Judaism
Religious Origins: How Primeval Humans Turned Society into God
Abstract
Religious Origins 1
What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from men’s imagination.Joseph Campbell, The Way of the Myth
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999; Saturday, 8 August 2009
Anthropological Studies
Where should we look for culturally early fragments of human social evolution? Early sociologists of religion made errors because they thought they could see all levels of human development in the reports of primitive tribes from all over the world, brought in by explorers, merchants and travellers. Much of the “data” was anecdotal and, although some remarkable books were written from it, they amount only to speculations.
We have been slow to accept that primitive people are not simple minded, backwards or mentally retarded. Their own lives and organisation are often well suited to their lifestyle and they often have an astonishingly comfortable and carefree life with sufficient food and little or no social conflict, or little until the missionaries arrived. They are not “noble savages” because we are a lot more savage than they are, but they do have a certain nobility and sensitivity to their environment. Essentially they are no different from us. We know that prehistoric hunter gatherers killed animals in wasteful ways and, even in recent times, the Maoris have driven the New Zealand Moa extinct. But most such peoples seem to have recognised, presumably through experiences like this, that there is no sense in it. We have not yet properly reached that stage. We know what we are doing, but have no will to change it.
People with better weapons and social organisation pushed less knowledgeable peoples aside and seized their lands. They were marginalised, so we have to seek them in the margins, in isolated islands, dense forests and in otherwise difficult terrain. They were the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, the Botocudos of Brazil, the Veddahs of Ceylon, the Andamanese Islanders, the Aetas of the Philippine Islands, the Samoans of the Malay Peninsula, the Australian Aboriginals and Tasmanians, and the Bushmen of South Africa. These peoples were thought of as the least socially sophisticated human peoples, the surviving fossils of culture in the early Stone Age, the Europeans of tens of thousands of years ago. Better equipped and organised cultures had driven them into the islands, deserts and forests.
In Tierra del Fuego, the lowly Yahgans were studied in 1882 and 1883 by two French scientists before modern ideas could reach them. These scholars declared:
We have never detected the least allusion to any kind of cult or religious idea.
They quote a missionary who had earlier spent twenty years amongst the Yahgans:
They have neither hope nor fear beyond the grave. For them there is neither God, nor good, nor evil, nor spirits to fear apart from the phantoms which may injure them in this world. Death is the end of existence, and they have no idea of a spiritual life or of the composition of man from a body and a soul.
Whether these men were mistaken or whether the missionary activity had some effect is for anthropologists to decide, because the Yahgans certainly believed in spirits and a God at a later date. If the French anthropologists are to be believed, there is no presumption that human cultures have to have gods and spirits, and this can be concluded even if they had such beliefs but only feebly held. Yet, the Christian likes to assume a primitive revelation. Why then did the revelation not contain a warning that worship should be kept free from bloodshed, human sacrifices and all the monstrosities of religion.
Even more sophisticated peoples needed no God or gods. The human race cannot have begun with a revelation and degenerated from it. As a purely instinctive animal, it began without religion, the only higher things they knew being powers of Nature and society, then they believed in spirits of the dead and sometimes a great spirit, then in polytheism, and then in monotheism. Is the final stage a return to no religion?
Brazilian Indians were reported to have no gods and no religious practices except a firm belief in the body’s invisible double. This is closely connected with dreams, but their name for it is “shadow”. Concerning the Tasmanian Aboriginals, driven to extinction, the first bishop of Tasmania, a missionary of long experience, said:
No trace can be found of any religious usage, or even sentiment, among them, unless indeed we may call by that name the dread of a malignant and destructive spirit which seems to have been their predominant, if not their only, feeling on the subject.
Though they had no gods and no kind of worship, they had a religion of belief in magic and malignant and destructive spirits of the dead who were never mentioned. They were convinced that man had a double which survived the body, and their name for it was “shadow”. Beyond this they had only a feeling of awe for the sun and the moon, which however they did not worship.
The Bushmen of South Africa are often quoted as believing in a supreme spirit, ‘Kung[†]‘Kung. The ‘ is a click of the tongue, who created all things, but ‘Kung was not a god, and they were said not to clearly believe in a spirit which survives the body:
Everything connected with their religion—that is, their dread of something outside of and more powerful than themselves—was vague and uncertain. They could give no explanations whatever about it, and they did not all hold the same opinions on the subject. Some of them spoke indeed of a powerful being termed ‘Kung or Cagu, but when questioned about him, their replies showed that they held him to be a man like themselves, though possessing charms of great power. Many are supposed to have had a vague belief in immortality… but probably very few of them ever gave a thought to such matter.
They vaguely believe in the survival of some part of the person, for which they have no definite name. Can we be sure this vagueness was not the anthropologist’s rather than the Bushman’s? Even if it was genuine, it reveals nothing about the beliefs of the Bushmen. Ask any ordinary Catholic about Catholic doctrine and it is doubtful that any two would be sure of it or would agree. Bushmen certainly have rich legends about ancestors, one of whom, ‘Kung, is well on the way to becoming a god, though apparently he was not worshipped.
Such cases show us the variety of religion in development but suggest no trace of a primitive revelation or of a religious instinct. Some anthropologists thought modern primitives did not have any religion in the sense that we understand it. If religion is the belief in and worship of gods, then some of them have no religion, unless the meaning of the word is extended to include a belief in spirits. Animism, and magic seems to develop amongst them equally with, not to precede, their rudimentary religion. Emergent humans could have had no belief in gods, because primeval people could not have evolved the idea of god. When people with developed religions contact extant primitive people, the “god” they describe is a strong man akin to some prominent ancestor of theirs, about whom they tell stories, as the British did about King Arthur or Robin Hood. They respect this superhuman but apparently do not worship him.
