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Heaven and earth, as personified powers of nature and thus worthy of worship, are evidently not of equal age. Although from earliest times heaven was believed to be the residence of a high being or a prominent god, the earth as a personified entity is much rarer; it probably first occurred among archaic agrarian civilizations, and it continues to occur in some less industrialized societies in which agriculture is practiced. Gods of heaven, however, are characteristic spiritual beings of early and contemporary hunting and gathering societies and are found in almost all cultures.
Some worldviews generally assume the earth to be simply given (i.e., as continuously existing). Sometimes the earth is believed to have emerged out of chaos or a primal sea or to have come into existence by the act of a heavenly god, transformer, or demiurge (creator). Even in these worldviews, however, the earth usually remains without a divine owner, unless through agriculture and the cult of the dead the earth is conceived as the source of the renewing powers of nature or as the underworld.
Heaven
The fact that heaven is animated by rain-giving clouds (with lightning and thunder) and by a regular chorus of warming and illuminating celestial bodies (sun, moon, and stars) led to concepts of the personification of heaven from earliest times. Heavenly deities, as the personification of the physical aspects of the sky, appear in variations that are adapted to the types of cultures concerned. The listing offered below does not represent a unilinear development that is applicable everywhere.
The father of the family
The god of heaven is often viewed as an ever active father of the family, often called upon but rarely the recipient of sacrifices. He is able to intervene in human and natural affairs without the aid of an intermediary—e.g., priest, medicine man, or ancestors. As a numinous (spiritual) being, he is closer to humanity than other spiritual powers are. He sends lightning and rain and rules the stars that are at most essential aspects of himself or are members of his family subject to him. He is the creator and the receiver of the dead. Modern scholars have designated such a being as the “high god,” “supreme god,” the “highest being” of the “original monotheism” (according to the theories of the German scholar P.W. Schmidt), the idealized god of heaven (according to the views of the Italian historian of religion Raffaele Pettazzoni), or the familiar father deity (according to the views of the British anthropologist Andrew Lang). Very human, often comical, or even unethical and repulsive traits of such deities are often represented in myths that also sometimes include legends of animal or human ancestors.
This type of deity is generally found in its most developed form among the old hunting and gathering peoples of the temperate and arid areas (e.g., the North America forest dwellers, the Fuegians of South America, the indigenous peoples of Australia, and the African Khoisan) and of the tropical primeval forests, where he is usually conceived as a storm and thunder being (e.g., Tore of the Bambuti of the Ituri Forest). He is also worshiped among the pastoral peoples as the “blue” or “white” sky of the wide pastures in the steppes of northeastern Africa (e.g., Waka of the Oromo) and of Central and North Asia (e.g., Torem, Num, and Tengri of the Ugrians, Nenets, and Mongols). Among such peoples, heaven is often merged with an old hunting deity, the lord of the animals, or it allows the latter to exist as a hypostasis by his side.
The withdrawn god
The god of heaven may be a deus otiosus, who has, after completing the creation, withdrawn into heaven and abandoned the government of the world to the human ancestors or to nature spirits that are dependent on him and act as mediators. This type of the god, who is able to intervene directly only in times of great need, such as drought, pestilence, or war, can be found primarily where worship of the dead or worship of individual local “earth spirits”—not yet integrated into an all-inclusive earth deity—obscures everything else. This type of god occurs especially in areas of so-called primitive agriculture (e.g., large parts of Africa, Melanesia, and South America).
The first among equals
The god of heaven also may be the head of a pantheon of gods, the first among equals, or the absolute ruler in a hierarchy of gods. This occurs in polytheism (belief in many gods) in its purest form. The deities associated with him are often related to him by family ties (genealogies of gods). Occasionally, the heavenly phenomena are distributed among members of the clan of gods, the god of heaven himself thus becoming rather vague. The divine pair heaven-earth represents only one among many possible combinations—e.g., Dyaus-pitri (= heaven, male) and Prithivi (= earth, female) in Vedic India or, with an unusual distribution of the sexes, Nut (= heaven, woman) and Geb (= earth, man) in ancient Egypt.
Occasionally, as in the pantheons of Greece and western Asia, generations of gods succeed each other. In such instances, the more universal god of heaven is often replaced by the younger god of thunderstorms (e.g., Zeus of the Greeks, Teshub of the Hittites, or Hadad of the Western Semitic peoples) or is even relegated to the background by a goddess, such as Inanna-Ishtar (the love or fertility goddess in Babylonia) or Amaterasu, the sun goddess of Japan.
In ancient China, heaven (tian) ruled over the many more popular gods and was even closely related to the representatives of the imperial household. Deification of the celestial emperor is a cultic practice that extends from Korea to Annam (part of Vietnam). The roots of the worship of heaven in Asia are probably the beliefs of central and northern Asian nomads in a solitary god of heaven. Gods of heaven, above or behind a pantheon, probably originated in areas where a theocratic stratified bureaucracy existed or where sacral kingdoms exist or have existed—e.g., in the Sudanor northeastern Africa (Akan-Baule, Benin, Yoruba, Jukun, Buganda, and neighbouring states), western Indonesia, Polynesia and Micronesia, and the advanced civilizations of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and South America.