Thanks. That was worth calling attention to.

It's an ancient and common sentiment of mankind, which I share, that man's earliest thoughts on religion may in some sense have been the most authentic and valuable.

Of course, later-arriving and fiercer religions, shaped more by a quasi-Darwinian struggle, have taken care to specify and fix by faith what those earlier beliefs were and how they arose. According to Islam, Islam is the first, primordial religion, and Judaism and Christianity are later falsifications. Jewish and Christian views on the earliest religion are available to read in the Torah or Old Testament.

The real thing does not look like a game of religious claim-jumping gone berserk and bloody. It's engaged with the cosmos, with nature, in a very direct way.

Often it's simply a bunch of incorrect statements about geography, biology and astronomy.

But there's a fascination to its basic reasonableness, a sense of wonder and also of balance long ago screwed up and lost.

I think the post linked to illustrates the appeal of this directness very well.

Even if the speculation in the post is right, in a sense one of the great points of the religion is trivial. Anyone with a primary school education now can know wore than the greatest sages did way back when on what global facts may have stood behind the sacred stories.

And yet there is wonder there, at the furthest horizon of original and perhaps not even wholly human insight.

But to speak usefully of this vanishing point is impossible as far as I know, so I'll stop there.

I do thank you for the read and thoughts!

For all the verbiage I spend on other things, these smaller pieces are the most fulfilling to me. Rarely read but satisfying the need to just get them down.

I have done a couple in this light, like- Flooding the Zone of Human Culture

Which looks at some of the variety of flood myths globally, and they do not all tell the same story, but similar stories and how the peoples saw them. I think it was the Iriquois that were the ones that had the basic: the waters rose, we walked to higher ground, others did not and wished to be saved from their stupidity. Or was it the Tonawanda for that? Very down to earth and compelling for its very straightforward outlook.

If you like some alt-history or similar 'what if?' sort of things, then a look at what happens when one man is pushed just a little too far- Another Strange Idea

So much fun looking at such things and Nessie and hauntings and other bits of detritus.

Again, my thanks! Using tinyurls for links, and hope those work.

I thought everybody knew this. Powells and Bergier covered it in one of their books on secret magical societies. The Thule Group, if I recall correctly, had its own chapter. Nazis were involved.

The book came out in the late 60s or early 70s.

And at first I thought it was a re-reading akin to Chomsky's take on the 'Lord of the Rings'