When Westerners accepted that primitive tribes could communicate by language perfectly well, they decided that primitives perceived things differently from advanced people. They decided that primitive people saw the supernatural in everything. In the sense that they accepted nonhuman volition, it is perhaps true, but they did not see it in everything all the time, any more than a Catholic sees the blood of Christ in every glass of wine. Some primitive societies accept the “supernatural” as natural. But most primitive people live their lives in a down to earth and practical way. Common objects might have had some power, but it normally manifested only when it was supposed to—on ritual or magical occasions—not while they were going about their everyday business. If a stone has a “supernatural” aspect, it only manifests when it is used in a certain way, so they are not fearful of using a stone for some practical purpose. When the stone is painted or polished or placed in a tree, it might become a fetish, but the act of the person or people endow it with its supernatural properties.
Expert opinion oscillated from tribes that had no religion at all, they were so primitive, to tribes so superstitious that their whole existence was conditioned by ghouls and spirits. The experts were apt to ignore the practical routine of native people in favour of their peculiar—to the observer “religious”—practices, which they were then depicted as being obsessed by.
Most primitive people are no different to us in that they have to make a living. Yet the nineteenth century observers of them, who were mainly missionaries particularly concerned with religion, were not bothered about their everyday lives, but about the state of their immortal souls, which they considered on the verge of everlasting incineration because of their traditional religious rituals.
In those cases where the natives even had simple ordinary “religious” practices, and no spectacular or bloody rituals, the missionaries reported that they were devoid of any idea of God. Thus, Sir Samuel Baker declared in 1867 that the Northern Nilotes of the Nile basin lived in a “puny” world, devoid of any form of worship or idolatry, or even superstition. Their minds were “stagnant”. Only four years later Tylor refuted this racism, but equal nonsense was being reported by Western observers into the twentieth century.
The scientist examining religion has no reason to impose any preconceived view on to his conclusions, quite the opposite. Their whole scientific training is to aim to be objective. Anyone with a religious belief trying to do the same has a strong reason to accept only a view that meets their preconceived ideas. Such people think their beliefs ought to determine everything they do in life, so their examination of anything, particularly religion, cannot be objective.
Scholarly Misunderstandings
Careful anthropology in the field is essential to provide accurate data for theories of religion, but it is almost impossible to do adequately. J D Unwin (Sex and Culture, 1934) emphasized that the supernatural beings of primitive people, described by missionaries and anthropologists, are most often constructions of the observers who do not understand the conceptions described to them by native people, and so they express them in the terms with which they are most familiar. When, in descriptions of primitive beliefs, we find words like “spirit” or “god”, the meaning is much vaguer and better expressed by the impersonal word “power”. These constructions, which make us think in our own personal terms, detract us from the impersonal, or perhaps collective, nature of the beliefs of primitive people.
It is quite impossible for anyone to comprehend properly a primitive society even by living in it for several years. Many have tried but few can have succeeded, E E Evans-Pritchard and B Malinowski among them. Just understanding the nuances of language before beginning to collect data must be difficult enough, if not impossible. Evans-Pritchard’s studies of the Azande and the Nuer of Sudan were much admired, but even he spent little more than a year in total with either tribe, and had to learn the lingo in that time before he could begin, and then depended on particular people to inform him of tribal customs and habits, and these people were probably not at all typical tribespeople.
In one Australian Aboriginal tribe studied by P Worsley, “knowledge of the beliefs and rituals of ‘their’ culture on the part of most members was abysmal”. Knowledge of their beliefs rested in a few specialists and leaders, and, he adds, “a few skeptics”. V W Turner found the same. The one who explains things to anthropologists asking questions is the equivalent of a doctor of divinity in our society, and no sociologist would take what a professor of theology had to say about western religion as being typical. Sociologists are well aware that any external observer projects a spurious unity into what they are seeing in a group under observation, yet they seem not to allow for it in their own observations. R K Merton found that anyone who was not a member of a group thought its norms were more rigid than they were in fact. When the outsider aspires to membership and eventually succeeds in getting it, as a new convert, they usually exceed their older fellow members in enthusiasm and zealotry.
Moreover, anthropologists are inclined to put tribal priorities in the order they think ought to be significant because they are for us, irrespective of what the people under study think. They put emphasis on the highest supernatural entity in our tradition, God and his role as Creator, though they then find little to say because the native people put no emphasis on these matters, even when they have traditions about them. The Lovedu do not “exercise their minds” with speculation about beginnings or final causes, and the Mende led essentially practical lives in which they showed no interest in the supernatural. Even in instances like these that are not uncommon, the anthropologists will still have somewhere in their report a chapter on supernatural beliefs. It is like saying Britain is a Christian country even though nine out of ten people do not attend church, except for weddings and funerals.
“Mystical” is another word used inappropriately. Often any public action in native society is mystical or sacred, even digging a hole for a post. The reason is that anything communal or done for the public good is sacred, the prime meaning of sacred to them being that it is communal, as opposed to private actions which are considered as profane. But, the distinction between sacred and profane is often not as discrete, and therefore clear cut, for them as it is for us. The posthole might be for a new clan hut. Is that a private house or a public building?
There is no impermeable membrane between the mundane and the magical.P Worsley
Nor is the world divided clearly into the material and the spiritual or immaterial. Spirits are not other worldly because their importance is the effects they have in this world. They are no more otherworldly than the wind, often itself considered to be a passing spirit[†]Spirit. The word means breath. To respire is to breathe.. Even their concept of heaven is more like the spiritualists’ heaven of our societies, like the world we live in except that it has no sorrow and suffering! Indeed, the native heaven might have those too because it is not an idealized world, but an idealized society.
The primitive conception is of a single reality in which humans have only limited powers, but they have some access to stronger powers through the mediating power of the totem or the founding father, all of these powers being real, natural. They believed they had ample evidence that the mediating powers worked in the real world. Among it was their conviction that people became spirits in dreams and trances, and were less limited then, being able to visit other places and people, including the dead. Ritual activity, considered religious by outsiders, is often just a different type of normal activity like sowing seed, building, cooking. Each has its own purpose, and ritual has its own purpose too, but it is just a different purpose to them. The difference they perceive, though, is emphatically not that it is supernatural, mystical, magical or religious, as we might think. The activity might be connected more or less explicitly with an explanatory myth, but it is not held in any peculiar reverence.
