Reference: The Primal Religions
Reference: The World’s Religions by Huston Smith
[NOTE: In color are Vinaire’s comments.]
Primal time is atemporal; an eternal now. Primal time focuses on causal rather than chronological sequence; for primal peoples, “past” means preeminently closer to the originating Source of things.
Orality. Literacy, we have noted, is unknown to the primal religions. To be sure, it has now visited some of them; but this changes little in our inquiry for, when it arrives, leaders usually shelter their tribe’s sacred lore from its encroachments. To commit living myth and legend to lifeless script, they assume, would be to imprison it and sound its death knell. It is not easy for people who value writing to fathom their instinct here, but if we try we can perhaps catch a glimpse of why they consider writing to be not just a competitor to exclusive orality but one that threatens the virtues it bestows.
Literacy is unknown to the primal religions, and, today, when it has visited some of them, the leaders usually shelter their tribe’s sacred lore from its encroachments.
We can begin with the versatility of the spoken over the written word. Speech is a part of a speaker’s life, and as such shares that life’s vitality. This gives it a flexibility that can be tailored to speaker and hearer alike. Familiar themes can be enlivened by fresh diction. Rhythm can be introduced, together with intonations, pauses, and accentuations, until speaking borders on chanting, and storytelling emerges as a high art. Dialect and delivery can be added to flesh out characters that are being described, and when animal postures and gaits are mimed and their noises simulated, we are into theater. Silence can be invoked to heighten tension or suspense, and can even be used to indicate that the narrator has interrupted the story to engage in private prayer.
Speech shares life’s vitality and gives it a flexibility that can be tailored to speaker and hearer alike.
This much is obvious, but it scarcely touches on the distinctive genius of primal orality. For if we go no further than this, we leave the door open for advocates of writing to respond, “Fine; let’s have both,” which of course is what the historical religions do have; their scriptures share the stage with homilies, songs, pageants, and morality plays. We do not understand the distinctiveness of primal orality until we confront its exclusiveness, the way it views writing not as a supplement to speaking but its foe. For once introduced, writing does not leave the virtues of orality intact. In important ways it undercuts them.
We do not understand the distinctiveness of primal orality until we confront its exclusiveness, the way it views writing not as a supplement to speaking but its foe.
Chief among the endowments that exclusive reliance on speech confers is human memory. Literate peoples grow slack in recall. “Why should I tax myself when I can find what I need written down somewhere?” is the lettered attitude toward memory. It is not difficult to see that things would be different if libraries were not available. The memories of blind people, for example, are legendary; and we can add this report from the New Hebrides: “The children are educated by listening and watching…. Without writing, memory is perfect, tradition exact…. The thousand myths which every child learns (often word perfect, and one story may last for hours) are a whole library.” And what do they think of us? “The natives easily learn to write after white impact. They regard writing as a curious and useless performance. They say: ’Cannot a man remember and speak?’”
Without writing, learning occurs by listening and watching; memory becomes perfect, and traditions exact. Writing is then looked upon as a curious and useless performance.
To help us comprehend what life without writing would be like, we might try visualizing our forebears as bands of blind Homers who gather each evening around their fire after the day’s work is accomplished. Everything that their ancestors learned with difficulty, from healing herbs to stirring legends, is now stored in their collective minds, and there only. Would they not cherish the heritage their conversation sustains? Would they not revere it and rehearse it endlessly, each supplementing and correcting the accounts of others?
Life without writing would be people who gather each evening around their fire after the day’s work is accomplished, conversing about their heritage endlessly.
What is important for us to understand here is the impact of this ongoing, empowering seminar on its participants. Everyone feeds the living reservoir of knowledge, while receiving in return its answering flow of information that shapes and stocks their lives. Each member of the tribe becomes its walking library. To see this as a genuine alternative to the advantages of reading, we can listen to an early adventurer in Africa who reported, “My trusted friend and companion was an old man who could not read or write, though well versed in stories of the past. The old chiefs listened enthralled. Under the present system of [colonial] education there is grave risk that much of this may be lost.” Another traveler to Africa pointed out that “unlike the English system in which one could pass one’s life without coming into contact with poetry, the Uraon tribal system uses poetry as a vital appendix to dancing, marriages and the cultivation of a crop—functions in which all Uraons join as a part of their tribal life. If we have to single out the factor which caused the decline of English village culture, we should have to say it was literacy.”
Everyone feeds the living reservoir of knowledge, while receiving in return its answering flow of information that shapes and stocks their lives. Each member of the tribe becomes its walking library.
