Lecture: How Temples and Religion Played a Central Role in Creating the Ancient Economic Order That Has Become Secularized Today
- Frontmatter
- Preface
- Prologue: What Are the Roots of Civilization?
- Chronology and Maps
- Spring: Establishing Society’s Structural Proportions
- 1. How the Archaic Kosmos Integrated Nature and Society
- 2. The Shift From Lunar to Solar Calendars and Counting
- 3. Measures, Rules, and Prices
- Summer: Balancing Self-Expression With Group Order
- 4. Alphanumeric Notation and the Calendrical-Musical Kosmos
- 5. Music, Temperament, and Social Concord
- 6. The Distributive Justice of Group Feasts and Banquets
- Autumn: The Division of Labor and Economic Justice
- 7. Social Division Into Calendrical Tribes and Ranks
- 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
- 9. The Archaic Cosmology of Cities: Building the Kosmos on Earth
- Winter: The Archaic Order in Motion and Its Collapse
- 10. Social Justice Sanctified, From Inanna and Nanshe to Nemesis
- 11. Periodicities of Property and Debt
- 12. The Cosmology of War
- Epilogue: Modern Civilization as the Destruction of Archaic Order
- Backmatter
- Acknowledgments
- Bibliography
- Lecture: How Temples and Religion Played a Central Role in Creating the Ancient Economic Order That Has Become Secularized Today
- Help Us Edit and Join This Collaborative Research Project
- Navigate the Query Pages Throughout This Book
- Style Guide for This Book
The following text was adapted from a speech delivered by Michael Hudson on February 14, 2025, and was produced by Human Bridges.
Introduction
It might sound sarcastic to say that temples in the Bronze Age and classical antiquity played the role that banks do today in the western world, but they did. They towered over their city. When banks do that today in the west, they are asserting that they play the role that temples and religion itself did in earlier times. Banks and finance are the organizing principle in the west today that temples and religion used to be. They played the central role in creating economic order that formed the basic context for social order.
Religion always has been much more than the idea of “god” or “the gods.” It coordinated the organization of social life. Its primary original function was to design and keep the calendar. From that function came its role in officiating at rites of passage for individual families, and in organizing key holidays and feasts for the population at large.
That role included sanctifying laws and behavior, and shaping the social infrastructure.
That infrastructure included a hierarchy of status and responsibility. Subordination to divine authority may be created as an analog to earthly life. In antiquity, everyone was subject to a higher authority. The family to the father, the clan to a chief‚ and the ruler himself to a god of justice.
Temples were the administrative organs of religion. Their architecture was designed to reflect the cosmos, largely the directional orientation, and the mathematical proportions reflecting the calendrical movements of the sun and moon. That is why many western historians of religion saw archaic temples as “astral religion.”
Temples’ influence centered around key religious holidays when the population came together, to participate in re-creating the cosmos. In time, medicine was added, and all knowledge plugged into a system of how to view the world and behave in it.
The calendar and its turning points supplied the basic planning model for the rest of society. That may seem banal. But the function of religion was to give order in the world. And the key to early order was the calendar. This was based on the moon and sun. Its lunisolar order was projected onto the stars.
The turning points of the sun were the major turning points of the year, and they were seen to correlate with the seasons on earth, and with specific stars.
So if organizing the calendar was the first science, it evolved out of the religious idea of an orderly cosmos, in which everything was connected.
Religion was intended to calm by providing a faith in order. Music and harmony were part of this.
What was to be calmed was not just the individual, but all society—the community. This meant healing rifts according to civil law. Originally these were family rifts, as the basic organizational unit was the family. The family was to be brought into harmony with the community. Religious sanctification was the key to this law, to its moral principles.
This was achieved by a feeling of mutuality. Mutual feeding of each other went hand in hand with an exchange of food, gift exchange, and mutual aid.
And from that came more general trade and exchange. That was given a sense of proportion and order, starting with the payment of fines (to compensate for personal injury), taxes, and payments to the temples.
Religious or Political Movements and Justice
Next to order, every major world religion has originated as a protest against injustice. Judaism was a protest against kings gone bad. Christianity was a protest against the abuses of wealth, above all by creditors—quite similar in fact to early Sumerian and Babylonian justice deities. Islam was a further protest against mercantile injustice and usury. Socialism and Marxism were protests against the degradation of labor, using the technology unleashed by the Industrial Revolution to impoverish rather than to enrich the world.
It was only natural that the new sense of restoring justice would be merged with the idea of order, grounding its mythology and foundation ceremonies in the calendrical rhythms of nature.
Religion is often a refuge and source of solace to the downtrodden, much as it was to African American enslaved people in the 18th and 19th centuries. They famously identified with the Hebrews in captivity, and looked forward to deliverance.