It ought not to be forgotten that religion is not merely the interest of any solitary person.
It is made under the influence of his fellow men, and the religious individual takes over in great measure his beliefs, his ritual behavior, and his religious ways of feeling from an organized group of other people. In other words, religion is in great part a social phenomenon—its beliefs are social beliefs and its rites consist of individuals taking part in social ceremonies.R H Thouless, General and Social Psychology, 4th Edition, 1958
The French sociologists, of whom Emile Durkheim and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl were the best known, rightly stressed religion as a social phenomenon. At least Evans-Pritchard began with the correct assumption, that religion is a sociological study, as living in a society colours everything that an individual does and thinks, and it is precisely this deep cultural colouring that no social anthroplogist can experience. An American citizen is brought up with US customs, US laws, and US English as a language. The American sees the world in all of this cultural colouring. Could a Nuer learn all this sufficiently well to do a sound study of US religion? Primitive people are no less human than the average Yankee. They are not half human savages, unless you go so far as to define civilization as a particular culture, as many Yankees do. We are sophisticated people who have had long experience of reason and rationality based on the scientific method, yet primitive people are no less rational in applying their premises. It is the premises that are wrong, not their logic. Their logic is logical to them!
The Victorian experts also were racist in failing to understand that simple people can be just as metaphorical in expression as sophisticated people. Primeval people had not discovered the logical way of thinking that many of us consider natural—they thought in a prelogical way—but they had the same talents we have. It is simply that they had not had the chance to practise them that we much later people have had. Their thinking is mythological, not logical, or rather it is mythopoetic, for their “logic” was much more simply metaphorical than ours now is, though our thinking is itself entirely metaphorical. We have used and refined our metaphors so much that we do not realize now that they are metaphors, but when thinking is openly metaphorical then it is mythopoetic. Effectively, primitive people are in a poetic way of thinking.
If a native says a man is a leopard, we think he is simple to hold such a belief because we all know men cannot be leopards. Yet the clan whose totem animal is a leopard sometimes say they are leopards. To our logical and nonpoetical way of thinking, it is nonsense. But considered metaphorically, what is nonsensical about it? We can say our boss is a monster, the meter maid is a cow, our rival is a rat. We have forgotten that “monster”, “cow” and “rat” are metaphors. We have a series of misfortunes and conclude we’ve had a spell of bad luck. Primitive people say they’ve been bewitched. The primitive explanation has more content, though both explain nothing much, in fact. We label witchcraft as supernatural but for primitive people it is a perfectly normal explanation of bad luck.
Often the misunderstanding was that of the scholar not the native. These scholars often did not bother to get the nuances of the words they were interpreting. Every linguist knows that words rarely have exactly corresponding words in a different language and translation is a compromise or approximation. Students used to be urged to read a foreign work “in the original” so that the translator’s assumptions were not forced on to them, but instead they could consider alternatives and satisfy themselves. Often biblical scholars today are not satisfied with the popular translations of biblical Greek or Hebrew and offer their own translation to bring out a nuance. But no one could expect average Christian punters to understand anything so unrevealed.
The scholar would decide that a native meant “soul” by a certain word and take it for granted that the native concept matched the scholar’s. Could a Polynesian understand an Eskimo explaining the Arctic landscape? Could an American or European? Eskimos are supposed to have a large number of words for snow all with different meanings. Whether this is true or not, it illustrates the problem. Could a Christian make an Eskimo understand that the crucified man was the lamb of God?
E E Evans-Pritchard described the religion of the Nuer, but it seems like a pruned version of western monotheism. One wonders whether the Nuer have been influenced by Coptic Christianity or by Judaism, or whether some missionary had had a go at them before Evans-Pritchard got there. Even their name for a god (kwoth) seems suspiciously like “god” or “good” philologically. They have a supreme god in the sky, and good spirits are spirits of the air. Less good ones are more earthbound. But they have, in parallel with this quite westernized way of thinking, a lesser belief in totem spirits based on a totem animal treated with “respect” by greeting them when they are met, and even by burying them when they are found dead. They never eat them.
What casts doubt on to Evans-Pritchard’s interpretations is that he says a bird resting on the roof of a hut is a spirit. He has already said that spirits are people of the sky. Nuer also say twins are people of the sky, and they are birds. Nuer do not mean twins are like birds, but that both are people of the sky, now, E E Evans-Pritchard avers, meant metaphorically! Twins are identified with birds because both are children of God. Twins are not spirits themselves, Evans-Pritchard says, but are manifestations of spirit. The Nuer do not eat birds or their eggs, suggesting that they are or were totem animals. Is all this mythopoetic thinking? Or is Evans-Pritchard missing a trick?
The importance of twins to them is explained by the Nuer quite logically, albeit fantastically to our minds. The totemic representation of a clan is caused by the founding ancestor of the clan being born as the twin of the totemic animal. The founder of the tribe and the totemic animal as twins are close kin. So, all the founder’s descendents, the tribe, are kin of the totem animal. Both the ancestor and the totem animal are spirits, and to be born a twin is to be born a spirit. Yet in the case of the totem animal, Nuer know the animal itself is not a spirit. What they seem to mean is that the image or concept of the animal—the Platonic ideal, we would say—is a spirit.
It is rather the idea of crocodile than the saurian creatures themselves which stands for spirit to a lineage.E E Evans-Pritchard
Evans-Pritchard says they regard the spirit as being in or behind the material appearance of it. So they say the totem animal itself is not a spirit, but act as if it were! The lion is not a spirit, but a sacrifice to the lion spirit is fed to the lions, and when they give offerings to some bird spirit, they call to those birds telling them the offering is available. In each case they are clear that the totem or its animal is not the spirit.