If exclusive orality protects human memory, it also guards against two other depletions. The first of these is the capacity to sense the sacred through nonverbal channels. Because writing can grapple with meanings explicitly, sacred texts tend to gravitate to positions of such eminence as to be considered the preeminent if not exclusive channel of revelation. This eclipses other means of divine disclosure. Oral traditions do not fall into this trap. The invisibility of their texts, which is to say their myths, leaves their eyes free to scan for other sacred portents, virgin nature and sacred art being the prime examples. In the Middle Ages, when Europe was even less lettered than China, “the ignorant and unlettered man could read the meaning of sculptures that now only trained archaeologists can interpret.”
Exclusive orality protects human memory and guards the capacity to sense the sacred through nonverbal channels. It leaves their eyes free to scan for other sacred portents, such as, virgin nature and sacred art.
Finally, because writing has no limits, it can proliferate to the point where people get lost in its endless corridors. Secondary material comes to blur what is important. Minds become waterlogged with information and narrowed through specialization. Memory is protected against such cripplings. Being embedded in life, life calls it to count at every turn, and what is useless and irrelevant is quickly weeded out.
Writing can proliferate to the point where people get lost in its endless corridors.Secondary material comes to blur what is important.
We can summarize the gifts of exclusive orality by quoting anthropologist Paul Radin. “The disorientation in our whole psychic life and in our whole apperception of the external realities produced by the invention of the alphabet, the whole tendency of which has been to elevate thought and thinking to the rank of the exclusive proof of all verities, never occurred among [tribal] peoples.”
Exclusive orality among tribal people protects them from the disorientation in psychic life produced by the invention of the alphabet.
Place versus Space. A second distinguishing feature of primal religion is its embeddedness in place. Place is not space. Whereas space is abstract, place is concrete. A cubic yard of space is identical wherever we calculate it, but no two places are alike, as Stephen Foster’s refrain, “There’s no place like home,” attests.
A second distinguishing feature of primal religion is its embeddedness in place.
Many historical religions are attached to places; Judaism and Shinto, both of which began as primal religions, come immediately to mind. No historical religion, however, is embedded in place to the extent that tribal religions are. Two anecdotes, both drawn from the Onondaga tribe of the Hau de no sau nee (the Six Nations in upstate New York), can serve to make this point.
No historical religion, however, is embedded in place to the extent that tribal religions are.
Oren Lyons was the first Onondagan to enter college. When he returned to his reservation for his first vacation, his uncle proposed a fishing trip on a lake. Once he had his nephew in the middle of the lake where he wanted him, he began to interrogate him. “Well, Oren,” he said, “you’ve been to college; you must be pretty smart now from all they’ve been teaching you. Let me ask you a question. Who are you?” Taken aback by the question, Oren fumbled for an answer. “What do you mean, who am I? Why, I’m your nephew, of course.” His uncle rejected his answer and repeated his question. Successively, the nephew ventured that he was Oren Lyons, an Onondagan, a human being, a man, a young man, all to no avail. When his uncle had reduced him to silence and he asked to be informed as to who he was, his uncle said, “Do you see that bluff over there? Oren, you are that bluff. And that giant pine on the other shore? Oren, you are that pine. And this water that supports our boat? You are this water.”
The tribal people identify themselves with their place and the nature around them.
The second anecdote comes from the same tribe. An outdoor ceremony in which this author was included opened with a prayer that lasted for fifty minutes. No eyes were closed; on the contrary, everyone seemed to be actively looking around. As the prayer was offered in native tongue, I could understand nothing of it. When I later asked its content, I was told that the entire prayer had been devoted to naming everything in sight, animate and “inanimate,” with the invisible spirits of the area included, inviting them to join in the occasion and bless its proceedings.
The tribal people are very much in communication with their natural surrounding.
It would be wrong to think that attention to detail (in this second anecdote) and to ancestral setting (in the first) makes this notion of place confining. When the Australian Kurnai go on walkabouts, the concreteness of place goes with them. The springs and major trees and rocks that they encounter are not interchangeable with others of their kind; each triggers memories of the legendary events they were a part of. The Navajos do not even need to leave home for their sense of place to balloon. By fashioning their dwellings to the world’s shape, their buildings draw the world into their homes. The pillars that support their roofs are named for, and thus identified with, the deities that support the entire cosmos: Earth, Mountain Woman, Water Woman, and Corn Woman.
It would be wrong to think that attention to detail and to ancestral setting makes this notion of place confining.
In the opening pages of The Savage Mind, Claude Levi-Strauss quotes a native thinker as remarking, penetratingly, that “all sacred things must have their place.” The observation argues that location in place—not any place, but in each and every instance the exact and rightful place—is a feature of sanctity. “Being in their place,” Levi-Strauss continues, “is what makes [objects] sacred; for if they were taken out of their place, even in thought, the entire order of the universe would be destroyed.”
Being in their place is what makes objects sacred; for if they were taken out of their place, even in thought, the entire order of the universe would be destroyed.
