, that reduction to the status of mortal flesh would be the certain result, the sure penalty, which would unfailingly attend default in the execution of their planetary mission. But a comprehension of the immortality status of the material order of sonship is essential to a clear understanding of the consequences attendant upon the default of Adam and Eve.
(845.5) 75:7.5 1. Adam and Eve, like their fellows on Jerusem, maintained immortal status through intellectual association with the mind-gravity circuit of the Spirit. When this vital sustenance is broken by mental disjunction, then, regardless of the spiritual level of creature existence, immortality status is lost. Mortal status followed by physical dissolution was the inevitable consequence of the intellectual default of Adam and Eve.
(845.6) 75:7.6 2. The Material Son and Daughter of Urantia, being also personalized in the similitude of the mortal flesh of this world, were further dependent on the maintenance of a dual circulatory system, the one derived from their physical natures, the other from the superenergy stored in the fruit of the tree of life. Always had the archangel custodian admonished Adam and Eve that default of trust would culminate in degradation of status, and access to this source of energy was denied them subsequent to their default.
(845.7) 75:7.7 Caligastia did succeed in trapping Adam and Eve, but he did not accomplish his purpose of leading them into open rebellion against the universe government. What they had done was indeed evil, but they were never guilty of contempt for truth, neither did they knowingly enlist in rebellion against the righteous rule of the Universal Father and his Creator Son.
8. The So-Called Fall of Man
(846.1) 75:8.2 There has been no “fall of man.” The history of the human race is one of progressive evolution, and the Adamic bestowal left the world peoples greatly improved over their previous biologic condition. The more superior stocks of Urantia now contain inheritance factors derived from as many as four separate sources: Andonite, Sangik, Nodite, and Adamic.
(846.2) 75:8.3 Adam should not be regarded as the cause of a curse on the human race. While he did fail in carrying forward the divine plan, while he did transgress his covenant with Deity, while he and his mate were most certainly degraded in creature status, notwithstanding all this, their contribution to the human race did much to advance civilization on Urantia.
(846.3) 75:8.4 In estimating the results of the Adamic mission on your world, justice demands the recognition of the condition of the planet. Adam was confronted with a well-nigh hopeless task when, with his beautiful mate, he was transported from Jerusem to this dark and confused planet. But had they been guided by the counsel of the Melchizedeks and their associates, and had they been more patient, they would have eventually met with success. But Eve listened to the insidious propaganda of personal liberty and planetary freedom of action. She was led to experiment with the life plasm of the material order of sonship in that she allowed this life trust to become prematurely commingled with that of the then mixed order of the original design of the Life Carriers which had been previously combined with that of the reproducing beings once attached to the staff of the Planetary Prince.
(846.4) 75:8.5 Never, in all your ascent to Paradise, will you gain anything by impatiently attempting to circumvent the established and divine plan by short cuts, personal inventions, or other devices for improving on the way of perfection, to perfection, and for eternal perfection.
(846.5) 75:8.6 All in all, there probably never was a more disheartening miscarriage of wisdom on any planet in all Nebadon. But it is not surprising that these missteps occur in the affairs of the evolutionary universes. We are a part of a gigantic creation, and it is not strange that everything does not work in perfection; our universe was not created in perfection. Perfection is our eternal goal, not our origin.
(846.6) 75:8.7 If this were a mechanistic universe, if the First Great Source and Center were only a force and not also a personality, if all creation were a vast aggregation of physical matter dominated by precise laws characterized by unvarying energy actions, then might perfection obtain, even despite the incompleteness of universe status. There would be no disagreement; there would be no friction. But in our evolving universe of relative perfection and imperfection we rejoice that disagreement and misunderstanding are possible, for thereby is evidenced the fact and the act of personality in the universe. And if our creation is an existence dominated by personality, then can you be assured of the possibilities of personality survival, advancement, and achievement; we can be confident of personality growth, experience, and adventure. What a glorious universe, in that it is personal and progressive, not merely mechanical or even passively perfect!
(846.7) 75:8.8 [Presented by Solonia, the seraphic “voice in the Garden.”]
The Urantia Book
Paper 76
The Second Garden
(847.2) 76:0.2 Cain and Sansa were both born before the Adamic caravan had reached its destination between the rivers in Mesopotamia. Laotta, the mother of Sansa, perished at the birth of her daughter; Eve suffered much but survived, owing to superior strength. Eve took Sansa, the child of Laotta, to her bosom, and she was reared along with Cain. Sansa grew up to be a woman of great ability. She became the wife of Sargan, the chief of the northern blue races, and contributed to the advancement of the blue men of those times.
1. The Edenites Enter Mesopotamia
(847.4) 76:1.2 When word had reached the dwellers in the land of the second garden that the king and high priest of the Garden of Eden was marching on them, they had fled in haste to the eastern mountains. Adam found all of the desired territory vacated when he arrived. And here in this new location Adam and his helpers set themselves to work to build new homes and establish a new center of culture and religion.
(847.5) 76:1.3 This site was known to Adam as one of the three original selections of the committee assigned to choose possible locations for the Garden proposed by Van and Amadon. The two rivers themselves were a good natural defense in those days, and a short way north of the second garden the Euphrates and Tigris came close together so that a defense wall extending fifty-six miles could be built for the protection of the territory to the south and between the rivers.
(847.6) 76:1.4 After getting settled in the new Eden, it became necessary to adopt crude methods of living; it seemed entirely true that the ground had been cursed. Nature was once again taking its course. Now were the Adamites compelled to wrest a living from unprepared soil and to cope with the realities of life in the face of the natural hostilities and incompatibilities of mortal existence. They found the first garden partially prepared for them, but the second had to be created by the labor of their own hands and in the “sweat of their faces.”
2. Cain and Abel
(848.2) 76:2.2 Now, in those days it was customary to make offerings to the priesthood of the things at hand. Herders would bring of their flocks, farmers of the fruits of the fields; and in accordance with this custom, Cain and Abel likewise made periodic offerings to the priests. The two boys had many times argued about the relative merits of their vocations, and Abel was not slow to note that preference was shown for his animal sacrifices. In vain did Cain appeal to the traditions of the first Eden, to the former preference for the fruits of the fields. But this Abel would not allow, and he taunted his older brother in his discomfiture.
(848.3) 76:2.3 In the days of the first Eden, Adam had indeed sought to discourage the offering of animal sacrifice so that Cain had a justifiable precedent for his contentions. It was, however, difficult to organize the religious life of the second Eden. Adam was burdened with a thousand and one details associated with the work of building, defense, and agriculture. Being much depressed spiritually, he intrusted the organization of worship and education to those of Nodite extraction who had served in these capacities in the first garden; and in even so short a time the officiating Nodite priests were reverting to the standards and rulings of pre-Adamic times.*
(848.4) 76:2.4 The two boys never got along well, and this matter of sacrifices further contributed to the growing hatred between them. Abel knew he was the son of both Adam and Eve and never failed to impress upon Cain that Adam was not his father. Cain was not pure violet as his father was of the Nodite race later admixed with the blue and the red man and with the aboriginal Andonic stock. And all of this, with Cain’s natural bellicose inheritance, caused him to nourish an ever-increasing hatred for his younger brother.
(848.5) 76:2.5 The boys were respectively eighteen and twenty years of age when the tension between them was finally resolved, one day, when Abel’s taunts so infuriated his bellicose brother that Cain turned upon him in wrath and slew him.
(848.6) 76:2.6 The observation of Abel’s conduct establishes the value of environment and education as factors in character development. Abel had an ideal inheritance, and heredity lies at the bottom of all character; but the influence of an inferior environment virtually neutralized this magnificent inheritance. Abel, especially during his younger years, was greatly influenced by his unfavorable surroundings. He would have become an entirely different person had he lived to be twenty-five or thirty; his superb inheritance would then have shown itself. While a good environment cannot contribute much toward really overcoming the character handicaps of a base heredity, a bad environment can very effectively spoil an excellent inheritance, at least during the younger years of life. Good social environment and proper education are indispensable soil and atmosphere for getting the most out of a good inheritance.
(849.1) 76:2.7 The death of Abel became known to his parents when his dogs brought the flocks home without their master. To Adam and Eve, Cain was fast becoming the grim reminder of their folly, and they encouraged him in his decision to leave the garden.
(849.2) 76:2.8 Cain’s life in Mesopotamia had not been exactly happy since he was in such a peculiar way symbolic of the default. It was not that his associates were unkind to him, but he had not been unaware of their subconscious resentment of his presence. But Cain knew that, since he bore no tribal mark, he would be killed by the first neighboring tribesmen who might chance to meet him. Fear, and some remorse, led him to repent. Cain had never been indwelt by an Adjuster, had always been defiant of the family discipline and disdainful of his father’s religion. But he now went to Eve, his mother, and asked for spiritual help and guidance, and when he honestly sought divine assistance, an Adjuster indwelt him. And this Adjuster, dwelling within and looking out, gave Cain a distinct advantage of superiority which classed him with the greatly feared tribe of Adam.
(849.3) 76:2.9 And so Cain departed for the land of Nod, east of the second Eden. He became a great leader among one group of his father’s people and did, to a certain degree, fulfill the predictions of Serapatatia, for he did promote peace between this division of the Nodites and the Adamites throughout his lifetime. Cain married Remona, his distant cousin, and their first son, Enoch, became the head of the Elamite Nodites. And for hundreds of years the Elamites and the Adamites continued to be at peace.
3. Life in Mesopotamia
(849.5) 76:3.2 Adam wisely spent most of the time training his children and their associates in civil administration, educational methods, and religious devotions. Had it not been for this foresight, pandemonium would have broken loose upon his death. As it was, the death of Adam made little difference in the conduct of the affairs of his people. But long before Adam and Eve passed away, they recognized that their children and followers had gradually learned to forget the days of their glory in Eden. And it was better for the majority of their followers that they did forget the grandeur of Eden; they were not so likely to experience undue dissatisfaction with their less fortunate environment.
(849.6) 76:3.3 The civil rulers of the Adamites were derived hereditarily from the sons of the first garden. Adam’s first son, Adamson (Adam ben Adam), founded a secondary center of the violet race to the north of the second Eden. Adam’s second son, Eveson, became a masterly leader and administrator; he was the great helper of his father. Eveson lived not quite so long as Adam, and his eldest son, Jansad, became the successor of Adam as the head of the Adamite tribes.
(849.7) 76:3.4 The religious rulers, or priesthood, originated with Seth, the eldest surviving son of Adam and Eve born in the second garden. He was born one hundred and twenty-nine years after Adam’s arrival on Urantia. Seth became absorbed in the work of improving the spiritual status of his father’s people, becoming the head of the new priesthood of the second garden. His son, Enos, founded the new order of worship, and his grandson, Kenan, instituted the foreign missionary service to the surrounding tribes, near and far.
(850.1) 76:3.5 The Sethite priesthood was a threefold undertaking, embracing religion, health, and education. The priests of this order were trained to officiate at religious ceremonies, to serve as physicians and sanitary inspectors, and to act as teachers in the schools of the garden.
(850.2) 76:3.6 Adam’s caravan had carried the seeds and bulbs of hundreds of plants and cereals of the first garden with them to the land between the rivers; they also had brought along extensive herds and some of all the domesticated animals. Because of this they possessed great advantages over the surrounding tribes. They enjoyed many of the benefits of the previous culture of the original Garden.
(850.3) 76:3.7 Up to the time of leaving the first garden, Adam and his family had always subsisted on fruits, cereals, and nuts. On the way to Mesopotamia they had, for the first time, partaken of herbs and vegetables. The eating of meat was early introduced into the second garden, but Adam and Eve never partook of flesh as a part of their regular diet. Neither did Adamson nor Eveson nor the other children of the first generation of the first garden become flesh eaters.
(850.4) 76:3.8 The Adamites greatly excelled the surrounding peoples in cultural achievement and intellectual development. They produced the third alphabet and otherwise laid the foundations for much that was the forerunner of modern art, science, and literature. Here in the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates they maintained the arts of writing, metalworking, pottery making, and weaving and produced a type of architecture that was not excelled in thousands of years.
(850.5) 76:3.9 The home life of the violet peoples was, for their day and age, ideal. Children were subjected to courses of training in agriculture, craftsmanship, and animal husbandry or else were educated to perform the threefold duty of a Sethite: to be priest, physician, and teacher.
(850.6) 76:3.10 And when thinking of the Sethite priesthood, do not confuse those high-minded and noble teachers of health and religion, those true educators, with the debased and commercial priesthoods of the later tribes and surrounding nations. Their religious concepts of Deity and the universe were advanced and more or less accurate, their health provisions were, for their time, excellent, and their methods of education have never since been surpassed.
4. The Violet Race
(850.8) 76:4.2 Eve did not suffer pain in childbirth; neither did the early evolutionary races. Only the mixed races produced by the union of evolutionary man with the Nodites and later with the Adamites suffered the severe pangs of childbirth.
(851.1) 76:4.3 Adam and Eve, like their brethren on Jerusem, were energized by dual nutrition, subsisting on both food and light, supplemented by certain superphysical energies unrevealed on Urantia. Their Urantia offspring did not inherit the parental endowment of energy intake and light circulation. They had a single circulation, the human type of blood sustenance. They were designedly mortal though long-lived, albeit longevity gravitated toward the human norm with each succeeding generation.
(851.2) 76:4.4 Adam and Eve and their first generation of children did not use the flesh of animals for food. They subsisted wholly upon “the fruits of the trees.” After the first generation all of the descendants of Adam began to partake of dairy products, but many of them continued to follow a nonflesh diet. Many of the southern tribes with whom they later united were also nonflesh eaters. Later on, most of these vegetarian tribes migrated to the east and survived as now admixed in the peoples of India.
(851.3) 76:4.5 Both the physical and spiritual visions of Adam and Eve were far superior to those of the present-day peoples. Their special senses were much more acute, and they were able to see the midwayers and the angelic hosts, the Melchizedeks, and the fallen Prince Caligastia, who several times came to confer with his noble successor. They retained the ability to see these celestial beings for over one hundred years after the default. These special senses were not so acutely present in their children and tended to diminish with each succeeding generation.
(851.4) 76:4.6 The Adamic children were usually Adjuster indwelt since they all possessed undoubted survival capacity. These superior offspring were not so subject to fear as the children of evolution. So much of fear persists in the present-day races of Urantia because your ancestors received so little of Adam’s life plasm, owing to the early miscarriage of the plans for racial physical uplift.
(851.5) 76:4.7 The body cells of the Material Sons and their progeny are far more resistant to disease than are those of the evolutionary beings indigenous to the planet. The body cells of the native races are akin to the living disease-producing microscopic and ultramicroscopic organisms of the realm. These facts explain why the Urantia peoples must do so much by way of scientific effort to withstand so many physical disorders. You would be far more disease resistant if your races carried more of the Adamic life.
(851.6) 76:4.8 After becoming established in the second garden on the Euphrates, Adam elected to leave behind as much of his life plasm as possible to benefit the world after his death. Accordingly, Eve was made the head of a commission of twelve on race improvement, and before Adam died this commission had selected 1,682 of the highest type of women on Urantia, and these women were impregnated with the Adamic life plasm. Their children all grew up to maturity except 112, so that the world, in this way, was benefited by the addition of 1,570 superior men and women. Though these candidate mothers were selected from all the surrounding tribes and represented most of the races on earth, the majority were chosen from the highest strains of the Nodites, and they constituted the early beginnings of the mighty Andite race. These children were born and reared in the tribal surroundings of their respective mothers.
5. Death of Adam and Eve
(852.1) 76:5.2 Adam and Eve did not, as citizens of Jerusem, have Thought Adjusters, nor were they Adjuster indwelt when they functioned on Urantia in the first garden. But shortly after their reduction to mortal status they became conscious of a new presence within them and awakened to the realization that human status coupled with sincere repentance had made it possible for Adjusters to indwell them. It was this knowledge of being Adjuster indwelt that greatly heartened Adam and Eve throughout the remainder of their lives; they knew that they had failed as Material Sons of Satania, but they also knew that the Paradise career was still open to them as ascending sons of the universe.
(852.2) 76:5.3 Adam knew about the dispensational resurrection which occurred simultaneously with his arrival on the planet, and he believed that he and his companion would probably be repersonalized in connection with the advent of the next order of sonship. He did not know that Michael, the sovereign of this universe, was so soon to appear on Urantia; he expected that the next Son to arrive would be of the Avonal order. Even so, it was always a comfort to Adam and Eve, as well as something difficult for them to understand, to ponder the only personal message they ever received from Michael. This message, among other expressions of friendship and comfort, said: “I have given consideration to the circumstances of your default, I have remembered the desire of your hearts ever to be loyal to my Father’s will, and you will be called from the embrace of mortal slumber when I come to Urantia if the subordinate Sons of my realm do not send for you before that time.”
(852.3) 76:5.4 And this was a great mystery to Adam and Eve. They could comprehend the veiled promise of a possible special resurrection in this message, and such a possibility greatly cheered them, but they could not grasp the meaning of the intimation that they might rest until the time of a resurrection associated with Michael’s personal appearance on Urantia. And so the Edenic pair always proclaimed that a Son of God would sometime come, and they communicated to their loved ones the belief, at least the longing hope, that the world of their blunders and sorrows might possibly be the realm whereon the ruler of this universe would elect to function as the Paradise bestowal Son. It seemed too good to be true, but Adam did entertain the thought that strife-torn Urantia might, after all, turn out to be the most fortunate world in the system of Satania, the envied planet of all Nebadon.
(852.4) 76:5.5 Adam lived for 530 years; he died of what might be termed old age. His physical mechanism simply wore out; the process of disintegration gradually gained on the process of repair, and the inevitable end came. Eve had died nineteen years previously of a weakened heart. They were both buried in the center of the temple of divine service which had been built in accordance with their plans soon after the wall of the colony had been completed. And this was the origin of the practice of burying noted and pious men and women under the floors of the places of worship.
(852.5) 76:5.6 The supermaterial government of Urantia, under the direction of the Melchizedeks, continued, but direct physical contact with the evolutionary races had been severed. From the distant days of the arrival of the corporeal staff of the Planetary Prince, down through the times of Van and Amadon to the arrival of Adam and Eve, physical representatives of the universe government had been stationed on the planet. But with the Adamic default this regime, extending over a period of more than four hundred and fifty thousand years, came to an end. In the spiritual spheres, angelic helpers continued to struggle in conjunction with the Thought Adjusters, both working heroically for the salvage of the individual; but no comprehensive plan for far-reaching world welfare was promulgated to the mortals of earth until the arrival of Machiventa Melchizedek, in the times of Abraham, who, with the power, patience, and authority of a Son of God, did lay the foundations for the further uplift and spiritual rehabilitation of unfortunate Urantia.
(853.1) 76:5.7 Misfortune has not, however, been the sole lot of Urantia; this planet has also been the most fortunate in the local universe of Nebadon. Urantians should count it all gain if the blunders of their ancestors and the mistakes of their early world rulers so plunged the planet into such a hopeless state of confusion, all the more confounded by evil and sin, that this very background of darkness should so appeal to Michael of Nebadon that he selected this world as the arena wherein to reveal the loving personality of the Father in heaven. It is not that Urantia needed a Creator Son to set its tangled affairs in order; it is rather that the evil and sin on Urantia afforded the Creator Son a more striking background against which to reveal the matchless love, mercy, and patience of the Paradise Father.
6. Survival of Adam and Eve
(853.3) 76:6.2 They did not long rest in the oblivion of the unconscious sleep of the mortals of the realm. On the third day after Adam’s death, the second following his reverent burial, the orders of Lanaforge, sustained by the acting Most High of Edentia and concurred in by the Union of Days on Salvington, acting for Michael, were placed in Gabriel’s hands, directing the special roll call of the distinguished survivors of the Adamic default on Urantia. And in accordance with this mandate of special resurrection, number twenty-six of the Urantia series, Adam and Eve were repersonalized and reassembled in the resurrection halls of the mansion worlds of Satania together with 1,316 of their associates in the experience of the first garden. Many other loyal souls had already been translated at the time of Adam’s arrival, which was attended by a dispensational adjudication of both the sleeping survivors and of the living qualified ascenders.
(853.4) 76:6.3 Adam and Eve quickly passed through the worlds of progressive ascension until they attained citizenship on Jerusem, once again to be residents of the planet of their origin but this time as members of a different order of universe personalities. They left Jerusem as permanent citizens — Sons of God; they returned as ascendant citizens — sons of man. They were immediately attached to the Urantia service on the system capital, later being assigned membership among the four and twenty counselors who constitute the present advisory-control body of Urantia.
(854.1) 76:6.4 And thus ends the story of the Planetary Adam and Eve of Urantia, a story of trial, tragedy, and triumph, at least personal triumph for your well-meaning but deluded Material Son and Daughter and undoubtedly, in the end, a story of ultimate triumph for their world and its rebellion-tossed and evil-harassed inhabitants. When all is summed up, Adam and Eve made a mighty contribution to the speedy civilization and accelerated biologic progress of the human race. They left a great culture on earth, but it was not possible for such an advanced civilization to survive in the face of the early dilution and the eventual submergence of the Adamic inheritance. It is the people who make a civilization; civilization does not make the people.
(854.2) 76:6.5 [Presented by Solonia, the seraphic “voice in the Garden.”]
The Urantia Book
Paper 77
The Midway Creatures
(855.2) 77:0.2 On Urantia there function two distinct orders of midwayers: the primary or senior corps, who came into being back in the days of Dalamatia, and the secondary or younger group, whose origin dates from the times of Adam.
1. The Primary Midwayers
(855.4) 77:1.2 It is well always to bear in mind that the successive bestowals of the Sons of God on an evolving planet produce marked changes in the spiritual economy of the realm and sometimes so modify the workings of the interassociation of spiritual and material agencies on a planet as to create situations indeed difficult of understanding. The status of the one hundred corporeal members of Prince Caligastia’s staff illustrates just such a unique interassociation: As ascendant morontia citizens of Jerusem they were supermaterial creatures without reproductive prerogatives. As descendant planetary ministers on Urantia they were material sex creatures capable of procreating material offspring (as some of them later did). What we cannot satisfactorily explain is how these one hundred could function in the parental role on a supermaterial level, but that is exactly what happened. A supermaterial (nonsexual) liaison of a male and a female member of the corporeal staff resulted in the appearance of the first-born of the primary midwayers.
(855.5) 77:1.3 It was immediately discovered that a creature of this order, midway between the mortal and angelic levels, would be of great service in carrying on the affairs of the Prince’s headquarters, and each couple of the corporeal staff was accordingly granted permission to produce a similar being. This effort resulted in the first group of fifty midway creatures.
(855.6) 77:1.4 After a year of observing the work of this unique group, the Planetary Prince authorized the reproduction of midwayers without restriction. This plan was carried out as long as the power to create continued, and the original corps of 50,000 was accordingly brought into being.
(856.1) 77:1.5 A period of one-half year intervened between the production of each midwayer, and when one thousand such beings had been born to each couple, no more were ever forthcoming. And there is no explanation available as to why this power was exhausted upon the appearance of the one thousandth offspring. No amount of further experimentation ever resulted in anything but failure.
(856.2) 77:1.6 These creatures constituted the intelligence corps of the Prince’s administration. They ranged far and wide, studying and observing the world races and rendering other invaluable services to the Prince and his staff in the work of influencing human society remote from the planetary headquarters.
(856.3) 77:1.7 This regime continued until the tragic days of the planetary rebellion, which ensnared a little over four fifths of the primary midwayers. The loyal corps entered the service of the Melchizedek receivers, functioning under the titular leadership of Van until the days of Adam.
2. The Nodite Race
(856.5) 77:2.2 The physical members of the Prince’s staff had been constituted sex creatures for the purpose of participating in the plan of procreating offspring embodying the combined qualities of their special order united with those of the selected stock of the Andon tribes, and all of this was in anticipation of the subsequent appearance of Adam. The Life Carriers had planned a new type of mortal embracing the union of the conjoint offspring of the Prince’s staff with the first-generation offspring of Adam and Eve. They had thus projected a plan envisioning a new order of planetary creatures whom they hoped would become the teacher-rulers of human society. Such beings were designed for social sovereignty, not civil sovereignty. But since this project almost completely miscarried, we shall never know what an aristocracy of benign leadership and matchless culture Urantia was thus deprived of. For when the corporeal staff later reproduced, it was subsequent to the rebellion and after they had been deprived of their connection with the life currents of the system.
(856.6) 77:2.3 The postrebellion era on Urantia witnessed many unusual happenings. A great civilization — the culture of Dalamatia — was going to pieces. “The Nephilim (Nodites) were on earth in those days, and when these sons of the gods went in to the daughters of men and they bore to them, their children were the ‘mighty men of old,’ the ‘men of renown.’” While hardly “sons of the gods,” the staff and their early descendants were so regarded by the evolutionary mortals of those distant days; even their stature came to be magnified by tradition. This, then, is the origin of the well-nigh universal folk tale of the gods who came down to earth and there with the daughters of men begot an ancient race of heroes. And all this legend became further confused with the race mixtures of the later appearing Adamites in the second garden.
(857.1) 77:2.4 Since the one hundred corporeal members of the Prince’s staff carried germ plasm of the Andonic human strains, it would naturally be expected that, if they engaged in sexual reproduction, their progeny would altogether resemble the offspring of other Andonite parents. But when the sixty rebels of the staff, the followers of Nod, actually engaged in sexual reproduction, their children proved to be far superior in almost every way to both the Andonite and the Sangik peoples. This unexpected excellence characterized not only physical and intellectual qualities but also spiritual capacities.
(857.2) 77:2.5 These mutant traits appearing in the first Nodite generation resulted from certain changes which had been wrought in the configuration and in the chemical constituents of the inheritance factors of the Andonic germ plasm. These changes were caused by the presence in the bodies of the staff members of the powerful life-maintenance circuits of the Satania system. These life circuits caused the chromosomes of the specialized Urantia pattern to reorganize more after the patterns of the standardized Satania specialization of the ordained Nebadon life manifestation. The technique of this germ plasm metamorphosis by the action of the system life currents is not unlike those procedures whereby Urantia scientists modify the germ plasm of plants and animals by the use of X rays.
(857.3) 77:2.6 Thus did the Nodite peoples arise out of certain peculiar and unexpected modifications occurring in the life plasm which had been transferred from the bodies of the Andonite contributors to those of the corporeal staff members by the Avalon surgeons.
(857.4) 77:2.7 It will be recalled that the one hundred Andonite germ plasm contributors were in turn made possessors of the organic complement of the tree of life so that the Satania life currents likewise invested their bodies. The forty-four modified Andonites who followed the staff into rebellion also mated among themselves and made a great contribution to the better strains of the Nodite people.
(857.5) 77:2.8 These two groups, embracing 104 individuals who carried the modified Andonite germ plasm, constitute the ancestry of the Nodites, the eighth race to appear on Urantia. And this new feature of human life on Urantia represents another phase of the outworking of the original plan of utilizing this planet as a life-modification world, except that this was one of the unforeseen developments.
(857.6) 77:2.9 The pure-line Nodites were a magnificent race, but they gradually mingled with the evolutionary peoples of earth, and before long great deterioration had occurred. Ten thousand years after the rebellion they had lost ground to the point where their average length of life was little more than that of the evolutionary races.
(857.7) 77:2.10 When archaeologists dig up the clay-tablet records of the later-day Sumerian descendants of the Nodites, they discover lists of Sumerian kings running back for several thousand years; and as these records go further back, the reigns of the individual kings lengthen from around twenty-five or thirty years up to one hundred and fifty years and more. This lengthening of the reigns of these older kings signifies that some of the early Nodite rulers (immediate descendants of the Prince’s staff) did live longer than their later-day successors and also indicates an effort to stretch the dynasties back to Dalamatia.
(857.8) 77:2.11 The records of such long-lived individuals are also due to the confusion of months and years as time periods. This may also be observed in the Biblical genealogy of Abraham and in the early records of the Chinese. The confusion of the twenty-eight-day month, or season, with the later introduced year of more than three hundred and fifty days is responsible for the traditions of such long human lives. There are records of a man who lived over nine hundred “years.” This period represents not quite seventy years, and such lives were regarded for ages as very long, “threescore years and ten” as such a life span was later designated.
(858.1) 77:2.12 The reckoning of time by the twenty-eight-day month persisted long after the days of Adam. But when the Egyptians undertook to reform the calendar, about seven thousand years ago, they did it with great accuracy, introducing the year of 365 days.
3. The Tower of Babel
(858.3) 77:3.2 Bablot proposed to erect a pretentious temple of racial glorification at the center of their then occupied territory. This temple was to have a tower the like of which the world had never seen. It was to be a monumental memorial to their passing greatness. There were many who wished to have this monument erected in Dilmun, but others contended that such a great structure should be placed a safe distance from the dangers of the sea, remembering the traditions of the engulfment of their first capital, Dalamatia.
(858.4) 77:3.3 Bablot planned that the new buildings should become the nucleus of the future center of the Nodite culture and civilization. His counsel finally prevailed, and construction was started in accordance with his plans. The new city was to be named Bablot after the architect and builder of the tower. This location later became known as Bablod and eventually as Babel.
(858.5) 77:3.4 But the Nodites were still somewhat divided in sentiment as to the plans and purposes of this undertaking. Neither were their leaders altogether agreed concerning either construction plans or usage of the buildings after they should be completed. After four and one-half years of work a great dispute arose about the object and motive for the erection of the tower. The contentions became so bitter that all work stopped. The food carriers spread the news of the dissension, and large numbers of the tribes began to forgather at the building site. Three differing views were propounded as to the purpose of building the tower:*
(858.6) 77:3.5 1. The largest group, almost one half, desired to see the tower built as a memorial of Nodite history and racial superiority. They thought it ought to be a great and imposing structure which would challenge the admiration of all future generations.(859.2) 77:3.8 The religious group were promptly voted down. The majority rejected the teaching that their ancestors had been guilty of rebellion; they resented such a racial stigma. Having disposed of one of the three angles to the dispute and failing to settle the other two by debate, they fell to fighting. The religionists, the noncombatants, fled to their homes in the south, while their fellows fought until well-nigh obliterated.
(858.7) 77:3.6 2. The next largest faction wanted the tower designed to commemorate the Dilmun culture. They foresaw that Bablot would become a great center of commerce, art, and manufacture.
(859.1) 77:3.7 3. The smallest and minority contingent held that the erection of the tower presented an opportunity for making atonement for the folly of their progenitors in participating in the Caligastia rebellion. They maintained that the tower should be devoted to the worship of the Father of all, that the whole purpose of the new city should be to take the place of Dalamatia — to function as the cultural and religious center for the surrounding barbarians.
(859.3) 77:3.9 About twelve thousand years ago a second attempt to erect the tower of Babel was made. The mixed races of the Andites (Nodites and Adamites) undertook to raise a new temple on the ruins of the first structure, but there was not sufficient support for the enterprise; it fell of its own pretentious weight. This region was long known as the land of Babel.
4. Nodite Centers of Civilization
(859.5) 77:4.2 Three out of the four great Nodite centers were established immediately following the Bablot conflict:
(859.6) 77:4.3 1. The western or Syrian Nodites. The remnants of the nationalistic or racial memorialists journeyed northward, uniting with the Andonites to found the later Nodite centers to the northwest of Mesopotamia. This was the largest group of the dispersing Nodites, and they contributed much to the later appearing Assyrian stock.(860.6) 77:4.11 Some of the early associates of Van subsequently settled about the shores of the lake which still bears his name, and their traditions grew up about this locality. Ararat became their sacred mountain, having much the same meaning to later-day Vanites that Sinai had to the Hebrews. Ten thousand years ago the Vanite ancestors of the Assyrians taught that their moral law of seven commandments had been given to Van by the Gods upon Mount Ararat. They firmly believed that Van and his associate Amadon were taken alive from the planet while they were up on the mountain engaged in worship.
(859.7) 77:4.4 2. The eastern or Elamite Nodites. The culture and commerce advocates migrated in large numbers eastward into Elam and there united with the mixed Sangik tribes. The Elamites of thirty to forty thousand years ago had become largely Sangik in nature, although they continued to maintain a civilization superior to that of the surrounding barbarians.
(859.8) 77:4.5 After the establishment of the second garden it was customary to allude to this near-by Nodite settlement as “the land of Nod”; and during the long period of relative peace between this Nodite group and the Adamites, the two races were greatly blended, for it became more and more the custom for the Sons of God (the Adamites) to intermarry with the daughters of men (the Nodites).
(860.1) 77:4.6 3. The central or pre-Sumerian Nodites. A small group at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers maintained more of their racial integrity. They persisted for thousands of years and eventually furnished the Nodite ancestry which blended with the Adamites to found the Sumerian peoples of historic times.
(860.2) 77:4.7 And all this explains how the Sumerians appeared so suddenly and mysteriously on the stage of action in Mesopotamia. Investigators will never be able to trace out and follow these tribes back to the beginning of the Sumerians, who had their origin two hundred thousand years ago after the submergence of Dalamatia. Without a trace of origin elsewhere in the world, these ancient tribes suddenly loom upon the horizon of civilization with a full-grown and superior culture, embracing temples, metalwork, agriculture, animals, pottery, weaving, commercial law, civil codes, religious ceremonial, and an old system of writing. At the beginning of the historical era they had long since lost the alphabet of Dalamatia, having adopted the peculiar writing system originating in Dilmun. The Sumerian language, though virtually lost to the world, was not Semitic; it had much in common with the so-called Aryan tongues.
(860.3) 77:4.8 The elaborate records left by the Sumerians describe the site of a remarkable settlement which was located on the Persian Gulf near the earlier city of Dilmun. The Egyptians called this city of ancient glory Dilmat, while the later Adamized Sumerians confused both the first and second Nodite cities with Dalamatia and called all three Dilmun. And already have archaeologists found these ancient Sumerian clay tablets which tell of this earthly paradise “where the Gods first blessed mankind with the example of civilized and cultured life.” And these tablets, descriptive of Dilmun, the paradise of men and God, are now silently resting on the dusty shelves of many museums.
(860.4) 77:4.9 The Sumerians well knew of the first and second Edens but, despite extensive intermarriage with the Adamites, continued to regard the garden dwellers to the north as an alien race. Sumerian pride in the more ancient Nodite culture led them to ignore these later vistas of glory in favor of the grandeur and paradisiacal traditions of the city of Dilmun.
(860.5) 77:4.10 4. The northern Nodites and Amadonites — the Vanites. This group arose prior to the Bablot conflict. These northernmost Nodites were descendants of those who had forsaken the leadership of Nod and his successors for that of Van and Amadon.
(860.7) 77:4.12 Mount Ararat was the sacred mountain of northern Mesopotamia, and since much of your tradition of these ancient times was acquired in connection with the Babylonian story of the flood, it is not surprising that Mount Ararat and its region were woven into the later Jewish story of Noah and the universal flood.
(860.8) 77:4.13 About 35,000 B.C. Adamson visited one of the easternmost of the old Vanite settlements to found his center of civilization.
5. Adamson and Ratta
(861.2) 77:5.2 Adamson was among that group of the children of Adam and Eve who elected to remain on earth with their father and mother. Now this eldest son of Adam had often heard from Van and Amadon the story of their highland home in the north, and sometime after the establishment of the second garden he determined to go in search of this land of his youthful dreams.
(861.3) 77:5.3 Adamson was 120 years old at this time and had been the father of thirty-two pure-line children of the first garden. He wanted to remain with his parents and assist them in upbuilding the second garden, but he was greatly disturbed by the loss of his mate and their children, who had all elected to go to Edentia along with those other Adamic children who chose to become wards of the Most Highs.
(861.4) 77:5.4 Adamson would not desert his parents on Urantia, he was disinclined to flee from hardship or danger, but he found the associations of the second garden far from satisfying. He did much to forward the early activities of defense and construction but decided to leave for the north at the earliest opportunity. And though his departure was wholly pleasant, Adam and Eve were much grieved to lose their eldest son, to have him go out into a strange and hostile world, as they feared, never to return.
(861.5) 77:5.5 A company of twenty-seven followed Adamson northward in quest of these people of his childhood fantasies. In a little over three years Adamson’s party actually found the object of their adventure, and among these people he discovered a wonderful and beautiful woman, twenty years old, who claimed to be the last pure-line descendant of the Prince’s staff. This woman, Ratta, said that her ancestors were all descendants of two of the fallen staff of the Prince. She was the last of her race, having no living brothers or sisters. She had about decided not to mate, had about made up her mind to die without issue, but she lost her heart to the majestic Adamson. And when she heard the story of Eden, how the predictions of Van and Amadon had really come to pass, and as she listened to the recital of the Garden default, she was encompassed with but a single thought — to marry this son and heir of Adam. And quickly the idea grew upon Adamson. In a little more than three months they were married.
(861.6) 77:5.6 Adamson and Ratta had a family of sixty-seven children. They gave origin to a great line of the world’s leadership, but they did something more. It should be remembered that both of these beings were really superhuman. Every fourth child born to them was of a unique order. It was often invisible. Never in the world’s history had such a thing occurred. Ratta was greatly perturbed — even superstitious — but Adamson well knew of the existence of the primary midwayers, and he concluded that something similar was transpiring before his eyes. When the second strangely behaving offspring arrived, he decided to mate them, since one was male and the other female, and this is the origin of the secondary order of midwayers. Within one hundred years, before this phenomenon ceased, almost two thousand were brought into being.
(862.1) 77:5.7 Adamson lived for 396 years. Many times he returned to visit his father and mother. Every seven years he and Ratta journeyed south to the second garden, and meanwhile the midwayers kept him informed regarding the welfare of his people. During Adamson’s life they did great service in upbuilding a new and independent world center for truth and righteousness.
(862.2) 77:5.8 Adamson and Ratta thus had at their command this corps of marvelous helpers, who labored with them throughout their long lives to assist in the propagation of advanced truth and in the spread of higher standards of spiritual, intellectual, and physical living. And the results of this effort at world betterment never did become fully eclipsed by subsequent retrogressions.
(862.3) 77:5.9 The Adamsonites maintained a high culture for almost seven thousand years from the times of Adamson and Ratta. Later on they became admixed with the neighboring Nodites and Andonites and were also included among the “mighty men of old.” And some of the advances of that age persisted to become a latent part of the cultural potential which later blossomed into European civilization.
(862.4) 77:5.10 This center of civilization was situated in the region east of the southern end of the Caspian Sea, near the Kopet Dagh. A short way up in the foothills of Turkestan are the vestiges of what was onetime the Adamsonite headquarters of the violet race. In these highland sites, situated in a narrow and ancient fertile belt lying in the lower foothills of the Kopet range, there successively arose at various periods four diverse cultures respectively fostered by four different groups of Adamson’s descendants. It was the second of these groups which migrated westward to Greece and the islands of the Mediterranean. The residue of Adamson’s descendants migrated north and west to enter Europe with the blended stock of the last Andite wave coming out of Mesopotamia, and they were also numbered among the Andite-Aryan invaders of India.
6. The Secondary Midwayers
(862.6) 77:6.2 Among the children of Adamson there were just sixteen of the peculiar progenitors of the secondary midwayers. These unique children were equally divided as regards sex, and each couple was capable of producing a secondary midwayer every seventy days by a combined technique of sex and nonsex liaison. And such a phenomenon was never possible on earth before that time, nor has it ever occurred since.
(862.7) 77:6.3 These sixteen children lived and died (except for their peculiarities) as mortals of the realm, but their electrically energized offspring live on and on, not being subject to the limitations of mortal flesh.
(862.8) 77:6.4 Each of the eight couples eventually produced 248 midwayers, and thus did the original secondary corps — 1,984 in number — come into existence. There are eight subgroups of secondary midwayers. They are designated as A-B-C the first, second, third, and so on. And then there are D-E-F the first, second, and so on.
(862.9) 77:6.5 After the default of Adam the primary midwayers returned to the service of the Melchizedek receivers, while the secondary group were attached to the Adamson center until his death. Thirty-three of these secondary midwayers, the chiefs of their organization at the death of Adamson, endeavored to swing the whole order over to the service of the Melchizedeks, thus effecting a liaison with the primary corps. But failing to accomplish this, they deserted their companions and went over in a body to the service of the planetary receivers.
(863.1) 77:6.6 After the death of Adamson the remainder of the secondary midwayers became a strange, unorganized, and unattached influence on Urantia. From that time to the days of Machiventa Melchizedek they led an irregular and unorganized existence. They were partially brought under control by this Melchizedek but were still productive of much mischief up to the days of Christ Michael. And during his sojourn on earth they all made final decisions as to their future destiny, the loyal majority then enlisting under the leadership of the primary midwayers.
7. The Rebel Midwayers
(863.3) 77:7.2 The original number of secondary midwayers was 1,984, and of these 873 failed to align themselves with the rule of Michael and were duly interned in connection with the planetary adjudication of Urantia on the day of Pentecost. No one can forecast the future of these fallen creatures.
(863.4) 77:7.3 Both groups of rebel midwayers are now held in custody awaiting the final adjudication of the affairs of the system rebellion. But they did many strange things on earth prior to the inauguration of the present planetary dispensation.
(863.5) 77:7.4 These disloyal midwayers were able to reveal themselves to mortal eyes under certain circumstances, and especially was this true of the associates of Beelzebub, the leader of the apostate secondary midwayers. But these unique creatures must not be confused with certain of the rebel cherubim and seraphim who also were on earth up to the time of Christ’s death and resurrection. Some of the older writers designated these rebellious midway creatures as evil spirits and demons, and the apostate seraphim as evil angels.
(863.6) 77:7.5 On no world can evil spirits possess any mortal mind subsequent to the life of a Paradise bestowal Son. But before the days of Christ Michael on Urantia — before the universal coming of the Thought Adjusters and the pouring out of the Master’s spirit upon all flesh — these rebel midwayers were actually able to influence the minds of certain inferior mortals and somewhat to control their actions. This was accomplished in much the same way as the loyal midway creatures function when they serve as efficient contact guardians of the human minds of the Urantia reserve corps of destiny at those times when the Adjuster is, in effect, detached from the personality during a season of contact with superhuman intelligences.
(863.7) 77:7.6 It is no mere figure of speech when the record states: “And they brought to Him all sorts of sick people, those who were possessed by devils and those who were lunatics.” Jesus knew and recognized the difference between insanity and demoniacal possession, although these states were greatly confused in the minds of those who lived in his day and generation.*
(863.8) 77:7.7 Even prior to Pentecost no rebel spirit could dominate a normal human mind, and since that day even the weak minds of inferior mortals are free from such possibilities. The supposed casting out of devils since the arrival of the Spirit of Truth has been a matter of confounding a belief in demoniacal possession with hysteria, insanity, and feeble-mindedness. But just because Michael’s bestowal has forever liberated all human minds on Urantia from the possibility of demoniacal possession, do not imagine that such was not a reality in former ages.
(864.1) 77:7.8 The entire group of rebel midwayers is at present held prisoner by order of the Most Highs of Edentia. No more do they roam this world on mischief bent. Regardless of the presence of the Thought Adjusters, the pouring out of the Spirit of Truth upon all flesh forever made it impossible for disloyal spirits of any sort or description ever again to invade even the most feeble of human minds. Since the day of Pentecost there never again can be such a thing as demoniacal possession.
8. The United Midwayers
(864.3) 77:8.2 The members of the older or primary order are generally known by numerals; they are often given names such as 1-2-3 the first, 4-5-6 the first, and so on. On Urantia the Adamic midwayers are designated alphabetically in order to distinguish them from the numerical designation of the primary midwayers.
(864.4) 77:8.3 Both orders are nonmaterial beings as regards nutrition and energy intake, but they partake of many human traits and are able to enjoy and follow your humor as well as your worship. When attached to mortals, they enter into the spirit of human work, rest, and play. But midwayers do not sleep, neither do they possess powers of procreation. In a certain sense the secondary group are differentiated along the lines of maleness and femaleness, often being spoken of as “he” or “she.” They often work together in such pairs.
(864.5) 77:8.4 Midwayers are not men, neither are they angels, but secondary midwayers are, in nature, nearer man than angel; they are, in a way, of your races and are, therefore, very understanding and sympathetic in their contact with human beings; they are invaluable to the seraphim in their work for and with the various races of mankind, and both orders are indispensable to the seraphim who serve as personal guardians to mortals.
(864.6) 77:8.5 The United Midwayers of Urantia are organized for service with the planetary seraphim in accordance with innate endowments and acquired skills, in the following groups:
(864.7) 77:8.6 1. Midway messengers. This group bear names; they are a small corps and are of great assistance on an evolutionary world in the service of quick and reliable personal communication.(865.3) 77:8.10 Midwayers vary greatly in their abilities to make contact with the seraphim above and with their human cousins below. It is exceedingly difficult, for instance, for the primary midwayers to make direct contact with material agencies. They are considerably nearer the angelic type of being and are therefore usually assigned to working with, and ministering to, the spiritual forces resident on the planet. They act as companions and guides for celestial visitors and student sojourners, whereas the secondary creatures are almost exclusively attached to the ministry of the material beings of the realm.
(864.8) 77:8.7 2. Planetary sentinels. Midwayers are the guardians, the sentinels, of the worlds of space. They perform the important duties of observers for all the numerous phenomena and types of communication which are of import to the supernatural beings of the realm. They patrol the invisible spirit realm of the planet.
(865.1) 77:8.8 3. Contact personalities. In the contacts made with the mortal beings of the material worlds, such as with the subject through whom these communications were transmitted, the midway creatures are always employed. They are an essential factor in such liaisons of the spiritual and the material levels.
(865.2) 77:8.9 4. Progress helpers. These are the more spiritual of the midway creatures, and they are distributed as assistants to the various orders of seraphim who function in special groups on the planet.
(865.4) 77:8.11 The 1,111 loyal secondary midwayers are engaged in important missions on earth. As compared with their primary associates, they are decidedly material. They exist just outside the range of mortal vision and possess sufficient latitude of adaptation to make, at will, physical contact with what humans call “material things.” These unique creatures have certain definite powers over the things of time and space, not excepting the beasts of the realm.
(865.5) 77:8.12 Many of the more literal phenomena ascribed to angels have been performed by the secondary midway creatures. When the early teachers of the gospel of Jesus were thrown into prison by the ignorant religious leaders of that day, an actual “angel of the Lord” “by night opened the prison doors and brought them forth.” But in the case of Peter’s deliverance after the killing of James by Herod’s order, it was a secondary midwayer who performed the work ascribed to an angel.
