This new perspective owes much to the work of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He has been at the forefront of research into moral decision-making, which is grounded in evolutionary theory. Because people have been living in groups for hundreds of thousands of years, it really isn’t surprising that prosocial or “moral” behaviors are often the result of intuition or snap judgments that are later explained by recourse to reason. Humans are the most prosocial of primates and it would be surprising if this ability were not highly developed.

In recent years Haidt has extended these basic insights to politics and other domains (such as religion), where the terrain is much more uneven and confounded by modern culture. The ideas, in other words, have been extended and applied in ways that are questionable. In this recent article on Haidt from The Chronicle, the overextension is apparent.

After being asked how people came together to build cooperative societies beyond kinship, Haidt asserts that “morality” was the key:

A big part of Haidt’s moral narrative is faith. He lays out the case that religion is an evolutionary adaptation for binding people into groups and enabling those units to better compete against other groups. Through faith, humans developed the “psychology of sacredness,” the notion that “some people, objects, days, words, values, and ideas are special, set apart, untouchable, and pure.” If people revere the same sacred objects, he writes, they can trust one another and cooperate toward larger goals. But morality also blinds them to arguments from beyond their group.

If we take ethnohistoric hunter-gatherers for our model of how people formed larger and more cohesive groups in the ancient past, Haidt’s “morality” answer is patently wrong. These groups were held together by kinship ties first and by extended or fictive kinship second. Their “religions” (i.e., shamanisms) weren’t grounded in morals and weren’t much concerned with morals. While such groups had moral norms and ethical rules, these weren’t twined with supernaturalism and had an independent, non-spiritual basis.

Large communities held together by religion-faith-morals are a recent development in human history, no more than a few thousand years old. The kind of community that Haidt describes is a post-Neolithic formation that has its origins in the Axial Age. So does the idea that religion is a matter of “faith.” These are not ancient or evolutionary ideas. Moralizing gods and religions are relative newcomers to the supernatural world.

Haidt’s mistake here is a common one: observe modern or relatively recent cultural formations and then uncritically project them back into the ancestral or evolutionary past. This mistake has other consequences, which are evident in what Haidt calls “innate” or evolutionary moral foundations:  “care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.” These “innate” concerns sound suspiciously modern; I suspect at least a few are products of post-Neolithic and Western societies.

Todd Schorr's "Hunter Gatherer"

I’ve spent several years immersed in the ethnohistoric hunter-gatherer record and can’t recall much or any concern with liberty-oppression. This is the kind of concern that arises when you have centralized authority and government, which were absent for most of human history. Nor can I recall much concern for authority-subversion. Again, these kinds of concerns are related to centralized authority and government which didn’t exist in our hunting-gathering past. While hunting-gathering societies are concerned with ritual purity, translating this as sanctity-degradation has a distinctly Axial feel to it. Degradation, in particular, smacks of the Christian fall from grace.

Haidt’s “foundational morals” aren’t innate or universal. The list is provincial, limited in both time and space. Had Haidt tested his list against history or made cross-cultural comparisons, this would have been evident.

These efforts, while interesting and instructive, haven’t really grappled with the ways in which particular kinds of creation myths perform particular kinds of psycho-cultural work in the present. I have yet to see, for instance, an analysis of the ways in which the Edenic creation myth, in its structural and thematic details, frames a particular kind of individuated self and conditions a particular kind of collective culture. I suspect there are constitutive links between certain kinds of myths and certain kinds of identities. Identifying and tracing these links would seem to be a fruitful task but may be much easier said than done.

If links between particular kinds of myth and particular kinds of culture exist, the search for connections would begin with a thematic classification and mapping of the myths. This has been done for the creation myths of North American Indians. Anna Birgitta Rooth examined over 300 creation myths collected from North American natives and discerned 8 thematic types:

1. The Earth-Diver: this myth involves some being, often an animal, who dives to the bottom of an ocean to get sand or mud from which the earth and its denizens are created. It is found all over North America except for Arizona and New Mexico (i.e., the Puebloan area). Interestingly, the earth-diver creation myth is also widespread in Eurasia.

2. The World-Parents: this myth tells of a sky-father and earth-mother who jointly produce the earth and all living things. This usually involves the earth-mother giving birth and the fertility symbolism is heavy. This myth is found primarily in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Similar myths can be found outside of North America in Japan and Polynesia.

3. The Emergence: this myth involves a hole in the earth or a cave from which humans and animals emerge to the present world. It is found primarily in the southwest Puebloan area with some spillover the the adjacent Plains. This is the primary form of creation myth found in Meso-America.

4. The Spider as First Being: in this myth the spider is the first being who spins a web that holds the earth together or makes it firm and thus makes it possible for other beings to exist on it. How these other beings come into existence is highly variable, but the spider is at the center of the entire cosmology. Versions of this myth can also be found in south America and China.

5. The Fighting or Robbery: this myth recounts the heroic deeds of a culture hero or transformer who steals the earth and its creations from greedy, pre-existing beings who have been hoarding for themselves. The transformer then gives these gifts to humanity. This is the most common form of creation myth among Northwest Coast Indians and finds parallels in northeast Asia.

6. The Ymir: in this myth the world is created from the corpse of a dead giant or a dead man or woman. The skull is made into the sky, the bones become rocks, the hair becomes vegetation, and the blood becomes water. It is found throughout the North American continent. It is similarly widespread in Eurasia, and has interesting parallels with the Edenic myth.

7. The Two Creators Contest: this highly varied myth involves two creators, often siblings or relatives, who engage in a contest to “make” the best things with the result being the creation of the world and its contents. In some variations the world is created as a byproduct of a contest between the two. This myth is found in all areas of North America and has parallels in Asia.

