Reference:The Primal Religions
Reference: The World’s Religions by Huston Smith
[NOTE: In color are Vinaire’s comments.]
Tribal wisdom: The circles in spider webs are sticky, whereas its radii are not. This means, “If you wander from side to side in life you get stuck, but if you move toward its center you don’t.”
A summary of the primal world as thus far sketched shows its internal divisions to be provisional and there to be no transcendent reality that relativizes it. All of this, however, would amount to a string of zeros without a digit to confer value on them were we not to introduce the divine source from which the world is believed to issue, or in other versions, divine arrangers who bring order out of chaos. The presence of these divinities raises the question of theism in the primal traditions, and it must be considered carefully, for the issue is a subtle one.
Is theism present in any form in primary traditions?
A common stereotype pegs primal religions as polytheistic, and this is not altogether wrong if the word tokens that the divine can congeal in hallowed places and alight on specific objects. But this has nothing to do with the flat, Olympian, and Mediterranean polytheism generally that the Bible had to contend with; nor does it militate against a single Ultimate of which the many gods are instantiations or expressions. Wilhelm Schmidt’s twelve-volume Ursprung der Gottesidee, concluded that every then-known tribe—the work was published between 1912 and 1955—had its High God who lives and works through its deputies. The Yoruba of West Africa, for example, never rank their Supreme Being, Olodimave, with lesser divinities (orisa), nor do the Edo confuse Osanobuwa with the ebo. Even if Schmidt overstates the case, however, this scarcely matters; for the issue is not whether tribal peoples explicitly identify a Supreme Being who coordinates the gods but instead, whether they sense such a being whether they name and personify it or not. The evidence suggests that they do. As the Navajo artist Carl Gorman points out: “Some researchers into Navajo religion say that we have no supreme God because he is not named. This is not so. The Supreme Being is not named because he is unknowable. He is simply the Unknown Power. We worship him through his creation for he is everything in his creation. The various forms of creation have some of his spirit within them.” One can call this pan-or poly-monotheism if one wishes. The fact remains that though primal religions affirm the divine Unity less exclusively, and in some cases seem even to veil it, they contain nothing that is strictly comparable to the anthropomorphic polytheism of the early Europeans. It is just that the holy, the sacred, the wakan as the Sioux call it, need not be exclusively attached, or consciously attached at all, to a distinguishable Supreme Being.
The evidence suggests that the tribal people do sense a Supreme Being. The Supreme Being is not named because it is simply the Unknown Power.
Something may even be lost by so attaching it, that loss being the removal of holiness from things that are other than the God that is factored out. This brings us to what is probably the most important single feature of living primal spirituality; namely, what has been called its symbolist mentality. The symbolist vision sees the things of the world as transparent to their divine source. Whether that source is specified or not, the world’s objects are open to its light. Physical sight presents the water in a lake in existential isolation, for as far as the eye reports, the body of water exists as a reality in its own right. From there modern thought may go on to reason that the water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen, and if a spiritual gloss is desired it may attribute to the water allegorical significance. Normally, however, modernity recognizes no ontological connection between material things and their metaphysical, spiritual roots. In this respect primal peoples are better metaphysicians, though their metaphysics, where articulated—we have seen that it need not be—is naturally of mythic cast. When ethnologists declared that for the Algonquins “there is no manitu [spirit] outside the world of appearances,” this simply meant that they were unaware that for the primal mind appearances never exist entirely on their own. As the friend of Black Elk whom we have already mentioned puts the point:
It is often difficult for those who look on the tradition of the Red Man from the outside or through the “educated” mind to understand that no object is what it appears to be, but it is simply the pale shadow of a Reality. It is for this reason that every created object is wakan, holy, and has a power according to the loftiness of the spiritual reality that it reflects. The Indian humbles himself before the whole of creation because all visible things were created before him and, being older than he, deserve respect.
Every object is holy, and has a power according to the loftiness of the spiritual reality that it reflects. The Indian humbles himself before the whole of creation because all visible things were created before him and, being older than he, deserve respect.
A student of the Musicas in the high Andes of Columbia confirms this point: “All primordial men saw the ‘more’ in the ‘less,’ in the sense that the landscape was for them a reflection of a superior reality which ‘contained’ the physical reality; they added, may one say, to the latter, a ‘spiritual dimension’ which escapes modern man.”
There is a superior reality which contains the physical reality.
Paul Radin, who was mentioned earlier, was as impatient as any anthropologist with the “erroneous impression” that primal people are mystics across the board. He insisted that we find among them, as among us, “two general types of temperament: the man of action and the thinker, the type which lives fairly exclusively on what might be called a motor level and the type that demands explanations and derives pleasure from some form of speculative thinking.” Yet he would “not for a moment,” he said, “deny that mysticism and symbolism are more frequently utilized among them than among Western Europeans today…. Only when we have fully grasped the mystic and symbolic meanings inherent in most of the activities of primitive man can we hope to understand him.” As an example of what he was referring to, we can cite the tribesman who pointed out that the circles in spider webs are sticky, whereas its radii are not. This means, he said, that if you wander from side to side in life you get stuck, but if you move toward its center you don’t.
Tribal wisdom: The circles in spider webs are sticky, whereas its radii are not. This means, “If you wander from side to side in life you get stuck, but if you move toward its center you don’t.”
This section should not end without mentioning a distinctive personality type, the shaman—widespread but not universal in tribal societies—who can bypass symbolism and perceive spiritual realities directly. We can think of shamans as spiritual savants, savant being defined as a person whose talents, be they in music (Mozart), drama (Shakespeare), mathematics, or whatever domain, are exceptional to the point of belonging to a different order of magnitude. Subject to severe physical and emotional traumas in their early years, shamans are able to heal themselves and reintegrate their lives in ways that place psychic if not cosmic powers at their disposal. These powers enable them to engage with spirits, both good and evil, drawing power from the former and battling the latter where need be. They are heavily engaged in healing, and appear to have preternatural powers to foretell the future and discern lost objects.
Some tribal societies have shamans, who can bypass symbolism and perceive spiritual realities directly. They are heavily engaged in healing, and appear to have preternatural powers to foretell the future and discern lost objects.
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