The literature on the subject
of religion's origins usually falls under three categories;
(1) the theological - religion emerged from a Divine revelation and the reason we practice religion is because there is a God or gods or supernatural forces. Religion is man's attempt to explain to himself this "fact" of a divine message usually conveyed via a shaman, prophet, or priest who acts as the intermediary of the Divine. This is still the majority view (i.e. of most people on the planet) and contrasts with;
(2) the psychological; the assertion that religion corresponds to some emotional need. Freud saw it as a sublimation of Oedipal urges whereas Bataille sees it as built into the particular stages in which primitive subjectivity develops. There are many other psychological theories, besides. And finally, there is;
(3) the sociological; which looks at group behavior and dynamics and how these shape religious practice. The most noteworthy contribution using this approach has been Emile Durkheim with his work "The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life." The evolutionary viewpoint is usually contained within the sociological as we are then looking at the survival of the gene within the group, and the group itself within its environment.
Now, many rationalist explanations will combine features of approach (2) and (3) and generally scoff at any suggestion that there is merit in approach (1). For me, however, a truly satisfying Theory of religion's origins would take account of possibilities and explanations offered by all three approaches.
It is in the hunter-gatherer type group where it is almost certain that animistic thought began - and therefore the seeds of religion as we know it. We know that even homoerectus (1.5 mya) could use fire in ambushing game though we're not so sure whether he could make it. Either way, there are many myths of fire "being taken" from the Gods, the most famous being Prometheus. If homoerectus could conceptualise the independent making of fire without the help of nature (through lightning or heatwave kindling) then the myths would probably not be speaking of the possession of fire as an act of defiance or hubris - in other words, it's almost certainly the remnant of an early taboo. We are really probing into the distant roots of time here and attempting to reconstruct from the store of myth and a fragmentary archaeological record the type of people and ways of life in which the first stirrings of religious thought began.
Ethnographies, the accumulated body of case studies made by anthropologists of the tribes/indigenous peoples which they have studied first-hand by embedding themselves in their lives for significant lengths of time - this ethnographic record is just too suggestive of the universality of animistic practices among hunter-gatherer small commune groups to suppose anything other than that these practices/beliefs preceded the emergence of the larger city-states that we begin to see emerging with the development of agriculture around the tenth millennium b.p. By studying this record we can gain invaluable glimpses into what the conditions may have been like when religious thought first emerged on the human landscape. Some commentators see the birth of religious thought as an unscrupulous ploy by local elites attempting to centralize power and duping "the masses". However, the ethnographic record does not bear this out. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that belief in the supernatural was sincere and widespread and originated in small hunter-gatherer bands that valued above all else cooperation and cohesiveness. It is most likely that animistic thought and ritual, if anything, contributed strongly to this sense of group solidarity and inaugurated a sense of law and order through various taboos, edicts and moral sanctions.
Our earliest mitochondrial ancestors, the Kung San of the Kalahari, along with many other Bushmen hunter-gatherers have been noted for their acephelous egalitarian social structure. It's tied in with the mobile lifestyle. A lot of anthropologists, when looking at the institution of marriage, for instance, view its origins in the need to form alliances within settled agricultural communities where the protection of territory and resources are the prime concern - the customs of dowry and bride price etc., evolving from here. Some groups will be sedentary - there's evidence of constructed shelters in Olduvai gorge dating as far back as 1.2mya - but most groups will be tracking game and going wherever it can be found. All this has implications for the type of social organization that animism first appears in and the group dynamics will inevitably shape the way in which it is practiced; in terms of its rituals and so forth.