8. The Blind Brother: this myth tells of two brothers who rise from the depths of the ocean bringing people with them. One brother tricks the other in a way that results in blindness; the blind brother in his anger then visits hardship on the people who have come to earth. This myth is found only in southern California and Arizona, and it told in adjacent parts of Mexico. Its distribution seems limited to these areas.

Rooth includes maps for each creation myth type showing where they can be found; although she doesn’t provide a single comprehensive map, a composite overlay would show that the myths have geographic clusters but don’t seem to correlate to any particular kind of culture (i.e., woodlands, coastal, horticultural, nomadic, Plains, Puebloan) or language area. As a cultural diffusionist writing in the 1950s, Rooth does find some attenuated connections which she describes in very general terms.

Her classifications and maps clearly indicate a complex history of migrations and contacts. The latter has resulted in several kinds of syncretic creation myths, many of which can be found in roughly similar forms outside of the Americas or in the Old World. It would take a tremendous effort to test the hypothesis that certain kinds of cultural structures correlate with certain kinds of creation myths. It could be done using the Human Relations Area Files, which codes for cultural variables but not necessarily for kinds of creation myth.

Because I don’t think this will be done anytime soon, where does this leave us? Probably nowhere. I can’t discern even the barest hints of a relationship between the structure of these societies and types of creation myths. What I have learned is that the Edenic myth, though dominant in some parts of the world, doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface when it comes to types and varieties of creation myths. They seem limited only by the imagination, which is to say not limited at all.

Reference:

Rooth, Anna B. (1957). The Creation Myths of the North American Indians Anthropos, 52 (3/4), 497-508

When fully modern humans left Africa around 75,000 years ago, they almost certainly carried some form of shamanism with them. It is even possible that humans they encountered along the way — those whose ancestors had left Africa during earlier migrations (such as Neanderthals and Denisovans) — were shamanic. We know that some of these encounters involved genetic mixing; they also probably involved ritual mixing. Indeed, having sex with different looking and sounding strangers may have been richly imbued with ritual.

Whatever the case, one thing is certain: wherever humans went, so too did shamanism. It is found throughout Africa, Near East, Europe, Asia, Oceania, Australia, Arctic, and Americas. If you look at any map which shows migration routes from Africa and colonization of the world, the map shows not just the movement of people over tens of thousands of years: it also shows the spread of shamanisms.

All humans were hunter-gatherers and shamanic until the advent of agriculture some 12,000 years ago. But wherever agriculture takes hold in any kind of intensive way, shamanism is transformed into something that looks more like what we today call “religion.” It becomes, in other words, more organized, systematic, and doctrinal. The primacy of individual supernaturalism, a hallmark of shamanism, gives way to collective supernaturalism or formal religions.

In isolated areas where foraging and small-scale horticulture persisted for longer periods of time, so too did shamanism. Traditional shamanism exists today primarily in small-scale societies such as those found in the Amazon and New Guinea. As an ancient practice which many deem to be closer to the “primordial supernatural source,” it is hardly surprising that it has been appropriated and commodified for global use. Commercial neo-shamanism thrives in places like New York, Paris, and Tokyo.

Traditional shamanism was not, however, wholly replaced by Neolithic religions created to meet the needs of agricultural and large-scale societies. As Robert Bellah frequently observes when discussing the history of religions: “nothing is ever lost.” There is in other words a bit of shamanism in all religions today. Ideas about souls, spirits, gods, other-worlds, after-lives, possession, prophecy, and divination were all developed within shamanism and existed for many thousands of years before the earliest religions formalized and systematized them.

This process of incorporation and domestication did not completely subsume shamanism. Strands of shamanism persisted in more traditional forms, especially in rural areas, and elements of it continued to be practiced at the margins under different names: oracles, mediums, healers, diviners, psychics, seers, clairvoyants, sorcerers, and witches. Within more established religions, people who privileged and cultivated the shamanic substrates of those traditions are known as mystics, sages, gurus, prophets, and saints. Shamanism runs as deep as it does wide, and a splendid book on the shamanic aspects of Christianity is begging to be written.

While waiting for this genealogy of shamanic Christianity, it may be less threatening to trace the transformational course of shamanic practice in Japan, where supernatural syncretism has long been the norm. Where syncretism prevails, it is easier to acknowledge borrowings and debts.

In 1975 Carmen Blacker published The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan and highlighted the prevalence of Japanese “folk” beliefs that run alongside and mix with official Shinto and temple Buddhism. In “Witch Animals” (open), Blacker examines belief in animals who have spirits that can be cultivated as household guardians. This is a common idea among hunter-gatherers in general and Amerindians in particular; the latter famously sought visions to identify an animal whose spirit would become a lifelong companion and protector. In “Exorcism” (open), Blacker examines the belief that physical-mental illnesses are caused by spirit maleficence or possession, the cure for which is exorcism. Similar beliefs are found in nearly all shamanic societies, with the cure being a ritualized extraction or casting out.

Blacker is aware of these shamanic connections and suggests in early chapters (open) that Japanese “folk” practices are rooted in an ancient hunting and gathering past. That such practices have persisted is remarkable in light of Meiji period (1868-1912) efforts to modernize Japan, one programmatic aspect of which was to root out shamanic “superstitions” and create a national tradition which conformed to the Western concept and category of “religion.”

Although such superstitions were by the time of the Meiji period identified mostly with Buddhism, this had not always been the case. When Buddhists first arrived in Japan around 550 CE, they encountered an intensely spiritualized landscape that was deeply informed by indigenous Japanese shamanism. This shamanism arose in conjunction with the Jomon peoples, who hunted and gathered in Japan from 14,000-300 BCE, a spectacularly long run during which they built permanent settlements, made pottery, and developed rituals.