(865.6) 77:8.13 Their chief work today is that of unperceived personal-liaison associates of those men and women who constitute the planetary reserve corps of destiny. It was the work of this secondary group, ably seconded by certain of the primary corps, that brought about the co-ordination of personalities and circumstances on Urantia which finally induced the planetary celestial supervisors to initiate those petitions that resulted in the granting of the mandates making possible the series of revelations of which this presentation is a part. But it should be made clear that the midway creatures are not involved in the sordid performances taking place under the general designation of “spiritualism.” The midwayers at present on Urantia, all of whom are of honorable standing, are not connected with the phenomena of so-called “mediumship”; and they do not, ordinarily, permit humans to witness their sometimes necessary physical activities or other contacts with the material world, as they are perceived by human senses.
9. The Permanent Citizens of Urantia
(866.1) 77:9.2 Unlike the various orders of celestial beings who are assigned to minister on a planet, the midwayers live on an inhabited world. The seraphim come and go, but the midway creatures remain and will remain, albeit they are nonetheless ministers for being natives of the planet, and they provide the one continuing regime which harmonizes and connects the changing administrations of the seraphic hosts.
(866.2) 77:9.3 As actual citizens of Urantia, the midwayers have a kinship interest in the destiny of this sphere. They are a determined association, persistently working for the progress of their native planet. Their determination is suggested by the motto of their order: “What the United Midwayers undertake, the United Midwayers do.”
(866.3) 77:9.4 Although their ability to traverse the energy circuits makes planetary departure feasible to any midwayer, they have individually pledged themselves not to leave the planet prior to their sometime release by the universe authorities. Midwayers are anchored on a planet until the ages of settled light and life. With the exception of 1-2-3 the first, no loyal midway creatures have ever departed from Urantia.
(866.4) 77:9.5 1-2-3 the first, the eldest of the primary order, was released from immediate planetary duties shortly after Pentecost. This noble midwayer stood steadfast with Van and Amadon during the tragic days of the planetary rebellion, and his fearless leadership was instrumental in reducing the casualties in his order. He serves at present on Jerusem as a member of the twenty-four counselors, having already functioned as governor general of Urantia once since Pentecost.
(866.5) 77:9.6 Midwayers are planet bound, but much as mortals talk with travelers from afar and thus learn about remote places on the planet, so do midwayers converse with celestial travelers to learn about the far places of the universe. So do they become conversant with this system and universe, even with Orvonton and its sister creations, and so do they prepare themselves for citizenship on the higher levels of creature existence.
(866.6) 77:9.7 While the midwayers were brought into existence fully developed — experiencing no period of growth or development from immaturity — they never cease to grow in wisdom and experience. Like mortals they are evolutionary creatures, and they have a culture which is a bona fide evolutionary attainment. There are many great minds and mighty spirits among the Urantia midway corps.
(866.7) 77:9.8 In the larger aspect the civilization of Urantia is the joint product of the Urantia mortals and the Urantia midwayers, and this is true despite the present differential between the two levels of culture, a differential which will not be compensated prior to the ages of light and life.
(866.8) 77:9.9 The midway culture, being the product of an immortal planetary citizenry, is relatively immune to those temporal vicissitudes which beset human civilization. The generations of men forget; the corps of midwayers remembers, and that memory is the treasure house of the traditions of your inhabited world. Thus does the culture of a planet remain ever present on that planet, and in proper circumstances such treasured memories of past events are made available, even as the story of the life and teachings of Jesus has been given by the midwayers of Urantia to their cousins in the flesh.
(867.1) 77:9.10 Midwayers are the skillful ministers who compensate that gap between the material and spiritual affairs of Urantia which appeared upon the death of Adam and Eve. They are likewise your elder brethren, comrades in the long struggle to attain a settled status of light and life on Urantia. The United Midwayers are a rebellion-tested corps, and they will faithfully enact their part in planetary evolution until this world attains the goal of the ages, until that distant day when in fact peace does reign on earth and in truth is there good will in the hearts of men.
(867.2) 77:9.11 Because of the valuable work performed by these midwayers, we have concluded that they are a truly essential part of the spirit economy of the realms. And where rebellion has not marred a planet’s affairs, they are of still greater assistance to the seraphim.
(867.3) 77:9.12 The entire organization of high spirits, angelic hosts, and midway fellows is enthusiastically devoted to the furtherance of the Paradise plan for the progressive ascension and perfection attainment of evolutionary mortals, one of the supernal businesses of the universe — the superb survival plan of bringing God down to man and then, by a sublime sort of partnership, carrying man up to God and on to eternity of service and divinity of attainment — alike for mortal and midwayer.
(867.4) 77:9.13 [Presented by an Archangel of Nebadon.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 78
The Violet Race After the Days of Adam
(868.2) 78:0.2 This paper depicts the planetary history of the violet race, beginning soon after the default of Adam, about 35,000 B.C., and extending down through its amalgamation with the Nodite and Sangik races, about 15,000 B.C., to form the Andite peoples and on to its final disappearance from the Mesopotamian homelands, about 2000 B.C.
1. Racial and Cultural Distribution
(868.4) 78:1.2 Adam and Eve also contributed much that was of value to the social, moral, and intellectual progress of mankind; civilization was immensely quickened by the presence of their offspring. But thirty-five thousand years ago the world at large possessed little culture. Certain centers of civilization existed here and there, but most of Urantia languished in savagery. Racial and cultural distribution was as follows:
(868.5) 78:1.3 1. The violet race — Adamites and Adamsonites. The chief center of Adamite culture was in the second garden, located in the triangle of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers; this was indeed the cradle of Occidental and Indian civilizations. The secondary or northern center of the violet race was the Adamsonite headquarters, situated east of the southern shore of the Caspian Sea near the Kopet mountains. From these two centers there went forth to the surrounding lands the culture and life plasm which so immediately quickened all the races.(869.8) 78:1.12 This was the picture of the world prior to the beginnings of the great expansions of the violet race, about twenty-five thousand years ago. The hope of future civilization lay in the second garden between the rivers of Mesopotamia. Here in southwestern Asia there existed the potential of a great civilization, the possibility of the spread to the world of the ideas and ideals which had been salvaged from the days of Dalamatia and the times of Eden.
(868.6) 78:1.4 2. Pre-Sumerians and other Nodites. There were also present in Mesopotamia, near the mouth of the rivers, remnants of the ancient culture of the days of Dalamatia. With the passing millenniums, this group became thoroughly admixed with the Adamites to the north, but they never entirely lost their Nodite traditions. Various other Nodite groups that had settled in the Levant were, in general, absorbed by the later expanding violet race.
(869.1) 78:1.5 3. The Andonites maintained five or six fairly representative settlements to the north and east of the Adamson headquarters. They were also scattered throughout Turkestan, while isolated islands of them persisted throughout Eurasia, especially in mountainous regions. These aborigines still held the northlands of the Eurasian continent, together with Iceland and Greenland, but they had long since been driven from the plains of Europe by the blue man and from the river valleys of farther Asia by the expanding yellow race.
(869.2) 78:1.6 4. The red man occupied the Americas, having been driven out of Asia over fifty thousand years before the arrival of Adam.
(869.3) 78:1.7 5. The yellow race. The Chinese peoples were well established in control of eastern Asia. Their most advanced settlements were situated to the northwest of modern China in regions bordering on Tibet.
(869.4) 78:1.8 6. The blue race. The blue men were scattered all over Europe, but their better centers of culture were situated in the then fertile valleys of the Mediterranean basin and in northwestern Europe. Neanderthal absorption had greatly retarded the culture of the blue man, but he was otherwise the most aggressive, adventurous, and exploratory of all the evolutionary peoples of Eurasia.
(869.5) 78:1.9 7. Pre-Dravidian India. The complex mixture of races in India — embracing every race on earth, but especially the green, orange, and black — maintained a culture slightly above that of the outlying regions.
(869.6) 78:1.10 8. The Sahara civilization. The superior elements of the indigo race had their most progressive settlements in what is now the great Sahara desert. This indigo-black group carried extensive strains of the submerged orange and green races.
(869.7) 78:1.11 9. The Mediterranean basin. The most highly blended race outside of India occupied what is now the Mediterranean basin. Here blue men from the north and Saharans from the south met and mingled with Nodites and Adamites from the east.
(869.9) 78:1.13 Adam and Eve had left behind a limited but potent progeny, and the celestial observers on Urantia waited anxiously to find out how these descendants of the erring Material Son and Daughter would acquit themselves.
2. The Adamites in the Second Garden
(869.11) 78:2.2 The heroism displayed in the leadership of the second garden constitutes one of the amazing and inspiring epics of Urantia’s history. These splendid souls never wholly lost sight of the purpose of the Adamic mission, and therefore did they valiantly fight off the influences of the surrounding and inferior tribes while they willingly sent forth their choicest sons and daughters in a steady stream as emissaries to the races of earth. Sometimes this expansion was depleting to the home culture, but always these superior peoples would rehabilitate themselves.
(870.1) 78:2.3 The civilization, society, and cultural status of the Adamites were far above the general level of the evolutionary races of Urantia. Only among the old settlements of Van and Amadon and the Adamsonites was there a civilization in any way comparable. But the civilization of the second Eden was an artificial structure — it had not been evolved — and was therefore doomed to deteriorate until it reached a natural evolutionary level.*
(870.2) 78:2.4 Adam left a great intellectual and spiritual culture behind him, but it was not advanced in mechanical appliances since every civilization is limited by available natural resources, inherent genius, and sufficient leisure to insure inventive fruition. The civilization of the violet race was predicated on the presence of Adam and on the traditions of the first Eden. After Adam’s death and as these traditions grew dim through the passing millenniums, the cultural level of the Adamites steadily deteriorated until it reached a state of reciprocal balance with the status of the surrounding peoples and the naturally evolving cultural capacities of the violet race.
(870.3) 78:2.5 But the Adamites were a real nation around 19,000 B.C., numbering four and a half million, and already they had poured forth millions of their progeny into the surrounding peoples.
3. Early Expansions of the Adamites
(870.5) 78:3.2 Some of the Adamites early journeyed westward to the valley of the Nile; others penetrated eastward into Asia, but these were a minority. The mass movement of the later days was extensively northward and thence westward. It was, in the main, a gradual but unremitting northward push, the greater number making their way north and then circling westward around the Caspian Sea into Europe.
(870.6) 78:3.3 About twenty-five thousand years ago many of the purer elements of the Adamites were well on their northern trek. And as they penetrated northward, they became less and less Adamic until, by the times of their occupation of Turkestan, they had become thoroughly admixed with the other races, particularly the Nodites. Very few of the pure-line violet peoples ever penetrated far into Europe or Asia.
(870.7) 78:3.4 From about 30,000 to 10,000 B.C. epoch-making racial mixtures were taking place throughout southwestern Asia. The highland inhabitants of Turkestan were a virile and vigorous people. To the northwest of India much of the culture of the days of Van persisted. Still to the north of these settlements the best of the early Andonites had been preserved. And both of these superior races of culture and character were absorbed by the northward-moving Adamites. This amalgamation led to the adoption of many new ideas; it facilitated the progress of civilization and greatly advanced all phases of art, science, and social culture.
(871.1) 78:3.5 As the period of the early Adamic migrations ended, about 15,000 B.C., there were already more descendants of Adam in Europe and central Asia than anywhere else in the world, even than in Mesopotamia. The European blue races had been largely infiltrated. The lands now called Russia and Turkestan were occupied throughout their southern stretches by a great reservoir of the Adamites mixed with Nodites, Andonites, and red and yellow Sangiks. Southern Europe and the Mediterranean fringe were occupied by a mixed race of Andonite and Sangik peoples — orange, green, and indigo — with a sprinkling of the Adamite stock. Asia Minor and the central-eastern European lands were held by tribes that were predominantly Andonite.
(871.2) 78:3.6 A blended colored race, about this time greatly reinforced by arrivals from Mesopotamia, held forth in Egypt and prepared to take over the disappearing culture of the Euphrates valley. The black peoples were moving farther south in Africa and, like the red race, were virtually isolated.
(871.3) 78:3.7 The Saharan civilization had been disrupted by drought and that of the Mediterranean basin by flood. The blue races had, as yet, failed to develop an advanced culture. The Andonites were still scattered over the Arctic and central Asian regions. The green and orange races had been exterminated as such. The indigo race was moving south in Africa, there to begin its slow but long-continued racial deterioration.
(871.4) 78:3.8 The peoples of India lay stagnant, with a civilization that was unprogressing; the yellow man was consolidating his holdings in central Asia; the brown man had not yet begun his civilization on the near-by islands of the Pacific.
(871.5) 78:3.9 These racial distributions, associated with extensive climatic changes, set the world stage for the inauguration of the Andite era of Urantia civilization. These early migrations extended over a period of ten thousand years, from 25,000 to 15,000 B.C. The later or Andite migrations extended from about 15,000 to 6000 B.C.
(871.6) 78:3.10 It took so long for the earlier waves of Adamites to pass over Eurasia that their culture was largely lost in transit. Only the later Andites moved with sufficient speed to retain the Edenic culture at any great distance from Mesopotamia.
4. The Andites
(871.8) 78:4.2 The earliest Andite peoples took origin in the regions adjacent to Mesopotamia more than twenty-five thousand years ago and consisted of a blend of the Adamites and Nodites. The second garden was surrounded by concentric circles of diminishing violet blood, and it was on the periphery of this racial melting pot that the Andite race was born. Later on, when the migrating Adamites and Nodites entered the then fertile regions of Turkestan, they soon blended with the superior inhabitants, and the resultant race mixture extended the Andite type northward.
(872.1) 78:4.3 The Andites were the best all-round human stock to appear on Urantia since the days of the pure-line violet peoples. They embraced most of the highest types of the surviving remnants of the Adamite and Nodite races and, later, some of the best strains of the yellow, blue, and green men.
(872.2) 78:4.4 These early Andites were not Aryan; they were pre-Aryan. They were not white; they were pre-white. They were neither an Occidental nor an Oriental people. But it is Andite inheritance that gives to the polyglot mixture of the so-called white races that generalized homogeneity which has been called Caucasoid.
(872.3) 78:4.5 The purer strains of the violet race had retained the Adamic tradition of peace-seeking, which explains why the earlier race movements had been more in the nature of peaceful migrations. But as the Adamites united with the Nodite stocks, who were by this time a belligerent race, their Andite descendants became, for their day and age, the most skillful and sagacious militarists ever to live on Urantia. Thenceforth the movements of the Mesopotamians grew increasingly military in character and became more akin to actual conquests.
(872.4) 78:4.6 These Andites were adventurous; they had roving dispositions. An increase of either Sangik or Andonite stock tended to stabilize them. But even so, their later descendants never stopped until they had circumnavigated the globe and discovered the last remote continent.
5. The Andite Migrations
(872.6) 78:5.2 These Andites inaugurated new advances throughout Eurasia and North Africa. From Mesopotamia through Sinkiang the Andite culture was dominant, and the steady migration toward Europe was continuously offset by new arrivals from Mesopotamia. But it is hardly correct to speak of the Andites as a race in Mesopotamia proper until near the beginning of the terminal migrations of the mixed descendants of Adam. By this time even the races in the second garden had become so blended that they could no longer be considered Adamites.
(872.7) 78:5.3 The civilization of Turkestan was constantly being revived and refreshed by the newcomers from Mesopotamia, especially by the later Andite cavalrymen. The so-called Aryan mother tongue was in process of formation in the highlands of Turkestan; it was a blend of the Andonic dialect of that region with the language of the Adamsonites and later Andites. Many modern languages are derived from this early speech of these central Asian tribes who conquered Europe, India, and the upper stretches of the Mesopotamian plains. This ancient language gave the Occidental tongues all of that similarity which is called Aryan.
(872.8) 78:5.4 By 12,000 B.C. three quarters of the Andite stock of the world was resident in northern and eastern Europe, and when the later and final exodus from Mesopotamia took place, sixty-five per cent of these last waves of emigration entered Europe.
(873.1) 78:5.5 The Andites not only migrated to Europe but to northern China and India, while many groups penetrated to the ends of the earth as missionaries, teachers, and traders. They contributed considerably to the northern groups of the Saharan Sangik peoples. But only a few teachers and traders ever penetrated farther south in Africa than the headwaters of the Nile. Later on, mixed Andites and Egyptians followed down both the east and west coasts of Africa well below the equator, but they did not reach Madagascar.
(873.2) 78:5.6 These Andites were the so-called Dravidian and later Aryan conquerors of India; and their presence in central Asia greatly upstepped the ancestors of the Turanians. Many of this race journeyed to China by way of both Sinkiang and Tibet and added desirable qualities to the later Chinese stocks. From time to time small groups made their way into Japan, Formosa, the East Indies, and southern China, though very few entered southern China by the coastal route.
(873.3) 78:5.7 One hundred and thirty-two of this race, embarking in a fleet of small boats from Japan, eventually reached South America and by intermarriage with the natives of the Andes established the ancestry of the later rulers of the Incas. They crossed the Pacific by easy stages, tarrying on the many islands they found along the way. The islands of the Polynesian group were both more numerous and larger then than now, and these Andite sailors, together with some who followed them, biologically modified the native groups in transit. Many flourishing centers of civilization grew up on these now submerged lands as a result of Andite penetration. Easter Island was long a religious and administrative center of one of these lost groups. But of the Andites who navigated the Pacific of long ago none but the one hundred and thirty-two ever reached the mainland of the Americas.
(873.4) 78:5.8 The migratory conquests of the Andites continued on down to their final dispersions, from 8000 to 6000 B.C. As they poured out of Mesopotamia, they continuously depleted the biologic reserves of their homelands while markedly strengthening the surrounding peoples. And to every nation to which they journeyed, they contributed humor, art, adventure, music, and manufacture. They were skillful domesticators of animals and expert agriculturists. For the time being, at least, their presence usually improved the religious beliefs and moral practices of the older races. And so the culture of Mesopotamia quietly spread out over Europe, India, China, northern Africa, and the Pacific Islands.
6. The Last Andite Dispersions
(873.6) 78:6.2 Sixty-five per cent entered Europe by the Caspian Sea route to conquer and amalgamate with the newly appearing white races — the blend of the blue men and the earlier Andites.(874.4) 78:6.7 The Andites had almost entirely evacuated this region by 6000 B.C., though their descendants, largely mixed with the surrounding Sangik races and the Andonites of Asia Minor, were there to give battle to the northern and eastern invaders at a much later date.
(873.7) 78:6.3 Ten per cent, including a large group of the Sethite priests, moved eastward through the Elamite highlands to the Iranian plateau and Turkestan. Many of their descendants were later driven into India with their Aryan brethren from the regions to the north.
(874.1) 78:6.4 Ten per cent of the Mesopotamians turned eastward in their northern trek, entering Sinkiang, where they blended with the Andite-yellow inhabitants. The majority of the able offspring of this racial union later entered China and contributed much to the immediate improvement of the northern division of the yellow race.
(874.2) 78:6.5 Ten per cent of these fleeing Andites made their way across Arabia and entered Egypt.
(874.3) 78:6.6 Five per cent of the Andites, the very superior culture of the coastal district about the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates who had kept themselves free from intermarriage with the inferior neighboring tribesmen, refused to leave their homes. This group represented the survival of many superior Nodite and Adamite strains.
(874.5) 78:6.8 The cultural age of the second garden was terminated by the increasing infiltration of the surrounding inferior stocks. Civilization moved westward to the Nile and the Mediterranean islands, where it continued to thrive and advance long after its fountainhead in Mesopotamia had deteriorated. And this unchecked influx of inferior peoples prepared the way for the later conquest of all Mesopotamia by the northern barbarians who drove out the residual strains of ability. Even in later years the cultured residue still resented the presence of these ignorant and uncouth invaders.
7. The Floods in Mesopotamia
(874.7) 78:7.2 For thousands of years after the submergence of the first Eden the mountains about the eastern coast of the Mediterranean and those to the northwest and northeast of Mesopotamia continued to rise. This elevation of the highlands was greatly accelerated about 5000 B.C., and this, together with greatly increased snowfall on the northern mountains, caused unprecedented floods each spring throughout the Euphrates valley. These spring floods grew increasingly worse so that eventually the inhabitants of the river regions were driven to the eastern highlands. For almost a thousand years scores of cities were practically deserted because of these extensive deluges.
(874.8) 78:7.3 Almost five thousand years later, as the Hebrew priests in Babylonian captivity sought to trace the Jewish people back to Adam, they found great difficulty in piecing the story together; and it occurred to one of them to abandon the effort, to let the whole world drown in its wickedness at the time of Noah’s flood, and thus to be in a better position to trace Abraham right back to one of the three surviving sons of Noah.
(875.1) 78:7.4 The traditions of a time when water covered the whole of the earth’s surface are universal. Many races harbor the story of a world-wide flood some time during past ages. The Biblical story of Noah, the ark, and the flood is an invention of the Hebrew priesthood during the Babylonian captivity. There has never been a universal flood since life was established on Urantia. The only time the surface of the earth was completely covered by water was during those Archeozoic ages before the land had begun to appear.
(875.2) 78:7.5 But Noah really lived; he was a wine maker of Aram, a river settlement near Erech. He kept a written record of the days of the river’s rise from year to year. He brought much ridicule upon himself by going up and down the river valley advocating that all houses be built of wood, boat fashion, and that the family animals be put on board each night as the flood season approached. He would go to the neighboring river settlements every year and warn them that in so many days the floods would come. Finally a year came in which the annual floods were greatly augmented by unusually heavy rainfall so that the sudden rise of the waters wiped out the entire village; only Noah and his immediate family were saved in their houseboat.
(875.3) 78:7.6 These floods completed the disruption of Andite civilization. With the ending of this period of deluge, the second garden was no more. Only in the south and among the Sumerians did any trace of the former glory remain.
(875.4) 78:7.7 The remnants of this, one of the oldest civilizations, are to be found in these regions of Mesopotamia and to the northeast and northwest. But still older vestiges of the days of Dalamatia exist under the waters of the Persian Gulf, and the first Eden lies submerged under the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea.
8. The Sumerians — Last of the Andites
(875.6) 78:8.2 It was during the floodtimes that Susa so greatly prospered. The first and lower city was inundated so that the second or higher town succeeded the lower as the headquarters for the peculiar artcrafts of that day. With the later diminution of these floods, Ur became the center of the pottery industry. About seven thousand years ago Ur was on the Persian Gulf, the river deposits having since built up the land to its present limits. These settlements suffered less from the floods because of better controlling works and the widening mouths of the rivers.
(875.7) 78:8.3 The peaceful grain growers of the Euphrates and Tigris valleys had long been harassed by the raids of the barbarians of Turkestan and the Iranian plateau. But now a concerted invasion of the Euphrates valley was brought about by the increasing drought of the highland pastures. And this invasion was all the more serious because these surrounding herdsmen and hunters possessed large numbers of tamed horses. It was the possession of horses which gave them a tremendous military advantage over their rich neighbors to the south. In a short time they overran all Mesopotamia, driving forth the last waves of culture which spread out over all of Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa.
(876.1) 78:8.4 These conquerors of Mesopotamia carried in their ranks many of the better Andite strains of the mixed northern races of Turkestan, including some of the Adamson stock. These less advanced but more vigorous tribes from the north quickly and willingly assimilated the residue of the civilization of Mesopotamia and presently developed into those mixed peoples found in the Euphrates valley at the beginning of historic annals. They quickly revived many phases of the passing civilization of Mesopotamia, adopting the arts of the valley tribes and much of the culture of the Sumerians. They even sought to build a third tower of Babel and later adopted the term as their national name.
(876.2) 78:8.5 When these barbarian cavalrymen from the northeast overran the whole Euphrates valley, they did not conquer the remnants of the Andites who dwelt about the mouth of the river on the Persian Gulf. These Sumerians were able to defend themselves because of superior intelligence, better weapons, and their extensive system of military canals, which were an adjunct to their irrigation scheme of interconnecting pools. They were a united people because they had a uniform group religion. They were thus able to maintain their racial and national integrity long after their neighbors to the northwest were broken up into isolated city-states. No one of these city groups was able to overcome the united Sumerians.
(876.3) 78:8.6 And the invaders from the north soon learned to trust and prize these peace-loving Sumerians as able teachers and administrators. They were greatly respected and sought after as teachers of art and industry, as directors of commerce, and as civil rulers by all peoples to the north and from Egypt in the west to India in the east.
(876.4) 78:8.7 After the breakup of the early Sumerian confederation the later city-states were ruled by the apostate descendants of the Sethite priests. Only when these priests made conquests of the neighboring cities did they call themselves kings. The later city kings failed to form powerful confederations before the days of Sargon because of deity jealousy. Each city believed its municipal god to be superior to all other gods, and therefore they refused to subordinate themselves to a common leader.
(876.5) 78:8.8 The end of this long period of the weak rule of the city priests was terminated by Sargon, the priest of Kish, who proclaimed himself king and started out on the conquest of the whole of Mesopotamia and adjoining lands. And for the time, this ended the city-states, priest-ruled and priest-ridden, each city having its own municipal god and its own ceremonial practices.
(876.6) 78:8.9 After the breakup of this Kish confederation there ensued a long period of constant warfare between these valley cities for supremacy. And the rulership variously shifted between Sumer, Akkad, Kish, Erech, Ur, and Susa.
(876.7) 78:8.10 About 2500 B.C. the Sumerians suffered severe reverses at the hands of the northern Suites and Guites. Lagash, the Sumerian capital built on flood mounds, fell. Erech held out for thirty years after the fall of Akkad. By the time of the establishment of the rule of Hammurabi the Sumerians had become absorbed into the ranks of the northern Semites, and the Mesopotamian Andites passed from the pages of history.
(877.1) 78:8.11 From 2500 to 2000 B.C. the nomads were on a rampage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Nerites constituted the final eruption of the Caspian group of the Mesopotamian descendants of the blended Andonite and Andite races. What the barbarians failed to do to effect the ruination of Mesopotamia, subsequent climatic changes succeeded in accomplishing.
(877.2) 78:8.12 And this is the story of the violet race after the days of Adam and of the fate of their homeland between the Tigris and Euphrates. Their ancient civilization finally fell due to the emigration of superior peoples and the immigration of their inferior neighbors. But long before the barbarian cavalrymen conquered the valley, much of the Garden culture had spread to Asia, Africa, and Europe, there to produce the ferments which have resulted in the twentieth-century civilization of Urantia.
(877.3) 78:8.13 [Presented by an Archangel of Nebadon.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 79
Andite Expansion in the Orient
1. The Andites of Turkestan
(878.3) 79:1.2 For almost fifteen thousand years centers of mixed Andite culture persisted in the basin of the Tarim River in Sinkiang and to the south in the highland regions of Tibet, where the Andites and Andonites had extensively mingled. The Tarim valley was the easternmost outpost of the true Andite culture. Here they built their settlements and entered into trade relations with the progressive Chinese to the east and with the Andonites to the north. In those days the Tarim region was a fertile land; the rainfall was plentiful. To the east the Gobi was an open grassland where the herders were gradually turning to agriculture. This civilization perished when the rain winds shifted to the southeast, but in its day it rivaled Mesopotamia itself.
(878.4) 79:1.3 By 8000 B.C. the slowly increasing aridity of the highland regions of central Asia began to drive the Andites to the river bottoms and the seashores. This increasing drought not only drove them to the valleys of the Nile, Euphrates, Indus, and Yellow rivers, but it produced a new development in Andite civilization. A new class of men, the traders, began to appear in large numbers.
(879.1) 79:1.4 When climatic conditions made hunting unprofitable for the migrating Andites, they did not follow the evolutionary course of the older races by becoming herders. Commerce and urban life made their appearance. From Egypt through Mesopotamia and Turkestan to the rivers of China and India, the more highly civilized tribes began to assemble in cities devoted to manufacture and trade. Adonia became the central Asian commercial metropolis, being located near the present city of Ashkhabad. Commerce in stone, metal, wood, and pottery was accelerated on both land and water.
(879.2) 79:1.5 But ever-increasing drought gradually brought about the great Andite exodus from the lands south and east of the Caspian Sea. The tide of migration began to veer from northward to southward, and the Babylonian cavalrymen began to push into Mesopotamia.
(879.3) 79:1.6 Increasing aridity in central Asia further operated to reduce population and to render these people less warlike; and when the diminishing rainfall to the north forced the nomadic Andonites southward, there was a tremendous exodus of Andites from Turkestan. This is the terminal movement of the so-called Aryans into the Levant and India. It culminated that long dispersal of the mixed descendants of Adam during which every Asiatic and most of the island peoples of the Pacific were to some extent improved by these superior races.
(879.4) 79:1.7 Thus, while they dispersed over the Eastern Hemisphere, the Andites were dispossessed of their homelands in Mesopotamia and Turkestan, for it was this extensive southward movement of Andonites that diluted the Andites in central Asia nearly to the vanishing point.
(879.5) 79:1.8 But even in the twentieth century after Christ there are traces of Andite blood among the Turanian and Tibetan peoples, as is witnessed by the blond types occasionally found in these regions. The early Chinese annals record the presence of the red-haired nomads to the north of the peaceful settlements of the Yellow River, and there still remain paintings which faithfully record the presence of both the blond-Andite and the brunet-Mongolian types in the Tarim basin of long ago.
(879.6) 79:1.9 The last great manifestation of the submerged military genius of the central Asiatic Andites was in A.D. 1200, when the Mongols under Genghis Khan began the conquest of the greater portion of the Asiatic continent. And like the Andites of old, these warriors proclaimed the existence of “one God in heaven.” The early breakup of their empire long delayed cultural intercourse between Occident and Orient and greatly handicapped the growth of the monotheistic concept in Asia.
2. The Andite Conquest of India
(879.8) 79:2.2 The earliest race mixtures in India were a blending of the migrating red and yellow races with the aboriginal Andonites. This group was later weakened by absorbing the greater portion of the extinct eastern green peoples as well as large numbers of the orange race, was slightly improved through limited admixture with the blue man, but suffered exceedingly through assimilation of large numbers of the indigo race. But the so-called aborigines of India are hardly representative of these early people; they are rather the most inferior southern and eastern fringe, which was never fully absorbed by either the early Andites or their later appearing Aryan cousins.
(880.1) 79:2.3 By 20,000 B.C. the population of western India had already become tinged with the Adamic blood, and never in the history of Urantia did any one people combine so many different races. But it was unfortunate that the secondary Sangik strains predominated, and it was a real calamity that both the blue and the red man were so largely missing from this racial melting pot of long ago; more of the primary Sangik strains would have contributed very much toward the enhancement of what might have been an even greater civilization. As it developed, the red man was destroying himself in the Americas, the blue man was disporting himself in Europe, and the early descendants of Adam (and most of the later ones) exhibited little desire to admix with the darker colored peoples, whether in India, Africa, or elsewhere.
(880.2) 79:2.4 About 15,000 B.C. increasing population pressure throughout Turkestan and Iran occasioned the first really extensive Andite movement toward India. For over fifteen centuries these superior peoples poured in through the highlands of Baluchistan, spreading out over the valleys of the Indus and Ganges and slowly moving southward into the Deccan. This Andite pressure from the northwest drove many of the southern and eastern inferiors into Burma and southern China but not sufficiently to save the invaders from racial obliteration.
(880.3) 79:2.5 The failure of India to achieve the hegemony of Eurasia was largely a matter of topography; population pressure from the north only crowded the majority of the people southward into the decreasing territory of the Deccan, surrounded on all sides by the sea. Had there been adjacent lands for emigration, then would the inferiors have been crowded out in all directions, and the superior stocks would have achieved a higher civilization.
(880.4) 79:2.6 As it was, these earlier Andite conquerors made a desperate attempt to preserve their identity and stem the tide of racial engulfment by the establishment of rigid restrictions regarding intermarriage. Nonetheless, the Andites had become submerged by 10,000 B.C., but the whole mass of the people had been markedly improved by this absorption.
(880.5) 79:2.7 Race mixture is always advantageous in that it favors versatility of culture and makes for a progressive civilization, but if the inferior elements of racial stocks predominate, such achievements will be short-lived. A polyglot culture can be preserved only if the superior stocks reproduce themselves in a safe margin over the inferior. Unrestrained multiplication of inferiors, with decreasing reproduction of superiors, is unfailingly suicidal of cultural civilization.
(880.6) 79:2.8 Had the Andite conquerors been in numbers three times what they were, or had they driven out or destroyed the least desirable third of the mixed orange-green-indigo inhabitants, then would India have become one of the world’s leading centers of cultural civilization and undoubtedly would have attracted more of the later waves of Mesopotamians that flowed into Turkestan and thence northward to Europe.
3. Dravidian India
(881.2) 79:3.2 Not long after conquering India, the Dravidian Andites lost their racial and cultural contact with Mesopotamia, but the later opening up of the sea lanes and the caravan routes re-established these connections; and at no time within the last ten thousand years has India ever been entirely out of touch with Mesopotamia on the west and China to the east, although the mountain barriers greatly favored western intercourse.
(881.3) 79:3.3 The superior culture and religious leanings of the peoples of India date from the early times of Dravidian domination and are due, in part, to the fact that so many of the Sethite priesthood entered India, both in the earlier Andite and in the later Aryan invasions. The thread of monotheism running through the religious history of India thus stems from the teachings of the Adamites in the second garden.
(881.4) 79:3.4 As early as 16,000 B.C. a company of one hundred Sethite priests entered India and very nearly achieved the religious conquest of the western half of that polyglot people. But their religion did not persist. Within five thousand years their doctrines of the Paradise Trinity had degenerated into the triune symbol of the fire god.
(881.5) 79:3.5 But for more than seven thousand years, down to the end of the Andite migrations, the religious status of the inhabitants of India was far above that of the world at large. During these times India bid fair to produce the leading cultural, religious, philosophic, and commercial civilization of the world. And but for the complete submergence of the Andites by the peoples of the south, this destiny would probably have been realized.*
(881.6) 79:3.6 The Dravidian centers of culture were located in the river valleys, principally of the Indus and Ganges, and in the Deccan along the three great rivers flowing through the Eastern Ghats to the sea. The settlements along the seacoast of the Western Ghats owed their prominence to maritime relationships with Sumeria.
(881.7) 79:3.7 The Dravidians were among the earliest peoples to build cities and to engage in an extensive export and import business, both by land and sea. By 7000 B.C. camel trains were making regular trips to distant Mesopotamia; Dravidian shipping was pushing coastwise across the Arabian Sea to the Sumerian cities of the Persian Gulf and was venturing on the waters of the Bay of Bengal as far as the East Indies. An alphabet, together with the art of writing, was imported from Sumeria by these seafarers and merchants.
(881.8) 79:3.8 These commercial relationships greatly contributed to the further diversification of a cosmopolitan culture, resulting in the early appearance of many of the refinements and even luxuries of urban life. When the later appearing Aryans entered India, they did not recognize in the Dravidians their Andite cousins submerged in the Sangik races, but they did find a well-advanced civilization. Despite biologic limitations, the Dravidians founded a superior civilization. It was well diffused throughout all India and has survived on down to modern times in the Deccan.
4. The Aryan Invasion of India
(882.2) 79:4.2 The early Aryan centers were scattered over the northern half of India, notably in the northwest. These invaders never completed the conquest of the country and subsequently met their undoing in this neglect since their lesser numbers made them vulnerable to absorption by the Dravidians of the south, who subsequently overran the entire peninsula except the Himalayan provinces.
(882.3) 79:4.3 The Aryans made very little racial impression on India except in the northern provinces. In the Deccan their influence was cultural and religious more than racial. The greater persistence of the so-called Aryan blood in northern India is not only due to their presence in these regions in greater numbers but also because they were reinforced by later conquerors, traders, and missionaries. Right on down to the first century before Christ there was a continuous infiltration of Aryan blood into the Punjab, the last influx being attendant upon the campaigns of the Hellenistic peoples.
(882.4) 79:4.4 On the Gangetic plain Aryan and Dravidian eventually mingled to produce a high culture, and this center was later reinforced by contributions from the northeast, coming from China.
(882.5) 79:4.5 In India many types of social organizations flourished from time to time, from the semidemocratic systems of the Aryans to despotic and monarchial forms of government. But the most characteristic feature of society was the persistence of the great social castes that were instituted by the Aryans in an effort to perpetuate racial identity. This elaborate caste system has been preserved on down to the present time.
(882.6) 79:4.6 Of the four great castes, all but the first were established in the futile effort to prevent racial amalgamation of the Aryan conquerors with their inferior subjects. But the premier caste, the teacher-priests, stems from the Sethites; the Brahmans of the twentieth century after Christ are the lineal cultural descendants of the priests of the second garden, albeit their teachings differ greatly from those of their illustrious predecessors.
(882.7) 79:4.7 When the Aryans entered India, they brought with them their concepts of Deity as they had been preserved in the lingering traditions of the religion of the second garden. But the Brahman priests were never able to withstand the pagan momentum built up by the sudden contact with the inferior religions of the Deccan after the racial obliteration of the Aryans. Thus the vast majority of the population fell into the bondage of the enslaving superstitions of inferior religions; and so it was that India failed to produce the high civilization which had been foreshadowed in earlier times.
(882.8) 79:4.8 The spiritual awakening of the sixth century before Christ did not persist in India, having died out even before the Mohammedan invasion. But someday a greater Gautama may arise to lead all India in the search for the living God, and then the world will observe the fruition of the cultural potentialities of a versatile people so long comatose under the benumbing influence of an unprogressing spiritual vision.
(883.1) 79:4.9 Culture does rest on a biologic foundation, but caste alone could not perpetuate the Aryan culture, for religion, true religion, is the indispensable source of that higher energy which drives men to establish a superior civilization based on human brotherhood.
5. Red Man and Yellow Man
(883.3) 79:5.2 While the early Neanderthalers were spread out over the entire breadth of Eurasia, the eastern wing was the more contaminated with debased animal strains. These subhuman types were pushed south by the fifth glacier, the same ice sheet which so long blocked Sangik migration into eastern Asia. And when the red man moved northeast around the highlands of India, he found northeastern Asia free from these subhuman types. The tribal organization of the red races was formed earlier than that of any other peoples, and they were the first to migrate from the central Asian focus of the Sangiks. The inferior Neanderthal strains were destroyed or driven off the mainland by the later migrating yellow tribes. But the red man had reigned supreme in eastern Asia for almost one hundred thousand years before the yellow tribes arrived.
(883.4) 79:5.3 More than three hundred thousand years ago the main body of the yellow race entered China from the south as coastwise migrants. Each millennium they penetrated farther and farther inland, but they did not make contact with their migrating Tibetan brethren until comparatively recent times.
(883.5) 79:5.4 Growing population pressure caused the northward-moving yellow race to begin to push into the hunting grounds of the red man. This encroachment, coupled with natural racial antagonism, culminated in increasing hostilities, and thus began the crucial struggle for the fertile lands of farther Asia.
(883.6) 79:5.5 The story of this agelong contest between the red and yellow races is an epic of Urantia history. For over two hundred thousand years these two superior races waged bitter and unremitting warfare. In the earlier struggles the red men were generally successful, their raiding parties spreading havoc among the yellow settlements. But the yellow man was an apt pupil in the art of warfare, and he early manifested a marked ability to live peaceably with his compatriots; the Chinese were the first to learn that in union there is strength. The red tribes continued their internecine conflicts, and presently they began to suffer repeated defeats at the aggressive hands of the relentless Chinese, who continued their inexorable march northward.
(883.7) 79:5.6 One hundred thousand years ago the decimated tribes of the red race were fighting with their backs to the retreating ice of the last glacier, and when the land passage to the West, over the Bering isthmus, became passable, these tribes were not slow in forsaking the inhospitable shores of the Asiatic continent. It is eighty-five thousand years since the last of the pure red men departed from Asia, but the long struggle left its genetic imprint upon the victorious yellow race. The northern Chinese peoples, together with the Andonite Siberians, assimilated much of the red stock and were in considerable measure benefited thereby.*
(884.1) 79:5.7 The North American Indians never came in contact with even the Andite offspring of Adam and Eve, having been dispossessed of their Asiatic homelands some fifty thousand years before the coming of Adam. During the age of Andite migrations the pure red strains were spreading out over North America as nomadic tribes, hunters who practiced agriculture to a small extent. These races and cultural groups remained almost completely isolated from the remainder of the world from their arrival in the Americas down to the end of the first millennium of the Christian era, when they were discovered by the white races of Europe. Up to that time the Eskimos were the nearest to white men the northern tribes of red men had ever seen.
(884.2) 79:5.8 The red and the yellow races are the only human stocks that ever achieved a high degree of civilization apart from the influences of the Andites. The oldest Amerindian culture was the Onamonalonton center in California, but this had long since vanished by 35,000 B.C. In Mexico, Central America, and in the mountains of South America the later and more enduring civilizations were founded by a race predominantly red but containing a considerable admixture of the yellow, orange, and blue.
(884.3) 79:5.9 These civilizations were evolutionary products of the Sangiks, notwithstanding that traces of Andite blood reached Peru. Excepting the Eskimos in North America and a few Polynesian Andites in South America, the peoples of the Western Hemisphere had no contact with the rest of the world until the end of the first millennium after Christ. In the original Melchizedek plan for the improvement of the Urantia races it had been stipulated that one million of the pure-line descendants of Adam should go to upstep the red men of the Americas.
6. Dawn of Chinese Civilization
(884.5) 79:6.2 In Burma and the peninsula of Indo-China the cultures of India and China mixed and blended to produce the successive civilizations of those regions. Here the vanished green race has persisted in larger proportion than anywhere else in the world.
(884.6) 79:6.3 Many different races occupied the islands of the Pacific. In general, the southern and then more extensive islands were occupied by peoples carrying a heavy percentage of green and indigo blood. The northern islands were held by Andonites and, later on, by races embracing large proportions of the yellow and red stocks. The ancestors of the Japanese people were not driven off the mainland until 12,000 B.C., when they were dislodged by a powerful southern-coastwise thrust of the northern Chinese tribes. Their final exodus was not so much due to population pressure as to the initiative of a chieftain whom they came to regard as a divine personage.
(885.1) 79:6.4 Like the peoples of India and the Levant, victorious tribes of the yellow man established their earliest centers along the coast and up the rivers. The coastal settlements fared poorly in later years as the increasing floods and the shifting courses of the rivers made the lowland cities untenable.
(885.2) 79:6.5 Twenty thousand years ago the ancestors of the Chinese had built up a dozen strong centers of primitive culture and learning, especially along the Yellow River and the Yangtze. And now these centers began to be reinforced by the arrival of a steady stream of superior blended peoples from Sinkiang and Tibet. The migration from Tibet to the Yangtze valley was not so extensive as in the north, neither were the Tibetan centers so advanced as those of the Tarim basin. But both movements carried a certain amount of Andite blood eastward to the river settlements.
(885.3) 79:6.6 The superiority of the ancient yellow race was due to four great factors:
(885.4) 79:6.7 1. Genetic. Unlike their blue cousins in Europe, both the red and yellow races had largely escaped mixture with debased human stocks. The northern Chinese, already strengthened by small amounts of the superior red and Andonic strains, were soon to benefit by a considerable influx of Andite blood. The southern Chinese did not fare so well in this regard, and they had long suffered from absorption of the green race, while later on they were to be further weakened by the infiltration of the swarms of inferior peoples crowded out of India by the Dravidian-Andite invasion. And today in China there is a definite difference between the northern and southern races.(886.1) 79:6.13 And but for the mountain barriers and the later decline in spiritual culture, the yellow race undoubtedly would have attracted to itself the larger part of the Andite migrations from Turkestan and unquestionably would have quickly dominated world civilization.
(885.5) 79:6.8 2. Social. The yellow race early learned the value of peace among themselves. Their internal peaceableness so contributed to population increase as to insure the spread of their civilization among many millions. From 25,000 to 5000 B.C. the highest mass civilization on Urantia was in central and northern China. The yellow man was first to achieve a racial solidarity — the first to attain a large-scale cultural, social, and political civilization.
(885.6) 79:6.9 The Chinese of 15,000 B.C. were aggressive militarists; they had not been weakened by an overreverence for the past, and numbering less than twelve million, they formed a compact body speaking a common language. During this age they built up a real nation, much more united and homogeneous than their political unions of historic times.
(885.7) 79:6.10 3. Spiritual. During the age of Andite migrations the Chinese were among the more spiritual peoples of earth. Long adherence to the worship of the One Truth proclaimed by Singlangton kept them ahead of most of the other races. The stimulus of a progressive and advanced religion is often a decisive factor in cultural development; as India languished, so China forged ahead under the invigorating stimulus of a religion in which truth was enshrined as the supreme Deity.
(885.8) 79:6.11 This worship of truth was provocative of research and fearless exploration of the laws of nature and the potentials of mankind. The Chinese of even six thousand years ago were still keen students and aggressive in their pursuit of truth.
(885.9) 79:6.12 4. Geographic. China is protected by the mountains to the west and the Pacific to the east. Only in the north is the way open to attack, and from the days of the red man to the coming of the later descendants of the Andites, the north was not occupied by any aggressive race.
7. The Andites Enter China
(886.3) 79:7.2 The northern centers of culture along the Yellow River had always been more progressive than the southern settlements on the Yangtze. Within a few thousand years after the arrival of even the small numbers of these superior mortals, the settlements along the Yellow River had forged ahead of the Yangtze villages and had achieved an advanced position over their brethren in the south which has ever since been maintained.
(886.4) 79:7.3 It was not that there were so many of the Andites, nor that their culture was so superior, but amalgamation with them produced a more versatile stock. The northern Chinese received just enough of the Andite strain to mildly stimulate their innately able minds but not enough to fire them with the restless, exploratory curiosity so characteristic of the northern white races. This more limited infusion of Andite inheritance was less disturbing to the innate stability of the Sangik type.
(886.5) 79:7.4 The later waves of Andites brought with them certain of the cultural advances of Mesopotamia; this is especially true of the last waves of migration from the west. They greatly improved the economic and educational practices of the northern Chinese; and while their influence upon the religious culture of the yellow race was short-lived, their later descendants contributed much to a subsequent spiritual awakening. But the Andite traditions of the beauty of Eden and Dalamatia did influence Chinese traditions; early Chinese legends place “the land of the gods” in the west.
(886.6) 79:7.5 The Chinese people did not begin to build cities and engage in manufacture until after 10,000 B.C., subsequent to the climatic changes in Turkestan and the arrival of the later Andite immigrants. The infusion of this new blood did not add so much to the civilization of the yellow man as it stimulated the further and rapid development of the latent tendencies of the superior Chinese stocks. From Honan to Shensi the potentials of an advanced civilization were coming to fruit. Metalworking and all the arts of manufacture date from these days.
(886.7) 79:7.6 The similarities between certain of the early Chinese and Mesopotamian methods of time reckoning, astronomy, and governmental administration were due to the commercial relationships between these two remotely situated centers. Chinese merchants traveled the overland routes through Turkestan to Mesopotamia even in the days of the Sumerians. Nor was this exchange one-sided — the valley of the Euphrates benefited considerably thereby, as did the peoples of the Gangetic plain. But the climatic changes and the nomadic invasions of the third millennium before Christ greatly reduced the volume of trade passing over the caravan trails of central Asia.