Temples and Hierarchical Power
The Greek word for sacred, hiero, provides the root for our modern term hierarchic, and the worldly impact of religion has long involved establishing the authority of a hierarchy. This is what made archaic religion a practical guide for structuring worldly life, as well as serving as a constraint on personal egotism—above all that which was engendered by personal wealth and the power that went with it. So religion not only supported power, but it also acted in principle as a check on its abuse.
The key economic role that temples played included organizing money, credit, trade, and social welfare. This was essential to maintaining economic order.
Temples and palace rulers typically were closely linked as a distinct sector. Those of Mesopotamia are called the “large institutions.” They were set aside as distinct corporate entities, with their own landholding, herds of cattle, and labor force.
A Quick Summary of the Roles of Temples Across the Early Stages of Civilizational History
1. Currency
Temples served as hubs for guaranteeing the integrity of precious metals, principal exchange commodities, and coinage. Temples also produced money (and refined silver long before classical antiquity’s coinage).
2. Standardized Weights and Measures
Temples were the standard-makers and standard-keepers for weights and measures, serving as a bulwark against the practices of private merchants who frequently used false weights to cheat customers.
3. Production Hubs
In the ancient Near East, temples were the organizational matrix for available labor (usually widows and orphans) for producing textiles and other handicrafts for private or public/private merchants to trade for foreign metal, stone, and other raw materials not produced locally.
4. Trade and Account-Keeping
Trade conducted under the auspices of temples was more likely to be transparent and follow approved customs. Out of that grew a temple role for recording accounts of exchange. And account-keeping was the key to economic management.
5. Social Equity
Economic management of the temples, which often held large tracts of land to support their social activities, was subject to moral laws and ideas of social equity.
Society designated high-level responsibilities and a lot of decision-making to temples instead of to an independent oligarchy acting in its own interests against those of society as a whole and also instead of mutual aid. That was the role of temples and religion itself to reinforce.
Temples thus were protectors of the social order that they had played a major role in creating in the first place. That involved the sanctification of contracts, and also oaths taken in legal trials.
6. Officiation and Witnessing
Temple priests played a role officiating at rites of passage. These were public, involving social witnessing of marriage contracts and related mutual obligations.
Banks as the Successors to Temples
Today in the west, the successors to temples have been banks. Their architecture long emulated that of “temples of finance,” towering over many cities just as temples did over ancient and medieval towns, with clock towers from which the time was announced.
Banks have become society’s economic planners, and the wealthiest individuals enjoy the highest status. Their gain-seeking and financial wealth are applauded as progress. That is just the opposite of how ancient societies kept merchants and moneylenders at a low rank so as to prevent a domestic financial and landowning oligarchy from developing.
Today’s social hierarchy is based on successful greed, above all financial greed.
Religion and Discontent
The reason why new religions were so apocalyptic and at the same time so structural is that they arose in times of great discontent, when society broke down. This was especially the case when the breakdown came as a result of debt overhead, as is happening today.
By offering a new structure based on moral justice and mutual aid, this role of religion threatened worldly vested interests, especially those of creditors and oligarchies.
For this reason religion may have been radical in times of discontent and troubles. That may have led to breakaways from the existing orthodox religions, if these had simply turned into a defense of vested interests that had created an unfair world.
In such cases religion became a program of social reform, creating a new world, replacing the existing social order. For this world, an overall structure needed to be described, and that involved criticizing what went wrong with the old religious hierarchy.
One path of least resistance was to “restore” an idealized beginning. This often involved an emphasis on personal behavior, but the problem ultimately is social.
Archaic War Chiefs and Sky Chiefs
Many archaic communities had two chiefs: a war chief, and a domestic priest keeping the calendar. That was the first organizing principle ever since the Ice Age.
Religion often has been juxtaposed to science, as “belief.” Superstition is defined as correlation that is false. And probably no superstition is more poked fun at than astrology.
But the first and most telling correlation throughout the world was calendrical in character. The patterns provided the original basis for social organization. It also was the origin of religion—the “sky chief” in contrast to the war chief.
From this perspective, religion was the “original” impulse for science: in the sense of a search for order in the world, for regularities. This is after all the first step in establishing lines of cause and effect. Religion, science, and cosmology all went together.
Religion has long been associated with otherworldly and subjective beliefs concerning a personal god, bringing to mind such words as awe and god-fearing—a “faith,” reinforced by ceremonies that excite feelings on a nonverbal plane. The irrational played a role in such beliefs, from shamanistic trances to the rituals of blood sacrifice and endowment of mantles of authority to sanctify power.
Ultimately, though, religion is about being peaceful, not making war. For the authorities against which sacred protest is aimed always have the monopoly of armed power and force.
