Polytheism to Monotheism by Natural Selection

Göbekli Tepe, Sanliurfa, Turkey, February 2023

During my visit to Turkey, I had the privilege of seeing the oldest Neolithic structure in the world. Placed on the top of a wide landscape of rolling hills and dry valleys, the grass was beginning to green from winter’s cold. The first thing I saw were these huge sandstones, rooted deep into the pit, towering out to meet me. The stones, carvings and sculptures dating to 9,000 BCE. Found by a farmer who moved the rocks to build his border walls for his sheep, it is thousands of years older than both Stonehenge and the Ancient Pyramids of Giza. I walked from the city of Sanliurfa, past the industrial mines and crossing farmland. Sometimes Apple Maps showed a road which wasn’t there and so I trudged through muddy land. It was sunny nonetheless, and I could see many cars pass up to the mountain to see this magnificent site. I climbed the hill, my legs burning with the heavy rucksack strapped to my shoulders. I couldn’t believe how far away this place was. I looked behind me to see the valley I had climbed and saw the cars and buses pass me up the road with ease. I saw a dog approaching, happily climbing the hill and crossing the road to see me. I was a little cautious since we were nowhere near the city, and I didn’t know how friendly these dogs were, so I hurried up the hill and got to the site. I had about an hour before the centre would close and I was desperate to see it.

These stones were extremely fascinating. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Buried beneath the ground, were tall stones which created temples and rooms. The carvings on the stone — are outwardly indented, carved to reveal animal shapes. Many of the stone carvings were of a wolf. I immediately connected with the stray dog I saw earlier.

Göbekli Tepe, Sanliurfa, Turkey, detailed carving showing animal figure, February 2023

I had visited many religious places in my life: from Buddhist and Hindu temples to Turkey’s mosques, as well as my own country’s cathedrals and churches. Göbekli Tepe seemed to be exploring something on another planet, an alien world so vastly different to ours. Even though the place was packed with tourists: smartphones, Instagram posts, and camera drones, I walked into another time and another place of worship.

In my belief, worshipping something is the same as embodying it. These people were embodying a wolf or a predator. More accurately, as the carving was on the wall, the predator is next to them: something to be aware of, something to be warned by. I know these people had their gods, and certainly with good reasons to have them even if nobody around me with their selfie cameras could possibly understand.

It seemed strange to connect the selfie sticks with this place. It seemed wrong. I felt as if the seriousness and importance of this great place of worship had been tarnished and had become perverted. Does anyone ask where these gods came from? Why are they told in this particular way? Why did these people go to such lengths to hull these enormous rocks up the hill and across the rolling plane? Why did they carve animals, beasts and statues of them? And why did we tell these stories?

Was it for entertainment, to mask the reality of our Earthly lives? Or did they tell of a higher truth, a higher reality we cannot see?

Mysticism vs Reductionism

Growing up in a secular society, I’m struggling to connect the realities of this life with these ancient stories. You are usually told in Religious Studies that the people who practised these beliefs had (and have) a worldview which literally aligns with the theological description: Jesus did come back from the dead, Moses did split the rivers, God did create the Earth in 7 days. But then, in Sciences, you are taught that the Earth is millions of years old, that there were dinosaurs, and that you are nothing but a mixture of atoms and particles that will inevitably decay and break into the Earth in a dark and expansive universe.

Looking at Göbekli Tepe, seeing these massive stones, and knowing they were carried across this valley and placed in such a way to worship, you can’t help but believe that the religious fundamentalists as well as reductionists are deeply, deeply narrowed in their thinking. When I was taught these ideas in school, I couldn’t quite believe either of those positions are true —or in any way helpful. When navigating through life’s traumas, either worldview whether it be the delusion of mysticism or the reductions in a meaningless world can’t provide meaning. How can you have a dialogue with yourself when there is no sense of reality? How can you be motivated by beauty, culture and truth when there is no sense of any of those things in the latter?

I questioned this since I was 15: messy-haired, spotted and had no idea what made up the world. I admit the question wasn’t specifically formulated then — I was still struggling with feminist groups, thinking of comebacks to say to bullies, and trying to be a teacher’s pet. To struggle with this problem is the same as struggling with being itself. The same wedge which had separated reality from the spirit was also the same wedge which was causing my depression and anxiety —but you could also say that the endeavour to be a teacher’s pet and tell lies fuelled that. The only thing which held to me, as far as I could tell, was the events of the time and the story. And to explain my findings, I have to go to the beginning of this story: the story of our civilisation.