8. Later Chinese Civilization
(887.2) 79:8.2 With the completion of the conquest of eastern Asia the ancient military state gradually disintegrated — past wars were forgotten. Of the epic struggle with the red race there persisted only the hazy tradition of an ancient contest with the archer peoples. The Chinese early turned to agricultural pursuits, which contributed further to their pacific tendencies, while a population well below the land-man ratio for agriculture still further contributed to the growing peacefulness of the country.
(887.3) 79:8.3 Consciousness of past achievements (somewhat diminished in the present), the conservatism of an overwhelmingly agricultural people, and a well-developed family life equaled the birth of ancestor veneration, culminating in the custom of so honoring the men of the past as to border on worship. A very similar attitude prevailed among the white races in Europe for some five hundred years following the disruption of Greco-Roman civilization.*
(887.4) 79:8.4 The belief in, and worship of, the “One Truth” as taught by Singlangton never entirely died out; but as time passed, the search for new and higher truth became overshadowed by a growing tendency to venerate that which was already established. Slowly the genius of the yellow race became diverted from the pursuit of the unknown to the preservation of the known. And this is the reason for the stagnation of what had been the world’s most rapidly progressing civilization.
(887.5) 79:8.5 Between 4000 and 500 B.C. the political reunification of the yellow race was consummated, but the cultural union of the Yangtze and Yellow river centers had already been effected. This political reunification of the later tribal groups was not without conflict, but the societal opinion of war remained low; ancestor worship, increasing dialects, and no call for military action for thousands upon thousands of years had rendered this people ultrapeaceful.
(887.6) 79:8.6 Despite failure to fulfill the promise of an early development of advanced statehood, the yellow race did progressively move forward in the realization of the arts of civilization, especially in the realms of agriculture and horticulture. The hydraulic problems faced by the agriculturists in Shensi and Honan demanded group co-operation for solution. Such irrigation and soil-conservation difficulties contributed in no small measure to the development of interdependence with the consequent promotion of peace among farming groups.
(887.7) 79:8.7 Soon developments in writing, together with the establishment of schools, contributed to the dissemination of knowledge on a previously unequaled scale. But the cumbersome nature of the ideographic writing system placed a numerical limit upon the learned classes despite the early appearance of printing. And above all else, the process of social standardization and religio-philosophic dogmatization continued apace. The religious development of ancestor veneration became further complicated by a flood of superstitions involving nature worship, but lingering vestiges of a real concept of God remained preserved in the imperial worship of Shang-ti.
(888.1) 79:8.8 The great weakness of ancestor veneration is that it promotes a backward-looking philosophy. However wise it may be to glean wisdom from the past, it is folly to regard the past as the exclusive source of truth. Truth is relative and expanding; it lives always in the present, achieving new expression in each generation of men — even in each human life.
(888.2) 79:8.9 The great strength in a veneration of ancestry is the value that such an attitude places upon the family. The amazing stability and persistence of Chinese culture is a consequence of the paramount position accorded the family, for civilization is directly dependent on the effective functioning of the family; and in China the family attained a social importance, even a religious significance, approached by few other peoples.
(888.3) 79:8.10 The filial devotion and family loyalty exacted by the growing cult of ancestor worship insured the building up of superior family relationships and of enduring family groups, all of which facilitated the following factors in the preservation of civilization:
(888.4) 79:8.11 1. Conservation of property and wealth.(888.8) 79:8.15 The formative period of Chinese civilization, opening with the coming of the Andites, continues on down to the great ethical, moral, and semireligious awakening of the sixth century before Christ. And Chinese tradition preserves the hazy record of the evolutionary past; the transition from mother- to father-family, the establishment of agriculture, the development of architecture, the initiation of industry — all these are successively narrated. And this story presents, with greater accuracy than any other similar account, the picture of the magnificent ascent of a superior people from the levels of barbarism. During this time they passed from a primitive agricultural society to a higher social organization embracing cities, manufacture, metalworking, commercial exchange, government, writing, mathematics, art, science, and printing.
(888.5) 79:8.12 2. Pooling of the experience of more than one generation.
(888.6) 79:8.13 3. Efficient education of children in the arts and sciences of the past.
(888.7) 79:8.14 4. Development of a strong sense of duty, the enhancement of morality, and the augmentation of ethical sensitivity.
(888.9) 79:8.16 And so the ancient civilization of the yellow race has persisted down through the centuries. It is almost forty thousand years since the first important advances were made in Chinese culture, and though there have been many retrogressions, the civilization of the sons of Han comes the nearest of all to presenting an unbroken picture of continual progression right on down to the times of the twentieth century. The mechanical and religious developments of the white races have been of a high order, but they have never excelled the Chinese in family loyalty, group ethics, or personal morality.
(888.10) 79:8.17 This ancient culture has contributed much to human happiness; millions of human beings have lived and died, blessed by its achievements. For centuries this great civilization has rested upon the laurels of the past, but it is even now reawakening to envision anew the transcendent goals of mortal existence, once again to take up the unremitting struggle for never-ending progress.
(888.11) 79:8.18 [Presented by an Archangel of Nebadon.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 80
Andite Expansion in the Occident
(889.2) 80:0.2 The modern white peoples incorporate the surviving strains of the Adamic stock which became admixed with the Sangik races, some red and yellow but more especially the blue. There is a considerable percentage of the original Andonite stock in all the white races and still more of the early Nodite strains.
1. The Adamites Enter Europe
(889.4) 80:1.2 In the eastern trough of the Mediterranean the Nodites had established one of their most extensive cultures and from these centers had penetrated somewhat into southern Europe but more especially into northern Africa. The broad-headed Nodite-Andonite Syrians very early introduced pottery and agriculture in connection with their settlements on the slowly rising Nile delta. They also imported sheep, goats, cattle, and other domesticated animals and brought in greatly improved methods of metalworking, Syria then being the center of that industry.
(889.5) 80:1.3 For more than thirty thousand years Egypt received a steady stream of Mesopotamians, who brought along their art and culture to enrich that of the Nile valley. But the ingress of large numbers of the Sahara peoples greatly deteriorated the early civilization along the Nile so that Egypt reached its lowest cultural level some fifteen thousand years ago.
(889.6) 80:1.4 But during earlier times there was little to hinder the westward migration of the Adamites. The Sahara was an open grazing land overspread by herders and agriculturists. These Saharans never engaged in manufacture, nor were they city builders. They were an indigo-black group which carried extensive strains of the extinct green and orange races. But they received a very limited amount of the violet inheritance before the upthrust of land and the shifting water-laden winds dispersed the remnants of this prosperous and peaceful civilization.
(890.1) 80:1.5 Adam’s blood has been shared with most of the human races, but some secured more than others. The mixed races of India and the darker peoples of Africa were not attractive to the Adamites. They would have mixed freely with the red man had he not been far removed in the Americas, and they were kindly disposed toward the yellow man, but he was likewise difficult of access in faraway Asia. Therefore, when actuated by either adventure or altruism, or when driven out of the Euphrates valley, they very naturally chose union with the blue races of Europe.
(890.2) 80:1.6 The blue men, then dominant in Europe, had no religious practices which were repulsive to the earlier migrating Adamites, and there was great sex attraction between the violet and the blue races. The best of the blue men deemed it a high honor to be permitted to mate with the Adamites. Every blue man entertained the ambition of becoming so skillful and artistic as to win the affection of some Adamite woman, and it was the highest aspiration of a superior blue woman to receive the attentions of an Adamite.
(890.3) 80:1.7 Slowly these migrating sons of Eden united with the higher types of the blue race, invigorating their cultural practices while ruthlessly exterminating the lingering strains of Neanderthal stock. This technique of race blending, combined with the elimination of inferior strains, produced a dozen or more virile and progressive groups of superior blue men, one of which you have denominated the Cro-Magnons.
(890.4) 80:1.8 For these and other reasons, not the least of which was more favorable paths of migration, the early waves of Mesopotamian culture made their way almost exclusively to Europe. And it was these circumstances that determined the antecedents of modern European civilization.
2. Climatic and Geologic Changes
(890.6) 80:2.2 The purer indigo elements moved southward to the forests of central Africa, where they have ever since remained. The more mixed groups spread out in three directions: The superior tribes to the west migrated to Spain and thence to adjacent parts of Europe, forming the nucleus of the later Mediterranean long-headed brunet races. The least progressive division to the east of the Sahara plateau migrated to Arabia and thence through northern Mesopotamia and India to faraway Ceylon. The central group moved north and east to the Nile valley and into Palestine.
(890.7) 80:2.3 It is this secondary Sangik substratum that suggests a certain degree of kinship among the modern peoples scattered from the Deccan through Iran, Mesopotamia, and along both shores of the Mediterranean Sea.
(890.8) 80:2.4 About the time of these climatic changes in Africa, England separated from the continent, and Denmark arose from the sea, while the isthmus of Gibraltar, protecting the western basin of the Mediterranean, gave way as the result of an earthquake, quickly raising this inland lake to the level of the Atlantic Ocean. Presently the Sicilian land bridge submerged, creating one sea of the Mediterranean and connecting it with the Atlantic Ocean. This cataclysm of nature flooded scores of human settlements and occasioned the greatest loss of life by flood in all the world’s history.*
(891.1) 80:2.5 This engulfment of the Mediterranean basin immediately curtailed the westward movements of the Adamites, while the great influx of Saharans led them to seek outlets for their increasing numbers to the north and east of Eden. As the descendants of Adam journeyed northward from the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, they encountered mountainous barriers and the then expanded Caspian Sea. And for many generations the Adamites hunted, herded, and tilled the soil around their settlements scattered throughout Turkestan. Slowly this magnificent people extended their territory into Europe. But now the Adamites enter Europe from the east and find the culture of the blue man thousands of years behind that of Asia since this region has been almost entirely out of touch with Mesopotamia.
3. The Cro-Magnoid Blue Man
(891.3) 80:3.2 While we speak of the blue man as pervading the European continent, there were scores of racial types. Even thirty-five thousand years ago the European blue races were already a highly blended people carrying strains of both red and yellow, while on the Atlantic coastlands and in the regions of present-day Russia they had absorbed a considerable amount of Andonite blood and to the south were in contact with the Saharan peoples. But it would be fruitless to attempt to enumerate the many racial groups.
(891.4) 80:3.3 The European civilization of this early post-Adamic period was a unique blend of the vigor and art of the blue men with the creative imagination of the Adamites. The blue men were a race of great vigor, but they greatly deteriorated the cultural and spiritual status of the Adamites. It was very difficult for the latter to impress their religion upon the Cro-Magnoids because of the tendency of so many to cheat and to debauch the maidens. For ten thousand years religion in Europe was at a low ebb as compared with the developments in India and Egypt.
(891.5) 80:3.4 The blue men were perfectly honest in all their dealings and were wholly free from the sexual vices of the mixed Adamites. They respected maidenhood, only practicing polygamy when war produced a shortage of males.
(891.6) 80:3.5 These Cro-Magnon peoples were a brave and farseeing race. They maintained an efficient system of child culture. Both parents participated in these labors, and the services of the older children were fully utilized. Each child was carefully trained in the care of the caves, in art, and in flint making. At an early age the women were well versed in the domestic arts and in crude agriculture, while the men were skilled hunters and courageous warriors.
(891.7) 80:3.6 The blue men were hunters, fishers, and food gatherers; they were expert boatbuilders. They made stone axes, cut down trees, erected log huts, partly below ground and roofed with hides. And there are peoples who still build similar huts in Siberia. The southern Cro-Magnons generally lived in caves and grottoes.
(892.1) 80:3.7 It was not uncommon during the rigors of winter for their sentinels standing on night guard at cave entrances to freeze to death. They had courage, but above all they were artists; the Adamic mixture suddenly accelerated creative imagination. The height of the blue man’s art was about fifteen thousand years ago, before the days when the darker-skinned races came north from Africa through Spain.
(892.2) 80:3.8 About fifteen thousand years ago the Alpine forests were spreading extensively. The European hunters were being driven to the river valleys and to the seashores by the same climatic coercion that had turned the world’s happy hunting grounds into dry and barren deserts. As the rain winds shifted to the north, the great open grazing lands of Europe became covered by forests. These great and relatively sudden climatic modifications drove the races of Europe to change from open-space hunters to herders, and in some measure to fishers and tillers of the soil.
(892.3) 80:3.9 These changes, while resulting in cultural advances, produced certain biologic retrogressions. During the previous hunting era the superior tribes had intermarried with the higher types of war captives and had unvaryingly destroyed those whom they deemed inferior. But as they commenced to establish settlements and engage in agriculture and commerce, they began to save many of the mediocre captives as slaves. And it was the progeny of these slaves that subsequently so greatly deteriorated the whole Cro-Magnon type. This retrogression of culture continued until it received a fresh impetus from the east when the final and en masse invasion of the Mesopotamians swept over Europe, quickly absorbing the Cro-Magnon type and culture and initiating the civilization of the white races.
4. The Andite Invasions of Europe
(892.5) 80:4.2 Between the third and fourth invasions a horde of Andonites entered Europe from the north, having come from Siberia by way of the Russian rivers and the Baltic. They were immediately assimilated by the northern Andite tribes.
(892.6) 80:4.3 The earlier expansions of the purer violet race were far more pacific than were those of their later semimilitary and conquest-loving Andite descendants. The Adamites were pacific; the Nodites were belligerent. The union of these stocks, as later mingled with the Sangik races, produced the able, aggressive Andites who made actual military conquests.
(892.7) 80:4.4 But the horse was the evolutionary factor which determined the dominance of the Andites in the Occident. The horse gave the dispersing Andites the hitherto nonexistent advantage of mobility, enabling the last groups of Andite cavalrymen to progress quickly around the Caspian Sea to overrun all of Europe. All previous waves of Andites had moved so slowly that they tended to disintegrate at any great distance from Mesopotamia. But these later waves moved so rapidly that they reached Europe as coherent groups, still retaining some measure of higher culture.
(893.1) 80:4.5 The whole inhabited world, outside of China and the Euphrates region, had made very limited cultural progress for ten thousand years when the hard-riding Andite horsemen made their appearance in the sixth and seventh millenniums before Christ. As they moved westward across the Russian plains, absorbing the best of the blue man and exterminating the worst, they became blended into one people. These were the ancestors of the so-called Nordic races, the forefathers of the Scandinavian, German, and Anglo-Saxon peoples.
(893.2) 80:4.6 It was not long before the superior blue strains had been fully absorbed by the Andites throughout all northern Europe. Only in Lapland (and to a certain extent in Brittany) did the older Andonites retain even a semblance of identity.
5. The Andite Conquest of Northern Europe
(893.4) 80:5.2 For three thousand years the military headquarters of the northern Andites was in Denmark. From this central point there went forth the successive waves of conquest, which grew decreasingly Andite and increasingly white as the passing centuries witnessed the final blending of the Mesopotamian conquerors with the conquered peoples.
(893.5) 80:5.3 While the blue man had been absorbed in the north and eventually succumbed to the white cavalry raiders who penetrated the south, the advancing tribes of the mixed white race met with stubborn and protracted resistance from the Cro-Magnons, but superior intelligence and ever-augmenting biologic reserves enabled them to wipe the older race out of existence.
(893.6) 80:5.4 The decisive struggles between the white man and the blue man were fought out in the valley of the Somme. Here, the flower of the blue race bitterly contested the southward-moving Andites, and for over five hundred years these Cro-Magnoids successfully defended their territories before succumbing to the superior military strategy of the white invaders. Thor, the victorious commander of the armies of the north in the final battle of the Somme, became the hero of the northern white tribes and later on was revered as a god by some of them.
(893.7) 80:5.5 The strongholds of the blue man which persisted longest were in southern France, but the last great military resistance was overcome along the Somme. The later conquest progressed by commercial penetration, population pressure along the rivers, and by continued intermarriage with the superiors, coupled with the ruthless extermination of the inferiors.
(893.8) 80:5.6 When the tribal council of the Andite elders had adjudged an inferior captive to be unfit, he was, by elaborate ceremony, committed to the shaman priests, who escorted him to the river and administered the rites of initiation to the “happy hunting grounds” — lethal submergence. In this way the white invaders of Europe exterminated all peoples encountered who were not quickly absorbed into their own ranks, and thus did the blue man come to an end — and quickly.
(893.9) 80:5.7 The Cro-Magnoid blue man constituted the biologic foundation for the modern European races, but they have survived only as absorbed by the later and virile conquerors of their homelands. The blue strain contributed many sturdy traits and much physical vigor to the white races of Europe, but the humor and imagination of the blended European peoples were derived from the Andites. This Andite-blue union, resulting in the northern white races, produced an immediate lapse of Andite civilization, a retardation of a transient nature. Eventually, the latent superiority of these northern barbarians manifested itself and culminated in present-day European civilization.
(894.1) 80:5.8 By 5000 B.C. the evolving white races were dominant throughout all of northern Europe, including northern Germany, northern France, and the British Isles. Central Europe was for some time controlled by the blue man and the round-headed Andonites. The latter were mainly situated in the Danube valley and were never entirely displaced by the Andites.*
6. The Andites Along the Nile
(894.3) 80:6.2 The Nile valley began to suffer from floods shortly before the Mesopotamian valleys but fared much better. This early setback was more than compensated by the continuing stream of Andite immigrants, so that the culture of Egypt, though really derived from the Euphrates region, seemed to forge ahead. But in 5000 B.C., during the flood period in Mesopotamia, there were seven distinct groups of human beings in Egypt; all of them, save one, came from Mesopotamia.
(894.4) 80:6.3 When the last exodus from the Euphrates valley occurred, Egypt was fortunate in gaining so many of the most skillful artists and artisans. These Andite artisans found themselves quite at home in that they were thoroughly familiar with river life, its floods, irrigations, and dry seasons. They enjoyed the sheltered position of the Nile valley; they were there much less subject to hostile raids and attacks than along the Euphrates. And they added greatly to the metalworking skill of the Egyptians. Here they worked iron ores coming from Mount Sinai instead of from the Black Sea regions.
(894.5) 80:6.4 The Egyptians very early assembled their municipal deities into an elaborate national system of gods. They developed an extensive theology and had an equally extensive but burdensome priesthood. Several different leaders sought to revive the remnants of the early religious teachings of the Sethites, but these endeavors were short-lived. The Andites built the first stone structures in Egypt. The first and most exquisite of the stone pyramids was erected by Imhotep, an Andite architectural genius, while serving as prime minister. Previous buildings had been constructed of brick, and while many stone structures had been erected in different parts of the world, this was the first in Egypt. But the art of building steadily declined from the days of this great architect.
(894.6) 80:6.5 This brilliant epoch of culture was cut short by internal warfare along the Nile, and the country was soon overrun, as Mesopotamia had been, by the inferior tribes from inhospitable Arabia and by the blacks from the south. As a result, social progress steadily declined for more than five hundred years.
7. Andites of the Mediterranean Isles
(895.2) 80:7.2 About 12,000 B.C. a brilliant tribe of Andites migrated to Crete. This was the only island settled so early by such a superior group, and it was almost two thousand years before the descendants of these mariners spread to the neighboring isles. This group were the narrow-headed, smaller-statured Andites who had intermarried with the Vanite division of the northern Nodites. They were all under six feet in height and had been literally driven off the mainland by their larger and inferior fellows. These emigrants to Crete were highly skilled in textiles, metals, pottery, plumbing, and the use of stone for building material. They engaged in writing and carried on as herders and agriculturists.
(895.3) 80:7.3 Almost two thousand years after the settlement of Crete a group of the tall descendants of Adamson made their way over the northern islands to Greece, coming almost directly from their highland home north of Mesopotamia. These progenitors of the Greeks were led westward by Sato, a direct descendant of Adamson and Ratta.
(895.4) 80:7.4 The group which finally settled in Greece consisted of three hundred and seventy-five of the selected and superior people comprising the end of the second civilization of the Adamsonites. These later sons of Adamson carried the then most valuable strains of the emerging white races. They were of a high intellectual order and, physically regarded, the most beautiful of men since the days of the first Eden.
(895.5) 80:7.5 Presently Greece and the Aegean Islands region succeeded Mesopotamia and Egypt as the Occidental center of trade, art, and culture. But as it was in Egypt, so again practically all of the art and science of the Aegean world was derived from Mesopotamia except for the culture of the Adamsonite forerunners of the Greeks. All the art and genius of these latter people is a direct legacy of the posterity of Adamson, the first son of Adam and Eve, and his extraordinary second wife, a daughter descended in an unbroken line from the pure Nodite staff of Prince Caligastia. No wonder the Greeks had mythological traditions that they were directly descended from gods and superhuman beings.
(895.6) 80:7.6 The Aegean region passed through five distinct cultural stages, each less spiritual than the preceding, and erelong the last glorious era of art perished beneath the weight of the rapidly multiplying mediocre descendants of the Danubian slaves who had been imported by the later generations of Greeks.
(895.7) 80:7.7 It was during this age in Crete that the mother cult of the descendants of Cain attained its greatest vogue. This cult glorified Eve in the worship of the “great mother.” Images of Eve were everywhere. Thousands of public shrines were erected throughout Crete and Asia Minor. And this mother cult persisted on down to the times of Christ, becoming later incorporated in the early Christian religion under the guise of the glorification and worship of Mary the earth mother of Jesus.
(895.8) 80:7.8 By about 6500 B.C. there had occurred a great decline in the spiritual heritage of the Andites. The descendants of Adam were widespreadly dispersed and had been virtually swallowed up in the older and more numerous human races. And this decadence of Andite civilization, together with the disappearance of their religious standards, left the spiritually impoverished races of the world in a deplorable condition.
(896.1) 80:7.9 By 5000 B.C. the three purest strains of Adam’s descendants were in Sumeria, northern Europe, and Greece. The whole of Mesopotamia was being slowly deteriorated by the stream of mixed and darker races which filtered in from Arabia. And the coming of these inferior peoples contributed further to the scattering abroad of the biologic and cultural residue of the Andites. From all over the fertile crescent the more adventurous peoples poured westward to the islands. These migrants cultivated both grain and vegetables, and they brought domesticated animals with them.
(896.2) 80:7.10 About 5000 B.C. a mighty host of progressive Mesopotamians moved out of the Euphrates valley and settled upon the island of Cyprus; this civilization was wiped out about two thousand years subsequently by the barbarian hordes from the north.
(896.3) 80:7.11 Another great colony settled on the Mediterranean near the later site of Carthage. And from north Africa large numbers of Andites entered Spain and later mingled in Switzerland with their brethren who had earlier come to Italy from the Aegean Islands.
(896.4) 80:7.12 When Egypt followed Mesopotamia in cultural decline, many of the more able and advanced families fled to Crete, thus greatly augmenting this already advanced civilization. And when the arrival of inferior groups from Egypt later threatened the civilization of Crete, the more cultured families moved on west to Greece.
(896.5) 80:7.13 The Greeks were not only great teachers and artists, they were also the world’s greatest traders and colonizers. Before succumbing to the flood of inferiority which eventually engulfed their art and commerce, they succeeded in planting so many outposts of culture to the west that a great many of the advances in early Greek civilization persisted in the later peoples of southern Europe, and many of the mixed descendants of these Adamsonites became incorporated in the tribes of the adjacent mainlands.
8. The Danubian Andonites
(896.7) 80:8.2 These descendants of Andon were dispersed through most of the mountainous regions of central and southeastern Europe. They were often reinforced by arrivals from Asia Minor, which region they occupied in considerable strength. The ancient Hittites stemmed directly from the Andonite stock; their pale skins and broad heads were typical of that race. This strain was carried in Abraham’s ancestry and contributed much to the characteristic facial appearance of his later Jewish descendants who, while having a culture and religion derived from the Andites, spoke a very different language. Their tongue was distinctly Andonite.
(897.1) 80:8.3 The tribes that dwelt in houses erected on piles or log piers over the lakes of Italy, Switzerland, and southern Europe were the expanding fringes of the African, Aegean, and, more especially, the Danubian migrations.
(897.2) 80:8.4 The Danubians were Andonites, farmers and herders who had entered Europe through the Balkan peninsula and were moving slowly northward by way of the Danube valley. They made pottery and tilled the land, preferring to live in the valleys. The most northerly settlement of the Danubians was at Liege in Belgium. These tribes deteriorated rapidly as they moved away from the center and source of their culture. The best pottery is the product of the earlier settlements.
(897.3) 80:8.5 The Danubians became mother worshipers as the result of the work of the missionaries from Crete. These tribes later amalgamated with groups of Andonite sailors who came by boats from the coast of Asia Minor, and who were also mother worshipers. Much of central Europe was thus early settled by these mixed types of the broad-headed white races which practiced mother worship and the religious rite of cremating the dead, for it was the custom of the mother cultists to burn their dead in stone huts.
9. The Three White Races
(897.5) 80:9.2 1. The northern white race. This so-called Nordic race consisted primarily of the blue man plus the Andite but also contained a considerable amount of Andonite blood, together with smaller amounts of the red and yellow Sangik. The northern white race thus encompassed these four most desirable human stocks. But the largest inheritance was from the blue man. The typical early Nordic was long-headed, tall, and blond. But long ago this race became thoroughly mixed with all of the branches of the white peoples.(898.7) 80:9.12 This was the picture of race mixture presented in central Europe about 3000 B.C. In spite of the partial Adamic default, the higher types did blend.
(897.6) 80:9.3 The primitive culture of Europe, which was encountered by the invading Nordics, was that of the retrograding Danubians blended with the blue man. The Nordic-Danish and the Danubian-Andonite cultures met and mingled on the Rhine as is witnessed by the existence of two racial groups in Germany today.
(897.7) 80:9.4 The Nordics continued the trade in amber from the Baltic coast, building up a great commerce with the broadheads of the Danube valley via the Brenner Pass. This extended contact with the Danubians led these northerners into mother worship, and for several thousands of years cremation of the dead was almost universal throughout Scandinavia. This explains why remains of the earlier white races, although buried all over Europe, are not to be found — only their ashes in stone and clay urns. These white men also built dwellings; they never lived in caves. And again this explains why there are so few evidences of the white man’s early culture, although the preceding Cro-Magnon type is well preserved where it has been securely sealed up in caves and grottoes. As it were, one day in northern Europe there is a primitive culture of the retrogressing Danubians and the blue man and the next that of a suddenly appearing and vastly superior white man.
(897.8) 80:9.5 2. The central white race. While this group includes strains of blue, yellow, and Andite, it is predominantly Andonite. These people are broad-headed, swarthy, and stocky. They are driven like a wedge between the Nordic and Mediterranean races, with the broad base resting in Asia and the apex penetrating eastern France.
(898.1) 80:9.6 For almost twenty thousand years the Andonites had been pushed farther and farther to the north of central Asia by the Andites. By 3000 B.C. increasing aridity was driving these Andonites back into Turkestan. This Andonite push southward continued for over a thousand years and, splitting around the Caspian and Black seas, penetrated Europe by way of both the Balkans and the Ukraine. This invasion included the remaining groups of Adamson’s descendants and, during the latter half of the invasion period, carried with it considerable numbers of the Iranian Andites as well as many of the descendants of the Sethite priests.
(898.2) 80:9.7 By 2500 B.C. the westward thrust of the Andonites reached Europe. And this overrunning of all Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and the Danube basin by the barbarians of the hills of Turkestan constituted the most serious and lasting of all cultural setbacks up to that time. These invaders definitely Andonized the character of the central European races, which have ever since remained characteristically Alpine.
(898.3) 80:9.8 3. The southern white race. This brunet Mediterranean race consisted of a blend of the Andite and the blue man, with a smaller Andonite strain than in the north. This group also absorbed a considerable amount of secondary Sangik blood through the Saharans. In later times this southern division of the white race was infused by strong Andite elements from the eastern Mediterranean.
(898.4) 80:9.9 The Mediterranean coastlands did not, however, become permeated by the Andites until the times of the great nomadic invasions of 2500 B.C. Land traffic and trade were nearly suspended during these centuries when the nomads invaded the eastern Mediterranean districts. This interference with land travel brought about the great expansion of sea traffic and trade; Mediterranean sea-borne commerce was in full swing about forty-five hundred years ago. And this development of marine traffic resulted in the sudden expansion of the descendants of the Andites throughout the entire coastal territory of the Mediterranean basin.
(898.5) 80:9.10 These racial mixtures laid the foundations for the southern European race, the most highly mixed of all. And since these days this race has undergone still further admixture, notably with the blue-yellow-Andite peoples of Arabia. This Mediterranean race is, in fact, so freely admixed with the surrounding peoples as to be virtually indiscernible as a separate type, but in general its members are short, long-headed, and brunet.
(898.6) 80:9.11 In the north the Andites, through warfare and marriage, obliterated the blue men, but in the south they survived in greater numbers. The Basques and the Berbers represent the survival of two branches of this race, but even these peoples have been thoroughly admixed with the Saharans.
(898.8) 80:9.13 These were the times of the New Stone Age overlapping the oncoming Bronze Age. In Scandinavia it was the Bronze Age associated with mother worship. In southern France and Spain it was the New Stone Age associated with sun worship. This was the time of the building of the circular and roofless sun temples. The European white races were energetic builders, delighting to set up great stones as tokens to the sun, much as did their later-day descendants at Stonehenge. The vogue of sun worship indicates that this was a great period of agriculture in southern Europe.
(899.1) 80:9.14 The superstitions of this comparatively recent sun-worshiping era even now persist in the folkways of Brittany. Although Christianized for over fifteen hundred years, these Bretons still retain charms of the New Stone Age for warding off the evil eye. They still keep thunderstones in the chimney as protection against lightning. The Bretons never mingled with the Scandinavian Nordics. They are survivors of the original Andonite inhabitants of western Europe, mixed with the Mediterranean stock.
(899.2) 80:9.15 But it is a fallacy to presume to classify the white peoples as Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean. There has been altogether too much blending to permit such a grouping. At one time there was a fairly well-defined division of the white race into such classes, but widespread intermingling has since occurred, and it is no longer possible to identify these distinctions with any clarity. Even in 3000 B.C. the ancient social groups were no more of one race than are the present inhabitants of North America.
(899.3) 80:9.16 This European culture for five thousand years continued to grow and to some extent intermingle. But the barrier of language prevented the full reciprocation of the various Occidental nations. During the past century this culture has been experiencing its best opportunity for blending in the cosmopolitan population of North America; and the future of that continent will be determined by the quality of the racial factors which are permitted to enter into its present and future populations, as well as by the level of the social culture which is maintained.
(899.4) 80:9.17 [Presented by an Archangel of Nebadon.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 81
Development of Modern Civilization
(900.2) 81:0.2 The influence of the violet race, though in numbers smaller than had been planned, produced an advance in civilization which, since the days of Adam, has far exceeded the progress of mankind throughout its entire previous existence of almost a million years.
1. The Cradle of Civilization
(900.4) 81:1.2 It was the great climatic and geologic changes in northern Africa and western Asia that terminated the early migrations of the Adamites, barring them from Europe by the expanded Mediterranean and diverting the stream of migration north and east into Turkestan. By the time of the completion of these land elevations and associated climatic changes, about 15,000 B.C., civilization had settled down to a world-wide stalemate except for the cultural ferments and biologic reserves of the Andites still confined by mountains to the east in Asia and by the expanding forests in Europe to the west.
(900.5) 81:1.3 Climatic evolution is now about to accomplish what all other efforts had failed to do, that is, to compel Eurasian man to abandon hunting for the more advanced callings of herding and farming. Evolution may be slow, but it is terribly effective.
(900.6) 81:1.4 Since slaves were so generally employed by the earlier agriculturists, the farmer was formerly looked down on by both the hunter and the herder. For ages it was considered menial to till the soil; wherefore the idea that soil toil is a curse, whereas it is the greatest of all blessings. Even in the days of Cain and Abel the sacrifices of the pastoral life were held in greater esteem than the offerings of agriculture.
(900.7) 81:1.5 Man ordinarily evolved into a farmer from a hunter by transition through the era of the herder, and this was also true among the Andites, but more often the evolutionary coercion of climatic necessity would cause whole tribes to pass directly from hunters to successful farmers. But this phenomenon of passing immediately from hunting to agriculture only occurred in those regions where there was a high degree of race mixture with the violet stock.
(901.1) 81:1.6 The evolutionary peoples (notably the Chinese) early learned to plant seeds and to cultivate crops through observation of the sprouting of seeds accidentally moistened or which had been put in graves as food for the departed. But throughout southwest Asia, along the fertile river bottoms and adjacent plains, the Andites were carrying out the improved agricultural techniques inherited from their ancestors, who had made farming and gardening the chief pursuits within the boundaries of the second garden.
(901.2) 81:1.7 For thousands of years the descendants of Adam had grown wheat and barley, as improved in the Garden, throughout the highlands of the upper border of Mesopotamia. The descendants of Adam and Adamson here met, traded, and socially mingled.
(901.3) 81:1.8 It was these enforced changes in living conditions which caused such a large proportion of the human race to become omnivorous in dietetic practice. And the combination of the wheat, rice, and vegetable diet with the flesh of the herds marked a great forward step in the health and vigor of these ancient peoples.
2. The Tools of Civilization
(901.5) 81:2.2 You who now live amid latter-day scenes of budding culture and beginning progress in social affairs, who actually have some little spare time in which to think about society and civilization, must not overlook the fact that your early ancestors had little or no leisure which could be devoted to thoughtful reflection and social thinking.
(901.6) 81:2.3 The first four great advances in human civilization were:
(901.7) 81:2.4 1. The taming of fire.(901.11) 81:2.8 While fire, the first great discovery, eventually unlocked the doors of the scientific world, it was of little value in this regard to primitive man. He refused to recognize natural causes as explanations for commonplace phenomena.
(901.8) 81:2.5 2. The domestication of animals.
(901.9) 81:2.6 3. The enslavement of captives.
(901.10) 81:2.7 4. Private property.
(901.12) 81:2.9 When asked where fire came from, the simple story of Andon and the flint was soon replaced by the legend of how some Prometheus stole it from heaven. The ancients sought a supernatural explanation for all natural phenomena not within the range of their personal comprehension; and many moderns continue to do this. The depersonalization of so-called natural phenomena has required ages, and it is not yet completed. But the frank, honest, and fearless search for true causes gave birth to modern science: It turned astrology into astronomy, alchemy into chemistry, and magic into medicine.
(901.13) 81:2.10 In the premachine age the only way in which man could accomplish work without doing it himself was to use an animal. Domestication of animals placed in his hands living tools, the intelligent use of which prepared the way for both agriculture and transportation. And without these animals man could not have risen from his primitive estate to the levels of subsequent civilization.
(902.1) 81:2.11 Most of the animals best suited to domestication were found in Asia, especially in the central to southwest regions. This was one reason why civilization progressed faster in that locality than in other parts of the world. Many of these animals had been twice before domesticated, and in the Andite age they were retamed once again. But the dog had remained with the hunters ever since being adopted by the blue man long, long before.
(902.2) 81:2.12 The Andites of Turkestan were the first peoples to extensively domesticate the horse, and this is another reason why their culture was for so long predominant. By 5000 B.C. the Mesopotamian, Turkestan, and Chinese farmers had begun the raising of sheep, goats, cows, camels, horses, fowls, and elephants. They employed as beasts of burden the ox, camel, horse, and yak. Man was himself at one time the beast of burden. One ruler of the blue race once had one hundred thousand men in his colony of burden bearers.
(902.3) 81:2.13 The institutions of slavery and private ownership of land came with agriculture. Slavery raised the master’s standard of living and provided more leisure for social culture.
(902.4) 81:2.14 The savage is a slave to nature, but scientific civilization is slowly conferring increasing liberty on mankind. Through animals, fire, wind, water, electricity, and other undiscovered sources of energy, man has liberated, and will continue to liberate, himself from the necessity for unremitting toil. Regardless of the transient trouble produced by the prolific invention of machinery, the ultimate benefits to be derived from such mechanical inventions are inestimable. Civilization can never flourish, much less be established, until man has leisure to think, to plan, to imagine new and better ways of doing things.
(902.5) 81:2.15 Man first simply appropriated his shelter, lived under ledges or dwelt in caves. Next he adapted such natural materials as wood and stone to the creation of family huts. Lastly he entered the creative stage of home building, learned to manufacture brick and other building materials.
(902.6) 81:2.16 The peoples of the Turkestan highlands were the first of the more modern races to build their homes of wood, houses not at all unlike the early log cabins of the American pioneer settlers. Throughout the plains human dwellings were made of brick; later on, of burned bricks.
(902.7) 81:2.17 The older river races made their huts by setting tall poles in the ground in a circle; the tops were then brought together, making the skeleton frame for the hut, which was interlaced with transverse reeds, the whole creation resembling a huge inverted basket. This structure could then be daubed over with clay and, after drying in the sun, would make a very serviceable weatherproof habitation.
(902.8) 81:2.18 It was from these early huts that the subsequent idea of all sorts of basket weaving independently originated. Among one group the idea of making pottery arose from observing the effects of smearing these pole frameworks with moist clay. The practice of hardening pottery by baking was discovered when one of these clay-covered primitive huts accidentally burned. The arts of olden days were many times derived from the accidental occurrences attendant upon the daily life of early peoples. At least, this was almost wholly true of the evolutionary progress of mankind up to the coming of Adam.
(903.1) 81:2.19 While pottery had been first introduced by the staff of the Prince about one-half million years ago, the making of clay vessels had practically ceased for over one hundred and fifty thousand years. Only the gulf coast pre-Sumerian Nodites continued to make clay vessels. The art of pottery making was revived during Adam’s time. The dissemination of this art was simultaneous with the extension of the desert areas of Africa, Arabia, and central Asia, and it spread in successive waves of improving technique from Mesopotamia out over the Eastern Hemisphere.
(903.2) 81:2.20 These civilizations of the Andite age cannot always be traced by the stages of their pottery or other arts. The smooth course of human evolution was tremendously complicated by the regimes of both Dalamatia and Eden. It often occurs that the later vases and implements are inferior to the earlier products of the purer Andite peoples.
3. Cities, Manufacture, and Commerce
(903.4) 81:3.2 The increase in trade and in the manufacture of raw materials into various articles of commerce was directly instrumental in producing those early and semipeaceful communities which were so influential in spreading the culture and the arts of civilization. Before the era of extensive world trade, social communities were tribal — expanded family groups. Trade brought into fellowship different sorts of human beings, thus contributing to a more speedy cross-fertilization of culture.
(903.5) 81:3.3 About twelve thousand years ago the era of the independent cities was dawning. And these primitive trading and manufacturing cities were always surrounded by zones of agriculture and cattle raising. While it is true that industry was promoted by the elevation of the standards of living, you should have no misconception regarding the refinements of early urban life. The early races were not overly neat and clean, and the average primitive community rose from one to two feet every twenty-five years as the result of the mere accumulation of dirt and trash. Certain of these olden cities also rose above the surrounding ground very quickly because their unbaked mud huts were short-lived, and it was the custom to build new dwellings directly on top of the ruins of the old.
(903.6) 81:3.4 The widespread use of metals was a feature of this era of the early industrial and trading cities. You have already found a bronze culture in Turkestan dating before 9000 B.C., and the Andites early learned to work in iron, gold, and copper, as well. But conditions were very different away from the more advanced centers of civilization. There were no distinct periods, such as the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages; all three existed at the same time in different localities.
(904.1) 81:3.5 Gold was the first metal to be sought by man; it was easy to work and, at first, was used only as an ornament. Copper was next employed but not extensively until it was admixed with tin to make the harder bronze. The discovery of mixing copper and tin to make bronze was made by one of the Adamsonites of Turkestan whose highland copper mine happened to be located alongside a tin deposit.
(904.2) 81:3.6 With the appearance of crude manufacture and beginning industry, commerce quickly became the most potent influence in the spread of cultural civilization. The opening up of the trade channels by land and by sea greatly facilitated travel and the mixing of cultures as well as the blending of civilizations. By 5000 B.C. the horse was in general use throughout civilized and semicivilized lands. These later races not only had the domesticated horse but also various sorts of wagons and chariots. Ages before, the wheel had been used, but now vehicles so equipped became universally employed both in commerce and war.
(904.3) 81:3.7 The traveling trader and the roving explorer did more to advance historic civilization than all other influences combined. Military conquests, colonization, and missionary enterprises fostered by the later religions were also factors in the spread of culture; but these were all secondary to the trading relations, which were ever accelerated by the rapidly developing arts and sciences of industry.
(904.4) 81:3.8 Infusion of the Adamic stock into the human races not only quickened the pace of civilization, but it also greatly stimulated their proclivities toward adventure and exploration to the end that most of Eurasia and northern Africa was presently occupied by the rapidly multiplying mixed descendants of the Andites.
4. The Mixed Races
(904.6) 81:4.2 Each of the Urantia races was identified by certain distinguishing physical characteristics. The Adamites and Nodites were long-headed; the Andonites were broad-headed. The Sangik races were medium-headed, with the yellow and blue men tending to broad-headedness. The blue races, when mixed with the Andonite stock, were decidedly broad-headed. The secondary Sangiks were medium- to long-headed.
(904.7) 81:4.3 Although these skull dimensions are serviceable in deciphering racial origins, the skeleton as a whole is far more dependable. In the early development of the Urantia races there were originally five distinct types of skeletal structure:
(904.8) 81:4.4 1. Andonic, Urantia aborigines.(904.13) 81:4.9 As these five great racial groups extensively intermingled, continual mixture tended to obscure the Andonite type by Sangik hereditary dominance. The Lapps and the Eskimos are blends of Andonite and Sangik-blue races. Their skeletal structures come the nearest to preserving the aboriginal Andonic type. But the Adamites and the Nodites have become so admixed with the other races that they can be detected only as a generalized Caucasoid order.
(904.9) 81:4.5 2. Primary Sangik, red, yellow, and blue.
(904.10) 81:4.6 3. Secondary Sangik, orange, green, and indigo.
(904.11) 81:4.7 4. Nodites, descendants of the Dalamatians.
(904.12) 81:4.8 5. Adamites, the violet race.
(905.1) 81:4.10 In general, therefore, as the human remains of the last twenty thousand years are unearthed, it will be impossible clearly to distinguish the five original types. Study of such skeletal structures will disclose that mankind is now divided into approximately three classes:
(905.2) 81:4.11 1. The Caucasoid — the Andite blend of the Nodite and Adamic stocks, further modified by primary and (some) secondary Sangik admixture and by considerable Andonic crossing. The Occidental white races, together with some Indian and Turanian peoples, are included in this group. The unifying factor in this division is the greater or lesser proportion of Andite inheritance.(905.5) 81:4.14 In North China there is a certain blending of Caucasoid and Mongoloid types; in the Levant the Caucasoid and Negroid have intermingled; in India, as in South America, all three types are represented. And the skeletal characteristics of the three surviving types still persist and help to identify the later ancestry of present-day human races.
(905.3) 81:4.12 2. The Mongoloid — the primary Sangik type, including the original red, yellow, and blue races. The Chinese and Amerinds belong to this group. In Europe the Mongoloid type has been modified by secondary Sangik and Andonic mixture; still more by Andite infusion. The Malayan and other Indonesian peoples are included in this classification, though they contain a high percentage of secondary Sangik blood.
(905.4) 81:4.13 3. The Negroid — the secondary Sangik type, which originally included the orange, green, and indigo races. This is the type best illustrated by the Negro, and it will be found through Africa, India, and Indonesia wherever the secondary Sangik races located.
5. Cultural Society
(905.7) 81:5.2 Through agriculture, animal domestication, and improved architecture, mankind gradually escaped the worst of the incessant struggle to live and began to cast about to find wherewith to sweeten the process of living; and this was the beginning of the striving for higher and ever higher standards of material comfort. Through manufacture and industry man is gradually augmenting the pleasure content of mortal life.
(906.1) 81:5.3 But cultural society is no great and beneficent club of inherited privilege into which all men are born with free membership and entire equality. Rather is it an exalted and ever-advancing guild of earth workers, admitting to its ranks only the nobility of those toilers who strive to make the world a better place in which their children and their children’s children may live and advance in subsequent ages. And this guild of civilization exacts costly admission fees, imposes strict and rigorous disciplines, visits heavy penalties on all dissenters and nonconformists, while it confers few personal licenses or privileges except those of enhanced security against common dangers and racial perils.
(906.2) 81:5.4 Social association is a form of survival insurance which human beings have learned is profitable; therefore are most individuals willing to pay those premiums of self-sacrifice and personal-liberty curtailment which society exacts from its members in return for this enhanced group protection. In short, the present-day social mechanism is a trial-and-error insurance plan designed to afford some degree of assurance and protection against a return to the terrible and antisocial conditions which characterized the early experiences of the human race.
(906.3) 81:5.5 Society thus becomes a co-operative scheme for securing civil freedom through institutions, economic freedom through capital and invention, social liberty through culture, and freedom from violence through police regulation.
(906.4) 81:5.6 Might does not make right, but it does enforce the commonly recognized rights of each succeeding generation. The prime mission of government is the definition of the right, the just and fair regulation of class differences, and the enforcement of equality of opportunity under the rules of law. Every human right is associated with a social duty; group privilege is an insurance mechanism which unfailingly demands the full payment of the exacting premiums of group service. And group rights, as well as those of the individual, must be protected, including the regulation of the sex propensity.
(906.5) 81:5.7 Liberty subject to group regulation is the legitimate goal of social evolution. Liberty without restrictions is the vain and fanciful dream of unstable and flighty human minds.
6. The Maintenance of Civilization
(906.7) 81:6.2 The civilization which is now evolving on Urantia grew out of, and is predicated on, the following factors:
(906.8) 81:6.3 1. Natural circumstances. The nature and extent of a material civilization is in large measure determined by the natural resources available. Climate, weather, and numerous physical conditions are factors in the evolution of culture.(911.8) 81:6.43 And it was by these rungs on the evolutionary ladder that civilization climbed to that place where those mighty influences could be initiated which have culminated in the rapidly expanding culture of the twentieth century. And only by adherence to these essentials can man hope to maintain his present-day civilizations while providing for their continued development and certain survival.
(907.1) 81:6.4 At the opening of the Andite era there were only two extensive and fertile open hunting areas in all the world. One was in North America and was overspread by the Amerinds; the other was to the north of Turkestan and was partly occupied by an Andonic-yellow race. The decisive factors in the evolution of a superior culture in southwestern Asia were race and climate. The Andites were a great people, but the crucial factor in determining the course of their civilization was the increasing aridity of Iran, Turkestan, and Sinkiang, which forced them to invent and adopt new and advanced methods of wresting a livelihood from their decreasingly fertile lands.
(907.2) 81:6.5 The configuration of continents and other land-arrangement situations are very influential in determining peace or war. Very few Urantians have ever had such a favorable opportunity for continuous and unmolested development as has been enjoyed by the peoples of North America — protected on practically all sides by vast oceans.
