Reference: The Primal Religions
Reference: The World’s Religions by Huston Smith
[NOTE: In color are Vinaire’s comments.]
Pre-historic religions have a much longer span. During that immense time span people lived their religion in an importantly different mode, which must have shaped their sensibilities significantly. Remnants of this mode survive as psychic traces in our deep unconscious.
This book has dealt with the major historical religions. Historical religions have sacred texts and a cumulative tradition that builds and develops. The Christianity of the Middle Ages is not that of the Apostolic Church any more than NeoConfucianism is the Confucianism its founder taught, though in both cases strong continuities can be discerned.
We have dealt with historic religions so far.
The historical religions now pretty much blanket the earth, but chronologically they form only the tip of the religious iceberg; for they span less than four thousand years as compared with the three million years or so of the religions that preceded them. During that immense time span people lived their religion in an importantly different mode, which must have shaped their sensibilities significantly. We shall call their religious pattern primal because it came first, but alternatively we shall refer to it as tribal because its groupings were invariably small, or oral because writing was unknown to them. This mode of religiosity continues in Africa, Australia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Siberia, and among the Indians of North and South America. Its numbers are diminishing, but we devote this final substantive chapter to them, partly to pay them tribute but also for the contrasting light they can throw on the historical religions that have engaged us. What was, and in the places just mentioned still is, the religion of peoples who live in small communities, on subsistent economies that are the direct product of their own efforts, and without depending on writing? Without hope of doing justice to the subject, and skirting almost entirely the continental and intra-continental differences among them, we shall try to catch aglimpse of human religiousness in its earliest mode. It is a more-than-academic exercise, for we can be sure that remnants of this mode survive as psychic traces in our deep unconscious. There is also the possibility that we might learn from them, for tribes may have retained insights and virtues that urbanized, industrial civilizations have allowed to fall by the wayside.
Pre-historic religions have a much longer span. During that immense time span people lived their religion in an importantly different mode, which must have shaped their sensibilities significantly. Remnants of this mode survive as psychic traces in our deep unconscious.
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The Australian Experience
We can begin by putting behind us the nineteenth-century prejudice that later means better, a view that may hold for technology, but not for religion. History does show that social roles become more differentiated as societies grow in size and complexity. Lines between clergy and laity get drawn, and divisions between sacred and secular come to view; in this respect later societies resemble later biological species, which develop differentiated limbs and organs. But in both cases life was present from the start, and in the religious case it is a mistake to assume that later historical expressions are nobler than earlier ones. If God does not evolve, neither, it seems, does homo religiosus, not in any important respect. Mircea Eliade came to believe that archaic peoples are more spiritual than their descendants because, clothed as they are in leaves and skins and nourished directly by the fruits of the earth, they are unencumbered by external devices. However that may be, everything that we find flowering in the historical religions—monotheism, for example—is prefigured in the primal ones in faint but discernible patterns.
Social roles become more differentiated as societies grow in size and complexity. But it is a mistake to assume that later historical expressions are nobler than earlier ones. Everything that we find flowering in the historical religions is prefigured in the primal ones in faint but discernible patterns.
The muted character of distinctions in the primal religions—distinctions that in the historical religions explode into opposites, such as heaven and hell, or samsara and nirvana—provides a fitting entry into our subject and one that is nicely illustrated by the religion of the Australian aborigines. Australia is the only continent that did not undergo the Neolithic experience, which elsewhere began about 10,000 B.C. and witnessed the invention of farming and technically advanced stone implements. This exemption places the Australian aborigines closest among extant peoples to the earth’s original human inhabitants, with the negligible exception of a tiny tribe in the Philippines, the Tassaday, whose authenticity is disputed. The world of aboriginal religion is a single one. We shall see that other primal religions resemble it in this respect, but the “antiquity” of the aborigines makes the sharpest division in their world—every world includes divisions of some sort—seem subdued in comparison to its counterparts in other primal cosmologies.
Australia is the only continent that did not undergo the Neolithic experience. This exemption places the Australian aborigines closest among extant peoples to the earth’s original human inhabitants.
The distinction we have in mind is that between the aborigines’ ordinary life and what anthropologists began by calling their “mythic world” (le monde mythique; Levy-Bruhl) but now refer to by the aborigines’ own term, “the Dreaming.” This latter term has the advantage of indicating that there are not two worlds, but instead a single world that can be experienced in different ways.
The aborigines’ ordinary life is distinct from their “the Dreaming” life.
The world that the aborigines ordinarily experience is measured out by time; the seasons cycle, and generations come and go. Meanwhile, the backdrop for this unending procession is stable. Time does not touch it, for it is “everywhen.” Legendary figures people this backdrop world. They are not gods; they are much like ourselves, while at the same time being larger than life. What gives them their exceptional status is that they originated, or better instituted, the paradigmatic acts of which daily life consists. They were geniuses for having molded and thereby modeled life’s essential conditions—male and female; human, bird, fish, and the like—and its essential activities such as hunting, gathering, war, and love. We are inclined to say that when the Arunta go hunting they mime the exploits of the first and archetypal hunter, but this distinguishes them from their archetype too sharply. It is better to say that they enter the mold of their archetype so completely that each becomes the First Hunter; no distinction remains. Similarly for other activities, from basket weaving to lovemaking. Only while they are conforming their actions to the model of some archetypal hero do the Arunta feel that they are truly alive, for in those roles they are immortal. The occasions on which they slip from such molds are quite meaningless, for time immediately devours those occasions and reduces them to nothingness.
Only while they are conforming their actions to the model of some archetypal hero do the Arunta feel that they are truly alive, for in those roles they are immortal.
We can see from this that aboriginal religion turns not on worship but on identification, a “participation in,” and acting out of, archetypal paradigms. The entire life of the aborigine, insofar as it rises above triviality and becomes authentic, is ritual. Mythic beings are not addressed, propitiated, or beseeched. The line that divides the human from those beings is broad in principle, but it can be easily erased, for it disappears in the moment of ritual merger when everywhen becomes now. Here there are no priests, no congregations, no mediating officiants, no spectators. There is only the Dreaming and conformance to it.
The aboriginal religion turns not on worship but on identification, a “participation in,” and acting out of, archetypal paradigms. There is only the Dreaming and conformance to it.
Parallels to the Dreaming motif abound, but nowhere with outlines quite as sharp as those in the Australian prototype. Though this difference is small, it is the only one in the population of the primal religions that we will mention. For the rest of the chapter we will be occupied with features that the primal religions share, and which set them apart as a group from the historical religions that have been this book’s focus. The next section will consider their “orality”—a word invented to designate a mode of life in which words are spoken only, never written—and the distinctive ways they conceive of space and time. Other commonalities will emerge when their world view is outlined.
“Orality” is a word invented to designate a mode of life in which words are spoken only, never written.
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