You can find the answer at your local history museum. I found it at Göbekli Tepe. How far back in history you go is up to you — the story is still the same: finding meaning is a struggle, in the pursuit of that meaning gives rise to many problems of struggle, but what is produced is art, culture and beauty. Our ancient ancestors, just like us, recorded how they navigated their landscape through cave paintings, sculptures, tools and ultimately by stories.

So then you ask: why do we struggle? What are we aiming at? Somehow, when we look back at how far we’ve come in our pursuit, we understand that the pursuit compliments the problem of meaning, and within that journey, we see that that is where meaning lies.

I’m interested in ancient people. As I’ve seen in Göbekli Tepe, I’m interested in the beginning. I want to go as far back as possible. I’m looking at the origin because that is where everything stems from. How we developed these stories of giants, of gods and of a single God has something to do with how we lived, how we communicated, and who we were when we hunted and gathered. We hunted for meaning, and we gathered stories.

The First Culture

The ocean stretches out as far as the eye can see, the waves crashing against the rocky shore. A small group of huts and shelters hug the coastline, nestled among the canoes and rafts that dot the shore.

The villagers are dressed in seal skins and furs, their faces painted with intricate designs. They move with a sense of purpose, preparing for their daily fish and gathering of food. They are connected to the water and the land, for both are connected to them.

In the centre of the village, a group of elders sit around a fire, passing the time with stories and teachings. They are the leaders of the community, respected for their wisdom and experience.

As the sun begins to set, the families gather around the evening fires, sharing their catch and discussing the day's events. They know that the ocean is a powerful force, and they must respect it in order to survive.

The young children sit at the feet of their parents and grandparents, learning about the ways of their people and the importance of community. They dream of one-day becoming skilled fishers, able to provide for their families and protect their village.

As the night falls, the villagers retire to their shelters, content in the knowledge that they have done their part to preserve the way of life they love so much.

Detail of Enki from the Adda Seal, an ancient Akkadian cylinder seal dating to circa 2300. (I must add that the highlighted text is completely fiction for analogous purposes. I chose the name Enki for this exact reason but this is only analogous and should not be taken as the same name)

There are many lessons we can draw from isolated communities in prehistoric times. Namely, there are rules and regulations they follow in order to survive. These rules have been passed from offspring to offspring so that each generation. The elders tell these rules through stories and mythology, not to scare children or control them, but to teach them lessons and principles so that they do not suffer the consequences faced by their ancestors. There are rituals for the younglings to become a fisherman so that he has adequate skills to feed and lead their community. Let’s imagine we choose Enki, the god of the water, who must be respected and worshipped. You must not take from Enki more than you need and you must be skilled at fishing to face Her dangerous waters. If we abandon these teachings and replace them with a worldview that is all but controlling and tyrannical — or even delusional — then where can we draw our lessons from if not the past? How did we get to the success we have today if such a system is so tyrannical and hellbent on economic control?

You might think these people are primitive. Don’t they know that there isn’t a god who controls the waters? It’s just the global climate and weather patterns! And don’t they know that taking more from Enki doesn’t mean Enki will take revenge? Why are worshipping these weird statues and weird gods?

In The Message (1976), said the Quraysh leader to the Christian King Najashi “They deny Christ! [The Muslims] say you worship three gods: ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost,’ they say.”

“We are an ancient civilization. To call our gods wood and stone is to speak ignorantly of them. Idol the worship is not what we worship, but the spirit that recites within the form.” The Message, 1976

Even today, ‘idol’ worshipping is still misunderstood amongst the masses of ‘religious’ people online. If we could understand the utility of the spirit of idol worship, then we can see its benefit. Enki tells us:

“Don’t over-fish! Allow the fish pods time to reproduce for the next season.”

I can't help but wonder if there is something more personifying the role of fishing into a god, and it seems unnatural to me to just dismay Her as an idol and not something as real and connected with the water as the people that depend on it.

We can organise our ideologies into either the physical events of the world—as the religious fundamentalists claim — or we can relate a transcendent element which incorporates the future. People are drawn to stories, not reductionist tales of logic and science.

We don’t know why these people survived for so long with these stories, but the fact that they survived speaks of a truth in them: they weren’t stupid or idolatry as most scholars today would categorise them. We survived because they survived. They survived because their stories survived. And to pass away the stories which have been developed over thousands of years of struggle, conflict, destruction, disaster and deprivation leads to the imminent destruction of ourselves.