The hunter-gatherer bands have been estimated to have on average 100 or 150 members so we're talking about face-to-face communities here. The time period too is enormous - animism could have developed from very basic concepts anytime from 1.5 mya to well worked out pantheons by the time we get to 20,000 years ago. It's also inconceivable that anonymity could be maintained in these types of conditions especially when you're constantly on the go and will have to make do with temporary shelters to bed down for the night. The population of France during the Neolithic has been estimated to be only 20,000 and ten million for the entire world. Even with a thousand people living in the same commune you'd still meet the same person twice or three days a week. In other words, religious thought couldn't have been invented on the spot as it were in Ur, Mamluk, etc., in the Fertile Crescent, as a means of controlling the population or maintaining your elite status simply because religious thought had already been in existence for tens of thousands of years before these large-scale agricultural settlements had even been developed.
There are strong reasons to believe that the awful sundering of death makes the shaman figure feel his duty to be a solemn one - and one not to be taken lightly. Also, in the earliest manifestations of animism, it's not to be disregarded as a possibility that the entire group, or maybe a significant portion of the group will feel that they can influence events through ritual - and that the centralization of shamanic privilege only began to emerge as we draw closer to that other centralization of previously dispersed groups that comes with the larger city-states near a reliable food resource and the dawn of agriculture (c.10,000 years ago). As an example, among the Azande in Sudan in the 1930's when Evans-Pritchard was carrying out fieldwork virtually everybody in the tribe practised magic to some extent. Some were regarded as having more powerful spells than others, mind you, but the level of embeddedness in their daily lives was astonishing. They attributed any bad luck, for example - if termites had eaten away the supports of their hutstand - as a result of someone's incantation. They would then pass a counteracting charm, but animosities ran high, as you could never be quite sure who it was that was passing the spell against you. But the point being that everyone had the power to pass effective magic, there was no special Divine agent who was the sole intermediary of the "spiritual" realm. Some among the Azande had a good reputation for having "good" spells - this is as much a question of originality as much as anything else; whoever was capable of the more elaborate ritual would earn certain kudos.
But it is well to remember the egalitarian thrust of many of these tribes. This tells us something about the role played by these early forms of religious behavior in promoting group cohesion and solidarity. Many of the native American Indians couldn't come to consensus with the settlers; they had to discuss the matter in council. Plus, in some of them the women would have veto authority due to the in-mixing of clans and totem groups. The system of kinship alliances had its own built-in checks and balances to ensure that power didn't become centralized. "Chiefs", were often only as good as their last speech, face was easily lost, and commitment to honor, duty, and the consensus viewpoint of what their ancestors upheld as the "right path" was the safest way to trod for those who wished to have more responsibility (why should we talk about "power" all the time - with "power" comes headaches too! - you're setting an example in a close-knit community here and you're married to the daughter of your worst enemy - you're constantly treading on eggshells.) Power back then couldn't have meant letting yourself go, and having servants at your beck and call - tributes were given out of respect as much as anything else. Once people got settled - and food supplies were in proximity - the animistic rites and rituals would then take on a different character as they are now transplanted onto a functioning "state" apparatus with soldierly, administration and authority figures all charged with the effective management of village/city-state resources. As outlying tribes are brought under the spere of influence of the city-states, state-sponsored cults are grafted onto its apparatus.
As city-states become empires, the cults themselves are homogenized and the first pantheons appear absorbing elements from their animistic past. This process of synchronization becomes complete in the West with the emergence of the great Abrahamic faiths - Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But animistic thought had announced the birth of something uniquely human, that happened with astonishing sameness right across the globe, be it Indians in the North and South America, the Asias, Australian aborigines, the populations in Europe and the Middle East; they all independently come up with the same animistic beliefs - only the names of the deities, sprites, nymphs etc that they worship are different. In all the anthropological records (as far as I am aware) there is not a single example of a contemporary hunter-gatherer group (and thousands have been studied - from the Dayaks in Indonesia and Borneo to the Azande in the Sudan and the tribes still living in the Amazon rainforest today) - none of them are without a conception of the supernatural, rituals that relate to that supernatural and a body of orally transmitted tradition that represents their accumulated knowledge base of this supernatural world. Everywhere you look in fact, can be seen this proud heritage of humankind - the wonder of man's symbol-making capacity.