(907.3) 81:6.6 2. Capital goods. Culture is never developed under conditions of poverty; leisure is essential to the progress of civilization. Individual character of moral and spiritual value may be acquired in the absence of material wealth, but a cultural civilization is only derived from those conditions of material prosperity which foster leisure combined with ambition.
(907.4) 81:6.7 During primitive times life on Urantia was a serious and sober business. And it was to escape this incessant struggle and interminable toil that mankind constantly tended to drift toward the salubrious climate of the tropics. While these warmer zones of habitation afforded some remission from the intense struggle for existence, the races and tribes who thus sought ease seldom utilized their unearned leisure for the advancement of civilization. Social progress has invariably come from the thoughts and plans of those races that have, by their intelligent toil, learned how to wrest a living from the land with lessened effort and shortened days of labor and thus have been able to enjoy a well-earned and profitable margin of leisure.
(907.5) 81:6.8 3. Scientific knowledge. The material aspects of civilization must always await the accumulation of scientific data. It was a long time after the discovery of the bow and arrow and the utilization of animals for power purposes before man learned how to harness wind and water, to be followed by the employment of steam and electricity. But slowly the tools of civilization improved. Weaving, pottery, the domestication of animals, and metalworking were followed by an age of writing and printing.
(907.6) 81:6.9 Knowledge is power. Invention always precedes the acceleration of cultural development on a world-wide scale. Science and invention benefited most of all from the printing press, and the interaction of all these cultural and inventive activities has enormously accelerated the rate of cultural advancement.
(907.7) 81:6.10 Science teaches man to speak the new language of mathematics and trains his thoughts along lines of exacting precision. And science also stabilizes philosophy through the elimination of error, while it purifies religion by the destruction of superstition.
(907.8) 81:6.11 4. Human resources. Man power is indispensable to the spread of civilization. All things equal, a numerous people will dominate the civilization of a smaller race. Hence failure to increase in numbers up to a certain point prevents the full realization of national destiny, but there comes a point in population increase where further growth is suicidal. Multiplication of numbers beyond the optimum of the normal man-land ratio means either a lowering of the standards of living or an immediate expansion of territorial boundaries by peaceful penetration or by military conquest, forcible occupation.
(908.1) 81:6.12 You are sometimes shocked at the ravages of war, but you should recognize the necessity for producing large numbers of mortals so as to afford ample opportunity for social and moral development; with such planetary fertility there soon occurs the serious problem of overpopulation. Most of the inhabited worlds are small. Urantia is average, perhaps a trifle undersized. The optimum stabilization of national population enhances culture and prevents war. And it is a wise nation which knows when to cease growing.
(908.2) 81:6.13 But the continent richest in natural deposits and the most advanced mechanical equipment will make little progress if the intelligence of its people is on the decline. Knowledge can be had by education, but wisdom, which is indispensable to true culture, can be secured only through experience and by men and women who are innately intelligent. Such a people are able to learn from experience; they may become truly wise.
(908.3) 81:6.14 5. Effectiveness of material resources. Much depends on the wisdom displayed in the utilization of natural resources, scientific knowledge, capital goods, and human potentials. The chief factor in early civilization was the force exerted by wise social masters; primitive man had civilization literally thrust upon him by his superior contemporaries. Well-organized and superior minorities have largely ruled this world.
(908.4) 81:6.15 Might does not make right, but might does make what is and what has been in history. Only recently has Urantia reached that point where society is willing to debate the ethics of might and right.
(908.5) 81:6.16 6. Effectiveness of language. The spread of civilization must wait upon language. Live and growing languages insure the expansion of civilized thinking and planning. During the early ages important advances were made in language. Today, there is great need for further linguistic development to facilitate the expression of evolving thought.
(908.6) 81:6.17 Language evolved out of group associations, each local group developing its own system of word exchange. Language grew up through gestures, signs, cries, imitative sounds, intonation, and accent to the vocalization of subsequent alphabets. Language is man’s greatest and most serviceable thinking tool, but it never flourished until social groups acquired some leisure. The tendency to play with language develops new words — slang. If the majority adopt the slang, then usage constitutes it language. The origin of dialects is illustrated by the indulgence in “baby talk” in a family group.
(908.7) 81:6.18 Language differences have ever been the great barrier to the extension of peace. The conquest of dialects must precede the spread of a culture throughout a race, over a continent, or to a whole world. A universal language promotes peace, insures culture, and augments happiness. Even when the tongues of a world are reduced to a few, the mastery of these by the leading cultural peoples mightily influences the achievement of world-wide peace and prosperity.
(908.8) 81:6.19 While very little progress has been made on Urantia toward developing an international language, much has been accomplished by the establishment of international commercial exchange. And all these international relations should be fostered, whether they involve language, trade, art, science, competitive play, or religion.
(909.1) 81:6.20 7. Effectiveness of mechanical devices. The progress of civilization is directly related to the development and possession of tools, machines, and channels of distribution. Improved tools, ingenious and efficient machines, determine the survival of contending groups in the arena of advancing civilization.
(909.2) 81:6.21 In the early days the only energy applied to land cultivation was man power. It was a long struggle to substitute oxen for men since this threw men out of employment. Latterly, machines have begun to displace men, and every such advance is directly contributory to the progress of society because it liberates man power for the accomplishment of more valuable tasks.
(909.3) 81:6.22 Science, guided by wisdom, may become man’s great social liberator. A mechanical age can prove disastrous only to a nation whose intellectual level is too low to discover those wise methods and sound techniques for successfully adjusting to the transition difficulties arising from the sudden loss of employment by large numbers consequent upon the too rapid invention of new types of laborsaving machinery.
(909.4) 81:6.23 8. Character of torchbearers. Social inheritance enables man to stand on the shoulders of all who have preceded him, and who have contributed aught to the sum of culture and knowledge. In this work of passing on the cultural torch to the next generation, the home will ever be the basic institution. The play and social life comes next, with the school last but equally indispensable in a complex and highly organized society.
(909.5) 81:6.24 Insects are born fully educated and equipped for life — indeed, a very narrow and purely instinctive existence. The human baby is born without an education; therefore man possesses the power, by controlling the educational training of the younger generation, greatly to modify the evolutionary course of civilization.
(909.6) 81:6.25 The greatest twentieth-century influences contributing to the furtherance of civilization and the advancement of culture are the marked increase in world travel and the unparalleled improvements in methods of communication. But the improvement in education has not kept pace with the expanding social structure; neither has the modern appreciation of ethics developed in correspondence with growth along more purely intellectual and scientific lines. And modern civilization is at a standstill in spiritual development and the safeguarding of the home institution.
(909.7) 81:6.26 9. The racial ideals. The ideals of one generation carve out the channels of destiny for immediate posterity. The quality of the social torchbearers will determine whether civilization goes forward or backward. The homes, churches, and schools of one generation predetermine the character trend of the succeeding generation. The moral and spiritual momentum of a race or a nation largely determines the cultural velocity of that civilization.
(909.8) 81:6.27 Ideals elevate the source of the social stream. And no stream will rise any higher than its source no matter what technique of pressure or directional control may be employed. The driving power of even the most material aspects of a cultural civilization is resident in the least material of society’s achievements. Intelligence may control the mechanism of civilization, wisdom may direct it, but spiritual idealism is the energy which really uplifts and advances human culture from one level of attainment to another.
(910.1) 81:6.28 At first life was a struggle for existence; now, for a standard of living; next it will be for quality of thinking, the coming earthly goal of human existence.
(910.2) 81:6.29 10. Co-ordination of specialists. Civilization has been enormously advanced by the early division of labor and by its later corollary of specialization. Civilization is now dependent on the effective co-ordination of specialists. As society expands, some method of drawing together the various specialists must be found.
(910.3) 81:6.30 Social, artistic, technical, and industrial specialists will continue to multiply and increase in skill and dexterity. And this diversification of ability and dissimilarity of employment will eventually weaken and disintegrate human society if effective means of co-ordination and co-operation are not developed. But the intelligence which is capable of such inventiveness and such specialization should be wholly competent to devise adequate methods of control and adjustment for all problems resulting from the rapid growth of invention and the accelerated pace of cultural expansion.
(910.4) 81:6.31 11. Place-finding devices. The next age of social development will be embodied in a better and more effective co-operation and co-ordination of ever-increasing and expanding specialization. And as labor more and more diversifies, some technique for directing individuals to suitable employment must be devised. Machinery is not the only cause for unemployment among the civilized peoples of Urantia. Economic complexity and the steady increase of industrial and professional specialism add to the problems of labor placement.
(910.5) 81:6.32 It is not enough to train men for work; in a complex society there must also be provided efficient methods of place finding. Before training citizens in the highly specialized techniques of earning a living, they should be trained in one or more methods of commonplace labor, trades or callings which could be utilized when they were transiently unemployed in their specialized work. No civilization can survive the long-time harboring of large classes of unemployed. In time, even the best of citizens will become distorted and demoralized by accepting support from the public treasury. Even private charity becomes pernicious when long extended to able-bodied citizens.
(910.6) 81:6.33 Such a highly specialized society will not take kindly to the ancient communal and feudal practices of olden peoples. True, many common services can be acceptably and profitably socialized, but highly trained and ultraspecialized human beings can best be managed by some technique of intelligent co-operation. Modernized co-ordination and fraternal regulation will be productive of longer-lived co-operation than will the older and more primitive methods of communism or dictatorial regulative institutions based on force.
(910.7) 81:6.34 12. The willingness to co-operate. One of the great hindrances to the progress of human society is the conflict between the interests and welfare of the larger, more socialized human groups and of the smaller, contrary-minded asocial associations of mankind, not to mention antisocially-minded single individuals.
(910.8) 81:6.35 No national civilization long endures unless its educational methods and religious ideals inspire a high type of intelligent patriotism and national devotion. Without this sort of intelligent patriotism and cultural solidarity, all nations tend to disintegrate as a result of provincial jealousies and local self-interests.
(911.1) 81:6.36 The maintenance of world-wide civilization is dependent on human beings learning how to live together in peace and fraternity. Without effective co-ordination, industrial civilization is jeopardized by the dangers of ultraspecialization: monotony, narrowness, and the tendency to breed distrust and jealousy.
(911.2) 81:6.37 13. Effective and wise leadership. In civilization much, very much, depends on an enthusiastic and effective load-pulling spirit. Ten men are of little more value than one in lifting a great load unless they lift together — all at the same moment. And such teamwork — social co-operation — is dependent on leadership. The cultural civilizations of the past and the present have been based upon the intelligent co-operation of the citizenry with wise and progressive leaders; and until man evolves to higher levels, civilization will continue to be dependent on wise and vigorous leadership.
(911.3) 81:6.38 High civilizations are born of the sagacious correlation of material wealth, intellectual greatness, moral worth, social cleverness, and cosmic insight.
(911.4) 81:6.39 14. Social changes. Society is not a divine institution; it is a phenomenon of progressive evolution; and advancing civilization is always delayed when its leaders are slow in making those changes in the social organization which are essential to keeping pace with the scientific developments of the age. For all that, things must not be despised just because they are old, neither should an idea be unconditionally embraced just because it is novel and new.
(911.5) 81:6.40 Man should be unafraid to experiment with the mechanisms of society. But always should these adventures in cultural adjustment be controlled by those who are fully conversant with the history of social evolution; and always should these innovators be counseled by the wisdom of those who have had practical experience in the domains of contemplated social or economic experiment. No great social or economic change should be attempted suddenly. Time is essential to all types of human adjustment — physical, social, or economic. Only moral and spiritual adjustments can be made on the spur of the moment, and even these require the passing of time for the full outworking of their material and social repercussions. The ideals of the race are the chief support and assurance during the critical times when civilization is in transit from one level to another.
(911.6) 81:6.41 15. The prevention of transitional breakdown. Society is the offspring of age upon age of trial and error; it is what survived the selective adjustments and readjustments in the successive stages of mankind’s agelong rise from animal to human levels of planetary status. The great danger to any civilization — at any one moment — is the threat of breakdown during the time of transition from the established methods of the past to those new and better, but untried, procedures of the future.
(911.7) 81:6.42 Leadership is vital to progress. Wisdom, insight, and foresight are indispensable to the endurance of nations. Civilization is never really jeopardized until able leadership begins to vanish. And the quantity of such wise leadership has never exceeded one per cent of the population.
(912.1) 81:6.44 This is the gist of the long, long struggle of the peoples of earth to establish civilization since the age of Adam. Present-day culture is the net result of this strenuous evolution. Before the discovery of printing, progress was relatively slow since one generation could not so rapidly benefit from the achievements of its predecessors. But now human society is plunging forward under the force of the accumulated momentum of all the ages through which civilization has struggled.
(912.2) 81:6.45 [Sponsored by an Archangel of Nebadon.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 82
The Evolution of Marriage
(913.2) 82:0.2 While religious, social, and educational institutions are all essential to the survival of cultural civilization, the family is the master civilizer. A child learns most of the essentials of life from his family and the neighbors.
(913.3) 82:0.3 The humans of olden times did not possess a very rich social civilization, but such as they had they faithfully and effectively passed on to the next generation. And you should recognize that most of these civilizations of the past continued to evolve with a bare minimum of other institutional influences because the home was effectively functioning. Today the human races possess a rich social and cultural heritage, and it should be wisely and effectively passed on to succeeding generations. The family as an educational institution must be maintained.
1. The Mating Instinct
(913.5) 82:1.2 Sex interest and desire were not dominating passions in primitive peoples; they simply took them for granted. The entire reproductive experience was free from imaginative embellishment. The all-absorbing sex passion of the more highly civilized peoples is chiefly due to race mixtures, especially where the evolutionary nature has been stimulated by the associative imagination and beauty appreciation of the Nodites and Adamites. But this Andite inheritance was absorbed by the evolutionary races in such limited amounts as to fail to provide sufficient self-control for the animal passions thus quickened and aroused by the endowment of keener sex consciousness and stronger mating urges. Of the evolutionary races, the red man had the highest sex code.
(913.6) 82:1.3 The regulation of sex in relation to marriage indicates:
(913.7) 82:1.4 1. The relative progress of civilization. Civilization has increasingly demanded that sex be gratified in useful channels and in accordance with the mores.(914.2) 82:1.6 The Sangik races had normal animal passion, but they displayed little imagination or appreciation of the beauty and physical attractiveness of the opposite sex. What is called sex appeal is virtually absent even in present-day primitive races; these unmixed peoples have a definite mating instinct but insufficient sex attraction to create serious problems requiring social control.
(914.1) 82:1.5 2. The amount of Andite stock in any people. Among such groups sex has become expressive of both the highest and the lowest in both the physical and emotional natures.
(914.3) 82:1.7 The mating instinct is one of the dominant physical driving forces of human beings; it is the one emotion which, in the guise of individual gratification, effectively tricks selfish man into putting race welfare and perpetuation high above individual ease and personal freedom from responsibility.
(914.4) 82:1.8 As an institution, marriage, from its early beginnings down to modern times, pictures the social evolution of the biologic propensity for self-perpetuation. The perpetuation of the evolving human species is made certain by the presence of this racial mating impulse, an urge which is loosely called sex attraction. This great biologic urge becomes the impulse hub for all sorts of associated instincts, emotions, and usages — physical, intellectual, moral, and social.
(914.5) 82:1.9 With the savage, the food supply was the impelling motivation, but when civilization insures plentiful food, the sex urge many times becomes a dominant impulse and therefore ever stands in need of social regulation. In animals, instinctive periodicity checks the mating propensity, but since man is so largely a self-controlled being, sex desire is not altogether periodic; therefore does it become necessary for society to impose self-control upon the individual.
(914.6) 82:1.10 No human emotion or impulse, when unbridled and overindulged, can produce so much harm and sorrow as this powerful sex urge. Intelligent submission of this impulse to the regulations of society is the supreme test of the actuality of any civilization. Self-control, more and more self-control, is the ever-increasing demand of advancing mankind. Secrecy, insincerity, and hypocrisy may obscure sex problems, but they do not provide solutions, nor do they advance ethics.
2. The Restrictive Taboos
(914.8) 82:2.2 Among the early races there was little or no regulation of the relations of the sexes. Because of this sex license, no prostitution existed. Today, the Pygmies and other backward groups have no marriage institution; a study of these peoples reveals the simple mating customs followed by primitive races. But all ancient peoples should always be studied and judged in the light of the moral standards of the mores of their own times.
(915.1) 82:2.3 Free love, however, has never been in good standing above the scale of rank savagery. The moment societal groups began to form, marriage codes and marital restrictions began to develop. Mating has thus progressed through a multitude of transitions from a state of almost complete sex license to the twentieth-century standards of relatively complete sex restriction.
(915.2) 82:2.4 In the earliest stages of tribal development the mores and restrictive taboos were very crude, but they did keep the sexes apart — this favored quiet, order, and industry — and the long evolution of marriage and the home had begun. The sex customs of dress, adornment, and religious practices had their origin in these early taboos which defined the range of sex liberties and thus eventually created concepts of vice, crime, and sin. But it was long the practice to suspend all sex regulations on high festival days, especially May Day.
(915.3) 82:2.5 Women have always been subject to more restrictive taboos than men. The early mores granted the same degree of sex liberty to unmarried women as to men, but it has always been required of wives that they be faithful to their husbands. Primitive marriage did not much curtail man’s sex liberties, but it did render further sex license taboo to the wife. Married women have always borne some mark which set them apart as a class by themselves, such as hairdress, clothing, veil, seclusion, ornamentation, and rings.
3. Early Marriage Mores
(915.5) 82:3.2 There always have been and always will be two distinct realms of marriage: the mores, the laws regulating the external aspects of mating, and the otherwise secret and personal relations of men and women. Always has the individual been rebellious against the sex regulations imposed by society; and this is the reason for this agelong sex problem: Self-maintenance is individual but is carried on by the group; self-perpetuation is social but is secured by individual impulse.
(915.6) 82:3.3 The mores, when respected, have ample power to restrain and control the sex urge, as has been shown among all races. Marriage standards have always been a true indicator of the current power of the mores and the functional integrity of the civil government. But the early sex and mating mores were a mass of inconsistent and crude regulations. Parents, children, relatives, and society all had conflicting interests in the marriage regulations. But in spite of all this, those races which exalted and practiced marriage naturally evolved to higher levels and survived in increased numbers.
(915.7) 82:3.4 In primitive times marriage was the price of social standing; the possession of a wife was a badge of distinction. The savage looked upon his wedding day as marking his entrance upon responsibility and manhood. In one age, marriage has been looked upon as a social duty; in another, as a religious obligation; and in still another, as a political requirement to provide citizens for the state.
(916.1) 82:3.5 Many early tribes required feats of stealing as a qualification for marriage; later peoples substituted for such raiding forays, athletic contests and competitive games. The winners in these contests were awarded the first prize — choice of the season’s brides. Among the head-hunters a youth might not marry until he possessed at least one head, although such skulls were sometimes purchasable. As the buying of wives declined, they were won by riddle contests, a practice that still survives among many groups of the black man.
(916.2) 82:3.6 With advancing civilization, certain tribes put the severe marriage tests of male endurance in the hands of the women; they thus were able to favor the men of their choice. These marriage tests embraced skill in hunting, fighting, and ability to provide for a family. The groom was long required to enter the bride’s family for at least one year, there to live and labor and prove that he was worthy of the wife he sought.
(916.3) 82:3.7 The qualifications of a wife were the ability to perform hard work and to bear children. She was required to execute a certain piece of agricultural work within a given time. And if she had borne a child before marriage, she was all the more valuable; her fertility was thus assured.
(916.4) 82:3.8 The fact that ancient peoples regarded it as a disgrace, or even a sin, not to be married, explains the origin of child marriages; since one must be married, the earlier the better. It was also a general belief that unmarried persons could not enter spiritland, and this was a further incentive to child marriages even at birth and sometimes before birth, contingent upon sex. The ancients believed that even the dead must be married. The original matchmakers were employed to negotiate marriages for deceased individuals. One parent would arrange for these intermediaries to effect the marriage of a dead son with a dead daughter of another family.
(916.5) 82:3.9 Among later peoples, puberty was the common age of marriage, but this has advanced in direct proportion to the progress of civilization. Early in social evolution peculiar and celibate orders of both men and women arose; they were started and maintained by individuals more or less lacking normal sex urge.
(916.6) 82:3.10 Many tribes allowed members of the ruling group to have sex relations with the bride just before she was to be given to her husband. Each of these men would give the girl a present, and this was the origin of the custom of giving wedding presents. Among some groups it was expected that a young woman would earn her dowry, which consisted of the presents received in reward for her sex service in the bride’s exhibition hall.
(916.7) 82:3.11 Some tribes married the young men to the widows and older women and then, when they were subsequently left widowers, would allow them to marry the young girls, thus insuring, as they expressed it, that both parents would not be fools, as they conceived would be the case if two youths were allowed to mate. Other tribes limited mating to similar age groups. It was the limitation of marriage to certain age groups that first gave origin to ideas of incest. (In India there are even now no age restrictions on marriage.)
(916.8) 82:3.12 Under certain mores widowhood was greatly to be feared, widows being either killed or allowed to commit suicide on their husbands’ graves, for they were supposed to go over into spiritland with their spouses. The surviving widow was almost invariably blamed for her husband’s death. Some tribes burned them alive. If a widow continued to live, her life was one of continuous mourning and unbearable social restriction since remarriage was generally disapproved.
(917.1) 82:3.13 In olden days many practices now regarded as immoral were encouraged. Primitive wives not infrequently took great pride in their husbands’ affairs with other women. Chastity in girls was a great hindrance to marriage; the bearing of a child before marriage greatly increased a girl’s desirability as a wife since the man was sure of having a fertile companion.
(917.2) 82:3.14 Many primitive tribes sanctioned trial marriage until the woman became pregnant, when the regular marriage ceremony would be performed; among other groups the wedding was not celebrated until the first child was born. If a wife was barren, she had to be redeemed by her parents, and the marriage was annulled. The mores demanded that every pair have children.
(917.3) 82:3.15 These primitive trial marriages were entirely free from all semblance of license; they were simply sincere tests of fecundity. The contracting individuals married permanently just as soon as fertility was established. When modern couples marry with the thought of convenient divorce in the background of their minds if they are not wholly pleased with their married life, they are in reality entering upon a form of trial marriage and one that is far beneath the status of the honest adventures of their less civilized ancestors.
4. Marriage Under the Property Mores
(917.5) 82:4.2 Primitive marriage was an investment, an economic speculation; it was more a matter of business than an affair of flirtation. The ancients married for the advantage and welfare of the group; wherefore their marriages were planned and arranged by the group, their parents and elders. And that the property mores were effective in stabilizing the marriage institution is borne out by the fact that marriage was more permanent among the early tribes than it is among many modern peoples.
(917.6) 82:4.3 As civilization advanced and private property gained further recognition in the mores, stealing became the great crime. Adultery was recognized as a form of stealing, an infringement of the husband’s property rights; it is not therefore specifically mentioned in the earlier codes and mores. Woman started out as the property of her father, who transferred his title to her husband, and all legalized sex relations grew out of these pre-existent property rights. The Old Testament deals with women as a form of property; the Koran teaches their inferiority. Man had the right to lend his wife to a friend or guest, and this custom still obtains among certain peoples.
(917.7) 82:4.4 Modern sex jealousy is not innate; it is a product of the evolving mores. Primitive man was not jealous of his wife; he was just guarding his property. The reason for holding the wife to stricter sex account than the husband was because her marital infidelity involved descent and inheritance. Very early in the march of civilization the illegitimate child fell into disrepute. At first only the woman was punished for adultery; later on, the mores also decreed the chastisement of her partner, and for long ages the offended husband or the protector father had the full right to kill the male trespasser. Modern peoples retain these mores, which allow so-called crimes of honor under the unwritten law.
(917.8) 82:4.5 Since the chastity taboo had its origin as a phase of the property mores, it applied at first to married women but not to unmarried girls. In later years, chastity was more demanded by the father than by the suitor; a virgin was a commercial asset to the father — she brought a higher price. As chastity came more into demand, it was the practice to pay the father a bride fee in recognition of the service of properly rearing a chaste bride for the husband-to-be. When once started, this idea of female chastity took such hold on the races that it became the practice literally to cage up girls, actually to imprison them for years, in order to assure their virginity. And so the more recent standards and virginity tests automatically gave origin to the professional prostitute classes; they were the rejected brides, those women who were found by the grooms’ mothers not to be virgins.
5. Endogamy and Exogamy
(918.2) 82:5.2 While the inbreeding of good stock sometimes resulted in the upbuilding of strong tribes, the spectacular cases of the bad results of the inbreeding of hereditary defectives more forcibly impressed the mind of man, with the result that the advancing mores increasingly formulated taboos against all marriages among near relatives.
(918.3) 82:5.3 Religion has long been an effective barrier against outmarriage; many religious teachings have proscribed marriage outside the faith. Woman has usually favored the practice of in-marriage; man, outmarriage. Property has always influenced marriage, and sometimes, in an effort to conserve property within a clan, mores have arisen compelling women to choose husbands within their fathers’ tribes. Rulings of this sort led to a great multiplication of cousin marriages. In-mating was also practiced in an effort to preserve craft secrets; skilled workmen sought to keep the knowledge of their craft within the family.
(918.4) 82:5.4 Superior groups, when isolated, always reverted to consanguineous mating. The Nodites for over one hundred and fifty thousand years were one of the great in-marriage groups. The later-day in-marriage mores were tremendously influenced by the traditions of the violet race, in which, at first, matings were, perforce, between brother and sister. And brother and sister marriages were common in early Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and throughout the lands once occupied by the Andites. The Egyptians long practiced brother and sister marriages in an effort to keep the royal blood pure, a custom which persisted even longer in Persia. Among the Mesopotamians, before the days of Abraham, cousin marriages were obligatory; cousins had prior marriage rights to cousins. Abraham himself married his half sister, but such unions were not allowed under the later mores of the Jews.
(919.1) 82:5.5 The first move away from brother and sister marriages came about under the plural-wife mores because the sister-wife would arrogantly dominate the other wife or wives. Some tribal mores forbade marriage to a dead brother’s widow but required the living brother to beget children for his departed brother. There is no biologic instinct against any degree of in-marriage; such restrictions are wholly a matter of taboo.
(919.2) 82:5.6 Outmarriage finally dominated because it was favored by the man; to get a wife from the outside insured greater freedom from in-laws. Familiarity breeds contempt; so, as the element of individual choice began to dominate mating, it became the custom to choose partners from outside the tribe.
(919.3) 82:5.7 Many tribes finally forbade marriages within the clan; others limited mating to certain castes. The taboo against marriage with a woman of one’s own totem gave impetus to the custom of stealing women from neighboring tribes. Later on, marriages were regulated more in accordance with territorial residence than with kinship. There were many steps in the evolution of in-marriage into the modern practice of outmarriage. Even after the taboo rested upon in-marriages for the common people, chiefs and kings were permitted to marry those of close kin in order to keep the royal blood concentrated and pure. The mores have usually permitted sovereign rulers certain licenses in sex matters.
(919.4) 82:5.8 The presence of the later Andite peoples had much to do with increasing the desire of the Sangik races to mate outside their own tribes. But it was not possible for out-mating to become prevalent until neighboring groups had learned to live together in relative peace.
(919.5) 82:5.9 Outmarriage itself was a peace promoter; marriages between the tribes lessened hostilities. Outmarriage led to tribal co-ordination and to military alliances; it became dominant because it provided increased strength; it was a nation builder. Outmarriage was also greatly favored by increasing trade contacts; adventure and exploration contributed to the extension of the mating bounds and greatly facilitated the cross-fertilization of racial cultures.
(919.6) 82:5.10 The otherwise inexplicable inconsistencies of the racial marriage mores are largely due to this outmarriage custom with its accompanying wife stealing and buying from foreign tribes, all of which resulted in a compounding of the separate tribal mores. That these taboos respecting in-marriage were sociologic, not biologic, is well illustrated by the taboos on kinship marriages, which embraced many degrees of in-law relationships, cases representing no blood relation whatsoever.
6. Racial Mixtures
(919.8) 82:6.2 Of the six colored Sangik races, three were primary and three were secondary. Though the primary races — blue, red, and yellow — were in many respects superior to the three secondary peoples, it should be remembered that these secondary races had many desirable traits which would have considerably enhanced the primary peoples if their better strains could have been absorbed.
(920.1) 82:6.3 Present-day prejudice against “half-castes,” “hybrids,” and “mongrels” arises because modern racial crossbreeding is, for the greater part, between the grossly inferior strains of the races concerned. You also get unsatisfactory offspring when the degenerate strains of the same race intermarry.
(920.2) 82:6.4 If the present-day races of Urantia could be freed from the curse of their lowest strata of deteriorated, antisocial, feeble-minded, and outcast specimens, there would be little objection to a limited race amalgamation. And if such racial mixtures could take place between the highest types of the several races, still less objection could be offered.
(920.3) 82:6.5 Hybridization of superior and dissimilar stocks is the secret of the creation of new and more vigorous strains. And this is true of plants, animals, and the human species. Hybridization augments vigor and increases fertility. Race mixtures of the average or superior strata of various peoples greatly increase creative potential, as is shown in the present population of the United States of North America. When such matings take place between the lower or inferior strata, creativity is diminished, as is shown by the present-day peoples of southern India.
(920.4) 82:6.6 Race blending greatly contributes to the sudden appearance of new characteristics, and if such hybridization is the union of superior strains, then these new characteristics will also be superior traits.
(920.5) 82:6.7 As long as present-day races are so overloaded with inferior and degenerate strains, race intermingling on a large scale would be most detrimental, but most of the objections to such experiments rest on social and cultural prejudices rather than on biological considerations. Even among inferior stocks, hybrids often are an improvement on their ancestors. Hybridization makes for species improvement because of the role of the dominant genes. Racial intermixture increases the likelihood of a larger number of the desirable dominants being present in the hybrid.
(920.6) 82:6.8 For the past hundred years more racial hybridization has been taking place on Urantia than has occurred in thousands of years. The danger of gross disharmonies as a result of crossbreeding of human stocks has been greatly exaggerated. The chief troubles of “half-breeds” are due to social prejudices.
(920.7) 82:6.9 The Pitcairn experiment of blending the white and Polynesian races turned out fairly well because the white men and the Polynesian women were of fairly good racial strains. Interbreeding between the highest types of the white, red, and yellow races would immediately bring into existence many new and biologically effective characteristics. These three peoples belong to the primary Sangik races. Mixtures of the white and black races are not so desirable in their immediate results, neither are such mulatto offspring so objectionable as social and racial prejudice would seek to make them appear. Physically, such white-black hybrids are excellent specimens of humanity, notwithstanding their slight inferiority in some other respects.
(920.8) 82:6.10 When a primary Sangik race amalgamates with a secondary Sangik race, the latter is considerably improved at the expense of the former. And on a small scale — extending over long periods of time — there can be little serious objection to such a sacrificial contribution by the primary races to the betterment of the secondary groups. Biologically considered, the secondary Sangiks were in some respects superior to the primary races.
(921.1) 82:6.11 After all, the real jeopardy of the human species is to be found in the unrestrained multiplication of the inferior and degenerate strains of the various civilized peoples rather than in any supposed danger of their racial interbreeding.
(921.2) 82:6.12 [Presented by the Chief of Seraphim stationed on Urantia.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 83
The Marriage Institution
(922.2) 83:0.2 Marriage has been many times in jeopardy, and the marriage mores have drawn heavily on both property and religion for support; but the real influence which forever safeguards marriage and the resultant family is the simple and innate biologic fact that men and women positively will not live without each other, be they the most primitive savages or the most cultured mortals.
(922.3) 83:0.3 It is because of the sex urge that selfish man is lured into making something better than an animal out of himself. The self-regarding and self-gratifying sex relationship entails the certain consequences of self-denial and insures the assumption of altruistic duties and numerous race-benefiting home responsibilities. Herein has sex been the unrecognized and unsuspected civilizer of the savage; for this same sex impulse automatically and unerringly compels man to think and eventually leads him to love.
1. Marriage as a Societal Institution
(922.5) 83:1.2 1. In the regulation of personal sex relations.(922.7) 83:1.4 The family, which grows out of marriage, is itself a stabilizer of the marriage institution together with the property mores. Other potent factors in marriage stability are pride, vanity, chivalry, duty, and religious convictions. But while marriages may be approved or disapproved on high, they are hardly made in heaven. The human family is a distinctly human institution, an evolutionary development. Marriage is an institution of society, not a department of the church. True, religion should mightily influence it but should not undertake exclusively to control and regulate it.
(922.6) 83:1.3 2. In the regulation of descent, inheritance, succession, and social order, this being its older and original function.
(922.8) 83:1.5 Primitive marriage was primarily industrial; and even in modern times it is often a social or business affair. Through the influence of the mixture of the Andite stock and as a result of the mores of advancing civilization, marriage is slowly becoming mutual, romantic, parental, poetical, affectionate, ethical, and even idealistic. Selection and so-called romantic love, however, were at a minimum in primitive mating. During early times husband and wife were not much together; they did not even eat together very often. But among the ancients, personal affection was not strongly linked to sex attraction; they became fond of one another largely because of living and working together.
2. Courtship and Betrothal
(923.2) 83:2.2 Coercion, not attraction, was the approach to primitive marriage. In early times woman had no sex aloofness, only sex inferiority as inculcated by the mores. As raiding preceded trading, so marriage by capture preceded marriage by contract. Some women would connive at capture in order to escape the domination of the older men of their tribe; they preferred to fall into the hands of men of their own age from another tribe. This pseudo elopement was the transition stage between capture by force and subsequent courtship by charming.
(923.3) 83:2.3 An early type of wedding ceremony was the mimic flight, a sort of elopement rehearsal which was once a common practice. Later, mock capture became a part of the regular wedding ceremony. A modern girl’s pretensions to resist “capture,” to be reticent toward marriage, are all relics of olden customs. The carrying of the bride over the threshold is reminiscent of a number of ancient practices, among others, of the days of wife stealing.
(923.4) 83:2.4 Woman was long denied full freedom of self-disposal in marriage, but the more intelligent women have always been able to circumvent this restriction by the clever exercise of their wits. Man has usually taken the lead in courtship, but not always. Woman sometimes formally, as well as covertly, initiates marriage. And as civilization has progressed, women have had an increasing part in all phases of courtship and marriage.
(923.5) 83:2.5 Increasing love, romance, and personal selection in premarital courtship are an Andite contribution to the world races. The relations between the sexes are evolving favorably; many advancing peoples are gradually substituting somewhat idealized concepts of sex attraction for those older motives of utility and ownership. Sex impulse and feelings of affection are beginning to displace cold calculation in the choosing of life partners.
(923.6) 83:2.6 The betrothal was originally equivalent to marriage; and among early peoples sex relations were conventional during the engagement. In recent times, religion has established a sex taboo on the period between betrothal and marriage.
3. Purchase and Dowry
(924.1) 83:3.2 The bride shows were occasions for dressing up and decorating daughters for public exhibition with the idea of their bringing higher prices as wives. But they were not sold as animals — among the later tribes such a wife was not transferable. Neither was her purchase always just a cold-blooded money transaction; service was equivalent to cash in the purchase of a wife. If an otherwise desirable man could not pay for his wife, he could be adopted as a son by the girl’s father and then could marry. And if a poor man sought a wife and could not meet the price demanded by a grasping father, the elders would often bring pressure to bear upon the father which would result in a modification of his demands, or else there might be an elopement.
(924.2) 83:3.3 As civilization progressed, fathers did not like to appear to sell their daughters, and so, while continuing to accept the bride purchase price, they initiated the custom of giving the pair valuable presents which about equaled the purchase money. And upon the later discontinuance of payment for the bride, these presents became the bride’s dowry.
(924.3) 83:3.4 The idea of a dowry was to convey the impression of the bride’s independence, to suggest far removal from the times of slave wives and property companions. A man could not divorce a dowered wife without paying back the dowry in full. Among some tribes a mutual deposit was made with the parents of both bride and groom to be forfeited in case either deserted the other, in reality a marriage bond. During the period of transition from purchase to dowry, if the wife were purchased, the children belonged to the father; if not, they belonged to the wife’s family.
4. The Wedding Ceremony
(924.5) 83:4.2 Magic, ritual, and ceremony surrounded the entire life of the ancients, and marriage was no exception. As civilization advanced, as marriage became more seriously regarded, the wedding ceremony became increasingly pretentious. Early marriage was a factor in property interests, even as it is today, and therefore required a legal ceremony, while the social status of subsequent children demanded the widest possible publicity. Primitive man had no records; therefore must the marriage ceremony be witnessed by many persons.
(924.6) 83:4.3 At first the wedding ceremony was more on the order of a betrothal and consisted only in public notification of intention of living together; later it consisted in formal eating together. Among some tribes the parents simply took their daughter to the husband; in other cases the only ceremony was the formal exchange of presents, after which the bride’s father would present her to the groom. Among many Levantine peoples it was the custom to dispense with all formality, marriage being consummated by sex relations. The red man was the first to develop the more elaborate celebration of weddings.
(924.7) 83:4.4 Childlessness was greatly dreaded, and since barrenness was attributed to spirit machinations, efforts to insure fecundity also led to the association of marriage with certain magical or religious ceremonials. And in this effort to insure a happy and fertile marriage, many charms were employed; even the astrologers were consulted to ascertain the birth stars of the contracting parties. At one time the human sacrifice was a regular feature of all weddings among well-to-do people.
(925.1) 83:4.5 Lucky days were sought out, Thursday being most favorably regarded, and weddings celebrated at the full of the moon were thought to be exceptionally fortunate. It was the custom of many Near Eastern peoples to throw grain upon the newlyweds; this was a magical rite which was supposed to insure fecundity. Certain Oriental peoples used rice for this purpose.
(925.2) 83:4.6 Fire and water were always considered the best means of resisting ghosts and evil spirits; hence altar fires and lighted candles, as well as the baptismal sprinkling of holy water, were usually in evidence at weddings. For a long time it was customary to set a false wedding day and then suddenly postpone the event so as to put the ghosts and spirits off the track.
(925.3) 83:4.7 The teasing of newlyweds and the pranks played upon honeymooners are all relics of those far-distant days when it was thought best to appear miserable and ill at ease in the sight of the spirits so as to avoid arousing their envy. The wearing of the bridal veil is a relic of the times when it was considered necessary to disguise the bride so that ghosts might not recognize her and also to hide her beauty from the gaze of the otherwise jealous and envious spirits. The bride’s feet must never touch the ground just prior to the ceremony. Even in the twentieth century it is still the custom under the Christian mores to stretch carpets from the carriage landing to the church altar.
(925.4) 83:4.8 One of the most ancient forms of the wedding ceremony was to have a priest bless the wedding bed to insure the fertility of the union; this was done long before any formal wedding ritual was established. During this period in the evolution of the marriage mores the wedding guests were expected to file through the bedchamber at night, thus constituting legal witness to the consummation of marriage.
(925.5) 83:4.9 The luck element, that in spite of all premarital tests certain marriages turned out bad, led primitive man to seek insurance protection against marriage failure; led him to go in quest of priests and magic. And this movement culminated directly in modern church weddings. But for a long time marriage was generally recognized as consisting in the decisions of the contracting parents — later of the pair — while for the last five hundred years church and state have assumed jurisdiction and now presume to make pronouncements of marriage.
5. Plural Marriages
(925.7) 83:5.2 The next step in mating evolution was the group marriage. This communal phase of marriage had to intervene in the unfolding of family life because the marriage mores were not yet strong enough to make pair associations permanent. The brother and sister marriages belonged to this group; five brothers of one family would marry five sisters of another. All over the world the looser forms of communal marriage gradually evolved into various types of group marriage. And these group associations were largely regulated by the totem mores. Family life slowly and surely developed because sex and marriage regulation favored the survival of the tribe itself by insuring the survival of larger numbers of children.
(926.1) 83:5.3 Group marriages gradually gave way before the emerging practices of polygamy — polygyny and polyandry — among the more advanced tribes. But polyandry was never general, being usually limited to queens and rich women; furthermore, it was customarily a family affair, one wife for several brothers. Caste and economic restrictions sometimes made it necessary for several men to content themselves with one wife. Even then, the woman would marry only one, the others being loosely tolerated as “uncles” of the joint progeny.
(926.2) 83:5.4 The Jewish custom requiring that a man consort with his deceased brother’s widow for the purpose of “raising up seed for his brother,” was the custom of more than half the ancient world. This was a relic of the time when marriage was a family affair rather than an individual association.
(926.3) 83:5.5 The institution of polygyny recognized, at various times, four sorts of wives:
(926.4) 83:5.6 1. The ceremonial or legal wives.(926.8) 83:5.10 True polygyny, where all the wives are of equal status and all the children equal, has been very rare. Usually, even with plural marriages, the home was dominated by the head wife, the status companion. She alone had the ritual wedding ceremony, and only the children of such a purchased or dowered spouse could inherit unless by special arrangement with the status wife.
(926.5) 83:5.7 2. Wives of affection and permission.
(926.6) 83:5.8 3. Concubines, contractual wives.
(926.7) 83:5.9 4. Slave wives.
(926.9) 83:5.11 The status wife was not necessarily the love wife; in early times she usually was not. The love wife, or sweetheart, did not appear until the races were considerably advanced, more particularly after the blending of the evolutionary tribes with the Nodites and Adamites.
(926.10) 83:5.12 The taboo wife — one wife of legal status — created the concubine mores. Under these mores a man might have only one wife, but he could maintain sex relations with any number of concubines. Concubinage was the steppingstone to monogamy, the first move away from frank polygyny. The concubines of the Jews, Romans, and Chinese were very frequently the handmaidens of the wife. Later on, as among the Jews, the legal wife was looked upon as the mother of all children born to the husband.
(926.11) 83:5.13 The olden taboos on sex relations with a pregnant or nursing wife tended greatly to foster polygyny. Primitive women aged very early because of frequent childbearing coupled with hard work. (Such overburdened wives only managed to exist by virtue of the fact that they were put in isolation one week out of each month when they were not heavy with child.) Such a wife often grew tired of bearing children and would request her husband to take a second and younger wife, one able to help with both childbearing and the domestic work. The new wives were therefore usually hailed with delight by the older spouses; there existed nothing on the order of sex jealousy.
(926.12) 83:5.14 The number of wives was only limited by the ability of the man to provide for them. Wealthy and able men wanted large numbers of children, and since the infant mortality was very high, it required an assembly of wives to recruit a large family. Many of these plural wives were mere laborers, slave wives.
(927.1) 83:5.15 Human customs evolve, but very slowly. The purpose of a harem was to build up a strong and numerous body of blood kin for the support of the throne. A certain chief was once convinced that he should not have a harem, that he should be contented with one wife; so he promptly dismissed his harem. The dissatisfied wives went to their homes, and their offended relatives swept down on the chief in wrath and did away with him then and there.
6. True Monogamy — Pair Marriage
(927.3) 83:6.2 The earliest monogamy was due to force of circumstances, poverty. Monogamy is cultural and societal, artificial and unnatural, that is, unnatural to evolutionary man. It was wholly natural to the purer Nodites and Adamites and has been of great cultural value to all advanced races.
(927.4) 83:6.3 The Chaldean tribes recognized the right of a wife to impose a premarital pledge upon her spouse not to take a second wife or concubine; both the Greeks and the Romans favored monogamous marriage. Ancestor worship has always fostered monogamy, as has the Christian error of regarding marriage as a sacrament. Even the elevation of the standard of living has consistently militated against plural wives. By the time of Michael’s advent on Urantia practically all of the civilized world had attained the level of theoretical monogamy. But this passive monogamy did not mean that mankind had become habituated to the practice of real pair marriage.
(927.5) 83:6.4 While pursuing the monogamic goal of the ideal pair marriage, which is, after all, something of a monopolistic sex association, society must not overlook the unenviable situation of those unfortunate men and women who fail to find a place in this new and improved social order, even when having done their best to co-operate with, and enter into, its requirements. Failure to gain mates in the social arena of competition may be due to insurmountable difficulties or multitudinous restrictions which the current mores have imposed. Truly, monogamy is ideal for those who are in, but it must inevitably work great hardship on those who are left out in the cold of solitary existence.
(927.6) 83:6.5 Always have the unfortunate few had to suffer that the majority might advance under the developing mores of evolving civilization; but always should the favored majority look with kindness and consideration on their less fortunate fellows who must pay the price of failure to attain membership in the ranks of those ideal sex partnerships which afford the satisfaction of all biologic urges under the sanction of the highest mores of advancing social evolution.
(927.7) 83:6.6 Monogamy always has been, now is, and forever will be the idealistic goal of human sex evolution. This ideal of true pair marriage entails self-denial, and therefore does it so often fail just because one or both of the contracting parties are deficient in that acme of all human virtues, rugged self-control.
(927.8) 83:6.7 Monogamy is the yardstick which measures the advance of social civilization as distinguished from purely biologic evolution. Monogamy is not necessarily biologic or natural, but it is indispensable to the immediate maintenance and further development of social civilization. It contributes to a delicacy of sentiment, a refinement of moral character, and a spiritual growth which are utterly impossible in polygamy. A woman never can become an ideal mother when she is all the while compelled to engage in rivalry for her husband’s affections.
(928.1) 83:6.8 Pair marriage favors and fosters that intimate understanding and effective co-operation which is best for parental happiness, child welfare, and social efficiency. Marriage, which began in crude coercion, is gradually evolving into a magnificent institution of self-culture, self-control, self-expression, and self-perpetuation.
7. The Dissolution of Wedlock
(928.3) 83:7.2 Among primitive peoples only about one half the marriages proved satisfactory. The most frequent cause for separation was barrenness, which was always blamed on the wife; and childless wives were believed to become snakes in the spirit world. Under the more primitive mores, divorce was had at the option of the man alone, and these standards have persisted to the twentieth century among some peoples.
(928.4) 83:7.3 As the mores evolved, certain tribes developed two forms of marriage: the ordinary, which permitted divorce, and the priest marriage, which did not allow for separation. The inauguration of wife purchase and wife dowry, by introducing a property penalty for marriage failure, did much to lessen separation. And, indeed, many modern unions are stabilized by this ancient property factor.
(928.5) 83:7.4 The social pressure of community standing and property privileges has always been potent in the maintenance of the marriage taboos and mores. Down through the ages marriage has made steady progress and stands on advanced ground in the modern world, notwithstanding that it is threateningly assailed by widespread dissatisfaction among those peoples where individual choice — a new liberty — figures most largely. While these upheavals of adjustment appear among the more progressive races as a result of suddenly accelerated social evolution, among the less advanced peoples marriage continues to thrive and slowly improve under the guidance of the older mores.