As Buddhism developed in Japan it did so not by displacing traditional beliefs developed over 14,000 years, but rather by incorporating and accepting them. This meant that over the centuries Japanese Buddhism developed into a distinctive amalgam described here by Jason A. Josephson:

During the Tokugawa period [1603-1868] the vast majority of interaction between priests and parishioners was for the purpose of practical, this-worldly benefits (genze riyaku 現世利益) or memorial rituals for the dead (kuyō 供養). The day-to-day life of Buddhist priests of all sects was filled with the performance of exorcisms, funerals, distributing healing charms, and spells for rain.

Many of these rituals were intended for apotropaic purposes, banishing monsters, limiting their negative effects, or transforming the curses of ancestors and kami into blessings. Hungry ghosts (gaki 餓鬼) and demons (oni 鬼 or ma 魔) were an integral part of the worldview promoted by the Buddhist establishment; and one of the main benefits of seemingly unconnected activities such as lay ordination rituals, for instance, was to manage these sorts of supernatural entities. Despite later revisionism, both demons and this-worldly magic were fundamental to Buddhism—in canonical texts and in daily practices.

While Buddhist priests were performing these ancient (shamanic) rites during the medieval Tokugawa period (1603-1868), this had not always been the case. For centuries prior, Buddhist priests had been learning this craft from female shamans known as miko. In a recent article on spirit mediums or miko in pre-Tokugawa Japan, Lori Meeks observes that miko were often ensconced in or around temples where they performed a variety of services that were much in demand but were not on official Buddhist offer:

[W]e can find many examples of miko who engaged in a variety of closely linked spiritual services, such as the transmission of oracles from gods and bodhisattvas, which was thought to occur through divine trance; channeling spirits of the dead; divine petition, which sometimes involved exorcism; fortune-telling; rituals and blessings for romantic relationships and childbirth; and physical healing.

Both shrine miko and arukimiko also developed extensive repertoires of spiritual services meant to meet the needs of individual patrons: the conjuring of dead spirits, divination, love rites, and physical healing.

Although miko were tolerated, accommodated, and sometimes celebrated in medieval Japan, they were often viewed with suspicion by government officials attempting to impose control and maintain order in collaboration with more placid and malleable temple Buddhists. Miko were recognized as shamanic atavists and may have served as reminders of an unruly populace or anarchic past. The fact that miko carried drums and danced connects them directly to shamans, as does the fact they were healers.

When it comes to shamans or those who carry on aspects of shamanic tradition within larger-scale societies, the usual course is for shamanic functions to be co-opted by mainstream religious traditions or relegated to the periphery where they are denigrated as “superstition.” The latter epithet is euphemism for “supernatural beliefs not fitted within recognized religions or traditional doctrines.” From the priest to the palmist, all supernatural practitioners are indebted to the universal shaman.

References:

Meeks, Lori (2011). The Disappearing Medium: Reassessing the Place of Miko in the Religious Landscape of Premodern Japan
History of Religions, 50 (3), 208-260 DOI: 10.1086/656611

Josephson, Jason A. (2006). When Buddhism Became a “Religion”: Religion and Superstition in the Writings of Inoue Enryō Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 33 (1), 143-168

Habu, Junko (2008). Growth and decline in complex hunter-gatherer societies: a case study from the Jomon period Sannai Maruyama site, Japan Antiquity, 82, 571-584

While I greatly admire Pagels’ work and understand this was a lecture setting, this answer won’t do. The emotional explanation for religion has been around for a long time and was most famously stated by Sigmund Freud in The Future of an Illusion (1927).

Freud explains religion as wish fulfillment, with emotional fear playing the major role. Humans faced with an inexplicable and cruel world create coping mechanism gods: “The gods retain the threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.”

This is a good explanation as far as it goes but the problem is that it doesn’t go very far. Many things contribute to religiosity, with emotions being only one of several contributing factors. There undoubtedly is a cognitive component to religiosity. Human brains have evolved in such a way that we naturally generate supernatural concepts.

At some time in human history, perhaps 60,000 years ago, minds became fully modern or capable of thinking as we think. Once this occurred, it would not have taken long for people to begin constructing stories about supernatural perceptions. Over tens of thousands of years these stories would have become increasingly elaborate. All modern religions are related, in deep time and through conceptual descent, to these early forms of religion or shamanisms.

Two more recent transformations altered the basic ancestral patterns of supernaturalism. The first was Neolithization or the domestication of plants-animals. When people settle down and begin producing food, shamanisms give way to the earliest organized religions. The second was the transformation wrought on these religions by Axial movements or the Axial Age. Today’s “world religions” all have Axial roots.

The entire history of religions, therefore, has a cognitive component and a cultural component. They work together and it is hard to say one is more important than the other. They are equally essential to explain the persistence of religion.

All cognitive and cultural activities have an emotional aspect to them. In this sense, one can say that emotions play a major role in religiosity even if this role is not (as Pagels suggests) mono-causal.

This is of course simply an abbreviated sketch of religious history. The emotional aspect of this history is treated with considerable sophistication by Robert Fuller in Spirituality in the Flesh: Bodily Sources of Religious Experience (Oxford 2008). Fuller situates these emotions within an evolutionary framework and shows how everything works together to produce what he calls “spirituality.”

Even if you don’t agree with Fuller, his body or emotion based approach to these issues deserves serious consideration and makes considerable sense.

• The Gnostic Gospels
• Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity
• The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics
• Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas

Pagels’ well-deserved appeal is a bit perplexing. Christians and non-Christians read her books. The former are invariably challenged and the latter always enriched. It is a rare kind of balancing act, impelled at all times by piercing and impertinent questions. I love reading her stuff and am looking forward to her forthcoming book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelations.

Pagels recently previewed the book in this splendid video lecture, which is long (over an hour). There is also a transcript, from which I have excised the following as a teaser:

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I started with three questions. First, who wrote this book? And what was he thinking? Second, what other books of Revelation were written about the same time? How did this book, and only this one, get into the Bible? And what constitutes the appeal, whether you’re talking psychologically, literarily, politically, of this book?