(1) the theological - religion emerged from a Divine revelation and the reason we practice religion is because there is a God or gods or supernatural forces. Religion is man's attempt to explain to himself this "fact" of a divine message usually conveyed via a shaman, prophet, or priest who acts as the intermediary of the Divine. This is still the majority view (i.e. of most people on the planet) and contrasts with;
(2) the psychological; the assertion that religion corresponds to some emotional need. Freud saw it as a sublimation of Oedipal urges whereas Bataille sees it as built into the particular stages in which primitive subjectivity develops. There are many other psychological theories, besides. And finally, there is;
(3) the sociological; which looks at group behavior and dynamics and how these shape religious practice. The most noteworthy contribution using this approach has been Emile Durkheim with his work "The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life." The evolutionary viewpoint is usually contained within the sociological as we are then looking at the survival of the gene within the group, and the group itself within its environment.
Now, many rationalist explanations will combine features of approach (2) and (3) and generally scoff at any suggestion that there is merit in approach (1). For me, however, a truly satisfying Theory of religion's origins would take account of possibilities and explanations offered by all three approaches.
It is in the hunter-gatherer type group where it is almost certain that animistic thought began - and therefore the seeds of religion as we know it. We know that even homoerectus (1.5 mya) could use fire in ambushing game though we're not so sure whether he could make it. Either way, there are many myths of fire "being taken" from the Gods, the most famous being Prometheus. If homoerectus could conceptualise the independent making of fire without the help of nature (through lightning or heatwave kindling) then the myths would probably not be speaking of the possession of fire as an act of defiance or hubris - in other words, it's almost certainly the remnant of an early taboo. We are really probing into the distant roots of time here and attempting to reconstruct from the store of myth and a fragmentary archaeological record the type of people and ways of life in which the first stirrings of religious thought began.
Ethnographies, the accumulated body of case studies made by anthropologists of the tribes/indigenous peoples which they have studied first-hand by embedding themselves in their lives for significant lengths of time - this ethnographic record is just too suggestive of the universality of animistic practices among hunter-gatherer small commune groups to suppose anything other than that these practices/beliefs preceded the emergence of the larger city-states that we begin to see emerging with the development of agriculture around the tenth millennium b.p. By studying this record we can gain invaluable glimpses into what the conditions may have been like when religious thought first emerged on the human landscape. Some commentators see the birth of religious thought as an unscrupulous ploy by local elites attempting to centralize power and duping "the masses". However, the ethnographic record does not bear this out. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that belief in the supernatural was sincere and widespread and originated in small hunter-gatherer bands that valued above all else cooperation and cohesiveness. It is most likely that animistic thought and ritual, if anything, contributed strongly to this sense of group solidarity and inaugurated a sense of law and order through various taboos, edicts and moral sanctions.
Our earliest mitochondrial ancestors, the Kung San of the Kalahari, along with many other Bushmen hunter-gatherers have been noted for their acephelous egalitarian social structure. It's tied in with the mobile lifestyle. A lot of anthropologists, when looking at the institution of marriage, for instance, view its origins in the need to form alliances within settled agricultural communities where the protection of territory and resources are the prime concern - the customs of dowry and bride price etc., evolving from here. Some groups will be sedentary - there's evidence of constructed shelters in Olduvai gorge dating as far back as 1.2mya - but most groups will be tracking game and going wherever it can be found. All this has implications for the type of social organization that animism first appears in and the group dynamics will inevitably shape the way in which it is practiced; in terms of its rituals and so forth.