The Second Culture

We will now explore another isolated community around 500 miles inland, nestled away in the mountains.

The rocky peaks of the mountain loom high above the village, their jagged edges dusted with snow. A blanket of fog rests across the mountain’s valley. A small cluster of stone huts huddles together at the base of the mountain, nestled among the goats that roam the rocky terrain.

The air is cold and crisp, the wind biting at the skin. The villagers are dressed in heavy furs and layers of clothing, their faces hard and weathered from the harsh conditions.

In the centre of the village, a group of elders sit around a fire, their faces grave as they discuss the dangerous predators that lurk in the mountains. They speak of the mountain lions, powerful and majestic creatures who roam the peaks. Their leader, Nergal, is the God of the Lions and they tell of his destructive power should they ever cross him.

The villagers worship Nergal, god of the mountain, offering Him sacrifices of goats in the hopes of placating His wrath. They know that if they kill too many goats, Nergal will send the mountain lions to hunt in the village instead.

As the sun begins to set, the families gather, sharing the day's hunt and talking about their plans for the future. They know that the mountain is a harsh and unforgiving place, and they must work together to survive.

The young children listen intently to their parents and grandparents, learning about the ways of their people and the importance of respecting Nergal. They dream of one day becoming skilled hunters and herders, able to provide for their families and protect their village.

As the night falls, the villagers retire to their homes, huddled together for warmth and comfort. They know that Nergal watches over them, and they hope to earn His favour through their devotion and respect.

Elil, previously known as Enlil, was a deity in ancient Mesopotamian culture linked to storms, wind, air, and earth. The earliest records depict him as the primary god of the Sumerian divine assembly. Statuette of Enlil sitting on his throne from the site of Nippur, dated 1800 – 1600 BC, now on display in the Iraq Museum.

Mountain lions are the top predators that dwell with the people. Over generations, both the people and the lions have developed a coexistence. It was discovered (not scientifically because ‘science’ is only around 500 years old) that if they kill too many goats too frequently, then the mountain lion wouldn’t have any goats to eat, and so would alter their territory and come into conflict with the people instead, introducing a dangerous and disastrous game. Because we personify each natural existence, the people viewed this as an act of revenge. Nergal is saying:

“Don't kill too many goats.”

If we kill too many goats, they can’t feed on the grass or the weeds which overgrow and make the whole ecosystem unstable and difficult to live in. More importantly, if we hunt and slaughter the mountain lion and cross the god Nergal, then the goats overpopulate and completely graze the mountain, so we have no food and our village will starve.

The mountain lion automatically becomes sacred. There are morals which we navigate through to survive the harshness of the land. We connect each natural thing around us — because that is all that is around us to connect — a moral placement in the land and in the air. And if we break that code, then people will starve, suffer, or die. This is very intelligent.

No matter how advanced we are today, human beings are part of the food chain. There is an order and chaos we must consider when we act. What’s emerging is a moral rule. How do we live so that we can eat, so that our children can eat and so that our children’s children can eat? How do we live so that we don’t suffer under nature? How can we coexist with the destructive elements that rule over our lives?

We live through the stories of our ancestors. We live through the gods and deities we’ve personified. We act upon the elements so that we can have a relationship with them, just as we have a relationship with our friends and with our families. And as our nature shifts, or as our climate changes, for example (although I don’t like to mix religious thinking with a pre-destined political view on climate change), we also change. Our stories which allow us to survive change with us. The story which allows us to navigate can change. The old ideas can die so we don’t. Not only can we form a relationship with the natural world that rules us, but we can also bargain with it. We can exchange the suffering of today for the prosperity of tomorrow. However, it’s much easier to do the reverse: we can also exchange the indulgence of today for the demise and destruction of tomorrow.

The Third

The mountain lions that once roamed the peaks have all but disappeared, and the goats are fewer in number. The winters are becoming colder and harsher, and the leaders of the tribe are becoming worried. The youthful fathers and mothers suggest that they should leave the mountain and seek out a warmer climate. The winds are changing and the birds are migrating. Nergal is coming to feast if they do not move quickly.