The evidence suggests that John was a Jewish prophet. He was living in exile around the year 90 of the first century. We can’t understand this book until we understand that it was written in war time, or shortly after war. John was a refugee, apparently, from the Jewish war that had destroyed his home country, Judea, started, as you may know, in year 66 when Jews rebelled against the Roman Empire.

When John travelled through the provinces of the Roman Empire, particularly in the province called Asia Minor, which is now Turkey and Syria, John would have seen that every evidence that the kingdom that had come with power wasn’t God’s kingdom. It was Rome.

John says it was while he was in that area, right near Ephesus, that he first heard a divine voice, and had a terrifying vision in which Jesus said that Israel’s God is about to come and destroy the evil powers of the world once and for all. What John did in the Book of Revelation was draw on the cultural resources of his own people to create, if you like, anti-Roman propaganda.

When John of Patmos asks, “How long is God going to allow evildoers to triumph over Israel?” he says Jesus told him what the earlier prophets had said, that God is about to come and finish the cosmic war he started in the beginning of time, and kill the dragon who embodies the forces of evil once and for all. John of Patmos triumphantly says that today’s Babylon, which is Rome, although it’s raging like Leviathan, is decadent as the whore, is about to fall as Rome triumphs.

Although, for over a thousand five hundred years, John’s book has been in the New Testament, John had no anticipation of a New Testament, because his only scriptures were the Hebrew Bible. John regarded himself as a Jew who had found the Messiah. And would have been shocked to learn that his future readers regarded him as a Christian. As far as he was concerned, Christianity hadn’t yet been invented. John never uses the term Christian.

[W]hat made this book so appealing, and for whom, that it was included in the New Testament and proved so influential? I mentioned this book was very controversial when John wrote it. And it’s not surprising that the people who championed this book during the next hundred to 200 years were followers of Jesus who were experiencing or witnessing Roman persecution first hand. They were living under threat of being arrested, tortured, executed, for atheism and treason. During those dangerous times, many of them found in John’s prophecy hope that Rome, which was of course indomitable, was going to just fall and collapse at the end of the world.

[W]hen Emperor Constantine shifted the Roman world toward Christianization, you might have expected that this book would get left in the dust, with other books of disproved prophecy. Many of them did. Over several decades, after Constantine and his successors became the patrons of the Christian Bishops, a lot of Christian leaders began to draw up a list, a canon, of authorized books. Canon means a standard. It’s a measure you hold up to see what’s a standard. And many of them drew up lists of books.

What’s interesting to me is that, well, the earliest account we have is by a friend and counselor of Constantine, Eusebius, Bishop of Palestine, Caesarea, and he says in a very early account, well, he has a list of the recognized books. And he says, and if it’s right, if it seems right to you, well, The Book of Revelation, we could add to that. Then he has a list of disputed books, and then it puts at the end of the disputed books, none of which are now in the New Testament. Well, if it seems right, maybe The Book of Revelation; because it’s one of the most disputed books. We don’t know. It’s very highly disputed.

We have only five lists that remain from the year 350 to the year 400 of canon books, and you can see that the Bishop of Jerusalem, the Counsel of Bishops in Asia Minor, Gregory of Nazianus, this one’s the Fathers of the Church and other bishops, they all have many books that are now in the New Testament. But every single list leaves out The Book of Revelation very deliberately, except the one list that happened to be the list that was adopted. And that book is included on Athanasius’ list, the Bishop of Alexandria, in Egypt.

[W]hat made Athanasius’ take on Revelation different? Was it that he could actually reinterpret all the prophecies. Instead of taking John’s prophecies as referring to God’s victory over evil powers embodied in Rome, he said, well, you can’t take it literally. We’re going to apply John’s vision of cosmic war to my lifelong battle, which is a lifelong battle to establish a Catholic church which is a Catholic church endorsed by the Roman Empire. This will become the church of what later becomes the Holy Roman Empire.

Athanasius was trying to create a Christian communion, which was supposedly universal Catholic, and he insisted that the war between the forces of good and the forces of evil is not against Rome, but it’s against deviance and Christians who oppose the new Catholic church, either Pagans, later against Jews, and also against those he called maniacs and heretics.

Athanasius says, well, the beast is really not about Rome. The whore is not about Rome. The beast and the whore represent heresy. And when Jesus divides the saved from the damned, it’s really the Orthodox Christians being divided from Pagans, Jews and heretics. And that is the way he pictures it throughout all of his writing. I mention this only because his spin on these prophecies shows us, gives a clue about how this book has survived for a couple thousand years.

It’s very clear that John had very specific targets in mind when he was writing. For example, if you read about a great mountain that suddenly erupts, and is thrown into the sea and pollutes the waters for days, he’s thinking about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that happened in the year 79, about ten years before his writing. And everybody would know that. And if he’s writing about the great beast whose human number is six hundred and sixty-six, you know that he’s either thinking about the imperial name of the emperor Nero, who was the one you’d choose for the worst possible emperor, or Domitian, who was ruling at the time John wrote. He had very specific targets in mind.

[John] couches his meaning in images that could be easily deciphered by his contemporaries, but also hidden, because it was dangerous to attack Rome directly. In this kind of dreamlike image, those images, as you know, have been plugged in to almost any conflict ever since. They speak less to the head than to the heart, and to very intense emotions that shape our dreams.

(End of My Brief Excision)

———————————————-

My own reading of Revelation isn’t very dreamy, except to the extent that nightmares are dreams.

Isn’t it ironic that Athanasius made the case for canonization or inclusion in the Bible by arguing that Revelation should be interpreted metaphorically, and today there are many millions of people who interpret it literally?

Otherwise, there is a great deal more to Pagels’ lecture and I encourage you to watch the video in its entirety or read the whole transcript. It looks like Pagels’ next book will be another success.

