Jack and the magic beans

In this article I will propose that some of our myths about sky gods are in fact very very old scientific theories which tried to explain the available observed phenomena in the best possible way with the knowledge of the universe people possessed at that time...

Actually I would even argue that we would most likely explain the same observed phenomena today in the same way, if we weren't taught all that "science stuff" at school that some "smart scientists" figured out already, so we don't have to...

So I will start with telling you where the super cool image from the first tweet is from. It's from Prohodna cave in Bulgaria, which was possibly used as an early sky god temple. I talked about this in my post "The eyes of the sky god"...

This is a bit of a knotted story, and I have been struggling which thread to pick first. So I will start with a fairytale: Jack and the magic beans. 

Jack, not the brightest  boy in the world, sells his family's only cow for handful of "magic beans"...

Everyone thinks this is the most stupid thing done by the most stupid kid, but the beans turn out to be really magic, and grow into enormous plant that reaches all the way to the "land in the sky"...

The land in the sky is where a "giant" lives. And the giant has pile of treasure. Jack, who suddenly gets super smart and cunning, of course steals the treasure from the "stupid" giant...

When "giant" realises what's going on, he chases Jack, follows him down the magic bean, which Jack cuts and "giant" plunges to his death. The End...

What does this have to do with sky gods? It's just a silly story...Well, first this is not the only version of this story...There are many more from many different cultures and you can read about them here:  "The Composition of 'Jack and the Beanstalk'"...

Interestingly, in some versions it is St Peter, the gatekeeper of Heaven that the hero meets up in the land in the sky, and not a giant...This is very interesting as Heaven was originally imagined as the land in the sky...

Well actually: God made "firmament" and called the "firmament" Heaven...What's a firmament? Well It's a stone dome, covering the flat earth, separating our sky from the rest of...Well the rest...At least Hebrews believed that it was so...

But Hebrews didn't of course invent this themselves. They copied it, like most of their religion, from Mesopotamians...The ancient Mesopotamians regarded the sky (heaven) as a series of stone domes (usually three, but sometimes seven) covering the flat Earth.

And of course we know who lives in Heaven...God...You know the guy who, according to the story of the prophet Elijah, lights fire on the altar (presumably by lightning) on which an ox was laid as a sacrifice...And then gives rain which ends famine... 

Canaanite Baal, but this time in Hebrew...By the way, the same God in Heaven, is the guy who throws "fire and brimstone" on your head when he gets pissed off...

Interesting...I love this definition of "brimstone": "an archaic term synonymous with sulfur, evokes the acrid odor of sulfur dioxide given off by lightning strikes"...Cause lightning is the only weapon of sky gods, everyone knows that...

So The God is a Thunder God then, and fire and brimstone is just an euphemism for lightning...

I don't think so...

Why?

Cause that would not explain why people thought a solid land in the sky populated by murderous giants (sorry sky gods, you know they were imagined as giants, right?) was something "logical" and "self explanatory"...

And they definitely did think that... And they were definitely shitless of the "wrath of (sky) god"...I mean don't get me wrong, thunder and lightning can be terrifying...

And in agricultural societies, the guy who controls sunshine and rain has absolute power over people's lives...I talked about it in my posts "The power of the thunder giant" and "Lords of divination"...

But as I said that does not explain why people were terrified of giants living in the stone land above our sky...

And why thunder gods wielded (most likely stone head axes) as their weapon, which is why people worshiped prehistoric stone axes as "thunder stones"...I talked about this in my post "Kataibates"... 

But this can help explain all this: people believed that thunderbolts were made of stone...You can read more about it in "The changing meaning of 'thunderbolt'"...

A 15th-century engraving depicts the town of Ensisheim in present-day France being struck by a thunderbolt...

Ha! That looks an awful lot like a meteorite, right? And guess what meteorites smell like? Apparently , sulphur...You know, the brimstone...You can read more about this here and here...

And when they start falling from the sky, they look like this...You know, fire and brimstone...Now that is something to be terrified of...I mean seriously shitless...

I mean giant stones are falling from the sky...Someone must be throwing them down...It has to be a giant...And in order for him to have enough stones to throw on our heads, he must be living on a stone land above the sky. Which has to be a dome, as the earth is obviously flat...

If you were observing rocks falling from the sky, which caused destruction and fire and which smelled like brimstone, how would you explain all that?

I think that the above is the logically tightest explanation based on our ancestor's knowledge of the universe...Anything else would be just a fantasy 🙂

One last thing. Apart from (stone) axes, sky gods loved clubs. Like this one which Baal raises above his head...

By the way, these were stone topped clubs...Like these ones:

Egypt, Pre Dynastic, 3200 - 3000 BC

Mesopotamia, Sumerian, Dynasty of Lagash c. 2400–2300 BC

Like above mentioned Baal for instance...He is holding a mace (club) above his head...Why?

Well stone head maces were modelled after club originally wielded by this guy: Orion. The greatest hunter, the father of the gods...I talked about this in my post "Grandmother's cudgels"...

And the clubs he was armed with looked like this...And they smelled of brimstone as they smashed the sinners to smithereens, and set the their houses on fire...Cause Orion's club is the source of the Orionides meteorite shower...

The Mighty Smighter, the Giant living in the stone sky, armed with a stone club (or a stone mace or a stone axe depending on your preference) and on whom all the later Terrifying Sky Gods were modeled on...

Eventually, stones stopped falling from the sky (as frequently as they once used to fall). When sky gods got pissed off they "shot thunderbolts at you" which people for some weird reason believed were made of stone...

Oh and Proto Indo Europan root for god (deywós) is derived from the root for sky (Dyēus)...

And interestingly the Serbian word "Div" derived from this root for god means giant...