In the texts presented here, Gerhard Bott, the mastermind of German patriarchy-critical religious studies, describes the early phases of the emergence of religion and rule without the patriarchal biases of conventional historical scholarship. He was inspired above all by E.O. James, Marija Gimbutas, Gerda Lerner and his university teacher Alexander Rüstow, who coined the term 'neoliberalism'. Horst Tran (Munich) has translated these chapters from Bott's groundbreaking book 'The Invention of the Gods` (2009) into English in arrangement with the author and has been assigned by him full rights to the translated texts.