The China Rule should apply with double force in the field of evolutionary religious studies or what could be called the bio-cultural history of religions. Although the field is vast and permeable, these studies can be divided into types and most scholars work within one of the following paradigms:

Mathematical: these abstract studies rely on rational choice and game theory developed by scholars firmly ensconced within Western intellectual, historical, and religious traditions.

Epidemiological: these studies focus on memory or cognitive constraints and the transmission of religious ideas which usually are Western but sometimes are based on small-scale societies that have been studied by ethnographers.

Experimental: these studies test Western subjects (usually undergraduates) using primes that are either religious or which evoke a response relevant to so-called “world religions.” The cognitive studies in this category are more general and typically test for apprehension of supernatural or invisible agents without reference to any particular religions.

Sociological: these studies rely on Western survey data to test relationships between “religion” and other variables; the religious concepts used in such studies are usually Western but sometimes derive from Western constructions of eastern “world religions.”

Anthropological: these studies revolve around an evolutionary-archaeological record developed mostly by Western scholars working in safe or accessible areas of the world; they often tell a chronological story about religion based on this limited record.

While all these kinds of studies are important, their relevance to the evolution and history of “religions” more generally is limited. Until we have all these kinds of studies which apply The China Rule, we cannot be confident that the results are generalizable. My sense is that China, past and present, looms as one giant counterfactual to conclusions that many scholars have drawn (or wish to draw) about the “evolution of religion.” No genealogy of religions is complete without China.

I mention these things because it explains my interest and coverage, over the past year, of Chinese supernaturalism and “religion.” My use of scare quotes here is particularly warranted, given that the Chinese didn’t until recently have a word for “religion” (they created one for purposes of translating Western ideas into Chinese) and most Chinese don’t conceive of “religion” as being a separate conceptual or historical category. It has long been part and inseparable parcel of everyday Chinese life, without the Western trappings of institutions, doctrines, hierarchies, or formalities.

While I sometimes hear that modern Chinese aren’t “religious,” this view derives largely from Western constructions and understandings of “religion.” Metaphysical ideas and supernatural agencies are alive and well in China. One of the most famous traditions, not nearly as old as others but still ancient, revolves around the famous sage Confucius (551-479 BCE).

There are debates about whether “Confucianism” is or is not a “religion.” As is true of debates about whether something is consonant with “true” or “authentic” Christianity or Islam or Hinduism, the answer depends on how the tradition is interpreted and constructed. When it comes to Confucian ideas, some prefer the philosophical-moral construction while others prefer the metaphysical construction.

There is however no debate that a ritual cult devoted to Confucius arose shortly after his death and that the Confucian Cult was eventually incorporated into the Imperial Cult. In “Sacrifice and the Imperial Cult of Confucius,” Thomas Wilson details the history of this development. He sets the stage by noting that the Chinese state, which originated in 1776 BCE, has long been concerned with the supernatural:

A principal duty of the Chinese court was to provide ritual feasts for the gods and spirits at imperial altars and temples. From ancient times to the early twentieth century, the emperor regularly offered a ritual feast–or sacrifice–to Heaven and Earth, the royal ancestors, the gods of grains and soils, sun and moon, stars, and other gods and spirits that reigned over different realms of the cosmos.

Ritual officers stationed throughout the empire venerated local deities, such as wind and clouds, mountains and rivers, city gods and the spirits of the banners that hung at cardinal locations throughout the city. Sacrifice was part of a complex relationship between men and gods based upon mutual dependency.

Wilson then examines the rise of the ritual-sacrificial cult, which “began as a local cult celebrated by Confucius’ biological descendants and his doctrinal heirs.”

Although the Confucian cult had popular appeal, it was most closely associated with the classically educated. Because a classical education was required for civil service, it was not long before the state realized the need to incorporate Confucius into the official cult.

Because the Imperial Cult was rooted in more ancient tradition and made no reference to Confucius, the incorporation process was not without difficulty. Like all canonizations, some things had to be forgotten and others privileged.

This process, which is both history and social construction, was byzantine but it always cohered around the ritual that permeated all aspects of Chinese life. In most cases the ritual involved sacrifice, which in the Chinese context means a feast to feed the spirits. Although Wilson recognizes that this ritual symbolism is rich and rife with semiotic possibility, he rightly focuses on the instrumental goals of sacrifice:

[T]o take sacrifice seriously for what it purports to be–a ritual feast to feed the spirits–is to recognize that it was a technical activity requiring exacting ritual mastery aimed at achieving concrete results. The immediate aim of sacrifice was to venerate the gods, the long-term aim was to nurture them so that the cosmic order would be maintained.

Here we have a splendid example of one of the oldest supernatural practices in human history: offering spirits or gods something tangible in exchange for something both tangible and intangible.

Reference:

Wilson, T. (2002). Sacrifice and the Imperial Cult of Confucius History of Religions, 41 (3) DOI: 10.1086/463684

It is a thoughtful exchange but contains nothing new. Similar debates have been ongoing for well over a century without advance or resolution. Science and religion debates which take “God” as a starting point are myopic. They begin with the false assumption that humans throughout history have been preoccupied with the idea of God, and that the monotheistic concept of God is the starting point for this kind of inquiry. Such assumptions are usually embedded in a Whiggish or progressive religious history with “God” being the apotheosis of supernatural thinking.

The kind of “God” that Lightman discusses is a relatively recent idea, limited in time and space, that ignores religious history and diversity. We can see this in the definitions Lightman proposes:

For the purposes of this discussion, and in agreement with almost all religions, God is a being not restricted by the laws that govern matter and energy in the physical universe. In other words, God exists outside matter and energy. In most religions, this Being acts with purpose and will, sometimes violating existing physical laws (i.e., performing miracles), and has additional qualities such as intelligence, compassion and omniscience.