Eternal time. In contrast to the historical religions of the West, which are messianically forward looking, primal religions give the appearance of looking toward the past. That is not altogether wrong, and from the Western perspective, where time is linear, there is no other way to put the matter. But primal time is not linear, a straight line that moves from the past, through the present, into the future. It is not even cyclical as the Asian religions tend to regard it, turning in the way the world turns and seasons cycle. Primal time is atemporal; an eternal now. To speak of atemporal or timeless time is paradoxical, but the paradox can be relieved if we see that primal time focuses on causal rather than chronological sequence; for primal peoples, “past” means preeminently closer to the originating Source of things. That the Source precedes the present is of secondary importance.
Primal time is atemporal; an eternal now. Primal time focuses on causal rather than chronological sequence; for primal peoples, “past” means preeminently closer to the originating Source of things.
The word Source is used here to refer to the gods who, where they did not actually create the world, ordered it and gave it its viable structure. Those gods continue to exist, of course, but that does not shift interest to the present, for the past continues to be considered the Golden Age. When divine creation had suffered no ravages of time and mismanagement, the world was as it should be. That is no longer the case, for a certain enfeeblement has occurred; thus steps are needed to restore the world to its original condition. “For religious man of the archaic cultures,” Mircea Eliade writes, “the world is renewed annually; in other words, with each new year it recovers its original sanctity, the sanctity that it possessed when it came from the Creator’s hands.” Altars are erected that simulate the world’s original shape, and the mandating words the gods uttered on the day the world was created are faithfully repeated. We can liken such rites of renewal to telephone poles that boost sagging cables. The annual Sun Dance of the Plains Indians is called the Dance for World and Life Renewal. Individual tasks, too, need renewing. For example, the Polynesian Island of Tikopia has a ritual for repairing boats. In it a boat is repaired, not because it needs repair but ritualistically, “according to specifications,” as we might say, which in this case means the way the gods demonstrated the repair of boats. The ritual recharges this important island activity with significance and at the same time reinstates standards that may have slipped.
For religious man of the archaic cultures the world is renewed annually; in other words, with each new year it recovers its original sanctity, the sanctity that it possessed when it came from the Creator’s hands.
If we stopped here we would have said nothing distinctive about the primal view of time, for historical religions too have renewal rites, these being a feature of their primal heritage that they have retained. All of them have solstice festivals of some sort to reverse the winter’s darkness, as well as “easters” to abet nature’s rebirth. In Taiwan the Taoist festival Chiao effects renewal through rituals that span a sixty-year cycle, for just as nature needs to be revived each spring, so too must the greater cosmos be renewed on the scale of a human lifespan. Everyone participates in these rites. Preparations for a given phase of the cycle can take years, and the financial outlay is enormous.
Historical religions too have renewal rites, these being a feature of their primal heritage that they have retained.
For a feature of the primal view of time that the historical religions have largely abandoned, we can turn to the way it tends to rank order beings according to their proximity to their divine source. Thus animals are often venerated for their “anteriority,” and among animals the otter’s relative stupidity leads the Winnebagos to infer that it was created last. This principle applies to the human species as well; its pioneers are revered over their descendants, who are regarded as something of epigones. Primal peoples respect their elders enormously.
The primal view tends to rank order beings according to their proximity to their divine source. Primal peoples respect their elders enormously.
East Asians do likewise with their filial piety and ancestor worship; and it can be remarked in passing that Taoism and its Japanese cousin Shinto are the historical religions that across the board have remained closest to their primal roots. But to stay with the primal religions, it is not going too far to say that they think of their gods in more or less ancestral terms. Human ancestors are viewed as prolongations of the tribe’s earliest ancestors, who were divine. This makes them a bridge that connects the current generation with its first and supreme ancestor; one thinks again of Shinto, where the Emperor is the direct descendant of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, and the Japanese people are her indirect descendants. Standing closer to the gods than does the present generation, ancestors are seen as inheriting more of their virtues, which makes them models for conduct. Exempt from the complications of life that devolution introduces, ancestors are thought to enjoy a wholeness of character that their offspring lack. The assumption probably arises not from Freud’s postulate of subconscious idealizations of parental figures, but from deeper regions of intuition; from an instinctive ontological recognition that closer-to-the-source means to be in some sense better. In any case, all that has been said of the ancestors applies to some extent to elders of the current generation. Even the childlikeness and naivete of their later years tends to be regarded as an advance toward the state of paradisiacal rightness that preceded the world’s decline. Toward the close of his life, Black Elk, a shaman of the Oglala Sioux, often fell to all fours to play with toddlers. “We have much in common,” he said. “They have just come from the Great Mysterious and I am about to return to it.”
The primal religions think of their gods in more or less ancestral terms. Human ancestors are viewed as prolongations of the tribe’s earliest ancestors, who were divine.
We turn now to other features of primal religion that are embedded in its worldview. In sketching that view we continue to use broad strokes, confining ourselves to features that remain relatively constant beneath the variety of concrete cosmologies through which they find expression.
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