Then the Nuer think of a human being as tripartite being made up of a body, breath (life) and intellect (soul). Soul is apparently distinct from spirit, the latter normally existing only outside the body, whereas soul is integral with it, having been created with it, and dies with it, all bar a short period when it hangs about the corpse. Yet our word “spirit” means “breath”, obviously meaning life, and so seems equivalent to the breath the Nuer think of as life. Is it? Has Evans-Pritchard not delved deep enough, and has he read into Nuer religion his own Christian prejudices. He converted to Catholicism in his forties. Are there these days no educated Nuer able to take a view on Evans-Pritchard’s work? These criticisms are meant to show how difficult the job is. Evans-Pritchard’s work was superb in its day.
The Childhood of the Race
Kant postulated that the key to understanding mental advances was to realize we had to escape from being prepossessed with the subjective. We perceive things subjectively but we receive them from an objective world, and that is what we need to comprehend. The main objective factors that have influenced us are Nature, through evolution, and society through acculturation. Even the first humans had experienced, through evolution, an immensely long time developing that had structured the brain so that its interpretations of sense impressions matched objective reality.
Humanity is also a social animal, and has been since it emerged as a new species, needing the company and support of others to survive. However much the political right plug individual endeavour, it has to be endeavour in a social context. Great apes like gorillas are the closest we are to solitary animals, and they are almost extinct. Despite our present excessive numbers, we shall follow them if we do not accept the consequences of being a global family rather than hate laden selfish rednecks. If the rednecks continue to stir up hatred in the world, the ensuing war will be the end of civilization, and perhaps the end of humanity.
Of course, every person is the center of their own subjective world, but the mental categories found in the mind through evolution, and the cultural requirements of the society that brings us up impose objectivity, sociability, and reality on to us. The primitive person looked out on to their personal world and it seemed to be directed entirely at them. What they looked upon seemed to be another entity, and was treated as if it could respond. They spoke to it, and showed it what they wanted through mime or play, just as the old parlour game, “Twenty Questions”, began with a mime.
We noted the primitive mind is no less logical than our own. It simply had not yet formed the idea of logic. It was exploring ways of interpreting the world, and what emerged at first was myth, and the corresponding method of looking is mythopoetic—metaphorically. Mary Douglas illustrated it with the Copernicam revolution in the fifteenth century. Before then, mankind was the center of the universe. Even the sun revolved around us. The history of knowledge is the story of how the mind freed itself of successive bonds, often socially conditioned.
Our growth as a race is reflected in our individual growth from infancy. We begin unconscious and empty headed, except for our mainly social instincts, and our consciousness grows through our bodily experience. Through trial and error, and mainly the guidance of our mother, we fumble towards comprehension. At the first glimmerings, children confuse external things and people. People respond to their attempts at speech and they think things will too. Eventually, experience teaches us to distinguish one from the other. The world seems dual, everything is divided into this and that, into good and bad. Primitive society early on distinguished the sacred and the profane when it too went through a dualistic phase. Communicating, everything new can only be described in terms of previous bodily experience. Every concept we have has to be described in terms of common experiences, in short by metaphors.
Children are not philosophers. They are trying to learn how to live through practice, and the same was true of early humans. Tylor and Frazer, working from the viewpoint of individuals, imagined hypothetical paleolithic philosophers wondering how to explain, say, a river, thunder or the sun. The primeval people did not do it, though eventually it was done. The key to religious evolution, as to most things human, is social. Like evolution, that is a fact. It is the detail that remains in doubt, and might always be so. Individual Primeval people must have used metaphors by way of descriptions which served also as explanations. Individual speculation was much later, and even the most primitive of modern stone age societies are far more advanced than the primeval people were.
Like a child, the primeval humans spoke to trees and animals as if they were human. It became a habit and seemed quite normal, so that more advanced men in the primitive stage continued to talk to trees and animals though now they knew they could expect no reply. The primitive explanation was that people were not speaking to the animal but to its spirit. It was a logical hypothesis to explain an inconsistency in experience.
Concepts such as animism, whereby everything had a spirit which could be addressed and do magical things, is not illogical, it is just an earlier stage of thinking based on the people’s experience so far. Primeval people were acute observers of the world, and the hypotheses they offered up are only silly to us because we have hindsight based on many centuries of additional experience and practice. Naturally, the concern of the people was concern for themselves, and for their society, again concern for themselves because they knew they depended on society for their security.
Explanations tended to be purely subjective, but always society and Nature were present. The answers the primitive sage came up with were ad hoc. They made no attempt at that stage to devise any systems. Primitive people had no reason to think in a systematic way, and thought of the anthropologist who asked such questions as not concentrating on what mattered. What mattered to them was only whatever was of immediate concern, and not speculating on the cause of it. The big questions were over sudden accidents and deaths. They wonder “Why me”, “Why now”, just like us. They had no answers, but society offered them comfort, a function central to religion still.
In the stage of thinking dually was prepared the distinction between the material and the immaterial. The spirit could only sometimes be seen as a shadow or reflexion, but was always present. We can distinguish between the material and the immaterial quite well. A force field, like a magnetic field or gravity, is immaterial, and we have no qualms about it, and have no reason now to think it is supernatural. Primitive people similarly had no reason to think a spirit was supernatural. Spirits were natural to them.
Historically, religion, whatever else it has done, has had the purpose of explanation. It has been the main source of meaning in human life. It no longer is. Now science is what gives us explanations, and the meaning science offers is tried and tested, not just assumed on faith because it is comforting to believe it. But it might be a mistake to assume any strong definition of what religion is a priori. If religion evolved as natural things do, then it evolved the characteristics we deem to be those of religion from something earlier that did not have these features. It was tribal society. Principally, religion began by conveying the significance of social life to the individuals in a primeval group of humans. The first firmly “religious” idea other than awe of the powers of Nature, and awareness of powers generally, was a belief in what we today call soul or spirit. Primitive “religion” seems to make its first appearance as a belief that a part of man survives the death and decay of the body.