The hunter-gatherer bands have been estimated to have on average 100 or 150 members so we're talking about face-to-face communities here. The time period too is enormous - animism could have developed from very basic concepts anytime from 1.5 mya to well worked out pantheons by the time we get to 20,000 years ago. It's also inconceivable that anonymity could be maintained in these types of conditions especially when you're constantly on the go and will have to make do with temporary shelters to bed down for the night. The population of France during the Neolithic has been estimated to be only 20,000 and ten million for the entire world. Even with a thousand people living in the same commune you'd still meet the same person twice or three days a week. In other words, religious thought couldn't have been invented on the spot as it were in Ur, Mamluk, etc., in the Fertile Crescent, as a means of controlling the population or maintaining your elite status simply because religious thought had already been in existence for tens of thousands of years before these large-scale agricultural settlements had even been developed.
There are strong reasons to believe that the awful sundering of death makes the shaman figure feel his duty to be a solemn one - and one not to be taken lightly. Also, in the earliest manifestations of animism, it's not to be disregarded as a possibility that the entire group, or maybe a significant portion of the group will feel that they can influence events through ritual - and that the centralization of shamanic privilege only began to emerge as we draw closer to that other centralization of previously dispersed groups that comes with the larger city-states near a reliable food resource and the dawn of agriculture (c.10,000 years ago). As an example, among the Azande in Sudan in the 1930's when Evans-Pritchard was carrying out fieldwork virtually everybody in the tribe practised magic to some extent. Some were regarded as having more powerful spells than others, mind you, but the level of embeddedness in their daily lives was astonishing. They attributed any bad luck, for example - if termites had eaten away the supports of their hutstand - as a result of someone's incantation. They would then pass a counteracting charm, but animosities ran high, as you could never be quite sure who it was that was passing the spell against you. But the point being that everyone had the power to pass effective magic, there was no special Divine agent who was the sole intermediary of the "spiritual" realm. Some among the Azande had a good reputation for having "good" spells - this is as much a question of originality as much as anything else; whoever was capable of the more elaborate ritual would earn certain kudos.
But it is well to remember the egalitarian thrust of many of these tribes. This tells us something about the role played by these early forms of religious behavior in promoting group cohesion and solidarity. Many of the native American Indians couldn't come to consensus with the settlers; they had to discuss the matter in council. Plus, in some of them the women would have veto authority due to the in-mixing of clans and totem groups. The system of kinship alliances had its own built-in checks and balances to ensure that power didn't become centralized. "Chiefs", were often only as good as their last speech, face was easily lost, and commitment to honor, duty, and the consensus viewpoint of what their ancestors upheld as the "right path" was the safest way to trod for those who wished to have more responsibility (why should we talk about "power" all the time - with "power" comes headaches too! - you're setting an example in a close-knit community here and you're married to the daughter of your worst enemy - you're constantly treading on eggshells.) Power back then couldn't have meant letting yourself go, and having servants at your beck and call - tributes were given out of respect as much as anything else. Once people got settled - and food supplies were in proximity - the animistic rites and rituals would then take on a different character as they are now transplanted onto a functioning "state" apparatus with soldierly, administration and authority figures all charged with the effective management of village/city-state resources. As outlying tribes are brought under the spere of influence of the city-states, state-sponsored cults are grafted onto its apparatus.
As city-states become empires, the cults themselves are homogenized and the first pantheons appear absorbing elements from their animistic past. This process of synchronization becomes complete in the West with the emergence of the great Abrahamic faiths - Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But animistic thought had announced the birth of something uniquely human, that happened with astonishing sameness right across the globe, be it Indians in the North and South America, the Asias, Australian aborigines, the populations in Europe and the Middle East; they all independently come up with the same animistic beliefs - only the names of the deities, sprites, nymphs etc that they worship are different. In all the anthropological records (as far as I am aware) there is not a single example of a contemporary hunter-gatherer group (and thousands have been studied - from the Dayaks in Indonesia and Borneo to the Azande in the Sudan and the tribes still living in the Amazon rainforest today) - none of them are without a conception of the supernatural, rituals that relate to that supernatural and a body of orally transmitted tradition that represents their accumulated knowledge base of this supernatural world. Everywhere you look in fact, can be seen this proud heritage of humankind - the wonder of man's symbol-making capacity.
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