(928.6) 83:7.5 The new and sudden substitution of the more ideal but extremely individualistic love motive in marriage for the older and long-established property motive, has unavoidably caused the marriage institution to become temporarily unstable. Man’s marriage motives have always far transcended actual marriage morals, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Occidental ideal of marriage has suddenly far outrun the self-centered and but partially controlled sex impulses of the races. The presence of large numbers of unmarried persons in any society indicates the temporary breakdown or the transition of the mores.
(928.7) 83:7.6 The real test of marriage, all down through the ages, has been that continuous intimacy which is inescapable in all family life. Two pampered and spoiled youths, educated to expect every indulgence and full gratification of vanity and ego, can hardly hope to make a great success of marriage and home building — a lifelong partnership of self-effacement, compromise, devotion, and unselfish dedication to child culture.*
(929.1) 83:7.7 The high degree of imagination and fantastic romance entering into courtship is largely responsible for the increasing divorce tendencies among modern Occidental peoples, all of which is further complicated by woman’s greater personal freedom and increased economic liberty. Easy divorce, when the result of lack of self-control or failure of normal personality adjustment, only leads directly back to those crude societal stages from which man has emerged so recently and as the result of so much personal anguish and racial suffering.
(929.2) 83:7.8 But just so long as society fails to properly educate children and youths, so long as the social order fails to provide adequate premarital training, and so long as unwise and immature youthful idealism is to be the arbiter of the entrance upon marriage, just so long will divorce remain prevalent. And in so far as the social group falls short of providing marriage preparation for youths, to that extent must divorce function as the social safety valve which prevents still worse situations during the ages of the rapid growth of the evolving mores.
(929.3) 83:7.9 The ancients seem to have regarded marriage just about as seriously as some present-day people do. And it does not appear that many of the hasty and unsuccessful marriages of modern times are much of an improvement over the ancient practices of qualifying young men and women for mating. The great inconsistency of modern society is to exalt love and to idealize marriage while disapproving of the fullest examination of both.
8. The Idealization of Marriage
(929.5) 83:8.2 The likening of human associations to divine associations is most unfortunate. The union of husband and wife in the marriage-home relationship is a material function of the mortals of the evolutionary worlds. True, indeed, much spiritual progress may accrue consequent upon the sincere human efforts of husband and wife to progress, but this does not mean that marriage is necessarily sacred. Spiritual progress is attendant upon sincere application to other avenues of human endeavor.
(929.6) 83:8.3 Neither can marriage be truly compared to the relation of the Adjuster to man nor to the fraternity of Christ Michael and his human brethren. At scarcely any point are such relationships comparable to the association of husband and wife. And it is most unfortunate that the human misconception of these relationships has produced so much confusion as to the status of marriage.
(929.7) 83:8.4 It is also unfortunate that certain groups of mortals have conceived of marriage as being consummated by divine action. Such beliefs lead directly to the concept of the indissolubility of the marital state regardless of the circumstances or wishes of the contracting parties. But the very fact of marriage dissolution itself indicates that Deity is not a conjoining party to such unions. If God has once joined any two things or persons together, they will remain thus joined until such a time as the divine will decrees their separation. But, regarding marriage, which is a human institution, who shall presume to sit in judgment, to say which marriages are unions that might be approved by the universe supervisors in contrast with those which are purely human in nature and origin?
(930.1) 83:8.5 Nevertheless, there is an ideal of marriage on the spheres on high. On the capital of each local system the Material Sons and Daughters of God do portray the height of the ideals of the union of man and woman in the bonds of marriage and for the purpose of procreating and rearing offspring. After all, the ideal mortal marriage is humanly sacred.
(930.2) 83:8.6 Marriage always has been and still is man’s supreme dream of temporal ideality. Though this beautiful dream is seldom realized in its entirety, it endures as a glorious ideal, ever luring progressing mankind on to greater strivings for human happiness. But young men and women should be taught something of the realities of marriage before they are plunged into the exacting demands of the interassociations of family life; youthful idealization should be tempered with some degree of premarital disillusionment.
(930.3) 83:8.7 The youthful idealization of marriage should not, however, be discouraged; such dreams are the visualization of the future goal of family life. This attitude is both stimulating and helpful providing it does not produce an insensitivity to the realization of the practical and commonplace requirements of marriage and subsequent family life.
(930.4) 83:8.8 The ideals of marriage have made great progress in recent times; among some peoples woman enjoys practically equal rights with her consort. In concept, at least, the family is becoming a loyal partnership for rearing offspring, accompanied by sexual fidelity. But even this newer version of marriage need not presume to swing so far to the extreme as to confer mutual monopoly of all personality and individuality. Marriage is not just an individualistic ideal; it is the evolving social partnership of a man and a woman, existing and functioning under the current mores, restricted by the taboos, and enforced by the laws and regulations of society.
(930.5) 83:8.9 Twentieth-century marriages stand high in comparison with those of past ages, notwithstanding that the home institution is now undergoing a serious testing because of the problems so suddenly thrust upon the social organization by the precipitate augmentation of woman’s liberties, rights so long denied her in the tardy evolution of the mores of past generations.
(930.6) 83:8.10 [Presented by the Chief of Seraphim stationed on Urantia.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 84
Marriage and Family Life
(931.2) 84:0.2 Mating is purely an act of self-perpetuation associated with varying degrees of self-gratification; marriage, home building, is largely a matter of self-maintenance, and it implies the evolution of society. Society itself is the aggregated structure of family units. Individuals are very temporary as planetary factors — only families are continuing agencies in social evolution. The family is the channel through which the river of culture and knowledge flows from one generation to another.
(931.3) 84:0.3 The home is basically a sociologic institution. Marriage grew out of co-operation in self-maintenance and partnership in self-perpetuation, the element of self-gratification being largely incidental. Nevertheless, the home does embrace all three of the essential functions of human existence, while life propagation makes it the fundamental human institution, and sex sets it off from all other social activities.
1. Primitive Pair Associations
(931.5) 84:1.2 Woman, because of physical and emotional attachment to her offspring, is dependent on co-operation with the male, and this urges her into the sheltering protection of marriage. But no direct biologic urge led man into marriage — much less held him in. It was not love that made marriage attractive to man, but food hunger which first attracted savage man to woman and the primitive shelter shared by her children.
(931.6) 84:1.3 Marriage was not even brought about by the conscious realization of the obligations of sex relations. Primitive man comprehended no connection between sex indulgence and the subsequent birth of a child. It was once universally believed that a virgin could become pregnant. The savage early conceived the idea that babies were made in spiritland; pregnancy was believed to be the result of a woman’s being entered by a spirit, an evolving ghost. Both diet and the evil eye were also believed to be capable of causing pregnancy in a virgin or unmarried woman, while later beliefs connected the beginnings of life with the breath and with sunlight.
(932.1) 84:1.4 Many early peoples associated ghosts with the sea; hence virgins were greatly restricted in their bathing practices; young women were far more afraid of bathing in the sea at high tide than of having sex relations. Deformed or premature babies were regarded as the young of animals which had found their way into a woman’s body as a result of careless bathing or through malevolent spirit activity. Savages, of course, thought nothing of strangling such offspring at birth.
(932.2) 84:1.5 The first step in enlightenment came with the belief that sex relations opened up the way for the impregnating ghost to enter the female. Man has since discovered that father and mother are equal contributors of the living inheritance factors which initiate offspring. But even in the twentieth century many parents still endeavor to keep their children in more or less ignorance as to the origin of human life.
(932.3) 84:1.6 A family of some simple sort was insured by the fact that the reproductive function entails the mother-child relationship. Mother love is instinctive; it did not originate in the mores as did marriage. All mammalian mother love is the inherent endowment of the adjutant mind-spirits of the local universe and is in strength and devotion always directly proportional to the length of the helpless infancy of the species.
(932.4) 84:1.7 The mother and child relation is natural, strong, and instinctive, and one which, therefore, constrained primitive women to submit to many strange conditions and to endure untold hardships. This compelling mother love is the handicapping emotion which has always placed woman at such a tremendous disadvantage in all her struggles with man. Even at that, maternal instinct in the human species is not overpowering; it may be thwarted by ambition, selfishness, and religious conviction.
(932.5) 84:1.8 While the mother-child association is neither marriage nor home, it was the nucleus from which both sprang. The great advance in the evolution of mating came when these temporary partnerships lasted long enough to rear the resultant offspring, for that was homemaking.
(932.6) 84:1.9 Regardless of the antagonisms of these early pairs, notwithstanding the looseness of the association, the chances for survival were greatly improved by these male-female partnerships. A man and a woman, co-operating, even aside from family and offspring, are vastly superior in most ways to either two men or two women. This pairing of the sexes enhanced survival and was the very beginning of human society. The sex division of labor also made for comfort and increased happiness.
2. The Early Mother-Family
(932.8) 84:2.2 The primitive family, growing out of the instinctive biologic blood bond of mother and child, was inevitably a mother-family; and many tribes long held to this arrangement. The mother-family was the only possible transition from the stage of group marriage in the horde to the later and improved home life of the polygamous and monogamous father-families. The mother-family was natural and biologic; the father-family is social, economic, and political. The persistence of the mother-family among the North American red men is one of the chief reasons why the otherwise progressive Iroquois never became a real state.
(933.1) 84:2.3 Under the mother-family mores the wife’s mother enjoyed virtually supreme authority in the home; even the wife’s brothers and their sons were more active in family supervision than was the husband. Fathers were often renamed after their own children.
(933.2) 84:2.4 The earliest races gave little credit to the father, looking upon the child as coming altogether from the mother. They believed that children resembled the father as a result of association, or that they were “marked” in this manner because the mother desired them to look like the father. Later on, when the switch came from the mother-family to the father-family, the father took all credit for the child, and many of the taboos on a pregnant woman were subsequently extended to include her husband. The prospective father ceased work as the time of delivery approached, and at childbirth he went to bed, along with the wife, remaining at rest from three to eight days. The wife might arise the next day and engage in hard labor, but the husband remained in bed to receive congratulations; this was all a part of the early mores designed to establish the father’s right to the child.
(933.3) 84:2.5 At first, it was the custom for the man to go to his wife’s people, but in later times, after a man had paid or worked out the bride price, he could take his wife and children back to his own people. The transition from the mother-family to the father-family explains the otherwise meaningless prohibitions of some types of cousin marriages while others of equal kinship are approved.
(933.4) 84:2.6 With the passing of the hunter mores, when herding gave man control of the chief food supply, the mother-family came to a speedy end. It failed simply because it could not successfully compete with the newer father-family. Power lodged with the male relatives of the mother could not compete with power concentrated in the husband-father. Woman was not equal to the combined tasks of childbearing and of exercising continuous authority and increasing domestic power. The oncoming of wife stealing and later wife purchase hastened the passing of the mother-family.
(933.5) 84:2.7 The stupendous change from the mother-family to the father-family is one of the most radical and complete right-about-face adjustments ever executed by the human race. This change led at once to greater social expression and increased family adventure.
3. The Family Under Father Dominance
(934.1) 84:3.2 The scant courtesy paid womankind during the Old Testament era is a true reflection of the mores of the herdsmen. The Hebrew patriarchs were all herdsmen, as is witnessed by the saying, “The Lord is my Shepherd.”
(934.2) 84:3.3 But man was no more to blame for his low opinion of woman during past ages than was woman herself. She failed to get social recognition during primitive times because she did not function in an emergency; she was not a spectacular or crisis hero. Maternity was a distinct disability in the existence struggle; mother love handicapped women in the tribal defense.
(934.3) 84:3.4 Primitive women also unintentionally created their dependence on the male by their admiration and applause for his pugnacity and virility. This exaltation of the warrior elevated the male ego while it equally depressed that of the female and made her more dependent; a military uniform still mightily stirs the feminine emotions.
(934.4) 84:3.5 Among the more advanced races, women are not so large or so strong as men. Woman, being the weaker, therefore became the more tactful; she early learned to trade upon her sex charms. She became more alert and conservative than man, though slightly less profound. Man was woman’s superior on the battlefield and in the hunt; but at home woman has usually outgeneraled even the most primitive of men.
(934.5) 84:3.6 The herdsman looked to his flocks for sustenance, but throughout these pastoral ages woman must still provide the vegetable food. Primitive man shunned the soil; it was altogether too peaceful, too unadventuresome. There was also an old superstition that women could raise better plants; they were mothers. In many backward tribes today, the men cook the meat, the women the vegetables, and when the primitive tribes of Australia are on the march, the women never attack game, while a man would not stoop to dig a root.
(934.6) 84:3.7 Woman has always had to work; at least right up to modern times the female has been a real producer. Man has usually chosen the easier path, and this inequality has existed throughout the entire history of the human race. Woman has always been the burden bearer, carrying the family property and tending the children, thus leaving the man’s hands free for fighting or hunting.
(934.7) 84:3.8 Woman’s first liberation came when man consented to till the soil, consented to do what had theretofore been regarded as woman’s work. It was a great step forward when male captives were no longer killed but were enslaved as agriculturists. This brought about the liberation of woman so that she could devote more time to homemaking and child culture.
(934.8) 84:3.9 The provision of milk for the young led to earlier weaning of babies, hence to the bearing of more children by the mothers thus relieved of their sometimes temporary barrenness, while the use of cow’s milk and goat’s milk greatly reduced infant mortality. Before the herding stage of society, mothers used to nurse their babies until they were four and five years old.
(934.9) 84:3.10 Decreasing primitive warfare greatly lessened the disparity between the division of labor based on sex. But women still had to do the real work while men did picket duty. No camp or village could be left unguarded day or night, but even this task was alleviated by the domestication of the dog. In general, the coming of agriculture has enhanced woman’s prestige and social standing; at least this was true up to the time man himself turned agriculturist. And as soon as man addressed himself to the tilling of the soil, there immediately ensued great improvement in methods of agriculture, extending on down through successive generations. In hunting and war man had learned the value of organization, and he introduced these techniques into industry and later, when taking over much of woman’s work, greatly improved on her loose methods of labor.
4. Woman’s Status in Early Society
(935.2) 84:4.2 Woman’s status has always been a social paradox; she has always been a shrewd manager of men; she has always capitalized man’s stronger sex urge for her own interests and to her own advancement. By trading subtly upon her sex charms, she has often been able to exercise dominant power over man, even when held by him in abject slavery.
(935.3) 84:4.3 Early woman was not to man a friend, sweetheart, lover, and partner but rather a piece of property, a servant or slave and, later on, an economic partner, plaything, and childbearer. Nonetheless, proper and satisfactory sex relations have always involved the element of choice and co-operation by woman, and this has always given intelligent women considerable influence over their immediate and personal standing, regardless of their social position as a sex. But man’s distrust and suspicion were not helped by the fact that women were all along compelled to resort to shrewdness in the effort to alleviate their bondage.
(935.4) 84:4.4 The sexes have had great difficulty in understanding each other. Man found it hard to understand woman, regarding her with a strange mixture of ignorant mistrust and fearful fascination, if not with suspicion and contempt. Many tribal and racial traditions relegate trouble to Eve, Pandora, or some other representative of womankind. These narratives were always distorted so as to make it appear that the woman brought evil upon man; and all this indicates the onetime universal distrust of woman. Among the reasons cited in support of a celibate priesthood, the chief was the baseness of woman. The fact that most supposed witches were women did not improve the olden reputation of the sex.
(935.5) 84:4.5 Men have long regarded women as peculiar, even abnormal. They have even believed that women did not have souls; therefore were they denied names. During early times there existed great fear of the first sex relation with a woman; hence it became the custom for a priest to have initial intercourse with a virgin. Even a woman’s shadow was thought to be dangerous.
(935.6) 84:4.6 Childbearing was once generally looked upon as rendering a woman dangerous and unclean. And many tribal mores decreed that a mother must undergo extensive purification ceremonies subsequent to the birth of a child. Except among those groups where the husband participated in the lying-in, the expectant mother was shunned, left alone. The ancients even avoided having a child born in the house. Finally, the old women were permitted to attend the mother during labor, and this practice gave origin to the profession of midwifery. During labor, scores of foolish things were said and done in an effort to facilitate delivery. It was the custom to sprinkle the newborn with holy water to prevent ghost interference.
(935.7) 84:4.7 Among the unmixed tribes, childbirth was comparatively easy, occupying only two or three hours; it is seldom so easy among the mixed races. If a woman died in childbirth, especially during the delivery of twins, she was believed to have been guilty of spirit adultery. Later on, the higher tribes looked upon death in childbirth as the will of heaven; such mothers were regarded as having perished in a noble cause.
(936.1) 84:4.8 The so-called modesty of women respecting their clothing and the exposure of the person grew out of the deadly fear of being observed at the time of a menstrual period. To be thus detected was a grievous sin, the violation of a taboo. Under the mores of olden times, every woman, from adolescence to the end of the childbearing period, was subjected to complete family and social quarantine one full week each month. Everything she might touch, sit upon, or lie upon was “defiled.” It was for long the custom to brutally beat a girl after each monthly period in an effort to drive the evil spirit out of her body. But when a woman passed beyond the childbearing age, she was usually treated more considerately, being accorded more rights and privileges. In view of all this it was not strange that women were looked down upon. Even the Greeks held the menstruating woman as one of the three great causes of defilement, the other two being pork and garlic.
(936.2) 84:4.9 However foolish these olden notions were, they did some good since they gave overworked females, at least when young, one week each month for welcome rest and profitable meditation. Thus could they sharpen their wits for dealing with their male associates the rest of the time. This quarantine of women also protected men from over-sex indulgence, thereby indirectly contributing to the restriction of population and to the enhancement of self-control.
(936.3) 84:4.10 A great advance was made when a man was denied the right to kill his wife at will. Likewise, it was a forward step when a woman could own the wedding gifts. Later, she gained the legal right to own, control, and even dispose of property, but she was long deprived of the right to hold office in either church or state. Woman has always been treated more or less as property, right up to and in the twentieth century after Christ. She has not yet gained world-wide freedom from seclusion under man’s control. Even among advanced peoples, man’s attempt to protect woman has always been a tacit assertion of superiority.
(936.4) 84:4.11 But primitive women did not pity themselves as their more recently liberated sisters are wont to do. They were, after all, fairly happy and contented; they did not dare to envision a better or different mode of existence.
5. Woman Under the Developing Mores
(936.6) 84:5.2 As society evolved, the sex standards rose higher among women because they suffered more from the consequences of the transgression of the sex mores. Man’s sex standards are only tardily improving as a result of the sheer sense of that fairness which civilization demands. Nature knows nothing of fairness — makes woman alone suffer the pangs of childbirth.
(936.7) 84:5.3 The modern idea of sex equality is beautiful and worthy of an expanding civilization, but it is not found in nature. When might is right, man lords it over woman; when more justice, peace, and fairness prevail, she gradually emerges from slavery and obscurity. Woman’s social position has generally varied inversely with the degree of militarism in any nation or age.
(937.1) 84:5.4 But man did not consciously nor intentionally seize woman’s rights and then gradually and grudgingly give them back to her; all this was an unconscious and unplanned episode of social evolution. When the time really came for woman to enjoy added rights, she got them, and all quite regardless of man’s conscious attitude. Slowly but surely the mores change so as to provide for those social adjustments which are a part of the persistent evolution of civilization. The advancing mores slowly provided increasingly better treatment for females; those tribes which persisted in cruelty to them did not survive.
(937.2) 84:5.5 The Adamites and Nodites accorded women increased recognition, and those groups which were influenced by the migrating Andites have tended to be influenced by the Edenic teachings regarding women’s place in society.
(937.3) 84:5.6 The early Chinese and the Greeks treated women better than did most surrounding peoples. But the Hebrews were exceedingly distrustful of them. In the Occident woman has had a difficult climb under the Pauline doctrines which became attached to Christianity, although Christianity did advance the mores by imposing more stringent sex obligations upon man. Woman’s estate is little short of hopeless under the peculiar degradation which attaches to her in Mohammedanism, and she fares even worse under the teachings of several other Oriental religions.
(937.4) 84:5.7 Science, not religion, really emancipated woman; it was the modern factory which largely set her free from the confines of the home. Man’s physical abilities became no longer a vital essential in the new maintenance mechanism; science so changed the conditions of living that man power was no longer so superior to woman power.
(937.5) 84:5.8 These changes have tended toward woman’s liberation from domestic slavery and have brought about such a modification of her status that she now enjoys a degree of personal liberty and sex determination that practically equals man’s. Once a woman’s value consisted in her food-producing ability, but invention and wealth have enabled her to create a new world in which to function — spheres of grace and charm. Thus has industry won its unconscious and unintended fight for woman’s social and economic emancipation. And again has evolution succeeded in doing what even revelation failed to accomplish.
(937.6) 84:5.9 The reaction of enlightened peoples from the inequitable mores governing woman’s place in society has indeed been pendulumlike in its extremeness. Among industrialized races she has received almost all rights and enjoys exemption from many obligations, such as military service. Every easement of the struggle for existence has redounded to the liberation of woman, and she has directly benefited from every advance toward monogamy. The weaker always makes disproportionate gains in every adjustment of the mores in the progressive evolution of society.
(937.7) 84:5.10 In the ideals of pair marriage, woman has finally won recognition, dignity, independence, equality, and education; but will she prove worthy of all this new and unprecedented accomplishment? Will modern woman respond to this great achievement of social liberation with idleness, indifference, barrenness, and infidelity? Today, in the twentieth century, woman is undergoing the crucial test of her long world existence!
(938.1) 84:5.11 Woman is man’s equal partner in race reproduction, hence just as important in the unfolding of racial evolution; therefore has evolution increasingly worked toward the realization of women’s rights. But women’s rights are by no means men’s rights. Woman cannot thrive on man’s rights any more than man can prosper on woman’s rights.
(938.2) 84:5.12 Each sex has its own distinctive sphere of existence, together with its own rights within that sphere. If woman aspires literally to enjoy all of man’s rights, then, sooner or later, pitiless and emotionless competition will certainly replace that chivalry and special consideration which many women now enjoy, and which they have so recently won from men.
(938.3) 84:5.13 Civilization never can obliterate the behavior gulf between the sexes. From age to age the mores change, but instinct never. Innate maternal affection will never permit emancipated woman to become man’s serious rival in industry. Forever each sex will remain supreme in its own domain, domains determined by biologic differentiation and by mental dissimilarity.
(938.4) 84:5.14 Each sex will always have its own special sphere, albeit they will ever and anon overlap. Only socially will men and women compete on equal terms.
6. The Partnership of Man and Woman
(938.6) 84:6.2 Every successful human institution embraces antagonisms of personal interest which have been adjusted to practical working harmony, and homemaking is no exception. Marriage, the basis of home building, is the highest manifestation of that antagonistic co-operation which so often characterizes the contacts of nature and society. The conflict is inevitable. Mating is inherent; it is natural. But marriage is not biologic; it is sociologic. Passion insures that man and woman will come together, but the weaker parental instinct and the social mores hold them together.
(938.7) 84:6.3 Male and female are, practically regarded, two distinct varieties of the same species living in close and intimate association. Their viewpoints and entire life reactions are essentially different; they are wholly incapable of full and real comprehension of each other. Complete understanding between the sexes is not attainable.
(938.8) 84:6.4 Women seem to have more intuition than men, but they also appear to be somewhat less logical. Woman, however, has always been the moral standard-bearer and the spiritual leader of mankind. The hand that rocks the cradle still fraternizes with destiny.
(938.9) 84:6.5 The differences of nature, reaction, viewpoint, and thinking between men and women, far from occasioning concern, should be regarded as highly beneficial to mankind, both individually and collectively. Many orders of universe creatures are created in dual phases of personality manifestation. Among mortals, Material Sons, and midsoniters, this difference is described as male and female; among seraphim, cherubim, and Morontia Companions, it has been denominated positive or aggressive and negative or retiring. Such dual associations greatly multiply versatility and overcome inherent limitations, even as do certain triune associations in the Paradise-Havona system.
(939.1) 84:6.6 Men and women need each other in their morontial and spiritual as well as in their mortal careers. The differences in viewpoint between male and female persist even beyond the first life and throughout the local and superuniverse ascensions. And even in Havona, the pilgrims who were once men and women will still be aiding each other in the Paradise ascent. Never, even in the Corps of the Finality, will the creature metamorphose so far as to obliterate the personality trends that humans call male and female; always will these two basic variations of humankind continue to intrigue, stimulate, encourage, and assist each other; always will they be mutually dependent on co-operation in the solution of perplexing universe problems and in the overcoming of manifold cosmic difficulties.
(939.2) 84:6.7 While the sexes never can hope fully to understand each other, they are effectively complementary, and though co-operation is often more or less personally antagonistic, it is capable of maintaining and reproducing society. Marriage is an institution designed to compose sex differences, meanwhile effecting the continuation of civilization and insuring the reproduction of the race.
(939.3) 84:6.8 Marriage is the mother of all human institutions, for it leads directly to home founding and home maintenance, which is the structural basis of society. The family is vitally linked to the mechanism of self-maintenance; it is the sole hope of race perpetuation under the mores of civilization, while at the same time it most effectively provides certain highly satisfactory forms of self-gratification. The family is man’s greatest purely human achievement, combining as it does the evolution of the biologic relations of male and female with the social relations of husband and wife.
7. The Ideals of Family Life
(939.5) 84:7.2 Woman’s instinct to love and care for children conspired to make her the interested party in promoting marriage and primitive family life. Man was only forced into home building by the pressure of the later mores and social conventions; he was slow to take an interest in the establishment of marriage and home because the sex act imposes no biologic consequences upon him.
(939.6) 84:7.3 Sex association is natural, but marriage is social and has always been regulated by the mores. The mores (religious, moral, and ethical), together with property, pride, and chivalry, stabilize the institutions of marriage and family. Whenever the mores fluctuate, there is fluctuation in the stability of the home-marriage institution. Marriage is now passing out of the property stage into the personal era. Formerly man protected woman because she was his chattel, and she obeyed for the same reason. Regardless of its merits this system did provide stability. Now, woman is no longer regarded as property, and new mores are emerging designed to stabilize the marriage-home institution:
(939.7) 84:7.4 1. The new role of religion — the teaching that parental experience is essential, the idea of procreating cosmic citizens, the enlarged understanding of the privilege of procreation — giving sons to the Father.(940.4) 84:7.8 But the home as an institution, a partnership between one man and one woman, dates more specifically from the days of Dalamatia, about one-half million years ago, the monogamous practices of Andon and his immediate descendants having been abandoned long before. Family life, however, was not much to boast of before the days of the Nodites and the later Adamites. Adam and Eve exerted a lasting influence on all mankind; for the first time in the history of the world men and women were observed working side by side in the Garden. The Edenic ideal, the whole family as gardeners, was a new idea on Urantia.
(940.1) 84:7.5 2. The new role of science — procreation is becoming more and more voluntary, subject to man’s control. In ancient times lack of understanding insured the appearance of children in the absence of all desire therefor.
(940.2) 84:7.6 3. The new function of pleasure lures — this introduces a new factor into racial survival; ancient man exposed undesired children to die; moderns refuse to bear them.
(940.3) 84:7.7 4. The enhancement of parental instinct — each generation now tends to eliminate from the reproductive stream of the race those individuals in whom parental instinct is insufficiently strong to insure the procreation of children, the prospective parents of the next generation.*
(940.5) 84:7.9 The early family embraced a related working group, including the slaves, all living in one dwelling. Marriage and family life have not always been identical but have of necessity been closely associated. Woman always wanted the individual family, and eventually she had her way.
(940.6) 84:7.10 Love of offspring is almost universal and is of distinct survival value. The ancients always sacrificed the mother’s interests for the welfare of the child; an Eskimo mother even yet licks her baby in lieu of washing. But primitive mothers only nourished and cared for their children when very young; like the animals, they discarded them as soon as they grew up. Enduring and continuous human associations have never been founded on biologic affection alone. The animals love their children; man — civilized man — loves his children’s children. The higher the civilization, the greater the joy of parents in the children’s advancement and success; thus the new and higher realization of name pride comes into existence.
(940.7) 84:7.11 The large families among ancient peoples were not necessarily affectional. Many children were desired because:
(940.8) 84:7.12 1. They were valuable as laborers.(940.15) 84:7.19 Ancestor worshipers view the failure to have sons as the supreme calamity for all time and eternity. They desire above all else to have sons to officiate in the post-mortem feasts, to offer the required sacrifices for the ghost’s progress through spiritland.
(940.9) 84:7.13 2. They were old-age insurance.
(940.10) 84:7.14 3. Daughters were salable.
(940.11) 84:7.15 4. Family pride required extension of name.
(940.12) 84:7.16 5. Sons afforded protection and defense.
(940.13) 84:7.17 6. Ghost fear produced a dread of being alone.
(940.14) 84:7.18 7. Certain religions required offspring.
(941.1) 84:7.20 Among ancient savages, discipline of children was begun very early; and the child early realized that disobedience meant failure or even death just as it did to the animals. It is civilization’s protection of the child from the natural consequences of foolish conduct that contributes so much to modern insubordination.
(941.2) 84:7.21 Eskimo children thrive on so little discipline and correction simply because they are naturally docile little animals; the children of both the red and the yellow men are almost equally tractable. But in races containing Andite inheritance, children are not so placid; these more imaginative and adventurous youths require more training and discipline. Modern problems of child culture are rendered increasingly difficult by:
(941.3) 84:7.22 1. The large degree of race mixture.(941.6) 84:7.25 The olden ideas of family discipline were biologic, growing out of the realization that parents were creators of the child’s being. The advancing ideals of family life are leading to the concept that bringing a child into the world, instead of conferring certain parental rights, entails the supreme responsibility of human existence.
(941.4) 84:7.23 2. Artificial and superficial education.
(941.5) 84:7.24 3. Inability of the child to gain culture by imitating parents — the parents are absent from the family picture so much of the time.
(941.7) 84:7.26 Civilization regards the parents as assuming all duties, the child as having all the rights. Respect of the child for his parents arises, not in knowledge of the obligation implied in parental procreation, but naturally grows as a result of the care, training, and affection which are lovingly displayed in assisting the child to win the battle of life. The true parent is engaged in a continuous service-ministry which the wise child comes to recognize and appreciate.
(941.8) 84:7.27 In the present industrial and urban era the marriage institution is evolving along new economic lines. Family life has become more and more costly, while children, who used to be an asset, have become economic liabilities. But the security of civilization itself still rests on the growing willingness of one generation to invest in the welfare of the next and future generations. And any attempt to shift parental responsibility to state or church will prove suicidal to the welfare and advancement of civilization.
(941.9) 84:7.28 Marriage, with children and consequent family life, is stimulative of the highest potentials in human nature and simultaneously provides the ideal avenue for the expression of these quickened attributes of mortal personality. The family provides for the biologic perpetuation of the human species. The home is the natural social arena wherein the ethics of blood brotherhood may be grasped by the growing children. The family is the fundamental unit of fraternity in which parents and children learn those lessons of patience, altruism, tolerance, and forbearance which are so essential to the realization of brotherhood among all men.
(941.10) 84:7.29 Human society would be greatly improved if the civilized races would more generally return to the family-council practices of the Andites. They did not maintain the patriarchal or autocratic form of family government. They were very brotherly and associative, freely and frankly discussing every proposal and regulation of a family nature. They were ideally fraternal in all their family government. In an ideal family filial and parental affection are both augmented by fraternal devotion.
(942.1) 84:7.30 Family life is the progenitor of true morality, the ancestor of the consciousness of loyalty to duty. The enforced associations of family life stabilize personality and stimulate its growth through the compulsion of necessitous adjustment to other and diverse personalities. But even more, a true family — a good family — reveals to the parental procreators the attitude of the Creator to his children, while at the same time such true parents portray to their children the first of a long series of ascending disclosures of the love of the Paradise parent of all universe children.
8. Dangers of Self-Gratification
(942.3) 84:8.2 Originally, property was the basic institution of self-maintenance, while marriage functioned as the unique institution of self-perpetuation. Although food satisfaction, play, and humor, along with periodic sex indulgence, were means of self-gratification, it remains a fact that the evolving mores have failed to build any distinct institution of self-gratification. And it is due to this failure to evolve specialized techniques of pleasurable enjoyment that all human institutions are so completely shot through with this pleasure pursuit. Property accumulation is becoming an instrument for augmenting all forms of self-gratification, while marriage is often viewed only as a means of pleasure. And this overindulgence, this widely spread pleasure mania, now constitutes the greatest threat that has ever been leveled at the social evolutionary institution of family life, the home.
(942.4) 84:8.3 The violet race introduced a new and only imperfectly realized characteristic into the experience of humankind — the play instinct coupled with the sense of humor. It was there in measure in the Sangiks and Andonites, but the Adamic strain elevated this primitive propensity into the potential of pleasure, a new and glorified form of self-gratification. The basic type of self-gratification, aside from appeasing hunger, is sex gratification, and this form of sensual pleasure was enormously heightened by the blending of the Sangiks and the Andites.
(942.5) 84:8.4 There is real danger in the combination of restlessness, curiosity, adventure, and pleasure-abandon characteristic of the post-Andite races. The hunger of the soul cannot be satisfied with physical pleasures; the love of home and children is not augmented by the unwise pursuit of pleasure. Though you exhaust the resources of art, color, sound, rhythm, music, and adornment of person, you cannot hope thereby to elevate the soul or to nourish the spirit. Vanity and fashion cannot minister to home building and child culture; pride and rivalry are powerless to enhance the survival qualities of succeeding generations.
(942.6) 84:8.5 Advancing celestial beings all enjoy rest and the ministry of the reversion directors. All efforts to obtain wholesome diversion and to engage in uplifting play are sound; refreshing sleep, rest, recreation, and all pastimes which prevent the boredom of monotony are worth while. Competitive games, storytelling, and even the taste of good food may serve as forms of self-gratification. (When you use salt to savor food, pause to consider that, for almost a million years, man could obtain salt only by dipping his food in ashes.)
(943.1) 84:8.6 Let man enjoy himself; let the human race find pleasure in a thousand and one ways; let evolutionary mankind explore all forms of legitimate self-gratification, the fruits of the long upward biologic struggle. Man has well earned some of his present-day joys and pleasures. But look you well to the goal of destiny! Pleasures are indeed suicidal if they succeed in destroying property, which has become the institution of self-maintenance; and self-gratifications have indeed cost a fatal price if they bring about the collapse of marriage, the decadence of family life, and the destruction of the home — man’s supreme evolutionary acquirement and civilization’s only hope of survival.
(943.2) 84:8.7 [Presented by the Chief of Seraphim stationed on Urantia.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 85
The Origins of Worship
(944.2) 85:0.2 In the evolution of the human species, worship in its primitive manifestations appears long before the mind of man is capable of formulating the more complex concepts of life now and in the hereafter which deserve to be called religion. Early religion was wholly intellectual in nature and was entirely predicated on associational circumstances. The objects of worship were altogether suggestive; they consisted of the things of nature which were close at hand, or which loomed large in the commonplace experience of the simple-minded primitive Urantians.
(944.3) 85:0.3 When religion once evolved beyond nature worship, it acquired roots of spirit origin but was nevertheless always conditioned by the social environment. As nature worship developed, man’s concepts envisioned a division of labor in the supermortal world; there were nature spirits for lakes, trees, waterfalls, rain, and hundreds of other ordinary terrestrial phenomena.
(944.4) 85:0.4 At one time or another mortal man has worshiped everything on the face of the earth, including himself. He has also worshiped about everything imaginable in the sky and beneath the surface of the earth. Primitive man feared all manifestations of power; he worshiped every natural phenomenon he could not comprehend. The observation of powerful natural forces, such as storms, floods, earthquakes, landslides, volcanoes, fire, heat, and cold, greatly impressed the expanding mind of man. The inexplicable things of life are still termed “acts of God” and “mysterious dispensations of Providence.”
1. Worship of Stones and Hills
(944.6) 85:1.2 Stones first impressed early man as being out of the ordinary because of the manner in which they would so suddenly appear on the surface of a cultivated field or pasture. Men failed to take into account either erosion or the results of the overturning of soil. Stones also greatly impressed early peoples because of their frequent resemblance to animals. The attention of civilized man is arrested by numerous stone formations in the mountains which so much resemble the faces of animals and even men. But the most profound influence was exerted by meteoric stones which primitive humans beheld hurtling through the atmosphere in flaming grandeur. The shooting star was awesome to early man, and he easily believed that such blazing streaks marked the passage of a spirit on its way to earth. No wonder men were led to worship such phenomena, especially when they subsequently discovered the meteors. And this led to greater reverence for all other stones. In Bengal many worship a meteor which fell to earth in A.D. 1880.
(945.1) 85:1.3 All ancient clans and tribes had their sacred stones, and most modern peoples manifest a degree of veneration for certain types of stones — their jewels. A group of five stones was reverenced in India; in Greece it was a cluster of thirty; among the red men it was usually a circle of stones. The Romans always threw a stone into the air when invoking Jupiter. In India even to this day a stone can be used as a witness. In some regions a stone may be employed as a talisman of the law, and by its prestige an offender can be haled into court. But simple mortals do not always identify Deity with an object of reverent ceremony. Such fetishes are many times mere symbols of the real object of worship.
(945.2) 85:1.4 The ancients had a peculiar regard for holes in stones. Such porous rocks were supposed to be unusually efficacious in curing diseases. Ears were not perforated to carry stones, but the stones were put in to keep the ear holes open. Even in modern times superstitious persons make holes in coins. In Africa the natives make much ado over their fetish stones. In fact, among all backward tribes and peoples stones are still held in superstitious veneration. Stone worship is even now widespread over the world. The tombstone is a surviving symbol of images and idols which were carved in stone in connection with beliefs in ghosts and the spirits of departed fellow beings.
(945.3) 85:1.5 Hill worship followed stone worship, and the first hills to be venerated were large stone formations. It presently became the custom to believe that the gods inhabited the mountains, so that high elevations of land were worshiped for this additional reason. As time passed, certain mountains were associated with certain gods and therefore became holy. The ignorant and superstitious aborigines believed that caves led to the underworld, with its evil spirits and demons, in contrast with the mountains, which were identified with the later evolving concepts of good spirits and deities.
2. Worship of Plants and Trees
(945.5) 85:2.2 Early man looked upon sprouting grain with dread and superstitious awe. The Apostle Paul was not the first to draw profound spiritual lessons from, and predicate religious beliefs on, the sprouting grain.
(945.6) 85:2.3 The cults of tree worship are among the oldest religious groups. All early marriages were held under the trees, and when women desired children, they would sometimes be found out in the forest affectionately embracing a sturdy oak. Many plants and trees were venerated because of their real or fancied medicinal powers. The savage believed that all chemical effects were due to the direct activity of supernatural forces.
(945.7) 85:2.4 Ideas about tree spirits varied greatly among different tribes and races. Some trees were indwelt by kindly spirits; others harbored the deceptive and cruel. The Finns believed that most trees were occupied by kind spirits. The Swiss long mistrusted the trees, believing they contained tricky spirits. The inhabitants of India and eastern Russia regard the tree spirits as being cruel. The Patagonians still worship trees, as did the early Semites. Long after the Hebrews ceased tree worship, they continued to venerate their various deities in the groves. Except in China, there once existed a universal cult of the tree of life.
(946.1) 85:2.5 The belief that water or precious metals beneath the earth’s surface can be detected by a wooden divining rod is a relic of the ancient tree cults. The Maypole, the Christmas tree, and the superstitious practice of rapping on wood perpetuate certain of the ancient customs of tree worship and the later-day tree cults.
(946.2) 85:2.6 Many of these earliest forms of nature veneration became blended with the later evolving techniques of worship, but the earliest mind-adjutant-activated types of worship were functioning long before the newly awakening religious nature of mankind became fully responsive to the stimulus of spiritual influences.
3. The Worship of Animals
(946.4) 85:3.2 Early men revered the animals for their power and their cunning. They thought the keen scent and the farseeing eyes of certain creatures betokened spirit guidance. The animals have all been worshiped by one race or another at one time or another. Among such objects of worship were creatures that were regarded as half human and half animal, such as centaurs and mermaids.
(946.5) 85:3.3 The Hebrews worshiped serpents down to the days of King Hezekiah, and the Hindus still maintain friendly relations with their house snakes. The Chinese worship of the dragon is a survival of the snake cults. The wisdom of the serpent was a symbol of Greek medicine and is still employed as an emblem by modern physicians. The art of snake charming has been handed down from the days of the female shamans of the snake love cult, who, as the result of daily snake bites, became immune, in fact, became genuine venom addicts and could not get along without this poison.
(946.6) 85:3.4 The worship of insects and other animals was promoted by a later misinterpretation of the golden rule — doing to others (every form of life) as you would be done by. The ancients once believed that all winds were produced by the wings of birds and therefore both feared and worshiped all winged creatures. The early Nordics thought that eclipses were caused by a wolf that devoured a portion of the sun or moon. The Hindus often show Vishnu with a horse’s head. Many times an animal symbol stands for a forgotten god or a vanished cult. Early in evolutionary religion the lamb became the typical sacrificial animal and the dove the symbol of peace and love.
(946.7) 85:3.5 In religion, symbolism may be either good or bad just to the extent that the symbol does or does not displace the original worshipful idea. And symbolism must not be confused with direct idolatry wherein the material object is directly and actually worshiped.
4. Worship of the Elements
(947.1) 85:4.2 Many things and numerous events have functioned as religious stimuli to different peoples in different ages. A rainbow is yet worshiped by many of the hill tribes of India. In both India and Africa the rainbow is thought to be a gigantic celestial snake; Hebrews and Christians regard it as “the bow of promise.” Likewise, influences regarded as beneficent in one part of the world may be looked upon as malignant in other regions. The east wind is a god in South America, for it brings rain; in India it is a devil because it brings dust and causes drought. The ancient Bedouins believed that a nature spirit produced the sand whirls, and even in the times of Moses belief in nature spirits was strong enough to insure their perpetuation in Hebrew theology as angels of fire, water, and air.
(947.2) 85:4.3 Clouds, rain, and hail have all been feared and worshiped by numerous primitive tribes and by many of the early nature cults. Windstorms with thunder and lightning overawed early man. He was so impressed with these elemental disturbances that thunder was regarded as the voice of an angry god. The worship of fire and the fear of lightning were linked together and were widespread among many early groups.
(947.3) 85:4.4 Fire was mixed up with magic in the minds of primitive fear-ridden mortals. A devotee of magic will vividly remember one positive chance result in the practice of his magic formulas, while he nonchalantly forgets a score of negative results, out-and-out failures. Fire reverence reached its height in Persia, where it long persisted. Some tribes worshiped fire as a deity itself; others revered it as the flaming symbol of the purifying and purging spirit of their venerated deities. Vestal virgins were charged with the duty of watching sacred fires, and in the twentieth century candles still burn as a part of the ritual of many religious services.
5. Worship of the Heavenly Bodies
(947.5) 85:5.2 Moon worship preceded sun worship. Veneration of the moon was at its height during the hunting era, while sun worship became the chief religious ceremony of the subsequent agricultural ages. Solar worship first took extensive root in India, and there it persisted the longest. In Persia sun veneration gave rise to the later Mithraic cult. Among many peoples the sun was regarded as the ancestor of their kings. The Chaldeans put the sun in the center of “the seven circles of the universe.” Later civilizations honored the sun by giving its name to the first day of the week.
(947.6) 85:5.3 The sun god was supposed to be the mystic father of the virgin-born sons of destiny who ever and anon were thought to be bestowed as saviors upon favored races. These supernatural infants were always put adrift upon some sacred river to be rescued in an extraordinary manner, after which they would grow up to become miraculous personalities and the deliverers of their peoples.
6. Worship of Man
(948.2) 85:6.2 Early man regarded all unusual persons as superhuman, and he so feared such beings as to hold them in reverential awe; to some degree he literally worshiped them. Even having twins was regarded as being either very lucky or very unlucky. Lunatics, epileptics, and the feeble-minded were often worshiped by their normal-minded fellows, who believed that such abnormal beings were indwelt by the gods. Priests, kings, and prophets were worshiped; the holy men of old were looked upon as inspired by the deities.
(948.3) 85:6.3 Tribal chiefs died and were deified. Later, distinguished souls passed on and were sainted. Unaided evolution never originated gods higher than the glorified, exalted, and evolved spirits of deceased humans. In early evolution religion creates its own gods. In the course of revelation the Gods formulate religion. Evolutionary religion creates its gods in the image and likeness of mortal man; revelatory religion seeks to evolve and transform mortal man into the image and likeness of God.
(948.4) 85:6.4 The ghost gods, who are of supposed human origin, should be distinguished from the nature gods, for nature worship did evolve a pantheon — nature spirits elevated to the position of gods. The nature cults continued to develop along with the later appearing ghost cults, and each exerted an influence upon the other. Many religious systems embraced a dual concept of deity, nature gods and ghost gods; in some theologies these concepts are confusingly intertwined, as is illustrated by Thor, a ghost hero who was also master of the lightning.
(948.5) 85:6.5 But the worship of man by man reached its height when temporal rulers commanded such veneration from their subjects and, in substantiation of such demands, claimed to have descended from deity.
7. The Adjutants of Worship and Wisdom
(948.7) 85:7.2 You must remember that feeling, not thinking, was the guiding and controlling influence in all evolutionary development. To the primitive mind there is little difference between fearing, shunning, honoring, and worshiping.
(948.8) 85:7.3 When the worship urge is admonished and directed by wisdom — meditative and experiential thinking — it then begins to develop into the phenomenon of real religion. When the seventh adjutant spirit, the spirit of wisdom, achieves effective ministration, then in worship man begins to turn away from nature and natural objects to the God of nature and to the eternal Creator of all things natural.
(949.1) 85:7.4 [Presented by a Brilliant Evening Star of Nebadon.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 86
Early Evolution of Religion
(950.2) 86:0.2 Man’s earliest prereligious fear of the forces of nature gradually became religious as nature became personalized, spiritized, and eventually deified in human consciousness. Religion of a primitive type was therefore a natural biologic consequence of the psychologic inertia of evolving animal minds after such minds had once entertained concepts of the supernatural.
1. Chance: Good Luck and Bad Luck
(950.4) 86:1.2 The limited intellectual horizon of the savage so concentrates the attention upon chance that luck becomes a constant factor in his life. Primitive Urantians struggled for existence, not for a standard of living; they lived lives of peril in which chance played an important role. The constant dread of unknown and unseen calamity hung over these savages as a cloud of despair which effectively eclipsed every pleasure; they lived in constant dread of doing something that would bring bad luck. Superstitious savages always feared a run of good luck; they viewed such good fortune as a certain harbinger of calamity.
(950.5) 86:1.3 This ever-present dread of bad luck was paralyzing. Why work hard and reap bad luck — nothing for something — when one might drift along and encounter good luck — something for nothing? Unthinking men forget good luck — take it for granted — but they painfully remember bad luck.