Max Müller, in the nineteenth century, thought that examination of the meaning of the names of gods can reveal something of their origin. Gods were a “disease of language” in that ancients words lost their original meaning as usage changed, and the old words became gods. He illustrated it with the expression “nomina became numina”, “names became spirits”. An example was the tale of Daphne dying in the arms of Apollo. Apollo loved Daphne who fled and died becoming a laurel tree. Apollo was once a word for the sun and Daphne for the dawn, and the myth is simply a description of the dawn. The name of the laurel tree is also dawn so the myth is that the dawn fled from the rising sun, died and transformed into the bush called by the same name. It seems more likely that the metaphor was composed while the meaning of the words was still remembered. In a Jewish version of this myth, Joseph is the sun and Aseneth is the dawn. Aseneth repents before the rising sun and becomes a city of refuge, probably a pun on the name Aseneth.
Fear of the Dark
Victorian mythologists were like philosophers. They spent much of their time speculating, and rarely bothered to check their speculations against reality. Yet philosophy is still an attractive university course. Even scientists like Einstein are fond of “thought experiments”. Speculation can be useful, especially if it provides some criterion for progress. The nineteenth century anthropologists did useful work, and work which is still useful although it cannot be used uncritically.
What is wrong then in considering what the earliest people must have felt at night? Naturally, we cannot know, but we can be fairly sure that diurnal animals would be scared when it got dark. Apes were prey for big cats, hyenas, bears, wolves, dogs, and so on. Many of these predators were nocturnal. When consciousness began to glimmer they must have wondered at their feeling of terror at night. Would they have immediately recognised their odd feeling as an instinctive fear of predation by big cats?
We do not know, but it assumes knowledge and powers of reasoning that had not yet developed. They would simply have feared the night itself. The instinctve fear was not conscious, but consciousness made fear and night become real and eventually made an association between them. Later they will have realised that the danger of night was the danger of big cats, but who was to know what other dangers there were too? By then the fear was simply a fear of the dark. Many sophisticated people still fear the dark or the night and think there are monsters lurking on the doorstep or round the corner. It seems a sensible fear based on instinct and rendering people cautious and alert in difficult circumstances. Yet the sensible instinct made conscious is a supernatural monster lurking behind the door. These monsters could easily become devils.
Critics, Christian and nonChristian, say such speculations are quite unhistoric and of no value. They seem to forget that we are speculating thus precisely because the period we are considering is not written down in books or painted on walls. These were prehistoric events of a psychological and sociological nature that were not written down for our future edification. There is no certain evidence for these ideas, or any contrary ones. There is no certain evidence for God, but that does not stop billions of Christians from genuflecting before him every sunday.
The best we can do is speculate, propose hypotheses and see whether they have any consequences that can be tested. We have modern society, modern primitive societies and ancient historic societies to go on. We can extrapolate from these and scientific studies of consciousness. Though imperfect, the approach is scientific. It is simply that data to accept or reject this idea or that are not easy to get.
We can assume that simple people, however primitive, tried to account for what was slowly entering their consciousness. We can get clues by careful field studies on simple people today, but it has to be remembered that these simple people are fully conscious and rational, even though their premises are perhaps not correct from our scientific viewpoint. So, even anthropological field studies have to be seen as studies of advanced people relative to the emergent humans who first came aware of their night fears.
Religion must have succeeded the growth of human consciousness, so it can never be studied in the field. We can be sure it evolved somehow from the earliest inchoate thoughts that emerging humans had. The nineteenth century anthropologists seemed to imagine a fully formed man, a little hairy perhaps, but with an empty but conscious brain. All the armchair anthropologist had to do was to imagine what the simple, untaught, factless man would do in certain circumstances. It is an interesting exercise but not of much practical value. Consciousness has to evolve, and it does so only slowly. We do not know at what stage consciousness evolved. Are chimpanzees conscious? They can recognize themselves in a mirror. Surely such self awareness implies consciousness. If so, our ape like ancestors were probably becoming conscious before they even crossed the species gap into humanity.
Whenever it occurred, an animal, behaving perfectly naturally for an animal—that is by instinct—began to have glimmerings of consciousness, selfconsciousness, emotions, its environment. What surprised these animals in some way would perhaps have forced its way into their consciousness first. Certainly they must early on have been puzzled by emotional feelings like sexual attraction and fear.
All of this speculation is at the individual level. An individual might be surprised by its shadow, or by its fear of the dark. Individuals might have personified their fears and emotions. But it is only when they began to communicate effectively to each other that the basis of religion arose. Religion is necessarily communal, social.
Mircea Eliade and the Supernatural
In India, Mircea Eliade noticed that simple peasants, being so close to nature, saw the world as an unbroken cycle of life, death and rebirth—of Nature when one’s life depended directly on it. It is likely to be a world wide characteristic of primitive agricultural societies. Eliade dismissed attempts to find an origin of religion because the idea of the holy is an “unique and irreducible element in it”. Religion is a cause not an effect—evidently like God, an uncaused cause.
The humble scientist can only grin, or wince, at men like Eliade of elevated reputation who hold down prestigious university profesorships for donkey’s years, failing to observe the most elementary of scientific standards. Whether the idea of the holy is unique and irreducible, or a cause not an effect are among the very things to be determined by study, not things to be merely assumed at the outset. And even if it proves to be true today that people have an irreducible idea of the holy, what is the basis for imagining that primeval men, barely distinguishable from apes, could have had it?
The great man decides from his assumptions that religion can only be studied on its own terms, phenomenologically[†]Phenomenology. The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (ed J Bowker) says phenomenology is used of “endeavours to study religion without commitments to the truth or otherwise of what is being studied”, and meanwhile “suspending value judgements about the worth or otherwise of what is being studied”!, just as most religious people want. Eliade is plainly no objective searcher for truth. He is an apologist for religion. Some modern moral psychologists, influenced by Eliade and Maslow, seem similarly lured by the temptations of religious subjectivism rather than standing by scientific objectivism.