We can categorize religious beliefs according to the degree to which God acts in the world….Most religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, subscribe to an interventionist view of God.

This is just wrong. It is not true that “almost all religions” have this particular conception of “God.” Nor is it true that “most religions” subscribe to an interventionist view of “God.”

Humans have believed in the supernatural for at least 45,000 years and perhaps longer. The anthropomorphic and interventionist kind of God to which Lightman refers is perhaps 3,000 years old. This particular conception of God is limited in time and space. It is a modern God that derives primarily from the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). It is not a majority God and never has been.

Because Lightman frames his entire science/religion discussion around the God debates that take place within his own high culture salon, his definitions are not a problem so long as they are limited to that tiny arena. But they are not generalizable.

While Western intellectuals may arrive at resolutions or accommodations they find satisfying, these say little or nothing about debates that haven’t existed throughout most of human history and which huge numbers of modern people without God would never even consider.

• It was built by nomadic hunter-gatherers rather than sedentary or village agriculturalists.
• It was a religious or ritual pilgrimage center that attracted people from far and wide.
• The massive stone pillars or megaliths were “temples” or “shrines.”
• Göbekli was not a residential site and the structures were not occupied.

From these conclusions flow the claim that a new kind of symbolism led to the domestication of plant and animals. According to the excavator Klaus Schmidt, hunter-gatherers living in the region developed a new religion 11,000 years ago which resulted in the Neolithic Revolution, and this radically new way of life spread from Göbekli to the rest of the world. No explanation has been offered for what might have (divinely) sparked this “new religion” that is responsible for modern civilization.

These are extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence. In the previous posts in this series, we have examined some of the evidence and over the past week I have read most of the Göbekli papers. The evidence does not, at this time, support these claims.

Let’s start with what the evidence does show, keeping in mind the all-important point that perhaps 5% of the total site (and none of the surrounds) have been excavated:

• The people who built and used Göbekli were hunting and gathering.
• The structures and symbols at Göbekli had ritual significance.
• The T-shaped pillars are the oldest known megaliths.
• People were preparing and eating plants-animals while at Göbekli.
• People were making tools at Göbekli.

Göbekli is undoubtedly impressive and important. It was built and used during a momentous transition in human history: from food gathering to food production. This transition or “Neolithicization” was not a single event that occurred in one place and one time. It was sporadic and uneven, taking several hundreds or even thousands of years. It occurred fitfully at different times and in different places. Göbekli was not the sole source of this transition and is not the seat of the Neolithic Revolution.

It obviously required substantial resources to build Göbekli, so how was it done? If the builders were in fact hunter-gatherers without incipient agriculture or animal husbandry, one possible answer comes from Klaus Schmidt. The picture he paints of Göbekli 11,000 years ago is of a veritable paradise or “hunter’s dream.” If the area surrounding Göbekli was as rich and full of year-round resources as he suggests, the people there would not have been ordinary hunter-gatherers.

When hunter-gatherers are fortunate enough to find themselves in resource rich areas, they tend to settle and their societies become bigger and more complex. The paradigmatic example comes from the American Northwest Coast, where natives settled on stretches of river that provided abundant and reliable salmon. They built impressive structures and developed a rich symbolism; their rituals were elaborate.

Where resources are concentrated and dense, populations grow and people have time to do things other than gather and hunt. Perhaps Göbekli was such a place.

It seems more likely however that the people at Göbekli were hunting and gathering in a resource rich area, in addition to being in a region where the process of Neolithicization was well underway. We are fortunate to have excellent descriptions of this process, which began in the Levant, in the October 2011 pre-print issue of Current Anthropology (Banning’s Göbekli article is in the already printed October issue).

In “Becoming Farmers: The Inside Story” and “Neolithization Processes in the Levant: The Outer Envelope” (open access), Anna Belfer-Cohen and Nigel Goring-Morris survey the many developments in the region which culminated in the domestication of plants and animals. The authors provide the larger historical context into which Göbekli fits and effectively demystify Göbekli in the process.

This brings us back to Banning and the questions he raises in “So Fair a House.” Banning was not the first archaeologist to suggest that Schmidt’s interpretations and claims were questionable but he was the first to write a substantive article about them. Banning is not alone in thinking that Göbekli may be a Neolithic village and not a hunter-gatherer cult center.

It is premature to decide these issues one way or another. Too little of the site and surrounding area has been excavated. Those monumental portions that have been excavated have yielded suggestive evidence. More (and finer-grained) excavation, without preconceived ideas about what is being excavated, needs to occur. Specific hypotheses need to be formulated and tested. Until these things happen, Göbekli should be bracketed with a series of question marks.

Whatever questions remain, there is no question that Klaus Schmidt deserves enormous credit and thanks. His keen eye resulted in the discovery of Göbekli, and his hard work has yielded up an historical treasure. He understands that this treasure will keep giving for decades to come and is not to be ripped out of the ground in a frenzy, monetary and political pressures notwithstanding. He is by all accounts the most gracious of hosts who shares his time and finds freely.

Göbekli is and will remain one of the world’s premier archaeological sites no matter what it actually is or represents.

References:

Goring-Morris, A., & Belfer-Cohen, A. (2011). Neolithization Processes in the Levant Current Anthropology, 52 (S4) DOI: 10.1086/658860

Belfer-Cohen, A., & Goring-Morris, A. (2011). Becoming Farmers: Current Anthropology, 52 (S4) DOI: 10.1086/658861

E.B. Banning suggests something along these lines in “So Fair a House: Göbekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East” (Current Anthropology 2011). Banning exhaustively reviews the Göbekli evidence and challenges the prevailing interpretation of the site. This is precisely what was needed and it shows archaeology working as a science.