A few of the villagers gather their belongings and set out on a journey to find a new home. It has been many generations since anyone has left the mountains. They travel for days, crossing rocky terrain and icy rivers. They find new trees and fruits and see different creatures. Eventually, after days of travelling, they reach the coast. The air is warmer. There, they encounter a group of fishermen, living in a small village by the sea…

At first, the two groups are wary of each other, but they soon realize that they have much to learn from each other. They exchange goat meat and fish, the fishermen learn about the mountains and the hunters learn how to fish — they learn how to swim. Trade routes begin to form between the two communities after many more expeditions come down from the mountain.

Over the years, the two groups grow closer and begin to form a clan. They exchange wives and form alliances, and their gods begin to merge and share the same narrative. Nergal and Enki (now Nega and Ink: their languages have also merged) are married and are in unity with each other. They worship them and recognize their wrath, telling each other stories and learning about each other's traditions.

As the generations pass, the mountain and fishing communities become inseparable, bound together by a shared history and a deep sense of unity. The trade routes along the way diverge and farming communities begin to form, the people work the land and the soil, learning the ways of the trees and the fruit, forming their own rules and morals, personified by another god: Elil, god of the earth and soil. Both Nega, now a provider of the air, and Ink, goddess of water work together with Elil to grow trees, bear fruit and feed the community. This whole system is in balance and the elders tell these stories to ensure that the people cooperate with the gods and each other.

As you can see, our little communities have grown exponentially quickly. Their gods share the same traditions and the same stories. They’ve developed a relationship with even more elements of the land. Namely, Elil is the god of Earth, Nega is the god of Air, and Ink is the goddess of Water. Our community’s clan will grow and grow till it eventually encounters other tribes. Some will cooperate and trade and the clan’s growth will swallow the traditions and acquire the gods of those clans, just as before. Each iteration of groups will tell stories, some information will be lost but the most important aspects of the story will remain. Each group will provide something for the mega-clan to learn from. Trade, cooperation, and education will flourish. No longer are these communities isolated.

The Thirds

Some clans will resist and war will ensue. However, out of these wars, there will be a victor, and the victor will tell stories of courage and bravery, of danger and of warfare. He will not take credit, for the god of War (yes! personification of the soldier, the commander) was always on his side. Wars will ensue, and truces will be made and broken.

Perseus and Andromeda (1891) by Frederic Leighton, located in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, United Kingdom; Frederic Leighton, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Feelings will be met for the goddess of Love works her magic between men and women. Desire, trust and marriage will spread throughout the mega-clan. This mega-clan is beginning to look like an empire.

Pygmalion and Galatea (1890) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, United States; Jean-Léon Gérôme, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Accumulative Polytheism

What this all points to are that in any polytheistic tradition, the gods in the meta-space are a direct truth of the physical space our humanity inhabits. Whatever stories we tell each other are a reflection of Man’s relationship with the land and each other who inhabits that land. It is of no surprise that an empire such as the Romans spread so strongly with Neptune across the seas, Mars in moments of the war, Mercury for the lone explorer, Venus for love and Saturn for time.

Iterate this over hundreds of years and we’ve traded many more cultures and stories. And then whatever we act out between communities, the Gods which we represent also act out what we’ve done. The reason why the stories of these ancient mythologies have survived is that those are the strongest, most representative of the human condition, of how to act and what is the moral code. Iterate this over thousands of years and across many isolated communities becoming engulfed into a shared culture: we have multiple gods. Each god not only embodies a separate community but also a separate spirit of emotions and actions. If you love someone, you embody Venus. And if you wish to wage war, you embody Mars.

You might believe that this is extremely archaic, but these people survived with these gods for many generations. These gods are what you call upon to act out your life when it's all you know how to do. What informs that act lies deep within your culture. What informs your culture is the stories. What informs the stories are the lives, tragedies and experiences of our ancestors.

Minerva and the Triumph of Jupiter, a depiction of Zeus and Athena in Olympus, after the Roman names of the gods, painting by Rene Antoine Houasse

If they didn’t have them, for instance, if you convinced them that there is no God of Water or God of the Mountain, then things would very rapidly deteriorate for the fishing and the mountain community. And if you offered an evolutionary perspective — a scientific, reductionist perspective — I doubt they would understand. These people were not scientific, in fact, even scientists aren’t that scientific. (I know because I studied Physics for 4 years at university where it was thought that six triple-shots of vodka and clubbing will be OK for a productive day of experiments in the morning.) These people viewed the world as people in themselves, the personification of the natural forces that govern the universe. It’s why we have statues of gods that look like us rather than anything else. Man was created in God’s image and likeness.