In his approach, however, Eliade is a Frazerian or a Tylorian, and subject to the criticisms aimed at them. He did what they did, compared religions across cultures and times, with due caution, rightly considering it legitimate to do so. He believed the concepts underlying widely different religions were the same. The eucharist is a religious meal, and all religious meals are meals! One can see that believers interpret their meals quite differently now, but that is simply because different myths of origin have been attached to the ritual of a meal in different cultures.
What would be remarkable is that all myths of religious meals were identifiably the same. That is only likely where an original praxis—myth and ritual—had diffused from a common center, and even then they get astonishingly metamorphosed in the process. The Greek myths which owe their origins to the Assyrians and Egyptians are examples. Herodotus saw Zeus as comparable with Amun-Ra because sky gods have typical features whenever and wherever they are. Though Eliade joined the fashion of objecting to reductionism, he found himself using it, and quite rightly so. So called reductionism does not deserve criticism. It is necessary to understand anything.
He also attempted to analyse the praxis of primitive men still living in tribal societies. Nomenclature gets confusing here, many sociologists hating the word “primitive” as not PC, but Mary Douglas justifiably defended it, and R N Bellah did not hesitate to use it, but also used the word “archaic” to describe religious systems a stage on from primitive ones. “Primitive” means pertaining to the earliest stages of something’s development, but it is therefore certain there are no primitive people living today. All of them, even the least developed, are a stage beyond the earliest stages of humanity.
A synonym of primitive is “primeval”, and this would perhaps be the better word to use for the very earliest stage of human development, when people were just emerging conscious practices. “Primitive” society bears the same relationship to “primeval” as Sanskrit to the postulated ur-language that is the root of all Indo-Iranian tongues. An alternative would be to identify society with technological stages, calling the earliest societies “palæolithic”, so that “primitive” corresponds with the later mesolithic and neolithic stages. Bronze age would then correspond with Bellah’s “archaic”. Anyway, primeval societies do not exist and so cannot be studied but have to be extrapolated backwards from the best evidence now available, principles and historical trends.
Wonder
Primitive religion centered on the distinction between the sacred and the profane, but Eliade can only see the word “supernatural” when he sees the word “sacred”. If this were extrapolated back into the primeval period, human beings emerged from the apes already having a concept of the supernatural. It is quite untenable, for it requires apes to be able to distinguish between the natural and the supernatural. Consciousness grows only in the natural world. Like children, the first people must have found the world amazing, but, however incomprehensible it was to them, it was natural. Children accept fairies, witches and magic as quite natural, and still hang on to them as they grow older and get to know they are not true. That is the story of religion!
Some simple tribes have a sense of amazement or awe at certain things that happen, either naturally or ritually. Modern Westerners, more than you might think, feel just the same, getting a feeling of wonder in particular situations, whether in church or before an astonishing natural vista. Cathedrals were built with the idea of producing just such impressions in the minds of medieval peasants who were largely confined to their village, and knew only their wattle and daub shacks, and perhaps the slightly grander house of a nearby yeoman.
It is the same natural sense of wonder that children have more often because they have not yet experienced enough of the world to make them indifferent to it. The indifference to wonder that comes with age is what makes it all the more wondrous on the occasions when it is experienced as an adult. The feeling of wonder when you have been everywhere and done everything becomes full of signicance and fearsome power, especially if you have been taught to be religious. For those brought up to think in terms of the cosmic superbeing, God, it is easy to attribute it to Him, but it is an assumption with no foundation in fact.
The extrapolation of a sense of wonder to primeval humanity—when people were still in the childhood of the race—can hardly be wrong. What is wrong is the interpretation of it as a manifestation of the holy. Some have understood it as a revelation of the divine, but it took much more socially advanced people to develop the concept of the supernatural and of gods. The religious experience, much spoken of by Christians and others, can hardly be called an experience unless something occurs, or seems to, but, even if something does occur, it does not come with a label saying it is God’s work, or even that it is purely religious.
Whatever its basis is, religious believers are not justified in calling it religious other than their own preconvictions. Even when the experience is clothed in religious imagery, it is the familiar imagery of the believer not that of some other religion, as anyone would expect if one of the religions was the true one. Obviously the experience is not some privileged revelation by a universal God, but is a purely subjective and local phenomenon. Not a jot of evidence suggests that these experiences have anything to do with the supernatural, particularly God. Only the modern interpretation is supernatural.
The supernatural interpretation is a false application of a false concept to a natural experience. The experience of unity with things beyond us is the sudden dissolving of the barriers we put up to protect our “selves”, without which we would realize our utter insignificance[†]Self. The illness called schizophrenia might be the effect of the permanent breakdown of the barriers protecting our “selves”. Sufferers become confused and eventually overwhelmed by a surfeit of information from their inability to focus on what concerns themselves. . Self has evolved to make us think of ourselves as important, and on these occasions when it momentarily dissolves, we appreciate the wonder of what is beyond us in the world that we form just a part of.
The experience is natural and normal for kids, if uncommon in adult life. Even so, a significant proportion of adults have known the sense of wonder, but most do not think of it as religious. They think of it as what it is—a sense of wonder! It seems to have a quality of grandeur because it has such a quality. It is the feeling of kinunity with the natural world, a sense both of the immensity of Nature and our insignificance in comparison, yet it is uplifting to realize we are a part of something so much more significant than we are individually.
The true interpretation is disguised firstly by its rareness in adulthood in a tolerable form, and secondly because, at some stage in history, it has been misunderstood as the same as the ecstasy enjoyed from tribal dancing and ceremonial by which society offered security and refuge from external forces under the patronage of the totem spirit. Tribal society was a part of the natural world to primeval human beings. Through the misapprehension, the intoxication felt in those wild and sometimes orgiastic rituals, perhaps fed by drugs and ferments, transferred to the psychological feeling of piety and unity with God—the religious experience. So, what was actually a feeling of unity with Nature transferred by association to the modern figment called God. S Augustine wrote:
What is now called the Christian religion has existed among the ancients, and was not absent from the beginning of the human race, until Christ came in the flesh, from which time, religion, which existed already, began to be called Christian.