In his very first site report from 1998, Schmidt had already concluded that Göbekli was a ritual center and claimed the “archaeological evidence is overwhelming, as the function of two partially excavated pillar buildings irrefutably prove.” As Banning’s article shows, the evidence is not overwhelming and the claims that have been made about Göbekli are refutable.

After surveying the evidence and various claims made by Schmidt, Banning offers an alternative view. It is a view informed by lessons learned from history and theory. The history comes from another famous Neolithic site, Çatalhöyük, which was first excavated in the 1960s by James Mellart. Mellart interpreted richly decorated structures as ritual “shrines” and claimed they were not residential. It was later found that the so-called “shrines” were in fact houses.

The theory comes from the ethnographically informed realization that binaries such as sacred/profane and secular/religious are post-Enlightenment Western constructs rather than human universals. By extension and association, this means that the ritual/domestic binary is either suspect or provincial. None of these binaries can be projected uncritically back in time and mapped onto 11,000 year old ruins. Historically situated and modern conceptions are not reliable guides to ancient cosmologies. And given what we know about most non-Western cosmologies, it seems unlikely that the Göbekli world was constructed or perceived through these binaries.

It is more likely that the sacred/profane existed on a continuum and were conjoined, as were ritual and domestic activities. With these things in mind, Banning observes: “The point is not that specialized shrines are incompatible with domestic ritual but that evidence for ritual or conspicuous symbolism does not automatically imply specialized temples.”

These salutary reminders out of the way, Banning turns to the nub of the Göbekli issue: “The question is whether the evidence justifies the site’s interpretation, as its excavator argues, as a hunter-gatherer cult center with no domestic occupation at all.” To answer it, Banning examines several aspects of the site: (a) the famous T-shaped pillars which Schmidt asserts were free-standing, open-air monoliths (similar to those at Stonehenge), (b) the supposed lack of evidence for household or domestic activities, (c) the alleged lack of access to water and (d) the ostensible absence of domesticated plants-animals.

For each, Banning points to contradictory evidence and suggests looking for additional corroborating or refuting evidence. In some cases this involves nothing more than looking at the existing evidence differently, more closely, or without preconceptions. In all cases, Banning finds the evidence or lack thereof equivocal.

If the Göbekli structures were in fact unroofed, it surely follows they were not houses. Beginning with a structural examination of the pillars, Banning suggests they are placed and buttressed in a manner that would have supported overhead wooden beams, which in turn would have been thatched. There are several hints (ranging from grooves and notches to wood) that this may in fact have been the case, and Banning has sketched one possible layout:

Göbekli’s T-shaped pillars are arranged in the round and may seem completely unique (which they are in terms of size alone), yet it turns out that similar pillars and arrangements are found at other Neolithic sites in the area, and in several cases these structures are residential.

Aside from the structures themselves, the most remarkable feature of Göbekli is that it was discovered virtually intact. Fortuitously for archaeologists, Göbekli’s users (whether occupants or visitors) periodically filled earlier and older structures with surrounding debris and built on top of them. After its final use, the site was again filled. This explains why the site went unrecognized for so long; it looked like just another hill.

Banning is particularly interested in the huge amounts of fill material that were used and which he suspects was created on site as a result of occupation:

Notably, the site’s deep deposits also exhibit high densities of lithics—including a variety of points, scrapers, burins, and sickle blades—as well as evidence for “all stages of production.” One might expect to find stone tools related to the quarrying and manufacture of limestone monoliths and debris from the tools’ manufacture, but those in the fills, at least, are not noticeably different from what one might expect to find in a domestic deposit.

There is also abundant animal bone while dark earth found in the soil horizons may be anthropogenic, probably associated with the high density of bone fragments and other organic materials. Plant remains are not well preserved in these deposits but include a broad suite of edible wild seeds and the charcoal of trees such as ash, almond, poplar, and Brant’s oak that could have furnished both fuel and roof timbers.

In addition, Banning identifies possible hearths or hearth rings and mortars that would have been used to process grain. Some of these are bedrock mortars, which I happened to notice — near what appears to be a large cistern — in privately taken pictures of the site. The cistern is interesting because it speaks to the issue of water: Schmidt asserts that Göbekli had no easy or reliable access to this essential resource.

It would be unwise to assume that the lack of water at the site today is indicative of the situation 11,000 years ago:

[D]uring Göbekli Tepe’s occupation around 8000 cal BC, during the early Boreal period, the climate was considerably more humid than the current 450 mm of mean annual precipitation would suggest, and the water table was likely rather higher, potentially with springs closer to the site that no longer exist. Deforestation and modern irrigation projects have also had serious impacts on local water tables and streamflow, making the present distribution of water a poor indicator of Neolithic water sources.

Indeed, the many different kinds of (moisture-loving) plant remains found at the site suggest that water fell or flowed in amounts sufficient to nourish them.

In Schmidt’s estimation, these plant remains are — like the abundant animal remains — significant because they do not show signs of domestication. Aside from the difficulties of identifying domestication on the basis of morphology (with domesticated seeds being larger and domesticated animals smaller), Göbekli is a transitional Neolithic site. Hunting and gathering did not simply stop when people began planting seeds and controlling animals or domesticating them.

During this transitional period, plants and animals on the way to domestication may not look like their wild counterparts or may be “tweeners.” Of course some of these plants and animals were never domesticated; their presence is best explained by a mixed economy: there was some hunting and gathering of non-domesticates while at the same time others were being selected for domestication.

Where does this leave us? Banning has an idea and states it forcefully, though not in precisely this order:

While there is no doubt that Göbekli Tepe is an important site and that aspects of its structures were symbolically loaded, the claim that the site had no residential occupation is simply not credible.

Most likely, either the famous “temples” are actually houses or houses lie elsewhere on the site and are simply not represented or not yet identified in the excavated sample.