His being embodies our being in the spiritual sense. There was always a top god, a king god. The abstraction that emerges over further iterations, taking an analysis of the Roman and Greek mythologies, you can see that monotheism was slowly surfacing over an evolutionary period. It’s not surprising that this form of religious evolution is very similar to the origin of species: where the most dominant species can emerge by natural selection, and the selection is something remarkable because the selection reveals a moral relationship between the transcendent and the physical: what stories we keep and what stories we leave behind to die. In disruptive selection, the most extreme traits within separate populations are favoured, purely by the obstacles which separate a population into separate niches. Similarly, religious idolatries emerge from the community's separation. However, as communities advance and undergo migration encounter other communities with other deities, unlike different species that cannot reproduce, our cultures can integrate with one another and abstract further deities into the next generation.

There is already thinking that the updates of this transcend story is locked into psychedelics and the dream, similar to a genetic mutation. Likewise, this connects with the evolutionary analogy I propose which allows genetic updates to arise from mutations.

What’s evolving are the stories we tell each other. As our humanity faces greater hardships and changes, so do our stories evolve to reflect that. The abstraction which survives natural selection is the most relevant: the hyper-truth. The metaphysical present society and the moral code we live by are reflections of one another; just as the ocean reflects the sky so do our values placed onto Earth are fought out in the heavens.

Darwin's finches or Galapagos finches. Darwin, 1845. Journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the countries visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the world, under the Command of Capt. Fitz Roy, R.N. 2d edition. 1.

Regression to Monotheism

The historical record of polytheistic religious practises over time reveals that there is a convergence back to worshipping one god. In other words, what these stories reveal is that over time, the story we are telling each other is that there is One God. Zeus is the king God of the Greeks, Jupiter of the Romans, Marduk of the Mesopotamians, and very earlier Yahweh of the Jews. There is a top god, a father of all gods. And so over our short evolutionary history, there is an evolution of culture in directing ourselves towards monotheism as we become more interconnected over long periods. A leader is driving all these gods, aligning them to expansion and successful conquest.

I would like to expand into further detail about monotheistic religions, particularly Judeo-Christian thought.

Raphael, The Council of the Gods, 1518, Fresco Panel – Villa Farnesina, Rome, Italy

Currently, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity stand at the top of the world’s religions. If we can iterate further, who knows what mythological structure will dominate in the next ten thousand years? As we become more shared as a culture, though divisions will exist (and even then that will still unify our communities: wars are also a form of cultural exchange), then we will still converge towards monotheism.

The Future of Diety Exchange

Wars are interesting regarding evolving religious movements. What is true in today’s society is that traditional wars in the masculine sense have completely ceased. Whoever has the biggest guns, the largest tanks, the highest morale, and the best strategies all have become completely irrelevant in our modern society. Since the invention of the atomic bomb in 1945 by a team led by Robert Oppenheimer, which culminated in the complete destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, modern warfare has completely changed course. In other words, we now have weapons that can inflict mass destruction on each other, but none of us would dare to use them.

This is by no means an indicator of world peace. Human beings are not creatures that can just put a cap on the bottle of conflict. Instead, we’ve found another way to inflict pain and suffering on each other: information. We can’t send people to war to die for our country, or physically obliterate another; instead what we can do is equip the populous with a doctrine through education, news, literature, music, and television and provide them with technologies such as phones, computers, and online platforms to do so.

Despite being increasingly technologically advanced, we’ve failed as a Western society to integrate our ancient culture into the system. Instead, we let the smaller, more perverted and more resentful gods rule over us. This is what we face today: although we have world peace on the physical stage, cyberspace is not at all at peace, especially between the world’s religions. In fact, the war which exists in cyberspace is becoming so violent that it is bleeding into our own physical reality due to the growing belief that it is identical to the real world.

Cyberspace is not all representative of the real world. What we are building is something akin to a delusion, a delusion which is being exchanged rapidly on the grandest of scales.

This is our form of religious exchange. This is how we exchange our gods. This is how we grab the carpet under our neighbour’s feet. This is how we topple investors. This is how we topple governments and undermine authority. Is this war culminating towards a higher form of monotheism? Is this truly the best way to advance our cultures, by putting ourselves at odds with one another? Will Christians and Muslims share the same temples? Will they worship the same God as they share the same stories?