Believers have many misapprehensions about religion. There is no qualitative difference between revealed religion and natural religion. It is just that revealed religions are fossilised in the pages of a book. They mistake Nature and society for God, failing to realize that they it is not God that transcends us. Most importantly, our society protects and shelters us, not God, and lives on when we die. The communal feeling can be as strong as the sense of natural wonder, and again that was a conscious purpose of having people worship God communally and in grand buildings called God’s house—the church. The mistake is to think society or Nature is a supernatural God in these experiences. Both society and Nature are much greater and more powerful than we are, seemingly almighty and immortal in comparison with us, and so falsely attributed to God.
The feeling is also often described as otherworldly, but that is because we spend much of our lives self absorbed. The sense of identity is a natural sense that makes us concerned for ourselves, and our own preservation. If we permanently felt we were part of something all together greater—society or Nature—we should hardly be bothered to look after ourselves. Selfishness serves an evolutionary purpose, but has to be toned down in society. So social living inclines us to see ourselves part of something bigger and more powerful, normally society, but every now and then we go beyond that and feel part of the living reef, the whole of life and Nature, a sublime feeling.
What is served by denying its true source, and attributing it instead to an imaginary being called God? It would only be acceptable to do that if God was recognized as society and Nature, but people indoctrinated with supernature will not do it. The consequence is that we are destroying Nature, and are heading towards the destruction of society with mass weaponry.
Why invent something imaginary to explain an unusual feeling? It is no explanation anyway. No supernatural being can have been the first explanation of the mysterious. Human beings are conditioned by our culture, and we are still being taught that an imaginary God controls Nature. God is a product of Nature. We humans made God in our own image! It is the personification of human society, and Nature itself.
Eliade virtually describes it correctly himself with no reference to the supernatural:
For primitives, as for men of all premodern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and in the last analysis to reality. The sacred is saturated with being. Sacred power seems reality and at the same time enduringness and efficacity… it is easy to understand that religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power.Sacred and Profane
This natural feeling of wonder is doubtless the source of religious awe and Max Müller deduced that human beings always had an intuition for the divine or an “idea of the Infinite” from observing Nature. He thought that emerging people would have tried to touch the moon, as a child might, and gathered from their inability to do so, the concept of the Infinite, from which they conceived intangible things that became gods. Similarly, breath was intangible and became the basis of someone’s spirit or soul. Yet, if so, it precludes the need to propose a primitive revelation or a religious instinct.
Many tribes feel awe at natural events but do not worship them or try to placate them. On the other hand, Polynesians apparently are quite matter of fact about hurricanes that they often experience and are undoubtedly awesome. So, little can be concluded, except that it illustrates another fault of the armchair students of the primitive. They compile vast collections of data to illustrate some speculation they have, but often say nothing about all the instances that could be collected that refute it.
The Idea of the Holy
The Christian is keen to diminish any hypotheses put forward about the development of religion, mainly because it is a threat to the idea of revelation. Their criticisms have some validity precisely because the original development of religion in mankind is no longer open to direct study. Educated guesswork, when facts are not available, is legitimate. What has to be recognised however, is that such speculations have an insecure basis and fresh data might validate or invalidate them. Whether religious or atheistical, we should correct our guesses based on the data. Modern religion has four main functions for its members:
- Social Bonding
- Feeling
- Morals
- Meaning
None of these properties are restricted to religion alone, so various apologists have claimed the list is incomplete because it misses out the idea of the holy. In fact, “holiness” is entirely a feeling, and so it is encompassed in the second category. In no case has a holy feeling been definitely traceable to God, so “holiness”, if it means God, cannot be separately included in this list. The mystical or religious experience of God, depends entirely on the subjective decision that it is God, but since the same feeling can be induced by starvation, mortification, electromagnetic fields and drugs, no one can ever been certain that God was responsible for it:
Individual mystical experience is a highly social form of behaviour, conditioned usually by the internalization of sophisticated and culturally given theological notions embedded in a complex of values and beliefs about man, society, God, the cosmos, morality, etc.P Worsley
Even the personal religious experience is therefore a social phenomenon. The individual mystic identifies the experience with their beliefs. They are socially conditioned to think in a certain way, and when they get a sense of awe, it surprises them by its peculiarity into attributing the cause to whatever they have been taught as being mystical.
Social conditioning like this tends to unity of belief, and that justifies the personification of whole groups with particular beliefs. The Islamicist, Patricia Crone, says Allah was a source of communal identity to Arabs. He “validated their society”. They wanted Charles Montague Doughty (1843-1926), the great Victorian traveller among the Arabs to convert and settle, then they would give him palm trees. They wanted Doughty to be one of them. It was not a transcendental matter. Loyalty to Allah was to them a practical matter of identity. Equally, “Christian fundamentalists think so and so” is a justifiable generalization, because their conditioning makes them closely alike in their thinking—though never entirely! Catholics often do not have even elementary ideas about their faith, but can be immovably behind it. E Willems showed that S American Catholics often hold to their religion because it is now identified with nationalism and patriotism, yet it is so imperfectly understood that it has hybridized with African and Indian religions, and hardly differs in places from Voodoo.
Reality and a Worldview
In 1967, Peter L Berger and Thomas Luckmann, declared (The Social Construction of Reality) that a worldview is an interpretation of reality, and therefore reality was a social construct (social construction). This is a tad illogical. Though human societies do interpret experience in their own ways so that their interpretation of reality is a social construct, it does not mean that reality is a social construct. It is absurd to conclude that because we interpret our experience of reality that it is not real.
Not one of the theoreticians who spout things like this will jump off a cliff to prove that reality is not what we have constructed it to be. A reality that is nothing but a construct of a group of people can be anything they choose, and, if they decide that cliffs are not dangerous, then they could not and should not be dangerous. It is not so. There is a physical reality that we experience through our senses, and from it, and a wider diachronic experience of reacting to it, comes our construct of what it is. Obviously different versions of it have differed from society to society and time to time, but now we have a more secure way of constructing a model of reality. It is science.