(950.6) 86:1.4 Early man lived in uncertainty and in constant fear of chance — bad luck. Life was an exciting game of chance; existence was a gamble. It is no wonder that partially civilized people still believe in chance and evince lingering predispositions to gambling. Primitive man alternated between two potent interests: the passion of getting something for nothing and the fear of getting nothing for something. And this gamble of existence was the main interest and the supreme fascination of the early savage mind.
(951.1) 86:1.5 The later herders held the same views of chance and luck, while the still later agriculturists were increasingly conscious that crops were immediately influenced by many things over which man had little or no control. The farmer found himself the victim of drought, floods, hail, storms, pests, and plant diseases, as well as heat and cold. And as all of these natural influences affected individual prosperity, they were regarded as good luck or bad luck.
(951.2) 86:1.6 This notion of chance and luck strongly pervaded the philosophy of all ancient peoples. Even in recent times in the Wisdom of Solomon it is said: “I returned and saw that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill; but fate and chance befall them all. For man knows not his fate; as fishes are taken in an evil net, and as birds are caught in a snare, so are the sons of men snared in an evil time when it falls suddenly upon them.”
2. The Personification of Chance
(951.4) 86:2.2 The struggle for life is so painful that certain backward tribes even yet howl and lament over each new sunrise. Primitive man constantly asked, “Who is tormenting me?” Not finding a material source for his miseries, he settled upon a spirit explanation. And so was religion born of the fear of the mysterious, the awe of the unseen, and the dread of the unknown. Nature fear thus became a factor in the struggle for existence first because of chance and then because of mystery.
(951.5) 86:2.3 The primitive mind was logical but contained few ideas for intelligent association; the savage mind was uneducated, wholly unsophisticated. If one event followed another, the savage considered them to be cause and effect. What civilized man regards as superstition was just plain ignorance in the savage. Mankind has been slow to learn that there is not necessarily any relationship between purposes and results. Human beings are only just beginning to realize that the reactions of existence appear between acts and their consequences. The savage strives to personalize everything intangible and abstract, and thus both nature and chance become personalized as ghosts — spirits — and later on as gods.
(951.6) 86:2.4 Man naturally tends to believe that which he deems best for him, that which is in his immediate or remote interest; self-interest largely obscures logic. The difference between the minds of savage and civilized men is more one of content than of nature, of degree rather than of quality.
(951.7) 86:2.5 But to continue to ascribe things difficult of comprehension to supernatural causes is nothing less than a lazy and convenient way of avoiding all forms of intellectual hard work. Luck is merely a term coined to cover the inexplicable in any age of human existence; it designates those phenomena which men are unable or unwilling to penetrate. Chance is a word which signifies that man is too ignorant or too indolent to determine causes. Men regard a natural occurrence as an accident or as bad luck only when they are destitute of curiosity and imagination, when the races lack initiative and adventure. Exploration of the phenomena of life sooner or later destroys man’s belief in chance, luck, and so-called accidents, substituting therefor a universe of law and order wherein all effects are preceded by definite causes. Thus is the fear of existence replaced by the joy of living.
(952.1) 86:2.6 The savage looked upon all nature as alive, as possessed by something. Civilized man still kicks and curses those inanimate objects which get in his way and bump him. Primitive man never regarded anything as accidental; always was everything intentional. To primitive man the domain of fate, the function of luck, the spirit world, was just as unorganized and haphazard as was primitive society. Luck was looked upon as the whimsical and temperamental reaction of the spirit world; later on, as the humor of the gods.
(952.2) 86:2.7 But all religions did not develop from animism. Other concepts of the supernatural were contemporaneous with animism, and these beliefs also led to worship. Naturalism is not a religion — it is the offspring of religion.
3. Death — The Inexplicable
(952.4) 86:3.2 Early man accepted life as a fact, while he regarded death as a visitation of some sort. All races have their legends of men who did not die, vestigial traditions of the early attitude toward death. Already in the human mind there existed the nebulous concept of a hazy and unorganized spirit world, a domain whence came all that is inexplicable in human life, and death was added to this long list of unexplained phenomena.
(952.5) 86:3.3 All human disease and natural death was at first believed to be due to spirit influence. Even at the present time some civilized races regard disease as having been produced by “the enemy” and depend upon religious ceremonies to effect healing. Later and more complex systems of theology still ascribe death to the action of the spirit world, all of which has led to such doctrines as original sin and the fall of man.
(952.6) 86:3.4 It was the realization of impotency before the mighty forces of nature, together with the recognition of human weakness before the visitations of sickness and death, that impelled the savage to seek for help from the supermaterial world, which he vaguely visualized as the source of these mysterious vicissitudes of life.
4. The Death-Survival Concept
(953.1) 86:4.2 The dream origin of the belief in a future existence explains the tendency always to imagine unseen things in the terms of things seen. And presently this new dream-ghost-future-life concept began effectively to antidote the death fear associated with the biologic instinct of self-preservation.
(953.2) 86:4.3 Early man was also much concerned about his breath, especially in cold climates, where it appeared as a cloud when exhaled. The breath of life was regarded as the one phenomenon which differentiated the living and the dead. He knew the breath could leave the body, and his dreams of doing all sorts of queer things while asleep convinced him that there was something immaterial about a human being. The most primitive idea of the human soul, the ghost, was derived from the breath-dream idea-system.
(953.3) 86:4.4 Eventually the savage conceived of himself as a double — body and breath. The breath minus the body equaled a spirit, a ghost. While having a very definite human origin, ghosts, or spirits, were regarded as superhuman. And this belief in the existence of disembodied spirits seemed to explain the occurrence of the unusual, the extraordinary, the infrequent, and the inexplicable.
(953.4) 86:4.5 The primitive doctrine of survival after death was not necessarily a belief in immortality. Beings who could not count over twenty could hardly conceive of infinity and eternity; they rather thought of recurring incarnations.
(953.5) 86:4.6 The orange race was especially given to belief in transmigration and reincarnation. This idea of reincarnation originated in the observance of hereditary and trait resemblance of offspring to ancestors. The custom of naming children after grandparents and other ancestors was due to belief in reincarnation. Some later-day races believed that man died from three to seven times. This belief (residual from the teachings of Adam about the mansion worlds), and many other remnants of revealed religion, can be found among the otherwise absurd doctrines of twentieth-century barbarians.
(953.6) 86:4.7 Early man entertained no ideas of hell or future punishment. The savage looked upon the future life as just like this one, minus all ill luck. Later on, a separate destiny for good ghosts and bad ghosts — heaven and hell — was conceived. But since many primitive races believed that man entered the next life just as he left this one, they did not relish the idea of becoming old and decrepit. The aged much preferred to be killed before becoming too infirm.
(953.7) 86:4.8 Almost every group had a different idea regarding the destiny of the ghost soul. The Greeks believed that weak men must have weak souls; so they invented Hades as a fit place for the reception of such anemic souls; these unrobust specimens were also supposed to have shorter shadows. The early Andites thought their ghosts returned to the ancestral homelands. The Chinese and Egyptians once believed that soul and body remained together. Among the Egyptians this led to careful tomb construction and efforts at body preservation. Even modern peoples seek to arrest the decay of the dead. The Hebrews conceived that a phantom replica of the individual went down to Sheol; it could not return to the land of the living. They did make that important advance in the doctrine of the evolution of the soul.
5. The Ghost-Soul Concept
(954.1) 86:5.2 The ghost soul could be heard and seen, but not touched. Gradually the dream life of the race so developed and expanded the activities of this evolving spirit world that death was finally regarded as “giving up the ghost.” All primitive tribes, except those little above animals, have developed some concept of the soul. As civilization advances, this superstitious concept of the soul is destroyed, and man is wholly dependent on revelation and personal religious experience for his new idea of the soul as the joint creation of the God-knowing mortal mind and its indwelling divine spirit, the Thought Adjuster.
(954.2) 86:5.3 Early mortals usually failed to differentiate the concepts of an indwelling spirit and a soul of evolutionary nature. The savage was much confused as to whether the ghost soul was native to the body or was an external agency in possession of the body. The absence of reasoned thought in the presence of perplexity explains the gross inconsistencies of the savage view of souls, ghosts, and spirits.
(954.3) 86:5.4 The soul was thought of as being related to the body as the perfume to the flower. The ancients believed that the soul could leave the body in various ways, as in:
(954.4) 86:5.5 1. Ordinary and transient fainting.(954.8) 86:5.9 The savage looked upon sneezing as an abortive attempt of the soul to escape from the body. Being awake and on guard, the body was able to thwart the soul’s attempted escape. Later on, sneezing was always accompanied by some religious expression, such as “God bless you!”
(954.5) 86:5.6 2. Sleeping, natural dreaming.
(954.6) 86:5.7 3. Coma and unconsciousness associated with disease and accidents.
(954.7) 86:5.8 4. Death, permanent departure.
(954.9) 86:5.10 Early in evolution sleep was regarded as proving that the ghost soul could be absent from the body, and it was believed that it could be called back by speaking or shouting the sleeper’s name. In other forms of unconsciousness the soul was thought to be farther away, perhaps trying to escape for good — impending death. Dreams were looked upon as the experiences of the soul during sleep while temporarily absent from the body. The savage believes his dreams to be just as real as any part of his waking experience. The ancients made a practice of awaking sleepers gradually so that the soul might have time to get back into the body.
(954.10) 86:5.11 All down through the ages men have stood in awe of the apparitions of the night season, and the Hebrews were no exception. They truly believed that God spoke to them in dreams, despite the injunctions of Moses against this idea. And Moses was right, for ordinary dreams are not the methods employed by the personalities of the spiritual world when they seek to communicate with material beings.
(954.11) 86:5.12 The ancients believed that souls could enter animals or even inanimate objects. This culminated in the werewolf ideas of animal identification. A person could be a law-abiding citizen by day, but when he fell asleep, his soul could enter a wolf or some other animal to prowl about on nocturnal depredations.
(955.1) 86:5.13 Primitive men thought that the soul was associated with the breath, and that its qualities could be imparted or transferred by the breath. The brave chief would breathe upon the newborn child, thereby imparting courage. Among early Christians the ceremony of bestowing the Holy Spirit was accompanied by breathing on the candidates. Said the Psalmist: “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.” It was long the custom of the eldest son to try to catch the last breath of his dying father.
(955.2) 86:5.14 The shadow came, later on, to be feared and revered equally with the breath. The reflection of oneself in the water was also sometimes looked upon as proof of the double self, and mirrors were regarded with superstitious awe. Even now many civilized persons turn the mirror to the wall in the event of death. Some backward tribes still believe that the making of pictures, drawings, models, or images removes all or a part of the soul from the body; hence such are forbidden.
(955.3) 86:5.15 The soul was generally thought of as being identified with the breath, but it was also located by various peoples in the head, hair, heart, liver, blood, and fat. The “crying out of Abel’s blood from the ground” is expressive of the onetime belief in the presence of the ghost in the blood. The Semites taught that the soul resided in the bodily fat, and among many the eating of animal fat was taboo. Head hunting was a method of capturing an enemy’s soul, as was scalping. In recent times the eyes have been regarded as the windows of the soul.
(955.4) 86:5.16 Those who held the doctrine of three or four souls believed that the loss of one soul meant discomfort, two illness, three death. One soul lived in the breath, one in the head, one in the hair, one in the heart. The sick were advised to stroll about in the open air with the hope of recapturing their strayed souls. The greatest of the medicine men were supposed to exchange the sick soul of a diseased person for a new one, the “new birth.”
(955.5) 86:5.17 The children of Badonan developed a belief in two souls, the breath and the shadow. The early Nodite races regarded man as consisting of two persons, soul and body. This philosophy of human existence was later reflected in the Greek viewpoint. The Greeks themselves believed in three souls; the vegetative resided in the stomach, the animal in the heart, the intellectual in the head. The Eskimos believe that man has three parts: body, soul, and name.*
6. The Ghost-Spirit Environment
(955.7) 86:6.2 Very early in the history of mankind the realities of the imaginary world of ghosts and spirits became universally believed, and this newly imagined spirit world became a power in primitive society. The mental and moral life of all mankind was modified for all time by the appearance of this new factor in human thinking and acting.
(955.8) 86:6.3 Into this major premise of illusion and ignorance, mortal fear has packed all of the subsequent superstition and religion of primitive peoples. This was man’s only religion up to the times of revelation, and today many of the world’s races have only this crude religion of evolution.
(955.9) 86:6.4 As evolution progressed, good luck became associated with good spirits and bad luck with bad spirits. The discomfort of enforced adaptation to a changing environment was regarded as ill luck, the displeasure of the spirit ghosts. Primitive man slowly evolved religion out of his innate worship urge and his misconception of chance. Civilized man provides schemes of insurance to overcome these chance occurrences; modern science puts an actuary with mathematical reckoning in the place of fictitious spirits and whimsical gods.
(956.1) 86:6.5 Each passing generation smiles at the foolish superstitions of its ancestors while it goes on entertaining those fallacies of thought and worship which will give cause for further smiling on the part of enlightened posterity.
(956.2) 86:6.6 But at last the mind of primitive man was occupied with thoughts which transcended all of his inherent biologic urges; at last man was about to evolve an art of living based on something more than response to material stimuli. The beginnings of a primitive philosophic life policy were emerging. A supernatural standard of living was about to appear, for, if the spirit ghost in anger visits ill luck and in pleasure good fortune, then must human conduct be regulated accordingly. The concept of right and wrong had at last evolved; and all of this long before the times of any revelation on earth.
(956.3) 86:6.7 With the emergence of these concepts, there was initiated the long and wasteful struggle to appease the ever-displeased spirits, the slavish bondage to evolutionary religious fear, that long waste of human effort upon tombs, temples, sacrifices, and priesthoods. It was a terrible and frightful price to pay, but it was worth all it cost, for man therein achieved a natural consciousness of relative right and wrong; human ethics was born!
7. The Function of Primitive Religion
(956.5) 86:7.2 Modern society is removing the business of insurance from the realm of priests and religion, placing it in the domain of economics. Religion is concerning itself increasingly with the insurance of life beyond the grave. Modern men, at least those who think, no longer pay wasteful premiums to control luck. Religion is slowly ascending to higher philosophic levels in contrast with its former function as a scheme of insurance against bad luck.
(956.6) 86:7.3 But these ancient ideas of religion prevented men from becoming fatalistic and hopelessly pessimistic; they believed they could at least do something to influence fate. The religion of ghost fear impressed upon men that they must regulate their conduct, that there was a supermaterial world which was in control of human destiny.
(956.7) 86:7.4 Modern civilized races are just emerging from ghost fear as an explanation of luck and the commonplace inequalities of existence. Mankind is achieving emancipation from the bondage of the ghost-spirit explanation of ill luck. But while men are giving up the erroneous doctrine of a spirit cause of the vicissitudes of life, they exhibit a surprising willingness to accept an almost equally fallacious teaching which bids them attribute all human inequalities to political misadaptation, social injustice, and industrial competition. But new legislation, increasing philanthropy, and more industrial reorganization, however good in and of themselves, will not remedy the facts of birth and the accidents of living. Only comprehension of facts and wise manipulation within the laws of nature will enable man to get what he wants and to avoid what he does not want. Scientific knowledge, leading to scientific action, is the only antidote for so-called accidental ills.
(957.1) 86:7.5 Industry, war, slavery, and civil government arose in response to the social evolution of man in his natural environment; religion similarly arose as his response to the illusory environment of the imaginary ghost world. Religion was an evolutionary development of self-maintenance, and it has worked, notwithstanding that it was originally erroneous in concept and utterly illogical.
(957.2) 86:7.6 Primitive religion prepared the soil of the human mind, by the powerful and awesome force of false fear, for the bestowal of a bona fide spiritual force of supernatural origin, the Thought Adjuster. And the divine Adjusters have ever since labored to transmute God-fear into God-love. Evolution may be slow, but it is unerringly effective.
(957.3) 86:7.7 [Presented by an Evening Star of Nebadon.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 87
The Ghost Cults
(958.2) 87:0.2 Man has had a long and bitter struggle with the ghost cult. Nothing in human history is designed to excite more pity than this picture of man’s abject slavery to ghost-spirit fear. With the birth of this very fear mankind started on the upgrade of religious evolution. Human imagination cast off from the shores of self and will not again find anchor until it arrives at the concept of a true Deity, a real God.
1. Ghost Fear
(958.4) 87:1.2 Though the savage credited ghosts with supernatural powers, he hardly conceived of them as having supernatural intelligence. Many tricks and stratagems were practiced in an effort to hoodwink and deceive the ghosts; civilized man still pins much faith on the hope that an outward manifestation of piety will in some manner deceive even an omniscient Deity.
(958.5) 87:1.3 The primitives feared sickness because they observed it was often a harbinger of death. If the tribal medicine man failed to cure an afflicted individual, the sick man was usually removed from the family hut, being taken to a smaller one or left in the open air to die alone. A house in which death had occurred was usually destroyed; if not, it was always avoided, and this fear prevented early man from building substantial dwellings. It also militated against the establishment of permanent villages and cities.
(958.6) 87:1.4 The savages sat up all night and talked when a member of the clan died; they feared they too would die if they fell asleep in the vicinity of a corpse. Contagion from the corpse substantiated the fear of the dead, and all peoples, at one time or another, have employed elaborate purification ceremonies designed to cleanse an individual after contact with the dead. The ancients believed that light must be provided for a corpse; a dead body was never permitted to remain in the dark. In the twentieth century, candles are still burned in death chambers, and men still sit up with the dead. So-called civilized man has hardly yet completely eliminated the fear of dead bodies from his philosophy of life.
(959.1) 87:1.5 But despite all this fear, men still sought to trick the ghost. If the death hut was not destroyed, the corpse was removed through a hole in the wall, never by way of the door. These measures were taken to confuse the ghost, to prevent its tarrying, and to insure against its return. Mourners also returned from a funeral by a different road, lest the ghost follow. Backtracking and scores of other tactics were practiced to insure that the ghost would not return from the grave. The sexes often exchanged clothes in order to deceive the ghost. Mourning costumes were designed to disguise survivors; later on, to show respect for the dead and thus appease the ghosts.
2. Ghost Placation
(959.3) 87:2.2 It was once thought that the great desire of a ghost was to be quickly “laid” so that it might proceed undisturbed to deadland. Any error of commission or omission in the acts of the living in the ritual of laying the ghost was sure to delay its progress to ghostland. This was believed to be displeasing to the ghost, and an angered ghost was supposed to be a source of calamity, misfortune, and unhappiness.
(959.4) 87:2.3 The funeral service originated in man’s effort to induce the ghost soul to depart for its future home, and the funeral sermon was originally designed to instruct the new ghost how to get there. It was the custom to provide food and clothes for the ghost’s journey, these articles being placed in or near the grave. The savage believed that it required from three days to a year to “lay the ghost” — to get it away from the vicinity of the grave. The Eskimos still believe that the soul stays with the body three days.
(959.5) 87:2.4 Silence or mourning was observed after a death so that the ghost would not be attracted back home. Self-torture — wounds — was a common form of mourning. Many advanced teachers tried to stop this, but they failed. Fasting and other forms of self-denial were thought to be pleasing to the ghosts, who took pleasure in the discomfort of the living during the transition period of lurking about before their actual departure for deadland.
(959.6) 87:2.5 Long and frequent periods of mourning inactivity were one of the great obstacles to civilization’s advancement. Weeks and even months of each year were literally wasted in this nonproductive and useless mourning. The fact that professional mourners were hired for funeral occasions indicates that mourning was a ritual, not an evidence of sorrow. Moderns may mourn the dead out of respect and because of bereavement, but the ancients did this because of fear.
(959.7) 87:2.6 The names of the dead were never spoken. In fact, they were often banished from the language. These names became taboo, and in this way the languages were constantly impoverished. This eventually produced a multiplication of symbolic speech and figurative expression, such as “the name or day one never mentions.”
(960.1) 87:2.7 The ancients were so anxious to get rid of a ghost that they offered it everything which might have been desired during life. Ghosts wanted wives and servants; a well-to-do savage expected that at least one slave wife would be buried alive at his death. It later became the custom for a widow to commit suicide on her husband’s grave. When a child died, the mother, aunt, or grandmother was often strangled in order that an adult ghost might accompany and care for the child ghost. And those who thus gave up their lives usually did so willingly; indeed, had they lived in violation of custom, their fear of ghost wrath would have denuded life of such few pleasures as the primitives enjoyed.
(960.2) 87:2.8 It was customary to dispatch a large number of subjects to accompany a dead chief; slaves were killed when their master died that they might serve him in ghostland. The Borneans still provide a courier companion; a slave is speared to death to make the ghost journey with his deceased master. Ghosts of murdered persons were believed to be delighted to have the ghosts of their murderers as slaves; this notion motivated men to head hunting.
(960.3) 87:2.9 Ghosts supposedly enjoyed the smell of food; food offerings at funeral feasts were once universal. The primitive method of saying grace was, before eating, to throw a bit of food into the fire for the purpose of appeasing the spirits, while mumbling a magic formula.
(960.4) 87:2.10 The dead were supposed to use the ghosts of the tools and weapons that were theirs in life. To break an article was to “kill it,” thus releasing its ghost to pass on for service in ghostland. Property sacrifices were also made by burning or burying. Ancient funeral wastes were enormous. Later races made paper models and substituted drawings for real objects and persons in these death sacrifices. It was a great advance in civilization when the inheritance of kin replaced the burning and burying of property. The Iroquois Indians made many reforms in funeral waste. And this conservation of property enabled them to become the most powerful of the northern red men. Modern man is not supposed to fear ghosts, but custom is strong, and much terrestrial wealth is still consumed on funeral rituals and death ceremonies.
3. Ancestor Worship
(960.6) 87:3.2 Ancestor worship was originally more of a fear than a worship, but such beliefs did definitely contribute to the further spread of ghost fear and worship. Devotees of the early ancestor-ghost cults even feared to yawn lest a malignant ghost enter their bodies at such a time.
(960.7) 87:3.3 The custom of adopting children was to make sure that someone would provide offerings after death for the peace and progress of the soul. The savage lived in fear of the ghosts of his fellows and spent his spare time planning for the safe conduct of his own ghost after death.*
(960.8) 87:3.4 Most tribes instituted an all-souls’ feast at least once a year. The Romans had twelve ghost feasts and accompanying ceremonies each year. Half the days of the year were dedicated to some sort of ceremony associated with these ancient cults. One Roman emperor tried to reform these practices by reducing the number of feast days to 135 a year.
(961.1) 87:3.5 The ghost cult was in continuous evolution. As ghosts were envisioned as passing from the incomplete to the higher phase of existence, so did the cult eventually progress to the worship of spirits, and even gods. But regardless of varying beliefs in more advanced spirits, all tribes and races once believed in ghosts.
4. Good and Bad Spirit Ghosts
(961.3) 87:4.2 As the cult of ghost fear expanded, there came about the recognition of higher types of spirits, spirits not definitely identifiable with any individual human. They were graduate or glorified ghosts who had progressed beyond the domain of ghostland to the higher realms of spiritland.
(961.4) 87:4.3 The notion of two kinds of spirit ghosts made slow but sure progress throughout the world. This new dual spiritism did not have to spread from tribe to tribe; it sprang up independently all over the world. In influencing the expanding evolutionary mind, the power of an idea lies not in its reality or reasonableness but rather in its vividness and the universality of its ready and simple application.
(961.5) 87:4.4 Still later the imagination of man envisioned the concept of both good and bad supernatural agencies; some ghosts never evolved to the level of good spirits. The early monospiritism of ghost fear was gradually evolving into a dual spiritism, a new concept of the invisible control of earthly affairs. At last good luck and bad luck were pictured as having their respective controllers. And of the two classes, the group that brought bad luck were believed to be the more active and numerous.
(961.6) 87:4.5 When the doctrine of good and bad spirits finally matured, it became the most widespread and persistent of all religious beliefs. This dualism represented a great religio-philosophic advance because it enabled man to account for both good luck and bad luck while at the same time believing in supermortal beings who were to some extent consistent in their behavior. The spirits could be counted on to be either good or bad; they were not thought of as being completely temperamental as the early ghosts of the monospiritism of most primitive religions had been conceived to be. Man was at last able to conceive of supermortal forces that were consistent in behavior, and this was one of the most momentous discoveries of truth in the entire history of the evolution of religion and in the expansion of human philosophy.
(961.7) 87:4.6 Evolutionary religion has, however, paid a terrible price for the concept of dual spiritism. Man’s early philosophy was able to reconcile spirit constancy with the vicissitudes of temporal fortune only by postulating two kinds of spirits, one good and the other bad. And while this belief did enable man to reconcile the variables of chance with a concept of unchanging supermortal forces, this doctrine has ever since made it difficult for religionists to conceive of cosmic unity. The gods of evolutionary religion have generally been opposed by the forces of darkness.
(962.1) 87:4.7 The tragedy of all this lies in the fact that, when these ideas were taking root in the primitive mind of man, there really were no bad or disharmonious spirits in all the world. Such an unfortunate situation did not develop until after the Caligastic rebellion and only persisted until Pentecost. The concept of good and evil as cosmic co-ordinates is, even in the twentieth century, very much alive in human philosophy; most of the world’s religions still carry this cultural birthmark of the long-gone days of the emerging ghost cults.
5. The Advancing Ghost Cult
(962.3) 87:5.2 And now the simple ghost cult is followed by the practices of the more advanced and relatively complex spirit-ghost cult, the service and worship of the higher spirits as they evolved in man’s primitive imagination. Religious ceremonial must keep pace with spirit evolution and progress. The expanded cult was but the art of self-maintenance practiced in relation to belief in supernatural beings, self-adjustment to spirit environment. Industrial and military organizations were adjustments to natural and social environments. And as marriage arose to meet the demands of bisexuality, so did religious organization evolve in response to the belief in higher spirit forces and spiritual beings. Religion represents man’s adjustment to his illusions of the mystery of chance. Spirit fear and subsequent worship were adopted as insurance against misfortune, as prosperity policies.
(962.4) 87:5.3 The savage visualizes the good spirits as going about their business, requiring little from human beings. It is the bad ghosts and spirits who must be kept in good humor. Accordingly, primitive peoples paid more attention to their malevolent ghosts than to their benign spirits.
(962.5) 87:5.4 Human prosperity was supposed to be especially provocative of the envy of evil spirits, and their method of retaliation was to strike back through a human agency and by the technique of the evil eye. That phase of the cult which had to do with spirit avoidance was much concerned with the machinations of the evil eye. The fear of it became almost world-wide. Pretty women were veiled to protect them from the evil eye; subsequently many women who desired to be considered beautiful adopted this practice. Because of this fear of bad spirits, children were seldom allowed out after dark, and the early prayers always included the petition, “deliver us from the evil eye.”
(962.6) 87:5.5 The Koran contains a whole chapter devoted to the evil eye and magic spells, and the Jews fully believed in them. The whole phallic cult grew up as a defense against the evil eye. The organs of reproduction were thought to be the only fetish which could render it powerless. The evil eye gave origin to the first superstitions respecting prenatal marking of children, maternal impressions, and the cult was at one time well-nigh universal.*
(963.1) 87:5.6 Envy is a deep-seated human trait; therefore did primitive man ascribe it to his early gods. And since man had once practiced deception upon the ghosts, he soon began to deceive the spirits. Said he, “If the spirits are jealous of our beauty and prosperity, we will disfigure ourselves and speak lightly of our success.” Early humility was not, therefore, debasement of ego but rather an attempt to foil and deceive the envious spirits.
(963.2) 87:5.7 The method adopted to prevent the spirits from becoming jealous of human prosperity was to heap vituperation upon some lucky or much loved thing or person. The custom of depreciating complimentary remarks regarding oneself or family had its origin in this way, and it eventually evolved into civilized modesty, restraint, and courtesy. In keeping with the same motive, it became the fashion to look ugly. Beauty aroused the envy of spirits; it betokened sinful human pride. The savage sought for an ugly name. This feature of the cult was a great handicap to the advancement of art, and it long kept the world somber and ugly.
(963.3) 87:5.8 Under the spirit cult, life was at best a gamble, the result of spirit control. One’s future was not the result of effort, industry, or talent except as they might be utilized to influence the spirits. The ceremonies of spirit propitiation constituted a heavy burden, rendering life tedious and virtually unendurable. From age to age and from generation to generation, race after race has sought to improve this superghost doctrine, but no generation has ever yet dared to wholly reject it.
(963.4) 87:5.9 The intention and will of the spirits were studied by means of omens, oracles, and signs. And these spirit messages were interpreted by divination, soothsaying, magic, ordeals, and astrology. The whole cult was a scheme designed to placate, satisfy, and buy off the spirits through this disguised bribery.
(963.5) 87:5.10 And thus there grew up a new and expanded world philosophy consisting in:
(963.6) 87:5.11 1. Duty — those things which must be done to keep the spirits favorably disposed, at least neutral.(963.9) 87:5.14 It was not merely out of curiosity that the ancients sought to know the future; they wanted to dodge ill luck. Divination was simply an attempt to avoid trouble. During these times, dreams were regarded as prophetic, while everything out of the ordinary was considered an omen. And even today the civilized races are cursed with the belief in signs, tokens, and other superstitious remnants of the advancing ghost cult of old. Slow, very slow, is man to abandon those methods whereby he so gradually and painfully ascended the evolutionary scale of life.
(963.7) 87:5.12 2. Right — the correct conduct and ceremonies designed to win the spirits actively to one’s interests.
(963.8) 87:5.13 3. Truth — the correct understanding of, and attitude toward, spirits, and hence toward life and death.
6. Coercion and Exorcism
(964.1) 87:6.2 In the early days of the cult, man’s efforts to influence ghost action were confined to propitiation, attempts by bribery to buy off ill luck. As the evolution of the ghost cult progressed to the concept of good as well as bad spirits, these ceremonies turned toward attempts of a more positive nature, efforts to win good luck. Man’s religion no longer was completely negativistic, nor did he stop with the effort to win good luck; he shortly began to devise schemes whereby he could compel spirit co-operation. No longer does the religionist stand defenseless before the unceasing demands of the spirit phantasms of his own devising; the savage is beginning to invent weapons wherewith he may coerce spirit action and compel spirit assistance.
(964.2) 87:6.3 Man’s first efforts at defense were directed against the ghosts. As the ages passed, the living began to devise methods of resisting the dead. Many techniques were developed for frightening ghosts and driving them away, among which may be cited the following:
(964.3) 87:6.4 1. Cutting off the head and tying up the body in the grave.(964.10) 87:6.11 Ghosts were supposed to be disturbed and frightened by noise; shouting, bells, and drums drove them away from the living; and these ancient methods are still in vogue at “wakes” for the dead. Foul-smelling concoctions were utilized to banish unwelcome spirits. Hideous images of the spirits were constructed so that they would flee in haste when they beheld themselves. It was believed that dogs could detect the approach of ghosts, and that they gave warning by howling; that cocks would crow when they were near. The use of a cock as a weather vane is in perpetuation of this superstition.
(964.4) 87:6.5 2. Stoning the death house.
(964.5) 87:6.6 3. Castration or breaking the legs of the corpse.
(964.6) 87:6.7 4. Burying under stones, one origin of the modern tombstone.
(964.7) 87:6.8 5. Cremation, a later-day invention to prevent ghost trouble.
(964.8) 87:6.9 6. Casting the body into the sea.
(964.9) 87:6.10 7. Exposure of the body to be eaten by wild animals.
(964.11) 87:6.12 Water was regarded as the best protection against ghosts. Holy water was superior to all other forms, water in which the priests had washed their feet. Both fire and water were believed to constitute impassable barriers to ghosts. The Romans carried water three times around the corpse; in the twentieth century the body is sprinkled with holy water, and hand washing at the cemetery is still a Jewish ritual. Baptism was a feature of the later water ritual; primitive bathing was a religious ceremony. Only in recent times has bathing become a sanitary practice.
(964.12) 87:6.13 But man did not stop with ghost coercion; through religious ritual and other practices he was soon attempting to compel spirit action. Exorcism was the employment of one spirit to control or banish another, and these tactics were also utilized for frightening ghosts and spirits. The dual-spiritism concept of good and bad forces offered man ample opportunity to attempt to pit one agency against another, for, if a powerful man could vanquish a weaker one, then certainly a strong spirit could dominate an inferior ghost. Primitive cursing was a coercive practice designed to overawe minor spirits. Later this custom expanded into the pronouncing of curses upon enemies.
(965.1) 87:6.14 It was long believed that by reverting to the usages of the more ancient mores the spirits and demigods could be forced into desirable action. Modern man is guilty of the same procedure. You address one another in common, everyday language, but when you engage in prayer, you resort to the older style of another generation, the so-called solemn style.
(965.2) 87:6.15 This doctrine also explains many religious-ritual reversions of a sex nature, such as temple prostitution. These reversions to primitive customs were considered sure guards against many calamities. And with these simple-minded peoples all such performances were entirely free from what modern man would term promiscuity.
(965.3) 87:6.16 Next came the practice of ritual vows, soon to be followed by religious pledges and sacred oaths. Most of these oaths were accompanied by self-torture and self-mutilation; later on, by fasting and prayer. Self-denial was subsequently looked upon as being a sure coercive; this was especially true in the matter of sex suppression. And so primitive man early developed a decided austerity in his religious practices, a belief in the efficacy of self-torture and self-denial as rituals capable of coercing the unwilling spirits to react favorably toward all such suffering and deprivation.
(965.4) 87:6.17 Modern man no longer attempts openly to coerce the spirits, though he still evinces a disposition to bargain with Deity. And he still swears, knocks on wood, crosses his fingers, and follows expectoration with some trite phrase; once it was a magical formula.
7. Nature of Cultism
(965.6) 87:7.2 From the dawn of civilization every appealing movement in social culture or religious advancement has developed a ritual, a symbolic ceremonial. The more this ritual has been an unconscious growth, the stronger it has gripped its devotees. The cult preserved sentiment and satisfied emotion, but it has always been the greatest obstacle to social reconstruction and spiritual progress.
(965.7) 87:7.3 Notwithstanding that the cult has always retarded social progress, it is regrettable that so many modern believers in moral standards and spiritual ideals have no adequate symbolism — no cult of mutual support — nothing to belong to. But a religious cult cannot be manufactured; it must grow. And those of no two groups will be identical unless their rituals are arbitrarily standardized by authority.
(965.8) 87:7.4 The early Christian cult was the most effective, appealing, and enduring of any ritual ever conceived or devised, but much of its value has been destroyed in a scientific age by the destruction of so many of its original underlying tenets. The Christian cult has been devitalized by the loss of many fundamental ideas.
(965.9) 87:7.5 In the past, truth has grown rapidly and expanded freely when the cult has been elastic, the symbolism expansile. Abundant truth and an adjustable cult have favored rapidity of social progression. A meaningless cult vitiates religion when it attempts to supplant philosophy and to enslave reason; a genuine cult grows.
(966.1) 87:7.6 Regardless of the drawbacks and handicaps, every new revelation of truth has given rise to a new cult, and even the restatement of the religion of Jesus must develop a new and appropriate symbolism. Modern man must find some adequate symbolism for his new and expanding ideas, ideals, and loyalties. This enhanced symbol must arise out of religious living, spiritual experience. And this higher symbolism of a higher civilization must be predicated on the concept of the Fatherhood of God and be pregnant with the mighty ideal of the brotherhood of man.
(966.2) 87:7.7 The old cults were too egocentric; the new must be the outgrowth of applied love. The new cult must, like the old, foster sentiment, satisfy emotion, and promote loyalty; but it must do more: It must facilitate spiritual progress, enhance cosmic meanings, augment moral values, encourage social development, and stimulate a high type of personal religious living. The new cult must provide supreme goals of living which are both temporal and eternal — social and spiritual.
(966.3) 87:7.8 No cult can endure and contribute to the progress of social civilization and individual spiritual attainment unless it is based on the biologic, sociologic, and religious significance of the home. A surviving cult must symbolize that which is permanent in the presence of unceasing change; it must glorify that which unifies the stream of ever-changing social metamorphosis. It must recognize true meanings, exalt beautiful relations, and glorify the good values of real nobility.
(966.4) 87:7.9 But the great difficulty of finding a new and satisfying symbolism is because modern men, as a group, adhere to the scientific attitude, eschew superstition, and abhor ignorance, while as individuals they all crave mystery and venerate the unknown. No cult can survive unless it embodies some masterful mystery and conceals some worthful unattainable. Again, the new symbolism must not only be significant for the group but also meaningful to the individual. The forms of any serviceable symbolism must be those which the individual can carry out on his own initiative, and which he can also enjoy with his fellows. If the new cult could only be dynamic instead of static, it might really contribute something worth while to the progress of mankind, both temporal and spiritual.
(966.5) 87:7.10 But a cult — a symbolism of rituals, slogans, or goals — will not function if it is too complex. And there must be the demand for devotion, the response of loyalty. Every effective religion unerringly develops a worthy symbolism, and its devotees would do well to prevent the crystallization of such a ritual into cramping, deforming, and stifling stereotyped ceremonials which can only handicap and retard all social, moral, and spiritual progress. No cult can survive if it retards moral growth and fails to foster spiritual progress. The cult is the skeletal structure around which grows the living and dynamic body of personal spiritual experience — true religion.
(966.6) 87:7.11 [Presented by a Brilliant Evening Star of Nebadon.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 88
Fetishes, Charms, and Magic
(967.2) 88:0.2 At first, the spirit of a fetish was believed to be the ghost of a dead man; later on, the higher spirits were supposed to reside in fetishes. And so the fetish cult eventually incorporated all of the primitive ideas of ghosts, souls, spirits, and demon possession.
1. Belief in Fetishes
(967.4) 88:1.2 The first fetishes were peculiarly marked pebbles, and “sacred stones” have ever since been sought by man; a string of beads was once a collection of sacred stones, a battery of charms. Many tribes had fetish stones, but few have survived as have the Kaaba and the Stone of Scone. Fire and water were also among the early fetishes, and fire worship, together with belief in holy water, still survives.
(967.5) 88:1.3 Tree fetishes were a later development, but among some tribes the persistence of nature worship led to belief in charms indwelt by some sort of nature spirit. When plants and fruits became fetishes, they were taboo as food. The apple was among the first to fall into this category; it was never eaten by the Levantine peoples.
(967.6) 88:1.4 If an animal ate human flesh, it became a fetish. In this way the dog came to be the sacred animal of the Parsees. If the fetish is an animal and the ghost is permanently resident therein, then fetishism may impinge on reincarnation. In many ways the savages envied the animals; they did not feel superior to them and were often named after their favorite beasts.
(967.7) 88:1.5 When animals became fetishes, there ensued the taboos on eating the flesh of the fetish animal. Apes and monkeys, because of resemblance to man, early became fetish animals; later, snakes, birds, and swine were also similarly regarded. At one time the cow was a fetish, the milk being taboo while the excreta were highly esteemed. The serpent was revered in Palestine, especially by the Phoenicians, who, along with the Jews, considered it to be the mouthpiece of evil spirits. Even many moderns believe in the charm powers of reptiles. From Arabia on through India to the snake dance of the Moqui tribe of red men the serpent has been revered.
(968.1) 88:1.6 Certain days of the week were fetishes. For ages Friday has been regarded as an unlucky day and the number thirteen as an evil numeral. The lucky numbers three and seven came from later revelations; four was the lucky number of primitive man and was derived from the early recognition of the four points of the compass. It was held unlucky to count cattle or other possessions; the ancients always opposed the taking of a census, “numbering the people.”
(968.2) 88:1.7 Primitive man did not make an undue fetish out of sex; the reproductive function received only a limited amount of attention. The savage was natural minded, not obscene or prurient.
(968.3) 88:1.8 Saliva was a potent fetish; devils could be driven out by spitting on a person. For an elder or superior to spit on one was the highest compliment. Parts of the human body were looked upon as potential fetishes, particularly the hair and nails. The long-growing fingernails of the chiefs were highly prized, and the trimmings thereof were a powerful fetish. Belief in skull fetishes accounts for much of later-day head-hunting. The umbilical cord was a highly prized fetish; even today it is so regarded in Africa. Mankind’s first toy was a preserved umbilical cord. Set with pearls, as was often done, it was man’s first necklace.
(968.4) 88:1.9 Hunchbacked and crippled children were regarded as fetishes; lunatics were believed to be moon-struck. Primitive man could not distinguish between genius and insanity; idiots were either beaten to death or revered as fetish personalities. Hysteria increasingly confirmed the popular belief in witchcraft; epileptics often were priests and medicine men. Drunkenness was looked upon as a form of spirit possession; when a savage went on a spree, he put a leaf in his hair for the purpose of disavowing responsibility for his acts. Poisons and intoxicants became fetishes; they were deemed to be possessed.
(968.5) 88:1.10 Many people looked upon geniuses as fetish personalities possessed by a wise spirit. And these talented humans soon learned to resort to fraud and trickery for the advancement of their selfish interests. A fetish man was thought to be more than human; he was divine, even infallible. Thus did chiefs, kings, priests, prophets, and church rulers eventually wield great power and exercise unbounded authority.
2. Evolution of the Fetish
(968.7) 88:2.2 Belief in relics is an outgrowth of the ancient fetish cult. The relics of modern religions represent an attempt to rationalize the fetish of the savage and thus elevate it to a place of dignity and respectability in the modern religious systems. It is heathenish to believe in fetishes and magic but supposedly all right to accept relics and miracles.
(969.1) 88:2.3 The hearth — fireplace — became more or less of a fetish, a sacred spot. The shrines and temples were at first fetish places because the dead were buried there. The fetish hut of the Hebrews was elevated by Moses to that place where it harbored a superfetish, the then existent concept of the law of God. But the Israelites never gave up the peculiar Canaanite belief in the stone altar: “And this stone which I have set up as a pillar shall be God’s house.” They truly believed that the spirit of their God dwelt in such stone altars, which were in reality fetishes.
(969.2) 88:2.4 The earliest images were made to preserve the appearance and memory of the illustrious dead; they were really monuments. Idols were a refinement of fetishism. The primitives believed that a ceremony of consecration caused the spirit to enter the image; likewise, when certain objects were blessed, they became charms.
(969.3) 88:2.5 Moses, in the addition of the second commandment to the ancient Dalamatian moral code, made an effort to control fetish worship among the Hebrews. He carefully directed that they should make no sort of image that might become consecrated as a fetish. He made it plain, “You shall not make a graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or on the earth beneath, or in the waters of the earth.” While this commandment did much to retard art among the Jews, it did lessen fetish worship. But Moses was too wise to attempt suddenly to displace the olden fetishes, and he therefore consented to the putting of certain relics alongside the law in the combined war altar and religious shrine which was the ark.
(969.4) 88:2.6 Words eventually became fetishes, more especially those which were regarded as God’s words; in this way the sacred books of many religions have become fetishistic prisons incarcerating the spiritual imagination of man. Moses’ very effort against fetishes became a supreme fetish; his commandment was later used to stultify art and to retard the enjoyment and adoration of the beautiful.
(969.5) 88:2.7 In olden times the fetish word of authority was a fear-inspiring doctrine, the most terrible of all tyrants which enslave men. A doctrinal fetish will lead mortal man to betray himself into the clutches of bigotry, fanaticism, superstition, intolerance, and the most atrocious of barbarous cruelties. Modern respect for wisdom and truth is but the recent escape from the fetish-making tendency up to the higher levels of thinking and reasoning. Concerning the accumulated fetish writings which various religionists hold as sacred books, it is not only believed that what is in the book is true, but also that every truth is contained in the book. If one of these sacred books happens to speak of the earth as being flat, then, for long generations, otherwise sane men and women will refuse to accept positive evidence that the planet is round.
(969.6) 88:2.8 The practice of opening one of these sacred books to let the eye chance upon a passage, the following of which may determine important life decisions or projects, is nothing more nor less than arrant fetishism. To take an oath on a “holy book” or to swear by some object of supreme veneration is a form of refined fetishism.
(969.7) 88:2.9 But it does represent real evolutionary progress to advance from the fetish fear of a savage chief’s fingernail trimmings to the adoration of a superb collection of letters, laws, legends, allegories, myths, poems, and chronicles which, after all, reflect the winnowed moral wisdom of many centuries, at least up to the time and event of their being assembled as a “sacred book.”
(970.1) 88:2.10 To become fetishes, words had to be considered inspired, and the invocation of supposed divinely inspired writings led directly to the establishment of the authority of the church, while the evolution of civil forms led to the fruition of the authority of the state.
3. Totemism
(970.3) 88:3.2 Totemism is a combination of social and religious observances. Originally it was thought that respect for the totem animal of supposed biologic origin insured the food supply. Totems were at one and the same time symbols of the group and their god. Such a god was the clan personified. Totemism was one phase of the attempted socialization of otherwise personal religion. The totem eventually evolved into the flag, or national symbol, of the various modern peoples.
(970.4) 88:3.3 A fetish bag, a medicine bag, was a pouch containing a reputable assortment of ghost-impregnated articles, and the medicine man of old never allowed his bag, the symbol of his power, to touch the ground. Civilized peoples in the twentieth century see to it that their flags, emblems of national consciousness, likewise never touch the ground.
(970.5) 88:3.4 The insignia of priestly and kingly office were eventually regarded as fetishes, and the fetish of the state supreme has passed through many stages of development, from clans to tribes, from suzerainty to sovereignty, from totems to flags. Fetish kings have ruled by “divine right,” and many other forms of government have obtained. Men have also made a fetish of democracy, the exaltation and adoration of the common man’s ideas when collectively called “public opinion.” One man’s opinion, when taken by itself, is not regarded as worth much, but when many men are collectively functioning as a democracy, this same mediocre judgment is held to be the arbiter of justice and the standard of righteousness.
4. Magic
(970.7) 88:4.2 The object of magic, sorcery, and necromancy was twofold:
(970.8) 88:4.3 1. To secure insight into the future.(970.10) 88:4.5 The objects of science are identical with those of magic. Mankind is progressing from magic to science, not by meditation and reason, but rather through long experience, gradually and painfully. Man is gradually backing into the truth, beginning in error, progressing in error, and finally attaining the threshold of truth. Only with the arrival of the scientific method has he faced forward. But primitive man had to experiment or perish.
(970.9) 88:4.4 2. Favorably to influence environment.
(970.11) 88:4.6 The fascination of early superstition was the mother of the later scientific curiosity. There was progressive dynamic emotion — fear plus curiosity — in these primitive superstitions; there was progressive driving power in the olden magic. These superstitions represented the emergence of the human desire to know and to control planetary environment.
(971.1) 88:4.7 Magic gained such a strong hold upon the savage because he could not grasp the concept of natural death. The later idea of original sin helped much to weaken the grip of magic on the race in that it accounted for natural death. It was at one time not at all uncommon for ten innocent persons to be put to death because of supposed responsibility for one natural death. This is one reason why ancient peoples did not increase faster, and it is still true of some African tribes. The accused individual usually confessed guilt, even when facing death.
