Before 15,000 BCE: (Henotheism as the Ancient Afrasian Belief System — A Relict Distribution Identifying an Ancient Cultural Feature That Once Spread Uninter…

Before 15,000 BCE: (Henotheism as the Ancient Afrasian Belief System — A Relict Distribution Identifying an Ancient Cultural Feature That Once Spread Uninterruptedly Across Wide Areas but Persists in Later Times Only in Scattered Peripheral Locations, Henotheism Being a System in Which People Accept the Existence of Multiple Gods but Each Local Clan or Group of Clans Has Its Own God to Whom the Community Must Direct Its Primary Loyalty and Ritual Observances): What is a relict distribution? It is a distribution in which a particular cultural trait of long-ago origin has been preserved by people down to much later times in only a few scattered locales far separated from each other — the classic criterion for identifying an ancient item of culture, a feature that once spread uninterruptedly across wide areas but persists in later times only in scattered, often peripheral locations. In the Afrasian case, the belief system with a relict distribution was of a type called henotheism. Henotheism is a belief system in which people accept the existence of multiple gods, but in which each local clan or group of clans, or each local population grouping of some other kind, has its own god. To receive divine protection and prosper, the community must direct its primary loyalty and ritual observances to its own god. This is not monotheism — it does not deny the existence of other gods. And it is not simple polytheism — it does not treat all gods as equally available to all worshippers. It is something more specific: a system of divine allegiance organized along lines of kinship and locality, where each community’s relationship with its particular deity is exclusive, binding, and foundational to its identity. The concept of a people having “their” god — a god who belongs to them and to whom they belong — is the signature of henotheism, and its presence among Afrasian speakers at opposite ends of the family’s geographical range tells us that this is not a local invention but an inheritance from the deepest levels of the Afrasian past.