In short, there is no strong reason to assume that the people who used the buildings at Göbekli Tepe, in any stratum, were not Neolithic villagers.

Ignoring even the possibility that some of the claimed shrines and temples at Neolithic sites may have been houses or other types of buildings, however, could distort our interpretations not only of Neolithic religion but of nonreligious aspects of the communities that inhabited or used those sites.

So fair a holy house indeed. In the next and final post in the Göbekli series, we will synthesize the materials from the previous ones and take stock of the whole.

Reference:

Banning, E.B. (2011). So Fair a House: Gobekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Current Anthropology, 52 (5), 619-660 : 10.1086/661207

The first report — “Beyond Daily Bread: Evidence of Early Neolithic Ritual” — appeared in 1998. After noting that his views are preliminary, Schmidt contrasts Göbekli with similar sites whose location can be explained because they have water access, agricultural land, and hunting grounds. Göbekli seemingly lacked these things, a fact which makes its location puzzling. For Schmidt, this suggests Göbekli was sited for “non-profane” or sacred reasons.

Here Schmidt deploys Emile Durkheim’s problematic sacred-profane dichotomy that is closely related to (and probably derives from) the Enlightenment construct of secular-religious. A corollary of this dichotomy is a distinction between ritual and non-ritual activities, which Schmidt applies to Göbekli:

[R]itual activity, aside from burials, is not normally an archaeologically predictable phenomenon, and evidence for such special events is certainly rare in the earlier prehistoric archaeological record. Göbekli Tepe, on the other hand, apparently was a special location devoted to very important specific rituals, at least for a certain time. The archaeological evidence is overwhelming, as the function of two partially excavated pillar buildings irrefutably prove.

After only a few years of excavation, Schmidt was clearly impressed by the size and scale of the megalithics and their seemingly anomalous placement on the landscape. Already, Schmidt had concluded that Göbekli was a ritual or religious site and the evidence was not only “overwhelming” but also “irrefutable.” With perhaps 1-2% of the total site having been excavated at that time (based on estimates that 5% has been excavated through 2011), these are interesting assertions.

In 2001, Schmidt published “Göbekli Tepe: A Preliminary Report on the 1995-1999 Excavations.” In this report Schmidt affirms and extends his previous conclusions:

The function of these buildings can only be characterized as associated with ritual purposes, and no serious claim for domestic use is tenable. It is clear that Gobekli Tepe was not an early Neolithic settlement with some ritual buildings, but that the whole site served a mainly ritual function. It was a mountain sanctuary.

Whatever Göbekli represents, it is even more astonishing given Schmidt’s assertion — based on the ostensible fact that only “wild” or non-domesticated plant remains and animal bones had been found — that it was constructed by hunter-gatherers who must have periodically come together for ritual reasons. Schmidt then suggests that ritual or religion spurred the domestication of plant-animals and caused the Neolithic Revolution:

Cauvin’s connection between the profane and the sacred, is a perfect guide to understand the change of the hunter-gatherer societies to the Neolithic way of life, not only through economic or ecological reasons, but by the impact of a transcendental sphere….Gordon Childe’s Neolithic Revolution is getting a new facet, the religious one.

Here Schmidt references French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin, who controversially argues in The Birth of the Gods and Origins of Agriculture (2000) that hunter-gatherers developed more complex religious ideas before they domesticated plants-animals, and that the Neolithic Revolution was the result rather than a cause. Schmidt obviously agrees and interprets Göbekli as proof.

In “Göbekli Tepe — The Stone Age Sanctuaries” (2010), Schmidt details recent finds and interprets them in light of his earlier conclusions:

Göbekli Tepe was not used for habitation; it consists of several sanctuaries in the form of round megalithic enclosures. [N]o residential buildings have been discovered. However, at least two phases of monumental religious architecture have been uncovered.

[T]here is no question that the site of Göbekli Tepe was not a mundane settlement of the period, but a site belonging to the religious sphere, a sacred area, since the excavation has revealed no residential buildings. Göbekli Tepe seems to have been a regional centre where communities met to engage in complex rites.

So the general function of the enclosures remains mysterious; but it is clear that the pillar statues in the centre of these enclosures represented very powerful beings. If gods existed in the minds of Early Neolithic people, there is an overwhelming probability that the T-shape is the first know monumental depiction of gods.

Schmidt then asserts that a religious revolution caused the Neolithic Revolution:

There are no domesticated animals or plants. The enclosures date to the period of transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer societies during the 10th and 9th millennia in the Near East. The evolution of modern humanity involved a fundamental change from small-scale, mobile hunter-gatherer bands to large, permanently co-resident communities.

Jacques Cauvin’s suggestions were correct: the factor that allowed the formation of large, permanent communities was the facility to use symbolic culture, a kind of pre-literate capacity for producing and ‘reading’ symbolic material culture, that enabled communities to formulate their shared identities, and their cosmos.

Although Schmidt offers several possibilities for interpreting Göbekli’s rich symbolism, he does not explain (in either this article or others) what might have caused this religious revolution. If radically different ideas led the way to domestication and “civilization,” how do we account for the development of these ideas?

This seminal question aside, there are others. In the next post we will look at E.B. Banning’s recent article in Current Anthropology which challenges Schmidt’s interpretation of Göbekli.

References:

Schmidt, Klaus (1998). Beyond Daily Bread: Evidence of Early Neolithic Rituals from Gobekli Tepe Neo-Lithics, 2, 1-5

Schmidt, Klaus (2001). Gobekli Tepe, Southeastern Turkey: A Preliminary Report on the 1995-1999 Excavations Paleorient, 26 (1), 45-54

Schmidt, Klaus (2010). Göbekli Tepe – The Stone Age Sanctuaries: New Results of Ongoing Excavations with a Special Focus on Sculptures and High Reliefs Documenta Praehistorica, XXXVII, 239-256