(971.2) 88:4.8 Magic is natural to a savage. He believes that an enemy can actually be killed by practicing sorcery on his shingled hair or fingernail trimmings. The fatality of snake bites was attributed to the magic of the sorcerer. The difficulty in combating magic arises from the fact that fear can kill. Primitive peoples so feared magic that it did actually kill, and such results were sufficient to substantiate this erroneous belief. In case of failure there was always some plausible explanation; the cure for defective magic was more magic.
5. Magical Charms
(971.4) 88:5.2 Magical charms were concocted from a great variety of things: human flesh, tiger claws, crocodile teeth, poison plant seeds, snake venom, and human hair. The bones of the dead were very magical. Even the dust from footprints could be used in magic. The ancients were great believers in love charms. Blood and other forms of bodily secretions were able to insure the magic influence of love.
(971.5) 88:5.3 Images were supposed to be effective in magic. Effigies were made, and when treated ill or well, the same effects were believed to rest upon the real person. When making purchases, superstitious persons would chew a bit of hard wood in order to soften the heart of the seller.
(971.6) 88:5.4 The milk of a black cow was highly magical; so also were black cats. The staff or wand was magical, along with drums, bells, and knots. All ancient objects were magical charms. The practices of a new or higher civilization were looked upon with disfavor because of their supposedly evil magical nature. Writing, printing, and pictures were long so regarded.
(971.7) 88:5.5 Primitive man believed that names must be treated with respect, especially names of the gods. The name was regarded as an entity, an influence distinct from the physical personality; it was esteemed equally with the soul and the shadow. Names were pawned for loans; a man could not use his name until it had been redeemed by payment of the loan. Nowadays one signs his name to a note. An individual’s name soon became important in magic. The savage had two names; the important one was regarded as too sacred to use on ordinary occasions, hence the second or everyday name — a nickname. He never told his real name to strangers. Any experience of an unusual nature caused him to change his name; sometimes it was in an effort to cure disease or to stop bad luck. The savage could get a new name by buying it from the tribal chief; men still invest in titles and degrees. But among the most primitive tribes, such as the African Bushmen, individual names do not exist.
6. The Practice of Magic
(972.2) 88:6.2 There was both a public and a private phase to magic. That performed by the medicine man, shaman, or priest was supposed to be for the good of the whole tribe. Witches, sorcerers, and wizards dispensed private magic, personal and selfish magic which was employed as a coercive method of bringing evil on one’s enemies. The concept of dual spiritism, good and bad spirits, gave rise to the later beliefs in white and black magic. And as religion evolved, magic was the term applied to spirit operations outside one’s own cult, and it also referred to older ghost beliefs.
(972.3) 88:6.3 Word combinations, the ritual of chants and incantations, were highly magical. Some early incantations finally evolved into prayers. Presently, imitative magic was practiced; prayers were acted out; magical dances were nothing but dramatic prayers. Prayer gradually displaced magic as the associate of sacrifice.
(972.4) 88:6.4 Gesture, being older than speech, was the more holy and magical, and mimicry was believed to have strong magical power. The red men often staged a buffalo dance in which one of their number would play the part of a buffalo and, in being caught, would insure the success of the impending hunt. The sex festivities of May Day were simply imitative magic, a suggestive appeal to the sex passions of the plant world. The doll was first employed as a magic talisman by the barren wife.
(972.5) 88:6.5 Magic was the branch off the evolutionary religious tree which eventually bore the fruit of a scientific age. Belief in astrology led to the development of astronomy; belief in a philosopher’s stone led to the mastery of metals, while belief in magic numbers founded the science of mathematics.
(972.6) 88:6.6 But a world so filled with charms did much to destroy all personal ambition and initiative. The fruits of extra labor or of diligence were looked upon as magical. If a man had more grain in his field than his neighbor, he might be haled before the chief and charged with enticing this extra grain from the indolent neighbor’s field. Indeed, in the days of barbarism it was dangerous to know very much; there was always the chance of being executed as a black artist.
(972.7) 88:6.7 Gradually science is removing the gambling element from life. But if modern methods of education should fail, there would be an almost immediate reversion to the primitive beliefs in magic. These superstitions still linger in the minds of many so-called civilized people. Language contains many fossils which testify that the race has long been steeped in magical superstition, such words as spellbound, ill-starred, possessions, inspiration, spirit away, ingenuity, entrancing, thunderstruck, and astonished. And intelligent human beings still believe in good luck, the evil eye, and astrology.*
(973.1) 88:6.8 Ancient magic was the cocoon of modern science, indispensable in its time but now no longer useful. And so the phantasms of ignorant superstition agitated the primitive minds of men until the concepts of science could be born. Today, Urantia is in the twilight zone of this intellectual evolution. One half the world is grasping eagerly for the light of truth and the facts of scientific discovery, while the other half languishes in the arms of ancient superstition and but thinly disguised magic.
(973.2) 88:6.9 [Presented by a Brilliant Evening Star of Nebadon.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 89
Sin, Sacrifice, and Atonement
(974.2) 89:0.2 The savage was early possessed with the notion that spirits derive supreme satisfaction from the sight of human misery, suffering, and humiliation. At first, man was only concerned with sins of commission, but later he became exercised over sins of omission. And the whole subsequent sacrificial system grew up around these two ideas. This new ritual had to do with the observance of the propitiation ceremonies of sacrifice. Primitive man believed that something special must be done to win the favor of the gods; only advanced civilization recognizes a consistently even-tempered and benevolent God. Propitiation was insurance against immediate ill luck rather than investment in future bliss. And the rituals of avoidance, exorcism, coercion, and propitiation all merge into one another.
1. The Taboo
(974.4) 89:1.2 The respect which these prohibitions commanded in the mind of the savage exactly equaled his fear of the powers who were supposed to enforce them. Taboos first arose because of chance experience with ill luck; later they were proposed by chiefs and shamans — fetish men who were thought to be directed by a spirit ghost, even by a god. The fear of spirit retribution is so great in the mind of a primitive that he sometimes dies of fright when he has violated a taboo, and this dramatic episode enormously strengthens the hold of the taboo on the minds of the survivors.
(974.5) 89:1.3 Among the earliest prohibitions were restrictions on the appropriation of women and other property. As religion began to play a larger part in the evolution of the taboo, the article resting under ban was regarded as unclean, subsequently as unholy. The records of the Hebrews are full of the mention of things clean and unclean, holy and unholy, but their beliefs along these lines were far less cumbersome and extensive than were those of many other peoples.
(975.1) 89:1.4 The seven commandments of Dalamatia and Eden, as well as the ten injunctions of the Hebrews, were definite taboos, all expressed in the same negative form as were the most ancient prohibitions. But these newer codes were truly emancipating in that they took the place of thousands of pre-existent taboos. And more than this, these later commandments definitely promised something in return for obedience.
(975.2) 89:1.5 The early food taboos originated in fetishism and totemism. The swine was sacred to the Phoenicians, the cow to the Hindus. The Egyptian taboo on pork has been perpetuated by the Hebraic and Islamic faiths. A variant of the food taboo was the belief that a pregnant woman could think so much about a certain food that the child, when born, would be the echo of that food. Such viands would be taboo to the child.
(975.3) 89:1.6 Methods of eating soon became taboo, and so originated ancient and modern table etiquette. Caste systems and social levels are vestigial remnants of olden prohibitions. The taboos were highly effective in organizing society, but they were terribly burdensome; the negative-ban system not only maintained useful and constructive regulations but also obsolete, outworn, and useless taboos.
(975.4) 89:1.7 There would, however, be no civilized society to sit in criticism upon primitive man except for these far-flung and multifarious taboos, and the taboo would never have endured but for the upholding sanctions of primitive religion. Many of the essential factors in man’s evolution have been highly expensive, have cost vast treasure in effort, sacrifice, and self-denial, but these achievements of self-control were the real rungs on which man climbed civilization’s ascending ladder.
2. The Concept of Sin
(975.6) 89:2.2 As the savage mind evolved to that point where it envisaged both good and bad spirits, and when the taboo received the solemn sanction of evolving religion, the stage was all set for the appearance of the new conception of sin. The idea of sin was universally established in the world before revealed religion ever made its entry. It was only by the concept of sin that natural death became logical to the primitive mind. Sin was the transgression of taboo, and death was the penalty of sin.
(975.7) 89:2.3 Sin was ritual, not rational; an act, not a thought. And this entire concept of sin was fostered by the lingering traditions of Dilmun and the days of a little paradise on earth. The tradition of Adam and the Garden of Eden also lent substance to the dream of a onetime “golden age” of the dawn of the races. And all this confirmed the ideas later expressed in the belief that man had his origin in a special creation, that he started his career in perfection, and that transgression of the taboos — sin — brought him down to his later sorry plight.
(976.1) 89:2.4 The habitual violation of a taboo became a vice; primitive law made vice a crime; religion made it a sin. Among the early tribes the violation of a taboo was a combined crime and sin. Community calamity was always regarded as punishment for tribal sin. To those who believed that prosperity and righteousness went together, the apparent prosperity of the wicked occasioned so much worry that it was necessary to invent hells for the punishment of taboo violators; the numbers of these places of future punishment have varied from one to five.
(976.2) 89:2.5 The idea of confession and forgiveness early appeared in primitive religion. Men would ask forgiveness at a public meeting for sins they intended to commit the following week. Confession was merely a rite of remission, also a public notification of defilement, a ritual of crying “unclean, unclean!” Then followed all the ritualistic schemes of purification. All ancient peoples practiced these meaningless ceremonies. Many apparently hygienic customs of the early tribes were largely ceremonial.
3. Renunciation and Humiliation
(976.4) 89:3.2 Just about the time barbarian man was recovering from the wasteful practice of burning and burying property with the dead, just as the economic structure of the races was beginning to take shape, this new religious doctrine of renunciation appeared, and tens of thousands of earnest souls began to court poverty. Property was regarded as a spiritual handicap. These notions of the spiritual dangers of material possession were widespreadly entertained in the times of Philo and Paul, and they have markedly influenced European philosophy ever since.
(976.5) 89:3.3 Poverty was just a part of the ritual of the mortification of the flesh which, unfortunately, became incorporated into the writings and teachings of many religions, notably Christianity. Penance is the negative form of this ofttimes foolish ritual of renunciation. But all this taught the savage self-control, and that was a worth-while advancement in social evolution. Self-denial and self-control were two of the greatest social gains from early evolutionary religion. Self-control gave man a new philosophy of life; it taught him the art of augmenting life’s fraction by lowering the denominator of personal demands instead of always attempting to increase the numerator of selfish gratification.
(976.6) 89:3.4 These olden ideas of self-discipline embraced flogging and all sorts of physical torture. The priests of the mother cult were especially active in teaching the virtue of physical suffering, setting the example by submitting themselves to castration. The Hebrews, Hindus, and Buddhists were earnest devotees of this doctrine of physical humiliation.
(976.7) 89:3.5 All through the olden times men sought in these ways for extra credits on the self-denial ledgers of their gods. It was once customary, when under some emotional stress, to make vows of self-denial and self-torture. In time these vows assumed the form of contracts with the gods and, in that sense, represented true evolutionary progress in that the gods were supposed to do something definite in return for this self-torture and mortification of the flesh. Vows were both negative and positive. Pledges of this harmful and extreme nature are best observed today among certain groups in India.
(977.1) 89:3.6 It was only natural that the cult of renunciation and humiliation should have paid attention to sexual gratification. The continence cult originated as a ritual among soldiers prior to engaging in battle; in later days it became the practice of “saints.” This cult tolerated marriage only as an evil lesser than fornication. Many of the world’s great religions have been adversely influenced by this ancient cult, but none more markedly than Christianity. The Apostle Paul was a devotee of this cult, and his personal views are reflected in the teachings which he fastened onto Christian theology: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman.” “I would that all men were even as I myself.” “I say, therefore, to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them to abide even as I.” Paul well knew that such teachings were not a part of Jesus’ gospel, and his acknowledgment of this is illustrated by his statement, “I speak this by permission and not by commandment.” But this cult led Paul to look down upon women. And the pity of it all is that his personal opinions have long influenced the teachings of a great world religion. If the advice of the tentmaker-teacher were to be literally and universally obeyed, then would the human race come to a sudden and inglorious end. Furthermore, the involvement of a religion with the ancient continence cult leads directly to a war against marriage and the home, society’s veritable foundation and the basic institution of human progress. And it is not to be wondered at that all such beliefs fostered the formation of celibate priesthoods in the many religions of various peoples.
(977.2) 89:3.7 Someday man should learn how to enjoy liberty without license, nourishment without gluttony, and pleasure without debauchery. Self-control is a better human policy of behavior regulation than is extreme self-denial. Nor did Jesus ever teach these unreasonable views to his followers.
4. Origins of Sacrifice
(977.4) 89:4.2 Early in the evolution of religion there existed two conceptions of the sacrifice: the idea of the gift sacrifice, which connoted the attitude of thanksgiving, and the debt sacrifice, which embraced the idea of redemption. Later there developed the notion of substitution.
(977.5) 89:4.3 Man still later conceived that his sacrifice of whatever nature might function as a message bearer to the gods; it might be as a sweet savor in the nostrils of deity. This brought incense and other aesthetic features of sacrificial rituals which developed into sacrificial feasting, in time becoming increasingly elaborate and ornate.
(978.1) 89:4.4 As religion evolved, the sacrificial rites of conciliation and propitiation replaced the older methods of avoidance, placation, and exorcism.
(978.2) 89:4.5 The earliest idea of the sacrifice was that of a neutrality assessment levied by ancestral spirits; only later did the idea of atonement develop. As man got away from the notion of the evolutionary origin of the race, as the traditions of the days of the Planetary Prince and the sojourn of Adam filtered down through time, the concept of sin and of original sin became widespread, so that sacrifice for accidental and personal sin evolved into the doctrine of sacrifice for the atonement of racial sin. The atonement of the sacrifice was a blanket insurance device which covered even the resentment and jealousy of an unknown god.
(978.3) 89:4.6 Surrounded by so many sensitive spirits and grasping gods, primitive man was face to face with such a host of creditor deities that it required all the priests, ritual, and sacrifices throughout an entire lifetime to get him out of spiritual debt. The doctrine of original sin, or racial guilt, started every person out in serious debt to the spirit powers.
(978.4) 89:4.7 Gifts and bribes are given to men; but when tendered to the gods, they are described as being dedicated, made sacred, or are called sacrifices. Renunciation was the negative form of propitiation; sacrifice became the positive form. The act of propitiation included praise, glorification, flattery, and even entertainment. And it is the remnants of these positive practices of the olden propitiation cult that constitute the modern forms of divine worship. Present-day forms of worship are simply the ritualization of these ancient sacrificial techniques of positive propitiation.
(978.5) 89:4.8 Animal sacrifice meant much more to primitive man than it could ever mean to modern races. These barbarians regarded the animals as their actual and near kin. As time passed, man became shrewd in his sacrificing, ceasing to offer up his work animals. At first he sacrificed the best of everything, including his domesticated animals.
(978.6) 89:4.9 It was no empty boast that a certain Egyptian ruler made when he stated that he had sacrificed: 113,433 slaves, 493,386 head of cattle, 88 boats, 2,756 golden images, 331,702 jars of honey and oil, 228,380 jars of wine, 680,714 geese, 6,744,428 loaves of bread, and 5,740,352 sacks of corn. And in order to do this he must needs have sorely taxed his toiling subjects.*
(978.7) 89:4.10 Sheer necessity eventually drove these semisavages to eat the material part of their sacrifices, the gods having enjoyed the soul thereof. And this custom found justification under the pretense of the ancient sacred meal, a communion service according to modern usage.
5. Sacrifices and Cannibalism
(979.1) 89:5.2 Early man was a cannibal; he enjoyed human flesh, and therefore he offered it as a food gift to the spirits and his primitive gods. Since ghost spirits were merely modified men, and since food was man’s greatest need, then food must likewise be a spirit’s greatest need.
(979.2) 89:5.3 Cannibalism was once well-nigh universal among the evolving races. The Sangiks were all cannibalistic, but originally the Andonites were not, nor were the Nodites and Adamites; neither were the Andites until after they had become grossly admixed with the evolutionary races.
(979.3) 89:5.4 The taste for human flesh grows. Having been started through hunger, friendship, revenge, or religious ritual, the eating of human flesh goes on to habitual cannibalism. Man-eating has arisen through food scarcity, though this has seldom been the underlying reason. The Eskimos and early Andonites, however, seldom were cannibalistic except in times of famine. The red men, especially in Central America, were cannibals. It was once a general practice for primitive mothers to kill and eat their own children in order to renew the strength lost in childbearing, and in Queensland the first child is still frequently thus killed and devoured. In recent times cannibalism has been deliberately resorted to by many African tribes as a war measure, a sort of frightfulness with which to terrorize their neighbors.
(979.4) 89:5.5 Some cannibalism resulted from the degeneration of once superior stocks, but it was mostly prevalent among the evolutionary races. Man-eating came on at a time when men experienced intense and bitter emotions regarding their enemies. Eating human flesh became part of a solemn ceremony of revenge; it was believed that an enemy’s ghost could, in this way, be destroyed or fused with that of the eater. It was once a widespread belief that wizards attained their powers by eating human flesh.
(979.5) 89:5.6 Certain groups of man-eaters would consume only members of their own tribes, a pseudospiritual inbreeding which was supposed to accentuate tribal solidarity. But they also ate enemies for revenge with the idea of appropriating their strength. It was considered an honor to the soul of a friend or fellow tribesman if his body were eaten, while it was no more than just punishment to an enemy thus to devour him. The savage mind made no pretensions to being consistent.
(979.6) 89:5.7 Among some tribes aged parents would seek to be eaten by their children; among others it was customary to refrain from eating near relations; their bodies were sold or exchanged for those of strangers. There was considerable commerce in women and children who had been fattened for slaughter. When disease or war failed to control population, the surplus was unceremoniously eaten.
(979.7) 89:5.8 Cannibalism has been gradually disappearing because of the following influences:
(979.8) 89:5.9 1. It sometimes became a communal ceremony, the assumption of collective responsibility for inflicting the death penalty upon a fellow tribesman. The blood guilt ceases to be a crime when participated in by all, by society. The last of cannibalism in Asia was this eating of executed criminals.(980.5) 89:5.16 Finally animal substitutes came into general use for sacrificial purposes, and even among the more backward tribes dog-eating greatly reduced man-eating. The dog was the first domesticated animal and was held in high esteem both as such and as food.
(979.9) 89:5.10 2. It very early became a religious ritual, but the growth of ghost fear did not always operate to reduce man-eating.
(979.10) 89:5.11 3. Eventually it progressed to the point where only certain parts or organs of the body were eaten, those parts supposed to contain the soul or portions of the spirit. Blood drinking became common, and it was customary to mix the “edible” parts of the body with medicines.
(980.1) 89:5.12 4. It became limited to men; women were forbidden to eat human flesh.
(980.2) 89:5.13 5. It was next limited to the chiefs, priests, and shamans.
(980.3) 89:5.14 6. Then it became taboo among the higher tribes. The taboo on man-eating originated in Dalamatia and slowly spread over the world. The Nodites encouraged cremation as a means of combating cannibalism since it was once a common practice to dig up buried bodies and eat them.
(980.4) 89:5.15 7. Human sacrifice sounded the death knell of cannibalism. Human flesh having become the food of superior men, the chiefs, it was eventually reserved for the still more superior spirits; and thus the offering of human sacrifices effectively put a stop to cannibalism, except among the lowest tribes. When human sacrifice was fully established, man-eating became taboo; human flesh was food only for the gods; man could eat only a small ceremonial bit, a sacrament.
6. Evolution of Human Sacrifice
(980.7) 89:6.2 Human sacrifice has been virtually universal; it persisted in the religious customs of the Chinese, Hindus, Egyptians, Hebrews, Mesopotamians, Greeks, Romans, and many other peoples, even on to recent times among the backward African and Australian tribes. The later American Indians had a civilization emerging from cannibalism and, therefore, steeped in human sacrifice, especially in Central and South America. The Chaldeans were among the first to abandon the sacrificing of humans for ordinary occasions, substituting therefor animals. About two thousand years ago a tenderhearted Japanese emperor introduced clay images to take the place of human sacrifices, but it was less than a thousand years ago that these sacrifices died out in northern Europe. Among certain backward tribes, human sacrifice is still carried on by volunteers, a sort of religious or ritual suicide. A shaman once ordered the sacrifice of a much respected old man of a certain tribe. The people revolted; they refused to obey. Whereupon the old man had his own son dispatch him; the ancients really believed in this custom.
(980.8) 89:6.3 There is no more tragic and pathetic experience on record, illustrative of the heart-tearing contentions between ancient and time-honored religious customs and the contrary demands of advancing civilization, than the Hebrew narrative of Jephthah and his only daughter. As was common custom, this well-meaning man had made a foolish vow, had bargained with the “god of battles,” agreeing to pay a certain price for victory over his enemies. And this price was to make a sacrifice of that which first came out of his house to meet him when he returned to his home. Jephthah thought that one of his trusty slaves would thus be on hand to greet him, but it turned out that his daughter and only child came out to welcome him home. And so, even at that late date and among a supposedly civilized people, this beautiful maiden, after two months to mourn her fate, was actually offered as a human sacrifice by her father, and with the approval of his fellow tribesmen. And all this was done in the face of Moses’ stringent rulings against the offering of human sacrifice. But men and women are addicted to making foolish and needless vows, and the men of old held all such pledges to be highly sacred.
(981.1) 89:6.4 In olden times, when a new building of any importance was started, it was customary to slay a human being as a “foundation sacrifice.” This provided a ghost spirit to watch over and protect the structure. When the Chinese made ready to cast a bell, custom decreed the sacrifice of at least one maiden for the purpose of improving the tone of the bell; the girl chosen was thrown alive into the molten metal.
(981.2) 89:6.5 It was long the practice of many groups to build slaves alive into important walls. In later times the northern European tribes substituted the walling in of the shadow of a passerby for this custom of entombing living persons in the walls of new buildings. The Chinese buried in a wall those workmen who died while constructing it.
(981.3) 89:6.6 A petty king in Palestine, in building the walls of Jericho, “laid the foundation thereof in Abiram, his first-born, and set up the gates thereof in his youngest son, Segub.” At that late date, not only did this father put two of his sons alive in the foundation holes of the city’s gates, but his action is also recorded as being “according to the word of the Lord.” Moses had forbidden these foundation sacrifices, but the Israelites reverted to them soon after his death. The twentieth-century ceremony of depositing trinkets and keepsakes in the cornerstone of a new building is reminiscent of the primitive foundation sacrifices.
(981.4) 89:6.7 It was long the custom of many peoples to dedicate the first fruits to the spirits. And these observances, now more or less symbolic, are all survivals of the early ceremonies involving human sacrifice. The idea of offering the first-born as a sacrifice was widespread among the ancients, especially among the Phoenicians, who were the last to give it up. It used to be said upon sacrificing, “life for life.” Now you say at death, “dust to dust.”
(981.5) 89:6.8 The spectacle of Abraham constrained to sacrifice his son Isaac, while shocking to civilized susceptibilities, was not a new or strange idea to the men of those days. It was long a prevalent practice for fathers, at times of great emotional stress, to sacrifice their first-born sons. Many peoples have a tradition analogous to this story, for there once existed a world-wide and profound belief that it was necessary to offer a human sacrifice when anything extraordinary or unusual happened.
7. Modifications of Human Sacrifice
(982.1) 89:7.2 An outgrowth of the passing child sacrifice was the custom of smearing blood on the house doorposts for the protection of the first-born. This was often done in connection with one of the sacred feasts of the year, and this ceremony once obtained over most of the world from Mexico to Egypt.
(982.2) 89:7.3 Even after most groups had ceased the ritual killing of children, it was the custom to put an infant away by itself, off in the wilderness or in a little boat on the water. If the child survived, it was thought that the gods had intervened to preserve him, as in the traditions of Sargon, Moses, Cyrus, and Romulus. Then came the practice of dedicating the first-born sons as sacred or sacrificial, allowing them to grow up and then exiling them in lieu of death; this was the origin of colonization. The Romans adhered to this custom in their scheme of colonization.
(982.3) 89:7.4 Many of the peculiar associations of sex laxity with primitive worship had their origin in connection with human sacrifice. In olden times, if a woman met head-hunters, she could redeem her life by sexual surrender. Later, a maiden consecrated to the gods as a sacrifice might elect to redeem her life by dedicating her body for life to the sacred sex service of the temple; in this way she could earn her redemption money. The ancients regarded it as highly elevating to have sex relations with a woman thus engaged in ransoming her life. It was a religious ceremony to consort with these sacred maidens, and in addition, this whole ritual afforded an acceptable excuse for commonplace sexual gratification. This was a subtle species of self-deception which both the maidens and their consorts delighted to practice upon themselves. The mores always drag behind in the evolutionary advance of civilization, thus providing sanction for the earlier and more savagelike sex practices of the evolving races.
(982.4) 89:7.5 Temple harlotry eventually spread throughout southern Europe and Asia. The money earned by the temple prostitutes was held sacred among all peoples — a high gift to present to the gods. The highest types of women thronged the temple sex marts and devoted their earnings to all kinds of sacred services and works of public good. Many of the better classes of women collected their dowries by temporary sex service in the temples, and most men preferred to have such women for wives.
8. Redemption and Covenants
(982.6) 89:8.2 Men eventually conceived the idea that the offering of some part of the body could take the place of the older and complete human sacrifice. Physical mutilation was also considered to be an acceptable substitute. Hair, nails, blood, and even fingers and toes were sacrificed. The later and well-nigh universal ancient rite of circumcision was an outgrowth of the cult of partial sacrifice; it was purely sacrificial, no thought of hygiene being attached thereto. Men were circumcised; women had their ears pierced.
(983.1) 89:8.3 Subsequently it became the custom to bind fingers together instead of cutting them off. Shaving the head and cutting the hair were likewise forms of religious devotion. The making of eunuchs was at first a modification of the idea of human sacrifice. Nose and lip piercing is still practiced in Africa, and tattooing is an artistic evolution of the earlier crude scarring of the body.
(983.2) 89:8.4 The custom of sacrifice eventually became associated, as a result of advancing teachings, with the idea of the covenant. At last, the gods were conceived of as entering into real agreements with man; and this was a major step in the stabilization of religion. Law, a covenant, takes the place of luck, fear, and superstition.
(983.3) 89:8.5 Man could never even dream of entering into a contract with Deity until his concept of God had advanced to the level whereon the universe controllers were envisioned as dependable. And man’s early idea of God was so anthropomorphic that he was unable to conceive of a dependable Deity until he himself became relatively dependable, moral, and ethical.
(983.4) 89:8.6 But the idea of making a covenant with the gods did finally arrive. Evolutionary man eventually acquired such moral dignity that he dared to bargain with his gods. And so the business of offering sacrifices gradually developed into the game of man’s philosophic bargaining with God. And all this represented a new device for insuring against bad luck or, rather, an enhanced technique for the more definite purchase of prosperity. Do not entertain the mistaken idea that these early sacrifices were a free gift to the gods, a spontaneous offering of gratitude or thanksgiving; they were not expressions of true worship.
(983.5) 89:8.7 Primitive forms of prayer were nothing more nor less than bargaining with the spirits, an argument with the gods. It was a kind of bartering in which pleading and persuasion were substituted for something more tangible and costly. The developing commerce of the races had inculcated the spirit of trade and had developed the shrewdness of barter; and now these traits began to appear in man’s worship methods. And as some men were better traders than others, so some were regarded as better prayers than others. The prayer of a just man was held in high esteem. A just man was one who had paid all accounts to the spirits, had fully discharged every ritual obligation to the gods.
(983.6) 89:8.8 Early prayer was hardly worship; it was a bargaining petition for health, wealth, and life. And in many respects prayers have not much changed with the passing of the ages. They are still read out of books, recited formally, and written out for emplacement on wheels and for hanging on trees, where the blowing of the winds will save man the trouble of expending his own breath.
9. Sacrifices and Sacraments
(984.1) 89:9.2 In connection with the Mother of God cult, in Mexico and elsewhere, a sacrament of cakes and wine was eventually utilized in lieu of the flesh and blood of the older human sacrifices. The Hebrews long practiced this ritual as a part of their Passover ceremonies, and it was from this ceremonial that the later Christian version of the sacrament took its origin.
(984.2) 89:9.3 The ancient social brotherhoods were based on the rite of blood drinking; the early Jewish fraternity was a sacrificial blood affair. Paul started out to build a new Christian cult on “the blood of the everlasting covenant.” And while he may have unnecessarily encumbered Christianity with teachings about blood and sacrifice, he did once and for all make an end of the doctrines of redemption through human or animal sacrifices. His theologic compromises indicate that even revelation must submit to the graduated control of evolution. According to Paul, Christ became the last and all-sufficient human sacrifice; the divine Judge is now fully and forever satisfied.
(984.3) 89:9.4 And so, after long ages the cult of the sacrifice has evolved into the cult of the sacrament. Thus are the sacraments of modern religions the legitimate successors of those shocking early ceremonies of human sacrifice and the still earlier cannibalistic rituals. Many still depend upon blood for salvation, but it has at least become figurative, symbolic, and mystic.
10. Forgiveness of Sin
(984.5) 89:10.2 Sin must be redefined as deliberate disloyalty to Deity. There are degrees of disloyalty: the partial loyalty of indecision; the divided loyalty of confliction; the dying loyalty of indifference; and the death of loyalty exhibited in devotion to godless ideals.
(984.6) 89:10.3 The sense or feeling of guilt is the consciousness of the violation of the mores; it is not necessarily sin. There is no real sin in the absence of conscious disloyalty to Deity.
(984.7) 89:10.4 The possibility of the recognition of the sense of guilt is a badge of transcendent distinction for mankind. It does not mark man as mean but rather sets him apart as a creature of potential greatness and ever-ascending glory. Such a sense of unworthiness is the initial stimulus that should lead quickly and surely to those faith conquests which translate the mortal mind to the superb levels of moral nobility, cosmic insight, and spiritual living; thus are all the meanings of human existence changed from the temporal to the eternal, and all values are elevated from the human to the divine.
(984.8) 89:10.5 The confession of sin is a manful repudiation of disloyalty, but it in no wise mitigates the time-space consequences of such disloyalty. But confession — sincere recognition of the nature of sin — is essential to religious growth and spiritual progress.
(985.1) 89:10.6 The forgiveness of sin by Deity is the renewal of loyalty relations following a period of the human consciousness of the lapse of such relations as the consequence of conscious rebellion. The forgiveness does not have to be sought, only received as the consciousness of re-establishment of loyalty relations between the creature and the Creator. And all the loyal sons of God are happy, service-loving, and ever-progressive in the Paradise ascent.
(985.2) 89:10.7 [Presented by a Brilliant Evening Star of Nebadon.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 90
Shamanism — Medicine Men and Priests
(986.2) 90:0.2 In the advancing concepts of primitive man the spirit world was eventually regarded as being unresponsive to the ordinary mortal. Only the exceptional among humans could catch the ear of the gods; only the extraordinary man or woman would be heard by the spirits. Religion thus enters upon a new phase, a stage wherein it gradually becomes secondhanded; always does a medicine man, a shaman, or a priest intervene between the religionist and the object of worship. And today most Urantia systems of organized religious belief are passing through this level of evolutionary development.
(986.3) 90:0.3 Evolutionary religion is born of a simple and all-powerful fear, the fear which surges through the human mind when confronted with the unknown, the inexplicable, and the incomprehensible. Religion eventually achieves the profoundly simple realization of an all-powerful love, the love which sweeps irresistibly through the human soul when awakened to the conception of the limitless affection of the Universal Father for the sons of the universe. But in between the beginning and the consummation of religious evolution, there intervene the long ages of the shamans, who presume to stand between man and God as intermediaries, interpreters, and intercessors.
1. The First Shamans — The Medicine Men
(986.5) 90:1.2 Since in olden times anything abnormal was ascribed to spirit possession, any striking mental or physical abnormality constituted qualification for being a medicine man. Many of these men were epileptic, many of the women hysteric, and these two types accounted for a good deal of ancient inspiration as well as spirit and devil possession. Quite a few of these earliest of priests were of a class which has since been denominated paranoiac.
(987.1) 90:1.3 While they may have practiced deception in minor matters, the great majority of the shamans believed in the fact of their spirit possession. Women who were able to throw themselves into a trance or a cataleptic fit became powerful shamanesses; later, such women became prophets and spirit mediums. Their cataleptic trances usually involved alleged communications with the ghosts of the dead. Many female shamans were also professional dancers.
(987.2) 90:1.4 But not all shamans were self-deceived; many were shrewd and able tricksters. As the profession developed, a novice was required to serve an apprenticeship of ten years of hardship and self-denial to qualify as a medicine man. The shamans developed a professional mode of dress and affected a mysterious conduct. They frequently employed drugs to induce certain physical states which would impress and mystify the tribesmen. Sleight-of-hand feats were regarded as supernatural by the common folk, and ventriloquism was first used by shrewd priests. Many of the olden shamans unwittingly stumbled onto hypnotism; others induced autohypnosis by prolonged staring at their navels.
(987.3) 90:1.5 While many resorted to these tricks and deceptions, their reputation as a class, after all, stood on apparent achievement. When a shaman failed in his undertakings, if he could not advance a plausible alibi, he was either demoted or killed. Thus the honest shamans early perished; only the shrewd actors survived.
(987.4) 90:1.6 It was shamanism that took the exclusive direction of tribal affairs out of the hands of the old and the strong and lodged it in the hands of the shrewd, the clever, and the farsighted.
2. Shamanistic Practices
(987.6) 90:2.2 Ancient black art, both religious and secular, was called white art when practiced by either priests, seers, shamans, or medicine men. The practitioners of the black art were called sorcerers, magicians, wizards, witches, enchanters, necromancers, conjurers, and soothsayers. As time passed, all such purported contact with the supernatural was classified either as witchcraft or shamancraft.
(987.7) 90:2.3 Witchcraft embraced the magic performed by earlier, irregular, and unrecognized spirits; shamancraft had to do with miracles performed by regular spirits and recognized gods of the tribe. In later times the witch became associated with the devil, and thus was the stage set for the many comparatively recent exhibitions of religious intolerance. Witchcraft was a religion with many primitive tribes.
(987.8) 90:2.4 The shamans were great believers in the mission of chance as revelatory of the will of the spirits; they frequently cast lots to arrive at decisions. Modern survivals of this proclivity for casting lots are illustrated, not only in the many games of chance, but also in the well-known “counting-out” rhymes. Once, the person counted out must die; now, he is only it in some childish game. That which was serious business to primitive man has survived as a diversion of the modern child.
(988.1) 90:2.5 The medicine men put great trust in signs and omens, such as, “When you hear the sound of a rustling in the tops of the mulberry trees, then shall you bestir yourself.” Very early in the history of the race the shamans turned their attention to the stars. Primitive astrology was a world-wide belief and practice; dream interpreting also became widespread. All this was soon followed by the appearance of those temperamental shamanesses who professed to be able to communicate with the spirits of the dead.
(988.2) 90:2.6 Though of ancient origin, the rain makers, or weather shamans, have persisted right on down through the ages. A severe drought meant death to the early agriculturists; weather control was the object of much ancient magic. Civilized man still makes the weather the common topic of conversation. The olden peoples all believed in the power of the shaman as a rain maker, but it was customary to kill him when he failed, unless he could offer a plausible excuse to account for the failure.
(988.3) 90:2.7 Again and again did the Caesars banish the astrologers, but they invariably returned because of the popular belief in their powers. They could not be driven out, and even in the sixteenth century after Christ the directors of Occidental church and state were the patrons of astrology. Thousands of supposedly intelligent people still believe that one may be born under the domination of a lucky or an unlucky star; that the juxtaposition of the heavenly bodies determines the outcome of various terrestrial adventures. Fortunetellers are still patronized by the credulous.
(988.4) 90:2.8 The Greeks believed in the efficacy of oracular advice, the Chinese used magic as protection against demons, shamanism flourished in India, and it still openly persists in central Asia. It is an only recently abandoned practice throughout much of the world.
(988.5) 90:2.9 Ever and anon, true prophets and teachers arose to denounce and expose shamanism. Even the vanishing red man had such a prophet within the past hundred years, the Shawnee Tenskwatawa, who predicted the eclipse of the sun in 1806 and denounced the vices of the white man. Many true teachers have appeared among the various tribes and races all through the long ages of evolutionary history. And they will ever continue to appear to challenge the shamans or priests of any age who oppose general education and attempt to thwart scientific progress.*
(988.6) 90:2.10 In many ways and by devious methods the olden shamans established their reputations as voices of God and custodians of providence. They sprinkled the newborn with water and conferred names upon them; they circumcised the males. They presided over all burial ceremonies and made due announcement of the safe arrival of the dead in spiritland.
(988.7) 90:2.11 The shamanic priests and medicine men often became very wealthy through the accretion of their various fees which were ostensibly offerings to the spirits. Not infrequently a shaman would accumulate practically all the material wealth of his tribe. Upon the death of a wealthy man it was customary to divide his property equally with the shaman and some public enterprise or charity. This practice still obtains in some parts of Tibet, where one half the male population belongs to this class of nonproducers.
(989.1) 90:2.12 The shamans dressed well and usually had a number of wives; they were the original aristocracy, being exempt from all tribal restrictions. They were very often of low-grade mind and morals. They suppressed their rivals by denominating them witches or sorcerers and very frequently rose to such positions of influence and power that they were able to dominate the chiefs or kings.
(989.2) 90:2.13 Primitive man regarded the shaman as a necessary evil; he feared him but did not love him. Early man respected knowledge; he honored and rewarded wisdom. The shaman was mostly fraud, but the veneration for shamanism well illustrates the premium put upon wisdom in the evolution of the race.
3. The Shamanic Theory of Disease and Death
(989.4) 90:3.2 Viewed in this light, much of the inexplicable and irrational in the ancient cults is understandable. The ceremonies of the cult were primitive man’s attempt to control the material world in which he found himself. And many of his efforts were directed to the end of prolonging life and insuring health. Since all diseases and death itself were originally regarded as spirit phenomena, it was inevitable that the shamans, while functioning as medicine men and priests, should also have labored as doctors and surgeons.
(989.5) 90:3.3 The primitive mind may be handicapped by lack of facts, but it is for all that logical. When thoughtful men observe disease and death, they set about to determine the causes of these visitations, and in accordance with their understanding, the shamans and the scientists have propounded the following theories of affliction:
(989.6) 90:3.4 1. Ghosts — direct spirit influences. The earliest hypothesis advanced in explanation of disease and death was that spirits caused disease by enticing the soul out of the body; if it failed to return, death ensued. The ancients so feared the malevolent action of disease-producing ghosts that ailing individuals would often be deserted without even food or water. Regardless of the erroneous basis for these beliefs, they did effectively isolate afflicted individuals and prevent the spread of contagious disease.(990.5) 90:3.10 Evolution unerringly achieves its end: It imbues man with that superstitious fear of the unknown and dread of the unseen which is the scaffolding for the God concept. And having witnessed the birth of an advanced comprehension of Deity, through the co-ordinate action of revelation, this same technique of evolution then unerringly sets in motion those forces of thought which will inexorably obliterate the scaffolding, which has served its purpose.
(989.7) 90:3.5 2. Violence — obvious causes. The causes for some accidents and deaths were so easy to identify that they were early removed from the category of ghost action. Fatalities and wounds attendant upon war, animal combat, and other readily identifiable agencies were considered as natural occurrences. But it was long believed that the spirits were still responsible for delayed healing or for the infection of wounds of even “natural” causation. If no observable natural agent could be discovered, the spirit ghosts were still held responsible for disease and death.
(990.1) 90:3.6 Today, in Africa and elsewhere may be found primitive peoples who kill someone every time a nonviolent death occurs. Their medicine men indicate the guilty parties. If a mother dies in childbirth, the child is immediately strangled — a life for a life.
(990.2) 90:3.7 3. Magic — the influence of enemies. Much sickness was thought to be caused by bewitchment, the action of the evil eye and the magic pointing bow. At one time it was really dangerous to point a finger at anyone; it is still regarded as ill-mannered to point. In cases of obscure disease and death the ancients would hold a formal inquest, dissect the body, and settle upon some finding as the cause of death; otherwise the death would be laid to witchcraft, thus necessitating the execution of the witch responsible therefor. These ancient coroner’s inquests saved many a supposed witch’s life. Among some it was believed that a tribesman could die as a result of his own witchcraft, in which event no one was accused.
(990.3) 90:3.8 4. Sin — punishment for taboo violation. In comparatively recent times it has been believed that sickness is a punishment for sin, personal or racial. Among peoples traversing this level of evolution the prevailing theory is that one cannot be afflicted unless one has violated a taboo. To regard sickness and suffering as “arrows of the Almighty within them” is typical of such beliefs. The Chinese and Mesopotamians long regarded disease as the result of the action of evil demons, although the Chaldeans also looked upon the stars as the cause of suffering. This theory of disease as a consequence of divine wrath is still prevalent among many reputedly civilized groups of Urantians.
(990.4) 90:3.9 5. Natural causation. Mankind has been very slow to learn the material secrets of the interrelationship of cause and effect in the physical domains of energy, matter, and life. The ancient Greeks, having preserved the traditions of Adamson’s teachings, were among the first to recognize that all disease is the result of natural causes. Slowly and certainly the unfolding of a scientific era is destroying man’s age-old theories of sickness and death. Fever was one of the first human ailments to be removed from the category of supernatural disorders, and progressively the era of science has broken the fetters of ignorance which so long imprisoned the human mind. An understanding of old age and contagion is gradually obliterating man’s fear of ghosts, spirits, and gods as the personal perpetrators of human misery and mortal suffering.
4. Medicine Under the Shamans
(991.1) 90:4.2 The faith required to get well under the foolish ministrations of one of these ancient shamans was, after all, not materially different from that which is required to experience healing at the hands of some of his later-day successors who engage in the nonscientific treatment of disease.
(991.2) 90:4.3 The more primitive tribes greatly feared the sick, and for long ages they were carefully avoided, shamefully neglected. It was a great advance in humanitarianism when the evolution of shamancraft produced priests and medicine men who consented to treat disease. Then it became customary for the entire clan to crowd into the sickroom to assist the shaman in howling the disease ghosts away. It was not uncommon for a woman to be the diagnosing shaman, while a man would administer treatment. The usual method of diagnosing disease was to examine the entrails of an animal.
(991.3) 90:4.4 Disease was treated by chanting, howling, laying on of hands, breathing on the patient, and many other techniques. In later times the resort to temple sleep, during which healing supposedly took place, became widespread. The medicine men eventually essayed actual surgery in connection with temple slumber; among the first operations was that of trephining the skull to allow a headache spirit to escape. The shamans learned to treat fractures and dislocations, to open boils and abscesses; the shamanesses became adept at midwifery.
(991.4) 90:4.5 It was a common method of treatment to rub something magical on an infected or blemished spot on the body, throw the charm away, and supposedly experience a cure. If anyone should chance to pick up the discarded charm, it was believed he would immediately acquire the infection or blemish. It was a long time before herbs and other real medicines were introduced. Massage was developed in connection with incantation, rubbing the spirit out of the body, and was preceded by efforts to rub medicine in, even as moderns attempt to rub liniments in. Cupping and sucking the affected parts, together with bloodletting, were thought to be of value in getting rid of a disease-producing spirit.
(991.5) 90:4.6 Since water was a potent fetish, it was utilized in the treatment of many ailments. For long it was believed that the spirit causing the sickness could be eliminated by sweating. Vapor baths were highly regarded; natural hot springs soon blossomed as primitive health resorts. Early man discovered that heat would relieve pain; he used sunlight, fresh animal organs, hot clay, and hot stones, and many of these methods are still employed. Rhythm was practiced in an effort to influence the spirits; the tom-toms were universal.
(991.6) 90:4.7 Among some people disease was thought to be caused by a wicked conspiracy between spirits and animals. This gave rise to the belief that there existed a beneficent plant remedy for every animal-caused disease. The red men were especially devoted to the plant theory of universal remedies; they always put a drop of blood in the root hole left when the plant was pulled up.
(991.7) 90:4.8 Fasting, dieting, and counterirritants were often used as remedial measures. Human secretions, being definitely magical, were highly regarded; blood and urine were thus among the earliest medicines and were soon augmented by roots and various salts. The shamans believed that disease spirits could be driven out of the body by foul-smelling and bad-tasting medicines. Purging very early became a routine treatment, and the values of raw cocoa and quinine were among the earliest pharmaceutical discoveries.
(992.1) 90:4.9 The Greeks were the first to evolve truly rational methods of treating the sick. Both the Greeks and the Egyptians received their medical knowledge from the Euphrates valley. Oil and wine was a very early medicine for treating wounds; castor oil and opium were used by the Sumerians. Many of these ancient and effective secret remedies lost their power when they became known; secrecy has always been essential to the successful practice of fraud and superstition. Only facts and truth court the full light of comprehension and rejoice in the illumination and enlightenment of scientific research.
5. Priests and Rituals
(992.3) 90:5.2 Ritual is the technique of sanctifying custom; ritual creates and perpetuates myths as well as contributing to the preservation of social and religious customs. Again, ritual itself has been fathered by myths. Rituals are often at first social, later becoming economic and finally acquiring the sanctity and dignity of religious ceremonial. Ritual may be personal or group in practice — or both — as illustrated by prayer, dancing, and drama.
(992.4) 90:5.3 Words become a part of ritual, such as the use of terms like amen and selah. The habit of swearing, profanity, represents a prostitution of former ritualistic repetition of holy names. The making of pilgrimages to sacred shrines is a very ancient ritual. The ritual next grew into elaborate ceremonies of purification, cleansing, and sanctification. The initiation ceremonies of the primitive tribal secret societies were in reality a crude religious rite. The worship technique of the olden mystery cults was just one long performance of accumulated religious ritual. Ritual finally developed into the modern types of social ceremonials and religious worship, services embracing prayer, song, responsive reading, and other individual and group spiritual devotions.
(992.5) 90:5.4 The priests evolved from shamans up through oracles, diviners, singers, dancers, weathermakers, guardians of religious relics, temple custodians, and foretellers of events, to the status of actual directors of religious worship. Eventually the office became hereditary; a continuous priestly caste arose.
(992.6) 90:5.5 As religion evolved, priests began to specialize according to their innate talents or special predilections. Some became singers, others prayers, and still others sacrificers; later came the orators — preachers. And when religion became institutionalized, these priests claimed to “hold the keys of heaven.”
(992.7) 90:5.6 The priests have always sought to impress and awe the common people by conducting the religious ritual in an ancient tongue and by sundry magical passes so to mystify the worshipers as to enhance their own piety and authority. The great danger in all this is that the ritual tends to become a substitute for religion.
