Some academic sources:
- The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture by Jacques Cauvin (1994/2000)
- Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods by David Lewis‑Williams & David Pearce (2005)
- Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth by Walter Burkert (1972/1983)
- Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion by HC Peoples et al. (2016)
- Subsistence: Models and Metaphors for the Transition to Agriculture by H. Starr (2005)
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Myths didn’t juts reflect the shift, they were also one of the cultural tools that made the shift psychologically possible.
For instance, the H&G worldview is cyclical (time repeats) but the agricultural worldview is linear. H&G myths emphasize eternal returns, cycles of creation and destruction, spirits of rivers, trees, animals. Agricultural myths introduce beginning of time, progress, destiny, apocalypse.
As animals became domesticated, their spiritual status from H&G mythology declines, while the status of plants and land rises under agriculture. There’s agricultural symbolism in Christ’s body being bread and his blood being wine.
The shift the agriculture produces surplus, property, inheritance, kings, priests, and so myth arise to justify social structures that don’t make sense in nomadic foraging bands.
Sacrifice is an agricultural logic. Classic pattern: god dies, god’s body becomes food, eating is communion. It is directly agricultural: plant dies when harvested, seed is buried (like a corpse), resurrection in spring. Sacrifice becomes cosmic agriculture.
The Garden -> Exile story is a pattern we see in Genesis (“By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread”) but also in Greek mythology; Kronos’ Golden Age changes when Zeus forces humans to work.
In H&G, the trickster gods (Coyote, Raven, Loki, Anansi) are central, but with damaging they become dangerous, marginalized, punished because agriculture requires law, calendar, taboo, not chaos.