Conclusion

We are left with all these manuscripts and religious texts. We rely on YouTube scholars and pastors to decide on their meanings, and it’s not exactly clear what these ancient people were saying or what they were thinking when they were written. Today, It’s not clear either whether Mohammed Hijab or Zakir Naik understand what the Quranic text is saying, and whether that meaning is in its original form.

What is clear is that these ancient people survived harsh environments and faced terrible moments of sacrifice, and they clung to these ideas of god, and gods, and of divinity and greatness. What is more remarkable is they survived with them! And the evidence stands clear that these people survived on traditions, on worship and sacrifice. They didn’t depend on some reductionistic Nihilism which pop science and pop religion love to purport continuously, masked by a cloak of wonder and virtue.

What is clear from all these examples I’ve given is that there is a God. And the spirit of these ancient traditions are ways in which we can act and be acted upon in our life. if we lose God, you cannot possibly imagine how much more we will lose. The plague of neo-Marxists and post-modernists in schools and universities, within huge corporations and our governments, is trying to undermine God and Western civilisation itself. A godless society will suffer unimaginable consequences. We will let the whole natural order and our relationship with it collapse. We will kill healthy growing babies because they interfere with our careers. We will carve out healthy human beings because someone feels trapped inside of a body. We will give all our freedoms away to a totalitarian authority. We will convince our sick neighbour that he should kill himself. We will angrily shout and exclude each other because someone doesn’t agree with us. We overfish because there is no God of Fish to stop us. We overkill because the God of The Mountain blew away in the wind. We go against the natural order because why not? There is no God.

Motivation

Thank you for reading this article, I know it’s been a long one but I hope it’s sparked some curiosity and wisdom. This theory, I hope will be picked up by religious historians, archaeologists, behavioural biologists, or anthropologists, but I also understand that my viewership is extremely small and perhaps this theory will go on being forgotten. It is a theory that I would like to work on and adjust as well as see if it aligns with the historical and anthropological record.

My main motivation to write this article firstly stemmed from frustration within the Muslim community. Namely, the notion that polytheism is highly rebuked and highly frowned upon. Even the mere study of Ancient Greek or Roman mythologies is seen as polytheistic worship. Yet, in all the teachings of the Madrasas, it’s not made clear at any point why polytheism is a path to evil. I seriously doubt the practice of submitting to Allah when Allah Himself is interpreted by tyrannical, pyramidal and culturally destructive mullahs.

Indeed, the foundational history of Islam by the beginning of the 7th century is based on staunch resistance and oppression from the Qurayshi people, a group of pagan Arab tribes who worshipped a multitude of gods. In a hall-of-mirrors fashion, it is said throughout every Madrasa and every Islamic school and every Jummah sermon that the Quraysh were a rotten bunch of idol worshippers. Quraysh equals bad.

These rotten specimens established a successful commercial trading centre in the middle of a harsh and unforgiving desert, connected thousands of people from all types of backgrounds and traditions to worship and trade, gained an immense political reputation between the Indian Ocean and East Africa, protected and carried out religious services of a holy shrine, and managed merchants and financing on a grand organisational level never before seen in the Arabian Peninsula. It doesn’t seem right to disregard this success, nor does it seem fair to demonise them.

However, history is written by the victors and Wahhabism has certainly cast ideological warfare across the Muslim community to fuel this thinking. Muhammed equal good.

“But they attribute to Allah partners - the jinn while He has created them - and have fabricated for Him sons and daughters. Exalted is He and high above what they describe.” Koran 6:100.

“When the sky has split [open] And has cast out that within it and relinquished it. And has responded to its Lord and was obligated [to do so]” Koran 84: 1-5.

The Quranic verses suggest an intersection between Qurayshi traditions and Islamic teachings and show that Muhammad recognized polytheism as a legitimate worship form while considering Allah as the highest God. This is similar to Zeus and Jupiter's position in Greek and Roman mythology. Muhammad was a member of Quraysh and likely a polytheist himself. Over the Quran's 23-year revelation period, its stories, lessons, verses, and teachings gradually shifted from polytheism to monotheism, converging towards the worship of One God.

There are many similarities between ancient polytheist and modern monotheist mythologies, way too many to ignore and cast aside as ‘idol worshipping’. Just as our ancestors are making sense of the world around them through their idols, so too are we. There are trees and birds, animals and food, there is water and fish, there are others like us, and others not so much like us but we can find similarities; for the sky, and God, are exalted above us, all, with the gods and the forces that run it.