(993.1) 90:5.7 The priesthoods have done much to delay scientific development and to hinder spiritual progress, but they have contributed to the stabilization of civilization and to the enhancement of certain kinds of culture. But many modern priests have ceased to function as directors of the ritual of the worship of God, having turned their attention to theology — the attempt to define God.
(993.2) 90:5.8 It is not denied that the priests have been a millstone about the neck of the races, but the true religious leaders have been invaluable in pointing the way to higher and better realities.
(993.3) 90:5.9 [Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.]
The Urantia Book
Paper 91
The Evolution of Prayer
(994.2) 91:0.2 The earliest prayer forms were not addressed to Deity. These expressions were much like what you would say to a friend as you entered upon some important undertaking, “Wish me luck.” Primitive man was enslaved to magic; luck, good and bad, entered into all the affairs of life. At first, these luck petitions were monologues — just a kind of thinking out loud by the magic server. Next, these believers in luck would enlist the support of their friends and families, and presently some form of ceremony would be performed which included the whole clan or tribe.
(994.3) 91:0.3 When the concepts of ghosts and spirits evolved, these petitions became superhuman in address, and with the consciousness of gods, such expressions attained to the levels of genuine prayer. As an illustration of this, among certain Australian tribes primitive religious prayers antedated their belief in spirits and superhuman personalities.
(994.4) 91:0.4 The Toda tribe of India now observes this practice of praying to no one in particular, just as did the early peoples before the times of religious consciousness. Only, among the Todas, this represents a regression of their degenerating religion to this primitive level. The present-day rituals of the dairymen priests of the Todas do not represent a religious ceremony since these impersonal prayers do not contribute anything to the conservation or enhancement of any social, moral, or spiritual values.
(994.5) 91:0.5 Prereligious praying was part of the mana practices of the Melanesians, the oudah beliefs of the African Pygmies, and the manitou superstitions of the North American Indians. The Baganda tribes of Africa have only recently emerged from the mana level of prayer. In this early evolutionary confusion men pray to gods — local and national — to fetishes, amulets, ghosts, rulers, and to ordinary people.
1. Primitive Prayer
(995.1) 91:1.2 Religion and its agencies, the chief of which is prayer, are allied only with those values which have general social recognition, group approval. Therefore, when primitive man attempted to gratify his baser emotions or to achieve unmitigated selfish ambitions, he was deprived of the consolation of religion and the assistance of prayer. If the individual sought to accomplish anything antisocial, he was obliged to seek the aid of nonreligious magic, resort to sorcerers, and thus be deprived of the assistance of prayer. Prayer, therefore, very early became a mighty promoter of social evolution, moral progress, and spiritual attainment.
(995.2) 91:1.3 But the primitive mind was neither logical nor consistent. Early men did not perceive that material things were not the province of prayer. These simple-minded souls reasoned that food, shelter, rain, game, and other material goods enhanced the social welfare, and therefore they began to pray for these physical blessings. While this constituted a perversion of prayer, it encouraged the effort to realize these material objectives by social and ethical actions. Such a prostitution of prayer, while debasing the spiritual values of a people, nevertheless directly elevated their economic, social, and ethical mores.
(995.3) 91:1.4 Prayer is only monologuous in the most primitive type of mind. It early becomes a dialogue and rapidly expands to the level of group worship. Prayer signifies that the premagical incantations of primitive religion have evolved to that level where the human mind recognizes the reality of beneficent powers or beings who are able to enhance social values and to augment moral ideals, and further, that these influences are superhuman and distinct from the ego of the self-conscious human and his fellow mortals. True prayer does not, therefore, appear until the agency of religious ministry is visualized as personal.
(995.4) 91:1.5 Prayer is little associated with animism, but such beliefs may exist alongside emerging religious sentiments. Many times, religion and animism have had entirely separate origins.
(995.5) 91:1.6 With those mortals who have not been delivered from the primitive bondage of fear, there is a real danger that all prayer may lead to a morbid sense of sin, unjustified convictions of guilt, real or fancied. But in modern times it is not likely that many will spend sufficient time at prayer to lead to this harmful brooding over their unworthiness or sinfulness. The dangers attendant upon the distortion and perversion of prayer consist in ignorance, superstition, crystallization, devitalization, materialism, and fanaticism.
2. Evolving Prayer
(995.7) 91:2.2 Both prayer and magic arose as a result of man’s adjustive reactions to Urantian environment. But aside from this generalized relationship, they have little in common. Prayer has always indicated positive action by the praying ego; it has been always psychic and sometimes spiritual. Magic has usually signified an attempt to manipulate reality without affecting the ego of the manipulator, the practitioner of magic. Despite their independent origins, magic and prayer often have been interrelated in their later stages of development. Magic has sometimes ascended by goal elevation from formulas through rituals and incantations to the threshold of true prayer. Prayer has sometimes become so materialistic that it has degenerated into a pseudomagical technique of avoiding the expenditure of that effort which is requisite for the solution of Urantian problems.
(996.1) 91:2.3 When man learned that prayer could not coerce the gods, then it became more of a petition, favor seeking. But the truest prayer is in reality a communion between man and his Maker.
(996.2) 91:2.4 The appearance of the sacrifice idea in any religion unfailingly detracts from the higher efficacy of true prayer in that men seek to substitute the offerings of material possessions for the offering of their own consecrated wills to the doing of the will of God.
(996.3) 91:2.5 When religion is divested of a personal God, its prayers translate to the levels of theology and philosophy. When the highest God concept of a religion is that of an impersonal Deity, such as in pantheistic idealism, although affording the basis for certain forms of mystic communion, it proves fatal to the potency of true prayer, which always stands for man’s communion with a personal and superior being.
(996.4) 91:2.6 During the earlier times of racial evolution and even at the present time, in the day-by-day experience of the average mortal, prayer is very much a phenomenon of man’s intercourse with his own subconscious. But there is also a domain of prayer wherein the intellectually alert and spiritually progressing individual attains more or less contact with the superconscious levels of the human mind, the domain of the indwelling Thought Adjuster. In addition, there is a definite spiritual phase of true prayer which concerns its reception and recognition by the spiritual forces of the universe, and which is entirely distinct from all human and intellectual association.
(996.5) 91:2.7 Prayer contributes greatly to the development of the religious sentiment of an evolving human mind. It is a mighty influence working to prevent isolation of personality.
(996.6) 91:2.8 Prayer represents one technique associated with the natural religions of racial evolution which also forms a part of the experiential values of the higher religions of ethical excellence, the religions of revelation.
3. Prayer and the Alter Ego
(996.8) 91:3.2 The early and primitive form of prayer was much like the semimagical recitations of the present-day Toda tribe, prayers that were not addressed to anyone in particular. But such techniques of praying tend to evolve into the dialogue type of communication by the emergence of the idea of an alter ego. In time the alter-ego concept is exalted to a superior status of divine dignity, and prayer as an agency of religion has appeared. Through many phases and during long ages this primitive type of praying is destined to evolve before attaining the level of intelligent and truly ethical prayer.
(997.1) 91:3.3 As it is conceived by successive generations of praying mortals, the alter ego evolves up through ghosts, fetishes, and spirits to polytheistic gods, and eventually to the One God, a divine being embodying the highest ideals and the loftiest aspirations of the praying ego. And thus does prayer function as the most potent agency of religion in the conservation of the highest values and ideals of those who pray. From the moment of the conceiving of an alter ego to the appearance of the concept of a divine and heavenly Father, prayer is always a socializing, moralizing, and spiritualizing practice.
(997.2) 91:3.4 The simple prayer of faith evidences a mighty evolution in human experience whereby the ancient conversations with the fictitious symbol of the alter ego of primitive religion have become exalted to the level of communion with the spirit of the Infinite and to that of a bona fide consciousness of the reality of the eternal God and Paradise Father of all intelligent creation.
(997.3) 91:3.5 Aside from all that is superself in the experience of praying, it should be remembered that ethical prayer is a splendid way to elevate one’s ego and reinforce the self for better living and higher attainment. Prayer induces the human ego to look both ways for help: for material aid to the subconscious reservoir of mortal experience, for inspiration and guidance to the superconscious borders of the contact of the material with the spiritual, with the Mystery Monitor.
(997.4) 91:3.6 Prayer ever has been and ever will be a twofold human experience: a psychologic procedure interassociated with a spiritual technique. And these two functions of prayer can never be fully separated.
(997.5) 91:3.7 Enlightened prayer must recognize not only an external and personal God but also an internal and impersonal Divinity, the indwelling Adjuster. It is altogether fitting that man, when he prays, should strive to grasp the concept of the Universal Father on Paradise; but the more effective technique for most practical purposes will be to revert to the concept of a near-by alter ego, just as the primitive mind was wont to do, and then to recognize that the idea of this alter ego has evolved from a mere fiction to the truth of God’s indwelling mortal man in the factual presence of the Adjuster so that man can talk face to face, as it were, with a real and genuine and divine alter ego that indwells him and is the very presence and essence of the living God, the Universal Father.
4. Ethical Praying
(997.7) 91:4.2 Prayer must never be so prostituted as to become a substitute for action. All ethical prayer is a stimulus to action and a guide to the progressive striving for idealistic goals of superself-attainment.
(998.1) 91:4.3 In all your praying be fair; do not expect God to show partiality, to love you more than his other children, your friends, neighbors, even enemies. But the prayer of the natural or evolved religions is not at first ethical, as it is in the later revealed religions. All praying, whether individual or communal, may be either egoistic or altruistic. That is, the prayer may be centered upon the self or upon others. When the prayer seeks nothing for the one who prays nor anything for his fellows, then such attitudes of the soul tend to the levels of true worship. Egoistic prayers involve confessions and petitions and often consist in requests for material favors. Prayer is somewhat more ethical when it deals with forgiveness and seeks wisdom for enhanced self-control.
(998.2) 91:4.4 While the nonselfish type of prayer is strengthening and comforting, materialistic praying is destined to bring disappointment and disillusionment as advancing scientific discoveries demonstrate that man lives in a physical universe of law and order. The childhood of an individual or a race is characterized by primitive, selfish, and materialistic praying. And, to a certain extent, all such petitions are efficacious in that they unvaryingly lead to those efforts and exertions which are contributory to achieving the answers to such prayers. The real prayer of faith always contributes to the augmentation of the technique of living, even if such petitions are not worthy of spiritual recognition. But the spiritually advanced person should exercise great caution in attempting to discourage the primitive or immature mind regarding such prayers.
(998.3) 91:4.5 Remember, even if prayer does not change God, it very often effects great and lasting changes in the one who prays in faith and confident expectation. Prayer has been the ancestor of much peace of mind, cheerfulness, calmness, courage, self-mastery, and fair-mindedness in the men and women of the evolving races.
5. Social Repercussions of Prayer
(998.5) 91:5.2 But prayer need not always be individual. Group or congregational praying is very effective in that it is highly socializing in its repercussions. When a group engages in community prayer for moral enhancement and spiritual uplift, such devotions are reactive upon the individuals composing the group; they are all made better because of participation. Even a whole city or an entire nation can be helped by such prayer devotions. Confession, repentance, and prayer have led individuals, cities, nations, and whole races to mighty efforts of reform and courageous deeds of valorous achievement.
(998.6) 91:5.3 If you truly desire to overcome the habit of criticizing some friend, the quickest and surest way of achieving such a change of attitude is to establish the habit of praying for that person every day of your life. But the social repercussions of such prayers are dependent largely on two conditions:
(998.7) 91:5.4 1. The person who is prayed for should know that he is being prayed for.(999.2) 91:5.6 Prayer is the technique whereby, sooner or later, every religion becomes institutionalized. And in time prayer becomes associated with numerous secondary agencies, some helpful, others decidedly deleterious, such as priests, holy books, worship rituals, and ceremonials.
(999.1) 91:5.5 2. The person who prays should come into intimate social contact with the person for whom he is praying.
(999.3) 91:5.7 But the minds of greater spiritual illumination should be patient with, and tolerant of, those less endowed intellects that crave symbolism for the mobilization of their feeble spiritual insight. The strong must not look with disdain upon the weak. Those who are God-conscious without symbolism must not deny the grace-ministry of the symbol to those who find it difficult to worship Deity and to revere truth, beauty, and goodness without form and ritual. In prayerful worship, most mortals envision some symbol of the object-goal of their devotions.
6. The Province of Prayer
(999.5) 91:6.2 Prayer is not a technique for curing real and organic diseases, but it has contributed enormously to the enjoyment of abundant health and to the cure of numerous mental, emotional, and nervous ailments. And even in actual bacterial disease, prayer has many times added to the efficacy of other remedial procedures. Prayer has turned many an irritable and complaining invalid into a paragon of patience and made him an inspiration to all other human sufferers.
(999.6) 91:6.3 No matter how difficult it may be to reconcile the scientific doubtings regarding the efficacy of prayer with the ever-present urge to seek help and guidance from divine sources, never forget that the sincere prayer of faith is a mighty force for the promotion of personal happiness, individual self-control, social harmony, moral progress, and spiritual attainment.
(999.7) 91:6.4 Prayer, even as a purely human practice, a dialogue with one’s alter ego, constitutes a technique of the most efficient approach to the realization of those reserve powers of human nature which are stored and conserved in the unconscious realms of the human mind. Prayer is a sound psychologic practice, aside from its religious implications and its spiritual significance. It is a fact of human experience that most persons, if sufficiently hard pressed, will pray in some way to some source of help.
(999.8) 91:6.5 Do not be so slothful as to ask God to solve your difficulties, but never hesitate to ask him for wisdom and spiritual strength to guide and sustain you while you yourself resolutely and courageously attack the problems at hand.
(999.9) 91:6.6 Prayer has been an indispensable factor in the progress and preservation of religious civilization, and it still has mighty contributions to make to the further enhancement and spiritualization of society if those who pray will only do so in the light of scientific facts, philosophic wisdom, intellectual sincerity, and spiritual faith. Pray as Jesus taught his disciples — honestly, unselfishly, with fairness, and without doubting.
(1000.1) 91:6.7 But the efficacy of prayer in the personal spiritual experience of the one who prays is in no way dependent on such a worshiper’s intellectual understanding, philosophic acumen, social level, cultural status, or other mortal acquirements. The psychic and spiritual concomitants of the prayer of faith are immediate, personal, and experiential. There is no other technique whereby every man, regardless of all other mortal accomplishments, can so effectively and immediately approach the threshold of that realm wherein he can communicate with his Maker, where the creature contacts with the reality of the Creator, with the indwelling Thought Adjuster.
7. Mysticism, Ecstasy, and Inspiration
(1000.3) 91:7.2 The great religious teachers and the prophets of past ages were not extreme mystics. They were God-knowing men and women who best served their God by unselfish ministry to their fellow mortals. Jesus often took his apostles away by themselves for short periods to engage in meditation and prayer, but for the most part he kept them in service-contact with the multitudes. The soul of man requires spiritual exercise as well as spiritual nourishment.
(1000.4) 91:7.3 Religious ecstasy is permissible when resulting from sane antecedents, but such experiences are more often the outgrowth of purely emotional influences than a manifestation of deep spiritual character. Religious persons must not regard every vivid psychologic presentiment and every intense emotional experience as a divine revelation or a spiritual communication. Genuine spiritual ecstasy is usually associated with great outward calmness and almost perfect emotional control. But true prophetic vision is a superpsychologic presentiment. Such visitations are not pseudo hallucinations, neither are they trancelike ecstasies.
(1000.5) 91:7.4 The human mind may perform in response to so-called inspiration when it is sensitive either to the uprisings of the subconscious or to the stimulus of the superconscious. In either case it appears to the individual that such augmentations of the content of consciousness are more or less foreign. Unrestrained mystical enthusiasm and rampant religious ecstasy are not the credentials of inspiration, supposedly divine credentials.
(1000.6) 91:7.5 The practical test of all these strange religious experiences of mysticism, ecstasy, and inspiration is to observe whether these phenomena cause an individual:
(1000.7) 91:7.6 1. To enjoy better and more complete physical health.(1001.4) 91:7.13 But prayer has no real association with these exceptional religious experiences. When prayer becomes overmuch aesthetic, when it consists almost exclusively in beautiful and blissful contemplation of paradisiacal divinity, it loses much of its socializing influence and tends toward mysticism and the isolation of its devotees. There is a certain danger associated with overmuch private praying which is corrected and prevented by group praying, community devotions.
(1000.8) 91:7.7 2. To function more efficiently and practically in his mental life.
(1000.9) 91:7.8 3. More fully and joyfully to socialize his religious experience.
(1000.10) 91:7.9 4. More completely to spiritualize his day-by-day living while faithfully discharging the commonplace duties of routine mortal existence.
(1001.1) 91:7.10 5. To enhance his love for, and appreciation of, truth, beauty, and goodness.
(1001.2) 91:7.11 6. To conserve currently recognized social, moral, ethical, and spiritual values.
(1001.3) 91:7.12 7. To increase his spiritual insight — God-consciousness.
8. Praying as a Personal Experience
(1001.6) 91:8.2 Prayer is not an evolution of magic; they each arose independently. Magic was an attempt to adjust Deity to conditions; prayer is the effort to adjust the personality to the will of Deity. True prayer is both moral and religious; magic is neither.
(1001.7) 91:8.3 Prayer may become an established custom; many pray because others do. Still others pray because they fear something direful may happen if they do not offer their regular supplications.
(1001.8) 91:8.4 To some individuals prayer is the calm expression of gratitude; to others, a group expression of praise, social devotions; sometimes it is the imitation of another’s religion, while in true praying it is the sincere and trusting communication of the spiritual nature of the creature with the anywhere presence of the spirit of the Creator.
(1001.9) 91:8.5 Prayer may be a spontaneous expression of God-consciousness or a meaningless recitation of theologic formulas. It may be the ecstatic praise of a God-knowing soul or the slavish obeisance of a fear-ridden mortal. It is sometimes the pathetic expression of spiritual craving and sometimes the blatant shouting of pious phrases. Prayer may be joyous praise or a humble plea for forgiveness.
(1001.10) 91:8.6 Prayer may be the childlike plea for the impossible or the mature entreaty for moral growth and spiritual power. A petition may be for daily bread or may embody a wholehearted yearning to find God and to do his will. It may be a wholly selfish request or a true and magnificent gesture toward the realization of unselfish brotherhood.
(1001.11) 91:8.7 Prayer may be an angry cry for vengeance or a merciful intercession for one’s enemies. It may be the expression of a hope of changing God or the powerful technique of changing one’s self. It may be the cringing plea of a lost sinner before a supposedly stern Judge or the joyful expression of a liberated son of the living and merciful heavenly Father.
(1001.12) 91:8.8 Modern man is perplexed by the thought of talking things over with God in a purely personal way. Many have abandoned regular praying; they only pray when under unusual pressure — in emergencies. Man should be unafraid to talk to God, but only a spiritual child would undertake to persuade, or presume to change, God.
(1002.1) 91:8.9 But real praying does attain reality. Even when the air currents are ascending, no bird can soar except by outstretched wings. Prayer elevates man because it is a technique of progressing by the utilization of the ascending spiritual currents of the universe.
(1002.2) 91:8.10 Genuine prayer adds to spiritual growth, modifies attitudes, and yields that satisfaction which comes from communion with divinity. It is a spontaneous outburst of God-consciousness.
(1002.3) 91:8.11 God answers man’s prayer by giving him an increased revelation of truth, an enhanced appreciation of beauty, and an augmented concept of goodness. Prayer is a subjective gesture, but it contacts with mighty objective realities on the spiritual levels of human experience; it is a meaningful reach by the human for superhuman values. It is the most potent spiritual-growth stimulus.
(1002.4) 91:8.12 Words are irrelevant to prayer; they are merely the intellectual channel in which the river of spiritual supplication may chance to flow. The word value of a prayer is purely autosuggestive in private devotions and sociosuggestive in group devotions. God answers the soul’s attitude, not the words.
(1002.5) 91:8.13 Prayer is not a technique of escape from conflict but rather a stimulus to growth in the very face of conflict. Pray only for values, not things; for growth, not for gratification.
9. Conditions of Effective Prayer
(1002.7) 91:9.2 1. You must qualify as a potent prayer by sincerely and courageously facing the problems of universe reality. You must possess cosmic stamina.(1002.14) 91:9.9 [Presented by the Chief of the Urantia Midwayers.]
(1002.8) 91:9.3 2. You must have honestly exhausted the human capacity for human adjustment. You must have been industrious.
(1002.9) 91:9.4 3. You must surrender every wish of mind and every craving of soul to the transforming embrace of spiritual growth. You must have experienced an enhancement of meanings and an elevation of values.
(1002.10) 91:9.5 4. You must make a wholehearted choice of the divine will. You must obliterate the dead center of indecision.
(1002.11) 91:9.6 5. You not only recognize the Father’s will and choose to do it, but you have effected an unqualified consecration, and a dynamic dedication, to the actual doing of the Father’s will.
(1002.12) 91:9.7 6. Your prayer will be directed exclusively for divine wisdom to solve the specific human problems encountered in the Paradise ascension — the attainment of divine perfection.
(1002.13) 91:9.8 7. And you must have faith — living faith.
The Urantia Book
Paper 92
The Later Evolution of Religion
(1003.2) 92:0.2 1. The adjutant of worship — the appearance in animal consciousness of superanimal potentials for reality perception. This might be termed the primordial human instinct for Deity.(1003.5) 92:0.5 The co-ordinate functioning of these three divine ministrations is quite sufficient to initiate and prosecute the growth of evolutionary religion. These influences are later augmented by Thought Adjusters, seraphim, and the Spirit of Truth, all of which accelerate the rate of religious development. These agencies have long functioned on Urantia, and they will continue here as long as this planet remains an inhabited sphere. Much of the potential of these divine agencies has never yet had opportunity for expression; much will be revealed in the ages to come as mortal religion ascends, level by level, toward the supernal heights of morontia value and spirit truth.
(1003.3) 92:0.3 2. The adjutant of wisdom — the manifestation in a worshipful mind of the tendency to direct its adoration in higher channels of expression and toward ever-expanding concepts of Deity reality.
(1003.4) 92:0.4 3. The Holy Spirit — this is the initial supermind bestowal, and it unfailingly appears in all bona fide human personalities. This ministry to a worship-craving and wisdom-desiring mind creates the capacity to self-realize the postulate of human survival, both in theologic concept and as an actual and factual personality experience.
1. The Evolutionary Nature of Religion
(1003.7) 92:1.2 Religion progressed from nature worship up through ghost worship to fetishism throughout the savage childhood of the races. With the dawn of civilization the human race espoused the more mystic and symbolic beliefs, while now, with approaching maturity, mankind is ripening for the appreciation of real religion, even a beginning of the revelation of truth itself.
(1004.1) 92:1.3 Religion arises as a biologic reaction of mind to spiritual beliefs and the environment; it is the last thing to perish or change in a race. Religion is society’s adjustment, in any age, to that which is mysterious. As a social institution it embraces rites, symbols, cults, scriptures, altars, shrines, and temples. Holy water, relics, fetishes, charms, vestments, bells, drums, and priesthoods are common to all religions. And it is impossible entirely to divorce purely evolved religion from either magic or sorcery.
(1004.2) 92:1.4 Mystery and power have always stimulated religious feelings and fears, while emotion has ever functioned as a powerful conditioning factor in their development. Fear has always been the basic religious stimulus. Fear fashions the gods of evolutionary religion and motivates the religious ritual of the primitive believers. As civilization advances, fear becomes modified by reverence, admiration, respect, and sympathy and is then further conditioned by remorse and repentance.
(1004.3) 92:1.5 One Asiatic people taught that “God is a great fear”; that is the outgrowth of purely evolutionary religion. Jesus, the revelation of the highest type of religious living, proclaimed that “God is love.”
2. Religion and the Mores
(1004.5) 92:2.2 Religion clings to the mores; that which was is ancient and supposedly sacred. For this reason and no other, stone implements persisted long into the age of bronze and iron. This statement is of record: “And if you will make me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of hewn stone, for, if you use your tools in making it, you have polluted it.” Even today, the Hindus kindle their altar fires by using a primitive fire drill. In the course of evolutionary religion, novelty has always been regarded as sacrilege. The sacrament must consist, not of new and manufactured food, but of the most primitive of viands: “The flesh roasted with fire and unleavened bread served with bitter herbs.” All types of social usage and even legal procedures cling to the old forms.
(1004.6) 92:2.3 When modern man wonders at the presentation of so much in the scriptures of different religions that may be regarded as obscene, he should pause to consider that passing generations have feared to eliminate what their ancestors deemed to be holy and sacred. A great deal that one generation might look upon as obscene, preceding generations have considered a part of their accepted mores, even as approved religious rituals. A considerable amount of religious controversy has been occasioned by the never-ending attempts to reconcile olden but reprehensible practices with newly advanced reason, to find plausible theories in justification of creedal perpetuation of ancient and outworn customs.
(1004.7) 92:2.4 But it is only foolish to attempt the too sudden acceleration of religious growth. A race or nation can only assimilate from any advanced religion that which is reasonably consistent and compatible with its current evolutionary status, plus its genius for adaptation. Social, climatic, political, and economic conditions are all influential in determining the course and progress of religious evolution. Social morality is not determined by religion, that is, by evolutionary religion; rather are the forms of religion dictated by the racial morality.
(1005.1) 92:2.5 Races of men only superficially accept a strange and new religion; they actually adjust it to their mores and old ways of believing. This is well illustrated by the example of a certain New Zealand tribe whose priests, after nominally accepting Christianity, professed to have received direct revelations from Gabriel to the effect that this selfsame tribe had become the chosen people of God and directing that they be permitted freely to indulge in loose sex relations and numerous other of their olden and reprehensible customs. And immediately all of the new-made Christians went over to this new and less exacting version of Christianity.
(1005.2) 92:2.6 Religion has at one time or another sanctioned all sorts of contrary and inconsistent behavior, has at some time approved of practically all that is now regarded as immoral or sinful. Conscience, untaught by experience and unaided by reason, never has been, and never can be, a safe and unerring guide to human conduct. Conscience is not a divine voice speaking to the human soul. It is merely the sum total of the moral and ethical content of the mores of any current stage of existence; it simply represents the humanly conceived ideal of reaction in any given set of circumstances.
3. The Nature of Evolutionary Religion
(1005.4) 92:3.2 Religion has always been largely a matter of rites, rituals, observances, ceremonies, and dogmas. It has usually become tainted with that persistently mischief-making error, the chosen-people delusion. The cardinal religious ideas of incantation, inspiration, revelation, propitiation, repentance, atonement, intercession, sacrifice, prayer, confession, worship, survival after death, sacrament, ritual, ransom, salvation, redemption, covenant, uncleanness, purification, prophecy, original sin — they all go back to the early times of primordial ghost fear.
(1005.5) 92:3.3 Primitive religion is nothing more nor less than the struggle for material existence extended to embrace existence beyond the grave. The observances of such a creed represented the extension of the self-maintenance struggle into the domain of an imagined ghost-spirit world. But when tempted to criticize evolutionary religion, be careful. Remember, that is what happened; it is a historical fact. And further recall that the power of any idea lies, not in its certainty or truth, but rather in the vividness of its human appeal.
(1006.1) 92:3.4 Evolutionary religion makes no provision for change or revision; unlike science, it does not provide for its own progressive correction. Evolved religion commands respect because its followers believe it is The Truth; “the faith once delivered to the saints” must, in theory, be both final and infallible. The cult resists development because real progress is certain to modify or destroy the cult itself; therefore must revision always be forced upon it.
(1006.2) 92:3.5 Only two influences can modify and uplift the dogmas of natural religion: the pressure of the slowly advancing mores and the periodic illumination of epochal revelation. And it is not strange that progress was slow; in ancient days, to be progressive or inventive meant to be killed as a sorcerer. The cult advances slowly in generation epochs and agelong cycles. But it does move forward. Evolutionary belief in ghosts laid the foundation for a philosophy of revealed religion which will eventually destroy the superstition of its origin.
(1006.3) 92:3.6 Religion has handicapped social development in many ways, but without religion there would have been no enduring morality nor ethics, no worth-while civilization. Religion enmothered much nonreligious culture: Sculpture originated in idol making, architecture in temple building, poetry in incantations, music in worship chants, drama in the acting for spirit guidance, and dancing in the seasonal worship festivals.
(1006.4) 92:3.7 But while calling attention to the fact that religion was essential to the development and preservation of civilization, it should be recorded that natural religion has also done much to cripple and handicap the very civilization which it otherwise fostered and maintained. Religion has hampered industrial activities and economic development; it has been wasteful of labor and has squandered capital; it has not always been helpful to the family; it has not adequately fostered peace and good will; it has sometimes neglected education and retarded science; it has unduly impoverished life for the pretended enrichment of death. Evolutionary religion, human religion, has indeed been guilty of all these and many more mistakes, errors, and blunders; nevertheless, it did maintain cultural ethics, civilized morality, and social coherence, and made it possible for later revealed religion to compensate for these many evolutionary shortcomings.
(1006.5) 92:3.8 Evolutionary religion has been man’s most expensive but incomparably effective institution. Human religion can be justified only in the light of evolutionary civilization. If man were not the ascendant product of animal evolution, then would such a course of religious development stand without justification.
(1006.6) 92:3.9 Religion facilitated the accumulation of capital; it fostered work of certain kinds; the leisure of the priests promoted art and knowledge; the race, in the end, gained much as a result of all these early errors in ethical technique. The shamans, honest and dishonest, were terribly expensive, but they were worth all they cost. The learned professions and science itself emerged from the parasitical priesthoods. Religion fostered civilization and provided societal continuity; it has been the moral police force of all time. Religion provided that human discipline and self-control which made wisdom possible. Religion is the efficient scourge of evolution which ruthlessly drives indolent and suffering humanity from its natural state of intellectual inertia forward and upward to the higher levels of reason and wisdom.
(1006.7) 92:3.10 And this sacred heritage of animal ascent, evolutionary religion, must ever continue to be refined and ennobled by the continuous censorship of revealed religion and by the fiery furnace of genuine science.
4. The Gift of Revelation
(1007.2) 92:4.2 But regardless of apparent connection or derivation, the religions of revelation are always characterized by a belief in some Deity of final value and in some concept of the survival of personality identity after death.
(1007.3) 92:4.3 Evolutionary religion is sentimental, not logical. It is man’s reaction to belief in a hypothetical ghost-spirit world — the human belief-reflex, excited by the realization and fear of the unknown. Revelatory religion is propounded by the real spiritual world; it is the response of the superintellectual cosmos to the mortal hunger to believe in, and depend upon, the universal Deities. Evolutionary religion pictures the circuitous gropings of humanity in quest of truth; revelatory religion is that very truth.
(1007.4) 92:4.4 There have been many events of religious revelation but only five of epochal significance. These were as follows:
(1007.5) 92:4.5 1. The Dalamatian teachings. The true concept of the First Source and Center was first promulgated on Urantia by the one hundred corporeal members of Prince Caligastia’s staff. This expanding revelation of Deity went on for more than three hundred thousand years until it was suddenly terminated by the planetary secession and the disruption of the teaching regime. Except for the work of Van, the influence of the Dalamatian revelation was practically lost to the whole world. Even the Nodites had forgotten this truth by the time of Adam’s arrival. Of all who received the teachings of the one hundred, the red men held them longest, but the idea of the Great Spirit was but a hazy concept in Amerindian religion when contact with Christianity greatly clarified and strengthened it.
(1007.6) 92:4.6 2. The Edenic teachings. Adam and Eve again portrayed the concept of the Father of all to the evolutionary peoples. The disruption of the first Eden halted the course of the Adamic revelation before it had ever fully started. But the aborted teachings of Adam were carried on by the Sethite priests, and some of these truths have never been entirely lost to the world. The entire trend of Levantine religious evolution was modified by the teachings of the Sethites. But by 2500 B.C. mankind had largely lost sight of the revelation sponsored in the days of Eden.
(1007.7) 92:4.7 3. Melchizedek of Salem. This emergency Son of Nebadon inaugurated the third revelation of truth on Urantia. The cardinal precepts of his teachings were trust and faith. He taught trust in the omnipotent beneficence of God and proclaimed that faith was the act by which men earned God’s favor. His teachings gradually commingled with the beliefs and practices of various evolutionary religions and finally developed into those theologic systems present on Urantia at the opening of the first millennium after Christ.
(1008.1) 92:4.8 4. Jesus of Nazareth. Christ Michael presented for the fourth time to Urantia the concept of God as the Universal Father, and this teaching has generally persisted ever since. The essence of his teaching was love and service, the loving worship which a creature son voluntarily gives in recognition of, and response to, the loving ministry of God his Father; the freewill service which such creature sons bestow upon their brethren in the joyous realization that in this service they are likewise serving God the Father.
(1008.2) 92:4.9 5. The Urantia Papers. The papers, of which this is one, constitute the most recent presentation of truth to the mortals of Urantia. These papers differ from all previous revelations, for they are not the work of a single universe personality but a composite presentation by many beings. But no revelation short of the attainment of the Universal Father can ever be complete. All other celestial ministrations are no more than partial, transient, and practically adapted to local conditions in time and space. While such admissions as this may possibly detract from the immediate force and authority of all revelations, the time has arrived on Urantia when it is advisable to make such frank statements, even at the risk of weakening the future influence and authority of this, the most recent of the revelations of truth to the mortal races of Urantia.
5. The Great Religious Leaders
(1008.4) 92:5.2 1. The pre-existent ideas of the evolutionary cults.(1008.7) 92:5.5 Most great religious epochs have been inaugurated by the life and teachings of some outstanding personality; leadership has originated a majority of the worth-while moral movements of history. And men have always tended to venerate the leader, even at the expense of his teachings; to revere his personality, even though losing sight of the truths which he proclaimed. And this is not without reason; there is an instinctive longing in the heart of evolutionary man for help from above and beyond. This craving is designed to anticipate the appearance on earth of the Planetary Prince and the later Material Sons. On Urantia man has been deprived of these superhuman leaders and rulers, and therefore does he constantly seek to make good this loss by enshrouding his human leaders with legends pertaining to supernatural origins and miraculous careers.
(1008.5) 92:5.3 2. The sublime ideals of revealed religion.
(1008.6) 92:5.4 3. The personal viewpoints of the great religious leaders, the prophets and teachers of mankind.
(1008.8) 92:5.6 Many races have conceived of their leaders as being born of virgins; their careers are liberally sprinkled with miraculous episodes, and their return is always expected by their respective groups. In central Asia the tribesmen still look for the return of Genghis Khan; in Tibet, China, and India it is Buddha; in Islam it is Mohammed; among the Amerinds it was Hesunanin Onamonalonton; with the Hebrews it was, in general, Adam’s return as a material ruler. In Babylon the god Marduk was a perpetuation of the Adam legend, the son-of-God idea, the connecting link between man and God. Following the appearance of Adam on earth, so-called sons of God were common among the world races.
(1009.1) 92:5.7 But regardless of the superstitious awe in which they were often held, it remains a fact that these teachers were the temporal personality fulcrums on which the levers of revealed truth depended for the advancement of the morality, philosophy, and religion of mankind.
(1009.2) 92:5.8 There have been hundreds upon hundreds of religious leaders in the million-year human history of Urantia from Onagar to Guru Nanak. During this time there have been many ebbs and flows of the tide of religious truth and spiritual faith, and each renaissance of Urantian religion has, in the past, been identified with the life and teachings of some religious leader. In considering the teachers of recent times, it may prove helpful to group them into the seven major religious epochs of post-Adamic Urantia:
(1009.3) 92:5.9 1. The Sethite period. The Sethite priests, as regenerated under the leadership of Amosad, became the great post-Adamic teachers. They functioned throughout the lands of the Andites, and their influence persisted longest among the Greeks, Sumerians, and Hindus. Among the latter they have continued to the present time as the Brahmans of the Hindu faith. The Sethites and their followers never entirely lost the Trinity concept revealed by Adam.(1010.4) 92:5.16 The future of Urantia will doubtless be characterized by the appearance of teachers of religious truth — the Fatherhood of God and the fraternity of all creatures. But it is to be hoped that the ardent and sincere efforts of these future prophets will be directed less toward the strengthening of interreligious barriers and more toward the augmentation of the religious brotherhood of spiritual worship among the many followers of the differing intellectual theologies which so characterize Urantia of Satania.
(1009.4) 92:5.10 2. Era of the Melchizedek missionaries. Urantia religion was in no small measure regenerated by the efforts of those teachers who were commissioned by Machiventa Melchizedek when he lived and taught at Salem almost two thousand years before Christ. These missionaries proclaimed faith as the price of favor with God, and their teachings, though unproductive of any immediately appearing religions, nevertheless formed the foundations on which later teachers of truth were to build the religions of Urantia.
(1009.5) 92:5.11 3. The post-Melchizedek era. Though Amenemope and Ikhnaton both taught in this period, the outstanding religious genius of the post-Melchizedek era was the leader of a group of Levantine Bedouins and the founder of the Hebrew religion — Moses. Moses taught monotheism. Said he: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one God.” “The Lord he is God. There is none beside him.” He persistently sought to uproot the remnants of the ghost cult among his people, even prescribing the death penalty for its practitioners. The monotheism of Moses was adulterated by his successors, but in later times they did return to many of his teachings. The greatness of Moses lies in his wisdom and sagacity. Other men have had greater concepts of God, but no one man was ever so successful in inducing large numbers of people to adopt such advanced beliefs.
(1009.6) 92:5.12 4. The sixth century before Christ. Many men arose to proclaim truth in this, one of the greatest centuries of religious awakening ever witnessed on Urantia. Among these should be recorded Gautama, Confucius, Lao-tse, Zoroaster, and the Jainist teachers. The teachings of Gautama have become widespread in Asia, and he is revered as the Buddha by millions. Confucius was to Chinese morality what Plato was to Greek philosophy, and while there were religious repercussions to the teachings of both, strictly speaking, neither was a religious teacher; Lao-tse envisioned more of God in Tao than did Confucius in humanity or Plato in idealism. Zoroaster, while much affected by the prevalent concept of dual spiritism, the good and the bad, at the same time definitely exalted the idea of one eternal Deity and of the ultimate victory of light over darkness.
(1010.1) 92:5.13 5. The first century after Christ. As a religious teacher, Jesus of Nazareth started out with the cult which had been established by John the Baptist and progressed as far as he could away from fasts and forms. Aside from Jesus, Paul of Tarsus and Philo of Alexandria were the greatest teachers of this era. Their concepts of religion have played a dominant part in the evolution of that faith which bears the name of Christ.
(1010.2) 92:5.14 6. The sixth century after Christ. Mohammed founded a religion which was superior to many of the creeds of his time. His was a protest against the social demands of the faiths of foreigners and against the incoherence of the religious life of his own people.
(1010.3) 92:5.15 7. The fifteenth century after Christ. This period witnessed two religious movements: the disruption of the unity of Christianity in the Occident and the synthesis of a new religion in the Orient. In Europe institutionalized Christianity had attained that degree of inelasticity which rendered further growth incompatible with unity. In the Orient the combined teachings of Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism were synthesized by Nanak and his followers into Sikhism, one of the most advanced religions of Asia.
6. The Composite Religions
(1010.6) 92:6.2 On Urantia, evolutionary and revelatory religion are progressing side by side while they blend and coalesce into the diversified theologic systems found in the world in the times of the inditement of these papers. These religions, the religions of twentieth-century Urantia, may be enumerated as follows:
(1011.1) 92:6.3 1. Hinduism — the most ancient.(1011.12) 92:6.14 The most advanced religions of ancient times were Judaism and Hinduism, and each respectively has greatly influenced the course of religious development in Orient and Occident. Both Hindus and Hebrews believed that their religions were inspired and revealed, and they believed all others to be decadent forms of the one true faith.
(1011.2) 92:6.4 2. The Hebrew religion.
(1011.3) 92:6.5 3. Buddhism.
(1011.4) 92:6.6 4. The Confucian teachings.
(1011.5) 92:6.7 5. The Taoist beliefs.
(1011.6) 92:6.8 6. Zoroastrianism.
(1011.7) 92:6.9 7. Shinto.
(1011.8) 92:6.10 8. Jainism.
(1011.9) 92:6.11 9. Christianity.
(1011.10) 92:6.12 10. Islam.
(1011.11) 92:6.13 11. Sikhism — the most recent.
(1011.13) 92:6.15 India is divided among Hindu, Sikh, Mohammedan, and Jain, each picturing God, man, and the universe as these are variously conceived. China follows the Taoist and the Confucian teachings; Shinto is revered in Japan.
(1011.14) 92:6.16 The great international, interracial faiths are the Hebraic, Buddhist, Christian, and Islamic. Buddhism stretches from Ceylon and Burma through Tibet and China to Japan. It has shown an adaptability to the mores of many peoples that has been equaled only by Christianity.
(1011.15) 92:6.17 The Hebrew religion encompasses the philosophic transition from polytheism to monotheism; it is an evolutionary link between the religions of evolution and the religions of revelation. The Hebrews were the only western people to follow their early evolutionary gods straight through to the God of revelation. But this truth never became widely accepted until the days of Isaiah, who once again taught the blended idea of a racial deity combined with a Universal Creator: “O Lord of Hosts, God of Israel, you are God, even you alone; you have made heaven and earth.” At one time the hope of the survival of Occidental civilization lay in the sublime Hebraic concepts of goodness and the advanced Hellenic concepts of beauty.
(1011.16) 92:6.18 The Christian religion is the religion about the life and teachings of Christ based upon the theology of Judaism, modified further through the assimilation of certain Zoroastrian teachings and Greek philosophy, and formulated primarily by three individuals: Philo, Peter, and Paul. It has passed through many phases of evolution since the time of Paul and has become so thoroughly Occidentalized that many non-European peoples very naturally look upon Christianity as a strange revelation of a strange God and for strangers.
(1011.17) 92:6.19 Islam is the religio-cultural connective of North Africa, the Levant, and southeastern Asia. It was Jewish theology in connection with the later Christian teachings that made Islam monotheistic. The followers of Mohammed stumbled at the advanced teachings of the Trinity; they could not comprehend the doctrine of three divine personalities and one Deity. It is always difficult to induce evolutionary minds suddenly to accept advanced revealed truth. Man is an evolutionary creature and in the main must get his religion by evolutionary techniques.
(1012.1) 92:6.20 Ancestor worship onetime constituted a decided advance in religious evolution, but it is both amazing and regrettable that this primitive concept persists in China, Japan, and India amidst so much that is relatively more advanced, such as Buddhism and Hinduism. In the Occident, ancestor worship developed into the veneration of national gods and respect for racial heroes. In the twentieth century this hero-venerating nationalistic religion makes its appearance in the various radical and nationalistic secularisms which characterize many races and nations of the Occident. Much of this same attitude is also found in the great universities and the larger industrial communities of the English-speaking peoples. Not very different from these concepts is the idea that religion is but “a shared quest of the good life.” The “national religions” are nothing more than a reversion to the early Roman emperor worship and to Shinto — worship of the state in the imperial family.
7. The Further Evolution of Religion
(1012.3) 92:7.2 New religions cannot be invented; they are either evolved, or else they are suddenly revealed. All new evolutionary religions are merely advancing expressions of the old beliefs, new adaptations and adjustments. The old does not cease to exist; it is merged with the new, even as Sikhism budded and blossomed out of the soil and forms of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and other contemporary cults. Primitive religion was very democratic; the savage was quick to borrow or lend. Only with revealed religion did autocratic and intolerant theologic egotism appear.
(1012.4) 92:7.3 The many religions of Urantia are all good to the extent that they bring man to God and bring the realization of the Father to man. It is a fallacy for any group of religionists to conceive of their creed as The Truth; such attitudes bespeak more of theological arrogance than of certainty of faith. There is not a Urantia religion that could not profitably study and assimilate the best of the truths contained in every other faith, for all contain truth. Religionists would do better to borrow the best in their neighbors’ living spiritual faith rather than to denounce the worst in their lingering superstitions and outworn rituals.
(1012.5) 92:7.4 All these religions have arisen as a result of man’s variable intellectual response to his identical spiritual leading. They can never hope to attain a uniformity of creeds, dogmas, and rituals — these are intellectual; but they can, and some day will, realize a unity in true worship of the Father of all, for this is spiritual, and it is forever true, in the spirit all men are equal.
(1012.6) 92:7.5 Primitive religion was largely a material-value consciousness, but civilization elevates religious values, for true religion is the devotion of the self to the service of meaningful and supreme values. As religion evolves, ethics becomes the philosophy of morals, and morality becomes the discipline of self by the standards of highest meanings and supreme values — divine and spiritual ideals. And thus religion becomes a spontaneous and exquisite devotion, the living experience of the loyalty of love.
(1013.1) 92:7.6 The quality of a religion is indicated by:
(1013.2) 92:7.7 1. Level of values — loyalties.*(1013.6) 92:7.11 Religious meanings progress in self-consciousness when the child transfers his ideas of omnipotence from his parents to God. And the entire religious experience of such a child is largely dependent on whether fear or love has dominated the parent-child relationship. Slaves have always experienced great difficulty in transferring their master-fear into concepts of God-love. Civilization, science, and advanced religions must deliver mankind from those fears born of the dread of natural phenomena. And so should greater enlightenment deliver educated mortals from all dependence on intermediaries in communion with Deity.
(1013.3) 92:7.8 2. Depth of meanings — the sensitization of the individual to the idealistic appreciation of these highest values.
(1013.4) 92:7.9 3. Consecration intensity — the degree of devotion to these divine values.
(1013.5) 92:7.10 4. The unfettered progress of the personality in this cosmic path of idealistic spiritual living, realization of sonship with God and never-ending progressive citizenship in the universe.
(1013.7) 92:7.12 These intermediate stages of idolatrous hesitation in the transfer of veneration from the human and the visible to the divine and invisible are inevitable, but they should be shortened by the consciousness of the facilitating ministry of the indwelling divine spirit. Nevertheless, man has been profoundly influenced, not only by his concepts of Deity, but also by the character of the heroes whom he has chosen to honor. It is most unfortunate that those who have come to venerate the divine and risen Christ should have overlooked the man — the valiant and courageous hero — Joshua ben Joseph.
(1013.8) 92:7.13 Modern man is adequately self-conscious of religion, but his worshipful customs are confused and discredited by his accelerated social metamorphosis and unprecedented scientific developments. Thinking men and women want religion redefined, and this demand will compel religion to re-evaluate itself.
(1013.9) 92:7.14 Modern man is confronted with the task of making more readjustments of human values in one generation than have been made in two thousand years. And this all influences the social attitude toward religion, for religion is a way of living as well as a technique of thinking.
(1013.10) 92:7.15 True religion must ever be, at one and the same time, the eternal foundation and the guiding star of all enduring civilizations.
(1013.11) 92:7.16 [Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.]
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