Besides physical reality, there is a social reality of what people agree on from their interactions with each other. Any interpretation of physical reality is a part of a social reality, as are classes, economics, institutions, customs, and so on. Among them is religion. Religion was the worldview or culture of the tribe, the common ideas and practices they had that distinguished them from their neighbours. Plainly social reality is malleable or protean. It is not a given like physical reality.
A social construct is a concept or practice of a particular group, the consequences, albeit unintended or unconscious, of an accumulation over many generations of human decisions, and are therefore the natural consequences of human society rather than laws prescribed by any god. Indeed, god is a social construct! Social constructionism is working out how social phenomena are created, institutionalized, and become culture and tradition. Though reality is obviously real, our perceptions of it occur within a cultural tradition. It is in this relativist sense, and not in any absolute sense, that reality is socially constructed and is therefore a perpetual, dynamic process.
“Constructionism” became popular with Berger and Luckmann’s book. All knowledge is derived from and maintained by dialectical social interactions, especially everyday knowledge of reality, which comes from parents and other people close to the child. Social interaction within a prescribed culture confirms perceptions made when a child, because their teachers’ perceptions came from the same social force, the local or tribal culture. Culture is the sum of social experience crystallized into social conventions and institutions by language, upbringing, education, myth and ritual, and ultimately religion, philosophy and science. A culture is held in common by all members of the social group, and so seems, in the absence of scientific tests, objectively real. In this way, reality is socially constructed—interpreted in the light of the socially held attitudes and readings of the local culture. Culture is an essential part of any individual’s personal identity—even their humanity—so acculturation makes people human! It is not to be disparaged on the grounds that it is indoctrination, especially when scientific tests are available to confirm beliefs.
For long, culture was primarily religion[†]Religion was not then separately defined from culture., every custom among primitive people finding an explanation in religion, including the way people responded to the physical necessities of the real world. For many people in the world, it is still religion that gives them their worldview. Conversely, one could say that anyone’s worldview is their religion, but not in the conventional sense. When believers jeer at atheistic liberals that atheism is their religion, they are right, but their sense of the word is different from the liberal’s. The liberal atheist can reply that their “religion” is superior being both true and nondogmatic.
As in the evolution of species, a worldview is stable until it is subject to some environmental stress. Societies set up mechanisms to protect their worldview. Christianity murdered heretics as dangerous deviants, or considered as mad, but conquest and colonisation can suddenly change a society’s worldview. And a society can become dissatisfied with their worldview, through drought, famine, or some other persistent or threatening problem. People might then be willing to follow a preacher, prophet or king who teaches what normally would have been considered heretical. Even then, the change usually has plain roots in the earlier worldview. It is conquest that causes radical change.
Paradise and the Tribal Kingdom
Eliade tells us the sacred is not uncommon. It can be seen everywhere. It means it can only be Nature and society. The whole territory of a tribe was identifed with it by its totems. It belonged to the tribe, and so it was all sacred, and Nature supplied most of the symbols and myths of primitive religion. Despite this or perhaps because of it, human beings have, according to Eliade, a “nostalgia for Paradise”. By using the word “nostalgia”, he implies the paradise was in the past. We had it and lost it. I say “Despite this”, because if everything is sacred, then surely we live in paradise, and the nostalgia is perverse, and “because of it”, because the nostalgia must be for the time when everything really was sacred, and so we did live in paradise—in primitive tribal society. Plainly the Judaeo-Christian creation myth expresses the nostalgia for ancient tribal society when everything was sacred and simple, but original sin and the city builder, Cain, spoilt it all.
Yet a yearning for perfection is entirely natural without any need to refer to golden times past. No one wants to contemplate the faults of society or the dangers of Nature, if they can avoid it. They would rather imagine a world free of faults and dangers, idealistic as it might be, so they invent such a world and take it to be an ideal. Paradise is an ideal world, and Utopia is an ideal society. The yearning for them gives us a motivation to try to achieve them. It is defeated when believers characterize the world as utterly irredeemable, as many Christians sects do.
From 450 AD until 1000 AD, we western Europeans lived in darkness because the dominant belief, Christianity, was that the world was worthless and God would soon destroy it. There was no incentive for anyone to begin to think of improving it. No one was taught anything except a few monks for sacerdotal purposes. Any thoughts of personal improvement by keeping clean or learning to read were considered as vain and impious. Society was ordained by God, and, disgusting as it was, so it would remain until the End—soon! Well, by 1000 AD, the millennium, at the outside. But 1000 AD came and the world still did not end!
It was the failure of Christ to return at the millennium that shocked the faithful all over Europe. Many of them caught on to the way they had been conned, and they abandoned the sacerdotal religion for heresies that placed the burden of salvation on the person, not on the sacraments and church ritual. Eventually, after 400 more years of struggle, a hybrid of Catharism and Catholicism emerged as Protestantism. But both thesis and synthesis hated the antithesis, and together in unison they continued to burn them and each other.
Eliade could not stop giving emerging humanity modern ideas of such as holiness and the supernatural, something that Frazer and Tylor tried not to do, or at least they tried to imagine how primeval “philosophers” tried to work things out, though the idea of a primeval philosopher is an anachronistic parallel of a modern one. Moreover, Eliade lets the conventional religious ideas he was brought up with influence his approach and judgements.
He used the word “sacred” often but what it could have meant as a supernatural concept to an emerging human is never explained. It seems it has its modern meaning and usage, and the primitive people understand them in the same way. To counter criticisms or avoid embarrassment, he claimed they used it in endlessly changeable ways, or it was a formless or protean conception. In short, it means nothing. They did not have any such conception. To them, the sacred simply meant those things that were held in common by the tribe, and so could not be used by profane hands, by individuals. They became supernatural when they were considered the property of some personalized power beyond—a god.
